Simmons on Justifying the State

This essay explores A. John Simmons’s distinction between justification and legitimacy. While political philosophy historically conflated these terms, Simmons argues they are best understood as independent normative concepts. Justification serves an evaluative function, measuring an institution’s overall goodness, moral permissibility, and capacity to provide essential social goods like security and stable rules. Legitimacy, conversely, is transactional and historical, tracking a state’s morally acquired complex rights to legislate, enforce laws, and demand compliance through explicit, voluntary consent. Upon decoupling these concepts, Simmons defends a posteriori philosophical anarchism, asserting that while a legitimate state is theoretically possible, no existing state has successfully secured the required consent from its citizenry. Consequently, existing states are illegitimate but can still be justified by the beneficial social bargain they provide. A central contribution of this essay is the rejection of the “prioritarian interpretation,” which wrongly assumes legitimacy always takes lexical priority over justification in Simmons’s thought. Instead, this paper advocates for a “contextualist interpretation,” showing that how we navigate trade-offs between a state’s rightfulness and its goodness depends on the situation. Finally, the essay examines the distinction between justifying an institution and justifying its specific acts, demonstrating that institutional quality does not dictate the moral standing of particular state actions.