Allen Buchanan

Political Legitimacy and Democracy

The term ‘political legitimacy’ is unfortunately ambiguous. One serious source of confusion is the failure to distinguish clearly between political legitimacy and political authority and to conflate political authority with authoritativeness. I will distinguish between (1) political legitimacy, (2) political authority, and (3) authoritativeness. I will also articulate two importantly different variants of the notion of political authority. Having drawn these distinctions, I will argue first that political legitimacy, rather than political authority, is the more central notion for a theory of the morality of political power. My second main conclusion will be that where democratic authorization of the exercise of political power is possible, only a democratic government can be legitimate. Another ambiguity is also a source of confusion. Sometimes it is unclear whether ‘legitimacy’ is being used in a descriptive or a normative sense. In this article I am concerned exclusively with legitimacy in the normative sense, not with the conditions under which an entity is believed to be legitimate. However, a normative account of legitimacy is essential for a descriptive account. Unless one distinguishes carefully between political legitimacy, political authority, and authoritativeness, one will not be clear about what beliefs in legitimacy are beliefs about.

Rawls's Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World*

1. Peoples are free and independent, and their freedom and independence are to be respected by other peoples. 2. Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings. 3. Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them. 4. Peoples are to observe a duty of non-intervention. 5. Peoples have the right of self-defense but no right to instigate war for reasons other than self-defense. 6. Peoples are to honor human rights. 7. Peoples are to observe certain specified restrictions in the conduct of war. 8. Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime.1

Choosing Who Will Be Disabled: Genetic Intervention and the Morality of Inclusion

The Nobel prize-winning molecular biologist Walter Gilbert described the mapping and sequencing of the human genome as “the grail of molecular biology.” The implication, endorsed by enthusiasts for the new genetics, is that possessing a comprehensive knowledge of human genetics, like possessing the Holy Grail, will give us miraculous powers to heal the sick, and to reduce human suffering and disabilities. Indeed, the rhetoric invoked to garner public support for the Human Genome Project appears to appeal to the best of the Western traditions enthusiasm for progress: the idea of improving human lives through the practical application of scientific knowledge.

HUMAN NATURE AND ENHANCEMENT

Appeals to the idea of human nature are frequent in the voluminous literature on the ethics of enhancing human beings through biotechnology. Two chief concerns about the impact of enhancements on human nature have been voiced. The first is that enhancement may alter or destroy human nature. The second is that if enhancement alters or destroys human nature, this will undercut our ability to ascertain the good because, for us, the good is determined by our nature. The first concern assumes that altering or destroying human nature is in itself a bad thing. The second concern assumes that human nature provides a standard without which we cannot make coherent, defensible judgments about what is good. I will argue (1) that there is nothing wrong, per se, with altering or destroying human nature, because, on a plausible understanding of what human nature is, it contains bad as well as good characteristics and there is no reason to believe that eliminating some of the bad would so imperil the good as to make the elimination of the bad impermissible, and (2) that altering or destroying human nature need not result in the loss of our ability to make judgments about the good, because we possess a conception of the good by which we can and do evaluate human nature. I will argue that appeals to human nature tend to obscure rather than illuminate the debate over the ethics of enhancement and can be eliminated in favor of more cogent considerations.

The heart of human rights

Acknowledgements Preface Chapter One: Introduction Chapter Two: A Pluralistic Justificatory Methodology for Human Rights Chapter Three: The Task of Justification Chapter Four: The Case for a System of International Legal Human Rights Chapter Five: An Ecological View of The Legitimacy of International Legal Human Rights Institutions Chapter Six: The Problematic Supremacy of International Human Rights Law Chapter Seven: The Challenge of Ethical Pluralism Chapter Eight: Conclusions Appendix One: Non-Rights Norms in Major Human Rights Documents Appendix Two: Results of the Investigation Index

Justice and Charity

The distinction between justice and charity is thought to be fundamental in ethical theory. Yet remarkably little has been done to develop the distinction systematically or to articulate the role it is to play in ethical theory. Four theses about the difference between justice and charity are widely held and rarely argued for: (1) Duties ofjustice (with the exception of those which correspond to special rights generated by promising or special relationships or reciprocal group undertakings that generate obligations of fair play) are exclusively negative duties (duties to refrain from certain actions); duties of charity are generally positive duties (duties to render aid). (2) Duties of justice may be enforced; duties of charity may not. (3) Duties of justice are perfect duties; duties of charity are imperfect. (Perfect duties are determinate both with regard to the content of what is required and with regard to the identity of the individual who is the object of the duty; duties of charity are indeterminate in both senses: the kind and amount of aid, as well as the choice of a recipient are left to the discretion of the benefactor.) (4) Justice is a matter of rights; charity is not (duties of justice have correlative rights; duties of charity do not), and what is ones right is owed to one, the lack of which gives one justified grounds for complaint that one has been wronged. It is far from clear how claims 1-4 are supposed to be related to one another. Although all four purport to characterize differences between justice and charity, we shall see that not all are equally plausible candidates for answering the question, What makes something a duty of charity rather than a duty of justice, and vice versa? Moreover, it will become clear that some of these claims are thought to be derivable from the others, although the connecting assumptions are often either not made explicit or not argued for. By analyzing theses 1-4 and by articulating and assessing the grounds for asserting them, I shall explore the distinction between justice and

Enhancement and the ethics of development.

Much of the debate about the ethics of enhancement has proceeded according to two framing assumptions. The first is that although enhancement carries large social risks, the chief benefits of enhancement are to those who are enhanced (or their parents, in the case of enhancing the traits of children). The second is that, because we now understand the wrongs of state-driven eugenics, enhancements, at least in liberal societies, will be personal goods, chosen or not chosen in a market for enhancement services. This article argues that both framing assumptions must be rejected, once it is understood that some enhancements— especially those that are most likely to garner resources and become widespread— will increase human productivity. Once one appreciates the productivity-increasing potential of enhancements, one can begin to see that enhancement need not be primarily a zero sum affair, that the social costs of forgoing enhancements may be great, and that the state may well take an interest in facilitating biomedical enhancements, just as it does in facilitating education and other productivity-increasing traditional enhancements. Appreciating the productivity-increasing potential of enhancements also makes it possible to view the enhancement debate in a new light, through the lens of the ethics of development.

Toward a Theory of the Ethics of Bureaucratic Organizations

This essay articulates a crucial and neglected element of a general theory of the ethics of bureaucratic organizations, both private and public. The key to the approach developed here is the thesis that the distinctive ethical principles applicable to bureaucratic organizations are responses to the distinctive agency-risks that arise from the nature of bureaucratic organizations as complex webs of principal/agent relationships. It is argued that the most important and distinctive ethical principles for bureaucratic organizations express commitments on the part of bureaucrats that function to reduce the agency risks that are inherent in such organizations. This approach to the ethics of bureaucratic organizations is shown to be more illuminating than those that concentrate exclusively or primarily on determining the conditions for corporate responsibility or on the idea that the ethical obligations distinctive of bureaucracies are role-derived.

The Egalitarianism of Human Rights

Since the publication of Rawls’s deeply revisionist and controversial though fragmentary discussion of human rights in The Law of Peoples (1999), there has been a dramatic increase in philosophical interest in human rights. There are two chief reasons for this change, apart from the fact that Rawls’s attention to a topic tends to legitimize it. The first is the justification deficit, the disturbing fact that, while the global culture and institutionalization of human rights are gaining considerable

SOCIAL MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY

The distinctive aim of applied ethics is to provide guidance as to how we ought to act, as individuals and as shapers of social policies. In this essay, I argue that applied ethics as currently practiced is inadequate and ought to be transformed to incorporate what I shall call social moral epistemology. This is a branch of social epistemology, the study of the social practices and institutions that promote (or impede) the formation, preservation, and transmission of true beliefs. For example, social epistemologists critically evaluate the comparative advantages of adversarial versus inquisitorial criminal proceedings as mechanisms for the discovery of truth.