This article argues that diverse theorists have reasons to theorize about fairness in nonideal conditions, including theorists who reject fairness in ideal theory. It then develops a new all-purpose model of ‘nonideal fairness.’ §1 argues that fairness is central to nonideal theory across diverse ideological and methodological frameworks. §2 then argues that ‘nonideal fairness’ is best modeled by a nonideal original position adaptable to different nonideal conditions and background normative frameworks (including anti-Rawlsian ones). §3 then argues that the parties to (...) the model have grounds to seek a variety of remedial social, legal, cultural, and economic ‘nonideal primary goods’ for combating injustice, as well as grounds to distribute these goods in an equitable and inclusive manner. Finally, I illustrate how the model indexes the nonideal primary goods it justifies to different nonideal contexts and background normative frameworks, illustrating why diverse theorists should find the model and its output principles attractive. (shrink)

One of the prevailing explanations of the corporate scandals of the Enron era and the recent financial crisis is the failure of professional gatekeepers—such as auditors, corporate lawyers, and securities analysts—to detect and disrupt corporate misconduct. The alleged solution to this failure—typically proposed and justified on consequentialist grounds—is to impose legal liability on professionals. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the normative foundations of gatekeeper liability. In the course of this paper, I shall defend the claim that (...) gatekeeper liability may be morally objectionable not only on grounds of fairness but also on consequentialist grounds. The expected contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it systematizes the framing and moral justification of gatekeeping duties. Second, it calls into question the normative underpinnings for targeting intermediaries instead of primary wrongdoers. Third, it anticipates some negative results of gatekeeping strategies in the accounting profession, specifically in the realm of clientele selection, the expectation gap, and auditor compensation. (shrink)

The principle of fair play is widely thought to require simply that costs and benefits be distributed fairly. This gloss on the principle, while not entirely inaccurate, has invited a host of popular objections based on misunderstandings about fair play. Central to many of these objections is a failure to treat the principle of fair play as a transactional principle—one that allocates special obligations and rights among persons as a result of their interactions. I offer an interpretation of the principle (...) of fair play that emphasizes its similarities to another transactional principle: consent. This interpretation reveals that playing fair requires one to reciprocate specifically by following the rules of the cooperative scheme from which one benefits, just as consent requires one to act according to the terms of an agreement. I then draw on the comparison with consent to reply to some popular and persistent objections to the principle. (shrink)

There is an emerging consensus among political philosophers that state legitimacy involves something more than—or perhaps other than—political obligation. Yet the principle of fair play, which many take to be a promising basis for political obligation, has been largely absent from discussions of the revised conception of legitimacy. This paper shows how the principle of fair play can generate legitimate political authority by drawing on a neglected feature of the principle—its stipulation that members of a cooperative scheme must reciprocate specifically (...) by submitting to the scheme's rules. (shrink)

The philosophical literature on state legitimacy has recently seen a significant conceptual revision. Several philosophers have argued that the state's right to rule is better characterized not as a claim right to obedience, but as a power right. There have been few attempts to show that traditional justifications for the claim right might also be used to justify a power right, and there have been no such attempts involving the principle of fair play, which is widely regarded as the most (...) promising basis for a claim right to obedience. William Edmundson argues that the principle of fair play cannot generate power rights, and so any attempt at a fair play account of legitimacy must fail. I explain how fair play could generate a power right, owing to its stipulation that the rules of a cooperative scheme specify the form of participants' repayment. (shrink)

Recent debate in the literature on political obligation about the principle of fairness rests on a mistake. Despite the widespread assumption to the contrary, a person can have a duty of fairness to share in the burdens of sustaining some cooperative scheme even though that scheme does not represent a net benefit to her. Recognizing this mistake allows for a resolution of the stalemate between those who argue that the mere receipt of some public good from a scheme can generate (...) a duty of fairness and those who argue that only some voluntary action of consent or acceptance of the good can generate such a duty. I defend a version of the principle of fairness that holds that it is the person’s reliance on a scheme for the provision of some product or service that generates duties of fairness to share in the burdens of sustaining the scheme. And, on this version, the principle of fairness is politically significant: regardless of whether the citizen has a duty to obey the law, she will still have important political duties of fairness generated by her reliance on the various public goods provided by those society-wide cooperative schemes sustained by the sacrifices of her fellow citizens. (shrink)

Philosophical attention to problems about global justice is flourishing in a way it has not in any time in memory. This paper considers some reasons for the rise of interest in the subject and reflects on some dilemmas about the meaning of the idea of the cosmopolitan in reasoning about social institutions, concentrating on the two principal dimensions of global justice, the economic and the political.

Alon Harel defines extreme cases as those in which the only way to avert a destructive threat is to harm innocent people. He rejects traditional consequentialist and non-consequentialist approaches because of the type of reasoning they both employ. I interpret Harel as making two central objections to this form of reasoning. First, traditional approaches require comparisons to be made about the value of human life. Second, decisions in extreme cases, even if permissible, should not be made under the guidance of (...) rules. I argue that these objections, though prima facie plausible, are on reflection relatively weak, and I offer instead a more moderate argument that vindicates Harel’s general thesis that deliberation is morally relevant. More specifically, I argue that whether one acts on certain conditions affects both the moral permissibility of one’s actions and the duties owed by others. (shrink)

Does the receipt of benefits from some common resource create an obligation to contribute toward its maintenance? If so, what is the basis of this obligation? I consider whether individual contributions to climate change can be impugned as wrongful free riding upon the stability of the planet's climate system, when persons enjoy its benefits but refuse to bear their share of its maintenance costs. Two main arguments will be advanced: the first urges further modification of H.L.A. Hart’s “principle of fairness” (...) as the basis for demanding that would-be free riders pay their fair share in the context of climate change, while the second claims that remedial action on climate change is better captured through collective action analysis than through harm principles that seek to connect individual actions to bad environmental outcomes. (shrink)

This paper examines the conceptual development of the philosophical justifications for tyrannicide. It posits that the political philosophy of tyrannicide can be categorised into three distinct periods or models, the classical, medieval, and liberal, respectively. It argues that each model contained unique themes and principles that justified tyrannicide in that period; the classical, through the importance attached to public life and the functional role of leadership; the medieval, through natural law doctrine; and the liberal, through the postulates of social contract (...) theory. Subsequent analysis of these different models however, reveals that these historical models are unable to provide a sufficient philosophical basis for a contemporary justification of tyrannicide. In Part II, it will be contended that a reinvigorated conception of self-defence, a theme common to all three models, when coupled with the modern notion of universal human rights, may provide the foundation for a contemporary theory of tyrannicide. (shrink)

Among the most popular strategies for justifying political obligations are those that appeal to the principle of fairness. These theories face the challenge, canonically articulated by Robert Nozick, of explaining how it is that persons are obligated to schemes when they receive goods that they do not ask for but cannot reject. John Simmons offers one defense of the principle of fairness, arguing that people could be bound by obligations of fairness if they voluntarily accept goods produced by a cooperative (...) scheme. Simmons, however, thinks that such a theory will do little work in justifying political obligations, since virtually no one voluntarily accepts state goods. This paper attempts to advance just such a theory by arguing that states are in fact genuine cooperative schemes and that Simmons is overly pessimistic in his appraisal of whether the majority of citizens accept the goods provided by their states. (shrink)

I offer a new account of fair-play obligations for non-excludable benefits received from the state. Firstly, I argue that non-acceptance of these benefits frees recipients of fairness obligations only when a counterfactual condition is met; i.e. when non-acceptance would hold up in the closest possible world in which recipients do not hold motivationally-biased beliefs triggered by a desire to free-ride. Secondly, I argue that because of common mechanisms of self-deception there will be recipients who reject these benefits without meeting the (...) counterfactual condition. For this reason, I suggest that those who reject non-excludable benefits provided by the state have a duty to support their rejection with adequate reasons. Failing that, they can be permissibly treated as if they had fair-play obligations (although in fact they might not have them). Thus, I claim that there is a distinction, largely unappreciated, between the question of whether we have a duty of fairness to obey the law and the question of whether we can be permissibly treated as if we had one. (shrink)

The moral principle of fairness or fair play is widely believed to be a solid ground for political obligation, i.e., a general prima facie moral duty to obey the law qua law. In this article, I advance a new and, more importantly, principled objection to fairness theories of political obligation by revealing and defending a justificatory gap between the principle of fairness and political obligation: the duty of fairness on its own is incapable of preempting the citizen‟s liberty to reciprocate (...) fairly in ways other than obeying the law. This justificatory gap is unaffected by the ongoing debate between the voluntarist and the nonvoluntarist accounts of fairness, and it cannot be bridged by the two arguments that are perhaps implicit in Klosko‟s account, namely the presumptive benefits argument and the democratic procedure argument. (shrink)

The principle of fairness holds that individuals (beneficiaries) who benefit from a cooperative scheme of others (cooperators) have an obligation to do their share in return for their benefit. The original proponent of this principle, H. L. A. Hart suggests ‘mutuality of restrictions’ as a moral basis because it is fair to mutually restrict the freedom of both beneficiaries and cooperators; so called the fairness obligation. This paper explores ‘mutuality of restrictions’, which is interpreted as a right-based and an equality-based (...) justification of the fairness obligation. It is not argued whether both ways of justifying the obligation makes a success, but that they are in need of presupposing that there is a duty for beneficiaries to do their share in return for their benefit. This suggests turning to a duty-based justification of the fairness obligation. (shrink)

In this paper I outline a theory of legitimacy that grounds the state’s right to rule on a natural duty not to harm others. I argue that by refusing to enter the state, anarchists expose those living next to them to the dangers of the state of nature, thereby posing an unjust threat. Since we have a duty not to pose unjust threats to others, anarchists have a duty to leave the state of nature and enter the state. This duty (...) correlates to a claim-right possessed by those living next to them, who also have a right to act in self-defence to enforce this obligation. This argument, if successful, would be particularly attractive, as it provides an account of state legitimacy without importing any normative premises that libertarians would reject. (shrink)

This paper attempts to establish that, and explain why, the practice of punishing offenders is in principle morally permissible. My account is a nonstandard version of the fair play view, according to which punishment 's permissibility derives from reciprocal obligations shared by members of a political community, understood as a mutually beneficial, cooperative venture. Most fair play views portray punishment as an appropriate means of removing the unfair advantage an offender gains relative to law-abiding members of the community. Such views (...) struggle, however, to provide a plausible account of this unfairly gained benefit. By contrast, on my account punishment 's permissibility follows more straightforwardly from the fair play view of political obligation: Specifically, the rule instituting punishment is itself among those rules with which members of the political community are obliged to comply. For criminal offenders, compliance requires submitting to the prospect of punishment. (shrink)

The paper offers a realist account of political obligation. More precisely, it offers an account that belongs to the Williamsian liberal strain of contemporary realist theory (as opposed to a Geussian radical realist strain) and draws on and expands some ideas familiar from Bernard Williams’s oeuvre (thick/thin ethical concepts, political realism/moralism, a minimal normative threshold for distinctively political rule). Accordingly, the paper will claim that the fact of membership in a polity provides people with sufficient reason for complying with those (...) political authority claims whose source is that particular polity. The paper will explain that membership in a polity is constituted not by communitarian identification (Horton), nationhood (Tamir), joined commitment/plural subjectivity (Gilbert), but by the fact that people are stably exposed to political authority claims associated with a particular polity which they find making sense as passing the minimal normative threshold for a distinctively political form of rule (as opposed to the rule of terror or sheer coercion). This political-ethical phenomenon is widely known as political obligation but the paper will argue that the label is in fact a misnomer because it does not refer to a generic obligation. The implications of this account are manifold but two seem especially important: first, the notion of political obligation makes sense even beyond the realm of moralist political theory and, second, realist political theory should pay more attention to the problem of compliance than it used to do. (shrink)

I propose an alternative interpretation of the Crito. The arguments that are typically taken to be Socrates’ primary arguments against escape are actually supplementary arguments that rely on what I call the Superiority Thesis, the thesis that the state and its citizens are members of a moral hierarchy where those below are tied by bonds of obligation to those above. I provide evidence that Socrates holds this thesis, demonstrate how it resolves a number of apparent difficulties and show why my (...) interpretation is preferable to competing interpretations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to take the first steps toward providing a refurbished consent theory of political authority, one that rests in part on a reconception of the relationship between the surrender of judgment and the authoritativeness of political institutions. On the standard view, whatever grounds political authority implies that one ought to surrender one's judgment to that of one's political institutions. On the refurbished view, it is the surrender of one's judgment – which can plausibly be considered (...) a form of consent – that makes political institutions practically authoritative. (shrink)

Under what conditions, if any, do those the law addresses have a moral duty or obligation to obey it simply because it is the law? In this essay, I identify five general approaches to carrying out this task, and offer a somewhat detailed discussion of one or two examples of each approach. The approaches studied are: relational‐role approaches that appeal to the fact that an agent occupies the role of member in the political community; attempts to ground the duty to (...) obey the law in individual consent or fair play; natural duty approaches; instrumental approaches; and philosophical anarchism, an approach that denies that most subjects of contemporary states have a duty to obey the law simply in virtue of its status as such. (shrink)

The article examines whether realist theory should adopt a philosophical anarchist position concerning political obligation. The conclusions are mixed. Drawing on a distinction between strong and weak theories of political obligation (in the terminology of the paper, strong theories are committed to morality-based theorizing while weak theories depart from it), the article argues that philosophical anarchism and realist theory are natural allies against strong theories of political obligation but they must part company when it comes to weak theories because it (...) is exactly their departure from morality-based theorizing that can make weak theories especially appealing to realists. In addition, two further objections can be raised against philosophical anarchism on realist grounds: first, philosophical anarchists are drawn to undesirably sweeping conclusions about the non-existence of legitimate political authority or the extreme scarcity of genuine political relations by their Kantian or Lockean background assumptions and, second, Simmons seems to have an implicit weak theory of political obligation which could be, ironically, much more appealing to realists than his overall Lockean anarchism or his sweeping criticism of weak theories. All in all, can a realist be an anarchist? Probably, but definitely not on philosophical anarchist grounds. (shrink)

The principle of fairness is a moral principle which states that individuals are under an obligation to contribute towards beneficial cooperative projects. It has been appealed to in arguing that citizens are obligated to pay for public goods that their government supplies. Yet the principle has faced a number of powerful objections, most notably those of Robert Nozick. In responding to some of these objections, proponents of the principle have placed a number of conditions on its application. However, by doing (...) so, they have reduced the number of public goods that the principle can explain obligations to contribute towards, and consequently limited its relevance to questions of political obligation. I argue here that a more permissive version of the principle, with fewer conditions on its application, will perform equally well in responding to Nozick's objections. This opens up the possibility of a theory of political obligation that relies more heavily on the principle of fairness than has previously been thought possible. (shrink)

The thesis examines the theoretical relationship between law and ethics. Its methodology is informed by both the existentialist tradition of ethical phenomenology and the natural law tradition in legal theory. The main claim of the thesis is that a phenomenological analysis of ethical experience, as suggested by the writings of existentialist authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas, provides important support for the natural law tradition. This claim is developed and defended through detailed engagement with the natural law theory (...) of John Finnis. Specifically, I contend that Finnis’ account of moral reasoning as applying the principles of practical reasonableness to a context of self-evident, basic values gains significant support from a phenomenological theory of ethical experience. Finnis’ emphasis on the irreducible role of choice in moral deliberation also finds support in the existentialist tradition. However, I criticise some key aspects of Finnis’ theory, including his emphasis on the transcendental character of the basic values and his account of legal obligation. I begin by outlining some central features of the existentialist approach to philosophy. I advance an interpretation of existentialism as ethical phenomenology. I then discuss some possible methodological connections between the existentialist and natural law traditions. This discussion provides the methodological framework for the remainder of the thesis. The thesis develops and defends a substantially original theory of the relationships between law, ethics and politics. The exposition begins with an account of the relationship between law and community that draws upon the work of Finnis and G. W. F. Hegel. I then outline a phenomenological theory of ethical experience, drawing in particular on the writings of Sartre and Levinas. I employ this phenomenological account of ethics to develop a conception of moral reasoning as reflective, good faith engagement with pre-reflective social judgements of ethical significance. This view of ethical experience and moral reasoning is then used as the basis for an examination of the concept of law and its relationship to political discourse. I turn next to the notions of legal authority and obligation. I argue that law, in the focal sense of the term, presents a generic, peremptory obligation that is necessarily moral in character. In the course of the argument, I critically discuss the conceptions of legal authority proposed by Joseph Raz, Adolf Reinach, H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Finnis, Jacques Derrida and Hans Kelsen. This view of legal obligation entails there are fundamental moral conditions that positive rules must satisfy to qualify as law, in the focal sense. I explore the nature of the moral framework created by these conditions through a detailed analysis of the ethical foundations of political discourse. I argue that political discourse is founded upon an ontological apprehension of the nature of humans as free, ethical beings, which finds expression in a developed notion of political freedom. I suggest that the distinction between positive and negative forms of freedom advanced by Isaiah Berlin is best understood in terms of the different types of political claims invoked by those conceptions. I develop this theory by reference to the work of Charles Taylor, Gerald C. MacCallum, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, W. D. Ross, Robert Nozick and F. A. Hayek. I conclude by discussing the role of ethical experience in the interpretation of legal materials. I argue that ethical judgements play an irreducible role in constructing the natural interpretive context for judicial reasoning. I engage with the work of Hart, Lon L. Fuller, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ferdinand de Saussure and Ronald Dworkin, among others. In the final substantive chapter of the thesis, the potential for ethical judgements to play a constructive role in judicial action is illustrated through a detailed discussion of the doctrine of government neutrality. (shrink)

One of the core issues in contemporary political philosophy is concerned with `political obligation.' Stated in an overly simplified way, the question being asked when one investigates political obligation is, "What, if anything, do citizens owe to their government and how are these obligations generated if they do exist?" The majority of political philosophers investigating this issue agree that a political obligation is a moral requirement to act in certain ways concerning political matters. Despite this agreement about the general nature (...) of what is being searched for, a broad division has arisen between political obligation theorists - there are some who take political obligations to actually exist and there are some who take there to be no general political obligation. While there is debate within the camp defending political obligation about what it is that generates the obligations, the common core of all "defender theories" is the fundamental idea that one has a moral requirement to support and obey the political institutions of one's country. Despite utilitarianism's status as one of the major ethical theories, historically, it has largely been dismissed by theorists concerned with political obligation. Within the contemporary debate it is generally accepted that utilitarianism cannot adequately accommodate a robust theory of political obligation. The overarching objective of this dissertation is to challenge this general dismissal of a utilitarian account and to build upon the two accounts which have been developed in offering a robust utilitarian theory of political obligation which can be considered a competitor to the other contemporary theories. However, as this utilitarian account of political obligation develops, the possibility will also emerge for a non-antagonistic relationship between the utilitarian theory on offer and the contemporary political obligation debate. The moral reasons posited by the traditional theories of political obligation can be included in and accommodated by my utilitarian account. The utilitarian account of political obligation can accept that there are many types of reasons explaining why broad expectations concerning individual and group behavior are created, and each type of reason can be understood as supporting the utilitarian claim that there are moral reasons for following the laws and supporting legitimate political authorities. Taken all together, my arguments will take the form of a three tiered response to the prevailing opinion that any utilitarian attempt to account for political obligations is doomed. The first tier contends that the utilitarian can consistently claim that there are moral reasons to follow the law. This is not a particularly strong claim, but it is one which has been denied by the vast majority of political theorists. The second tier of my argument addresses this apparent issue by contending that even the traditional deontological accounts of political obligation are not offering more than this. Lastly, it is contended that, given the contingent features of humans, the strength of the utilitarian political obligations is comparable to other accounts' analyses of the obligations. (shrink)

As Rawls's thought evolved from his 1958 article ‘Justice as Fairness’ to the 1996 edition of his book Political Liberalism, his response to the problem of political compliance would seem to have undergone a number of changes. This article critically evaluates the development of Rawls's various explicit or implied arguments that serve to justify compliance to just social arrangements, and concludes that the problem of political compliance remains without any cogent solution within the vast corpus of Rawls's work. Key Words: (...) liberalism • philosophical anarchism • political duties • political obligation • Rawls. (shrink)

Anarchism and Political Modernity looks at the place of 'classical anarchism' in the postmodern political discourse, claiming that anarchism presents a vision of political postmodernity. The book seeks to foster a better understanding of why and how anarchism is growing in the present. To do so, it first looks at its origins and history, offering a different view from the two traditions that characterize modern political theory: socialism and liberalism. Such an examination leads to a better understanding of how anarchism (...) connects with newer political trends and why it is a powerful force in contemporary social and political movements. This new volume in the Contemporary Anarchist Studies series offers a novel philosophical engagement with anarchism and contests a number of positions established in postanarchist theory. Its new approach makes a valuable contribution to an established debate about anarchism and political theory. It offers a new perspective on the emerging area of anarchist studies that will be of interest to students and theorists in political theory and anarchist studies. (shrink)

This paper considers the formulation of the moral requirement against hypocrisy, paying particular attention to the logical scope of ‘requires’ in that formulation. The paper argues (i) that we should prefer a wide-scope formulation to a narrow-scope formulation, and (ii) this result has some advantages for our normative theorizing about hypocrisy – in particular, it allows us to resist several of Daniela Dover’s (2019) recent arguments against the anti-hypocrisy requirement.

The paper is organized around two major, but closely interconnected goals. First, the paper’s principal aim is to offer a normative theory of political obligations that is based on certain insights of philosophical anarchism, theories of associative obligations and political realism. Second, the paper aims to offer a normative theoretical framework to examine political obligations in contemporary non-democratic contexts that does not vindicate non-democratic regimes and that does not exclude political obligations from the terrain of moral normativity. The theory of (...) political obligations this paper proposes can be briefly summarized as follows: political obligations are duties of compliance with the political authority claims of those who exercise political power. Their primary ground is membership. The mere fact of membership has moral weight in its own right and it is also inseparably embedded into a rich context of moral reasons for action that includes general reasons; ad hoc reasons; regime-specific reasons applying to every subject; and regime-specific offices that attribute specific responsibilities to individuals and groups. This rich context of typical moral reasons plays an important role in deciding what needs to be done, all things considered, with respect to the political authority claims. This account attempts to describe compliance in terms of genuine political obligations and also claims to be a plausible and general account. It does not claim to be a theoretically coherent moral justification for political obligations, however, just a theoretically coherent account of the varied sources and limitations of political obligations. (shrink)

El artículo sostiene que la teoría liberal está tensionada por una pretensión de universalidad normativa y su implementación institucional en el contexto de los Estados nacionales. Esta tensión se expresa claramente en el caso de la inmigración con la demanda estatal de control discrecional de las fronteras. El artículo desarrolla cuatro argumentos a favor de la relevancia normativa de las fronteras, y sostiene que no son conclusivos. Correspondientemente, desde una perspectiva liberal se dispondría de menos argumentos para justificar el cierre (...) discrecional de las fronteras. (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)

The existence of the obligation to follow rules in sport is widely accepted, but there are only a few studies that provide accounts that justify it. Building upon Wolff's challenge to traditional political theories, this study proposes a theory that limits the level of normativity to which participants in sport contests are bound in an effort to maximize their autonomy. Instead of constructing a unitary theory of obligations to follow sport rules, a pluralistic account is offered, one that allows for (...) multiple sources of normativity, thus augmenting the freedom of communities to play games according to their values. (shrink)

This paper reflects on some amendments to the Declaration of Helsinki in 2008. It focuses on former paragraphs 5 (now 6) and 19 (now 17). Paragraph 5 suggested that the wellbeing of research participants should take precedence over the interests of science and society. Paragraph 6 now proposes that it should take precedence over all other interests. Paragraph 19, and the new paragraph 17, suggest that research involving the members of a disadvantaged population is only justified if the clinical trial (...) is likely to benefit them. In both cases, the recommendation is that the interests of the research subjects should prevail over the interests of third parties. This paper assesses the plausibility of these statements, and in order to do so, considers debates on the moral duty to participate in biomedical research. It is argued that, even if seen in the context of the Declaration as a whole, the statements contained in these paragraphs risk offering a misleading portrait of science and risk eroding some of the ethical principles that should form the basis of a satisfactory shared life, such as altruism and responsibility for our fellows. (shrink)

To what extent can we as a community legitimately require individuals to contribute to producing public goods? Most of us think that, at least sometimes, refusing to pay for a public good that you have enjoyed can involve a kind of 'free riding' that makes it wrong. But what is less clear is under exactly which circumstances this is wrong. To work out the answer to that, we need to know why it is wrong. I argue that when free riding (...) is wrong, the reason is that it is unfair. That is not itself a very controversial claim. But spelling out why it is unfair allows us to see just which forms of free riding are wrong. Moreover, it supplies a basis from which some more controversial conclusions can be defended. Even if a public good is one that you have been given without asking for it or seeking it out, it can still be wrong not to be prepared to pay for it. It can be wrong not to be prepared to pay for public goods even when you do not receive them at all. And furthermore, it can be right to force you to do so. (shrink)

The moral principle of fairness or fair play is widely believed to be a solid ground for political obligation, i.e., a general prima facie moral duty to obey the law qua law. In this article, I advance a new and, more importantly, principled objection to fairness theories of political obligation by revealing and defending a justificatory gap between the principle of fairness and political obligation: the duty of fairness on its own is incapable of preempting the citizen’s liberty to reciprocate (...) fairly in ways other than obeying the law. This justificatory gap is unaffected by the ongoing debate between the voluntarist and the nonvoluntarist accounts of fairness, and it cannot be bridged by the two arguments that are perhaps implicit in Klosko’s account, namely the presumptive benefits argument and the democratic procedure argument. (shrink)

In his ‘Rules and Obligations,’ Bogdan Ciomaga defends a pluralist account of moral obligations to follow sport rules by arguing that no single explanation of such obligations will plausibly apply in multiple contexts. I dispute this claim by showing that consent generates rule-following obligations in a very wide variety of the contexts in which sports are played, including each of those Ciomaga cites in support of his pluralist account. The contractualist or consent-based theory of rule normativity therefore offers a substantially (...) unifying – though not a unitary, for reasons I go on to explain – source of moral obligations to follow sport rules. (shrink)

The concept of political obligation has not attracted much attention within Heideggerian scholarship. In this paper, we identify and explicate Heidegger’s conception of political obligation embedded in his pre-Kehre works. It will be argued that Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time and his address as Rector of Freiburg contain a latent associative account of political obligation. We argue that the ontological framework disclosed in Being and Time and the more concrete policy prescriptions of the Rectoral Address reveal a communitarian ethos (...) which animates the early Heideggerian canon and grounds his account of political obligation. For Heidegger, Dasein must be connected to a particular community’s ontological heritage in order to delimit its ontical possibilities in concrete situations. It will be argued that this relationship between ontological heritage and ontical possibilities is what defines political obligation for Heidegger. (shrink)

Does the receipt of benefits from some common resource create an obligation to contribute toward its maintenance? If so, what is the basis of this obligation? I consider whether individual contributions to climate change can be impugned as wrongful free riding upon the stability of the planet's climate system, when persons enjoy its benefits but refuse to bear their share of its maintenance costs. Two main arguments will be advanced: the first urges further modification of H.L.A. Hart’s “principle of fairness” (...) as the basis for demanding that would-be free riders pay their fair share in the context of climate change, while the second claims that remedial action on climate change is better captured through collective action analysis than through harm principles that seek to connect individual actions to bad environmental outcomes. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Contemporary political liberalism defends the view that any legitimate law ought to be justified to those reasonable citizens subject to it. A standard way in which to accomplish this task is to construct a set of public reasons, comprised of constitutional essentials and public democratic values, which are then used to justify all political mandates. The dissertation begins with a criticism of this process of justification for outcomes of legitimate procedures of public decision-making. It argues that given how reasons contribute (...) to judgment formation, it is highly optimistic to assume that reasonable consent on procedures of collective decision-making correspond to the justifiability of procedural outcomes. Instead, I argue for an ideal of legitimate decision-making which enables each citizen to assume a threshold level of personal responsibility for all political decisions made by the political collective. Integrating responsibility into a theory of liberal legitimacy requires a reformulation of the rules of public justification. I argue that citizens concerned with making responsible political decisions must be allowed to justify their political positions through both reasonable judgments as well as sympathetic judgments such as compassion for those who live with disability and mercy towards the criminally motivated. The notion of sympathy, as formulated by David Hume and expanded by Adam Smith, provides an account of how individuals’ ethical evaluations are affected by their ability to be in fellow-feeling with other people. A substantial portion of my doctoral thesis considers the situations in which a private judgment couched in sympathetic terms can meet political liberalism’s demands of publicity and reciprocity. (shrink)

Faced with a choice between escaping without consequences and submitting to a democratic decision, Socrates chooses the latter. So immense is Socrates’ duty to obey law, we are led to believe, that even the threat of death is insufficient to abrogate it. Crito proposes several arguments purporting to ground Socrates’ strong duty to obey, with the appeal to the Athenian system’s democratic credentials carrying most of the normative weight. A careful reading of the dialogue, in conjunction with the ‘Apology’, reveals, (...) however, a more complex picture. If Crito sets the conditions that render a regime legitimate, and therefore warranting of obedience, the Apology reveals a legal system’s shortcomings that justify disobedience. This article substantiates this position by delineating circumstances that can justify resistance. Contemporary forms of political resistance can also rely on similar conditions. Plato’s texts anticipate the current democratic turn of civil disobedience. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper is a preliminary attempt to better understand the concept of legitimacy in stakeholder theory. The normative component of stakeholder theory plays a central role in the concept of legitimacy. Though the elaboration of legitimacy contained herein applies generally to all “normative cores” this paper relies on Phillips’s principle of stakeholder fairness and therefore begins with a brief description of this work. This is followed by a discussion of the importance of legitimacy to stakeholder theory as well as the (...) general ambiguity of the term. A distinction is then drawn between normative and derivative legitimacy. Reference to this distinction helps distinguish between a relationship with the organization based on direct moral obligation and one based on the power to help or harm the organization. It is concluded that stakeholders who retain the ability to affect the organization arelegitimate(derivatively), but that this legitimacy is derived from the moral obligation owed other (normative) stakeholders and that the two sorts of legitimacy are importantly different from one another. An example of the normative/derivative distinction at work in managerial decision making is elaborated upon and managerial and research implications are then suggested. (shrink)

The private provision of security services has attracted a great deal of recent attention, both professional and popular. Much of that attention suggests the questioned moral legitimacy of the private vs. public provision of security. Linking the literature on moral legitimacy and responsibility from new institutional and stakeholder theories, we examine the relationship between moral legitimacy and responsible behavior by both private security companies (PSCs) and their stakeholders. We ask what the moral-legitimacy-enhancing responsibilities of both might be, and contribute to (...) both literatures and their managerial implications by detailing the content of those responsibilities, emphasizing the reciprocal nature of moral obligations. We suggest that the moral legitimacy of the industry depends upon responsible behavior by both PSCsandtheir stakeholders. (shrink)

The two leading traditions of theorizing about democratic legitimacy are liberalism and deliberative democracy. Liberals typically claim that legitimacy consists in the consent of the governed, while deliberative democrats typically claim that legitimacy consists in the soundness of political procedures. Despite this difference, both traditions see the need for legitimacy as arising from the coercive enforcement of law and regard legitimacy as necessary for law to have normative authority. While I endorse the broad aims of these two traditions, I believe (...) they both misunderstand the nature of legitimacy. In this essay I argue that the legitimacy of a law is neither necessary nor sufficient for its normative authority, and I argue further that the need for legitimacy in law arises regardless of whether the law is coercively enforced. I thus articulate a new understanding of the legitimacy and authority of law. (shrink)

Daniel Butt develops an account of corrective responsibilities borne by beneficiaries of injustice. He defends the consistency model. I criticize the vagueness in this model and present two interpretations of benefit from injustice responsibilities: obligation and natural duty. The obligation model falls prey to the involuntariness objection. I defend a natural duties model, discussing how natural duties can be circumstantially perfected into directed duties and showing how the natural duties model avoids the involuntariness objection. I also address objections from structural (...) injustice and demandingness. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of the fair play principle suggest that, under appropriate conditions, those who benefit from the cooperative labor of others acquire an obligation of repayment. However, these accounts have had little to say about the nature of such obligations within morally or legally problematic cooperative schemes, taking the matter to be either straightforward or unimportant. It is neither. The question of what sorts of fair play obligations obtain for those who benefit from illicit cooperative activity is a matter of (...) great complexity and consequence with implications for, inter alia, global economic justice. In this essay, I explore the nature of this obligation within illicit cooperative schemes, specifically those with so-called negative externalities, or deleterious effects on non-members of the scheme. I conclude that the willing beneficiaries of such schemes acquire a fair-play obligation to recognize and respond to their culpability. This reconceptualization of the fair play principle opens up new avenues for exploring the obligations of those who benefit from acts of collective wrongdoing. (shrink)