CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Corsano, Daniel |
|---|---|
| Title | The Voluntaristic State: An Actual Consent Account of Legitimate Authority |
| Summary | The aim of this thesis is to articulate an actual consent account of legitimate government as appointed by a free association of people, to protect them from harm, with the power to use coercion both to apprehend wrongdoers and to collect taxes in order to finance its activities in the most efficient way possible. The account itself is articulated in section III. 2, and depends on a form of moral skepticism defended in section II. 1, and an argument for the legitimacy of certain forms of coercion articulated in section II. 3, claiming that by those who non-consent to an authority whose only purpose is to provide protection from harm to all who consent to it have no moral standing to protest being the authority as it carries out its duty. This argument is able to justify only a minimal state, or the minimal core of a larger, altogether non-voluntaristic state, concerned with providing protection from harm, though it doesn’t exclude the possibility of justifying further government powers with additional arguments. Section III. 3 discusses some lines of argument for supplementing the voluntaristic state with a regime of private property. |
| Supervisor | Rippon, Simon |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/corsano_daniel.pdf |
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