Applbaum Arthur Isak
Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
AMA J Ethics. 2017 Feb 1;19(2):207-213. doi: 10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.2.sect1-1702.
Legitimate authority is the normative power to govern, where a normative power is the ability to change the normative situation of others. Correlatively, when one has the normative power to govern others, these others face a normative liability to be governed. So understood, physicians do not have legitimate authority over their patients, and patients do not have legitimate authority over their physicians. An authority is legitimate only when it is a free group agent constituted by its free members. On this conception, associations of physicians sometimes have legitimate authority over individual physicians, and physicians sometimes count as members subject to the legitimate authority of these associations. This might be so even when they have not consented to membership.
合法权威是一种治理的规范性权力，其中规范性权力是改变他人规范处境的能力。相应地，当一个人拥有治理他人的规范性权力时，这些他人就面临着被治理的规范性责任。照此理解，医生对其患者不具有合法权威，患者对其医生也不具有合法权威。只有当权威是由其自由成员构成的自由群体主体时，它才是合法的。按照这种观念，医生协会有时对个体医生拥有合法权威，而医生有时也被视为受这些协会合法权威约束的成员。即便他们并未同意成为成员，情况也可能如此。
