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Course: Wireless Philosophy > Unit 10
Lesson 3: The basis of state authorityThe basis of state authority
In this Wireless Philosophy video, Geoff Pynn (Elgin Community College) explains two different accounts of the basis of state authority: first, that the state is founded on a contract among its citizens, and second, that the state is justified by considerations of fairness.
View our Democracy learning module and other videos in this series here: https://www.wi-phi.com. Created by Gaurav Vazirani.
Want to join the conversation?
- Great discussion! My question: I'm sure philosophers, political theorists, civic leaders at different levels, and the man/woman on the street have seen the basis of state authority thru the lens of their various eras. Is something radically different in the era we are currently in?
I've been using driving habits as an analogy for the mood/state of mind about the individual - and by extension, groups of like-minded individuals - in society, and on a daily basis I see a breakdown of adherence to state authority, a disregard for the welfare of one's fellow citizen and just plain rude and dangerous behavior.
I attribute this to the increased presence of the self-entitled individual brought on by the presence of certain US politicians who themselves have very little regard for state authority. Is this a valid observation. Are we going thru a phase?
Thanks.(2 votes)
Video transcript
[ Intro + Jingle ] Hi, I'm Geoff Pynn. I teach
Philosophy at Elgin Community College, and in this video I'm going to ask: Where does the state's authority come from? When I was a teenager, I
got a ticket for jaywalking. I looked both ways and made
sure no cars were coming, but as soon as I crossed the street,
a police car appeared out of nowhere. The officer issued me a
ticket, and I had to pay the fine. I protested. But the
officer stressed: what I did was against the law, and
he was only enforcing it. My parents and most
of my friends agreed. Although they all thought that giving
the ticket was a petty thing for him to do, they also all thought he
had every right to do it. So what gives the state, and the
people who represented it, such authority? Thomas Hobbes argued that without
a powerful state, our lives would wind up "poor, solitary,
nasty, brutish and short." Hobbes's argument is that all of
us benefit from the state's authority. But even if Hobbes is right
about that, it's still doesn't explain what gives the state
the right to its authority. People don't gain rightful authority
over you just by acting in your benefit. So, why is the state any different? According to the social contract
theory, the state's authority rests on an agreement between
each of us and society: each of us commits to respect
the law, in exchange for everyone else's
commitment to do the same. Since we have a moral obligation
to abide by our commitments, the social contract provides the
basis for the state's right to govern, and for our duty to obey. The social contract theory
says, not only is it in our interest to make such an agreement
- we actually have made it. That's why we can leave home secure in
the knowledge that our belongings are safe. The social contract lays the foundation for social trust, which
is essential for society to function well in all sorts of ways. Still, few of us have ever
explicitly made such an agreement. Just because it would be rational for us to
do so doesn't mean we've actually done it. So the proponents of
this theory usually say the social contract
is a tacit agreement. What does this mean? John Locke thought that
residing within the state's borders meant that we had
agreed to respect its laws. "Every man that hath any
Possession or Enjoyment or any part of the Dominions
of any Government, doth thereby give his tacit Consent, and is as far forth
obliged to obedience to the laws of that Government...
whether this Possession be of Land to him in his Heirs for ever,
or a Lodging for only a Week; or whether it be barely
traveling freely on the Highway." But simply being somewhere
seems like a different thing from making a commitment to
obey a complicated set of laws. Why think the one is
equivalent to the other? Well, think of it like this. When
you play a game of poker, you don't usually explicitly
agree to obey the rules. Nevertheless, simply by playing,
you make a tacit agreement to do so. In the same way, you might
think, simply by living in society you're agreeing to follow its laws. But there's a difference between
society and a poker game. You don't have to play
poker. You choose to. Your consent to the rules
of the game is signaled by your conscious and
informed choice to play. Do you have a similar choice
about living in society? In theory, anyone who doesn't
like the rules of one place could move somewhere else. Maybe simply by not
leaving, you are in effect choosing the rules of
the society where you live. But as David Hume, a
critic of Locke's, pointed out, for many people, this
really isn't very plausible. "Can we seriously
say, that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice
to leave his country, when he knows no foreign
language or manners, and lives from day to day by
the small wages he acquires? We may as well assert that a
man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the
dominion of the master; though he was carried on board
while asleep and must leap into the ocean, and perish,
the moment he leaves her." If you can't leave a place,
it doesn't seem plausible to treat the fact that you
haven't left it as a choice, any more than a prisoner can be
said to have chosen to stay in jail. Since an agreement
involves conscious choice, the fact that many of us can't
leave the country where we live spells trouble for the
social contract theory. It can only work if we
can make sense of the idea that you've chosen
your society's laws -- even if you've never done so
explicitly, and have no other options. A different way of
thinking about the state's authority starts with
the idea of fairness. Suppose you expect the fire
department to help you in an emergency, but refuse to pay your
share of the taxes that fund it. You're being totally unfair
to your tax-paying neighbors -- you're being a freeloader,
expecting them to pay the costs of
protecting you from disaster. And, you ought to be fair. Obeying the law comes at a cost --
you give up your freedom to do whatever you want. Each of us benefits from
everybody else paying this cost -- that's why we can afford not to worry
about other people stealing our stuff. But if you depend on others to
respect the states authority when you won't respect it yourself, you're
being a freeloader, which is unfair. You're refusing to pay a cost that you
expect everybody else to pay for you. So, if you have a basic duty
to be fair, this reasoning would explain why your
obligated to respect the law. Do we have a duty to be fair? It seems like sometimes other
considerations take precedence -- your survival, for example. But even if the answer is yes,
another challenge remains. A fair burden isn't
necessarily an equal burden. If you never use your kitchen and
your roommate cooks every night, it wouldn't be fair to say that you
should alternate nightly, cleaning up. What's fair is that they should do
most of the cleaning, since they're the one who
makes most of the mess. If each of us receives
unequal benefits from the state, it's not fair for us to all pay
the same cost of obedience. And some may not benefit from
the state at all -- it would hardly be unfair for them
to refuse to obey. At least not until we can make
sense of the idea of tacit consent or ensure that it really is fair for
each of us to pay the cost of obedience. If we really have a duty to obey, the state needs to provide a way
for us to consent to its laws, and to ensure that
they are genuinely fair. Perhaps democracy can
answer these challenges. Maybe voting on the rules is
a way of consenting to them. And maybe a democratic system
would come closest to being a fair one. What do you think?