Abstract
In believing or acting on authority, an agent appears to believe or act without making up her own mind about what is the case or what to do. How is this possible? How can an agent make up her mind about a theoretical or practical question, and so believe or act intentionally, without doing so for herself? This paper argues that the standard account available in the literature of how it is that an agent can make up her mind without doing so for herself, an account framed in terms of Joseph Raz’s notion of preemptive reasons, fails to adequately distinguish our rational dependence on other agents from reliance on ordinary instruments. It then offers an alternative account of what it is to make up one’s mind without doing so for oneself, one that focuses on the way in which the kind of rational responsibility that accrues to instances of settling a theoretical or practical question can be interpersonally distributed between agents and authorities.
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Notes
Hart goes on to claim that what is required for taking another’s will as a guide to action is that one take the other’s expression of will as a reason to act that is also meant “to preclude or cut off any independent deliberation by the hearer of the merits pro and con of doing the act” (1990: p. 100). As Raz points out, however, it is implausible that commands are meant to cut off an agent’s independent deliberation. As far as the commander is concerned, the agent can deliberate all that she wants about the independent merits of the act as long as she obeys the command (1986: p. 39).
Raz too talks of the authority’s decision “replacing” other reasons (1986: p. 42). See also Friedman: “To cite authority as a reason for doing an act (or believing an opinion) is to put a stop to the demand for reason at the level of the act itself, and to transfer one’s reason to another person’s “will” or judgment” (1990: p. 67).
I discuss the way in which Raz and Zagzebski attempt to cash out these claims—in terms of Raz’s notion of preemptive reasons—in the next section.
In this paper I will somewhat artificially use the terms ‘deference’ to refer to what is aimed at by theoretical or epistemic authority and ‘obedience’ to refer to what is aimed at by practical authority. The exercise of theoretical authority aims at deference (or deferential belief), while the exercise of practical authority aims at obedience (or obedient action).
See, for example, Darwall (2006).
I have here focused only on Raz’s account of what it is for an agent to make up her mind without doing so for herself, with what he terms his “Pre-emptive Thesis” (1986: p. 46). Raz’s service conception of authority includes several other components that do not bear directly on my concerns here. My objections in the next section to Raz’s preemptive account of authority thus bear only on this particular feature of his service conception.
One significant difference between Raz’s account of practical authority and Zagzebski’s account of epistemic authority is that Zagzebski’s account does not focus primarily on the way in which the directives of epistemic authorities provide preemptive reasons. She develops her account of epistemic authority as an account of what she calls “the authority of belief” and only later applies this account to “the authority of testimony.” For Zagzebski, epistemic authority is first and foremost a matter of the way in which the beliefs of an authority provide agents with preemptive reasons for belief, regardless of the way in which these beliefs are expressed. Raz, on the other hand, is first and foremost concerned with authoritative directives, with acts that aim at settling questions for others. For more on the significance of this difference, see McMyler (2014).
An anonymous referee points out that here are likely a variety of different forms of reliance on ”instruments,” some of which might be quite similar to reliance on authority. Some communicative media—road signs, for instance—can be understood as possessing a kind of derived authority, an authority derived from that of their makers, and some instruments might also be treated by agents as having a kind of authority derived from that of their designers. In such cases, the readings of the instrument might be treated very much like testimony. This is consistent with my general point in the text that there are some instruments that are not treated as having derived authority, instruments that agents use to make up their own minds about what is the case. Nevertheless, such instruments might still be construed as providing preemptive reasons. The notion of preemption is thus insufficient to explain what is going on when one agent allows another agent to make up her mind for her. This means that it is also insufficient to explain what is going on when instruments are treated as having derived authority.
While clearly recognizing this problem, Raz himself does not appear to offer a solution. He merely claims that other accounts of the justification of authority (consent-based accounts, for example) do not solve the problem (2009: p. 161).
Hieronymi’s talk of attitudes “embodying” an answer to a question is shorthand for a conjunction of conditionals like the following: “If one has settled for oneself positively the question of whether to \(\Phi \), one intends to \(\Phi \), and one intends to \(\Phi \) just in case one is committed to a positive answer to the question of whether to \(\Phi \)” (2009: p. 138). Note that Hieronymi here speaks of one settling for oneself the question of whether to \(\Phi \). I think that such talk of agents settling questions for themselves (as opposed to simply settling questions) is unnecessary for everything that she wants to defend. My concern in this section is with what it might mean to settle a question, in the general way that Hieronymi proposes, without doing so for oneself.
While this use of the term ‘rational responsibility’ is my own, I intend it to encompass what Hieronymi calls “answerability” (the sense in which one can be rightly asked one’s reasons whenever one counts as having settled a question) as well as the further respects in which she contends that answerability opens one to challenge and criticism concerning whether one’s reasons live up to the rational standards at play in the situation. It is features of these further dimensions of rational responsibility that, I will argue, distinguish deference or obedience to authority from reliance on ordinary instruments.
I also seem to be non-observationally aware of the cause of my jumping. Of course, I observed (heard) the noise, but I am not in the position of having merely observed the noise causing me to jump. The causation itself seems to be known from the inside: “Now among things known without observation must be included the causes of some movements. E.g. ‘Why did you jump back suddenly like that?’ ‘The leap and loud bark of that crocodile made me jump.’ (I am not saying that I did not observe the crocodile barking; but I did not observe that making me jump.)” (Anscombe 1957: p. 15).
The tension here is reminiscent of the tension we saw in the discussions of authority cited earlier. Is obedience to authority acting for a reason or not? Does it involve making up one’s mind or not?
Again, some instruments might be treated as having a kind of authority derived from that of their designers. On my view, to treat instruments in this way would be to treat them as providing more than preemptive reasons. It would be to treat them as providing authoritative reasons that parcel out rational responsibility for an agent’s belief or action between the agent and the instrument’s designers, whomever they might be. Such cases are interesting and complex, and they likely involve deference not to another individual but to an epistemic community. Understanding the authority of such communities, I contend, will also require understanding how the kind of rational responsibility involved in settling theoretical and practical questions can be distributed across agents and communities.
Darwall (2009) also argues that Raz’s account of practical authority fails to capture a sense of responsibility or accountability integral to the phenomenon. As Raz (2010) points out, however, what Darwall means by practical authority or, in his terms, “second-personal authority,” is quite distinctive, making its precise relation to Raz’s concerns (and to my own) with the exercise of authority involved in authoritative directives difficult to discern. In McMyler (2011) I tried to align my own concerns with the exercise of theoretical authority with Darwall’s concerns with second-personal authority. I now think that these concerns are distinct.
Raz himself seems open to the possibility that there might be better ways than his own of explaining the “preemptiveness” of authoritative directives (2010: p. 298). Raz’s “pre-emption thesis” is only one component of his general account of authority, the component meant to explain how obedience to authority involves, in the terms that I have put it, not making up one’s own mind about what to do. My alternative account of what it is to not make up one’s own mind is consistent with the other components of Raz’s service conception of authority, including his “dependence thesis” and his “normal justification thesis.”
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McMyler, B. On not making up one’s own mind. Synthese 197, 2765–2781 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1563-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1563-0