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Response to “On Communitarian and Global Sources of Legitimacy”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2011

Daniel Philpott
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Extract

Amitai Etzioni advances arguments about two forms of legitimacy, what I will call empirical legitimacy and substantive legitimacy. Empirical legitimacy is a matter of what people consider to be legitimate. It is assessed through the methods of social science—conducting surveys, for instance. Substantive legitimacy is a matter not of what people happen to think but of what is legitimate in the sense of being just or morally right. Etzioni's argument about empirical legitimacy, namely, that it is shaped through collective processes that involve emotions as well as reason, I find broadly plausible. Then he makes an argument about substantive legitimacy, one that explains how we are to know if an “act” (a term he uses broadly) is truly just or moral. This latter argument I wish to explore further and to raise questions about.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , Winter 2011 , pp. 129 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2011

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References

1 Budziszewski, J., What We Can't Not Know: A Guide (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 2004)Google Scholar.

2 Finnis, J. M., “Scepticism, Self-Refutation, and the Good of Truth,” in Law, Morality, and Society, ed. Hacker, P. M. S. and Raz, J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 247–67Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 250, 258–59.

4 See Finnis, John, Boyle, Joseph M., and Grisez, Germain, Nuclear Deterrence, Morality, and Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

5 See, for instance, the contrasting views of Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 251–68Google Scholar; and Boyle, Joseph, “Just and Unjust Wars: Casuistry and the Boundaries of the Moral World,” Ethics & International Affairs 11, no. 1 (1997): 83–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

7 Glendon, Mary Ann, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001)Google Scholar.

8 Novak, Michael, “Human Dignity, Human Rights,” First Things 97 (1999)Google Scholar: 40.