The Dilemma of Authority - (Social and Political Power) by Allyn Fives (Hardcover)

About the Book

The moral problem of authority is the challenge of reconciling legitimate authority (the right to rule) with the demands of freedom and rationality. In this book, it is argued that authority can have legitimacy, but when it does it generates a moral dilemma, where the obligation to obey comes at some cost to freedom and reason.

Book Synopsis

This book analyses the so-called moral problem of authority, which is the challenge of reconciling legitimate authority (the right to rule) with the demands of freedom and rationality. It offers a critique of authority sceptics, both anarchist and non-anarchist, who insist that authority can never have legitimacy. It also points to problems with many conventional defences of authority, including those of deliberative democracy, which assume that insofar as authority is legitimate it simply satisfies the demands of freedom or rationality. In this book, through a close engagement with the work of Joseph Raz in particular, it is argued that authority can have legitimacy, but when it does it generates a moral dilemma, where the obligation to obey comes at some cost to freedom and reason.

From the Back Cover

Authority has a moral problem: the challenge of reconciling legitimate authority, the right to rule, with the demands of freedom and rationality.

The dilemma of authority analyses this so-called moral problem, arguing that authority can have legitimacy but that this legitimacy produces a moral dilemma, where the obligation to obey comes at some cost to freedom and reason. The book offers a rigorous critique of authority sceptics, both anarchist and non-anarchist, who dispute that authority can ever have legitimacy. It examines the justifications of authority, focusing on membership, and explores what type of reason an authoritative directive is, how it can come into conflict with other forms of reason, and how those conflicts are resolved. A central concern of the book, therefore, is rationality - the kinds of reasons we give in politics, and how those reasons operate. An authoritative directive is a reason that operates by excluding other reasons but it, too, can be defeated by conflicting reasons. The dilemma of authority book gets at the crux of this impasse.

Highlighting the tragic nature of our experience - that we often must do some wrong no matter what we do - this book offers a novel defence of authority itself, presenting an innovatively value-pluralist account.

About the Author

Allyn Fives is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Galway.