My Bloggingheads diavlog on moral authority with Daniel Schultz is now up. Naturally, in watching it, I’m struck by the point I failed to make: that prophetic leadership is always inconsistent with wielding state power. Machiavelli’s “armed prophet” is always an ex-prophet. To denounce Barack Obama because he isn’t Martin Luther King is simply to misconceive King’s role, and Obama’s.
[Andy Sabl has a superb book on this point.]
Mark, on the other hand, has the right moral-authority beard.
I dunno about this definition of moral authority. It turns on how broadly you define interest. It may be that it’s in the person’s own interest to act morally. And a lot of evidently non-moral action isn’t (believed by anyone to be) in the person’s interest. (We often want something that’s we know isn’t good for us.) You can’t get away from offering some more explicit notion of what the sphere of moral reasons is.