Abstract
Contractualists seek to publicly justify moral principles, but it seems doubtful that a set of specific principles or policies can be definitively justified. In this sense, the contractualist project has an indeterminate result: the precise content of liberal morality is open to reasonable dispute. Liberal citizens thus find themselves disagreeing about the demands of liberal morality. They require, as Locke argued, an umpire to resolve their disputes. This paper analyzes what is required of such an umpire, and then employs a four-stage argument to show that constitutional representative democracy is the uniquely justified umpiring procedure for resolving these disputes. Democratic politics, on this view, is the continuation of ethical dispute by other means.
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I would like to thank Fred D'Agostino, William Nelson and Jonathan Riley for their very helpful written comments. I also greatly benefitted from discussions with Julian Lamont, Loren Lomasky, Philip Pettit, Jeremy Shearmur and Stuart Warner and from Daniel Shapiro's response to an earlier version of this paper. My thanks too to the journal's readers.
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Gaus, G.F. Public justification and democratic adjudication. Constit Polit Econ 2, 251–281 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02393132
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02393132