Abstract

It is a consequence of this account of political legitimacy that legitimate government will not always be possible. If fundamental interests or values are too radically opposed, it may be impossible to find enough common impartial motivation to support a framework within which all reasonable parties must agree they should be resolved. The license individuals have to concentrate on their own lives and those they specially care about is morally unproblematic, only if they can exercise it in the context of a just social order, which gives expression to their moral impersonal motives without encroaching unacceptably on the personal domain.