Both contain an important element of truth, but both are also unsatisfactory, and to remedy their failings political philosophy needs to move beyond this habitual opposition. It must indeed focus on the characteristic problems of political life, which include widespread disagreement about morality, and for just that reason it demands a significant autonomy from moral philosophy.Yet it cannot determine how these problems are to be addressed except by reference to moral principles understood as having an antecedent validity, inasmuch as they serve to determine how the authoritative rules of society are to be established. Political philosophy must be a more complex enterprise than either of the customary positions assumes, if it is to heed these two imperatives.