The aim of this paper is to offer a broad characterization of the kind of account that I believe cannot plausibly face conclusively the problem of the ethics of immigration restrictions in a non-ideal world at the level of the constitutional essentials. I argue that justice-based accounts of immigration controls fail to normatively evaluate what immigration controls do to outsiders subjected to them in non-ideal conditions, so judgments of justice by themselves tend to be overall bad for the interest of (...) immigrants. I explain this by insisting that a prior question about the legitimacy of immigration controls have been overlooked by familiar accounts. A full account of the ethics of immigration suitable for guiding constitutional essentials should be able to connect distinct kinds of justice-based evaluations in order to ask both, what legitimacy requires from territorial institutional control as well as what justice requires from immigration policy. (shrink)

Many democratic theorists hold that when a decision is collectively made in the right kind of way, in accordance with the right procedure, it is permissible to enforce it. They deny that there are further requirements on the type of reasons that can permissibly be used to justify laws and policies. In this paper, I argue that democratic theorists are mistaken about this. So-called public reason requirements follow from commitments that most of them already hold. Drawing on the democratic ideal (...) of civic equality, I show that it can successfully explain why political decision-making must have the right sort of procedure-independent justification. However, contra standard accounts of public reason, I argue that laws and policies need to be justified with convergence accessible, not shared, reasons. Public reasons are those that are accessible in light of evaluative standards shared by all, or in light of every citizen’s private evaluative standards. Since this will make the set of public reasons wider, it makes the theory more palatable to sceptics while retaining the framework’s justificatory potential. (shrink)

Populism – which positions a ‘true people’ in opposition to a corrupt elite – is often contrasted with liberalism. This article initially outlines the incompatibility between populism and normative...

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 (...) through the decision-making agency of a demos, but also through the institutionally distinct sources of political agency that shape the governance capabilities of public power. To develop this argument, the article traces a new theoretical account of the normative and institutional sources of collective agency, political legitimacy, and democratic boundaries, and illustrates it through a democratic reconstruction of the classical body politic metaphor. It further shows how this theoretical account lends strong prescriptive support to pluralist institutional boundaries within democratic global governance. (shrink)

This paper elaborates the concept of global public power as the subject of principles of political legitimacy in global politics, and defends it through a critical comparison with other concepts widely employed to depict this regulative subject: states, global basic structure, and global governance. The goal underlying this argument is to bring some greater unity and integration to conceptual understandings of the subject of principles of political legitimacy within analyses of global politics, and in doing so to frame a broader (...) research agenda for locating in practice the concrete political agencies and institutions that are appropriate targets for demands of political legitimation under the prevailing empirical conditions of global pluralism. (shrink)

This article takes a new idea, ‘normative behaviourism’, and applies it to global political theory, in order to address at least one of the problems we might have in mind when accusing that subject of being too ‘unrealistic’. The core of this idea is that political principles can be justified, not just by patterns in our thinking, and in particular our intuitions and considered judgements, but also by patterns in our behaviour, and in particular acts of insurrection and crime. The (...) problem addressed is ‘cultural relativism’, understood here not as a meta-ethical doctrine, but as the apparent ‘fact’ that people around the world have culturally varying intuitions and judgements of a kind that lead them to affirm different political principles. This is a problem because it seems to follow (1) that global agreement on any substantial set of political principles is impossible, and (2) that any political theory in denial of this ‘fact’ would be, for that reason, deeply unrealistic. The solution argued for here is that, if domestic political principles (i.e. principles intended to regulate a single state) could be justified by normative behaviourism, and in reference to culturally invariant behaviour, then an international system supportive of such principles is justifiable by extension. (shrink)

The creation of increasingly complex artificial intelligence (AI) systems raises urgent questions about their ethical and social impact on society. Since this impact ultimately depends on political decisions about normative issues, political philosophers can make valuable contributions by addressing such questions. Currently, AI development and application are to a large extent regulated through non-binding ethics guidelines penned by transnational entities. Assuming that the global governance of AI should be at least minimally democratic and fair, this paper sets out three desiderata (...) that an account should satisfy when theorizing about what this means. We argue, first, that an analysis of democratic values, political entities and decision-making should be done in a holistic way; second, that fairness is not only about how AI systems treat individuals, but also about how the benefits and burdens of transformative AI are distributed; and finally, that justice requires that governance mechanisms are not limited to AI technology, but are incorporated into a range of basic institutions. Thus, rather than offering a substantive theory of democratic and fair AI governance, our contribution is metatheoretical: we propose a theoretical framework that sets up certain normative boundary conditions for a satisfactory account. (shrink)

In this paper, two claims are made. The main claim is that a fruitful approach for theorizing the political legitimacy of global governance and the proper normative role of civil society actors is the so-called ‘function-sensitive’ approach. The underlying idea of this approach is that the demands of legitimacy may vary depending on function and the relationship between functions. Within this function-sensitive framework, six functions in global governance are analyzed and six principles of legitimacy defended, together constituting a minimalist account (...) of political legitimacy. This account suggests that civil society actors may strengthen political legitimacy by performing five of these functions under certain conditions and insofar as the proposed normative political principles are fulfilled: problem identification, agenda-setting, implementation, enforcement and monitoring, and evaluation. The second claim is critical and is chiselled out against the backdrop of this function-sensitive account, through which I demonstrate that much vagueness and confusion with regard to the proper role of civil society actors for strengthening the political legitimacy of global governance could be traced to the so-called ‘transmission belt’ model, which has gained popularity in international political theory. This model depicts civil society as a transmission belt between the public sphere and decision-making loci, where it is assumed that civil society actors contribute to the strengthening of political legitimacy by transmitting peoples’ preferences, beliefs, and opinions from the former to the latter space by indirectly or directly influencing the decision-making. It is argued that this picture is misleading and generates erroneous prescriptions of how civil society actors should act to increase political legitimacy. (shrink)

Nationalism seems a persistent ideology in academia as much as in politics; despite the fact that it has been shown that nationalism is deeply unjust for minorities. A case for national identity is often invoked to supplement liberalism regarding the inner difficulties that liberal theories have to explain their membership, assure stability and produce endorsement. So, it seems that national identity may also be required for justice. While this controversy continues, I argue that a different approach is available. We can (...) define a conception of legitimacy independently from a conception of justice, and then ask what legitimacy requires from our national allegiances. If everything goes well, much of the controversy from justice disappears as we find that the case for cultural nationalism may be illegitimate for liberal democracies. (shrink)

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 (...) domestic context, but not in the international context? I argue that no proceduralist higher-order theory succeeds, and that we need to look for other solutions. (shrink)

Political instrumentalism claims that the right to rule should be distributed such that justice is promoted best. Building on a distinction made by consequentialists in moral philosophy, I argue that instrumentalists should distinguish two levels of normative thinking about legitimacy, the critical and applied level. An indirect instrumentalism which acknowledges this distinction has significant advantages over simpler forms of instrumentalism that do not.

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, (...) which must be implemented via practitioners' discretion in changing contexts. (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)

The debate about justice in immigration seems somehow stagnated given that it seems justice requires both further exclusion and more porous borders. In the face of this, I propose to take a step back and to realize that the general problem of borders—to determine what kind of borders liberal democracies ought to have—gives rise to two particular problems: first, to justify exclusive control over the administration of borders (the problem of legitimacy of borders) and, second, to specify how this control (...) ought to be exercised (the problem of justice of borders). The literature has explored the second but ignored the first. Therefore, I propose a different approach to the ethics of immigration by focusing on concerns of legitimacy in a three-step framework: first, identifying the kind of authority or power that immigration controls exercise; second, redefining borders as international and domestic institutions that issue that kind of power; and finally, considering supranational institutions that redistribute the right to exclude among legitimate borders. (shrink)