Will Wilkinson takes anarchist Crispin Sartwell over the proposition that an illegitimate state is therefore a morally indefensible state:
The point is: Showing that the state is not legitimate does not deliver anarchy because "If the state is not legitimate, then it is not morally defensible" is a false premise. The existence of a moral justification, in terms of flourishing, say, doesn't entail final moral justification, since there is no fact of the matter about the final authoritative moral vocabulary.
Read the whole thing.
Hat-tip: Marginal Revolution
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I haven't read Sartwell's book, so I don't know quite how he's using the notion of legitimacy. In it's broadest sense, though, legitimacy just amounts to rational justifiability. Problem is that we probably wouldn't all agree on what counts as a rational justification. But suppose the intuition behind the enlightenment was actually sound, and rationality represents an objective standard. Then I think we'd have to acknowledge the validity of Sartwell's inference from illegitimacy to moral indefensibility. Morality, after all, is a rational enterprise, one concerned with the soundness of the reasons we adduce for various actions.
At least that's how things look to this anarchist.