In the recent debate on political legitimacy, we have seen the emergence of a revisionist camp, advocating the idea of ‘legitimacy without political obligation,’ as opposed to the traditional view that political obligation is necessary for state legitimacy. The revisionist idea of legitimacy is appealing because if it stands, the widespread skepticism about the existence of political obligation will not lead us to conclude that the state is illegitimate. (...) Unfortunately, existing conceptions of ‘legitimacy without political obligation’ are subject to serious objections. In this article, I propose a new conception of ‘legitimacy without political obligation,’ and defend it against various objections that the revisionist idea of legitimacy is either conceptually or morally mistaken. This new conception of legitimacy promises to advance the debates between anarchists and statists by making the task of philosophical anarchists significantly more difficult. (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)

Contemporary debates on obedience and consent, such as those between Thomas Senor and A. John Simmons, suggest that either political obligation must exist as a concept or there must be natural duty of justice accessible to us through reason. Without one or the other, de facto political institutions would lack the requisite moral framework to engage in legitimate coercion. This essay suggests that both are unnecessary in order to provide a conceptual framework in which obedience to (...) coercive political institutions can be understood. By providing a novel reading of Hobbes’s Leviathan, this article argues that both political obligation and a natural duty to justice are unnecessary to ground the ability of political institutions to engage in legitimate coercion. This essay takes issue with common readings of Hobbes which assume consent is necessary to generate obedience on the part of citizens, and furthermore that political obligation is critical for the success of political institutions. While the failure of the traditional Hobbesian narrative of a consenting individual would seem to suggest the Leviathan is indefensible as a project, this paper argues that the right of war in the state of nature was more central for Hob- bes’s understanding of political institutions than obligation. Furthermore, Hobbes provides an adequate defense of political institutions even if his arguments about consent, obligation and punishment are only rhetorical. In this way Hobbesian law is best understood as a set of practical requirements to avoid war, and not as moral requirements that individuals are bound to comply with. Thus Hobbesian political institutions are not vulnerable to contemporary philosophical anarchist criticisms about political obligation and political institutions as such. To develop this reading, I focus primarily on the Leviathan, including interpretations by Skinner, Kateb, Flathman, and Oakeshott. Ultimately, this argument provides insight into contem- porary political institutions of the state, citizenship, criminality, and the law in a world where political obligation has not been adequately justified. (shrink)

Central to Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia is a defense of the legitimacy of the minimal state’s use of coercion against anarchist objections. Individuals acting within their natural rights can establish the state without committing wrongdoing against those who disagree. Nozick attempts to show that even with a natural executive right, individuals need not actually consent to incur political obligations. Nozick’s argument relies on an account of compensation to remedy the infringement of the non-consenters’ procedural rights. Compensation, (...) however, cannot remedy the infringement, for either it is superfluous to Nozick’s account of procedural rights, or it is made to play a role inconsistent with Nozick’s liberal voluntarist commitments. Nevertheless, Nozick’s account of procedural rights contains clues for how to solve the problem. Since procedural rights are incompatible with a natural executive right, Nozickeans can argue that only the state can enforce individuals’ rights without wronging anyone, thus refuting the anarchist. Thanks to Annette Dufner, Arnt Myrstad, Arthur Ripstein, Gopal Sreenivasan, James Sterba, Chloe Taylor, Sergio Tenenbaum, and Shelley Weinberg. Thanks also to Matt Zwolinski and Jonelle DePetro, who commented on earlier versions of the paper at the Central APA 2007 and at the 2006 Illinois Philosophical Association Conference (respectively). Finally, thanks to my graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for their active engagement with the ideas during a seminar on liberal theories of justice (fall 2007). (shrink)

The paper focuses on John Rawls’ theory of political obligation. Rawls bases political obligation on our natural duties of justice, which are mediated to us by our sense of justice. Therefore the justification of political obligation also requires moral justification: the justification of the principles of justice. In the paper I first investigate that part of Rawls’ argument that has the role of justification: the method of reflective equilibrium. This method raises several problems, the (...) most severe of which is that it neglects the fact of pluralism. The second part of the paper deals with this problem. I analyse how Rawls’ theory and his method of justification has changed as a result of taking into account the fact of pluralism. Finally, building on the demands of pluralism and the shortcomings of the Rawlsian answer, I present a possible theory of political obligation. This theory is grounded in the interpretation of the community’s political culture while fitting it into a discourse-based theoretical framework. (shrink)

What obligations are there on voters? This paper argues that voters should make their electoral decision competently, and does so by developing on a recent proposal for democratic legitimacy. It then explores three problems arising from this ‘competency obligation’. First, how should voters be competent? I propose three conditions required for voter competence. Second, how competent should voters be? I argue that the competency required tracks the significance of the consequences of the vote. Third, if the electorate are (...) unlikely to deliver a competent decision, should suffrage be restricted to the competent alone? I defend unrestricted suffrage on the grounds that restricting suffrage cannot guarantee a competently made electoral decision. Instead, obligations on voters should be minimised by political parties satisfying their obligations to be politically sound; if they are sound, then the obligation to be competent can be easily satisfied by voters. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: So far in this book, we have examined algorithmic decision systems from three autonomy-based perspectives: in terms of what we owe autonomous agents (chapters 3 and 4), in terms of the conditions required for people to act autonomously (chapters 5 and 6), and in terms of the responsibilities of agents (chapter 7). -/- In this chapter we turn to the ways in which autonomy underwrites democratic governance. Political authority, which is to say the ability of a government to (...) exercise power, may be justifiable or not. Whether it is justified and how it can come to be justified is a question of political legitimacy. Political legitimacy is another way in which autonomy and responsibility are linked. This relationship is the basis of the current chapter, and it is important in understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems. We will draw the connection as follows. We begin, in section 8.1, by describing two uses of technology: crime predicting technology used to drive policing practices and social media technology used to influence elections (including by Cambridge Analytica and by the Internet Research Agency). In section 8.2 we consider several views of legitimacy and argue for a hybrid version of normative legitimacy based on one recently offered by Fabienne Peter. In section 8.3 we will explain that the connection between political legitimacy and autonomy is that legitimacy is grounded in legitimating processes, which are in turn based on autonomy. Algorithmic systems—among them PredPol and the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Internet Research Agency amalgam—can hinder that legitimation process and conflict with democratic legitimacy, as we argue in section 8.4. We will conclude by returning to several cases that serve as through-lines to the book: Loomis, Wagner, and Houston Schools. -/- The link below is to an open-access copy of the chapter. (shrink)

Some types of solar radiation management (SRM) research are ethically problematic because they expose persons, animals, and ecosystems to significant risks. In our earlier work, we argued for ethical norms for SRM research based on norms for biomedical research. Biomedical researchers may not conduct research on persons without their consent, but universal consent is impractical for SRM research. We argue that instead of requiring universal consent, ethical norms for SRM research require only political legitimacy in decision-making about (...) global SRM trials. Using Allen Buchanan & Robert Keohane's model of global political legitimacy, we examine several existing global institutions as possible analogues for a politically legitimate SRM decision-making body. (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)

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)

For the political naturalist, skepticism about political obligations only arises because of a basic confusion about the necessity of the state for human well-being. From this perspective, human beings are naturally political animals and cannot flourish outside of political relationships. In this paper, I suggest that this idea can be developed in two basic ways. For the thick naturalist, political institutions are constitutive of the best life. For the thin naturalist, they secure the basic background (...) conditions of peace and stability that are necessary for any minimally decent human life. Both approaches, however, are problematic, and while political institutions might have a special kind of value for human well-being, it is difficult to convert this claim into a justification for political obligations. (shrink)

Drawing on empirical evidence from history and anthropology, we aim to demonstrate that there is room for genealogical ideology critique within normative political theory. The test case is some libertarians’ use of folk notions of private property rights in defence of the legitimacy of capitalist states. Our genealogy of the notion of private property shows that asking whether a capitalist state can emerge without violations of self-ownership cannot help settling the question of its legitimacy, because the (...) notion of private property presupposed by that question is a product of the entity it is supposed to help legitimise: the state. We anchor our genealogical critique in recent work on ideology in epistemology and philosophy of language, and in current debates on the methodology of political theory. But, unlike more traditional approaches that aim to debunk whole concepts or even belief systems, we propose a more targeted, argument-specific form of ideology critique. (shrink)

The two justificatory roles of the social contract are establishing whether or not a state is legitimate simpliciter and establishing whether any particular individual is politically obligated to obey the dictates of its governing institutions. Rawls's theory is obviously designed to address the first role but less obviously the other. Rawls does offer a duty-based theory of political obligation that has been criticized by neo-Lockean A. John Simmons. I assess Simmons's criticisms and the possible responses that could be (...) made to them, including those offered by Samuel Freeman. I conclude they rest on a Rawlsian equivocation and ultimately fail. (shrink)

There are often public calls to codify moral sentiments after failures to help others, and recent tragedies have renewed interest in one’s legal duty to aid another. This Article examines the moral underpinnings and legitimacy of so-called “Bad Samaritan” laws—laws that criminalize failures to aid others in emergency situations. Part I examines the theoretical backdrop of duties imposed by Bad Samaritan laws, including their relationship with various moral duties to aid. This leads to the analysis in Part II, which (...) examines two related questions that are raised when moving from moral to legal duties: First, on what ground does the state have the authority to dictate that one’s needs should be met in the way specified by a particular legal duty? Second, does a special relationship exist that legitimizes the establishment of such legal duties? (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)

What is the point of ideology critique? Prominent Anglo-American philosophers recently proposed novel arguments for the view that ideology critique is moral critique, and ideologies are flawed insofar as they contribute to injustice or oppression. We criticize that view and make the case for an alternative and more empirically-oriented approach, grounded in epistemic rather than moral commitments. We make two related claims: (i) ideology critique can debunk beliefs and practices by uncovering how, empirically, they are produced by self-justifying power, and (...) (ii) the self-justification of power should be understood as an epistemic rather than moral flaw. Drawing on the recent realist revival in political theory, we argue that this genealogical approach has more radical potential, despite being more parsimonious than morality-based approaches. We demonstrate the relative advantages of our view by discussing the results of empirical studies on the contemporary phenomenon of neopatriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa. (shrink)

Massimo Renzo has recently offered a theory of legitimacy that attempts to ground the state’s right to rule on the assumption that people in the state of nature pose an unjust threat to each other and can therefore, in self-defense, be forced to enter the state, that is, to become subject to its authority. I argue that depending on how “unjust threat” is interpreted in Renzo’s self-defense argument for the authority of the state, either his premise that “those who (...) pose an unjust threat to others can be justifiably coerced in self-defense, at least when they are morally responsible for posing the threat,” or his premise that “would-be independents pose an unjust threat to those living next to them in the state of nature,” or both of them are wrong. I further argue that his premise that would-be independents pose an unjust threat by refusing to enter the state is also mistaken. Refusing to enter the state, that is, refusing to be subject to the authority of the state, is no threat at all, and hence coercing people into entering the state is no means of self-defense and incapable of enhancing security. Renzo’s deduction of state authority from the right to self-defense fails. (shrink)

Political equality is in tension with political quality, and quality has recently been neglected. My thesis is that proper attention to the quality of democratic procedures and their outcomes requires that we accept substantive inequalities of political input in the interest of increasing input overall. Mainly, I hope to refute political egalitarianism, the view that justice or legitimacy requires substantive political equality, specifically equal availability of power or influence over collective choices that have legal (...) force. I hope to show that political egalitarianism exaggerates individual rights in the conduct of political procedures, and neglects the substantive justice of the decisions made through those procedures. Some unequal distributions of influence may better promote just decisions, and without reliance on any invidious comparisons such as the relative wisdom of the wealthy or the educated. (shrink)

In this article, I draw on the Mesoamerican institution of community offices (cargo) to support the view that political authority should be based on both political legitimacy and political expertise. I argue that the Mesoamerican tradition of cargos allows for a notion of political expertise that one acquires by rendering a service to one’s community. This expertise could be made a prerequisite for political representation without being vulnerable to several charges that have been (...) levelled against epistocracy. (shrink)

In his paper “Fairness, Political Obligation, and the Justificatory Gap” (published in the Journal of Moral Philosophy), Jiafeng Zhu argues that the principle of fair play cannot require submission to the rules of a cooperative scheme, and that when such submission is required, the requirement is grounded in consent. I propose a better argument for the claim that fair play requires submission to the rules than the one Zhu considers. I also argue that Zhu’s attribution of consent to (...) people commonly thought to be bound to follow the rules by a duty of fair play is implausible. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to introduce an innovative approach to the theoretical debate of the last two centuries on how to appropriately conceptualize modern democracy. The main argument that is being put forward by the analysis is that the common reliance on the assumption of pre-modern political philosophy, that democracy is a certain type of political regime or at least a form of rule, has become insufficient to cover the influence and scope of its modern meaning (...) and practical use. Political theory faces the risk of becoming misguided and prejudiced, if the problem of re-conceptualizing democracy is not taken seriously into account. The article tends to offer new insights on the ongoing democratic debate by focusing on one simple question: can modern democracy be understood in terms of a political regime or should it be viewed as a distinct entity? The field of study relevant to our analysis of democracy ranges from Enlightenment thinkers, such as J. J. Rousseau and Voltaire, to XIX–XX century political philosophers (like A. de Tocqueville and C. Schmitt) and some contemporary theorists, like P. Manent. The article starts with explanations, why it is important to look deeper into the conceptual difficulties of modern democracy and why political philosophy and its theories on political regimes are crucial for such a task. Parts 3–5 of the analysis tend to prove that the only way to appropriately understand modern democracy is to identify and question its basic assumptions: the sovereignty of the people and social equality. The final part of the article – part 6 – offers a critique of understanding modern democracy as a political regime. The critique identifies three main theoretical problems, inherent to the discussion on modern democracy, which make it difficult to avoid contradictions when applying the name “democratic” to various political regimes. The article concludes that: First, democracy is not a political regime in a pre-modern sense of the term, which is an assumption still widely taken for granted in political theory. Democracy should be seen as a universal principle of legitimization of power, which can be applied by various regimes. Second, political philosophy faces the danger of adopting an oversimplified understanding of democracy as merely an institutional form of rule (a view perpetuated by social sciences); as well as the danger of conceptualizing democracy as a substance-free and abstract ideal, applicable to all forms of government. Both of these concepts fail to acknowledge the scope of democracy and thus should not be seen as satisfactory. Third, theoretical discussions on democracy suffer from three conceptual shortcomings, which make it impossible to speak about democracy as a political regime. The three problems are: 1. a tendency to see democracy as an ideal concept with no need of practical grounding; 2. making democracy a formal concept with no need of references to its normative nor positive substance; 3. making democracy a pseudo-religious entity by imitating structural elements of Christian religion: faith in a universal nature of humans, an all-powerful sovereign (the people), messianic mission. Lastly, the article generalizes that political philosophy has an obligation to demystify the concept of democracy in order to re-emerge discussions about the substance of different political regimes. For this purpose the concept of loyalty should be taken into account. If we want to prove that a certain state corresponds to a certain political regime, we must try to understand why its subjects maintain loyalty to a specific form of rule. Only unprejudiced political philosophy is capable of such a task, that’s why it should avoid taking the concept of democracy for granted. (shrink)

The challenge posed by legal indeterminacy to legal legitimacy has generally been considered from points of view internal to the law and its application. But what becomes of legal legitimacy when the legal status of a given norm is itself a matter of contestation? This article, the first extended scholarly treatment of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s new definition of antisemitism, pursues this question by examining recent applications of the IHRA definition within the UK following its adoption (...) by the British government in 2016. Instead of focusing on this definition’s substantive content, I show how the document reaches beyond its self-described status as a “non-legally binding working definition” and comes to function as what I call a quasi-law, in which capacity it exercises the de facto authority of the law, without having acquired legal legitimacy. Broadly, this work elucidates the role of speech codes in restricting freedom of expression within liberal states. (shrink)

Ideally, should liberals in a pluralistic society be able to agree to abide by a common legal system such that all their disputes are resolved without resort to illegal force? Rawls believes the answer is “yes.” I explain and defend his answer, but I also conclude, focusing on the example of abortion, that the truth is “not necessarily, not always.” Rawls’s conceptions of reasonable citizens and public reason help explain why there is a strong prima facie duty to forswear (...) illegal force. It is based on the duty to respect others, which requires that one be able to justify one's actions to them insofar as they are reasonable and matters of basic justice are at issue. One cannot justify using illegal force to those who reasonably think a law is just; to them it is a form of disrespect. Nonetheless, if one reasonably thinks that a fundamental injustice is tolerated or even established by the law, then one may be no less reasonable than one has reason to be if one uses illegal force, sacrificing this form of respect to right a greater wrong. (shrink)

Debates between political liberals and liberal perfectionists have been reinvigorated by Jonathan Quong’s Liberalism Without Perfection. In this paper I argue that certain forms of perfectionism can rebut or evade Quong’s three central objections – that perfectionism is manipulative, paternalistic, and illegitimate. I then argue that perfectionists can defend an ‘internal conception’ of perfectionism, parallel in structure to Quong’s ’internal conception’ of political liberalism, but with a different conception of the justificatory constituency. None of Quong’s arguments show (...) that his view should be preferred to this perfectionist internal conception. It can thus equally claim to achieve ‘justification to all reasonable citizens’. (shrink)

Recent divine command theorists make a serious and impressive case that a sophisticated divine command theory has significant metaethical advantages and can adequately meet traditional objections, such as the Euthyphro problem. I survey the attempt sympathetically with a view to explaining how the divine command theory can deal with traditional objections while delivering on metaethical desiderata, such as providing an account of ethical objectivity. I argue, however, that to the extent that a divine command theory succeeds, an ideal observer theory (...) can do equally well. Once the divine command theory is rendered immune to Euthyphro-related objections, we will have all the machinery needed to show that an ideal observer theory can provide the same metaethical advantages, without supposing the existence of a divine commander. Other things being equal, ontological simplicity favors the ideal observer theory. (shrink)

The article focuses on the justification provided by classical contract theory for the right of states to enact laws and the corresponding obligation of political allegiance. First the distinction between political authority and parental authority developed by John Locke in his seminal work “Two Treatises of Government” is explored. Thereafter it is discussed why the interests the individuals have in the creation of a state fail to vindicate the exercise of governmental power. As regards David Hume’s influential (...) objections to contract theory it is argued that the consent criterion of political legitimacy withstands his criticism. Hume cannot establish that the core idea of Locke’s justificatory approach is mistaken; he merely demonstrates that hardly any existing state meets the consent requirement. Finally the question is discussed which conditions a state must fulfil in order to be entitled to claim that its citizens tacitly approve of its authority. (shrink)

Some sharing economy firms have adopted a strategy of “regulatory entrepreneurship,” openly violating regulations with the aim of rendering them dead letters. This article argues that in a democracy, regulatory entrepreneurship is a presumptively unethical business strategy. In all but the most corrupt political environments, businesses that seek to change their regulatory environment should do so through the democratic political process, and they should do so without using illegal business practices to build a political constituency. To (...) show this, the article defends a qualified moral obligation for businesspeople to obey the law even in societies that fall short of ideal democracy and that are rife with economic injustice. Owners and managers of successful businesses have strong moral reasons to obey laws concerning resource allocation. Such laws include not only property law, but also tax laws, environmental regulations, and other laws that regulate businesses in competitive markets. The moral reasons to obey such laws apply even to laws that business leaders think unfair or inefficient, provided that the laws in question have reasonable, good faith defenders. (shrink)

Without doubt, the global challenges we are currently facing—above all world poverty and climate change—require collective solutions: states, national and international organizations, firms and business corporations as well as individuals must work together in order to remedy these problems. In this chapter, I discuss climate change mitigation as a collective action problem from the perspective of moral philosophy. In particular, I address and refute three arguments suggesting that business firms and corporations have no moral duty to reduce greenhouse gas (...) emissions: (i) that business corporations are not appropriate addressees of moral demands because they are not moral agents, and (ii) that to the extent that they are moral agents their primary moral obligation is to their owners or shareholders, and (iii) the appeal to the difference principle: that individual business corporations cannot really make a significant difference to successful climate change mitigation. (shrink)

Though many ethicists have the intuition that we should leave nature alone, Kyle Johannsen argues that we have a duty to research safe ways of providing large-scale assistance to wild animals. Using concepts from moral and political philosophy to analyze the issue of wild animal suffering (WAS), Johannsen explores how a collective, institutional obligation to assist wild animals should be understood. He claims that with enough research, genetic editing may one day give us the power to safely intervene (...) without perpetually interfering with wild animals’ liberties.---------------Questions addressed include: In what way is nature valuable and is interference compatible with that value? Is interference a requirement of justice? What are the implications of WAS for animal rights advocacy? What types of intervention are promising?---------------Expertly moving the debate about human relations with wild animals beyond its traditional confines, Wild Animal Ethics is essential reading for students and scholars of political philosophy and political theory studying animal ethics, environmental ethics, and environmental philosophy. (shrink)

The concept of law is not a theorist's invention but one that people use every day. Thus one measure of the adequacy of a theory of law is its degree of fidelity to the concept as it is understood by those who use it. That means as far as possible. There are important truisms about the law that have an evaluative cast. The theorist has either to say what would make those evaluative truisms true or to defend her choice to (...) dismiss them as false of law or not of the essence of law. Thus the legal theorist must give an account of the truth grounds of the more central evaluative truisms about law. This account is a theory of legitimacy. It will contain framing judgments that state logical relations between descriptive judgments and directly evaluative judgments. Framing judgments are not directly evaluative, nor do they entail directly evaluative judgments, but they are nonetheless moral judgments. Therefore, an adequate theory of law must make (some) moral judgments. This means that an adequate theory of law has to take a stand on certain (but not all) contested issues in political philosophy. Legal theory is thus a branch of political philosophy. Moreover, one cannot be a moral-aim functionalist about legal institutions without compromising one's positivism about legal norms. (shrink)

Most bioethicists who address questions to which global justice matters have not considered the significance of the disputes over the correct theory of global justice. Consequently, the significance of the differences between theories of global justice for bioethics has been obscured. In this paper, I consider when and how these differences are important. I argue that certain bioethical problems can be resolved without addressing disagreements about global justice. People with very different views about global justice can converge on the (...) existence of a duty to aid the very badly off — those in absolute poverty — wherever they may be. However, despite agreement on extreme cases, there should be disagreement over the extent of international obligations to those who are only relatively poor. Consequently, different theories of justice will diverge in their implications for a number of important problems in contemporary bioethics. I close by sketching in more detail two contemporary bioethical issues —concerning pharmaceutical patents and the health worker brain drain —and show how responses to them might be developed by cosmopolitan and statist liberals. (shrink)

What would it mean to have a suitably ‘realistic’ account of political liberty? On the one hand, I don’t think we can properly understand liberty without an underlying account of personhood or agency.2 In making sense of liberty, we need to ask: What kind of agency does it presuppose or promote? What kind of independence do we care most about? What does it mean to exercise control, or to be self-guiding, in the kind of world we live in (...) today? At the same time, a conception of moral and political personhood needs to be appropriately ‘realistic’: It shouldn’t be over-idealized (or over-simplified), nor demand more than can be reasonably expected, given the kind of creatures we are. (shrink)

Hypothetical contracts have been said to be not worth the paper they are not written on. This paper defends hypothetical consent theories of justice, such as Rawls's, against the view that they lack justificatory power. I argue that while hypothetical consent cannot generate political obligation, it can generate political legitimacy.

P.J. Markie tries to solve the so-called particularity problem of natural duty accounts of political obligation, a problem which seems to make natural duty accounts implausible. I argue that Markie at best “dissolves” the problem: while his own natural duty account of political obligation still does not succeed in ensuring particularity, this is not an implausible but an entirely plausible implication of his account, thanks to the weakness of his concept of political obligation. The (...) price for this, however, is that his approach has little to do with political obligation and the particularity problem as discussed in the literature. (shrink)

(Early) Modern social contract theories reject the idea that legal and political institutions are grounded in an alleged natural ordering or hierarchy of human beings, and instead argue that only government by a public (and not private) authority can fulfil the idea of justice as freedom and equality for all. To be authoritative and not just powerful, governing institutions must be shared as ours in this irreducible sense. I first outline how Kant’s ideal account of rightful freedom brilliantly transforms (...) this tradition as found in the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, before proposing a way to see Kant’s two-layered non-ideal theory—his accounts of human nature (“moral anthropology”) and historical societies (“the principle of politics”)—as complementing his ideal theory of rightful freedom. This enables us to envision a conception not only of rightful external freedom but of rightful human freedom in particular societies—with their histories—on planet Earth. With these arguments at hand, we can also better appreciate the importance of realizing that the four possible political conditions for Kant—anarchy, barbarism, despotism, and republic—are ideas of reason, which means that they are never perfectly realized. Hence, historical societies we are not either in the state of nature or in civil society. In addition, in historical societies founded on principles of freedom, there are pockets of injustice or pockets that are devoid of justice that can only be captured by means of one of the three political ideas that are not constitutive of the republican legal-political framework. Kant’s four ideas therefore give us more tools with which to capture the nature of different political forces and challenges facing us in our historical societies. (shrink)

This is an anthology that is coming out in Farsi. -/- Table of Contents (in English): -/- 1. (2021). “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy.” The Cambridge Kant Lexicon, ed. Julian Wuerth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 691-695. 2. (2010). “Kant and Lying to the Murderer at the Door . . . One More Time: Kant’s Legal Philosophy and Lies to Murderers and Nazis.” The Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 41(4), pp. 403-421. 3. (2006). “Kant and Dependency Relations: (...) Kant on the State’s Right to Redistribute Resources to Protect the Rights of Dependents.” Dialogue – Canadian Philosophical Review, Vol. 45, pp. 257-284. 4. (2011). “A Kantian Conception of Global Justice.” Review of International Studies, Vol. 37(5), pp. 2043-2057. 5. (2010). “Kant’s Non-Absolutist Conception of Political Legitimacy: How Public Right ‘Concludes’ Private Right in ‘The Doctrine of Right.’”Kant-Studien, Vol. 3, pp. 331-351. 6. (2008). “Kant’s Non-Voluntarist Conception of Political Obligations: Why Justice Is Impossible in the State of Nature.” Kantian Review, Vol. 13(2), pp. 1-45. 7. (2021). “Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 121 (2), pp. 221-248. 8. (2020). “Kantian Care.” Caring for Liberalism: Dependency and Political Theory, ed. Asha L. Bhandary and Amy Baehr, New York: Routledge, pp. 50-74. 9. (2020). “Kant and Moral Responsibility for Animals.” Kant & Animals, ed. Lucy Allais and John Callanan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 157-175. -/- Thanks to all the original publishers of these articles for permitting them to be reprinted in translation here. Photo cover: pluspointsphere(.com). (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a conflict between two principles informing Locke’s political philosophy, namely his waste restriction and his strong voluntarism. Locke’s waste restriction is proposed as a necessary, enforceable restriction upon rightful private property holdings and it yields arguments to preserve and redistribute natural resources. Locke’s strong voluntarism is proposed as the liberal ideal of political obligations. It expresses Locke’s view that each individual has a natural political power, which can only be transferred to (...) a political body through the individual’s voluntary, actual consent. On this view, the legitimacy of a political power is dependent upon its subjects’ actual consent to its authority. After briefly outlining these two ideas informing Locke’s conception, I argue that we cannot maintain both at the same time. Therefore, contemporary Lockeans must either derive restrictions upon private property concerned with preserving natural resources from other aspects of Locke’s theory or they must accept weak voluntarism as the ideal of political obligations. I argue that both alternatives pose significant problems for the Lockean project. (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)

According to Corey Brettschneider, we can protect freedom of religion and promote equality, by distinguishing religious groups’ claims to freedom of expression and association from their claims to financial and verbal support from the state. I am very sympathetic to this position, which fits well with my own views of democratic rights and duties, and with the importance of recognizing the scope for political choice which democratic politics offers to governments and to citizens. This room for political choice, (...) I believe, is necessary if people are to have any chance of reconciling the conflicting moral and political obligations they are likely to face, however idealized our conception of democracy or morality. Granted that no amount of personal and political choice will ever guarantee that we do not encounter tragic choices, and painfully conflicting moral demands, it is an important feature of democracy – or so I believe – that its rights reflect the importance of mitigating these conflicts so that people are able, as a rule, to act as they ought, so that they do not experience their moral sentiments, beliefs and capacities simply as grounds for recrimination, alienation and despair. I therefore believe that democracies have good reason not to force the consciences of the undemocratic and the intolerant, where it is possible to accommodate such people without threatening the rights of others. However, the fact that I share many of Brettschneider’s intuitions and beliefs does not mean that I share them all. In particular, I find his conception of democracy unduly narrow, and unduly based on a rather idealized conception of the American constitution which is unlikely to appeal to those whose conceptions of democracy are more republican, more socialist, more pragmatic and more international than his. I have explained these worries elsewhere and drawn out some of their implications for his arguments about privacy and judicial review. There is no need to repeat them here. I will also set to one side my worries about his uninflected, overly abstract and rather reified characterization of the State, in the hope that others will discuss this and that, in the end, a more nuanced conception of the State and a more lively appreciation of the conflicting people, institutions, histories and norms which make up most states, will prove consistent with his arguments. Finally, I do not propose to enter into a detailed discussion of the difficulties of Brettschneider’s overly abstract and reified conception of State ‘speech’ and ‘expression’ which, while motivated by the language of American constitutionalism, appears to cover pretty much anything a government might do, from raising and spending taxes, to accepting judicial interpretations of contested constitutional provisions, or to affirmatively pronouncing on the goals that will animate its legislative agenda and its aspirations for citizen’s lives. Again, while I would have wished for a more nuanced and analytical discussion of so central a concept as ‘expression’ and, in particular, expression by ‘the State’, I am uncertain that anything fundamental in Brettschneider’s account of citizen rights and duties would be altered in the process. Instead, then, I want to focus on points in Brettschneider’s argument that intrigue, and sometimes puzzle, me the most and where issues of nuance and clarification might make a substantial difference to our views of equality and religious freedom. (shrink)

This essay presents a new way of conceptualizing the problem of political obligation. On the traditional ‘normativist’ framing of the issue, the primary task for theory is to secure the content and justification of political obligations, providing practically applicable moral knowledge. This paper develops an alternative, ‘pragmatist’ framing of the issue, by rehabilitating a frequently misunderstood essay by Hanna Pitkin and by recasting her argument in terms of the ‘pragmatic turn’ in recent philosophy, as articulated by Robert (...) Brandom. From this perspective, the content and justification of political obligations cannot be determined in a way that is in principle separable from their application. This casts ‘political obligation’ not as a problem to be philosophically resolved, but as a political predicament that calls for a kind of practical engagement. The merit of this perspective is to draw our attention toward the conditions under which the problem appears as a lived predicament. (shrink)

The contemporary political philosopher John Rawls considers himself to be part of the social contract tradition of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, but not of the tradition of Locke's predecessor, Thomas Hobbes. Call the Hobbesian tradition interest-based, and the Lockean tradition right-based, because it assumes that there are irreducible moral facts which the social contract can assume. The primary purpose of Locke's social contract is to justify the authority of the state over its citizens despite the fact (...) that those citizens are naturally free and equal. I assume that this task is of central importance to all right-based social contract theories: in chapter one I lay out the general problems faced by all contract theories, and in chapter two, three and four I examine in depth the accounts of political obligation offered by Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls. I conclude that all members of the right-based social contract tradition fail to provide an account of obligation that can explain the bond between a citizen and her state. (shrink)

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)

IntroductionAssociative theories of political obligation offer a fresh alternative to approaches such as social contract theory, fair play, and the natural duty of justice. Few suggestions in ethics are more intuitive than the idea that we have special obligations to our family and friends, just in virtue of our relationships with them, and it is reasonable that obligations to political society are also grounded through association.A basic question for associative theories is to explain how associations give rise (...) to obligation, but here there is a common error. Many associative theorists and their critics take this question to be equivalent to the question: what distinguishes associations that are morally acceptable from those that are not? The assumption is that associations which are morally acceptable are those that give rise to obligations. However, this assumption is wrong in two ways. Associations that have some unacceptable features may still give rise to obl .. (shrink)

One of the most noticeable trends in recent years has been the increasing reliance of public decision-making processes on algorithms, i.e. computer-programmed step-by-step instructions for taking a given set of inputs and producing an output. The question raised by this article is whether the rise of such algorithmic governance creates problems for the moral or political legitimacy of our public decision-making processes. Ignoring common concerns with data protection and privacy, it is argued that algorithmic governance does pose a (...) significant threat to the legitimacy of such processes. Modelling my argument on Estlund’s threat of epistocracy, I call this the ‘threat of algocracy’. The article clarifies the nature of this threat and addresses two possible solutions. It is argued that neither solution is likely to be successful, at least not without risking many other things we value about social decision-making. The result is a somewhat pessimistic conclusion in which we confront the possibility that we are creating decision-making processes that constrain and limit opportunities for human participation. (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)

Honors Research: PPE @ UPenn | This thesis seeks to address some of the most central questions to the fields of political philosophy and political economy. How can social order and government develop from anarchy under standard economic assumptions of rationality, where all agents act strictly in their own interests? What are the deontological limits to the State’s use of force such that political legitimacy is maintained, and how do these ethical boundaries of government relate to (...) moral obligations conferred upon individuals? Finally, what sets of policies and social institutions ought the State implement to achieve the best welfare outcomes for a society, and is there a necessary conflict between policy consequentialism and deontological ethics? This thesis will first show that a laissez-faire capitalist social order spontaneously emerges from the State of Nature as a result of mutual self-interest between rational agents, with the institution of government being a mere product of market forces that is best modeled as a locally-monopolized, excludable, collective entity with global competition. Then, this thesis will defend a theory of natural rights on the basis that persons are normatively separate, before establishing that laissez-faire capitalism and its contractual form of government are uniquely in compliance with these universal moral standards of conduct that predate the institution of any state. Finally, it will be argued in this thesis that the key tenets of laissez-faire capitalism - strong individual rights to life, liberty, and property - produce maximal human welfare from both individualist and collectivist aggregations, before such conclusions are translated into a foundation for limited government. These arguments serve to solidify libertarianism as both the dominant political philosophy and the globally convergent equilibrium of political organization, while also demonstrating that laissez-faire capitalism is the optimal form of social order. (shrink)

The tension between the authority of states and the authority of international institutions is a persistent feature of international relations. Legitimacy assessments of international institutions play a crucial role in resolving such tensions. If an international institution exercises legitimate authority, it creates binding obligations for states. According to Raz’s well-known service conception, legitimate authority depends on the reasons for actions of those who are subject to it. Yet what are the practical reasons that should guide the actions of states? (...) Can states be bound by international institutions on all kinds of issues or are certain issues exempted because of sovereignty considerations? This paper argues that self-regarding reasons cannot ground political authority with the respective demand for compliance. Since reasons for states concern individuals both inside and outside of their jurisdiction and other state peoples, self-regarding reasons for states, which form a domain of personal pursuits or sovereign decisions, are highly restricted. (shrink)

International institutions have become increasingly important not only in the relations between states, but also for individuals. When are these institutions legitimate? The legitimacy standards fo...

This paper investigates how political theorists and philosophers should understand egalitarian political demands in light of the increasingly important realist critique of much of contemporary political theory and philosophy. It suggests, first, that what Martin O'Neill has called non-intrinsic egalitarianism is, in one form at least, a potentially realistic egalitarian political project and second, that realists may be compelled to impose an egalitarian threshold on state claims to legitimacy under certain circumstances. Non-intrinsic egalitarianism can meet (...) realism’s methodological requirements because it does not have to assume an unavailable moral consensus since it can focus on widely acknowledged bads rather than contentious claims about the good. Further, an appropriately formulated non-intrinsic egalitarianism may be a minimum requirement of an appropriately realistic claim by a political order to authoritatively structure some of its members' lives. Without at least a threshold set of egalitarian commitments, a political order seems unable to be transparent to many of its worse off members under a plausible construal of contemporary conditions. (shrink)