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2:00 pm

Jonathan Parry (LSE): “The Truth in Political Voluntarism”

10 March 2020, 2:00 pm3:30 pm
LAK 2.06, Lakatos Building
London, WC2A 2AE United Kingdom

When are political regimes permitted to coercively rule their subjects? And when do subjects have moral obligations to support and obey their regimes? One influential strain of thought – political voluntarism – holds that political legitimacy is grounded in the exercise of self-regarding normative powers (consent and promise) on the part of subjects. Despite its attractive emphasis on individual self-sovereignty, this view is widely held to be hopeless. A popular alternative – political functionalism – grounds political legitimacy on the successful performance of morally valuable tasks. In this talk I outline a hybrid view which aims to combine the attractive features of both voluntarism and functionalism. The view that I propose takes coercive rule and political obligations to be ultimately justified by appeal to the value of a regime’s functioning (its contribution to individual wellbeing in particular), but it understands this value to be sensitive to the exercise of self-regarding normative powers on the part of each subject, thus integrating a concern for individual self-sovereignty.

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