Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T19:02:15.196Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Authority

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Roger Teichmann
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

As children, we are often told both what to do and what to think. For a child to learn at all, it must in the first instance simply trust those, such as parents, who teach it things; and this goes for practical as well as theoretical learning. Doubting is necessarily something that comes later, for to be able to doubt one must have some beliefs already, e.g. concerning what sort of reasons count as good reasons, and what count as bad. But in growing up, a person does, or should, develop the capacity for rational doubt, and also the capacity for rational resistance to being told what to do. The first capacity constitutes a critical faculty, and the second is an essential constituent of practical autonomy.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 54 , March 2004 , pp. 229 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Cf. Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘On Promising and its Justice’, Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol III (Blackwell, 1981), 15Google Scholar.

2 G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Authority in Morals’, ibid., 45.

3 G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘On the Source of the Authority of the State’, ibid., 134.

4 This qualification is an important one, and applies to much of what I say about teaching in this article. A teacher of philosophy should be more interested in the psyches of his or her students than in the imparting of information, and to that extent cannot enjoy the same sort of authority as a history teacher.

5 ‘Authority in Morals’, ibid., 44.

6 Pace Joseph Raz. In The Morality of Freedom (58–9), Raz argues that where there is already a reason for people (or for a person) to do so-and-so, there cannot be any extra reason to do it in virtue of there being a (legitimate) directive to do it. Raz says that this would be ‘counting twice’; and prefers to speak of a reason to obey or comply as ‘pre-empting’ or ‘replacing’ the original reason to do so-and-so.

But there are as many reasons for doing so-and-so as there are possible grounds for complaint if one omits to do it: i.e.(here) two— the reasons being (a) that the ends in question would be best served by doing so-andso, and (b) that one should not be disobedient (undermine X's authority, etc.). The reasons for having a set-up requiring obedience may indeed refer to the ends mentioned in (a)—those reasons won't, by the way, include (a) itself; but it's quite compatible with this that the force of (b) be additional to, because different in kind from, the force of (a).

7 For more on the distinction between a rule's applying and its having force, see Teichmann, R., ‘Explaining the Rules’, Philosophy, 10 2002Google Scholar.

8 ‘Authority in Morals’, ibid., 48.