The Legitimacy of International Law: Previous Chapter

6
The Legitimacy of International Law
Hart maintains that doubts regarding international law’s status as law originate in the
observation that it deviates in certain respects from the “standard case” of municipal
law; that is, the legal system of a modern state. For some, the deviation that motivates
their skepticism may be the one Hart identifies, namely international law’s horizon-
tal structure, the relative paucity of specialization in the performance of governance
tasks that characterizes the international legal order. For others, the deviation that
grounds their skepticism may lie elsewhere. In the previous chapter, we identified it
as the perception that the global political order manifests insufficient fidelity to the
ideal of the rule of law. In this chapter, we locate it in the suspicion that international
law lacks legitimacy, a moral claim to authority over international legal subjects
correlative to their moral duty to obey the law.
We begin in section I with an analysis of the concept of legitimacy, or perhaps, more
precisely, the concept of legitimate authority. In sections II–V we consider four possible
grounds for international law’s legitimacy: enhancing its subjects’ ability to act as they
have most reason to act, the consent of those it claims as subjects, considerations of fair
play, and international law’s democratic credentials. Our focus in each case is twofold:
first with arguments for thinking that a particular ground is either necessary or sufficient
for international law’s legitimacy, and second with the implications the account in
question has for international law’s present claim to legitimacy. As will become clear,
none of the grounds for international law’s legitimacy considered herein, either sepa-
rately or in combination, shows the existing international legal order to be fully
legitimate; indeed, it likely falls well short of that (perhaps ideal) standard. Still, just
as the failure of any existing social order to realize a conception of justice does not by
itself provide a reason to reject that conception, so too the failure of the international
legal order to qualify as legitimate according to some standard of legitimacy does not by
itself provide a reason to reject that standard. We conclude in section VI by examining
a number of reasons why we should care about international law’s legitimacy; indeed,
why from a moral point of view increasing the international legal order’s legitimacy
might even take priority over making it more just.
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The Legitimacy of International Law 99
i the concept of legitimacy
A Legitimacy as a Right to Rule

Judgments of political legitimacy concern attempts to rule or govern. A attempts to
rule or govern B with respect to some domain of conduct if and only if A maintains
that B ought to defer to A’s judgment regarding what B may, must, or must not do;
that is, if and only if A claims practical authority over B. When A does so, she
maintains that her directives provide B with content-independent and exclusionary
reasons for action. So, if A claims authority over B and she directs B not to Φ, then
she maintains that B has a reason not to Φ simply because A instructed him not do so,
a reason that makes no reference to the content of A’s direction to B (that is, what Φ-
ing is). Moreover, she maintains that B ought to treat A’s instruction not to Φ as
a reason to exclude from his deliberation some or all of the reasons he might have to
Φ. From B’s perspective, to treat A’s directive as a content-independent and exclu-
sionary reason just is to defer to A’s judgment, or in other words, to recognize her as
having practical authority over him.
An illustration may be helpful. Suppose Ali promises to meet Betty for dinner this
evening at a restaurant of Betty’s choosing. Her promise gives Betty a right to rule Ali
with respect to one very circumscribed aspect of her life, namely, where Ali will dine
tonight. Betty chooses McDonald’s, thereby giving Ali a content-independent and
exclusionary reason to join her for dinner there. The reason is content-independent
because it is the fact that Betty chose McDonald’s, and not any facts about
McDonald’s such as its low prices or fast service that account for Ali’s obligation
to dine there. Had Betty chosen a different restaurant, then Ali would have been
obligated to join Betty there. Ali’s promise to Betty also excludes certain reasons for
not dining at McDonald’s that she would otherwise be permitted to act on. For
example, Ali may not particularly like the type of food McDonald’s serves, or she
may prefer to stay home. Her promise precludes her from acting on those reasons
(although not from forming the belief that she would be better off if she did not join
Betty for dinner). In contrast, suppose Ali had not made this promise to Betty, and
that, instead, Betty had simply proposed to Ali that they go to McDonald’s for dinner.
In this case, Ali would be justified in acting on her dislike for the food McDonald’s
serves or her preference for staying home, since Betty would have no claim against
Ali that precludes her acting for those reasons.
A’s attempt to rule over B is legitimate if and only if A has a right to rule B, a right
that correlates to B’s duty to obey A. Strictly speaking, what the subject of a legitimate
authority owes her is not conduct but a certain form of deliberation or practical
reasoning, one that treats the authority’s directives as content-independent and
exclusionary reasons for action. Put another way, the duty to obey correlative to
another’s right to rule is best understood in terms of deference to the ruler’s
judgment. Particular conduct may also be owed to the ruler, but it need not be.
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100 Philosophy and International Law
For example, B may have a duty not to damage C’s property, one correlative to C’s
property right, and a duty to defer to A’s judgment regarding what counts as damage
to C’s property (that is, what counts as a violation of C’s property right). The latter
duty may correlate to A’s moral right to direct B’s conduct (vis-à-vis C’s property), or
to C’s moral right to B reasoning in whatever manner will make him most likely to
respect C’s property right, or both. Getting clear on this conceptual point is
important if we are to avoid the common but mistaken assumption that
a successful theory of legitimacy must explain how those subject to a putative
authority can owe it conduct in accordance with its directives.
To claim the right to rule is not to have it. If A’s attempt to rule over B is
illegitimate, then while A may claim that B ought to treat her instruction not to Φ
as a content-independent and exclusionary reason, B has no duty to do so. Note,
however, that B may still have prudential or moral reasons not to Φ, perhaps even
conclusive ones; the denial of a putative authority’s legitimacy is neither equivalent
to nor does it entail the claim that an agent should not act as the putative authority
would have him act. Moreover, A’s attempt to rule over B may correctly be judged to
be good, or at least better than the likely alternatives, even if A has no right to rule
B. Both of these points bear emphasis since many accounts of what makes law
legitimate entail that international law often lacks the authority it claims, or in other
words, that it is illegitimate.
If states and other international legal subjects can still have a conclusive or all
things considered moral reason to act as international law or an international legal
institution directs, even though it is illegitimate, then why should we care about its
legitimacy? In the next subsection, we will consider whether this question points to
the need to revisit the characterization of legitimacy as a right to rule. Here,
however, I want to review several responses advanced by legal philosophers who
accept that characterization.
We can begin by noting that it does not follow from the fact that an agent can
have an all-things-considered moral reason to act as an illegitimate law or legal
institution would have her act that she will always, or even often, have such
a reason. In practice, the legitimacy of law or legal institutions may make
a significant difference to what agents have a moral reason to do. But more
importantly, legal rights and obligations are frequently treated as conclusive
reasons for action in both private deliberation and public justification or criticism.
That is, the assertion that a given act is legal or illegal is often taken to suffice as
a justification for performing an act, or for holding an agent accountable for
performing it by, say, criticizing her or withholding some benefit to which she is
normally entitled. Therefore, it is worth investigating the conditions under which
these attempts at justifying conduct actually succeed, which is to say the conditions
law must satisfy to be legitimate.
John Tasioulas maintains that “the law’s distinctive contribution to a community’s
realization of valuable goals consists precisely in successfully laying down authoritative
standards of conduct.”1 Some might argue that this entails only that we can have
a weighty moral reason to encourage people to believe the law is legitimate, but not
necessarily a reason to be concerned with whether the law truly is legitimate.2 Respect for
individuals as autonomous moral agents militates against such a conclusion, however.
Rather, if we maintain that in general people ought to defer to the law, then we owe them
an argument demonstrating that the law is legitimate. Indeed, as we will discuss later in
this chapter, it may be that justice can only be fully realized among agents who interact
with one another on terms set out in legitimate law. If so, then we have a very compelling
reason to be concerned with what makes law, including international law, legitimate.
B Against Legitimacy as a Right to Rule

Recently, several philosophers have criticized the traditional characterization of
legitimacy as a right to rule.3 One impetus for this challenge comes from the
observation that we can (and should, and arguably do) assess the legitimacy of
international institutions that neither claim authority over others nor exercise any
ability to coerce them. Therefore, we need a broader notion of legitimacy, one that
satisfies two desiderata. First, it must be one we can employ to judge the legitimacy
of institutions that rule as well as those that do not. Second, those judgments must
play the same role in our deliberation, since otherwise they will not constitute the
use of the same concept. In other words, concluding that an institution is legitimate
must have the same significance for our practical reasoning regardless of whether
that institution is one that attempts to rule.4
Allen Buchanan’s Meta-Coordination View of the concept of legitimacy meets
both of these requirements. Judgements of legitimacy, he maintains, serve a specific
practical function, namely, facilitating:
[T]he achievement of a consensus on whether an institution is worthy of our moral
reason-based support. The assertion that an institution is legitimate represents an
all-things-considered judgment regarding the moral reasons to support it, namely
that those reasons weigh in favor of supporting the institution, in spite of the risks
that such support entails.5
1
John Tasioulas, “The Legitimacy of International Law,” in The Philosophy of International Law, eds.
Samantha Besson and John Tasioulas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 100.
2
Of course, where legal norms and institutions facilitate injustice, the loss of de facto legitimacy that
renders them less able to contribute to the production of social order may be morally desirable.
3
See, for instance, Allen Buchanan, The Heart of Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013); Allen Buchanan, “Institutional Legitimacy,” in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 4,
eds. David Sobel et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Eva Erman, “Global Political
Legitimacy Beyond Justice and Democracy,” International Theory 8, 1 (2016): 29–62; N.P. Adams,
“Institutional Legitimacy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 26, 1 (2018): 84–102.
4
As will become clear, the claim that a judgment of legitimacy must have the same significance for our
deliberation does not entail that we must engage with or relate to all institutions in exactly the
same way.
5
Buchanan, “Institutional Legitimacy,” 54–5.
Elsewhere, Buchanan states that to claim that an institution is legitimate is to claim that
it satisfies certain criteria in virtue of which agents have moral reason to accord that
institution the respect necessary for it to function well.6 The form respect for an
institution must take, or what counts as exhibiting the proper respect, varies depending
on both the nature of the institution and the relationship an agent stands in to that
institution: “For those to whom the institution addresses its rules, it involves
a presumption of compliance that operates independently of an assessment of the
content of any particular directive.”7 Those not addressed by such an institution but
able to impact its operation should “at the very least, not interfere with its efforts to
promulgate and promote compliance with its directives.”8 Presumably, respect for
legitimate institutions that do not rule likewise requires that agents not interfere with
their functioning well. For example, in the case of treaty bodies that monitor states’
compliance with the Human Rights Conventions they have signed (and, if necessary,
ratified), this might include refraining from conduct that makes it difficult or impossible
to collect the information needed to conduct its assessment. Finally, if an institution is
legitimate then the means agents may adopt to respond to its failings are generally more
morally constrained than in the case of an illegitimate institution.9 Legitimate institu-
tions merit reform, whereas illegitimate ones warrant revolution and replacement.
Should we replace a description of legitimacy as a right to rule with Buchanan’s
more abstract concept of legitimacy as “having a standing that commands certain
forms of respect?” or being “morally worthy of our support?”10 We can, but I will
offer two reasons why we need not do so. First, the dispute between Buchanan and
theorists of legitimacy as a right to rule may rest entirely on different uses of the term
“legitimacy” rather than any substantive disagreement. Second, even if we accept
arguendo Buchanan’s concept of legitimacy, any assessment of international law’s
legitimacy will pay special attention to those international institutions that enact,
apply, and enforce international law. That is, it will offer criteria for the legitimacy of
institutions that rule. This account of what makes international law or international
legal institutions legitimate will either be identical to one of the accounts offered by
a theorist who conceives of legitimacy as a right to rule, or a rival to it. In either case,
we can proceed with the normative question of interest in this chapter without
having to resolve the debate over how best to understand the concept of legitimacy.
Consider, first, the claim that the dispute between Buchanan and proponents of
the narrower concept of legitimacy that equates it with a right to rule is merely
verbal, a difference in the use of the term “legitimate” that does not track or shine
light on any substantive disagreement. For example, A. John Simmons defines
a state’s legitimacy as “its exclusive right to impose new duties on subjects by
6
Buchanan, Heart of Human Rights, p. 179.
7
Buchanan, “Institutional Legitimacy,” 56; see also Heart of Human Rights, p. 184.
8
Buchanan, Heart of Human Rights, p. 184.
9
Ibid, p. 185.
10
Ibid, p. 180; Buchanan, “Institutional Legitimacy,” 55.
initiating legally binding directives, to have those directives obeyed, and to coerce
noncompliers.”11 In short, a legitimate state is one that has a right to rule.12 However,
Simmons also maintains that states may be justified or unjustified, by which he
means prudentially rational, morally acceptable, or both. Justifications of the state,
or any other institution, involve “rebutting certain kinds of possible objections to it:
either comparative objections – that other acts or institutions (etc.) are preferable to
the one in question – or noncomparative objections – that the act in question is
unacceptable or wrong or that the institution practices or sanctions wrongdoing or
vice.”13 What follows if an institution such as the state is justified? On Simmons’
preferred account, this fact “gives us moral reasons to refrain from undermining it
and will typically give us moral reason to positively support that state (or perhaps
even to promote the existence of similar states . . .).”14 This looks very similar to
Buchanan’s claim that an institution’s legitimacy gives us reason to support it, to act
in ways that contribute to that institution functioning well and to refrain from acting
in ways that interfere with it doing so. Moreover, Simmons’ acknowledgment that
the justifiability of an institution will sometimes be comparative entails that it will
rest on precisely the sort of balancing of costs and benefits that Buchanan defends as
appropriate for carrying out assessments of legitimacy (in his broad sense of that
term). It appears that Buchanan simply uses the term “legitimate” to refer what
11
A. John Simmons, Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 137.
12
A state’s right to rule includes a right to coerce noncompliers because states necessarily claim “a
monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Max Weber, “Politics as
Vocation,” in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 4). On one reading, this claim describes a legal-political order in
which the coercive enforcement of the law is normally undertaken by state officials (understood
broadly to include both state employees and contractors), with self-help exercised only rarely, in self-
defense against an imminent threat, for example. As we have seen, international law lacks specialists in
law enforcement. This difference in the nature of the two types of legal-political order explains why
the defense of a state’s right to rule must include a justification of its exclusive right to coerce
noncompliers while a defense of the international legal order’s right to rule does not.
Alternatively, we might read the above quote from Weber with an emphasis on the idea of
legitimacy. What distinguishes the modern state is not the fact that it monopolizes the use of physical
force within a given territory, or its claim to do so. Rather, it is the state’s assertion that it enjoys the sole
authority to determine what counts as the legitimate, meaning rightful or permissible, use of force
within a given territory that distinguishes it from the form of political society that preceded its
emergence in Europe. International law has long made a similar claim with respect to the use of
force between states (and in the form of prohibitions on genocide and crimes against humanity, as well
as UN Security Council authorized armed humanitarian interventions, it has begun to circumscribe
states’ right to coercively enforce law on their own territory). This reading implies that we should treat
(coercive) enforcement of the law as simply another form of conduct over which authority may be
exercised but not conduct in which an agent must engage in order to qualify as an authority. If so, then
we ought to characterize the concept of ruling solely in terms of the exercise of authority, and so
conceive of a right to rule as the exercise of legitimate authority. This is so even if the justifiability of
a putative authority’s claim to legitimacy depends on its ability to reliably impose costs on the
disobedient and grant benefits to the obedient.
13
Ibid, p. 125.
14
Ibid, p. 137.
Simmons’ describes using the term “justified,” or perhaps to refer to both of the
features that Simmons picks out using the terms “justified” and “legitimate.”15
Are there any reasons to prefer one characterization of legitimacy over the other?
Fit with the use of that term in ordinary public discourse might provide one, but as
Buchanan and others rightly note there is no single, unified, practice regarding the
use of the term “legitimate.” Some speakers treat it as synonymous with “legal,”
others with “justified,” and still others with “just”; indeed, the same speaker may
mean different things by “legitimate” in different contexts. Buchanan emphasizes
that one virtue of his account of the concept of legitimacy is that it distinguishes
judgments of legitimacy from assessments of an institution’s justice or its prudential
value.16 Yet theorists such as Simmons can make the same claim on behalf of their
characterization of legitimacy, insofar as the moral basis of an institution’s right to
rule is not reducible to its being just, prudentially optimal, or for that matter,
justifiable in Simmons’ sense of that term. Arguably, political philosophers have
converged on an understanding of legitimacy as a right to rule (even while disagree-
ing over the nature of that right), but perhaps we should not put too much weight on
that fact. In using a term such as “legitimacy” for theoretical purposes, what matters
most is the insight provided by a particular use of that term in combination with the
use of other terms that figure in the overall theory. Simmons worries that certain uses
of the term “legitimacy” by contemporary political philosophers pose a risk of
conflating the two dimensions of institutional evaluation he distinguishes using
the terms “legitimacy” and “justification.” At times Buchanan appears to do just
that.17 Still, I suspect that we can use either Simmons’ or Buchanan’s approach to
framing the substantive moral assessments of institutions, as long as we pay careful
attention to the moral questions we are asking and precisely what follows from the
answers we give.
Ultimately, Buchanan’s objection to traditional accounts of legitimacy as a right to
rule rest on three related criticisms of the theorists who use it to evaluate political and
legal institutions. First, from a practical standpoint the question of whether we have
moral reason to support an institution – whether it is legitimate in Buchanan’s broad
sense, or what Simmons calls justifiable – is currently a far more pressing matter than
whether we have the specific sort of moral reasons to support it that concern theorists of
legitimacy as a right to rule. Second, a focus on legitimacy as a right to rule leads
theorists to ignore the need to develop and apply criteria for morally assessing the
exercise of (political) power by institutions that make no claim to rule. Third, theorists
15
Adams argues that Simmons’ does not go far enough when he distinguishes justification and
legitimacy because the latter concept still refers to a number of dimensions along which we can
morally assess an institution, or at least the state. See Adams, “Institutional Legitimacy,” 17.
16
Buchanan, “Institutional Legitimacy,” 54.
17
For instance, Buchanan offers as an objection to Simmons’ understanding of legitimacy the fact that
we can have moral reasons to support an institution even when we have no duty to obey it
(“Institutional Legitimacy,” 68–9). Simmons will reply that this argument conflates two dimensions
along which we can morally evaluate an institution.
of legitimacy as a right to rule tend to engage in ideal theory, with a focus on developing
arguments from first moral principles with little attention to empirical realities. Yet in
a decidedly nonideal world such theories are of little or no practical value. To put the
point using Simmons’ terminology, if we live in a world where no international political
or legal institution comes close to satisfying the criteria for legitimacy, then the question
on which we ought to focus is whether any of these institutions are justifiable. Likewise,
if reforms that would make these institutions legitimate are far less feasible than those
that would make them justifiable, then that gives us a weighty moral reason to focus our
efforts on the latter rather than the former. Therefore, at least those political and legal
philosophers with an interest in shaping contemporary practice ought to devote far
more effort to developing theories of international institutions’ justifiability than to
theories of their legitimacy.
Although not without merit, I suspect these criticisms of many theorists of legiti-
macy as a right to rule are overdrawn. More importantly for our purposes, however, is
that none of Buchanan’s arguments precludes the need to assess the moral authority of
international law, and so to develop and defend criteria for carrying out such an
assessment. That is because on Buchanan’s account an institution’s legitimacy (in his
broad sense of that term) gives us a moral reason to support it by according it the form
of respect it needs from us in order to function well. In the case of legislative and
adjudicative institutions, that means treating the directives they issue as authoritative,
that is, as providing content-independent and exclusionary reasons for action.
Therefore, whatever the upshot of the debate over the best way to characterize the
concept of legitimacy, we need a normative theory of international law’s legitimate
authority, an account of the conditions it must satisfy if the legal status of an agent’s
conduct per se is to provide him or her with a moral reason for action. In the
remainder of this chapter, we consider several attempts to provide one.
ii the instrumental argument for international

law’s legitimacy
A Law in the Service of Right Reason

Justifications of authority fall into one of two categories: those in which deference to
authority is instrumental to the just treatment of others, and, more broadly, to acting
as one has reason to act, and those in which deference to authority is (also)
constitutive of the just treatment of others. In contemporary debates, the first of
these approaches is most closely associated with the philosopher Joseph Raz, with
Samantha Besson and John Tasioulas among those who have drawn on Raz’s work to
offer an analysis of international law’s legitimacy.18 According to Raz, law is
18
Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Joseph Raz, “The Problem of
Authority: Revisiting the Service Conception,” Minnesota Law Review 90, 4 (2006): 1003–44;
legitimate, or has a justified claim to authority vis-à-vis its subjects, when the
following two conditions are met:
(1) The Normal Justification Condition (NJC): The subject would better conform
to reasons that apply to him anyway (that is, to reasons other than the directives
of the authority) if he intends to be guided by the authority’s directives than if he
does not.
(2) The Independence Condition (IC): The matters regarding which the first
condition is met are such that with respect to them it is better to conform to
reason than to decide for oneself, unaided by authority.19
A’s claim to authority over B is justified, then, if B is more likely to act as he has most
reason to act by deferring to A’s judgment regarding what he should or should not do
than by acting on his own judgment, except in cases where it is more important that
B decide for himself what to do than that he decide correctly, or in other words, than
that he do what he has most reason to do. In such cases, A enjoys a right to rule B, and
B has a duty to obey A’s directives.
Some theorists contend that the NJC does not suffice to justify one agent’s
claim to authority over another. They argue that the mere fact that B will do
better at acting as he has most reason to act if he defers to A’s judgment does
not entail that A has a right to rule B.20 Raz concedes this point in some cases,
namely, those where it is more important that an agent act on his own
judgment than that he act in accordance with right reason. When and why
this is the case is a point over which theorists may disagree without disputing
Raz’s general account of when one agent’s claim to authority over another is
justified. Moreover, it is not merely the fact that an agent will do better at
acting on the reasons that apply to him by deferring to the law that renders the
law legitimate, or what is the same, that generates a duty to obey the law.
Rather, it is that fact in conjunction with the nature of the reasons that apply to
the agent independently of the law that does so. If B has a moral duty to treat
C justly, a reason for action that exists independently of the law, and if B is
more likely to fulfill that duty by obeying the law than by acting on his own
judgment, then those two facts suffice to establish the law’s legitimate authority
over B. If, in fact, B is more likely to treat C justly if she defers to A’s judgment
regarding what that requires than if she acts on her own judgment, then it is
hard to see why that does not suffice to establish B’s duty to obey A.21
Samantha Besson, “The Authority of International Law: Lifting the State Veil,” Sydney Law Review 31,
3 (2009): 343–80; Tasioulas, “Legitimacy of International Law.”
19
Raz, “Problem of Authority,” 1014.
20
See, among others, Allen Buchanan, “The Legitimacy of International Law,” in The Philosophy of
International Law, eds. Samantha Besson and John Tasioulas (New York: Oxford University Press),
p. 85.
21
The worry is likely that the foregoing argument does not establish that B owes her duty of obedience to
A. But as we noted in the previous section, it is a mistake to build that into the concept of legitimacy (or
Some argue that satisfaction of the NJC cannot suffice to establish the law’s
authority over an agent because if it did then even a deeply unjust state could be
legitimate.22 The fact that state officials or some of its subjects stand ready to
perpetrate even greater injustices if an individual does not act as the law directs
may give the individual a reason to treat the law as authoritative, but surely it does
not entail that the state has a right to rule the individual, that is, that it enjoys
legitimate authority. In response, it is important to keep in mind that on Raz’s
instrumental account, the duty to obey the law of a deeply unjust state may rarely
be owed to the state. Rather, it is owed to those individuals a person is more likely to
treat justly by obeying the law than by acting on his or her own judgment.
But, second, we should distinguish between the NJC’s being satisfied and an agent
having good reason to believe that it is. Subjects of a deeply unjust state will often
have little reason to believe that either its law or its legal institutions aim to improve
their conformity to the independent (moral) reasons that apply to them, or, in other
words, that the law reflects a good faith effort to satisfy the NJC. Therefore, they will
have little or no reason to treat it as authoritative; that is, as providing them with
content-independent and exclusionary reasons for action. This is likely to be so even
where, as a matter of fact, the law of a deeply unjust state does satisfy the NJC, at least
vis-à-vis some of its subjects. In such cases, while the individuals in question ought to
defer to the law rather than act on their own judgment, they will likely not be
blameworthy for their failure to recognize that this is the case.
Suppose, arguendo, that the independence condition is met. How might interna-
tional law help those over whom it claims jurisdiction improve their conformity to
right reason; that is, to act as they have most or undefeated reason to act? One way it
may do so is by correcting for ignorance or mistaken beliefs. Tasioulas offers as an
example international legal rules created via the enactment of multilateral treaties.23
The process whereby such rules are crafted makes it likely that they reflect informa-
tion that any single party to the convention would fail to acquire on its own, and so
fail to take into account when deciding what sort of foreign policy or domestic legal
regime to adopt. Moreover, negotiations over multilateral treaties can serve as
a useful corrective to biases that undergird parties’ mistaken beliefs, once again
facilitating practical reasoning that is better informed and so likely to more closely
approximate or conform to right reason than would unilateral decision making. In
some cases, international law may also provide some of its subjects with access to
expertise they cannot produce domestically.
legitimate authority). Whether an agent owes her obedience to law to those who govern depends on
the independent moral reasons that apply to her, and to which she better conforms by obeying the law
than by acting on her own judgment. That is, the question of who enjoys the right correlative to an
agent’s duty to defer to the law is a substantive one, not a conceptual one.
22
See, for example, Thomas Christiano, The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and Its
Limits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 234.
23
Tasiouals, “Legitimacy of International Law,” 101.
International law can also protect its subjects against what Tasioulas labels
volitional defects. For example, state officials may come under great pressure from
more powerful states, representatives of multinational corporations, or domestic
interest groups to engage in conduct that promotes those actors’ perceived interests
or vision of justice but that is contrary to right reason. International law provides
a mechanism for resisting such pressure.24 International law’s ability to steel its
subjects against temptation is particularly important given the general human
disposition to impatience, the tendency to treat oneself or one’s circumstances as
exceptional, and the fact that the interests of legal officials in remaining in power
may diverge from both the prudential interests of the state’s present and future
members and the demands of justice.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, international law can enhance its subjects’
conformity to right reason by facilitating coordination on common standards of right
conduct.25 In some cases, it may do so by rendering more determinate a shared but
vague standard, where the parties are rightly indifferent between any of a number of
possible ways in which the abstract standard may be made more concrete. Far more
common, however, are disputes over what the standard of right conduct is. Examples
include disagreements regarding the moral principles that govern the use of force,
international migration, trade, financial transactions, and the use of and control over
the oceans or the Earth’s atmosphere. In all of these cases, international actors are
generally likely to do better at approximating justice by conforming to common
standards set out in international law than by acting on their own judgment. In some
instances, such as addressing climate change, this may be because justice can only
be achieved via the cooperation of (nearly) all states. In others, the attempt by a state
or international organization to act on its own understanding of what justice
requires, even when it is accurate, may well result in an overall increase in interna-
tional (and perhaps domestic) injustice. That is partly because one state’s genuinely
just war or trade policy may appear to another to be an act of aggression or beggar-
thy-neighbor protectionism. But in addition, state officials acting in bad faith may
offer the example of another state’s just but illegal conduct as cover for their own
unjust conduct. Both of these observations provide reasons to conclude that injus-
tices are likely to follow when states and other international legal subjects deviate
from the common standards of right conduct set out in international law. Indeed,
Besson speaks for many political and legal theorists when she writes that: “[I]n
conditions of pervasive and persistent reasonable disagreement about justice, the
creation of a legal order as a means of general co-ordination over matters of justice is
actually in itself a requirement of justice.”26
24
See the discussion of international trade agreements in Chapter 11, section I.
25
Besson, “Authority of International Law,” 352–7; Tasioulas, “Legitimacy of International Law,” 102;
Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane, “The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions,” Ethics
and International Affairs 20, 4 (2006): 407–8.
26
Besson, “Authority of International Law,” 353.
Where international law’s legitimacy is a function of its facilitating coordination on

common standards of right conduct, international law’s de facto legitimacy is
a necessary condition for its de jure authority.27 It follows, Tasioulas notes, that “in
order to maintain this source of legitimacy . . . public international law must not stray
too far from implementing values that resonate widely with its would-be subjects.”28 As
a consequence, at a given point in time the content of international law may diverge
considerably from what justice truly requires. Yet, as long as international legal
subjects are more likely to act justly (or, perhaps better, less unjustly) by obeying
international law than by acting on their own judgment, they have a duty to do so.
The instrumental account entails that international law’s legitimacy may be
piecemeal. For any particular international legal norm or legal regime, the NJC
may fail to establish its authority over some or even all of the actors whose conduct it
purports to direct. Some argue that existing international law only serves the interests
of powerful states (or elites within those states), or that it frequently prioritizes peace
and stability at the expense of justice. Even those who maintain that international
law is not merely the product of power and interest acknowledge that those two
factors play a considerable role in determining its content. Consequently, interna-
tional law’s dictates may often diverge from what right reason requires precisely
because it is the result of legislative activities that are not undertaken on the basis of
a good faith effort to identify it. Perhaps the argument from coordination on
common standards of right conduct still serves to justify the legitimacy of many
international legal norms even when they are not the product of an effort to identify
just terms of interaction. Yet that fact (if it is one) may also warrant a fair bit of
skepticism regarding the extent of international law’s legitimacy.
B Identifying Law that Satisfies the Normal Justification Thesis

Thus far we have focused on the various ways in which international law can satisfy the
NJC. Yet a theory of the legitimacy of international law should do more than explain
the normative basis of international law’s legitimacy, in other words, what makes it
authoritative. It should also offer guidance on how to identify legitimate international
law, reasons to believe that international law, or international legislators and adjudi-
cators, meet the normal justification condition. The complex standard of legitimacy
for global governance institutions advocated by Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane
provides an excellent starting point for developing such an account.29
27
Raz, “Problem of Authority,” 1036. See also Besson, “Authority of International Law,” 356.
28
Tasioulas, “Legitimacy of International Law,” 102.
29
Buchanan and Keohane, “Legitimacy of Global Governance.” The authors characterize global
governance institutions broadly to include “multilateral entities” such as the WTO, the UN
Security Council, and the climate change regime built around the Kyoto Protocol (or, now, the
Paris Climate Agreement).
The complex standard consists of a set of substantive and procedural requirements

that, when met, provide compelling evidence for the legitimacy of a global govern-
ance institution’s attempt to rule.30 The former include not persistently violating the
least controversial human rights, not foregoing institutional changes that would
provide greater benefits than existing ones and that are both feasible and accessible
without excessive transition costs, and not intentionally or knowingly engaging in
conduct at odds with the global governance institutions’ purported aims and com-
mitments. The latter include mechanisms for holding global governance institu-
tions accountable for meeting the aforementioned substantive requirements as well
as mechanisms for contesting the terms of accountability; that is, the ends that global
governance institutions ought to pursue and the means they should employ in doing
so. To be effective, mechanisms for holding officials accountable must be broadly
transparent. This includes making information about how the institution works not
only available but accessible to both internal and external actors (including inspec-
tors general and nongovernmental organizations), as well as the provision of public
justifications for the most consequential efforts at governance.
What unifies the various elements of the complex standard is that they all provide
the legal subjects of global governance institutions with reason to believe that
officials in these institutions are making a good faith effort to determine what justice
requires. The point may be clearer if we consider the converse: the absence of one or
more elements of the complex standard of legitimacy gives subjects of an attempt at
global governance reason to doubt that the putative rulers aspire to enhance their
conformity to right reason. Instead, subjects may suspect, and perhaps rightly so, that
governance is being exercised in pursuit of other goals, such as the national interest
of powerful states or the private interests of businesses or religious groups, that partly
deviate from or even conflict with the demands of justice. Consider, for example, the
substantive elements of the complex standard: no attempt at international govern-
ance by either global governance institutions or by states that persistently violated
“the least controversial human rights” or that systematically discriminated in the
application and enforcement of international legal norms could plausibly claim to
be making a good faith effort to enhance its subjects’ conformity to right reason. The
procedural elements that compose the complex standard evidence a good faith effort
to determine what right reason requires partly because they militate against efforts to
deploy international law for private interest rather than the public or common good,
and partly because they improve the quantity and quality of the information on the
basis of which global governance is conducted. As the first of these claims implies,
the complex standard’s procedural elements are desirable not only for their
30
These two categories correspond closely to the categories of output and input legitimacy employed by
many international relations or IR-influenced scholars. See Daniel Bodansky, “Legitimacy in
International Law and International Relations,” in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International
Law and International Relations: The State of the Art, eds. Jeffrey L. Dunoff and Mark A. Pollack
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 321–41.
evidentiary value but because they are likely to facilitate efforts at governance that
actually succeed in being legitimate; that is, that actually meet the normal justifica-
tion for authority. As an example of the second claim, the requirement that global
governance institutions facilitate effective engagement with external epistemic
agents such as Human Rights Watch and the International Committee of the Red
Cross likely leads to more informed and less biased rules and decisions than either
these institutions’ officials or those they directly or indirectly govern would achieve
on their own.
International law’s value as a means for enhancing its subjects’ conformity to right
reason is not the only ground theorists have offered for its legitimacy. Many have
sought instead, or at least in addition, to defend noninstrumental accounts accord-
ing to which obedience to legitimate international law constitutes the just treatment
of others. At least since the nineteenth century, the most prominent such account
used to justify international law’s claim to authority has been state consent. More
recently theorists have identified considerations of fair play as a basis for interna-
tional law’s legitimacy, or maintained that the justifiability of international law’s
claim to authority requires that it be democratically enacted. We will consider each
of these approaches in turn.
iii consent as a basis for international law’s legitimacy

Consent involves a minimum of two parties: an agent who grants another a claim
right or power and thereby acquires a correlative duty or liability, and an agent who
acquires the right. For example, in signing and ratifying a treaty setting out the terms
that will govern their use of a river that runs through or along both of their territories,
two states may be said to grant one another rights to conduct that conforms to those
terms, and to acquire obligations to act as the treaty directs. Similarly, in joining the
WTO states consent to its Dispute Resolution Body’s authority to resolve their
disputes regarding compliance with their obligations under that treaty. In conform-
ing to the terms of a treaty to which they have consented, states uphold their duties to
one another, which is to say that, in at least one respect, they treat one another justly.
They may also treat one another justly because the content of the treaty reflects or
determines what justice truly requires vis-à-vis the use of a common resource, trade,
the use of force, and so on. This need not be the case, however; a state that has
consented to govern its conduct according to certain terms may not unilaterally
disregard them simply because it believes that justice or its national interest require
contrary conduct.31 Rather, the state owes its obedience to the other party or parties
to the agreement, or, in other words, the state’s consent makes the norms that
comprise the agreement authoritative.
31
Note that the claim here concerns whose judgment regarding what justice requires ought to control. As
I discuss below, an agent’s consent to perform some act cannot render permissible what it would
otherwise be unjust for him to do.
Consent’s attraction as a basis for a duty to obey the law rests on its ability to
reconcile a conception of agents as morally free and equal with their submission to
authority. If an agent chooses to place himself under a duty to another then those
duties are the product of the agent’s control over his life, not requirements imposed
on him or a facet of his subjugation to the will of another agent. If consent is to
manifest this kind of control it must be free and informed. Agreements that are made
involuntarily or as a result of fraud generate neither moral duties nor moral rights.
Moreover, one agent may consent on another’s behalf only if the latter authorizes
him to do so, since only then will the resulting obligations be properly characterized
as a product of the obligated agent’s control over his life. Finally, the moral freedom
and equality of all agents places limits on the obligations any can acquire via
consent; even when free and informed, agreements to commit murder, theft,
fraud, and other crimes are null and void.
Each of the foregoing conditions on the generation of moral obligations via
consent provides a basis for challenging consent-based arguments for international
law’s legitimacy. In light of the costs their citizens are likely to suffer if they refuse,
the consent of economically and militarily weak states to bilateral or multilateral
treaties frequently fails to qualify as voluntary.32 Even where the costs of nonparti-
cipation do not rise to the level necessary to render agreement nonvoluntary, if the
distribution of benefits and burdens set out in the agreement reflect unrectified past
injustices committed by one party against another, then the agreement may still be at
odds with the commitment to the treatment of all as free and equal that underpins
consent-based accounts of legitimacy. Put another way, where the terms of an
agreement reflect unrectified exploitation, consent may not be morally binding
even if it is not coerced.
States increasingly consent to general frameworks that are then filled in by treaty-
based but partly autonomous bodies that exercise quasi-legislative and/or quasi-
judicial powers.33 As a consequence, states may find themselves subject to obliga-
tions they did not anticipate or intend to acquire when they consented to the original
framework. Generally speaking, while an agent need not know the precise details of
the obligation she is acquiring via consent, the greater her ignorance of these matters
the less compelling it will be to describe the agent’s consent as the exercise of control
over her life rather than as abdication of control to another. Insofar as a treaty permits
signatories to withdraw their consent to its terms, as many do, it might be argued that
a state’s decision not to do so constitutes its tacit or ongoing consent to specification
of its terms by semi-autonomous international organizations such as the WTO or the
32
See, for instance, the critical discussion of the Central American Free Trade Agreement in Frank
J. Garcia, Global Justice and International Economic Law: Three Takes (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), pp. 240–62.
33
Mattias Kumm, “The Legitimacy of International Law: A Constitutionalist Framework of Analysis,”
European Journal of International Law 15, 5 (2004): 914.
ICC. Of course, this argument succeeds only if the costs of withdrawal from the
treaty are not so high as to render continued submission to it nonvoluntary.
The current governments of some and perhaps even many states lack the legit-
imate authority to consent to obligations on behalf of the political communities they
claim to represent. Clearly this is true if a necessary condition for state officials
having the standing to morally obligate their citizens under international law is that
the state be sufficiently democratic and respectful of some core set of its subjects’
rights.34 It may still be true of a fair number of states even if we should employ
a somewhat broader understanding of what it is for state officials to adequately
represent their citizens. Whether democratic or not, states may consistently fail to
represent the interests of certain domestic minorities, such as indigenous peoples.
The existence of persistent minorities challenges any state’s claim to the standing to
acquire obligations on behalf of all its subjects. Finally, some theorists point to the
fact that much international lawmaking is carried out not by states’ legislators but by
members of their executive branches as a reason to doubt that those who purport to
acquire international legal obligations on their citizens’ behalf have the moral
standing to do so. In some cases, such as legislative ratification of treaties negotiated
by a state’s executive branch, those who are empowered by a state’s constitution to
make law have some say in its acquisition of international legal obligations. Where
that amounts to little more than an up or down vote on terms negotiated entirely,
and perhaps secretively, by the executive, there may be reason to doubt that
legislative consent suffices to render the resulting duties consistent with the treat-
ment of the state’s citizens as free and equal.
If any international legal norm or regime requires conduct that treats people in
a manner incompatible with a proper understanding of their moral status as free and
equal, then no state’s consent to abide by those norms generates a genuine moral
duty to do so. Thus, if Thomas Pogge is right to maintain that the WTO, the IMF,
and the World Bank systematically contribute to the persistence of severe global
poverty, and if, in doing so, they fail to treat the global poor as a proper under-
standing of their moral status as free and equal requires, then no state’s consent to
rule by these organizations gives rise to a moral obligation to act as they direct.35
Much depends on the proper understanding of people’s moral status as free and
equal, of course. However defined, if consent matters because and to the extent that
it enables agents to control or shape their lives by altering their rights, duties, powers,
and immunities vis-à-vis others, then it cannot render permissible let alone
34
Note that what is at issue here is a government’s moral standing to create a moral obligation on the part
of the state and its citizens to conform to certain international legal norms, such as those set out in
a particular treaty the government signs (and, where necessary, ratifies). This is distinct from the
government’s international legal standing to sign the treaty, in virtue of which it can generate legal
obligations for the state’s citizens and officials. Or so a legal positivist will maintain. Since Dworkin
argues that legal obligations are simply a species of moral obligation, any practice of government that
has no claim to legitimacy does not count as a genuinely legal one.
35
Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2002).
obligatory conduct at odds with a proper appreciation for any agent’s moral freedom
and equality.
The foregoing arguments suggest that even where consent seems most likely to
justify international law’s claim to legitimacy, namely with respect to treaty-based
law that applies to states, its success is likely to be piecemeal at best.36 This conclu-
sion is only strengthened when we consider customary international law (CIL).
Where CIL is a product of longstanding state practice, then those states that
voluntarily and knowingly engage in the practice, or that at least do not persistently
object to it, might be said to tacitly consent to the norms that structure that
practice.37 Once again, however, this conclusion does not follow for those states
whose participation or failure to object is nonvoluntary; for instance, postcolonial
states subject to customary international legal norms developed largely by European
powers prior to or during the colonial era. Consent also appears to be an inadequate
basis for the legitimacy of international legal norms that apply directly to individuals.
These observations are typically offered to support the conclusion that, at best,
consent offers an incomplete ground for international law’s legitimacy. It is worth
noting the possibility of drawing the opposite conclusion, however. If consent
provides the only possible basis for a moral duty to obey the law, because only
consent reconciles a conception of agents as free and equal with their submission to
authority, then significant portions of international law may simply be illegitimate.
iv fair play as a basis for international law’s legitimacy

A number of contemporary theorists argue that the principle of fair play provides
a compelling alternative to consent as a basis for the moral duty to obey domestic
law.38 That alone warrants investigating whether fair play (also) grounds a moral
duty on the part of states’ and perhaps other international actors to obey international
law. But in addition, the principle of fair play may provide an account of a moral
duty to obey international law in cases where an appeal to consent requires contort-
ing that concept almost beyond recognition. For instance, the claim that states have
a moral duty to obey customary international legal norms because they accept the
benefits that follow from others’ compliance may better cohere with the practice of
customary international law than does the claim that states consent to these norms.
Similarly, even if many states have signed on to treaties or acquiesced to evolving
norms of customary international law in circumstances that rendered their actions
36
See Matthew Lister, “The Legitimating Role of Consent in International Law,” Chicago Journal of
International Law 11, 2 (2011): 664–91.
37
Our concern here is with the ability of consent to account for the legitimacy of customary interna-
tional legal norms, not with the role it (allegedly) plays in the emergence or existence of such norms.
38
See, for example, George Klosko, The Principle of Fairness and Political Obligation (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1992); Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican
Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 68–78; and Playing Fair: Political
Obligation and the Problems of Punishment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
involuntary, at some later date they may come to accept the benefits that follow from
the other signatories’ compliance with the resulting legal norms, and thereby
acquire a duty of fair play to likewise abide by those norms. Together, these
considerations suggest that conceiving of deference to international law as
a matter of fair cooperation is worth exploring.
In H.L.A. Hart’s words, the principle of fair play holds that “when a number of
persons conduct any joint enterprise according to rules and thus restrict their liberty,
those who have submitted to these restrictions have a right to similar submissions
from those who benefited by their submission.”39 In these conditions, a beneficiary
who chooses not to limit her liberty takes unfair advantage of those who do so. She is
a free rider who takes the benefits provided by others’ participation in a cooperative
scheme that requires them to limit their liberty in some way without bearing the cost
of likewise limiting her own liberty.
While Hart’s formulation of the principle of fair play makes sense of the widely
shared intuition that free riders treat participants in a cooperative scheme unfairly,
Robert Nozick maintains that it sweeps too widely.40 Specifically, it seems to allow
those who organize a joint enterprise to simply impose the benefits of the scheme on
anyone, and then demand that those persons contribute their fair share to the
operation of the scheme in return for the benefits they have received. To many,
such an exercise of arbitrary control over others’ lives and liberty is incompatible
with respect for their status as free and equal, or as autonomous agents. If we are to
honor a person’s status as a creature capable of acting as the author of her own life,
we cannot restrict her liberty to exercise that capacity simply by imposing benefits on
her and then demanding that she limit her liberty in certain ways so as to contribute
to the production of those benefits.
Simmons argues that we can avoid this implication by taking an agent’s obligation
to do her fair share in maintaining a cooperative scheme to be conditional on her
acceptance of the benefit it provides her.41 To accept the benefit produced by others’
cooperation an agent must either try to get it, or, if she cannot avoid receiving the
benefit, then she must do so knowingly and willingly. The latter conditions require
that the person know she is receiving a benefit; know that the benefit is produced by
others’ participation in the cooperative scheme; believe the benefits are worth the
cost of restricting her liberty in the ways participation in the scheme demands, and
not have the benefits forced on her against her will. Note that on Simmons’s
interpretation, fair play obligations are voluntary, or acquired, ones. A person
comes to have an obligation to contribute her fair share to the operation of
a cooperative scheme that provides her with a nonexcludable benefit only as
a result of her free and informed formation of a preference order that ranks the
39
H.L.A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?” Philosophical Review 64, 2 (1955): 185.
40
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 93–5.
41
A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1979), pp. 123–36.
receipt of benefits, at the cost of doing her share to maintain the scheme, over
freedom from contributing to the scheme at the cost of going without the benefits it
provides.
Many (although not all) of the benefits provided by the international legal order
are nonexcludable. These include relatively secure borders and peaceful relations
between states in most parts of the world, various sorts of environmental benefit
(such as protection against the ill effects of a hole in the ozone layer or, hopefully
one day, protection against dangerous climate change) and health benefits (such as
protection from global pandemics), common rules governing air travel, shipping
lanes, and so on. Individual states benefit not only through their own actions under
these rules – some of which they might be denied – but, more importantly, from
other states’ compliance with them. Insofar as these are benefits states necessarily
receive, rather than ones they enjoy only if they try to get them, it follows that they
can acquire a fair play obligation to contribute to their provision only if they receive
them knowingly and willingly. But what would it be for states to knowingly and
willingly receive the benefits provided by the international legal order? Can any
sense be made of this idea? And does it even matter whether they do so, or might
mere receipt of the benefits that result from other states’ submission to international
law suffice to generate a fair play obligation on a state to do likewise.
The initial case for claiming that only states that accept the benefits provided by
the international legal order have a fair play obligation to obey it rests on intuitions
regarding the importance of political self-determination. As Christopher Heath
Wellman points out, without postulating a deontological right to political self-
determination it is impossible to account for the judgment that the United States
would act wrongly were it to annex Canada (or vice versa), even if doing so were to
result in improvements to the welfare of both countries’ citizens.42 This example
suggests that a certain kind of group enjoys a right to self-determination consisting, at
least, of a claim right against others that they not interfere with that group’s attempt
to live a particular way of life.43 In this respect, a group’s right to political self-
determination mirrors an individual’s right to self-determination.44
As we noted earlier, in the absence of the acceptance of benefits condition the
principle of fair play conflicts with individual autonomy because it entails that an
individual is subject to the arbitrary will of other agents. They can restrict an
individual’s self-determination simply by bestowing benefits on her, since her
receipt of benefits produced by their cooperative scheme will generate an obligation
to do her fair share in maintaining it. Likewise, in the case of political self-
42
Christopher Heath Wellman, A Theory of Secession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
pp. 47, 50–1.
43
As in the case of individuals, a group’s moral claim to noninterference in its pursuit of a particular way
of life is limited by certain natural (that is, nonvoluntary) duties it has to other groups and individuals.
44
See Chapter 10 for an extended discussion of the moral basis of a group’s right to political self-
determination.
determination, without the acceptance of benefits clause the principle of fair play
will leave those states inhabited by a group with a right to political self-determination
vulnerable to the arbitrary will of other states. Those other states will enjoy a moral
power to restrict the political autonomy (or liberty) of the state in question simply by
bestowing certain benefits on it. As long as the benefits the state receives outweigh
the costs to it of contributing to the scheme that produces them, the state will have
a moral obligation to do its fair share in maintaining the scheme, even if it would
prefer not to do so and go without the benefits the scheme provides. But just as it is
wrong to deny an individual the liberty to choose to go without a particular benefit,
so, too, it is wrong to deny a group the liberty to choose to go without a particular
benefit. The upshot is that a state (or perhaps more accurately, a group that exercises
a moral right to political self-determination via the institutions of a state) has a fair
play duty to obey international law, or at least those legal norms constitutive of
a particular international legal regime, only if it accepts the benefits it provides.
States do not have mental states, and, so it might seem, cannot knowingly and
willingly receive the benefits provided by the international legal order. Nevertheless,
we frequently speak of a state’s agency; for example, we say that states launch wars,
sign treaties, and disregard norms of international law. State’s act, we believe, when
individual persons occupying offices in them act, in their capacity as legal officials.
Moreover, we frequently speak of state’s mental states, saying that states intend to
launch wars, decide to sign treaties, and choose to disregard norms of international
law. Here too, we mean to refer to legal officials, although in this case their mental
states, rather than their actions. There is nothing mysterious in this statement:
“China believes that even limited economic sanctions against Iran will threaten its
access to Iranian oil, and will therefore choose to veto any proposal that the United
Nations Security Council implement such sanctions.” Such a statement is not
merely a prediction of future behavior, but also a description of what the speaker
takes to be the beliefs and intentions of those Chinese government officials legally
empowered to take such an action. I suggest, therefore, that we understand a state’s
acceptance of benefits in terms of the mental states had by certain legal officials in
that state. Specifically, a state accepts the benefits provided by the international legal
order if and only if the following two conditions are met: (a) the state officials legally
empowered to negotiate the terms on which it will participate with other states in
(the cooperative scheme that is) the international legal order knowingly and will-
ingly accept the benefits provided by international law; and (b) these officials have
the moral standing necessary to place their subjects under a moral obligation, or put
another way, to acquire a moral obligation that is binding on the political commu-
nity in whose name they act.45
45
For discussion of several challenges to this characterization of a state’s acceptance of benefits, see
Lefkowitz, “The Principle of Fairness and States’ Duty to Obey International Law,” Canadian Journal
of Law and Jurisprudence 24, 2 (2011): 335–8.
Suppose we grant that the principle of fair play could justify the claim that states
have a moral duty to obey international law. Does it actually do so? A fully satisfac-
tory response to that question requires a detailed empirical investigation that lies
beyond the scope of this book. As a starting point, however, it may be worth
considering whether Simmons’ concerns with the use of the principle of fair play
to justify a moral duty to obey domestic law apply equally to its use to justify a moral
duty to obey international law.
Simmons poses two challenges to those who attempt to ground a duty to obey
domestic law in the principle of fair play.46 First, he argues that genuine cooperation
requires that each cooperator know that the others share the goal to be achieved by
working together, and understands his or her contribution as part of a joint effort to
achieve that goal. The small-scale cooperative schemes from which Simmons
claims we draw our intuitions regarding obligations of fair play are characterized
by face-to-face interaction, horizontal structures of power and authority, and
a conscious and willing sacrifice of individual liberty for the sake of the common
good. Modern states, in contrast, are massively impersonal, built around hierarch-
ical structures of power and authority, and populated mainly by agents who comply
with the law’s demands largely from habit and fear of punishment. If Simmons is
right to deny that states constitute genuine cooperative schemes, and that fair play
obligations arise only in the case of such schemes, then it follows that the duty to
obey domestic law cannot be justified by appeal to the principle of fair play.
Second, even if Simmons is wrong about either of these two claims, he also
contends that few citizens of modern states accept the benefits their state provides
them: “Many citizens barely notice (and seem disinclined to think about) the
benefits they receive” from their domestic legal system, to which it might be
added that even in cases where they are aware of the benefits, subjects of modern
states often fail to recognize that their provision results from others’ obedience to
law.47 If correct, it follows from these claims that few people meet the knowledge
condition for the acceptance of benefits. Simmons also suggests that many citizens
of modern states do not believe that the benefits they receive from government are
worth the price they are forced to pay for them in taxes, service, and restrictions on
their liberty. Even if that conclusion is false, those who believe it will still not accept
the benefits in the sense necessary to generate a fair play obligation to obey the law.
Third, Simmons questions whether most people regard the payment of taxes to the
state as a contribution to the operation of a cooperative scheme. Instead, they may
well regard the government as something like a company from which they purchase
certain goods, albeit one that in many cases exercises monopoly power and the use of
coercion to compel people to buy its products. If people do not recognize the
benefits they receive from government as the product of a cooperative scheme,
46
Simmons, Moral Principles, pp. 136–41. See also Simmons, Justification and Legitimacy.
47
Simmons, Moral Principles, p. 139.
then they will not accept those benefits in the requisite sense, and so once again they
will have no duty to obey the law grounded in the principle of fair play.
These reasons for doubting that citizens accept the benefits their state provides
them are less plausible when we turn to states’ acceptance of the benefits they
receive from the international legal order. For example, even if individuals are
unaware of the benefits of public health, or that they are the product (in part) of
a cooperative scheme realized in law and public policy, the same is unlikely to be
true for legal officials in most states. To the contrary, many states include institutions
devoted partially or entirely to pursuing public health via legal and political coop-
eration with other states and with international bodies such as the World Health
Organization. Indeed, in general, states are far likelier to meet the knowledge
condition for acceptance of benefits, since they do not face the same limitations
on time, energy, and ability that individuals do. Moreover, officials in a state
institution concerned with issues of public health are often directly involved in
negotiations over the aims, scope, content, and implementation of international
legal norms that impact public health. Even when they do not participate in such
activities themselves, they often influence these decisions indirectly by informing
and shaping the views of those officials who do exercise the authority to form
international legal agreements and regimes. Thus, the existence of such institutions,
and the conduct of officeholders in them, provides evidence both that states are
aware of the benefits they receive from the participation of other states in the
international legal order, and that the benefits they receive are the result of such
participation.
Now consider Simmons’ claim that the principle of fairness only applies to a genuine
cooperative scheme – one that, as Donald Regan writes, “involves a real (and successful)
attempt to achieve a jointly valued outcome by coordinated behavior.”48 The interna-
tional legal order may well satisfy this condition. States do share certain broad goals they
hope to achieve via participation in the international legal order, peace and prosperity
foremost among them. In addition, states are often more self-conscious about their
obedience to international law than is the case with individuals and their obedience to
domestic law. This may make states more likely to view obedience to law as their
contribution to the joint achievement of a stable, peaceful, and prosperous society of
states. Additionally, several of the features Simmons identifies as distinguishing genuine
cooperative schemes from a modern domestic legal order do not apply equally to the
international legal order. These include the number of participants in the scheme and
a horizontal structure of enforcement and authority. Collectively, the observations set
out in this paragraph and the preceding one suggest that Simmons’ reasons for skepti-
cism regarding the existence of a fair play duty to obey domestic law do not apply
equally, or perhaps at all, to the argument for a fair play duty to obey international law.
48
Donald Regan, Utilitarianism and Cooperation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 127.
Quoted in Simmons, Justification and Legitimacy, pp. 39–40.
Nevertheless, the attempt to justify a moral duty to obey international law by

appeal to the principle of fair play encounters many of the same challenges as the
argument from consent. For instance, the acceptance condition on the acquisition
of duties of fair play reflects the moral importance of autonomy or self-
determination. Fair play obligations follow only where actors voluntarily participate
in a cooperative scheme. This condition is not met where the terms of a treaty reflect
past, present, or the threat of future unjust coercion or exploitation. The same is true
for customary legal norms whose content reflects unjust power differentials. Indeed,
it may be inaccurate to describe the collective action these treaty and customary
legal norms facilitate as examples of cooperation. Moreover, the officials of states
with illegitimate governments lack the moral standing necessary to acquire fair play
obligations on behalf of the political community they rule. Their acceptance of the
benefits provided by other states’ compliance with (particular) international legal
norms generates no moral duty on the state or its subjects to likewise comply with the
law. Consequently, when a state’s illegitimate government is replaced by
a legitimate one, the new government may rightly reject the claim that it has a fair
play duty to comply with (particular) international legal norms, at least until it has
determined whether the benefits of participation in the scheme constituted by those
norms warrants the limits on liberty they impose. While they do not rule out the
possibility that some states currently have fair play obligations to obey certain
international legal norms, the two arguments canvased here offer plausible reasons
to think this will often not be the case.
v democracy and international law’s legitimacy

Is a voluntary act, whether in the form of consent or the acceptance of benefits,
a necessary condition for international law’s legitimacy? Perhaps not. As we noted
earlier in this chapter, some philosophers maintain that in circumstances character-
ized by disagreement over what counts as rightful conduct, agents have a moral duty
to subject themselves to a common juridical order, that is, one in which all are
governed by common standards. Obedience to law itself constitutes a form of respect
for others’ moral status as free and equal, distinct from the respect exhibited by
complying with laws that correctly track what counts as treating others morally
independently of the law requiring it. But what conditions must law satisfy if it is
to constitute just relations between agents? One popular answer is that it must be
democratic.
At the domestic level, some form of democratic decision making understood in
individual-majoritarian terms is widely viewed as at least a necessary condition for
legitimacy, so much so that few rulers feel able to go without at least the facade of
democratic rule. It may seem natural, therefore, to conclude that the legitimacy of
global governance institutions and international law more generally requires that
they become more democratic. Whether this is so depends, however, on the manner
in which democracy contributes to law’s legitimacy. Like legitimacy, democratic

governance may be defended on both instrumental and noninstrumental grounds.
As an example of the former, individual-majoritarian decision making may have
epistemic advantages over the feasible alternatives.49 Depending on how substantive
a conception of democratic decision making we employ, it may result in greater
collective deliberation than would otherwise take place. Two important points
follow from this observation. First, democracy’s instrumental value contributes to
its legitimacy only insofar as it increases the probability that democratically enacted
law meets the NJC, or in other words, improves its subjects’ conformity to right
reason. Second, if democracy is valuable only because its output satisfies the NJC,
then there is little reason to think democracy is a necessary condition for law’s
legitimacy. In some cases, nondemocratic decision-making procedures may perform
equally well or better at producing legitimate law; for example, where democratic
decision-making procedures systematically lead to unjustifiable discrepancies in the
weight or importance given to the interests of some over others, as state level
democratic governance may do vis-à-vis the interests of citizens and noncitizens.50
Indeed, even if democratically enacted law best satisfies the NJC, nondemocrati-
cally enacted law will still be legitimate if no democratic decision-making procedure
exists and those over whom the law claims authority do better by deferring to it than
by acting on their own judgment. In short, if democracy’s value is entirely instru-
mental, then international law’s democratic deficit need not preclude its legitimacy.
Many of those who defend democratic decision making as a necessary condition
for the legitimacy of domestic law do so on noninstrumental grounds, however. For
example, Thomas Christiano argues that in circumstances characterized by both the
moral necessity of coordination on common standards of right conduct and dis-
agreement as to what those standards should be, justice requires that people organize
their lives together on the basis of rules that publicly treat them as equals.51 In the
case of a modern state, this entails that law must be made democratically. To defend
these claims, Christiano introduces three concepts: fundamental interests, the facts
of judgment, and the fundamental interests in judgment. An agent’s fundamental
interests are those that figure centrally in a person’s well-being, and in the absence of
which an agent is very unlikely to enjoy any well-being at all. Justice requires the
equal advancement of fundamental interests, Christiano maintains. The facts of
judgment include diversity in people’s natural talents and cultural surroundings;
cognitive biases in the interpretation of their own and others’ interests (including
what counts as their advancement), as well as the value of their own interests in
comparison to the interests of others; and fallibility in both moral and nonmoral
judgment. The facts of judgment explain why disagreement as to what justice truly
49
Robert Goodin, Reflective Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); David Estlund,
Democratic Authority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
50
Buchanan and Keohane, “Legitimacy of Global Governance,” 415–16.
51
Christiano, Constitution of Equality, pp. 75–130, 231–59.
requires will be rife, even among those committed to the equal advancement of
interests. Finally, the fundamental interests in judgment consist of the interest in
correcting for others’ cognitive biases, the interest in being at home in the world, and
the interest in being treated as a person with equal moral standing. Each of these
interests provides a moral basis for a claim against others that one’s judgment
regarding matters of justice be given equal weight in the collective task of determin-
ing how the shared aspects of social life ought to be arranged. Should agents be
denied the proper recognition of their interests in judgment, they are extremely
unlikely to be successful in the pursuit of whatever other interests they may have;
hence their inclusion on the list of fundamental human interests.
Given the facts of judgment, the fundamental interests in judgment generate
a moral demand that government publicly treat people as equals. Against
a background constituted by diversity, cognitive bias, and fallibility, and the perva-
sive disagreement to which they give rise, agents will have compelling reason to
believe that their fundamental interests in judgment, and so their other fundamental
interests, are not being unjustifiably set back only if political power is exercised
within institutions that publicly realize equality. Democratic decision making
satisfies this criterion, since it “enables us all to see that we are being treated as
equals despite disagreements [regarding the true demands of justice] as long as we
take into account the facts of judgment and the interests that accompany them.”52
Our interest in correcting for others’ cognitive biases appears to be instrumental in
nature, insofar as its value lies in mitigating the setbacks to other interests that
frequently follow when people act on mistaken understandings of what others’
interests are or what counts as advancing them. To this extent, Christiano’s argu-
ment for the legitimacy of democratic lawmaking might be characterized as an
instrumental one; obedience to law is a means whereby actors can better approx-
imate the aim of honoring or promoting the interests of all equally than if they act on
their own judgment of what that requires.53 In contrast, obedience to democratically
enacted laws that determine how various shared aspects of social life ought to be
arranged just is to acknowledge others’ interest in being treated as moral equals, as
well as their interest in being at home in the world. To deny someone a say in how
the shared aspects of social life ought to be arranged, or to disregard an answer to that
question reached via a democratic decision procedure, is to assert one’s moral
superiority over others. Hence the only way to honor others’ fundamental interest
in being treated as a moral equal is to obey democratically enacted law. In the same
vein, if individuals are to feel at home in an egalitarian social world, one premised
52
Ibid, 76.
53
Christiano contends that, as a matter of fact, any process that fails to accord people an equal say in
determining the form that the shared aspects of social life ought to take will inevitably result in a set
back to their interests. Although this is an empirical, and so contingent, claim, Christiano maintains
that it rests on extremely deep features of human nature and human society, so deep that political
philosophers need not be very concerned with counterarguments that rest on worlds in which these
features are absent.
on an understanding of moral equality as the equal advancement of interests, then

they must be able to see that world as one that they help to create and sustain, rather
than one that others impose on them.
Although Christiano maintains that domestic law ought to be made democrati-
cally, he does not draw the same conclusion vis-à-vis international law. To the
contrary, he argues that, at present and for the foreseeable future, a global parlia-
ment that created international law through a process of majoritarian decision
making would almost certainly fail to govern in a manner that publicly treated all
of the individuals it ruled as equals.54 In part, Christiano worries that a global
parliament would fail to be sufficiently democratic. For example, it might too
readily produce persistent minorities, discrete and insular groups that never succeed
in making legislation. Were this to occur, the law enacted by the global parliament
would likely fail to advance the interests of the minority, or at least fail to do so in
a manner that treated those interests as equal in their moral importance to the
interests of the majority. From the standpoint of legitimacy rather than justice,
however, the more important shortcoming would be the global parliament’s failure
to publicly treat the members of the permanent minority as equals. After all, what
reason would they (or we) have to believe that the legislative process respected their
fundamental interests in correcting for cognitive biases, being at home in the world,
and being treated as a person with equal moral standing if the law never reflected
their view of the terms on which the shared aspects of the global social world should
be arranged? Christiano also argues that the weakness of international civil society
warrants skepticism regarding the prospects for a global parliament satisfying the
principle of public equality, and so generating legitimate international law. As he
remarks, “political parties, interest groups, and diverse media outlets . . . are abso-
lutely necessary to democracy because citizens can only devote a small amount of
time to political questions, so there must be intermediate institutions that enable
citizens to acquire a grasp of the key political issues and alternatives.”55 In the
absence of a robust civil society, government is likely to become the preserve of
a largely unaccountable ruling elite, and thereby lay the seeds for a populist backlash
that, under the leadership of a demagogue, can easily become antidemocratic and
illiberal.
Even if a global democracy were to function flawlessly, producing neither persis-
tent minorities nor government by a largely unaccountable elite, Christiano main-
tains it would still fail to produce legitimate law. That is because democratically
enacted law publicly treats all those it addresses as equals only if there is a great deal
of interdependence among their interests and each has a roughly equal stake in the
normative social order the law creates. Consider the latter point first. If a system of
54
Thomas Christiano, “Democratic Legitimacy and International Institutions,” in The Philosophy of
International Law, eds. Samantha Besson and John Tasioulas (New York: Oxford University Press,
2010), pp. 129–36.
55
Ibid, 135.
rules will affect two parties to very different degrees, with one party’s life barely
impacted while the other’s plans and prospects are deeply dependent on the content
of these rules, then it would be unfair to give them an equal say in settling what those
rules should be. To do so would give the first party too much control over the second
one, with the second party unable to view the process as one that publicly treats all
parties as moral equals. But why does the public equality argument for democratic
rule apply only when there is a great deal of interdependence among agents’
interests? Why not treat each interest or issue separately? Christiano replies that
“since democratic decision-making must be taken by majority rule, it is important
that there be many issues so that those who come up losers on some issues be winners
on others.”56 In the absence of recurring decision making on a bundle of issues,
losers in a majority-rule process have little reason to view it as publicly treating them
as equals. Like permanent minorities, they have no procedural evidence, namely
victories in the decision-making process, that they can point to as reason to believe
that the governing institution is truly committed to the equal treatment of all those it
rules.
Christiano acknowledges a few instances of interdependence among the interests
of all individuals around the world, such as the danger posed by climate change.
However, he maintains that international legal institutions governing trade and the
environment typically impact individuals’ interests far less than domestic legal
orders do, and at least by implication not enough to meet the first of the two
conditions for the existence of a common world. Moreover, even when international
legal norms do impact the lives of individuals around the world they do so to very
different degrees. The life plans and prospects of some individuals may depend
a great deal on international trade, while for others the impact may be quite small.
Were all to exercise an equal say in determining the international rules that ought to
govern cross-border trade then those whose lives depend heavily on those rules could
rightly complain that the procedure for governing global trade did not publicly treat
them as moral equals.
If a global parliament will not produce legitimate international law, that is, law
that publicly treats all those it addresses as equals, then what legislative process could
do so? Christiano’s answer is the consent of democratic states to rules that are the
product of fair negotiations. Rather than pursuing global democracy, our efforts to
reform the international legal order should aim at its evolution into a fair democratic
association. In principle, at least, state-level democratic procedures offer individuals
a voice in the shaping of international legal norms, and, in practice, they might
better serve this end than would a global parliament, even if they fell well short of the
ideal. For example, a fair democratic association can help protect against one
scenario in which a group finds itself a permanent minority, namely, where the
populations of small states find themselves consistently outvoted by the populations
56
Ibid, 131.
of large states. Democratic societies can also protect indigenous peoples and other
insular minorities against the danger of never exercising an effective voice in the
crafting of international law by granting them special consultative rights or repre-
sentative bodies domestically. Properly designed, these mechanisms could enable
such groups to leverage their state’s influence over international legislation to better
ensure that their interests are considered. Moreover, many democratic societies have
thriving civil societies that pressure their political and legal institutions to accom-
modate and represent the interests and concerns of all their citizens.
Christiano also maintains that a fair democratic association offers a better institu-
tional response to the limited interdependence that characterizes relations between
citizens of different states, as well as the fact that they often have quite different stakes
in specific international legal regimes: “Democratic association allows states to pick
and choose what terms they enter into and so allows them to determine how
important issues are to their peoples and to sub-populations within their
societies.”57 For example, some democratic states may choose to enter into regional
associations that largely eliminate barriers to the movement of goods and people
across their borders, and that pool some of their resources for the pursuit of shared or
common ends. The European Union provides the clearest example of such an
association. Other states may choose to associate on terms that broadly preserve
their political-legal independence from one another. However, Christiano argues
that certain morally mandatory aims limit states’ freedom to choose whether to
become a party to an international agreement, or to persistently object to an evolving
customary international legal norm. These include the protection of persons against
serious and widespread violations of their human rights, the avoidance of global
environmental catastrophe, the alleviation of severe global poverty, and the estab-
lishment of a fair system of international trade.58 To illustrate, while democratic
states need not consent to international legal norms that completely eliminate their
right to restrict immigration, they have no right to withhold consent to international
legal norms mandating that they grant refuge or asylum to noncitizens who face an
existential threat that their own state is either unable or unwilling to address. Yet
a system of global government that incorporates an element of state consent may be
advantageous even where it addresses morally mandatory aims; for instance, if it
encourages regional associations of states to design and test alternative legal norms or
regimes that serve this end.59
While state consent plays a prominent role in the Fair Democratic Association
model of global government, that role is not the one it has traditionally been thought
to play in explaining international law’s legitimacy, or states’ duty to obey it. Rather,
consent is a feature of a process for creating international law that publicly treats as
57
Ibid, 136.
58
Thomas Christiano, “Legitimacy and the International Trade Regime,” San Diego Law Review 52, 5
(2015): 987–8.
59
Ibid, 989.
moral equals all of the individuals over whom it claims jurisdiction, either directly or
as citizens of a particular state. Put another way, were the international legal order to
evolve into a Fair Democratic Association, the “normative force” of states’ moral
duty to obey the law would not be grounded in their agreement to abide by the law.
Instead, its justification would lie in the fact that by obeying international law
produced by a legislative process that assigns state consent a central role (albeit
with certain limitations), actors would publicly treat the citizens of other democratic
states as moral equals.60 In circumstances characterized by the moral necessity of
adherence to common rules and pervasive disagreement regarding what those rules
ought to be, deference to law that publicly treats all of its subjects as equals is itself
a requirement of justice.
Yet the Fair Democratic Association model of global governance confronts
serious challenges. To state the obvious, many states are currently either
nondemocratic or democratic in name only. Furthermore, economic and
military inequalities enable some states to exercise far more power in inter-
national negotiations than do others, which they frequently use to press for
their own advantage (even if they occasionally make concessions they need
not offer to gain other states’ cooperation). Indeed, Christiano says as much,
describing the fair democratic association as an ideal of global government
whose realization is at best quite far off. More worrisome, however, is the
possibility that a free democratic association may fail to provide even
a principled basis for the legitimacy of international law. Voluntary agree-
ments will publicly treat the parties to them as equals only if they are
negotiated and entered into in free and fair conditions. Securing such condi-
tions, however, requires a public law whose legitimacy cannot itself depend
on voluntary agreement. Put another way, in order to ensure that negotiations
between democratic states take place on a level playing field we need an
institution that can effectively settle what counts as fair and unfair bargaining
by issuing and enforcing rules to that effect. Clearly that institution’s legiti-
macy cannot be the product of fair negotiations among democratic states since
the existence of such an institution is itself a condition for the fairness of any
negotiations. As Christiano himself recognizes, realizing the conditions for
a free democratic association “seems to drive us in the direction of global
institutions, which in turn must be evaluated in terms of democratic
principles.”61 This appears to leave us at an impasse, unable to ground
international law’s legitimacy in either its enactment by a global democratic
legislature or in a voluntary association of democratic states.
60
See Samantha Besson, “State Consent and Disagreement in International Law-Making: Dissolving
the Paradox,” Leiden Journal of International Law 29, 2 (2016): 305–15.
61
Thomas Christiano, “Is Democratic Legitimacy Possible for International Institutions?” in Global
Democracy: Normative and Empirical Perspectives, eds. Daniele Archibugi et al. (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 92.
vi why care about legitimacy?

In this chapter, we have construed the skeptical challenge to international law as
a concern with its legitimacy. In light of our survey of several justifications for law’s
legitimate authority and a correlative moral duty to obey the law, some degree of
misgiving appears warranted. How much depends partly on which of these accounts
accurately describes the grounds of a moral duty to obey the law, and partly on
empirical questions regarding the extent to which the conditions they set out are
currently met.
Does international law’s legitimacy deficit matter? Yes and no. As we noted earlier,
we should be careful not to infer from the illegitimacy of international legal norms or
global governance institutions that agents have no moral reasons to support them
(including, in some cases, acting as they require) or to work for their reform rather
than their replacement. Crucially, however, the sort of arguments that can be offered
in support of complying with illegitimate rules and institutions differ from the one
available when rules and institutions are legitimate, namely, that one has a moral duty
to obey those rules and institutions. Moreover, where international law’s illegitimacy
owes largely to its being an instrument for the unjust advancement of national or
special interests by the relatively powerful, the less powerful may have little choice but
to play by the existing legal rules. Doing so may be the right thing to do not only
prudentially but also morally if conduct that violates those rules is either unlikely to
bring about a more just world or, possibly, if there are limits on the setbacks to their
own interests that agents must bear in order to combat injustice.
Nevertheless, there are compelling reasons to pursue the goal of a more legitimate
international legal order. First, greater legitimacy entails an increase in justice. This
conclusion follows necessarily from the instrumental account of what makes law
legitimate; holding compliance with the law constant, a world with more legitimate
law is one in which actors more often conform to right reason than they do in a world
with less legitimate law. Empirically, we have compelling evidence that mechanisms of
accountability, transparency, and participation in the crafting of law and in governance
more generally typically lead to outcomes widely viewed as just, or at least as more just
than those produced by governance in the absence of such mechanisms.
Second, it seems plausible to maintain that an increase in the actual legitimacy of
international law will lead to an increase in belief in its legitimacy, which will, in
turn, increase international law’s actual legitimacy by making it more effective at
guiding its subjects conduct. The converse point may be even more powerful; the
failure to pursue greater legitimacy for the international legal order may lead to more
injustice as cynicism erodes some of the advances in, for example, managing
conflicts, promoting human rights, and protecting the environment to which inter-
national law has been a significant contributor.
Third, it may be possible to reach greater agreement on international law’s
legitimacy than on its justice. Recall in this regard Christiano’s argument that
democratic governance allows individuals to see the political institution that rules
them as committed to the equal advancement of all its subjects’ interests even when
the substance of some of its law offer reason to doubt it. Legitimacy also requires less
than justice, both in terms of what it takes for an agent to enjoy legitimate authority
and in terms of the duty it imposes on agents. In particular, an agent may concede
the law’s legitimacy while working to change it, perhaps even by acts of civil
disobedience.
Finally, it may be that we should be at least as concerned with the legitimacy of
international law as with its justice. The aforementioned possibility that we are more
likely to achieve widespread agreement on legitimacy than on justice provides
a pragmatic reason to draw this conclusion. However, as we have noted there may
also be a principled argument for doing so, namely, if just relations between agents
can only be realized within a legitimate legal order. If true, this claim entails that the
pursuit of global justice requires the realization of a legitimate international legal
order.
***
Time, now, to take stock of the progress we have made in responding to international
legal skepticism. In this chapter and the preceding ones, we have pursued the
strategy Hart urges on those who wish to address legal skeptics, namely identifying
“what they want to know and why they want to know it.”62 We now have a much
clearer understanding of the different theoretical assumptions and practical con-
cerns that may lie behind the question “is international law really law?” This
understanding can help us avoid talking past one another when we debate interna-
tional law’s status as genuine law, while also highlighting what follows from the
position we take on this issue given a particular conception of law and its relation-
ship to concepts such as the rule of law and legitimacy. If, as Hart maintains, the
purpose of legal philosophy is to clarify and advance both theoretical inquiry and
moral deliberation, then ours is a job well done.63
62
Hart, Concept, p. 5.
63
Ibid, 214.

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6

The Legitimacy of International Law

i the concept of legitimacy

A Legitimacy as a Right to Rule

B Against Legitimacy as a Right to Rule

ii the instrumental argument for international

A Law in the Service of Right Reason

Where international law’s legitimacy is a function of its facilitating coordination on

B Identifying Law that Satisfies the Normal Justification Thesis

The complex standard consists of a set of substantive and procedural requirements

iii consent as a basis for international law’s legitimacy

iv fair play as a basis for international law’s legitimacy

Nevertheless, the attempt to justify a moral duty to obey international law by

v democracy and international law’s legitimacy

in which democracy contributes to law’s legitimacy. Like legitimacy, democratic

on an understanding of moral equality as the equal advancement of interests, then

vi why care about legitimacy?

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