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Himma

The Nature of Authority provides a comprehensive theory of

the nature of authoritative guidance. It argues that the following
claims exhaust the constitutive properties of authoritative
tellings: authoritative tellings (1) tell subjects what to do; (2)
give rise to reasons to comply; (3) are issued by personal
beings and govern the behavior of personal beings; (4) are Philosophy of Law
issued by rationally competent beings and govern the behavior
of rationally competent beings; (5) are issued under a claim
of right that counts as plausible in virtue of being grounded
in a system to which subjects acquiesce as governing their
behavior; (6) are issued by beings with the power to impose
their will on subjects with respect to what they do; (7) create

The Nature of Authority

The Nature of
obligations to comply; and (8) are backed by a threat of
detriment that is reasonably contrived to deter enough
noncompliance to enable the system to minimally achieve its

Authority
ends. Claim (8) can be inferred from each of the above claims
except for claim (3).

About the Series Series Editors

This series provides an accessible George Pavlakos
overview of the philosophy of law, University of
drawing on its varied intellectual traditions Glasgow
in order to showcase the interdisciplinary
dimensions of jurisprudential enquiry,
Gerald J. Postema
University of
Kenneth Einar Himma
review the state of the art in the field, North Carolina
and suggest fresh research agendas for at Chapel Hill
the future. Focussing on issues rather than Kenneth M.
traditions or authors, each contribution Ehrenberg
seeks to deepen our understanding of University of Surrey
the foundations of the law, ultimately with
a view to offering practical insights into
some of the major challenges of our age.

Cover image: Jane Couroussopoulos,

www.janepaint.com ISSN 2631-5815 (online)
ISSN 2631-5807
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Elements in Philosophy of Law
edited by
George Pavlakos
University of Glasgow
Gerald J. Postema
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Kenneth M. Ehrenberg
University of Surrey
Sally Zhu
University of Sheﬃeld

THE NATURE OF
AUTHORITY

Kenneth Einar Himma

University of Zagreb

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

a department of the University of Cambridge.
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education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

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DOI: 10.1017/9781009255790
© Kenneth Einar Himma 2024
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Elements in Philosophy of Law

DOI: 10.1017/9781009255790
First published online: December 2024

Kenneth Einar Himma

University of Zagreb
Author for correspondence: Kenneth Einar Himma, [email protected]

Abstract: The Nature of Authority provides a comprehensive theory of

the nature of authoritative guidance. It argues that the following claims
exhaust the constitutive properties of authoritative tellings:
authoritative tellings (1) tell subjects what to do; (2) give rise to reasons
to comply; (3) are issued by personal beings and govern the behavior of
personal beings; (4) are issued by rationally competent beings and
govern the behavior of rationally competent beings; (5) are issued
under a claim of right that counts as plausible in virtue of being
grounded in a system to which subjects acquiesce as governing their
behavior; (6) are issued by beings with the power to impose their will on
subjects with respect to what they do; (7) create obligations to comply;
and (8) are backed by a threat of detriment that is reasonably contrived
to deter enough noncompliance to enable the system to minimally
achieve its ends. Claim (8) can be inferred from each of the above claims
except for claim (3).

Keywords: practical authority, epistemic authority, law, jurisprudence,

conceptual analysis
© Kenneth Einar Himma 2024
ISBNs: 9781009507813 (HB), 9781009255813 (PB), 9781009255790 (OC)
ISSNs: 2631-5815 (online), 2631-5807 (print)

Preface 1

PART I PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 3

1 Introduction 3

2 Metaphysics, Modality, and Conceptual Analysis 6

3 Two Kinds of Authority: Epistemic and Practical 9

4 The Razian Theory of Practical Authority 10

PART II THE EXISTENCE CONDITIONS OF PRACTICAL

AUTHORITY 14
5 The Constitutive Properties of Authoritative Tellings 14

6 Other Candidates for Constitutive Properties

of Authoritative Tellings 15

PART III CLAIMS (1) THROUGH (7) AND THE SANCTIONS

THESIS 17
7 Practical Authority as Telling People What to Do 17

8 Practical Authority as a Source of Reasons to Comply 19

9 Practical Authority as a Personal Relationship 25

10 Practical Authority as Rational 29

11 Practical Authority as the Power of Will-Imposition 35

12 Practical Authority as Grounded in a Claim of Right 41

13 Practical Authority as Giving Rise to Obligations 49

14 Must Authoritative Tellings Create Exclusionary Reasons? 56

15 Objections: Of Angels and Emergency Volunteers 60

Conclusions 63

Bibliography 64

All writing is pigshit.

—Antonin Artaud

Preface
The concept of practical authority plays an indispensable role in theorizing
about the nature of law. Law might not be the most paradigmatic species of
practical authority; however, it is indisputable that law is a locus of such
authority and that mandatory legal prescriptions, norms, and directives
count as authoritative because they count as law:1 it is uncontentious,
bordering on banal, that courts have something that counts as legal authority
over persons appearing before them and that court orders count as legally
authoritative.
Despite its centrality to our jurisprudential theorizing and practices, no one
has tried to formulate a comprehensive conceptual theory of practical authority.
The most influential theory of practical authority, Raz’s service conception,
does not so much as purport to fully articulate its nature. This should not be
thought a defect of the service conception because it is equally, if not more,
concerned with the following normative issues: (i) the conditions under which
authority is morally justified, (ii) the standards governing how subjects should
reason with authoritative tellings, and (iii) the normative considerations that
authoritative tellings should be based on.
The reason we lack a comprehensive conceptual theory of practical authority
is that the issues associated with its moral and practical justification are regarded
as being of more social importance – and rightly so. It matters a great deal, for
instance, whether the practices associated with legal authority are morally
justified. It is not surprising, then, that theorists would devote more energy to
the normative moral issues than to the descriptive conceptual issues.
Even so, these conceptual issues have been strangely disparaged as “un-
interesting”2 and not worth working on. It should be clear that we cannot work
out a theory of legitimate authority (i.e., what it should be, as a matter of
political morality) without understanding its nature (i.e., what it is, as a concep-
tual matter).3 For instance, the moral issues regarding the justification of

1
Hereinafter I will refer to mandatory prescriptions, general and particular, that have their source in
some personal being as tellings because they tell people what to do.
2
Sigh. As if these folks have epistemically privileged access to some God’s-eye notion of what’s
interesting that the rest of us lack.
3
But this is not why I work on conceptual issues. I ﬁnd conceptual and metaphysical issues,
including those characterized as metaethical, more challenging than theoretical or applied
normative issues because they are more abstract. And I can’t help thinking that some of the
hostility directed at conceptual jurisprudence has to do with its difﬁculty. It is quite telling that
philosophers in other areas never whine about conceptual analysis, metaphysics, or metaethics.

practical authority obviously depend on whether it is inherently coercive; the

most morally salient feature of legal authority, after all, is that it is frequently
exercised to incarcerate people. Without a theory of the concept, it is impos-
sible to develop a general theory of moral legitimacy that enables us to
evaluate our systems of authoritative guidance in a systematic, rather than
piecemeal, way.
The Nature of Authority attempts to rectify this omission, arguing for two
main theses. The ﬁrst thesis is that the indented claim below exhausts the
constitutive properties of authoritative tellings in the sense that any claim
truly describing a constitutive property of authoritative tellings that does not
appear among the properties listed in this claim can be derived from claims
that do:

Authoritative tellings (1) tell subjects what to do; (2) give rise to reasons to
comply; (3) are issued by personal beings and govern the behavior of personal
beings; (4) are issued by rational beings and govern the behavior of rational
beings; (5) are issued under a claim of right that counts as plausible in virtue
of being grounded in a system that subjects accept, or acquiesce to, as governing
their acts; (6) are issued by beings with the power to impose their will on subjects
with respect to what they do; and (7) create obligations to comply.

The second main thesis is that only tellings backed by the threat of a sanction
count as authoritative (the Sanctions Thesis). This Element argues that the
Sanctions Thesis can justiﬁably be inferred from all but one of the above
claims, either as a logical implication of those claims or as the best explan-
ation of why they are true, the exception being claim (3) that authoritative
tellings are issued by personal beings and govern the behavior of such
beings. All but one of these properties, I conclude, are uniquely explained
by the Sanctions Thesis.
It is crucial to note at the outset that the analysis of this Element is nonpartisan
in the sense that it does not assume any conceptual claims about law beyond the
truism that law is, by nature, a social artifact. It is conceptually possible for the
norms of morality to exist in a world without intelligent beings, as would be true
if morality is objective rather than conventional in nature. Morality would
simply lack application in that world. But it is not conceptually possible for
a system of law to exist in a world without intelligent beings. Since no remotely
plausible natural law theory denies that law counts as an artifact in virtue of
being brought into existence by our social practices, this truism is compatible
with positivism and every plausible antipositivist theory. Since law is a species
of authoritative guidance, this is as it should be.

PART I PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

1 Introduction
This Element articulates a theory of the nature of practical authority, but what
does it mean to speak of the “nature” of something? The nature of a kind K is
exhausted by the properties something must have to count as an instance of K –
that is, its existence conditions.4 Otherwise put, the nature of K is exhausted by
the properties that constitute anything that instantiates them as a K – its
constitutive properties, as I hereinafter describe them.
Consider the concept of a bachelor. Merriam-Webster defines the term
bachelor as “an unmarried man.”5 If the Pope does not count as a bachelor, as
some believe, because he is ineligible for marriage, then this definition does not
exhaust the constitutive properties of bachelorhood; in this case, it is also
a necessary condition for an unmarried man to count as a bachelor that he is
eligible for marriage. But if the Pope counts as a bachelor and there are no other
plausible counterexamples, this definition exhausts the constitutive properties
of bachelorhood. Accordingly, if either conditional exhausts the constitutive
properties of bachelorhood, that conditional fully explicates its nature.
A theory of the nature of K is best understood as an empirically grounded
theory of our concept of K. Since, as discussed below, the only concepts to
which we have epistemic access are defined by what we do with words, a theory
of the nature of K is best understood as an empirically grounded theory of our
conceptual practices for using the corresponding concept-term K: a theory of the
nature of bachelorhood, then, is an empirically grounded theory of our concep-
tual practices for using bachelor; a theory of the nature of authority is an
empirically grounded theory of our conceptual practices for using authority;
a theory of the nature of law is an empirically grounded theory of our conceptual
practices for using law; and so on.
The content of our conceptual practices for using any term is fixed by two
types of consideration: (a) our conventions for using it, which are compiled by
lexicographers and roughly summarized in dictionary definitions; and (b)
shared philosophical assumptions, if any, about the nature of the associated
kind that condition the application of these semantic conventions in hard cases.
There is thus a division of labor between lexicography and philosophy in
addressing conceptual matters. Lexicography is concerned just to report the
content of our conventions for using a word; these conventions are roughly

4
General terms – like law, water, blue, proposition – deﬁne kinds (of thing). Our concepts pick out
kinds.
5
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bachelor.

summarized by dictionary deﬁnitions and, for this reason, tend to be over-

inclusive or underinclusive in determining the reference class of the term of
interest. Philosophy, in contrast, is concerned to articulate a more complete, and
thus more accurate, account of a kind’s constitutive properties by explicating
the shared assumptions about its nature that qualify the application of those
conventions in hard cases.
That a dictionary definition is vulnerable to counterexamples – as is true if the
Pope does not count as a bachelor – is not necessarily a defect. Dictionary
definitions are reports of a word’s meaning that are intended merely to provide
enough information about how to use it to constitute a speaker as competent
using it. But one can be competent using a word without knowing how it applies
in hard cases, if any. One does not need to know whether, for instance, the Pope
counts as a bachelor to be competent using the term bachelor.
Competence with a word is, after all, a baseline capacity that is wholly
constituted by an ability to apply it in easy cases. One counts as competent
using a word if one can use it in the vast majority of circumstances one is likely
to encounter. If you know, for instance, that law is, as Cambridge Dictionary
defines it, “a rule, usually made by a government, that is used to order the way in
which a society behaves,”6 then you are competent with the word – even if you
don’t have a clue whether there can be a system without sanctions that counts as
one of law. Just knowing this definition is enough to enable you to ascertain, at
least roughly, which norms count as law in any country you might be visiting.
There are two methodological approaches to analyzing the nature of a kind.
Modest conceptual analysis is concerned to explicate the nature of a kind as it is
wholly determined by what we do with language – that is, it is concerned to
explicate our conceptual practices with respect to some term of interest.7
Immodest conceptual analysis, though it purports to analyze concepts that are
in some mysterious sense ours, is concerned to explicate the nature of a kind as
determined independently of what we do with language.
This Element adopts modest conceptual analysis for two reasons. First,
I don’t have a clue how to ascertain the nature of a kind if it is determined
independently of what we do with language – and, to be candid, neither do you.
Second, I believe that we can learn something important about ourselves by
understanding how we use language to organize the world of our experience.
We adopt a language to talk about features of the world that we find salient.
Understanding the underlying conceptual practices can thus teach us something

6
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/law.
7
For a defense of modest conceptual analysis, see Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics:
A Defense of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2000).

worthwhile about not only what we value but also how we conceive ourselves
and society.
On either approach, conceptual analysis is descriptive in virtue of being
concerned to explicate what the content of the concept of interest is (what the
term means), as opposed to what it ought to be (what the term should mean). For
what it is worth, I am skeptical of the idea that we can improve our world simply
by changing our conceptual practices in any other ways than to make them more
rigorous or to remove words used for the sole purpose of hurting other people.
Either way, ascertaining whether these practices should be changed is the
province of conceptual engineering. Conceptual engineering and conceptual
analysis are hence different, but complementary, projects.
At the outset, I should explain one feature of the methodology that is likely to
strike readers as nonstandard – namely, that I frequently rely on dictionary
definitions. But I cite definitions only to justify claims that are aptly described as
“truisms” about a term in virtue of being transparently entailed by our semantic
conventions for using it. Although the vast majority of these claims strike my
mind as uncontentious, they would otherwise have to be assumed without
defense. While it is common for philosophers to claim some proposition is
a truism without giving a defense, this often leads to futile disputes about
intuitions that I prefer to avoid.
The point of relying on dictionary definitions to even this limited extent is to
defend what I take to be conceptual truisms that would otherwise have to go
without defense. If a proposition is transparently entailed by our conventions
for using a term and you disagree it expresses a truism, then, absent exceptional
circumstances, you are confused about the term’s meaning. My use of defin-
itions is intended simply to preempt disagreements about whether some claim
expresses a conceptual truism. While this should be clear from the discussion,
I feel obliged to explain that these definitions do no heavy lifting whatsoever,
because, as I have discovered to my profound puzzlement, philosophers are
suspicious of dictionaries.
To dispel these bizarre suspicions, it is helpful to note that lexicographers –
unlike philosophers – are required to get training in the methods of the social
sciences in the course of their professional education. Lexicographers, unlike
philosophers, are social scientists. It is utterly crucial to understand both that our
conventions for using a word are empirically determined and that the content of
those conventions can be reliably discerned only through the empirical methods
of the social sciences. Although one must be competent with a word to ascertain
the deeper assumptions about the nature of the associated kind, the canons of
ordinary usage cannot simply be intuited from the privilege of the philosophical
armchair. They must be learned empirically.

None of this assumes dictionary definitions are infallible. These definitions can
be mistaken in hard cases, but that is because our conventions do not even purport
to address those cases. They can also be mistaken when our conventions are being
worked out for a new word or are in the process of being revised; such revisions
can occur when an existing word is considered harmful or when science has
revealed something new about a kind we thought we had a handle on.8 While
a dictionary definition can be inaccurate, the mistakes are generally confined to
hard cases because the polling techniques deployed to ascertain our conventions
are scientifically sound. Absent exceptional circumstances, a dictionary definition
will not be systematically mistaken for this reason.
One last observation would be helpful. I do not claim that a comprehensive
theory of the nature of practical authority can be derived from just the defin-
itions of the relevant terms. The point of citing definitions is to minimize the
number of potentially contestable claims that must be assumed. My analysis
sometimes relies on claims that I assume without defense because they seem
uncontentious. But this is simply unavoidable. Every argument has to be
grounded in claims that are assumed; trying to defend every claim in an
argument would lead to an infinite regress. For this reason, the most I (or anyone
else, for that matter) can do is minimize the number of assumptions in the
argument. That is one of the helpful things that my reliance on dictionary
definitions enables me to do.

2 Metaphysics, Modality, and Conceptual Analysis

Conceptual analysis is concerned to explicate the nature of the kind referred to by
the term of interest, but the nature of a kind is determined by the properties that
constitute something as an instance of that kind – that is, the properties something
must have to count as an instance of that kind: the nature of a bachelor is
determined by the properties constituting something as a bachelor; the nature of
authority is determined by the properties constituting something as an authority;
the nature of law is determined by the properties constituting something as a law;
and so on.
Constitution differs from causation in the following respect. Being unmarried
might have many causal effects – such as loneliness. But being unmarried does
not cause a man to be a bachelor. Whatever it is that causally explains why he is
unmarried causally explains why he is a bachelor. If he is unmarried because he
is an asshole, then it is the fact he is an asshole that causally explains why he is
unmarried and hence why he is a bachelor. But being an asshole is not what

8
This appears to be the case with the term water. See n. 10 for a discussion of the claim that water is
H2O and its implications with respect to whether it is in the nature of H2O that it is water.

constitutes him as a bachelor. What constitutes him as a bachelor is that he is

unmarried, because someone counts as a bachelor in virtue of being an unmar-
ried man.
Claims about the nature of a kind are necessarily true, if true at all: to say it is
part of the nature of a bachelor that bachelors are unmarried is to say it is
necessarily true that bachelors are unmarried; to say it is part of the nature of
authority that it tells people what to do is to say it is necessarily true that
authorities tell people what to do; to say it is part of the nature of a legal system
that it consists of norms is to say it is necessarily true that a legal system consists
of norms; and so on.
There are three kinds of descriptively necessary statements, which differ
according to what explains why the instances of that kind are necessarily
true.9 To begin, a descriptive statement is logically necessary just in case it is
deducible from some set of favored logical axioms. What explains why
a descriptive statement is logically necessary is therefore that it can be validly
deduced from the favored axioms, which are assumed by the system to be
logically necessary.
It is important to note that the axioms of a system of logic define the behavior
of its connectives, quantifiers, and any other operators it contains. Standard
propositional logics, for instance, include the “law of contraposition” as an
axiom. This expresses the truism that, for all sentences p and q, [(p → q) →
(~q → ~p)]. Similarly, standard modal logics include the schema that, for all
sentences p, (□p → p) as an axiom. This expresses the truism that, for any
sentence p, if p is necessarily true, p is true. Logical necessity is determined by
the form of a sentence – and not its content – as that form is constructed by the
arrangement of its connectives, quantifiers, and operators.
Metaphysical and nomological necessity, in contrast, are determined by the
content of a sentence. The claim, for instance, that no squares are round is
metaphysically necessary because it cannot be deduced from just the favored
logical axioms defining the behavior of the relevant connectives and quantifiers;
nor can it be deduced from those axioms with the help of statements that
describe causal regularities in the universe. Its necessity depends on the content
of the concepts of square and round.
A claim is hence metaphysically necessary just in case it follows from the
union of some set of favored logical axioms and some set of favored metaphysical
claims – that is, claims that are true no matter what laws correctly describe causal

9
Moral claims are thought to be normatively necessary, if true. Most moral theorists believe such
claims are true in virtue of their content, but some – so-called divine command theorists – believe
they are true in virtue of being commanded by a perfect deity. True moral norms would count as
authoritative tellings on the latter, but not the former, view.

regularities in this world but that do not follow from just the favored axioms.
Inasmuch as the favored metaphysical claims are true in virtue of their content, so
is any claim that is validly deduced from them. Accordingly, the truth of
a metaphysically necessary claim cannot be explained in terms of just the favored
axioms and claims describing causal regularities in the material world.
There are two species of metaphysical necessity: conceptual and nonconcep-
tual. A metaphysically necessary truth counts as conceptual if and only if it is
true in virtue of how we use the constituent words: the claim all bachelors are
unmarried is conceptual because it is true just in virtue of the way that we use the
term bachelor. A metaphysically necessary truth counts as nonconceptual, in
contrast, if it is true but not just in virtue of how we use the constituent words.
The claim that nothing can be red and green all over is nonconceptual because it
is true no matter what the laws of nature happen to be but does not follow from
just the union of the set of favored logical axioms and a set of claims that fully
describe how we use the word – that is, our conceptual practices.
A claim is nomologically necessary just in case it follows from the union of
some set of favored logical axioms, some set of favored metaphysical claims,
and a set of claims that correctly describe necessary causal regularities in our
world (such as those of physics) but does not follow from the union of the
favored logical axioms and favored metaphysical claims. The claim that water
freezes at 32°F counts as nomologically necessary in virtue of being deducible
only from a set that includes claims we believe correctly describe these causal
regularities.10
Claims about the nature of a kind count as metaphysical since they are
necessarily true, if true, and cannot be deduced from any set consisting of just
favored logical axioms and claims describing causal regularities in our world. It
is clear that claims about the nature of a kind cannot be deduced from an axiom
schema like [p → (q → p)]. It is likewise clear that claims about the nature of
a kind cannot be deduced from nomological claims like e=mc2. Claims about
the nature of a kind are metaphysical, then, because true claims about the nature
of a kind are necessary but cannot be deduced from any set consisting of just
logical axioms and claims correctly describing causal regularities. Claims
describing the constitutive properties of a kind – that is, those properties
constituting something as a member of that kind – also count as metaphysical
because those properties deﬁne its nature.

10
The character of the claim that water is necessarily composed of H2O molecules is not clear. If
our semantic conventions for using the term preclude characterizing anything as water that is not
composed of H2O, then it is conceptually and metaphysically necessary. If they do not preclude
characterizing entities not composed of H2O molecules as water, then it is nomologically
necessary.

Whether or not the truth-value of some claim about the nature of a kind can
change depends on which methodology is adopted. Modest conceptual analysis
attempts to identify true claims about the nature of a kind that are wholly
conditioned by our conceptual practices and hence assumes that the truth-
value of claims about the nature of a kind is determined by our conceptual
practices. If these practices change in salient particulars, then so will the truth-
value of any related claims about the nature of the associated kind. Immodest
conceptual analysis attempts to identify true claims about a kind’s nature that
are not wholly conditioned by our conceptual practices and hence assumes that
the truth-value of claims describing the nature of a kind is determined utterly
independently of those practices. If the truth-value of a claim describing some
kind’s nature changes, it is not, according to immodest conceptual analysis,
because our conceptual practices have changed. True claims describing the
nature of a kind are conditionally necessary on modest conceptual analysis
but not on immodest conceptual analysis.
It is worth noting one salient difference between the locution constitutive
properties and another phrase sometimes used to describe the properties deﬁn-
ing the nature of a kind. Unlike the locution essential properties, the phrase
constitutive properties neither implies nor insinuates that the nature of a kind
cannot change and thus does not imply a problematic conceptual “essentialism.”
Given that immodest conceptual analysis assumes that the nature of a kind
cannot change, the properties constituting that nature are aptly characterized as
essential properties in this stronger sense.

3 Two Kinds of Authority: Epistemic and Practical

Our conceptual practices distinguish two kinds of authority. Epistemic authority
prescribes what ought to be believed through assertions that create reasons to
believe those assertions: an oncologist’s assertion that a patient has cancer gives
rise to a reason to believe she has cancer; an attorney’s assertion that a client should
settle a lawsuit gives rise to a reason to believe she should settle it; and so on.
Practical authority prescribes what should be done through utterances that give rise
to reasons to do what those utterances say should be done: a sergeant telling a soldier
under her command to march gives rise to a reason to march; a judge telling
a witness to answer a question gives rise to a reason to answer it; and so on.11

11
As Cambridge explains the distinction, the term authority means “[t]he power or right to give
orders . . . and enforce obedience” and “the power to control or demand obedience from others”
and “the ability to influence other people . . . because you . . . have a lot of knowledge.” https://
dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/authority. The first definition is concerned with
practical authority and, it is worth noting, supports the Sanctions Thesis, whereas the second is
concerned with epistemic authority.

Epistemic and practical authority are logically independent because each

species of authority has at least one constitutive property that the other one
lacks: P counts as having epistemic authority on whether Q should perform
certain acts only if P’s views on whether Q should perform them are more likely
to be correct than Q’s because P has expertise on whether Q should perform
them.12 In contrast, whether P has practical authority to direct Q to perform
them does not depend at all on whether P has expertise constituting P as an
epistemic authority on whether Q should perform them.13 Though someone
with practical authority might have such expertise, it is not a necessary condi-
tion for P to count as having practical authority to tell Q to perform certain acts
that she also counts as having epistemic authority on whether Q should perform
them.
Conversely, it is not a necessary condition for P to count as an epistemic
authority on whether Q should perform such acts that P counts as having
practical authority to direct Q to perform them. Whether P counts as having
practical authority to tell Q to do s depends on whether P is minimally efﬁca-
cious in inducing Q to do s.14 However, whether P counts as having epistemic
authority on whether Q should do s does not depend on whether P is minimally
efﬁcacious in inducing Q to do s. No matter how many patients die because they
do not follow an oncologist’s recommendations, the oncologist counts as having
epistemic authority pertaining to the treatment of cancer provided that she has
the requisite expertise. The claim that P counts as having practical authority
over Q is hence logically independent of the claim that P counts as having
epistemic authority over Q.

4 The Razian Theory of Practical Authority

There has been a great deal of philosophical effort devoted to identifying the
principles that a system of authoritative guidance must meet to count as morally
or practically justiﬁed,15 but comparatively little philosophical effort has been

12
I say “only if,” instead of “if and only if,” because the fact that P knows more than Q about some
topic does not suffice to constitute P as having epistemic authority on that topic because it does
not suffice to constitute P as having the conceptually requisite expertise on it.
13
Raz believes that whether P has legitimate practical authority over Q depends on whether P has
epistemic authority on what Q should do given the reasons that antecedently apply to Q. But
whether some instance of authority is legitimate is a normative moral issue different from the
descriptive conceptual issue of whether someone counts as having practical authority. Indeed, it is
crucial to understand in this connection that Raz’s distinction between merely de facto authority
and authority per se acknowledges the banality that there can be morally illegitimate authority. He
is absolutely clear, though this is often overlooked, that the latter refers only to legitimate authority.
14
See Section 6 for more discussion of this efficacy condition.
15
See, e.g., Harry Beran, The Consent Theory of Political Obligation (Croon Helm, 1987);
Allen Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy and Self-Determination (Oxford University Press, 2004);

expended on the conceptual issues of what constitutes a telling as authoritative

and what constitutes someone as having practical authority.
Joseph Raz has had more to say about the nature of practical authority than
anyone, but his theory of practical authority is as much concerned with norma-
tive issues, like how authority ought to be exercised and how subjects ought to
reason with authoritative tellings, as with purely descriptive issues regarding the
constitutive properties of practical authority. This section explicates his service
conception of practical authority.

4.1 The Service Conception of Authority

Raz’s service conception of authority consists of three theses: the Preemption,
Dependence, and Normal Justiﬁcation Theses. According to the Preemption
Thesis, “[t]he fact that an authority requires performance of an action is a reason
for its performance which is not to be added to all other relevant reasons when
assessing what to do, but should replace some of them.”16 The Preemption
Thesis therefore expresses two claims: (i) authoritative tellings give rise to
reasons to comply as a matter of conceptual necessity; and (ii) subjects should
treat them as replacing some of the reasons that would otherwise be applicable
in their decision-making about what to do.17
Only claim (i) is conceptual. It asserts that every telling that counts as
authoritative gives rise to a reason to comply, as a descriptive matter of fact.
Claim (ii), in contrast, is a normative claim pertaining to how subjects should
treat these reasons in their deliberations; it is therefore, in essence, a claim about
what is required by the content of objective norms of practical reasoning – or,
more accurately, a claim about what we (or perhaps people with the appropriate
expertise) believe is required by these putatively objective standards.18
The Dependence Thesis is, by its own terms, a normative claim purporting to
identify the reasons on which authoritative tellings should be based – namely,

David Estlund, Democratic Authority (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Leslie Green, The
Authority of the State (Oxford University Press, 1989); John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil
Government, ed. C. B MacPherson (Hackett, 1990); Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
(Basic Books, 1977); Plato, Euthyphro, Apology and Crito, trans. F. J. Church (Macmillan,
1948); John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1996); Robert Paul Wolff,
In Defense of Anarchism (Harper & Row, 1970). It bears repeating here that one cannot expect to
reliably identify the relevant norms of morally legitimate authority without understanding what
authority is by nature. If the project of descriptive conceptual analysis needs justiﬁcation (sigh, it
doesn’t), that is more than enough to do the job.
16 17
Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain (Clarendon Press, 1994), 214. Ibid.
18
I put the matter this way because I do not think we have epistemic access to truths – whether
conceptual, moral, or metaphysical – that are objective in the sense their truth values are
determined entirely by mind-independent considerations. But nothing turns on my putting it
this way.

those that “apply to the subjects of those directives and [that] bear on the
circumstances covered by the directives.”19 The Dependence Thesis, as is true
of claim (ii) of the Preemption Thesis, purports to be an objective requirement
of practical reasoning that applies to the decisions of those with practical
authority. Although Raz believes that the Dependence Thesis is necessarily
true, its necessity is not determined by our conceptual practices; it is determined
instead, on his view, by the content of the relevant norms of practical reasoning.
The Normal Justiﬁcation Thesis is, by its own terms, a claim describing what
justiﬁes practical authority. As Raz articulates it:

The normal and primary way to establish that a person should be acknow-
ledged to have authority over another person involves showing that the
alleged subject is likely better to comply with reasons which apply to him
(other than the alleged authoritative directives) if he accepts the directives of
the alleged authority as authoritatively binding, and tries to follow them, than
if he tries to follow the reasons which apply to him directly.20

Given the language in which it is expressed, the Normal Justification Thesis can be
interpreted as descriptive – though this is clearly not the interpretation Raz intends.
The problem is that its language suggests that the Normal Justification Thesis is an
empirical claim: thus construed, the Normal Justification Thesis is a claim about how
authority is normally justified. But claims about how people “normally” do things
are sociological, empirically descriptive, and contingent in character.21 It should be
clear both that Raz does not intend to make a sociological claim here and that he
would not do so without attempting to provide the needed empirical evidence.22

4.2 Authoritative Tellings and Exclusionary Reasons

According to Raz’s Exclusionary Thesis, any telling that counts as authoritative
gives rise to a second-order exclusionary reason that bars the agent from acting
on the reasons it is supposed to replace. An authoritative telling is thus doubly
normative, according to the Exclusionary Thesis, in the following respect: it
gives rise not only to a ﬁrst-order reason to comply but also to a second-order

19 20
Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, 214. Ibid.
21
There are a number of ways to construe the Normal Justification Thesis if it is normative. First,
one can construe it as describing either the conditions in which assertions of authority are
justified or the conditions in which acceptance of some authority’s claim of right is justified.
Second, one can construe it as a condition sufficient to justify authority or as a condition
necessary to justify it. Finally, one can construe the Normal Justification Thesis either as an
ontological claim about what constitutes authority as justified or as an epistemological claim
about the most reliable way to ascertain whether a practical authority is justified – though the
latter seems clearly false to me.
22
But see Section 14 for an example of an instance in which Raz clearly makes an empirical claim
without even attempting to provide the needed empirical evidence for it.

exclusionary reason that protects the ﬁrst-order reason by barring a subject from
acting on the excluded set of reasons.
While the Exclusionary Thesis may seem to be a claim about the nature of
practical authority, it purports, in essence, to report what norms of practical
reasoning require of us in deliberations about what we should do. It is thus
a substantive normative claim about what norms of practical reasoning require –
and not a descriptive conceptual claim about the constitutive properties of
practical authority. As Raz acknowledges:

The distinction between first-order and second-order reasons for action has
not been recognized or discussed by philosophers. This is no doubt due at
least in part to the fact that it is not reflected in any straightforward way in our
use of the expressions of ordinary language. . . . My claim is that a useful
explication of the notions of strength, weight and overriding is possible but
only at the cost of restricting their scope of application and that if we embark
on such an explication the theory of conflict must allow for the existence of
other logical types of conflicts and of conflict resolutions.23

Accordingly, Raz infers the claim there are objective exclusionary reasons from
the content of what he believes are objective norms of practical reasoning
because he rejects the idea, and correctly so, that the Exclusionary Thesis is
true simply in virtue of how we use the relevant words. Rather, he believes that
the Exclusionary Thesis is true because objective norms of practical rationality
require subjects to consider the applicable exclusionary reasons when deliber-
ating about whether to comply with an authoritative telling.

4.3 Practical Authority as the Power of Will-Imposition

There is one more piece to the Razian theory of practical authority, which he
mentions only once and only in passing: an agent counts as having practical
authority only if “effective in imposing [her] will on many over whom [she]
claims authority.”24 It is clear this is a purely descriptive claim that purports to
explicate a constitutive property of authoritative guidance and is, for that
reason, a claim that purports to explicate its nature.

4.4 Conclusions
Raz’s service conception is mixed in the sense it consists of both conceptual and
normative elements. This, I think, is why Raz uses the term “conception” to

23
Raz, Practical Reason and Norms (Oxford University Press, 1999), 36 (emphasis added). For
more discussion of the Exclusionary Thesis, see Kenneth Einar Himma, “The Practical Otiosity
of Exclusionary Reasons,” Canadian Journal of Jurisprudence (forthcoming).
24
Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, 211.

describe his theory instead of the phrase “theory of the nature,” which he uses to
refer to his conceptual theory of law.25 Though, in Section 5, I endorse his
descriptive claims that authoritative guidance (i) gives rise to reasons to comply
and (ii) is grounded in a power of will-imposition, this falls considerably short
of a comprehensive theory of the nature of authoritative guidance. That is not, of
course, to deny the social importance of his normative claims. But my concern
in this Element is to defend purely descriptive claims about the nature of
authoritative guidance. I am not in the least concerned here with moral legitim-
acy or justiﬁcation.

PART II THE EXISTENCE CONDITIONS OF PRACTICAL

AUTHORITY

5 The Constitutive Properties of Authoritative Tellings

It is a conceptual truism that practical authority is exercised through the issuance
of tellings that count as authoritative in virtue of satisfying the norms that confer
such authority and constrain its scope. Whether a person P has practical authority
over another person Q is determined by whether the relevant institutional, moral,
or social norms confer a capacity on P to direct Q’s behavior; this capacity is
norm-governed in the sense that the relevant norms constrain the scope of
practical authority by limiting what it is authorized to demand of its subjects.
The existence conditions for both practical authority and authoritative guidance,
then, are deﬁned by the constitutive properties of authoritative tellings.
Part II of this Element argues that the following claim exhausts the constitutive
properties of authoritative tellings in the sense that any claim correctly describing
a constitutive property of authoritative tellings that does not appear among these
properties listed in this claim can be derived from those that do: Authoritative
tellings (1) tell subjects what to do; (2) create reasons to comply; (3) are issued by
personal beings and govern the actions of personal beings; (4) are issued by
rationally competent beings and govern the actions of rationally competent
beings; (5) are issued under a claim of right that counts as plausible in virtue of
being grounded in a system of norms that subjects at least acquiesce to; (6) are
issued by beings with a power to impose their will on subjects with respect to
what they do; and (7) create obligations to comply. Each of these claims strikes
me as stating a conceptual truism about the nature of practical authority.26

25
See, e.g., Joseph Raz, “About Morality and the Nature of Law,” American Journal of Jurisprudence,
vol. 48, no. 1 (2003), 1–15.
26
The burden of persuasion falls on the critic to produce plausible counterexamples. This is
nowhere near as easy as it may seem.

Part II attempts to show that only tellings backed by a sanction count as

authoritative (the Sanctions Thesis); in particular, it argues the Sanctions Thesis
can be inferred from each of claims (1) through (7), with the exception of (3)’s
claim that authoritative tellings are issued by, and govern the behavior of,
personal beings. It concludes that all but one of these constitutive properties
are uniquely explained by the Sanctions Thesis.
It should be noted that the term sanction, for my purposes, has a broader
application than is customary in legal philosophy. There is no requirement that
detriment be punitive or as severe as the penalties of the criminal law to count as
a sanction; even the threat of a failing grade satisﬁes the Sanctions Thesis to the
extent it enables a teacher to evaluate her students’ performance. It is enough,
then, to constitute detriment as a sanction, for my ends, that it is reasonably
likely, and therefore reasonably contrived, to minimally achieve the authority’s
ends – no matter how mild the detriment might be and regardless of whether it is
intended to deter noncompliance.27 If a slice of detriment is minimally equipped
to do this job, then it counts for my purposes as a sanction.

6 Other Candidates for Constitutive Properties

of Authoritative Tellings
There are, as far as I can tell, only three other presumptively plausible claims
purporting to identify constitutive properties of authoritative tellings. But two of
them are easily derived from claim (6) that practical authority is constituted, in
part, by a power of will-imposition over what subjects do.
The ﬁrst claim is that a telling counts as authoritative with respect to someone
only if she accepts, or acquiesces to, the putative authority’s claim of right over
her. Two people must do something to stand in the authority relation as authority
and subject: the teller must perform some verbal or nonverbal act that asserts the
conceptually requisite claim of right over the subject in the course of telling her
what she must do, and the subject must accept, or acquiesce to, the teller’s claim
of right over her by manifesting a disposition to comply when not initially
inclined to do so.

27
To count as an instance of an artifact kind, an artifact must be reasonably contrived to do what
artifacts of that kind are standardly needed and used to do. To count as a car, for instance,
a vehicle must be reasonably contrived to do what cars are standardly needed and used to do –
namely, transport persons and things from one location to another in a particular manner.
A motorcycle does not count as a car because it is not reasonably contrived to do what cars
are needed and used to do. In contrast, a car with a broken engine nonetheless counts as a car if it
can be repaired so as to reenable it to do what cars are standardly needed and used to do.
However, if not, it counts as totaled and counts as a car only in the attenuated sense that
a completely disassembled car or toy car counts as one. For more discussion of the nature of
artifacts, see Kenneth Einar Himma, Coercion and the Nature of Law (Oxford University Press,
2020), ch. 4.

It is important to note that someone can have practical authority over

a subject who always complies – provided that she is not necessarily preinclined
to do what the authority tells her to do independently of being told to do it. P can
count as having practical authority only over subjects who are potentially
recalcitrant in the sense that they can be initially inclined to do otherwise but
who would nevertheless comply enough in those instances to enable P to
minimally achieve the ends P seeks to achieve by directing their behavior.
The second is that P counts as having practical authority over Q only if P’s
tellings are sufficiently efficacious in inducing Q’s compliance to enable P to
minimally achieve the ends she directs Q’s behavior to achieve. This claim
mirrors the efficacy condition for law, as it should, given that law is
a conspicuous instance of authoritative guidance. But it is important to note
that this claim entails that subjects regard authoritative tellings as having
normative force and that authoritative tellings sometimes induce compliance
in subjects when initially undecided about what to do.
Both claims follow straightforwardly from the idea that a telling counts as
authoritative with respect to Q only if made by someone who has the power of
will-imposition over what Q does (i.e., claim (6) above). To impose one’s will
is, as Merriam-Webster defines the locution, to “force other people to do what
one wants.”28 The claim that P has the power to force Q to do what P directs Q to
do entails that Q acquiesces by doing what P has forced Q to do and that P’s
tellings are at least minimally efficacious in inducing Q’s compliance.
The only other plausible candidate for a constitutive property of authoritative
telling that I can think of is expressed by the Exclusionary Thesis. The
Exclusionary Thesis cannot be inferred from claim (6), as should be clear. Nor,
as was discussed above in Section 4.2 and will be discussed in more detail below
in Section 14, does the Exclusionary Thesis purport to describe a constitutive
property of authoritative guidance. But, either way, because I think the
Exclusionary Thesis is false, I will attempt a refutation of it in Section 14.
Obviously, I cannot conclusively rule out there being other plausible candi-
dates for constitutive properties of authoritative tellings, but this much is clear:
given that claims (1) through (7) express conceptual truisms about the nature of
authoritative guidance, any other claims that describe constitutive properties of
authoritative tellings must be consistent with those claims. Further, assuming
that I succeed in deriving the Sanctions Thesis from these truisms, any other
candidates for constitutive properties of authoritative tellings must also be
consistent with the Sanctions Thesis.
28
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impose%20one’s%20will. Cambridge defines the usage
of the term impose as “to officially force a rule, tax, punishment, etc. to be obeyed or received.”
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/impose.

PART III CLAIMS (1) THROUGH (7) AND THE

SANCTIONS THESIS

7 Practical Authority as Telling People What to Do

Authoritative guidance is distinguished from other forms of guidance in that its
point is to guide behavior by telling subjects what they must do – as opposed to
what they merely should do. A high-school guidance counselor might well have
epistemic authority on what students should do and might invoke the corres-
ponding expertise to advise them. But her prescriptions, no matter how couched
(“you simply must apply to university”), do not count as authoritative because
a guidance counselor lacks practical authority over students.
Tellings assert that something must be done and thus express, or purport to
express, content that constitutes a requirement. A prescription that some act
s should be done counts as telling some set S of subjects what to do only if (a) it
is mandatory in the sense it requires, or purports to require, members of S to do s,
and (b) it has a source in some class of agents T, such as a court or legislature, that is
not identical with S, to which we can aptly attribute actions and which thus
constitutes a composite, or collective, agent.29 While the sets S and T can be
singletons (i.e., consist of only one member), they cannot be identical because no
one can do something that counts as telling oneself what to do.
The requirement is created by the telling. Though there might be other pre-
scriptions that require the same act, a telling creates a requirement of a different
kind: a law requiring an act antecedently required by morality creates a legal
requirement distinct from the moral requirement; a conventional norm requiring
an act that is antecedently required by law and morality creates a conventional
requirement distinct from the legal and moral requirements; and so on.
One common response to a telling issued by someone who does not obviously
have authority over the recipient challenges her ability to enforce it – “or what?”
Though phrased as a question, “or what?” insinuates, and aggressively so, that
there is nothing that the utterer can do to enforce the telling and hence denies
that the subject must do what the telling says she must do. The aptness of the “or
what?” response indicates that we conceive of tellings as inherently bundled
with an implicit “do it, or else” and hence assumes that content counts as
a telling partly in virtue of expressing a credible threat of enforcement.30

29
For this reason, mandatory conventional norms count as deﬁning requirements but do not count
as tellings if the set of persons establishing the conventional norm is identical with the set of
persons whose behavior is governed by the norm.
30
I will use the term enforcement here even though it might be that only authoritative tellings are
correctly characterized as enforced because there is no more general term capturing the idea.
Though I could express the matter in terms of something resembling enforcement, there is no

A more aggressive response to a presumptively inappropriate telling is to say

to its utterer “make me.”31 Like the “or what?” response, “make me” does not
use fighting words but is likely to be construed as a threat. In particular, it
promises that any attempt to enforce the telling will be met with force that
suffices not just to defend against it but also to deter any future transgressions.
As is true of the first response, the “make me” response assumes that every
utterance that counts as a telling is backed by detriment.
Another common response to such tellings is to say, “you’re not my mother/
father.” This assumes that parents are emblematic of practical authority and
denies that the utterer of the telling has the authority assumed by its utterance: in
essence, this response expresses that, unlike one’s parents, the utterer of the
telling lacks practical authority over the person to whom the telling is directed.
It should be noted that the assumption that parental authority counts as an
instance of practical authority is problematic. The concern here is that the
phrase parental authority is often used to apply to children who have not
developed enough competence to count, on our moral and legal practices, as
subject to practical authority. Though it is true, of course, that parents frequently
have to tell their young children what to do, this does not entail they have
practical authority over their children – any more than the fact a robber tells her
victim what to do entails she has practical authority over her victim. What is
thought to be practical authority over children is hence better understood as
a species of custodial authority that limits the interference of other persons in
matters involving a child until she reaches the age of majority or is emancipated
by a court.
There are just two ways to interpret the “you’re not my mother/father”
response; but neither is as aggressive as “or what?” or “make me” because
neither invites a teller to enforce the telling nor threatens retaliation if she tries
to do so. On the first, it denies that the teller, unlike the parents of a young child,
has the causal ability to enforce a telling with enough detriment to induce its
recipient to comply, because the putative subject can resist whatever force the
teller can muster. However, to the extent that this interpretation expresses
resistance, it is more accurately described as promising defense than as threat-
ening aggression.32 On the second, it denies that the teller, unlike the recipient’s

need to do so once the reader is aware of the issue. To enforce a telling, as I use the term, is simply
to impose whatever detriment there is that backs it.
31
Although framed as an imperative, “make me” does not count as a telling because the point of the
response is not to require the utterer to enforce her telling. The point is to get the utterer to back off.
32
Insofar as Q is willing and able to resist attempts on the part of P to enforce a telling, the “you’re
not my mother/father” response distinguishes P from Q’s parents, whose enforcement efforts
Q would not resist. Q’s posture towards P is different from that towards her parents in the
following way: on the one hand, Q is both willing and able to resist P’s efforts to enforce her

parents, has the needed permission to enforce her tellings – and threatens neither
resistance nor aggression.
But the point, on each interpretation, is to call attention to the fact that the
utterer lacks a capacity of some kind, whether causal or norm-governed, to
punish noncompliance with disciplinary force; it is not to call attention to the
fact the utterer lacks parental or custodial authority over a subject, which is
never in question except in truly unusual circumstances that do not matter
here.33 The naturalness of this response, like the others, thus supports the
claim it is a necessary condition for P to have authority over Q that P has
a norm-governed capacity to enforce her tellings against Q.
This is true of another response that does the same work done by “you’re not
my mother/father” but without implicating the ﬂawed notion of parental author-
ity: the “you’re not the boss of me” response denies that the teller has practical
authority over the recipient on the ground the teller lacks the causal ability or
requisite permission to enforce the telling. Someone counts as a boss in an
organization partly in virtue of being able to enforce her tellings with detriment
reasonably contrived to deter enough noncompliance to enable her to minimally
achieve her ends. Such detriment, in the case of a lawful enterprise, might
consist in having one’s job terminated but, in the case of an organized criminal
gang, might consist in having one’s entire future terminated. In both cases, the
“you’re not the boss of me” response, like the others, repudiates the authority of
an utterer by denying that she has the requisite capacity to enforce it.
Accordingly, all these responses assume that, to count as a telling, a piece of
content must be backed by a threat of detriment that is reasonably contrived to
induce compliance in someone not initially inclined to do what the putative
telling requires. Since any content that counts as an authoritative telling also
counts as a telling, the Sanctions Thesis follows trivially.

8 Practical Authority as a Source of Reasons to Comply

Our conceptual and nonconceptual practices assume that authoritative guidance
is normative in the following sense: any telling that counts as authoritative gives
rise to a reason to do what it requires. If a police ofﬁcer, employer, or anyone
else with practical authority directs you to do something within the scope of her

telling; on the other, though Q might be able to resist her parents, she is unwilling to do so.
Q might believe her parents’ demands are unfair but will comply to placate them or accept
whatever detriment her parents have decided to impose to punish noncompliance.
33
One difference between custodial authority and practical authority is that someone with custodial
authority over Q exercises that authority by making decisions for Q to ensure Q’s interests are
adequately protected in cases where Q lacks the capacity to protect them – and not by telling
Q what to do. Custodial authority applies only where the subject lacks either the competence or
freedom (in the case of incarceration) to make decisions for herself.

authority to direct you to do, you have a reason to do it. That reason may be
defeated by other reasons. However, you have a reason to do it because someone
with authority to tell you to do it has told you to do it. Authoritative guidance is
thus conceptually normative in the sense that authoritative tellings give rise, as
a matter of conceptual necessity, to reasons that are source-based – or, as the
matter is typically put, “content-independent” – because those reasons derive
from the source of the telling and not its content.

8.1 Authoritative Guidance as Giving Rise

to Objective Reasons
The propositions constituting the reasons to comply count as objective insofar as
objective standards of practical reasoning require rational self-interested agents to
consider them in their decision-making about what ought to be done. The capacity
of authoritative guidance to generate subjective reasons (i.e., propositions that
actually function as reasons in the minds of a subject, as a descriptive matter of
fact) is, then, grounded in its capacity to generate objective reasons (i.e., proposi-
tions that should function as reasons in the minds of subjects, as a normative
matter of practical reasoning). Whether a person counts as rational hence depends
on whether her deliberations about what she should do minimally conform to
what we take to be objective standards of practical reasoning.

8.2 Motivating, Justifying, and Explanatory Reasons

Practical reasons can be distinguished on the basis of how they support an act.
A motivating reason to do s is a proposition that a subject regards, or should regard,
as motivating her to do s and that inclines, or should incline, her to do it. Motivating
reasons function to incline – and thus to motivate – subjects to do what they are
motivating reasons to do.34 A justifying reason to do s is a proposition that some
subject views, or should view, as justifying her in doing s under a system of standards
that antecedently governs her acts.35 Justifying reasons function to justify the subject
in doing what some norm requires or permits her to do under the same normative
system to which the norm belongs. These systems include both law and morality.
Theorists sometimes distinguish a class of explanatory reasons, which
explain why someone did something, but these are just descriptive historical

34
To motivate someone to do a is to incline her to do a by giving her a reason to do it. As Merriam-
Webster deﬁnes it, a motive is “something (such as a need or desire) that causes a person to act.”
35
Justifying reasons are sometimes referred to as normative reasons. See, e.g., David McNaughton
and Piers Rawling, “Motivating Reasons and Normative Reasons,” in Daniel Star (ed.), The
Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 171–196.
I have chosen this nomenclature to eliminate ambiguity, such as occurs when some people use
normative to refer only to objective reasons and others use it to refer only to justifying reasons.

reports of what motivating reasons ﬁgured into a subject’s decisions to do what

she did. Otherwise put, an explanatory reason is a proposition that figured into
the subject’s past reasoning about what she should do and is hence, in essence,
just a description of her (subjective) reasons for having done something.36
Although recourse to such reports can help us to ascertain whether something
some subject did was justified, explanatory reasons do not function to guide
conduct – and are hence irrelevant with respect to how practical authority guides
behavior by giving rise to reasons to comply.
The relevant reasons to comply are motivating reasons. Practical authority
attempts to induce compliance by motivating it – and not by justifying it. The
function of a law that prohibits murder is to generate a new reason that motiv-
ates subjects to abstain from murder in cases where the preexisting moral
reasons do not succeed in inducing them to abstain; law subjects have never
needed to legally justify not killing people.37 A mandatory legal norm might
also provide justifying reasons that justify an act under the law. However, such
norms do so only with respect to two classes of act: (i) acts falling under
exceptions to legal norms that govern unofficial behavior (e.g., those allowing
self-defense) and (ii) acts falling under legal norms that govern official behavior
(e.g., those authorizing the court to enforce a telling by imposing a sanction).
While it is true that one can have a motivating reason to act in a manner that is
justified under the law, this is a different matter.
Either way, if authoritative tellings necessarily give rise to reasons to comply,
then those reasons are objective and motivating in character. Authoritative
guidance attempts to induce compliance by manufacturing an incentive to
comply – in the form, as we will see, of a disincentive to disobedience – that
is reasonably contrived, and therefore reasonably likely, to motivate rationally
competent self-interested subjects like us to comply.

8.3 Three Irreducible Sources of Value and Normative Force

We cannot explain how authoritative tellings create objective motivating
reasons to comply without identifying the source of value that endows them
with what normative force they have. The actions of rationally self-interested

36
See Maria Alvarez and Jonathan Way, “Reasons for Action: Justiﬁcation, Motivation, and
Explanation,” in Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Fall 2024 edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/reasons-
just-vs-expl/.
37
Notice that there is never any need to justify a behavior within a system unless it presumptively
conﬂicts with some existing norm of that system. It would hence make no sense to enact a law
prohibiting murder for the purpose of abstaining from murder because there was no preexisting
legal norm that required subjects to commit murder. I am grateful to Pablo Ariel Rapetti for
making me aware of the need to address this point.

subjects like us are motivated by three kinds of considerations that cannot be

reduced to other more basic considerations that we regard as having value: these
pertain to whether an action (1) satisfies morality; (2) promotes self-interest; or
(3) results in beauty.38 These three considerations correspond to three sources of
value that endow any prescription with what normative force it is, or should be,
regarded as having.39
It is not just happenstance that we are motivated by values from these sources.
Self-interested subjects like us are not likely to survive, much less thrive, in
worlds like ours if we are not motivated by each of these irreducible values.
Things will not go well for people unmoved by aesthetic value, because it is
difficult to have satisfying relationships without caring about beauty and the
various media through which it is expressed, like films, novels, and music. But
things will go catastrophically badly for people who are unmoved by moral or,
assuming this is even nomologically possible for beings hardwired like us,
prudential value – so much so that the mental health of someone who does
not care at all about these two types of value is suspect for that reason.40
The conceptual normativity of authoritative guidance must ultimately be
explained in terms of objective motivating reasons derived from these sources
of value. Authoritative tellings are equipped to guide our behavior only if
reasonably contrived to make a practical difference in what rationally compe-
tent self-interested subjects like us decide to do. But a telling can make such
a practical difference only by giving rise to something that rationally competent
subjects like us are reasonably likely to regard as a motivating reason to comply
because we should regard it as a motivating reason to comply. Given that these
three kinds of value exhaust the considerations that rationally competent

38
It is generally assumed that moral and prudential values are the only two irreducible sources of
normativity. See, e.g., Roger Crisp, “Prudential and Moral Reasons,” in Daniel Star (ed.), The
Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 800–820.
While I am convinced altruistic value can be explained wholly in terms of moral and prudential
values, our nonconceptual practices appear to entail that beauty is intrinsically and thus irredu-
cibly valuable. “Beauty for its own sake,” as the slogan goes. But nothing of importance here
turns on this.
39
It is true that we value many things – for example, truth, friendship, art, humor. But such value is
ultimately derived from at least one of these irreducible sources of value. We value friendship for
a number of prudential and moral reasons. We value art for prudential and aesthetic reasons.
While one might think that there are other irreducible sources of value, it is clear that any such
sources are not relevant in explicating the conceptual normativity of authoritative guidance.
40
It is not nomologically possible for beings like us to be indifferent about our prudential interests.
Although one might think that people who end their lives are not motivated by prudential
interests, this is mistaken; in all but the most unusual cases, they are motivated to end what
they experience as unbearable pain – emotional in the case of depression and physical in the case
of an excruciating terminal illness. I trust it is nomologically possible for us to subordinate our
interests to the greater good. But that does not involve indifference to what we take to be in our
own interests.

subjects like us are reasonably likely to treat as reasons to comply because we

should treat them as reasons to comply, the conceptual normativity of authori-
tative guidance must be explained in terms of these three values.
Authoritative guidance is equipped to guide behavior, then, only if its tellings
give rise, by nature, to objective motivating reasons from at least one of these
three basic sources because only reasons from such sources are sufﬁciently likely
to induce compliance in self-interested subjects who count as rationally compe-
tent in virtue of deliberating in a manner minimally responsive to what we
converge in thinking are objective standards of epistemic and practical reasoning.
It is clear that an authoritative telling need not create an objective moral or
aesthetic motivating reason. It may be true that the tellings of a legitimate legal
system, which count as authoritative in virtue of counting as law, necessarily
give rise to objective moral reasons to comply. But there is nothing in just the
practices constituting a normative system as one of law that entails that every
legal system is morally legitimate; history is replete, after all, with instances of
legal systems that are unconscionably wicked. While, moreover, there is con-
siderable beauty in the breadth, depth, and coherence of our legal practices,
there is nothing in them even remotely contrived to give rise to aesthetic reasons
to do what law requires – assuming this counterintuitive notion is even coherent.
The only way, then, to explain the conceptual normativity of authoritative
guidance is in terms of its capacity to create something that subjects are
plausibly presumed to regard as a prudential motivating reason to comply
because subjects should regard it as such. Since (1) any telling that counts as
authoritative gives rise to an objective motivating reason to comply, (2) any
proposition that counts as a motivating reason to do something expresses
a value from one of these basic sources, and (3) there can be authoritative
tellings that give rise to neither objective moral nor aesthetic motivating
reasons, it follows that any telling that counts as authoritative gives rise to
an objective prudential motivating reason to do as it requires. Authoritative
tellings, then, give rise to objective prudential motivating reasons to comply,
as a matter of conceptual necessity.
It might be true that an authoritative telling can create objective motivating
reasons expressing value from more than one of these basic sources of value;
but this much is clear: the conceptual normativity of any particular species of
normative system can be explained only in terms of its constitutive properties –
that is, those constituting a norm as a member of that system. If these constitu-
tive properties give rise to an objective motivating reason from one source in
even one instance, they must do so in every instance; if they do not give rise to an
objective motivating reason from that source in one instance, they cannot do so
in any instance.

8.4 Two Kinds of Reason-Giving: Robust and Triggering

We cannot explain how authoritative guidance gives rise, by nature, to objective
motivating reasons to comply without considering David Enoch’s important
distinction between two kinds of reason-giving: robust and triggering. Robust
reason-giving involves the creation of a novel reason – that is, one that did not
preexist the norm. Reason-giving by triggering, in contrast, involves altering the
descriptive nonnormative facts to implicate the applicability of a preexisting
reason that was not previously applicable.41
It is not clear that human beings can create practical reasons that have never
existed; nor is it clear what we would have to do to create such reasons. While
Enoch suggests that requests give rise to reasons to comply in the robust sense, it
strikes me as more plausible to think that requests can give rise to reasons only
by triggering preexisting prudential and moral reasons; after all, it is pruden-
tially and morally good, all else being equal, to satisfy reasonable requests.
Doing favors is presumed to be good – and, within reason, rightly so.
Either way, it is clear that authoritative tellings can give rise to objective
motivating reasons only by triggering preexisting reasons from one of the
sources described in Section 8.3. Since, as we have seen, there are just three
basic irreducible sources of value, the only reasons that an authoritative telling
can give rise to must express a value from at least one of these sources. Further,
since these value-sources preexist the utterance of a telling, the only reasons that
an authoritative telling can give rise to must likewise preexist the telling.
Accordingly, an authoritative telling can give rise to an objective motivating
reason only by triggering a preexisting reason from one of these sources.
Given that there can be tellings requiring wicked acts that count as authorita-
tive, on our descriptive usage of the term, and that hence do not trigger
preexisting moral reasons, the only reason-giving capacity plausibly attributed
to the nature of authority is the capacity to trigger preexisting objective pruden-
tial motivating reasons. If the only irreducible kind of practical reason to which
an authoritative telling gives rise, by nature, is prudential, then an authoritative
telling can guide behavior only by triggering the application of some preexisting
objective motivating prudential reason that was inapplicable before its issuance.

8.5 How Authoritative Tellings Trigger Prudential Reasons

to Comply: The Sanctions Thesis
Only the Sanctions Thesis explains how authoritative tellings trigger preexist-
ing objective motivating prudential reasons to comply as a matter of conceptual
41
David Enoch, “Reason-Giving and the Law,” in Leslie Green and Brian Leiter (eds.), Oxford
Studies in Philosophy of Law: Volume 1 (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 1–38.

necessity. A threat of detriment that backs a telling triggers a prudential reason

to comply as a means of avoiding the detriment. Since rewards cannot motivate
compliance by deterring noncompliance, the Sanctions Thesis uniquely
explains what equips authoritative guidance, by nature, to deter enough non-
compliance to enable the authority to minimally achieve the ends she seeks to
achieve by telling subjects what they must do. Although there may be many
considerations a particular subject regards, as a purely contingent matter, as
other kinds of reason, the only constitutive property of an authoritative telling
that is reasonably contrived – and therefore equipped by nature – to trigger an
objective motivating prudential reason to comply is that it is backed by a threat
of detriment that constitutes a sanction. Only the Sanctions Thesis, then, has the
resources to explain the conceptual normativity of authoritative guidance.

9 Practical Authority as a Personal Relationship

Authority relations can hold only among beings that resemble us in ways that
explain why we standardly need and use authoritative guidance to do what we
standardly need and use it to do. Authoritative guidance is efﬁcacious because
there is something about it equipped to do what we need and use it to do. But it is
equipped to do what we need and use it to do only because there is something
about us that is responsive to the constitutive mechanisms it deploys to do these
things.42
What explains why we are responsive to these mechanisms, in part, is that we
have psychological features that enable us to have relationships that count as
personal with other beings with these features. Authority relations cannot obtain
among impersonal things like plants, bacteria, and boxes, because authority is
neither needed nor able to do among them what it is needed and able to do
among us. Only beings who count as personal in virtue of instantiating certain
psychological properties can have or be subject to practical authority, because
only beings with these properties can have the kind of personal relationship that
is deﬁned by the authority relation.
That the authority relation is a personal relationship can be seen from the
etymology of the word. The term authority includes author as its root, and its
inclusion is not a matter of chance. Authorities are authors of tellings that count
as authoritative, and authors count as personal in virtue of being able to do
something that constitutes authoring content – authoring being done in this case

42
Authoritative guidance resembles penicillin in this respect: penicillin works because it is
equipped to do what we need and use it to. However, it is equipped to do these things only
because there is something about us that makes us responsive to the mechanisms it deploys to do
those things. What explains why authoritative guidance and penicillin work has as much to do
with facts about us as with facts about them.

for persons who comprise an audience of sorts in virtue of being subject to the
tellings of the authoring authority.43 The issue is to explain the sense in which
the authority relation counts as a personal relationship that can obtain only
among personal beings.
The relevant use of personal is defined in terms of the capacity for
a particular kind of awareness: Oxford defines the usage as “existing as an
entity with self-awareness, not as an abstraction or an impersonal force,”
whereas Merriam-Webster defines it as “being . . . self-conscious.”44 Two
subjects can count as personal and hence as able to have a relationship that
counts as personal only if each is conscious not only in the sense of being
brutely aware – aware simpliciter – but also in the sense of being aware one is
aware. Brute consciousness is not enough to constitute two beings as able to
stand in the authority relation; in addition, two subjects can stand in an
authority relation only if each is aware of being aware – or, as the definitions
put the matter, each is self-aware or self-conscious.45
What being aware one is aware amounts to is not clear;46 however, it involves
being aware that one is distinct from at least one other thing. Self-awareness in
this sense is basic, because it need not involve being aware of any material
entities: even if none of my sense perceptions is veridical because all are
induced by some Cartesian deceiver, I count as self-aware in virtue of being
aware I am distinct from those perceptions. Indeed, a being can be self-aware in
this fundamental sense without having any sense organs at all.
That said, even these fleshed-out definitions lack the resources to fully
explain how something that counts as personal can stand in the authority
relation because one being can have authority over another only if each is
aware of the other. These reports of the meaning of the term personal do not
assert that a being must have the capacity for other-awareness to count as

43
It would be nonstandard to describe the act of writing something not intended for an audience,
like a diary, as authoring. When a diary is published, its creator counts as an author and its
creation constitutes an act of authoring. But it is arguable that her writing counts as authoring
only if she consents or does not object to its being published.
44
www.oed.com/dictionary/personal_adj?tab=meaning_and_use#30954873; www.merriam-web
ster.com/dictionary/personal.
45
The relevant usage of self-conscious should not be construed as referring to the painful state
associated with debilitating shyness. Merriam-Webster deﬁnes this latter use as “uncomfortably
conscious of oneself as an object of observation of others” and deﬁnes the usage above as
“conscious of one’s own acts or states as belonging in oneself: aware of oneself as an individual.”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-conscious.
46
It cannot refer to an awareness of being aware if that requires some mysterious capacity
for second-order awareness, awareness being construed in the same way in both instances.
While I can grasp, apprehend, or understand I am aware, this is a different matter. Self-awareness
in this respect implicates a cognitive ability – and not some metaphysically queer faculty for
brute higher-order awareness that is distinct from awareness simpliciter.

personal. But that is because they assume that a capacity for self-awareness
deﬁnes a corresponding capacity for other-awareness. What constitutes a dog as
personal is, for instance, that she is aware of other beings who likewise count
as personal, which enables her to have relationships with them. A being counts
as personal, then, only if she is capable of having relationships that count as
personal. The concept of personal, then, is inherently relational.
A relationship counts as personal in virtue of being communicative in
character. A personal relationship is constituted by a series of mutually respon-
sive actions: part of what enables a human being and dog to have a personal
relationship is that they can do things together; a person can play fetch with
a dog only if both can perform the acts needed to play the game and possess
something like an understanding of how to play it.47 But they can do these
things together only to the extent their interaction communicates to each other
that a game is being played. To count as personal, then, a being must have the
capacity to communicate in some manner with other personal beings.
The capacity for communicative agency is, of course, central to our attribu-
tions of practical authority and authoritativeness. Communication performs
a function essential to authoritative guidance because content does not consti-
tute a telling unless communicated to subjects: insofar as (1) the basic/concep-
tual point/function of practical authority is to tell subjects what to do and (2)
something must have the ability to perform the basic/conceptual point/function
of practical authority to count as having practical authority over others, one
being can count as having practical authority over another being only if each is
capable of communicative agency and can exercise it through communicative
acts that are understood by the other.
The idea that the authority relation can hold only among subjects who count
as personal in virtue of possessing these psychological features, by itself, tells us
nothing more exciting than that the Sanctions Thesis could be true. However,
that accomplishes nothing, because all this shows is that the Sanctions Thesis is
coherent (that is, not self-contradictory). The problem is that just knowing P and
Q are self-aware, other-aware, and capable of actions that are reasonably
contrived to communicate content says nothing about whether they can impose
or experience something that counts as detriment. For that reason, merely
knowing two beings have these properties entails nothing about whether they

47
I say have “something like an understanding” because it is unclear whether only rational beings
are properly described as understanding content. Though we commonly attribute a rudimentary
capacity of understanding to dogs, it is unclear whether the assumptions conditioning our
ordinary attributions of understanding entail that only beings with linguistic capacities, lacking
in dogs, can understand content.

can induce someone to comply by threatening detriment or be induced to

comply as a means of avoiding its imposition.
Either way, it is clear that only beings who are self- and other-aware are
responsive to threats of detriment because only such beings can grasp a threat or
experience something as detriment. However, the idea that those who have or
are subject to authority are capable of communicative agency partly in virtue of
being self- and other-aware, by itself, does not entail that the constitutive
properties of authoritative guidance include threats of detriment. The claim
that only personal beings can be induced to act by a threat tells us nothing, then,
about whether the constitutive mechanism through which practical authority
tries to induce compliance is by deploying such threats.
To dispel any potential confusion about the implications of this analysis, it would
be helpful to consider the relationship between the concept of personal and the
concept of a person as this latter concept ﬁgures into debates about the morality of
abortion. First, the concept of personal is purely descriptive in the sense that all its
constitutive properties are factually descriptive, as was discussed above. In con-
trast, the concept of a person is a thick concept that has morally evaluative and
factually descriptive elements. That a being counts as a person, on this thick usage,
entails that it has a special moral status which endows it with a right to life equal in
strength to that held by every other being that counts as a person.
Second, the two concepts are logically independent.48 It is not, to begin,
a sufﬁcient condition for a being to count as a person, on this usage, that it counts
as personal, on this descriptive usage. Dogs count as personal on this usage but not as
persons on this morally thick usage. This does not imply that dogs do not have the
same moral rights as persons – although this latter claim is not absurd. However, they
do not count as persons. Conversely, it is not a necessary condition for a being to
count as a person on this thick usage that it counts as personal. Abortion rights
opponents believe that human fetuses count as persons from the moment of concep-
tion. Regardless of whether this claim is true, it is clear that human fetuses do not
count as personal from the moment of conception, because they do not become
brutely conscious until twenty-four weeks of gestational development. In conse-
quence, they lack all of the constitutive properties needed to count as personal.49

48
One might think that this simply follows from claims about the impossibility of deducing is-
statements from ought-statements and the impossibility of deducing ought-statements from is-
statements. However, the concept of a person is a thick concept that has both descriptive and
morally evaluative elements. Descriptive claims can be deduced from claims involving thick
concepts. For instance, the descriptive claim that P killed Q is implied by the claim that
P murdered Q because the concept of murder is thick in virtue of having both descriptive and
morally evaluative elements.
49
See, e.g., Hugo Lagercrantz, “The Emergence of Consciousness: Science and Ethics,” Seminars
in Fetal and Natal Development, vol. 17, no. 5 (2014), 300–305.

10 Practical Authority as Rational

Authoritative guidance is successful in guiding our conduct because it is
properly equipped to do what we standardly need and use it to do; but, as
discussed in Section 9, it is equipped to do what we need and use it to do only
because we have psychological features that make us responsive to the consti-
tutive mechanisms that authoritative guidance deploys to do all of these things.
What explains why these mechanisms are successful in doing what we need and
use them to do in the circumstances in which we deploy them has as much to do
with facts about us as it does with facts about those mechanisms.
There are two facts about us that help to explain why authoritative guidance,
as we conceive it, is equipped to do what we standardly need and use it to do.
The ﬁrst, discussed in Section 9, is that we possess self-awareness, other-
awareness, and communicative agency, which constitutes us as personal.
The second, discussed in this section, is that we make decisions about what to
believe and do in a manner minimally responsive to what we believe are
objective standards of epistemic and practical reasoning, which constitutes us
as rationally competent.
The claim that only rationally competent beings can be subject to practical
authority is uncontentious. A personal being can stand in the authority relation
as subject only if she is capable of being rationally induced to do something she
is not initially inclined to do.50 Someone psychologically incapable of being
rationally induced to do something she is not initially inclined to do cannot be
told what to do except in the uninteresting sense that she can be the intended
recipient of an utterance that expresses, or purports to express, a telling. The
most basic point of any telling, authoritative or not, is to guide behavior. But
only the behavior of personal beings who can be rationally induced to comply
can be efﬁcaciously guided.51
The claim that only rationally competent beings can have practical authority
is less obvious but also true. A personal being can stand in the authority relation
as authority only if she has intelligible ends and can discern what others need to
do in order for her to achieve those ends. The tellings of someone utterly lacking
this ability would be arbitrary, inconsistent, and hence incapable of guiding
behavior as a means of achieving those ends. Only a person with intelligible

50
Rational inducement involves persuading someone to believe/do something by convincing her
that she has winning reasons to believe/do it.
51
It is helpful to note that the claim that someone is conclusively – as opposed to necessarily –
committed to doing what an authority tells her to do is consistent with the claim she is capable of
being rationally induced to do what she is not initially inclined to do. I take myself to be
conclusively committed to not killing people, but this doesn’t imply that I am psychologically
incapable of murder. As the joke goes, I just haven’t met the right victim yet.

ends who can ascertain how the behavior of others contributes to achieving
them can guide the behavior of someone else.
Although the topic of rationality has generated a large philosophical litera-
ture, it is almost exclusively concerned with articulating norms of epistemic and
practical reasoning, rather than with explicating the nature of rationality. While
these theories are sometimes expressed in terms of claims about the relationship
between reasons and norms,52 they are normative theories that explain how
rationally competent beings should reason, rather than descriptive theories that
articulate the conditions that must be met to count as rational.53
Theorists seem to assume that the nature of rationality can be adequately
explicated simply by identifying the right principles of reasoning. While Robert
Nozick, for instance, entitled his book on the topic The Nature of Rationality,
there is nothing in that volume that even purports to be a conceptual analysis of
the sort I attempt in this section. As Nozick describes his objectives in the book:

We shall reformulate current decision theory to include the symbolic meaning

of actions, propose a new rule of rational decision (that of maximizing
decision-value), and then proceed to trace the implications of this rule for
the Prisoner’s Dilemma and for Newcomb’s Problem. . . . I also shall explore
the scope and limits of instrumental rationality, the effective and efﬁcient
pursuit of given goals . . .54

By its own terms, then, the book is concerned to articulate objective standards of
rationality as they apply to difﬁcult issues of reasoning. While this account may
succeed in improving our understanding of the norms governing practical
reasoning, it tells us nothing about the nature of rationality because it assumes
our grasp of the concept is satisfactory.

52
Raz’s Practical Reason and Norms is best understood as a theory of rationality that takes the
shape of a descriptive analysis of the concept of a norm together with a normative theory of how
norms should function in practical reasoning. As he describes his goal in the introduction: “This
is a study in the theory of norms. . . . The key concept for the explanation of norms is that of
reasons for action. . . . The central thesis of the book is that some kinds of rules (categorical and
permissive rules) are reasons for action of a special type, and other rules (power-conferring rules)
are logically related to such reasons.” Ibid., 9. Since the concept of a norm is clearly different
from that of a reason, it is more accurate to say that norms give rise to reasons than that norms are
reasons. But since Raz takes himself to be advancing a novel thesis about the kinds of reasons he
identiﬁes with certain norms, he is not plausibly construed as making descriptive claims about
the nature of rationality and is best construed as making normative claims about how we should
reason.
53
It is worth noting here that the most comprehensive online resource in philosophy, Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, does not include an entry devoted to the nature of rationality. That
omission strikes me as both notable and problematic.
54
Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality (Princeton University Press, 1993). A quick perusal of
the contents conﬁrms this.

That might be right, but it would nonetheless be helpful to say a bit about the
nature of rationality. Collins defines the term rational as meaning “able to make
decisions based on intelligent thinking rather than on emotion,” whereas
Merriam-Webster defines it as meaning “having reason or understanding.”55
Rationality, on each definition, requires the power of reason.
The power of reason is constituted by a capacity to process propositional
content in a manner that minimally satisfies norms of reasoning.56 Oxford
defines reason as meaning “[t]he power of the mind to think and form valid
judgements by a process of logic,”57 while Merriam-Webster defines it as
meaning “the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in
orderly rational ways.”58
Although these definitions of reason assume that the power of reason comes
with the capacity to satisfy these standards, they do not assume the relevant
mental processes always do so. Rather, they refer to, as Collins expresses it, “the
ability that people have to think and to make sensible judgments.”59 Given that
a judgment can count as sensible without optimally satisfying these standards,
the power of reason should be understood as just the ability to think about what
one should believe/do in a manner that is minimally responsive to what we
converge in believing are objective standards of logic and orderly thinking.
While the relevant notion of a capacity picks out an ability that is causal in
nature, it does not suffice to constitute someone as rational that she has a causal
ability to reason. The claim that P has such an ability tells us no more than that
her body has the necessary hardware in the form of a brain that has enough
computing power to enable P to reason. While instantiating this ability is
a necessary condition to count as rationally competent, it is not a sufficient
condition.
To count as rationally competent, P must also exercise this ability to reason in
a manner that is minimally responsive to standards of reasoning. There are

55
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/rational; www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/
rational.
56
The inference rules of any system of logic operate only on propositions: the rule modus ponens
permits the inference of a proposition appearing as the consequent of a conditional from that
conditional and the proposition appearing as its antecedent; universal instantiation permits the
inference of the proposition that some given entity has a property from the proposition that every
entity has that property; and so on. While one can reason about whether one part of a sentence
expressing a proposition can be replaced with something else in a manner that preserves its truth
value, one must nonetheless reason with propositions to reach a justiﬁed conclusion on this issue.
57
www.oed.com/dictionary/reason_n1?tab=meaning_and_use#26881284 (emphasis added).
58
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reason (emphasis added).
59
www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/reason (emphasis added). Collins deﬁnes
sensible as “actions or decisions . . . based on reasons rather than emotions.” www.collinsdic
tionary.com/dictionary/english/sensible. As should be clear, a decision can be based on reasons
without satisfying the relevant standards of epistemic or practical rationality.

many persons regarded as incompetent despite possessing the nomologically

requisite hardware: the disabilities associated with mental illnesses like schizo-
phrenia can be so bad that afflicted persons are deemed not competent – despite
the fact that their brains might still have the requisite computing power. Though
there are physical causes impairing the operation of the brain in these unfortu-
nate cases, this is consistent with its instantiating the causal capacity to do what
brains normally do.60
And the vast majority of our day-to-day decisions are obviously responsive to
these standards: when we need groceries, we go to the market to buy them; when
we need gas, we go to the gas station to fill the tank; when we decide to be
doctors, we apply to medical school; etc. Truly worrisome problems of poor
decision-making occur only at the margins: while these problems might happen
with sufficient frequency to lead one to doubt we count as rational in some ideal,
immodest sense,61 the nature of rationality, as it is constructed by our concep-
tual practices, defines a comparatively low bar.
Rationality, as that concept figures into ordinary attributions of authoritative-
ness, requires competence in epistemic and practical reasoning. Only personal
beings who are epistemically rational count as practically rational: one can
deliberate about what to do in a manner minimally responsive to standards of
practical reasoning only to the extent that one’s beliefs are formed in a manner
minimally responsive to standards of epistemic reasoning. It is not just that the
standards of practical reasoning include the logical norms that function as
standards of epistemic rationality; it is, further, that one cannot arrive at justified
decisions about what to do without processing evidence for claims that function
as premises in lines of reasoning concerned with arriving at justified beliefs
about what to do.
But, in addition, an attribution of rationality presupposes that the subject’s
beliefs and acts are at least sometimes conditioned by her reasoning. Someone
utterly infallible about what ought to be believed or done does not count as
rational if her reasoning never conditions her beliefs or acts. It is not enough to
constitute a subject as rational that she can reason sufficiently well to count as
having the power of reason; her beliefs and acts must at least sometimes be

60
Any piece of hardware can be rendered unable to do something that it has the nomological
capacity to do without destroying that capacity. An automobile can be rendered transiently
unable to transport things from one location to another by a wire coming loose in the starter; but it
would be incorrect to characterize it as having lost the nomological capacity to transport persons
and property from one location to another.
61
Psychologists have sometimes challenged the claim we are rational. See, e.g., Daniel Kahneman
and Amos Tversky, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science, vol.
211, no. 4481 (1981), 453–458. See also Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2011), app. B.

conditioned by her reasoning.62 Rationality is determined as much by what

a subject believes and does as it is by how well she can reason about what should
be believed and done. Accordingly, the two must be connected in the right way
to warrant an attribution of rationality.
Practical rationality also requires a felt ability to distinguish among states of
affairs in terms of how desirable they are and therefore in terms of their
comparative value. While epistemic rationality requires being able to value
true over false beliefs, practical rationality requires being able to rank states of
affairs, at least roughly, according to their desirability. P counts as practically
rational only if she is generally motivated to alter her behavior when needed to
actualize a desired state or to avoid an undesired state and can hence be
rationally induced to do so by content bearing on the occurrence of those states.
And that requires the ability to rank them, at least roughly, by value.
To count as practically rational, one’s decisions about what to do must be
motivated by valuations grounded in the ability to experience some states of affairs
as desirable and others as undesirable.63 What distinguishes a valuation from a mere
replica, facsimile, or simulation is that it is felt. It is true that a capacity on the part of
P to predict the value-responses of other people can ground a valuation if
P experiences their responses as having value that can rationally induce P to act
in a manner likely to produce them. However, to count as practically rational,
P must care enough about some value that it occasionally induces her to act as
a means of realizing that value. Otherwise, she can do no more than mimic the
psychological states and processes of beings who do count as such. The concept of
practical rationality has to do with how people decide what they do – and hence with
the connection between their ability to reason and their actions.
The claim that P is practically rational entails, then, that there is some state of
affairs she cares enough about to try to actualize with her behavior. Norms of
practical reasoning are concerned to ensure that the acts of rational self-
interested subjects conduce to bringing about states of affairs that they generally
desire to bring about because they should desire to bring about those states.
Satisfaction of these norms thus conduces to bringing about the desired states by
ensuring the agent’s decisions are sound in the same way that satisfaction of the
62
This should not be thought to require free will, as it is not clear we have free will in any robust
sense. If we do not have free will, then our reasoning conditions our beliefs and acts only in the
weak sense that the series of neurological states corresponding to steps in our reasoning causally
produce the neurological states corresponding to the beliefs and acts they cause. It is because this
claim is uncontentious, after all, that it is hard to grasp how our acts could be free in the sense
metaphysical libertarianism claims we are.
63
This entails that only beings who have some kind of agency or justiﬁably believe they do – as
would be true of us even if systematically deceived by a Cartesian demon – count as practically
rational; however, our conceptual practices pertaining to authority assume we are not systemat-
ically deceived by Cartesian demons. And it is those practices this Element seeks to theorize.

standards of logic conduces to believing only what is true by ensuring her

reasoning is valid.64
There are, as was discussed in Section 8, three sources of value and thus of
practical reasons – aesthetic, moral, and prudential. However, only one is
relevant in explaining the conceptual normativity of authoritative tellings:
since it is possible for authoritative tellings to require acts that are morally
wicked and acts that are aesthetically undesirable (assuming this peculiar notion
applies to ordinary acts), the only considerations that could explain the concep-
tual normativity of authoritative guidance are prudential in character.
What explains the prudential normativity of authoritative tellings, according to
the Sanctions Thesis, is that they are backed by detriment reasonably contrived to
deter enough noncompliance to enable the authority to minimally achieve the
ends she intends to achieve by telling others what to do. The Sanctions Thesis
requires no more by way of a developed capacity for discerning and weighing
practical reasons than an ability to discern that a threat of detriment should be
avoided, as a matter of prudential reasoning, and a disposition to avoid such
detriment when possible in a manner that is minimally responsive to objective
norms of prudential reasoning.
The idea that only the capacity to evaluate prudential considerations is relevant
with respect to explicating the nature of practical authority uniquely coheres with
this fact about us: while some of us are amoral, sociopathic, or worse, all of us are
self-interested. If many of us are indifferent, and even hostile, to the demands of
morality, no human being (or, for that matter, sentient nonhuman animal) is – or
could be – indifferent to her own prudential interests.65 We might not always do
what we believe maximally conduces to our interests or get the prudential
calculus right. But all of us care enough about our prudential interests that we
want to avoid significant detriment when possible.
Even so, the claim that someone cares about her prudential interests does not
entail that she is prudentially rational. Concern for one’s interests is necessary, but
not sufficient, to count as prudentially rational; one must also be epistemically
rational as to one’s beliefs about what does, and does not, conduce to one’s
prudential interests. A person who inflicts significant harm on herself on the strength
of a delusion – which counts as such in virtue of being patently inconsistent with all

64
What someone should desire can sometimes depend on what she antecedently desires. Although
there are arguably things all rationally competent self-interested subjects should desire, there are also
things that only rationally competent self-interested subjects with certain preferences should desire.
If I want to get to Zagreb as quickly as possible, I should also want to take the ﬁrst available ﬂight.
65
Approximately four percent of us – a chillingly high percentage – count as sociopathic in virtue
of lacking a sense of self-restraint grounded in an ability to empathize with the feelings of other
people. For a fascinating discussion of sociopathy and its prevalence in the population, see
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door (Harmony Books, 2005).

the available evidence – that it conduces to her well-being is not behaving in

a manner that is prudentially rational.
The line between what counts as prudentially rational and what does not is
difficult to draw because self-interested beings often take unjustified risks to
realize trivial benefits; but this much is clear. Our conceptual practices assume
that there is a line to be drawn here. They assume, in particular, that prudential
rationality involves (i) a capacity to form beliefs about what conduces to one’s
prudential interests in a manner that is minimally responsive to objective stand-
ards of epistemic reasoning and (ii) a capacity to assess those beliefs in a manner
that is minimally responsive to objective standards of practical reasoning.
A threat of detriment has two features that equip it to make a difference with
respect to what rationally competent self-interested beings like us decide to do.
First, it appeals to an interest shared of psychological necessity by all human beings
(and sentient nonhuman animals) – namely, that in avoiding unpleasantness. One
need be neither epistemically nor practically rational to have and act on this
prudential interest. Newborn infants and sentient nonhuman animals instinctively –
and immediately – exhibit aversive behaviors in response to painful stimuli. But
while self-interested, they lack the developed capacities needed to count as rational.
Second, the use of threats to enforce authoritative tellings appeals to the most
basic of our rational capacities. If the Sanctions Thesis is true, it is enough to
constitute someone as able to stand in the authority relation that she can ascertain
it is a bad idea, all else being equal, to resist an armed robber’s demands and is
presumptively motivated to comply for that reason. Rational competence, then,
requires no more than just the ability to link some piece of detriment to noncom-
pliance and an abiding disposition to avoid such detriment – that is, to accept and
act on the view, to put the matter in Hulk-speak, “pain, bad.”
The only plausible explanation of why the constitutive mechanisms of authorita-
tive guidance are equipped to do what they are standardly used and needed to do
among beings like us is that every telling that counts as authoritative is backed by
detriment constituting a sanction: the only considerations rational self-interested
beings like us can universally be presumed to value are those implicated by the
Sanctions Thesis. There is just nothing else in these mechanisms that is remotely
equipped to rationally induce potentially recalcitrant self-interested subjects like us
to comply.

11 Practical Authority as the Power of Will-Imposition

Practical authority is partly constituted by a power to induce compliance.
Someone lacking the right kind of power to induce members of a group to do
as she directs lacks the requisite resources to guide their behavior by telling

them what to do and, partly for this reason, does not count as having practical
authority over them. Having the right kind of power to induce compliance in
other people is foundational in equipping authority to perform its conceptual
function of telling subjects what they must do.
To have a power to bring about a state of affairs S is to have the ability to bring
it about that S occurs; it is incoherent to say P has a power to bring about
something that she has no ability to bring about. Dictionary.com defines the
term power as meaning “[the] ability to do or act,” whereas Merriam-Webster
defines it as meaning “[the] ability to act or produce an effect.”66
The idea that P has a power to bring about some state of affairs S by doing
s entails that P is minimally efficacious in bringing it about that S obtains by
doing s when she does s. This does not imply that she is trying to bring S about
every time she does s. But it does imply that when P does s to bring about S, she
succeeds often enough to minimally achieve the ends she seeks to achieve by
doing s. The claim that practical authority is constituted by a power to induce
compliance implies that it is sufficiently efficacious in inducing compliance to
enable the authority to minimally achieve her ends.
This power is not mechanistic. Whatever power an authority might have to
induce compliance, it does not involve an ability to mechanistically cause
subjects to do what she directs. It should be clear, for instance, that using
a microchip implanted in someone’s brain to mechanistically control what
that person’s body does by uttering imperative sentences does not count as
exercising authority; one’s imperatives in this instance are analogous to com-
mands one might input into a computing device to cause it to perform some
operation.
Our conceptual and nonconceptual practices presuppose that authoritative
guidance is equipped, by nature, with the necessary resources to make
a practical difference in what subjects decide to do, not by mechanistically
causing a conforming act, but by inducing one. Though it might seem plausible
to describe P mechanistically causing Q to do s as inducing Q to do s, causing
Q to perform some action does not do so by making a practical difference in Q’s
decision-making because causal mechanisms circumvent Q’s deliberative pro-
cesses altogether.
Indeed, though it may seem plausible to describe Q in such instances as
having been induced to do something, mechanistically causing her body to
make the desired movements does not count as even inducing Q to do some-
thing, because such movements do not count as an act. Whatever it is that P may

66
www.dictionary.com/browse/power; www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/power (emphases
added).

be seeking to achieve by causing Q’s body to make the desired movements, it

does not involve exercising practical authority over Q.
Practical authority can make a difference in a subject’s deliberations about
whether to comply only by rationally inducing her to comply – that is, by giving
rise to something that she is likely to regard as a reason to comply because she
should regard it as such.67 Practical authority is thus constituted by a power to
trigger preexisting reasons intended to rationally induce subjects to comply by
persuading them to do so and is thus constituted by a power to persuade.
Theorists characterize practical authority’s constitutive power to persuade
using the less perspicuous – though far more titillating – idea of will-imposition;
as Joseph Raz puts this conceptual truism, a person counts as having practical
authority over others only if she is “effective in imposing [her] will on many over
whom [she] claims authority.”68 Practical authority’s constitutive power to induce
compliance thus implicates an ability to rationally induce a subject to alter her will
when she is not initially inclined to do what the authority says to do; a person
cannot count as “effective” in imposing her will over subjects without having
a power to do that. Although talk of will-imposition adds little beyond some sexy
obscurity to what might otherwise be clearer, it is standard in the literature.
It is worth noting here that part of what explains the obscurity attending the
notion of will-imposition is that the meaning of the locution “impose one’s will”
cannot be directly derived from the meaning of its constituent terms. It should
be clear that, whatever kind of conscious mental state is picked out by the term
will, whether it is an intention, volition, or preference of some kind, a conscious
mental state is not something that can be imposed by one person on another
person.
One might think it helpful to consider the notion of will-opposition (i.e.,
something done against a person’s will), given that will-imposition and will-
opposition both implicate the power to induce others to change their wills.
However, practical authority’s constitutive power of will-imposition cannot
be explained in terms of the idea it does something against the will of subjects
with respect to what it tells them to do. If P tells Q to do something and
Q complies out of fear P will punish her if she fails to comply, then P has done
something that constitutes imposing her will on Q without having done
something against Q’s will.
While it is uncontentious that will-opposition involves force, it is not clear
whether or not will-imposition also does because the term impose is ambiguous

67
This, of course, harmonizes nicely with the claim that authoritative tellings necessarily give rise
to reasons to comply and the claim that the authority relation holds only among rationally
competent beings, which were discussed above in Sections 8 and 10, respectively.
68
Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, 211.

between two uses. As Merriam-Webster defines these usages, impose means “to
establish or bring about as if by force” and “to establish or apply by authority.”69
Although the former definition entails will-imposition involves force,70 the
latter definition does not: there is nothing in just our conventions for using
impose that transparently entails practical authority can “establish or apply”
something only by means that count as forceful.
The term impose might be ambiguous on the issue; but the idiomatic phrase
impose one’s will is not: as Merriam-Webster defines this phrase, it means “to
force other people to do what one wants.”71 Given that our conceptual practices
equate will-imposition with something that counts as force, practical authority’s
constitutive power of will-imposition can be explicated only in terms of a power
involving the deployment of force as a means of rationally inducing compliance.
That said, we cannot reliably infer the Sanctions Thesis from the claim that
practical authority is constituted by a power of will-imposition over subjects
because the term force is also ambiguous. Though force is most commonly used
to refer to a threat of violence as a means of inducing someone to do something
that she does not want to do,72 a second use is defined in terms of a power to
persuade: Oxford defines this use as meaning a “[p]ower to convince or per-
suade the reason or judgement,”73 while Merriam-Webster defines it as meaning
a “capacity to persuade or convince.”74
Our conceptual practices regarding epistemic authority differ from those
regarding practical authority in one respect especially salient here: although it
is a necessary condition for P to count as having practical authority over Q that
P has the ability to do something reasonably contrived to persuade Q to do what
P tells Q to do, it is not a necessary condition for P to count as having epistemic
authority over Q that P has the ability to do something reasonably contrived to
persuade Q to believe what P says should be believed.
Epistemic authority on some topic is wholly constituted by recognized
expertise on it. An oncologist counts as an epistemic authority on cancer solely
in virtue of her expertise – which is conferred by her education and acknow-
ledged by her medical license. It is, after all, her expertise that explains why her
diagnostic claims give rise to epistemic reasons to believe them. An oncologist

69
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impose.
70
One might worry about the omission of as if, but it is not clear what counts as done as if by force.
Although threatening force can induce someone to do something, bringing about something by
threatening force does not amount to bringing it about as if by force.
71
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impose%20one%27s%20will.
72
Oxford deﬁnes this usage as “coercion or compulsion, especially with the use or threat of
violence.” https://tinyurl.com/49hrhap9.
73
www.oed.com/dictionary/force_n1?tab=meaning_and_use#4006739.
74
www.merriam-webster.site/dictionary/force.

who is utterly unequipped to persuade patients of her claims and recommenda-

tions might be a shitty doctor, but she still counts as an epistemic authority on
cancer. Expertise is enough to constitute someone as having epistemic authority
because it is not a necessary condition for someone with expertise to have
epistemic authority that she is efficacious in persuading others of her beliefs on
the topic of her expertise.
Nevertheless, the claim is not that a person must already have the power to
persuade subjects to do what they are told to count as having practical authority
over them – beyond some basic ability to communicate content to others. The
claim is that the norms conferring authority on a person do so by endowing her
with the power to persuade by will-imposition.
That is, in part, what differentiates our conceptual practices pertaining to
practical authority from those pertaining to other species of guidance. These
norms confer authority on P by endowing P with a power to rationally induce
a subject to comply when the subject is not initially inclined to do so. Since this
equips P with the requisite power of persuasion, it follows that practical
authority, unlike epistemic authority, is constituted by a power to persuade –
in this instance, by the power to persuade subjects to do as they are told.
But practical authority differs from epistemic authority in terms of the mechan-
ism it uses to persuade. When an epistemic authority desires to persuade, she does
so by giving explanations that others are free to question. If an epistemic authority
wants to persuade Q to believe/do something, then she will do so by explaining
why it should be believed/done, on an evidentiary metric that Q regards, or should
regard, as relevant. An oncologist counts as non-shitty at doctoring in virtue of
being willing and able to explain her beliefs regarding a patient’s condition in an
accessible way that answers any questions the patient may have.
In contrast, a police officer who pulls you over on some highway need not
attempt to convince you she is justified in pulling you over or ordering you to
exit your car – though she should do both of these things (especially during
these times of unrest between police and public). If a police officer finds it
disrespectful to be questioned, she will respond by threatening arrest if you do
not comply. But if she nonetheless answers your questions, she is likely to
regard herself as having done you a favor. Although practical authority is partly
constituted by the power to induce compliance by means of persuasion, people
with practical authority, unlike those with epistemic authority, are, much more
often than not, unwilling to explain themselves to subjects because they expect
subjects to do what they are told when they are told. Indeed, this is part of what
authoritative guidance is used to do – that is, to preempt debate.
It is true, of course, that practical authority must be able to create epistemic
reasons for subjects to believe they should do what the authority tells them to do,

but one need not be an epistemic authority to create epistemic reasons to believe
what one says. It is enough, with respect to the majority of what we say, that we
are regarded as credible and reasonably conscientious about verifying claims
before making them. If Q knows that P carefully reads the newspaper and is
honest about reporting what she reads, Q has a defeasible epistemic reason to
believe what P says when P claims the paper said something. It sufﬁces, then, to
endow a practical authority P with the power to produce the applicable epi-
stemic reasons, that Q justiﬁably believes that (i) a normative system N that
antecedently governs her behavior confers practical authority on P to tell
Q what to do with respect to acts over which N has jurisdiction and (ii) P is
sincere when she tells Q to do something within that range of acts.
This power to persuade is what is picked out by the idea that practical
authority is, by nature, effective in imposing its will on subjects. Someone
who is equipped to persuade others to do s only by resorting to the devices used
by epistemic authorities when they want to explain themselves does not count as
having practical authority with respect to s because someone can count as
having practical authority without being remotely inclined to explain herself.
Persuasion by explanation has nothing to do with will-imposition or with the
nature of practical authority. Practical authority’s constitutive power of persua-
sion, then, must be explained by its constitutive power of will-imposition.
It is straightforward to show that the Sanctions Thesis explains practical
authority’s power of will-imposition. Since (1) the meaning of the locution
“impose one’s will” is “to force other people to do what one wants” and (2) the
Sanctions Thesis explains authority’s constitutive power to persuade in terms of
a norm-governed capacity to enforce its tellings, the Sanctions Thesis explains
authority’s constitutive power of will-imposition in terms of a power to persuade
subjects to do as they are told as a means of avoiding the application of force.
It is even easier to show that only the Sanctions Thesis explains practical
authority’s constitutive power of will-imposition. While one might believe that
there is nothing else in the practices constituting practical authority that explains
this power, the argument is more direct: any measure that is reasonably contrived
to “force other people to do what one wants” constitutes an enforcement device in
virtue of being reasonably contrived to deter noncompliance. Given that the only
way to force someone to perform an act that does not involve compulsion is by
means that count as coercive, we can conclude that the Sanctions Thesis uniquely
explains authority’s constitutive power of will-imposition.75

75
The application conditions of the relevant usage of force are as broad as those of coerce. As
Oxford deﬁnes it, force is “coercion or compulsion, especially with the use or threat of violence.”
https://tinyurl.com/49hrhap9. The occurrence of especially in the deﬁnition assumes a person
can threaten force without threatening violence: if P threatens to disclose embarrassing facts

The Sanctions Thesis incorporates both uses of force discussed above by

explaining practical authority’s constitutive power of will-imposition in terms
of its norm-governed capacity to manufacture normative force by threatening
coercive force: that we converge in believing we have an objective reason to
avoid coercive force is what explains the ability of both coercion and force to
make a practical difference in a subject’s decision-making. Practical authority’s
constitutive power of will-imposition can be explained, then, only in terms of an
ability to persuade by means that count as coercive and is thus forceful in both
senses of the root term.76
It is worth noting that Raz’s claim that an agent counts as having practical
authority only if she is “effective in imposing [her] will on many over whom
[she] claims authority” is inconsistent with his claim there can be law without
sanctions in a society of angels. If, as I have argued here, practical authority’s
power of will-imposition must be explained by a norm-governed capacity to
impose detriment for noncompliance, then Raz’s society-of-angels argument is
unsound. The problem is that there is no one with the requisite power of will-
imposition in such a society because there is no one authorized to impose
sanctions for noncompliance. Sanctions may not be needed to guide the behav-
ior of angels, but they are needed to constitute a normative system as one of
authority and thus as one of law.77

12 Practical Authority as Grounded in a Claim of Right

Practical authority is grounded in a claim of right – or, as it is sometimes described,
a claim of authority.78 What distinguishes the tellings of someone with a power to
direct behavior in virtue of having practical authority from those of someone with
just a power to do so is that the former are made under a claim of right that counts as
plausible on some appropriate metric whereas the latter are not.

12.1 The Concept of a Claim

The term claim has a number of easily conflated usages. It is often used as a verb
to suggest a nontrivial probability that a statement is either false or unjustified.
As Oxford defines it, claim means “state or assert that something is the case,
typically without providing evidence or proof.”79 This use of claim does not

about Q if she refuses to do s and Q does s to prevent their disclosure, then Q counts as having
been forced and coerced to do s.
76
This is why authoritative guidance, by its very nature, implicates a need for moral justiﬁcation.
77
I will say more about the society-of-angels argument in Section 15.
78
If these two claims are distinct, the claim of right is the more basic one: it is the claim of right that
someone has to direct behavior that grounds her claim of authority.
79
https://tinyurl.com/4wv8333t.

assert that a piece of content is false or unjustified. But a word that expresses
that some piece of content is asserted without evidence or proof can aptly be
used to express skepticism about that content; a familiar example is “so you
claim” when uttered in response to content one believes is dubious as a means of
expressing that one believes it is dubious.
Something akin to this usage is often used in theorizing about the nature of law
and authority: two famous examples are Joseph Raz’s view that law claims
legitimate authority and Robert Alexy’s view that law claims moral correctness.80
In both cases, the term claim is used as a verb to attribute an unsupported assertion
to a legal system or – more plausibly, since normative systems are abstract objects
incapable of agency81 – to its officials. Given that judges often enforce morally
problematic norms, an appropriate response to either such claim, without under-
standing more about the salient qualities of the system and its norms, is the kind of
skepticism insinuated by this verb-usage of claim.
But this is not the usage of interest; the relevant use of claim is as a noun that
refers to a right that some person has or is believed to have. Merriam-Webster
treats this usage as synonymous with one usage of the term right, defining it as
“a right to something.”82 In contrast, Collins and Dictionary.com define it in
terms of an appeal for something that is believed to fall within the scope of an
entitlement; the former defines it as a “demand for something you think you
have a right to,” and the latter defines it as “a demand for something as due; an
assertion of a right or an alleged right.”83
The noun usage incorporates one feature of the verb usage relevant here –
namely, that the content of the claim can be challenged – but it does not incorporate
the insinuation that the content is false or lacking justification. Since practical
authority must be conferred by a system of norms that otherwise governs the
behavior of subjects, the claim of right is grounded in those norms, which constitute
evidence of its veracity. The noun-usage signals that the content of the claim could
be false without insinuating that it is false or lacking in needed evidence.

12.2 The Concept of a Right

The lexical meaning of the relevant usage of right is notoriously difﬁcult to
clarify because the term is deﬁned in terms of synonyms that are as much in

80
Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, 215; Robert Alexy, “Law and Correctness,” Current Legal
Problems, vol. 51, no. 1 (1998), 205–221. For a criticism of Raz’s view that applies to Alexy’s,
see Kenneth Einar Himma, Morality and the Nature of Law (Oxford University Press, 2019), ch. 5.
81
See Himma, Morality and the Nature of Law, ch. 5.
82
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/claim.
83
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/claim; www.dictionary.com/browse/claim. (italicized
emphasis added).

need of clarification: Collins defines the term as meaning “what you are morally
or legally entitled to do or to have,” and Merriam-Webster defines it as “some-
thing to which one has a just claim: such as . . . the power or privilege to which
one is justly entitled.”84
These definitions are not especially helpful, but there is no need for an
explication of the nature of a right because its most salient property for my
purposes is clear.85 To say that P has a right to do s that is held against Q is to
say, in part, that Q owes an obligation not to interfere with P’s doing s: my
constitutional speech right against the state defines a legal obligation on the part
of officials not to interfere with my speech unless it is necessary to achieve
a compelling state interest; my moral right to life defines a moral obligation on
the part of others not to interfere with my continuing to live unless it is necessary
to prevent me from culpably causing death or grievous bodily harm to others;
and so on.
The right constituting P as having authority must thus be understood as
defining an obligation not to interfere in ways deemed illicit with P’s efforts
to direct behavior that fall within its scope. While the complete range of what
counts as illicit is not always clear, this much is: to the extent P is authorized to
do something s in directing the behavior of subjects that is otherwise impermis-
sible under the relevant norms, P’s right to do s is constituted by an obligation
on the part of her subjects not to interfere with her doing s in ways that would
otherwise be permissible under those norms.

12.3 The Concept of a Claim of Right

The meaning of the locution claim of right is straightforwardly derived from the
meanings of its constituent terms. Given that (1) claim refers to an expressed
view about the content of what is described as a claim and that (2) right refers to
an obligation of noninterference on the part of those persons against whom the
right is held, the locution claim of right refers to an expressed view about an
obligation of noninterference owed by those against whom the right is held or
thought to be held.
What this obligation requires is not clear. One might think it requires com-
pliance, but this is false: Q does not do something that constitutes interfering
with the exercise of P’s authority simply by not complying. To interfere in
a situation, as Cambridge deﬁnes it, is to “spoil[] it or prevent[] its progress.”86
If Q does not do what P tells her to do, then Q has violated an obligation if P has
84
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/right; www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/
right (italicized emphases added).
85
See, e.g., Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights (Harvard University Press, 1990).
86
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/interfere.

authority to tell Q to do it. However, Q has not done anything that prevented
P from telling her what to do.
Although Q is obligated to do what P tells her to do if P has practical authority
over her, that does not follow from the claim Q has an obligation of noninter-
ference; nonparties to the authority relation can also have such an obligation
under the same norms conferring authority on P over Q but have no obligation
to comply because they are not subject to P’s authority: every soldier has a legal
obligation to obey the orders of her commanding officer; but civilians also have
a legal obligation not to interfere with the efforts of a commanding officer to
direct the acts of soldiers under her authority.
The claim of right purports to justify tellings made under it by reference to the
same norms conferring authority. The proposition that P does s under a claim of
right expresses that P claims, expressly or impliedly, to be justified in doing s in
virtue of having a right to do it and thus that P’s doing s would otherwise be
problematic. The notion that s is done under a claim of right implicitly acknow-
ledges that a right is needed because s is otherwise prohibited under the same
norms giving rise to the justifying claim of right.87
The claim that P has a right – as opposed to a claim of right – to do s under
a system does not entail that doing s is otherwise prohibited by the system: the
claim P has a legal right to speak her mind does not imply, for instance, it would
otherwise be legally impermissible to do so; a legal system can permit some-
thing without conferring a right to do it by just not prohibiting it. The claim of
language in the phrase claim of right implies or insinuates that a permission is
needed to do what is done under claim of right because doing it is otherwise
prohibited.
This permission defines the scope of the relevant obligation of noninterfer-
ence. The claim that P has a permission under some set N of norms to do what
others are not permitted to do under N entails that others have an obligation
under N not to interfere with P’s doing it in ways that would otherwise be
allowed if N did not confer a permission on P to do it. A police officer has a legal
permission to coercively detain an intoxicated driver that obligates others not to
interfere in ways that would otherwise be permissible under the law.
The idea that it is a conceptual truth that law claims moral correctness or
legitimacy, as Alexy and Raz believe, is thus rooted in a confusion about what

87
A norm authorizing a judge to decide a case justiﬁes her in deciding that case – that is, justiﬁes
her in asserting jurisdiction over the case. It does not necessarily justify the content of her
decision under the relevant legal norms. One can challenge the content of a decision without
challenging the judge’s authority to decide the case. While there can be cases so badly decided
that one can argue the judge lacked authority to decide them that way, these cases are compara-
tively unusual.

kinds of right can ground practical authority. Since practical authority need not
be grounded in a moral right to direct behavior, there is absolutely nothing in the
practices constituting a personal being as having practical authority that entails
a claim of moral correctness or legitimacy. If, by nature, the law makes claims
about its authority, those claims say nothing about law’s moral qualities,
because nothing in our conceptual practices entails that only morally justiﬁed
tellings count as legally authoritative. Although there are usages of these terms
concerned only with ideal systems of authoritative guidance and law, such
usages are not relevant for my purposes.88

12.4 What Is a Plausible Claim of Right?

A claim of right must count as plausible to constitute someone as having
practical authority over members of some group. A robber with a hyperactive
sense of entitlement might claim she has a right to your money; however, that
cannot even partly constitute her demand as authoritative because her claim is
patently false and therefore obviously implausible. Even if she is a member of
an organized criminal gang governed by norms requiring its members to rob
nonmembers, those norms do not count as authoritative towards nonmembers.
To say that a claim is plausible is to say it should be believed, at least
provisionally, in virtue of seeming likely to be true: Collins defines plausible
as “seem[ing] likely to be true or valid,” whereas Merriam-Webster defines the
term as “appearing worthy of belief.”89
The dictionary definitions identify a number of ways in which content might
appear veridical but one is of fundamental importance. Content appears prob-
able, reasonable, or worthy of belief only insofar as it appears likely to be true in
light of the available evidence. To say a claim is plausible is therefore to make
a defeasible prereflective judgment about its probable truth value – namely, that
it is likely to be true. Since we are justified, at least provisionally, in believing
what appears likely to be true, the characterization of a claim as plausible entails
that subjects are presumptively justified in believing it without reflection on the
strength of the evidence.
Whether a claim counts as plausible can vary from one group to another,
depending on what evidence they have. Two thousand years ago, the claim the
earth is flat counted as plausible simply in virtue of appearing flat in all
directions because we had no evidence to the contrary: someone believing the
earth is flat on the strength of those appearances was presumptively justified in
88
For a discussion of an evaluative use of the term law that applies to an evaluative use of the term
authority, see Himma, Morality and the Nature of Law, ch. 2.
89
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/plausiblee; www.merriam-webster.com/diction
ary/plausible (italicized emphases added).

believing it, as would be a child with nothing more to go on than what her eyes
tell her. But viewed against the background of what has been conclusively
established by, among other things, photographs of the earth taken from
space, the claim the earth is flat might seem plausible to someone who is
unfamiliar with the overwhelming evidence. However, it is not plausible –
that is, does not count as plausible.
The applicable standards of plausibility are hence socially constructed
because they are determined by what we converge in believing is presumptively
justified, as an objective matter, on the basis of the appearances. While these
standards are ultimately conventional, we believe that they mirror objective
standards that determine what counts, from a God’s-eye perspective we cannot
achieve, as really plausible. It is hence the doxastic reactions of those over
whom someone claims authority that determine whether or not her claim counts
as plausible.
Our conceptual practices pertaining to attributions of practical authority
entail that two questions are especially pertinent in assessing the plausibility
of P’s claim of right over members of a group: the first is whether there is a set of
norms governing group members that confers a right upon P to direct their
behavior; the second is whether members accept or acquiesce to P’s claim of
right by complying enough when not initially inclined to do so to enable P to
minimally achieve her ends.90
A claim of right counts as plausible as to members of a group, then, only if
grounded in norms epistemically accessible to them. Although this does not
entail subjects are aware of all the nuances of that claim, which would include
details about its limits, it entails they are able to ascertain, without unreasonable
difficulty, that someone claims a right to direct their behavior that is grounded in
those norms – whether because those norms are published in a medium to which
subjects have easy access or whether because they are easily deduced from
either the behavior of persons claiming such a right or the behavior of others
subject to this claim.
Note that Q’s acquiescing to a claim of right plays the same role in determin-
ing its plausibility that Q’s contracting with another person plays in determining
the plausibility of the claim that Q is contractually obligated to that person.
Inasmuch as whether we agree to a contractual obligation determines the truth
of claims pertaining to whether we are contractually obligated, it determines the
plausibility of these claims. If my agreeing to a set of contractual obligations
constitutes the claim I have these obligations as true, then it also constitutes that
claim as plausible to me, since the fact I agreed to them is epistemically

90
See Section 6.

accessible to me. If a person understands all the relevant facts constituting

a claim as true and understands these facts constitute that claim as true, then
she knows all she needs to know in order to discern the appearance of its likely
truth and thus its plausibility.
Acquiescing to the requisite claim of right constitutes it as plausible in the
following way. Since Q’s acquiescing to P’s claim is partly constituted by
a disposition to comply, it involves treating P’s claim as true and thus as plausible.
Insofar as Q is aware P claims the same right over others who acquiesce and
thereby manifest a similar disposition to comply, Q’s awareness of these facts
constitutes P’s claim of right over them as plausible to Q. But if everyone else who
accepts or acquiesces to P’s claim is aware that others over whom P claims
authority also accept or acquiesce to it, thereby manifesting a similar disposition
to comply, then P’s claim of right counts as plausible to all group members.
The plausibility of authority’s constitutive claim of right is, then, determined by
the following social facts: (1) the claim of right is grounded in public norms that are
knowable (and usually understood in broad outlines) by members of the relevant
group; (2) members converge in accepting or acquiescing to it, thereby manifesting
a disposition to comply that enables the authority to minimally achieve the ends she
wishes to achieve by directing their behavior; and (3) each member is aware that all
the others accept or acquiesce to it, thereby manifesting the conceptually requisite
disposition that enables the authority to minimally achieve her ends.
It bears reiterating that norms confer practical authority by creating a permission
to do what is otherwise prohibited – by authorizing a person to do it. Legal norms
authorize judges in criminal cases to order bailiffs to remove the defendant from the
courtroom and transport her to another place where she will be incarcerated,
thereby creating a permission to do so. Absent that permission, ordering a person
to be taken and transported from one place and incarcerated in another would
constitute, in every existing legal system, criminal intent to kidnap her.
Creation of a special permission to direct behavior in the form of a right to do
so is the only mechanism by which a system can confer something that counts,
on our conceptual practices, as practical authority: a system N of norms counts
as conferring authority on P to do something that counts as directing the
behavior of others within its jurisdiction only if N prohibits subjects from
doing that something but authorizes and thereby entitles P to do it.

12.5 Practical Authority’s Constitutive Claim of Right

and the Sanctions Thesis
The Sanctions Thesis uniquely explains this constitutive feature of practical
authority: the only explanation of the notion that authority must be exercised

under a plausible claim of right that presumptively justifies it is that a telling can
count as authoritative only if backed by detriment. It is because a judge is legally
authorized to enforce her tellings by imposing detriment in the form of a fine or
incarceration that her tellings must be grounded in a claim of legal right that
legally justifies doing so; she needs a legal right to do so because the law does
not permit others to fine or sentence people to incarceration. That a judge is
authorized by legal norms to do what is otherwise unlawful explains why her
tellings count as legally authoritative only if made under a plausible claim of
legal right, which justifies her, at least presumptively, under the law in issuing
those tellings.91
There is simply nothing else in the practices constituting authoritative guidance
that needs a justification of any kind – including moral justification. Practical
authority guides behavior through utterances that tell the subject what to do.
However, uttering a sentence purporting to tell someone what to do no more
needs to be done under claim of right than uttering any other sentence does: I am
as much permitted to say “you must do this” as I am to say “the sky is blue” under
any system of norms governing my behavior I know of, other than those of
etiquette. It is the fact that the authority’s utterances telling people what to do are
permissibly enforced by detriment severe enough to deter noncompliance that
explains why authoritative tellings need a justification.
It might be helpful to note how the claim that practical authority is partly
constituted by a plausible claim of right is explained by the claim that it is partly
constituted by a power of will-imposition. It is not surprising that rationally
competent self-interested beings like us sometimes resist being told what to do,
given that authority’s capacity to tell others what to do must be explained in
terms of a permission to do what others are not permitted to do. Because an
authoritative telling comes bundled with a claim that the teller has a right to do
something others are not permitted to do, it can offend the subject’s sense of
autonomy and equality.92 The fact that these power inequalities, like economic
inequalities, sometimes elicit rebellious feelings in rational self-interested sub-
jects like us in worlds like ours where we must compete for everything we need
or want is not in the least surprising.
None of this tells us anything about whether the practices conferring authority
on someone to enforce her tellings in any particular society are morally justified,
but that is a strength of the theory – and not a defect. Any conceptual theory of
practical authority that entails that the claim of right must be morally justified is
inconsistent with our conceptual practices and fails to explicate them for that
91
It does not necessarily justify the content of the relevant tellings. See n. 87.
92
It does not help in this regard that practical authorities and their subjects are sometimes
invidiously – and ill-advisedly – described as superiors and subordinates.

reason; our conceptual practices assume there can be illegitimate – or morally

unjustiﬁed – authority. The requisite justiﬁcation is internal to the system confer-
ring authority. Accordingly, it is the same norms that confer authority which
function to justify enforcing authoritative tellings within that system of norms.

13 Practical Authority as Giving Rise to Obligations

One of the distinguishing features of practical authority is that its tellings create
obligations to comply. If a judge tells me to do something within the scope of her
legal authority to tell me to do, then it follows that I am legally obligated to do it;
if my employer tells me to do something within the scope of her contractual
authority to tell me to do, then it follows that I am contractually obligated to do
it; and so on. The idea that a telling defines an obligation to comply is simply
part of what we express when we describe it as authoritative.93
There are two constitutive properties of practical authority that distinguish it
from power. The first, discussed above in Section 12, is that authoritative
tellings, unlike those of someone who has just power, are made under a claim
of right that counts as plausible in virtue of being accepted or acquiesced to by
those who are subject to the teller’s authority. The second, discussed in this
section, is that authoritative tellings, unlike those of someone with only a power,
create obligations to comply of the same type as the norms conferring authority
on the teller. As Hart famously points out, an armed robber’s tellings can oblige
compliance but cannot, unlike those of practical authority, obligate it.94
These two constitutive properties are related. Part of what explains why
a practical authority’s tellings give rise, by nature, to an obligation to comply
is that they are grounded in a right to direct behavior; any set of norms
conferring a right on P to direct Q’s behavior does so partly in virtue of requiring
93
The concept of obligation has gotten comparatively little attention in the literature. While Jeremy
Bentham, John Austin, and H. L. A. Hart all had something to say about it, most contemporary
theorists have focused on distinguishing one kind of obligation from another (e.g., legal from
moral obligation) or explicating the nature of a particular kind of obligation (e.g., legal obliga-
tion). See, most recently, Stefan Bertea, A Theory of Legal Obligation (Cambridge University
Press, 2019); Dan Wodak, “What Does ‘Legal Obligation’ Mean?” Pacific Philosophical
Quarterly, vol. 99, no. 4 (2018), 790–816.
94
Following H. L. A. Hart, I use the term oblige to refer to a particular kind of prudential response
to a choice situation; as Hart describes the usage, “The gunman orders his victim to hand over his
purse and threatens to shoot him if he refuses; if the victim complies we refer to the way in which
he was forced to do so by saying he was obliged to do so. To some it has seemed clear that in this
situation where one person gives another an order backed by threats, and in this sense of ‘oblige,’
we have the essence of law, or at least ‘the key to the science of jurisprudence.”’ Hart, The
Concept of Law, 3rd ed. (Clarendon Press, 2012), 6 (underlined emphasis added). Although Hart
appears to limit this usage only to contexts involving threats of physical or emotional coercion,
I use the term to include responses to contexts in which a significant benefit is promised. On this
broader use, one counts as obliged to cash in a winning lottery ticket, instead of throwing it away
and foregoing the cash prize.

that Q do what P tells her to do – that is, by creating an obligation that binds Q. It
is true that any robust right to free speech permits P, absent unusual circum-
stances, to address a sentence r to Q that purports to tell Q to do something;
however, the fact P uttered a telling in the exercise of her free speech rights
cannot, by itself, obligate Q to do what that utterance says must be done. What
creates Q’s obligation to comply are the norms that confer authority on, and
thereby authorize, P to direct Q’s behavior; these norms confer a right on P to
direct Q’s behavior by obligating Q to do what P tells her to do.
As will be discussed below, obligations bind by creating liabilities to detri-
ment that rational self-interested subjects like us prefer to avoid, all else being
equal, as a descriptive matter of fact, because we should prefer to avoid it, all
else being equal, as an objective matter of practical reasoning. Indeed, it is the
fact that obligations create liabilities which explains how they give rise, as
a matter of conceptual necessity, to objective reasons that motivate compliance
and to objective reasons that justify it. The idea that obligations bind by creating
liabilities is at the core of the relevant conceptual and nonconceptual practices.

13.1 Obligations as Binding

The content of our concept of obligation is determined by our conventions for
using the term obligation together with the shared philosophical assumptions
about its nature that condition and ground those semantic conventions. Oxford
deﬁnes the term obligation as meaning “an act or course of action to which
a person is morally or legally bound,” whereas Merriam-Webster deﬁnes it as
meaning “something one is bound to do.”95
As the italicized language indicates, the claim that obligations bind is foun-
dational to both our conceptual and nonconceptual practices regarding obliga-
tion. As Hart explains ordinary usage:

The ﬁgure of a bond binding the person obligated, which is buried in the word
“obligation,” and the similar notion of a debt latent in the word “duty” are
explicable in terms of . . . a chain binding those who have obligations so that
they are not free to do what they want.96

These truisms comprise the foundation of our conceptual practices regarding

the nature of obligation.
It is also true, though not as obvious, that the mechanism through which
obligations bind cannot be explained just in terms of the subject’s feeling unfree
to do what she would otherwise feel free to do. As Hart observes:

95
www.oed.com/dictionary/obligation_n?tab=meaning_and_use#34088866; www.merriam-web
ster.com/dictionary/obligation (emphases added).
96
Hart, The Concept of Law, 87.

Natural and perhaps illuminating though these ﬁgures or metaphors are [i.e.,
that of a chain binding those with obligations], we must not allow them to trap
us into a misleading conception of obligation as essentially consisting in
some feeling of pressure or compulsion experienced by those who have
obligations. The fact rules of obligation are generally supported by serious
social pressure does not entail that to have an obligation under the rules is to
experience feelings of compulsion or pressure.97

Whatever it is that explains how obligations bind, our conceptual practices

assume that the mechanism is objective, and not subjective.
The problem is to identify this mechanism by which obligation does some-
thing that counts as binding subjects, on our conceptual practices. Section 13.2
explicates the nature of obligation in terms of its constitutive properties and
argues that obligations bind by creating liabilities in the form of potential
exposure to detriment that subjects prefer to avoid, all else being equal, as
a descriptive matter of fact, because they should prefer to avoid it, all else being
equal, as a matter of practical reasoning.98 This section concludes that these
liabilities explain how obligations bind in terms of the reasons to which they
give rise as a matter of conceptual necessity.

13.2 The Constitutive Properties of Obligation

The constitutive properties of – that is,. the existence or application conditions
for – obligation, as our conceptual practices construct that notion, can be roughly
summarized as follows: P has an obligation to do s under N if and only if (1) N is
a normative system; (2) there is a mandatory norm n in N that governs P’s
behavior; (3) n requires that P do s; (4) N excludes certain considerations as
excusing or justifying noncompliance with n; (5) n binds P in virtue of implicat-
ing a liability subjects regard as detriment to be avoided, all else being equal,
because they should regard it as such; (6) n creates an objective reason that
justiﬁes P in doing s under N and immunizes P in N against the imposition of the
relevant liability; and (7) n creates an objective reason that should motivate, all
else being equal, the agent to comply that is grounded in the undesirability of the
liability to which N gives rise.99

97
Ibid., 138.
98
One might think obligations bind in part by creating second-order exclusionary reasons. but
I will argue in Section 14 that objective exclusionary reasons do not exist. However, either way, it
should be clear that obligations bind by creating liabilities that give rise to ﬁrst-order reasons to
comply grounded in the detriment constituting the liability. If obligations give rise to exclusion-
ary reasons as a matter of conceptual necessity, those reasons must also be grounded in the
detriment constituting the liability. There is simply nothing else in the constitutive properties of
obligation that is equipped to do that normative work.
99
Contrast with Stefan Bertea’s view that “obligation is best conceived as a practically normative
requirement that makes a perceptible and yet empirically resistible claim on us, who in turn do

13.3 Obligations Bind by Creating Liabilities

The only one of these claims needing explication for my purposes is the claim
that obligations create liabilities as a matter of conceptual necessity; this is the
only claim of the seven above that one might sensibly think does not obviously
express a conceptual truism about the nature of obligation.100
Obligations bind by defining a consequence to which the subject is liable.
While the term liable is most frequently used in connection with the law,101 it
can be used in connection with other species of prescription: as Merriam-
Webster explains this usage, it means “being in a position to incur” and “subject
to some usually adverse contingency or action.”102 It might feel more natural to
limit the application of this term to the law, but the term is aptly applied, as
a matter of ordinary usage, to other prescriptions, social and nonsocial alike.
One can count as liable only to detriment because one can incur, or be subject
to, only detriment. As Cambridge defines it, incur means to “to experience
something bad as a result of actions you have taken.”103 Given that it is inapt to
describe winning a lottery as “something bad,” it is inapt to describe someone
who buys a ticket as “incurring” the prize money or as “liable” to winning it.
It is likewise inapt to characterize someone who buys a lottery ticket as being
“subject to” the winnings. Though the prize money is correctly characterized as
“subject to” taxation, this is because having one’s winnings taxed counts as
detriment constituting a tax liability. The term liability applies only to what
members of the group regard as detriment in virtue of preferring to avoid it, all
else being equal, because they should prefer to avoid it, all else being equal.
Our conceptual practices do not entail that detriment counts as a liability in
a system only if it is reasonably likely to deter enough noncompliance to enable the
system to minimally achieve its ends. It is clear, for instance, that the liabilities
defined by mandatory moral norms are not sufficiently severe to deter enough

something presumptively wrong, for which we can be held accountable, insofar as we fail to
abide by it,” which he describes as “the fundamental, or essential, and so minimal characteriza-
tion of obligation.” Bertea, A Theory of Legal Obligation, ch. 1, sec. 4.
100
One might think that moral obligations are a counterexample to the claim that obligations are
constituted, by nature, by a liability, but this is false. Violating a moral obligation constitutes one
as deserving of blame, censure, or punishment. Since we regard being deserving of blame,
censure, or punishment as detriment we prefer to avoid, it counts as a liability – albeit one that
lacks the teeth of being blamed, censured, or punished. Most of us care a great deal about the
requirements of morality, though we might disagree on the content of those requirements. We
want not just to be regarded as good but to actually be good.
101
Merriam-Webster deﬁnes the narrower usage as “obligated according to law or equity” and
“subject to appropriation and attachment.” www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liable.
102
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liable. Though the Merriam-Webster deﬁnition states
that the contingency is “usually adverse,” one is inaptly described as either “in a position to
incur” or “subject to” a contingency that is not adverse.
103
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/incur.

noncompliance to enable the system of morality to minimally achieve whatever

ends are plausibly attributed to it.104 If they were, then we would not need law’s
coercive strictures to enable us to live together in comparative peace. Assuming it is
a necessary condition, as I argue in this Element, for a telling to count as authorita-
tive that it is backed by detriment severe enough to enable the teller to minimally
achieve her ends, no such requirement applies to the concept of a liability.
Understanding how the idea of liability figures into our conceptual and
nonconceptual practices pertaining to obligation requires understanding
a number of logical relationships that obtain among a cluster of concepts.
Most conspicuously, obligation is related to wrongness in the following way:
the claim that P has an obligation to do a is logically equivalent to – albeit not
synonymous with – the claim that it is wrong for P to abstain from doing a. The
only way to do wrong, on our conceptual practices, is to violate an obligation.
The concept of wrongness is related to that of culpability, but the relationship is
more complicated. One counts as culpable only if one does wrong in virtue of not
having met an obligation, but one can do wrong without being culpable: if P is
legally insane and provably commits a murder, then P has committed a legal
wrong – despite the fact she lacks the abilities needed for legal culpability and is
immunized from punishment for this reason. Moreover, it is plausible to think that
one can count as culpable for an action that is not wrong: if P tells Q something,
mistakenly believing it is false, and this is not intended as a joke, then P’s uttering
it to Q is correctly described as culpable – indeed, even if P’s uttering it to Q does
not count as wrong because it turns out to be true, contrary to what P believes.
But, either way, it is clear both that the term wrong applies only to acts and that the
term culpable applies only to mental states, like intentions.
The concepts of obligation, wrongness, and culpability are related to that of
liability in the following ways: P counts as liable only for acts she is obligated
not to perform; P counts as liable only for acts that count as wrong in virtue of
violating some obligation; and P counts as liable only for acts that count as
culpable. Someone can thus count as culpable only for acts that count as wrong.
One counts as liable to detriment in virtue of deserving it for having culpably
done wrong under the same system of norms giving rise to the obligation. Moral
norms defining obligations create a liability in the form of being subject to
blame, censure, or punishment in virtue of deserving it under these norms.
Social norms of etiquette defining obligations create a liability in the form of
being subject to social disapproval in virtue of deserving it under those norms.
Criminal laws defining obligations create a liability in the form of being subject
to fines or incarceration in virtue of one’s deserving it under the same norms.

104
See n. 100.

This liability explains the normative force of the obligation and the reason to
which it gives rise. Obligations bind by creating liabilities that subjects have
objective motivating reasons to avoid. One cannot be immunized against the
imposition of the detriment to which one is liable simply because one regards
oneself, correctly or not, as having had conclusive conflicting reasons. If these
reasons are excluded as excusing or justifying noncompliance, they cannot immun-
ize one against the detriment that one deserves under the norms creating the
obligation and corresponding liability. It is therefore the objective motivating reason
to avoid the detriment one deserves for noncompliance that expresses the sense in
which one must or shall, as opposed to merely should, do what the corresponding
norm requires.
It is tempting to think prescriptions creating obligations have a normativity
lacking in prescriptions that do not create obligations; however, that is
a mistake. While we do not conceptualize nonobligatory mandatory prescrip-
tions as defining liabilities, the two kinds of prescriptions both implicate detri-
ment, albeit a little differently. Obligatory mandatory prescriptions do so by
creating liabilities that are justifiably imposed under the same system that
constitutes them as obligatory, whereas nonobligatory mandatory prescriptions
do not define such liabilities, even if backed by detriment.105
Indeed, it is worth noting here that noncompliance with a nonobligatory
mandatory prescription can result in the imposition of far more severe detriment
than noncompliance with an obligatory mandatory prescription. Being shot in
the face for disobeying a robber’s telling is obviously less desirable, as an
objective matter of practical reasoning, than being deserving of blame for
culpably telling some innocuous lie. The conceptual normativity of obligatory
mandatory prescriptions cannot be distinguished from that of other mandatory
prescriptions in terms of the severity of the detriment backing them.
The only conceptual difference between the two kinds of prescription rele-
vant here is that obligatory mandatory prescriptions create objective justifying
reasons as a matter of conceptual necessity by giving rise to novel liabilities,
whereas nonobligatory mandatory prescriptions do not. But this distinction does
not correspond to any conceptual difference regarding normativity because
justifying reasons do not count, strictly speaking, as reasons to comply since
they operate to justify, rather than to rationally induce, compliance. That the law
defines a justification for killing someone in self-defense does not, by itself,
trigger an objective motivating reason to do so. It is the person’s interest in
continuing to live that gives rise to that reason to do so by triggering it.
105
I assume, for the sake of argument, there can be prescriptions that count as mandatory despite
not being backed by detriment to avoid begging any questions. But, as will be recalled, I argued
in Section 7 that every prescription that counts as mandatory is backed by detriment.

13.4 The Concept of Obligation and the Sanctions Thesis

The claim that every telling that counts as authoritative is backed by detriment is
entailed by the claims that (a) authoritative tellings define obligations and (b)
obligations bind by creating liabilities. Since a person can be obligated to comply
with a telling only if it creates a liability for noncompliance, it follows that every
telling giving rise to an obligation creates a liability for noncompliance. Since,
further, something counts as a liability only if it exposes subjects to detriment for
noncompliance by placing them “in a position to incur” it, thereby constituting
them as “subject to” it, a person counts as obligated under a system of norms only
if that system puts her in a position to incur, thereby making her subject to,
detriment for noncompliance.106 But since a telling counts as authoritative only if
it defines an obligation to comply, it follows that every telling that counts as
authoritative is backed by something that counts as detriment.
The Sanctions Thesis expresses a stronger claim than just that every telling
that counts as authoritative is backed by something that counts as detriment; it
asserts, further, that every telling that counts as authoritative is backed by
detriment sufficiently severe – and therefore reasonably likely – to deter enough
noncompliance to enable the teller to minimally achieve those ends that she
intends to achieve by directing the behavior of subjects. Since a telling can be
backed by detriment insufficiently severe to do that work,107 the Sanctions
Thesis cannot be deduced from the claim that every telling that counts as
authoritative creates a liability that constitutes an obligation to comply.
Nonetheless, it can justifiably be inferred as the best explanation of how
authoritative tellings necessarily give rise to obligations to comply with the
help of an uncontentious claim about the constitutive properties of authoritative
tellings. If a telling counts as authoritative only if efficacious in deterring enough
noncompliance among subjects to enable the teller to minimally achieve her ends,
it is because the liability that constitutes the telling as binding is reasonably
contrived, and therefore equipped, to deter enough noncompliance to enable her
to minimally achieve those ends.
Further, one can infer the Sanctions Thesis with the help of a somewhat weaker
claim about the constitutive efficacy of authoritative guidance – namely, that
every telling that counts as authoritative is issued by someone efficacious in
inducing compliance in subjects not already disposed to comply. This weaker
claim does not imply every authoritative telling succeeds in deterring enough

106
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/liable.
107
Proponents of more stringent penalties for crime typically ground their views in claims that
existing penalties are not sufﬁciently severe to reduce the incidence of crime to what they
believe are acceptable levels.

noncompliance to enable the authority to minimally achieve her ends; that

something is reasonably contrived to perform some function does not entail it is
successful in performing it. But the only plausible explanation of why authorita-
tive guidance is, by nature, minimally efﬁcacious in guiding behavior is that only
tellings that are reasonably contrived to deter enough noncompliance to enable
the authority to minimally achieve her ends count as authoritative.
A telling that is not reasonably contrived to deter enough noncompliance to
enable the authority to minimally achieve her ends by guiding the behavior of
subjects is not reasonably contrived to do what authoritative tellings are stand-
ardly needed and used to do – namely, to induce compliance in subjects who are
not already disposed to comply. If part of what constitutes an authoritative
telling as reasonably contrived to perform this function is that it gives rise to an
obligation as a matter of conceptual necessity, the liability constituting an
authoritative telling as binding – and, accordingly, as obligatory – must be
reasonably contrived to deter enough noncompliance to enable the authority to
minimally achieve her ends and counts as a sanction, as I have explicated that
concept. Since there can be wicked authoritative tellings that neither give rise to
novel moral obligations nor conform to preexisting ones, the Sanctions Thesis is
the only plausible explanation of how authoritative tellings deﬁne obligations to
comply as a matter of conceptual necessity.

14 Must Authoritative Tellings Create Exclusionary Reasons?

The Exclusionary Thesis asserts that mandatory prescriptions create exclusionary
reasons which, by nature, bar subjects from acting on certain conﬂicting ﬁrst-
order reasons.108 Since it is a truism that every telling counts as a mandatory
prescription, the Exclusionary Thesis entails that every telling that counts as
authoritative gives rise to a second-order exclusionary reason (i.e., that every
authoritative telling necessarily triggers a second-order exclusionary reason).
Exclusionary reasons are objective and motivating in character. Since the only
kind of reason that could function to bar an agent from acting on a motivating
reason is another motivating reason, exclusionary reasons count as motivating
reasons. Since, as Raz claims, one should treat mandatory prescriptions as
exclusionary reasons,109 they likewise count as objective. They also count, of
course, as subjective for a subject if she treats them as having normative force in

108
As Raz puts it, “mandatory norms are exclusionary reasons.” Raz, Practical Reason and Norms,
72. To the extent authoritative tellings count as mandatory prescriptions, they also count as
exclusionary reasons.
109
Raz claims that rationally competent subjects “may be justiﬁed in not acting on the balance of
[ﬁrst-order] reasons.” Ibid., 39.

her decision-making. However, they count as objective, on Raz’s view, because

the subject should regard these prescriptions as exclusionary reasons.
Raz discusses three deliberative conﬂict situations that he believes can be
resolved by recourse to objective exclusionary reasons. However, it sufﬁces to
consider one because each has a similar structure and is thus adequately addressed
with a similar analysis. Raz’s example of Jeremy’s reasoning in one of these
situations is particularly germane since it is concerned with the nature of authority:

Jeremy is ordered by his commanding ofﬁcer to appropriate and use a van

belonging to a certain tradesman. Therefore, he has a reason to appropriate
the van. His friend urges him to disobey the order pointing to weighty reason
for doing so. Jeremy does not deny that his friend may have a case. But, he
claims, it does not matter whether he is right or not. Orders are orders and
should be obeyed even if wrong, even if no harm will come from disobeying
them. . . . The order is a reason for doing what you were ordered regardless of
the balance of the reasons.110

As Raz represents Jeremy’s thinking, the order precludes his acting on his own
assessment of the order’s moral character: “It means that it is not for you to
decide what is best.”111
Two observations would be helpful here. First, this is a thought experiment and
not a report of some rigorous empirical study of our conceptual practices. In
essence, Raz has simply written his views on how Jeremy should think on whether
to comply into the example. But without rigorous social scientific empirical
confirmation, these views are not justifiably attributed to ordinary speakers,
whose convergent beliefs about what the norms of practical reasoning require
help to determine the content of our evaluative practices.112 In consequence, these
examples show nothing more momentous than that recourse to exclusionary
reasons is objectively rational (i.e., that recourse to exclusionary reasons is not
objectively irrational). Unfortunately, all this entails is that the Exclusionary Thesis
is a coherent thesis about the nature of a mandatory prescription.113
Second, it is clear that Jeremy can justifiably reach the same result without
recourse to second-order motivating exclusionary reasons if he conceptualizes
orders as giving rise to first-order motivating reasons that can be outweighed
only in exceptional cases, as when needed to prevent perpetuating a gross

110 111
Ibid. Ibid. 112 But see n. 22 and associated text.
113
Given that it is a necessary condition for a subject to count as rational, as was seen in Section 10,
that her reasoning minimally conforms to what we take to be objective standards of epistemic
and practical reasoning, the relevant notions of coherence and rationality track each other in the
following way: A subject’s reasoning counts as rational if and only if it is coherent. Accordingly,
a subject’s reasoning counts as irrational if and only if it is incoherent. The idea of coherence
assumes that the subject’s thinking about whether to perform some act is connected in the right
way with whether it should be performed. Rationality, again, deﬁnes a comparatively low bar.

injustice. This conforms to our shared views about the nature of orders: not even
the United States Code of Military Justice requires a soldier to obey every
order.114 Further, since the concept of an exclusionary reason was unfamiliar to
philosophers until Raz invented it,115 it is much more plausible to think ordinary
speakers conceive orders as giving rise to only weighty first-order reasons to do
what they require.
This latter point would not surprise Raz, as he takes pains to avoid overselling
the Exclusionary Thesis; Raz never so much as insinuates that objective stand-
ards of practical reasoning ever require us to consider second-order exclusion-
ary reasons. Indeed, on the first page of chapter 1 of Practical Reasons and
Norms, Raz describes his goal as “to show that these distinctions are plausible
and useful.”116 Although he claims that “a useful explication of the notions of
strength, weight, and overriding . . . must allow for the existence of other logical
types of conflict and of conflict resolution,”117 he never gives any arguments in
support of the claim that recourse to such reasons is even sometimes required.
All the examples he discusses in the book are more easily – and naturally –
resolved just by considering all of the first-order motivating reasons.
One might think this is enough to establish that first- and second-order
mechanisms for resolving conflict are on the same level. But this overlooks
that first-order mechanisms are indispensable in constituting mandatory pre-
scriptions as defining wrongs. Without a mandatory moral norm to define an
objective first-order motivating reason to abstain from, say, intentionally killing
people, there is no problem of any order in doing so. There is no first-order
problem because there is no moral norm to define a wrong and no second-order
problem because there is no norm of any kind to cause the problem; without
a mandatory moral norm to define a set of excluded reasons, there are no
relevant objective exclusionary reasons. If objective exclusionary motivating
reasons are needed to perform some function in our practical reasoning, it is, as
Raz believes, to protect the relevant objective first-order motivating moral
reasons by augmenting them.
But it is not clear why the objective first-order moral motivating reasons
created by a mandatory moral prescription, as a matter of conceptual necessity,
need such protection or why only objective exclusionary moral motivating
reasons are equipped to protect them. The idea that mandatory moral prescrip-
tions necessarily give rise to objective exclusionary moral motivating reasons
might seem plausible inasmuch as we conceive moral obligations as giving rise
to moral motivating reasons that trump prudential motivating reasons. But

114
It requires only that “lawful orders” be obeyed. 10 U.S.C. 892; UCMJ art. 92.
115
See Section 4.2. 116 Raz, Practical Reason and Norms, 15. 117
Ibid., 36.

a second-order exclusionary moral motivating reason is needed to neutralize

countervailing first-order prudential motivating reasons only when those first-
order reasons to perform some wrongful act objectively outweigh the first-order
motivating moral reason to abstain from its performance.
The notion that prudential considerations ever defeat the objective first-order
moral motivating reasons to which mandatory moral prescriptions give rise cannot
be reconciled with our evaluative moral practices. Consider the moral norm that
prohibits torture. If our ordinary evaluative practices define the touchstone, then
the first-order moral reason not to torture a person necessarily outweighs any
prudential benefits that may accrue to you from doing so. Even if someone
promises you a trillion dollars to torture someone for just ten seconds, it is
wrong to do so; the moral cost to human dignity vastly exceeds any prudential
benefits to you. Accordingly, from the vantage point of shared views about what
objective standards require of moral reasoning, the existence of objective second-
order exclusionary reasons is otiose.
There is no work that objective exclusionary reasons are needed to do in
explaining our conceptual practices pertaining to authoritative guidance. If it
were true that only legitimate tellings count as authoritative, the objective first-
order moral motivating reasons to comply would do all the needed work. Those
reasons either outweigh the countervailing first-order motivating reasons or they do
not. But if not, there is no ground for thinking that there must be an objective
exclusionary moral reason that tips the balance in favor of compliance by excluding
the conflicting first-order motivating reasons. Further, if the Sanctions Thesis is
true, the objective first-order motivating reasons – which include moral motivating
reasons if the authority is legitimate – do all the needed deliberative work. In
neither case are there grounds to think objective standards of practical reasoning
require recourse to exclusionary motivating reasons.
But the idea there is no work objective exclusionary motivating reasons are
needed to do under norms of practical reasoning entails that these reasons do not
exist. If a proposition counts as an objective reason only if it favors doing, or
abstaining from doing, something under objective norms of practical reasoning,
then a proposition that does no deliberative work under these norms (i.e.
objectively favors nothing) does not count as an objective reason. However, if
it does not count as an objective reason, then it does not exist as such. Although
this does not preclude subjects from treating some proposition as giving rise to
an exclusionary reason, it implies that any subject who does so, thinking it is an
objective requirement of practical reasoning, has made a mistake.118

118
The analysis is agnostic with respect to whether there are objective second-order exclusionary
justifying reasons.

But, either way, assuming the Exclusionary Thesis is true, the objective
exclusionary motivating reasons to which a mandatory prescription gives
rise in virtue of its nature must express the same kind of value that is
expressed by the ﬁrst-order motivating reason to which it gives rise in virtue
of its nature. It should be clear that (a) the only objective motivating reasons
to which mandatory moral prescriptions give rise, by nature, are moral in
character and that (b) the only objective motivating reasons to which pru-
dential prescriptions give rise, by nature, are prudential in character.
Accordingly, if the Exclusionary Thesis and the Sanctions Thesis are both
true, then any telling that counts as authoritative gives rise to both an
objective ﬁrst-order prudential motivating reason and an objective second-
order exclusionary prudential motivating reason. Only the Sanctions Thesis
can explain the conceptual normativity of authoritative guidance, as that
notion was explained in Section 8.

15 Objections: Of Angels and Emergency Volunteers

There are two objections that should be addressed here. One of them, Joseph
Raz’s society-of-angels argument, is directed at the claim that it is a necessary
condition for a normative system to count as one of law that some of its
mandatory norms are backed by a sanction. But it is worth considering what,
if anything, the society-of-angels argument might tell us about the nature of
authority. The second owes to David Estlund.119 Though it is concerned with
morally legitimate authority, it can teach us something interesting about the
nature of practical authority.120
According to Raz’s society-of-angels argument, there can exist among
morally perfect beings a normative system lacking sanctions that counts as

119
Estlund, Democratic Authority.
120
Hart rejects that legal systems are inherently coercive on the ground it would constitute them as
“gunmen writ large,” but this is just silly. First, every legal system that has existed has backed
laws prohibiting violence with a sanction. However, no one apart from a philosophical anarchist
would claim this constitutes a legal system as analogous to a gunman. Second, I have been
threatened with a loaded gun in my life and I am sure that no one who has ever had that
harrowing experience would be remotely tempted to think law constitutes a gunman writ large
just because it punishes violence. Most of us have disobeyed a traffic law at some point in our
lives; though that might not be legally or morally justified, it is not irrational. In contrast, it is
obviously irrational, absent unusual circumstances, to refuse to surrender the contents of one’s
wallet to a robber.
The gunman writ large argument is much weaker for other species of authoritative guidance
because the associated liabilities are not as severe as those of the criminal justice system.
Indeed, the only reason that there is a general moral problem of justifying practical authority is
that authoritative tellings are backed, by nature, with a threat of detriment; absent this threat,
there is nothing in our nonconceptual practices pertaining to authority that is plausibly pre-
sumed in need of moral justification.

one of law.121 The worry is that such a system would include only norms that
address pure coordination problems, like on which side of the road one ought
to drive.122 The system would not include any criminal norms prohibiting
murder, assault, theft, or fraud because morally perfect subjects have no need,
epistemic or practical, for such norms. Further, such a system would not
include any norms pertaining to contracts or negligence because morally
perfect subjects likewise have no need for these norms; an angel would
never breach a contract unless released from it by the other parties and
would always take the appropriate precautions to protect others from foresee-
able injury.
What is left is an exceptionally thin system of norms that is not remotely
equipped to do any of the jobs that have been done by every legal system in
history. Notice that such a system would not include the so-called minimum
content of natural law – which includes prohibitions of actions likely to lead to
violent conflicts. Every system that constitutes one of law that has ever existed
in our world has included, and enforced, the prohibitions of the minimum
content of natural law. This is because we converge in believing, and justifiably
so, that self-interested beings like us need to have these prohibitions backed by
sanctions in order to enable us to live together in worlds of challenging material
scarcity like ours. It is the content of law that helps to differentiates law from
every other species of behavioral guidance, including those that define and
govern the games we play.
It is worth noting that the society-of-angels argument cannot be extended
to cover authoritative tellings in general.123 Other species of authoritative
guidance, like those of an employer or school, are less concerned with
preventing harm than with ensuring subjects know how to do what they are
required to do and can do such things competently. It is true that even
employers and teachers need to back their tellings with sanctions, human
nature being what it is, in order to deter enough harmful behavior to minim-
ally achieve their ends. But practical authority’s function in these cases is to
ensure subjects can do what they need – or are needed – to do out in the world
by guiding their behavior.

121
Raz, Practical Reason and Norms, 159–160.
122
A problem counts as one of pure coordination, as I intend the notion here, only if subjects have
a stronger preference for agreement on a solution than for any particular solution to the problem.
It is true some theorists have claimed the conceptual function of law is to coordinate behavior.
But they are using the term coordinate in a much looser way than I am.
123
It is worth noting that if the argument succeeds in refuting the applicability of the Sanctions
Thesis to law, it also succeeds in refuting its applicability to authoritative guidance in general.
The law, after all, is just one species of authoritative guidance. This is why it is helpful to
consider whether the society-of-angels argument succeeds against its applicability to law.

This limits the reach of Raz’s society-of-angels argument in the following

way. The character of subjects matters with respect to evaluating conceptual
theories of law because the most basic function of a legal system is to keep the
peace among rational self-interested beings like us in worlds of acute material
scarcity like ours. Law cannot do any of the other things we use law to do unless
it is efficacious in preventing the war of all against all that constitutes the
Hobbesian state of nature. But since the angels are morally perfect, there is no
need for either criminal prohibitions or the sanctions backing them because
there is no need to deter morally perfect beings from committing harmful
acts.124 In contrast, we are so far from being morally perfect – and, for that
matter, from being even morally perfectible – that it is just foolish to think we
can learn anything about an institution contrived to enable beings like us to live
in peace and reap the benefits of cooperation from beings with psychological
features that inherently self-interested beings like us could never possess.125
Estlund’s argument is not directly on point but is nonetheless quite helpful
here. He points out that one can be morally bound to comply with a telling even
when it is not backed with a sanction. That, of course, is obviously true, but it
tells us nothing about the nature of practical authority. One might, for instance,
be morally bound to comply with the tellings of a Samaritan who takes the
initiative at the site of a bad automobile accident to direct traffic around the
disabled cars. However, one can be morally obligated to do what another person
says to do for reasons having nothing to do with authority – including that
compliance is likely to conduce to the well-being of other people.
As it happens, the example is readily adapted to support the Sanctions Thesis.
If a police officer with legal authority over the stretch of highway where the
accident occurred deputizes the Samaritan, thereby authorizing her to issue
tickets with enforceable fines to noncomplying drivers, then the Samaritan has
something that counts as derivative authority over that stretch of highway for as
long as she remains duly deputized. Such authorization is necessary to count as
having practical authority over another person – as this Element has argued.
While Estlund’s observations may seem to problematize the analysis here, it
turns out they actually support the Sanctions Thesis.

124
Indeed, it is not metaphysically possible to deter a morally perfect being from committing an
immoral act. Someone can be deterred from committing only those acts she is contemplating
committing, and a morally perfect being is precluded, by her nature, from contemplating the
commission of immoral acts.
125
Mainstream philosophical and religious traditions in the West generally take the position that
human nature is not perfectible and that human redemption requires faith in the grace of God.
See, e.g., Harold Coward, The Perfectibility of Human Nature in Eastern and Western Thought
(SUNY Press, 2012).

Conclusions
This Element attempts to provide a comprehensive theory of the nature of
practical authority. To that end, it argues for two principal theses. The ﬁrst is
that the following claim exhausts the constitutive properties of authoritative
tellings: authoritative tellings (1) tell subjects what to do; (2) create reasons to
comply; (3) are issued by personal beings and govern the behavior of personal
beings; (4) are issued by rationally competent beings and govern the behavior of
rationally competent beings; (5) are issued under a claim of right that counts as
plausible in virtue of being grounded in a system that subjects accept or
acquiesce to as governing their behavior; (6) are issued by beings with the
power to impose their will on subjects with respect to what they do; and (7)
create obligations to comply.
The second thesis is that the claim that only tellings that are backed by the
threat of a sanction count as authoritative (the Sanctions Thesis) can be inferred
from each of the claims of the list, either as a logical implication or as the best
explanation of why that claim is true – apart from claim (3) that authoritative
tellings are issued only by personal beings and govern the behavior of only
personal beings. Accordingly, this Element argues that all but one of these
constitutive properties are uniquely explained by the Sanctions Thesis.

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Series Editors
George Pavlakos
University of Glasgow
George Pavlakos is Professor of Law and Philosophy at the School of Law, University of
Glasgow. He has held visiting posts at the universities of Kiel and Luzern, the European
University Institute, the UCLA Law School, the Cornell Law School and the Beihang Law
School in Beijing. He is the author of Our Knowledge of the Law (2007) and more recently has
co-edited Agency, Negligence and Responsibility (2021) and Reasons and Intentions in Law
and Practical Agency (2015).

Gerald J. Postema
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Gerald J. Postema is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Among his publications count Utility, Publicity, and Law: Bentham’s Moral and
Legal Philosophy (2019); On the Law of Nature, Reason, and the Common Law: Selected
Jurisprudential Writings of Sir Matthew Hale (2017); Legal Philosophy in the Twentieth
Century: The Common Law World (2011), Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, 2nd
edition (2019).

Kenneth M. Ehrenberg
University of Surrey
Kenneth M. Ehrenberg is Professor of Jurisprudence and Philosophy at the University of
Surrey School of Law and Co-Director of the Surrey Centre for Law and Philosophy. He is the
author of The Functions of Law (2016) and numerous articles on the nature of law,
jurisprudential methodology, the relation of law to morality, practical authority, and the
epistemology of evidence law.

Associate Editor
Sally Zhu
University of Sheﬃeld
Sally Zhu is a Lecturer in Property Law at University of Sheﬃeld. Her research is on property
and private law aspects of platform and digital economies.

About the Series

This series provides an accessible overview of the philosophy of law, drawing on its
varied intellectual traditions in order to showcase the interdisciplinary dimensions of
jurisprudential enquiry, review the state of the art in the ﬁeld, and suggest fresh research
agendas for the future. Focussing on issues rather than traditions or authors, each
contribution seeks to deepen our understanding of the foundations of the law, ultimately
with a view to oﬀering practical insights into some of the major challenges of our age.

Elements in the Series

Hans Kelsen’s Normativism
Carsten Heidemann
The Materiality of the Legal Order
Marco Goldoni
Sociological Approaches to Theories of Law
Brian Z. Tamanaha
Revisiting the Rule of Law
Kristen Rundle
The Place of Coercion in Law
Triantafyllos Gkouvas
The Diﬀerentiation and Autonomy of Law
Emilios Christodoulidis
The Moral Prerequisites of the Criminal Law: Legal Moralism and the Problem
of Mala Prohibita
Ambrose Y. K. Lee and Alexander F. Sarch
Legal Personhood
Visa A. J. Kurki
The Philosophy of Legal Proof
Lewis Ross
The Nature of Authority
Kenneth Einar Himma

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The Nature of Authority

Uploaded by

The Nature of Authority

Uploaded by

Himma

The Nature of Authority provides a comprehensive theory of

The Nature of Authority

About the Series Series Editors

Cover image: Jane Couroussopoulos,

Kenneth Einar Himma

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

Elements in Philosophy of Law

Kenneth Einar Himma

Abstract: The Nature of Authority provides a comprehensive theory of

Keywords: practical authority, epistemic authority, law, jurisprudence,

PART I PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 3

2 Metaphysics, Modality, and Conceptual Analysis 6

3 Two Kinds of Authority: Epistemic and Practical 9

4 The Razian Theory of Practical Authority 10

PART II THE EXISTENCE CONDITIONS OF PRACTICAL

6 Other Candidates for Constitutive Properties

PART III CLAIMS (1) THROUGH (7) AND THE SANCTIONS

8 Practical Authority as a Source of Reasons to Comply 19

9 Practical Authority as a Personal Relationship 25

10 Practical Authority as Rational 29

11 Practical Authority as the Power of Will-Imposition 35

12 Practical Authority as Grounded in a Claim of Right 41

13 Practical Authority as Giving Rise to Obligations 49

14 Must Authoritative Tellings Create Exclusionary Reasons? 56

15 Objections: Of Angels and Emergency Volunteers 60

All writing is pigshit.

practical authority obviously depend on whether it is inherently coercive; the

PART I PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

summarized by dictionary deﬁnitions and, for this reason, tend to be over-

2 Metaphysics, Modality, and Conceptual Analysis

constitutes him as a bachelor. What constitutes him as a bachelor is that he is

3 Two Kinds of Authority: Epistemic and Practical

Epistemic and practical authority are logically independent because each

4 The Razian Theory of Practical Authority

expended on the conceptual issues of what constitutes a telling as authoritative

4.1 The Service Conception of Authority

4.2 Authoritative Tellings and Exclusionary Reasons

4.3 Practical Authority as the Power of Will-Imposition

PART II THE EXISTENCE CONDITIONS OF PRACTICAL

5 The Constitutive Properties of Authoritative Tellings

Part II attempts to show that only tellings backed by a sanction count as

6 Other Candidates for Constitutive Properties

It is important to note that someone can have practical authority over

PART III CLAIMS (1) THROUGH (7) AND THE

7 Practical Authority as Telling People What to Do

A more aggressive response to a presumptively inappropriate telling is to say

8 Practical Authority as a Source of Reasons to Comply

8.1 Authoritative Guidance as Giving Rise

8.2 Motivating, Justifying, and Explanatory Reasons

reports of what motivating reasons ﬁgured into a subject’s decisions to do what

8.3 Three Irreducible Sources of Value and Normative Force

subjects like us are motivated by three kinds of considerations that cannot be

subjects like us are reasonably likely to treat as reasons to comply because we

8.4 Two Kinds of Reason-Giving: Robust and Triggering

8.5 How Authoritative Tellings Trigger Prudential Reasons

necessity. A threat of detriment that backs a telling triggers a prudential reason

9 Practical Authority as a Personal Relationship

can induce someone to comply by threatening detriment or be induced to

10 Practical Authority as Rational

We shall reformulate current decision theory to include the symbolic meaning

many persons regarded as incompetent despite possessing the nomologically

conditioned by her reasoning.62 Rationality is determined as much by what

standards of logic conduces to believing only what is true by ensuring her

the available evidence – that it conduces to her well-being is not behaving in

11 Practical Authority as the Power of Will-Imposition

be seeking to achieve by causing Q’s body to make the desired movements, it

who is utterly unequipped to persuade patients of her claims and recommenda-

The Sanctions Thesis incorporates both uses of force discussed above by

12 Practical Authority as Grounded in a Claim of Right

12.1 The Concept of a Claim

12.2 The Concept of a Right

12.3 The Concept of a Claim of Right

12.4 What Is a Plausible Claim of Right?

accessible to me. If a person understands all the relevant facts constituting

12.5 Practical Authority’s Constitutive Claim of Right

Cover image: Jane Couroussopoulos,