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Title: Theoretical Anarchism
Author: Benjamin McMyler
Date: 2014
Language: en
Topics: philosophy, theory, Philosophical Anarchism
Source: *Philosophical Topics*, Volume 42, Number 1, Spring 2014. DOI:10.5840/philtopics201442110

Benjamin McMyler

Theoretical Anarchism

Abstract

Philosophical anarchists hold that there is no such thing as genuine

practical authority. Most epistemologists seem to at least tacitly

accept an analogous position with respect to theoretical authority, that

there is no such thing as a kind of authority over belief that is

robustly analogous to genuine practical authority. I argue that

appreciating this has an important consequence. Absent reason to think

that there is a relevant difference between the practical and

theoretical cases, anarchism about practical and theoretical authority

should either stand or fall together.

I. Introduction

In his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Thomas Reid claims that

there is a class of mental capacities or activities that are irreducibly

social in nature. He terms such mental capacities “social operations of

mind.”

When [a person] asks information, or receives it; when he bears

testimony, or receives the testimony of another; when he asks a favor,

or accepts one; when he gives a command to his servant, or receives one

from a superior: when he plights his faith in a promise or contract;

these are acts of social intercourse between intelligent beings, and can

have no place in solitude. They suppose understanding and will; but they

suppose something more, which is neither understanding nor will; that

is, society with other intelligent beings.

(2002, 68) [End Page 219]

Reid’s catalogue of social operations of mind includes both theoretical

and practical or cognitive and conative activities. He classes the

asking and receiving of information and the giving and receiving of

testimony alongside the asking and receiving of favors, the giving and

receiving of commands and promises, and the formation of contracts,

claiming that all such activities cannot be reduced to the operation of

some combination of individual solitary capacities.

To ask a question, is as simple an operation as to judge or reason; yet

it is neither judgment, nor reasoning, nor simple apprehension, nor is

it any composition of these. Testimony is neither simple apprehension,

nor judgment, nor reasoning. The same may be said of a promise, or of a

contract. These acts of mind are perfectly understood by every man of

common understanding; but, when Philosophers attempt to bring them

within the pale of their divisions, by analysing them, they find

inexplicable mysteries, and even contradictions, in them.

(2002, 68)

By the “inexplicable mysteries” that result when philosophers attempt to

analyze the social operations of mind in terms of solitary operations,

Reid presumably has in mind Hume’s famous discussion of promise and

contract, but he is clear that these mysteries arise much more broadly

whenever one attempts to reduce any of the social operations of mind to

capacities that are solitary.

Stephen Darwall has made similar claims concerning the phenomenon of the

second person. In The Second-Person Standpoint, Darwall claims that

there are a variety of speech acts that purport to provide a distinctive

kind of reason for action that arises only within the context of

interpersonal or social relations. He calls these reasons

“second-personal reasons.”

A second-personal reason is one whose validity depends on presupposed

authority and accountability relations between persons and, therefore,

on the possibility of the reason’s being addressed person-to-person.

Reasons addressed or presupposed in orders, requests, claims,

reproaches, complaints, demands, promises, contracts, givings of

consent, commands, and so on are all second-personal in this sense. They

simply wouldn’t exist but for their role in second-personal address.

(2006, 8; original emphasis)

Darwall claims that orders, requests, claims, reproaches, complaints,

demands, promises, contracts, givings of consent, and commands are all

speech acts capable of generating distinctively second-personal reasons,

reasons that “wouldn’t exist but for their role in second-personal

address,” and he holds that the phenomenon of the second person cannot

be reduced to or explained in terms of anything non-second-personal.

These notions—second-personal authority, valid claim or demand,

second-personal reason, and responsibility—therefore comprise an

interdefinable circle; each implies all the rest. Moreover, I contend,

there is no way to break into this circle from outside it. Propositions

formulated only with normative and evaluative concepts that are not

already implicitly second-personal cannot adequately ground propositions

formulated with concepts within the circle.

(2006, 12) [End Page 220]

Darwall’s conception of the second person is sophisticated and complex,

and it might appear to have little in common with Reid’s discussion of

the social operations of mind. But it is worth noting that Reid himself

explicitly links the exercise of his social operations of mind, many of

which are identical to the speech acts that Darwall claims are capable

of producing irreducibly second-personal reasons, to the phenomenon of

the second person.

In all languages, the second person of verbs, the pronoun of the

second-person, and the vocative case in nouns, are appropriated to the

expression of social operations of mind, and could never have had place

in language but for this purpose: Nor is it a good argument against this

observation that, by a rhetorical figure, we sometimes address persons

that are absent, or even inanimated beings, in the second person. For it

ought to be remembered, that all figurative ways of using words or

phrases suppose a natural and literal meaning of them.

(2002, 70)

Reid claims that the function of the grammatical second person is to aid

in the exercise of the social operations of mind, and he even goes so

far as to claim that without the social operations, language would have

no need for the second person.

In this respect, there is a striking similarity between the phenomena

that Reid identifies under the heading of the social operations of mind

and the phenomena that Darwall identifies under the heading of the

second-person standpoint. Though their respective accounts of these

phenomena differ considerably, they both think that there is something

philosophically significant at work in transactions like promising,

contracting, and commanding. Moreover, they both think that appreciating

the philosophical significance of such transactions requires

appreciating their irreducibly social character. It requires

appreciating that what is going on in such transactions is not something

that can be reduced to some combination of individual or third-personal

materials.

Despite these similarities, Reid and Darwall differ in one crucial

respect. Whereas Reid includes cognitive operations like the asking and

receiving of information and the giving and receiving of testimony among

his social operations of mind, Darwall holds that the phenomenon of the

second person is essentially practical. He claims that there can be no

such thing as an irreducibly second-personal reason for belief, and he

holds that cognitive transactions like the giving and receiving of

testimony must ultimately bottom out in third-personal considerations

(2006, 57). Whereas Reid sees an important continuity between what is

going on in transactions like testifying and commanding, Darwall sees a

striking and important discontinuity.

In Testimony, Trust, and Authority, I argued that there is just as much

reason to think that there can be irreducibly second-personal reasons

for belief as there is to think that there can be irreducibly

second-personal reasons for action and that Darwall’s reasons for

thinking the contrary are unconvincing. I do not wish to rehearse or

defend that argument here. Instead, I would like to begin to approach

the general disagreement between Reid and Darwall by both narrowing my

focus and taking a rather large step back. Rather than focusing on

general claims about [End Page 221] the nature of the second person or

of second-personal reasons, I want to focus on one particular kind of

second-personal transaction, that involved in the exercise of authority,

particularly in the giving and receiving of orders and commands. And

rather than attempt to give a positive general account of the nature of

such authority relations, I want to examine a worry about their very

existence. There is a position in political philosophy that denies that

there is any such thing as genuine, legitimate, or de jure authority,

that there is any such thing as a person or group in a position to make

it the case that others ought to do things simply by directing them to

do so.[1] This position is typically called philosophical anarchism.

Philosophical anarchists admit the existence of de facto

authorities—persons or groups that claim authority and have the power to

make it the case that others comply with their directives—but they hold

that power to enforce compliance is insufficient for genuine authority.

A genuine authority is not only able to make people do things but to

make it the case that they ought to do things simply by directing them

to do so. Such genuine authority, claims the philosophical anarchist,

doesn’t exist.

Importantly, philosophical anarchism doesn’t entail political anarchism.

Philosophical anarchism is a position concerning the existence of

genuine authority. This philosophical position doesn’t entail the

political position that existing states and institutions ought to be

opposed or eliminated. Philosophical anarchists hold that even if there

is no such thing as genuine authority, we might still have good moral

and prudential reasons for conforming to the law. Moreover, avowed

philosophical anarchists divide according to whether they take the

anarchist thesis to be an a priori thesis concerning whether there can

possibly be such a thing as genuine authority or an a posteriori thesis

concerning whether existing legal and political institutions are

genuinely authoritative.[2]

In this paper I will be concerned with one particularly austere version

of the a priori philosophical anarchist position. I will argue that most

contemporary epistemologists seem to at least tacitly accept a position

concerning authority over belief that is structurally analogous to this

austere a priori philosophical anarchist position concerning authority

over action. Just as the a priori philosophical anarchist holds that

there can be no such thing as genuine authority over action, most

contemporary epistemologists seem to at least tacitly accept that there

can be no such thing as genuine authority over belief, that the very

idea of a kind of authority over belief that is robustly analogous to

legitimate practical authority is incoherent.[3] Most contemporary

epistemologists are, in this respect, theoretical anarchists.[4]

Appreciating this has an important consequence. If theoretical anarchism

genuinely parallels the a priori philosophical anarchist position with

respect to practical authority, then absent reason to think that there

is a relevant disanalogy between the theoretical and practical cases,

there is good reason to think that the theoretical and practical guises

of philosophical anarchism should either stand or fall together. If we

want to accept theoretical anarchism, as nearly all epistemologists do,

then we should be prepared to accept practical anarchism, and if we want

to [End Page 222] reject practical anarchism, as nearly all political

philosophers do, then we should be prepared to reject theoretical

anarchism.

Some political philosophers, including H. L. A. Hart and Joseph Raz,

seem prepared to reject both practical and theoretical anarchism.[5] I

think that this is the correct course to take, but I will not argue for

this directly here.[6] Rejecting philosophical anarchism ultimately

requires presenting a satisfying general account of the nature of

authority, and in this paper I only try to set the stage for such an

account by arguing that the fate of practical anarchism is quite

plausibly linked to the fate of theoretical anarchism. If this is right,

then there is good reason to think that a satisfying general account of

the nature of authority should be capable of explaining both theoretical

and practical authority. This amounts to a partial defense of Reid’s

contention that the phenomena he identifies under the heading of the

social operations of mind spans the divide between theoretical and

practical reason. At the very least, it should lead us to reconsider

whether and in what way the concept of authority ought to play a role in

epistemological theorizing similar to the role that it typically plays

in social and political theory.

Section II provides a very general characterization of one version of

the philosophical anarchist position with respect to practical

authority. This version of the anarchist position is a position

concerning reasons for action. The anarchist holds that there is no such

thing as what I call a distinctively authoritative reason for action, no

such thing as a reason for action of the kind that authoritative

practical directives purport to provide. Authoritative directives

purport to provide reasons for action that require that an agent

“suspend her own private judgment” concerning what to do in favor of the

judgment of the authority, and this, claims the anarchist, is

incoherent. There can be no such reasons.

Section III applies this philosophical anarchist position to the case of

theoretical authority. Just as the anarchist about practical authority

holds that there is no such thing as a distinctively authoritative

reason for action, the anarchist about theoretical authority holds that

there is no such thing as a distinctively authoritative reason for

belief. There is no such thing as a reason for belief that requires that

a subject suspend her own private judgment concerning what is the case

in favor of the judgment of an authority.

Finally, section IV examines a series of remarks of Elizabeth Anscombe’s

that might be taken to point to a relevant difference between the

theoretical and practical cases, a difference that might give us reason

to think that the truth of theoretical anarchism simply follows from the

distinctive nature of theoretical rationality. If this is the case, then

we needn’t think that the theoretical and practical guises of

philosophical anarchism should either stand or fall together. I argue

that although Anscombe identifies a genuine disanalogy between authority

over belief and authority over action, this disanalogy concerns a

feature of practical authority different from that which is targeted by

the philosophical anarchist. It therefore poses no threat to the idea

that practical and theoretical anarchism should either stand or fall

together. [End Page 223]

II. Philosophical Anarchism

Arguments for philosophical anarchism are typically cast in moral terms.

Philosophical anarchists typically hold that there is something immoral

or unjust about obedience to authority. William Godwin, possibly the

first modern philosophical anarchist, claims that “[t]o a rational being

there can be but one rule of conduct, justice, and one mode of attaining

that rule, the exercise of his understanding” (1971, 90). Godwin holds

that genuine obedience to authority involves suspending the exercise of

one’s understanding and thus that obedience to authority is inherently

unjust. In a similar fashion, Robert Paul Wolff, one of the most

influential contemporary philosophical anarchists, claims that “[w]hen I

place myself in the hands of another, and permit him to determine the

principles by which I shall guide my behavior, I repudiate the freedom

and reason which give me dignity. I am then guilty of what Kant might

have called the sin of willful heteronomy” (1970, 71–72). Wolff holds

that we have a moral duty to be autonomous, to make ourselves the

ultimate authors of our decisions. Like Godwin, he holds that genuine

obedience to authority involves willingly making someone else the

ultimate author of our decisions. Genuine obedience is therefore

immoral.

One might reasonably question whether autonomy is a moral duty and hence

whether there is something inherently immoral about obedience to

authority. As Scott Shapiro has argued, however, the philosophical

anarchist position can be formulated while abstracting away from such

specifically moral considerations (2002, 390). The reason that

anarchists like Godwin and Wolff hold that there is something immoral or

unjust about genuine obedience to authority is that they have a

particular conception of the nature of obedience. On this conception,

genuinely obeying an authority’s directive—treating the authority’s

directive as the kind of reason for action that it purports to

be—involves acting in a way that is inconsistent with rational autonomy.

This claim is independent of any particular claims concerning the value

of autonomy, and hence one might accept that there is no such thing as

genuine authority without accepting that there is anything immoral about

obedience to authority.

Philosophical anarchism is typically characterized as the denial that

subjects have a duty or obligation to obey the directives of purported

practical authorities. The anarchist position can be construed more

fundamentally, however, as a thesis about reasons for action. In denying

that there is such a thing as a duty or obligation of obedience, the

anarchist is denying that the directives of purported practical

authorities, directives such as orders and commands, provide an audience

with a distinctive kind of reason for action, a distinctive kind of

reason for complying with the directive. Depending on how one construes

the nature of obligation, this distinctive kind of reason for action

might amount to a duty or an obligation. Nevertheless, the anarchist

position can be formulated in such a way as to leave to one side

particular conceptions of the nature of obligation. On this formulation,

philosophical anarchism is the view that there is no such thing as a

distinctively [End Page 224] authoritative reason for action, no such

thing as a reason for action of the kind that orders and commands

intuitively purport to provide.[7]

The philosophical anarchist thus recognizes that practical authorities

purport to exercise a particular kind of normative power. They purport

to have the power to generate for others, through the issuing of

practical directives, reasons for action that would not exist absent the

directive. Authorities purport to create reasons. Moreover, the

anarchist recognizes that the reasons that practical authorities purport

to create are of a distinctive kind. Authoritative practical directives

purport to provide reasons for action that are predicated on the

audience’s “suspending her own private judgment” concerning what to do

in favor of the judgment of the authority. If the audience acts as

directed but without suspending her own private judgment concerning what

to do, then she conforms to the directive without genuinely obeying. She

acts as directed, but she doesn’t act for the distinctive kind of reason

that the directive purports to provide.[8]

Imagine that I order you to give me your wallet. I have no authority

over you, and so my directive doesn’t, of itself, give you a reason to

give me your wallet. You might judge that I could really use the money

and on this basis decide to give me your wallet, but here you conform to

my directive without genuinely obeying. You perform the action that I

direct you to perform, but you do not act for the kind of reason that my

directive purports to provide. This is because you have come to your own

conclusion—you have made up your own mind—that giving me your wallet is

the thing to do in the situation. Even if you take my order to be a

reliable indicator of the fact that I could really use the money, in

deciding to give me your wallet on the basis of this fact, you are

making up your own mind what to do. Authoritative practical directives

purport to provide reasons for action regardless of the audience’s own

private judgment concerning the merits of the directed action. Hence, to

the extent that an audience’s action is based on her own private

judgment concerning what to do, then to that extent she has not acted

for the particular kind of reason that the directive purports to

provide.

This characterization of the kind of reason for action that

authoritative practical directives purport to provide relies heavily on

the unexplained metaphor of suspending private judgment. At this level

of abstraction, however, there is something extremely intuitive about

this metaphor. Authoritative practical directives appear to be

distinguished from other speech acts intended to influence the actions

of others by the way in which they purport to provide reasons for action

that somehow substitute the authority’s judgment for that of the

audience. In this respect, ordering or commanding someone to do

something is very different from advising someone to do something. In

advising an audience to do something, a speaker is presenting an

audience with considerations that count in favor of a course of action

completely independently of the speaker’s act of presenting them to the

audience. The audience is then in the position of coming to her own

conclusion concerning whether these independently available

considerations make the course of action the thing to do in the

situation. In contrast, when a speaker [End Page 225] commands an

audience to do something, the speaker is not simply presenting the

audience with a consideration that counts in favor of acting

independently of the command, and the audience is not thereby left in

the position of having to come to her own conclusion concerning whether

so acting is the thing to do. The command itself purports to provide a

reason for action regardless of the audience’s own private judgment

concerning the merits of the directed action. Hence, it can be the case

that the audience ought to act as directed even if she thinks that the

command is mistaken, even if she thinks that, in her own private

judgment, so acting is not the thing to do.[9]

The philosophical anarchist position that I am concerned with here holds

that this intuitive feature of authoritative practical directives is

incoherent. The anarchist accepts that authoritative practical

directives purport to provide reasons for action that are predicated on

an audience’s suspending her own private judgment concerning what to do

in favor of the judgment of the authority.[10] However, she holds that

to genuinely suspend one’s own private judgment concerning what to do

would be to divorce one’s actions from one’s responsiveness to practical

reasons.[11] Insofar as this is the case, there can be no such thing as

a genuine reason for action that requires such suspension of private

judgment, no such thing as a distinctively authoritative reason. If

there were such reasons, they would be reasons for action acting on

which would be acting for a non-reason. The very idea of such a reason

is incoherent, and insofar as authoritative practical directives purport

to provide such reasons, these directives are incoherent as well. This

means that when an agent takes herself to be acting for such a

distinctively authoritative reason, she is acting irrationally. She is

acting on the basis of a consideration that does not, in the way in

which it purports, bear positively on the question what to do.[12]

Importantly, in claiming that there is no such thing as a distinctively

authoritative reason for action, philosophical anarchists are not

denying that the directives of de facto practical authorities can amount

to genuine reasons for action. Wolff presents an example of a ship

passenger taking the commands of the ship’s captain to be genuine

reasons for acting as directed without genuinely obeying and so without

sacrificing her rational autonomy:

Taking responsibility for one’s actions means making the final decisions

about what one should do. For the autonomous man, there is strictly

speaking no such thing as a command. If someone in my environment is

issuing what are intended as commands, and if he or others expect those

commands to be obeyed, that fact will be taken account of in my

deliberations. I may decide that I ought to do what the person is

commanding me to do, and it may even be that his issuing of the command

is the factor in the situation which makes it desirable to do so. For

example, if I am on a sinking ship and the captain is giving orders for

manning the lifeboats, and if everyone else is obeying the captain

because he is the captain, I may decide that under the circumstances I

had better do what he says, since the confusion caused by disobeying him

would be generally harmful. But insofar as I make such a decision, I am

not obeying his command; that is, I am not acknowledging him as [End

Page 226] having authority over me. I would make the same decision, for

exactly the same reasons, if one of the passengers had started to issue

“orders” and had, in the confusion, come to be obeyed.

(1970, 15–16; original emphasis)

This passage has puzzled commentators. Harry Frankfurt, for example,

claims that Wolff is here being flatly inconsistent (1973, 409). Whereas

Wolff sometimes claims that the autonomous agent “may do what another

tells him, but not because he has been told to do it” (1970,14), in this

passage, Wolff portrays the ship passenger as maintaining her autonomy

even though she clearly acts as she does because she has been told to do

so. The captain’s issuing of the command is, as Wolff puts it, “the

factor in the situation” on the basis of which the passenger

autonomously decides to act.

I think that we can make sense of what Wolff says about the ship

passenger without charging him with inconsistency. The anarchist about

practical authority can reject obedience to authority while at the same

time admitting that the commands of practical authorities can amount to

genuine reasons for action by claiming that the kind of reason for

action provided by a speaker’s command is in no way distinctively

authoritative. Orders and commands are nothing more that ordinary events

that an audience must take into account in making up her own mind

concerning what to do. In certain circumstances, a speaker’s command may

be “the factor in the situation” that makes it the case that the

audience ought to act as commanded, but in judging that this is the

case, an audience is doing nothing more than exercising her own

judgment. If an audience proceeds to act as commanded, then she will be

merely conforming to the command. She will not be genuinely obeying.

In this respect, to say that there is no such thing as a distinctively

authoritative reason for action is not to say that de facto

authoritative directives cannot provide genuine reasons for action. The

commands of others can provide perfectly genuine reasons for action

without providing distinctively authoritative reasons. In fact, the view

that authoritative directives cannot provided genuine reasons for

action—a view encouraged, admittedly, by Wolff’s claim that the

autonomous agent may do what she is told but not because she has been

told to do it—is so profoundly implausible that it is difficult to

imagine any philosophical anarchist actually accepting it. The orders

and commands of speakers are ordinary empirical events that should be

capable of figuring into an agent’s reasoning about what to do in the

same way as any other ordinary events. Just as a child’s scream can give

me a reason to rush to her aid, so can the commands of authorities give

us reasons to act, even reasons to act in conformity with the commands.

To deny this would be to single authoritative directives out as a

special class of events that, for some mysterious reason, are simply

incapable of bearing on the question what to do.

This means that if we are to interpret the anarchist position at all

charitably, we shouldn’t interpret it as denying that authoritative

directives can provide genuine reasons for action. When Wolff claims

that the autonomous individual may do [End Page 227] what she is told,

but not because she has been told to do it, he isn’t denying that the

autonomous individual may take her being told to do something to bear

positively on the question whether to do it. What Wolff is denying is

that the autonomous individual takes her being told to do something to

be a consideration that counts in favor of doing it in a distinctively

authoritative way, in a way that is predicated on the individual’s

suspending her own private judgment concerning what to do. This helps to

explain Wolff’s claim that, for the autonomous individual, there is

strictly speaking no such thing as a command (1970, 15). Surely, the

autonomous individual recognizes that there are such things as commands.

She recognizes that there exist speech acts that are issued with

particular authoritative intentions and that thereby purport to provide

a distinctively authoritative reason for action. According to the

anarchist, these intentions are incoherent—there is no such thing as a

distinctively authoritative reason for action, and so the intention to

give such a reason to an audience is an intention that cannot possibly

be fulfilled. De facto authoritative directives therefore cannot provide

reasons for action in the way in which they are intended. Nevertheless,

they can still provide reasons for action in ways other than that in

which they are intended.

III. Anarchism and Theoretical Authority

With this formulation of the philosophical anarchist position concerning

reasons for action in view, we can now begin to assess how this position

might apply to theoretical authority, or authority over belief.

Philosophical anarchism is almost invariably formulated as a thesis

about practical authority. Anarchists hold that there are no genuine

practical authorities, no persons or groups whose directives generate

for others duties or obligations of obedience. So formulated, this

position might appear difficult to apply to theoretical authority.

Theoretical authorities do not demand obedience, and we don’t appear to

have a duty or obligation to believe the statements of theoretical

authorities.

Nevertheless, I have argued that the anarchist position concerning

practical authority can be construed as a position concerning reasons

for action, and theoretical authorities certainly do purport to provide

reasons. A theoretical authority’s testimony, her telling an audience

that p, purports to provide an audience with an epistemic reason for

belief concerning the content of the testimony. Theoretical authorities

thus purport to exercise a normative power. They purport to have the

power to generate for others through testifying epistemic reasons that

would not exist absent the testimony. Moreover, at least superficially,

the epistemic reasons that theoretical authorities purport to provide

appear very similar to the reasons for action purportedly provided by

authoritative practical directives. A theoretical authority’s testimony

purports to provide an epistemic reason that is predicated on the

audience’s somehow suspending her own private judgment concerning what

is the case in favor of the judgment of the authority. If the audience

believes [End Page 228] what the authority says but without suspending

her own private judgment, then she conforms to the testimony but without

genuinely assenting to the authority. She believes what the authority

says, but she doesn’t believe for the distinctive kind of reason that

the authority’s testimony purports to provide.

Imagine that a well-respected climate scientist tells me that global

warming is occurring and is largely the result of human activity. This

gives me an epistemic reason to believe that global warming is

occurring, and it does so even if my own personal experience suggests

otherwise. My own personal experience might suggest that average

temperatures are actually declining, but the climate scientist is in a

better position to know than I am. She is an expert, and her testimony

is offered with the intention that it provide me with an epistemic

reason that is predicated on my suspending my own private judgment

concerning what is the case. The climate scientist is not trying to

rationally persuade me that global warming is occurring. She is not

giving me an argument with the intention that I come to my own

conclusion about things. She is simply telling me that such and such is

the case. Hence, properly accepting her testimony—taking her testimony

to be the kind of reason for belief that it purports to be—would appear

to require suspending my own private judgment in favor of that of the

authority. If I believe what it is that the scientist says but without

suspending my own private judgment concerning the facts, then I conform

to the authority’s theoretical directive, but I do not believe in the

way in which the authority intends. As Elizabeth Anscombe (1979) puts

it, I believe what it is that the speaker says, but I do not believe

her.[13]

Like the anarchist about practical authority, the theoretical anarchist

holds that this intuitive feature of authoritative theoretical

directives is incoherent. She might accept that authoritative

theoretical directives, such as expert testimony, purport to provide

epistemic reasons that are predicated on an audience’s suspending her

own private judgment concerning what is the case.[14] However, she holds

that to genuinely suspend one’s own private judgment concerning what is

the case would be to divorce one’s beliefs from one’s responsiveness to

epistemic reasons. Insofar as this is the case, there can be no such

thing as an epistemic reason for belief that requires such suspension of

private judgment, no such thing as a distinctively authoritative reason

for belief. If there were such reasons, they would be epistemic reasons

believing on the basis of which would be believing for a

non-(epistemic)-reason. The very idea of such a reason is incoherent,

and insofar as authoritative theoretical directives purport to provide

such reasons, these directives are incoherent as well. This means that

when an agent takes herself to believe for such a distinctively

authoritative reason, she believes irrationally. She believes on the

basis of a consideration that cannot, in the way in which it purports,

bear positively on the question what is the case.[15]

Just as the anarchist about practical authority is in a position to

accept that purportedly authoritative practical directives can amount to

genuine reasons for action, so the anarchist about theoretical authority

is in a position to accept that purportedly authoritative theoretical

directives can amount to genuinely epistemic [End Page 229] reasons. The

theoretical anarchist can reject assent to theoretical authority while

at the same time admitting that expert testimony can amount to a genuine

reason for belief by claiming that the kind of reason for belief

provided by such testimony is in no way distinctively authoritative. The

testimony of so-called theoretical authorities is nothing more than

ordinary inductive evidence that an audience must take into account in

making up her own mind concerning what is the case. In certain

circumstances, a speaker’s testimony might make it the case that the

audience ought to believe what the speaker says, but in judging that

this is the case, an audience is doing nothing more than exercising her

own judgment. If an audience proceeds to believe what she is told, then

she will be merely conforming to the speaker’s testimony. She will not

be genuinely assenting to theoretical authority. Testimonial belief thus

does not involve any kind of assent to authority. In particular, it

doesn’t involve suspending one’s own private judgment in favor of the

judgment of the authority. Instead, it involves the simple exercise of

one’s own judgment in proportioning one’s belief to the evidence.[16]

Most contemporary epistemologists seem to at least tacitly accept this

general position concerning theoretical authority. This includes both

reductionists and anti-reductionists about testimony. Reductionists

about testimony hold that a speaker’s testimony amounts to little more

than a species of ordinary inductive evidence. Anti-reductionists reject

this, but in so doing they rarely go so far as to claim that testimony

amounts to anything like a distinctively authoritative reason for

belief.[17] Anti-reductionists typically construe comprehension of a

speaker’s testimony as providing a prima facie reason for belief

analogous to the prima facie reason for belief provided by perceptual

representation. They thus tend to construe testimony as analogous to the

kind of non-inductive “evidence” provided by perceptual experience.

Importantly, the reason for belief provided by this non-inductive

testimonial evidence is not taken to be predicated on anything like the

audience’s suspending her own private judgment concerning the content of

the testimony, and so these anti-reductionist positions appear to be

consistent with the theoretical anarchist rejection of genuine

theoretical authority.

In this respect, I think that it is fair to say that most contemporary

epistemologists would be inclined to accept theoretical anarchism. This

epistemological position is rarely explicitly formulated, and to my

knowledge it is never referred to as a kind of anarchism. But this

actually points to the strength of the anarchist position. Anarchism

with respect to theoretical authority is typically taken to be so

obviously correct that it is difficult to understand how it could

possibly be denied. How can a speaker’s testimony possibly be anything

other than more or less reliable evidence that an audience uses to make

up her own mind what to believe? Anarchism with respect to practical

authority isn’t typically taken to be so obvious, but it isn’t clear why

it shouldn’t be. One might equally wonder how it could possibly be

denied. How can a speaker’s command that an audience do something

possibly be anything other than a more or less reliable guide that the

audience uses to make up her own mind what to do? [End Page 230]

The general philosophical anarchist position that I have articulated

thus appears to be one that can be applied to both practical and

theoretical authority. Applied to practical authority, it is the view

that there is no such thing as a distinctively authoritative reason for

action. Applied to theoretical authority, it is the view that there is

no such thing as a distinctively authoritative epistemic reason for

belief. Moreover, both the practical and theoretical guises of this

anarchist position stem from a common source—the idea that “suspending

private judgment” in the way that is intuitively required for genuine

obedience or assent to authority involves suspending one’s

responsiveness to reasons and is therefore inconsistent with rational

agency.[18] According to the philosophical anarchist, the very idea of a

distinctively authoritative reason for belief or action is incoherent,

and so there can be no such thing as genuine theoretical or practical

authority. The philosophical anarchist can admit the existence of de

facto theoretical and practical authorities, authorities whose

directives purport to provide distinctively authoritative reasons for

belief and action, and she can even admit that these directives can, in

the appropriate circumstances, amount to genuine reasons for belief and

action. However, she denies that these reasons are distinctively

authoritative. She denies that there is any such thing as a reason for

belief or action that is predicated on a subject’s suspending her own

private judgment.

IV. Should Theoretical and Practical Anarchism Stand or Fall

Together?

The structural parallel between the anarchist positions with respect to

theoretical and practical authority suggests, I think, that the two

positions should either stand or fall together. If we accept theoretical

anarchism, as most epistemologists do, then we should be prepared to

accept practical anarchism, and if we reject practical anarchism, as

most political philosophers do, then we should be prepared to reject

theoretical anarchism. Perhaps this can be avoided, however. Perhaps the

fate of theoretical anarchism shouldn’t be tied in this way to the fate

of practical anarchism. One might argue that the truth of theoretical

anarchism is simply a function of the nature of theoretical rationality

and, as a result, that it has no implications for practical authority.

One of the ways in which theoretical and practical rationality differ

would then be that only practical rationality admits of distinctively

authoritative reasons, and the concept of legitimate or de jure

authority would then be an essentially practical concept that has no

direct application to belief. This could be construed as a particular

application of Darwall’s broader claim that there is something

essentially practical about the second-person standpoint.

If this is right, then it would explain why the anarchist position

regarding theoretical authority is rarely even formulated let alone

argued for. If theoretical anarchism simply follows from the nature of

theoretical rationality, then this position might look fundamentally

different from the philosophical anarchist [End Page 231] position with

respect to practical authority, so different, in fact, that it might not

even deserve to be called a form of anarchism. If the nature of

theoretical rationality makes it the case that there can be no such

thing as a kind of authority over belief robustly analogous to

legitimate practical authority, then nothing like the anarchist

challenge to the existence of legitimate practical authority can even

arise in the theoretical realm.

Though many philosophers seem to be attracted to the idea that

theoretical and practical rationality differ fundamentally with respect

to the issue of authority, this idea is rarely argued for in any

detail.[19] In the end, countering this idea will require providing a

general theory of the differences between theoretical and practical

rationality and of the way in which authority can be exercised in the

theoretical and practical domains. I hope to provide such a general

theory elsewhere. For now, however, I would like to end by pointing to

some of the difficulties involved in developing a convincing argument

for this widely accepted idea. In order to do this, I want to examine a

series of remarks of Elizabeth Anscombe’s aimed at articulating some of

the important differences between theoretical and practical authority.

While Anscombe does not, as I read her, deny the existence of genuine

theoretical authority, she is at pains to argue that there are

significant differences between authority over belief and authority over

action, differences that might lead one to think that, whatever

theoretical authority actually amounts to, it cannot be something that

robustly parallels legitimate practical authority.

In “Authority in Morals” (1981), Anscombe examines the complex question

of whether and in what respect there can be authorities in moral

matters. Preparatory to her discussion of specifically moral authority,

she describes several interconnected differences between authority over

belief and authority over action. She begins by noting that, in the case

of authority over belief, an audience’s judging that what the authority

says is mistaken is tantamount to a rejection of her authority, while in

the case of authority over action, an audience’s judging that what the

authority demands is mistaken is consistent with respecting her

authority (1981, 43). If someone tells me that p, and if I think that

the speaker is mistaken, that p isn’t the case, then I am not treating

her as a theoretical authority on the matter. In contrast, if someone

tells me to Φ, and if I think that the speaker is mistaken, that Φ-ing

isn’t the thing to do in the situation, then I might very well continue

to treat her as an authority. I might rationally obey the speaker’s

demand while continuing to think that the demand is mistaken.

One might take this as reason to deny that the kind of suspension of

private judgment intuitively required for genuine obedience to practical

authority is so much as possible in the theoretical realm. As we have

seen, such suspension of private judgment makes room for cases in which

it is rational for a subject to obey an authority’s command to Φ even

though the subject thinks, in her own private judgment, that Φ-ing is

not the thing to do. A soldier might judge that her commanding officer’s

order to Φ is mistaken but still rationally decide to Φ. However, [End

Page 232] it might seem that there is no room for such cases in the

theoretical realm. There is no room for cases in which it is rational

for a subject to judge, in her own private judgment, that p is false and

still accept the speaker’s testimony, thereby believing that p. One

might take this to demonstrate that the kind of suspension of private

judgment that is intuitively required for genuine obedience to practical

authority has no genuine analogue in the theoretical realm.[20]

I think that this purported disanalogy between the theoretical and

practical cases is, at the very least, overblown. Consider, first, the

theoretical case. The case that isn’t possible in the theoretical realm

has the following form. The subject both believes that p is false and

accepts the speaker’s testimony, thereby believing that p is true. This

cannot be rational. A subject cannot rationally settle the question

whether p both positively and negatively. However, the same is true in

the practical sphere. A subject cannot rationally settle the practical

question whether to Φ both positively and negatively. To settle the

practical question whether to Φ is, I take it, to set one’s will or form

an intention.[21] But one cannot rationally settle this question

negatively, thereby willing or intending not to Φ, and accept a

speaker’s command, thereby willing or intending to Φ. Moreover, the case

of the soldier doesn’t have this form. The soldier does not both intend

not to Φ and intend to Φ. Rather, she intends to Φ on the basis of her

commanding officer’s order, thereby settling positively the question

whether to Φ, even though, in a sense that remains to be explained, she

judges that the officer’s order is mistaken.

In this respect, whatever exactly it means to say that the soldier

judges that the officer’s command is mistaken, it must amount to

something less than the soldier’s settling negatively the question

whether to Φ. Perhaps the soldier simply counts as having settled

negatively the question whether, absent the officer’s command, Φ-ing

would be the thing to do.[22] This would be to say that, absent the

speaker’s command, the speaker wouldn’t settle positively the question

whether to Φ. However, if this is all that is going on in the practical

case, then it appears that something analogous is possible in the

theoretical realm. Imagine that you tell me that something extremely

improbable happened to you in the past. I argue with you, claiming that

the occurrence of such an event is indeed extremely improbable, but you

stick to your guns. You insist that despite the acknowledged

improbability of such an event, the event did indeed occur. After

arguing for a while, you say to me, “Look, I’m telling you that this

happened. You’re just going to have to believe me.” This looks like a

case in which it might be perfectly rational for me to believe you that

p in spite of the fact that, absent your testimony, I wouldn’t believe

that p. Clearly, this is not a case in which I both believe that p is

false and nevertheless accept your testimony, but as we’ve seen, the

case of the soldier isn’t like this either. In both this theoretical

case and the practical case of the soldier, we have a subject rationally

accepting a speaker’s testimony or command despite judging that, absent

the speaker’s testimony or command, this wouldn’t be the thing to

believe or do. [End Page 233]

Interestingly, Anscombe seems to make this very point herself. In

discussing the idea that one’s own conscience must be the ultimate

arbiter of right and wrong, she writes:

There is confusion here. Let conscience be one’s judgment of right and

wrong, i.e. of good and evil in conduct, of what is virtuous and what

vicious to do. Then to say that one’s own conscience is necessarily

supreme arbiter in such matters is to say that necessarily what one

judges right and wrong, one judges right and wrong.

One could similarly say that one cannot think anything to be true

without thinking it. But that does not tend to show that one cannot

think a thing on the strength of what someone else says, judging that

that is much more likely than what one could have been inclined to think

if left to oneself.

(1981, 46)

Even though accepting a speaker’s testimony requires judging that p is

true, this doesn’t show that one cannot believe that p on the strength

of a speaker’s telling one that p while recognizing that, “if left to

oneself,” one wouldn’t believe that p. What, then, does it mean to make

a judgment concerning some moral matter “for oneself”?

I call it a judgment that he makes for himself when he judges on a

ground that he can see for himself; he does not merely judge “that is

wrong,” he judges “that is wrong because …” and then follows some

further account of the action, which he can judge, and which he also

judges to make the action wrong. To rely exclusively on one’s own

conscience (one’s ‘unaided’ conscience) is to refuse to judge anything

in practical matters unless in this sense one is able to judge for

oneself. Now in this sense of “one’s own conscience” only a foolish

person thinks that his own conscience is the last word, so far as he is

concerned, about what to do. For just as any reasonable man knows that

his memory may sometimes deceive him, any reasonable man knows that what

one has conscientiously decided on one may later conscientiously regret.

A man may have reason to judge that another man’s moral counsel is more

reliable than his own unaided conscience; he will in any case be well

advised to take counsel with others; he may, moreover, have reason to

believe that some public source of moral teaching is more reliable than

his own unaided judgment. Of course he would not have any basis for such

judgments if he did not already rely on his own moral judgments to some

extent; but it would be sophistical to argue from this that his own

conscience must after all be for him the last word about what he ought

to do.

(1983, 46–47)

Though what Anscombe says here concerns specifically moral matters, it

has wider application. Anscombe distinguishes between two senses of

judging or believing “for oneself.” In the first sense, to believe for

oneself is simply to believe. Of course, one cannot believe in this

sense without believing for oneself. In the second sense, to believe for

oneself is to believe on the basis of considerations that give “some

further account” of what one believes, for example, to believe that

global warming is occurring on the basis of one’s understanding of the

scientific evidence that counts in favor of this conclusion. This sense

of believing for oneself rules out belief based on theoretical

authority, but it would be foolish to think that one must [End Page 234]

always believe for oneself in this sense. One might very well judge that

someone else’s judgment concerning, for example, the relevant scientific

evidence, is more likely to be correct than one’s own and therefore

substitute another’s judgment on these matters for one’s own.

Anscombe’s discussion of the confusion that can arise from conflating

these two different senses of believing for oneself also applies to the

case of obedience. Here also there are two senses in which one might be

said to settle “for oneself” the question whether to Φ. In the first

sense, to settle for oneself the question whether to Φ is simply to

settle this question, either positively or negatively. Clearly, in this

sense of settling a question “for oneself,” an agent cannot obey a

speaker’s command to Φ without settling positively the question whether

to Φ. In the case of the soldier obeying her officer’s command to Φ even

while thinking that the command is mistaken, the soldier clearly settles

positively the question whether to Φ. In a second sense of “for

herself,” however, the soldier doesn’t judge “for herself” or “in her

own private judgment” that so acting is the thing to do. Instead, on the

basis of only those considerations that the soldier understands as

providing a further account of the character of the action as to be

done, considerations that do not include the officer’s command, the

soldier judges that so acting is not the thing to do. This sense of

judging “for oneself” is one that necessarily factors out the speaker’s

command, but for all that we have seen thus far, this is not relevantly

different from what is going on in cases in which an audience believes a

speaker that p even while judging that, absent the speaker’s testimony,

she wouldn’t “in her own private judgment” believe that p.

Anscombe is thus concerned to make room for a kind of suspension of

private judgment with respect to belief that, for all that we have seen

thus far, parallels the kind of suspension of private judgment involved

in obedience to practical authority. What, then, of the disanalogy she

wishes to draw between authority over action and authority over belief?

Anscombe goes on to claim that the disanalogy she is concerned with

pertains to what is capable of “making it right” that a person do or

believe something.

There is a difference between saying: You did not do as I told you, and

that is bad, because it was I, whom you ought to obey, who told you,

and: You did not believe what I said, and that is bad, because it was I,

whom you ought to believe, who told you.

The difference lies in this: that the one with authority over what you

do, can decide, within limits, what you shall do; his decision is what

makes it right for you to do what he says—if the reproach against you,

when you disobey him, is only that of disobedience. But someone with

authority over what you think is not at liberty, within limits, to

decide what you shall think among the range of possible thoughts on a

given matter; what makes it right for you to think what you think, given

that it is your business to form a judgment at all, is simply that it is

true, and no decision can make something a true thing for you to think

as the decision of someone in authority can make something a good thing

for you to do.

(1983, 44) [End Page 235]

Anscombe claims that a practical authority’s decision about what you

shall do is what “makes it right” or makes it “a good thing for you to

do.” In contrast, a theoretical authority is not capable of “making it

right” for you to think something; she is not capable of making

something “a true thing for you to think.”

It is certainly correct that, generally speaking, a speaker’s telling me

that p doesn’t make it true that p. There are exceptions. A speaker’s

telling me that she is telling me something does make it true that she

is telling me something, but this is an odd case. A scientist’s telling

me that global warming is occurring does not make it true that global

warming is occurring, and this might make for a difference between

theoretical and practical authority. After all, practical authorities

certainly seem capable of making it right that we do things.

What Anscombe says here, however, fails to distinguish between two

different senses in which an authority might “make it right” that a

speaker do or believe something. Consider first the case of belief. In

one sense, for a belief to be “right” is for it to be true. In another

sense, for a belief to be “right” is for it to be justified, for it to

be based on sufficient epistemic reasons. A belief can be right in one

of these senses without being right in the other. A belief can be true

without being justified, and a belief can be justified without being

true. Apart from self-referential cases like the one mentioned above,

speakers are not generally capable of making what they say a true thing

to believe. However, they are certainly capable of making what they say

a justified thing to think. A speaker’s testimony that p often amounts

to sufficient epistemic reason for believing that p, and so speakers are

in this sense capable of making it right for an audience to believe

something.

Anscombe seems to be claiming that practical authorities are capable of

doing something analogous to the first sense of making it right to

believe something, something analogous to making something a true thing

to think. Not only are practical authorities capable of making something

a justified thing to do, of giving an audience sufficient reason to do

something, they are capable of making that thing “a good thing to do.” I

think that there is a sense in which this is correct. Imagine that a

group of people determines that a decision needs to be made concerning a

certain course of action, for example, whether to drive on the right- or

the left-hand side of the road. There is disagreement within the group

as to which course of action to pursue. Some people would prefer driving

on the left, while some would prefer driving on the right. It is

imperative that everyone does one or the other, but it doesn’t matter

which. The group therefore decides to put one person in charge of making

the decision. This person is charged with determining for everyone else

what to do, and when she makes a decision, when she declares, say, that

everyone must drive on the right, this decision makes it the case that

driving on the right is “a good thing to do.” We can imagine that prior

to her decision, there simply wasn’t a fact of the matter concerning

whether driving on the right or on the left was the good or appropriate

thing to do. But after the decision, driving on the right is clearly the

thing to do. This seems to be a clear case in which an authority’s

decision “makes it right” to do what she demands, and the sense in [End

Page 236] which her decision makes the action right is not only that it

gives the audience a sufficient reason for performing the action. The

authority’s decision is what makes the action objectively correct.

Anscombe thus points to what I take to be a genuine disanalogy between

theoretical and practical authority. The decisions of practical

authorities are capable of making actions right or good in a way that

the decisions of theoretical authorities are not capable of making

beliefs true.[23] However, practical authorities do not only solve

coordination problems, and when they are not simply solving coordination

problems, it is less clear that they are capable of “making actions

right” in a sense that goes beyond that of giving the audience a

sufficient (authoritative) reason for performing the action. Consider

the case of arbitration.[24] When disputing parties agree to enter

arbitration, they agree to bind themselves to the decision of the

arbitrator. This is similar to the above case of a group of people

agreeing to bind themselves to the decisions of an authority charged

with solving a coordination problem. However, in the above case, there

was no fact of the matter about whether it was right to drive on the

right or the left prior to the authority’s decision. In the case of

arbitration, there is a fact of the matter concerning, for example,

whether one of the parties breached a contract, and the arbitrator is

tasked not only with making a decision but with making the right

decision, with determining whether a contract was breached and, if so,

what remedies ought to be implemented. If the arbitrator determines that

a contract was breached and directs one party to pay restitution, then

the arbitrator’s directive gives the guilty party a distinctively

authoritative reason to act. The arbitrator “makes it right” for the

party to pay restitution in that she gives the party good reason to do

so. However, it is not clear that the arbitrator “makes it right” for

the party to do this in the sense of making the action correct. The

arbitrator’s job is to figure out the course of action that is the

independently correct one in the situation and to then give the parties

reason to pursue it. Similarly, the job of a theoretical authority is to

determine what is independently the case and then to give her audience

reason to believe it.

So even though Anscombe is right that in some cases, particularly those

that involve solving coordination problems, practical authorities are

capable of making a certain course of action correct, it would be a

mistake to think that this is true of all cases of legitimate practical

authority. While a military officer may frequently be tasked with

solving coordination problems and, in so doing, may thereby make certain

actions correct, she may often also be tasked with figuring out which

actions are independently correct in certain situations and then giving

her soldiers reason to pursue them. Presumably, the officer’s order to

ceasefire is of this latter variety. What all cases of practical

authority have in common is that they involve the giving of a particular

kind of reason, a distinctively authoritiative reason, but for all that

we have seen thus far, this is something that is true of theoretical

authority as well. So even if theoretical and practical authority

sometimes differ in the sense that Anscombe identifies, there is a

deeper commonality that spans even this difference. [End Page 237]

The philosophical anarchist position that I have been concerned with in

this paper is one that targets this deeper commonality. The anarchist is

not worried about the fact that we must solve coordination problems. In

Wolff’s example of the autonomous ship passenger, the passenger treats

the captain’s orders much as she would the directives of someone charged

with solving a simple coordination problem. Wolff thinks that this is

consistent with refusing to treat what the captain says as a

distinctively authoritative reason for action. It is the idea of

distinctively authoritative reasons, of reasons that require that a

subject suspend her own private judgment, that the anarchist opposes,

and we haven’t yet seen good reason to think that the possibility of

such distinctively authoritative reasons for belief is ruled out by the

nature of theoretical rationality. The disanalogy that Anscombe

identifies between authority over belief and authority over action,

though genuine, thus poses no threat to the idea that the theoretical

and practical guises of philosophical anarchism should either stand or

fall together.

Clearly, there is much more to be said about these issues. Nevertheless,

I think that we have here a limited defense of Reid’s contention that,

at least with respect to the particular phenomenon of authority, the

problems involved in understanding this distinctively social phenomenon

are problems that span the divide between theoretical and practical

reason. Philosophical anarchism can be understood as a particular

instance of the general desire to reduce the social or second-personal

operations of mind to operations that are solitary or third personal. In

arguing that there is no such thing as legitimate or genuine authority,

the anarchist contends that the only proper relation we can bear to the

directives of de facto authorities is to treat them as merely reliable

indicators of what to do or believe, just as we treat the output of

ordinary impersonal instruments. Rejecting this position ultimately

requires defending a positive alternative account of the nature of

authority, something that I have not attempted here. However, I do hope

to have motivated the idea that, pace Darwall, the problem here is one

that spans the divide between theoretical and practical reason. The

philosophical anarchist position is one that applies equally to

theoretical and practical authority, and so we have good reason to think

that a positive defense of authority as a distinctively social or

second-personal transaction should be capable of applying to both

authority over belief and authority over action.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Linda Radzik, Linda Zagzebski, and audiences at the

University of Reading and the SIAS Summer Seminar “The Second-Person:

Comparative Perspectives” organized by James Conant and Sebastian Rödl

for helpful comments on this material. [End Page 238]

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242]

[1] Legitimate or de jure authorities are often characterized as having

a “right to rule” that generates for others a corresponding “duty to

obey.” The idea that authorities have a right to rule has been

questioned. See, for example, Enoch (2012). Moreover, as I argue below,

the philosophical anarchist position can be formulated in such a way as

to leave to one side questions about whether subjects have a duty or

obligation of obedience. I thus take the core of the philosophical

anarchist position to target the idea that authorities are in a position

(whether or not they have a right to this position) to make it the case

that others ought to do things (whether or not they have a duty or

obligation to do these things) simply by directing them to do so.

[2] A priori anarchism is defended by Wolff (1970). A posteriori

anarchism is defended by Simmons (1979).

[3] A notable exception is Zagzebski (2012).

[4] Note also that the position I am here calling “theoretical

anarchism” is very different from the position that Feyerabend (1975)

famously calls “epistemological anarchism.” Epistemological anarchism is

a position concerning scientific methodology, that there is no

scientific methodology that is in a privileged position to yield

knowledge. Theoretical anarchism, as I explain below, is a position

concerning reasons for belief.

[5] See, in particular, Hart (1990, 107) and Raz (2009, 155–56).

[6] As I argue below, a priori philosophical anarchists hold that the

very concept of authority and the ordinary practices structured in terms

of this concept, practices such as ordering and commanding, are

incoherent. If this is correct, then those who believe in the existence

of genuine authority are not only mistaken, they actually believe

something nonsensical (Shapiro 2002, 383). Like most political

philosophers (including a posteriori philosophical anarchists) I think

that this is enough to make the a priori philosophical anarchist

position highly implausible.

[7] Shapiro argues that the anarchist position is most fundamentally a

position concerning “the space of reasons,” namely that “the only

reasons that exist are either content-dependent or non-peremptory”

(2002, 390). On Shapiro’s account, the anarchist holds that there is no

such thing as a content-independent peremptory reason. This is very

similar to the position that I present here. However, for reasons that I

cannot get into here, I think that the anarchist might actually be in a

position to accept that authoritative directives amount to

content-independent peremptory reasons. I have thus formulated the

anarchist position as the denial that there is any such thing as a

distinctively authoritative reason, a reason that, as I discuss below,

requires that an agent “suspend her own private judgment” concerning

what to do. Most fundamentally, the anarchist is opposed to the idea

that there can be reasons for action that require that an agent not make

up her own mind about what to do.

[8] For discussion of various examples of the use of the metaphor of

suspending private judgment in relation to authority over both belief

and action, see Friedman (1990).

[9] I raise some problems for understanding what exactly is going on in

such a situation in section IV.

[10] One might reject the idea that authoritative practical directives

even purport to provide reasons that require that an agent suspend her

own private judgment, however, one will then face the difficulty of

finding some other way to distinguish between the speech acts of

commanding and advising. The anarchist accepts that commands are

distinguished from advice in that they require that an agent suspend

private judgment in favor of the judgment of someone else. This is what

makes commanding an (attempted) exercise of authority.

[11] Godwin thus construes obedience to authority as a kind of mental

slavery, a slavery that he claims is actually more injurious to one’s

humanity than actual physical enslavement (1971, 124). While someone who

is coerced or physically forced into acting at least retains the ability

to exercise her own rational powers, the obedient agent actually cedes

these powers to the authority. Her mind thus becomes a mere instrument

(an “agent” in another sense of the word) for carrying out the wishes of

another. A strikingly similar picture of obedience emerges from the

social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s analysis of his infamous

experiments on obedience to authority. Milgram claims that when a person

obeys an authority she enters what he calls “the agentic state,” a state

explicitly opposed to that of autonomy. From within the agentic state, a

person defines herself [End Page 239] as a mere instrument for the use

of others and no longer deems herself responsible for what she does

(1974, 133–34).

[12] The anarchist position that I am concerned with here despairs of

the possibility of making coherent sense of the idea of a distinctively

authoritative reason. Unsurprisingly, philosophers seeking to defend the

existence of de jure authority have for the most part attempted to

provide coherent accounts of this idea. See, for example, Raz (1979) and

(1986), Hart (1990), and Friedman (1990).

[13] I discuss several reasons for thinking that the kind of suspension

of private judgment intuitively involved in obedience to practical

authority is not possible in the theoretical realm in section IV.

[14] One might deny that the testimony of a theoretical authority even

purports to provide a reason for belief that is predicated on the

audience’s suspending private judgment. I think that this misconstrues

the phenomenology of the speech act of telling as opposed to such speech

acts as arguing and merely expressing an opinion. Nevertheless, I don’t

think that this point is crucial for the parallel that I draw here. One

might also deny that the commands of a practical authority even purport

to provide a reason for action that is predicated on an audience’s

suspending private judgment, and such a position would still plausibly

count as a form of practical anarchism.

[15] To deny that there are any distinctively authoritative epistemic

reasons for belief is not yet to deny that there are any distinctively

authoritative non-epistemic reasons for belief. Genuinely epistemic

reasons for believing that p are considerations that a subject takes to

bear on the question whether p. Non-epistemic reasons for believing that

p are considerations that a subject takes to bear on the question

whether to act so as to bring about the belief that p by, say,

collecting evidence or taking a pill designed to induce the belief. Such

non-epistemic reasons for belief are ultimately reasons for action—they

are practical reasons—and hence questions about whether such reasons can

be distinctively authoritative are questions about practical authority.

Theoretical anarchism is a thesis about epistemic reasons. Theoretical

authorities purport to provide considerations that bear on the question

whether p, and they purport to do so in a distinctively authoritative

way, in a way that is predicated on the audience’s suspending her own

private judgment. The theoretical anarchist denies that such epistemic

reasons are possible, but this isn’t yet to deny that there are

distinctively authoritative non-epistemic reasons for belief. The

theoretical anarchist might accept that a speaker’s command that an

audience act to bring about a particular belief provides the audience

with a distinctively authoritative reason. One might even call this a

distinctively authoritative “reason for belief,” but this is not a

distinctively authoritative epistemic reason.

[16] One of the clearest historical adherents of this kind of

theoretical anarchist position is Locke (1979).

[17] A notable exception is Zagzebski (2012). So-called assurance views

of testimony can also be read as pushing in the direction of construing

testimony as a kind of authoritative directive. I develop an account of

testimony along these lines in McMyler (2011).

[18] Godwin appears to accept both practical and theoretical anarchism,

and his arguments for the significance of private judgment in action are

often bound up with epistemological considerations. Like Locke, Godwin

holds that knowledge consists in the perception of relations of

agreement and disagreement between ideas, and also like Locke, Godwin

thinks that, as a result, genuine knowledge cannot be acquired from

human testimony. In order for me to know, for example, that the three

angles of a plane triangle are equal to two right angles, it is not

enough that Euclid or some other mathematician has told me that this is

so. I must be able to understand the proof for myself. According to

Godwin, this is true not only of propositions of mathematics and

geometry, but of every proposition: “Every proposition has an intrinsic

evidence of its own. Every consequence has premises from which it flows;

and upon them, and not upon anything else, its validity depends” (1971,

92). Godwin thinks that as goes for knowledge, so goes for action. Just

as every proposition has its own “intrinsic evidence” that amounts to

the sole basis upon which it can be known, so every action has its own

“intrinsic tendency to be performed” that amounts to the sole basis upon

which it can be rationally performed. The only truly legitimate form of

authority is thus “the authority of reason” (1971, 121), and the only

truly legitimate form of obedience is obedience to the dictates of one’s

own understanding: “The purest kind of obedience is, where an action

flows from the independent conviction of our private judgment, where we

are directed, not by the precarious and mutable interference of another,

but by a recollection of the intrinsic and indefeasible tendency of the

action to be performed” (1971, 119). [End Page 240]

[19] For some attempts to argue in this direction, in addition to

Darwall (2006), see Owens (2008) and Enoch (2011).

[20] I discuss a similar issue in the context of Darwall’s (2006) claim

that there can be no such thing as a genuinely or irreducibly

second-personal reason for belief in McMyler (2011). My treatment of the

issue here differs slightly from that earlier discussion.

[21] I take it that to settle the question whether to Φ is not to form a

belief or judgment that Φ-ing is the thing to do. For one way of making

out the claim that the conclusion of practical reasoning is action or

intention-formation rather than belief or judgment about what to do, see

Hieronymi (2009).

[22] In McMyler (2011), I argue that such a judgment must be a

theoretical judgment about a practical subject matter. This is a further

issue that leads to confusion concerning what is involved in suspending

private judgment in the practical and theoretical realms, but one that

does not, I think, make for a difference in the possibilities for the

exercise of authority. Since the discussion here is complicated enough,

I have suppressed this issue here.

[23] This is related to a distinction drawn by Friedman (1990) between

being “in authority” and being “an authority.” A person is in authority

when there is an established and agreed-upon procedure that puts her in

the position of deciding a course of action concerning which there would

otherwise be disagreement. A person is an authority when she has special

access to an independent order of facts. Friedman thinks that these are

both forms of authority and that in both cases the directives of the

authorities involved amount to distinctively authoritative reasons for

belief or action, but he holds, rightly, that the presuppositions of the

two forms of authority differ. As I read Friedman, however, the

distinction between being in authority and an authority doesn’t map

cleanly onto the distinction between practical and theoretical

authority. Friedman holds that all theoretical authorities are in the

position of being an authority, and he holds that only practical

authorities are in the position of being in authority. However, he seems

to hold that some practical authorities are both in authority and an

authority and that some practical authorities may only be an authority.

[24] Raz frequently appeals to the case of arbitration in support of his

service conception of authority.