Drawing its strength from the UN Charter and UDHR, human rights ethics is a beacon of hope and a promise that requires continuous reaffirmation during these turbulent times. These two documents, with their unwavering faith in ‘fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small,’ have shaped our understanding of human rights as global and universal ethics. However, this faith is now being severely (...) tested by four countercurrents: extremism, exclusionism, selectivism, and populism. These countercurrents pose significant and urgent human rights threats that activists, academics, and policymakers must confront by reasserting the basic core values of the UN Charter and UDHR. (shrink)

Several authors have recently begun to apply virtue theory to argumentation. Critics of this programme have suggested that no such theory can avoid committing an ad hominem fallacy. This criticism is shown to trade unsuccessfully on an ambiguity in the definition of ad hominem. The ambiguity is resolved and a virtue-theoretic account of ad hominem reasoning is defended.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is one of the ways through which companies gain legitimacy. However, CSR actions themselves are subject to public skepticism because of increased public awareness of greenwashing and scandalous corporate behavior. Legitimacy of CSR actions is indeed influenced by the actions of the company but also is rooted in the basic cultural values of a society and in the ideologies of evaluators. This study examines the legitimacy of CSR actions of publicly traded forest products (...) companies as compared to family-owned forest products companies. Results indicate a lower legitimacy for CSR actions of publicly traded companies than for family-owned companies. The study also examines the effect of social responsibility orientation (SRO) of evaluators on the legitimacy accorded to companies' CSR actions. We found that SRO was negatively associated with legitimacy, especially for women. Perceived profitability of companies was negatively associated with legitimacy of CSR actions for publicly traded but not for family-owned companies. (shrink)

Political legitimacy is best understood as one type of a broader notion, which I call institutional legitimacy. An institution is legitimate in my sense when it has the right to function. The right to function correlates to a duty of non-interference. Understanding legitimacy in this way favorably contrasts with legitimacy understood in the traditional way, as the right to rule correlating to a duty of obedience. It helps unify our discourses of legitimacy across a wider (...) range of practices, especially including the many evaluations we increasingly make of international institutions of various sorts, but also including domestic institutions. (shrink)

Whilst legitimacy is often thought to concern the processes through which coercive decisions are made in society, justice has been standardly viewed as a ‘substantial’ matter concerning the moral justification of the terms of social cooperation. Accordingly, theorization about procedures may seem appropriate for the former but not for the latter. To defend proceduralism as a relevant approach to justice, I distinguish three questions: (1) Who is entitled to exercise coercive power? (2) On what terms should the participants to (...) a scheme of cooperation interact? (3) How should the costs and benefits produced by cooperation be distributed? Legitimacy concerns (1), whereas justice applies to (2) and (3). Although the appropriateness of proceduralism is debatable in relation to (3), it seems well equipped to address the justice-related question in (2). And it does so by focusing on the inherent moral acceptability of the way in which persons are treated by the procedures through which they interact. (shrink)

The financial crisis which recently occurred is the epiphenomenon of a structural crisis of advanced capitalism. Although it referred to a very different context the diagnosis made by Habermas in his work Legitimationsprobleme des Spätkapitalismus , published in 1973, remains a very useful key in order to understand the irreducibility of social policy and the way the post-Fordist capitalism assumes the mediation between the economic and the social sphere — that is, how it deals with both the deficit of rationality (...) and the deficit of legitimacy. Instead of being the political expression of social relations the neo-liberal system decouples labour and capital and, governed by financial markets, disconnects the social and the political rights and undermines the possibility of a true foundation of citizenship. In other words, the ‘refeudalization’ Habermas had reported as early as in Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit (1962) remains quite topical. (shrink)

One of the main challenges faced by realists in political philosophy is that of offering an account of authority that is genuinely normative and yet does not consist of a moralistic application of general, abstract ethical principles to the practice of politics. Political moralists typically start by devising a conception of justice based on their pre-political moral commitments; authority would then be legitimate only if political power is exercised in accordance with justice. As an alternative to that dominant approach I (...) put forward the idea that upturning the relationship between justice and legitimacy affords a normative notion of authority that does not depend on a pre-political account of morality, and thus avoids some serious problems faced by mainstream theories of justice. I then argue that the appropriate purpose of justice is simply to specify the implementation of an independently grounded conception of legitimacy, which in turn rests on a context- and practice-sensitive understanding of the purpose of political power. (shrink)

This book articulates a systematic vision of an international legal system grounded in the commitment to justice for all persons. It provides a probing exploration of the moral issues involved in disputes about secession, ethno-national conflict, "the right of self-determination of peoples," human rights, and the legitimacy of the international legal system itself. Buchanan advances vigorous criticisms of the central dogmas of international relations and international law, arguing that the international legal system should make justice, not simply peace among (...) states, a primary goal, and rejecting the view that it is permissible for a state to conduct its foreign policies exclusively according to what is in the "national interest." He also shows that the only alternatives are not rigid adherence to existing international law or lawless chaos in which the world's one superpower pursues its own interests without constraints. This book not only criticizes the existing international legal order, but also offers morally defensible and practicable principles for reforming it. Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination will find a broad readership in political science, international law, and political philosophy. (shrink)

So far, most of the philosophical literature on occupations has tried to assess the legitimacy of military rule in the aftermath of armed conflicts by exclusively employing the theoretical resources of just war theory. In this paper, I argue that this approach is mistaken. Occupations occur during or in the aftermath of wars but they are fundamentally a specific type of rule over persons. Thus, theories of political legitimacy should be at least as relevant as just war theory (...) for the moral evaluation of occupations. This paper, therefore, draws on both traditions and argues that just war theory plays a limited role in identifying the purposes and appropriate agents of occupation authority, but that theories of legitimacy are necessary for explaining why and under which conditions foreign actors have the right to rule in the aftermath of armed conflicts. (shrink)

In May 2017, yet another South African university became a site of hate speech. Three students chose to display Nazi-inspired posters, which advertised an ‘Anglo-Afrikaner student’ event, under the motto ‘Fight for Stellenbosch’. That the posters provoked the response which it so obviously sought, was evident in the student outrage, and the swift condemnation from university management. Neither the prevalence of hate speech, nor its predictable responses, is new. The central concern of this article is to consider the extent to (...) which tolerance can offer a plausible response to hate speech. The questions which arise, however, are: Does the right to divergent viewpoints hold the same legitimacy as antagonistic ones? When is the boundary between legitimate and hate speech breached? Does a democracy imply the tolerance of all forms of speech? Or, are there limits to the forms of speech that a democracy ought to tolerate? (shrink)

The notion of world government is anathema to most political theorists. This is the case due to the arguments that a world government is infeasible, undesirable and unnecessary. This threef...

In this article, I address the question: what kind of normative principles should regulate the governance processes through which migration across international borders is managed? I begin by contrasting two distinct categories of normative controversy relating to this question. The first is a familiar set of moral controversies about justice within border governance, concerning what I call the ethics of exclusion. The second is a more theoretically neglected set of normative controversies about how institutional capacity for well functioning border governance (...) can best be achieved, concerning what I call the constitution of control of international borders. I argue that progress can be made in resolving controversies of the latter kind by applying a new normative theory of political legitimacy, distinct from the moral theories of justice routinely applied to ethics of exclusion controversies. On the ‘collective agency’ model of political legitimacy that I propose here, principles of political legitimacy have the regulatory role of combating complex collective action problems that may otherwise impede an institution’s collectively valuable functions. Through applying this theory, I sketch some provisional prescriptions for the design of international border governance institutions that may follow from the demand for strengthening their political legitimacy. (shrink)

What, if anything, can realism say about the normative conditions of political legitimacy? Must a realist political theory accept that the ability to successfully employ coercive power is equivalent to the right to rule, or can it incorporate normative criteria for legitimacy but without collapsing into a form of moralism? While several critics argue that realism fails to adequately differentiate itself from moralism or that it cannot coherently appeal to normative values so as to distinguish might from right, (...) this article seeks to help develop a realist account of legitimacy by demonstrating how it can successfully and stably occupy this position between moralism and Realpolitik. Through this discussion, however, the article also argues that political rule necessitates the use of coercive power which is (at best) imperfectly legitimated, and that this blurs the distinction between politics and successful domination which lies at the heart of many recent accounts of political realism. In at least this sense, realism retains important and under-acknowledged affinities to Realpolitik. (shrink)

This article discusses consumer activism not as an ethical, but as a political phenomenon. A political concept of consumer activism implies, first, that consumers sometimes express support or opposition to products and services or consumer and business practices at least partly in order to advance nonmarket agendas, and, second, that consumer activism in the economic sphere occasionally has palpable impact on the organization of social life. Early contributors to the debate were optimistic that political consumer activism might be able to (...) extend democracy into the economic sphere. In recent years, however, scholars have increasingly voiced misgivings about this, arguing that political consumer activism may suffer from a democratic deficit: it may amount to an impermissible form of vigilantism or facilitate the illegitimate conversion of market power into political power. This article systematizes and reassesses these concerns, focusing in particular on arguments that dispute the compatibility of political consumer activism with liberal democracy as a procedural ideal. I conclude that political consumer activism does not face problems to do with legitimacy in this regard, most importantly because money does not play a more important role in market-based politics than in official democratic processes. Political consumer activism takes many forms, yet it is hardly ever about voting with the pocketbook. (shrink)

This article uses the example of South Africa to explore how inequality, institutions, identity, and polarization interact. The first 15 years of the country’s constitutional democracy was characterized by a virtuous spiral fueled by hope that a thriving, inclusive society was in reach, an embrace of win-win cooperation, and a surge of civic confidence in the legitimacy of the public domain. The next 15 years witnessed rising discontent in response to continuing massive inequality and economic hardship – plus sustained (...) efforts by populist political entrepreneurs to use economic discontent to fuel identity-based polarization and weaken institutions. In both periods, contrary to the either/or discourse of much scholarship, change was fueled by the ways in which economic expectations and identity politics interacted with one another. Renewal of the political center needs both reforms that address economic imbalances and engagement at the level of ideas. (shrink)

This book offers a systematic treatment of the requirements of democratic legitimacy. It argues that democratic procedures are essential for political legitimacy because of the need to respect value pluralism and because of the learning process that democratic decision-making enables. It proposes a framework for distinguishing among the different ways in which the requirements of democratic legitimacy have been interpreted. Peter then uses this framework to identify and defend what appears as the most plausible conception of democratic (...) legitimacy. According to this conception, democratic legitimacy requires that the decision-making process satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness. (shrink)

Political legitimacy is a virtue of political institutions and of the decisions—about laws, policies, and candidates for political office—made within them. This entry will survey the main answers that have been given to the following questions. First, how should legitimacy be defined? Is it primarily a descriptive or a normative concept? If legitimacy is understood normatively, what does it entail? Some associate legitimacy with the justification of coercive power and with the creation of political authority. Others (...) associate it with the justification, or at least the sanctioning, of existing political authority. Authority stands for a right to rule—a right to issue commands and, possibly, to enforce these commands using coercive power. An additional question is whether legitimate political authority is understood to entail political obligations or not. Most people probably think it does. But some think that the moral obligation to obey political authority can be separated from an account of legitimate authority, or at least that such obligations arise only if further conditions hold. (shrink)

Is authoritarian power ever legitimate? The contemporary political theory literature—which largely conceptualizes legitimacy in terms of democracy or basic rights—would seem to suggest not. I argue, however, that there exists another, overlooked aspect of legitimacy concerning a government’s ability to ensure safety and security. While, under normal conditions, maintaining democracy and rights is typically compatible with guaranteeing safety, in emergency situations, conflicts between these two aspects of legitimacy can and often do arise. A salient example of this (...) is the COVID-19 pandemic, during which severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach. While unsettling, this suggests the political importance of climate action. For if we wish to avoid legitimating authoritarian power, we must act to prevent crises from arising that can only be resolved by such means. (shrink)

Modern society is challenged by a loss of efficiency in national governance systems values, and lifestyles. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourse builds upon a conception of organizational legitimacy that does not appropriately reflect these changes. The problems arise from the a-political role of the corporation in the concepts of cognitive and pragmatic legitimacy, which are based on compliance to national law and on relatively homogeneous and stable societal expectations on the one hand and widely accepted rhetoric assuming that (...) all members of society benefit from capitalist production on the other. We therefore propose a fundamental shift to moral legitimacy, from an output and power oriented approach to an input related and discursive concept of legitimacy. This shift creates a new basis of legitimacy and involves organizations in processes of active justification vis-à-vis society rather than simply responding to the demands of powerful groups. We consider this a step towards the politicization of the corporation and attempt to re-embed the debate on corporate legitimacy into its broader context of political theory, while reflecting the recent turn from a liberal to a deliberative concept of democracy. (shrink)

Traditional concepts of legitimacy that often focus on a right to exercise coercion or a right to create moral obligations are not applicable to many political institutions. In particular, many global governance institutions rely on ways of providing governance that do not involve coercion or the creation of moral obligations. That is why this paper develops a novel concept of legitimacy as the right to function. This more general concept of legitimacy is able to help us make (...) sense of many references to the term `legitimacy´ in academic or practical-political debates that cannot be explained by traditional concepts of legitimacy. In addition, the use of the concept of legitimacy as the right to function opens up the conceptual space to accommodate important insights with respect to the normative criteria of legitimacy in global governance. For instance, as global governance institutions fulfil very different functions it is plausible that the criteria of legitimacy for different global governance institutions are not the same because in judgments concerning their legitimacy different rights are at stake. (shrink)

The legitimacy of humanitarian intervention has been contested for more than a century, yet pressure for such intervention persists. Normative evolution and institutional design have been closely linked since the first debates over humanitarian intervention more than a century ago. Three norms have competed in shaping state practice and the normative discourse: human rights, peace preservation, and sovereignty. The rebalancing of these norms over time, most recently as the state’s responsibility to protect, has reflected specific international institutional environments. The (...) contemporary legitimacy of humanitarian intervention is based on UN Security Council authorization of the use of force. Although the Security Council is often viewed as representative of great-power influence, international acceptance of its role is based on the role of non-permanent members and their support for the sovereignty norm. The current rebalanced norms supporting humanitarian intervention, institutional bias that protects state sovereignty, and the changing character of mass violence may undermine the tenuous contemporary legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. Normative adjustments and new institutional designs are required to insure the legitimacy of international action that protects populations against mass violence. (shrink)

In the contemporary philosophical literature, political legitimacy is often identified with a right to rule. However, this term is problematic. First, if we accept an interest theory of rights, it often remains unclear whose interests justify a right to rule : either the interest of the holders of this right to rule or the interests of those subject to the authority. And second, if we analyse the right to rule in terms of Wesley Hohfeld’s characterization of rights, we find (...) disagreement among philosophers about what constitutes the conceptual core of political authority: a power-right or a claim-right to rule. In this paper I show that both of these are problematic for a number of reasons. First, if we think that it is only the interests of the holders of a right to rule that justify the possession of authority, the conceptual core of authority must consist in a claim-right. However, this understanding of authority biases our thinking about legitimacy in favor of democratic exercises of power. Second, if we hold such a decisively democratic view of legitimacy, we confront an impasse with respect to addressing global collective action problems. Although it is clear that political authority is necessary or useful for solving these issues, it is doubtful that we can establish global institutions that are democratically authorized anytime soon. The paper suggests an alternative ‘Power-Right to Command View’ of political legitimacy that avoids the democratic bias and allows for thinking about solutions to global problems via global service authorities. (shrink)

Controversial industry sectors, such as alcohol, gambling, and tobacco, though long-established, suffer organizational legitimacy problems. The authors consider various strategies used to seek organizational legitimacy in the U.K. casino gambling market. The findings are based on a detailed, multistakeholder case study pertaining to a failed bid for a regional supercasino. They suggest four generic strategies for seeking organizational legitimacy in this highly complex context: construing, earning, bargaining, and capturing, as well as pathways that combine these strategies. The (...) case analysis and proposed bidimensional model of generic legitimacy-seeking strategies contribute to limited literature on organizational legitimacy in controversial industry sectors. In addition, beyond organizations active in controversial contexts, this study and its implications are useful for individuals and organizations supporting or opposing the organizational legitimacy of organizations in controversial industries. (shrink)

A conception of legitimacy is at the core of normative theories of democracy. Many different conceptions of legitimacy have been put forward, either explicitly or implicitly. In this article, I shall first provide a taxonomy of conceptions of legitimacy that can be identified in contemporary democratic theory. The taxonomy covers both aggregative and deliberative democracy. I then argue for a conception of democratic legitimacy that takes the epistemic dimension of public deliberation seriously. In contrast to standard (...) interpretations of epistemic democracy, however, the conception I put forward avoids procedure-independent standards of correctness. Instead, it relies on a procedural social epistemology and defines legitimacy entirely in terms of the fairness of procedures. I call this conception of democratic legitimacy `Pure Epistemic Proceduralism'. I shall argue that it should be preferred over `Rational Epistemic Proceduralism', the conception of legitimacy that underlies the standard interpretation of epistemic democracy. Key Words: legitimacy • deliberative democracy • epistemic democracy • social epistemology. (shrink)

Most contemporary political philosophers take justice—rather than legitimacy—to be the fundamental virtue of political institutions vis-à-vis the challenges of ethical diversity. Justice-driven theorists are primarily concerned with finding mutually acceptable terms to arbitrate the claims of conflicting individuals and groups. Legitimacy-driven theorists, instead, focus on the conditions under which those exercising political authority on an ethically heterogeneous polity are entitled to do so. But what difference would it make to the management of ethical diversity in liberal democratic societies (...) if legitimacy were prior to or independent from justice? -/- This question identifies a widely underexplored issue whose theoretical salience shows how the understanding of what constitutes the primary question of political philosophy has a deep impact on how practical political questions are interpreted and addressed. What difference would it make, for example, whether the difficulties concerning the safeguard of human rights were couched in terms of the justice or of the legitimacy of the documents and treaties sanctioning their implementation. How should the issue of the quality of democracies be addressed whether one assigned priority to the justice or legitimacy of democratic institutions? Addressing these and other topical questions, the book offers a new theoretical angle from which to consider a number of pressing social and political issues. (shrink)

This paper examines the differences between moralist, realist, and pragmatist approaches to political legitimacy by articulating their largely implicit views of judgment. Three claims are advanced. First, the salient opposition among approaches to legitimacy is not between “moralism” and “realism.” Recent realist proposals for rethinking legitimacy share with moralist views a distinctive form, called “normativism”: a quest for knowledge of principles that solve the question of legitimacy. This assumes that judging legitimacy is a matter of (...) applying such principles to a case at hand. Second, neither Rawls nor Habermas is a normativist about political legitimacy. The principles of legitimacy they proffer claim to express rather than adjudicate the legitimacy of a liberal-democratic regime, and thus cannot solve the question of legitimacy at a fundamental level. But perhaps we should question the normativist aspiration to theoretically resolving the problem to begin with. My third claim is that a “pragmatist” approach enables us to rethink political legitimacy more deeply by shifting focus from the articulation of principles to the activity of judging. Implicit in Rawls’s and Habermas’s theories I then find clues towards an alternative account of judgment, in which the question of legitimacy calls not for theoretical resolution but for ongoing practical engagement. (shrink)

The literature regarding social and environmental sustainability of business focuses primarily on rationales for adopting sustainability strategies and operational practices in support of that goal. In contrast, we examine sustainability from a perspective that has received far less research attention—attitudes that inform managerial decision-making. We develop a conceptual model that identifies six elemental categories of attitudes that can be held independently or aggregated to yield a meta-attitude representing the legitimacy of sustainability. Our model distinguishes among three types of internally (...) held attitudes and externally perceived subjective norms: pragmatic, moral, and cognitive. We propose a refinement of Ajzen's (In: Kuhl J, Beckmann J (eds) Action control: from cognition to behavior, 1985; Organ Behav Hum Decis Process 50:179-211, 1991) Theory of planned behavior (TPB) that incorporates these sub-categories of personal attitudes and subjective norms. Practical implications are discussed including how organizations considering adopting sustainability programs might use the model as a conceptual tool to help achieve and assess program success. (shrink)

There is a tension between the idea of popular sovereignty and our understanding that basic constitutional rights and liberties have a normative authority which is independent from the results of democratic decision‐making procedures. On the one hand there is the claim that the content of political justice, at least as far as the basic liberties are concerned, is to be fixed solely by substantive moral and political argument, while on the other there is the claim that it is the people (...) who determine the specific scheme of basic liberties that they live under. The apparent tension between the two claims can be resolved by introducing, firstly, a distinction between the concept of justice and the concept of legitimacy and, secondly, between proto‐rights and constitutional rights. Unlike constitutional rights, proto‐rights are moral, not legal, rights, and they are less specific than constitutional rights: one set of proto‐rights allows for various schemes of legal constitutional rights. Proto‐rights are part of the principles of justice and can be established only by substantive argument while constitutional rights have to be established by the procedures of democratic legitimization, and, therefore, they are a result of the exercise of popular sovereignty. The correlated distinctions between justice and legitimacy, and between proto‐rights and constitutional rights, allow us to specify the scope of the two claims and, hence, to affirm both simultaneously. The philosophical and legal relevance of the distinctions made is elucidated by a brief discussion of the constitutional rights of freedom of speech in the US and Germany. (shrink)

The Legitimacy of Miracle defends the view that miracles, in the strong sense of being events produced by a supernatural agent overriding the usual course of nature, can take place without violating any laws of nature. This means that the evidence for miracles cannot be judged to be in conflict with the evidence for the laws of nature; the result being that Humean objections to the rationality of belief in miracles fail.

Public justification-based accounts of liberal legitimacy rely on the idea that a polity’s basic structure should, in some sense, be acceptable to its citizens. In this paper I discuss the prospects of that approach through the lens of Gerald Gaus’ critique of John Rawls’ paradigmatic account of democratic public justification. I argue that Gaus does succeed in pointing out some significant problems for Rawls’ political liberalism; yet his alternative, justificatory liberalism, is not voluntaristic enough to satisfy the desiderata of (...) a genuinely democratic theory of public justification. So I contend that—pace Gaus, but also Rawls—rather than simply amending political liberalism, the claims of justificatory liberalism bring out fatal tensions between the desiderata of any theory of liberal-democratic legitimacy through public justification. (shrink)

Drawing on empirical evidence from history and anthropology, we aim to demonstrate that there is room for genealogical ideology critique within normative political theory. The test case is some libertarians’ use of folk notions of private property rights in defence of the legitimacy of capitalist states. Our genealogy of the notion of private property shows that asking whether a capitalist state can emerge without violations of self-ownership cannot help settling the question of its legitimacy, because the notion of (...) private property presupposed by that question is a product of the entity it is supposed to help legitimise: the state. We anchor our genealogical critique in recent work on ideology in epistemology and philosophy of language, and in current debates on the methodology of political theory. But, unlike more traditional approaches that aim to debunk whole concepts or even belief systems, we propose a more targeted, argument-specific form of ideology critique. (shrink)

Arguably, the corporate social responsibility practices of multinational enterprises are influenced by a wide range of both internal and external factors. Perhaps, most critical among the exogenous forces operating on MNEs are those exerted by state and other key institutional actors in host countries. Crucially, academic research conducted to date offers little data about how MNEs use their CSR activities to strategically manage their relationship with those actors in order to gain legitimisation advantages in host countries. This paper addresses that (...) gap by exploring interactions between external institutional pressures and firm-level CSR activities, which take the form of community initiatives, to examine how MNEs develop their legitimacy-seeking policies and practices. In focusing on a developing country, Sri Lanka, this paper provides valuable insights into how MNEs instrumentally utilise community initiatives in a country where relationship-building with governmental and other powerful non-governmental actors can be vitally important for the long-term viability of the business. Drawing on neo-institutional theory and CSR literature, this paper examines and contributes to the embryonic but emerging debate about the instrumental and political implications of CSR. The evidence presented and discussed here reveals the extent to which, and the reasons why, MNEs engage in complex legitimacy-seeking relationships with Sri Lankan host institutions. (shrink)

This essay examines the political-philosophical legitimacy of critical thinking as an aim of compulsory education. Although critical thinking is given an important role in Norwegian educational policy, the right to demand a critical attitude from all citizens has been extensively debated in political and pedagogical philosophy the last two decades. This debate stems in large part from the late work of John Rawls. In this essay, I start by stating the case for critical thinking as an educational aim, focusing (...) on democratic education. Next, I give an account of the challenge that Rawls’ later philosophy puts to education for critical thinking. Finally, I discuss some possible ways of responding to the Rawls. The upshot will be that some aspects of critical thinking can and must be defended as politically legitimate. However, any such defence must include a reply to the Rawlsian argument – if not, it will simply be naïve. In that sense, much Norwegian educational policy has been naïve. (shrink)

The increase in cases of political corruption, the loss of politicians' credibility, the development of social and political forms of pathology, and the role of the State have been at the center of political debates. In one way or another, these problems raise the question of the legitimacy of the established powers. The result is that legitimacy, a key notion of political thought in general, has today become a burning issue. Coicaud examines all these issues and proffers insightful (...) answers to questions such as the connections between morality and politics, how rulers acquire or lose the right to govern, and how one can become the advocate of a theory of political justice that, while establishing limits, respects and even ensures the promotion of plurality within societies. (shrink)

The essays collected in this special issue explore what legitimacy means for actors and institutions that do not function like traditional states but nevertheless wield significant power in the global realm. They are connected by the idea that the specific purposes of non-state actors and the contexts in which they operate shape what it means for them to be legitimate and so shape the standards of justification that they have to meet. In this introduction, we develop this guiding methodology (...) further and show how the special issue’s individual contributions apply it to their cases. In the first section, we provide a sketch of our purpose-dependent theory of legitimacy beyond the state. We then highlight two features of the institutional context beyond the state that set it apart from the domestic case: problems of feasibility and the structure of international law. (shrink)

This Article explores the relationship between the legitimacy of international courts and expansive judicial lawmaking. We compare lawmaking by three regional integration courts - the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Andean Tribunal of Justice, and the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice. These courts have similar jurisdictional grants and access rules, yet each has behaved in a strikingly different way when faced with opportunities to engage in expansive judicial lawmaking. The CJEU is the most activist, but its (...) audacious legal doctrines have been assimilated as part of the court’s legitimate authority. The ATJ and ECOWAS have been more cautious, but there is little to suggest that this caution has enhanced the legitimacy of either court. The ATJ has avoided serious challenges from governments, but its rulings have had little political impact. Conversely, the ECCJ’s circumspection has not shielded it from political opposition to its adjudication of clearly-established human rights. This pattern is at odds with the oft-voiced conventional wisdom that expansive judicial lawmaking undermines judicial legitimacy. Our modest goal in this Article is to problematize that claim and to posit an alternative hypothesis - that ICs spark legitimacy challenges due to the domestic political effects of their decisions, regardless of whether those decisions are expansionist. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper is a preliminary attempt to better understand the concept of legitimacy in stakeholder theory. The normative component of stakeholder theory plays a central role in the concept of legitimacy. Though the elaboration of legitimacy contained herein applies generally to all “normative cores” this paper relies on Phillips’s principle of stakeholder fairness and therefore begins with a brief description of this work. This is followed by a discussion of the importance of legitimacy to stakeholder theory (...) as well as the general ambiguity of the term. A distinction is then drawn between normative and derivative legitimacy. Reference to this distinction helps distinguish between a relationship with the organization based on direct moral obligation and one based on the power to help or harm the organization. It is concluded that stakeholders who retain the ability to affect the organization arelegitimate(derivatively), but that this legitimacy is derived from the moral obligation owed other (normative) stakeholders and that the two sorts of legitimacy are importantly different from one another. An example of the normative/derivative distinction at work in managerial decision making is elaborated upon and managerial and research implications are then suggested. (shrink)

Political realists argue that the concept of political legitimacy should be linked to subjects’ beliefs, while still offering normative guidance. In this article, I suggest doing so by referring to the concepts of acceptance and acceptability. I argue that a regime is legitimate if its power is accepted by subjects, provided that such acceptance meets the requirements of acceptability: subjects’ beliefs about the regime’s legitimacy need to successfully satisfy three requirements—coherence, fact-sensitivity, and politics-sensitivity—via entering public debate. I rely (...) on pragmatism to investigate the link between subjects’ beliefs and their experience of facing political authority. (shrink)

The use of Genetic Modification in food is the subject of deep political disagreement. Much of the disagreement involves different perceptions of the kinds of risks posed by pursuing GM food, and how these are to be tolerated and regulated. As a result, a primary institutional site of GM food politics is regulatory agencies tasked with risk assessment and regulation. Locating GM food politics in administrative areas of governance regimes produces unique challenges of democratic legitimacy, conventionally secured through legislative (...) channels. In particular, debate over the ends of a society’s policy on GM food inevitably continues in these institutional locations, despite conventional instrumental understandings of administrative legitimacy resting on effective application of ‘ends-means’ norms. This paper assesses the two major regulatory frameworks currently applied to GM food—the ‘precautious’ and ‘proof of harm’ approaches—and presents their respective limits in securing the procedural and substantive dimensions of the legitimacy of administrative deference in democratic societies. On the basis of these criticisms, a synthesized and emergent approach—‘experiential precaution’—is presented as having the resources to deepen the legitimacy of risk governance institutions in the case of GM food. It is characterized by deepened participatory practices of negotiated rulemaking and inclusion of further substantive requirements in approval criteria. (shrink)

The traditional medical epistemology, resting on a biomedical paradigmatic monopoly, fails to display an adequate representation of medical knowledge. Clinical knowledge, including the complexities of human interaction, is not available for inquiry by means of biomedical approaches, and consequently is denied legitimacy within a scientific context. A gap results between medical research and clinical practice. Theories of knowledge, especially the concept of tacit knowing, seem suitable for description and discussion of clinical knowledge, commonly denoted the art of medicine. A (...) metaposition allows for inquiry of clinical knowledge, inviting an expansion of the traditional medical epistemology, provided that relevant criteria for scientific knowledge within this field are developed and applied. The consequences of such approaches are discussed. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to consider the question of whether democratic legitimacy requires viewpoint neutrality with regard to political speech – including extremist political speech, such as hate speech. The starting point of my discussion is Jeremy Waldron’s negative answer to this question. He argues that it is permissible for liberal democracies to ban certain extremist viewpoints – such as vituperative hate speech – because such viewpoint-based restrictions protect the dignity of persons and a social and moral (...) environment of mutual respect. According to Waldron, well-drafted narrow hate speech bans are not democratically illegitimate, and they do not undermine systemic democratic legitimacy – that is, the legitimacy of a democratic political system. In contrast to Waldron, I will argue that democratic legitimacy requires viewpoint neutrality to respect persons as thinking agents. I will defend a civil libertarian doctrine of viewpoint neutrality, and this doctrine requires that citizens in liberal democracies ought to have a legal free speech right to do moral wrong – that is, a legal right to express and defend any political viewpoint or idea, even if it is morally wrong to express, or expose others to, such views. It will be argued that any viewpoint-based restriction on public discourse (including narrow hate speech bans) is democratically illegitimate, and that such restrictions undermine systemic democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

This study is focused on unsustainable agri-food systems, especially intensive livestock farming and its resulting environmental harms. Specifically we focus on the development of technologies that seek to mitigate these environmental harms. These technologies are generally developed as incremental innovations in response to government regulation. Critics of these technological solutions allege that these developments legitimate unsustainable food production systems and are incapable of supporting agri-food systems transformation. At the same time, technology developers and other actors seek to present these technologies (...) as the legitimate solution to agri-environmental harms. Our study seeks to explore the perceptions and constructions of legitimacy for technologies that are developed to reduce ammonia emissions in intensive livestock farming in Flanders (Belgium). We use a qualitative case study, employing semi-structured interviews and workshops, with technology developers of ammonia-emission reducing technologies and stakeholders in the intensive livestock farming industry in Flanders. What our study shows is that technologies developed to reduce emissions are dependent on regulative legitimacy. The normative and cognitive legitimacy of these technologies is lacking, both due to ties to the intensive livestock industry and due to uncertainty over the performance of these technologies. With the delegitimation of intensive livestock farming, the legitimacy of these technologies is also under threat. In response, technology developers are looking to (re-)construct this legitimacy through knowledge claims over the performance of their technologies. We show several ways for other actors to deal with this, centred on either re-legitimising technologies to maintain the status quo, or to contest these knowledge claims and use them to disrupt path dependencies. (shrink)

In political theory it goes without saying that the constitution of government raises a claim for legitimacy. With the constitution of the people, however, it is different. It is often dismissed as a historical question. The conviction is that since the people cannot decide on its own composition the boundaries of democracy must be determined by other factors, such as the contingent forces of history. This article critically assesses this view. It argues that like the constitution of government, the (...) constitution of the people raises a claim for legitimacy. The failure to see this is what makes many theorists run into the arms of history. They submit the legitimacy of the people to the arbitrary and asymmetrical forces of the present. (shrink)

Increasingly secret, complex, and inscrutable computational systems are being used to intensify existing power relations and to create new ones; in particular, they are being used to govern. To be all-things-considered morally permissible new, or newly intense, power relations must meet standards of procedural legitimacy and proper authority. This is necessary for them to protect and realise democratic values of individual liberty, relational equality, and collective self-determination. For governing power in particular to be legitimate and have proper authority, it (...) must meet a publicity requirement: reasonably competent members of the governed community must be able to determine that they are being governed legitimately and with proper authority. The publicity requirement can be satisfied only if the powerful can explain their decision-making to members of their political community. At least some duties of explanation are therefore democratic duties. This chapter first sets out the foregoing argument, then applies it to opaque computational systems, and clarifies precisely what kinds of explanations are necessary to fulfil these democratic values. (shrink)

This article focuses on the company-stakeholder relationship between a large pulp and paper company and a small monastery and nature retreat center. The literature on stakeholder management and organizational legitimacy provides a theoretical foundation. The analysis demonstrates how organizational power and legitimacy can influence stakeholder legitimacy. The authors illustrate the ways that a company can manage the legitimacy of stakeholders through the use of political language and symbolic activity. The results contribute to a better understanding of (...) stakeholder identification, salience, and the different contexts of legitimacy in the company-stakeholder relationship. Implications for stakeholder research and practice are also discussed. (shrink)

Institutions undertake a huge variety of constitutive purposes. One of the roles of legitimacy is to protect and promote an institution’s pursuit of its purpose; state legitimacy is generally understood as the right to rule, for example. When considering legitimacy beyond the state, we have to take account of how differences in purposes change legitimacy. I focus in particular on how differences in purpose matter for the stringency of the standards that an institution must meet in (...) order to be legitimate. An important characteristic of an institution’s purpose is its deontic status, i.e. whether it is morally impermissible, merely permissible, or mandatory. Although this matters, it does so in some non-obvious ways; the mere fact of a morally impermissible purpose is not necessarily delegitimating, for example. I also consider the problem of conflicting, multiple, and contested institutional purposes, and the different theoretical roles for institutional purpose. Understanding how differences in purpose matter for an institution’s legitimacy is one part of the broader project of theorizing institutional legitimacy in the many contexts beyond the traditional context of the state. (shrink)

The biofuel boom is placing enormous demands on existing cropping systems, with the most crucial consequences in the agri-food sector. The biofuel industry is responding by initiating private governance and certification. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Cramer Commission, among others, have formulated criteria on “sustainable” biofuel production and processing. This article explores the legitimacy of private governance and certification by the biofuel industry, highlighting opportunities and challenges. It argues that the concept of output based (...) class='Hi'>legitimacy is problematic in the case of biofuel as long as no consensus or commonly agreed “best” solution has been established on what sustainable biofuel production is. Furthermore, it shows that the private governance initiatives analyzed fail to adequately include actors from developing countries. Finally, the article argues that we need mechanisms for control and accountability in order to guarantee that the political output of biofuel certification serves the common welfare. (shrink)

Global governance has a major impact on the lives of people around the world. However, traditional theories of legitimacy were usually developed for states and are not suitable for the diversity of global governance institutions that exist today. This book first develops a normative concept of legitimacy that is applicable to all political institutions. According to this concept, to regard an institution as legitimate means ascribing it the right to exercise its function in political practice. Secondly, the book (...) discusses how the use of this concept opens up new perspectives in the debate on legitimacy criteria for global governance institutions. In this context, the book analyses the relationship of legitimacy to the values of justice and democracy and discusses the role of feasibility constraints and the all-affected principle in legitimacy judgements. The concept of legitimacy as the right to function opens up the conceptual space to accommodate the insight that legitimacy criteria are not the same for all global governance institutions, but depend on their function and context. Thirdly, the book applies the developed theoretical framework to a specific global governance institution, the G20. (shrink)

This is a translation of the afterword of Legality and Legitimacy, rewritten by Carl Schmitt in 1958 for his collection Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924–1954. In the afterword, Schmitt once again describes the situation in Germany in the early 1930’s, and argues against the influential German lawyers who rejected his interpretation of the Weimar Constitution. He rejects the wide-spread opinion that he wanted a state of emergency in Germany to be introduced, and insists that this book was his (...) final attempt to rescue the presidential republic of Weimar Germany. Schmitt then demonstrates the weakness of legal positivism and specifically stops at the several key points in his argument. First, according to Schmitt, the positivists did not know that legality, an unopposed form of the manifestation of legitimacy, had originally been an essential part of Western rationalism. Second, it is necessary to distinguish between the law and the sanctions because of their different legal statuses. This distinguishing is important because the legislative state was gradually becoming the administrative state. As a result, the governing institutions are more powerful than the parliamentary laws. Any parliamentary decision providing executive bodies relevant authority cannot be executed without an effective parliamentary majority. Thirdly, Schmitt explores the question of the so-called “premiums” for the legal possession of power. The afterword concludes with a brief overview of the situation at the end of the January 1933. The Publication includes the translator’s preface providing an overview of the main provisions of Schmitt's book, Legality and Legitimacy. (shrink)

This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should—indeed must—reckon with the medieval. Offering a much-needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg, who in his _Legitimacy of the Modern Age_ describes the “modern age” as a complete departure from the Middle Ages, these essays forcefully show that thinkers from Adorno to Žižek have repeatedly drawn from medieval sources to theorize modernity. To forget the medieval, or to discount its continued effect on contemporary thought, is to (...) neglect the responsibilities of periodization. In _The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages_, modernists and medievalists, as well as scholars specializing in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century comparative literature, offer a new history of theory and philosophy through essays on secularization and periodization, Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, Heidegger’s scholasticism, and Adorno’s nominalist aesthetics. One essay illustrates the workings of medieval mysticism in the writing of Freud’s most famous patient, Daniel Paul Schreber, author of _Memoirs of My Nervous Illness_. Another looks at Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s _Empire_, a theoretical synthesis whose conscientious medievalism was the subject of much polemic in the post-9/11 era, a time in which premodernity itself was perceived as a threat to western values. The collection concludes with an afterword by Fredric Jameson, a theorist of postmodernism who has engaged with the medieval throughout his career. _Contributors_: Charles D. Blanton, Andrew Cole, Kathleen Davis, Michael Hardt, Bruce Holsinger, Fredric Jameson, Ethan Knapp, Erin Labbie, Jed Rasula, D. Vance Smith, Michael Uebel. (shrink)