Abstract Public reason is widely understood as an account of political legitimacy. But despite this widely held view, the relationship between public reason and political legitimacy is not well understood. Some present public reason as the sole necessary and sufficient condition for exercises of political power to qualify as legitimate. But skeptics of public reason argue that it represents neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition on legitimate exercises of political power. In response, some defend a more modest picture of public reason’s role: it is presented as a mere desideratum in a wider account of political morality. This chapter defends a different view. On this alternate picture, political legitimacy is typically grounded in a natural duty of justice. But principles of justice cannot perform their role of providing a fair set of rules to adjudicate disputes and disagreements unless they are constrained by a public reason requirement. Public reason is thus a constituent part of a natural duty-based conception of political legitimacy.

Some claim that paternalism necessarily involves attempting to benefit someone against their expressed or assumed preferences, or against their will. More strongly, Jonathan Parry has argued that we wrong someone whenever we justify an act by appeal to the benefits the act delivers to a person who competently refuses those benefits. On this view, we act paternalistically when we fail to treat a competent person’s own views about their good as providing something like an exclusionary reason to disregard their well-being if that’s what they have directed us to do. This chapter argues that this view is false: there are many cases where we do not wrong someone by benefitting them against their competent wishes. This is because paternalism’s distinctive wrongness involves the paternalizer acting on the basis of a negative judgment about the paternalizee. However, benefitting someone against their wishes need not involve this kind of negative judgment. The author argues that this alternative construal of paternalism has significant practical implications for acts that involve benefits to groups, including a range of cases involving public policies.

This article argues that Tahzib's theory of perfectionist justice may struggle to resolve a tension between three political values: freedom, fairness, and sufficiency.

This article offers a brief synopsis of some of the main claims from The Morality of Defensive Force , and replies to the symposium contributions of Lars Christie, Lisa Hecht, and Jonathan Parry.

In his article, “The Space between Justice and Legitimacy”, Kit Wellman offers a novel account of the relationship between political philosophy's two central concepts.1 He argues that states can be legitimate yet impose many unjust laws and policies. This is true, he suggests, because political legitimacy should be understood as a claim about wide proportionality.2 Just as a country's war can be widely proportionate overall, and yet contain many instances of injustice, states can be proportionate (that is, legitimate) overall, yet contain a fair amount of injustice. But although Wellman thinks legitimate injustice is, in this sense, a real and pervasive phenomenon, he goes on to argue that legitimacy doesn't have much practical relevance with regard to unjust laws and policies. It doesn't make it permissible to impose and enforce unjust laws, nor does it generate an obligation to comply with unjust laws. Like Wellman, I think legitimate injustice is real and pervasive. But I don't share his view of this phenomenon and, as a result, I also don't agree with him about the practical implications of legitimate injustice. Contra Wellman, I think state officials can act permissibly when they enforce unjust but legitimate law, and I think they have claim rights against being interfered with when they do so. Before we begin, it will help to clarify what's at stake in labeling a state legitimate. There are many competing conceptions of political legitimacy in the literature, but, as Wellman says, “virtually everyone agrees that legitimacy at least entitles a state to coerce its constituents”.3 Following Wellman, I will assume this is, at a minimum, what's at stake in determining whether a state is legitimate. Other things being equal, a legitimate political authority is presumptively permitted to coerce its constituents in at least some ways that illegitimate authorities are not permitted to do. Wellman believes legitimate states can act unjustly, and he defends this view by appeal to a particular notion of proportionality. Just as it can be morally permissible to launch a war even when we can foresee that some of our troops will commit unjust crimes during its course, a state can be legitimate even though we know it sometimes commits injustice. In both cases, we weigh the good things that will be achieved if we proceed against all the harms or costs that will be caused. Provided the goods are sufficiently great to outweigh the harms or costs, the proposed course of action or the institution can be defended on the basis that the benefits are proportionate relative to the costs.4 As Wellman puts it, “Because states perform such incredibly valuable functions … they are worth at least some moral costs”.5 This is, on Wellman's view, simply what it is for a state to be legitimate. When the benefits the state provides are proportionate relative to the costs (including the injustices the state commits), the state is morally legitimate. This is an innovative way of thinking about the relationship between justice and political legitimacy. But I do not think it can be correct. In the ethics of self-defense and war, the standard way to determine whether some act is proportionate is to weigh the costs and benefits that will be caused by our action against the alternative of doing nothing.6 Suppose the only way to defend one innocent person from having her legs unjustly broken is by throwing a grenade that will kill two innocent bystanders. The act of throwing the grenade is not proportionate, because the costs of doing so (two innocent people are killed) are much worse than the alternative of doing nothing (one innocent person's legs get broken). If, however, these costs were reversed—if doing nothing meant two innocent people get killed, whereas throwing the grenade meant only one innocent person's legs get broken—then we might conclude throwing the grenade is proportionate. If we are to use wide proportionality to assess a state's legitimacy, we need to engage in a similar comparison. The difficulty, however, is that the state is unlike a harmful act that we contemplate performing, and so it's less clear what it might mean to ask, “are the costs created by the state proportionate relative to the alternative of doing nothing?”. How should we understand the benchmark of “doing nothing”? To see why I remain convinced that the gap between justice and legitimacy exists, let us return to the contrast between a slave-owner who forces slaves to build a pyramid and the prime minister of Norway. If I were the slave-owner, there is no question that I would be morally required to immediately free all of my slaves, even if there is no other way for me to build the pyramid. If I were the prime minister of Norway with the extraordinary power to unilaterally dismantle this government, however, I would not feel obligated to do so.7 Dismantle. A state is proportionate, and thus legitimate, when we would not be morally required to dismantle the government in order to prevent or halt the injustices the state commits. But this doesn't look like a good test. First, it's not clear what we are supposed to imagine occurs if the government or the state is dismantled. Maybe we should consider what would realistically occur in this particular country if its government or state apparatus suddenly ceased to exist. In many cases, what would occur might be terrible. In some places, civil war or ethnic cleansing might be the consequence of suddenly dismantling a government. In these cases, we would not be morally required to disband the government even if it were very, very bad. Even a brutal authoritarian regime might be preferable to civil war or ethnic cleansing, but surely that does not make a brutal authoritarian regime morally legitimate; it does not give that regime the moral permission to coerce its citizens to do things that they are not independently required to do. A regime is not morally legitimate merely because it is preferable to some of the worst conditions on earth.8 One problem with trying to conceptualize political legitimacy as a species of proportionality is that we almost never face a binary choice between our current political institutions as they are or else the total absence of those political institutions. Consider the Southern United States during the Jim Crow era. If the only two options were (1) retain the existing racist laws and institutions, or (2) a descent into an extremely dangerous form of anarchy, it's at least possible that option (1) might be widely proportionate relative to the benchmark of (2). But, of course, those weren't the only two options. Radically reforming the existing laws and institutions to make them less racist and unjust was a feasible option, and the very fact that it was a feasible option is surely part of the explanation as to why the racist political institutions might not have been morally legitimate. the appropriate baseline for testing proportionality must be the feasible alternatives rather than simply doing nothing at all. Just as a military intervention would not be proportionate if there were an equally effective and less costly diplomatic option available, a brutal dictator cannot justify the injustices of her regime if a more just political arrangement is within reach.9 But Wellman's statement here is puzzling for two reasons. First, this isn't how proportionality has standardly been conceptualized in the ethics of self-defense and war. As I've already explained, proportionality judgments are typically made by comparing a given act of harm-imposition relative to the benchmark of doing nothing. The entire set of feasible alternatives, however, is relevant with regard to a different moral judgment, namely, necessity. Philosophers working on self-defense and war typically claim that for an instance of harm-imposition to be morally permissible it must meet the condition of being necessary. Although there is a great deal of disagreement about how exactly to conceptualize the necessity condition, there is widespread agreement that judgments of necessity are made by comparing the potential act of harm-imposition to all the feasible alternatives.10 Killing a wrongful aggressor, for example, is not necessary if one of the defender's feasible alternatives is painlessly rendering the aggressor unconscious. Thus, although it's a matter of some dispute, on the most widely accepted picture, wide proportionality and necessity are two separate constraints on the permissible use of force. To be morally permissible, it's generally believed a harmful act must, among other things, satisfy both these constraints. All Alternatives. A state is proportionate, and thus legitimate, only when the net balance of benefits and costs it currently provides is proportionate relative to every feasible alternative. This test isn't helpful if we seek to explain how any existing state could ever be legitimate. It's surely true that every existing state has at least some unjust laws or unjust institutions which could be reformed to eliminate the injustice without becoming more unjust in other ways. It's thus true that, for every existing state, the status quo is not proportionate relative to a feasible alternative, and thus every existing state is illegitimate. The problem is even more stark, since this view has the implication that even hypothetical states that are far more just than any existing state would still be illegitimate so long as they contain even a single unjust law or institution that could feasibly be reformed. I think it's clear that these are not the conclusions Wellman seeks to defend. Wellman might reply that it's not feasible for a state to be entirely devoid of unjust laws or institutions; realistically, our best efforts to design and sustain political institutions will always contain some unjust features. But this reply involves shifting from the standard of “feasible” to the standard of “probable” or “likely”. Although the term feasible is contested,11 I suspect it's most commonly used to refer to whether achieving a given outcome is possible given our resources and technological limitations. In this sense, changing the laws regulating gun ownership in the US is clearly feasible. Of course, it is extremely unlikely that robust gun control legislation will be enacted in the US for reasons of ideology and political self-interest. Suppose, then, we take All Alternatives to refer only to those alternatives that are sufficiently likely to obtain. This would then vastly lower the bar for legitimacy. Even highly unjust states can be legitimate so long as it is sufficiently unlikely that they will become more just. The problem with this interpretation, however, is fairly obvious. It's often the case that laws or institutions are unlikely to be reformed because those who hold power don't want to reform them. It might, for example, be very unlikely that we can reform the unjust institutions in a country because the country is ruled by a tyrant who refuses to relinquish power and rules by violently suppressing dissent. On this interpretation, the tyrant can render his rule legitimate by forming a settled disposition to hang on to power through unjust means. I take this result to be a reductio of the proposed interpretation of the proportionality test. In sum, I don't see how the idea of wide proportionality can be made to work as an account of political legitimacy. One test for proportionality that Wellman seems to suggest—Dismantle—is far too weak a standard. It's too weak, in part, because it ignores the fact that we never face a binary choice between the status quo and dismantling the state. We always have many other feasible alternatives, which include reforming the unjust laws and institutions of our state. But the other test that Wellman floats—All Alternatives—creates either an unacceptably high standard or an unacceptably low one. If we focus on all feasible alternatives, then the bar for legitimacy is far too high—no existing state meets it and no hypothetical state with even a single unjust law meets it. But if we focus on likely or probable alternatives, then the bar is too low: very bad actors can render themselves legitimate by refusing to meet minimal moral standards they could meet if they wanted to. In each case Wellman argues that the answer is “no”. So, although legitimate states act unjustly, the fact that these injustices are perpetrated by legitimate states doesn't have many interesting practical consequences for the unjust laws the state attempts to impose. The state's legitimacy doesn't give it a special permission to act unjustly, it doesn't ground a duty to obey unjust laws, and it doesn't give the state a protected right to act unjustly. I disagree with Wellman on all three questions, but here I will focus only on the first. I think we should expect there to be a great deal of reasonable disagreement about justice. By that I mean that smart, sensible people, thinking clearly, who aren't driven by self-interest or prejudice, and who are committed to trying to treat others fairly, can and will disagree about many matters of justice, including difficult questions such as “What rates of income tax are required as a matter of justice?” or “Should freedom of expression extend to protect those who deny the Holocaust in order to promote anti-Semitism?”. But the fact that such people will disagree about the requirements of justice doesn't imply that there are no correct answers to these questions or that the answers are indeterminate—there may sometimes be correct answers in cases of reasonable disagreement. I also think that in cases of reasonable disagreement about what justice requires, a legitimate state should have some sort of democratic process to resolve the reasonable disagreement. Indeed, I think people have a claim of justice to an equal (and positive) say in resolving reasonable disagreements about justice. To disregard democratic decisions whenever one thinks they are unjust is a refusal to participate on equal terms in the political process with other reasonable people. To be clear: I'm not suggesting that unreasonable views about justice—those that are, in some sense, beyond the pale, such as the violations of core liberal rights and freedoms—have a claim to be implemented if selected by a democratic process. I'm only suggesting that some disagreements about justice are reasonable—all the competing views represent plausible interpretations of what justice requires—and that in disagreements of this type, there is a claim of justice to have an egalitarian democratic process for resolving the disagreements. Obviously, what I've just said is only the briefest sketch, and many details need to be filled in. But here is one way in which the view that I have sketched is inconsistent with Wellman's answers to the three questions above, in particular the first question: do legitimate states act permissibly when they act unjustly? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the correct theory of justice includes a very expansive principle of free speech, one that provides a protected claim right against interference to people who engage in hate speech—for example, Nazis who wish to march and chant anti-Semitic slurs in Jewish neighborhoods. But the issue is one over which reasonable people disagree, and after a fair democratic process, our political community enacts a law that prohibits certain forms of hate speech, including the Nazis' anti-Semitic march. I think justice requires giving people equal opportunity to exercise political power in cases of reasonable disagreement. If the government doesn't do what it has been directed to do by a fair democratic process (within the boundaries of the reasonable), it will be acting unjustly—failing to respect what justice requires regarding the distribution of political power. So if state officials decline to enforce the prohibition against the Nazis' march, they will be acting unjustly. However, if the state officials enforce the democratically enacted law prohibiting the march, they act contrary to the principle of free speech, another requirement of justice. So the state will act unjustly whatever it does. If we assume that at least one option from an agent's feasible set must be permissible, then it must be possible for the state to act permissibly and yet unjustly. P5. A fair democratic process sometimes results in the selection of a policy that is reasonable but substantively unjust. Therefore, I'm not sure which premises of this argument Wellman would reject. He might reject P1, but denying it is implausible. It's not credible to suppose that all our disagreements about justice are driven by self-interest, prejudice, or irrationality. I also do not think it is plausible to suppose, as some contemporary Kantians do, that almost all substantive issues of social or distributive justice are largely indeterminate.14 I am sure that many specific questions about the requirements of justice are indeterminate, but this fact is perfectly consistent with P1. P1 makes only the very modest claim that reasonable disagreement is possible even when there are determinate answers about the requirements of justice. I doubt that democracy can do the work we would ask of it here, though, because it is hard to see how voting (or even deliberating, discussing, and voting, if you prefer) on a course of action can magically change its deontic status. If it is impermissible for me to use slaves to build pyramids, for instance, how does it become any more permissible to do so after a democratic process?15 if the sincere but unreasonable beliefs of the majority do not change the moral status of a given course of action, why think that the beliefs of the majority have this moral power as long as the beliefs are not unreasonable? It strikes me as more natural to conclude that the majority has made a reasonable mistake than to suppose that the majority's not unreasonable judgment changes the moral status of a course of action.16 This statement could be taken as a rejection of P2, though Wellman is not explicitly considering P2, so we should tread carefully. In one sense, Wellman is surely correct. The mere fact that reasonable people disagree about whether Φ-ing is permissible surely does not, on its own, affect the deontic status of Φ-ing. But the argument that I've given doesn't move from the mere fact of disagreement to permissibility. Instead it claims that reasonable disagreements about justice require, as a matter of justice, some fair democratic mechanism of resolution. It then moves from this claim to a claim about the permissibility of injustice, via the assumption (P4) that at least one option from an agent's set must be permissible. My argument thus provides the answer to Wellman's rhetorical question: the beliefs of the majority might have this moral power because justice requires a democratic resolution of some of our reasonable disagreements. I worry, though, that it depends on a misunderstanding of the moral value of procedural justice. In my view, justice in both its procedural and substantive incarnations provides side-constraints to be respected, rather than competing values to be promoted … even if an egalitarian democrat's argument establishes that each of us has a right to democratic governance, it at most establishes that acting justly includes an additional side-constraint, but this is very different from showing that procedural justice is a value which sometimes outweighs, overrides, or undercuts the moral imperative to respect nonprocedural rights.17 In this passage Wellman points out something that egalitarian democrats sometimes ignore—the mere fact that there is something valuable about democratic procedures does not suffice, on its own, to show that the scope of the right to democratic governance extends to cover substantively unjust decisions. But the idea that claims of justice operate as side-constraints is notoriously tricky. Most obviously, what happens when two claims of justice conflict? Some proponents of the side-constraint view argue that this is conceptually impossible. Claims of justice, by their very nature, can never come into conflict.18 But this is very difficult to accept; it is sharply at odds with commonsense morality. This view requires either (a) that the content of justice be extremely sparse, so as to eliminate the possibility of conflicts arising, or else (b) a kind of specificationism about justice, such that whenever we have an apparent conflict of claims, we must conclude that in those specific circumstances, only one of the claims turns out to be a valid claim of justice. I think there are compelling reasons to reject both of these options, though I lack the space to lay those out here. It's also worth noting that Wellman doesn't give us any reasons to doubt that claims of justice might sometimes conflict—he just asserts the side-constraint view. But if we accept the commonsense view that claims of justice can sometimes conflict, then we can easily accept P2. And it's worth emphasizing how revisionary and counterintuitive it would be to deny P2. To deny P2 would mean that there need be nothing unjust about stuffing ballot boxes or suppressing other people's votes, provided doing so is a way of ensuring that only truly just policies are enacted. P3 seems uncontroversial if P2 has been accepted. P4 is not uncontroversial: a minority of philosophers claims that in some situations an agent will act wrongly regardless of what she does. Entering this debate is beyond the scope of this article, so I'll simply say that, along with many others, I think P4 is true: there must be a permissible option in an agent's set of choices.19 And P5 does not seem controversial if P1 is accepted. And so I disagree with Wellman: I think a legitimate state and its officials can sometimes act permissibly even though they act unjustly. I also disagree with Wellman about the second and third questions, but I won't pursue those disagreements here. The phenomenon of legitimate injustice is deeply puzzling, and I share the skepticism that Wellman expresses about the capacity of some recent work in political philosophy to provide an adequate account of this phenomenon. But we can't, I have argued, understand legitimate injustice as an instance of harms that are proportionate in light of all the good consequences that a state delivers. We should instead understand legitimate injustice as something that arises as a result of the complex and multi-dimensional nature of justice itself. There are principles of justice that apply to the distribution of political power in cases of reasonable disagreement. When these principles conflict with other substantive principles of justice, the phenomenon of legitimate injustice arises. This is because, in such situations, the state and its officials cannot avoid injustice. This fact, contra Wellman, has significant practical implications for permissible conduct in politics. On my view, unlike Wellman's, the moral legitimacy of a law does real practical work—it can render permissible conduct that would otherwise be impermissible, and it can explain why public officials have claim rights against interference even in some cases where they threaten to infringe claims of justice. Nothing I've said here constitutes an argument for the view that a principle of justice concerning the distribution of political power should ever take precedence over more substantive claims of justice. I do think this view is correct, but this isn't the place to present that argument. For comments and discussion, I am very grateful to Peter de Marneffe, Rebecca Stone, Paul Weithman, Kit Wellman, Leif Wenar, and an anonymous referee. None relevant. There are no potential conflicts of interest relevant to this article. The author declares human ethics approval was not needed for this study. All relevant data are included in the article.

I learned a lot from Gina Schouten's excellent book, Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Gendered Division of Labor.1 Like Schouten, I'm a political liberal. I thus share her conviction that an account of what's unjust or illegitimate about the gendered division of labor (GDL) should satisfy the constraint of liberal neutrality; it should be grounded in political values that are acceptable as such to all reasonable citizens. One widely held view is that the GDL is unjust because it creates an unjust distribution of important benefits or burdens, for example, income or time devoted to domestic labor. Schouten argues, however, that this isn't a conclusion that political liberals should, or even can, endorse. I disagree: political liberals can and should hold that the GDL is distributively unjust. To establish that the GDL sustains an unjust distribution the political liberal must meet four challenges, but Schouten is very skeptical that they can be met. First, the political liberal “will have to argue that the goods to be redistributed are politically valuable” (106–07). Suppose, for example, the GDL contributes to a distribution where women do a disproportionate share of the unpaid domestic labor in heterosexual couples. For this to be a problem of distributive justice, being free from unpaid domestic labor must be politically valuable, that is, it must be “a good that can be recognized as such regardless of one's comprehensive conception of the good” (102). But this can't be so, Schouten argues, since reasonable citizens disagree about the value of unpaid domestic labor as well as its comparative value relative to a well-paid career. Second, the political liberal “must also show that the value of the distributional paradigm can be affirmed from within any reasonable conception of the good” (103). This challenge cannot be met whenever the distributive paradigm relies on a measurement of opportunity sets that presupposes some reasonably contested view of what's required for a choice to count as voluntary. Third, the political liberal must establish that the identified goods and distributive paradigm “can be operationalized together in such a way as to register the mal-distributions of the gendered division of labor” (107). Even if there is some neutrally identifiable good that is inequitably distributed, the GDL may not be distributively unjust if it has other countervailing distributive consequences, for instance, limiting men's opportunities for caregiving at the same time as it diminishes women's career prospects. Finally, the political liberal must show “that structural remedies are called for despite the fact that the gendered division of labor is sustained, in large part, by decisions that a political conception of justice must classify as voluntary” (107). In many other contexts we aren't inclined to view inequalities arising from voluntary choices as unjust. So, the challenge is to explain why the inequalities created by the GDL are different. Suppose Ann and her twin brother Bob are similarly well-educated, healthy, and talented young adults, who both hope to raise families with a member of the opposite sex and pursue reasonably successful careers…Suppose the other members of Ann's and Bob's society differ regarding how to trade off the values realized through paid employment and work within the family, and as a result can be divided roughly into the following three types. First, ideal workers, who prefer to devote their time primarily to paid employment. Second, homemakers, who prefer to devote their time primarily to child care and supporting the family's main source of income. Third, co-parents, who prefer not to specialize in either employment or domestic activity, but share family responsibilities roughly equally. Suppose, too, that most men prefer to be ideal workers rather than coparents or homemakers, whereas most women prefer to be co-parents rather than homemakers or ideal workers. Thus, men and women will search for different types of partner and negotiate differently when dividing responsibilities within the family.2 I'll add two further assumptions to the example, both drawn from Schouten's own description of the GDL. First, the described distribution of preferences is a constituent part of the GDL. Second, many workplace norms favor the traditional breadwinner/homemaker model. For example, most well-paid careers require employees to put in fairly long hours without much flexibility, something that is inconsistent with doing the majority of unpaid domestic labor within a household. Given the demographics and the distribution of preferences in society, Ann and Bob face unequal opportunities to pursue a well-paid career while raising a family. Bob is more likely than Ann to find a partner willing to be a co-parent. Ann is thus less likely than Bob to realize the ambition of pursuing a successful career while raising a family. My argument is straightforward. The inequality between Ann and Bob is inconsistent with a principle of distributive justice that political liberals can easily affirm: John Rawls's principle of fair equality of opportunity (FEO). On Rawls's account, FEO requires that “those who are at the same level of talent and ability, and have the same willingness to use them, should have the same prospects of success regardless of their initial place in the social system.”3 This principle applies, among other things, to the competition amongst persons for jobs. By hypothesis, Ann and Bob have the same abilities and ambitions, and yet they do not have the same prospects for career success. The inequality between Ann and Bob is caused by the distribution of men's and women's preferences regarding the trade-off between paid employment and unpaid domestic labor, and these preferences are a constituent part of the GDL. It's thus difficult to see how the inequality of opportunity between them can be eliminated without replacing the GDL with a more egalitarian set of norms. Although the example is stylized, in crucial respects it's not unrealistic, and it offers a plausible characterization of a type of inequality of opportunity between many men and women in contemporary societies like the United States. Let's return to Schouten's four challenges. First, the good at stake in our example is the opportunity for a well-paid career. Income and opportunities for employment are listed by Rawls as social primary goods, and he presents them as benefits that can be recognized as such by all reasonable persons. If any goods meet the liberal neutrality constraint, they surely do. Second, FEO is part of Rawls's conception of justice as fairness, and this conception is freestanding, acceptable to all reasonable persons as a plausible interpretation of their shared public political values. Third, FEO condemns the inequality between Ann and Bob. This inequality registers as something caused by the GDL, and there is no obvious countervailing compensation that Ann receives. Finally, the fact that many of the GDL's norms are voluntarily adopted doesn't undermine the fact that the inequality between Ann and Bob is a matter of justice. After all, Ann and Bob have formed exactly the same ambitions: their opportunities are unequal due to factors beyond their control. It thus looks like we have a compelling account of the GDL as distributively unjust that meets Schouten's four challenges. Let's consider some objections to the argument sketched above. Some may object that Ann and Bob do not have unequal chances to pursue a successful career, rather, they have unequal chances to successfully realize a specific benefit bundle: a successful career + raising a family. But this bundle is not something that can be presented as suitably neutral. The decision about whether, and how, to raise a family is part of a conception of the good. There are no reasonably shared political values that require citizens to raise a family, and thus within political liberal conceptions of justice, citizens have no claim to an equal opportunity to do so, let alone an equal opportunity to do so in combination with the successful pursuit of a career. Justice thus cannot concern itself with the inequality between Ann and Bob. We should reject this objection. The production of future generations is a matter of public and political concern. Future generations are needed to sustain, among other things, economic activity, essential services, and pension schemes. Current citizens thus have important political interests in ensuring “the orderly production and reproduction of society and of its culture from one generation to the next.” This entails that “reproductive labor is socially [and politically] necessary labor,”4 and so too is raising, caring for, and educating children. It's thus false to present procreation and the raising children as something whose burdens and benefits are of no concern from the point of view of distributive justice. Ann and Bob each wish to perform a socially and politically valuable function. And there is no defensible public reason why women who make the choice to perform this valuable role should have fewer opportunities to secure an important social primary good (a well-paid career) relative to men who have the same abilities and ambitions. To hold otherwise is inconsistent with FEO. Consider a different objection. If coercion or legal rules are used to disadvantage some people's access to social primary goods relative to the access enjoyed by others, this is an injustice that can be condemned by political liberals. But, says the skeptic, that isn't what happens in the case of Ann and Bob. There are no laws restricting women's access to well-paid careers—no political coercion is used to ensure that Ann does more than 50% of the domestic labor in her household. The inequality between Ann and Bob instead arises as a result of the voluntary choices of many different individuals. It is other people's voluntarily formed preferences about the gendered division of labor that create the inequality. When other people's preferences render our own preferences more costly, this cannot be the basis for a complaint within a liberal conception of justice that seeks to remain neutral amongst reasonable conceptions of the good. [W]ithin a political conception of justice, neither internalized social norms nor the high costs of alternatives can categorically excuse individuals from bearing the costs of their choices. Just as our conceptions of the good guide the choices and tradeoffs we make in such areas as religious affiliation, our choices to specialize or not to specialize in caregiving and paid labor stem from values and commitments that presumptively merit political deference. These are choices that social institutions ought to regard as voluntary, and choices the costs of which we are presumptively expected to internalize, even when the choices stem from deeply embedded social norms or reflect second-best preferences (105). Call this the expensive tastes objection. To assess this objection, we need to distinguish between two different ways that other people's preferences can make your choices more expensive. One way is by making an option expensive for anyone who chooses it. This is what happens when the high demand for a scarce commodity pushes up the price of that commodity. Lots of people want to live by the beach, but beachfront property is scarce, and so it becomes more expensive for anyone who wishes to buy it. But sometimes other people's preferences increase the cost of an option only for some people in ways that track differences between persons that should be irrelevant from the point of view of political justice. Consider a society where most employers respond to employee preferences over holidays by providing paid holidays during the majority's religious holidays, but refuse to grant paid holidays during the days celebrated by the religious minority. The employers do this not out of malice or prejudice, but simply because it's more efficient to do things this way. In this society there are thus additional costs associated with being a member of a religious minority, but the costs are explained by the way the market responds to the freely formed religious choices made by the population. Along with many others, I am not inclined to say that the members of the religious minority simply have expensive tastes for which they can be held substantively responsible. If someone's conception of the good requires more of some measurable social good (e.g., more leisure time, or more wealth) then we should perhaps say this is an expensive taste for which they can be held responsible. But that's not what happens in this case. The members of the minority religion don't need more paid holidays than the members of the majority—they just need different days. Providing this may be less efficient, but doing so is not inconsistent with egalitarian justice, rather it's a requirement of FEO. The same holds when we turn to Ann and Bob. In their society, other people's preferences (in combination with workplace norms) do not make a given option or resource more costly for everyone. Rather, they create an inequality of opportunity between heterosexual men and women, in much the same way the distribution of religious preferences in the previous example (in combination with workplace norms) creates an inequality of opportunity between members of the religious majority and minority. My proposal is this: when the distribution of preferences, in combination with the available resources and existing norms, make some option expensive for anyone who chooses it, then the cost of that option is one for which a given person can presumptively be held responsible. But when preferences, available resources, and norms make a social primary good differentially expensive depending on differences between persons such as sex, race, or reasonable religious affiliation, the additional expense is not one for which a person is presumptively responsible at the bar of justice. Drawing this distinction is essential in respecting the idea that citizens—regardless of sex, race, and reasonable religious affiliation—are supposed to be equal from the political point of view, and thus their access to social primary goods should not be unequally costly depending on facts that are arbitrary from the political point of view. This proposal is consistent with the idea that we should not compensate people for expensive tastes. Someone who prefers things that are generally expensive—that is, expensive for everyone—cannot claim to be disadvantaged at the bar of justice. But someone does have a complaint at the bar of justice when access to a primary good is differentially costly depending on characteristics that are arbitrary from the point of view of citizenship such as sex, race, or reasonable religious affiliation. What metric could render the verdict that women's opportunity sets are sub-equally valuable without running afoul of neutrality…Without arguing that enactments of these opportunities are unequally valuable—which the neutrality constraint rules out—I do not see how we can show that the opportunities are unequally valuable, or that the differences render overall opportunity sets unequally valuable (104). Since political liberalism must remain neutral concerning the relative values of a paid career as opposed to being a homemaker, a political liberal conception of justice cannot hold that Ann is in fact less advantaged relative to Bob. But I think the objection here is mistaken for at least two reasons. First, it need not be true that Bob has less of an opportunity to be a homemaker relative to Ann. Suppose that people's preferences about parenting are also differentially flexible. Suppose that most men are fairly rigid in terms of their preferences, that is, they will not change their preference to be an ideal worker regardless of what they discover about a potential partner's preferences. But suppose many women are more flexible (in one direction only) about their preferences, that is, many women who begin with the preference to be a co-parent would willingly shift to a preference to be an ideal worker upon discovering that a potential partner would like to be a homemaker. Given these (not, I think, wildly unrealistic) assumptions, it might be true that Ann and Bob are equal in terms of the opportunity to be homemakers, yet unequal in terms of their opportunity to pursue a successful career while raising a family. Second, the politically relevant inequality of opportunity between Ann and Bob is the opportunity to pursue a successful career while raising a family. Ann is less likely to successfully realize this ambition relative to Bob. There is no need to compare the intrinsic value of being a homemaker relative to having a paid career. We can assume that Ann and Bob are (parenting preferences aside) equally likely to find a long-term partner with whom to start a family. But given the way parenting preferences are tied to gendered norms in their society, Ann is more likely to suffer a career cost while raising her family. That's all we need to know. A political liberal conception of justice must remain agnostic about the intrinsic merits of being a homemaker as opposed to a co-parent or an ideal worker, and so it makes no judgment about the relative merits of these options. All it needs to affirm is the following: (a) a well-paid career is something to which FEO applies, (b) raising a family is a contribution to the important social good of the orderly reproduction of society over time, and (c) two people with equal abilities and ambitions, and equally prepared to make the same contribution to the good described in (b), should not face unequal opportunities with regard to the good described in (a). I have argued that Rawls's principle of FEO can, under realistic conditions, condemn the gendered division of labor as unjust and thus provide the justification for promoting gender egalitarian norms that would help to reduce or eliminate the unjust inequality of opportunity we see in cases like that of Ann and Bob. Contra Schouten, I've argued that this account of the distributive injustice of the GDL is one that political liberals can and should affirm. Political liberals can thus advance a version of what Schouten calls the mal-distribution strategy. But Schouten also presents a different argument against the mal-distribution strategy. She argues that “[g]ender norms and gendered social institutions explain the injustice in the resultant distribution; not the other way around…The distribution of opportunities, health, and other valuable outcomes that results from the gendered division of labor is unjust—when it is unjust—because it results from an unjust set of social constraints. The mal-distribution strategy misplaces this injustice and issues correspondingly misguided prescriptions for how to fix it” (112). I lack the space to fully consider this argument here. But I'll register my disagreement with it. In my view, gendered norms are typically unjust when, and because, those norms create unjust distributions of rights, opportunities, income, wealth, or other primary goods. Imagine an (admittedly unrealistic) social world where there are gendered norms, but these norms don't lead to any unjust distributions of social primary goods. Suppose there is a gendered norm that leads more women to become doctors and more men to become lawyers, but these professions are equally well-paid and come with comparable social benefits. And imagine something similar is true with regard to many occupations—gendered norms lead more men into some and more women into others, but there's no pattern of inequality between men and women in rights, opportunities, income or wealth. My own views about the good life lead me to suspect that this gendered division of labor is problematic and regrettable—I don't think it would be good for our social world to be gendered in this way. But, absent further information, I don't think this social world is unjust. Gendered divisions of labor are not intrinsically unjust. They are rather typically a key factor in creating and sustaining unjust distributions of social primary goods.5

This paper discusses Jessica Flanigan's book, Pharmaceutical Freedom. The paper advances two main claims. First, the paper argues that, despite what Flanigan claims, there is a coherent way to endorse the Doctrine of Informed Consent while resisting the view that there is a right to self-medicate. Second, the paper argues that Flanigan is committed to a more radical conclusion than she acknowledges in the book; namely, that under some conditions it is morally permissible for people to take medications from drug manufacturers or pharmacies without paying the full price for those medications. The paper concludes by suggesting that this thesis about permissible theft, when combined with some further premises regarding the morality of defensive force, implies some even more radical conclusions regarding the use of force to obtain these medications.

Abstract This book provides an account of the central moral principles that regulate the permissible use of defensive force. The book argues that we cannot understand the morality of defensive force until we ask and answer deeper questions about how the use of defensive force fits with a more general account of justice and moral rights. In developing this view the book offers original accounts of liability, proportionality, and necessity. It also argues, contra the dominant view in the literature, that self-defence can sometimes be justified on the basis of an agent-relative prerogative to give greater weight to one’s own life and interests. The book also provides a novel conception of individual rights against harm. Unlike some, who believe that our rights against harm are fact-relative, Quong argues that our rights against being harmed by others must, in certain respects, be sensitive to the evidence that others can reasonably be expected to possess. The final chapter provides an extended defence of the means principle, a principle that prohibits harmfully using other persons’ bodies or other rightful property unless those persons are duty bound to permit this use or have otherwise waived their claims against such use.

Abstract Some philosophers endorse a fact-relative account of moral rights against harm. According to this view, if B’s ϕ-ing would contravene A’s right not to be harmed if B had access to all the facts, then B contravenes A’s right by ϕ-ing regardless of her epistemic position. Chapter 6 argues that moral rights against harm are not fact-relative, but must rather be sensitive, to a certain extent, to the evidence that duty-bearers can reasonably be expected to possess. The chapter argues that this conception of moral rights against harm has important implications for liability to defensive harm. In particular, people who pose fact-relative wrongful harm are not always liable to defensive harm, since such people may not threaten anyone’s moral rights via their actions.

This paper discusses Cécile Laborde’s book, Liberalism’s Religion. First, I pose some questions about how Laborde’s central proposal—disaggregating religion—is meant to solve the two most serious challenges that she argues confront existing liberal egalitarian theories. Second, I respond to some of the objections Laborde presses against my conception of political liberalism. Third, I argue that Laborde is mistaken in adopting accessibility as the appropriate standard for reasons within public justification. Finally, I suggest that Laborde’s view is, in the end, too accommodating to perfectionism in politics. Her view allows laws and public policies to promote particular religions or controversial conceptions of the good life when certain conditions are met, but this, I argue, is inconsistent with the foundational ideals of freedom and equality.

This chapter advances two main claims. First, that the distinction between consequentialism and deontology, although widely adopted, is illusory and only serves to obscure some of the genuine disputes underlying central debates in distributive justice. Second, that although luck egalitarianism and democratic egalitarianism are often presented as rival conceptions of justice—in particular, as offering competing accounts of the grounds of distributive justice—this may be a mistake, since this construal makes each view less plausible than it otherwise might be. Instead, the chapter proposes an alternative view where luck egalitarianism and democratic egalitarianism can be understood as complementary answers to different questions. Luck egalitarianism identifies one of the fundamental grounds of justice and injustice, whereas democratic egalitarianism is better conceptualized as offering a contractualist account of what it is for something to be just or unjust.

In this paper, I offer two arguments in support of the proposition that there are sometimes agent-relative prerogatives to impose harm on nonliable persons. The first argument begins with a famous case where most people intuitively agree it is permissible to perform an act that results in an innocent person’s death, and where there is no liability-based or consequentialist justification for acting. I show that this case is relevantly analogous to a case involving the intentional imposition of lethal defensive harm on a nonliable person. In the final part of the paper, I provide a second, independent, argument in support of the proposition that there are agent-relative permissions to foreseeably harm or kill nonliable people under certain conditions.