Example research essay topic: State Of Nature Morally Acceptable - 1,880 words

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Ethics, July 1999 v 109 i 4 p 739 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 18 th-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.

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 non comparative 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) ). Non maximizing 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 non comparative 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 non comparative 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 non state cooperative arrangement, subject though it might be to all of the in commodities 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 non comparatively). (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 non state 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 (hierarchical, in egalitarian, 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 non state alternatives (i. e. , that it is desirable to have states). 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 left...

Research essay sample on State Of Nature Morally Acceptable