John Locke
Ethics, July 1999 v109 i4 p739 Justification and Legitimacy(*). (philosophy of the state) A. John Simmons. Abstract: Different arguments are needed to show that a state is justified and that it is legitimate. Justifying the state is associated with the treatises of 18th-century philosophers. The Lockean approach to this issue captures features of institutional evaluation that the Kantian approach does not. Standard justifications of the state are offered to those motivated by objections to states. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 University of Chicago In this article I will discuss the relationship between two of the most basic ideas in political and legal philosophy: the justification of the state and state legitimacy. I plainly cannot aspire here to a complete account of these matters, but I hope to be able to say enough to motivate
If one could show that the state would be superior even to [the] most favored situation of anarchy . The legitimacy of particular states thus turns on consent, on the actual history of that state's relations with its subjects. "(2) But for all this, we are not always as careful as we might be in specifying exactly what this justificatory project amounts to or how the justifications offered differ from other kinds of institutional evaluation defended within the same works. But Locke also offers us (especially in chap. The background objection against which such attempts to justify the state are intended to be mounted must be understood to come from the anarchist, who denies that any state can be morally and prudentially justified. , with obligations to obey the law or to refrain from rival attempts to impose duties). A moral theory that is maximizing, that requires that acts or institutions (etc. Nonmaximizing moral theories, by contrast, may allow that all acts or institutions which avoid breaching applicable moral rules are justified, even if some are in different respects preferable to others (i. And international recognition, considered alone, plainly tracks the moral legitimacy of states at best irregularly. Some theorists have advocated weaker moral notions of legitimacy, according to which legitimacy is a mere liberty right or "justification right"(22)--a fight which correlates with no other parties' obligations (e. We study these historical texts in large measure because of their perceived contributions to a justificatory project that many feel confident in claiming as "the central task of social and political philosophy. On such accounts states could create or enhance their own legitimacy by indoctrination or mind control; or states might be legitimated solely by virtue of the extraordinary stupidity, immorality, imprudence, or misperceptions of their subjects. Such notions of legitimacy, as we shall see, sharply diminish the argumentative distance between accounts of state justification and accounts of state legitimacy. One proponent of the Weberian view, Charles Taylor, distinguishes between two senses of "legitimacy" as follows.
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