Authority

“Authority” is not one thing. Aristotle might remind us that it is said in many ways. Two of the most important have nearly opposite senses. One asserts an arbitrary power over others, or an entitlement to coerce others: “Do what you are told”. Why? “Because I said so”. The other is a kind of earned respect that is virtually identical with justification.

An important case is what is called argument from authority. There are practical situations in which very rapid response is required, and there is literally no time for debate. We don’t hesitate to simply grab a child who is in danger from an oncoming car, and we don’t consider this a violation of Kantian respect for others. We also tend to trust the judgment of those we judge to have good judgment. But in any situation in which what is good or what is true is disputed, argument from authority is basically cheating.

“Because I said so” or “because someone in authority said so” is logically circular, and a circular argument does not establish anything. A particularly insidious version of this is appeals to the will of God, as if all by itself this were a criterion of what is right.

What these conceal is the speaker’s unboundedly prideful implicit claim to personally know the will of God beyond any doubt, regardless of anyone else’s contrary view of what the will of God is.

Plato in his dialogue Euthyphro portrays Socrates as asking whether we should say that a thing is holy because the gods love it, or on the contrary that the gods love a thing because it is holy. ”Because the gods love it” or “because it is God’s will” is logically equivalent to “because I said so”, because the speaker simply assumes it is beyond doubt that the speaker’s view is God’s view.

Building on Plato, Leibniz asks whether a thing is good and just because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is good and just, and answers that it must be the latter, because to assert the former would make of God a tyrant rather than a being good and just. If on the other hand God is good and just, and therefore wills whatever is actually good and just in each situation, then we are responsible for understanding what is good and just in each case.

Claimed entitlements to coerce others should require substantial justification. We might be tempted to say that no one should ever coerce anyone else, but there are sociopaths and Nazis who do not respect others at all. The problem is that once an authority to coerce is instituted, it takes on a life of its own, and is prone to abuse. As the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But occasionally, coercion is the only way to avoid a greater evil. There are no easy answers here.

Primordial Choice?

Plotinus speaks of a primordial choice implicitly made by every human: to turn either toward the separated soul, or away from it. The idea is that such a choice comes first, and is not conditioned by anything. This is completely unlike Aristotle’s treatment of choice.

Aristotle discusses choice in the context of concrete ethical doings. A choice is the outcome of a deliberation, not something undertaken in a vacuum. Our freedom consists in many such choices, based on reasons. Our unfreedom consists in part in constraint by the cumulative consequences of all our previous choices.

(I call this particular kind of unfreedom superficial because because it is “unfree” mainly in the shallow sense that it is not completely unconditioned. A conditioning grounded in reasons that we assent to is very unlike a conditioning by relations of force. In a deeper sense, a grounding in reasons doesn’t at all make us less free; indeed, many philosophers have made a grounding in reasons the very criterion of freedom. Of course, our choices may also have unintended consequences, and we have to live with these as well. That is a less superficial unfreedom. And we may be swayed by passion or imagination, which is another kind. Or we may be constrained by relations of force.)

In modern times, various writers have abstracted the notion of unconditioned choice even further, so that in principle anything could be a matter of purely arbitrary decision. Completely unconditioned choice can only be arbitrary. Here lie the seeds of tyranny. (See also Desire of the Master.)

Is and Ought in Actuality

Aristotle regards the priority of actuality over potentiality to be one of his most important innovations. He regards it as a necessary condition for anything being intelligible. Along with the primacy of the good and that-for-the-sake-of-which in explanation, it is also central to his way of arguing for a first cause.

The Western tradition generally did not follow Aristotle on these points. Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin monotheisms have most often treated God as an absolute power, seeking to put unlimited omnipotence first in the order of explanation, before goodness. Christians were happy to criticize occasionalism in Islam, but theologians like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham defended an extreme sort of theological voluntarism, which was taken up again by Descartes. In the 19th century, Kierkegaard valorized Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as unconditional obedience to God, claiming that faith should take precedence over ethics generally. In the 20th century, Sartre defended unconditional free will for humans, while asserting a militant atheism and the absurdity of existence. His currently influential follower Alain Badiou goes even further. He bluntly says that concern for ethics is a waste of time, and that dialogue and democracy are a scam — not just in particular cases, but in general.

Mainstream views of religion have always insisted that the absolute power is also absolutely good, but have been unable to show why or how this is the case. This has opened the door to simplistic but unanswerable arguments that the facts of the world cannot be reconciled with claims that it is governed by a good absolute power.

Instead of sacrificing ethics and the good on either religious or secular grounds, we should put them first. Leibniz argues that an emphasis on the absolute power or arbitrary will of God is bad theology, and effectively makes God into the kind of tyrant that Plato denounced (see also Euthyphro; Arbitrariness, Inflation).

Aristotle’s first cause doesn’t govern the facts of the world. It is the world’s normative compass. It is the pure good and pure fulfillment that all things seek, according to their natures and insofar as they are capable. Or as Hegel might say, it is pure Idea.

The priority of actuality is a priority of the good and of normativity. For Aristotle, we shouldn’t call something “actual” just because it exists or is the case. Rather, something is actual when it is the case that it is fulfilling its potential, as it “ought” to do.

It is not a matter of pure moralism either though. Actuality does involve an element of being the case; it is just not reducible to that. What is true also matters quite a lot in the determination of what is right, even though it is not all that matters. Every particular good is interdependent with particular truth. That is why Aristotle seems to make the understanding of causes into one of the most important elements of virtue, while at the same time cautioning us that ethics is not a matter of exact knowledge.

We are looking for a kind of mean here. What is true matters for what is right, but what is right also matters for what is true. Truth is not reducible to a matter of neutral fact. There can be no truth without intelligibility, and there can be no intelligibility without taking normative considerations into account in interpretation.

Tyranny

Plato diagnosed tyranny as first and foremost an affliction of the soul. Socrates in Plato’s Republic characterizes the tyrannical soul by a malformed desire that strongly resists any kind of balanced consideration of other factors. This kind of desire wants its way immediately and unconditionally.

The tyrannical soul wants a kind of unquestioning recognition from others, without reciprocally recognizing them. This kind of attitude represents the opposite end of the spectrum from what Aristotle called magnanimity or great-souledness; rather, it is characteristic of the attitude of Mastery denounced by Hegel. Unfortunately, modern egoism, with its emphasis on a narrow kind of self, tends to devolve in this direction. (See also Freedom Without Sovereignty.)

While a tyrannical soul may be an Aristotelian cause of particular unjust acts, this does not mean that injustice as a whole is reducible to matters of individual character. Injustice is not just caused by the bad acts of individuals, but also often involves institutions and social structure, which have their persistence in part from a kind of materiality of their own.

Rights

Rights are an important legal concept, and in the interest of justice in an imperfect world sometimes need to be defended, but ethics should guide law, not the other way around. Mutual recognition makes the blunter instrument of unilateral “rights” superfluous for ethical purposes. Kantian respect for others and the Aristotelian spirit of friendship already do so. If we respect others in our actions and treat them in a friendly way, they need not worry about enforcing any putative rights in relation to us. (See also Leibniz.)

If we examine what Hegel called “positive” (actually existing) law, it is often not guided by good ethics as it should be. All too much law is devoted to institutionalizing unilateral privilege (etymologically, “private law”) of one sort or another. We are supposed to be consoled that by the fact that everyone is assigned at least a few privileges, but the whole model of unilateral privilege is ethically deeply wrong.

It is an unsavory fact that the unilateral, unconditional privileges associated with modern ownership and sovereignty historically descend from medieval European libertas or “liberty”, or the arbitrary “right” claimed by the Master to rape the peasant’s daughter and generally do as he pleases, with no regard for others. This kind of “liberty” is an ugly voluntarist fantasy associated with what Plato called the worst sort of character, that of a tyrant. Just such ugliness is recalled by, e.g., the old British Tory slogan “liberty and property”. It is the liberty of the privileged to walk over the rest of us.

Years ago, I was shocked to learn that the classic modern development of the notion of rights explicitly models all rights on unilateral property rights, making reciprocal rights of people a derivative afterthought. (See, e.g., C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism.) Hobbes and Locke did this, and specifically on the question of rights Kant and Hegel unfortunately followed suit, even though their views provide resources for a much better, people-first account, based on respect or mutual recognition.

All rights deserving of legal recognition should be grounded in respect. If we respect property, it should be rationally related to respect for people. No one has a “right” to be a billionaire. (See also Freedom from False Freedom.)