Disagreement and Legitimacy

Abstract

Disagreement in politics is ubiquitous. People disagree about what makes a life worthy or well-lived. They disagree about what they owe to each other in terms of justice. They also disagree about the proper manner of dealing with the consequences of disagreement. What is more, they disagree about the normative significance of moral and political disagreement. Disagreement has been, for at least three decades now, the focus of a series of major works in political philosophy. It has been called one of the fundamental 'circumstances of politics' by Waldron (1999). Rawls (1996) took disagreement to be at the heart of the problem of political legitimacy. Gerald Gaus takes it to be the most important task of liberal political theory to justify political institutions in the face of 'evaluative diversity' (Gauss 1996, 2011). For Thomas Christiano, disagreement is part of the basis of the authority of democracy (Christiano 2008). Political institutions make decisions and rules that are binding for everyone and can be coercively enforced against all, whether or not they agree with the content of the decisions. Most political theorists agree that such institutions are necessary in order to achieve justice and secure the fundamental rights of individuals. Therefore, not having political institutions at all is neither empirically plausible nor morally attractive. However, the ubiquity of disagreement about the content of the decisions that political institutions ought to make raises the question of how binding decisions can be legitimately enforced, through the use of coercion if necessary, against morally competent and responsible people who disagree in good faith with those decisions, even after careful reflection and given willingness to consider the reasons offered in their favor. All the political theories that focus centrally on disagreement assume that good faith disagreement on at least some matters survives even if all participants are deliberating in good faith and are motivated to find common grounds. Full consensus is not an option.

Democracy, respect for judgement and disagreement on democratic inclusion

“…Adherents of this principle either value respect for judgement as a nonderivatively good in itself (Waldron, 1999) or value it as an instrument for something else (Christiano, 2008). For this distinction see also Miklosi and Moles (2014). 5.…”