John Locke Essay, Research Paper
Mark
Ethics, July 1999 v109 i4 p739
Justification and Legitimacy(*). (philosophy of the state) A. John
Simmons.
Abstract: Different arguments are needed to show that a state is justified and that it is
legitimate. Justifying the state is associated with the treatises of 18th-century philosophers.
The Lockean approach to this issue captures features of institutional evaluation that the
Kantian approach does not. Standard justifications of the state are offered to those
motivated by objections to states.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 University of Chicago
In this article I will discuss the relationship between two of the most basic ideas in political
and legal philosophy: the justification of the state and state legitimacy. I plainly cannot aspire
here to a complete account of these matters, but I hope to be able to say enough to motivate
a way of thinking about the relation between these notions that is, I believe, superior to the
approach which seems to be dominant in contemporary political philosophy. Today, showing
that a state is justified and showing that it is legitimate are typically taken to require the very
same arguments. I will argue that this contemporary stance obscures the difference
between two central ways in which we should (and do) morally evaluate states, and it
generates confusions about other serious practical issues, such as those surrounding our
moral obligations to comply with law.
I begin (in Secs. I and II) with brief discussions of the ideas of justification and legitimacy
and with an attempt to capture what ought to be most central in our concerns about these
ideas. I turn then (in Sec. III) to two basic ways of thinking about the relation between
justification and legitimacy that I want to distinguish: what I will call the Lockean and the
Kantian approaches.(1) Next (in Sec. IV), I argue that the minority Lockean approach to
this issue captures essential features of institutional evaluation that the majority Kantian
approach does not, and I add (in Sec. V) brief mention of one further complication facing
any adequate account of political evaluation.
I
The project of “justifying the state” is one that we tend to associate with the great political
treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and especially with those of the
philosophers in the social contract tradition, such as Hobbes, Locke, or Kant. We study
these historical texts in large measure because of their perceived contributions to a
justificatory project that many feel confident in claiming as “the central task of social and
political philosophy.”(2) But for all this, we are not always as careful as we might be in
specifying exactly what this justificatory project amounts to or how the justifications offered
differ from other kinds of institutional evaluation defended within the same works. In order
to clearly distinguish what I take to be two importantly different dimensions of these
philosophical enterprises, I want to begin with some very general thoughts about practical
justification.
Justifying an act, a strategy, a practice, an arrangement, or an institution typically involves
showing it to be prudentially rational, morally acceptable, or both (depending on the kind of
justification at issue). And showing this, in standard cases, centrally involves rebutting
certain kinds of possible objections to it: either comparative objections–that other acts or
institutions (etc.) are preferable to the one in question–or noncomparative objections–that
the act in question is unacceptable or wrong or that the institution practices or sanctions
wrongdoing or vice. Justification, we might say, is in large measure a “defensive” concept, in
that we ask for justifications against a background presumption of possible objection:(3) so
we try to justify moral principles by showing them to be true or valid, to defeat the
objections of the skeptic or nihilist; we justify coercion against a background general
presumption in favor of liberty; we justify our actions in legal settings against concerns about
apparent or prima facie illegality; and so on.
A moral theory that is maximizing, that requires that acts or institutions (etc.) be the best
possible (in the circumstances) in order to be justified–such as maximizing forms of
utilitarianism–will require for justification showing that all comparative moral objections can
be met (i.e., it produces what I have called “optimality justifications”(4)). Nonmaximizing
moral theories, by contrast, may allow that all acts or institutions which avoid breaching
applicable moral rules are justified, even if some are in different respects preferable to
others (i.e., they produce what we can call “permissibility justifications”). Kantian and
traditional natural law theories are often understood in this way, so that justification requires
only a showing that all noncomparative objections can be met. If an act or institution is
consistent with God’s commands, passes the “consistent willing” test of the Categorical
Imperative, or avoids infringing anyone’s rights, this by itself may move it across the
threshold of justifiability.(5)
But what is it to justify the state? “Justifying the state,” with its all-inclusive tone, might at
first be thought to have to involve showing that every possible state is immune to any
systematic noncomparative moral objections. Or it might be taken to involve showing that
any possible state is preferable to (or as good as) any possible condition of statelessness. If
we understand “justifying the state” in either of these senses, then justifying the state is, I
think, impossible. Many states are and have been hopelessly immoral and extraordinarily
dangerous places to live. Even those who find Hobbes’s arguments otherwise persuasive
seldom agree with his (apparent) contention that life in any kind of state, no matter how
violent or oppressive, is to be preferred to any kind of life outside the state.(6) On this point
some variant of Locke’s (opposed) position seems correct: life in a pure state of nature or in
some nonstate cooperative arrangement, subject though it might be to all of the
incommodities of insecurity, lawlessness, and vulnerability such a state could be expected to
involve, is still a life to be preferred to life in a state ruled by a cruel and unchallengeable
tyrant, where injustice is systematic or wildly random and irresistible.(7)
If `justifying the state’ is to identify any plausible enterprise in political philosophy, then it
should at least be taken also to be accomplished if we can show that one or more specific
kinds of state are morally defensible (comparatively or noncomparatively).(8) So, I suggest,
we can justify the state by showing that some realizable type of state is on balance morally
permissible (or ideal) and that it is rationally preferable to all feasible nonstate
alternatives.(9) In the course of such a justification we will typically argue that certain
virtues that states may possess or goods they may supply–such as justice or the rule of
law–make it a good thing to have such states in the world.
Such a justification, of course, will provide some comfort to those who have chosen to live in
a justified state: their choice wasn’t a dumb choice–the state is a good bargain–nor was it a
choice to participate in an immoral arrangement. But most of us don’t choose the states in
which we live, and almost none of us chose to live in a state (as opposed to something else).
It seems plain that standard justifications of the state are offered not to happy participants in
states but to those moved by certain kinds of objections to states. The background objection
against which such attempts to justify the state are intended to be mounted must be
understood to come from the anarchist, who denies that any state can be morally and
prudentially justified.(10) A common anarchist view, of course, is that anything that is
sufficiently coercive (hierarchial, inegalitarian, etc.) to count as a state is also necessarily,
and for that reason, morally indefensible and prudentially irrational. States necessarily do
and sanction wrong, or are necessarily in other ways practically inferior to life without the
state.(11) Justifying the state would involve showing that these anarchist views are false.
And the justification of the state will be stronger as the kinds of states that are justified are
more numerous or more like past or existing states–with the strongest possible justification
of the state then being of the (unsuccessful) Hobbesian sort.
One can see a contemporary version of this conception of “justifying the state,” for instance,
in Robert Nozick’s well-known political philosophy. For Nozick, “the fundamental question of
political philosophy … is whether there should be any state at all. Why not have anarchy? …
If one could show that the state would be superior even to [the] most favored situation of
anarchy …, this would … justify the state.”(12) Of course, Nozick does not (attempt to)
justify the state in an especially strong fashion, for he goes on to argue (in pt. 1 of his book)
that only the minimal state is justified; any more extensive state than that, Nozick claims (in
pt. 2), cannot be justified. Nozick argues only for the justification of the minimal state; but he
does so precisely by trying to show that such a state could arise and function without
violating anyone’s rights in the process–thus rebutting the anarchist’s objection that even the
minimal state would necessarily do or sanction wrong (i.e., would violate rights) and so
could not be morally justified–and by trying to show that such a state would arise naturally
(guided by an “invisible hand”) from any state of nature–thus establishing, against the
anarchist, that the minimal state is prudentially superior to nonstate alternatives (i.e., that it is
desirable to have states).
II
While Nozick is not as clear about any of this as we might wish, it is important to see that
this justification of the state is not for him the only dimension of the evaluation of states.(13)
Indeed, given Nozick’s orientation toward historical (or “pedigree”) evaluations of
institutional arrangements, his justification of the state in terms of a purely hypothetical
account of a minimal state’s genesis might seem a complete non sequitur.(14) Showing that
it is possible for a (certain kind of) state to arise and function without immorality and that
having such a state would be a good thing–that the state is justified, on Nozick’s model–is
obviously not the same thing as showing that a particular actual state (even of that kind) did
in fact arise and does in fact function in morally acceptable ways. Rather than having
located a deep confusion in Nozick’s thought, however, I think this observation points the
way to a quite basic distinction between justification and legitimacy. For notice that Nozick
also defends an independent account of state legitimacy. Showing that a particular state is
legitimate appears to be for Nozick a function of showing that the actual history of the
state’s relationship to its individual subjects is morally acceptable).(15)
It is Locke’s political philosophy, of course, that provides the model for this sort of distinction
between political justification and legitimacy (though Locke himself never uses these terms
to describe the distinction). But Locke, in my view, is in certain ways clearer about the
distinction than is Nozick. For Locke, remember, “no one can be put out of [the state of
nature] and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent.”(16)
Political power is morally legitimate, and those subject to it are morally obligated to obey,
only where the subjects have freely consented to the exercise of such power and only
where that power continues to be exercised within the terms of the consent given. The
legitimacy of particular states thus turns on consent, on the actual history of that state’s
relations with its subjects. But Locke also offers us (especially in chap. 9 of the Second
Treatise of Government) a different and quite general argument for the moral and prudential
preferability of states ruled by limited governments to life in the state of nature. This other
argument is plainly addressed to those who maintain that the state in any form is morally or
prudentially inferior to life without the state. Notice that in justifying the (limited) state–by
rebutting the anarchist objection–Locke says nothing about the actual consent that is
required to legitimate a particular state with respect to its subjects.(17) That the limited state
is justified–that having limited states (governments) is on balance a good thing and that we
have good reason to create them–does not appear for Locke to show that any particular
limited state is legitimate, that any state (government) has the right to rule over any or all
persons within its (claimed) domain (i.e., the right to occupy the position of authority).(18)
This Lockean account utilizes one standard moral conception of state legitimacy,(19) and it
is this conception of “legitimacy” that I will hereafter have in mind when I use that term. A
state’s (or government’s) legitimacy is the complex moral right it possesses to be the
exclusive imposer of binding duties on its subjects, to have its subjects comply with these
duties, and to use coercion to enforce the duties. Accordingly, state legitimacy is the logical
correlate of various obligations, including subjects’ political obligations.(20) A state’s
“legitimacy right” is in part a right held specifically against the subjects bound by any
state-imposed duties, arising from morally significant relations–in Locke’s case, consensual
relations–between state and subject. It follows that “on balance” state legitimacy may be
complete or partial, depending on whether such relations hold with all or only with some of
those against whom the state enforces the duties it imposes (though the state is, of course,
either fully legitimate or fully illegitimate with respect to each individual under its rule).
I do not here take up at any length questions about how state legitimacy is related to
governmental legitimacy; I focus principally on questions about state legitimacy.
Governments can presumably be illegitimate even where the states they govern are not. But
state and governmental legitimacy seem not to be independent of one another, since an
illegitimate state could not, I think, have a legitimate government. On the Lockean model this
is easily explained. According to this model, states (”civil societies” or “commonwealths,” in
Locke’s parlance) earn their legitimacy by virtue of the (unanimous) consent of their
members, a consent that transfers to the collectivity those rights whose exercise by a
central authority is necessary for a viable political society. Governments are legitimate only
if they have been entrusted by the state (society) with the exercise of those same rights.(21)
So while a legitimate state might have an illegitimate government (one that, say, acquired its
power by force rather than by trust), an illegitimate state could never have a legitimate
government since illegitimate states do not possess the rights, transferred to them by their
subjects’ consents, that must be entrusted by a state to a government in order to legitimate
that government.
There are, of course, many other conceptions of state legitimacy, quite different from the
strong Lockean conception just described. Some theorists have advocated weaker moral
notions of legitimacy, according to which legitimacy is a mere liberty right or “justification
right”(22)–a fight which correlates with no other parties’ obligations (e.g., with obligations to
obey the law or to refrain from rival attempts to impose duties). Such notions of legitimacy,
as we shall see, sharply diminish the argumentative distance between accounts of state
justification and accounts of state legitimacy.
There is also a host of conceptions of state legitimacy–those used in ordinary political
discourse and those advocated by various social scientists and political theorists–whose
connections to either of the aforementioned moral conceptions of legitimacy are not
immediately clear. For instance, we sometimes count states as legitimate if they achieve
certain kinds of international recognition–if they are “accepted into the community of
nations”–or if they remain stable over long periods of time, exercising effective or