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Williams forandAgainst. Politics asaConstitutively Normative
Practice
LilianBermejo‑Luque1
Accepted: 26 June 2024
© The Author(s) 2024
Abstract
The main goal of this paper is to show that politics constitutes a normative domain of its own. To this, a concept of political
value that explains why the politically good provides reasons for actions is indispensable. I shape this concept by adopting the
framework of political minimalism and developing one of its central tenets, namely, that politics, as a constitutively normative
practice, specifies objective standards for evaluating political phenomena. I characterize the notion of political value in these
terms to offer a non-moralist foundation for political normativity. In this endeavor, the work of Bernard Williams plays two
opposing roles: while his metapolitical ideas exemplify the shortcomings of substantialist accounts of political normativity,
his criticism of the morality system and his conception of practical rationality as all-things-considered practical delibera-
tion are fundamental, to the point that the conception of political normativity endorsed here can be seen as an extension of
Williams’ ideas on normativity in general. Finally, I draw some consequences from this account of political minimalism to
show that this conception of political normativity can hardly be considered a variety of political realism.
Keywords Bernard Williams· Political normativity· Political realism· Political moralism· Political minimalism·
Constitutively normative practice
1 Introduction: Political Axiology
andPolitical Deontology
There are two ways to approach the study of political norma-
tivity. From a deontic1 perspective, the question is whether
we can have reasons and obligations specific to the political
sphere. If we anticipate that this is so, the challenge becomes
to explain why these reasons and obligations cannot be
derived from other types of reasons or obligations -such as
moral ones. Alternatively, from an axiological perspective,
the question is whether politics can establish its own stand-
ards of “goodness” or “correctness”, and if the answer is
yes, then the challenge becomes justifying specific criteria
for what makes political decisions, norms, regimes, ideolo-
gies, etc. good or bad, correct or incorrect, from a strictly
political point of view.
In principle, a robust account of political normativity
should integrate these two perspectives, articulating its
answers to both types of questions. In particular, it should
explain how adequately responding to our political reasons
leads to the politically good, and why what is politically
good determines what we should do. Such articulation
should be available whether we answer the above questions
positively (thereof assuming that politics constitutes a nor-
mative domain of its own) or negatively.
Although the axiological and the deontic perspectives
appear intertwined in early metapolitical reflections,2 from
Kant onwards the philosophical debate adopted mainly a
deontic perspective, focusing on the nature and foundation
of political obligations—specifically, the obligations of rul-
ers and, especially, of the ruled.
* Lilian Bermejo-Luque
lilianbl@ugr.es
1 Department ofPhilosophy I, University ofGranada,
Granada, Spain
1 In this context, 'deontic' refers to the realm of action guidance,
encompassing obligations, permissions, duties, as well as reasons and
justifications for our actions.
2 For example, when authors like Hobbes (2008, p XII) or (Hume
et al. (2007) assume that showing that a sovereign is legitimate is
enough to show that we have a duty to obey.
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L.Bermejo-Luque
As Bernard Williams (2005) represented this debate in
the political philosophy of his time, the alternatives were
either an enactment model that assumes that political obli-
gation is a form of moral obligation, or a structural model
that accounts for political normativity in terms of the moral
constraints to which political action would be subject. For
its part, political realism challenged such moralist theses,
seeking to show either that the political is orthogonal to
the moral, as radical realists like Geuss (2008) hold, or that
moral normativity underdetermines political normativity, as
Williams himself argued, among others.
In either case, political philosophers have not taken on the
task of integrating deontic and axiological perspectives. In
principle, moralists would be in a good position to carry out
this task. After all, moral value seems to be the only type of
value capable of establishing obligations by itself: that φ is
the only politically good option does not seem to imply that
we must φ. Even if φ is the only rational option, it might
make sense to question whether we must φ (Kolodny 2005;
Raz 2005). In contrast, the agreement within the morality
system (Williams 1985, Chap. 10) is that if φ is the only
morally good option, then we must φ regardless of any other
consideration. Thus, the political moralist could argue that
the politically good determines what to do because, in the
last resort, it brings with it the morally good.
However, despite this advantage, moralist philosophers
have not tackled the integration of the axiological and the
deontic aspects of political normativity. As a matter of fact,
they have paid scant attention to political axiology and the
task of justifying their proposed criteria to define politi-
cal value. This is not surprising. After all, from a moralist
standpoint, the politically good is either identical to the mor-
ally good (enactment model) or aligned with it (structural
model); thus, the supposed self-evidence of the value of the
morally good would render justifications for these criteria
unnecessary–for example, there would be no need to dem-
onstrate that political decisions must be just for them to be
good, but only to explain what makes a political decision
just indeed.
Contrastingly, the idea that we must justify our criteria to
distinguish good from bad politics has been one of the war-
horses of realism against moralism (Jubb and Rossi 2015,
p. 457). Realists strive to characterize a notion of politi-
cal value that avoids relying on normative intuitions, moral
or else. In the case of Bernard Williams, the task revolves
around the definition of legitimacy. However, as I will argue
(Sect.2), realism faces its central challenge in trying to
explain how political value translates into reasons for action.
The main goal of this paper is to provide a framework to
integrate the axiological and deontic perspectives of political
normativity under the assumption that politics constitutes a
normative domain of its own. Specifically, I seek to explain
why what is politically good determines what we should do
and why fulfilling our political obligations leads to politi-
cally valuable outcomes. To this, an alternative to both polit-
ical moralism and realism is needed. In a series of articles
on varied issues in political philosophy (Rodríguez-Alcázar
2017; Rodríguez-Alcázar etal. 2021; Bermejo-Luque and
Rodríguez-Alcázar 2023), this alternative has been named
political minimalism. I will adopt this account of political
normativity and define one of its key notions, i.e., that of
a constitutively normative practice, to carry out this task
(Sect.3).
As it will become apparent, the work of Bernard Wil-
liams will play two opposing roles in this endeavor: while
his metapolitical ideas exemplify the shortcomings of sub-
stantialist accounts of political normativity (Sect.2), his
criticism of the morality system and his conception of practi-
cal rationality as all-things-considered practical deliberation
are fundamental, to the point that the conception of political
normativity endorsed here can be seen as an extension of
Williams’ ideas on normativity in general (Sect.4). Yet, I
will draw some consequences from this account of political
minimalism to show that it cannot be considered a variety
of political realism. Specifically, I will examine the notion
of legitimacy (Sect.5) and the roles of conflict and utopia
within politics (Sect.6)to make this difference apparent.
2 Political Value fromaRealist Point ofView
In his posthumous work, In the Beginning was the Deed,
Williams (2005) employs what I have termed an axiological
approach to political normativity. Particularly, he aims at
specifying a standard to determine political value, which he
defines in terms of legitimacy. Williams derives this stand-
ard from what he identifies as the First Political Question
(FPQ): "the securing of order, protection, safety, trust, and
the conditions of cooperation" (Williams 2005, p. 3).
Yet, Williams adds, to be legitimate, politics must
respond to this question in the right way, that is, by com-
plying with a Basic Legitimation Demand (BLD), which
requires addressing the FPQ in a way that makes sense to
the citizens, and by attending to the Critical Theory Prin-
ciple (CTP), which prescribes that the acquiescence of the
citizens will not be obtained spuriously. These conditions
have an obvious motivation: there are ways of guaranteeing
order, protection, security, etc. that are not politically accept-
able—such as a methodical dictatorship (for the BLD), or a
regime retorting on brainwashing (for the CTP). Williams
admits that the foundation for the BLD and the CTP could
ultimately be moral, but thiswould not lead him to a moralist
view, for he contends that this foundation "does not repre-
sent a morality which is prior to politics" Williams (2005,
p. 5). Thus, in Williams’ account, legitimacy is a value that
stems from politics, not from morality, because the BLD
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Williams forandAgainst. Politics asaConstitutively Normative Practice
and CTP can only be articulated as constraints as long as
we are subject to the normative reality that political practice
brings about.
However, even if we accept that Williams’ notion of polit-
ical value cannot be reduced to morality, it remains unclear
that he can avoid moralism when explaining how political
value, so understood, generates reasons for action. For the
question arises: how does the legitimacy or illegitimacy of
something give us reasons to act one way instead of another?
One might presume that the notion of legitimacy involves
the type of imperative that is also characteristic of the notion
of moral value. This way, ‘legitimate’ would be to politics
what ‘just’ is to morality: that a norm or decision is just/
legitimate would provide a moral/political reason to com-
ply with it simply because that is what moral/political value
amounts to. But this response assumes that the type of link
between value and reasons advocated by the morality sys-
tem–which Williams himself criticized in Ethics and the
Limits of Philosophy (1985)—is correct, and this is far from
obvious. Even if it were, why should we think that it is also
the type of link between value and reason that political nor-
mativity provides (Cross, 2024)? In the morality system,
the notion of moral value is particularly tuned to imply
such a link because it is meant to be irreducible to any-
thing else: the morallygood is basically what we have most
reason to pursue. But Williams’ aim is precisely to offer a
definition–i.e., a standard—of political value, and this leaves
his account exposed to a version of Moore's open question
argument: for it seems to make perfect sense to question
whether the fact that a proposal is legitimate (in the sense
of fulfilling the FPQ, the BLD and the CT) is a reason to
accept itor promote it.
Realist thinkers have offered diverse solutions to this
kind of difficulty, drawing on various strands of realism.
For example, Cross (2022) tried to defend an instrumental
conception of political value by suggesting a different foun-
dation for both the BLD and the CTP. As Cross observes,
these requirements are instrumental to adequately respond to
the FPQ in the long term: not fulfilling these conditions is a
threat to political stability. From this point of view, political
value (i.e., legitimacy), understood as a means of guarantee-
ing a response to the FPQ in the long term, would provide
instrumental reasons for action because the type of outcome
that accompanies good politics (i.e., stability) is something
that we usually long for.
However, instrumentalismprovides a weak foundation
for political normativity, for it makesreasons to pursue the
politically good dependent on reasons to pursue the things
that the politically good delivers. This ultimately under-
mines the idea of politics being normative of its own.
Burelli (2022) echoes this difficulty and develops a func-
tionalist conception of political value that is meant to avoid
instrumentalism. To it, he relies on an etiological notion of
function, defined in terms of that feature or behavior which
1) objects of a class tend to have or display, and 2) is caus-
ally determinant for their existence. Thus, the etiological
functions of hearts or microwaves would be, respectively,
to pump blood and heat food since 1) this is what hearts and
microwaves typically do and 2) is causally relevant to their
existence. Thus, although hearts also make a characteristic
sound, this would not be their function because that sound
is not causally determinant for their existence. According to
Burelli's etiological account, the function of politics would
be to "secure binding collective decisions" (Burelli 2022, p.
629) and this would provide us with a standard–at least, a
partial one (Burelli 2023)–for evaluating certain phenomena
from a political point of view.
In principle, it seems difficult to make sense of this etio-
logical notion of function as normative. For example, we
humans tend to search for food, and this is causally relevant
for our existence, but it seems weird to say that our func-
tion is searching for food. Yet, Burelli might reply that even
though etiological functions can be worthless per se, the
notion can be used to provide objective standards to assess
members of functional classes. However, it is also difficult to
see how an account of value in these terms could imply con-
sequences for action. The fact that we can tell good members
of a functional class from bad ones does not explain why we
have reasons to promote the good ones, or the whole class
for that matter. As Erman and Möller (2023) have pointed
out, if we define political value in terms of the minimal polit-
ical function that Burelli proposes, it is not clear that politi-
cal value provides political reasons: why should we submit
to the norms of a group or contribute to promoting binding
collective decisions? The truth is that there are groups of all
kinds, and some of them are very undesirable, even from a
strictly political point of view.
Alternatively, we could propose a more clearly valuable
function as a criterion for distinguishing good from bad poli-
tics. After all, microwaves not only tend to heat food, but
also to do so faster than stoves, to have reasonable energy
consumption, to be small, compact, easy to install, easy to
use, relatively inexpensive, and so forth. These features are
also causally effective for their existence; therefore, we could
say that they constitute the function of microwaves and the
standard for evaluating them. However, if we define the
value of microwaves in this way, it becomes less obvious that
we are articulating a notion of microwave goodness rather
than simply listing things we usually value in a microwave.
In the case of artifacts like politics, their ability to achieve
things we generally desire (e.g., certain moral or material
ends) might give us reason to pursue “good” politics instead
of bad politics. But this response just reintroduces the chal-
lenges associated with instrumentalism.
Other realist approaches, of an institutionalist nature,
such as those of Sangiovanni (2008) or Jubb (2015), try
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L.Bermejo-Luque
to account for the relationship between political value and
political reasons by inverting the order of explanation.
Social and political institutions fundamentally alter
the relations in which people stand, and hence the
first principles of justice that are appropriate for them.
(Sangiovanni 2008, p. 138)
Basically, the institutionalist holds that political value
(understood either as justice or as legitimacy3) exists only
because we have the political obligations that our current
institutions and political practices consist of. Political cor-
rectness or goodness would be the property that arises from
meeting such obligations. From this point of view, politics
would be normative in the same way that, for example, com-
munication is normative for some pragmatists, that is, as a
result of the deontic reality that the corresponding institu-
tions and practices create.
However, the difficulty for institutionalism arises when
trying to specify what kind of reasons we can have to jus-
tify our specific political institutions and practices and the
norms that constitute them. For if we say that these reasons
are political, we are begging the question; and if we say that
they are not political, then we are placing political norma-
tivity outside politics (Rossi 2012, p. 159). Unfortunately,
the institutionalist cannot attempt a Rortyan response to this
difficulty and contend that there is no need to justify our
political practices because, to paraphrase Brandom (1994,
pp. 625–626), they are "normative all the way down." The
reason is that, unlike what happens with communication and
the conditions of communicative success, we are much too
capable of imagining alternative political institutions and
practices, and we need political reasons to discard some of
them and promote others if we aspire to offer a truly norma-
tive account of politics.
3 How toGive upSubstantialism: The
Notion ofaConstitutively Normative
Practice
As this brief survey is meant to illustrate, for the realist, the
task of explaining political reasons or obligations in terms
of the politically good evinces that their notion of politi-
calvalue is normatively weak. In turn, a realist explanation
of political value in terms of political reasons or obligations
seems vacuous: we can adopt a pragmatist perspective and
say that politics is essentially normative; however, this can
serve to define the political, but not tojustify a recognizably
normative model forpolitics.
In view of these difficulties, one may think that, for the
realist, political deontology and political axiology must be
considered as irreducible aspects of political normativity.
Some realists seem to endorse this view, at least partially,
when they assume that we can meaningfully assess political
phenomena qua political, regardless of whether the politi-
cally good effectively provides reasons for action, let alone
obligations (McQueen 2017; Sleat 2022). Yet, this view
would turn criteria to determine political value into a mere
standard for politics. As we have seen, the problem with
this is that, in general, satisfying a standard does not imply
being valuable: standards may be futile, like the standard for
wearing a bow tie,or even malicious, like mafia’s standard
for threatening competitors. That something is normatively
good or valuable is a prima facie reason to opt for it; in con-
trast,that something meets a certain standard is not a prima
facie reason to opt for it: it is only a reason if we have addi-
tional reasons to meet the standard (Enoch and Brady 2011).
Thus, as Bernard Williams’ critique of the enactment
model suggests, we should assume that, unless a non-moral-
ist notion of political value is able to explain why the politi-
cally good provides reasons for action, political moralism
will be unescapable. To claim that politics is normative in its
own terms, we must show both, that there is a kind of value
that is intrinsically political and that some reasons for action
are political reasons because they instantiate or bring about
the politically good. Basically, the idea is that we have to
characterize the notion of political value in orderto specify
the domain of politics, and we have to explain how political
value constitutes political reasons for actionin order to show
that this domain is effectively normative.
In this and the next sections, I seek to show that a non-
moralist account ofpolitical value can indeed explain why
the politically good provides reasons for action. Yet, to this,
it is essential to abandon the substantialism of realist (and
moralist) proposals. Metapolitical substantialism is the
view that the political value of a decision, policy, ideology,
regime, etc. depends on its ability to achieve some desirable
end, that is, something that deserves to be desired, either
for moral reasons or because it is (predicatively) good in
other sense.4 The problem with substantialism is that, if we
take that such ability determines the identity of a phenom-
enon as political–for example, if we consider that only by
responding to the FPQ while complying with the BLD and
the CTP we are dealing with a political phenomenon—then
political value ceases to be a standard for evaluating pol-
itics: politics becomes the same as good politics and the
3 In contrast to his later critique of institutionalism (Rossi 2019),
Enzo Rossi (2012) previously argued for a variant that took legiti-
macy, not justice, as the grounding value of political normativity.
4 For a thorough and insightful criticism of the notion of predicative
good, see Thompson (2008)
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Williams forandAgainst. Politics asaConstitutively Normative Practice
fact that something lacks political value can mean both that
it is politically flawed and that it is not political at all. In
turn, if we take that having this capacity does not determine
the identity of a phenomenon as political, then the notion
of value that we are characterizing is not that of political
value, but simply that of something that we value for some
(non-political) reason: a knife that does not cut may still
be considereda knife and may be good for spreading but-
ter or simply to be displayed as a model of a knife that is
otherwise useless; in the same way, political decisions that
do not respond to the FPQ while complying with the BLD
and the CTP may still be valued because, for example, they
express the true feelings of some people, or because they are
historically unique. Different achievements may be valuable
from different points of view, and they may provide reasons
to act one way or another if we have reasons to pursue them.
Faced with this dilemma, the question is: is it possible to
establish standards for politics without resorting to achieve-
ments whose value is independent of their strictly political
nature?
In a series of papers (Rodríguez-Alcázar 2017; Rod-
ríguez-Alcázar etal. 2021; Bermejo-Luque and Rodríguez-
Alcázar 2023), a constitutivist account of political norma-
tivity has been proposed as an alternative to both moralism
and realism. This proposal is called “political minimalism”
because, instead of assuming that political normativity
depends on substantive values, ends or norms, it argues that
the normative character of politics is the result of politi-
cal practice itself.5 To develop this idea, politics is char-
acterizedas a constitutively normative practice (CNP).In
Bermejo-Luque (2011, chap. 2) Iintroduced the concept of
aCNP to characterize the notion ofargumentative value,
but without providing a formal definition. In this paper, I
propose the following one:
A type of behavior or disposition Φ is a CNP if and only
if:
(1) Φ has a constitutive goal, in the sense that one counts
as Φ-ing because one counts as intending that goal.
That is, constitutive goals are not something that we
typically intend when we Φ, but something that we
count as intending because we count as Φ-ing. Accord-
ingly, the constitutive goal of playing chess would not
be to checkmate the opponent, but to move the pieces
according to the rules of chess. This is because, even
though checkmating the opponent is the typical goal
thatwe pursue when playing chess, it makes sense to
say that someone is playing chess even if they are try-
ing to let the opponent win. Similarly, the constitutive
goal of believing that p would not be to know that p,
but to < uphold the truth of whether p given that p > .
This is because it is possible to believe that p without
intending to know that p, but it is not possible to believe
that p without intending to uphold the truth of whether
p given that p.
(2) Φ-ing does not entail achieving the constitutive goal
of Φ: For example, since the constitutive goal of bik-
ing is to ride a bike, biking is not a CNP because it is
not possible to bike without completely achieving the
goal of riding a bike. On the other hand, it is possible
to play chess without moving the pieces according to
the rules of chess completely; that is, it is possible to
make mistakes when playing chess, because playing
chess does not amount to following the rules of chess,
but to displaying behavior that is typically conducive to
having the chess pieces moved according to these rules.
(3) The constitutive goal of Φ can only be achieved by
Φ-ing: While believing, playing chess and biking sat-
isfy this condition, purely instrumental activities such
as polishing shoes, mowing the lawn or relaxing the
back do not, because their constitutive goal (which is
to have the shoes polished, the lawn mowed, or the
back relaxed) can be achieved without exhibiting the
corresponding behavior or having the corresponding
disposition.
(4) By Φ-ing, subjects profess to be fulfilling the constitu-
tive goal of Φ: For example, playing chess would not
be a CNP despite meeting conditions 1 to 3, because
(admittedly, in very strange circumstances) it is possible
to be playing chess by moving the pieces in a certain
way without professing to be moving the pieces accord-
ing to the rules of chess. On the other hand, believing
that p would be a CNP because, in addition to fulfilling
conditions 1–3, when believing that p, individuals pro-
fess to hold the truth about whether p given that p.
Unlike characteristic functions or goals, constitutive
goals are not contingent as standards, and unlike constitu-
tive aims or norms, failure to satisfy them does not exclude
identity. Thus, if φ is a token of a constitutively normative
practice Φ, then there is an objective standard for evaluating
it qua Φ: this is a matter of whether or how far φ achieves its
constitutive goal qua Φ.6Regarding the characterization of
5 Some institutionalists also think of politics as a type of practice
(Sangiovanni 2008, 2016). However, in contrast with institutional
realism, political minimalism does not ground regulative norms for
politics on political practice. As pointed out before, that move would
result in constitutive, not regulative, norms, and therefore, it would
be unable to provide standards to distinguish good from bad politics,
but only to distinguish political phenomena from other types of phe-
nomena.
6 We can distinguish between two types of values for CNPs: cor-
rectness and goodness. Correctness applies in cases in which achiev-
ing the practice's constitutive goal allows for no degrees of success
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L.Bermejo-Luque
politics as a CNP, political minimalism makes the following
conjecture:
Political Minimalism Conjecture: all and only political
phenomena can be described as attempts at providing
good answers to the question "what shall we do?" as
an exercise of means-ends deliberation whose subject
is the political community.
According to this conjecture, politics would be a CNP whose
constitutive goal is providing good answers to the question
"what shall we do?" as an exercise of means-ends delibera-
tion whose subject is the political community.
4 Politics asaConstitutively Normative
Practice
Although a proper discussion of this conjecture and of the
thesis that politics is a CNP are beyond the scope of this
paper, in this section I shall at least briefly motivate this
view.
To begin with, a political community can be roughly
defined as a group of agents that interact as such agents and
face the coordination problems that make the question "what
shall we do?" relevant. This definition allows for communi-
ties of varying sizes and types, ranging from small groups
like university departments to the entirety of humanity.
They can be ad hoc initiatives like civic society movements
defending public heritage or well-established collectives like
sports leagues or royal academies. Some communities have
clear boundaries, like the citizenry of a country, while oth-
ers are more loosely defined, like the feminist or the human
rights movements. They can be naturally formed groups like
people living in a region, or crafted entities like nations.
Finally, the agents who are members of the community may
be individuals or communities themselves, such as interna-
tional organizations.
Political deliberation is usually associated with individu-
als acting as members of a community and deliberating on
its behalf. Besides, individuals entrusted with authority
by the community, or holding power otherwise, can both
deliberate and enact theirdecisions. Yet, the exercise of
means-ends deliberation that politics amounts to does not
necessitate explicitness or planned implementation: ordi-
nary people, through their everyday actions, do also pro-
vide answers to the "what shall we do?" question for the
entire community. Thus, as condition 3 for CNPs predicts,
politics also happens when community members contribute
answers through their decisions, the norms and conventions
they manage to establish, the possibilities they create, and
the expectations they set through their coordinations with
each other. For certain matters, these answers can be politi-
cally better than planned ones. At any rate, it is always the
entire community that ultimately implements responses to
the "what shall we do?" question, although rarely through
explicit public deliberation.
In view of this fact, it might be argued that politics is
not a CNP after all, because it doesn’t meet condition 1 in
our definition: community members do make politics with-
out intentionally trying to respond to any political question.
Moreover, dictators and corrupted politicians act politically
even though what they intend with their policies is not to
provide good answers to the “what shall we do?” question
for their communities. However, it must be noticed that, in
our definition of a CNP, goals are not psychological states,
but constitutive features of the practice. Because practices
are performed by agents, it makes sense to attribute to them
the disposition of aiming at a certain CNP’s constitutive goal
if they are to be interpreted as intentionally performing that
CNP. Thus, when dictators or bad politicians present their
decisions as political, they do so because they present them
as allegedly good responses to the political question –even
if, in the last resort, their psychological intentions are silenc-
ing the opposition, enriching their allies or relatives, etc. In
fact, it is because individuals have to present themselves
as professing this much to be regarded as political subjects
(condition 4) that political subjects are accountable as politi-
cal agents and not only as individuals. Much the same can
be said of the community when we describe it as a political
agent: such a description involves seeing its overall behav-
ior as an active response to certain political questions, not
merely as a passive effect of the political decisions of others.
Finally, politics clearly meets condition 2 in our defini-
tion, since engaging in politics, as dictators and bad politi-
cians do, does not equate to actually providing good answers
to "what shall we do?". But this leads us to the question of
how to determine that an answer to "what shall we do?",
as an exercise of means-ends deliberation, is a good one.
Again, I cannot properly address this question here, but I
shall briefly outline my proposed response to provide at least
an overview of the whole framework.
Footnote 6 (continued)
or failure. For example, beliefs can only be correct or incorrect qua
beliefs. Goodness, on the other hand, applies in cases in which the
practice allows for varying degrees of success. According to Ber-
mejo-Luque (2011), argumentation is one of such type of constitu-
tive practice, so that specific pieces of argumentation can be better or
worse qua argumentation.
Certainly, ‘correct’ and ‘(attributively) good’ are predicates whose
use extends beyond the realm of CNPs, but CNPs have objective
standards for determining correctness and goodness, whereas the
standards of other classes whose tokens can also be good or correct
depend on debatable considerations, such as what we normally expect
from them (e.g., of toasters) or what certain rules instead of others
say about them (e.g., of the spelling of ‘chiaroscuro’).
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Williams forandAgainst. Politics asaConstitutively Normative Practice
In Bermejo-Luque (forthcoming), I suggest that means-
ends deliberation is a CNP whose constitutive goal is
moving forward the agent’s agenda. The rationale for this
account stems from an analysis of the possible ways to criti-
cize the outputs of means-ends deliberations. In this account,
agents are entities whose behavior can be assessed in terms
of means-ends rationality, ends are all the things that an
agent wishes or aims at (either for their own sake or as a
means to achieve something else), and agendas are the sets
of ends of the agents, ordered according to their priority.
Priorities are established in virtue of the following relation-
ships between ends:
• Compatibility: Two ends are compatible to each other if
and only if satisfying any of them does not preclude the
satisfaction of the other.
• Necessity: An end x is necessary for another end y if and
only if y can only be satisfied if x is satisfied.
• Equivalence: Two ends are equivalent if their satisfac-
tion requires the same state of affairs and allows for the
satisfaction of the same ends.
Roughly, the more compatible and necessary an end is in
relation to the rest of the ends of an agenda, the higher its
priority. When an agent deliberates on two ends that have
the same priority but are incompatible to each other, it faces
a practical dilemma.
In the realm of political deliberation, the agent is the com-
munity, and the agenda of the political community (APC)
is the set of ends held by the members of the community,
ordered by their priority relationships. On this account, ends
such as order, security, and cooperation will normally have a
high priority in most APCs, as they are not only compatible
but also necessary for many other typical ends that individu-
als in political communities endorse. However, contrary to
what some realists suggest, these are only typical top priori-
ties in most APCs, but not necessarily the highest priorities
for any political community in any circumstances.
A project, action, or decision advances an APC if it pro-
motes a state of affairs that brings about some of the ends of
the APC and does not prevent the satisfaction of ends that
have a higher priority in that APC. Otherwise, the project,
action, or decision is politically bad or inadequate. Finally,
the more ends of an APC are satisfied, the more the APC is
advanced and the better the project, action, or political deci-
sion is. Thus, in this account, political value presents itself
in degrees, so that it makes sense to compare two political
ideas, actions, or decisions to determine which is better from
a political standpoint.
As I flesh out in the next section by reference to Wil-
liams’ account of practical rationality, political deliberation,
so understood, happens to be a form of all-things-considered
practical deliberation. Why is this so? Because, among the
ends that a political community may have, we can find com-
pliance with certain aesthetic, moral, economic, etc. … val-
ues, and the circumstances in which political agents wonder
what to do may be, among others, the fact that certain norms
(social, legal, moral, etc.) are in play.7 Accordingly, good
political deliberation will involve all these types of consid-
erations. Yet, it will do so not because these considerations
are normative for politics, but because they appeal to ends
endorsed by the community and to the means at its disposal.
This is the way in which political minimalism departs from
substantialism, both moralist and realist.8
Importantly, this way of renouncing substantialism does
not lead to an unacceptable form of relativism. Political
minimalism endorses the view that a certain political deci-
sion can be good in one political context but bad in another.
Such contextualist view seems plausible, and in any case, it
does not pose a threat to political normativity. Contrastingly,
the view that there are no objective criteria to distinguish
good from bad politics is a nonstarter for political norma-
tivity. This form of relativism blurs the distinction between
mere appearances of political goodness and genuine politi-
cal value. Political minimalism posits that political value
is a matter of providing objectively good answers to "what
shall we do?". Certainly, the goodness of such answers is
contingent on the specific ends that people pursue on each
occasion, but also on the surrounding circumstances that
determine the possibility of achieving them. As a conse-
quence, we will be mistaken in thinking that x is politically
good if x brings about ends that are incompatible to ends of
higher priority in the APC. Thus, for example, even for an
unreservedly xenophobic society, expelling foreigners might
ultimately prove to be bad politics because such a decision
could lead to undesirable consequences for a significant
7 Certainly, among the ends of an APC, we can find ends motivated
by the moral values and demands that the members of the commu-
nity hold. These ends result from the members’ moral intuitions about
what is good or bad, right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable, from
a moral point of view. Normally, advancing an APC involves comply-
ing with at least some basic moral ends, such as respect for human
life or individual freedom, since these types of ends are compatible
with almost all other ends of an APC and are even necessary for
many other ends that members of political communities usually have
(including other high-priority ends, such as certain levels of prosper-
ity, personal security, etc.).
Since the moral ends of the members of a community are part of
their APC and usually have high priority, the mere resolution of
members’ coordination problems may not translate into good politics
if this precludes the satisfaction of moral ends that have a higher pri-
ority in the agenda.
8 Fossen (2023) has recently argued for a similar non-substantivist
conception of political normativity. In his view, political philosophers
should stop looking for principles or criteria to shape a sound notion
of political value (that Fossen characterizes in terms of legitimacy).
Instead, they should attend to the real-world practice of assessing
authority as provider of such.
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L.Bermejo-Luque
portion of its members, such as labor shortages, international
sanctions, reputational damage on the global stage, or simply
the violation of basic human rights. Good responses to “what
shall we do?” are those that effectively take all the relevant
considerations into account and lay down plans accordingly.9
Political minimalism defines political value in terms
of the quality of this exercise of means-ends deliberation:
essentially, good political ideas, programs, ideologies,
institutions, decisions, policies, regimes, etc., are those that
provide good answers to the question "what shall we do?"
for the political community. Regarding the goal of show-
ing that politics constitutes a normative domain of its own,
the remaining question is: how does the politically good,
so understood, determine how to act? Or, put differently,
how is it that mere means-ends deliberation can be seen as
deliberation tout court?
5 Williamsiam Practical Normativity.
Political andMoral Reasons
As I hope to show in the next sections, political minimalism
can hardly be considered a version of realism. Nonetheless,
the articulation of the axiological and deontic perspectives
that follows from this conception of political normativity
and its account of the relationship between the political and
the moral are especially akin to Williams’ views on practi-
cal rationality.
As is well known, the axis of Williams’ critique of what
he calls “the morality system” challenges the notion of cat-
egorical obligation. Although, in the Judeo-Christian tradi-
tion, morality is constructed around the link between moral
value and this type of obligation, Williams argues that deon-
tic judgments are nothing but the conclusion of a practical
deliberation all things considered.
One can, of course, ask, on a given occasion, “what
should I do from an ethical point of view?” or “what
should I do from a self-interested point of view?”
These ask for the results of subdeliberations, and invite
one to review a particular type of consideration among
those that bear on the question and to think what the
considerations of that type, taking by themselves, sup-
port. In the same way, I can ask what I should do tak-
ing only economic or political or family considerations
into account. At the end of all that, there is the question
“what should I do all things considered?” There is only
one kind of question to be asked about what to do, of
which Socrates’ is a very general example, and moral
considerations are one kind of consideration that bear
on answering it. (Williams 1985, p. 6)
In the opening pages of Ethics and the Limits of Phi-
losophy, Williams also maintains that the question of "how
should one live" is the same as a question about the good
life (Williams 1985, p. 5). That is to say, for Williams, the
outcome of an exercise of practical deliberation is not only
an answer to what we should do but also an assessment of
the value of our doings: the reasons that can justify what
we do are those that show that what we do is good, in the
sense of "adequate from the point of view of our practical
deliberations."
Under this light, Williams’ conception of practical nor-
mativity would have only needed to contemplate the possi-
bility of a collective subject, i.e., an "us" such as the political
community, to give rise to the notion of political normativity
defended here.
Such deliberative account of practical normativity would
imply that practical deontology comprises only two realms:
the realm of the prudential10 ought, i.e., the one that the
question "what shall I do?" inaugurates, and the realm of the
political ought, i.e., the one that the question "what shall we
do?" inaugurates.
The standards constitutive of each type of deliberation
bring about the corresponding notions of value, namely, the
prudentially good and the politically good. In turn,appealing
to prudential or political values amounts to adducing pru-
dential or political reasons. Such reasons may be part of fur-
ther individual or collective deliberations. Yet, prudential/
political reasons can determine what to do by themselves.
This happens when they justify a specific answer to the ques-
tion “what shall I/we do?”. On the other hand, moral reasons
would be those that appeal to moral values, and according to
this deliberative conception of normativity, they could not
determine what to do by themselves because, as Williams
observes, these are only one kind of considerations that
are relevant in practical deliberations.11 In fact, following
10 Since this is an account of practical value in terms of the standards
of all-things-considered deliberation as a CNP, here, ‘prudential’ is
meant to refer exclusively to the realm of individual all-things-con-
sidered deliberation, not to the quality of being predicatively good for
the individual or to the reasons or deliberations conducive to the pre-
dicatively good for the individual.
11 Pace constitutivist projects in metaethics, the moral good, unlike
the political and the prudential good, does not seem to stem from
the standards of any CNP. The latter are types of attributive good
whereas moral good has traditionally been associated with predicative
good.
9 The question of identifying the relevant political community is fur-
ther explored in Bermejo-Luque and Rodríguez-Alcázar (forthcom-
ing). There, we argue that the "we" in the "what shall we do?" ques-
tion determines who the relevant political community is. Thus, when
a policy, decision, program, etc. requires actions from individuals
outside a community for its effectiveness, the "we" also encompasses
these external agents, who then constitute the relevant political com-
munity.
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Williams forandAgainst. Politics asaConstitutively Normative Practice
Williams’ internalism about reasons, the same would be true
of other values that may shape the set of ends that an indi-
vidual or a community endorses, such as aesthetic values,
economic values, etc.: for such values to constitute reasons
to act one way or another, they must promote ends endorsed
by the agent that deliberates about what to do.12
Accordingly, if the term ‘obligation’ were less burdened
with connotations from the morality system, we might sug-
gest that only political communities can have political obli-
gations, while individuals can only have obligations of a pru-
dential character. For example, on this account, a Member of
Parliament (MP) might have moral reasons to vote against
a proposal (for example, because it would involve break-
ing their electoral promises and betraying their constituents,
which is morally wrong) and political reasons to vote in
favor (for example, because it effectively moves forward the
PCA, which is politically good). To decide what to do, the
MP will have to take into account these and other relevant
considerations, and their decision will be deemed morally
good if it is altruistic rather than selfish, and politically good
if it is indeed a good answer to the question “what shall we
do?”. This implies that individuals may have moral reasons
to act in accordance with what is politically good, and that
they may have political reasons to act in accordance with
what is morally good –as well as moral reasons to act against
what is politically good and political reasons to act against
what is morally good.
Contrastingly, that a political proposal is indeed the best
answer to the "what shall we do?" question given the cir-
cumstances is tantamount to say that the political commu-
nity as a whole is rationally required to promote it. To meet
this requirement, the community may need, for example,
to promulgate laws and ensure compliance. This means
that such laws stand for obligations for the community as a
whole, but not for its members, as Bernard Williams, among
others, would hold.
6 Political Value andLegitimacy
As we have seen, the main consequence of political minimal-
ism is that it allows us to articulate the relationship between
political deontology and axiology, which is fundamental to
any attempt to show that political normativity is not reduc-
ible to moral normativity, as the realist maintains.
An additional consequence of this proposal, and in par-
ticular, of this notion of political value, is that it allows us to
exploit the full potential of an axiological approach to politi-
cal normativity. To illustrate this, it is useful to compare this
notion of political value with the notion of legitimacy.
The concept of legitimacy has traditionally occupied
center stage within the realist tradition. As I have tried to
show, accounting for political normativity in terms of legiti-
macy poses a dilemma whose options are equally unsatis-
factory. On the one hand, it invites us to think of the link
between political axiology and deontology in the same terms
as the morality system articulates the relationship between
moral value and obligation: from this point of view, if a
government or a law is legitimate, the ruled have at least
reasons to submit to them, if not the obligation to do so, sim-
ply because that is what it means for something to be legiti-
mate. As we have seen, to assume this, i.e., to assume that
'legitimate' is irreducible in this way, implies giving up on
establishing criteria for evaluating political phenomena. On
the other hand, trying to define legitimacy in order to have
such criteria leads us to a version of Moore's open question
argument: if what is legitimate is what meets certain condi-
tions, then that something is legitimate is only a reason to
act in its favor if we have reasons to pursue what is achieved
by meeting those conditions. At this point, only moralism,
within the framework of the morality system, could restore
the normative character to the concept of legitimacy by pos-
iting that only that which meets certain moral conditions is
legitimate—such as the condition of being just, as Rawls
would say.
Political value, as proposed by political minimalism, is
the property that the assessment of political decisions as
answers to the question “what shall we do?” determines.
This means, as pointed out in Sect.4, that political decisions
can be good or bad regardless of the community’s opinion
about their political value. Accordingly, this notion of politi-
cal value is extraneous to that of legitimacy, as characterized
in the realist tradition, and it delivers a better lens to evaluate
the actual adequacy of political solutions in tackling collec-
tive challenges.
Remarkably, by making political normativity pivot on
this notion of political value instead of on the notion of
legitimacy, we free ourselves to define legitimacy in non-
normative terms. Thus, we may say that the legitimacy of
a political phenomenon is a matter of its conformity to the
norms, procedures, principles, etc. that a political commu-
nity endorses. This is why, in modern times, the concept of
legitimacy intertwines with notions like consent, democracy,
rule of law, and human rights. Because we belong to this cul-
tural framework, this is what legitimacy means for us–but,
as Williams strives to explain, that legitimacy involves these
criteria is a contingent matter.
12 See Finlay (2006) for an account of the way in which a delibera-
tive conception of practical normativity can explain the intuition that
external reasons can also be considered as reasons proper: on this
view, a reason is what is adduced to show that a certain response to
“what shall I/we do?” is good;thus, external reasons are simply those
that can only be adduced from a second-person point of view.
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L.Bermejo-Luque
On the other hand, for the political minimalist, that x is
legitimate in this sense is a political prima facie reason in its
favor, because the norms, procedures, principles, etc. that a
community actually endorses are part of the circumstances
that determine whether x is a good answer to the “what shall
we do?” question. For example, once a political commu-
nity endorses certain norms and procedures to elect rulers,
the circumstances to elect a new ruler include, among other
things, that these norms and procedures are in play. Depend-
ing on the case, however, this may be a reason to reform such
norms and procedures (because they bring about unwanted
outcomes), or just to proceed as they prescribe (because their
outcomes are less problematic for the community than the
process of setting new norms and procedures).
The other problem with characterizing political value
in terms of legitimacy is that the comparability of political
proposals, policies, programs, institutions, ideologies, etc. in
terms of their political value is severely limited. Certainly,
Williams contemplates the possibility that the considerations
that support legitimacy “are scalar” (Williams 2005, p. 10),
but he also says that, once a certain threshold of legitimacy
has been reached, the choice between legitimate decisions
is reduced to the fact that one of the rival proposals man-
ages to win rather than lose (Williams 2005, p. 13). This
means that making a rational choice between incompatible
and equally legitimate proposals requires appealing to extra-
political reasons, which is tantamount to say that the choice
between such proposals cannot be justifiedfrom a merely
political point of view.
Contrastingly, political minimalism makes sense not
only of the idea that a political decision can be better than
another, but also of the idea that a decision can be both
legitimate and politically bad; or, in other words, that we
can have specifically political reasons to oppose, even fight
against, a legitimate political proposal. Basically, this hap-
pens when adherence to established norms and procedures,
thereby securing legitimacy, does not guarantee a decision’s
effectiveness in addressing the underlying coordination
problem that triggers the question “what shall we do?”.
7 Political Minimalism andPolitical Realism:
Conict andUtopia
The distinction between realism and moralism is often
presented as exhaustive. It is certainly possible to define
realism as any metapolitical view that rejects the idea that
any normativity in politics ultimately comes from morality.
Under this light, political minimalism would be a form of
realism indeed. However, it is also possible to think that this
is a false dichotomy because, as pointed out before, both
realism and moralism are substantialist views, and these are
not the only options for an account of political normativity.
Furthermore, several common elements exist across different
versions of realism, elements that do not necessarily follow
from the assumption that politics constitutes a normative
domain of its own. Thus, I will conclude by showing that,
if we define realism based on these shared elements, politi-
cal minimalism can hardly be considered a form of realism.
Although the definition of realism is a matter of con-
troversy, there seems to be some consensus on its main
characteristics:
“Among the hallmarks of this endeavor are a moral
psychology that includes the passions and emotions; a
robust conception of political possibility and rejection
of utopian thinking; the belief that political conflict—
of values as well as interests—is both fundamental
and ineradicable; a focus on institutions as the arenas
within which conflict is mediated and contained; and a
conception of politics as a sphere of activity that is dis-
tinct, autonomous, and subject to norms that cannot be
derived from individual morality. For political realists,
a ‘well-ordered society’ is rarely attainable; a modus
vivendi without agreement on first principles is often
the only practical possibility” (Galston 2010, p. 385)
“Here I define political realism, provisionally, as a
family of approaches to the study, practice, and norma-
tive evaluation of politics that (a) affirms the autonomy
(or, more minimally, the distinctiveness) of politics; (b)
takes disagreement, conflict, and power to be ineradi-
cable and constitutive features of politics; (c) rejects as
‘utopian’ or ‘moralist’ those approaches, practices, and
evaluations which seem to deny these facts; and (d)
prioritizes political order and stability over justice (or,
more minimally, rejects the absolute priority of justice
over other political values)” (McQueen 2017, p. 297)
Political minimalism is in line with some of these views.
For example, it does not start from an idealized concep-
tion of human nature. On the contrary, it predicts that the
best answers to our political questions start from a deep
understanding of the real circumstances in which these
questions make sense.13 These circumstances include not
only our authentic passions and emotions, but also the stark
reality of what we truly fear and care for, and the limits of
our capabilities. Besides, political minimalism posits that
the quality of a political proposal hinges on its ability to
13 This is, in effect, a prediction, not a definition: it is conceivable
that a flawed assessment of the situation, coupled with wishful think-
ing, could still lead to a good answer to the question “what shall we
do?” in certain (peculiar, to be sure) circumstances. Another predic-
tion is that deliberations conducted under conditions approximating
a Habermasian ideal speech situation Habermas (1984) are likely to
yield better answers to our political questions than those conducted
without meeting such conditions.
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Williams forandAgainst. Politics asaConstitutively Normative Practice
utilize all the resources available for the community in an
efficient and effective way (with the institutions that the
community has already established playing a crucial role
indeed), as well as its avoidance of unrealistic assumptions
(such as overestimating the environment's capacity to restore
natural resources or underestimating our enemies’ ability
to fight back). On this view, politics demands not only the
most accurate knowledge about the specific circumstances
of each case, but also deep understanding of human and
social psychology, history, and even scientific developments,
technologies, and so forth.
In contrast, the minimalist does not share the idea that
conflict and disagreement is fundamental for politics, nor
that politics consists in the struggle for power. In the first
half of the twentieth century, this conflictual conception of
politics gained dominance due to its shared appeal across
two opposing theoretical frameworks: those of Karl Marx,
on the one hand, and Carl Schmidt, on the other. In more
recent times, this conception has taken the postmodern form
of an agonistic populist theory that renounces the possibility
of rational mediation more explicitly (Laclau and Mouffe
1985). Although this renunciation may seem reasonable in
certain cases such as the class struggle, or the struggle of
the people against the elites, there are spaces in which, in
addition to being unwarranted, it is extremely pernicious, for
it hinders the possibility of developing tools and resources
for fruitful political deliberation and action to take place.
Political minimalism defines politics, simply, as the
sphere in which certain “we” ask themselves the question
“what shall we do?”. The urge to answer this question can
come from both inside the political community–because, in
fact, there are conflicting interests that require being accom-
modated—and from outside–typically, because a novel cir-
cumstance demands the coordination of the members of
the community to achieve some common ends. Certainly,
internal coordination problems have been paramount in trig-
gering political questions; yet, pursuing common ends in a
collaborative way is also a frequent episode in our political
lives. In fact, cooperation rather than conflict happens to
be the origin of many political communities, and denying
the political nature of these spaces unjustifiably restricts our
understanding of the political and overlooks the presence
of ideology, binding norms, regulations, etc. within them.
Of course, it is one thing to deny that conflict is the raison
d'être of politics and another to suppose that the suitability
of our specific answers to political questions will one day
cease to be a matter of controversy. Yet, in a far-off world
where agents were always willing to cooperate and to quit
the pursuit of their particular interests for the sake of the
common good, there would still be room for politics and for
giving better or worse answers to the question "what shall
we do?". Without going so far, a closer look at the diverse
political reality of our days reveals that, fortunately, these
communities of cooperation do come into being from time to
time. Such kind of political practice is undoubtedly valuable,
also from a political point of view.
On the other hand, although, as we have seen, political
minimalism does not start from an idealized conception of
politics or human nature, and avoids any appeal to an ideal
theory to outline the framework of political normativity or
of good political practice, it has no difficulty in recognizing
the political function of utopian projects, ideals, principles,
etc. In principle, this would be an advantage of minimal-
ism, because a recurring criticism to realism is its tendency
to privilege the status quo in an unjustified way (Finlayson
2017).
Certainly, “a ‘well-ordered society’ is rarely attainable”
and, most of the times, we just manage to coexist without
agreeing neither on first principles nor on ideals. However, it
is difficult to dismiss the role that first principles, ideals and
utopian thinking have played throughout history. From the
perspective of minimalism, ideals and utopias serve political
deliberation insofar as they encourage us to set ambitious
ends, and first principles can be useful if they serve to avoid
shortcuts whose consequences may be undesirable in the
long run.
Although some authors have tried to defend the trans-
formative potential of realism (e.g., Prinz and Rossi 2017;
Rossi 2019), minimalism would allow us to go beyond
what ideology critique and political genealogy allow, with-
out falling into a sterile utopianism. Thus, beyond the mere
denunciation of the contradictions of the status quo, politi-
cal philosophy could be as idealistic and utopian as human
creativity allows, provided that it effectively manages to
offer good answers to the question "what shall we do?". In
turn, being able to analyze the political function of ideals,
principles, and utopias (both in cases where they have led
to unquestionable social improvements, and in cases where
they have led to bad, even nefarious scenarios), should serve
to free us from naivety, but also from fear.
Acknowledgements This paper has benefited from the discussion with
the participants in the Conference ‘Political Normativity and Ethics’
(University of Granada, May 2023)and a seminar coordinated by Eva
Erman at the Political Science Department of the University of Stock-
holm (May 2024). My deepest gratitude to all of them. The work pre-
sented here has been founded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and
Technology (project ID: PID2019-107478GB-I00). Funding for open
access charge: Universidad de Granada / CBUA.
Funding Funding for open access publishing: Universidad de Granada/
CBUA.
Declarations
Conflict of interests The author declares no conflict of interest regard-
ing this piece of work.
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L.Bermejo-Luque
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attri-
bution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adapta-
tion, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source,
provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes
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