Abstract
What happens in the agent that enables her to comply with the legal command or directive? When we perform an action because we are complying with the legal command or directive, are we still active, self-governed autonomous agents? In what sense are we still autonomous agents? The task of this study is to explain what legal authority is and the premise of the study is that this question can only be answered through understanding of how legal authority operates upon the agent: if we recognize that legal commands or directives intervene upon, affect and change the agent’s practical reasoning, then we need to understand and explain how this happens.
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- 1.
According to the empirical account of intentional action, the acceptance of legal rules provides reasons for actions in the context of the law. For a full explanation of the empirical account of action in the context of the law and its criticism, see Rodriguez-Blanco (2014b, Chap. 5). I argue that the empirical account of intentional action is parasitic on the “guise of the good” explanation of intentional action.
- 2.
Arguably, Raz’s explanation of how legal rules intervene in our reasoning is non-empirical since he has emphasized that a reason for action should not simply be understood as beliefs as mental states (Raz 1979, 1986, 1999). However, in Rodriguez-Blanco (2014b, Chap. 8), I argue that Raz’s explanation of legal authority is a theoretical explanation of our reasoning capacities; i.e. when we explain how legal directives and rules intervene in the citizen’s practical reasoning from the third-person perspective. His explanation ignores the first person or deliberative point of view of the citizen who follows legal rules.
- 3.
For a defence of a conception of paradigms as the best methodology to understand social and human concepts see Rodriguez-Blanco (2003).
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
The first person to discuss deviant causal chains was Chisholm (Chisholm 1976).
- 8.
See Anscombe (1981) for an argument of authority as practical necessity.
- 9.
In Chapter 9 of Rodriguez-Blanco (2014b), I show that robust value realism is indispensable to making sense of our actions, practices and first-order deliberative phenomenology. See Chap. 3 for a full defence of the “guise of the good model.” See also Grisez’s interpretation of Aquinas’s precepts of natural law in Grisez (Grisez 1969, 368).
- 10.
I use this term as Kosman and Coope interpret it from Aristotle’s Physics, Books III and IV. This means, the change that acts upon something else so that this something else becomes F; i.e. the fulfilment of a potentiality. For example, the building of a house by a builder so that the house becomes built. See Kosman (1969) and Coope (2009).
- 11.
- 12.
Makin argues that the teacher analogy is intended to show that the teleological perspective is equally appropriate for other-directed capacities and self-directed capacity. See Aristotle (2006), 198.
- 13.
- 14.
Raz’s exclusionary reasons account (Raz 1999) privileges the theoretical point of view. See also note 2 above.
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Rodriguez-Blanco, V. (2018). The Authority of Law. In: Bongiovanni, G., Postema, G., Rotolo, A., Sartor, G., Valentini, C., Walton, D. (eds) Handbook of Legal Reasoning and Argumentation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9452-0_9
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