Abstract

In any society that protects the basic liberties of expression and association, people will reasonably disagree about conceptions of the good conceptions of what it is that makes lives valuable. This fact of reasonable disagreement raises a question of political justification: given that people disagree about value, how is it possible to politically justify a normative political conception that states how the basic institutions of society are to be organized? Political liberalism is a theory that has been developed to answer this question, most notably by John Rawls. Political liberalism says that a political conception is justified only if it is acceptable to all reasonable people. By making the acceptance of reasonable people a criterion of political justification, political liberalism shows respect for the fact of reasonable disagreement, for a reasonable person may reject any political conception that conflicts with his or her conception of the good. ;Rawls entertains the possibility that all reasonable people might agree on a conception of justice. But because his account of the reasonable is largely formal, it is possible that reasonable people can affirm conflicting accounts of justice. In this case, no conception of justice is politically justified. This would seem to imply either philosophical anarchism or that political liberalism's account of political justification is wrong. Rawls recognizes the possibility of reasonable disagreement about justice and so proposes a conception of legitimacy that might be the subject of reasonable agreement. A conception of legitimacy states the conditions under which the coercive use of state power is justified. If no reasonable person rejects some conception of legitimacy, then political liberalism does not lead to anarchism. However as Rawls describes them, reasonable people can disagree about legitimacy, too. This makes the choice between endorsing anarchism or rejecting political liberalism's account of political justification all the more pressing. This dissertation explores the plausibility of a third possibility: revising the account of the reasonable so that no reasonable person will reject Rawls' conception of legitimacy.