Consent of the Governed and Other Fables

Abstract

The consent of the governed plays a pivotal role in liberal philosophy. From Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, through to Kant and modern theorists such as John Rawls and Jeremy Waldron, consent has been the primary means by which the authority of the state gains legitimacy. We rarely think authoritative institutions need the actual consent of all those over whom they rule. Agents of the state cannot go around asking each individual person if they consent to each individual law, for example. For pragmatic reasons, the focus is on hypothetical consent – that is to say, if a reasonable person would consent to an authoritative institution, that institution is legitimate without needing to attain actual, direct consent. However, what you imagine a reasonable person would hypothetically consent to rests on what you believe about a variety of empirical facts about human history and human psychology, i.e. on what you believe about “human nature”. In this thesis I argue that most political philosophers do not seem particularly well-informed about these topics, often forming beliefs based on an outdated and/or false understanding of what human beings are like, or have historically been like, laying an epistemically unreliable foundation for political beliefs and leading liberal philosophers to regularly misunderstand the implications of the principles they advocate for. I further argue that there are good reasons to think that the kind of society which best instantiates liberal principles looks very different than what most people imagine.