David Estlund

This chapter argues, against Amartya Sen, that while a comparative theory of justice in terms only of “more just” but not “just” or “unjust” would suffice for purposes of choice, it is a disadvantage that it would not find any legitimate meaning in the statement that slavery is unjust, since that judgment entails a partition. The chapter argues that there are not sufficiently good reasons for paying that price. Even if such further “partition” information is of no use for purposes of choice over and above comparative information, this does not establish that a wholly comparative theory of justice is adequate—even for purposes of choice. The reason is that epistemology might favor the richer measure, delivering a partitioned scale, or at least partition-entailing judgments, in the first instance. A wholly comparative conception of justice would limit itself to impoverished resources, and for no good reason.

This commentary examines Wendy Salkin’s book, Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation (2024), which analyzes the phenomenon of individuals being treated by the public as representatives of oppressed or disadvantaged groups. Drawing on quotations from Abraham Lincoln (about whether calling a tail a leg makes it a leg) and Malcolm X (about whether individuals chosen by the public to speak to Black interests do really speak for or represent Black people), I raise concerns about Salkin’s stipulated definitions of “representation” and “speaking for.” The question is whether these novel meanings inappropriately change the subject matter from their ordinary uses. This is all compatible with the value of her theory of “informal political representatives.” But it is an important question who counts as speaking for certain groups such as Black Americans. Unfortunately, it’s not clear that those whom Salkin defines as “informal political representatives” of Black people do turn out, in any ordinary understanding of the phrase (as distinct from her stipulated meaning for it), to count as speaking for them.

This paper defends my challenge to the idea of purely structural wrong—the influential idea that social structures can be wrong independently of individual wrongdoing. Responding to criticisms from Kirun Sankaran & Jake Monaghan, and Stephanie Collins, I maintain my position against their charges of presupposing or concluding with the "deontic view" that only agents can commit wrongs. I then explain why I think Collins’s positive account of how there might be structurally targeted grievance attitudes such as resentment is not successful. She suggests that grievance attitudes can target social structures while their expression is properly directed at individual role-occupants. This proposal fails to explain how those attitudes that she, as is standard and sensible, takes to respond to “slights” by social structure, can be warranted when directed at structures that, as she agrees, lack agency and attitudes of their own.

In Massimo Renzo’s paper “Political Authority and Unjust War,” he defends an argument from authority to the effect that in principle, a soldier may be obligated and so permitted to follow orders even if they are understood to order killing of enemy soldiers who ought not to be killed. I propose some clarifications in the use of the ideas of duty and wrong, before turning to the conflict between such arguments from authority and some deep intuitions about the moral gravity of killing. A more restrictive view has come to be influential partly on that basis, but I argue in defense of Renzo that the restrictive view also conflicts with deep intuitions, including about the permissibility of duly commanded military killing in national defense against conquest or annexation. I argue that the national defense example puts arguments from authority in a sufficiently promising light that its tension with intuitions about killing is far from dispositive against it.

Structural injustice is either wrong or not. A deontic view, on which there is no injustice except agents’ wrongdoing, may have trouble reaching such intuitive cases as structural sexism, and especially structural class inequality. An alternative telic approach, on which injustice is bad but not wrong, can reach those cases. But how could injustice in that telic sense warrant resentment or righteous anger, as it seems injustice must? I press the dilemma to scrutinize not only the current idea of structural injustice but also a wider swath of views about justice, and I critically consider possible ways out of it.

Epistocracy—roughly, political rule by the wise—is similar to paternalism. In both cases, knowing better is not enough to justify taking charge. But also in both cases, the prohibition is unlikely to be absolute. If one person’s competence is low enough, and the other person would do enough better by taking over, then (simplifying) it is plausibly justified. Arguably it is partly on such grounds that children may be governed by others in ways that adults may not be. May political subjects likewise be ruled by those who know enough better? A right to collective self-rule is not enough by itself to answer this, any more than a right to individual self-rule tells us whether and when the competence disparity is enough to justify paternalism. This rough analogy exposes important issues in the project of defending a requirement of democracy as against epistocracy.

Even when it is not violent, a disruptive public protest often raises our hackles. Even when it is not illegal, we might wonder whether it is morally justifiable. In particular, one of the ways a protest can be disruptive—interfering with the ability of others to speak or express themselves—might seem especially damning. Such speech-interfering protests are often vilified, as if they fly in the face of the principle of freedom of speech, or even of the Constitution itself. Ought a protest’s interfering with the speech of others to count morally against that protest—is it forbidden by a moral principle of free speech? While it will be morally wrong in many cases, the moral presumption against it, even in the setting of a college campus, is not as overwhelming as is often supposed.