1 Philosophy 167 Lecture 1 Notes Three questions about the state. States claim a monopoly on the use of violence and coercion by threat of violence or physical force on the territory they control. This is not an empirical claim; it’s true by definition. Moreover, there is a vague further condition, also true by definition. A state is an entity that claims and to some considerable extent succeeds in establishing a monopoly on the use of violence and coercion by threat of violence or physical force on an indicated territory. If there is no entity operating on a territory that is playing that role, then we’d say that territory is stateless. A fourth condition might or might not be counted as necessarily holding of an entity if it is to qualify as a state. But the condition picks out a feature that most actual states possess. The state (almost always) claims moral legitimacy. The rulers do not typically say to their subjects openly, “We’ve got the guns and have power over you, so Na-Na-Na, you have to do what we command.” States, or leaders of states, claim that they are fulfilling the “state” role and they are morally justified in playing that role. A traditional question for political philosophy has been, under what conditions is state coercion morally legitimate (morally justified). It’s a question we pursue in this course. It divides into various questions. 1. One set of issues concerns the legitimacy of the purposes for which state power is being deployed and the acceptability of the means being employed to fulfill these purposes. 2. Another set of issues concerns how a particular set of institutions manned by a particular set of people legitimately get to be the institutions and people that function in the way characteristic of the state. The two questions can be stated in one sentence: Why are they doing those things in the name of the state? And with different emphasis we focus on another question: Why are they doing those things in the name of the state? 3. A third question lies in the background. Given all of the people inhabiting the earth and all of the patches of territory on the earth, how does a particular group of people inhabiting a particular contiguous territory become the people and territory who are legitimately united in a single state? (So we add to the questions of the previous paragraph: Why are they doing those things in the name of the state to those people and on that particular territory? Under this question there arise issues concerning the legitimacy of state borders, the grounds and limits of the state’s claim to control the entry and exit of people across those borders, and questions of secession and nationals elf-determination. (For example, the Kurds in Iraq today would hold that you ask the wrong question if you ask, how can Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites, and other peoples in Iraq come to live together in harmony and form one unified just nation-state? Many Kurds2 think they have a right to go their own way and form their own independent nation-state (perhaps along with Kurds now living in Turkey and Iran). We touch on some of these issues in week 10. Our first set of course readings, and especially the book by A. John Simmons and Christopher Wellman, is especially concerned with question 2 above. They raise the issue in this form: Is there a moral duty to obey the state? In other words, is there a general presumption that each of us is under a moral duty to comply with our legal obligations (at least if the state issuing laws and commands that generate these legal obligations is morally decent)? To ask this question is to approach the moral-legitimacy-of-the-state issue from a particular perspective. The background assumption is that if a state is morally legitimate, then it has the moral right to issue commands backed by coercive force, and if that is true, then those subject to the commands are (given certain conditions) morally obligated to comply with these commands, at least up to a point. The moral duty to obey state commands might be thought to apply even to unjust and unfair laws and public policies, at least within limits. Up to a point, I morally ought to do what the state commands just because the state commands it, even if what is commanded would not have been morally required if the state had not commanded it and even if the command itself is morally wrong. Roughly, both Wellman and Simmons, who take opposed views on this question, suppose that if you answer it in the negative, you are committed to anarchism or at least ‘philosophical anarchism.” I just note here that you might resist this way of framing the issue of the moral legitimacy of the state. You might think the state might have a rightful authority to issue coercive commands, even if there is no general obligation on the part of those commanded to obey. Or you might think there is still another way to conceive the moral legitimacy of the state issue. You might think we have a duty of fidelity to law, that is not equivalent to a presumption of a duty to obey the law. We explore this in the first weeks along with Wellman and Simmons. In later readings, Robert Nozick is concerned with both questions 1 and 2. Later authors starting with John Rawls are more focused on question 1. *************************************** A state-centered approach. As the discussion to this point already indicates, this course is state-centered. We pretty much assume a world of independent, sovereign states. Of such states we then ask, under what questions are they, or would they be, morally legitimate. Right-wing course authors tend to favor a restricted role for the state (a minimal state, as Nozick calls it). Left-wing course authors tend to favor a more expansive role for the state (including redistribution of property and other regulative measures deigned to render people’s condition more equal in some sense). I mention in passing that you might object to this state-centered approach on descriptive or normative grounds. The objection would be that the world at the beginning of the 21st century is changing so the picture of a world of sovereign independent states no longer fits the reality. You might point to various phenomena such as globalizaton of trade,3 increased regional integration (as we see with the European Union), and perhaps the dominance of a few superpowers or even just one (the U.S., for now). With vastly