About

Jonathan Quong is a Professor of Philosophy and Law at USC Dornsife. He received his D.Phil from Nuffield College, Oxford in 2004, and previously taught at the University of Manchester from 2003 to 2013. His research specialties include moral and political philosophy. Quong has held visiting positions at the Australian National University, Princeton University, and Tulane University. He is an associate editor for the journals Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs, as well as Ethics, and has served as associate editor for Philosophy & Public Affairs for over eight years. His academic work includes numerous publications, such as books, book chapters, encyclopedia articles, and journal articles, focusing on topics within political and moral philosophy.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Epistemology
• Law
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Criminology

Selected publications

• Public Reason and Political Legitimacy

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2026-04-22

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  Abstract Public reason is widely understood as an account of political legitimacy. But despite this widely held view, the relationship between public reason and political legitimacy is not well understood. Some present public reason as the sole necessary and sufficient condition for exercises of political power to qualify as legitimate. But skeptics of public reason argue that it represents neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition on legitimate exercises of political power. In response, some defend a more modest picture of public reason’s role: it is presented as a mere desideratum in a wider account of political morality. This chapter defends a different view. On this alternate picture, political legitimacy is typically grounded in a natural duty of justice. But principles of justice cannot perform their role of providing a fair set of rules to adjudicate disputes and disagreements unless they are constrained by a public reason requirement. Public reason is thus a constituent part of a natural duty-based conception of political legitimacy.

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• Political Philosophy

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2026-03-03

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• Political Philosophy

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2025-12-04

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  How to understand a long-standing puzzle in political philosophy: the relationship between justice and legitimacy Can laws be unjust and yet remain, in some sense, morally legitimate? In this book, Jonathan Quong considers central issues in political philosophy through the lens of this single question. He explores and evaluates recent influential work on this topic and then proposes a novel approach of his own. The puzzle at the heart of his account is the phenomenon of legitimate injustice—laws and policies that are substantively unjust yet may be legitimately imposed by government officials. How can such laws be legitimate if, as some have argued, justice is the first virtue of social institutions? Quong analyzes the work of those who deny that injustice committed by states can be legitimate simply by virtue of its democratic or procedural pedigree; the Kantian account of legitimate institutions and justice; instrumental approaches to political legitimacy; and the recent wave of work in democratic theory focused on its egalitarian character. Arguing that these analyses do not offer an adequate solution to the puzzle and that there are compelling reasons to revise or reject them, Quong lays out his view and explains the implications for more general theories of political morality. He argues that we can explain legitimate injustice by appeal to distributive justice. If political disagreement is inevitable, then unjust legislation is largely unavoidable; it constitutes a burden that must be distributed according to just principles. Quong’s novel and illuminating framework offers a unique introduction to crucial questions in political philosophy.

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• :<i>Justice by Means of Democracy</i>

  Ethics · 2025-03-17

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• Paternalism, Disagreement, and Groups

  2025-04-02 · 2 citations

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  Abstract Some claim that paternalism necessarily involves attempting to benefit someone against their expressed or assumed preferences, or against their will. More strongly, Jonathan Parry has argued that we wrong someone whenever we justify an act by appeal to the benefits the act delivers to a person who competently refuses those benefits. On this view, we act paternalistically when we fail to treat a competent person’s own views about their good as providing something like an exclusionary reason to disregard their well-being if that’s what they have directed us to do. This chapter argues that this view is false: there are many cases where we do not wrong someone by benefitting them against their competent wishes. This is because paternalism’s distinctive wrongness involves the paternalizer acting on the basis of a negative judgment about the paternalizee. However, benefitting someone against their wishes need not involve this kind of negative judgment. The author argues that this alternative construal of paternalism has significant practical implications for acts that involve benefits to groups, including a range of cases involving public policies.

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• Freedom, fairness, and sufficiency in Tahzib’s perfectionist theory of justice

  Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy · 2024-11-04

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• Rights

  2024-10-10

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  Appeals to rights are pervasive in moral, political, and legal debates, yet there is no clear consensus on what rights are and how they work. Do all rights have the same underlying function? Should a theory of rights be conceptual or normative? Can rights conflict with each other? Can rights conflict?

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  Philosophy &amp Public Affairs · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

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• Debate: Legitimate injustice: A response to Wellman

  Journal of Political Philosophy · 2023-03-15 · 12 citations

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  In his article, “The Space between Justice and Legitimacy”, Kit Wellman offers a novel account of the relationship between political philosophy's two central concepts.1 He argues that states can be legitimate yet impose many unjust laws and policies. This is true, he suggests, because political legitimacy should be understood as a claim about wide proportionality.2 Just as a country's war can be widely proportionate overall, and yet contain many instances of injustice, states can be proportionate (that is, legitimate) overall, yet contain a fair amount of injustice. But although Wellman thinks legitimate injustice is, in this sense, a real and pervasive phenomenon, he goes on to argue that legitimacy doesn't have much practical relevance with regard to unjust laws and policies. It doesn't make it permissible to impose and enforce unjust laws, nor does it generate an obligation to comply with unjust laws. Like Wellman, I think legitimate injustice is real and pervasive. But I don't share his view of this phenomenon and, as a result, I also don't agree with him about the practical implications of legitimate injustice. Contra Wellman, I think state officials can act permissibly when they enforce unjust but legitimate law, and I think they have claim rights against being interfered with when they do so. Before we begin, it will help to clarify what's at stake in labeling a state legitimate. There are many competing conceptions of political legitimacy in the literature, but, as Wellman says, “virtually everyone agrees that legitimacy at least entitles a state to coerce its constituents”.3 Following Wellman, I will assume this is, at a minimum, what's at stake in determining whether a state is legitimate. Other things being equal, a legitimate political authority is presumptively permitted to coerce its constituents in at least some ways that illegitimate authorities are not permitted to do. Wellman believes legitimate states can act unjustly, and he defends this view by appeal to a particular notion of proportionality. Just as it can be morally permissible to launch a war even when we can foresee that some of our troops will commit unjust crimes during its course, a state can be legitimate even though we know it sometimes commits injustice. In both cases, we weigh the good things that will be achieved if we proceed against all the harms or costs that will be caused. Provided the goods are sufficiently great to outweigh the harms or costs, the proposed course of action or the institution can be defended on the basis that the benefits are proportionate relative to the costs.4 As Wellman puts it, “Because states perform such incredibly valuable functions … they are worth at least some moral costs”.5 This is, on Wellman's view, simply what it is for a state to be legitimate. When the benefits the state provides are proportionate relative to the costs (including the injustices the state commits), the state is morally legitimate. This is an innovative way of thinking about the relationship between justice and political legitimacy. But I do not think it can be correct. In the ethics of self-defense and war, the standard way to determine whether some act is proportionate is to weigh the costs and benefits that will be caused by our action against the alternative of doing nothing.6 Suppose the only way to defend one innocent person from having her legs unjustly broken is by throwing a grenade that will kill two innocent bystanders. The act of throwing the grenade is not proportionate, because the costs of doing so (two innocent people are killed) are much worse than the alternative of doing nothing (one innocent person's legs get broken). If, however, these costs were reversed—if doing nothing meant two innocent people get killed, whereas throwing the grenade meant only one innocent person's legs get broken—then we might conclude throwing the grenade is proportionate. If we are to use wide proportionality to assess a state's legitimacy, we need to engage in a similar comparison. The difficulty, however, is that the state is unlike a harmful act that we contemplate performing, and so it's less clear what it might mean to ask, “are the costs created by the state proportionate relative to the alternative of doing nothing?”. How should we understand the benchmark of “doing nothing”? To see why I remain convinced that the gap between justice and legitimacy exists, let us return to the contrast between a slave-owner who forces slaves to build a pyramid and the prime minister of Norway. If I were the slave-owner, there is no question that I would be morally required to immediately free all of my slaves, even if there is no other way for me to build the pyramid. If I were the prime minister of Norway with the extraordinary power to unilaterally dismantle this government, however, I would not feel obligated to do so.7 Dismantle. A state is proportionate, and thus legitimate, when we would not be morally required to dismantle the government in order to prevent or halt the injustices the state commits. But this doesn't look like a good test. First, it's not clear what we are supposed to imagine occurs if the government or the state is dismantled. Maybe we should consider what would realistically occur in this particular country if its government or state apparatus suddenly ceased to exist. In many cases, what would occur might be terrible. In some places, civil war or ethnic cleansing might be the consequence of suddenly dismantling a government. In these cases, we would not be morally required to disband the government even if it were very, very bad. Even a brutal authoritarian regime might be preferable to civil war or ethnic cleansing, but surely that does not make a brutal authoritarian regime morally legitimate; it does not give that regime the moral permission to coerce its citizens to do things that they are not independently required to do. A regime is not morally legitimate merely because it is preferable to some of the worst conditions on earth.8 One problem with trying to conceptualize political legitimacy as a species of proportionality is that we almost never face a binary choice between our current political institutions as they are or else the total absence of those political institutions. Consider the Southern United States during the Jim Crow era. If the only two options were (1) retain the existing racist laws and institutions, or (2) a descent into an extremely dangerous form of anarchy, it's at least possible that option (1) might be widely proportionate relative to the benchmark of (2). But, of course, those weren't the only two options. Radically reforming the existing laws and institutions to make them less racist and unjust was a feasible option, and the very fact that it was a feasible option is surely part of the explanation as to why the racist political institutions might not have been morally legitimate. the appropriate baseline for testing proportionality must be the feasible alternatives rather than simply doing nothing at all. Just as a military intervention would not be proportionate if there were an equally effective and less costly diplomatic option available, a brutal dictator cannot justify the injustices of her regime if a more just political arrangement is within reach.9 But Wellman's statement here is puzzling for two reasons. First, this isn't how proportionality has standardly been conceptualized in the ethics of self-defense and war. As I've already explained, proportionality judgments are typically made by comparing a given act of harm-imposition relative to the benchmark of doing nothing. The entire set of feasible alternatives, however, is relevant with regard to a different moral judgment, namely, necessity. Philosophers working on self-defense and war typically claim that for an instance of harm-imposition to be morally permissible it must meet the condition of being necessary. Although there is a great deal of disagreement about how exactly to conceptualize the necessity condition, there is widespread agreement that judgments of necessity are made by comparing the potential act of harm-imposition to all the feasible alternatives.10 Killing a wrongful aggressor, for example, is not necessary if one of the defender's feasible alternatives is painlessly rendering the aggressor unconscious. Thus, although it's a matter of some dispute, on the most widely accepted picture, wide proportionality and necessity are two separate constraints on the permissible use of force. To be morally permissible, it's generally believed a harmful act must, among other things, satisfy both these constraints. All Alternatives. A state is proportionate, and thus legitimate, only when the net balance of benefits and costs it currently provides is proportionate relative to every feasible alternative. This test isn't helpful if we seek to explain how any existing state could ever be legitimate. It's surely true that every existing state has at least some unjust laws or unjust institutions which could be reformed to eliminate the injustice without becoming more unjust in other ways. It's thus true that, for every existing state, the status quo is not proportionate relative to a feasible alternative, and thus every existing state is illegitimate. The problem is even more stark, since this view has the implication that even hypothetical states that are far more just than any existing state would still be illegitimate so long as they contain even a single unjust law or institution that could feasibly be reformed. I think it's clear that these are not the conclusions Wellman seeks to defend. Wellman might reply that it's not feasible for a state to be entirely devoid of unjust laws or institutions; realistically, our best efforts to design and sustain political institutions will always contain some unjust features. But this reply involves shifting from the standard of “feasible” to the standard of “probable” or “likely”. Although the term feasible is contested,11 I suspect it's most commonly used to refer to whether achieving a given outcome is possible given our resources and technological limitations. In this sense, changing the laws regulating gun ownership in the US is clearly feasible. Of course, it is extremely unlikely that robust gun control legislation will be enacted in the US for reasons of ideology and political self-interest. Suppose, then, we take All Alternatives to refer only to those alternatives that are sufficiently likely to obtain. This would then vastly lower the bar for legitimacy. Even highly unjust states can be legitimate so long as it is sufficiently unlikely that they will become more just. The problem with this interpretation, however, is fairly obvious. It's often the case that laws or institutions are unlikely to be reformed because those who hold power don't want to reform them. It might, for example, be very unlikely that we can reform the unjust institutions in a country because the country is ruled by a tyrant who refuses to relinquish power and rules by violently suppressing dissent. On this interpretation, the tyrant can render his rule legitimate by forming a settled disposition to hang on to power through unjust means. I take this result to be a reductio of the proposed interpretation of the proportionality test. In sum, I don't see how the idea of wide proportionality can be made to work as an account of political legitimacy. One test for proportionality that Wellman seems to suggest—Dismantle—is far too weak a standard. It's too weak, in part, because it ignores the fact that we never face a binary choice between the status quo and dismantling the state. We always have many other feasible alternatives, which include reforming the unjust laws and institutions of our state. But the other test that Wellman floats—All Alternatives—creates either an unacceptably high standard or an unacceptably low one. If we focus on all feasible alternatives, then the bar for legitimacy is far too high—no existing state meets it and no hypothetical state with even a single unjust law meets it. But if we focus on likely or probable alternatives, then the bar is too low: very bad actors can render themselves legitimate by refusing to meet minimal moral standards they could meet if they wanted to. In each case Wellman argues that the answer is “no”. So, although legitimate states act unjustly, the fact that these injustices are perpetrated by legitimate states doesn't have many interesting practical consequences for the unjust laws the state attempts to impose. The state's legitimacy doesn't give it a special permission to act unjustly, it doesn't ground a duty to obey unjust laws, and it doesn't give the state a protected right to act unjustly. I disagree with Wellman on all three questions, but here I will focus only on the first. I think we should expect there to be a great deal of reasonable disagreement about justice. By that I mean that smart, sensible people, thinking clearly, who aren't driven by self-interest or prejudice, and who are committed to trying to treat others fairly, can and will disagree about many matters of justice, including difficult questions such as “What rates of income tax are required as a matter of justice?” or “Should freedom of expression extend to protect those who deny the Holocaust in order to promote anti-Semitism?”. But the fact that such people will disagree about the requirements of justice doesn't imply that there are no correct answers to these questions or that the answers are indeterminate—there may sometimes be correct answers in cases of reasonable disagreement. I also think that in cases of reasonable disagreement about what justice requires, a legitimate state should have some sort of democratic process to resolve the reasonable disagreement. Indeed, I think people have a claim of justice to an equal (and positive) say in resolving reasonable disagreements about justice. To disregard democratic decisions whenever one thinks they are unjust is a refusal to participate on equal terms in the political process with other reasonable people. To be clear: I'm not suggesting that unreasonable views about justice—those that are, in some sense, beyond the pale, such as the violations of core liberal rights and freedoms—have a claim to be implemented if selected by a democratic process. I'm only suggesting that some disagreements about justice are reasonable—all the competing views represent plausible interpretations of what justice requires—and that in disagreements of this type, there is a claim of justice to have an egalitarian democratic process for resolving the disagreements. Obviously, what I've just said is only the briefest sketch, and many details need to be filled in. But here is one way in which the view that I have sketched is inconsistent with Wellman's answers to the three questions above, in particular the first question: do legitimate states act permissibly when they act unjustly? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the correct theory of justice includes a very expansive principle of free speech, one that provides a protected claim right against interference to people who engage in hate speech—for example, Nazis who wish to march and chant anti-Semitic slurs in Jewish neighborhoods. But the issue is one over which reasonable people disagree, and after a fair democratic process, our political community enacts a law that prohibits certain forms of hate speech, including the Nazis' anti-Semitic march. I think justice requires giving people equal opportunity to exercise political power in cases of reasonable disagreement. If the government doesn't do what it has been directed to do by a fair democratic process (within the boundaries of the reasonable), it will be acting unjustly—failing to respect what justice requires regarding the distribution of political power. So if state officials decline to enforce the prohibition against the Nazis' march, they will be acting unjustly. However, if the state officials enforce the democratically enacted law prohibiting the march, they act contrary to the principle of free speech, another requirement of justice. So the state will act unjustly whatever it does. If we assume that at least one option from an agent's feasible set must be permissible, then it must be possible for the state to act permissibly and yet unjustly. P5. A fair democratic process sometimes results in the selection of a policy that is reasonable but substantively unjust. Therefore, I'm not sure which premises of this argument Wellman would reject. He might reject P1, but denying it is implausible. It's not credible to suppose that all our disagreements about justice are driven by self-interest, prejudice, or irrationality. I also do not think it is plausible to suppose, as some contemporary Kantians do, that almost all substantive issues of social or distributive justice are largely indeterminate.14 I am sure that many specific questions about the requirements of justice are indeterminate, but this fact is perfectly consistent with P1. P1 makes only the very modest claim that reasonable disagreement is possible even when there are answers about the requirements of justice. I that can do the work we would of it because it is to see how even and if on a course of action can its If it is for me to use slaves to build for how does it become any more permissible to do so after a democratic if the but unreasonable of the do not the moral status of a given course of why think that the of the have this moral power as long as the are not It me as more to conclude that the has made a reasonable than to suppose that the not unreasonable the moral status of a course of This statement could be as a of though Wellman is not so we should In one sense, Wellman is surely correct. The fact that reasonable people disagree about whether is permissible surely does on its the status of But the argument that I've given doesn't from the fact of disagreement to it that reasonable disagreements about justice as a matter of justice, some fair democratic of It then from this claim to a claim about the of injustice, the that at least one option from an agent's set must be argument thus provides the answer to Wellman's question: the of the might have this moral power because justice requires a democratic of some of our reasonable disagreements. I that it on a of the moral of justice. In my view, justice in both its and substantive provides to be rather than competing to be … even if an egalitarian argument that each of us has a right to democratic it at most that acting includes an but this is very different from that justice is a which sometimes or the moral to respect In this Wellman that egalitarian sometimes fact that there is valuable about democratic does not on its to that the of the right to democratic to substantively unjust But the idea that of justice as is what when two of justice of the view argue that this is of justice, by very can never into But this is very difficult to it is at with This view requires either that the of justice be extremely so as to eliminate the of or else a of about justice, such that whenever we have an of we must conclude that in those specific only one of the to be a claim of justice. I think there are reasons to reject both of these though I the to those It's also worth that Wellman doesn't give us any reasons to that of justice might sometimes just the But if we the view that of justice can sometimes then we can it's worth how and it would be to deny To deny would mean that there need be nothing unjust about or suppressing other doing so is a way of that only just are seems if has been is not a of that in some an will act of what does. this is beyond the of this article, so simply say that, with many I think is there must be a permissible option in an agent's set of does not if P1 is so I disagree with I think a legitimate state and its officials can sometimes act permissibly even though they act unjustly. I also disagree with Wellman about the and questions, but I those disagreements The phenomenon of legitimate injustice is and I share the that Wellman about the of some work in political to an account of this But we I have understand legitimate injustice as an instance of harms that are proportionate in of all the good consequences that a state We should understand legitimate injustice as that as a result of the and of justice There are of justice that to the distribution of political power in cases of reasonable disagreement. When these with other substantive of justice, the phenomenon of legitimate injustice This is in such the state and its officials cannot injustice. This Wellman, has practical implications for permissible in On my view, unlike the moral legitimacy of a law does real practical can render permissible that would be and it can explain why officials have claim rights against interference even in some cases they to of justice. I've said here an argument for the view that a principle of justice the distribution of political power should ever take over more substantive of justice. I do think this view is but this isn't the to that and I am very to Kit Wellman, and an There are no potential of relevant to this All relevant are in the The ethics was not for this

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  Philosophy &amp Public Affairs · 2023-10-01

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Frequent coauthors

• Andrew Williams

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• Joanna Mary Firth

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• Rebecca Stone

  Johns Hopkins Medicine

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