The next meeting of the Study Group Political Philosophy of the OZSW will be held on Monday October 27 from 14.30-17.00 in Utrecht. We will be discussing papers by Marie Gobel (UU) and Enzo Rossi (UvA). Please see below for programme. To register for this meeting please send an email to s.demaagt@uu.nl. Papers will be distributed one week in advance. During the meeting the speakers will briefly introduce their paper, followed by a commentary and a general discussion. Everyone is expected to have read the papers before the meeting. Programme Monday October 27 from 14.30-17.00 Location: Van Ravensteijnzaal, Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, Utrecht. Marie Gobel - A False Dichotomy: “Moral” versus “Practical” Accounts of Human Rights Commentator: Robin Celikates In the philosophical literature on human rights we frequently encounter an alleged opposition between so called “moral” and “practical” or “political” accounts of human rights. In my paper I will challenge this contrast by criticizing specific aspects of James Griffin’s (“moral”) and Charles Beitz’ (“practical”) theories of human rights – namely: the role that history plays in Griffin’s account, as well as his notion of universality; the role that morality plays in Beitz’ account, as well as his understanding of the “discursive practice” of human rights. The bottom line of my critique is that it is precisely a shortsighted perspective on the relation between “ethics” and “politics” or “practice” that explains some of the crucial weaknesses of their accounts. Enzo Rossi - Should Consent Matter for Legitimacy? Commentator: Thomas Fossen I answer my title’s question negatively,  by spelling out this embryonic argument: if political power is consented to it is not coercive, and what is not coercive is not in need of legitimation, so legitimacy cannot be a matter of consent. In other words, consent doesn’t establish legitimacy; it just shows that there is no need for it. Proponents of consent-based theories of legitimacy may retort that their view envisages coercion, when we refuse to comply with directives we consented to. My reply will be that this isn’t coercion, as our consent implicitly or explicitly entailed consent to enforcement of what we consented to. From further premises it follows that consent only affects the permissibility of actions in non-political domains. In other words, focusing on consent or any form of voluntariness in the theory of legitimacy is a form of political moralism, insofar as it questionably transports a feature of personal interaction into the domain of politics. So this paper offers four main, related original contributions: (i) the idea that voluntary rule is an incoherent aspiration: consent cannot establish political legitimacy because voluntarism cannot account for coercion; (ii) the idea that the standard distinction between justification and legitimacy can be preserved while denying that consent is what makes the difference between the two; (iii) a new argument for the view that legitimacy should not be analysed in terms of political obligations; (iv) the idea that it is possible to avoid sceptical or anarchical conclusions while denying that we have a firm answer to the question of political obligation.