With their insistence on 'partiality , Nagel's views represent, no
doubt, progress with respect to the position of those liberals who
equate the moral point of view with that of impartiality, and privilege it
at the expense of all kinds of personal commitments. The problem is
the emphasis he puts on unanimity and on his search for principles
that no one could reasonably reject and that all could agree that
everyone should follow. He sees the strength of such principles in the
fact that they will have a moral character. As a consequence, he argues
that when a system is legitimate, 'those living under it have no
grounds for complaint against the way its basic structure accom-
modates their point of view, and no one is morally justified in
withholding his cooperation from the functioning of the system, trying
to subvert its results, or trying to overturn it if he has the power to do
so/
34