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)

Legitimate political authority is often said to involve a “right to rule,” which is most plausibly understood as a Hohfeldian moral power on the part of the state to impose obligations on its subjects (or otherwise to change their normative situation). Many writers have taken the state’s moral power (if and when it exists) to be a correlate, in some sense, of an obligation on the part of the state’s subjects to obey its directives. Thus legitimate political authority is said (...) to entail a general obligation to obey the law, and a general obligation to obey the law is said to entail legitimate political authority. With some version of this idea in mind, many writers attempt to establish full (or partial) legitimate political authority by first arguing for the intermediate conclusion that there exists a general (or partial) obligation to obey the law. This article argues that such a strategy is fundamentally mistaken, because while legitimate authority does indeed entail an obligation to obey the law, an obligation to obey the law does not, in and of itself, entail legitimate authority. This can be referred to as “the reverse entailment problem.” To avoid this problem, a theory of political authority must argue directly for the existence of the appropriate kind of moral power on the part of the state. This article argues for the “value-based” conception of a moral power, which states, very roughly, that one person holds a power over another if there is sufficient value in the former possessing the capacity intentionally to impose an obligation on the latter (or otherwise to change her normative situation). This seemingly simple understanding of a moral power gives rise to surprisingly strong adequacy conditions on what can count as an acceptable theory of legitimate political authority, and these conditions decisively rule out most of the standard theories in the literature. (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)

In this article I discuss a number of issues raised by Professor Jules Coleman's recent article "Beyond the Separability Thesis." I suggest, to begin, that Coleman is correct that neither a narrow nor a broad formulation of the separability thesis takes us very far towards a robust distinction between legal positivism and legal non-positivism. I then offer a brief discussion of methodology in jurisprudence, suggesting that Coleman accepts, at least implicitly, what I call a "methodology of necessary features." Since there (...) is reason to think that law possesses some necessary features that are non-normative (or descriptive) and others that are moral in character, the promise of this pluralistic approach is that it will be capable of bridging the gap between so-called "descriptive" and "normative" theories of methodology in jurisprudence. Since the distinction between descriptive and normative methodological theories is sometimes taken to be one way, among others, of drawing a distinction between positivist and non-positivist theories of law, the pluralism of the "methodology of necessary features" gives us yet one more reason to think that the distinction between positivism and non-positivism is not a theoretically fundamental one. Finally, I discuss Coleman's "moral semantics claim," i.e., the idea that "legal content is best understood as moral directives about what is to be done and who is to decide what is to be done." Coleman acknowledges that the moral semantics claim, when taken together with the social facts thesis, raises a well-known problem: How can social facts create content-independent reasons for action? I suggest that we are most likely to find the answer to this question by focusing directly on whether or not law's claimed moral authority—meaning its claimed moral power—can be justified, rather than by focusing indirectly, as many theorists have done, on the existence or non-existence of a general obligation to obey the law. (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)

A la vanguardia del debate clásico sobre la justificación del castigo, algunas variantes del republicanismo penal sugieren que tal fundamento debe buscarse en una relación anterior al crimen: en una relación política. Afirman que podemos castigarnos porque pertenecemos, en conciudadanía, a una misma comunidad política. Pero entonces aparece necesariamente la pregunta sobre cómo se justifica el castigo a personas extranjeras. Con referencias al caso argentino, este artículo discute con las explicaciones teóricas ensayadas por Duff y las alternativas de Zedner, Yaffe (...) y Chehtman. El debate, así planteado, parece dirimirse entre fundar la respuesta punitiva en la comunidad entre personas ciudadanas dejando sin orientación normativa a las diversas formas de castigo de las no-ciudadanas o renunciar a una justificación relacional del castigo para todos. Para escapar del dilema, planteo que quienes entiendan que la legitimidad del castigo debe buscarse en algún tipo de relación política preexistente deben redefinir esa relación para que pueda dar cuenta de los diferentes vínculos que nos unen a quienes cohabitamos un mismo territorio político. En lugar de descartar a la membresía política como justificación del reproche penal, sostengo que se puede renunciar a que esa membresía constituya la única justificación posible. Finalmente propongo dos pautas para que una teoría de la justificación del castigo pueda dar cuenta de los diferentes criterios de atribución de la ley penal: el nivel de dependencia y el nivel de participación. (shrink)

Whether there is a general moral obligation to obey the law, often referred to as ‘political obligation’, is an enduring question in contemporary legal and political philosophy. Theories are continually being formulated, criticized, and reformulated as theorists attempt to settle this issue. However, there yet remains no general consensus as to whether any theory successfully answers this question in either the affirmative or the negative. I propose the legal doctrine of quasi-contract as a candidate for making sense of this persistent (...) issue. While the duty to reciprocate and the principle of reasonable expectations each falls short when independently advanced as a theory of political obligation, quasi-contract, which combines reciprocity, reasonable expectations, and additional moral considerations, is able to establish a satisfactory account of political obligation. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Waiting time is widely used in health and social policy to make resource allocation decisions, yet no general account of the moral significance of waiting time exists. We provide such an account. We argue that waiting time is not intrinsically morally significant, and that the first person in a queue for a resource does not ipso facto have a right to receive that resource first. However, waiting time can and sometimes should play a role in justifying allocation decisions. First, there (...) is a duty of fairness prohibiting line-cutting where a sufficiently just queue exists. Second, waiting time has several morally attractive features that can justify its incorporation into allocation schemes. Where candidates are in relevantly similar circumstances, allocating by waiting time is relatively efficient, maximizes distribution equality relative to other Pareto efficient distributions, and treats candidates fairly. The claim that allocation using waiting time is fair is controversial. Some have claimed that formal lotteries are a fairer way to select among equal beneficiaries. We argue that lotteries are no fairer than allocation based on waiting time when it is equiprobable how a prospective queue will be ordered. In practice, lotteries share many of the disadvantages of queues; which is fairer will depend on contingent features of the allocation scenario. The upshot is that first-come, first-served is in fact a just way to allocate resources in many of the cases where it seems pre-theoretically compelling, and waiting time has unique normative properties which frequently justify its incorporation into resource allocation schemes. (shrink)

In a just society, who should be liable for the significant costs associated with creating and raising children? Patrick Tomlin has recently argued that children themselves may be liable on the grounds that they benefit from being raised into independent adults. This view, which Tomlin calls ‘Kids Pay’, depends on the more general principle that a beneficiary can incur an obligation to share in the cost of an essential benefit that the benefactor is responsible for her requiring. I argue in (...) this paper that this principle is both generally false and particularly suspect in the kinds of cases that Tomlin needs it to be true, namely, cases in which a benefactor has created the need to be benefitted to satisfy a self-regarding interest in providing the benefit. In a nutshell, I argue that because parents electively put their children into a needy circumstance for the purpose of satisfying a self-regarding interest in meeting their children’s needs, they lack a legitimate claim against their children to share in its associated costs. (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)

It seems natural to think that compromises ought to be fair. But it is false. In this paper, I argue that it is never a moral desideratum to reach fair compromises and that we are sometimes even morally obligated to try to establish unfair compromises. The most plausible conception of the fairness of compromises is David Gauthier’s principle of minimax relative concession. According to that principle, a compromise is fair when all parties make equal concessions relative to how much they (...) can gain from an agreement and relative to how much they would lose without an agreement. To find out whether reaching a fair compromise sometimes is a moral desideratum, I discuss several paradigmatic cases in friendships, economics and politics, and I try to show that even when the parties have moral reasons to refrain from trying to maximize utility in the negotiations, they do not have moral reasons to aim at a fair compromise. My second claim is that we are sometimes morally obligated to try to establish unfair compromises, in particular when we are dealing with parties that try to establish morally very bad political arrangements. In such cases, we should try to concede as little as possible to achieve an outcome that is morally acceptable. Fair compromises, in other words, are morally much more dubious than is usually appreciated. (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)

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)

According to most contemporary theorists, free riding on the cooperative contributions of others is unfair. At the same time, obligations to contribute to cooperative schemes can compel conformity with conventional practices, and can do so to a degree that poses a real threat to individuality. This paper exposes this tension between fairness and individuality, and proposes a way to resolve it. The resolution depends on an alternative approach to understanding fairness—one that appeals to the relational goods fairness is meant to (...) maintain. In particular, norms of fairness protect against the interactions within a relationship becoming disrespectful. Many instances of free riding are indeed disrespectful and hence unfair. But this is not always so: one can choose to live a lifestyle that fails to return the benefits their community provides without disrespecting one's fellows. It is thus possible to free ride without being unfair, and so duties of fairness need not add to those already formidable forces that threaten to extinguish valuable individuality. (shrink)

Some acts (mala in se) are wrong prior to any social prohibition (e.g., murder). Other acts (mala prohibita) are wrong only once socially prohibited (e.g., traffic violations). This article considers certain obligations of care that parents owe to their children and children to their parents. Violations of these familial obligations are like paradigm mala prohibita in that they are wrongs created by social convention. But, it is argued, they are unlike paradigm mala prohibita in that their prohibition is not justified (...) merely by the desirable consequences of prohibiting them but also by the value of the prohibition itself. (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)

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)

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)

The problem of the ‘mountain man’, the caricature of self-sufficiency and individualism, is not a new one for autonomy theorists. It seems plausible that there is genuine value in self-direction according to one’s deeply-held principles. If autonomy involves something like this, then anyone concerned with autonomy as a social rather than individualistic phenomenon must explain what the mountain man gets wrong when he denies that his autonomy admits of being placed under obligations to others. In particular, the mountain man challenges (...) autonomy-minded social anarchists: if his denial of legitimate non-voluntary obligations is correct, then it is not just the state we should reject, but any organising body with coercive powers. This may be consistent with individualist anarchism or right-libertarianism, but it sits ill with the social anarchist intuition that we can have genuine political obligations. My thesis addresses this problem in three stages. First, I argue for a functional analysis of authority and autonomy: the concepts are not pre-existing “immovable objects”, but rather are defined by the role that they are intended to play in our discourse. I suggest that we need a concept of political or institutional authority in order to resolve co-ordination problems and pursue collaborative social goods, and a concept of autonomy to explain when and why self-direction is valuable. Second, I defend a social-relational conception of autonomy. The autonomous agent is powerful and authoritative, where this power and authority is in large part constituted, rather than merely affected, by the social structures and relations that we stand in. We are powerful and authoritative, I argue, when we stand in relations of non-domination: we are not vulnerable to arbitrary interference in our lives, and this non-vulnerability is defended in virtue of recognition respect for us as agents. There are two important implications of this account: that autonomy comes with a built-in equality condition whereby everybody’s autonomy is threatened if anybody’s is, and that there is no principled distinction to be drawn between ‘personal’ and ‘political’ autonomy. In the last three chapters, I suggest an autonomy-justified conception of authority. I argue for autonomy as the crucial collaborative good which authoritative institutions help us to pursue, and suggest that such institutions may legitimately claim authority if they act or effect actions in ways which are likely to promote or defend autonomy-constituting relations, and act or effect actions in ways consistent with maximal equal autonomy. Finally, I return to the anarchist argument, showing that while my accounts of autonomy and authority give us a plausible picture of how autonomy is compatible with genuinely authoritative institutions, this picture still has no room for the state. (shrink)

What constraints should be imposed on individual liberty for the sake of protecting our collective security? A helpful approach to answering this question is offered by a theory that grounds political obligation and authority in a moral requirement of fair contribution to mutually beneficial cooperative schemes. This approach encourages us to split the opening question into two—a question of correctness and a question of legitimacy—and generates a detailed set of answers to both subsidiary questions, with a nuanced and plausible set (...) of implications. The plausibility of its treatment of the issues surrounding liberty and security, I argue, helps to confer credibility on the fairness-based theory that carries these implications. (shrink)

Our reactions to actual crime-disbelief about the act committed, anger at the hurt caused, a desire to get even, and fear for ourselves and our children-arrive in an indecipherable rush of emotion. We perceive strong, intuitive, and sometimes oppositional reactions at once. So it is little wonder that no single traditional moral justification for punishment is satisfactory. Traditional theories, both retributive and utilitarian, are grounded in a priori truths that ignore the convergence of the theoretical, the practical and the emotional (...) that gives rise to the need to punish. In their stead, we should embrace an advertently pragmatic theoretical approach, which recognize the primary need to protect ourselves against danger, but looks as well to providing reformation wherever possible. Such an approach does not ignore the traditional rationales. To eschew retribution entirely is to deny a deeply-rooted moral intuition and forego efforts to tame it. To jettison utility is to condemn the victim and community to perpetual fear; just to the extent that retributive impulses, by any name, undermine necessary forward-looking concerns about our future's safety, they poorly serve our needs, which include service to the victim, the community and the offender. (shrink)

English today seems to be emerging as a global lingua franca. And a global lingua franca would be a global public good. Characteristically, being non-excludable, public goods are susceptible to free-riding: absent targeted distributive policies, some individuals can accrue a good’s benefits without having contributed to the costs of its production. In this paper, I make two arguments. First, I argue, against Philippe Van Parijs, that Anglophones are not unfairly free-riding on the efforts of non-Anglophones of producing English as a (...) global lingua franca. I defend the view that instances of what counts as unfair free-riding should be limited to free-riding on public goods that are co-operatively produced. Second, I suggest an alternative claim that is available for Van Parijs to make. Van Parijs believes a global lingua franca is required by global justice. This is a highly controversial claim. But if he is right, then Anglophones' free-riding on the global lingua franca while not an instance of unfair free-riding, may be objectionable nonetheless. (shrink)