Darwall's main thesis is that the best way to understand practical authority is through the presupposition that a legitimate authority has the standing to make claims and demands, as well as hold addressees accountable for them. This has led Raz to level the
* For criticism of Darwall's extending of the second-person see Lavin 2014, §3 and for criticism of Darwall's overall project see “Symposium on Stephen Darwall's The Second Person Standpoint in the October 2007 issue of Ethics Vol 118, No. 1
charge that Darwall “seems to use “authority” interchangeably with “standing” (Raz 2010, p. 292). Indeed, Darwall does use the phrase “authority or standing” throughout his writings on the second-person standpoint. What Darwall means by this phrase is that practical authority necessarily involves the presupposition of standing, or of a normative background relationship, to make claims and demands as well as “to hold accountable” (2013b p 154). This, Darwall is claiming, is a necessary precondition for the giving of commands. Without this relation, no command would be possible.
The argument Darwall is making is a transcendental one. That is to say, he is trying to answer the question: what are the necessary grounds of the possibility for a successful command?
His answer is that successful commands are necessarily “grounded in (de jure)
authority relations that an addresser takes to hold between him and his addressee” (Darwall 2006,pp. 3-4). In other words, we must presuppose the relation in order to make sense of commands. For this reason Darwall focuses on the pragmatic structure of the commanding situation, i.e., the second-person standpoint. It will take some time to unpack what exactly this means and what it implies for a theory of practical authority. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to doing so.
Moving, then, directly into our leading question of practical authority: who, according to Darwall, has authority over whom and for whose benefit? The simple answer, which can already be seen from his response to Raz, is:
A has authority over B if and only if A has the standing to command B and hold B to account for non-compliance.
This captures what Darwall calls 'second-personal address' which is characterised by an irreducible family of concepts: practical authority, responsibility to, valid claim or demand,
second-personal reasons (Darwall 2013a pp. 141 and 151; cf. Darwall 2006, pp. 11-15). Furthermore, ‘second-personal address’ is irreducibly relational as it is always made by an addresser and “necessarily always to someone (an addressee)” (Darwall 2013a, p. 151; cf. Darwall 2006, pp. 11). We may worry that the account relies on 'practical authority' as a fundamental element; in other words, that it cannot then give an account for the concept being presupposed. However, this is not the case. Rather, through elucidating this family of concepts in conjunction we can learn a great deal about how to understand practical authority, particularly about the question of standing.
We can already see how radically different this starting point is from Raz's service conception. While Raz starts with, and focuses primarily on, how to justify the content of authoritative commands, Darwall starts by asking what characterises the background normative relationship which makes practical authority possible. This is clearest in Second- Person Standpoint when Darwall, in a footnote, asks:
But what gives the “law” we committed ourselves to normative force? The fact that we committed ourselves to it, as if adopting it together? That could be so only if there exists a further background normative relation that gave us the authority so to bind ourselves voluntarily and whose authority does not itself depend on a voluntary commitment (Darwall 2006, pp. 264n26 emphasis added; cf. Ware 2009).
In other words, Darwall's account focuses primarily on the question of standing.
The best way to get a handle on Darwall's second person standpoint and his conception of standing is to start with an example he borrows from Hume when introducing his theory. It is Hume's 'gouty toe' example (Hume 1975, pp. 226): you stepping on my foot. Darwall concedes that there might be several reasons for you to remove your foot from mine (Darwall 2013a, pp. 136-137, 155).
For example, it might be the case that you think suffering is a bad state of affairs to which you do not want to contribute. Based on this fact alone, you might think that you
should not step on feet, as stepping on feet causes undue suffering. Therefore, when you are alerted to the fact that the weight of your foot on mine causes suffering (the suffering here should be phrased third personally because it is irrelevant whose suffering it is), then you find yourself in the best position to alleviate the suffering, and you remove your foot. Alternatively, you might think stepping on feet is “base thing and so beneath” the virtuous person, you aspire to be a virtuous person; therefore, naturally, you move your foot when alerted (Darwall 2010, pp. 262).
According to Darwall, both of these reasons can be accepted “without holding that anyone has any claim to [you] not stepping on other's feet or that it would wrong anyone for [you] to do so” (ibid.). The problem in both of these cases is that there is no-one in a position to give a pre-emptive reason or to hold anyone accountable for non-compliance. In fact, it is not necessary for there to be other people at all, only that there are other beings who can suffer (or have feet). Hence, there is no authority and the reason why there is no authority, and why there cannot possibly be authority in these situations is, according to Darwall, a lack of the normative second-personal relationship that holds between you and I. In other words, I must be entitled to make demands on you and hold you accountable for wronging me, and you must be answerable to my demands – this is just what it means, for Darwall, to be in a second-personal relationship.
Darwall grounds this prior normative relationship in the idea of equality and a common basis of authority. This is what he terms 'Fichte’s point', which posits that
any second-personal claim or 'summons' (Aufforderung) presupposes a common competence, authority, and, therefore, responsibility as free and rational; a mutual second-personality that addresser and addressee share and that is appropriately recognized reciprocally (Darwall 2006, pp. 21).*
* We can leave aside the historical accuracy of Darwall's reading of Fichte's point as he can make this point independently of its purported historical origins but doubts have been raised about the fidelity of Darwall's reading (Ware 2009, pp. 262-282).
'Fichte's point' is supposed to show that for (legitimate) authoritative relationships to arise it is necessary that individuals recognise the other's common dignity. In Rawls's words, that each is a “self-originating source of valid claims” (ibid., Ch 10; Rawls 1999b, Ch. 16).
How does this connect to the gouty toe example? In Darwall's essay on “Fichte and the Second-Person Standpoint”, he tells us that:
Since second-personal reasons concern not the goodness or badness of states of the world considered independently of our relation to them, but rather agent's relations to one another, they are invariably agent-relative in some way or other. (Darwall 2013b, p. 227)
In other words, what matters for practical authoritative relationships is not the reasons that might already apply to the individuals. What matters is rather the reasons that we justify to each other as free and equal persons.
It is only in you recognising my claim on you that you are made responsible. For you to be responsible for removing your foot from mine, you must recognise as valid my claim upon you; this is also what allows me to hold you accountable. Now we might wonder why we need to think of ourselves as responsible to the other's claim in order to be accountable to him? In other words, if another person makes a valid claim on us, why do we need to accept such a claim in order to be accountable to him for it? However, it is still open to Darwall to say that we are responsible for the content of the claim but this is not his question. Rather, the question he is raising is about who we are accountable to and who can hold us accountable.
Darwall answers this question by defending a further point, viz., 'Pufendorf's point'. This point says that in order to hold someone responsible for an action, that person must already be able to hold herself accountable. In Darwall's words:
and accountability, someone can be under a moral obligation to do something only if he can hold himself to the relevant demand through recognizing its legitimacy […] Someone can be accountable only by holding himself accountable (Darwall 2013b, p. 213; cf. Darwall 2006, pp. 23, 250).
Again, with the gouty toe, you would be responsible for moving your foot when I demand you to do so, only if it is something for which you can already hold yourself accountable.
This point seems, like 'Fichte's point', to be based in a particular reading of Rawls’ fundamental claim that people are 'self-originating sources of valid claims'. If I demand that you φ, then you have to recognise my demand as something for which you can hold yourself accountable in order for me to hold you accountable for your φ-ing. Why? If you do not recognise my demand as something for which you can hold yourself accountable, then I would be violating you as a source of a valid claim. I would be disrespecting you while demanding that you respect me as a source of valid claims, and this would be violating our equality as moral beings for me to treat you as a mere means.