Page - 177 - in VULNERABLE - The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19

177The Duty to Govern and the Rule of Law in an Emergency each finite, episodic project, but also for projects carried on over time: maintaining emergency preparedness, addressing the mounting pub- lic debt, confronting the failings exposed by present circumstances. Here, too, the failure to settle upon a pattern of coordination will be, in many instances, unreasonable, even if reason identifies no one pattern as the pattern that should be selected. How, then, is a community to settle upon a pattern of coordi- nation? In the final analysis, there are only two reasonable ways to secure a pattern of coordination: unanimity  or authority.1 Both aim to bring all persons to the same view: the first directly on which pat- tern of coordination is to be selected; the second indirectly on how to settle which scheme is to be selected. There can be no denying that some measure of unanimity successfully resolves some coordination problems in a community. Yet, for a greater number of matters, only authority will be available to settle, decisively, which coordination pat- tern will be the community’s. Authority secures what unanimity can- not: a way of settling, in the absence of unanimity, what is to be done by members of a community. Such need is all the more immediate when, as is the case in responding to a health pandemic, there is need to secure a pattern of coordination now, without delay. On this understanding, authority is a relationship between per- sons in authority and the community’s members. This relationship can aptly be labelled one of “service,”2 captured by common refer- ences to persons in political authority as “public servants” exercising a “public service.” The service in question is fulfilled in part by set- tling patterns of coordination. As illustrated by the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, persons in authority would fail to do their duty if they failed to settle on a pattern of coordination.3 With this failure in mind, we come to see how authority over a community’s members is synonymous with a responsibility for. 1. See Yves R Simon, A  General  Theory  of  Authority (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980) at 40; John Finnis, Natural  Law  and  Natural  Rights, 2nd ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) at 232. See further Leslie Green, “The Duty to Govern” (2007) 13:3/4 Legal Theory 165. 2. See e.g. Joseph Raz, The  Morality  of  Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) at chapter 3. 3. On whether, in a federation, such coordination should be achieved at the national level, see David Robitaille, this volume, Chapter A-4; Colleen M Flood & Bryan Thomas, this volume, Chapter A-6; Carissima Mathen, this volume, Chapter A-7.