Gürkan Çapar

Any theory of legitimacy encompassing a general standard applicable to all kinds of authorities is required to come to terms with the problem of specification and tell us something about how to make this general standard operational. The service conception of authority (SC) is also presented, and hailed, as a general standard of legitimacy, yet it remains to be addressed how it can be applied to different kinds of authorities such as parental, domestic political, and international authorities. There are two different aspects of the specification problem besetting SC. While one concerns specifying the sort of problem an authority is expected to solve, the other pertains to the different meanings that the independence condition may acquire when an individual is subject to the different kinds of authorities such as recognitional, parental, and international. In addressing this second specification question, the article argues that SC needs a moral foundation to give a concrete meaning to the independence condition and find a balance between its two partially contradictory conditions. Raz explains what the independence condition implies for political authorities when he introduces his perfectionist liberalism as an alternative to its anti-perfectionist variant and argues that political authorities are warranted to pursue perfectionist policies and take necessary steps to create the conditions that make individuals autonomous (substantive conception of individual autonomy). However, it is yet to be examined what the independence condition, thought together with Raz’s perfectionist liberalism, implies for other kinds of authorities. The article concludes by making some cursory explanations for the way in which recognitional/international and parental authorities interact with their subjects when they are delivering their services.