A. The Exclusive Right to Rule

According to commonsense morality, people have various rights regarding, e.g., their bodies, properties, contracts, and relationships (such as marriage and custody of children). Those rights constitute a sphere of external freedom for the right-holder, i.e., the freedom to set and pursue ends in the outside world without being constrained by others’ contingent will. Insofar as one operates within their rights, they should not be liable to others’ coercion. Furthermore, one's rights impose correlative duties on others. Those duties are, in principle, enforceable. If another person violates one's rights, the rights-violator is liable to necessary and proportional defensive force that aims to stop them and is further liable to compensate the right-holder for the damages ex post facto. Stated differently, rights, which constitute a protected sphere of freedom for the right-holder, are inherently connected with an authorization to use coercion in their defense.

In the absence of authority, everyone is left to assert and enforce their rights unilaterally. Due to normative indeterminacies and epistemic uncertainties, people's unilateral assertions of rights often conflict even if everyone acts in good faith. Potential examples are endless. When two people have an oral agreement but never sign a formal contract, one may believe that a binding contract has been established while the other denies it. When couples seek a divorce, they often disagree about custody arrangements. As people interact, the boundaries of their freedoms are coextensive. Take a divorced couple as an example. The mother has no custody right to be with her child when the father is exercising his right to do so, and vice versa. Because the contours of people's rights are coextensive, one univocal resolution must prevail regarding rights disputes. While normative indeterminacies and epistemic uncertainties are two distinct sources for reasonable disagreements about rights, I will demonstrate that rights disputes per se make legitimate authority morally necessary. Since it is more difficult to justify this claim regarding disputes arising from epistemic barriers alone, I will focus on them.

In defending the moral necessity of authority, let me start by considering an alternative position: authority is dispensable, and disputing parties are bound by and liable to coercion based on the objectively correct resolution, at least when reason dictates a unique solution. I will refer to this proposal as Objectivist Justice. Despite its prima facie attraction, Objectivist Justice does not stand up to scrutiny. Correct resolutions of rights are not automatically binding. Suppose that, in a state of nature, a couple breaks up. Each parent believes they should be the custodial parent based on their reasonable evaluation of their comparative strengths as parents. Assume for now that the actual balance of reasons dictates that the parents spend equal time with their child because, ceteris paribus, this arrangement is best for the child's long-term well-being. While both parents are mistaken, their neighbor—knowing the family for years—makes the right call. Nevertheless, they cannot convince the parents to accept their correct resolution. Suppose that the neighbor, being rich, is able and willing to hire a team of guards to use necessary and proportionate means to coerce the parents to comply. Intuitively, such benevolent intervention is objectionable, demonstrating that pace Objectivist Justice, being correct per se does not entail a moral standing to impose a binding resolution.

The neighbor lacks the standing to impose their correct resolution on the parents, ultimately not because the parents’ views have epistemic merits but because they are equally entitled to be free. Kantians have long advocated that an intuitive and fundamental conception of our freedom is freedom as independence, which is to be one's own master, i.e., “not to be forced to obey the will of another person.”Footnote ²⁴ When the neighbor forces the parents to obey their will amid their reasonable disagreement about rights, such behavior is incompatible with the parents’ freedom as independence and is thus objectionable.Footnote ²⁵ More generally, as a fallible reasoner, anyone may make good-faith mistakes about rights regarding any issue. By authorizing the right side to intervene with coercion whenever someone makes a reasonable mistake about rights, Objectivist Justice makes it hardly possible for anyone to enjoy freedom as independence: the enforcement of rights marshaled by the right side is nonetheless private enforcement with “the inevitable side-effect of subjecting us to the wills of others.”Footnote ²⁶ Furthermore, Objectivist Justice implies that people are, in principle, liable to coercive correction whenever they make reasonable mistakes about rights. Knowing their fallibility without knowing where exactly their mistakes lie, people would live under the constant dread that justified coercion will come to them at any moment by anyone who happens to be right. Such a human condition would be a paradigm of unfreedom.

In sum, Objectivist Justice is defective because it embraces unilateral enforcement of rights, which is incompatible with people's freedom. While univocal decisions about rights are morally required, no private party has the proper standing to deliver them. This inherent defect of the state of nature is the ultimate justification for political authority. As noted earlier, rights are supposed to constitute people's external freedom and impose enforceable correlative duties on others irrespective of their personal convictions. Only if the boundaries of rights are settled on behalf of everyone involved is no one subjected to others’ contingent will. Thus, rights are a priori premised on the existence of legitimate authority, an omnilateral will in Kantian terms, that validates rights-claims on behalf and in the name of everyone involved.

The totality of people's enforceable rights and obligations constitutes a system of justice. Given that the authority should effectively resolve people's reasonable disagreements about justice on everyone's behalf, it needs to satisfy the following conditions. Formally, this authority must monopolize comprehensive legislative, judiciary, and executive functions for a definitive population regulating both subjects’ interactions (i.e., the private sphere) and its own operation (i.e., the public sphere). Its decisions regarding the private sphere (about, e.g., property, contract, and tort) specify subjects’ private rights and obligations in their mutual dealings. Its decisions regarding the public sphere (about its constitution and maintenance) spell out its jurisdictional rights and citizens’ rights and obligations in sustaining its operation. Both kinds of decisions embody authoritative resolutions of justice. By providing systemic, univocal solutions of justice for its subjects, this authority liberates them from one another's coercive force. Procedurally, this authority must duly incorporate everyone's interest and voice in its decisions, at least at a fundamental level. A person is not free if they are protected from others’ contingent will but subjected to alien domination of the political power, which would be the case if political decisions are unresponsive to their interests and voices. By duly integrating everyone's will and interests, the authority becomes the apparatus of the people's self-governance. Substantively, this authority must offer reasonable resolutions of justice. As I have argued, legitimate authority is primarily justified on the ground that it properly settles people's reasonable disagreements about justice. If its decisions are unreasonable, they cannot be plausibly construed as resolving people's reasonable disputes and therefore lack legitimate authority over the people.

Since a directive satisfies the procedural criterion if and only if it results from a reasonably fair procedure, the procedural criterion—like the substantive criterion—depends on a conception of reasonableness. Ideally, a political directive—regarding either procedural designs or substantive issues—should reflect the balance of reasons for the issue at hand. Officials thus have a stringent duty to reason competently and decide based on their best judgment. Combining this observation with my overarching concern for citizens’ equal freedom, I adopt the following standard of reasonableness:

I do not intend to settle where the defensible thresholds lie regarding competent reasoning, adequate rights schemes, and sufficient respect for citizens’ fundamental equality. This sketchy formula is supposed to capture largely a liberal common ground.Footnote ²⁸ However, I expect it to have considerable teeth.Footnote ²⁹

Any agent that satisfies the formal criterion is a de facto authority. If such an authority pervasively fails Reasonableness procedurally or substantively, it lacks general legitimacy. Otherwise, it is generally legitimate. However, a generally legitimate authority can be unreasonable regarding specific issues. Those failures would render the resultant directives illegitimate. In sum, ceteris paribus, an agent that satisfies the aforementioned three criteria sufficiently possesses legitimate authority for the people in general.Footnote ³⁰ Since—as widely accepted—a liberal democratic state fits the bill, it acquires legitimate general authority for its citizenry. Recall that due to the illegitimacy of unilateral determination and enforcement, no private person has the right to settle reasonable disagreements about justice. Thus, the state is uniquely positioned to do so with its reasonable directives. In this way, the state has the exclusive right to rule. The state exercises its right to rule by creating offices with the mandates to decide practical issues within their jurisdictions. Since the state has an exclusive right to rule, whoever the state duly puts in an office has the exclusive right to settle practical issues within their jurisdiction. Therefore, I have vindicated Exclusive Right to Rule. Footnote ³¹

According to Exclusive Right to Rule, legitimate authority has the unique moral standing to demarcate the boundaries of people's rights. Thus, its legitimate directives must possess the moral power to determine people's rights, leading to what Stilz calls “a statist theory of rights.”Footnote ³² Those directives can render the contours of rights determined where reason leaves open. Within reasonable limits, they can even redefine such contours, defying the precise balance of reason. For example, suppose that the aforementioned divorcing couple—now under a civil condition—turns to the court to resolve their dispute about the custody arrangements. Recall that each parent wants to be the custodial parent based on their reasonable judgments. The court ought to adjudicate the case by considering all the pertinent reasons. Assume henceforth that the actual balance of reasons supports the father's claim: ceteris paribus, his being the custodial parent is best for the child's long-term well-being. However, the court mistakenly but reasonably sides with the mother, mandating that the child lives with her on weekdays and their father on weekends. In light of the court's exclusive right to rule, its legitimate ruling should determine the contours of each parent's custody right, despite being erroneous. This example is by no means exceptional. In general, legitimate laws define citizens’ moral rights by choosing one set of univocal answers to justice-related problems among various reasonable ones on their behalf. This statist theory of rights is moderate. Accordingly, when a directive is unreasonable, it is normatively impotent, which typically constrains how far moral rights shaped by political decisions can diverge from perfect justice.Footnote ³³

B. My Exclusionary Account

With this moderate statist theory of rights at hand, we can observe first that Exclusive Right to Rule entails Addition. Recall that individuals are always already obligated to respect others’ rights when those rights are properly validated. Since legitimate directives authoritatively define the boundaries of people's rights, subjects have at least a pro tanto moral obligation to comply with those directives. However, I will argue that Addition fails to capture fully the normative power of legitimate directives because Exclusive Right to Rule also implies that those directives possess exclusionary power on top of their moral weight. Specifically, I defend:

Here and in what follows, S refers to any subject and φ to any action required by legitimate directives. Two observations are in order. First, I label my thesis Thorough Exclusion because I hold that a legitimate directive excludes all the reasons bearing on its justifiability.Footnote ³⁴ I will refer to reasons bearing on the justifiability of a legitimate directive as dependent reasons.Footnote ³⁵ Second, there are two ways to understand Exclusion. According to the justificatory conception, Exclusion first and foremost occurs at the justificatory level: excluded reasons no longer count for or against S's φing. According to the motivational conception, Exclusion only occurs at the motivational level: while S should not act for excluded reasons, those reasons remain relevant to the morality of their φing.Footnote ³⁶ I hold that we should understand Thorough Exclusion according to the justificatory conception. First, whether Exclusion should occur at the motivational level depends on whether it happens at the justificatory level. If S knows that excluded reasons still bear on the morality of their φing and require them not to φ on balance, it would be irrational for S to φ disregarding those reasons.Footnote ³⁷ Moreover, while certain reasons are excluded, S is not prohibited from acting for them insofar as they conform with legitimate directives. For example, according to Thorough Exclusion, the legal prohibition of murder reflects and excludes reasons bearing on its justifiability, including that murder is egregiously wrong. However, citizens refraining from murder can undoubtedly be motivated by the wrongness of murder rather than merely by the fact that murder is legally prohibited.Footnote ³⁸ The justificatory conception of Thorough Exclusion can accommodate this, but the motivational conception cannot. According to the motivational conception, subjects should not act for this excluded reason as they refrain from murder. According to the justificatory conception, the legal prohibition of murder has incorporated and reflects the corresponding stringent moral prohibition, which thus does not provide an extra objection to murder along with the legal prohibition at the normative level. However, typically, the law only cares about subjects’ actions rather than their reasons for their actions, and thus subjects may obey the law “for any motive whatever.”Footnote ³⁹ Therefore, nothing is problematic in the eyes of the law where citizens refrain from murder for its moral depravity. Those two points show that we must understand Thorough Exclusion according to the justificatory conception if this thesis is defensible at all. The crucial question is whether it is defensible, which will be the focus of the rest of the paper.Footnote ⁴⁰

For any practical issue within an official's jurisdiction, the official should do their best to weigh pertinent reasons. Nevertheless, their legitimate directives are meant to determine the balance of reasons regardless of whether they in fact strike the right balance. Consider the earlier divorce example. I stipulated that the court arrived at an erroneous but reasonable ruling after considering the pertinent reasons. Still, its decision is supposed to pronounce on where the balance of reasons lies regarding their dispute and determine each parent's custody rights. The court's exclusive right to do so entails that neither parent has the right to act on their own judgment about the balance of reasons but ought to comply with the court's ruling. After the court's ruling, the father should return the child to their mother every Monday. Even if his preferred resolution—i.e., his being the custodial parent—is correct, the court nonetheless has decided incorrectly but legitimately that its adjudication is best supported by pertinent reasons. As Raz puts it, “the original reasons merge into . . . the judgment of a court, which . . . becomes res judicata.”Footnote ⁴¹ The adjudication replaces the original reasons and serves as the new normative basis for subjects’ actions.

A legitimate directive requiring S to φ is likely based on both dependent reasons counting in favor of S's φing (call them the dependent reasons to φ in short) and the dependent reasons against S's φing (call them the dependent reasons not to φ). In the divorce example, the court designates the mother as the custodial parent and requires the father to bring the child to their mother on Mondays. Reasons supporting the court's decision may include that the mother has more financial resources to foster the child. Reasons against it may include that the father is more devoted to supporting the child's education. A legitimate directive should be able to exclude the dependent reasons to φ and not to φ, fundamentally because it authoritatively determines the balance of those reasons for S regarding whether to φ. Specifically, the dependent reasons not to φ are excluded to rule out the normative basis where subjects appeal to those reasons to justify disobedience. Meanwhile, the dependent reasons to φ are also excluded because otherwise it leads to objectionable double-counting. Since the court's ruling is based on and reflects the normative weight of the fact that the mother has more financial resources to foster the child than does the father, this fact should not be counted again along with the court's ruling regarding whether the father should comply.Footnote ⁴²

Note that according to my justificatory conception, an asymmetry exists regarding whether Exclusion should occur at the motivational level. Since authority typically does not care about S's reason for action insofar as they comply, S may act for dependent reasons to φ. However, as the dependent reasons not to φ support S to disobey legitimate directives, S should not act for those reasons. In the divorce example, the father may respect the mother's right to be the custodial parent, thinking she can better provide for the child financially if this makes him feel better. However, he cannot act for his superior devotion to the child's education if this may lead him to disobey the ruling.

Below I will further defend Thorough Exclusion by demonstrating its three comparative advantages vis-à-vis the additive account. First, Thorough Exclusion accurately captures what authorities try to do—i.e., to sum up dependent reasons in their decisions—while the additive account flies in the face of their self-image. Raz offers an example where Parliament decides to tax unearned income at a higher rate than earned income, and a person goes to the court claiming that he is unfairly discriminated against because whether one's income is unearned should be irrelevant for the purposes of taxation.Footnote ⁴³ As Raz observes plausibly, the court may say: “Since the issue of the justice of such a differentiation was clearly decided upon by Parliament, we are precluded from examining the reasons for or against it on their merits. There may be an injustice here, but if so, it is not for us to put it right.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Generally speaking, when a legislature dictates a law to the judiciary, it intends for the judiciary to issue verdicts based on the law instead of reconsidering the dependent reasons along with the law. The same is true regarding elected executive officials vis-à-vis ordinary civil servants or military superiors vis-à-vis their subordinates. If authorities can be legitimate, the additive account's failure to accommodate their self-perception seems to be a significant weakness.

Second, legal systems commonly sanction disobedience. Such sanctions often seem justified, especially regarding subjects who persistently violate legitimate directives. However, the additive account may have trouble justifying those sanctions. Consider the divorce example again. Assume that the father believes—correctly—that the court has made a mistake. Despite the legitimacy of its ruling, he repeatedly holds on to the child on Mondays. The court therein holds him in contempt and subjects him to fines. Additive theorists may hold either that the father's claim to be the custodial parent outweighs his obligation to comply with the court's ruling or the opposite. However, the court's response is hardly justifiable in either scenario. First, assume that the father's claim to be the custodial parent outweighs his obligation to comply with the court's ruling. He is thus morally permitted to hold on to his child on Mondays. As he has accurately weighed the court's verdict in his deliberation, he shows no contempt for the court. However, assume that the opposite is true. The court's ruling tips the balance of reasons for the father, so he is overall obligated to return the child each Monday. Still, the father may judge incorrectly but reasonably that the court's ruling is not weighty enough to trump the countervailing reasons. In light of the additive account, the court's ruling only provides a pro tanto reason for compliance. Thus, as the father acts on his competent judgment about the new balance of reasons in good faith, he again shows no disrespect for the court despite his error. Therefore, the court's response to the father's disobedience seems morally objectionable in the additive framework. However, it makes perfect sense, according to my exclusionary account. Even though the father has weighed the court's ruling as one consideration among others, he disrespects the court because he fails to respect the verdict as it is meant to be, i.e., an authoritative summary of the reasons that bear on the custody arrangement, which is for the court to determine. Thus, in my account, there is an inherently fitting relation between the father's disobedience and the sanctions the court imposes on him.Footnote ⁴⁵

Finally, and more fundamentally, while Thorough Exclusion eliminates the unilateral determination of rights, the additive account does the opposite. In the divorce example, after the court legitimately settles the issue for the parents, Thorough Exclusion entails that the father should comply with the court's verdict and respect the mother's moral right to be the custodial parent. By contrast, within the additive framework, the father is supposed to reconsider all the reasons and decide whether the court's decision prevails. Regardless of what conclusion he arrives at in the end, he is unilaterally settling his dispute with the mother regarding their respective custody rights, which he has no moral standing to do—as I have argued. Unilateralism occurs not only when a person defies legitimate authoritative demarcations of rights. Instead, it is fundamentally a structural problem where private persons are supposed to decide by themselves how to resolve rights disputes. Thus, the problem persists even if private persons take legitimate directives into account as one consideration in their deliberation. By prescribing that people resort to private deliberation after authoritative resolutions are in place, the additive account makes the unilateral determination of rights ubiquitous rather than solving it. This final point also helps explain the authority's practices as observed in the first two points. Because only legitimate directives can settle the boundaries of rights without subjecting anyone to unilateral coercion, political authority intends its directives to sum up and replace reasons bearing on them and consequently judges subjects to be disrespectful when they fail to conceive those directives accordingly.

Note that Thorough Exclusion is inherently limited in two ways. First, it only holds when official directives are legitimate. S is morally permitted (or even obligated) to resist illegitimate directives drawing on dependent reasons that those directives grossly fail to respond to. Second, even when directives are legitimate, Thorough Exclusion only applies regarding S's φing. For example, in the divorce case, the court's adjudication normatively determines only that the father ought to return the child on Mondays until the arrangement is lawfully altered. This leaves open for the father to complain or appeal. Similarly, in Meals on Wheels, the authoritative budget is supposed to settle how many public resources are allocated to Meals on Wheels. Mary, the civil servant, or any other citizen, has full discretion to voice their moral objections against the decision through various legal means. Only when subjects defy legitimate directives regarding actions required by those directives do they illegitimately impose their unilateral judgments on others. By contrast, there is no illegitimate assertion of one's own opinion when citizens sort out their disagreements by actively engaging with political decisions in ways consistent with and encouraged by democratic ideals and the rule of law.

A. The Permissibility of Unlawful Resistance

Let me start with where my account embraces political resistance to dispel authoritarian impressions that one may mistakenly attribute to my account. Put aside illegitimate regimes, where my account prescribes no obligation for compliance. I have emphasized that a generally legitimate authority can issue illegitimate directives. Assume that the US has been a legitimate state after abolishing slavery and establishing universal suffrage and basic welfare. Notwithstanding, the Jim Crow laws were clearly illegitimate for their blatant discrimination. Citizens were morally permitted or even obligated to resist Jim Crow laws, with both lawful or unlawful means. Coordinated nonviolent disobedience during the civil rights movement was undoubtedly justified. Indeed, violent unlawful resistance may also be warranted, for example, if protestors were to resort to property sabotage to demonstrate their apt anger and press for change. It is beyond the purview of the paper to determine whether and what unlawful means of resistance are permissible in response to specific illegitimate laws. The crucial point is that illegitimate directives have no moral power over citizens, and thus citizens must resort to private deliberation to determine a permissible means of resistance. If such resistance imposes harm on others, pertinent moral constraints, e.g., necessity and proportionality, would apply.

Citizens often need to break other potentially legitimate laws to force the state to change illegitimate laws. For example, property sabotage as a means to fight against the Jim Crow laws would defy arguably legitimate property laws and thus infringe on other citizens’ morally valid property claims. One may wonder how such unlawful resistance could be permissible given the exclusionary power of legitimate laws. In response, first, publically violating legitimate Law-A as a means to challenge illegitimate Law-B shows no disrespect for Law-A's normative authority. Recall that a legitimate directive only excludes reasons bearing on its justifiability. Assuming that certain property laws—especially to the extent that they were independent of racial segregation—were legitimate during the Jim Crow era, those laws only excluded reasons pertinent to property distributions. Were protestors to violate those laws in pursuing desegregation, they would not be acting on those property-related reasons. Instead, they would be drawing on reasons against segregation, which were not excluded by any legitimate law. Thus, the exclusionary power of property laws constituted no principled objection against property sabotage for the sake of desegregation.

Furthermore, as stated earlier, unlawful resistance is morally permissible only if it satisfies applicable moral constraints, such as necessity and proportionality. Assuming that certain instances of property sabotage were necessary and proportional to desegregation, relevant costs suffered by property owners would be justified as a lesser evil. Nevertheless, because illegitimate laws result from the citizenry's defective self-governance, the citizenry should fairly share the expenses for righting the wrong by using national revenues to compensate private owners for their losses caused by justified unlawful resistance.

B. Objectivism About Legitimacy

Whether my account leaves appropriate space for unlawful resistance crucially depends on how we flesh out Reasonableness sketched in Section III. The more demanding the criterion is, the less authoritarian my account is. The stringency of Reasonableness depends on the thresholds for competent reasoning, adequate rights schemes, and sufficient respect for citizens’ fundamental equality, which I leave open. Nevertheless, as imprecise as it stands, Reasonableness supports a key observation. Political directives can hide their unreasonableness behind seemingly plausible narratives, secrets kept in the name of national security, the lack of public attention, and so forth. For example, voting restrictions in the US carry a prima facie plausible rationale, i.e., combating voter fraud. However, statistics regarding the rarities of voter fraud and the racially skewed voter suppression caused by those restrictions are widely available. I believe that no competent thinker committed to the right to political participation and citizens’ equal status can believe in those restrictions after surveying the statistics. Thus, unlawful resistance—e.g., using expired photo IDs in voter registration—may be perfectly permissible. Similarly, my account may embrace other forms of unlawful disobedience against covertly illegitimate directives, from consequential actions like Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers to quotidian activities like downloading copyrighted materials in defiance of certain unconscionable copyright regulations.

I do not intend to validate these specific examples of unlawful resistance, partly because people may reasonably disagree about whether a political directive passes the threshold for legitimacy. The point is instead that my exclusionary account, combined with defensible criteria of legitimacy, leaves proper room for unlawful resistance, even against directives that do not wear their illegitimacy on their face. However, my acknowledgment of reasonable disagreements about legitimacy apparently engenders a dilemma for my account. If citizens can be bound by objectively legitimate directives despite reasonable disagreements about their legitimacy, why can't objectively correct resolutions of justice bind them despite reasonable disagreements about justice? On the other hand, if citizens are allowed to act on their own reasonable judgments about the legitimacy of political directives, how does the introduction of the state address the problem of unilateral determination?

I embrace the first horn of the dilemma, i.e., citizens are bound by objectively legitimate directives. Call this thesis Objectivist Legitimacy in contrast with Objectivist Justice discussed in Section III, i.e., citizens are simply bound by correct resolutions of justice. I rejected Objectivist Justice because private citizens lack the moral standing to impose their preferred resolution—correct or not—on others who reasonably disagree. While Objectivist Justice licenses unilateral enforcement, which is incompatible with citizens’ equal freedom, Objectivist Legitimacy empowers the state to impose truly legitimate resolutions on all the involved parties. Such law enforcement—authorized by an omnilateral will—is the only form of force compatible with everyone's equal freedom. Stated differently, Objectivist Justice is doomed by its endorsement of unilateral enforcement, and Objectivist Legitimacy is not. This ultimately explains why we should accept the latter but not the former. That being said, when citizens implement Objectivist Legitimacy in good faith, some may mistakenly—albeit reasonably—deny the legitimacy of certain directives and disobey them. In such a case, their disobedience, though impermissible, may be excusable, so the state has reason to at least reduce their punishment.Footnote ⁵⁰

C. Obedience of Legitimate Directives

I am finally where the rubber hits the road. As Section I shows, I hold that plausible criteria for political legitimacy will leave considerable gaps between legitimacy (where directives are procedurally and substantively reasonable) and justice (where directives represent the balance of reasons). Furthermore, political decisions are seldom inconsequential. The tax code determines our disposable income and wealth. Hate speech regulations specify the boundaries of our free speech. And abortion laws confine women's control of their bodies. Legitimate directives falling short of justice often impose significant, unjustified harms on millions of citizens. However, my exclusionary account entails that citizens ought to comply with legitimate directives under normal circumstances and try to bring changes only through lawful means.

Is this an unacceptable conclusion? I do not think so. First, according to my account, only reasonable political directives have the power to define people's moral rights, i.e., by choosing one reasonable conception of justice among various reasonable ones. Typically, this significantly constrains how far binding laws may diverge from perfect justice. Use women's right to abortion as an example. Assuming for the sake of argument that it is unreasonable and thus illegitimate for the state to ban abortion entirely, a variety of gestational limits for abortion may fall into the range of reasonable options.Footnote ⁵¹ If a state adopts one of the reasonable options, its decision determines the contours of women's moral right to abortion. Suppose that the adopted gestational limit is shorter than what justice demands. Since it allows a reasonable time window for abortion and is promulgated in advance, it enables women to plan accordingly and thus is unlikely to deprive them of adequate external freedom. Thus, it does not seem too demanding that those who disagree with the law forgo illegal means to fight against it.

Furthermore, forgoing illegal means to fight against legitimate laws does not imply that citizens should do nothing when the law flouts their sense of justice. As an integral dimension of a reasonable regime, a state must allow various lawful means of contestation and dissent to be legitimate. When citizens disagree with legitimate directives, they can protest, contact elected officials, start justice campaigns, go to the courts, organize strikes, and support candidates who share their conceptions of justice. Thorough Exclusion is perfectly compatible with those cherished practices of public deliberation and contestation about the justice of political decisions. Active civic engagement is not only a virtue but also a citizen's moral obligation. As citizens constitute a self-governing body, justice is what we owe to each other. Nevertheless, legitimacy marks the threshold for required compliance. Recall that by providing reasonable resolutions amid citizens’ disagreements, legitimate directives are supposed to free citizens from one another's unilateral interpretation and enforcement of justice. Thus, when directives are legitimate, citizens ought to respect them and only use lawful means to advocate change.

Finally, rarely do those who resort to unlawful resistance understand themselves to act against unjust but legitimate directives. For example, during the civil rights movement, James Baldwin wrote: “white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.”Footnote ⁵² It seems a fairly common—though often implicit—understanding that illegitimacy, rather than mere injustice, grounds unlawful resistance. Some may insist that unlawful resistance is permissible even against legitimate directives, such as evading taxes when the tax code is reasonable but unfair. Such tactics are nonetheless too controversial to serve as counterexamples to my account.Footnote ⁵³

D. False Conviction Again

However, I have not forgotten False Conviction, where innocent Ian is convicted for life by an impeccable judicial procedure. Typically, while legitimate but unjust directives negatively affect millions of people, Reasonableness ensures that they can nonetheless retain adequate external freedom. In contrast, the devastating effects of false convictions concentrate on a few people. According to my account, Ian's innocence no longer constitutes a legitimate reason for him or others to use unlawful means to resist the ruling. Thus, if the verdict cannot be reversed legally, Ian is morally obligated to serve his prison sentence. Despite my abiding discomfort, I submit that this conclusion is forced on us if the rule of law is to solve the unilateralism of rights.

Let me begin with a few observations that may soften this conclusion—but only to a certain extent. First, many false convictions are not like Ian's. Instead, they result from severe procedural or substantive failures of the criminal justice system. My account by no means implies that innocent victims of such illegitimate practices are morally obligated to accept their convictions. The procedural and substantive constraints of reasonableness ensure the rarity of legitimate false convictions. Second, due to the knowing risk of false conviction, a legitimate criminal justice system must have ample space for appeal and retrial.Footnote ⁵⁴ This further guarantees that legitimate false convictions only reflect persistent bad epistemic luck rather than malice or apathy. Finally, while citizens are required and permitted to comply with false but legitimate convictions, the state should compensate the falsely convicted when they prove their innocence.Footnote ⁵⁵

Despite the above observations, my conclusion regarding False Conviction remains a bitter pill to swallow. One objection is especially pressing. I hold that citizens are obligated to comply with legitimate directives because they are obligated to refrain from forcing their unilateral judgments of justice on others. However, additive theorists will point out that Ian's claim not to be falsely imprisoned for life significantly outweighs the people's claim not to be subject to his unilateral judgment of justice.

In response, I will argue first that the people's claim against Ian's unilateral resolution and Ian's claim against false imprisonment differ crucially.Footnote ⁵⁶ While the former is a right, the latter is a mere legitimate interest. This is not because the former is more important than the latter. Instead, it is because the moderate statism of rights defended earlier and feasibility constraints on states’ operations dictate divergent treatments of the two.

As argued earlier, because rights impose coercive constraints on one another's freedom, they must be ratified and enforced by a legitimate authority to avoid morally problematic unilateral coercion. This leads to moderate statism of rights, according to which legitimate states have a moral power to determine rights. Thus, people's rights are affected not only by actual political decisions (when they are reasonable and duly made) but also by institutional constraints on states’ operations. On the one hand, administering criminal justice is part and parcel of a state's jurisdiction due to its coercive nature. Thus, the citizenry has the moral right to see to it that everyone complies with the state's legitimate verdicts. On the other hand, since the most reliable prosecution process has a margin of error, even optimal systems of rights administered by legitimate states cannot grant individuals a moral right to accurate verdicts. Therefore, individuals lack such a right. Stated differently, the fact that even the best criminal justice system cannot afford a right against false but fair convictions rules out the possibility that anyone can enjoy such a right. Therefore, while every citizen has a moral right to a fair trial, no one has a moral right against false imprisonment that results from a fair trial.Footnote ⁵⁷

Furthermore, granting the citizenry a right to administer criminal justice through the state apparatus while denying Ian a right against false but fair convictions is not to sacrifice Ian for the benefit of the majority. Ian's lack of a moral right against false but fair convictions is ultimately an entailment of his own right to external freedom. His right to external freedom mandates that he enter a legitimate state and enjoy a set of definitive rights administered by the state. Since even the best state cannot grant him a right against false but fair convictions, his right to external freedom dictates that he cannot enjoy a right against false but fair convictions—an observation, mutatis mutandis, equally applicable to everyone else.

That being said, Ian's claim against false imprisonment is a weighty legitimate interest. Thus, I face a further challenge: Why should we prioritize the people's right to administer criminal justice over Ian's weighty legitimate interest against false imprisonment? To respond, it is widely believed that rights typically trump mere legitimate interests. For example, a superrich person should help those in need, e.g., by donating to charities that support promising poor students for a college education. The amount of money means little to the rich person but a lot to the students struggling to afford further education. However, assuming that the property regime is legitimate, the rich person plausibly has the moral right not to donate, which the students or any bystander should not violate even by otherwise innocuous means, e.g., secretly transferring what the rich should donate from the rich's account to the charities’ account.Footnote ⁵⁸ In terms of legitimate interests, the students’ claim to further education significantly outweighs the rich person's claim to a tiny fraction of their wealth. However, the latter trumps the former because the latter constitutes a right, the former a mere legitimate interest. Ultimately, the same normative dynamic explains Ian's obligation to comply with the false verdict unless the verdict is lawfully nullified. While Ian has no moral right against false imprisonment that results from a fair trial, the people have the moral right not to be subject to his unilateral resolution of criminal justice. Of course, one may further question this widely accepted practice of prioritizing rights. Although rights and their priority have been an entrenched and fundamental fabric of our moral landscape, consequentialism denouncing rights and demanding that we always protect the weightiest legitimate interest remains an influential moral theory. This paper does not aim to settle the debate between consequentialists and rights advocates. Its unique contribution is to show that if one is committed to rights as constituting people's external freedom, one should acknowledge the moral necessity of legitimate states and the exclusionary power of their legitimate directives: they enable rights to perform their supposed moral function.Footnote ⁵⁹

To conclude, False Conviction, or the tremendous power of legitimate but unjust directives in general, attests to the solemnity of the people's right to collective self-governance through the state. It reminds us that being united as a people under the rule of law is a deadly serious enterprise. The flip side of the people's right to collective self-governance is each citizen's moral obligation to ensure the justice of our collective actions. Our deep discomfort with legitimate but flawed directives should spur us not to reject them but to duly correct them in pursuing a more perfect union.