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Michael Huemer joins us this week for a discussion on political authority, political obligation, and political legitimacy.
Professor Michael Huemer claims that if normal people acted like governments do, we would generally be horrified and find their behavior morally contemptible…so why do most people intuitively feel that government is justified in its actions? Professor Huemer, Aaron, and Trevor tackle problems of political obligation, political legitimacy, and political authority, and explain the differences between each of these terms.
Show Notes and Further Reading
Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey (book)
Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism (book)
Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He writes about on philosophical skepticism, the problem of induction, ethical intuitionism, free will, and deontological ethics, and has taught courses in ethics, social philosophy, logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, and metaphysics.
Aaron Powell founded Libertarianism.org. He is now the host of (Re)Imagining Liberty, a podcast about the case for radical freedom.
Trevor Burrus was a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy.
He is the editor of A Conspiracy against Obamacare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Deep Commitments: The Past, Present, and Future of Religious Liberty (Cato, 2017). Burrus holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.