The author argues that while State consent does contribute to international law’s legitimacy, it does not do so by providing a justification for it. States are not bound to obey international law because they have chosen to submit to its authority. Rather, international law provides them with a reason for action, and indeed they have a moral duty to obey it, if and only if they will do better at realizing justice if they act as the law directs them to act than if they act on their own judgment. As a means for crafting international law, State consent is, according to the author, valuable insofar as it yields international legal norms that satisfy this condition. He argues, that in a few cases, it may also constitute an intrinsically valuable expression of trust in the international political community or an international institution that exercises political authority.

This chapter investigates the conceptual question “what is a human right?” and the normative question “in virtue of what considerations does A enjoy a human right to X?” by examining the recent debate between two schools of legal and political philosophers.Orthodox theorists argue that human rights are a moral right possessed by all human being simply in virtue of their humanity.In contrast, political-practice theorists argue that human rights are constitutive elements of an ongoing attempt to reconceive state sovereignty and the international political order to which it is integral.This political undertaking, which includes the creation, application, and enforcement of international human rights law, provides the proper object of a philosophy of human rights.The bulk of this chapter is devoted to a critical examination of attempts by political-practice theorists to demonstrate the limited relevance of orthodox accounts of human rights to morally justifying international human rights practice (again, including international human rights law).It concludes with a brief consideration of the role that appeals to objective moral principles should play within that practice.

This chapter examines the legitimacy of international law.It begins with an analysis of the concept of legitimacy, or perhaps more precisely, of legitimate authority.It then considers four possible grounds for international law’s legitimacy: enhancing its subjects’ ability to act as they have most reason to act, the consent of those it claims as subjects, considerations of fair play, and international law’s democratic credentials.The chapter concludes with an examination of reasons why we should care about international law’s legitimacy; indeed, why from a moral point of view increasing the international legal order’s legitimacy might even take priority over making it more just.

The subject matter of Chapter 6 is the exclusionary reason account. In engaging with the exclusionary version of the reason account of legal obligation, I will be almost exclusively concerned with the work of John Finnis. In my critical assessment of Finnis’s theory of legal obligation, I will argue that such theory marks a significant advance over the accounts discussed in the previous chapters. Nonetheless, it can be criticized on two grounds. On the one hand, it claims that the force of legal obligation is invariant. Contrary to that view, I will argue that the obligations arising out of the law are defeasible requirements, and that as such they have variable force. On the other hand, whilst Finnis is committed to the thesis that legal obligation can be adequately characterized in terms of the notion of an exclusionary reason, I will maintain that it cannot, since legal obligation stands in a dialectical (or inclusionary, as opposed to exclusionary) relation to the fundamental demands of practical rationality.