Anthony Taylor

Political liberals hold that the exercise of political power must be made acceptable to all reasonable citizens. This view is widely thought to be vulnerable to a powerful objection: There is too little that would be acceptable to all reasonable citizens for political liberalism to provide a plausible basis for legitimate state action. This article offers a new response to this challenge, which proceeds in two steps. First, the article develops a distinctive interpretation of the reasonable acceptability test, which is based on the moral ideal that every citizen should be able to find her social position acceptable. Second, the article uses this interpretation to show that there are liberal principles of political morality that no citizen can reasonably reject.

Functionalists hold that the territorial rights of states are grounded solely in their successful performance of their morally mandated functions. In this paper, I defend a distinctive functionalist view of the right of territorial jurisdiction. I develop this view over the course of considering a variety of objections to functionalism that arise from reflection on cases of non- violent and otherwise rights-respecting annexation. Functionalism’s critics argue that it is committed to counterintuitive implications in these cases, as it is unable to explain why the usurper states do not gain rights over the territory they take over. Against these critics, I argue that functionalism can in fact deliver intuitively plausible verdicts regarding: (a) the territorial rights of unsuccessful states; (b) the morality of military occupation; and (c) the appropriate response to past territorial injustices.