Abstract

The central question of this dissertation is "what must a theory of political legitimacy for a morally pluralist society look like?" The key building blocks of the proposed answer are a morally cognitivist approach to moral belief; prima facie unconstrained moral pluralism; a "broad interpretation" of deliberation ; and the complex moral economy of a decision to participate in moral deliberation. It is argued that internally consistent moral theories that are compatible with moral cognitivism, the possibility of moral pluralism, and a robust belief in being "right" face critical challenges that culminate in the existence of a fundamental ambiguity in relation to the interpretation of an empirical disagreement. The proposed approach to addressing these challenges is a specie of epistemic proceduralism. However, rather than relying for its epistemic claim on the force of the Condorcet Jury Theorem, it advances an alternative "error-elimination" model of political justification. The independent plausibility of this model relies on the existence of two distinct kinds of moral errors that could be incurred in a cognitivist political justification: those avoidable through deliberation and those that are unaffected by it. The epistemic force of the model is, inter alia, in its sanctioning of political institutions that affect the incentives for individual deliberative participation and, hence, the minimization of avoidable errors