Justification and Legitimacy

Terrorism Salience increases System Justification: Experimental Evidence

“…Bush has been said to have kept ''the entire country in crisis mode for close to 5 years'' (Matsaganis and Payne, 2005, p. 387). To conclude, it is important to recognize that system justification is fundamentally different from a just system (for an elaboration of this point, see Simmons, 1999). We maintain that information about potential terrorist threats does not actually make a system more legitimate in a normative sense.…”

Your Liberty or Your Life: Reciprocity in the Use of Restrictive Measures in Contexts of Contagion

“…The way in which we are using the term moral legitimacy here is not to be confused with the notion of morally legitimate state authority, sometimes called political legitimacy or political obligation (cf. Edmundson 1998;Simmons 1999). Nor are we using legitimacy as Charles Taylor (1994, 58) does:…”

An Approach to the Problem of Authority

“…Second, that there are various classes of moral reasons that individuals may have for complying with the law, even in the absence of political obligations [17][18][19]22]. Third, that political obligation is only one aspect of the justification of political institutions, and the kind of evaluation properly involved in it does not replace the kinds of evaluation involved in other justifications of them [17,22,23]. These arguments interact with each other.…”

“…These considerations bring us to Simmons' third argument. For the following presentation of this argument [23]. Simmons claims (a) that political obligation concerns only one area of justification of political institutions, namely their right to rule and its correlative obligations, and (b) that this needs to be assessed in terms of a particular relationship created on the basis of significant elements of specific interaction between governments and each of their citizens.…”

“…Significantly, critical philosophical anarchists can use these reasons to distinguish good from bad governments, contrary to the accusation that their view implies that all illegitimate states are morally equal and should be treated in the same way [17,19,22]. Another "dimension of evaluation" that is distinguished in this context is that states may sometimes "act with justification," i.e., have some of their particular actions or policies justified on moral grounds, even when they lack the justification to exist and the legitimacy to rule [23]. For example, a thoroughly non-egalitarian government is justified in prohibiting murder even though it neither is virtuous to merit support nor has a right to issue directions and use coercion to back them up.…”