Dans le cadre des midis de l’éthique du CRÉ, Emil Andersson nous offrira une présentation intitulée « Liberal Legitimacy and Future Citizens ».

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Résumé

If the legitimate exercise of political power requires justifiability to all citizens, as John Rawls’s influential Liberal Principle of Legitimacy states, then what should we say about the legitimacy of actions that have a significant impact on the interests of future citizens? Prima facie, it appears plausible to demand that such actions, in order to be legitimate, should be justifiable to these future citizens. Surprisingly, this possibility has been overlooked in the literature. In this paper I address this neglected issue, and explore how Rawls’s principle can take future citizens into account. I identify two serious problems for the currently dominant interpretation of the principle, and suggest a revision of the view that would make it better equipped to account for the insight that future citizens matter for political legitimacy.