Objetivo 1: Identificar las competencias cardinales y técnicas requeridas en los

Raz proposes that we assess the legitimacy of authority by means of a test that he calls the ‘‘Normal Justification Thesis’’: authorities are legitimate insofar as agents who submit to them more successfully conform their actions to the reasons that apply to them than they would if they did not follow their directives.18 So, in the case of traffic regulation, we are 18

to ask whether drivers are more likely to drive in the ways rationally required by considerations of efficiency, safety, etc., if they submit to the direction of traffic lights, speed limits, and so forth, than if they each weighed these considerations up for themselves. Imagine a complex, busy, intersection: would drivers’ efforts to drive with due concern for efficient mobility and those of safety likely be enhanced or hindered by a system of traffic lights? It is difficult to believe that they could do better without the aid of traffic lights, a conclusion that might be quickly confirmed by observing what happens at busy intersections when the electricity powering the traffic lights cuts off. In this case, then, it seems likely that submission to authority meets Raz’s normal justification criterion.

Raz distinguishes five general ways to satisfy the Normal Justification Thesis. I quote his words:

1) The authority is wiser and therefore better able to establish how the individual should act.

2) It has a steadier will less likely to be tainted by bias, weakness or impetuosity, less likely to be diverted from right reason by temptations or pressures.

3) Direct individual action in an attempt to follow right reason is likely to be self-defeating. Individuals should follow an indirect strategy, guiding their action by one standard. . . [an authority’s instructions] . . . in order better to conform to another.

4) Deciding for oneself what to do causes anxiety [or] exhaustion, or involves costs in time or resources the avoidance of which by following authority does not have significant drawbacks. . .

5) The authority is in a better position to achieve (if its legitimacy is acknowledged) what the individual has reason to but is in no position to achieve.19

The requirements of social coordination are prominent on this list and their importance in Raz’s account deserves stress. In chapter 4, we discussed cases in which agents recognize a responsibility to cooperate in promoting some desirable outcome (we focused on relieving global poverty), but face problems in coordinating their collective efforts towards

such ends. These cases lend themselves to analysis in terms of Raz’s theory of authority. The severe needs of the globally deprived supply the affluent with reasons to provide assistance. But the affluent may be in a stronger position to respond properly to those reasons when they submit to authoritative rules to coordinate their efforts. Raz’s account implies that insofar as submission to such rules enables a more effective and appropriate response than would be possible through spontaneous and uncoordinated action, we ought to regard it as submission to a legiti- mate authority.

Conclusion

One obvious problem with Raz’s test of legitimacy is that it requires agents to compare the likely results of their submission to an authority with some alternative situation. But this immediately invites the question: Compared to what? For example, if the alternative is a Hobbesian state of nature, then it turns out that almost any state capable of maintaining basic social order, regardless of any other shortcomings, wields legiti– mate authority. But if the relevant comparison is with any imaginable alternative, it may be very difficult to show that existing schemes of authority are ever legitimate. Whenever we can imagine a scheme that would coordinate agents’ responses to sound reasons more effectively than is now the case, we shall be tempted to conclude that the current arrangement is illegitimate. This may lead us to worry that Raz’s test of legitimacy is indeterminate.

This point raises a serious issue, but there are at least some reasons to suppose that it exposes a strength rather than a weakness of Raz’s account. Our earlier criticisms of traditional theories of political obligation led us to doubt that when we inquire into the legitimacy of a state’s authority we are asking a simple question to which we should expect a simple yes-or-no answer. Notwithstanding its critical power, philosophical anarchism seemed thin and ultimately uninformative precisely because it expects and settles for one of these answers, in this case a flat ‘‘No.’’ But why should authority not be ‘‘legitimate to various degrees regarding different people’’? As Raz points out, ‘‘We are used to thinking in such

terms concerning tourists and temporary residents.’’ Why not apply ‘‘the same reasoning to all’’?20

With this in mind, the Normal Justification Thesis seems attractive precisely because it allows a more flexible and discriminating approach to the various questions we might raise about the legitimacy of authority. We can, for example, isolate particular areas of public regulation and use Raz’s test to answer carefully formulated questions about the legitimacy of authority in these specific contexts. This is what we did when we discussed the regulation of complex and busy intersections by traffic signals. We did not encounter any significant problems of indeterminacy there. Of course, reaching a conclusion about the legitimacy of traffic rules does not permit a general verdict on the legitimacy of all the forms of authority claimed by modern states. But again this is a problem only if we assume that it is possible or desirable to reach a simple guilty/ not guilty verdict across the board. Once we abandon that assumption as unrealistic, Raz’s more piecemeal alternative promises more discriminating answers to questions about when particular authorities are legitimate and when not, for whom, under what conditions, and over which areas of conduct.

It may also lead us to understand better what sort of value legitimacy might be, an issue that we criticized philosophical anarchists for failing to clarify. We noted at the start of the chapter that legitimate authority seems not to be a political ideal of the same order as justice or the common good. That is presumably why it makes sense to take pride in fighting or sacrificing oneself for the realization of social justice, but eccentric to view oneself as a crusader for legitimacy. In the light of Raz’s analysis, it seems better to say that political legitimacy is not an independent political or social ideal, but a possible virtue of the relation between rulers and ruled.

On Raz’s account, this virtue is displayed to the extent that authorities assist agents in their efforts to live rationally and responsibly, in accor- dance with the reasons that ought to guide their actions. These reasons may sometimes be derived from considerations of justice or from other moral ideals, but they may also reflect reasons grounded in prudence or

self-interest (think about the way in which judgments about safety were in play in our discussion of driving, for example). The practice of authority therefore ranges widely across the full gamut of possible reasons for action, and is not exclusively concerned with those deriving from justice and other ethical or social ideals. To this extent, Raz’s argument vindicates the philosophical anarchists’ claim that judgments about political legiti- macy and about the justification of political institutions in terms of moral ideals are distinct.

On the other hand, ideals of justice plausibly form a major source of reasons for political action of various sorts. Moreover, as our discussions in previous chapters have emphasized, principles of justice seem often to require or protect just those forms of social coordination that are integral to the practice of political authority. For these reasons, it will often be impossible to dissociate our concrete judgments about the legitimacy of particular institutional authorities from judgments about how they might ideally realize justice. So while justice and legitimacy are analytically distinct values, in many if not most concrete political contexts they must also surely be inextricably linked.

We have already felt the force of claims about liberty and freedom (terms I will use interchangeably) at various points in our discussion so far. In chapter 4, we saw how Rousseauan and Rawlsian contractualists seek to justify political arrangements by asking whether agents motivated to maintain their autonomy would freely accept them under appropriate conditions. The possible impact of various forms of economic regulation on personal freedom was a persistent theme in chapters 5 and 6, and in the previous chapter we worried about the compatibility of freedom and authority. But these issues have come up occasionally and unsystemat- ically, much as they do in ordinary political debate. Can we move beyond these rather informal claims about freedom and develop more precise and systematic accounts of the various different forms of human liberty and of their political implications?

For good or ill, recent philosophical efforts in this direction have been profoundly shaped by Isaiah Berlin’s seminal essay Two Concepts of Liberty, originally his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford.1 When Berlin delivered it in 1958, the world was divided into two ideologically opposed blocs the liberal democratic West and the communist East (from which Berlin himself was an e´migre´). His lecture was an effort to understand how, despite their bitter enmity, both sides of this Cold War division could nonetheless claim to be crusading for liberty.

Berlin’s explanation hinged on a distinction between two rather differ- ent understandings of political liberty that emerged from the European Enlightenment. The first, a ‘‘negative’’ concept of liberty, to be found predominantly in English writers (e.g. Hobbes, Bentham, and Mill),

1 _{Berlin (1969).} 176

takes freedom to be a function of the degree to which agents are inter- fered with, or obstructed. The second, a ‘‘positive’’ concept of liberty, to be found especially in the writings of Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, interprets freedom in contrasting terms, as a matter of autonomy and self-determination. This distinction, or variants on it, had been long recognized before Berlin’s essay. Berlin’s particular contribution was to chart the diverging historical careers of these two concepts over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to explain how they eventually came to be at loggerheads, with the positive concept evolving into a rationale for very illiberal forms of totalitarianism, and the negative concept underwriting the more benign institutions of liberal democracy.

Berlin’s readers have generally been more interested in the theoretical distinction between the two concepts of liberty than in his historical argu- ment about the evolution of two traditions of thinking about freedom. And perhaps because Berlin intended his lecture primarily as an essay in intellectual history, he left the underlying distinction itself tantalizingly vague. As a result, Berlin’s typology has generated an extraordinarily extensive critical discussion among commentators who take a variety of competing views: some believe they hold the key to understanding the distinction; others deny that there is such a distinction and claim that there really is only one basic concept of liberty; some claim that Berlin’s way of drawing the distinction is too crude and needs to be replaced with more discriminating ones; still others accept the distinction but maintain that there are other concepts of liberty that it cannot capture.

The resulting debate has become bewilderingly complex and is, I believe, rife with confusion. Whether it has shed much light on the issues is arguable. My aim in this chapter is simply to guide readers through this thicket and ward off some common confusions. My hope is that they can emerge better placed to appreciate the various substantive issues raised by efforts to promote ideals of a free society.