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).