Ever since its inception, democracy has been subjected to the objection that ordinary citizens are not fit to rule. I discuss and criticize the most influential contemporary version of this argument, due to Jason Brennan, according to which democracy is illegitimate because voters are incompetent. I accept two core premises of Brennan’s argument – that legitimacy requires competence, and that voters are incompetent (in the sense of competence Brennan accepts) – but reject the conclusion that representative democracy is illegitimate. I (...) show that the argument can be interpreted as making two different claims: (1) That the democratic policymaking process as a whole is incompetent, and democratic policies therefore illegitimate; (2) that only democratic elections are incompetent, which either (a) makes democratic policies illegitimate or (b) makes elections themselves illegitimate. Each of these claims is false: (1) is false because voter incompetence does not taint the policymaking process sufficiently; (2a) is false because incompetent elections do not imply that policies made post-election are illegitimate; and (2b) is false because electoral decisions are not the kinds of things that can be illegitimate in the appropriate way. Finally, I address three potential criticisms of my defense of democracy: (i) that I set the bar for voters’ performance too low, (ii) that the representative democracy I defend is not really democratic, and (iii) that Brennan’s argument is an argument for replacing democracy with epistocracy, rather than for the illegitimacy of representative democracy. (shrink)

Thomas Christiano argues that democracies acquire a right to rule by being the unique embodiment of publicly accessible rules. Justice requires the equal advancement of the interests of all. However, due to the need for citizens to shape a common world despite disagreement and limitations of human cognition, publicity is a necessary constraint on the pursuit of justice. Given that democracy is necessary to secure public equality, democratic authority is thus justified, as democracy is the only political arrangement that satisfies (...) both the publicity constraint and equality requirement. Christiano’s argument depends on a claim that individuals should be given the right to advance what they take to be their interests. This right is defended through two interlocking claims. First, according individuals this right advances three fundamental interests: i) correcting cognitive biases; ii) being at home in the world; and iii) equal moral standing. Second, the three fundamental interests imply that any collective decision-making procedure must be publicly accessible. Thus, any argument against the right to judge for oneself either violates the publicity requirement or the equality constraint. In this paper, I argue that Christiano’s argument faces a problem—under a two-stage plural voting system, an unequal distribution of voting rights can satisfy both the publicity requirement and the equality constraint. Thus, Christiano’s claim that public equality requires an equal distribution of the right to judge for oneself is mistaken. (shrink)

Thomas Christiano argues that democracies acquire a right to rule by being the unique embodiment of publicly accessible rules. Justice requires the equal advancement of the interests of all. However, due to the need for citizens to shape a common world despite disagreement and limitations of human cognition, publicity is a necessary constraint on the pursuit of justice. Given that democracy is necessary to secure public equality, democratic authority is thus justified, as democracy is the only political arrangement that satisfies (...) both the publicity constraint and equality requirement. Christiano’s argument depends on a claim that individuals should be given the right to advance what they take to be their interests. This right is defended through two interlocking claims. First, according individuals this right advances three fundamental interests: i) correcting cognitive biases; ii) being at home in the world; and iii) equal moral standing. Second, the three fundamental interests imply that any collective decision-making procedure must be publicly accessible. Thus, any argument against the right to judge for oneself either violates the publicity requirement or the equality constraint. In this paper, I argue that Christiano’s argument faces a problem—under a two-stage plural voting system, an unequal distribution of voting rights can satisfy both the publicity requirement and the equality constraint. Thus, Christiano’s claim that public equality requires an equal distribution of the right to judge for oneself is mistaken. (shrink)

For many liberal democrats toleration has become a sort of pet-concept, to which appeal is made in the face of a myriad issues related to the treatment of minorities. Against the inflationary use of toleration, whether understood positively as recognition or negatively as forbearance, I argue that toleration may not provide the conceptual and normative tools to understand and address the claims for accommodation raised by at least one kind of significant minority: democratic dissenting minorities. These are individuals, or aggregates (...) of them, who oppose, on principled grounds, the outcomes of the majoritarian decision-making process. I argue that democratic dissenting minorities' claims are better understood as calls for respect for a person's capacity for self-legislation. I view respect as the cornerstone of justice in a liberal democracy: all norms resulting in a constraint on a person's conduct should be appropriately justified to her. I argue that the reconciliation of democratic dissenting minorities' claims requires an enhancement of the justificatory strategies of democratic decisions by enhancing in turn citizens' rights to political participation. This should be done both during decision making and after a provision is enacted by also securing space for contestation through such forms of illegal protest as civil disobedience and conscientious objection. (shrink)

An often overlooked tension in liberal theory turns on its commitment to procedural accounts of legitimacy on the one hand, and to the robust protection of the right of citizens to dissent on the other. To the extent that one evaluates legitimate decision-making on the basis of the procedures that bear on it, determining how extra-procedural expressions of dissent fit into the picture becomes a complex undertaking. This is especially true if one accepts that protecting extra-procedural expressions of dissent is (...) itself foundational to the overall legitimacy of the state. My aim in this paper is to explore some of the implications that follow from this tension. The paper proceeds in two parts. In the first part, I review the political grounds that support a protection on dissent. By drawing on its republican foundations, I argue that the functional role that the right to dissent serves in complex political communities is intimately connected to concerns over legitimacy. I claim that for the right to perform its function successfully, protections must be placed on both procedural and extra-procedural forms of dissent. The second part of the paper issues a direct challenge to procedural accounts of legitimacy. If a protection on citizen dissent is vital to legitimating government action, and if that protection necessarily extends to both procedural and extra-procedural forms of dissent, it follows that legitimacy cannot be captured by procedure alone—even procedures that secure the fair and equal participation by all affected parties. (shrink)

Just because one has the right to vote does not mean just any vote is right. Citizens should not vote badly. This duty to avoid voting badly is grounded in a general duty not to engage in collectively harmful activities when the personal cost of restraint is low. Good governance is a public good. Bad governance is a public bad. We should not be contributing to public bads when the benefit to ourselves is low. Many democratic theorists agree that we (...) shouldn’t vote badly, but that’s because they think we should vote well. This demands too much of citizens. (shrink)

Normative political theorists working in the field of linguistic justice generally believe that participation in democratic life in linguistically diverse societies requires a shared lingua franca (e.g., Patten 2009; Van Parijs 2011). Even when a shared lingua franca is present, however, there is likely to be a variety of ways in which people speak it, due to variations in accent, pitch, register, and lexicon. This paper examines the implications of intra‐linguistic diversity for democracy and political representation. More specifically, by drawing (...) on Andrew Rehfeld's (2010) work and on relevant sociolinguistics research, the paper argues that widespread unconscious linguistic prejudice constitutes a constraint on some citizens' right to run for political office that is incompatible with democratic equality. The argument is illustrated via a number of examples concerning Australian politicians. (shrink)

The distinction between equality and sufficiency, much discussed in the distributive justice literature, is here applied to democratic theory. Overlooking this distinction can have significant normative implications, undermining some defences and criticisms of political equality, as I show by discussing the work of three prominent democratic theorists: Thomas Christiano, David Estlund, and Mark Warren. Most importantly, Christiano sometimes defends egalitarian conclusions using sufficientarian premises, or worries about inequality in situations where insufficiency is also part of the problem; inequality above the (...) level of sufficiency is not always as troubling. Estlund makes the reverse error. He attacks rather than defends political egalitarianism, but insufficiency seems to explain some of his concerns. Nonetheless, I show that political egalitarians may need to specify a sufficientarian threshold, to avoid levelling-down objections. Democratic theorists should thus take seriously the distinction between political equality and political sufficiency. More generally, political theorists and philosophers should be aware of omitted variable bias and interaction effects due to conceptual stretching arising from under-theorised distinctions in their thought experiments. (shrink)

The article elaborates an original intertwined reading of republican theory, deliberative democracy and political equality. It argues that republicans, deliberative democrats and egalitarian scholars have not paid sufficient attention to a number of features present in these bodies of scholarships that relate them in mutually beneficial ways. It shows that republicanism and deliberative democracy are related in mutually beneficial ways, it makes those relations explicit, and it deals with potential objections against them. Additionally, it elaborates an egalitarian principle underpinning the (...) resulting model that I label Equality of Access and Deliberation. The upshot of these considerations is a novel and mutually reinforcing interrelated three-tiered theoretical and institutional proposal. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms are increasingly used to support decision-making in the exercise of public authority. Here, we argue that an important consideration has been overlooked in previous discussions: whether the use of ML undermines the democratic legitimacy of public institutions. From the perspective of democratic legitimacy, it is not enough that ML contributes to efficiency and accuracy in the exercise of public authority, which has so far been the focus in the scholarly literature engaging with these developments. According to one (...) influential theory, exercises of administrative and judicial authority are democratically legitimate if and only if administrative and judicial decisions serve the ends of the democratic law maker, are based on reasons that align with these ends and are accessible to the public. These requirements are not satisfied by decisions determined through ML since such decisions are determined by statistical operations that are opaque in several respects. However, not all ML-based decision support systems pose the same risk, and we argue that a considered judgment on the democratic legitimacy of ML in exercises of public authority need take the complexity of the issue into account. This paper outlines considerations that help guide the assessment of whether a ML undermines democratic legitimacy when used to support public decisions. We argue that two main considerations are pertinent to such normative assessment. The first is the extent to which ML is practiced as intended and the extent to which it replaces decisions that were previously accessible and based on reasons. The second is that uses of ML in exercises of public authority should be embedded in an institutional infrastructure that secures reason giving and accessibility. (shrink)

Discussions of political obligation and political authority have long focused on the idea that the commands of genuine authorities constitute content-independent reasons. Despite its centrality in these debates, the notion of content-independence is unclear and controversial, with some claiming that it is incoherent, useless, or increasingly irrelevant. I clarify content-independence by focusing on how reasons can depend on features of their source or container. I then solve the long-standing puzzle of whether the fact that laws can constitute content-independent reasons is (...) consistent with the fact that some laws must fail to bind due to their egregiously unjust content. Finally I defend my understanding of content-independence against challenges and show why it retains a place of special importance for questions about the law and political obligation. Content-independence highlights that it is some feature of the law or law-making process in general that is supposed to generate moral obligations for citizens, not the merits of particular laws. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to link empirical findings concerning environmental inequalities with different normative yard-sticks for assessing whether these inequalities should be deemed unjust, or not. We argue that such an inquiry must necessarily take into account some caveats regarding both empirical research and normative theory. We suggest that empirical results must be contextualised by establishing geographies of risk. As a normative yard-stick we propose a moderately demanding social-egalitarian account of justice and democratic citizenship, which we take to (...) be best suited to identify unjust as well as legitimate instances of socio-environmental inequality. (shrink)

International institutions are facing increasing criticism of the legitimacy of their authority. But what does it mean for an international institution to be legitimate? Arthur Applbaum’s latest book provides a convincing new concept of legitimacy, namely, the power-liability view, and a new normative conception, the free group agent account. However, it is not clear how they can be applied to the international level. First, this paper examines how different concepts of legitimacy can be applied to international institutions. Second, it assesses (...) three different conceptions of legitimacy, namely, the service conception, Applbaum’s free group agent account and the autonomy-based conception for the international level. It outlines how on the last conception, international institutions’ legitimacy depends on three different aspects required to protect autonomy: the political power of the institution; its purpose; and its relation to other institutions. Finally, the paper argues that the creation of an international institution should be seen as part of relational legitimacy and that state consent plays an important role to protect the political autonomy of peoples. (shrink)

In Charles Mills’ essay, “White Ignorance,” and his trail-blazing monograph, The Racial Contract, he developed a view of how Whiteness or anti-Black-Indigenous-and-Latinx racism causes individuals to hold false beliefs or lack beliefs about racial injustice in particular and the world in general. I will defend a novel exegetical claim that Mills’ view is part of a more general view regarding how racial injustice can affect a subject’s epistemic standing such as whether they are justified in a belief and whether their (...) degree of confidence in the belief is rational given their evidence. Then, in light of this novel exegetical claim, I show how this interpretation of Mills’ view that racial injustice causes ignorance relates to how epistemically justified philosophers and social scientists are in the views that dominate their respective scholarly literature. (shrink)

Adam Smith raised a series of obstacles to effective large-scale social planning. In this paper, I draw these Smithian obstacles together to construct what I call the “Great Mind Fallacy,” or the belief that there exists some person or persons who can overcome the obstacles Smith raises. The putative scope of the Great Mind Fallacy is larger than one might initially suppose, which I demonstrate by reviewing several contemporary thinkers who would seem to commit it. I then address two ways (...) the fallacy might be overcome, finding both wanting. I close the paper by suggesting that Smith's Great Mind Fallacy sheds interesting light on his “impartial spectator” standard of morality, including with respect to the specific issues of property and ownership. (shrink)

What I refer to here as the dilemma of authority arises when one ought to defer to authority; one ought to act as the more weighty reason demands; one can do either; one cannot do both. For those who reject the possibility of legitimate authority, the dilemma does not arise. Among those who accept legitimate authority, some, including Joseph Raz, presume the conflict can be resolved without remainder. In this paper, I argue that, in a moral conflict of this kind, (...) when one of the reasons for action is defeated but not cancelled, it is rational to feel regret for failing to do what one ought to do. (shrink)

Nossa seleção de verbetes parte do interesse de cada pesquisador e os dispomos de maneira histórico-cronológica e, ao mesmo tempo, temática. O verbete de Melissa Lane, “Filosofia Política Antiga” vai da abrangência da política entre os gregos até a república e o império, às portas da cristianização. A “Filosofia Política Medieval”, de John Kilcullen e Jonathan Robinson, é o tópico que mais demanda espaço na nossa seleção em virtude das disputas intrínsecas ao período, da recepção de Aristóteles pelo medievo e (...) da tensão entre poder Papal e Civil. No verbete “Liberalismo”, de Gerald Gaus, Shane Courtland e David Schmidtz, vemos as fontes fundantes da Filosofia Política da modernidade. As ideias de liberdade negativa e positiva se coadunam com a Ética Liberal e sua influência sobre a abrangência do valor fundamental da liberdade individual diante das políticas públicas. O texto de Ian Carter, “Liberdade Positiva e Liberdade Negativa”, expõe o paradoxo da liberdade em suas concepções valorativas e neutra, muito úteis para compreender os problemas políticos que enfrentamos hoje. Por fim, Bas Van Der Vossen no texto “Libertarianismo” trata das noções tensas entre Estado e indivíduos. A concepção de “liberdade de si”, genuinamente negativa, ganha destaque justificatório. Jackie Scully, no verbete Bioética Feminista, exemplifica o valor da influência dessas correntes no âmago de todos os contemporâneos. Sua escrita homenageia postumamente Anne Donchin com um apanhado histórico da luta de inserção de políticas feministas na pesquisa acadêmica global. No verbete “Democracia”, os professores brasileiros Gustavo Dalaqua e Alberto Ribeiro Barros acrescentaram tópicos importantes ao tema geral, respectivamente: “Construtivismo Representativo vs. Representação Descritiva” e “Democracia Contestatória de Philip Pettit”. O texto de Thomas Christiano perpassa os principais argumentos de justificação política contra e a favor da democracia ocidental, com foco central nas concepções de liberdade e igualdade. Os verbetes dispostos nessa seleção de textos são tendenciosos na medida que expressam o interesse genuíno de cada pesquisador com os assuntos relevantes em suas pesquisas. Em virtude disso, a escolha “adota um lado” em detrimento de outros – mais especificamente: de outro que poderia ser mais “progressista”. Por si só, o livro já nasce reclamando um segundo volume, que será providenciado. Colocamos de lado qualquer exigência de “imparcialidade”, algo que não existe na Filosofia, muito menos na Filosofia Política. Sobressai, nesse aspecto, o caráter reflexivo que o assunto exige e a importância do assunto, sem o qual não teríamos a modernas concepções de representatividade, as teorias da justiça ou mesmo as ciências sociais. Um outro volume, portanto, se faz imperativo, por conta da abrangência da própria SEP e do respeito a seu projeto inicial, genuinamente um plano plural. (shrink)

La tesis central de este trabajo es que la tradicional tensión entre substancia y procedimiento socava las estabilidad de la justificación de la concepción liberal más extendida de la legitimidad (la Democracia Deliberativa). Dicha concepciones enfrentan problemas serios a la hora de articular de manera consistente dos dimensiones que parecen ir naturalmente asociadas a la idea de legitimidad: la dimensión procedimental, vinculada a la equidad del procedimiento, y la dimensión epistémica, asociada a la corrección de los resultados. En este trabajo (...) sostengo que a) esa tensión surge de la adopción de una concepción epistemológica social de tipo "veritativo-consecuencialista; b) es posible manejar dicha tensión mediante el remplazo de la epistemología subyacente por una concepción epistemológica social de tipo procedimentalista de orientación pragmatista y c) dicha operación orienta el diseño institucional en una dirección experimentalista. (shrink)

The justification of democracy, while widely debated, is hindered by a sub-optimal conceptual framework. For a start, there is confusion about the basic terms in the discussion. Many theorists claim to support either the ‘intrinsic’ or the ‘instrumental’ value of democracy, but it is unclear what this exactly means. Can democracy have other kinds of values? What does it mean to value democracy intrinsically? As a result, at certain points, scholars are talking past one another and their assessments of their (...) respective approaches to democracy are less clear than what they intended. This paper develops a conceptual framework of the values of democracy. I use this framework to classify theories of democracy under three main groups: theories that value democracy intrinsically, instrumentally, or contributorily (necessarily and non-necessarily). Through this analysis, the points of engagement among the different approaches will emerge and flawed arguments about democracy will be revealed. (shrink)

After a regime-changing war, a state often engages in lustration—condemnation and punishment of dangerous, corrupt, or culpable remnants of the previous system—e.g., de-Nazification or the more recent de-Ba’athification in Iraq. This common practice poses an important moral dilemma for liberals because even thoughtful and nuanced lustration involves condemning groups of people, instead of treating each case individually. It also raises important questions about collective agency, group treatment, and rectifying historical injustices. Liberals often oppose lustration because it denies moral individualism and (...) ignores rule of law, and their only justifications for lustration are consequentialist ones. This article suggests that lustration may not necessarily be a problem for liberals. While group treatment might be justified on grounds of convenience and pragmatism in times of transitional justice, there are also valid moral arguments consistent with moral individualism and due process for wholesale group punishment after a war. This article offers four overlapping moral justifications, in a robust defense of the core concept of lustration that is covered by each argument. (shrink)

Many business ethicists assume that if a type of conduct is illegal, then it is also unethical. This article scrutinizes that assumption, using the rideshare company Uber’s illegal operation in the city of Philadelphia as a case study. I argue that Uber’s unlawful conduct was permissible. I also argue that this position is not an extreme one: it is consistent with a variety of theoretical commitments in the analytic philosophical tradition regarding political obligation. I conclude by showing why business ethicists (...) would have a better rejoinder to the “dominant view” of business ethics associated with Milton Friedman if they dispensed with the assumption that illegal implies unethical. (shrink)

This article adapts John Rawls’s writings, arguing that past injustice can change what we ought to publicly affirm as the standard of justice today. My approach differs from forward-looking approaches based on alleviating prospective disadvantage and backward-looking historical entitlement approaches. In different contexts, Rawls’s own concern for the ‘social bases of self-respect’ and equal citizenship may require public endorsement of different principles or specifications of the standard of justice. Rawls’s difference principle focuses on the least advantaged socioeconomic group. I argue (...) that a historicized difference principle considers the relative standing of racial, gender, and other historically stigmatized groups; provides their members assurance by weakening incentives to manipulate justice to another group’s advantage; and may result in policies resembling reparations, though justified by forward-looking considerations of self-respect and public assurance. I then examine how disrespectful justifications were historically used to forcibly include indigenous peoples as citizens. While Rawls thinks providing citizens one package of basic liberties signals respect, indigenous self-government could better support self-respect. I invoke Rawlsian international justice, which calls for mutual respect between peoples. Indigenous peoples’ status should reflect their past and persisting peoplehood, providing assurance by weakening incentives to unjustly transform international into domestic contexts. (shrink)

There seem to be good reasons that democratic institutions must be reformed in order to minimize the danger of unsustainable policy decisions infringing upon duties of intergenerational justice. This is why there exist a number of different proposals of how to reform democratic states in order to foster their duties towards the future. However, the debate lacks a systematic assessment of these suggested reforms within a coherent theoretical and norma-tive framework. This paper aims at developing such a framework. We suggest (...) two conceptual dimensions defining the spectrum of different justi-fiable institutional reforms: the relation between democracy and justice as one dimension and the conditions considered relevant for viewing democracies as responsible collective agents as the other. Depending on how we understand this relation and these conditions, it is possible to substantiate a set of types of institutional reforms that will promote democracies’ capacities to comply with their responsibilities towards the future. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the following conclusions. First, quotas are not normative goals in themselves but only a means to reach non-discriminatory selection procedures. Second, in a democracy quotas are most plausibly used as a means to fill offices in those bodies which have a major impact on how well interests or discourses are translated into policy. Third, quotas for the young can be justified since, due to demographic development, their discourses tend to be marginalized. Fourth, youth quotas (...) cannot be a means to ensure long-term policy-making, but they can enhance legitimacy of long-term impacts from policy decisions taken today. (shrink)

How can one person’s having political power over another be justified? This essay explores the idea that such justifications must be in an important sense derivative, and that this ‘Derivative Justification Constraint’ bars certain justifications widely endorsed in political and philosophical debates. After critically discussing the most prominent extant articulations of the Constraint (associated with a view often called ‘political instrumentalism’), the essay offers a novel account of what precisely the Constraint bars (in short: justification by appeal to non-derivative goods (...) that include among their elements one person’s ruling over another), what motivates it (in a nutshell: a deeply non-instrumental concern for each person’s moral independence), and what it entails for how we may justify democratic political arrangements in particular. (shrink)

Why should one person obey another? Why (to ask the question from the first-person perspective) ought I to submit to another and follow her judgment rather than my own? In modern political thought, which denies that some are born rulers and others are born to be ruled, the most prominent answer has been: “Because I have consented to her authority.” By making authority conditional on the subjects’ consent, political philosophers have sought to reconcile authority’s hierarchical structure with the equal moral (...) standing of governor and governed. Yet such consent accounts of authority have long been deemed problematic on a number of grounds, not the least of which is that few citizens have given their consent to the state under whose laws they live. So unless we are willing to deny the state’s authority over those who have not consented, or revert to the pre-modern assumption of a natural political hierarchy, we must find another way of reconciling authority with our standing as free and equal moral agents. In recent political and legal philosophy, the most influential solution to this problem has been Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority, according to which legitimate authority, while it does not require the consent of the governed, must exist for their sake, or serve them. The normal way to justify someone’s authority, on the service conception, is to show that, by treating her directives as binding, the subjects are likely better to conform to reasons that apply to them anyway. The service conception has, however, recently been criticized (by, among others, Thomas Christiano, Scott Hershovitz, and Jeremy Waldron) for being insufficiently attuned to the significance that procedural, and in particular democratic, features of political and legal institutions have for the justification of their authority. If these ‘democratic critics’ are right, then two commitments that many in the liberal-democratic tradition may find independently attractive turn out to be in tension: the liberal idea that authority is normally legitimate only insofar as it serves its subjects, and the democratic idea that legitimate authority can (and regularly does) rest on fair procedures. In this article I argue that the critics’ arguments rest on a misunderstanding of the service conception; yet their worries point the way to an under-appreciated and interesting view of democracy as an authoritative arbitration procedure. After introducing the service conception’s view of justified authority, I briefly distinguish a broad and a narrow interpretation of it, and suggest that we should embrace the latter to make sense of the idea that political authority serves its subjects (Section I). Next I turn to the objection raised by the democratic critics: the service conception, they say, cannot make room for the intrinsic fairness of democratic procedures because it is preoccupied with the quality of outcomes (Section II). But, I argue, the objection rests on an illicit identification of two different kinds of outcomes: the outcome of the decision-making procedure on the one hand, the outcome or result of treating that first outcome as authoritative on the other. Distinguishing between these is crucial for an adequate understanding of democracy’s authority. While the service conception is indeed organized around the latter, this does not commit it to an exclusive concern with the former; yet it is a singular commitment to the former that is problematic from a democratic point of view (Section III). To bring home this point, I sketch a model of authority as arbitration that is frequently overlooked in recent discussions of authority even though it is centrally concerned with procedural (and ultimately democratic) values and fits squarely into the service conception of authority (Section IV). (shrink)

Do members of democratic societies have a moral right that others not actively prevent them from engaging in wrongdoing? Many political theorists think that they do. “It is a feature of democratic government,” Michael Walzer writes, “that the people have a right to act wrongly—in much the same way that they have a right to act stupidly”. Of course, advocates of a democratic right to do wrong may believe that the scope of this right is limited. A majority in a (...) democratic society, for example, may not have a moral right against being prevented from enslaving or arbitrarily disenfranchising a minority, or if it were to launch a wrongful aggressive war against another society. But many join Walzer in asserting that it would be wrong in principle to intervene to prevent some wrongs that democratic societies would inflict. This thesis, which we call the democratic right to do wrong thesis (DRTDWT), can be formulated as follows: DRTDWT – For democratic societies A and agents B, there is a class of wrongful policies and institutions X, such that if A chooses to implement members of this class pursuant to democratic procedures, B has a duty not to actively intervene to prevent the implementation of X. Our goal in this essay is to show that the DRTDWT should be rejected. (shrink)

Provided we blame others accurately, is blaming them morally right even if we are guilty of similar wrongdoing ourselves? On the one hand, hypocrisy seems to render blame morally wrong, and unjustified; but on the other, even hypocritical blaming seems better than silence. I develop an account of the wrongness of hypocritical blaming which resolves this apparent dilemma. When holding others accountable for their moral failings, we ought to be willing to reason, together with them, about our own, similar failings. (...) Hypocrisy undermines this process of mutual deliberation. Thus, even if better than silence, hypocritical blaming is second-best, and that is why it is wrong. (shrink)

Theories of political authority divide naturally into those that locate the source of states' authority in the history of states' interactions with their subjects and those that locate it in structural (or functional) features of states (such as the justice of their basic institutions). This paper argues that purely structuralist theories of political authority (such as those defended by Kant, Rawls, and contemporary “democratic Kantians”) must fail because of their inability to solve the boundary problem—namely, the problem of locating the (...) boundaries between different states' domains of authority in the natural or intuitive places. (shrink)

The “question of reasonable compliance” concerns how business firms should comply with morally reasonable laws that have been democratically enacted. This article argues that, out of respect for the governing authority of democratic citizens, firms should comply with the law in accordance with legislators’ normative expectations of compliance. It defends this view against arguments from the legal, economic and business ethics literatures that focus on the contentious nature of democracy and the competitive nature of the market. In response this article (...) argues that these adversarial features of democracy and capitalism do not limit the ability of democratic legislatures to set normative expectations of market actors, nor the duty of firms to comply with them. (shrink)

It is widely believed that immigrants, after some time, acquire a claim to naturalize and become citizens of their new state. What explains this claim? Although existing answers (may) succeed in justifying some of immigrants' rights claims, they cannot justify the claim that immigrants are owed the opportunity to naturalize because these theories lack a sufficiently rich account of the purpose of citizenship. To fill this gap, I offer a novel egalitarian account of citizenship. Citizenship, on this account, partially protects (...) immigrants against social hierarchy by realizing social equality in a publicly accessible manner. This explains claims to naturalize. (shrink)

So far, most of the philosophical literature on occupations has tried to assess the legitimacy of military rule in the aftermath of armed conflicts by exclusively employing the theoretical resources of just war theory. In this paper, I argue that this approach is mistaken. Occupations occur during or in the aftermath of wars but they are fundamentally a specific type of rule over persons. Thus, theories of political legitimacy should be at least as relevant as just war theory for the (...) moral evaluation of occupations. This paper, therefore, draws on both traditions and argues that just war theory plays a limited role in identifying the purposes and appropriate agents of occupation authority, but that theories of legitimacy are necessary for explaining why and under which conditions foreign actors have the right to rule in the aftermath of armed conflicts. (shrink)

Voluntarists in the early modern period speak of an agent’s following the law because she was ordered to do so or because it’s the law. Contemporary philosophers tend either to ignore or to dismiss the possibility of justified obedience of this sort – that is, they ignore or dismiss the possibility that something’s being the law could in itself constitute a good reason to act. In this paper, I suggest that this view isn’t taken seriously because of certain widespread beliefs (...) about practical reason – in particular, it’s due to the belief that it’s impossible for reasons to be “bootstrapped” into existence. I argue, though, that a plausible account of practical reasoning should allow that reasons can be bootstrapped into existence, and so there’s no reason to be suspicious about the possibility of a person’s being justified in following the law because it’s the law. I end by suggesting that this conclusion opens up important new avenues of inquiry for philosophers working on topics related to legal obedience. (shrink)

Prominent normative theories for accommodating minority national groups appeal to the value of national cultures and/or the psychology of group recognition. This article aims to show that an argument from political authority provides a better justification. Building on Joseph Raz's theory of authority, the article argues that members of minority national groups are disadvantaged in relation to their majority counterparts under standard democratic institutions; such institutions do not provide minority national groups with comparable access to the conditions for legitimate political (...) authority. Constitutional arrangements for accommodating minority national groups—such as territorial self-government or power-sharing—are justified insofar as they might offset this disadvantage. (shrink)

How could one person justifiably create reasons for another? This article reissues this familiar ‘standing’ objection to authority, to demonstrate the structural contribution of recognition to both the idea of authority and its justification. Drawing upon theories of recognition of reasons and persons, it argues that authority must be robustly recognised, not merely identified, by both its subjects and its claimants. Such recognition operates in either roles or relations of authority to make a subject’s relevant reasons for action an authority’s (...) business. By transmitting reasons between persons on both sides of roles or relations, recognition does the connective work that is necessary to distinguish the idea of authority from other concepts of control, while structuring its justification to require both standing between persons and standards in accordance with reasons. Without the connection between persons and transmission of reasons that comes through robust recognition, one’s power over another is both claimed and received not as authority, but as coercion or persuasion; the claim itself entails meddling with (rather than serving) subjects. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: I argue that Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority cannot convincingly account for the nature and source of democratic authority. It cannot explain why decisions made democratically are more likely to be sound than decisions made non-democratically, and therefore, why democratic decisions might be understood as constituting moral reasons for action and compliance independently of their instrumental dimensions. My argument is that democratic authority cannot be explained completely in terms of the truth or soundness of the outcomes it tends (...) toward. A full account of democratic authority must involve non-instrumental values about the moral caliber of democratic procedures. (shrink)

The institution of slavery is an unjust institution. The aim of this paper is to provide an explanation of why it is unjust. I argue that slavery is unjust because it makes it impossible for slaves to realise both their interest in self-respect and their interest in being at home in the world. Furthermore, I argue that this explanation of the injustice of slavery also provides us with an argument for political equality.

In a morally non-ideal legal system, how can law bind its subjects? How can the fact of a norm’s legality make it the case that practical reason is bound by that norm? Moreover, in such circumstances, what is the extent and character of law’s bindingness? I defend here an answer to these questions. I present a non-ideal theory of legality’s ability to produce binding reasons for action. It is not a descriptive account of law and its claims, it is a (...) normative theory of legal reasoning for particular social circumstances. The approach is, somewhat like Raz’s influential account, instrumental in character. Yet, it denies that the morally binding legal norms are, in whole or part, exclusionary reasons for the responsible subject. Law’s instrumentality must be given an alternative characterization. (shrink)

This paper develops a full account of Rawls's notion of a well-ordered society and uses it to address two luck egalitarian objections to his principles of justice. The first is an internal criticism which claims that Rawls's account of justice is better captured by a responsibility-sensitive egalitarian account. The second is an external objection according to which, regardless of the alleged inconsistency between Rawls's principles and his account of justice, we should reject those principles in favour of a responsibility-sensitive criterion (...) because it better captures our moral intuitions about distributive justice. The argument presented answers both objections by defending the value of well-orderedness and showing the difficulties of responsibility-sensitive egalitarian conceptions in realizing this ideal. (shrink)

Many political controversies involve conflicts between civil liberties and other important social goals. The orthodox view in liberal political theory is that civil liberties must be given strict priority over competing social goals because of the importance of the interests advanced by such liberties and/or their role in upholding the status of citizens. This paper criticizes both lines of argument. Interest-based arguments fail because we are sometimes willing to sacrifice the very fundamental interests of some citizens in order to advance (...) large collections of lower priority interests. This shows that civil liberties cannot have strict priority over other social goals just because of the importance of the interests that they protect. Meanwhile, because considerations of status are often at stake on both sides of conflicts between important civil liberties and other social goals, their importance cannot provide reason to give strict priority to such liberties. These arguments cast doubt on the view that civil liberties ought to have strict priority over other social goals. (shrink)

In this paper I defend a pure proceduralist conception of legitimacy that applies to epistemic democracy. This conception, which I call pure epistemic proceduralism, does not depend on procedure-independent standards for good outcomes and relies on a proceduralist epistemology. It identifies a democratic decision as legitimate if it is the outcome of a process that satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness. My argument starts with a rejection of instrumentalism–the view that political equality is only instrumentally valuable. I reject (...) instrumentalism on two grounds: (i) because it fails to respect reasonable value pluralism and to recognize the constitutive role of democratic procedures for legitimacy in pluralist societies, and (ii) because it neglects the constructive function of democratic decision-making. I then consider two alternatives to pure epistemic proceduralism: David Estlund's version of epistemic proceduralism and a Deweyan account of epistemic democracy. I argue that only pure epistemic proceduralism can make good on both shortcomings of instrumentalism, whereas each of the other two approaches only makes good on one and neglects the other. (shrink)

A conception of legitimacy is at the core of normative theories of democracy. Many different conceptions of legitimacy have been put forward, either explicitly or implicitly. In this article, I shall first provide a taxonomy of conceptions of legitimacy that can be identified in contemporary democratic theory. The taxonomy covers both aggregative and deliberative democracy. I then argue for a conception of democratic legitimacy that takes the epistemic dimension of public deliberation seriously. In contrast to standard interpretations of epistemic democracy, (...) however, the conception I put forward avoids procedure-independent standards of correctness. Instead, it relies on a procedural social epistemology and defines legitimacy entirely in terms of the fairness of procedures. I call this conception of democratic legitimacy `Pure Epistemic Proceduralism'. I shall argue that it should be preferred over `Rational Epistemic Proceduralism', the conception of legitimacy that underlies the standard interpretation of epistemic democracy. Key Words: legitimacy • deliberative democracy • epistemic democracy • social epistemology. (shrink)

Some claim that criminalisation is morally permissible only when the conduct criminalised is morally wrong. This claim can be disambiguated into at least three principles which differ according to whether, and how, wrongness is dependent on details of the law: the strong constraint, the moderate constraint, and the weak constraint. In this paper I argue that the weak wrongness constraint is preferable to the strong and moderate constraints. That is, we should prefer the view that conduct criminalised must be morally (...) wrong, but qualifying wrongness can depend on criminalising the conduct first. Further, I will show that my arguments in support of the weak wrongness constraint have wider implications. Favouring the weak wrongness constraint implies that condemning wrongs cannot be the only legitimate reason in favour of criminalisation. Those who think condemnation can justify criminalisation should be pluralists. (shrink)