Zoltan Miklosi

This chapter explores the relational critique of distributive conceptions of justice, according to which the proper focus of egalitarian justice is the egalitarian nature of social relations rather than the equal distribution of certain goods. It maintains that the relational critique constitutes a fundamental challenge to distributive egalitarianism only if it rejects the “core distributive thesis” that holds that the distribution of some nonrelational goods has relation-independent significance for justice. It argues that several relational proposals are compatible with that thesis, and therefore constitute extensions or revisions of the distributive conception rather than alternatives to it, and that those relational views that reject the core distributive thesis are the least plausible ones. Finally, the chapter shows that relational views are often ambiguous regarding the nature of the significance of egalitarian relations, i.e. whether it consists in their contribution to well-being, or in being the fitting response to equal moral status.

Recent social or relational egalitarian accounts of democratic authority attempt to vindicate the demand for an equal say in political decisions by appealing either to an analogy with valuable interpersonal relationships that include equal authority as their constitutive element, or to a bedrock judgment that inequality of authority and power absent mitigating conditions is morally objectionable. This paper argues that neither the positive view (as I refer to the first conception) nor the negative view (as I call the second) are successful on their own. The positive view provides a plausible account of when authority over collective decisions ought to be shared, yet it fails to explain why it ought to be shared on equal terms. By contrast, the negative view provides a convincing account of why authority ought to be shared on equal terms whenever it ought to be shared, its analysis of when authority ought to be shared is insufficiently discerning. Yet the paper also argues that the insights of the two approaches can be combined in a fruitful way that promises to vindicate democratic authority without rendering either approach redundant.

The ideal of equality of opportunity is often understood as a principle of fair competition for inherently unequal outcomes, being concerned only with the fairness of the processes through which different people may gain unequal rewards but not with the resulting unequal outcomes themselves. However, two of the philosophically most influential account of equality of opportunity, those of John Rawls and the more recent theory of Thomas Scanlon, belie that understanding. Scanlon, in particular, argues that equality of opportunity ought to be understood to include a requirement of institutional justification that constrains the range of permissible social positions for which people compete to begin with. This chapter argues that on the most plausible construal, this institutional justification includes a defeasible but important presumption against unequal outcomes as well, complementing the demands that apply to the process of competition. At the same time, both Rawls and Scanlon insist that the ideal of equality of opportunity applies only among people who stand in some social or institutional relationship with one another. For Rawls, this relationship is that of being subject to the same “basic structure,” involving the main social, economic, and political institutions as forming a coherent system. Scanlon’s view appears to allow a broader range of social relationships to trigger the requirements of equality of opportunity. This chapter suggests that the reasons that he allows to form the basis of an objection to unequal outcomes within a national economy are relevant more broadly, any time people are in competition for the same pool of scarce resources. Questions about the scope of the ideal of equality of opportunity, including the viability of an account that is broader than Scanlon’s but avoids the apparent absurdity that inequality is presumptively unfair even between people. “Millennia and galaxies away” is one of the most important tasks of future philosophical analysis in this field.

This paper explores Nils Holtug’s attempt in his recent book to show that shared liberal egalitarian values contribute significantly to achieving or maintaining the social cohesion that is necessary for egalitarian distributive policies to be politically sustainable. If successful, this attempt would constitute a powerful answer to the so-called Progressive’s Dilemma, which in effect holds that egalitarians must sacrifice one of two normative positions that they hold dear: egalitarian welfare state policies and permissive immigration regimes. If Holtug is right, no such sacrifice is necessary. This paper accepts Holtug’s empirical premises as true, and investigates instead the normative recommendation that appears to follow from them: that the liberal state ought to promote liberal egalitarian values. The paper argues that there is an apparent tension between Rawlsian political liberalism’s commitment to take reasonable normative pluralism seriously, on the one hand, and state promotion of liberal values, on the other hand. The public reason constraint on the uses of state power appears to rule out state promotion of such views that, even if correct, some reasonable citizens have reason to reject. This paper finds, however, that the challenge is ultimately unsuccessful. When certain constraints are honored, there is no incompatibility between taking evaluative diversity seriously and state attempts to persuade citizens of the correctness of a particular normative outlook

Cosmopolitans typically argue that the realization of cosmopolitan ideals requires the creation of global political institutions of some kind. While the precise nature of the necessary institutions is widely discussed, the problem of the transition to such an order has received less attention. In this paper, we address what we take to be a crucial aspect of the problem of transition: we argue that it involves a moral coordination problem because there are several morally equivalent paths to reform the existing order, but suitably placed and properly motivated political agents need to converge on a single route for the transition to be successful. It is, however, unclear how such a convergence can take place since the duty to create global institutions does not single out any coordination point. We draw on the so-called theory of hegemonic stability to address this problem and conceptualize what we call the hegemonic transition. From an explanatory point of view, we rely on the theory’s insights to explain how a hegemon may contribute to the creation of a rules-based international order by providing salient coordination points and accordingly, enabling coordination among states. From the normative point of view, we identify necessary conditions for the hegemonic transition to be morally permissible. To the extent that these conditions obtain, other states have pro tanto moral reasons to follow the salient coordination point provided by the leading state.

Avia Pasternak’s admirably clearly and tightly argued book defends four broad theses. First, it argues that contemporary states are appropriately regarded as corporate moral agents, entities that can act, consistently over time, on the basis of reasons of their own that can be distinct from the reasons of their constituent members, and at least some of which are moral reasons. This is the corporate moral agency of states thesis. Second, it argues that under certain circumstances that are frequently satisfied by contemporary states, including most democracies but also some non-democratic states, ‘members’ (roughly, citizens and long-term residents) are appropriately regarded as ‘inclusive authors’ of their state’s actions even when they are not aware of them or when they strenuously disagree with them. The conditions include, crucially, that members actually understand and accept themselves, in a manner not coerced against their will, to be members, and some of their actions as contributing to the maintenance of the state. Call this the inclusive authorship thesis. Third, it argues that inclusive authorship makes members morally liable to bear the burdens of remedial duties for the wrongful actions of the state, provided that a distribution of remedial duties that tracks the level of blameworthiness of different members is not feasible or would be prohibitively costly. Call this the moral liability thesis (recall that inclusive membership does not imply direct involvement in, support for, or even agreement with, the actions of the state that incur the remedial obligations, and therefore it does not entail blameworthiness). And finally, it argues that when the conditions stated in the second and third theses obtain, it is morally justified not only to distribute the burdens of remedial obligations to all inclusive authors of the state’s wrongful actions, but to distribute them in a nonproportional manner that does not track members’ level of ‘intentional citizenship’, the latter referring to the necessary conditions of inclusive authorship. Call this the nonproportionality thesis.

A central puzzle of contemporary moral and political philosophy is that while most of us believe that all or almost all human beings enjoy the same moral status, human beings possess the capacities that supposedly ground moral status to very unequal levels. This paper aims to develop a novel strategy to vindicate the idea of moral equality against this challenge. Its central argument is that the puzzle emerges only if one accepts a usually unstated theoretical premise about value and the proper response to value. The premise holds that if the presence of a valuable property warrants a certain kind of response towards its bearers, then every variation in the degree to which the property is present necessarily constitutes a reason for a corresponding variation in the response that is warranted towards its bearers. It argues that despite its intuitive appeal, the premise is not plausible as a general view about the proper way of responding to value, and as a view about responding to the value of rational beings in particular. It proposes an account of the proper manner of valuing rational beings that supports a distinctive version of the so-called threshold approach to justifying equal moral status.

This chapter explores the relational critique of distributive conceptions of justice, according to which the proper focus of egalitarian justice is the egalitarian nature of social relations rather than the equal distribution of certain goods. It maintains that the relational critique constitutes a fundamental challenge to distributive egalitarianism only if it rejects the “core distributive thesis” that holds that the distribution of some nonrelational goods has relation-independent significance for justice. It argues that several relational proposals are compatible with that thesis, and therefore constitute extensions or revisions of the distributive conception rather than alternatives to it, and that those relational views that reject the core distributive thesis are the least plausible ones. Finally, the chapter shows that relational views are often ambiguous regarding the nature of the significance of egalitarian relations, i.e. whether it consists in their contribution to well-being, or in being the fitting response to equal moral status.

Cosmopolitans typically argue that the realization of cosmopolitan ideals requires the creation of global political institutions of some kind. While the precise nature of the necessary institutions is widely discussed, the problem of the transition to such an order has received less attention. In this paper, we address what we take to be a crucial aspect of the problem of transition: we argue that it involves a moral coordination problem because there are several morally equivalent paths to reform the existing order, but suitably placed and properly motivated political agents need to converge on a single route for the transition to be successful. It is, however, unclear how such a convergence can take place since the duty to create global institutions does not single out any coordination point. We draw on the so-called theory of hegemonic stability to address this problem and conceptualize what we call the hegemonic transition. From an explanatory point of view, we rely on the theory’s insights to explain how a hegemon may contribute to the creation of a rules-based international order by providing salient coordination points and accordingly, enabling coordination among states. From the normative point of view, we identify necessary conditions for the hegemonic transition to be morally permissible. To the extent that these conditions obtain, other states have pro tanto moral reasons to follow the salient coordination point provided by the leading state.

The paper examines Thomas Nagel's ‘political conception’ of justice that holds that the requirements of socioeconomic justice apply only among those persons who are subject to the authority of the same political institutions. The paper has two aims. The first aim is to clarify the theoretical motivation for Nagel's theory, which it identifies in what it calls the ‘responsibility thesis’, i.e. that inequalities may be considered as unjust only if some agents are responsible for them, and to reconstruct the account of collective responsibility that, together with the responsibility thesis, may support his substantive conclusions. The second aim is to show that Nagel's conclusions must be rejected even if the account of collective responsibility that may support it is correct. This is so, first, because the responsibility thesis cannot be defended, and second, because even if the thesis is assumed to be correct, it does not succeed in restricting the scope of the requirements of justice to fellow citizens of particular nation states. In light of Nagel's own account of the link between legitimate authority and justice, the standards of the latter ought to apply to the state system as a whole, and not to particular states, taken separately.

According to the Democratic Stability Argument, since currently existing democratic states are overwhelmingly likely to play a leading role in the establishment of a just cosmopolitan order, should one ever be established, there are moral reasons to take measures that are necessary to preserve the adequate functioning of these states. If large-scale immigration can undermine their adequate functioning, then immigration restrictions are justified even from a cosmopolitan perspective, under non-ideal conditions. This paper argues that this argument may not succeed in justifying immigration restrictions under current conditions. Properly understood, the problem involves the competing claims of current poor admission-seekers and of the global poorest at some point in the future, i. e. the earliest feasible date of the establishment of the cosmopolitan order. The paper invokes normative arguments suggesting that the claims of the poorest in the distant future do not have lexical priority as a matter of principle. It also argues that available empirical estimates imply that the claims of admission-seekers in the present and near future potentially outcompete the claims of the poorest in the distant future. These considerations point towards a specification of the Democratic Stability Argument rather than to its complete rejection.

The paper examines the relationship between the two parts of Rawls’ second principle of justice. More specifically, it explores the ways in which the Difference Principle (DP) may constrain the range of acceptable social arrangements in light of the stated lexical priority of the requirement of fair equality of opportunity (FEO) over the DP. The paper discusses two possibilities. First, it examines the role the DP may play within an institutional scheme that satisfies the requirement of FEO. Second, it discusses the role the principle may play in selecting among different institutional schemes that satisfy FEO. The paper argues that the DP has an important role only if there is a range of institutional arrangements that are equivalent from the point of view of FEO but non-equivalent from the point of view of the DP. Next, it explores the possible sources of the variation among the different FEO-equivalent institutional schemes, and argues that on the most satisfactory reading of the requirement of FEO, there will not be much variation that is relevant from the point of view of the DP. The paper concludes that the role of the Difference Principle is at best very limited in constraining the range of social arrangements that are acceptable from the point of view of justice

The paper examines the so-called principle of all-affected interests (PAAI), which holds that political decisions ought to be made in such a manner that all those whose interests are affected by them have appropriate opportunity to participate in them. In conjunction with factual observations regarding global economic interdependence, the PAAI is frequently proposed as the normative premise of arguments for global democracy. The paper argues that these arguments underspecify the supposed wrong of affectedness. It argues that the perceived wrongness of some situations of being affected without an opportunity to participate can be fully captured in terms of inequality rather than exclusion.

What is the role of institutions in carrying out our duties of justice? Broadly speaking, there are two different ways to conceive of this role. In the first approach, it is assumed that the content of the duties of justice is fairly well specifiable, even in the absence of institutions, and the latter are merely very efficient means of justice. The role of institutions in carrying out the duties of justice, on this understanding, is that of increasing the efficiency of individual efforts directed at bringing about just states of affairs. In the second approach, institutions are seen as having a more fundamental and not merely an efficiency-enhancing role in the fulfillment of our duties of justice. On this view, the duties of justice are given ex pression by certain general principles, which, however, cannot be adequately specified in the absence of institutions of the relevant kind. A useful way of expressing this general thought is to say that the principles of justice in themselves underdetermine the content of the requirements that various agents face. The content of these requirements is fully specifiable only through the agency of institutions. This is not to say that the principles themselves do not express certain requirements and thereby constrain the range of acceptable arrangements, but only that they do not by themselves make available a full specification of the relevant duties. For the sake of convenience, the two approaches may be referred to as the Efficiency View and the Specification View, respectively. Later on, I will argue that the Specification View is correct and that therefore the Efficiency View provides an incomplete account of the role of institutions in honoring our duties of justice.

This paper argues that there is a tension between two central features of Dworkin’s partnership conception of democracy. The conception holds, on the one hand, that it is a necessary condition of the legitimacy of the decisions of a political majority that every member of the political community has a very robust right to publicly criticize those decisions. A plausible interpretation of this argument is that free political speech constitutes a normatively privileged vehicle for political minorities to become majorities, and therefore in the absence of freedom of speech minorities could not be rightfully compelled to comply with majority decisions. On the other hand, the partnership conception holds that properly exercised constraints on majority rule do not incur any moral costs. The no-moral-costs thesis is argued for on the basis that nothing of significance is lost when individuals’ influence on political decisions is diminished. However, the legitimacy argument for free speech assumes the significance of individual political influence, which the no-moral-costs thesis denies. Hence the tension

Disagreement in politics is ubiquitous. People disagree about what makes a life worthy or well-lived. They disagree about what they owe to each other in terms of justice. They also disagree about the proper manner of dealing with the consequences of disagreement. What is more, they disagree about the normative significance of moral and political disagreement. Disagreement has been, for at least three decades now, the focus of a series of major works in political philosophy. It has been called one of the fundamental ‘circumstances of politics’ by Waldron. Rawls took disagreement to be at the heart of the problem of political legitimacy. Gerald Gaus takes it to be the most important task of liberal political theory to justify political institutions in the face of ‘evaluative diversity’. For Thomas Christiano, disagreement is part of the basis of the authority of democracy.Political institutions make decisions and rules that are binding f

It is often claimed that states have territorial rights, and that these rights include the right to exclude people who seek admission to their territory. In this paper I will examine whether the most defensible account of territorial rights can provide support to the right to exclude. I will discuss three types of theories of territorial rights. The first account links the right of states to exclude to the prior right of individuals to freedom of association, which is said to include the right not to associate and to dissociate. The second is a Lockean theory that grounds the territorial rights of states, and hence their right to exclude, in the prior right of individuals to private property in the land that constitutes the territory of the state. I argue that these accounts have independently implausible implications, regardless of their implications for the immigration debate. The third account is a Kantian theory that bases the territorial jurisdiction of states on individuals? duty to create, sustain and submit themselves to a shared system of law that is a necessary condition of guaranteeing their rights and of discharging their duties towards one another. I will argue that the Kantian account is superior to its current alternatives. However, I also suggest that it cannot ground a broad right to exclude. nema