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This second part of the book turns to an examination of the conditions under which it is morally justifiable to exercise political power to enforce international law in the pursuit of justice. Ch. 5 develops a justice‐based conception of political legitimacy, where “political legitimacy” is defined as follows: An entity has political legitimacy if and only if it is morally justified in exercising political power, where the exercise of political power may, in turn, be defined as the (credible) attempt to achieve supremacy in the making, application, and enforcement of laws within a jurisdiction. It is argued that an entity that exercises political power is morally justified in doing so only if it meets a minimal standard of justice, understood as the protection of basic human rights. The conception of political legitimacy offered is meant to be perfectly general, and applies to any entity that wields political power, whether at the state, regional, or international level; it is used again in Chs 6–8. The eight sections of the chapter are: I. Political Legitimacy and the Morality of Political Power; The Irrelevance of the Idea that We Owe Compliance to the Government; III. Explaining the Preoccupation with the Government's Right to be Obeyed; IV. Toward a Theory of Political Legitimacy; V. Why Should Some Persons Rather than Others Wield Political Power?; VI. Democracy and Mutual Obligations among Citizens; and VIII. Conclusions.

Completes the second part of the book, and relies on the conception of political legitimacy delineated in Ch. 5 to advance a justice‐based, rather than a consent‐based, account of system legitimacy: a set of criteria that the international legal system would have to meet in order to be legitimate. Building on groundwork already laid in Chs 1 and 5, it is shown why, contrary to the dominant view among international lawyers, the consent of states cannot confer legitimacy on the international legal system. In addition, it is argued that it is a mistake to assume that political equality among states is a necessary condition for system legitimacy, and that the international legal system, like any system for the exercise of political power, ought to be democratic. It is also shown that the idea of democratizing the international legal system is an ambiguous one and should not be equated with increasing state majoritarianism in the workings of the system; the charge that the international legal system has a “democratic deficit” is valid, but it is a mistake to assume that the remedy is to make the system conform more closely to the ideal of democracy as state majoritarianism. The eight sections of the chapter are: I. The Question of System Legitimacy; II. The Case for Having an International Legal System; III. A Justice‐Based Conception of System Legitimacy; IV. The Consent Theory of System Legitimacy; I. Moral Minimalism and the Consent Theory of System Legitimacy. VI. The Instrumental Argument for State Consent as a Necessary Condition for System Legitimacy; VII. Is Democracy a Necessary Condition of System Legitimacy?; and VIII. The Pursuit of Justice in an Imperfect System.

Ch. 5 outlined an argument for a justice‐based general conception of what might be called internal political legitimacy: the conditions under which the exercise of political power within a political entity's own borders is morally justified. This conception of internal political legitimacy is used in Ch. 6 as a component of an account of recognitional legitimacy (also called international legitimacy). The concept of recognitional legitimacy plays a central role in international legal institutions and international affairs, where states, governments, and insurgency movements may all be recognized or not recognized as legitimate by individual states, groups of states, or regional or international organizations. The primary focus of this chapter is recognitional legitimacy as applied to states—i.e. on the judgement that a particular entity should or should not be recognized as a member in good standing of the system of states, with all the rights, powers, liberties, and immunities that go with that status; the guiding idea of the approach is that recognition is an act with serious moral implications and, as such, ought to be governed by rules that are themselves morally justifiable. The three sections of the chapter are: The Concept of Recognitional Legitimacy; II. Justifying the Justice‐Based Theory of Recognitional Legitimacy; and III. Legitimacy of States Versus Legitimacy of Governments.

Begins the task of applying the justice‐based conception of political legitimacy developed in Part Two of the book to the practically urgent and theoretically vexing issues of secession and self‐determination. Two main theses are advanced. The first is that international law should recognize a remedial right to secede but not a general right of self‐determination that includes the right to secede for all peoples or nations; from the standpoint of international law, the unilateral right to secede—the right to secede without consent or constitutional authorization—should be understood as a remedial right only, a last‐resort response to serious injustices (the Remedial Right Only Theory). The second thesis advanced is that international legal order should encourage alternatives to secession, in particular by working for greater compliance with existing international human rights norms prohibiting ethno‐national and religious discrimination and, in some cases, by supporting intrastate autonomy regimes, i.e. arrangements for self‐government short of full sovereignty. The six sections of the chapter are: I. Introduction; II. A Justice‐Based Theory of Secession; III. Theories of Secession; IV. Recognition and the Right to Secede; V. Secession and Distributive Justice; and VI. Conclusions.

This chapter sets out a political usage for the term ‘legitimacy’. It suggests that whatever subsequent associations or connections may be described between political legitimacy and other forms of legitimacy, it is possible to distinguish it as a feature of the relationship between government and governed, or of the processes or structures of government. It is also possible to distinguish between legitimation by specifically political claims or criteria, and legitimation by reference to other values.

This chapter criticizes the emphasis on privatization, the destruction of the Maoist-style emphasis on social welfare, and the growing gap between rich and poor. It argues that more needs to be done to combat the inequalities generated by capitalist modernization in China. Political legitimacy is not something to be defined by moral philosophers in total abstraction from the political reality. Rather, it is a matter of whether or not a political system faces a crisis of legitimacy depends on whether the people who live there doubt the rightness of its power, and whether they consider it the appropriate system for their country. The chapter ultimately endorses a definition of legitimacy as the legitimacy of the popular will.

This introductory chapter focuses on the importance of studying political legitimacy. It also provides a brief overview of the concepts of legitimacy and legitimate authority and discusses three accounts of justifiable and justified obedience. Legitimacy, in so far as it sustains government, can involve both citizenship and subjection. A study of legitimacy provides an opportunity not only to distinguish between various relations of and within government. It can also be employed to examine the various conceptions of government and politics available within political science.

This chapter argues that, in order to fully understand the significance of electoral legitimation, one has to study the way in which the individualistic legal requirement is embedded in a holistic vision—a vision that treats unanimity as an intrinsic moral, social, and political value. Democratic regimes had eventually adopted the principle of majority rule as a practical procedural necessity, since numerical unanimity was virtually impossible to achieve. Yet at the same time they remained under the sway of this older idea of substantive unanimity. Ultimately, this latent contradiction would eventually undermine the idea that legitimacy can spring from elections alone. In order to gauge the extent of the problem, the chapter embarks on a brief exploration of the old sense of unanimity.

Should large-scale, Western-based humanitarian and development INGOs such as Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders be evaluated based on whether they are politically legitimate? The philosophical literature on political legitimacy has addressed this question with regard to non-state actors in general, but has not said much specifically about INGOs. The INGO literature has discussed issues of political legitimacy, but has focused almost exclusively on one dimension of the concept—the criteria that INGOs must meet to be politically legitimate—while largely overlooking two other dimensions: that political legitimacy is (a) a minimum threshold for (b) the moral right to rule. Bringing the full “three-dimensional” concept of political legitimacy developed in the political philosophy literature to bear on INGOs is valuable in several ways: It flips the script of traditional charity-based approaches, treats aid recipients and other subjects of INGO rule as moral and political agents capable of making and acting on moral judgments, provides a locus of agreement for people who otherwise disagree about INGOs, and works synergistically with democratic criteria for INGO political legitimacy.

This chapter shows why the Rawls of Political Liberalism thinks that an overlapping consensus would obtain in, and stabilize, a well-ordered society. It explains how adherence to the ideals of political legitimacy and public reason contribute to stability. It draws out the implications of the pluralism about justice that Rawls came to think would characterize a just liberal society. It also shows that the interpretation of Political Liberalism offered in Chapters IX and X fits with Rawls's last and fullest treatment of political justification, the treatment found in his “Reply to Habermas”.

Chapter 3 describes the kind of agent that may claim territorial rights. In order for a people to qualify as a candidate for self-determination rights over territory, the people must: (i) demonstrate the capacity to meet minimal standards of justice, and (ii) have members who share a common conception of justice. The first criterion directly follows from the justification for territorial political power. Any group with a claim to significant political power (as comes with claims to territorial rights) must demonstrate the minimal capacity to establish institutions that function effectively in providing the objects of members’ basic individual needs. The second criterion is derived from the political legitimacy requirement. As political legitimacy requires self-rule, it presupposes a conception of the political ‘self’, or people. The view that the people is constituted by those who share a common conception of justice explains the relevant features of a unique collective, enduring agent that may hold self-determination rights over territory.

Many countries, including the United States, lack consensus about the core ethical principles concerning health and health care, beyond a market‐based approach to resource allocation. This chapter offers a normative theory for analyzing health policy decisions and recognizes that norms need fundamental restructuring to address existing health problems. Substantive normative principles (moral legitimacy) should be introduced into deliberative democratic process (political legitimacy) for a comprehensive, integrative theory of health and social justice. The chapter reviews the role of moral values in motivating citizens' support for public policies, and explores differences between social agreement frameworks such as incompletely theorized agreements (ITAs) and overlapping consensus and more traditional political bargaining models. ITA analysis of the American Clinton health care reform attempts reveals agreement on the mid‐level concept of universal coverage, but disagreement on both high‐ and low‐level principles. The chapter concludes that high‐level principle (e.g. health for all) or low‐level principle (e.g. willingness to pay for other's and future selves' health insurance) agreement, arising from internalization of shared public moral norms, might lead to more stable support for reform.

This introductory chapter discusses an anthropological approach to examining political order in Afghanistan. Rather than casting the nation in the context of war and conquerors, this chapter views the Afghans themselves as the main players to understand the country and its political dynamics. It examines the question of how rulers in Afghanistan obtained political legitimacy over the centuries and brought order to the land, particularly through looking at how notions of power and political legitimacy in Afghanistan change over a long period of time. The chapter lays out the groundwork for a more detailed discussion on these concepts by introducing the themes and theoretical framework underpinning the book's overall arguments.

If some external enforcement agency compels us to honor deals reached in the original position, then Harsanyi has shown that the outcome will be utilitarian. Under the same hypotheses, Rawls claims that the outcome will be egalitarian. This chapter confirms that Harsanyi is correct. It goes on to use the concept of an empathy equilibrium to predict the standard of interpersonal comparison needed to operate a utilitarian norm that will evolve in the medium run.

The debate over the relationship between the European Union (EU) and national politics hinges on the underlying model one has of the linkages between the EU, the member-state governments, and national politics. Some scholars view the EU as primarily an intergovernmental organisation where governments agree to pool their sovereignty to create rules in circumscribed arenas of joint benefit such as trade and monetary policy. The EU obtains its political legitimacy by virtue of the political legitimacy of the member-state governments. Since those governments are freely elected, citizens who disapprove of their government's policies in Europe can vote for other parties. In this way, the EU is ultimately within the power of citizens and does not in fact actually suffer a democratic deficit.