Candice Delmas

Three Conceptions of Practical Authority

Joseph Raz’s much discussed service conception of practical authority has recently come under attack from Stephen Darwall, who proposes that we instead adopt a second-personal conception of practical authority. 1 In sharp contrast to both Darwall and Raz, we believe that the best place to begin understanding practical authority is with a pared back conception of it, as simply a species of normative authority more generally, where this species is picked out merely by the fact that the normative authority in question is authority in relation to action, rather than belief. We call this the minimalist conception of practical authority. 2 We do not wish to deny that there might turn out to be substantive properties of practical authority that are peculiar to it (apart from the mere property of being the species of authority that is concerned with action), but, unlike both Raz and Darwall, we do not believe that such features play a fundamental role in defining or delimiting practical authority. We hope that this third conception of authority will appear particularly attractive coming, as it will, on the heels of a comparison of the alternatives. We begin, in section I, with a discussion of Darwall’s and Raz’s accounts of practical authority (readers who are already very familiar with the details of the debate between Darwall and Raz may wish to skip this section). Next, in section II, we consider what we take to be Darwall’s dialectically strongest criticism of Raz, concerning which we end up siding with Raz. Finally, in section III, we focus on the concept of authority afresh, and suggest that our alternative conception of practical authority provides a better starting place for future discussions of authority than either of the

On Michael Walzer’s “The Obligation to Disobey”*

Michael Walzer published “The Obligation to Disobey” in 1967, in the midst of the Civil Rights and anti–VietnamWar protest movements. Other philosophers, including Carl Cohen and John Rawls, had started exploring civil disobedience in the 1960s, but Walzer’s piece was groundbreaking in conceiving of disobedience to the law not in terms of permission but in terms of obligation, in line with the actual practice of disobedients and revolutionaries. One reason to read Walzer’s article afresh, nearly half a century since its publication, is that the gap between practice and theory remains: philosophers by and large still neglect the possibility that there may be a moral obligation to disobey the law.

Three Harms of “Conversion” Therapy

In “Brave New Love: The Threat of High-Tech ‘Conversion’ Therapy and the Bio-Oppression of Sexual Minorities,” Brian Earp, Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu (2014) defend the ethical permissibility, under strict conditions, of using biotechnology to alter the sexual orientation of a consenting adult. In this commentary, I articulate an ethical argument against the development and creation of high tech “conversion” therapy, which rests on the notion that sometimes giving people an option harms them,1 and concludes that sexual orientation should remain outside the individual’s control. Earp, Sandberg, and Savulescu argue that while the coercive use of the technology on children or unwilling individuals is ethically impermissible, its voluntary use can be justified on the grounds that it could benefit individuals who seriously suffer from their sexual orientation, and despite the worry that it might perpetuate oppressive social norms. Their central case study is that of a yeshiva student whose same-sex attraction feelings hinder the pursuit of his higher order spiritual goals. Helping the student alter his sexual orientation may be justified by concern for his welfare, the authors argue, even if his suffering is the result of internalized homophobic cultural norms. Some individuals like the yeshiva student may indeed benefit from sexual-orientation-altering therapy; yet, I submit that its development and creation should be viewed as a very serious cause for alarm in heterosexist societies. My argument is that it is better for sexual minorities not to have the option to alter their sexual orientation at all, because having the option to alter one’s sexual orientation, in a context of heteronormative domination, harms sexual minorities. The existence of “conversion” biotechnology would harm members of sexual minorities, both individually and collectively, by changing for the worse the norms that govern people’s attitudes toward sexual orientation. Giving members of sexual minorities the option to “convert” would harm them in three ways: (a) by generating pressures to undergo “conversion,” (b) by demanding that individuals justify their unaltered gay sexual orientation, and (c) by making “conversion” a rational course of action. First, by becoming an option, sexual orientation would no longer be outside individuals’ control. Thus, what is currently seen, under oppressive conditions, as the most persuasive basis for equal respect (or at least tolerance) of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals, namely, that sexual orientation,