Social Theory and Practice

In this paper I criticize the claim that fair trade entails a commitment to an ideal of formal equality according to which all members of the trade regime are to receive and offer equal, or uniform, treatment. I first elaborate on the idea of formal equality and its rationales, identify several positive arguments for departing from formal equality, and respond to a number of objections to “special and differential treatment” for poor countries. I then consider in more detail one specific element of formal equality in the trade regime, namely, the principle of reciprocity. Several distinct reciprocity principles are identified, none of which, I argue, should be regarded as a requirement of fairness. Next I consider a more recent interpretation of formal equality that requires trading countries to “harmonize” domestic laws and policies. I argue that harmonization is not required by fairness.

The 2008 global financial crisis raises ethical as much as financial questions. Moral outrage centered on the imbalance between banks (too big to fail) profiting from excessive risk-taking in good times and taxpayers suffering the costs in bad times. The paper analyzes this imbalance in terms of ethical theory. It first develops a rights-based framework to answer questions about the moral obligations of states and banks towards each other. It then criticizes standard economic thinking, which de-moralizes the phenomenon of moral hazard. Moral hazard between states and banks arises in a context that cannot be interpreted as normal economic contracting, but should rather be characterized as governed by an implicit social contract giving rise to moral obligations.

Where institutions are well-ordered and governed according to principles identified as necessary for justice, the attitudes and behaviors of citizens are also likely to be affected: they will develop a specific ethos that is appropriate for sustaining that just order. However, the absence of a substantially just basic structure will also take effect on what is considered an appropriate sense of justice suited to dealing with nonideal situations characterized by potentially profound injustice. Where ideal theory can describe an ethos necessary for supporting already just institutions and practices, we require a separate account of an ethos appropriate to nonideal conditions.

This essay develops a novel account of the distinction between a publicly justified polity and modus vivendi regimes by appealing to the ideal of congruence in public reason liberalism. A fully publicly justified polity is one whose laws are supported by congruent “first-personal” and “second-personal” moral reasons to internalize laws as personally binding on those subject to them. Regimes approach modus vivendi status to the extent that their laws fail to be justified by either type of reason, or where firstpersonal and second-personal reasons fail to justify internalization.

This article explores and critiques the relationship between justice and legitimacy in contemporary liberal thought. The first half sets out the extent to which liberalism demands the same necessary and sufficient conditions of justice and legitimacy, and in doing so obscures their evaluative distinctiveness. It then offers an interpretation of the deeper theoretical assumptions that result in this unsatisfactory conflation, arguing that the primacy that liberal theory has given to justice, understood as a moral concept, has resulted in a failure to appreciate the deeply multifaceted political nature of legitimacy. The suggestion is then made that it is only through recognizing this nature, including the different (political) circumstances in which the demand for legitimation arises and the needs to which it responds, that this theoretical impasse can be overcome. The article ends on the more radical thought that this may require liberal theory to displace justice as the first (moral) virtue of political systems and replace it with the (political) virtue of legitimacy.

The paper presents a compatibilist explanation of why manipulated agents are not responsible for the actions that result from the manipulation. I first show that an agent’s having reason to resent being manipulated into action is a sufficient condition for his not being responsible for that action, and so an adequate explanation of the latter fact in standard cases in which the agent does have reason to resent. I then consider some cases in which, apparently, manipulation is not cause for resentment, and suggest a way of generalizing the original explanation. I also compare the suggested approach with alternatives.

Some philosophers believe that we can, in theory, justifiably prepunish people—that is, punish them for a crime before they have committed that crime. In particular, it has been claimed that retributivists ought (in principle) to accept prepunishment. The question of whether prepunishment can be justified has sparked an interesting and growing philosophical debate. In this paper I look at a slightly different question: whether retributivists who accept that prepunishment can be justified should prefer (ordinary) postpunishment or prepunishment, or see them (in principle) as on a par. The answer is complex: asking this question brings to light unrecognized distinctions within both retributivism and prepunishment, giving us four different answers to the question, depending on what kind of retributivism and what kind of prepunishment are combined. Surprisingly, given that it is usually presented as a second best, to be pursued only when postpunishment is unavailable, some combinations will find prepunishment preferable.

John Roemer and G.A. Cohen made seminal contributions to the reconstruction of the Marxian theory of exploitation. However, both came to doubt the importance of the Marxian theory of exploitation for the socialist project. This paper defends the Marxian theory of exploitation against their skeptical conclusions. In so doing, it explicates Marxian exploitation’s distributive and relational dimensions, normative and explanatory roles, and complex normative and causal structure.

Immanuel Kant, in a much-maligned view, thought that we could only have indirect duties to nonhuman animals who have no inherent moral value since they lack rationality. While there are various responses to this worrisome position, no one seems to consider that animals could conceivably qualify as having rationality, even on Kantian high standards. Animals engage in various activities (such as playing, seeking revenge, and altruistically helping others) that could be taken as indicators of the core aspects of rationality that Kant requires for having absolute worth (such as a reflective selfconsciousness, a free end-setting ability, and the ability to make moral demands on others). While these animal behaviors will not prove that animals are rational, we must remember that we also cannot prove that other humans are rational. Instead, my goal is only to provide a basis for a precautionary moral principle that requires treating animals as minimally rational, given that they might be. On this basis, we ought to accept some direct Kantian duties for the respectful treatment of animals.

Genocide is a violent process that aims at the liquidation of protected groups. Like individuals, groups can be killed in a variety of ways and for many different reasons. Only the intention of the perpetrator distinguishes genocide from other forms of mass violence. The implications of the account given are striking. Genocide is not in any sense distinctively heinous. Nor is it necessarily immoral. Under certain conditions, settlercolonialism, ethnic cleansing, and forced assimilation will count as instances of the phenomenon. While the argument undermines the orthodox view, it can accommodate the idea that the Holocaust was distinctively heinous.

I argue in this paper that we can develop a conception of black identity—one I call “black social identity”—that African Americans can unobjectionably encourage one another to adopt. I develop a view that retains much of what is attractive in identity politics, theories of collective identity, and the politics of mutual recognition, while avoiding the philosophical weaknesses associated with such views. To motivate my account, I also engage and criticize Tommie Shelby’s argument that black political solidarity requires only a “thin” black identity, one based on the shared experiences of, and vulnerability to, anti-black racism.

On a proceduralist account of democracy, collective decisions derive their justification—at least in part—from the qualities of the process through which they have been made. To fulfill its justificatory function, this process should ensure that citizens have an equal right to political participation as a respectful response to their equal status as agents capable of self-legislation. How should democratic participation be understood if it is to offer such a procedural justification for democratic decisions? I suggest that, in order to overcome the structural procedural disadvantages affecting the actual, effective opportunities that citizens who hold nonmainstream views have to exercise their right to political participation, the enhancement of such opportunities requires securing space for contestation. Against this background, I vindicate the (currently underestimated) role of conscientious objection as a form of political participation.

The standard view that democratic governance of immigration amounts to the self-rule of citizens to the exclusion of migrants stands in tension with the democratic logic of political inclusion suggested by the all-affected interests principle. However, while all who are affected by immigration and border control must be included in their governance, such inclusion claims must be differentiated according to the kinds of interests at stake if this principle is to preserve the democratic ideal of self-rule. In contrast to those who argue that the principle either requires a global demos or threatens to undermine stable democratic states, this article argues that the principle requires recognizing the interest people have in a viable democratic political order, and that territorial states are the contingent vehicle for this interest in contemporary circumstances. This insight provides a principled basis for differentiating the inclusion claims of citizens and potential immigrants. As members of democratic states, citizens are responsible for the decisions and actions of their state and hence for authorizing policies on immigration and border control, but they must do so via institutions that ensure accountability to potential immigrants on the basis of their affected interests.

What is wrong with government whistleblowing and when can it be justified? In my view, “government whistleblowing,” that is, the unauthorized acquisition and disclosure of classified information about the state or government, is a form of “political vigilantism,” which involves transgressing the boundaries around state secrets, for the purpose of challenging the allocation or use of power. It may nonetheless be justified when it is suitably constrained and exposes some information that the public ought to know and deliberate about. Government whistleblowing should then be viewed, along the lines of civil disobedience, as a collective cognition- and legitimacy-enhancing device.

While theories of animal rights maintain that nonhuman animals possess prima facie rights, such as the right to life, the dominant philosophies of animal rights permit the killing of nonhuman animals for reasons of self-defense. I argue that the animal rights discourse on defensive killing is problematic because it seems to entail that any nonhuman animal who poses a threat to human beings can be justifiably harmed without question. To avoid this human-privileged conclusion, I argue that the animal rights position needs to both (1) deploy a new criterion of liability to defensive harm, and (2) seriously consider whether human beings themselves are liable to defensive harm in human-animal conflicts. By shifting the focus to whether humans are liable to defensive harm, we will find that in many situations of human-animal conflict, human beings are actually the ones liable to be harmed because they are often culpable or, to some degree, morally responsible for posing an unjust threat to nonhuman animals.