In this paper, we explore the role of reciprocity in the employment of restrictive measures in contexts of contagion. Reciprocity should be understood as a substantive value that governs the use, level and extent of restrictive measures. We also argue that independent of the role reciprocity plays in the legitimisation the use of restrictive measures, reciprocity can also motivate support and compliance with legitimate restrictive measures. The importance of reciprocity has implications for how restrictive measures should be undertaken when preparing (...) and evaluating public health responses to contagion. (shrink)

How to demarcate the political units within which democracy will be practiced? Although recent years have witnessed a steadily increasing academic interest in this question concerning the boundary problem in democratic theory, social contract theory’s potential for solving it has largely been ignored. In fact, contract views are premised on the assumption of a given people and so presuppose what requires legitimization: the existence of a demarcated group of individuals materializing, as it were, from nowhere and whose members agree among (...) themselves to establish a political order. In order to fill this gap in social contract theory, a distinction is made between three kinds of contract views: Lockean political voluntarism, contractarianism, and contractualism. Each of these views can be interpreted in such a way that it offers a democratic solution to the boundary problem. Ultimately, however, a Rawlsian interpretation of the contractualist solution is defended. (shrink)

Contrary to the received view, I argue that Kant, in the “Doctrine of Right”, outlines a third, republican alternative to absolutist and voluntarist conceptions of political legitimacy. According to this republican alternative, a state must meet certain institutional requirements before political obligations arise. An important result of this interpretation is not only that there are institutional restraints on a legitimate state's use of coercion, but also that the rights of the state (‘public right’) are not in principle reducible to the (...) rights of individuals (‘private right’). Thus, for Kant, political obligations are intimately linked to the existence of a certain kind of republican institutional framework. (shrink)

The idea that law claims authority (LCA) has recently been forcefully criticized by a number of authors. These authors present a new and intriguing objection, arguing that law cannot be said to claim authority if such a claim is not justified. That is, these authors argue that the view that law does not have authority viciously conflicts with the view that law claims authority. I will call this the normative critique of LCA. In this article, I assess the normative critique (...) of LCA, focusing predominantly on the arguments presented by its most incisive proponent Philip Soper. I defend a twofold conclusion. First, LCA, understood roughly along the lines put forward by Joseph Raz, is part of the most attractive analysis of law. Second, proponents of the normative critique, and in particular Soper, are committed to accepting LCA. (shrink)

Normative questions concerning political authority and political obligation are widely seen as central questions of political philosophy. Current global transformations require an innovative response from normative political thinking about these two topics. In light of a concrete example of the supranational forms of authority and obligation that have been and are emerging beyond the national state and beyond the traditional domains of international law, I lay out what has become the standard approach to authority and obligation and indicate why this (...) approach is inadequate in contemporary circumstances. I sketch an alternative approach and suggest how the most promising exemplar of this kind, Habermas’ discourse theory of law and politics, can better deal with the example. Having thus made plausible the advantages of the discourse theory of the alternative approach, I end with an ‘internal’ critique of Habermas’ own recent writings on the global political order. (shrink)

Political realism criticises the putative abstraction, foundationalism and neglect of the agonistic dimension of political practice in the work of John Rawls. This paper argues that had Rawls not fully specified the implementation of his theory of justice in one particular form of political economy then he would be vulnerable to a realist critique. But he did present such an implementation: a property-owning democracy. An appreciation of Rawls s specificationist method undercuts the realist critique of his conception of justice as (...) fairness. (shrink)

This article evaluates the theory of boundary legitimacy put forward in A John Simmons’s recent book Boundaries of Authority. I believe Simmons is correct to hold that questions about the legitimac...

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)

When officials of some political society portray their state as legitimate - and when do they not! - they intend to be laying claim to a large body of rights, the rights in which their state's legitimacy allegedly consists. The rights claimed are minimally those that states must exercise if they are to retain effective control over their territories and populations in a world composed of numerous autonomous states. Often the rights states are trying to claim in asserting their legitimacy (...) go far beyond this minimum. But whether a state's claims are modest or extravagant, the rights claimed invariably fall into three categories. The first category is a set of rights held over or against those persons who fall within the state's claimed legal jurisdiction - what I will call rights over subjects. The second is a set of rights claimed against those persons without the state's jurisdiction - what we can call rights against aliens. And the third category is a set of rights held over a particular geographical territory (whose extent largely determines the scope of the state's jurisdiction) - call these rights over territory. The rights states claim in these three categories jointly define their conception of the sovereignty that they (or their governments or institutions) enjoy, sovereignty that is more extensive (strong, absolute) as the rights asserted in these categories are more numerous and wide-ranging. It is principally on the third of these categories - on the nature and possible moral bases for the claims states make over geographical territories - that I will focus in this essay. The modern state is a territorial entity, and it claims to be legitimately so. Sidgwick was surely correct when he wrote that "it seems essential to the modern conception of a State that its government should exercise supreme dominion over a particular portion of the earth's surface ... Indeed, in modern political thought the connection between a political society and its territory is so close that the two notions almost blend." Common sense seems to view the territoriality of the modern state as natural and unquestionable. That, perhaps, explains why so little has been written, either by contemporary theorists or by the authors of the classics of modern political philosophy, on the moral bases of the modern state's claimed rights over territory. States typically claim not only legal authority over their territories (i.e., that their rights over those territories should be affirmed by international law), but moral authority as well - at the very least insofar as the relevant principles of international law are thought themselves to have moral weight. My concern here, then, will be with the possible moral bases for the kinds of claims made over geographical territories by typical modern states. (shrink)

Meu principal objetivo, neste artigo, é analisar o problema da justificação moral para JohnRawls, caracterizando a teoria da justiça como equidade como um sistema coerentista de justificaçãoque conta com uma epistemologia coerentista holística, uma teoria do contrato social que introduzuma ontologia social e uma estratégia pragmatista de justificação na teoria contratualista. No escopodeste trabalho, examinarei o pressuposto pragmatista de justificação na teoria do contrato social, o qual faz uso do argumento da estabilidade social e legitimidade política para garantir a validade (...) da regra, isto é, dos princípios de justiça, a partir de dois artigos centrais para este debate: "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical" e "Reply to Habermas" § 1, 2. Um objetivo específico será o demostrar a complementaridade entre o descritivismo e o prescritivismo nessa estratégia de justificação que possibilita a superação da dicotomia entre fato e valor. (shrink)

Abstract: We are all familiar with the way in which social roles, such as mother, father, professor, club football coach, citizen, and so on, confront us with clusters of duties that purport to bind us. Though we generally experience these role-duties as normatively binding, we might question this. What reason do role-occupants have for conforming to the duties that define their roles? I argue that the agent who identifies with her role thereby has a weighty and important justificatory reason for (...) conforming to the role's defining duties: namely, the identifying agent realizes the fundamental goods of meaning and self-determination by doing so. This is an important normative ground of role-duties because it, unlike the grounds of natural duty or voluntary assumption, ensures that the duties it grounds are not alien impositions but rather are elements of the identifying agent's wellbeing. I also argue that role-identification provides a reason that shares many of the characteristics of a moral reason, and I argue that role-identification in tandem with the principle of fair play grounds a moral duty to conform to one's role-duties. (shrink)

Organisations increasingly use digital nudges to influence their workforces’ behaviour without coercion or incentives. This can expose employees to arbitrary domination by infringing on their autonomy through manipulation and indoctrination. Nudges might furthermore give rise to the phenomenon of “organised immaturity.” Adopting a balanced approach between overly optimistic and dystopian standpoints, I propose a framework for determining the moral permissibility of digital nudging in the workplace. In this regard, I argue that not only should organisations provide pre-discursive justification of nudges (...) but they should also ensure that employees can challenge their implementation whenever necessary through legitimation procedures. Building on Rainer Forst’s concept of the right to justification, this article offers a way to combine contract- and deliberation-based theories for addressing questions in business ethics. I further introduce the concept of meta-autonomy as a capacity that employees can acquire to counter threats of arbitrary domination and to mitigate organised immaturity. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza el problema de cómo lidiar con situaciones en las que nuestras creencias morales van en contravía de las demandas de un gobierno que cuenta con el decidido apoyo de la mayoría de los miembros de la comunidad política a la cual uno pertenece. Siguiendo las tesis que plantea Jaspers en el Problema de la culpa, se intenta mostrar que si se interpreta el concepto de culpa política propuesto por Jaspers en la línea del filósofo liberal John Locke, (...) se puede arrojar una nueva luz sobre lo que la responsabilidad política significa. Esto también nos permitirá mostrar que las llamadas obligaciones políticas de los ciudadanos se extienden más allá de los requerimientos institucionales, asunto que ha sido el foco de recientes discusiones entre aquellos estudiosos que tratan la cuestión de la legitimidad política desde la perspectiva del contractualismo moderno. Tal extensión consiste básicamente en que los ciudadanos tienen obligaciones políticas relacionadas con la cultura política que constituyen su identidad política. (shrink)

Judicial obligation to enforce the law is typically regarded as both unproblematic and important: unproblematic because there is little reason to doubt that judges have a general, if prima facie, obligation to enforce law, and important because the obligation gives judges significant reason to limit their concern in adjudication to applying the law. I challenge both of these assumptions and argue that norms of political legitimacy, which may be extra-legal, are irretrievably at the basis of responsible judicial reasoning.

This paper offers a qualified defence of physician non-compliance with antiabortion legislation in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The paper examines two ethically troubling trends of post-Dobbs legislation: narrow and vague maternal health exemption clauses and mandatory reporting of miscarriages in jurisdictions where patients may criminal prosecution for medically induced abortions. It then examines and defends a professional obligation on the part of physicians to comply with the law. This obligation, however, (...) is defeasible. The paper then argues that physicians’ obligations to comply with the law is defeated when the law is illegitimate and following the law would constitute bad medical practice. Finally, it argues that the ethically troubling trends in post-Dobbs antiabortion legislation may meet these criteria. (shrink)

In my reading of Free Market Fairness, I challenge Tomasi’s key assumption that that we can and should pursue the account of social justice laid down in its essentials by John Rawls, but with this one crucial change, that the ‘economic liberties’ which Rawls excludes from his framework of basic liberties should be included on that list and be appropriately prioritized and protected. I argue that Rawls had very good grounds for excluding the right to own productive capital from his (...) list of basic rights; in short, that such a move would not enhance justice as fairness. Tomasi’s embrace of American capitalism as an approximation of what entrenched economic liberties can be expected to deliver simply makes an incredible claim less plausible. (shrink)

We need to acknowledge that the members of most modern societes adhere to different and partially contradictory moral convictions which to overcome we yet don’t have the intellectual means. Since such convictions typically include opions about which moral rules should be established as laws there will be disagreement about the correct rules of law as well. The article investigates the possibilities to find a system of laws that all can accept on the basis of such moral pluralism. It develops six (...) steps and models for the required justification. As the final step has the form of a strategic negotiation the concluding section explores which forms of representation and which deviations from unanimity are acceptable within this procedural model of justification. (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)

The introduction of corporate mode into universities with the widespread of neoliberalism has posed threats to intellectuals’ academic creativity and political sensitivity. To respond to the threats, I argue that it is high time we talk about educating hope. Moreover, I contend that Richard Rorty and Gilles Deleuze’s theories on hope can be of great help in understanding the complexity and exquisiteness of hope—non-representational and non-metaphysical, dependent on contingent encounters, transformative and political.

Some contemporary anarchist scholarship has rejected the Enlightenment-inspired reliance on reason that was supposedly central to classical anarchist thought and expanded the anarchist critique to address issues ignored by their classical predecessors. In making reason the object of critique, some contemporary anarchists expanded the anarchist framework to include critiques of domination residing outside the traditional power centers of the state, the capitalist firm, and the church thereby shedding light on the authoritarian tendencies inherent in the intellect itself. Though contemporary anarchist (...) scholarship has sought to apply this anti-authoritarian ethos to the realms of epistemology and ontology (by employing Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and other postfoundational thinkers), their own framework of analysis is glaringly susceptible to what Habermas called a “performative contradiction.” In questioning the authority of aspects of even our own intellect (and the epistemological and ontological presuppositions that accompany it) we call into question even the authority of our own argumentation. I answer this “contradiction” by interrogating two intellectual traditions. Firstly, I question a key postfoundational anarchist premise. Namely, I assess whether an understanding of classical anarchist thinkers as quintessential children of the Enlightenment is justified. Secondly, I offer an alternative path to reconciliation between the anti-authoritarian values of the anarchists and the anti-metaphysical values of the postfoundationalists (that I think mirrors anarchist anti-authoritarian concerns) by suggesting we are better served to think of an anti-authoritarianism of the intellect by employing three key twentieth century thinkers: Richard Rorty, Paul Feyerabend, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I do so while anchoring Rorty’s, Feyerabend’s, and Wittgenstein’s philosophies in the 19th century anti-metaphysical thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and the philosophical anarchism of Max Stirner. (shrink)

This article revisits long-standing questions about consent, membership and emigration in Locke’s thought. Commentators such as A John Simmons have argued that Locke opens political membership to both express consenters and some kind of tacit consenters, and not just to the former, as some have suggested. Simmons’s reading seems to render Locke more sensible in that it does not exclude large numbers of people from membership or burden the few members with all the civic duties, and also in that it (...) allows at least tacit-consenting members the right to relocate, while this right is denied to express-consenting members. Against this reading, the article shows, by resolving seemingly conflicting claims in the text, that people become members only by express consent. It also responds to the criticism that the express-consent-only reading would limit membership to a few and so would render Locke’s account implausible from a practical point of view. The article then addresses the purported restriction Locke imposes on express consenters’ right to emigrate, arguing that the restriction concerns the change of membership and not the right to relocate. (shrink)

This article aims to show that Locke’s discussion of tacit consent and the right to punish aliens in the Second Treatise of Government has important bearings on the moral status of undocumented immigrants. It argues that Locke conceptualized both friendly and hostile aliens, counting the former as tacit consenters to whom host states owed rights and protection. Moreover, it highlights how his approach, unlike theorists before and after him, was one that saw individuals as capable of shaping their own relationship (...) with the host. The article also examines Locke’s discussion of the federative power of the state, which includes the power to vet aliens within the country. Seen through this Lockean lens, the article argues that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants can be understood as tacit consenters or potential citizens who should be judged by how they choose to relate to the host, and not by their country of origin. While noting that the Lockean approach is not incompatible with border control, the article also shows how it puts the onus on the host to justify the power it exercises and to engage in dialogue with undocumented immigrants about what their status should be in the country. (shrink)

It is now commonplace for governments in Western countries to require the unemployed to work in exchange for their unemployment benefits. In this article I raise some serious doubts about the most promising and philosophically interesting defence of this argument, which relies on the ‘principle of reciprocity’. I argue that it is seriously unclear whether the obligations imposed on welfare claimants by ‘workfare’ schemes are legitimate and justified according to the principle of reciprocity. I do this by reconstructing the arguments (...) for the obligations of the unemployed put forward in both the United Kingdom and Australia. (shrink)

According to instrumental proceduralism, political power is justified when it is the output of a reliable procedure. In this paper, I examine how procedures are supposed to confer normative properties. Based on this assessment, I conclude that many proceduralists set the reliability bar too low. Next, I motivate two additional requirements for instrumental procedures. I introduce the notion of “predictable” procedural failure and argue that in order for a procedure to confer legitimacy or other normative properties on its output, it (...) must not have failed predictably. Finally, I argue that even when procedures are highly reliable, it must not be the case that their failures fall disproportionately on certain people. The goal is to develop an instrumental proceduralism that is more sensitive to the failures of real institutions. (shrink)

The associative argument for political obligation has taken an important place in the debate on political obligation. Proponents of this view argue that an obligation to obey the government arises out of ties of affiliation among individuals who share the same citizenship. According to them, relationships between compatriots constitute basic reasons for action in the same way in which relationships between family members or friends do. As critics point out, this account of the normative force of relationships has counterintuitive implications: (...) if relationships between people sharing the same citizenship make up basic reasons for action, then relationships between people sharing other attributes, for example, relationships between racists or sexists form basic reasons for action too. In this essay, I pursue a modified version of the associative approach that is not vulnerable to this objection. (shrink)

I argue that some instances of constitutional religious establishment can be consistent with an expressivist interpretation of democratic legitimacy. Whether official religious endorsements disparage or exclude religious minorities depends on a number of contextual considerations, including the philosophical content of the religion in question, the attitudes of the majority, and the underlying purpose of the official status of the religious doctrine.

Christopher Wellman is the strongest proponent of the natural-duty theory of political obligations and argues that his version of the theory can satisfy the key requirement of ; namely, justifying to members of a state the system of political obligations they share in. Critics argue that natural-duty theories like Wellman's actually require well-ordered states and/or their members to dedicate resources to providing the goods associated with political order to needy outsiders. The implication is that natural-duty approaches weaken the particularity requirement (...) and cannot justify to citizens the systems of political obligation they share in. I argue that the critics’ diagnosis of natural-duty approaches is correct, whereas the proposed implication is false. I maintain that 1) only natural-duty approaches can justify political obligations, and that 2) weakening the particularity requirement contributes to the theory's ability to justify a range-limited system of political obligations among compatriots. (shrink)

Governments are increasingly making use of field experiments to evaluate policy interventions in the spheres of education, public health and welfare. However, the research ethics literature is largely focused on the clinical context, leaving investigators, institutional review boards and government agencies with few resources to draw on to address the ethical questions they face regarding such experiments. In this article, we aim to help address this problem, investigating the conditions under which informed consent is required for ethical policy research conducted (...) or authorized by government. We argue that investigators need not secure participants' informed consent when conducting government policy experiments if: the government institution conducting or authorizing the experiment possesses a right to rule over the spheres of policy targeted by the research; and data collection does not involve the violation of participants' autonomy rights. (shrink)

As some thinkers have sought in the concept of global civil society an ethically driven site of deliberation and even resistance, so others have criticized global civil society for its lack of legitimacy and representativeness. This article attempts to answer these criticisms ? at least in part ? by invoking a moral commitment to the value of justification. I argue that the idea of justification, when examined, offers us a particular understanding of legitimacy which would be attainable for global civil (...) society actors. The article begins by setting out the case for concern about the legitimacy of global civil society. I then outline a certain understanding of justification, showing how a commitment to this conception provides both a response to critics of global civil society and an ethical baseline for humane actors within global civil society. I move on to trace the significance of the moral relevance of justification for actors' strategies. Lastly, however, I highlight the difficulty of justification in a diverse world. This is to say that the issues of legitimacy and strategy facing global civil society are only made more tractable, not dissolved, by an appeal to the importance of justification. (shrink)

This article argues that using Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority to reject philosophical anarchism can be affected by political anarchism. Whereas philosophical anarchism only denies the authority of the state, political anarchism claims that anarchism is a better alternative to the state. Raz’s theory holds that an institution has authority if it enables people to better conform with reason. I argue that there are cases where anarchism is an existing alternative to the state and better fulfils this condition. Consequently, (...) in these cases, anarchist groups and societies and not the state have legitimate authority. When anarchism is not an existing alternative to the state, the state will, under Raz’s theory, have some legitimate authority, but that authority will be limited because anarchism remains a better possible alternative to the state. To support the political anarchist claim I discuss the anarchist collectives during the Spanish civil war, which I argue are an example of anarchism as an existing alternative to the state that better fulfils Raz’s service conception and also provide suggestive evidence that anarchism is in general a better possible alternative. I also discuss the relationship between political anarchism and authority and I argue that despite some tension they are not irreconcilable. I conclude that the interesting anarchist challenge for political theorists is political not philosophical. (shrink)

Alice Le Goff ,Christian Nadeau | : Ce texte constitue une introduction au dossier. Il introduit les différentes contributions en mettant en relief leurs principales orientations. Ce faisant, il propose donc une cartographie conceptuelle, forcément partielle, des enjeux associés à la notion de démocratie épistémique et des enjeux du croisement de cette notion avec celle de démocratie de contestation. En un premier temps, nous revenons sur l’apport du procéduralisme épistémique et sur les questions qu’il soulève. Ensuite, nous revenons sur le (...) néo-pragmatisme et la façon dont il permet d’envisager une justification épistémique de la démocratie. Puis nous mettons l’accent sur les enjeux d’un dialogue entre modèle républicain de la démocratie contestataire et modèle épistémique. Enfin, le texte propose un résumé du parcours proposé dans le cadre de ce dossier. | : This introduction brings out the main lines of the articles collected in the present issue. Our aim is to provide the reader with a conceptual overview of the main stakes of epistemic democracy and of its intersections with the model of contestatory democracy. First, we focus on epistemic proceduralism, its contributions and the questions it raises. Second, we emphasize the way neo-pragmatism deals with the epistemic justification of democracy. Then, we insist on the interest of a dialogue between epistemic democracy and the neo-republican model of contestatory democracy. Finally, the text sums up the path followed in that issue. (shrink)

Though questions of political obligation have long been central to liberal political theory, discussion has generally focused on voluntaristic aspects of the individual's relationship to the state, as opposed to other factors through which the state is able to ground compliance with its laws. The individual has been conceptualized as naturally without political ties, whether or not formally in a state of nature, and questions of political obligation have centered on accounting for political bonds.Footnotes* For helpful comments on and discussion (...) of earlier drafts of this paper, I am grateful to the other contributors to this volume, the editors of Social Philosophy and Policy, Colin Bird, Richard Dagger, Joshua Dienstag, Charles Kromkowski, David Mapel, Debra Morris, John Simmons, Vivian Thomson, and Steven Wall. (shrink)

In this essay I reply to Alyssa Bernstein and Helga Varden's comments on my book, Kant and Cosmopolitanism. In response to Bernstein, I argue that Kant's opposition to the coercive incorporation of states into an international federation should be interpreted as permitting no exceptions. In response to Varden, I clarify Kant's conception and defence of patriotism as a duty, and I show how Kantian cosmopolitans can rebut Bernard Williams's objection. I also explicate why, given a specific feature of Kant's defence (...) of the state's duty to provide poverty relief, an international federation can be seen to have an analogous duty. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine the compatibility of Kantian cosmopolitanism and patriotism. In response to recent literature, I first argue that in order to discuss this issue fruitfully, one should distinguish between three different forms of patriotism and be careful to make clear when patriotism is obligatory, permissible, or prohibited. I then show that Kantians can defend the view that civic patriotism is a duty, but that attempts to also establish nationalist patriotism and trait-based patriotism as Kantian duties fail. Showing (...) that civic patriotism is a duty does not by itself show that it is compatible with cosmopolitanism, however, and I therefore examine the relationship between different duties in more detail, arguing that there is no conflict of duties here. Finally, I argue that Kantianism provides even a bit of room for nationalist and trait-based patriotism to count as having moral worth, although this room is very narrowly circumscribed. (shrink)

Economic theories of democratic legitimacy have criticized deliberative accounts of democratic legitimacy on the grounds that they do not represent a practical possibility and that they create conditions that make actual democracies worse. It is not simply that they represent the wrong ideal. Rather, they are too idealistic – failing to show proper regard for the cognitive and moral limitations of persons and the depth of disagreement in democratic society. This article aims to show that the minimalist criterion of democratic (...) legitimacy is self-defeating and that even if there are minimal cognitive, moral, and social requirements for the possibility of practicable deliberative democracy, these limitations do not necessarily impose insuperable barriers for democratic deliberation as the normative basis of democratic legitimacy. Thus, the limiting facts do not dictate the structure of appropriate normative models of democracy in the way minimalists have supposed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:We discuss workers’ dignity in hierarchical organizations. First, we explain why a conflict exists between high-ranking individuals’ authority and low-ranking individuals’ dignity. Then, we ask whether there is any justification that reconciles hierarchical authority with the dignity of workers. We advance a communitarian justification for hierarchical authority, drawing upon Confucianism, which provides that workers can justifiably accept hierarchical authority when it enables a certain type of social functioning critical for the good life of workers and other involved parties. The Confucian (...) communitarian perspective shows that promoting workers’ good life or well-being is an important condition for protecting their dignity. (shrink)

In morally grounding a public justification requirement, public reason liberals frequently invoke the idea that persons should be construed as “free and equal.” But this tells us little with regard to what it is about us that makes us free or how a claim about our status as persons can ultimately ground a requirement of public justification. In light of this worry, I argue that a public justification requirement can be grounded in a Nozick-inspired argument from the separateness of persons (...) (one that is consistent with the idea that individuals are free and equal). As I claim, one particular feature of the fact of our separateness – the possession of a basic psychology consisting of beliefs, intentions, sentiments, and a variety of desire-like psychological states – does the most work in grounding both a principle of liberty (PL) and a requirement of public justification (RPJ). Together, PL and RPJ provide the basic framework for a theory of public reason liberalism. (shrink)

This paper elaborates the concept of global public power as the subject of principles of political legitimacy in global politics, and defends it through a critical comparison with other concepts widely employed to depict this regulative subject: states, global basic structure, and global governance. The goal underlying this argument is to bring some greater unity and integration to conceptual understandings of the subject of principles of political legitimacy within analyses of global politics, and in doing so to frame a broader (...) research agenda for locating in practice the concrete political agencies and institutions that are appropriate targets for demands of political legitimation under the prevailing empirical conditions of global pluralism. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that individuals are, prior to the existence of just institutions requiring that they do so, bound as a matter of global distributive justice to restrict their use, or share the benefits fairly of any use beyond their entitlements, of the Earth’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases (EAC) to within a specified justifiable range. As part of the search for an adequate account of climate morality, I approach the task by revisiting, and drawing inspiration from, two (...) prominent models from classical political philosophy for thinking about norms (rights, permissions, limits, etc.) regarding “pre-institutional” appropriation of unowned resources; Locke and Kant, respectively. The basic resources they develop—connected to fundamental norms of equality and rights to self-preservation and freedom—in order to generate their particular schema for distributive shares prior to the existence of just institutions can be usefully and plausibly connected up with the scarce, valuable, rival, non-excludable, global, and unowned resource that is EAC in order to undergird a picture of individual climate duties in the contemporary world. It is a picture that comes with some fairly radical implications, especially for the well-off. (shrink)

This paper addresses Richard Vernon's approach to reconciling cosmopolitan political morality with particularized political obligations in his work, Cosmopolitan Regard. It situates his approach in his critical treatment of competing transactional theories of obligation, particularly reciprocity for benefits received, and presents his justification of particularized political obligations towards fellow members of persons' own state, based on complicity in unique systems of risk exposure. The paper also presents a critical treatment of his theory, and goes on to outline an alternate conception (...) of legitimacy without obligation as promising in addressing the identified concerns and as applicable to structures of governance beyond the state. (shrink)