LEGITIMACY FOR HOGS: THE SELFISH CASE FOR EXPRESS CONSENT THEORY

This dissertation investigates the source, if any, of political legitimacy. To answer this question, I examine conceptual, methodological, empirical, and normative issues. First, I define political legitimacy as the state’s claim-right to coerce, correlative to subjects’ duty to accept coercion through political obedience. Second, I argue that practical relevance is the sole desideratum for a theory of legitimacy. Maximising it requires determining how individuals with the most prevalent basic desires should rationally choose among competing theories. Third, drawing on experimental psychology, I identify these desires as predominantly selfish. It follows that the most practically relevant theory of legitimacy must be the one that best serves selfish desires. Fourth, in the normative section, I evaluate major theories of legitimacy and conclude that express consent theory most effectively fulfils predominantly selfish desires. Therefore, rational selfish individuals should endorse express consent theory, making it the most practically relevant theory of legitimacy.