Renzo's Attempt to Ground State Legitimacy on a Right to Self‐Defence, and the Uselessness of Political Obligation

• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Date: 01 March 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12112
• Author: Uwe Steinhoff

Renzo’s Attempt to Ground State

Legitimacy on a Right to Self-Defence,

and the Uselessness of Political

Obligation

UWE STEINHOFF

1. Introduction: Renzo’s Argument

Massimo Renzo (2011, 575) has recently offered “a theory of legitimacy that

grounds the state’s right to rule on a natural duty not to harm others,” and indeed

on the right to self-defence (ibid., 575–601).

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This argument is worth closer scrutiny

for three reasons. First, if it were really possible to logically derive the state’s

authority from the duty not to harm others (unjustly—that, of course, is what

Renzo means) or from a right to self-defence, then Renzo would have provided an

argument whose main normative premise is by far more plausible than the basic

normative premises of a number of competing accounts of political obligation.

After all, hardly anyone doubts that (all else being equal, that is, leaving necessity

justifications aside) you are not allowed to unjustly harm others; and the right of

self-defence is almost universally accepted as a moral right and seems also to be an

ironclad legal principle in all jurisdictions on the planet, not just in liberal ones. In

contrast, Immanuel Kant’s normative premise that “one is authorized to use coer-

cion against someone who already, by his nature, threatens him with coercion”

(Kant 2003, 86)—so that one can coerce others into leaving the state of nature, since

there the others will “by nature” threaten one with coercion—is not only controver-

sial, but seems to be flatly wrong. It is ultimately an incredibly permissive doctrine

of preventive force and stands in stark contrast to what Kant has to say elsewhere

on the preventive use of violence, for example in Perpetual Peace. Likewise, the

“principle of fairness” (its precise formulation differs from one fair-play theorist to

the other), according to which beneficiaries of a just and mutually beneficial coop-

erative scheme who “accept” the benefits of this scheme are obliged to contribute

their fair share to the cooperative effort, will leave libertarians unimpressed, and

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Renzo of course refers to a moral right.

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C2016 The Author. Ratio Juris V

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Ratio Juris. Vol. 29 No. 1 March 2016 (122–135)