About

Amanda Greene is an Associate Professor and Teaching Coordinator in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She earned her PhD in Philosophy from Stanford University in 2014. Her research focuses on legal and political philosophy, specifically examining the nature of legitimate political authority and whether democracies can make a special claim of political legitimacy. She also investigates classical political thought, with an emphasis on the account of law and freedom in Plato’s later writings. Additionally, her work explores global civil society, with particular attention to international organizations.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law

Selected publications

• The Art of the Possible

  2025-09-27

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract Bernard Williams claims that political philosophy requires a historical perspective. This chapter examines his unique emphasis on history when it comes to making judgements about political actors and political orders. First, it looks at how Williams combines universal considerations, such as drawing a distinction between order and tyranny, with a concern for historical context. It shows how this duality of contextualism and universalism is anchored in a respect for the limits of politics. Probing deeper, it finds in Williams a challenge to the current mindset that judgement calls for philosophical analysis whereas action calls for political analysis. According to Williams, it is argued, political judgements and political actions each require both a philosophical and a political sensibility. Only then can political critique have a point and make a difference. Finally, it is proposed that ‘answerability’ to a historically situated audience is the distinctive trait of Williams’s approach to political philosophy.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>The Grounds of Political Legitimacy</i> , by Fabienne Peter

  Mind · 2025-09-12

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Social Media and Mass Empowerment: Towards a Theory of Digital Legitimacy

  Journal of Moral Philosophy · 2024-09-16

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Many people are concerned about the legitimacy of digital technology companies like Meta. In this paper we show that two existing models for characterizing power – sovereign power and structural power – are inadequate when it comes to digital technology companies. This is because they fail to accommodate something crucial: the uniquely empowering nature of digital power. Companies like Meta empower users to interact by providing them with versatile systems defined by minimalist permission structures. Drawing on Searle’s theory of institutions and Hart’s theory of law, we show how these permission structures facilitate the creation of new powers, as well as new institutions, through the emergence and recognition of new social norms. This means we must ask how entities that provide us with such versatile – and thus unsteerable – means of empowerment can come to be legitimate. We argue that a custodial framework for digital legitimacy can assign responsibility for the patterns of empowerment that are sustained by companies like Meta.

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• Legitimacy

  Springer eBooks · 2023

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law
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• Tyranny, tribalism, and post-truth politics

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 14 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law

  To describe our political climate as “post-truth” is both compelling and poisonous. It is compelling, I argue, because it captures the lack of confidence between groups with divergent political outlooks. To illustrate, I portray two groups with different political outlooks: the heartlanders, whose concern for truthfulness is anchored in personal and relational integrity, and the metropolitans, whose concern for truthfulness is anchored in impartiality and cosmopolitanism. In this tale of two tribes, each group exhibits qualities of truthfulness – sincerity and accuracy – in ways that the other group does not recognize. The result is that each group interprets the other group’s political participation as an abandonment of truth for the sake of power, thereby undermining political legitimacy. Building on the work of Bernard Williams and John Stuart Mill, I argue that finding common ground is necessary if truth is to play a role in the resistance of tyranny. I critically examine several ways to restore a common concern for truth between the two tribes, offering reasons to doubt that they will succeed. Instead, I propose a rethinking of the widespread acceptance of a strict dichotomy between facts and values. Since public deliberation is characterized by a complex interplay between facts and values, I suggest that a better way forward is to openly explore this interplay, instead of impugning each other’s commitment to truthfulness. I conclude that, in the absence of a widely shared political outlook, it is politically poisonous to describe our age in “post-truth” terms.

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• 3. IS POLITICAL LEGITIMACY WORTH PROMOTING?

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-01-23 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter develops and defends a new account of political legitimacy. I argue that a regime is legitimate insofar as it achieves quality assent to rule. Assent to rule is an evaluative assessment of the regime, by its subjects, about whether the regime realizes some goods through the exercise of power and authority. Assent is quality assent just when it is consistent with what I call the minimal claim of ruling, namely, the provision of basic security for all subjects. When legitimacy is characterized in these terms, its achievement will be naturally correlated with the realization of key political goods: non-alienation, stability, and political alignment among subjects. What makes this account distinctive, and attractive, is that it captures the crucial insights from both sides of the theoretical divide in the existing literature on political legitimacy, namely (i) that legitimacy is a good-making feature of a regime, but also (ii) that legitimacy depends upon people’s subjective attitudes.

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• More Data, More Power? Towards a Theory of Digital Legitimacy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• Is Sincerity the First Virtue of Social Institutions? Police, Universities, and Free Speech

  Law and Philosophy · 2019-06-03

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In the final chapter of Speech Matters, Seana Shiffrin argues that institutions have especially stringent duties to protect speech freedoms. In this article, I develop a few lines of criticism. First, I question whether Shiffrin’s framework of justified suspended contexts is appropriate for institutional settings. Second, I challenge the presumption that the knowledge-gathering function performed by police is necessarily compromised by insincere practices. Third, I criticize Shiffrin’s characterization of the university as involving a complete repudiation of enforced consensus, and I express doubts about the close connection between education and democratic legitimation that Shiffrin endorses. Finally, I raise a problem with the book’s overall argument: even if one agrees that speech freedoms are necessary for moral development, they also may be threatening to moral development. The upshot is that the protection of speech should be modulated in order to account for the potential conflicts between sincerity and other valuable ends, rather than being oriented above all to sincerity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Can power be self‐legitimating? Political realism in Hobbes, Weber, and Williams

  European Journal of Philosophy · 2019-11-10 · 43 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Political realists seek to provide an alternative to accounts of political legitimacy that are based on moral standards. In this endeavor, they face the challenge of how to interpret the maxim that power cannot be self‐legitimating. In this paper, we argue that work by Bernard Williams sheds light on the possible answers to this challenge. While Williams aligns himself with the realist tradition, his account of legitimacy contains an implicit critique of political realism. This is evident, we show, in his rejections of the views of Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber. Williams is not satisfied with Hobbes because he conflates legitimacy and political order, eliminating space for criticizing power. Weber's view, however, offers a non‐moralist standard of legitimacy that has critical purchase. This critical purchase emerges from the demands made on rulers to uphold the values that underlie their legitimation, combined with the ethic of responsibility. The resulting grounds for criticism are thus consistent with the maxim that power cannot be self‐legitimating—the very maxim that Williams puts at the heart of his realism. By showing that Williams's partial rejection of Hobbes and Weber cannot be sustained only on realist grounds, our analysis clarifies the limits of political realism.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• WHEN ARE MARKETS ILLEGITIMATE?

  Social Philosophy and Policy · 2019-01-01 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: In this essay I defend an alternative account of why markets are legitimate. I argue that markets have a raison d’être—a potential to be valuable that, if fulfilled, would justify their existence. I characterize this potential in terms of the goods that are promoted by the legal protection of economic agency: resource discretion, contribution esteem, wealth, diffusion of power, and freedom of association. I argue that market institutions deliver these goods without requiring the participants to have shared ends, or shared deliberation about joint ends—indeed, this feature is the source of the market’s distinctive contribution to well-being. I suggest that when markets lack legitimacy, this is because they fail to fulfill their raison d’être, or fail to be recognized as doing so. Thus, the contours of legal protection must be drawn so that these goods are realized together in a recognizable way, without sacrificing one good for the sake of others. Finally, I argue that this account is appealing because it allows regulators to consider a plurality of goods, and because it makes room for the essential role of rhetoric in securing market legitimacy.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sam J. Gilbert

  University College London

  3 shared

• Ilaria Cozzaglio

  3 shared

• N. P. Adams

  University of Virginia

  1 shared

• Robert Mark Simpson

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Philosophy

  Stanford University