Some Worries About the Significance of Output Legitimacy

Many accounts of what it means for a state or an institution to have political legitimacy take the position that where a state is legitimate it has a right to rule (Christiano 2012). One plausible understanding of the right to rule maintains that this right includes a right to non-interference from external agents, such that a legitimate power-wielding agent is wronged when an outside agent does -or perhaps already when it attempts to- interfere with her legitimate power-wielding activities. This paper attempts to establish two main conclusions: First, that for reasons of analytical clarity and in order to distinguish between political legitimacy and mere institutional justification, we should conceive of political legitimacy as a right to rule that does in fact include such a right to non-interference from other agents. Second, that once we adopt such an understanding of the idea of political legitimacy, output legitimacy is unsuitable to ever bestow full political legitimacy on an agent or institution, irrespective of whether we are concerned with domestic or international instances of power-wielding. Political legitimacy, on this account, will always require democratic -input- legitimacy. I investigate a number of objections to both conclusions (made e.g. in the context of debates about the European Union’s legitimacy), but find them all wanting. Bibliography Christiano, Thomas. (2012). The Legitimacy of International Institutions. In Andrei Marmor (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Law. Baskingstoke: Routledge.