A life without liberty and material resources is not a good life. Equally, a life devoid of meaningful social relationships—such as friendships, family attachments, and romances—is not a good life. From this it is tempting to conclude that just as individuals have rights to liberty and material resources, they also have rights to access meaningful social relationships. I argue that this conclusion can be defended only in a narrow set of cases. ‘Pure’ social relationship deprivation—that is, deprivation that is not (...) caused, or accompanied, by deficits in liberties and material resources— mostly generates demands of private beneficence. I suggest that social relationship deprivation is unjust, hence a rights violation, only when it is due to factors—such as one’s race—that are irrelevant to one’s being a good participant in social relationships. I thus conclude that access to meaningful social relationships is not a fundamental concern for theories of justice. (shrink)

This will be the best way of explaining ‘Paris is the lover of Helen’, that is, ‘Paris loves, and by that very fact [et eo ipso] Helen is loved’. Here, therefore, two propositions have been brought together and abbreviated as one. Or, ‘Paris is a lover, and by that very fact Helen is a loved one’.

This paper evaluates an argument for immigration restrictions that appeals to the costs that immigration imposes on the citizens of a recipient state. According to this argument, citizens have associative duties to protect each other’s interests, immigration can damage these interests in certain cases, and the associative duties between compatriots justify immigration restrictions in these cases. Call this: the partiality argument for immigration restrictions. I argue that the partiality argument is unsound. Immigration restrictions violate negative duties to refrain from interfering (...) with people’s liberties and these duties silence compatriots’ associative duties to one another. Furthermore, I argue that compatriots lack associative duties to one another in virtue of the fact that the relationships between compatriots reliably cause injustice to outsiders. (shrink)