The existing global institutional order is far from being morally faultless.
But what standards should we employ to evaluate its moral failings, and
guide its reform? Should they be standards of legitimacy or standards of
justice? The bulk of the literature on international ethics has focused on
justice, but given that legitimacy is such an important political value,
this narrow focus seems unwarranted. Knowing what is perfectly just matters,
but for practical purposes, it matters even more to know what is legitimate,
and hence worthy of our support. This observation militates in favour of a
shift in focus, from theories of global justice to theories of global
legitimacy. Such a shift is precisely what I advocate in this paper, but
with a twist. Instead of insisting that we should concentrate on global
legitimacy, I suggest that we should keep focusing on global justice, but
that the content of the correct principles of global justice is the same as
that of (would-be) principles of global legitimacy. Justice and legitimacy
are not distinct values; rather, they indicate what equal respect (justice)
demands under different sets of circumstances. I argue that, under existing
circumstances, the only justice that matters to the assessment of global
political arrangements is what most political philosophers (mistakenly) call
legitimacy. I then conclude by sketching a picture of what a just global
order so conceived would look like.