The Authority of Law and Indirect Theories of Decision-Making

This paper focuses on indirect theories of decision-making, i.e. those theories that tell people to use a suboptimal decision-making procedure because in the long run this will be the best way to achieve the goals established by the theory. This scheme is central in two rather distant philosophical theories. The first is Raz’ “Service Conception of Authority” – centred on the idea of exclusionary reasons –, while the second is Parfit’s analysis of the structure of self-interest theory and consequentialism. The comparison is helpful because it brings to light some stark differences between two kinds of indirect theories: on the one hand, indirect theories that replace counter-intuitive decision-making methods with intuitive decisionmaking methods, and in addition have the possibility of being self-effacing and esoteric (concealing suboptimality); on the other hand, indirect theories that impose a counter-intuitive decision-method and are “genealogical”. It is argued that obedience to authority and rule-based decision-making are parts of an indirect theory belonging to this second kind, and this may help explain the psychological difficulty people have in understanding the ideal of Rule of Law.