What is the appropriate degree of abstraction from existing social facts when engaging in normative political theory? Through a focus on American Indian and other indigenous claims over historically expropriated lands, this essay argues that highly abstracted forms of normative analysis can often misunderstand the core moral problems at stake in real cases, and that they can pose moral dangers when they do so. As argued, the hard moral issues involved in indigenous land claims within countries such as Canada and (...) the United States often have far more to do with questions about competing uses for public lands than with abstract property theory as such. The essay argues that normative theorists will often do more social good, and pose fewer dangers, when they pay close attention to the real moral challenges that social actors face on the ground than when they become captured by abstract questions with ambiguous practical importance. (shrink)

Solidarity is a significant but poorly understood feature of political life. It is typically conceived, in “associative and teleological” terms, as working together for common political aims. But this conception misses the fact that solidarity requires individuals to will collective ends despite incompletely shared interests. Careful consideration of these elements reveals four “dynamics of solidarity”: its characteristic duties, the durability of commitments made in solidarity, the deference it involves, and its effects over time on agents’ habits and capacities. In this (...) article I describe these dynamics, first contrasting solidarity-given duties with duties of beneficence, justice, and loyalty. These contrasts lay bare the distinctive durability of solidarity, which differs from both the liberal’s commitment to justice and the loyalist’s commitment to the group. I then discuss deference, a feature of solidarity that has implications for individual engagement in political life more generally. Finally, I discuss the effects of solidarity on agents’ intellectual and physical capacities. I conclude by drawing out implications of these dynamics, challenging Tommie Shelby’s influential conception and justification of black solidarity and buttressing Philip Soper’s rejection of the Principle of Autonomy. (shrink)