Normative Standards for Global Institutions: Legitimacy, Not Practice-Dependent Justice

What kind of normative standards applies to global governance institutions? It seems quite obvious that we cannot hold existing global institutions to the same standards as states; in some way our normative assessment of different kinds of political entities must be sensitive to empirical context and existing conditions. But how should we account for this? One suggestion in the literature is that different principles of justice apply to different kinds of institutions because justice is a “practice-dependent”-value. On this view, the primary explanation for why we should not demand, for example, egalitarian distribution from existing institutions beyond the state is because such egalitarian principles are only triggered by the institutions of the state and only apply within states. The practice-dependent approach has appealing features; is seem able to deliver guidance for real-world issues and make empirically informed normative assessments. But, as I argue in the paper, the approach is faced with devastating methodological problems and delivers strange and counterintuitive recommendations in crucial cases. I argue instead that it is the standard of legitimacy, not justice, that differ for different kinds of governing institutions. Legitimacy specifies when political institutions have the “right to rule” and different forms of rule require different kinds of justification. By complementing practice-independent principles of justice with an account of what legitimacy requires under different empirical and institutional conditions, the problems with the practice-dependent approach can be avoided and at the same time we have tools to make non-arbitrary and empirically informed normative assessments of different kinds of institutions, including global governance institutions.