Legitimacy Revisited: Moral Power and Civil Disobedience
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Arthur Isak Applbaum
Abstract
In Legitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World, I offer both a conceptual analysis of legitimacy, the power-liability view, and a substantive moral theory, the free group agency view. Here, I defend my account against three challenges brought by Kjarsten Mikalsen. First, though I argue that conceptual analysis should not prematurely close open moral questions, it is not my view that conceptual analysis must have no substantive implications. Second, though I acknowledge that free group agency ordinarily supports a moral duty to obey, it is a feature, not a bug, that my conceptual analysis is consistent with moral theories that disagree with my preferred moral theory. Third, I argue that Mikalsen’s proposed explanation of justified civil disobedience, which sees law in such cases as creating a moral claim-right that entails a merely presumptive duty, is less perspicuous than the explanation given by the power-liability view. Along the way, I emphasize that the distinction between felicitous moral power and justified causal power is as important as the distinction between moral liability and moral duty.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to Matthias Brinkmann, Andreas Føllesdal, Lukas Meyer, and Anthony Taylor for organizing the 2022 workshop on “Ruling in a Wanton World” at the University of Graz. Pandemic precautions delayed the event for quite some time, but they were persistent and patient in holding out for a largely in-person event, which was a much more immersive and stimulating meeting of old and new friends than any virtual gathering could have been. My heartfelt thanks to all of the contributors and participants and the feast for the mind that they helped cook up. Further gratitude is due to Matthias and Tony, who then shouldered the time-consuming task of selecting and editing the excellent contributions for this special issue of Moral Philosophy and Politics.
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Special Issue: Legitimacy; Guest Editors: Matthias Brinkmann and Anthony Taylor
- Editorial
- Introduction to Special Issue
- Articles
- Persons, Agents and Wantons
- Political Legitimacy: What’s Wrong with the Power-Liability View?
- Does the Free Group Agency Account of Legitimacy Require Democracy?
- Applying Different Concepts and Conceptions of Legitimacy to the International Level: Service, Free Group Agents, and Autonomy
- Legitimacy Revisited: Moral Power and Civil Disobedience
- Regular Articles
- The Democratic Virtues of Randomized Trials
- Torture and Trolleys: Accepting the Nearly Absolute Wrongness of Philanthropic Torture of a Perpetrator
- Do Promises Towards Fossil Fuel Owners Matter?
- Does a State’s Right to Control Borders Justify Harming Refugees?
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Special Issue: Legitimacy; Guest Editors: Matthias Brinkmann and Anthony Taylor
- Editorial
- Introduction to Special Issue
- Articles
- Persons, Agents and Wantons
- Political Legitimacy: What’s Wrong with the Power-Liability View?
- Does the Free Group Agency Account of Legitimacy Require Democracy?
- Applying Different Concepts and Conceptions of Legitimacy to the International Level: Service, Free Group Agents, and Autonomy
- Legitimacy Revisited: Moral Power and Civil Disobedience
- Regular Articles
- The Democratic Virtues of Randomized Trials
- Torture and Trolleys: Accepting the Nearly Absolute Wrongness of Philanthropic Torture of a Perpetrator
- Do Promises Towards Fossil Fuel Owners Matter?
- Does a State’s Right to Control Borders Justify Harming Refugees?
