Much of what we believe we believe on the testimony of others.  One reason why we look to experts is because they have knowledge of subject beyond that of ourselves, and we follow their guidance trusting that expertise.  Organizations have also used specialists either by employing relevant experts, or increasingly, by having committees of experts that provide advice. These days governments and indeed large private sector organizations are increasingly looking for guidance on ethical issues.  However, are ethical issues like other issues where we are justified in trusting the guidance of experts? Taking moral responsibility surely means grasping the moral reasons justifying one’s actions for oneself.  What then is the role of moral expert? Indeed, is there such thing as a moral expert? 

Keith Dowding is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Political Philosophy at the Australian National University. He has published widely across the fields of comparative politics, public administration and policy and in political theory. He edited Journal of Theoretical Politics for 15 years. His latest books are Its the Government's Fault, Stupid (2020), Economic Perspectives on Government (with Brad Taylor) (2019), Rational Choice and Political Power (2019) and Power, Luck and Freedom (2017). With Patrick Dumont, Dowding edits the Routledge series on Social and Political Elites.

The common law of the good government has a long history in Europe. It may even be described as a core element of European and, by extension, Western civilization. As such, it also became a constitutive part of the civilization standard that was universalized qua international law in the 19th Century and spread as a part of the latter’s “civilizing mission” to the “rest” of the world. After that, the good government standard was included into the international law of statehood applicable to all States since 1945. It is in the shape of general positive duties of States under international human rights law that the minimal common content of the standard or norm of good government has mostly been specified and consolidated. Nowadays, however, not only have the terms “good” or “civilized” to qualify a State or government fallen into disrepute in international law, but the universal justification of the standard itself is in question. Regrettably, however, rather than attempting to remedy this, international lawyers have by and large avoided the issue. Instead of resorting to comparative law and working towards the identification of a common law of good government albeit on a truly universal scale this time, most international courts and other interpretive bodies have circumvented the question of the substance of the good government. In lieu, and under the influence of “new public management” methods in particular, they have resorted to ready-made and legalized procedural standards of so-called “good governance”, but also to non-legal, economic or technoscientific, standards or quantitative indicators of how States should be organized or, more exactly, administered. De facto, one may say that the standard of the “good” government or State has been replaced by that of a “developed” or “scientific” State. The difficulty, however, is that, behind the surface, the universality of those new standards is as questionable as the more substantive ones originally drawn from European public law. More importantly, this retreat from substantive legal reasoning reveals the weakness of international “public” law at a time when international institutions are facing an unprecedented political legitimacy crisis.

To reverse the movement, I propose to explore, in this presentation, what the good government standard could and should mean in international law today. My focus will be not so much on States, although things are related of course, but on the other and newer public institutions now centrally involved in international law-making: international organizations. There is indeed no, or very little, minimal public law internal or common to those organizations (outside the European Union), despite (or maybe, arguably, because of) their institutional continuity with States. At the moment, those organizations are merely expected (and not required under international law) to give evidence of “compliance” with good “governance” (as opposed to “government”) standards and are held “accountable” (as opposed to “responsible”) for it to their “stakeholders” (as opposed to constituents or citizens), for instance through various “audits” and other internal efficiency assessment mechanisms. My central argument will pertain to the alleged “publicness” of those organizations of international law, and to what such a claim implies not only in legal, but also, and most importantly, in institutional terms.

Samantha Besson holds the Chair “Droit international des institutions” at the Collège de France in Paris and is Part-Time Professor of Public International Law and European Law at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). A dual Swiss/British national, she was educated in Switzerland (Fribourg & Bern), Austria (Vienna), the United Kingdom (Oxford) and the United States (Columbia). She was a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Zurich, Lausanne and Lisbon and at Duke, Harvard and Penn Law Schools and a Research Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She is a member of the Board of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences and was the first Human Rights Delegate of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences. She taught in various capacities for the Hague Academy of International Law and is the co-chair of the ILA Study Group on the International Law of Regional Organizations. Samantha Besson’s research interests lie at the intersection of general international law, European Union institutional law and legal philosophy. Her latest monographs are La due diligence en droit international, Collected Courses of the Hague Academy of International Law, Vol. 409, Leiden/Boston: Brill Nijhoff 2020 and Reconstruire l’ordre institutionnel international, Leçons inaugurales du Collège de France, Paris: Fayard/Collège de France 2021.

The public sphere performs two important functions in democracy. The first is to facilitate the circulation of information used by citizens to form their opinions and take positions on public matters. The second function is as an agent of democratic accountability by facilitating pluralistic debate, criticism, challenge, and contestation.  The new-authoritarians - which we define as a group, leader, or party that seeks to promote authoritarian, autocratic, or patrimonial regimes within the framework of constitutional democracy - take aim at the public sphere to attempt to destroy its ability to perform these functions.  Although many tactics are used there are two general strategies. The first is to undermine trust in facts and create conditions in which disinformation circulates easily and effectively. The second is to undermine the power of criticism and dissent especially on the part of the press and minority opposition voices. In this way, new-authoritarians can claim to be staunch defenders of democracy (because they enthusiastically embrace elections and voting) and liberty (defending free-speech) at the same time as attacking what make elections and voting democratic in the first place.

Simone Chambers is Professor of Political Science at the University of California Irvine. A political philosopher who specializes in democracy studies, she is widely published on such topics as deliberative democracy, constitutionalism, referendums, the digital public sphere, rhetoric, civility, and the work of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. Her forthcoming book, The State of Contemporary Democratic Theory, is a critical survey of the ways political philosophy is addressing the democratic crises of our times.