Can the Government Force You to Do Something You Don’t Agree With?
The Rule You Never Voted For
Imagine your school announces a new rule: every student must spend one hour each day picking up litter in the hallways. No one asked you. No one voted. When you complain, the principal says, “Trust me, it keeps the school clean and teaches responsibility.”
That feeling in your stomach — the sense that something unfair just happened — is a problem that has kept philosophers awake for centuries. If a government can make laws that force you to do things, coercion is happening. Coercion means making someone act a certain way, backed up by a threat if they don’t. So what makes a coercive law fair? Is it enough that the people in charge think it’s a good idea?
A powerful answer emerged in the last few decades: a law is only justified if every single person has a good enough reason to accept it. This is the heart of the Public Justification Principle. It sounds simple, but it opens a trapdoor under almost every government on earth.
The Giant Problem: We Can’t Agree on What’s Right
The first person to see this trapdoor clearly was the philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002). He noticed something obvious about the world, something he called reasonable pluralism. It’s the fact that smart, honest, fair-minded people will always disagree about the biggest questions in life. What is the right way to live? Does God exist? What makes something truly valuable?
You can see this in your own friend group. One friend thinks fairness means everyone gets the same thing. Another thinks fairness means people who work harder get more. Both of them are being reasonable. Neither is being selfish or stupid. They just start from different places.
For a long time, thinkers tried to solve this by saying the government should only be based on what everyone actually agrees to, like a contract everyone signs. But that never worked, because in a diverse society, people don’t all agree to the same stuff. By the 1990s, Rawls and others had reframed the whole question. You don’t need actual agreement. You need to show that every reasonable person could endorse the law, using reasons that make sense to them.
Solution #1: Find Reasons Everyone Shares
Once you accept the Public Justification Principle, you face a huge choice. What kind of reasons can count when we try to justify a law?
The most popular answer is called the consensus view. It says that a law is publicly justified only if everyone can accept it for the same reasons. Imagine your teacher wants to ban phones in class. For the ban to be truly justified, everyone in the room — you, your best friend, the kid who never talks — must be able to point to a shared reason, like “phones distract from learning.” You can’t just have your own private reason.
Jonathan Quong, a philosopher working today, defends a strong version of this. He argues that public justification is about making our deepest political ideals fit together without contradiction. If we allow people to have totally different private reasons for a law, we lose something important: the sense that we are governing ourselves together, as a community of equals, using reasons we all can see.
The philosopher Jürgen Habermas (born 1929) pushes this even further. He thinks the only way to reach a justified law is through real, live conversation where everyone argues freely and a rational consensus emerges. For Habermas, you can’t just imagine what people would say. They have to actually say it, in a fair setting, until they convince each other.
But consensus has a sharp edge. What if your deepest reasons are religious? What if you think a law is good because of a verse in a sacred text, and your neighbor thinks that text isn’t a real source of reasons at all? A pure consensus view might say your reason doesn’t count, because it can’t be shared. That has led to a fierce pushback.
Solution #2: Make Your Own Case
The rival idea is called the convergence view. It says people can have completely different reasons for endorsing the same law, and that’s fine. The law is justified as long as each person has some reason that makes sense to them, even if your reason means nothing to me.
Think of a simple swap. You have a bag of apples. Your friend has a bag of oranges. You want more oranges; she wants more apples. You trade. You are both better off, but for totally different private reasons. The philosopher Gerald Gaus (1952–2020) argued that public justification works the same way. A law can be a “convergence point” where everyone’s separate paths happen to meet.
Gaus’s view is more relaxed about what reasons can enter the game. Your reason needs to be intelligible — meaning other people can at least see how it makes sense for you, given your own starting beliefs and values. They don’t have to share the reason. They just have to understand it as a real reason, not a random shout.
Convergence seems to solve the religious problem. If your faith gives you a reason to support a law against stealing, and my non-religious worldview gives me a different reason, the law still passes the test. We converged on it from different directions. David Gauthier (1932–2023), coming from a different tradition, thought a similar way about bargains: people accept rules that maximally advance their own interests, and the resulting rules are justified because each person gains something they want.
The Split: Whose Reasons Really Count?
By the 2010s, the consensus and convergence camps had grown into two full-scale research projects. Philosophers Kevin Vallier and Ryan Muldoon gave them names. The coherence project, following Quong, tries to make our political ideals consistent — like showing how freedom and equality really fit together. The diversity project, following Gaus, starts with the messy fact that people reason in wildly different ways and tries to find real-world social rules that diverse people can all accept.
These two projects have very different vibes. The coherence project wants to purify the reasons we use in public. Some reasons — like appeals to a truth only your religion sees — might have to stay outside the town square. Critics call this unfair to religious citizens. The diversity project wants to welcome all those reasons in, but then it faces its own nightmare. What if people’s diverse reasons never converge? What if the set of laws everyone can accept is empty? Gaus’s answer was subtle: people almost always prefer some shared rule over chaos. Even if you hate the litter-picking rule, you probably prefer it to a school where every hallway becomes a trash pile.
Underneath all of this is a question about who we are even trying to convince. Do we need to justify laws to every actual person, with all their quirks and bad information? That’s called justificatory populism, and almost no one likes it, because people can reject good laws out of stubbornness or confusion. So we idealize. We imagine people with better information and less selfishness. But how much better? If we imagine them as perfectly rational supercomputers, we might lose touch with real citizens entirely. A moderately idealized person — smarter and fairer than you usually are, but still recognizably you — has become a popular middle ground.
Why This Isn’t Just a Game for Philosophers
This whole debate sounds abstract, but it decides what a government can ever say to you. Think back to that school rule. A consensus thinker would tell the principal: “You need a reason for this rule that every student, from every background, can share.” A convergence thinker would say: “You just need to make sure each student has some good reason to go along, even if their reasons are all different.”
The fight over public justification is really a fight about respect. When someone forces you to do something, they owe you a reason that you can genuinely see as a reason. That is what separates a law from a threat. The next time you feel that prickle of unfairness about a rule, you’re standing in a long line of thinkers who asked the same question: “Why should I accept this?” And no one has settled the answer yet.
Think about it
- If a law is truly fair, should it feel fair to you personally, or is it enough if it feels fair to most reasonable people?
- Can a religious reason ever be a good enough reason for a law that applies to people of all faiths and none?
- Think of a school rule you hate. What would a convergence argument for it sound like? What would a consensus argument for it sound like? Which one feels more respectful?
