ABSTRACT
My account of the political entails, as we have seen, that all political action requires justification. In principle, that is. In practice, if we want it to square with any intuitions we have about politics, the requirement gets served
with a list o f conditionals: An agent should be able to justify an action or a position in a suitable setting, and that suitable setting might be different from the context o f the action. I needn’t justify myself to a rabid throng o f antiabortion protesters when I’m defending a Planned Parenthood clinic, but if I can’t, in some less volatile situation, offer any good reasons for my action, my action is unintelligible. And I don’t have to tell the election officials why I want to vote for Barney Frank, but if I don’t have any reasons for my choice, my voting makes a mockery of electoral politics. W hen and how a justification ought to be offered depends on all sorts o f considerations. Some of them are strategic, but there are also substantively normative ones. Also, as Montesquieu’s theory reminds us, our human foibles often make it necessary to ensure the proper justificatory contexts by institutional solutions. The secrecy o f the ballot, for example, exists to ensure that citizens can in fact make their choices for good reasons and to prevent illegitimate factors from entering the process.
