For Rousseau, government is only legitimate insofar as it is subordinated to popular sovereignty or, in other words, follows the general will of the people.
If hate is only legitimate if you direct it in certain directions, then there is a similar failure to treat it as subject to ethical and moral conduct.
Some scholars take a stringent libertarian, even anarchist, position on such matters: Political authority is only legitimate insofar as it is grounded in the express consent of those affected by its exercise.
But that assumption is only legitimate on some models of how modal talk works.
While there is no right to revolution, political authority is only legitimate if the head of state respects the social contract.
But it is important to bear in mind that it is only legitimate expectations which need to be considered in decision-making, not any expectation which someone forms.
According to his "harm principle," the exercise of political or social power is only legitimate if necessary to prevent serious harm done to one person by another, not to enforce some idea of the good in a paternalistic manner.
But killing in self-defense is only legitimate if the target poses an imminent threat.
Here the cultural and political institutions want to own the enthusiasm of Cubans, they believe that enthusiasm is only legitimate if it is something that is consistent with the interests of the State.
Steve Gaynor, co-creator of Gone Home, once proposed a simple metric for better representations of violence in games: "Violence performed by the player in a video game is only legitimate if the victim is a unique and specific individual".
