Daniel Guillery

Roads are highly dangerous and unequal places. This paper argues that their risks and benefits are not simply one category of the many benefits and burdens of social cooperation to be considered by a theory of justice. Rather, against the backdrop of a regime of land enclosure, certain sorts of inequalities in the roads are pro tanto morally objectionable simply as such. A system of publicly accessible roads is a precondition for justifiable enclosure of land. Further, the justifiability of enclosure depends on the system of roads fulfilling certain functions for all those subject to the regime of enclosure. This condition imposes constraints on the use of heavy vehicles within the road system. It is doubtful whether existing road systems in fact live up to this justificatory condition.

Recent philosophical work on settler colonialism has attempted to account for the distinctive wrong in these practices in terms of the violation of exclusionary territorial rights held by inhabitants of colonised areas. If it turns out that such rights are needed to account for this distinctive wrong, that appears to be a significant cost for views sceptical of territorial rights. This paper sets out to explore the possibility of accounting for this wrong without invoking exclusionary territorial rights and puts forward an account of sociocultural stability rights that allow us to do so (thereby indirectly supporting sceptical views of territorial rights).

The social (as opposed to environmental) harms of tourism are not yet much discussed in the philosophical literature. Nonetheless, residents in hyper-touristed areas commonly express sentiments of marginalisation and estrangement from the social practices present in their place of dwelling. In this paper, we argue that indeed, as common pre-theoretical ideas suggest, residents in a touristic neighbourhood can be marginalised in their relationship with tourists in a morally objectionable way, similarly to how longstanding residents may be marginalised with respect to gentrifiers in a gentrifying neighbourhood. An important difference, however, between the gentrification and tourism cases, is that while in the former residents and gentrifiers have a more-or-less stable relationship with each other, residents and tourists typically interact only in quite fleeting ways. This might seem to suggest that residents and tourists do not have the right kind of ongoing relationship that would make marginalisation possible in the first place. Here we contend that this is not the case, and in doing so we make two contributions to the literature. First, we present a refined conception of marginalisation, differentiate it from other relational wrongs, and explain how, though marginalisation does depend on an ongoing relationship, a relationship of the right kind is possible in spite of the transience of some of its members. Second, we explain how excessive tourism in particular might generate marginalisation in the spatially defined relationship among fellow users of a shared physical space. Thereby, we contribute to the assessment of the harms of overtourism, identifying a specific moral wrong that residents are likely to experience in certain touristic cities.

Recent philosophical work on settler colonialism has attempted to account for the distinctive wrong in these practices in terms of the violation of exclusionary territorial rights held by inhabitants of colonized areas. If it turns out that such rights are needed to account for this distinctive wrong, that appears to be a significant cost for views skeptical of territorial rights. This paper sets out to explore the possibility of accounting for this wrong without invoking exclusionary territorial rights and puts forward an account of sociocultural stability rights that allow us to do so (thereby indirectly supporting skeptical views of territorial rights).

States more or less universally claim discretionary rights to decide who may or may not cross their boundaries, and to use force and violence to ensure compliance with these decisions. The justification of these practices has received much attention, but I think there is an important underexplored element of this debate. I argue that, in order to provide a plausible justification, it is indispensable to ask questions about feasibility. Any plausible defence of anything like the kind of border control regime actually in force will need to pay close attention to social scientific research into feasible alternatives.

A common objection to a proposal or theory in political philosophy is that it is not feasible to realise what it calls for. This is commonly taken to be sufficient to reject a proposal or theory: feasibility, on this common view, operates as a straightforward constraint on moral and political theory, whatever is not feasible is simply ruled out. This paper seeks to understand what we mean when we say that some proposal or outcome is or is not feasible. It will argue that no single binary definition can be given. Rather, there is a whole range of possible specifications of the term ‘feasible’, each of which selects a range of facts of the world to hold fixed. No single one of these possible specifications, though, is obviously privileged as giving the appropriate understanding of ‘feasibility’ tout court. The upshot of my account of feasibility, then, will be that the common view of feasibility as a straightforward constraint cannot be maintained: in order to reject a moral theory, it will not be sufficient simply to say that it is not feasible.

It is common to think that state enforcement is a restriction on freedom that is morally permitted or justified because of the unfortunate circumstances in which we find ourselves. Human frailty and material scarcity combine to make the compromise of freedom involved in exclusive state enforcement power necessary for other freedoms or other goods. In the words of James Madison, ‘if men were angels, no government would be necessary’ (1990: 267). But there is an opposing tradition, according to which the very idea of freedom in society entails the necessity of state enforcement. However morally good human beings are, or whatever material conditions they find themselves in, on this view, the ideal of freedom we ought to be concerned to realise is such that it cannot be attained without state enforcement. It follows a priori from an important ideal of freedom that a state with exclusive enforcement power is necessary for individual liberty in society. In this paper, I argue against what I take to be the strongest argument of the a priori kind, which begins from the neo-republican ideal of freedom as non-domination, and thereby in (partial) defence of the alternative, Madisonian, view. Insofar as it is true that some sort of problematic domination will inevitably be present in a stateless society, I argue, the introduction of a state can do nothing to eliminate it. For the state to improve on even an ideal stateless society, it would need to give individuals control over the interference of potential dominators of a sort that could not be achieved in the ideal stateless society.