The basis of state authority

[ Intro + Jingle ] Hi, I'm Geoff Pynn. I teach Philosophy at Elgin Community College, and in this video I'm going to ask: Where does the state's authority come from? When I was a teenager, I got a ticket for jaywalking. I looked both ways and made sure no cars were coming, but as soon as I crossed the street, a police car appeared out of nowhere. The officer issued me a ticket, and I had to pay the fine. I protested. But the officer stressed: what I did was against the law, and he was only enforcing it. My parents and most of my friends agreed. Although they all thought that giving the ticket was a petty thing for him to do, they also all thought he had every right to do it. So what gives the state, and the people who represented it, such authority? Thomas Hobbes argued that without a powerful state, our lives would wind up "poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short." Hobbes's argument is that all of us benefit from the state's authority. But even if Hobbes is right about that, it's still doesn't explain what gives the state the right to its authority. People don't gain rightful authority over you just by acting in your benefit. So, why is the state any different? According to the social contract theory, the state's authority rests on an agreement between each of us and society: each of us commits to respect the law, in exchange for everyone else's commitment to do the same. Since we have a moral obligation to abide by our commitments, the social contract provides the basis for the state's right to govern, and for our duty to obey. The social contract theory says, not only is it in our interest to make such an agreement - we actually have made it. That's why we can leave home secure in the knowledge that our belongings are safe. The social contract lays the foundation for social trust, which is essential for society to function well in all sorts of ways. Still, few of us have ever explicitly made such an agreement. Just because it would be rational for us to do so doesn't mean we've actually done it. So the proponents of this theory usually say the social contract is a tacit agreement. What does this mean? John Locke thought that residing within the state's borders meant that we had agreed to respect its laws. "Every man that hath any Possession or Enjoyment or any part of the Dominions of any Government, doth thereby give his tacit Consent, and is as far forth obliged to obedience to the laws of that Government... whether this Possession be of Land to him in his Heirs for ever, or a Lodging for only a Week; or whether it be barely traveling freely on the Highway." But simply being somewhere seems like a different thing from making a commitment to obey a complicated set of laws. Why think the one is equivalent to the other? Well, think of it like this. When you play a game of poker, you don't usually explicitly agree to obey the rules. Nevertheless, simply by playing, you make a tacit agreement to do so. In the same way, you might think, simply by living in society you're agreeing to follow its laws. But there's a difference between society and a poker game. You don't have to play poker. You choose to. Your consent to the rules of the game is signaled by your conscious and informed choice to play. Do you have a similar choice about living in society? In theory, anyone who doesn't like the rules of one place could move somewhere else. Maybe simply by not leaving, you are in effect choosing the rules of the society where you live. But as David Hume, a critic of Locke's, pointed out, for many people, this really isn't very plausible. "Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day by the small wages he acquires? We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her." If you can't leave a place, it doesn't seem plausible to treat the fact that you haven't left it as a choice, any more than a prisoner can be said to have chosen to stay in jail. Since an agreement involves conscious choice, the fact that many of us can't leave the country where we live spells trouble for the social contract theory. It can only work if we can make sense of the idea that you've chosen your society's laws -- even if you've never done so explicitly, and have no other options. A different way of thinking about the state's authority starts with the idea of fairness. Suppose you expect the fire department to help you in an emergency, but refuse to pay your share of the taxes that fund it. You're being totally unfair to your tax-paying neighbors -- you're being a freeloader, expecting them to pay the costs of protecting you from disaster. And, you ought to be fair. Obeying the law comes at a cost -- you give up your freedom to do whatever you want. Each of us benefits from everybody else paying this cost -- that's why we can afford not to worry about other people stealing our stuff. But if you depend on others to respect the states authority when you won't respect it yourself, you're being a freeloader, which is unfair. You're refusing to pay a cost that you expect everybody else to pay for you. So, if you have a basic duty to be fair, this reasoning would explain why your obligated to respect the law. Do we have a duty to be fair? It seems like sometimes other considerations take precedence -- your survival, for example. But even if the answer is yes, another challenge remains. A fair burden isn't necessarily an equal burden. If you never use your kitchen and your roommate cooks every night, it wouldn't be fair to say that you should alternate nightly, cleaning up. What's fair is that they should do most of the cleaning, since they're the one who makes most of the mess. If each of us receives unequal benefits from the state, it's not fair for us to all pay the same cost of obedience. And some may not benefit from the state at all -- it would hardly be unfair for them to refuse to obey. At least not until we can make sense of the idea of tacit consent or ensure that it really is fair for each of us to pay the cost of obedience. If we really have a duty to obey, the state needs to provide a way for us to consent to its laws, and to ensure that they are genuinely fair. Perhaps democracy can answer these challenges. Maybe voting on the rules is a way of consenting to them. And maybe a democratic system would come closest to being a fair one. What do you think?