2024/2025

David Owens, DPhil

Professor of Philosophy

King’s College London

Born in 1963 in London
DPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford

Arbeitsvorhaben

Liberty, Authority, and Responsibility

The value of human liberty and the need to protect it lie at the heart of liberalism. For classical liberals, there are two special threats to our liberty: command and coercion. Rousseau claimed that nothing is worse than being subject to the will of another, and many would agree that being either under their authority or subject to their menace is bad in a special way. Anthropologists have described societies governed by complex social rules though devoid of commands backed up by coercion, and anarchists have argued that such societies are preferable to our own.
I want to defend the classical liberal problematic against critics who allege that it ignores the threat to human liberty from other more insidious but more important forms of social power. This will involve arguing that human beings have an interest in being responsible for their own acts and that both command and coercion threaten to deprive us of this responsibility as other social norms do not. My diagnosis casts light on the authority exercised by sovereign over subject, officer over soldier, employer over employee, master over slave, and perhaps parent over child, too.
Classical liberals sought to legitimize state authority by appeal to consent. Some forms of social authority (e.g. employment) are legitimated by consent and it is a question whether all forms of social authority must be so legitimated. Can soldiers be conscripted and can people be subject to the authority of a ruler simply because they were born into the relevant territory, or must these things happen by agreement? And are there limits to the kind of authority that can be authorised by consent? For example, can people sell themselves into slavery? My project will address these questions.

Recommended Reading

Owens, David. Shaping the Normative Landscape. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
–. Normativity and Control. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
–. Bound by Convention. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.