Legitimate but unreasonable

Nabil Fahmy, dean of the school of public affairs at American University in Cairo, said of students' demands to ouster Mubarak-affiliated school officials, that they were "legitimate, but ... not reasonable."  One might think that legitimate demands are demands that ought to be satisfied.  One might also think that only demands that pass the bar of reason ought to be satisfied.  Curious.  So what do we do?  How do we weigh these "competing values?"

Perhaps legitimate demands ought to be satisfied, but people have a duty to be reasonable?  I leave the status of the "ought" purposely ambiguous--i.e., whether moral, prudential, or other.  Think of those everyday situations when people make understandable but not entirely reasonable demands.  Isn't (for example) monogamous marriage itself an understandable if not entirely reasonable demand?  Less polemically, don't we often, in states of intense emotion, make understandable but not entirely reasonable demands?  Do emotion-based claims have an intrinsic legitimacy?  Does it make a difference whether we use the word "emotion" or the word "passion"?  I think it does.

Comments

  1. skholiastMarch 31, 2011 at 12:53 PM

    "Understandable" is not the same as "legitimate," though. Often enough we take some action in the heat of an argument, and later reproach ourselves for it; our friends may offer some consolation -- "after all, you're human." This is a reading of the action as understandable even if not reasonable. But to say my demand is legitimate but not reasonable is of a different order, and seems to me to imagine some other frame of reference. Legitimate according to what code? I can easily imagine something being legal but not reasonable, or prudent, or courageous, etc., but not reasonable, for instance. But these terms seem "thicker," if I may put it that way; they tell you more about what context or canon is being used to evaluate the question. "Legitimate" does not do this.

    As to the deeper question you ask, hasn't liberalism agreed since Isaiah Berlin (or indeed since the invention of political rights) that values are not all compatible all the time?

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  2. SocraticFuryMarch 31, 2011 at 2:52 PM

    That's a good point. I was speaking rather loosely. Let me admit straightaway that I don't know what legitimacy means in this context. I don't know that a *demand* can ever be legitimate or illegitimate, as distinguished from a *result*. Someone who wins public office through fraud--that is illegitimate. Someone who demands that, say, the government be overthrown, regardless of whether there are good or bad reasons to overthrow the government--is legitimacy a proper criterion by which to judge demands? I think that is very close to saying that some emotional reactions are legitimate and some are illegitimate (e.g., How can you find that acceptable? or, How can you like that person? etc.). And that strikes me as highly suspect. Even as I myself must confess to having had those same reactions. This obviously leads down the self-referentiality path.

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  3. NJLApril 2, 2011 at 6:42 PM

    Is this an argument about the incommensurable, or the political? Legitimate is technical; reasonable as prudent? So the questions asks a code-switching between two ways of being, one that permits questions only in a narrow, potential sense and one that demands the hard work of context and contingency? Or is the distinction mere a way around any inconvenient or challenging action at all?

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    Replies
    1. SocraticFuryApril 3, 2012 at 11:44 PM

      Neil, somehow I missed your response. So, I think you're right to read "reasonable" as "prudent" or "practical." So "legitimate" would then mean, what, "right in principle"? So, if my initial intuition is not altogether off the mark, and legitimate demands are demands that ought (in some as yet undetermined sense of the word) to be satisfied, then perhaps we can say that legitimate but unreasonable demands are demands that would ideally be satisfied but for contingent historical reasons, cannot or ought not to be. So, in this specific context, if justice consists in "giving to each what is deserved", then perhaps all the officials affiliated with the old regime ought to be purged, but that would incapacitate the educational system. Taking the broad view, one can say that giving the officials what they deserve deprives many more of what they deserve: a functioning educational system. And that possibility may contain a fundamental political lesson for us re the nature (that is to say, the limits) of justice.

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