 One line of response to normative disagreement draws on work in political philosophy that develops theories of public reason or public justification (see the  entry on public reason,  and the entry on  public justification).  According to public reason theorizing, political power is legitimate if and only if it is exercised in accordance with shared political values or normative reasons that idealized members of a political community can accept, would accept, could not reject, or would not reject. To return to the earlier example, imagine that when defending a soda tax to citizens, some legislators point to passages in their preferred religious texts to support the tax. Other supporters claim that smaller bodies are more beautiful than larger ones, and so we should try to reduce the incidence of obesity. Neither of these considerations would count as public reasons because reasonable citizens have different aesthetic standards and disagree about which (if any) religious texts are authoritative. According to public reason liberalism, to justify a policy on the basis of these sorts of reasons when some (idealized) citizens could not or would not accept those reasons would be to run afoul of a requirement of legitimacy.