  There is another way to think of this personal reasons criticism of instrumentalist approaches to political authority. The instrumentalist approach seems to be committed to the idea that an authority can be legitimate even if most of the members of the society do not agree with what it is doing. As long as the state is requiring people to act as they should act, the subjects have a duty to obey, even if they do not see that they have this duty. Now one can see how this may be true in some circumstances, where the members are deeply immoral or irrational. But it seems perverse to think that whether the state has legitimate authority is completely independent of the considered opinions of its subjects. Here is the reason behind the appearance. The state, being a group of people, owes the subjects some kind of duty of respect for the judgments of those members. This duty of respect requires at least some degree of responsiveness on the part of the state in making decisions. Furthermore the state, in part, is an institution that is grounded in the need for decisions against a background of disagreement about what ought to be done. For the state to make decisions against this background that completely ignores the views of the many dissenters seems a particularly egregious violation of the duty to accord some respect to the opinions of reasonable adult human beings.