Legitimacy of Practical Authority The purpose of this research is t

The purpose of this research is to examine Joseph Raz's development of a theory of the legitimacy of practical authority, Donald Regan's challenge to it, and Raz's rebuttal. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal components of Raz's theory, to evaluate criticisms of Raz's theory that Regan makes, and then to discuss Raz's response to those criticisms, with a view toward suggesting which arguments appear to make the most sense.

Raz's theory of practical authority seeks to develop a rational connection between the law and the legitimacy as well as efficacy of the idea of authority as the basis for life in a civilized society. It has to be said at the outset that Raz incorporates a great deal of qualification into the theory he develops. That is, he does not make a series of blanket declarations about the appropriate way to consider how to judge whether practical authority has legitimacy. This, as we shall see, is an important point in relation to Regan's theoretical challenge to Raz.

The method Raz uses to explain how authority derives legitimacy is to cite paradoxes or contradictions that arise when legitimacy is claimed for authority, to provide a critique of four explanations for "why people come to accept the authority of individuals or groups" (1:5), to show why the seemingly simple notion of acceptance of authority is deceptive and ambiguous, to show the connection between normative power and the rationale for authority, and to resolve, by m

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the autonomous individual may assert reasons against acting in accordance with authority, but these reasons are what Raz calls second-order reasons, which do not have the same standing as first-order reasons, whence authority derives legitimacy. It is the province of legitimate authority to create orders (i.e., not requests). By this he means the first-order context and so exclude from the structure of authority (and indeed of reason) the challenges to its authority: "For every order, if we know what the person who issued it thinks is the correct outcome of all possible practical conflicts in which it may be involved, we can ascribe to him the view that his order has just the weight that would justify all those consequences" (1:23). It follows, as Raz notes, that the orders, or "commands authority are facts of the world that are reasons for action" (1:25). Raz gives the example of a stoplight in the wilderness before which the reasonable, autonomous person stops. Another example might be the reasonable, autonomous person who is independently wealthy, who has enormous gold reserves, and yet who pays his bills with American currency rather than with either gold dust or currency of his own mint. The very existence of American legal

Category: Government - L