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Fabienne Peter argues that political legitimacy doesn't just depend on respect for the will of the citizens. 'The Grounds of Political Legitimacy' compares democratic and non-democratic conceptions of legitimacy and develops a novel hybrid conception of the grounds of political legitimacy.

"This book offers a systematic treatment of the requirements of democratic legitimacy. It argues that democratic procedures are essential for political legitimacy because of the need to respect value pluralism and because of the learning process that democratic decision-making enables. It proposes a framework for distinguishing among the different ways in which the requirements of democratic legitimacy have been interpreted. Peter then uses this framework to identify and defend what appears as the most plausible conception of democratic legitimacy. According to this conception, democratic legitimacy requires that the decision-making process satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness."--Jacket

AbstractCollective deliberation is fuelled by disagreements and its epistemic value depends, inter alia, on how the participants respond to each other in disagreements. I use this accountability thesis to argue that deliberation may be valued not just instrumentally but also for its procedural features. The instrumental epistemic value of deliberation depends on whether it leads to more or less accurate beliefs among the participants. The procedural epistemic value of deliberation hinges on the relationships of mutual accountability that characterize appropriately conducted deliberation. I will argue that it only comes into view from the second-person standpoint. I shall explain what the second-person standpoint in the epistemic context entails and how it compares to Stephen Darwall's interpretation of the second-person standpoint in ethics.

A conception of legitimacy is at the core of normative theories of democracy. Many different conceptions of legitimacy have been put forward, either explicitly or implicitly. In this article, I shall first provide a taxonomy of conceptions of legitimacy that can be identified in contemporary democratic theory. The taxonomy covers both aggregative and deliberative democracy. I then argue for a conception of democratic legitimacy that takes the epistemic dimension of public deliberation seriously. In contrast to standard interpretations of epistemic democracy, however, the conception I put forward avoids procedure-independent standards of correctness. Instead, it relies on a procedural social epistemology and defines legitimacy entirely in terms of the fairness of procedures. I call this conception of democratic legitimacy `Pure Epistemic Proceduralism'. I shall argue that it should be preferred over `Rational Epistemic Proceduralism', the conception of legitimacy that underlies the standard interpretation of epistemic democracy.

Abstract
Ken Binmore casts his naturalist theory of justice in opposition to theories of justice that claim authority on the grounds of some religious or moral doctrine. He thereby overlooks the possibility of a political conception of justice−a theory of justice based on the premise that there is an irreducible pluralism of metaphysical, epistemological, and moral doctrines. In my brief comment I shall argue that the naturalist theory of justice advocated by Binmore should be conceived of as belonging to one family of such doctrines, but not as overriding a political conception of justice.

Die Tatsache, dass Begriffe aus der politischen Ethik für die Beurteilung wirtschaftlicher Arrangements zunehmend an Bedeutung gewinnen, führt den Autor zu der Frage, wie die normativen Grundlagen einer Wirtschaftsethik, die sich als politische Ethik versteht, aussehen könnten. Er bezieht sich in seinem Beitrag auf den Kernbegriff der demokratischen Legitimität und untersucht ihre Bedeutung als schwaches normatives Prinzip für die Evaluation ökonomischer Arrangements. Er diskutiert zunächst die Frage, warum Legitimität als normatives Konzept in der ökonomischen Theorie bisher wenig Beachtung gefunden hat und entwickelt die These, dass eine bestimmte Konzeption von Legitimität durchaus zur Anwendung kommen kann, wenn die Legitimation im Markt von der Legitimation in der Politik getrennt wird. Er nimmt anschließend eine begriffliche Unterscheidung zwischen Wahlentscheid und Einwilligung vor und zeigt auf dieser Grundlage, dass der Legitimitätsbegriff auch in der herkömmlichen Verteidigung der Autonomie der Marktsphäre eine Rolle spielt. Die Unterscheidung macht ferner deutlich, dass die Legitimität von institutionellen Arrangements und Markttransaktionen nicht rein inner-marktlich gesichert werden kann. Der Autor nimmt in seiner Diskussion der unterschiedlichen Demokratietheorien die Perspektive eines "epistemischen Prozeduralismus" ein und plädiert für ein deliberatives Demokratieverständnis. (ICI2)