Moral Inversion and Authority: Power, Responsibility, and the Ethics of Coercion

This paper advances a revisionary account of political and institutional authority grounded in the Constraint-Amplification Thesis and the Principle of Asymmetric Moral Burden (AMB). Against dominant theories that treat authority as a permission-generating moral power, it argues that authority is a distinct moral kind whose defining feature is the amplification—not relaxation—of moral responsibility. To exercise coercive authority is to assume second-order normative control over others’ agency, thereby incurring heightened justificatory burdens proportional to one’s discretionary power, the asymmetry of exit, and the moral risks imposed on subjects. Authority, properly understood, is not a moral license but a morally hazardous office. This framework inverts standard service (Raz), coordination, and public reason accounts by rejecting the notion that epistemic or functional benefits reduce moral burden. The paper introduces “moral inversion” to diagnose contemporary institutions that systematically weaken accountability as power increases, transforming authority into morally authorized domination. It offers a positive account of legitimacy as a property of institutional design, requiring burden-internalization, symmetry of standing, and escalatory accountability. The implications are far-reaching for political authority, corporate governance, and digital platforms, all of which must be restructured to align power with intensified moral responsibility. Principle of Asymmetric Moral Burden (AMB) If agent A exercises coercive authority over subject B under conditions of (i) discretionary power, (ii) constrained exit, and (iii) second-order normative control, then A’s justificatory obligations scale upward with each of these dimensions.