An Epistemic Approach to the Justification of Public Coercion: Increasing the legitimacy by strengthening the argument quality

In order for a liberal-democratic society to function, the state needs to exercise public coercion vis-à-vis its citizens by enforcing laws or other rules.

But as such coercion will result in limitations of the freedom of citizens who object to such coercion, the coercion needs to be justified. The overarching aim of this project is to address how this should be done.

The dominant position among political theorists and philosophers today is that public coercion only can be justified interpersonally, which means that the permissibility of coercion is determined by the relationship between the reasons used in the justification and the views of those who are being coerced.

While that can be seen as an adequate accommodation for radical disagreements in politics, this approach is less receptive to concerns about how to achieve good quality of justification.

This can be called the epistemic quality of justification and it is s determined by impersonal rather than interpersonal criteria – i.e., by factors, such as truth and soundness.

By drawing on argumentation theory, the following two research questions will be addressed: What is the most plausible version of an epistemic approach to justifications of political coercion?

What is normatively gained and lost by prioritizing the quality of the justification rather than the interpersonal aspect of the justification? A wide-reflective equilibrium-style analysis will be used in the project, which will result in a book.