Past Event: MPWG: Filippa Ronquist (Yale and Univ. College London)

Title: Parental Authority and the Normal Justification Thesis

Abstract: An appealing answer to the question of what justifies parental authority is a broadly instrumentalist one: parental authority is necessary to ensure the wellbeing and development of children, and justified insofar as it promotes these ends. One of the most sophisticated and influential accounts of practical authority in this vein is Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority. The core idea of Raz's service conception of authority is that authorities are legitimate only if they provide their subjects with the service of improved reasons-compliance. In this paper, I raise an objection to the service conception which concerns its application to parental authority. A common criticism of the service conception is that it yields too much authority. Such a critique can be met by pointing out that the service conception, correctly understood, is limited to cases which involve improved compliance with categorical reasons – that is, reasons whose weight and stringency do not depend on our goals, tastes or desires. As I will argue, however, restricting the service conception to categorical reasons yields too little authority in the case of parental authority. Parents often have legitimate authority over their children in cases which involve only the improvement of non-categorical reasons. Such cases, further, appear paradigmatic of parental authority.