“Liberal Legitimacy and Future Citizens” - Emil Andersson (Uppsala University)
Philosophical Studies, 2025
Political philosophers have spent a lot of time theorizing the idea of justice between generations, and it is not difficult to see why this has been thought an important topic. Many of the actions taken by current governments (as well as by other actors, of course) will have profound effects on people who are not yet born, but who will exist in the future. If we were to greatly benefit ourselves by policies that would severely burden our successors – as we are arguably currently doing in the case of our reliance on non-renewable sources of energy – then surely that could amount to a great injustice. Hence, a complete theory of justice must take the interests of future people into account, and explain what duties of justice we have towards them. However, while justice is certainly important, whether political power is wielded in an effective pursuit of the proper ends is not the only thing that matters in the moral evaluation of governments. We also care about whether those who rule do so legitimately; whether they have the moral right to rule in the first place, and whether their actions fall within the boundaries of rightful ruling. This invites the question whether legitimacy is like justice, in the sense that it too has an intergenerational element. Are future people directly morally relevant for what is politically legitimate in the present?
Surprisingly, and unlike the topic of justice between generations, this question has received very limited attention from political philosophers. This limited attention is especially evident (and perhaps also especially surprising) in the case of the now vast literature on John Rawls’s (2005; 2001) influential account of political legitimacy. On Rawls’s view, the exercise of political power is only legitimate if it is justifiable to all citizens. While there are different ways of interpreting this idea (more on this below), it is not difficult to understand why many liberal philosophers have found it appealing. If we think that citizens are, in a fundamental normative sense, free and equal, then it appears plausible that those who rule must exercise their power in ways that respect this status of citizens. And this status of citizens is only respected, Rawls holds, if political power is exercised in such a way that it is justifiable to them. While this does not require actual consent, it could be thought of as requiring a kind of hypothetical consent; justifiability to citizens is a matter of what they would or could, under certain circumstances, accept. But to whom, more exactly, must the exercise of political power be justifiable? There is currently a widespread implicit (and in some rare cases explicit) assumption that the only citizens that matter in this context are the currently existing ones. But there are good reasons to reject this assumption, and my recent “Liberal Legitimacy and Future Citizens” is an attempt to explain why we ought to do so. In addition, it explores the implications of extending the Rawlsian view to include future citizens. As it turns out, the currently dominant interpretation of the Rawlsian view is unable to handle this inclusion in a satisfactory way. There is, however, a quite different understanding of this influential account of political legitimacy that appears to do much better.
What is it that determines whether someone should be included in the group of citizens to whom the exercise of political power must be justifiable? In the paper I consider some previously suggested necessary conditions for inclusion – being subjected to coercion, and being a co-author of democratically enacted decisions – which appear to suggest that future citizens should be excluded. I show that both suggestions have unintuitive implications, and instead suggest what I call the co-ownership condition. In brief, the view is this: all the members of a society are to be considered morally rightful co-owners of the political power that is exercised within it, and it is this co-ownership that gives rise to the requirement of justifiability to them. I then draw on the Rawlsian idea of society as a system of cooperation over time to explain why future citizens should also be considered members, and in virtue of that co-owners of political power. Since future citizens should be considered free and equal, and as participants in our temporally extended system of intra- and intergenerational cooperation, they have a rightful claim on how political power is exercised; it should only be exercised in ways consistent with their freedom and equality, and in order for it to be so it must be justifiable to them. Hence, what is legitimate in the present depends, not only on what is justifiable to the presently existing, but also on what is justifiable to future citizens.
This inclusion of future citizens is certainly of significance in its own right, but what makes it especially interesting is that it appears to give rise to serious problems for the currently dominant interpretation of the Rawlsian view. I identify several such problems in the paper, but here I shall only briefly explain one of these. This problem concerns the standard internalist account of what justifiability to someone consists in, according to which what is justifiable to someone is relative to their beliefs and commitments. This may seem a reasonable view, but it runs into trouble once we take seriously the fact that we are in a position to influence what future people will believe and care about. Since we have this ability, internalism allows for the possibility of engineering justifiability, and hence legitimacy, by simply ensuring that future people will have beliefs such that our actions turn out to be justifiable to them. This appears wildly implausible, and the case of future citizens therefore gives us reasons to doubt the established internalist view.
Are there any alternatives to internalism? Well, as a matter of fact I have in previous work defended an externalist view, according to which what is justifiable to someone is independent of their beliefs and commitments. Instead, what is justifiable to citizens is determined by the normative content of the conception of them as free and equal, and hence by what they could accept qua free and equal. This is not the place to go into the details of this view, but I believe that once we see that justifiability to future citizens is a requirement of legitimacy, it becomes clear that externalism has very clear and significant advantages over internalism. I therefore suggest that proponents of the Rawlsian account of political legitimacy have good reasons to rethink how their view is to be understood. The currently dominant interpretation should be abandoned, as otherwise we will be unable to provide a compelling account of how what is justifiable to future citizens limits how political power may legitimately be exercised in the present.
References
Andersson, Emil. 2022. “Freedom, Equality, and Justifiability to All: Reinterpreting Liberal Legitimacy”. The Journal of Ethics, Vol. 26, No. 4: 591-612.
Andersson, Emil. 2025. “Liberal Legitimacy and Future Citizens”. Philosophical Studies, Vol. 182, No. 5-6: 1067-1090.
Rawls, John. 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Edited by Erin Kelly. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, John. 2005. Political Liberalism (Expanded Edition). New York: Columbia University Press.