Research

Political Legitimacy

The Big Picture

Above your head, vastly removed from your control, the enormous machinery of government operates. It affects almost every part of your life, as well as everyone else’s. Whichever rulers you are subject to, they have a practical impact so persistent and deep that almost nothing else compares. The personal influence you have on this machinery is minuscule, effectively null: even if you live in a liberal democracy, the tiny flake of power given to you—in the form of the vote and other political liberties—cannot be said to make the state’s decisions yours. If you approve of its decisions, then only in the spectatorial way that you cheer on the weather, which is also beyond your power to control. Neither are you equal in power or other social resources to the public officials who rule over you.

This is a cold, unappealing, unromanticised view of what governments do. Nonetheless, it is correct. If we compare this picture against typical normative ideals of equality and liberty, then we can only conclude that government, as it standardly operates, is a tyrannical violation of our natural equality and freedom. There are, to my mind, only two intellectually honest responses to this challenge. First, we could stick to the normative ideals, accept their demands, and accordingly call for the end of all political structures as they currently exist. Perhaps only an anarchist world without any political power is morally acceptable, or perhaps we endorse some other alternative, such as small communes or worker collectives organised along democratic lines. Either way, the status quo must go.

The second response—the one I prefer—is to reject the orthodox versions of the equality and liberty ideals and replace them with a different justificatory standard. In particular, we should assess governments by their outcomes. The enormous power of the state, according to this alternative view, is justified because it implements principles of justice, because it makes us better off, or because it is preferable to the state of nature; whichever option one chooses, it is the products of government we value, not the process. For the instrumentalist, the machinery of the state is coercive and cannot be said to be an instance of autonomy, whether individual or collective, in any meaningful sense; but nonetheless, it can be justified via its effects.

Thus, we should assess governments in the same way we assess tools—they are in the same category as hammers, bridges, or monetary policy. Government is a complex social machine to achieve morally valuable ends. There is nothing mysterious or intrinsically valuable about this machine. All the major, interesting questions belong to what the valued aims are, and whether they are weighty enough to justify their moral costs. The rest is social science and political wisdom in choosing the best means for achieving our aims. This is the view I defend in a nutshell. We can call it instrumentalism.

The Book

The most thorough defence of instrumentalism you can find in my book, An Instrumentalist Theory of Political Legitimacy (Oxford University Press, 2024). To my knowledge, it is the first book-length defence of instrumentalism. There’s a review of it in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, which also offers a helpful overview.

Here’s a super-short summary of each chapter:

Chapter 1. Legitimacy is the property of political power being morally permissible to exercise.
Chapter 2. Political institutions can be legitimate without having political authority, and we should expect this to be the normal case.
Chapter 3. There are five broad families of political legitimacy – voluntarist, rationalist, relational, anti-moralits, and hybrid. Instrumentalism is a version of rationalism and non-rationalist theories fail.
Chapter 4. We should adopt a theory of justice based on two foundations, welfare and dignity, which yields both promotable aims and moral constraints.
Chapter 5. Justice, so understood, enjoys priority over competing values like stability or perfection, and should thus be at the core of instrumentalism.
Chapter 6. There are various ways how one could formulate instrumentalism in detail which are often ignored.
Chapter 7. Instrumentalism should be pursued indirectly, analogously to proposals for an indirect utilitarianism.
Chapter 8. Strong moral rights can be made compatible with instrumentalism by assuming that there is a fundamental balancing act in our moral theory.
Chapter 9. Democracy might possess value, but if it does, its value is secondary, paling in comparison to the substantive contents of justice.
Chapter 10. Views demanding public justification for legitimacy are wrong. Instrumentalism can accommodate political disagreement in various and convincing ways.

Articles on Legitimacy

Not all of my research on political legitimacy has been able to make it into the book. In other articles, I have pursued various supporting lines of argument, or issues which are perpendicular to the main themes of the book. Again, here are some impossibly brief summaries of each paper:

If we analyse consent theory’s foundations closely, we find that they actually support the legitimacy of non-consensual political institutions. In other words, rationalism emerges, by philosophical jiujitsu, out of the paradigm voluntarist theory. (Philosophical Review, forthcoming)
The mainstream concerning domestic institutions (like the state) emphasises democracy as a source of legitimacy, while authors in the literature on international institutions (like the WTO or EU) emphasise performance. Can this asymmetry be defended? No! The simpler explanation is that all institutions are justified on the basis of performance, further buttressing instrumentalism. (Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, here)
It is tempting to think that assessments of legitimacy must be transparent, such that we are always in a position to know whether our political institutions are legitimate or not. But this is false: legitimacy is intransparent, like justice. This does away with a major objection you might have against instrumentalism. (Philosophers' Imprint, here)
An underexplored issue: You might think that the intentions of public officials matter for political legitimacy. But we should be sceptical that this is the case. This makes it more likely that other things, such as outcomes, matter. (Res Publica, here)
Occupying a coordinating role does not bestow political authority, against a mainstream view which claims otherwise. This further supports that legitimate institutions can do without authority. (Ratio Juris, here)

The substantive argument of two further other have now been incorporated with no major changes into the book, although they can still be read as free-standing articles. (This article in Law and Philosophy became chapter 2 in the book, this article in Moral Philosophy and Politics was adapted as chapter 7.)

Articles on the Concept of Legitimacy

I have also done some work on the concept of legitimacy. As these claims are located on the conceptual level, I take them in principle to be independent from substantive moral claims.

It is increasingly popular to claim that normative legitimacy comes in degrees. But it’s surprisingly difficult to say what this would mean, and I caution against easy attempts. (Res Publica, here)
Nerds use the Hohfeld schema to explain legitimacy as the right to rule. But they have not nerded enough. If they had, they would realise that the Hohfeld schema strongly suggests non-essentialism: that there is no essence to the concept of political legitimacy. (Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, with Johan Vorland Wibye, here)

Even More

I have also written a longform review of Dorfman and Harel’s book Reclaiming the Public. The review is useful as an inverted mirror for my own position, as they defend a theory which is almost the polar opposite to mine. So read it if you want a sort-of negative deduction of instrumentalism through a strong critique of its opposite.

Lastly, Laura Valentini and I have authored a textbook chapter on authority (also touching a little on political legitimacy), which offers a neutral and accessible description of the field of contenders. In an article for the Oxford Handbook of Political Obligation, I also survey philosophical positions about the relationship between legitimacy and authority.

Democratic Theory

If the aim of political institutions is to promote justice, then some natural questions concerning institutional design follow. How can we ensure that democratic institutions work well? How should we deal with disagreements over the aims of justice? These and related questions in political epistemology have been my second major area of research.

The guiding idea I have defended is the importance of the epistemic division of labour: democracies can solve the complex practical problems we face, but only if they are institutionally designed in a way that ensures the combination of widely dispersed epistemic competences (Critical Review, here). I have also sketched what this entails for epistemic deference to normative experts (Episteme, here). Roughly, I think that moral deference to political experts is normally fine, even when such deference concerns normative issues.

Other Interests

In general, I am interested in typical topics at the intersection of philosophy and economics. I have been thinking about monetary policy and inflation in particular, but have been undecided what normative theorising contributes here. I am also interested in housing policy.

I have defended the right to roam in print (Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, here). The right to roam is a pretty cool feature of Scandinavian legal systems, where you can roam nature at will, even if the land is privately owned. The article offers the first defence of this right in analytic political philosophy.

My very first publication, going back to my writing sample for grad school (!), was on supererogation (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, here).