A. John Simmons

‘Rights and Territories: A Reply to Nine, Miller, and Stilz’ defends the Lockean theory of states’ territorial rights (as this theory was presented in Boundaries of Authority) against the critiques of Nine, Miller, and Stilz. In response to Nine’s concern that such a Lockean theory cannot justify the right of legitimate states to exclude aliens, it is argued that a consent-based theory like the Lockean one is flexible enough to justify a wide range of possible incidents of territorial rights – importantly including, though not necessarily including, the sort of right to exclude aliens that is familiar from actual political practice. Miller’s criticisms are more wide-ranging. In response, the article argues that Lockean labor-based property rights are both stronger and more enduring than Miller suggests and that nationalism’s resources for dealing with concerns about rights-supersession and trapped minorities are importantly overstated by Miller. Against Stilz’s Kantian, ‘presentist’ account of states’ authority over persons and territories, it is argued that the rectification of past (historical) wrongs remains morally crucial even in the context of otherwise-just societies and that Stilz’s Kantian/rawlsian position unconvincingly privileges the rights to autonomy of territorially concentrated groups over those of dissenting individuals or wrongfully dispersed groups.

Chapter 3 argues that the most prominent contemporary approach to understanding the boundaries of political authority over persons and territories—what is here called Kantian functionalism—cannot in fact locate those boundaries in a plausible way. Appeals to the actual history of political subjection are required for this. Functionalism, however, is disabled by its purely structuralist orientation, an orientation that cannot be corrected by appeals to the authority produced through democratic decision-making. The chapter explores the argumentative resources available to the Kantian, arguing that none can solve this boundary problem. It also examines the possibility of a Kantian retreat on these subjects to the domain of nonideal theory.

Chapter 4 examines the possible strategies of moral justification for states’ claims to jurisdictional and property-like authority over a particular geographical territory. It distinguishes nationalist, functionalist, and voluntarist strategies, dividing this last category into Lockean-individualist and plebiscitary voluntarism. All of these strategies are viewed as possible responses to cosmopolitan skepticism on these questions. Nationalism, functionalism, and plebiscitary voluntarism are criticized for their strongly counterintuitive implications. In particular, the chapter stresses their problems with “trapped minorities,” where minority groups or individuals do not share the political interests and assumptions of the majority nation or people, and their implausible commitments concerning “rights supersession,” where rights are assumed to lapse or pass to wrongdoers.

Chapter 8 concerns the property-like rights that states claim to the natural resources in and around their claimed territories. It distinguishes states’ “extended” territorial claims—to the air above, the sea around, and the subsurface domain—from their “core” claims to surface land and water. A central argument is that such extended claims cannot be justified without productive use, except insofar as certain kinds of control are required for the performance of core jurisdictional tasks. The chapter argues that the standard approaches to resource rights are, contrary to their claims, unable to justify more robust resource rights than these. It also explains and defends the position on states’ resource rights yielded by the Lockean theory that was defended in chapter 5.

There are several ways in which rights may be lost: by renunciation or “alienation,” through wrongdoing or “forfeiture,” and through “prescription” or the expiration of rights or their expropriation by competing claimants. One form of prescription is “supersession,” where rights are alleged to “fade away” over time to be replaced by others’ claims of right. Chapter 7 is an in-depth examination of the idea of rights supersession. That idea is centrally employed, but inadequately analyzed, in virtually all theories of territorial rights. The chapter distinguishes from true supersession various related phenomena. It then examines and criticizes all of the familiar arguments in favor of supersession, with special reference to Waldron’s well-known approach. The arguments considered concern “fading bases,” shaky counterfactuals, changing circumstances, and the evolving demands of justice.

Chapter 2 examines the justified aims or objects of legal disobedience. It begins with the famous theory of civil disobedience defended by John Rawls. This is contrasted with the approach taken by Henry David Thoreau. The chapter argues that Thoreau’s view permits, where Rawls’s theory is unable to allow, disobedience due to the historically illegitimate subjection of lands and peoples. The Kantian or Rawlsian approach to disobedience is unable to move beyond structural injustice as the justified object of that disobedience. The chapter also explains the distinction between ideal and nonideal theory and the proper place of an account of justified disobedience within that framework.

phipolPolitical PhilosophyStates are defined in international law as entities with permanent populations and fixed territories under government control.1 Henry Sidgwick, anticipating such definitions, was surely correct when he wrote that “it seems essential to the modern conception of a State that its government should exercise supreme dominion over a particular portion of the earth’s surface … Indeed, in modern political thought the connection between a political society and its territory is so close that the two notions almost blend.”...

In his paper "Role Obligations," Michael Hardimon defends an account of the nature and justification of institutional obligations that he takes to be clearly superior to the "standard" voluntarist view. Hardimon argues that this standard view presents a "misleading and distorted" picture of role obligations (and of morality generally); and in its best form he claims this view still "leaves out" of its understanding of even contractual role obligations an "absolutely vital factor". I argue against Hardimon that a related version of this "standard view" of institutional obligations is "standard" for a very good reason - namely, that it is true.

Chapter 6 examines hybrid or pluralist theories of territorial rights—that is, theories that are not “pure” uses of the strategies considered in chapter 4. It considers first an attempt to hybridize the kind of Kantian functionalism discussed in chapter 3. Stilz’s theory is rejected for being only selectively pluralistic in what appears to be an ad hoc fashion. Chapter 6 also argues that Meisels’s nationalist hybrid, while in fact committed to taking seriously historical wrongs and their lasting moral relevance, never lives up to that commitment. Finally, Nine’s Lockean hybrid is found to share all of the central positions and problems of the more familiar functionalist approaches that were criticized earlier in the book.

Chapter 9 examines another kind of property-like right claimed by modern states: the right to control movement across state borders. The chapter discusses the connections between the idea of national self-determination and states’ border rights. Recent arguments for open borders employing both the arbitrariness of nationality and rights of free movement are critiqued. Appeals by functionalists to states’ rights to self-determination as a justification for a robust right to exclude aliens are rejected. Similarly, appeals by nationalists to the idea of cultural self-determination are found inadequate. The chapter concludes by arguing that Lockean voluntarism in fact yields the desired balance between the rights of legitimate states to exclude and the rights of aliens to consideration.

Chapter 5 defends a Lockean theory of territory, arguing that it avoids the unpalatable commitments of its rivals. The chapter first outlines Locke’s own view, which derives states’ territorial rights from its willing members’ private rights over land and resources. It then describes the ways in which that historical position needs to be modified to make it defensible, taking the ideal it describes to be its strong point. The chapter also describes and answers the standard objections to this sort of theory. In doing so, it defends a view about the real point of philosophical theories of territory.

Chapter 1 explores the concept of authority. It distinguishes practical from epistemic authority and the varieties of practical authority. Epistemic authority has been characterized as “giving reasons for belief, not action.” Exercises of practical authority give reasons to act. The views of Hobbes, Locke, and Raz receive focused attention. The chapter identifies and discusses the chief philosophical approaches to the idea of political authority. It also explains the connections between political authority over persons and political authority as a territorial notion. The claims of territorial authority themselves can be divided into those that have the character of property claims and those that are jurisdictional.

This important book is the first serious philosophical examination of the modern state. It inquires into the justification of this particular form of political society. It asks whether all states are "nation-states," what are the alternative ways of organizing society, and which conditions make a state legitimate. The author concludes that, while states can be legitimate, they typically fail to have the powers (e.g., sovereignty) they claim. Many books analyze government and its functions, but none other focuses on the state as a distinctive form of political organization or examines critically the claims states make for themselves. In filling this lacuna, Christopher Morris has written a book that will command the attention of political philosophers, political scientists, legal theorists, and specialists in international relations

A. John Simmons is widely regarded as one of the most innovative and creative of today's political philosophers. His work on political obligation is regarded as definitive and he is also internationally respected as an interpreter of John Locke. The characteristic features of clear argumentation and careful scholarship that have been hallmarks of his philosophy are everywhere evident in this collection. The essays focus on the problems of political obligation and state legitimacy as well as on historical theories of property and justice. Cumulatively the collection presents a distinctive social and political philosophy, exploring the nature of our most fundamental rights and obligations, and displaying the power and plausibility of Lockean ideal theory

Theories of political authority divide naturally into those that locate the source of states' authority in the history of states' interactions with their subjects and those that locate it in structural (or functional) features of states (such as the justice of their basic institutions). This paper argues that purely structuralist theories of political authority (such as those defended by Kant, Rawls, and contemporary “democratic Kantians”) must fail because of their inability to solve the boundary problem—namely, the problem of locating the boundaries between different states' domains of authority in the natural or intuitive places

In On the Edge of Anarchy, A. John Simmons simultaneously pursues two distinguishable ends: to defend an interpretation of Locke as a “pure consent” theorist the essence of whose theory is that only actual voluntary individual consent can ground political obligations and authority, and to defend pure consent theory as the best theory of political obligation. Both ends are pursued under the heading of justifying “Lockean” consent theory, and the arguments for them overlap considerably because most of Simmons’s defense of his interpretation of Locke’s theory depends on his arguments that the position he attributes to Locke is, for independent philosophical reasons, the most defensible version of “voluntaristic” theory. Two of the very interesting, and surprising, inferences Simmons defends in this book are that believing ourselves to be naturally free from political obligation implies that most existing states are illegitimate, and that Locke was committed to the view that “political drudgery,” a condition in which all of our rights are alienated to the government, although imprudent, is not morally impermissible.