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233Social justiceOxford University Press. 1976.This book explores the various aspects of social justice--to each according to his rights, to each acording to his desert, and to each according to his need--comparing the writings of Hume, Spencer, and Kropotkin. Miller demonstrates that there are radical differences in outlook on social justice between societies, and that these differences can be explained by reference to features of the social structure.
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62Strangers in our midst: an overviewCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (6): 707-711. 2017.
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20Should Cities Control Immigration Policy?Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 (3): 385-395. 2023.Avner de Shalit wants cities to have their own immigration policies. On a radical reading, this would transfer control over immigrant admissions from states to cities. But can cities choose the immigrants they prefer on economic or cultural grounds, or does this discriminate unfairly against those judged to be less desirable? I argue that de Shalit fails to apply the luck egalitarian principle consistently when discussing immigrant admissions. I also claim that there is a tension between seeing …Read more
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88Secession and the Principle of NationalityCanadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 22 261-282. 1996.The secession issue appears to many contemporary thinkers to reveal a fatal flaw in the idea of national self-determination. The question is whether national minorities who come to want to be politically self determining should be allowed to separate from the parent state and form one of their own. Here the idea of national self-determination may lead us in one of two opposing directions. If the minority group in question regards itself as a separate nation, then the principle seems to support i…Read more
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248Reasonable Partiality Towards CompatriotsEthical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (1-2): 63-81. 2005.Ethical theories normally make room both for global duties to human beings everywhere and special duties to those we are attached to in some way. Such a split-level view requires us to specify the kind of attachment that can ground special duties, and to explain the comparative force of the two kinds of duties in cases of conflict. Special duties are generated within groups that are intrinsically valuable and not inherently unjust, where the duties can be shown to be integral to relationships wi…Read more
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70Philosophy, politics, democracy * by Joshua CohenAnalysis 71 (1): 202-204. 2011.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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96Property and Territory: Locke, Kant, and SteinerJournal of Political Philosophy 19 (1): 90-109. 2010.
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69Our unfinished debate about market socialismPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 13 (2): 119-139. 2014.This article reconstructs and reflects on the 1989 debate between Jerry Cohen and myself on market socialism in the light of Cohen's ongoing defence of communitarian socialism. It presents Cohen's view of market socialism as ethically deficient but a modest improvement on capitalism, and outlines some market socialist proposals from the 1980s. Our debate centred on the issues of distributive justice and community. I had argued that a market economy might be justified by appeal to desert based on…Read more
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72On nationality and global equality: a reply to HoltugEthics and Global Politics 4 (3): 165-171. 2011.I here defend some of the positions taken in National Responsibility and Global Justice against criticisms by Nils Holtug. I reinforce my suggestion that claims about national membership being ‘morally arbitrary’ are question begging and try to show how such membership can legitimately serve as a source of special obligations. I examine the claim that the problems involved in constructing a ‘currency’ of global justice also arise in the domestic context and suggest that appealing to ‘welfare’ as…Read more
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57Migration and justice: a reply to my criticsCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (6): 763-773. 2017.
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163Justice in immigrationEuropean Journal of Political Theory 14 (4): 391-408. 2015.Legitimate states have a general right to control their borders and decide who to admit as future citizens. Such decisions, however, are constrained by principles of justice. But which principles? To answer this we have to analyse the multifaceted relationships that may hold between states and prospective immigrants, distinguishing on the one hand between those who are either inside or outside the state’s territory, and on the other between refugees, economic migrants and ‘particularity claimant…Read more
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188Justice and boundariesPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 8 (3): 291-309. 2009.Michael Walzer has argued that `distributive justice presupposes a bounded world', but what counts as a relevant boundary? The article criticizes two arguments holding that boundaries should not count at all: a negative argument that there is no relevant difference between human relationships within and across state borders and a positive argument that principles of justice must, as a matter of logic, be universal in scope. It then examines three rival accounts of the bounded scope of distributi…Read more
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113In What Sense must Socialism be Communitarian?Social Philosophy and Policy 6 (2): 51. 1989.This paper stands at the confluence of two streams in contemporary political thought. One stream is composed of those critics of liberal political philosophy who are often described collectively as ‘communitarians’. What unites these critics is a belief that contemporary liberalism rests on an impoverished and inadequate view of the human subject. Liberal political thought – as manifested, for instance, in the writings of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Ronald Dworkin – claims centrally to do jus…Read more
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72Irregular Migrants: An Alternative PerspectiveEthics and International Affairs 22 (2). 2008.While accepting Carens's view that irregular migrants can rightfully claim from the state protection of human rights, Miller disagrees that such migrants can claim rights of citizenship.
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215In defence of nationalityIn Derek Matravers & Jonathan Pike (eds.), Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, Routledge, in Association With the Open University. pp. 3-16. 2002.
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194Border Regimes and Human RightsThe Law and Ethics of Human Rights 7 (1): 1-23. 2013.This article argues that there is no human right to cross borders without impediment. Receiving states, however, must recognize the procedural rights of those unable to protect their human rights in the place where they currently reside. Asylum claims must be properly investigated, and in the event that the state declines to admit them as refugees, it must ensure that the third country to which they are transferred can protect their rights. Both procedural and substantive rights apply while refu…Read more
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517Against Global EgalitarianismThe Journal of Ethics 9 (1-2): 55-79. 2005.This article attacks the view that global justice should be understood in terms of a global principle of equality. The principle mainly discussed is global equality of opportunity – the idea that people of similar talent and motivation should have equivalent opportunity sets no matter to which society they belong. I argue first that in a culturally plural world we have no neutral way of measuring opportunity sets. I then suggest that the most commonly offered defences of global egalitarianism – …Read more
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442National Responsibility and Global JusticeOxford University Press. 2007.This chapter outlines the main ideas of my book National responsibility and global justice. It begins with two widely held but conflicting intuitions about what global justice might mean on the one hand, and what it means to be a member of a national community on the other. The first intuition tells us that global inequalities of the magnitude that currently exist are radically unjust, while the second intuition tells us that inequalities are both unavoidable and fair once national responsibilit…Read more
David Miller
Nuffield College, Oxford University
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Nuffield College, Oxford UniversityProfessor
Areas of Specialization
Justice |
Political Theory |
Government and Democracy |
States and Nations |
Areas of Interest
2 more
Applied Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Value Theory |
Justice |
Political Theory |
Government and Democracy |
States and Nations |