Jake Monaghan

The philosophy of the city is concerned fundamentally with normative questions about city life and governance. Our answers to normative questions about the city (including the values and principles we think should constrain it and select policy) depend in no small part on how we choose to model or represent the city in normative inquiry. In this paper, I reconstruct several debates about the philosophy of the city to show how model choice influences our normative conclusions. I finish by critically evaluating those models to offer insight into the difficult task of model choice.

This chapter reports the results of four empirical studies that investigate the extent to which an epistemic closure principle for knowledge is reflected in folk epistemology. Previous work by Turri (2015a) suggested our shared epistemic practices may only include a closure principle that applies to perceptual beliefs but not to inferential beliefs. The chapter argues that the results of these studies provide reason for thinking individuals are making a performance error when their knowledge attributions and denials conflict with the closure principle. When the chapter authors used research materials that overcome proposed difficulties with Turri’s original materials, they found that participants did not reject closure. Furthermore, when they presented Turri’s original materials to non-philosophers with expertise in deductive reasoning, they endorsed closure for both perceptual and inferential beliefs. These results suggest that an unrestricted closure principle provides a better model of folk patterns of knowledge attribution than a source-relative one.

The ideas of “territory” and “turf” are important parts of both our folk theory and scholarly treatments of the city. Our territory is where we feel at home and have a measure of control outside of our private residences. Our turf suggests something similar, but less benign, highlighting the potential for exclusion, closure, and conflict. In this paper, I explore a problem for attempts to achieve territory-protecting urban policy. Justice requires territory but prohibits turf. Yet the inherently dynamic nature of territory induces attempts at preservation, most of which will be limited at best. Further, some attempts will produce illegitimate attempts at controlling territory. The result is that there is a pronounced risk of territory degenerating into turf. Realizing territory without turf—balancing control with dynamism—is one of the central challenges in the philosophy and policy of the city. I develop a moderate account of territorial maintenance as a way out of the puzzle.

This article presents a model of an “open,” largely laissez‐faire political society in which open exit is the only legitimately enforceable principle, like a liberal archipelago. It assumes the possibility of widespread “soft closure” policies that limit mobility. If those policies sufficiently diminish mobility, the society is no longer properly characterized as open, and its members’ associational rights are undermined. I substantiate these claims with a discussion of the “contract cities” innovation in mid‐20th century Southern California municipal governance. The model produces good reason to think that formal or plain open exit is insufficient for an open society, and that open societies need policy to ensure mobility. It also produces good reason to worry about the threat of soft closure.

David Estlund argues that theories of structural injustice have to show how victims can have warranted grievances, generally expressed through reactive attitudes. But he argues that no social structure can by itself be the target of warranted grievance. We argue that warrant for reactive attitudes is an inappropriate standard to hold theories of structural injustice to, because reactive attitudes are tightly connected to the mental states that motivate actions. This connection entails that reactive attitudes presuppose that agents are the perpetrators of injustice. But the point of the idea of structural injustice is that this presupposition is often unwarranted.

Political philosophy often focuses on “major institutions” that make up the “basic structure” of society. These include political, economic, and social institutions. In this paper I argue first that policing plays a substantial role in generating the kinds of inequalities and problems that are concerns of social or structural justice, and therefore that police agencies qualify as a major institution. When we abandon full compliance or similar idealizations, it is clear that policing is not a concern secondary to, e.g., the electoral system or the scheme of property rights in a society. Nor, I argue, does maintaining full compliance or moral character idealizations obviate an active enforcement role. Eliminating that role from an idealized model society requires engaging in a methodologically and substantively unattractive amount of abstraction. The result is that an active enforcement role is at the core of a complete theory of justice rather than something that is significant only “downstream” from more fundamental issues.

This article sketches a case for the importance of allowing and protecting civil disobedience in a democratic society. There are weighty reasons for non-enforcement of certain laws under certain circumstances, which undermines the legalistic claim that justice requires police to faithfully (try to) enforce all laws at all times. Furthermore, questions about how the police should respond to disobedient demonstrations are not settled by popular theoretical treatments of civil disobedience. Police responses to disobedient demonstrations should be guided by a principle of proportionality. This proportionality requirement is more stringent in cases of self-generated needs for self-defense. Common police tactics like “skirmish lines” predictably escalate interactions and create a need for further defensive force, thereby violating the proportionality requirement.

Diverse and dynamic societies face a problem of social control. Institutions of social control, of which the police are a part, are a necessary part of just and legitimate governance. But in our non-ideal world they are also responsible for injustices of their own. This project raises questions of political philosophy as they apply to the professional police agency. It begins by constructing an inchoate, but mainstream view about just policing, legalism, according to which police power is justified by the criminal code, and just policing is just the faithful enforcement of law. This view is undermined by the practical realities of policing, which involves widespread and unavoidable police discretion. It then develops an account of just and legitimate police discretion, including principles of proportionality, liberal neutrality, and democratic responsiveness. This sheds lights on controversial police tactics, order maintenance initiatives, and community policing strategies. This account also informs the just institutional arrangement of police powers, informing ongoing debates about police reform and abolition.

According to instrumental proceduralism, political power is justified when it is the output of a reliable procedure. In this paper, I examine how procedures are supposed to confer normative properties. Based on this assessment, I conclude that many proceduralists set the reliability bar too low. Next, I motivate two additional requirements for instrumental procedures. I introduce the notion of “predictable” procedural failure and argue that in order for a procedure to confer legitimacy or other normative properties on its output, it must not have failed predictably. Finally, I argue that even when procedures are highly reliable, it must not be the case that their failures fall disproportionately on certain people. The goal is to develop an instrumental proceduralism that is more sensitive to the failures of real institutions.

The practice of equipping police officers with naloxone has generated controversy within the profession. I adjudicate the disagreement in this article. I diagnose the dispute as rooted in a philosophical account of professional, role-based obligations. Parties to the debate appear to agree that what the police are permitted to do is determined in part by the essential goal of the police profession. Instead, I argue that we should make room for “experiments in working.” Finally, I argue that naloxone use by police is an experiment in working that falls squarely within the tradition of order maintenance policing.

The structure of police agencies, especially how the boundaries of their authority are drawn, is a crucial element of their legitimacy. Poorly drawn boundaries encourage unjustified police power and illegitimate police agencies. Claiming that realized political entities in developed democracies are illegitimate is fraught, in part because the difference between legitimate and illegitimate political power can be subtle in practice. To overcome this difficulty, I propose thinking in terms of “legitimacy-risk profiles.” I develop a way of determining a measure of risk to legitimacy associated with various kinds of police power and agency structure. I then use it to explore the institutional boundaries recommended by the legitimacy-risk profiles of different kinds of policing. The result is a normative framework for thinking about political legitimacy at the realized—that is, not the fundamental and idealized—level.

Speciesist or biological accounts of moral status can be defended by showing that all members of Homo sapiens have a moral status conferring property. In this article, I argue that the most promising defense locates the moral status conferring property in the relational property of being biologically tied to other humans. This requires that biological ties ground moral obligations. I consider and reject the best defenses of that premise. Thus, we are left with compelling evidence that biological ties and membership in a biological category like “species” ground neither moral obligations nor moral status. Because it is crucial to account for the moral significance of family bonds, I conclude by describing the sense in which biological ties matter morally.

Legitimate political institutions sometimes produce clearly unjust laws. It is widely recognized, especially in the context of war, that agents of the state may not enforce political decisions that are very seriously unjust or are the decisions of illegitimate governments. But may agents of legitimate states enforce unjust, but not massively unjust, laws? In this paper, I respond to three defences of the view that it is permissible to enforce these unjust laws. Analogues of the Walzerian argument from patriotism, the Vitorian epistemic argument, and the proceduralist argument found in Rawls, Estlund, and others do not show that law enforcement is usually permitted to enforce unjust laws. Finally, I develop a proceduralist argument for the thesis that law enforcement is permitted to disregard unjust laws. I conclude by considering objections concerning the problem of optimizing society for justice and the problem of law enforcement agents with deplorable moral beliefs.

The primary method for defending biocentric individualism—a prominent theory of the moral value of organisms—is to appeal to the fact that certain things are good for or bad for living creatures, even if they are not sentient. This defense is typically and frequently met with the objection that we can determine what is good for some living creature without thereby having any moral reason or obligation to promote or avoid undermining it. In this paper I show how a theory of the morality of defensive violence undermines this objection

We report the results of four empirical studies designed to investigate the extent to which an epistemic closure principle for knowledge is reflected in folk epistemology. Previous work by Turri (2015a) suggested that our shared epistemic practices may only include a source-relative closure principle—one that applies to perceptual beliefs but not to inferential beliefs. We argue that the results of our studies provide reason for thinking that individuals are making a performance error when their knowledge attributions and denials conflict with the closure principle. When we used research materials that overcome what we think are difficulties with Turri’s original materials, we found that participants did not reject closure. Furthermore, when we presented Turri’s original materials to non-philosophers with expertise in deductive reasoning (viz., professional mathematicians), they endorsed closure for both perceptual and inferential beliefs. Our results suggest that an unrestricted closure principle—one that applies to all beliefs, regardless of their source—provides a better model of folk patterns of knowledge attribution than a source-relative closure principle.

Recent controversial cases of killings by police have generated competing Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements. Blue Lives Matter proponents claim that the focus on and protests in light of police killings of unarmed black persons is unwarranted. Part of this dispute turns on the moral evaluation of the killing of citizens by law enforcement. To address the dispute, I develop an account of the special moral obligations of law enforcement and show how it can be applied. I argue that members of law enforcement have special moral obligations against killing citizens. The account generates moral guidance for law enforcement in a number of other ways. It implies, finally, that the Blue Lives Matter proponents fundamentally misunderstand the ethics of law enforcement.