What I meant was something like a command is authoritative if you’re under an obligation to obey it - so this would be limited to particular commands - whereas a person is authoritative if you’re under an obligation to obey them. I suppose, however, that may break down if the authority has to be ‘content independent’ and there’s no one who’s genuinely an authority in the sense you have to obey whatever they command. But what I really wanted to get at is that you might be obligated to obey certain commands re: medical treatment without the flight attendant suddenly becoming the boss in general, e.g. when it comes to sorting out camping arrangements.

Thanks for your response. With respect to your first point, I agree that there may be cases where the cause of a person’s non-consent to my doing X entitles me to act as if that person had consented to my doing X. What I have in mind here is a case where I have good reason to think that you would consent to my doing X – e.g. shooting you in a non-life threatening location, say your hand, when this is the only way to neutralize the terrorist currently holding you hostage – though you are not able to communicate your consent to me. (If my doing X constitutes an on-going activity, however, I do have a duty to get your actual consent as soon as this is possible (or at least not too costly)). This kind of case does differ from the sort that Estlund has in mind, however. First, though it is a case of non-consent, we have good reason to think that the agent in question does approve of being treated as if he had consented. In contrast, in Estlund’s examples the non-consenting agent presumably does not (or will not) approve of being treated as if he had consented. Second, the barrier to actual consent in this case is what Estlund calls a will-tracking nullifying condition – just as my consent is null if it is coerced and so does not accurately reflect my will, so too my non-consent is null if it is coerced and so does not accurately reflect my will. Estlund is not concerned with this sort of non-consent; rather, he wishes to defend the idea that in some cases non-consent can be null because of an external normative nullifying condition – i.e. some consideration that makes it morally wrong not to consent. So I’m not sure that the kind of null non-consent that I describe here adds to Estlund’s case for normative consent (though it may be a good criticism of libertarian consent theory, as Estlund describes it).

What does the foregoing discussion entail vis-à-vis the appeal to symmetry as a reason to prefer one theory over another? Perhaps it shows that consent and non-consent are symmetrical, in that both entail another’s authority only if certain conditions are met. Still, the reason to accept this account of consent and non-consent, as opposed to one that attaches no conditions to non-consent, is the intuitive appeal of the sort of case I described above. So, if what seems “natural” to you is that “coercing me into not doing X [consenting to some other person’s authority, or liberty to act in a certain manner, or whatever] has the same nullifying effect,” then I do not wish to resist it. What I do wish to resist is the idea that the accompanying symmetry functions as an independent factor that strengthens the case for the truth or correctness of this account of consent. Your remarks suggest that you agree – but we disagree as to what Estlund is up to, because appeal to symmetry as an independent basis for thinking a theory correct does seem to me to be what he is doing. Fortunately this disagreement will be resolved for us shortly!

One final point (though I may just be repeating myself): You say “if we believe that both doing X and refusing to do X each carry normative implications, and if we also believe those normative implications are nullified under certain conditions with regard to doing X, it would be very strange to assert that there are no conditions which can nullify the normative implications of not doing X.” Perhaps it would be strange, and perhaps Estlund does us a service by calling our attention to it and investigating whether there are conditions that can nullify the normative implications of non-consent. But then all of the weight in the argument will be borne by the case he is able to make for the nullity of non-consent in certain cases – in this case, the intuitions Estlund hopes to generate with his airplane crash example. In the absence of a more compelling case for external normative nullifying conditions on non-consent, I’m not bothered by an asymmetry between consent, for which there are external normative nullifying conditions, and non-consent, for which there are not. Perhaps this asymmetry is ‘strange’ – though I’m not sure why it is – but its ‘strangeness’ does not strike me as contributing any weight to the case against such a view.

First, I thought your dismissal of the symmetry idea was a little hasty. You say that we have no particular reason to look for symmetry in our moral theories – symmetry may be aesthetically pleasing but it doesn’t make a theory more plausible. Of course we shouldn’t strive for symmetry for its own sake, but I don’t think that’s what Estlund is doing (I’m going to use Estlund since you’re both David). The point I thought Estlund was making is that there are certain conditions which we tend to believe render consent null or void. When “consent” is coerced, or manipulated, or based on false information we don’t accord it the moral force that it would otherwise carry. Since withholding consent is the flip side of consent, it would be very surprising if there were not also conditions that nullified non-consent. This is not a matter of aesthetic sensibility – it’s just common sense. If we believe that both doing X and refusing to do X each carry normative implications, and if we also believe those normative implications are nullified under certain conditions with regard to doing X, it would be very strange to assert that there are no conditions which can nullify the normative implications of not doing X. If coercing me into doing X nullifies the moral force of doing X, shouldn’t coercing me into not doing X have the same nullifying effect? This thought seems so natural to me, I’m not sure why you want to resist it?

Second, like you, I found Estlund’s response to the direct authority objection difficult to understand. In Rawls’s and Scanlon’s theories, the veil of ignorance and the personal reasons restriction respectively ensure that the contracting parties focus on considerations other than justice or morality. In Estlund’s theory, however, the reasons it would be wrong to not to consent must be moral reasons, and it seems almost conceptually necessary that those reasons will be the same reasons that justify the authority. Given this, I don’t see why we aren’t better off admitting that normative consent is just a term for describing the range of moral considerations that can justify legitimate authority. Since, like you, I’m not confident I completely understood Estlund’s response on this point, I would be keen to hear more from him.

Allen Buchanan has suggested that the claim that X is an authority vis-a-vis Y entails that Y wrongs X if she fails to act as X directs, whereas saying that X’s claims are authoritative vis-a-vis Y does not have this entailment. It may be that Y is more likely to act as she has most reason to act (or, if you prefer, on an undefeated reason) if she defers to X’s judgment - that is, if she treats it as authoritative. Nevertheless, should she fail to do so, Y does not wrong X - or at least she does not do so simply in virtue of having acted contrary to his directive to her. [See Buchanan, ‘Political Legitimacy and Democracy’ ETHICS 112:4]. Is this the distinction you are aiming to capture in your differentiating between authority and authoritative?

A separate issue (as you suggest) is whether X can be an authority vis-a-vis Y with respect to moral judgments, or for that matter, whether X can issue directives concerning morality that are authoritative for Y. I don’t think it is a matter of means vs. ends - after all, the flight attendant could prohibit Joe from adopting a certain means to assisting wounded passengers because she believes it involves the violation of a deontological constraint. And it is not obvious that questions about morally permissible or impermissible means are any less controversial than questions about morally permissible, impermissible, or obligatory ends. Still, the issue raised at the outset of this paragraph might be addressed by assuming that no moral controversey attaches to the question of the proper means to adopt in pursuit of assisting the wounded passengers - no controversey, that is, either among the actors or among the range of qualified views. Perhaps this is what you intended all along?

Why think the airplane crash example provides an illustration of authoritative commands, but not of authority? I don’t think it can be because the flight attendant’s commands concern means rather than ends (though, in fairness, I’m not sure that’s what you intended to suggest). Buchanan’s distinction might be useful here - but if something like it was not what you had in mind, then I would be curious to know why you think the example illustrates only authoritativeness, but not authority. And one further question - if a meaningful distinction can be drawn between authority and authoritative, then if Joe treats the flight attendant’s commands as authoritative, but does not acknowledge her as an authority, has he done anything wrong? If not, then does this example fail to make the case for normative consent?

It seems David wants to justify certain people being in authority (though, for reasons to do with qualified acceptability, those people are the whole demos). The airplane crash example only seems to illustrate a case of authoritative commands, however. If the flight attendant says ‘grab bandages’ you should (I grant) grab bandages. If the flight attendant says ‘we should abandon the wounded, carry what we can, and march due south’ do we have reason to obey?

There are numerous things going on here. One is that the former case assumes different views of means to the same end - and, I’d suggest, is probably a case where Joe might be wise to defer to the flight attendant. The latter is a case of making judgement about moral ends and it’s not clear the flight attendant has any expertise here. (These are precisely the reasons David rejects Platonic epistocracy). But am I hopelessly confused in trying to distinguish between a person in authority and a person issuing authoritative commands?