Political Legitimacy and a Natural Duty to Democracy

Political legitimacy is a weird concept. It is so because it encompasses both a descriptive and a normative side. On one hand, we say that a certain political regime is legitimate insofar as it is actually supported and seen as legitimate by the majority of people under it (Weber 1947). On the other hand, we want the concept of legitimacy to convey also some normative meaning and such political regime to fulfill moral requirements about its structure and functioning (Simmons 1999). Normative political theory deals with the second account of legitimacy and engages in the hard task of clarifying the concept without collapsing it on the one of justice. Namely, the problem is to distinguish legitimacy from justice, in order to show how a state can be legitimate and legitimately exercise its power even though it can appear to be unjust to some of its citizens. If this is the case, legitimacy and justice in turn call on the question of political obligation. Indeed, we may be said to have a political obligation to obey the laws because they are just or because a legitimate political authority has issued them. In the first case it is the justness of these laws that impose a moral duty to obey them. However, since we happen to disagree on such justness, we need to impose the very same political obligation on each other through appeal to the way these laws have been produced. Now, we have different ways to look at the normative side of political legitimacy. We can take a state to be legitimate only as long as its citizens have consented to it and hence are under obligation to comply (Simmons). We can oppose that a good justification of a state in virtue of its structure and functioning renders such state legitimate without binding its citizens to compliance (Waldron 1987, 1999). Or, we can think that a good justification entails legitimacy, which in turn entails political obligation (Christiano 2008). In this paper, my aim is twofold. First, I aim to reconstruct these three main positions over the issue and illustrate how justification, legitimacy and obligation can fit together, depending on other relevant factors, as actual consent (Simmons), hypothetical consent (Waldron), democracy and natural duty (Waldron, Christiano). Second, I intend to show how the major divide among these accounts is due to the way they approach the question of our natural duties. In fact, while Simmons contends that we can act morally without thereby having the duty to create a state, both Waldron and Christiano make it a point of a moral natural duty we all share to establish a morally defensible and just state. However, to ground the final legitimacy of a political regime on individuals’ moral duty to act in a certain way constitutes a dangerous threat to its stability. In fact, if the legitimacy of public laws depends on their being democratically taken by morally motivated citizens, the stabilizing effect of democratic procedures gets neutralized by the substantial appeal to people’s motives.