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55What’s Wrong with Social Hierarchy? On Niko Kolodny’s The Pecking OrderEthical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (1): 129-137. 2023.This review critically assesses Niko Kolodny’s theory of social hierarchy and its importance as articulated in _The Pecking Order_ ( 2023 ). After summarizing Kolodny’s argument, I raise two critical challenges. First, I ask whether Kolodny leaves us without adequate account of why social hierarchies are, in themselves, objectionable. Second, I query whether Kolodny’s defense of representative democracy is decisive, and suggest that egalitarians should be open to alternative ways of mitigating t…Read more
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17The Politics of Social Cohesion: Immigration, Community, and Justice, written by Nils HoltugJournal of Moral Philosophy 20 (5-6): 573-576. 2023.
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452What Immigrants OweErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (n/a). 2021.Unlike natural-born citizens, many immigrants have agreed to undertake political obligations. Many have sworn oaths of allegiance. Many, when they entered their adopted country, promised to obey the law. This paper is about these agreements. First, it’s about their validity. Do they actually confer political obligations? Second, it’s about their justifiability. Is it permissible to get immigrants to undertake such political obligations? Our answers are ‘usually yes’ and ‘probably not’ respective…Read more
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53Democratic Empathy and Affective PolarizationSocial Philosophy Today 39 71-87. 2023.Social scientists have observed a sharp rise in affective polarization in many societies, particularly the United States. Since it is widely agreed that this poses a threat to democracy, finding solutions to this predicament is essential. One prominent proposal to depolarize the electorate holds that citizens need to exercise their capacities for empathy with the political opposition. However, defenders of the empathy response to affective polarization have yet to fully specify the range of mec…Read more
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47Democratic citizenship and polarization: Robert Talisse’s theory of democracyEthical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (4): 701-708. 2022.This review essay critically discusses Robert Talisse’s account of democracy and polarization. I argue that Talisse overstates the degree to which polarization arises from the good-faith practice of democratic citizenship and downplays the extent to which polarization is caused by elites and exacerbated by social structures; this leads Talisse to overlook structural approaches to managing polarization and leaves his account of how citizens should respond to polarization incomplete. I conclude th…Read more
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29The Right to EmigrateJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 24 (3). 2023.It is widely believed that there’s a right to emigrate. But what justifies this right? This paper explores this issue. It first argues that existing defenses of the right to emigrate are incomplete. It then outlines a novel egalitarian defense of the right to emigrate, on which that right is in part justified as a protection against social inequality. After considering objections, it argues that this account of the right to emigrate entails a limited right to immigrate and that states are under …Read more
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25Javier S. Hidalgo, Unjust Borders: Individuals and the Ethics of ImmigrationJournal of Moral Philosophy 19 (2): 205-208. 2022.
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111Relational Equality and ImmigrationEthics 132 (3): 644-679. 2022.Egalitarians often claim that well-off states’ immigration restrictions create or reinforce objectionable inequality. Standard defenses of this claim appeal to the distributive consequences of exclusion. This article offers a relational egalitarian defense of more open borders. On this view, well-off states’ immigration restrictions are problematic because they accord the citizens of well-off states a troubling form of asymmetric power over the disadvantaged. This creates an objectionably unequa…Read more