Equality and Partiality.

• Date: 01 May 1993
• Author: Cohen, Daniel A.
• Published date: 01 May 1993
• Author: Cohen, Daniel A.

Justice in the polity, Plato argued, mirrors justice in the individual: in both cases, justice consists of a suitable division of labor among different motivating forces.(1) In Equality and Partiality, Thomas Nagel(2) recasts this argument in Kantian form. Nagel argues that political legitimacy - a state's rightful claim to exercise coercive power over its members - can arise only from proper integration, through institutional means, of the personal and impersonal standpoints within each individual.(3)

Nagel analyzes the concept of political legitimacy in strongly individualistic terms: "The pure ideal of political legitimacy is that the use of state power should be capable of being authorized by each citizen" (p. 8). This analysis, in effect, imposes a unanimity requirement on political legitimacy: a political system is legitimate if justifiable to every person who lives under it (p. 33). Importantly, the requirement attaches to the system - the "principles, institutions and procedures which determine how that power will be used" (p. 8) - rather than to particular, controversial decisions made within that controlling framework.(4)

Nagel formulates the unanimity requirement in familiar contractualist terms: a legitimate political system rests on principles that "no one could reasonably reject, given the aim of finding principles which could be the basis of general agreement among persons similarly motivated."(5) According to Nagel, these principles do not merely represent a pragmatic bargain struck among self-interested agents pursuing their own interests(6) but have independent normative and motivational force. In particular, mere recognition of the fact that a system rests on principles no one could reasonably reject provides "reason to cooperate voluntarily in the maintenance of such a system and to respect its results" quite apart from any coercive force the system itself brings to bear.(7)

Whether Nagel's test of political legitimacy has any substantive content, of course, remains open to doubt. In the Anglo-American legal tradition, for lack of a better alternative, what the "reasonable" person believes is generally whatever twelve jurors on a particular day happen to say she believes. Such skepticism aside, Nagel himself derives an abstract guideline as to what reasonable people can agree to from his characterization of the dual standpoint within each individual:

Each of us has a primary attachment to his own personal interests, projects and commitments, but this is restrained by our occupation of the impersonal standpoint in two ways: first, by the recognition of the equal objective importance of what happens to everyone, and second, by the recognition of the special importance for each person of his own point of view ....[p. 38]

This characterization informs Nagel's general criterion of reasonable nonrejectability: a legitimate political system "reconciles the two universal principles of impartiality and reasonable partiality so that no one can object that his interests are not being accorded sufficient weight or that the demands on him [to satisfy the reasonable interests of others] are excessive" (p. 38).

Nagel gives few examples of actual institutional arrangements that appropriately strike such a balance. Rather, he articulates the general form of a...