Legitimacy and Responsiveness

In the context of the free will debate, Fisher and Ravizza use a concept of reasons responsiveness to account for when an action is performed freely. I want to apply a similar account to the legitimacy of actions performed by government entities.

On a reasons-responsive view of freedom, an action is performed freely only if it is caused by a mechanism that is somewhat responsive to reasons. This concept of "being responsive" needs to be spelled out more, however. The strongest way would be to say that an agent performs an action freely only if they would have done something else in any situation where there was good reason to do otherwise and not good reason to perform the action. This is likely too strong, however. For one, it requires an agent to be omniscient as to what the reasons are (at least, on reasons externalism). Alternatively, we could hold that the agent performs the action freely only if the action is performed via a mechanism which might have produced a different action in some close situations where there was good reason to do otherwise.

My aim here is to use a similar notion to account for the legitimacy of government actions. I take it that, to be legitimate, the government action needs to be responsive to the values of the people it governs. The values of those people should be responsive to reasons, of course, but that might not be required for the legitimacy of the government. The government action must be performed through a mechanism which usually produces actions as if motivated by the values of the people it governs.

There is a problem here, of course: how do we aggregate the diverse values of a populous? I am not sure there has to be just one answer to this question. It is open to a government to weight different values differently, provided that the weightings, in turn, are motivated by the values of the citizenry. So the aggregation scheme must be such that it provides the result that it is legitimate. Further, it should count all the citizens. It is possible for it to weight the values of some values differently than others, although this should be motivated by values regarding whose values are expected to be the most accurate, rather than which class is preferred. The limit here is provided by the threat of citizens regarding the government as ignoring them. When this occurs, it is safe to say, that government has failed to be sufficiently responsive.

This may be because it is impossible to be responsive to the values of the whole citizenry, or it may be due to failure to attend to the values of some group and take seriously the concerns of that group. In either case, there is a failure of society, a failure of the state as social body to maintain its unity. At such points, the government becomes either a tyranny of one group over another, it splits into two governments, or it finds some way to satisfy both parties, e.g., by ensuring that members of both groups have a role with some degree of efficacy in the government, so that both groups are confident that they are having a say. All of these are attempts at preserving at least a veneer of legitimacy. A government becomes illegitimate in the first case alone. In the other two cases, the legitimacy is repaired. My claim, then, is that a state becomes illegitimate only when it regularly fails to take the values of the whole citizenry into consideration, and thus where a mass of the citizenry has a long-standing sense of disenfranchisement, whatever their legal situation may be.

This is the root of representative democracies. A representative democracy is an attempt at ensuring that the government is responsive to the values of the citizenry. It is possible to maintain this level of legitimacy in non-democratic systems, however, and it is possible to impose a democratic system which fails to be legitimate precisely because it is democratic. The latter case would occur, for instance, if one tried to impose democracy somewhere where people believed that it was a terrible system of government. The former case would occur where a king, for instance, truly cared about his people and considered their values and well-being in his decisions (as, e.g., will be the case in the divine government in heaven).