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67Rethinking moral claim rightsJournal of Political Philosophy 31 (4): 433-451. 2023.Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
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On the messy "utopophobia vs factophobia" controversy : a systematization and assessmentIn Kevin Vallier & Michael Weber (eds.), Political Utopias: Contemporary Debates, Oup Usa. 2017.
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14On Public‐identity DisempowermentJournal of Political Philosophy 30 (4): 462-486. 2021.Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
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422On Public‐identity DisempowermentJournal of Political Philosophy 30 (4): 462-486. 2021.Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
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2Social Liberal or Cosmopolitan?Global Justice : Theory Practice Rhetoric 2. 2014.Review: David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007.
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93On the Duty to Withhold Global Aid Now to Save More Lives in the FutureEthics and Global Politics 4 (2): 125-34. 2011.The world is riddled with human suffering, poverty, and destitution. In the face of this moral tragedy, the least that the global wealthy can do is try to support aid programs aimed at relieving the plight of the very poor. Many political leaders, pop stars, and religious personalities have realized this, and routinely urge us to be more sensitive to the conditions of the distant needy. Giving aid thus seems to be one of the most important moral imperatives of our time. (Published: 22 June 2011)…Read more
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21The methodology of political theoryIn Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John P. Hawthorne (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, Oxford University Press. 2016.This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or crit…Read more
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30Political theorySSRN Electronic Journal. 2014.Political theory, sometimes also called “normative political theory”, is a subfield of the disciplines of philosophy and political science that addresses conceptual, normative, and evaluative questions concerning politics and society, broadly construed. Examples are: When is a society just? What does it mean for its members to be free? When is one distribution of goods socially preferable to another? What makes a political authority legitimate? How should we trade off different values, such as l…Read more
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316Cosmopolitan Justice and Rightful EnforceabilityIn Gillian Brock (ed.), Cosmopolitanism versus Non-cosmopolitanism. pp. 92-100. 2013.
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285Microfinance, Poverty Relief, and Political JusticeIn Luis Cabrera & Tom Sorell (eds.), Microfinance, Rights and Global Justice. pp. 84-104. 2015.
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467Just War and Global Distributive JusticeIn Pietro Maffettone & David Held (eds.), Global Political Theory. pp. 143-57. 2016.
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470On the Messy “Utopophobia vs Factophobia” ControversyIn Kevin Vallier & Michael Weber (eds.), Political Utopias: Contemporary Debates, Oup Usa. pp. 11-31. 2017.In recent years, political philosophers have been fiercely arguing over the virtues and vices of utopian vs realistic theorizing. Partly due to the lack of a common and consistently used vocabulary, these debates have become rather confusing. In this chapter, I attempt to bring some clarity to them and, in doing so, I offer a conciliatory perspective on the “utopian vs realistic theorizing” controversy. I argue that, once the notion of a normative or evaluative theory is clearly defined and dist…Read more
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191Human Rights, the Political View, and TNCs: An ExplorationIn Tom Campbell & Kylie Bourne (eds.), Political and Legal Approaches to Human Rights. pp. 168-86. 2018.A recently developed view in political theory holds that only political agents, particularly states, can be primary bearers of human-rights duties. Problematically, this so-called ‘political view’ appears unable to account for the human-rights responsibilities of powerful non-state actors, such as transnational corporations (TNCs). Can a recognizably political view respond to this concern? I show that, once the moral underpinnings of the political view are made explicit, it can. I suggest that, …Read more
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448The Case for Ideal TheoryIn Robyn Eckersley & Chris Brown (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of International Political Theory. pp. 664-676. 2018.
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902Global Justice and the Role of the State: A Critical SurveyIn Thom Brooks (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Global Justice, . 2020.Reference to the state is ubiquitous in debates about global justice. Some authors see the state as central to the justification of principles of justice, and thereby reject their extension to the international realm. Others emphasize its role in the implementation of those principles. This chapter scrutinizes the variety of ways in which the state figures in the global-justice debate. Our discussion suggests that, although the state should have a prominent role in theorizing about global justic…Read more
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372In what Sense Are Human Rights PoliticalPolitical Studies 60 (1): 180-94. 2012.Philosophical discussion of human rights has long been monopolised by what might be called the ‘natural-law view’. On this view, human rights are fundamental moral rights which people enjoy solely by virtue of their humanity. In recent years, a number of theorists have started to question the validity of this outlook, advocating instead what they call a ‘political’ view. My aim in this article is to explore the latter view in order to establish whether it constitutes a valuable alternative to th…Read more
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602Justice, Disagreement, and DemocracyBritish Journal of Political Science 43 (1): 177-99. 2013.Is democracy a requirement of justice or an instrument for realizing it? The correct answer to this question, I argue, depends on the background circumstances against which democracy is defended. In the presence of thin reasonable disagreement about justice, we should value democracy only instrumentally (if at all); in the presence of thick reasonable disagreement about justice, we should value it also intrinsically, as a necessary demand of justice. Since the latter type of disagreement is perv…Read more
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377Justice, Charity, and Disaster Relief: What, if Anything, Is Owed to Haiti, Japan and New Zealand?American Journal of Political Science 57 (2): 491-503. 2013.Whenever fellow humans suffer due to natural catastrophes, we have a duty to help them. This duty is not only acknowledged in moral theory, but also expressed in ordinary people’s reactions to phenomena such as tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Despite being widely acknowledged, this duty is also widely disputed: some believe it is a matter of justice, others a matter of charity. Although central to debates in international political theory, the distinction between justice and charity is ha…Read more
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245Canine Justice: An Associative AccountPolitical Studies 62 (1): 37-52. 2014.A prominent view in contemporary political theory, the ‘associative view’, says that duties of justice are triggered by particular cooperative relations between morally significant agents, and that ‘therefore’ principles of justice apply only among fellow citizens. This view has been challenged by advocates of global justice, who point to the existence of a world-wide cooperative network to which principles of justice apply. Call this the challenge from geographical extension. In this paper, I p…Read more
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489No Global Demos, No Global Democracy? A Systematization and CritiquePerspectives on Politics 12 (4): 789-807. 2014.A globalized world, some argue, needs a global democracy. But there is considerable disagreement about whether global democracy is an ideal worth pursuing. One of the main grounds for scepticism is captured by the slogan: “No global demos, no global democracy.” The fact that a key precondition of democracy—a demos—is absent at the global level, some argue, speaks against the pursuit of global democracy. The paper discusses four interpretations of the skeptical slogan—each based on a specific acc…Read more
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331Social Samaritan Justice: When and Why Needy Fellow Citizens Have a Right to AssistanceAmerican Political Science Review 109 (4): 735-749. 2015.In late 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast of the U.S., causing much suffering and devastation. Those who could have easily helped Sandy’s victims had a duty to do so. But was this a rightfully enforceable duty of justice, or a non-enforceable duty of beneficence? The answer to this question is often thought to depend on the kind of help offered: the provision of immediate bodily services is not enforceable; the transfer of material resources is. I argue that this double standard is unjust…Read more
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2528What Normative Facts Should Political Theory Be About? Philosophy of Science meets Political LiberalismIn David Sobel, Steven Wall & Peter Vallentyne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 185-220. 2018.Just as different sciences deal with different facts—say, physics versus biology—so we may ask a similar question about normative theories. Is normative political theory concerned with the same normative facts as moral theory or different ones? By developing an analogy with the sciences, we argue that the normative facts of political theory belong to a higher— more coarse-grained—level than those of moral theory. The latter are multiply realizable by the former: competing facts at the moral leve…Read more
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402The natural duty of justice in non-ideal circumstances: On the moral demands of institution building and reformEuropean Journal of Political Theory 20 (1). 2017.Principles of distributive justice bind macro-level institutional agents, like the state. But what does justice require in non-ideal circumstances, where institutional agents are unjust or do not e...
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384The content-independence of political obligation: What it is and how to test itLegal Theory 24 (2): 135-157. 2018.One of the distinctive features of the obligation to obey the law is its content-independence. We ought to do what the law commands because the law commands it, and not because of the law's content—i.e., the independent merits of the actions it prescribes. Despite its popularity, the notion of content-independence is marked by ambiguity. In this paper, I first clarify what content-independence is. I then develop a simple test—the “content-independence test”—which allows us to establish whether a…Read more
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11Social Liberal or Cosmopolitan? (review)Global Justice Theory Practice Rhetoric 2 50-53. 2009.Review: David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007.
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20Two Pictures of the Global-justice Debate: A Reply to TanLaw Ethics and Philosophy 2 219-26. 2014.
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10Social Liberal or Cosmopolitan? (review)Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric 2 50-53. 2009.Review: David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007.
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28Review of Lukas H. Meyer (ed.), Legitimacy, Justice and Public International Law (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (7). 2010.
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763Respect for persons and the moral force of socially constructed normsNoûs 55 (2): 385-408. 2021.When and why do socially constructed norms—including the laws of the land, norms of etiquette, and informal customs—generate moral obligations? I argue that the answer lies in the duty to respect others, specifically to give them what I call “agency respect.” This is the kind of respect that people are owed in light of how they exercise their agency. My central thesis is this: To the extent that (i) existing norms are underpinned by people’s commitments as agents and (ii) they do not conflict wi…Read more
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230II- What's Wrong with Being Lonely? Justice, Beneficence, and Meaningful RelatopnshipsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 90 (1): 49-69. 2016.A life without liberty and material resources is not a good life. Equally, a life devoid of meaningful social relationships—such as friendships, family attachments, and romances—is not a good life. From this it is tempting to conclude that just as individuals have rights to liberty and material resources, they also have rights to access meaningful social relationships. I argue that this conclusion can be defended only in a narrow set of cases. ‘Pure’ social relationship deprivation—that is, depr…Read more
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Ludwig Maximilians Universität, MünchenProfessor
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King's College LondonVisiting Professor
Munich, Bayern, Germany
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Law |
Applied Ethics |
Areas of Interest
2 more
Methods in Political Philosophy |
Social Ontology |
Freedom and Liberty |
Global Justice |
Rights |
Democracy |
Legal Authority and Obligation |