David Miller

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 refugees are physically present in the state’s territory and their immigration status is being investigated. The state’s obligation to protect these rights arises from the power it exercises over them. In contrast, the state does not exercise equivalent power over those it declines to admit in the first place, even though its immigration criteria – if discriminatory in the negative sense – can be faulted on other grounds. Beneath these arguments lie two basic assumptions: one is the need to separate human rights claims from other claims of justice, especially those deriving from citizenship; the other is the need to determine who bears the obligations that correspond to these rights. Attention to the different relations in which prospective immigrants may stand toward the state they hope to enter can help us understand how border regimes may comply with, or violate, human rights.

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 – the cosmopolitan claim that human lives have equal value, the argument that a persons nationality is a morally arbitrary characteristic, and the more empirical claim that relationships among fellow-nationals are no longer special in a way that matters for justice – are all defective. If we fall back on the idea of equality as a default principle, then we have to recognize that pursuing global equality of opportunity systematically would leave no space for national self-determination. Finally, I ask whether global inequality might be objectionable for reasons independent of justice, and argue that the main reason for concern is the inequalities of power that are likely to emerge in a radically unequal world.

Cosmopolitanism, originally a doctrine of world citizenship, has come in recent political philosophy to mean simply an ethical outlook in which every human being is equally an object of moral concern. However ethical cosmopolitans slide from this moral truism to deny, controversially, that as agents we have special duties of limited scope. Political communities create relations of reciprocity between their citizens and pursue projects that reflect culturally specific values and beliefs, generating special duties among fellow-members. Strong cosmopolitanism would require the creation of a world government, and this could only be an imperialist project in which existing cultural differences were either nullified or privatised.

How should we decide when to be altruistic? who are the poor we ought to help? Empirical evidence reveals that in practice altruistic behaviour is strongly influenced by contextual factors such as the cost of helping, perceptions of the person in need, and the number of other people who are in a position to offer help. Philosophers often argue that we should discount such factors, but I claim that altruism is better understood as doing one's proper share of the work of meeting nee. Three possible mechanisms for achieving this are explored: creating formal institutions to discharge our altruistic duties, imposing a legal duty of rescue on individuals, and fostering norms of responsibility that pick out individuals as salient helpers.

This book was written with three aims in mind. The first was to provide a reasonably concise account of Hume's social and political thought that might help students coming to it for the first time. The second aim was to say something about the relationship between philosophy and politics, with explicit attention to Hume, but implicit reference to a general issue. The third is to offer an integrated account of Hume's thought. The book accounts for the varying interpretation of the conservative and liberalist traditions by arguing that the distinction between liberalism and conservatism had little application in mid-18th-century Britain. Hume's ideology contained elements that we should now identify as conservative and liberal respectively, and so by selective emphasis it is possible to make him seem a thoroughbred conservative or liberal according to choice. These two problems the relationship between Hume's philosophy and his politics, and the ideological character of his thought are pursued through the first and second parts of the book respectively.

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 responsibility is allowed to operate. This conflict might be resolved either by adopting a cosmopolitan theory of justice (which leaves no room for national responsibility) or by adopting a ‘political’ theory of justice (which denies that questions of distributive justice can arise beyond the walls of the sovereign state). Since neither resolution is satisfactory, the chapter defends the idea of national responsibility and proposes a new theory of global justice, whose main elements are the protection of basic human rights worldwide, and fair terms of interaction between independent political communities.

Nationalism is often dismissed today as an irrational political creed with disastrous consequences. Yet most people regard their national identity as a significant aspect of themselves, see themselves as having special obligations to their compatriots, and value their nation's political independence. This book defends these beliefs, and shows that nationality, defined in these terms, serves valuable goals, including social justice, democracy, and the protection of culture. National identities need not be illiberal, and they do not exclude other sources of personal identity, such as ethnicity or religion. An ethics that gives weight to special relationships is more effective in motivating people to pursue justice and other values because it connects peoples’ duties to their identity; but this is consistent with recognizing some universal values, such as human rights. There are strong reasons for making the boundaries of states and nations coincide wherever possible, but in other cases, nations can achieve forms of self‐determination that fall short of full sovereignty. Multicultural arguments in favour of identity politics and special rights for minority groups ignore the benefits that such groups derive from participating in a shared national identity and the kind of democratic politics that such an identity makes possible. Although national identities are often said to be in decline in an increasingly globalized world, they serve such important purposes that our aim should be to rebuild them in a form that makes them more accessible to excluded cultural minorities.

The paper explores the basis of the responsibilities we owe to refugees. That we have such responsibilities is a very widely shared intuition: the need of those fleeing from persecution seems to call out for a response on our part. But what exactly are our obligations to such people? Who are they owed to and why do we have them? The paper argues in favour of a human rights approach to refugee protection that includes the requirement of the implementation of a burden sharing scheme. DOI 10.17879/95189441435.

Lea Ypi’s book Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency is a very rich book, and one cannot hope to do it justice in the space of a short discussion.1 In this commentary I will focus on the second part of her title, reserving for another occasion her interesting discussion of equality and sufficiency as principles of global justice. Here I will restrict myself to some remarks about method in political theory, and especially the idea of avant-garde political theory, which is perhaps Ypi’s most distinctive contribution