•  132
    Authority Without the Duty to Obey
    Mind 132 (528): 942-951. 2023.
    Authority is an important feature of military life. Political and military superiors claim the power to give binding orders to their subordinates. If they have the authority they claim (and that many citizens and soldiers take them to possess), then the subordinates are morally required to do as commanded. Tadros’ To Do, To Die, To Reason Why challenges the authority claims that political and military superiors make in giving orders: the kinds of considerations ordinarily thought to underpin the…Read more
  • Introduction
    with Melissa Schwartzberg
    In Melissa Schwartzberg & Daniel Viehoff (eds.), Democratic failure, New York University Press. 2020.
  •  10
    Democratic failure (edited book)
    with Melissa Schwartzberg
    New York University Press. 2020.
    Explores the challenges facing democracies in the twenty-first century In Democratic Failure, Melissa Schwartzberg and Daniel Viehoff bring together a distinguished group of interdisciplinary scholars in political science, law, and philosophy to explore the key questions and challenges facing democracies, both in the past and present, around the world. In ten timely essays, contributors examine the fascinating, centuries-old question of whether or not democracy can ever fulfill the promise of it…Read more
  •  147
    Legitimacy as a Right to Err
    In Jack Knight & Melissa Schwartzberg (eds.), NOMOS LXI: Political Legitimacy, Nyu Press. pp. 173-199. 2019.
    This essay proposes that legitimacy (on at least one understanding of the protean term) is centrally a right to err: a right to make mistakes that harm interests of others that are ordinarily protected by rights (Section 1). Legitimacy so understood is importantly distinct from authority, the normative power to impose binding (or enforceable) rules at will (Section 2). Specifically, legitimate institutions have a distinctive liberty right to harm others’ interests that other agents normally lack…Read more
  •  712
    Power and Equality
    Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 5 1-38. 2019.
    Several democratic theorists have recently sought to vindicate the ideal of equal political power (“political equality”) by tying it to the non-derivative value of egalitarian relationships. This chapter critically discusses such arguments. It clarifies what it takes to vindicate the ideal of political equality, and distinguishes different versions of the relational egalitarian argument for it. Some such arguments appeal to the example of a society without social status inequality (such as caste…Read more
  •  170
    Legitimate Injustice and Acting for Others
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 50 (3): 301-374. 2022.
    It is practically inevitable that even the best-intentioned public officials occasionally inflict unjust harm on people who should not have to suffer it. They mistakenly arrest innocent suspects, and convict innocent defendants. They erroneously adopt and enforce criminal laws that unduly restrict our freedom. They vote for, implement, and enforce tax laws that unfairly burden some citizens. And yet it is widely assumed that, as long as such officials act in good faith, and follow certain instit…Read more
  •  357
    Law and Morality at War offers a broadly instrumentalist defense of the authority of the laws of war: these laws serve combatants by helping them come closer to doing what they have independent moral reason to do. We argue that this form of justification sets too low a bar. An authority’s directives are not binding, on instrumental grounds, if the subject could, within certain limits, adopt an alternative, and superior, means of conforming to morality’s demands. It emerges that Haque’s argument …Read more
  •  418
    Democratic Equality and Political Authority
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 42 (4): 337-375. 2014.
    This essay seeks to provide a justification for the ‘egalitarian authority claim’, according to which citizens of democratic states have a moral duty to obey (at least some) democratically made laws because they are the outcome of an egalitarian procedure. It begins by considering two prominent arguments that link democratic authority to a concern for equality. Both are ultimately unsuccessful; but their failures are instructive, and help identify the conditions that a plausible defense of the e…Read more
  •  324
    Debate: Procedure and Outcome in the Justification of Authority
    Journal of Political Philosophy 19 (2): 248-259. 2010.
    Why should one person obey another? Why (to ask the question from the first-person perspective) ought I to submit to another and follow her judgment rather than my own? In modern political thought, which denies that some are born rulers and others are born to be ruled, the most prominent answer has been: “Because I have consented to her authority.” By making authority conditional on the subjects’ consent, political philosophers have sought to reconcile authority’s hierarchical structure with the…Read more
  •  246
    Authority and Expertise
    Journal of Political Philosophy 24 (4): 406-426. 2016.
    Call “epistocracy” a political regime in which the experts, those who know best, rule; and call “the epistocratic claim” the assertion that the experts’ superior knowledge or reliability is “a warrant for their having political authority over others.” Most of us oppose epistocracy and think the epistocratic claim is false. But why is it mistaken? Contemporary discussions of this question focus on two answers. According to the first, expertise could, in principle, be a warrant for authority. What…Read more
  •  135
    The Right against Interference: Human Rights and Legitimate Authority
    Law and Ethics of Human Rights 7 (1): 25-46. 2013.
    Among the functions of state borders is to delineate a domain within which outsiders may normally not interfere. But the human rights practice that has sprung up in recent decades has imposed significant limits on a state’s right against interference. This article considers the connection between human rights on the one hand and justified interference in the internal affairs of states on the other. States, this article argues, have a right against interference if and because they serve their sub…Read more
  •  87
    Roundtable on Epistemic Democracy and Its Critics
    with Jack Knight, Hélène Landemore, and Nadia Urbinati
    Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 28 (2): 137-170. 2016.
    On September 3, 2015, the Political Epistemology/ideas, Knowledge, and Politics section of the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on epistemic democracy as part of the APSA’s annual meetings. Chairing the roundtable was Daniel Viehoff, Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield. The other participants were Jack Knight, Department of Political Science and the Law School, Duke University; Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University; and Nadi…Read more
  •  103
    XIV—The Truth in Political Instrumentalism
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 117 (3): 273-295. 2017.
    How can one person’s having political power over another be justified? This essay explores the idea that such justifications must be in an important sense derivative, and that this ‘Derivative Justification Constraint’ bars certain justifications widely endorsed in political and philosophical debates. After critically discussing the most prominent extant articulations of the Constraint (associated with a view often called ‘political instrumentalism’), the essay offers a novel account of what pre…Read more