ABSTRACT
The importance of democracy is typically understood against the background of reasonable disagreement. This chapter argues that democratic legitimacy is grounded in democracy's relationship with distributive fairness. More specifically, it argues that making political decisions via a procedure that grants all citizens an equal say over the use of state power is a basic, uncontroversial requirement of distributive fairness, and that distributive fairness is thus an appropriate basis upon which to understand democracy's ability to resolve the problem of reasonable disagreement. In order for an understanding of the content of democratic justification to be plausible, it is necessary that the justification given in support of that understanding be free of reasonable disagreement. The fairness of democratic procedure is certainly a matter of degree, but it is a mistake to think that legitimacy, because it supervenes upon fairness, is therefore also a matter of degree.
