The authors articulate a global public standard for the normative legitimacy of global governance institutions. This standard can provide the basis for principled criticism of global governance institutions and guide reform efforts in circumstances in which people disagree deeply about the demands of global justice and the role that global governance institutions should play in meeting them.

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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 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)

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)

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)

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)

This paper is a preliminary attempt to better understand the concept of legitimacy in stakeholder theory. The normative componentof stakeholder theory plays a central role in the concept of legitimacy. Though the elaboration of legitimacy contained hereinapplies 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 are legitimate (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)

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)

This article aims to make conceptual room for a view about political legitimacy called the power-liability account. The view claims that politi- cal legitimacy is a form of normative power that entails moral liability, but not necessarily a moral claim-right that entails moral duty. The power-liability account supports appealing interpretations of justified civil disobedience in the face of legitimate but unjust law at home and of justified human rights interventions that violate legitimate international law abroad. I argue here (...) only for the conceptual possibility of this view, not for its normative correctness. I believe that the power-liability view indeed is correct, but it often is thought that the view not only is false but also incoherent. Many hold that entailed duty and immunity are built into the meaning of the concept of political legitimacy. My task is to loosen these conceptual strictures. (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)

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)

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)

This essay asks why Aristotle, certainly no friend to unlimited democracy, seems so much more comfortable with unconstrained rhetoric in political deliberation than current defenders of deliberative democracy. It answers this question by reconstructing and defending a distinctly Aristotelian understanding of political deliberation, one that can be pieced together out of a series of separate arguments made in the Rhetoric, the Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics.

Several prominent writers including Norman Daniels, James Sabin, Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson and Leonard Fleck advance a view of legitimacy according to which, roughly, policies are legitimate if and only if they result from democratic deliberation, which employs only public reasons that are publicised to stakeholders. Yet, the process described by this view contrasts with the actual processes involved in creating the Affordable Care Act and in attempting to pass the Health Securities Act. Since the ACA seems to be (...) legitimate, as the HSA would have been had it passed, there seem to be counterexamples to this view. In this essay, I clarify the concept of legitimacy as employed in bioethics discourse. I then use that clarification to develop these examples into a criticism of the orthodox view–that it implies that legitimacy requires counterintuitively large sacrifices of justice in cases where important advancement of healthcare rights depends on violations of publicity. Finally, I reply to three responses to this challenge: that some revision to the orthodox view salvages its core commitments, that its views of publicity and substantive considerations do not have the implications that I claim and that arguments for it are strong enough to support even counterintuitive results. My arguments suggest a greater role for substantive considerations than the orthodox view allows. (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)

In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl Lowith's well-known thesis that the idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramatic intervention that will consummate the history of the ...

What is it for a state, constitution or set of governmental institutions to have political legitimacy? This paper raises some doubts about two broadly liberal answers to this question, which can be labelled ?Kantian? and ?libertarian?. The argument focuses in particular on the relationship between legitimacy and principles of justice and on the place of consent. By contrast with these views, I suggest that, without endorsing the kind of voluntarist theory, according to which political legitimacy is simply (...) created by individual consent, an adequate understanding of political legitimacy should take much more account than most philosophical theories tend to do of the attitudes and beliefs of citizens and the social and political context in which they have saliency. This also involves acknowledging the limits of theory in determining criteria of political legitimacy. (shrink)

Here is my thesis (and the outline of this paper). Increasingly secret, complex and inscrutable computational systems are being used to intensify existing power relations, and to create new ones (Section II). To be all-things-considered morally permissible, new, or newly intense, power relations must in general meet standards of procedural legitimacy and proper authority (Section III). Legitimacy and authority constitutively depend, in turn, on a publicity requirement: reasonably competent members of the political community in which power is being (...) exercised must be able to determine that power is being exercised legitimately and with proper authority (Section IV). The publicity requirement can be satisfied only if the powerful can explain their decision-making—including the computational tools that they use to support it—to members of their political community. Section V applies these ideas to opaque computational systems. Section VI addresses objections; Section VII concludes. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: There is general agreement amongst those involved in the normative discussion about geoengineering that if we are to move forward with significant research, development, and certainly any future deployment, legitimate governance is a must. However, while we agree that the abstract concept of legitimacy ought to guide geoengineering governance, agreement surrounding the appropriate conception of legitimacy has yet to emerge. Relying upon Allen Buchanan’s metacoordination view of institutional legitimacy, this paper puts forward a conception of (...) class='Hi'>legitimacy appropriate for geoengineering governance, outlining five normative criteria an institution ought to fulfill if it is to justifiably coordinate our action around geoengineering. (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)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. This essay argues for the conceptual connection of legitimacy, resistance and ‘the people’ within liberal theories of public justification by making two primary claims: that legitimacy and resistance are mutually constitutive of one another and that together legitimacy and resistance are constitutive of an aspirational conception of ‘the people’. These claims revolve around the idea that the legitimacy of democratic regimes necessarily entails the questioning of that legitimacy through (...) resistance, which concerns demands that say something about the makeup of ‘the people’. The concern is conceptual, examples of resistance showing how the conceptual connection manifests itself. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. This essay argues for the conceptual connection of legitimacy, resistance and ‘the people’ within liberal theories of public justification by making two primary claims: that legitimacy and resistance are mutually constitutive of one another and that together legitimacy and resistance are constitutive of an aspirational conception of ‘the people’. These claims revolve around the idea that the legitimacy of democratic regimes necessarily entails the questioning of that legitimacy through (...) resistance, which concerns demands that say something about the makeup of ‘the people’. The concern is conceptual, examples of resistance showing how the conceptual connection manifests itself. (shrink)

Legitimacy is a concept that has been largely forgotten by the deconstructive discourse on law and politics. This article seeks, on the one hand, to reassess the role of legitimacy in deconstruction and, on the other hand, to bring deconstructive thinking to bear on the concept of legitimacy. By re-reading Derrida’s “Declarations of Independence” through the lenses of his later texts on sovereignty and (counter)signature, it is argued that, rather than being deconstructible, legitimacy is deconstructing any (...) self-founding of law and power. As such, legitimacy functions not as an evaluative concept of law and order but as a constantly insisting demand that facilitates the principles of responsibility and responsiveness. (shrink)

Firms worldwide are increasingly required to disclose their carbon emissions due to the environmental damage associated with climate change. Because there has been no previous literature focusing on the determinants of corporate carbon disclosure integrating environmental legitimacy and green innovation, the present study attempted to develop an original framework to fill the research gap. This study explored the influence of environmental legitimacy on corporate carbon disclosure, and investigated the role of green innovation as a mediator. With the samples (...) of Carbon Disclosure Project in China from 2008 to 2012, the results demonstrate that environmental legitimacy significantly negatively influences the likelihood of corporate carbon disclosure, and that green process innovation mediates the relationship, while green product innovation has no significant mediating effect. It means that environmental legitimacy not only directly affects the likelihood of corporate carbon disclosure, but also indirectly affects it via green process innovation. Hence, companies must increase both informal and formal mechanisms, i.e., external environmental legitimacy and internal green process innovation, to engage in carbon information disclosure and ensure sustainability. (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.

International institutions have become increasingly important not only in the relations between states, but also for individuals. When are these institutions legitimate? The legitimacy standards fo...

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)

Moral legitimacy entails intrinsic value and helps executives convince firm’s stakeholders and the general public of the ethical acceptability of an institution or its activities or projects. Social license to operate is the social approval of those affected by a certain business activity, and it is receiving increasing attention, especially in the context of controversial projects such as mining and public works. Moral legitimacy provides ethical support to SLO. Drawing from the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition and taking substantive justice and (...) the common good of society as the key references, this paper applies the Triple Font of Morality Theory and proposes four criteria which serve to evaluate moral legitimacy: contribution of the project or activity to the common good in a better way than other alternatives, morality of the means and procedures employed, ethical evaluation of the situation including stakeholder concerns and needs, and ethical evaluation of reasonably foreseeable consequences associated with the project and how to minimize possible damage or risks, and balance foreseeable negative consequences and benefits. The application of these criteria is illustrated through a project, presented as a case study, which certainly involved controversy and problems with SLO. The project was the construction of a rail tunnel for a high-speed train near the foundations of the Sagrada Familia, the well-known monumental church in Barcelona, Spain. (shrink)

What makes a government legitimate? Arthur Isak Applbaum rigorously argues that the greatest threat to democracies today is not loss of basic rights or despotism. It is the tyranny of unreason: domination of citizens by incoherent, inconstant, incontinent rulers. A government that cannot govern itself cannot legitimately govern others.

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)

Some types of solar radiation management (SRM) research are ethically problematic because they expose persons, animals, and ecosystems to significant risks. In our earlier work, we argued for ethical norms for SRM research based on norms for biomedical research. Biomedical researchers may not conduct research on persons without their consent, but universal consent is impractical for SRM research. We argue that instead of requiring universal consent, ethical norms for SRM research require only political legitimacy in decision-making about global SRM (...) trials. Using Allen Buchanan & Robert Keohane's model of global political legitimacy, we examine several existing global institutions as possible analogues for a politically legitimate SRM decision-making body. (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)

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)

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)

Elitist scepticism of democracy has a venerable history. This paper responds to the latest round of such scepticism—the ‘competence objection’, articulated in recent work by Jason Brennan. Brennan’s charge is that democracy is unjust because it allows uninformed, irrational, and morally unreasonable voters to exercise power over high-stakes political decisions, thus imposing undue risk upon the citizenry. I show that Brennan’s objection admits of two interpretations, and argue that neither can be sustained on close examination. Along the way, I consider (...) the merits of Brennan’s preferred ‘epistocratic’ alternative to democracy, and argue that it is likely to lead to lower-quality outcomes. (shrink)

Despite being fundamental to democracy, the normative concept of the people, i.e. the demos, is highly unclear. This article clarifies the legitimacy of the demos’ boundaries by structuring the debate into three strains of justification: first, normative membership principles; second, its democratic functionality and the necessity of cohesion for this essential function; and third, a procedural understanding of the demos. It will be shown that normative principles can only justify its expansion towards the ideal of an unbounded demos. On (...) the other hand, the democratic function of the demos can be understood as a criterion for its restriction. This, however, is only possible on the basis of an existing polity and not for the initial constitution of the demos. Consequently, a legitimate demos has to take both inclusionary and exclusionary tendencies into account. These tendencies need to be weighed against each other in the democratic process, which leads to a fundamentally procedural understanding of the legitimacy of the demos. (shrink)

The two leading traditions of theorizing about democratic legitimacy are liberalism and deliberative democracy. Liberals typically claim that legitimacy consists in the consent of the governed, while deliberative democrats typically claim that legitimacy consists in the soundness of political procedures. Despite this difference, both traditions see the need for legitimacy as arising from the coercive enforcement of law and regard legitimacy as necessary for law to have normative authority. While I endorse the broad aims of (...) these two traditions, I believe they both misunderstand the nature of legitimacy. In this essay I argue that the legitimacy of a law is neither necessary nor sufficient for its normative authority, and I argue further that the need for legitimacy in law arises regardless of whether the law is coercively enforced. I thus articulate a new understanding of the legitimacy and authority of law. (shrink)

Physicians commonly recommend ?placebo treatments?, which are not believed to have specific efficacy for the patient's condition. Motivations for placebo treatments include complying with patient expectations and promoting a placebo effect. In this article, we focus on two key empirical questions that must be addressed in order to assess the ethical legitimacy of placebo treatments in clinical practice: 1) do placebo treatments have the potential to produce clinically significant benefit? and 2) can placebo treatments be effective in promoting a (...) therapeutic placebo response without the use of deception? We examine evidence from clinical trials and laboratory experiments bearing on these two questions. The conclusion is reached that based on currently available evidence, it is premature to judge whether placebo treatments are ethically justifiable, with the possible exception of acupuncture for pain relief. (shrink)