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Moral Philosophy and Politics · 2024-04-01

Legitimacy Revisited: Moral Power and Civil Disobedience

Moral Philosophy and Politics · 2024-04-01 · 1 citations

Abstract In Legitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World , I offer both a conceptual analysis of legitimacy, the power-liability view, and a substantive moral theory, the free group agency view. Here, I defend my account against three challenges brought by Kjarsten Mikalsen. First, though I argue that conceptual analysis should not prematurely close open moral questions, it is not my view that conceptual analysis must have no substantive implications. Second, though I acknowledge that free group agency ordinarily supports a moral duty to obey, it is a feature, not a bug, that my conceptual analysis is consistent with moral theories that disagree with my preferred moral theory. Third, I argue that Mikalsen’s proposed explanation of justified civil disobedience, which sees law in such cases as creating a moral claim-right that entails a merely presumptive duty, is less perspicuous than the explanation given by the power-liability view. Along the way, I emphasize that the distinction between felicitous moral power and justified causal power is as important as the distinction between moral liability and moral duty.

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Moral Philosophy and Politics · 2023-03-27

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Moral Philosophy and Politics · 2022

• Computer Science
• Computer Science

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Moral Philosophy and Politics · 2022-10-01

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Moral Philosophy and Politics · 2021-04-01

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Moral Philosophy and Politics · 2021-10-01

PART I. Substance and Normative Power

Harvard University Press eBooks · 2019-10-15

Legitimacy

Harvard University Press eBooks · 2019-10-15 · 87 citations

What makes a government legitimate? Arthur Isak Applbaum rigorously argues that the greatest threat to democracies today is not loss of basic rights or despotism. It is the tyranny of unreason: domination of citizens by incoherent, inconstant, incontinent rulers. A government that cannot govern itself cannot legitimately govern others.

Legitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World

2019-11-19 · 36 citations

What makes a government legitimate? Arthur Isak Applbaum rigorously argues that the greatest threat to democracies today is not loss of basic rights or despotism. It is the tyranny of unreason: domination of citizens by incoherent, inconstant, incontinent rulers. A government that cannot govern itself cannot legitimately govern others