How should international law’s role in determining international distributive outcomes, economic and otherwise, affect how we think about its legitimate authority? Domestic institutions’ legitimate authority in respect of distribution derives in large part from their concurrent roles in enabling security and coordination. Internationally, by contrast, functional disaggregation means that distribution must be legitimised in its own right. I begin by distinguishing the phenomenon of Distributive International Law, on which my argument focuses. I next introduce a number of wide instrumental accounts (...) of legitimate authority, including Rawls’ Natural Duty account, Buchanan’s metacoordination view, and Williams’ political realism, showing how each understands legitimacy as an institution-level characteristic, allowing an institution’s success in one area to support its legitimacy in another where it may be less successful. This poses the question of how we distinguish amongst distinct institutions, which I answer by reference to the causal and constitutive (in)dependence amongst activities. This approach explains why distributive legitimacy does not arise as a separate question domestically: we cannot distinguish the state’s security and coordination activities from its distributive activities, so if the former are legitimate then so, ipso facto, are the latter. Internationally, by contrast, these mutual dependencies are limited, requiring that the legitimacy of distribution be established independently of other roles that international law plays. (shrink)

My starting point is what I call the Normative Authority Conception of justification, where S is justified in their belief that p at t (to some degree n) if and only if their believing that p at t is not ruled out by epistemic norms that have normative authority over S at t. With this in mind, this paper develops an account of doxastic justification by first developing an account of the normative authority of epistemic norms. Drawing from work in (...) political philosophy, I argue that (a) the cognitive and evaluative commitments and concerns behind our actual practices of holding each other and ourselves accountable for our beliefs reveal which epistemic norms we have consented to be under, and that (b) it is because we have consented to be under the authority of these norms – by actually holding ourselves and others accountable to them – that they in turn have normative authority over us. By connecting the authority of epistemic norms to the authority we have over ourselves in this way, the resulting account of doxastic justification (i) explains why it can be appropriate to criticize, resent, or sanction someone for having unjustified beliefs, (ii) avoids the phenomena of normative alienation and normative parochialism, and (iii) respects the social and collective nature of epistemic justification. (shrink)