•  256
    Domination and enforcement: The contingent and non-ideal relation between state and freedom
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 19 (4): 403-423. 2020.
    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 wh…Read more
  •  243
    The Concept of Feasibility: A Multivocal Account
    Res Publica 27 (3): 491-507. 2021.
    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 definit…Read more
  •  18
    Border Control, Territorial Rights and Feasibility
    Social Theory and Practice 49 (2): 237-260. 2023.
    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 co…Read more
  •  14
    Separating the Wrong of Settlement from the Right to Exclude
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 25 (2). 2023.
    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 territoria…Read more