- Submit
-
Browse
- All Categories
- Metaphysics and Epistemology
- Value Theory
- Science, Logic, and Mathematics
- Science, Logic, and Mathematics
- Logic and Philosophy of Logic
- Philosophy of Biology
- Philosophy of Cognitive Science
- Philosophy of Computing and Information
- Philosophy of Mathematics
- Philosophy of Physical Science
- Philosophy of Social Science
- Philosophy of Probability
- General Philosophy of Science
- Philosophy of Science, Misc
- History of Western Philosophy
- Philosophical Traditions
- Philosophy, Misc
- Other Academic Areas
- More
Switch to: References
Citations of:
Add citations
You must login to add citations.
|
|
|
The tension between the authority of states and the authority of international institutions is a persistent feature of international relations. Legitimacy assessments of international institutions play a crucial role in resolving such tensions. If an international institution exercises legitimate authority, it creates binding obligations for states. According to Raz’s well-known service conception, legitimate authority depends on the reasons for actions of those who are subject to it. Yet what are the practical reasons that should guide the actions of states? Can (...) |
|
|
ABSTRACT Peter Hägel's Billionaires in World Politics undoubtedly fills a gap in the literature of international relations and global governance. My comment seeks to highlight that Hägel's (2020. Billionaires in World Politics. 1st ed. Oxford Scholarship Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press) work allows us to advance our understanding of how these private actors can be understood as legitimate authorities and how they can contribute to the legitimacy of the international order. I divide my commentary into three points: the first concerns (...) |
|
|
People can have or lack ‘integrity’. But can public institutions? It is common to speak of the ‘integrity’ of such institutions: in popular discourse, legal decisions, law and regulations, and also increasingly, political theory, and proximate disciplines. Such integrity is often said to be at risk of being ‘subverted,’ ‘corroded,’ and ‘corrupted,’ by both forces within and without. Furthermore, the implication is that this is a very worrying thing. The integrity of our institutions, at least, needs to be preserved, supported, (...) |
|
|
In contemporary democracies, global capitalism exerts a significant influence over how state power is exercised, raising questions about where political power resides in global politics. This question is important, since our specific considerations about justifiability of political power, i.e. political legitimacy, depend on how we characterize political power at the global level. As a partial answer to this question, I argue that our notion of global political legitimacy should be reoriented to include the structural power of the Transnational Capitalist Class (...) |
|
|
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 (...) |
|
|
In the last few decades, the democratic credentials of global governance institutions have been extensively debated in the fields of international relations and political philosophy. However, despite their prominent role in the architecture of global governance, club governance institutions like the Group of Seven (G7) or the Group of Twenty (G20) have rarely been considered from the perspective of democratic theory. Focussing on the G20, this paper analyses its functions in international political practice and discusses whether, in exercising these functions, (...) |
|
|
Data platforms represent a new paradigm for carrying out health research. In the platform model, datasets are pooled for remote access and analysis, so novel insights for developing better stratified and/or personalised medicine approaches can be derived from their integration. If the integration of diverse datasets enables development of more accurate risk indicators, prognostic factors, or better treatments and interventions, this obviates the need for the sharing and reuse of data; and a platform-based approach is an appropriate model for facilitating (...) |
|
|
As Michel Foucault and others have shown, from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, Western political discourse has perpetuated an art of governing aimed at societies and populations. This article argues that this modern art of governing is now coming undone, in the name of governance. The discourse on governance is taking us from an art of governing premised on producing policy for a society or a population to an art of governing premised on solving problems with no necessary reference (...) |
|
|
How can codes of ethics acquire legitimacy—that is, how can they lay down obligations that will be seen by their subjects as morally binding? There are many answers to this question, reflecting the fact that moral agents have a host of different bases on which they may acknowledge code duties as ethically binding—or, alternatively, may reject those duties as morally irrelevant or actively corrupt. Drawing on a wide literature on legitimacy in other practical fields, this paper develops a multidimensional legitimacy (...) |
|
|
By appeal to the phenomenon of presupposition accommodation, Rae Langton and others have proposed that speakers can gain genuine authority over their audiences when they implicitly claim such autho... |
|
|
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. (...) |
|
|
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... |
|
|
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 (...) |
|
|
I argue that legitimacy discourses serve a gatekeeping function. They give practitioners telic standards for riding herd on social practices, ensuring that minimally acceptable versions of the practice are implemented. Such a function is a necessary part of implementing formalized social practices, especially including law. This gatekeeping account shows that political philosophers have misunderstood legitimacy; it is not secondary to justice and only necessary because we cannot agree about justice. Instead, it is a necessary feature of actual human social practices, (...) |
|
|
This paper discusses how the general and abstract concept of legitimacy applies to international institutions, using the United Nations Security Council as an example. We argue that the evaluation of the Security Council’s legitimacy requires considering three significant and interrelated aspects: its purpose, competences, and procedural standards. We consider two possible interpretations of the Security Council’s purpose: on the one hand, maintaining peace and security, and, on the other, ensuring broader respect for human rights. Both of these purposes are minimally (...) |
|
|
While methodological and metatheoretical questions pertaining to feasibility have been intensively discussed in the philosophical literature on feasibility and justice in recent years, these discussions have not permeated the debate on global democracy. The overall aim in this paper is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of importing some of the advancements made in this literature into the debate on global democracy as well as to develop aspects that are relevant for explaining the role of feasibility in normative political theory. This is (...) |
|
|
This article outlines a new approach to answering the foundational question in democratic theory of how the boundaries of democratic political units should be delineated. Whereas democratic theorists have mostly focused on identifying the appropriate population-group – or demos – for democratic decisionmaking, it is argued here that we should also take account of considerations relating to the appropriate scope of a democratic unit’s institutionalized governance capabilities – or public power. These matter because democratically legitimate governance is produced not only (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
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 (...) |
|
|
One of the recurrent criticisms of the project of cosmopolitan democracy has been that it has not examined the political, economic and social agents that might have an interest in pursuing this programme. This criticism is addressed directly in this article. It shows that there are a variety of paths that, in their own right, could lead to more democratic global governance, and that there are a diversity of political, economic and social agents that have an interest in the pursuit (...) |
|
|
As global governance institutions proliferate and become more powerful, their legitimacy is subject to ever sharper scrutiny. Yet what legitimacy means in this context and how it is to be ascertained are often unclear. In a previous paper in this journal, we offered a general account of the legitimacy of such institutions and a set of standards for determining when they are legitimate. In this paper we focus on the legitimacy of the UN Security Council as an institution for making (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The increasing use of transnational standard-setting bodies to address quality uncertainties and coordination issues across the global economy raises questions about how these bodies establish and maintain their legitimacy and accountability outside the sovereignty of democratic states. Based on a discussion of the legitimacy challenge posed by global governance, we provide an overview of mechanisms by which such bodies can defend their legitimacy claims and examine the actual mechanisms used by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). While the IASB staked (...) |
|
|
By reference to the illustrative case of the supranational regulation of local systems of food production, we aim to show the importance of identifying issues of international legitimacy as a discrete component – alongside issues of global distributive justice – of the liberal project of public justification of supranational collective decisions. Therefore, we offer the diagnosis of a problem but do not prescribe the therapy to cure it. |
|
|
Rich people stash away trillions of dollars in tax havens like Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, or Singapore. Multinational corporations shift their profits to low-tax jurisdictions like Ireland or Panama to avoid paying tax. Recent stories in the media about Apple, Google, Starbucks, and Fiat are just the tip of the iceberg. There is hardly any multinational today that respects not just the letter but also the spirit of tax laws. All this becomes possible due to tax competition, with countries strategically (...) |
|
|
The urgent need to address climate change poses a range of complex moral and practical concerns, not least because rising to the challenge will require cooperation among countries that differ greatly in their wealth, the extent of their contributions to the problem, and their vulnerability to environmental and economic shocks. This thesis by publication in the field of climate ethics aims to characterise a range of national responsibilities associated with acting on climate change (Part I), and to identify proposals for (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
One of the core issues in contemporary political philosophy is concerned with `political obligation.' Stated in an overly simplified way, the question being asked when one investigates political obligation is, "What, if anything, do citizens owe to their government and how are these obligations generated if they do exist?" The majority of political philosophers investigating this issue agree that a political obligation is a moral requirement to act in certain ways concerning political matters. Despite this agreement about the general nature (...) |
|
|
ABSTRACT:Little theoretical attention has been paid to the question of what obligations corporations and other business enterprises have to the four billion people living at the base of the global economic pyramid. This article makes several theoretical contributions to this topic. First, it is argued that corporations are properly understood as agents of global justice. Second, the legitimacy of global governance institutions and the legitimacy of corporations and other business enterprises are distinguished. Third, it is argued that a deliberative democracy (...) |
|
|
Which standards should we employ to evaluate the global order? Should they be standards of justice or standards of legitimacy? In this article, I argue that liberal political theorists need not face this dilemma, because liberal justice and legitimacy are not distinct values. Rather, they indicate what the same value, i.e. equal respect for persons, demands of institutions under different sets of circumstances. I suggest that under real-world circumstances – characterized by conflicts and disagreements – equal respect demands basic-rights protection (...) |
|
|
The primary purpose of government is to secure public goods that cannot be achieved by free markets. The Coordination Principle tells us to consolidate sovereign power in a single institution to overcome collective action problems that otherwise prevent secure provision of the relevant public goods. There are several public goods that require such coordination at the global level, chief among them being basic human rights. The claim that human rights require global coordination is supported in three main steps. First, I (...) |
|
|
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 (...) |
|
|
Do we violate human rights when we cooperate with and impose a global institutional order that engenders extreme poverty? Thomas Pogge argues that by shaping and enforcing the social conditions that foreseeably and avoidably cause global poverty we are violating the negative duty not to cooperate in the imposition of a coercive institutional order that avoidably leaves human rights unfulfilled. This article argues that Pogge's argument fails to distinguish between harms caused by the global institutions themselves and harms caused by (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView. |
|
|
International studies investigate the governance authority of state versus non-state actors in terms of their public or private authority. However, the public–private distinction does not sufficiently capture the variety of governance actors, or the forms of their authority, beyond that distinction. Focussing on businesses, this paper argues that certain governance actors assume public and private roles, as well as a third category of roles it calls ‘societal’ that transcend notions of public and private. To understand these roles and how they (...) |
|
|
The legislature and the judiciary have been a constant focus of contemporary political philosophy. However, the executive – ‘the government’ itself – has been comparatively neglected. Today, this is changing with a well-spring of new work that bears upon what we might call the ideal of ‘good governance’, that is, how governments (and/or their agents) should exercise their powers. This review paper begins by clarifying the concepts of ‘governance’ and ‘good’ governance (§1). It then highlights five sets of values, working (...) |
|
|
Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView. |
|
|
The traditional conception construes human rights as moral rights all people have due to some basic feature or interests deemed intrinsically valuable. This comported well with the revival of the discourse of human rights in the wake of atrocities committed during WWII. It served as a useful referent for local struggles against foreign rule and domestic dictatorship in the 1980s. Since 1989, human rights discourse acquired a new function: the justification of sanctions, military invasions, and transformative occupation administrations by outsiders, (...) |
|
|
Climate change governance is extremely challenging because of both the intrinsic difficulty of the issues at stake and the plurality of values and world-views. For these reasons, the ethical concerns that characterise climate change should also be meaningfully addressed through a specific version of procedural justice. Accordingly, in this article we adopt an impure notion of procedural justice. On this theoretical basis, we define relevant fairness criteria and contextualise them for climate governance systems. Then, we empirically justify fairness criteria against (...) |
|
|
In this article, we introduce the project developed in this special issue: a search for principles of ‘real-world’ justice in international migration that can offer practical guidance on real political problems of migration governance. We begin by highlighting two sources of divergence between the principal topics of theoretical controversy within literatures on migration justice and the animating sources of political controversy within real national and international publics. These arise first in the framing of the problems on which normative theory is (...) |
|
|
The United Nations Global Compact is one of the largest transnational governance schemes. Its success or failure, however, is a matter of debate. Drawing on research in cognitive linguistics, we argue that when evaluators discuss the UNGC, they apply the metaphorical concept of the family: the UNGC corresponds to the “family,” the UNGC headquarter to the “parent” and the business participants of the UNGC to the “children” of the family. As a corollary, evaluators’ implicit understanding of how a family is (...) |
|
|
While there is a growing body of work on moral issues and global governance in the fields of global justice and international relations, little work has connected principles of global health justice with those of global health governance for a theory of global health. Such a theory would enable analysis and evaluation of the current global health system and would ethically and empirically ground proposals for reforming it to more closely align with moral values. Global health governance has been framed (...) |
|
|
Institutional suggestions for how to rethink democracy in response to changing state responsibilities and capabilities have been numerous and often mutually incompatible. This suggests that conceptual unclarity still reigns concerning how the normative ideal of democracy as collective self-determination, i.e. ?rule by the people?, might best be brought to bear in a transnational and global context. The aim in this paper is twofold. First, it analyses some consequences of the tendency to smudge the distinction between democratic theory and moral theories (...) |
|
|
What justifies political power? Most philosophers argue that consent or democracy are important, in other words, it matters how power is exercised. But this book argues that outcomes primarily matter to justifying power. |
|
|
International institutions are facing increasing criticism of the legitimacy of their authority. But what does it mean for an international institution to be legitimate? Arthur Applbaum’s latest book provides a convincing new concept of legitimacy, namely, the power-liability view, and a new normative conception, the free group agent account. However, it is not clear how they can be applied to the international level. First, this paper examines how different concepts of legitimacy can be applied to international institutions. Second, it assesses (...) |
|
|
A number of recent authors have argued for the problem of ‘democratic dirty hands’. At least within a democracy, public officers can be rightly said to act in the name of the public; and thus, as agents to principals, the dirty hands of public officers are, ultimately attributable to that public. Even more troubling, so the argument goes, since dirty hands are necessary for public officers in any stable political order, then such democratic dirty hands are necessary for any stable (...) |
|
|
There are two bodies of literature, one offering theories of the legitimacy of domestic institutions like states, another offering theories of the legitimacy of international institutions like the IMF. Accounts of domestic legitimacy stress the importance of democratic procedure, while few to no theorists make democracy a necessary condition for the legitimacy of international institutions. In this paper, I ask whether this asymmetry can be defended. Is there a unified higher-order theory which can explain why legitimacy requires democracy in the (...) |
PhilPapers logo by Andrea Andrews and Meghan Driscoll.
This site uses cookies and Google Analytics (see our terms & conditions for details regarding the privacy implications). Use of this site is subject to terms & conditions.
All rights reserved by The PhilPapers Foundation
Server: philpapers-web-6f97f49787-zrclg uwo