[Political Philosophy: The Problem of Legitimate Injustice by Jonathan Quong (Princeton, 2026; 204 pp.)]
Jonathan Quong, who is a professor of philosophy and law at the University of Southern California, has accomplished a tour de force. The series in which his book appears is designed to give students an introduction to the main areas of the subject covered. You would not expect a book on political philosophy to focus on a problem—legitimate injustice—which has been addressed by only a few specialists. It would be like an introductory book on economics that devoted all its pages to the problem of Giffen goods. But Quong manages to pull it off. In the course of discussing legitimate injustice, he manages to cover a large number of central topics in political theory.
I especially liked his account of Kant’s view of justice and of Joseph Raz’s service conception of the state. By the way, Quong does not beg the question by assuming that there is such a thing as legitimate injustice; arguments that question this are addressed at length. In addition, Quong conveys to students a good sense of the way philosophers think (i.e., by advancing an argument, raising objections, and responding to the objections).
The problem of legitimate injustice is this: A good society is required to be just. But sometimes, agents of a liberal democratic state will be justified in enforcing unjust laws. When they do so, they act legitimately. Those living in the society, and possibly others as well, have a duty to obey them and not to interfere with them. As Quong puts it:
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. 2) Some ordinary laws in liberal democratic societies are unjust. 3) Many of these laws can be legitimate: that is, state officials act permissibly in enforcing these laws and they have rights against harmful interference while enforcing them.
Those of us who are Rothbardians will be tempted to respond that Quong’s problem is irrelevant to our concerns. We do not believe in a state at all, even if it is a liberal democracy. But I do not think that this by itself suffices to dispose of legitimate injustice. Analogous problems are readily stateable. Suppose that we aren’t living in a libertarian society. People disagree about the correct theory of justice. Most people, after all, aren’t libertarians, however much we hope this situation will soon change. Don’t we still obey laws that we deem unjust? Further, Rothbardians think that the libertarian law code will be enforced by competing protection agencies. Isn’t it likely that, in a libertarian society, some of the agencies would get details of the libertarian law code wrong, even though they think they are acting correctly? And if so, don’t these agencies act legitimately?
Let’s first look at the problem of the existence of unjust laws. Here is Quong’s comment:
Indeed, despite increasing degrees of political polarization in some liberal democracies, one of the few truths about politics that most people would accept is this: all existing liberal democracies are, to some extent, unjust. Which laws in particular are unjust is, of course, a matter of sharp dispute, but the bare idea that at least some existing laws are unjust is not controversial. Given pervasive political disagreement, the fact that at least some ordinary laws are unjust is utterly unsurprising. We don’t agree about what justice requires, and we can’t all be correct. Unless one holds a very implausible view about the infallibility of majorities or the representatives that they elect, we should expect democracies to make mistakes; they will sometimes, maybe quite often, enact unjust legislation.
Certainly, Rothbardians will regard many, if not most, laws enacted by the state as unjust. But would there be an analogous problem in a libertarian society in which people hire protection agencies? Aren’t there likely to be differences of opinion about details of the libertarian law code? What if each agency acts in accord with its own view and enforces this view against other libertarians who disagree? Won’t it be the case, then, that there are unjust laws even in a libertarian society?
I do not think this would prove to be a serious problem, although, since we don’t live in a libertarian society, our conclusions inevitably rest on speculation. The protection agencies are competitive, and people who thought one agency’s views are unjust could move to another. Admittedly, this doesn’t fully resolve the difficulty. What happens if one agency tries to enforce its views on non-clients? I can’t address this problem here, but those interested should consult Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty.
A more serious problem arises with regard to people’s rights. If the agencies make mistakes and violate people’s rights, don’t people have the right to stop them? Why should people treat what they do as legitimate?
Quong’s response to this for liberal democratic societies is that denying step 3 has a very high price. If people acted against the agents of the state, the society would be unstable:
This decentralized system [i.e., a system in which dissenters don’t consider laws they oppose legitimate] is unlikely to be a fair way to address the inevitable burdens of unjust legislation, for several reasons. It makes the enforcement of laws highly unpredictable. Unpredictable law enforcement is bad in a number of ways. It makes effective planning more difficult and costly. It means that like cases will not be treated alike. And it can exacerbate inequalities between rich and poor, for the simple reason that those with fewer resources face greater risks in gambling that laws won’t be enforced, whereas those with greater resources are in a better position to gamble on non-enforcement. These are all very substantial costs to the skeptic’s decentralizing proposal, and these costs are not offset by important benefits. Individual citizens and officials are not more likely to arrive at correct decisions about justice than democratic institutions. So if we follow the skeptic’s recommendation, this will not necessarily reduce the overall amount of injustice. Since the skeptic’s proposal creates substantial problems without necessarily reducing the burdens of unjust treatment, we should reject the proposal.
In a libertarian society, it seems likely that there would be very few areas in which there is serious uncertainty about the policies of protection agencies. In that case, the problem of legitimacy ceases to exist. The question of how to respond to agencies that make mistakes is a matter of prudence, and there is no need to consider the acts of such agencies prima facie legitimate. Non-libertarians who live in a libertarian society will probably consider the libertarian theory of justice to be radically mistaken, but the questions of how they should act and how the libertarian society should respond to them are other matters that can’t be dealt with here.
So long as we are Rothbardians, the problem of legitimate injustice turns out to be of minor importance, though thinking about it can teach us a great deal, as Quong has shown.
