Fabian Wendt

Do politicians have to get dirty hands – and what does that mean? Is it okay to be corrupt, when corruption is systemic? When is it a good thing to make compromises in politics? These are questions about political conduct that are raised in political ethics, a somewhat underappreciated subfield of political philosophy. This Element offers a fresh, systematic introduction to political ethics. It starts with a discussion of two challenges to the discipline: One comes from political realists who reject moralism in political philosophy, the other from public choice theorists who model politicians as rational egoists. It then discusses the problem of dirty hands, political corruption, and political compromise as three core topics of political ethics.

The article introduces a conception of liberty that is inspired by Robert Nozick’s ‘presumption in favor of liberty.’ According to that conception, persons are unfree when and insofar as they are prevented from doing something that does not violate anyone’s rights. The article argues that this conception not only has more textual support in Anarchy, State, and Utopia than the one G.A. Cohen attributes to Nozick, but also that it has several theoretical advantages over it. More generally, it shows that it is an all-around plausible and attractive conception of liberty. It can correctly classify justly imprisoned persons as unfree to move around outside prison, it can explain why it classifies only some but not all just preventions as instances of unfreedom, it does not make the concept of liberty redundant, it is not tied to libertarianism in a problematic way, and it captures everything that is worth promoting and respecting about non-interference.

The most fundamental problem of political philosophy is to explain the authority of the state. This article presents a novel account: the practice account of political authority. The practice account belongs to the family of natural duty accounts, but in contrast to other such accounts, it highlights the role that rules of conventional practices can (and must) play in explaining political authority. The idea is that we have a natural right to participate in justifiable conventional practices that secure basic justice and peace, as well as a natural duty to respect this same right in others; that duty explains why the rules of such practices can confer political authority on the state. Other natural duty accounts, the article shows, cannot explain political authority because they fail to provide a working mechanism that links people’s natural duties to the authority of the state.

It seems natural to adopt a historical approach when it comes to property titles: When property titles have a clean history, they are to be respected as a matter of justice; when they do not have a clean history, for example, in cases of prior theft, they must be returned to the original owners or their descendants. But the historical approach has serious drawbacks. This paper presents an alternative. Starting from the idea that property rights must be stable, we offer an account of why historic injustices sometimes do, but sometimes do not, undermine current titles. This account offers a standard of better or worse claims, and maintains that current titles are not undermined unless there are contestants who can put forward comparatively better claims.

The paper argues that the ethics of compromise, toleration, and war sometimes have to bracket who is right in the underlying conflict. It starts by highlighting a parallel between the ethics of compromise, toleration, and war: All three sometimes seem to apply symmetrically to those who are right and those who are wrong. It then discusses three attempts to make sense of this without bracketing who is right: one employs the idea of secondary oughts, a second appeals to conventions that are justifiably articulated in neutral terms, a third interprets the relevant oughts as subjective. The paper tries to show that none of them succeeds, and it concludes that we should embrace the view that the ethics of compromise, toleration, and war sometimes have to bracket who is right. The deeper rationale for this view, it suggests, is that sometimes all parties to a conflict must count as legitimate.

Gerechtigkeit ist ein wichtiger Wert, aber nur einer unter vielen. Für die Frage, welche und wie viele Flüchtlinge wir aufnehmen sollten, ist insbesondere der Wert sozialen Friedens von zentraler Bedeutung. Der Essay skizziert zunächst, was man aus der Perspektive der Gerechtigkeit über Flüchtlingspolitik sagen kann. Da manchmal Gerechtigkeit und sozialer Frieden für in der einen oder anderen Weise eng verbunden erachtet werden, versucht er danach zu zeigen, dass sozialer Frieden ein eigenständiger, von Gerechtigkeit unabhängiger Wert ist. In einem dritten Schritt wird dann erörtert, was aus der Perspektive sozialen Friedens zu der Frage zu sagen ist, welche und wie viele Flüchtlinge wir aufnehmen sollten.

In diesem Beitrag zeichne ich erstens Nozicks Kritik an strukturellen Gerechtigkeitstheorien nach und überlege, was sie wirklich zu zeigen vermag und was nicht; zweitens diskutiere ich, ob Nozicks Anspruchstheorie durch das von ihm akzeptierte „Lockesche Proviso“ ebenfalls strukturell ist; drittens stelle ich zwei Gerechtigkeitstheorien vor, die die Lehren von Nozicks Kritik an strukturellen Gerechtigkeitstheorien annehmen, ohne deswegen gleich alle strukturellen Prinzipien über Bord zu werfen: Den „Links-Libertarismus“ und den „moderaten Libertarismus“. Beide kombinieren eine Anspruchstheorie mit einem strukturellen Prinzip, und bei beiden Theorien nimmt das strukturelle Prinzip die Form eines Lockeschen Provisos an.

When we compromise on justice, we accept or acquiesce to an arrangement that we judge to be unjust, or at least not fully just. Such arrangements are often described as constituting a ‘modus vivendi’. What reasons could we have to accept a modus vivendi, thereby compromising on justice? Given the fact of disagreement on justice, this is an important, but rather neglected question in political philosophy. One possible answer, inspired by John Rawls, is that compromising on justice is only justified if this nonetheless brings us as close to ideal justice as possible under given circumstances. The most straightforward way to take issue with this answer is to present other reasons to compromise on justice. The articles in this book explore epistemic reasons and those that stem from values besides justice, like democracy, peace, toleration and non-subjugation. This book thereby sheds some light on the relevance of compromising for the legitimacy of institutional arrangements. It was previously published as a special issue of the Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy (Vol. 16, No. 4, 2013).

Democratic party politics requires compromises. A question that has hardly been tackled in normative political theory is how political parties ought to navigate these compromises. In this paper, I would like to explore this question from the specific perspective of classical liberal political parties. My focus will mostly be on parties in Western European countries with proportional representation and multi-party systems like Denmark, Germany, or the Netherlands, where liberal parties have often taken an active role in coalition governments.

This paper defends the view that the limits of compromise are identical with the moral principles that set limits to human action more generally. Moral principles that prohibit lying, stealing, or killing, for example, sometimes make it morally impermissible to accept a compromise proposal, for the simple reason that the proposal involves an act of lying, killing, or stealing. The same holds for any other moral principle that sets limits to human action. This may sound straightforward and, perhaps, trivial. Yet in the philosophical literature, discussions of the limits of compromise have singled out more specific principles: Avishai Margalit proposes that the limits of compromise are set by the value of humanity, Simon May points at racial equality and more generally democratic legitimacy, Alexander Ruser and Amanda Machin appeal to the value of integrity, and a fourth at least initially plausible account invokes the idea of public justifiability. After discussing in greater detail what an account of the limits of compromise may be expected to do, the paper will show that none of these accounts is convincing.

Lockeans regard taxation as a—perhaps sometimes permissible—infringement of moral property entitlements. This essay discusses whether, or in what form, this charge is defensible. In doing so, it will explore the truth and the limits of the conventionalist reply of Murphy and Nagel to Lockean challenges to taxation. It argues that there is a moral rationale for property conventions that is independent of the question whether and how one can acquire natural, pre-conventional property rights in the state of nature, that this rationale sets a moral standard for how good property conventions are and whether they are justifiable at all, and that once property conventions are in place, people’s moral property entitlements are at least partly determined by these conventions, sometimes even by unjustifiable ones that ought to be reformed. Because taxation can be a part of property conventions, taxation as such is not an infringement of moral property entitlements. But the essay will also argue that some taxation—excessive taxation—does infringe on moral property entitlements. This is because the moral rationale for property conventions sets some standards for what owners should be entitled to, and so excessive taxation will infringe upon moral entitlements that are partly not convention-based.

The article argues that persons should be conceived as self-owners and entitled to acquire private property within justifiable property conventions because they should be able to live as project pursuers. This is the ‘project pursuit argument’. It leads to a conception of self-ownership that is stringent, but weaker than standard libertarian notions of self-ownership, and to an understanding of private property as a convention that has to meet a sufficientarian threshold in order to be justifiable.