https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8580-0872
![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Institutions undertake a huge variety of constitutive purposes. One of the roles of legitimacy is to protect and promote an institution’s pursuit of its purpose; state legitimacy is generally understood as the right to rule, for example. When considering legitimacy beyond the state, we have to take account of how differences in purposes change legitimacy. I focus in particular on how differences in purpose matter for the stringency of the standards that an institution must meet in order to be legitimate. An important characteristic of an institution’s purpose is its deontic status, i.e. whether it is morally impermissible, merely permissible, or mandatory. Although this matters, it does so in some non-obvious ways; the mere fact of a morally impermissible purpose is not necessarily delegitimating, for example. I also consider the problem of conflicting, multiple, and contested institutional purposes, and the different theoretical roles for institutional purpose. Understanding how differences in purpose matter for an institution’s legitimacy is one part of the broader project of theorizing institutional legitimacy in the many contexts beyond the traditional context of the state.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. See Erman (Citationin press) for a recent attempt to work some similar issues out in the context of particular political purposes.
2. Many institutions also address rules to ‘outsiders’ or non-members; political institutions are a prime example of this. However, my point here is to define the core of what it means to be an institution and institutions are defined by the rules that define institutional roles and regulate the activities of members. The next step is important for the subclass of institutions that claim to bind outsiders in a particular way, but not for institutions in general.
3. Normative standing is a set of Hohfeldian advantages and disadvantages (Hohfeld, Citation1919).
4. Thus it will not do to reduce an institution’s purpose to a description of its actual functions. We need the purpose to describe the institution itself, but also to identify a mismatch between purpose and how it functions in practice, which may itself matter for legitimacy. Compare Buchanan and Keohane (Citation2006, p. 422) on institutional integrity. Even further, we are often concerned with the prospects for reform when we consider an institution’s legitimacy and having a purpose that may not be met but can be a guide for effective reform will matter as well. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify this.
5. This can apply to sub-units; for example, on legislatures, see Waldron (Citation2016, p. 154).
6. This example shows the contrast with the historical approach to individuating institutions. To my mind these distinct individuation criteria are simply useful in different contexts; neither captures the ‘real’ institution.
7. The right to non-interference is the core of the right to function but depending on the nature of the institutions’ functioning, this may well entail further normative advantages, as mentioned in Adams (Citation2018). Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify this issue. The important point here is that legitimacy necessarily and minimally includes this element, and that is enough to consider how purpose matters for the stringency of the requirements we would put on an institution achieving this status. Note also that the correlative duty not to interfere is only the duty that correlates to legitimacy; members, outsiders, and others may all well be under a variety of other duties and in general relate to the institution in a variety of ways due to other factors.
8. All institutions depend on free acceptance by some core group of participants. Some institutions, most notably states, also coercively impose roles on people. This is a hugely complicating matter for the legitimacy of such institutions that prima facie defeats the positive case I just outlined.
9. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this question.
10. This is (at least implicitly) considered throughout this special issue, including by Scherz and Zysset, Christiano, and especially Schmelzle.
11. This is not to endorse a pure libertarian baseline for evaluating institutional legitimacy. For example, we may have good reasons for forbidding certain types of economic institutions because of the effects of allowing the type, despite the fact that any given token might be unobjectionable on its own.
12. For example, in January of 2017 the German Constitutional Court decided not to ban the neo-Nazi NPD party on the grounds that it was ineffective. Thanks to a reviewer for bringing this example to my attention.
13. This strategy is employed whether one thinks that ultimately the outcomes of the state matter most for its legitimacy or the process by which the state comes about (for example by consent) matters most. For even in the latter case, the question is why people would consent to the state given some understanding of what the state is for, especially because no plausible account relies on actual extant consent; theories of tacit and hypothetical consent need to reconstruct what counts as consent and what is being consented to. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify this.
14. It may not even work in those cases (Sangiovanni, Citation2013, p. 221).
15. Furthermore, even sincere statements of institutional purpose can have a variety of aims (Lang & Lopers-Sweetman, Citation1991).
16. See Pavel, this issue, for consideration of the trade-offs between pursuing different goals in international law.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
N. P. Adams
N. P. Adams is a Postdoctoral Fellow at McMaster University (2018–19). Previously he was a Research Fellow with the Justitia Amplificata Centre for Advanced Studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (2015–2018). He works in political philosophy and philosophy of law, focusing on issues of legitimacy, authority, and civil disobedience. He has published on these topics in venues such as The Journal of Political Philosophy, Legal Theory, and Law and Philosophy.