For Your Own Good? Authority, Categorical Reason, and Paternalism

Instrumentalist accounts of authority seek to justify relations of authority—that is, relations in which one person has the ability to give binding directives to another—on the basis of some good, benefit or service that such relations provide for those subject to them. These accounts of authority are often criticized for justifying too much authority, and in particular, for justifying forms of authority which appear blatantly paternalistic. Some authority relations do not seem justified even though they are, or would be, clearly beneficial to those subject to them. In this article, I defend instrumentalist accounts of authority against this objection. I focus, in particular, on Joseph Raz’s well-known and influential formulation of instrumentalism about authority, as articulated in his service conception of authority, and on a version of the objection formulated by Stephen Darwall. I begin by arguing that, contrary to the suggestions made by several philosophers, instrumentalist justifications of authority would not be more plausible if restricted in scope to cases involving pre-existing obligations, or some particularly weighty subset of moral or categorical concerns. I suggest, instead, that worries about paternalism can be accommodated by instrumentalist accounts of authority in other ways.