Daniel Sharp

Citizenship regimes are under pressure. Decades of neoliberalism have eroded the social rights that make citizenship into a form of equal membership. Concurrently, democracies have hardened the borders of their citizenship regimes. In this paper, I contend that these two dynamics are interlinked. Based on this diagnosis, I argue that the familiar claim that democracies must choose between broadening and deepening citizenship is, in the long-term, mistaken. Deepening citizenship is necessary for broadening citizenship because economic precarity trengthens support for the far-right. Broadening citizenship is necessary for deepening citizenship because only an inclusive conception of citizenship can counter the neoliberal nationalist ideology that fuels the erosion of social citizenship.

The available resources for global health assistance are far outstripped by need. In the face of such scarcity, many people endorse a principle according to which highest priority should be given to the worst off. However, in order for this prioritarian principle to be useful for allocation decisions, policy‐makers need to know what it means to be badly off. In this article, we outline a conception of disadvantage suitable for identifying the worst off for the purpose of making health resource allocation decisions. According to our total advantage view: (1) the worst off are those who have the greatest total lifetime disadvantage; (2) advantage foregone due to premature death should be treated in the same way as other ways of being disadvantaged at a time; (3) how badly off someone is depends on the actual outcomes that will befall her without intervention, not her prospects at a time; and (4) all significant forms of disadvantage count for determining who is worst off, not just disadvantage relating to health. We conclude by noting two important implications of the total advantage view: first, that those who die young are among the globally worst off, and second, that the epidemiological shift in the global burden of disease from communicable to non‐communicable diseases should not lead to a corresponding shift in global health spending priorities.

In Beyond Empathy and Inclusion: The Challenge of Listening in Deliberative Democracy, Mary F. Scudder defends a listening-based approach to deliberative democracy. On this account, democratic legitimacy requires that citizens listen to each other’s deliberative contributions to give them fair consideration. She opposes this listening-based approach to a recent “empathic turn” in deliberative democratic theory, which emphasizes the importance of imaginative perspective-taking in democratic deliberation. Scudder develops an incisive critique of relying on empathy in democratic deliberation. According to her argument, our capacity to empathize is severely limited, and empathy cannot replace, but only distort listening. This argument suggests that we should listen rather than empathize in democratic deliberation. In this paper, we challenge the implicit assumption that empathy and listening must be regarded as mutually exclusive alternatives. We argue that empathy still has an important place within a listening-centric approach to democracy because empathy can improve listening broadly understood, according to its own inherent aim of ensuring fair consideration. Specifically, we identify three constructive roles that empathy can play in facilitating democratic listening: it can help us to understand what someone has said, see where someone is coming from, and promote mutual understanding. We argue that recognizing these constructive roles for empathy in democratic deliberation is compatible with acknowledging empathy’s limits and accepting that we should sometimes prefer listening without empathy. Ceasing to conceive of empathy and listening as mutually exclusive options opens up new questions and we close by discussing some potential directions of future study.

According to a common argument in defense of border control, legitimate states have a right to exclude on grounds of collective self-determination. I argue that the value of self-determination can also serve as a basis for criticizing states’ immigration policies. Specifically, I contend that the externalization policies of states in the Global North often undermine the self-determination of peoples in the Global South. I identify five pathways by which externalization policies undermine self-determination. I conclude by tentatively suggesting some potential implications of this argument for broader debates about the governance of migration.

Migration blackmail occurs when one state threatens to engineer a “migration crisis” on the borders of a target state by creating or permitting an irregular migration flow unless political or economic concessions are made by the target state. States may have legitimate interests in resisting migration blackmail. However, migrants have strong interests in accessing international protection and avoiding harm. These goals may seem to stand in tension and generate a dilemma: it may seem that there is no way for target states to effectively resist and deter blackmail while adequately respecting migrants’ interests. This paper explores what is problematic about migration blackmail and how states may permissibly respond to it. I argue that target states are not permitted to close their borders in response to migration blackmail but instead must respect the right to seek asylum. I offer four complementary arguments for this conclusion: (1) not all cases of migration blackmail are dilemmatic; (2) target states have often contributed to the circumstances that give rise to migration blackmail and so may bear some responsibility for the situation; (3) the interests of migrants in accessing protection and avoiding harm outweigh states’ interests in resisting blackmail; and (4) states have options available to resist migration blackmail without contravening the right to asylum.

Can awarding migrants fewer legal rights than citizens ever be just? This paper explores this issue. I first outline an abstract argument in favor of rights differentiation. According to this argument, people’s rights ought to track their independent claims; since these claims may vary, some rights differentiation is permissible. I then suggest that this argument threatens to undermine the institution of citizenship because citizens’ claims on the state can differ in just the way migrants’ claims can, and the rights of citizenship can be unbundled and awarded piecemeal. To resolve this tension, I offer a novel account of the normative functions of citizenship, which turns on the assertion that citizenship’s public conferral of equal rights promotes status equality and confers equal recognition. This account sets firm bounds on rights differentiation without ruling it out entirely.

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 the threat of hierarchy posed by political rule.

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’ respectively. We first argue that these agreements give immigrants political obligations. We then argue that getting immigrants to undertake such obligations is morally wrong. This is because it makes immigrants’ political obligations more burdensome than those of natural-born citizens. We conclude that the practice of getting immigrants to undertake such obligations should be abolished.

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 mechanisms through which empathy can counteract polarization. Recent proposals focus on empathy’s role in finding common ground and humanizing others. Drawing on the wider empathy literature, we identify several additional ways empathy might counter affective polarization. We show that the resultant account has important implications for the sorts of empathetic engagement with cross-partisans that is likely to reduce polarization. Our aim is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the potential of different kinds of empathetic engagement to counter polarization as well as the limits of empathy as a response to polarization.

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 a collective duty to institute a global migration system which protects effective exit.

It is widely believed that immigrants, after some time, acquire a claim to naturalize and become citizens of their new state. What explains this claim? Although existing answers (may) succeed in justifying some of immigrants' rights claims, they cannot justify the claim that immigrants are owed the opportunity to naturalize because these theories lack a sufficiently rich account of the purpose of citizenship. To fill this gap, I offer a novel egalitarian account of citizenship. Citizenship, on this account, partially protects immigrants against social hierarchy by realizing social equality in a publicly accessible manner. This explains claims to naturalize.

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 that Talisse’s insights should nevertheless be integrated into a broader agenda for thinking about the causes and solutions to polarization.

In ‘Are Citizenship Tests Necessarily Illiberal?’, Michael Blake argues that difficult citizenship tests are not necessarily illiberal, so long as they test for the right things. In this paper, I argue that Blake’s attempt to square citizenship tests with liberalism fails. Blake underestimates the burdens citizenship tests impose on immigrants, ignoring in particular the egalitarian claims immigrants have on equal social membership. Moreover, Blake’s positive justification of citizenship tests – that they help justify immigrants’ coercive voting power – both neglects the fact that such tests are coercively imposed on immigrants and that the citizenship test Blake envisions does little to help ensure immigrants’ votes are legitimate. Citizenship tests thus aren’t, even in principle, a way of protecting citizens from unjustified coercive power. They are, even under favourable circumstances, an illiberal way of obstructing immigrants’ quest for social equality.

After the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, most states enacted new measures to constrain international mobility. By May 8th, 2020, more than 93% of the world’s population lived in states with special entry bans and more than three billion lived in countries whose borders were almost completely closed to non-citizens. Can such measures be justified? If so, would this undermine the open borders view? This paper examines these questions. It argues, first, that, although short-term entry bans and other similar measures designed to protect public health can be justified, these bans need to be designed with a number of exemptions, in particular, for asylum seekers and refugees. Even in times of pandemic, completely closed borders are indefensible. It argues, second, that although extreme versions of the open borders position may have difficulty accepting this conclusion, other versions of the position can consistently justify special entry restrictions.

Non-communicable diseases now account for the majority of the global burden of disease and an international campaign has emerged to raise their priority on the post-2015 development agenda. We argue, to the contrary, that there remain strong reasons to prioritize maternal and child health. Policy-makers ought to assign highest priority to the health conditions that afflict the worst off. In virtue of how little healthy life they have had, children who die young are among the globally worst off. Moreover, many interventions to deal with the conditions that cause mortality in the young are low-cost and provide great benefits to their recipients. Consistent with the original Millennium Development Goals, the international community should continue to prioritize reductions in communicable diseases, neonatal conditions, and maternal health despite the shifts in the global burden of disease.

Although philosophers have explored several connections between neuroscience and moral responsibility, the issue of how real-world neurological modifications, such as Deep Brain Stimulation, impact moral responsibility has received little attention. In this article, we draw on debates about the relevance of history and manipulation to moral responsibility to argue that certain kinds of neurological modification can diminish the responsibility of the agents so modified. We argue for a historicist position - a version of the history-sensitive reflection view - and defend that account against a rival, relational view of responsibility. We conclude that DBS can, under certain conditions, diminish responsibility, and explore the circumstances under which this might be so. We conclude by suggesting that philosophical debates about moral responsibility, manipulation, and history have greater practical relevance than is sometimes thought, and that attention to practical cases can help inform and deepen this body of scholarship.

The available resources for global health assistance are far outstripped by need. In the face of such scarcity, many people endorse a principle according to which highest priority should be given to the worst off. However, in order for this prioritarian principle to be useful for allocation decisions, policy-makers need to know what it means to be badly off. In this article, we outline a conception of disadvantage suitable for identifying the worst off for the purpose of making health resource allocation decisions. According to our total advantage view: the worst off are those who have the greatest total lifetime disadvantage; advantage foregone due to premature death should be treated in the same way as other ways of being disadvantaged at a time; how badly off someone is depends on the actual outcomes that will befall her without intervention, not her prospects at a time; and all significant forms of disadvantage count for determining who is worst off, not just disadvantage relating to health. We conclude by noting two important implications of the total advantage view: first, that those who die young are among the globally worst off, and second, that the epidemiological shift in the global burden of disease from communicable to non-communicable diseases should not lead to a corresponding shift in global health spending priorities.