•  8
    The claims of those who are compelled to migrate are, in general, taken to be more urgent and pressing than the claims of those who were not forced to do so. This article does not defend the moral relevance of voluntarism to the morality of migration, but instead seeks to demonstrate two complexities that must be included in any plausible account of that moral relevance. The first is that the decision to start the migration journey is distinct from the decision to stop that journey, through rese…Read more
  •  11
    Migration and Manipulation
    Public Affairs Quarterly 37 (3): 174-187. 2023.
    Much modern discussion of the morality of migration begins with the concept of coercion, and takes the coercive nature of border enforcement as especially salient in the moral analysis of migration policy. Much migration control, however, begins not with overt coercion, but with what I term manipulations; these are ways of making migration more difficult that do not resemble canonical cases of coercion. Examples include the alteration of the physical pathways between states, attempts to deceive …Read more
  •  26
    Sanctuary Cities and Non-Refoulement
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (2): 457-474. 2020.
    More than two hundred cities in the United States have now declared themselves to be sanctuary cities. This declaration involves a commitment to non-compliance with federal law; the sanctuary city will refuse to use its own juridical power – including, more crucially, its own police powers – to assist the federal government in the deportation of undocumented residents. We will argue that the sanctuary city might be morally defensible, even if deportation is not always wrong, and even if the fede…Read more
  •  41
    Global cities, global justice?
    with Loren King
    Journal of Global Ethics 14 (3): 332-352. 2018.
    The global city is a contested site of economic innovation and cultural production, as well as profound inequalities of wealth and life chances. These cities, and large cities that aspire to ‘global’ status, are often the point of entry for new immigrants. Yet for political theorists (and indeed many scholars of global institutions), these critical sites of global influence and inequality have not been a significant focus of attention. This is curious. Theorists have wrestled with the nature and…Read more
  •  33
    Book Review: Immigration Justice, by Peter W. Higgins (review)
    with Peter Higgins
    Political Theory 43 (3): 412-415. 2015.
  •  133
    Two Models of Equality and Responsibility
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (2): 165-199. 2008.
  •  11
    Unwanted Compatriots: Alienation, Migration, and Political Autonomy
    Ethics and International Affairs 35 (4): 491-501. 2021.
    In Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration, Anna Stilz argues that legitimate political authority requires the actual—rather than hypothetical—consent of the governed. I argue, however, that her analysis of that consent is inconsistent, in the weight it ascribes to the felt desire to refrain from doing politics with some particular group of people. In the context of secession and self-determination, the lack of actual consent to shared political institutions is weighty enough to ren…Read more
  •  56
    What is the Border For?
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 17 (4): 379-397. 2020.
    Many discussions of the moral dimensions of borders emphasize how those borders foster and sustain a national community. In this paper, I discuss three distinct sorts of goods that might be best preserved in the presence of state borders. The first of these is decolonization; I argue that undermining colonial structures might require political institutions with the right to refuse unwanted outsiders. The second of these is social solidarity; we might find that the inability to exclude outsiders …Read more
  •  26
    Are Citizenship Tests Necessarily Illiberal?
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (2): 313-329. 2019.
    In recent years, many philosophers have argued that it is inherently illiberal to make citizenship for migrants conditional on a test. On these arguments, liberalism itself demands either that no test be administered, or that the test be so easy as to serve merely a symbolic function. In this paper, I make two claims in response to these ideas. The first is that a citizenship test - even a difficult one - is not inherently illiberal, when what is tested for reflects the actual backdrop of knowle…Read more
  •  11
    Global justice and the brain drain
    with Gillian Brock
    Ethics and Global Politics 9 (1): 33498. 2016.
  • Social Justice and State Borders
    Dissertation, Stanford University. 1998.
    Liberalism is premised upon moral egalitarianism, so that no arbitrary fact about persons can serve to justify a difference in the administration of justice. Yet liberalism also traditionally applies its egalitarianism only within the borders of the territorial state, so that arbitrary facts of citizenship serve to place a limit upon the range of such egalitarian principles. I argue that the current ways of solving this dilemma are inadequate; both the partialist and the Rawlsian cosmopolitan ap…Read more
  •  32
    Geeks and monsters: Bias crimes and social identity (review)
    Law and Philosophy 20 (2): 121-139. 2001.
    No Abstract
  •  10
    Geeks and Monsters: Bias Crimes and Social Identity
    Law and Philosophy 20 (2): 121-139. 2001.
  •  35
    Agency, Coercion, and Global Justice: A Reply to My Critics
    Law and Philosophy 35 (3): 313-335. 2016.
    Mathias Risse, Andrea Sangiovanni, and Kok-Chor Tan have offered some subtle and powerful criticisms of the ideas given in my Justice and Foreign Policy. Three themes in particular recur in their critiques. The first is that the arguments I make in that book rest upon unjustified, arbitrary, or contradictory premises. The second is that the use of coercion in the analysis of distributive justice is a mistake. The third is that the global institutional set represents, contrary to my arguments, an…Read more
  •  44
    Equality without Documents: Political Justice and the Right to Amnesty
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40 (S1): 99-122. 2010.
    All modern democratic societies claim to be egalitarian. They do not agree, of course, about what egalitarianism demands; the ideal of equality is hardly transparent and can be plausibly understood to encompass any number of social arrangements and values. Thatsomeform of equality is to be prized, though, is uncontroversial. Indeed, it may be true that all political theories that have stood the test of time can be understood as specifying and interpreting the ideal of equality. Whether or not th…Read more
  •  14
    The Ethics of Immigration, Joseph Carens , 384 pp., $35 cloth
    Ethics and International Affairs 29 (2): 237-240. 2015.
  •  36
    Justice, Institutions, and Luck
    Philosophical Review 125 (1): 148-151. 2016.
  •  21
    Collateral benefit
    Social Philosophy and Policy 23 (1): 218-230. 2006.
    This essay attempts to identify the ethical principles appropriate to a second-order political agent—an agent, that is, whose primary responsibility lies not in the implementation of state power, but in the response to and evaluation of that state power. The specific agent I examine is the human rights non-governmental organization, and the specific context is that of humanitarian military intervention. I argue that the specific role of the human rights NGO gives rise to ethical permissions not …Read more