Equality and Partiality

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 Nagel2 ,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. 3agel 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. 4agel 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."5According 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