Responsive Government and Duties of Conscience

Many political philosophers have defended the importance of enabling citizens to participate in law-making. Some argue that widespread citizen participation makes the law making process more likely to produce just law.1 Others argue that government must enable citizens to participate in law-making for law to be legitimate or to have legitimate authority.2 Still others argue that government must give citizens an equal share of political power in order to express equal respect for them.3 I will not dispute any of these arguments, but I believe they need to be supplemented, in part because they do not fully capture the reasons that enabling citizen participation matters morally, in part because they do not completely explain what democratic governments owe to citizens with minority political views. I claim that citizens need genuine opportunities to participate in law-making for another reason: they need to be able to satisfy individual duties of conscience.