In this paper, Ayelet Shachar begins by restating the main idea of her important book The Birthright Lottery : Citizenship and Global Inequality and then goes on to address in a constructive spirit the main themes raised by the five preceding comments written by scholars in the fields of law, philosophy and political science.Dans cet article, Ayelet Shachar commence par rappeler l’idée centrale de son livre important The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality avant de répondre de manière (...) constructive aux cinq commentaires qui précèdent, rédigés par des experts dans les domaines du droit, de la philosophie et de la science politique. (shrink)

Cet article est la traduction française de l’introduction du livre d’Ayelet Shachar, «The Puzzle of Birthright Citizenship», avec la permission de l’éditeur, tirée de The Birthright Lottery : Citizenship and Global Inequality, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp.1-18. © 2009 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Traduction de Martin Provencher.This paper is the French translation of Ayelet Shachar’s introduction, «The Puzzle of Birthright Citizenship», digitally reproduced by permission of the publisher from The Birthright Lottery : Citizenship and Global (...) Inequality, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp.1-18. © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Translation by Martin Provencher. (shrink)

As systems based on opaque Artificial Intelligence (AI) continue to flourish in diverse real-world applications, understanding these black box models has become paramount. In response, Explainable AI (XAI) has emerged as a field of research with practical and ethical benefits across various domains. This paper not only highlights the advancements in XAI and its application in real-world scenarios but also addresses the ongoing challenges within XAI, emphasizing the need for broader perspectives and collaborative efforts. We bring together experts from diverse (...) fields to identify open problems, striving to synchronize research agendas and accelerate XAI in practical applications. By fostering collaborative discussion and interdisciplinary cooperation, we aim to propel XAI forward, contributing to its continued success. Our goal is to put forward a comprehensive proposal for advancing XAI. To achieve this goal, we present a manifesto of 27 open problems categorized into nine categories. These challenges encapsulate the complexities and nuances of XAI and offer a road map for future research. For each problem, we provide promising research directions in the hope of harnessing the collective intelligence of interested stakeholders. (shrink)

Recent political theory has attempted to unbundle demos and ethnos, and thus citizenship from national identity. There are two possible ways to meet this challenge: by taming the relationship between citizenship and the nation, for example, by defending a form of liberal multicultural nationalism, or by transcending it with a postnational, cosmopolitan conception of citizenship. Both strategies run up against the boundedness of democratic authority. In this paper, I argue that Shachar adresses this issue in an innovative way, but (...) remains ultimately trapped by it. My argument has two parts. In the first one, I look at the analogy between property and citizenship on which Shachar rely to justify the obligations of wealthy states towards the global poor. I suggest that it does not work well to explain the rarity of citizenship and that the idea of taxing its value at the global level, however intuitive in liberal theory on property, could yield unexpected and non-liberal consequences. Nevertheless I also assess its merits. In the second part, I suggest that Shachar’s claim that her argument generates a legal obligation toward the global poor is not binding. It could only be so with the kind of cosmopolitan political institutions that she eschews. Thus we return where we begin. (shrink)

This paper offers a positive account of an important but under-explored class of mental states, non-propositional attitudes such as loving one’s department, liking lattice structures, fearing Freddy Krueger, and hating Sherlock Holmes. In broadest terms, the view reached is a representationalist account guided by two puzzles. The proposal allows one to say in an elegant way what differentiates a propositional attitude from an attitude merely about a proposition. The proposal also allows one to offer a unified account of the (...) non-propositional attitudes that captures both empty and non-empty cases by properly locating the posited representations in the metaphysical structure of the attitudes. (shrink)

This paper uses Shachar’s conception of jus nexi to explore three interrelated ideas. I first contend that Shachar’s analysis of the monetary value of birthright citizenship may be applied to temporary workers, lawful permanent residents and naturalized citizens as an exposé of inherited privilege in diverse communities and as a means of identifying which forms of membership and belonging are worth owning. Second, I use the idea of jus nexi to question which additional work relationships and identity networks (...) that might qualify as genuine connections to a given state. Finally, I question whether an operationalized version of jus nexi, that is an alternative category of citizenship, would supplant or complement existing jus soli and jus sanguinis rules. Here, I seek to apply Shachar’s theoretical contributions to current political debates and warn that a genuine connection test is increasingly being misused to support a nativist agenda. (shrink)

It is often argued that development aid can and should compensate the restrictions on migration. Such compensation, Shachar has recently argued, should be levied as a tax on citizenship to further the global equality of opportunity. Since citizenship is essentially a ‘birthright lottery’, that is, a way of legalizing privileges obtained by birth, it would be fair to compensate the resulting gap in opportunities available to children born in rich versus poor countries by a ‘birthright privilege levy’. This article (...) sets out a defence of three theses. The first states that equality of opportunity is incompatible with, and cannot be achieved in, segregated territories. The second posits that to believe that material equality compensates the injustice of restrictions on movement is to commit a ‘sedentarist mistake’. The third affirms that any citizenship levy, including the egalitarian and non-sedentarist formula I’m proposing, would be better understood as a penalty rather than a tax. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 3, Page 601-607, July 2022. Ayelet Shachar's The Shifting Border deploys a powerful map metaphor to support rethinking of borders and their functions. I interrogate this metaphor, developing some of the representational, constructive, and normative functions of maps, along with their connections to legal mechanisms for decoupling migration from territory. I survey three responses to the extra-territorialization of migration: a cynical response that rejects the possibility of migration justice, an abolitionist response (...) connected to open borders, and a revisionist response that advocates for widescale institutional reform. The revisionist response illuminates how Shachar's essay challenges us to reflect on what sorts of maps and accompanying social and political organizations would best support migrant justice. (shrink)

This article proposes to read John Banville’s The Book of Evidence, a crime story narrated from the protagonist’s first-person gaze, from a Lacanian perspective by referring to his mirror stage theory. As an extension of testimonial literature, the novel is deemed to be a narrative of introspective self-examination, thus introducing a creation of “the self” paralleling the text. The protagonist’s mnemonic narrative is accompanied by the idea of an alternative world of not only self-expression but also self-depiction and presentation, as (...) in Lacan’s Imaginary. This self-creation, however, may not be as innocent as it seems. The reason for this is that although the mirror phase involves a transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic, it presupposes the role of the other, biologically (m)other, in order to accustom the subject to the law of society. However, just because the protagonist, Freddie, mentions his mother’s presence as “nothing,” there is no soothing force for his adaptation to societal laws. Here, Freddie is subject to what Lacan sees as a minor prototype who lives in a society and yet is attached to his own rules, which is the first principle of male violence associated with this novel. Therefore, this article also tries to find answers for Freddie’s performance of male violence within the axis of psychoanalytic postulations elaborated on Lacan’s identity theory. (shrink)

In The Birthright Lottery, Ayelet Shachar subjects the institution of birthright citizenship to close scrutiny by applying to citizenship the historical and philosophical critique of hereditary ownership built up over four centuries of liberal and democratic theory, and proposing compelling alternatives drawn from the theory of private law to the usual modes of conveyance of membership. Nonetheless, there are some difficulties with this critique. First, the analogy between entailed property and birthright citizenship is not as illustrative as Shachar (...) intends it to be; second, the mechanism of the birthright privilege levy is insufficient for addressing structural impediments to growth; and third, the principle of ius nexi, while an important corrective to currently dominant principles of nationality, will likely have effects both unnecessary and insufficient to correct the injustices that Shachar identifies. In the end, the most significant improvements in the lives of the neediest persons on the planet are more likely advanced through conventional arguments for the lowering of barriers to the circulation of goods, labor, and capital. This shift in attention from opening borders to extending citizenship risks being a distraction from more effective means of addressing the injustices associated with global inequality.Dans son livre The Birthright Lottery, Ayelet Shachar soumet l’institution de la citoyenneté par droit de naissance à un examen rigoureux, en appliquant à la citoyenneté la critique philosophique et historique de la propriété héritée construite pendant quatre siècles de théorie démocratique libérale, et en proposant aux modes habituels d’attribution de la citoyenneté une alternative séduisante tirée de la théorie du droit privé. Néanmoins, cette critique comporte certaines difficultés. Premièrement, l’analogie entre la transmission de la propriété par l’institution de la taille et la citoyenneté par droit de naissance n’est pas aussi éclairante que le soutient Shachar ; deuxièmement, le mécanisme de la taxe sur le privilège du droit de naissance est insuffisant pour s’attaquer aux obstacles structurels à la croissance ; et troisièmement, le principe du jus nexi, bien qu’on puisse le considérer comme un important correctif du principe de nationalité actuellement dominant, aura vraisemblablement des effets à la fois non nécessaires et insuffisants pour corriger les injustices que Shachar identifie. En fin de compte, les améliorations les plus significatives dans la vie des personnes les plus démunies de la planète sont vraisemblablement mieux défendues à l’aide des arguments conventionnels en faveur d’une baisse des barrières à la circulation des biens, du travail et du capital. Ce déplacement de l’attention de l’ouverture des frontières à l’extension de la citoyenneté risque de nous distraire des moyens plus efficaces de nous attaquer aux injustices associées à l’inégalité globale. (shrink)

With The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality, Ayelet Shachar is the first major scholar to put the rich theory of property law theory to work in the realm of citizenship. Assessed on its own criteria, the book delivers on its promise to shake up our thinking on this question. Nevertheless, I argue in this paper that her account is not ultimately persuasive. First, Shachar takes for granted that citizenship is a valuable resource. I suggest that today legal (...) residency is more highly valued that citizenship. Also her defense of the state and the social advantages of having stable citizenship regimes does nothing to confront its decline as the central organizing principle of political life. Last but not least, the modalities of a birthright citizenship levy calls into question the underlying analysis. For instance, the current proposal looks undistinguishable from foreign aid and it would demand much more robust institutional organs of global governance that now exist. The second prong of her argument works at the domestic level as it tackles the problem of under- and over-inclusiveness of birthright citizenship. Here too I have reservations highlighted by modes of implementation. (shrink)

On September 7, 2008 the executive administration of American President George W. Bush announced that his government would take over the giant mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, costing the citizens $200 billion. One week later, the 160 year-old American investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. What would soon be known worldwide as “the financial crisis” had begun. In response to that crisis, less than a month later, on October 3, 2008, the (...) United States Congress passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which established the Troubled Asset Relief Program and authorized the use of $700 billion in taxpayer funds to bail out the banking and finance industry. As a result, the U.S. Treasury reports that the total bailout gave Bank of America $45 billion, Citigroup Bank $45 billion, AIG Bank $40 billion, J. P Morgan $25 billion, Wells Fargo $25 billion, General Motors $10.4 billion, Goldman Sachs $10 billion, Morgan Stanley $10 billion, GMAC $5 billion, and Chrysler corporation, a mere $4 billion. This response to a perceived crisis was not limited to the United States. On October 12, 2008—in one day alone—the United Kingdom coughed up the equivalent of €679 billion in bank relief. And in Germany, Der Spiegel reported on December 23, 2008 “The German government whipped its €480 billion bank bailout package through parliament in record time.". (shrink)