Zofia Stemplowska

This chapter argues that victims of serious wrongdoing probably enjoy immunity from coercive interventions (CNIs) designed to induce them to comply with their duties towards the wrongdoers. More precisely, it suggests that even if they cannot appeal to the fact that CNIs undermine their autonomy in order to block their use against them, they have a separate strategy open to them: they can appeal to the fact that the use of CNIs against them can be seen as an extension of the original wrong done to them, and the worse the wrongdoing of which one is the victim, the more immunity one is likely to enjoy from CNIs, and the threat of their use. Thus, importantly, the victims of serious wrongdoing probably enjoy the immunity even if, as the author argues, it cannot be grounded simply in the fact that CNIs would violate their autonomy. The author then outlines how it can be grounded in the need to limit the original wrongdoing.

Is it ever possible to mitigate any of the past injustice that was done to the living but who are no longer alive? Much has been written on what might be owed to the living on account of past injustices. Much less focus has been paid to the question of what might be owed at the bar of justice to the dead. This chapter advances an argument that does not rely on the possibility of posthumous benefit or harm. It argues that it is possible to mitigate some injustice done to those who are no longer alive. As a result, the living will sometimes have duties to the dead to mitigate some of the injustice they suffered while alive.

The chapter considers the contributions made by democratic legitimacy and social justice to the question of what may permissibly be enforced. According to the conventional view, democratic decisions forfeit their claim to permissible enforceability only when they are gravely unjust. That view is rejected here as unduly restrictive, with a “balancing” view proposed instead, according to which the two considerations need to be balanced on a case-by-case basis. Both the provenance and the content of decisions yield pro tanto reasons: which determines the permissibility of enforcement depends on whether we have greater reason in any given case to advance legitimacy or justice. A democratically legitimate law or policy need not be gravely unjust for it to be wrong to enforce it.

This book honours David Miller's remarkable contribution to political philosophy. Over the last fifty years, Miller has published an extraordinary range of work that has shaped the discipline in many different areas, including social justice, democracy, citizenship, nationality, global justice, and the history of political thought. His work is characterised by its commitment to a kind of theorising that makes sense to the people who have to put its principles into practice. This entails paying close attention to empirical evidence from the social sciences, but also results in a willingness to take the everyday beliefs of lay people seriously in its theorising. The aim is the construction of a political philosophy that can be radically reformative, but that nonetheless is justifiable and realisable here and now. This book brings together a range of papers from leading political theorists concerning many different aspects of Miller's work, on topics including national responsibility and global justice, self-determination, collective responsibility, human rights, immigration, market socialism, national identity, citizenship, multiculturalism, public goods, the political thought of David Hume, and the methodology of political philosophy. It includes a chapter by Miller himself, which develops his own distinctive approach to political theorising. The volume concludes with a complete bibliography of David Miller's published work.

People often fail to comply with the demands of morality. Partial compliance theory takes this noncompliance or its possibility into account in the formulation of moral requirements for people to comply with, or in the evaluation of people’s actions against those requirements. This chapter critically engages with recent work on partial compliance theory. It examines the relationship between noncompliance and injustice, assesses different ways of doing partial compliance theory, sketches the relationship between partial compliance theory and other central methodological debates in moral and political philosophy, and considers whether it is reasonable to issue moral requirements without examining what would happen if everyone did their part.

The two main questions addressed in the chapter are “What is the point of (good) nonideal theory?” and “Can (good) nonideal theory be done in isolation from ideal theory?” To address them, I distinguish between different types of nonideal theory and locate nonideal theory vis‐à‐vis ideal theory as well as realism and applied philosophy. I argue that nonideal theory is useful but some of its versions need to concede that they are defeatist. I also argue that nonideal theory builds on ideal theory, though not in all the ways suggested by defenders of ideal theory.

John Rawls tells at the start of A Theory of Justice that his theory is intentionally constrained in two ways: it is ideal and focuses on the justice of the basic structure of society. This chapter begins by evaluating Rawls's claim that ideal theory sets the target of reform for nonideal theory, whose task it is to work out what to do “under less happy conditions.” It states that it is unclear just when ideal theory can inform the priorities of nonideal theory. The chapter also presents discussions on whether the ideal theory is utopian and concessive to human nature. Even the kind of nonideal theory that delivers concrete action‐guidance for “us” remains unhelpfully ideal if it does so merely in the form of policies or institutional arrangements.

The dead are among us. We are reminded of their names through the books we read, the hoovers we buy, the sandwiches we consume, the tarmac we travel on, the wellingtons we wear, or, frequently, the buildings we visit. Even if we settled on the criteria for being worthy of commemoration, what should we do about the fact that there seem to be so many people who would likely meet them? Commemoration is a form of attention giving, and attention is a scarce resource. It is scarce even if it could be permissibly commanded at will. It is even more scarce when commanding attention may violate someone's freedom to decide for themselves where to bestow it. I will argue that when it comes to public commemorative attention, there are duties that fall on us all to remember the now dead victims of injustice. I will also offer reasons for why such duties would normally mean that we need to prioritize the remembrance of the victims of injustice ahead of remembrance that might be owed to those who had expectations of being remembered or even took steps by donations to secure such remembrance.

Can states permissibly enforce mandatory participation in the provision of public goods? Usual justifications of state action here appeal to the fact that such goods are very good for people. Arthur Ripstein argues that states can compel provision of public goods, but that the best explanation of this is grounded, not in the costs and benefits of the provision to the compelled parties, but in the parties’ moral status as independent agents. I argue that Ripstein’s alternative account poses more problems than it solves. Our best hope in grounding mandatory cooperation is to do so with reference to the duties that we have to serve people’s interests, including interests in autonomy, welfare, and being respected on account of one’s moral status.

Under what conditions are people responsible for their choices and the outcomes of those choices? How could such conditions be fostered by liberal societies? Should what people are due as a matter of justice depend on what they are responsible for? For example, how far should healthcare provision depend on patients' past choices? What values would be realized and which hampered by making justice sensitive to responsibility? Would it give people what they deserve? Would it advance or hinder equality? The explosion of philosophical interest in such questions has been fuelled by increased focus on individual responsibility in political debates. Political philosophers, especially egalitarians, have responded to such developments by attempting to map out the proper place for responsibility in theories of justice. This book both reflects on these recent developments in normative political theory and moves the debate forwards.

In Utopophobia Estlund offers a prominent version of a conditional account of feasibility. I think the account is too permissive. I defend an alternative incentives account of feasibility. The incentives account preserves the spirit of the conditional account but qualifies fewer actions as feasible. Simplified, the account holds that an action is feasible if there is an incentive such that, given the incentive, the agent is likely to perform the action successfully. If we accept that ought implies feasible, then we should reject some normative requirements on agents that Estlund would accept in light of his more permissive conditional account. But we can still recognise normative requirements on individual and collective agents that, if complied with, would result in a world that is radically better than our own.

Is there a duty to do more than one’s fair share of solving collective problems? If there is, can those who do less than their fair share coerce others to do more? These questions arise urgently in relation to the problem of refugee protection. The fact that various states host refugees to a dramatically different extent is due to a range of factors but the most prominent one is that, on the whole, states devote their differential capabilities to the aim of not hosting them. When some states fail to host – or otherwise assist – as many refugees as they should, must other states do more than their fair share in order to solve the problem of providing refugees with an appropriate place to live? I examine what I call the conservative, moderate and responsive answers to this question. I defend the responsive view and argue that there is a duty to do more than one’s fair share here and that such a duty is always enforceable.

Following wars, what requirements, if any, of remembrance do we – those who live in peacetime – have? On whom do they fall? Who must be remembered? How should they be remembered? Fabre offers us an account of remembrance that answers some of those questions and provides a helpful framework for working through the others. It is philosophically nuanced as well as attuned to the complexity of war and informed by actual commemorative practices. In this article, however, I expand Fabre's list of desiderata that a good account of war remembrance must meet. I argue that Fabre's account needs to be refined and, at least in one respect, revised in light of these new desiderata.

Political liberalism offers perhaps the most developed and dominant account of justice and legitimacy in the face of disagreement among citizens. A prominent objection states that the view arbitrarily treats differently disagreement about the good, such as on what makes for a good life, and disagreement about justice. In the presence of reasonable disagreement about the good, political liberals argue that the state must be neutral, but they do not suggest a similar response given reasonable disagreement about what justice requires. A leading political liberal, Jonathan Quong, has recently offered a rebuttal to this asymmetry objection. His reply rests on an innovative distinction between justificatory and foundational disagreement. Quong claims that disagreements about justice in a well ordered society are justificatory while disagreements about the good are foundational, and suggests that this fact blocks the asymmetry objection. We assess Quong's solution and argue that it fails to justify legitimate state action on matters of justice but not the good. We conclude that the asymmetry objection continues to undermine political liberalism

What duties do people have in the face of noncompliance of others with their duties? The paper defends the duty to take up the slack when slack taking is necessary to assist those in dire need. This duty has been criticized by J. L. Cohen, Liam Murphy and, more recently, David Miller. The duty is defended against arguments that appeal to the structure of the duty to aid, fair shares, responsibility, counterintuitiveness, and perverse consequences. The paper considers the implications of the duty for the case of aiding refugees.