A. John Simmons

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.”...

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.

Contemporary political philosophers routinely assume that some form of the modern, territorial state must be justified and that in a justified state most of the claims that modern states make will be vindicated. The principal question for them is what form the state must take in order to achieve this justification. How minimal or extensive must the state be, how responsive to groups within its territories and to people without must it be, and so on. Christopher Morris’s An Essay on the Modern State argues, in effect, that political philosophers should take a step backward from this starting point, to first examine more carefully the state itself, its purported justifications, and the claims states typically make over people and territories. This seems to me exactly the right prescription for political philosophy, and Morris’s book is an excellent illustration of how this step might be taken. Morris’s approach not only brings contemporary preoccupations into closer contact with those of classical political philosophy, it also nicely shows just how the projects of mainstream contemporary political philosophy are related to those of more radical and revisionist theory.

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 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

This paper examines the thesis that human labor creates property rights in or from previously unowned objects by virtue of labor's power to make new things. This thesis is considered for two possible roles: first, as a thesis to which John Locke might have been committed in his writings on property; and second, as a thesis of independent plausibility that could serve as part of a defensible contemporary theory of property rights. Understanding Locke as committed to the thesis of makers' rights has seemed to many of the best known recent Locke scholars to explain and unify Locke's various claims about property in a way that more traditional "labor-mixing" interpretations cannot. This paper argues that there is in fact no convincing evidence in Locke's texts to suggest any commitment to the thesis of makers' rights for humans.

John Locke's political theory has been the subject of many detailed treatments by philosophers and political scientists. But The Lockean Theory of Rights is the first systematic, full-length study of Locke's theory of rights and of its potential for making genuine contributions to contemporary debates about rights and their place in political philosophy. Given that the rights of persons are the central moral concept at work in Locke's and Lockean political philosophy, such a study is long overdue.

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.

Anarchist political philosophers normally include in their theories (or implicitly rely upon) a vision of a social life very different than the life experienced by most persons today. Theirs is a vision of autonomous, noncoercive, productive interaction among equals, liberated from and without need for distinctively political institutions, such as formal legal systems or governments or the state. This "positive" part of anarchist theories, this vision of the good social life, will be discussed only indirectly in this essay. Rather, I want to focus here on the "negative" side of anarchism, on its general critique of the state or its more limited critique of the specific kinds of political arrangements within which most residents of modern political societies live. Even more specifically, I will center my discussion on one particular version of this anarchist critique - the version that is part of the theory now commonly referred to as "philosophical anarchism". Philosophical anarchism has been much discussed by political philosophers in recent years. But it has not, I think, been very carefully defined or adequately understood. My object here will be to clear the ground for a fair evaluation of philosophical anarchism, by offering a more systematic account of the nature of the theory and of possible variants of the theory, and by responding to the most frequent objections to the theory. I hope by this effort to present philosophical anarchism as a more attractive, or at least a less obviously flawed, political philosophy.

Modern states claim rights of jurisdiction and control over particular geographical areas and their associated natural resources. Boundaries of Authority explores the possible moral bases for such territorial claims by states, in the process arguing that many of these territorial claims in fact lack any moral justification. The book maintains throughout that the requirement of states' justified authority over persons has normative priority over, and as a result severely restricts, the kinds of territorial rights that states can justifiably claim, and it argues that the mere effective administration of justice within a geographical area is insufficient to ground moral authority over residents of that area. The book argues that only a theory of territorial rights that takes seriously the morality of the actual history of states' acquisitions of power over land and the land's residents can adequately explain the nature and extent of states' moral rights over particular territories. Part I of the book examines the interconnections between states' claimed rights of authority over particular sets of subject persons and states' claimed authority to control particular territories. It contains an extended critique of the dominant

My aim in this essay is to explore the nature and force of “original-acquisition” justifications of private property. By “original-acquisition” justifications, I mean those arguments which purport to establish or importantly contribute to the moral defense of private property by: offering a moral/historical account of how legitimate private property rights for persons first arose ; offering a hypothetical or conjectural account of how justified private property could arise from a propertyless condition; or simply defending an account of how an individual can make private property in some previously unowned thing . The “original acquisition” to which such justifications centrally refer, then, may be either the first instance of legitimate private property in human history , or only the first legitimate acquisition of some particular thing . But in either case, the justification will involve or entail the defense of one or more moral principles specifying how unowned things can become privately owned — that is, the defense of the kind of principles Robert Nozick has called “principles of justice in acquisition.”

In this essay I will discuss the relationship between two of the most basic ideas in political and legal philosophy: the justification of the state and state legitimacy. I plainly cannot aspire here to a complete account of these matters; but I hope to be able to say enough to motivate a way of thinking about the relation between these notions that is, I believe, superior to the approach which seems to be dominant in contemporary political philosophy. Today showing that a state is justified and showing that it is legitimate are typically taken to require the very same arguments. I will argue that this contemporary stance obscures the difference between two central ways in which we should morally evaluate states, and it generates confusions about other serious practical issues, such as those surrounding our moral obligations to comply with law. I begin with brief discussions of the ideas of justification and legitimacy and with an attempt to capture what ought to be most central in our concerns about these ideas. I turn then to two basic ways of thinking about the relation between justification and legitimacy that I want to distinguish: what I will call the Lockean and the Kantian approaches. Next, I argue that the minority Lockean approach to this issue captures essential features of institutional evaluation that the majority Kantian approach does not; and I add brief mention of one further complication facing any adequate account of political evaluation