 Even if we were to accept this hard-line response, a deeper challenge remains: why, if international law can help us achieve vital goals—such as the avoidance of war, prevention of human rights abuses or the mitigation of climate change—on condition that all states generally comply with it, should its authority over them be subject to their consent? The question is all the more pointed once it is recognized that the governments of many states do not themselves enjoy the consent of their own subjects or even perpetrate grave injustices against them. Considerations such as these have led many to conclude that, contrary to received views, actual consent is not in general a necessary condition for international law’s legitimacy but is, at best, an idea that plays an important but limited role in explaining the bindingness of treaties. Nor, it has been argued, is actual consent generally a sufficient condition for legitimacy, since state consent to treaties that require the commission of human rights abuses would not be even presumptively binding (Buchanan 2010; Tasioulas 2010; Murphy 2017).