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    Carmelics

    A reasoning platform. Break down any belief into clear reasons, explore both sides, and weigh the evidence honestly.

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The legislator is Rousseau's attempted solution to the problem of founding a legitimate state with good laws.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.The legislator's authority depends on extra-rational persuasion, invoking divine sanction to bypass citizens' rational consent.
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    • 2.A founding process that circumvents rational deliberation cannot itself be legitimate by Rousseau's own standard of the general will.
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    • 3.Therefore, the legislator introduces a performative contradiction at the heart of Rousseau's theory of legitimate founding.
      ?

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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Kant argued that legitimate political authority must be grounded in principles all rational agents could autonomously endorse, not in historically contingent acts of a founding genius.
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    • 2.Rousseau's legislator exerts a paternalistic, pre-political shaping of the very wills whose consent is supposed to legitimate the state.
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    • 3.A process that manufactures the civic identity needed to validate its own outcome cannot provide the independent foundation that legitimacy requires.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.The legislator inspires a sense of collective identity in new citizens.
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    • 2.This collective identity allows citizens to identify with the whole and support legislation that will transform them and their children into good citizens.
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    Strongest counterpoint
    Explore the most compelling reason on the other side.