Human legitimacy principle

The “Human Legitimacy Principle” has been proposed by Lyndon Storey in his 2006 book "Humanity or Sovereignty: A road map for the 21s Century" to provide a test for political legitimacy in the context of his broader theory of potentialism and as a logical development of the basic concept of moral potential. The principle holds that political legitimacy is advanced by developing policies that are consistent with all of humanity having an equal opportunity to benefit. Potentialism confines the sense of the word benefit in the definition to outcomes consistent with the basic political benefits necessary for human development, such as freedom of conscience and expression, consultation by the political system with its subjects (including, but not confined to, democracy), access to education and knowledge, economic development in a framework of environmental sustainability, and political equality.

The human legitimacy principle provides a fundamental guide both to political justice and how to build a political system, specially a legitimate global governance system. It also allows for any particular policy to be analyzed as to whether it allows all people the same opportunity to benefit.

Analytically, the human legitimacy principle can be used to examine existent political systems for legitimacy. When we look at national political systems, we find they tend almost intrinsically to discriminate economically, politically, and militarily against non-nationals. Consequently, when they need to coordinate policies with other nations, they create a system of international political institutions and networks including only those powerful enough to enforce their presence and intended to ensure their prominence and the interests of their citizens and interest groups. Such a system of international system of governance based exclusively on the agreements among national countries can only promote inequality and is thus considered illegitimate by potentialim.

The other analytic function that we can perform is to diagnose solutions. If asked what the cause of warfare is today, we can say an illegitimate political system. If asked the solution to the problem of warfare, we can say it must start with building a legitimate international political system.

Normatively, the human legitimacy principle can also help us by telling us what sort of political system is most desirable. The answer is one in which some form of human development policies are available to humanity not just in one country. It is clear that a legitimate international political system must involve some process whereby benefits, whether economic or social, generated in one part of the world are not generated in a manner that limits the ability of people elsewhere to generate the same level of benefits. Thus, advocates of the human legitimacy principle usually support the development of some form of Human Union, a global political system that takes humankind beyond the existing system of competing states. Such global governance system would be "human" in that it is construed on the idea that it should benefit all humans according to the human legitimacy principle. It would be a union in the sense that it would transcend national borders, the word "union" being used to signify the similarity of the concept with "unions" like the United States where states still have rights and are not abolished, the European Union, where nation states also still have rights, or the still emerging regional or continental unions.

The major political group expressly advocating the human legitimacy principle is the Human Union Movement.

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