Three Conceptions of Practical Authority

Abstract

Joseph Raz’s much discussed service conception of practical authority has recently come under attack from Stephen Darwall, who proposes that we instead adopt a second-personal conception of practical authority. 1 In sharp contrast to both Darwall and Raz, we believe that the best place to begin understanding practical authority is with a pared back conception of it, as simply a species of normative authority more generally, where this species is picked out merely by the fact that the normative authority in question is authority in relation to action, rather than belief. We call this the minimalist conception of practical authority. 2 We do not wish to deny that there might turn out to be substantive properties of practical authority that are peculiar to it (apart from the mere property of being the species of authority that is concerned with action), but, unlike both Raz and Darwall, we do not believe that such features play a fundamental role in defining or delimiting practical authority. We hope that this third conception of authority will appear particularly attractive coming, as it will, on the heels of a comparison of the alternatives. We begin, in section I, with a discussion of Darwall’s and Raz’s accounts of practical authority (readers who are already very familiar with the details of the debate between Darwall and Raz may wish to skip this section). Next, in section II, we consider what we take to be Darwall’s dialectically strongest criticism of Raz, concerning which we end up siding with Raz. Finally, in section III, we focus on the concept of authority afresh, and suggest that our alternative conception of practical authority provides a better starting place for future discussions of authority than either of the