A Razian Audit of State Authority: Political Obligation, Legal Directives, and the Limits of Legitimate Power

This chapter considers how Joseph Raz’s service conception can be applied to different domains of democratic life to audit the state’s authority. In response to social contract and fair-play conceptions, which take for granted a past transaction that binds citizens to the state’s authority, the service conception has to do with whether the state’s directives help citizens conform to reasons that already apply to them. Deference enjoins us to resist testing every state directive, but the audit addresses important challenges to deference and tests each domain against citizen autonomy. We will consider pandemic responses and vaccination requirements, protest restrictions, and Quebec’s Bill 21. While the pandemic case passes the audit, both protest restrictions and Bill 21 fail, and for different reasons.