The preceding objections are all confused. This one is not: most people intuit that the government (or at least some governments) has authority; that is, the government just seems somehow morally special. When the government kills people, it seems less bad than when private parties commit murder; when the government conscripts people, it seems less bad than private slavery; when the government taxes people, it seems less bad than private extortion. Why wouldn’t this be good enough, given my own views about intuition, to defend unlibertarian policies? Why shouldn’t a nonlibertarian say, “There is no need to give a theory of why the government has authority, nor an argument that the government has authority, because it just seems that it does”?

That would be an unsatisfactory stance to take for several reasons. First, the notion of political authority is really not nearly as uncontroversial as the intuitive ethical judgments referred to in the earlier section titled “Some Commonsense Ethical Intuitions.” Attitudes toward authority vary greatly with political ideology, with all or most libertarians intuitively rejecting the notion of political authority (indeed, to some of us, the idea seems bizarre and obviously false).

Even among nonlibertarians, it is not so much that most people have the intuition that the government has authority or that most people believe that the government has authority, as that they are habitually disposed to presuppose the government’s authority. Most people, I suspect, have never actually thought about whether or why the government has legitimate authority. When explicitly confronted with the fact that the government performs many actions that would be considered wrongful for any other agent, very few people say: “Yeah, so what? It’s the government, so obviously it’s OK.” Rather, most people can very easily be brought to feel that there is a philosophical problem here.

When I present the issue to students, for example, it is very easy to motivate the problem, and no one ever suggests that no reason is needed for why the government is special. By contrast, for instance, when you point out that although it is wrong to destroy a human being, it is not considered similarly wrong to destroy a clod of dirt, no one gets puzzled.

Second, most people—even if they think it intuitive that the state has some sort of authority—will also have the intuition that this cannot be a brute fact—that there must be a grounding for this authority or an answer to what gives the state its authority. And hardly anyone thinks the explanation could just be “Well, it’s the government.” (By contrast, for instance, plenty of people think it’s a brute fact that pain is bad, or that the answer to what’s bad about pain is just “Well, it hurts.”) This being so, the failure of every explanation we can think of for what gives the state its authority ought to make one suspect that the state in fact has no such authority.

Third and most interesting, not all intuitions are equally trustworthy. Some intuitions and beliefs are the product of psychological biases. When we have specific reasons for believing that an intuition is the product of bias, we should distrust that intuition. In particular, a good deal of evidence, both from experimental psychology and from history, shows that most people have strong proauthority biases. 18

For example, the famous Milgram experiment shows that most people are willing to electrocute another (innocent) person, if ordered to do so by an authority figure. 19 Milgram explicitly draws the parallel to the willingness of ordinary Germans to participate in the persecution of Jews during World War II.

American soldiers, too, have participated in atrocities, such as the infamous My Lai massacre, in response to orders from an authority figure. Now, the point here is not merely that institutions of authority are dangerous. The point is that those who are subject to an authority figure will very often feel a sense of that person’s authority, even if that alleged authority is completely illegitimate, or the person is clearly overstepping whatever legitimate authority he might have.

Notice that there is no need here to argue about what constitutes legitimate authority or how we determine its bounds, because those cases are uncontroversial. No one thinks the scientist in Milgram’s experiment had the right to order the electrocution of the subjects, or that the officers at My Lai had the right to order the massacre. But the people in those situations felt a need to obey. Because of this, it is likely that we would all feel a sense of our government’s authority, even if that alleged authority were illegitimate, or the government were grossly overstepping its bounds.

Notice that in this third point, I am not merely saying that political intuitions in general can be biased. I am citing evidence of a bias in a specific direction, on a specific issue. Much more evidence of this proauthority bias is discussed in Chapter 6 of The Problem of Political Authority.

The distinction here is like the distinction between saying in general that sensory illusions are possible, and saying that you have evidence of a specific sensory illusion in the circumstances that you are, in fact, presently in. The general knowledge that sensory illusions exist does not cast doubt, for example, on my present perception of the table in front of me. However, my knowledge that light rays are bent when going from air into water does cast doubt on my perception in the specific case where I am looking at a stick half submerged in water. Similarly, the general knowledge that intuitions can be mistaken does not cast doubt on my intuition that I shouldn’t extort money from other people. But the existence of widespread proauthority biases (together with some mechanisms that would tend to generate them) does cast doubt on the specific belief that government has a special sort of authority, particularly when no one can give a plausible account of why it has that authority.