This article examines G. A. Cohen’s endorsement of a hybrid ethical theory and its relationship to his critique of John Rawls’s egalitarian liberalism. Cohen claimed that Rawls’s appeal to special incentives was a distortion of his own difference principle. I argue that Cohen’s acceptance of a personal prerogative (the central element of Samuel Scheffler’s version of a hybrid ethical theory) has several untoward consequences. First, it illuminates how any reasonable challenge to Rawls’s liberalism must recognise Thomas Nagel’s arguments concerning the (...) problems that arise when one attempts to implement a political theory analogous to a hybrid theory of ethics. Second, it undermines Cohen’s critique of Rawls. Third, it undermines the plausibility of Cohen’s ethos-driven social egalitarianism. The article concludes that, despite Nagel’s concerns, the most plausible form of egalitarianism—one that can accommodate the requirements of a hybrid ethical theory—will be Rawlsian, rather than Cohen’s ethos-based system. (shrink)

Realist thinkers in political philosophy often criticize ideal theorists for neglecting or eliminating the fact of politics in their work. This is supposed to be problematic because we should never expect to overcome politics. Any theory that attempts to do so is said to be unrealistic, naïve, and impractical. Although much has been said in the dispute between realists and ideal theorists in recent years, this particular line of criticism, which should be distinguished from other criticisms of ideal theory, has (...) not been clearly or explicitly addressed by ideal theorists in the literature. I deal with this issue by examining the ideal theory of John Rawls, which has been a prominent target of realist criticisms. My aim is to see where politics exists, or might exist, in Rawls’s theory, and whether this politics satisfactorily answers to the various aspects of the realist’s critique. My analysis suggests that there may be no inherent or necessary conflict between ideal theory and real politics, after all. (shrink)

Radical realists criticise the role that moral intuitions play in moralist political philosophy. However, radical realists may also rely on certain epistemic intuitions when making use of their theories of ideology critique. Hence, one might wonder whether radical realists’ criticism of moralists’ intuition-dependence is hypocritical. Call this the intuition asymmetry objection. My aim in this article is to show that the intuition asymmetry objection fails. After examining the basis of objections by radical realists to the role of moral intuitions in (...) moralist political philosophy, I show that the presence of intuitions in radical realist theories of ideology critique is consistent with their criticism of moralism. (shrink)

What does morality require of individuals in their dating and sex life? In this article I challenge recent outlines of antidiscrimination duties in the dating sphere and present a plausible alternative: the deliberative duty. This duty avoids the risks and limitations of earlier outlines: it is time-sensitive regarding the malleability of intimate preferences, it avoids being too demanding on the duty-bearer and minimizes the risk of generating mere dutiful attraction behavior towards right-holders. In addition, it is better suited for universal (...) action guidance in the dating sphere than earlier outlines of individual antidiscrimination duties. (shrink)

Widespread tax evasion and avoidance have recently led to both significant reforms of international tax governance and increased attention from theorists of global tax justice. Against the background of an analysis of the double challenge of effectiveness and distribution facing the taxation of multinational enterprises, this paper puts forward a taxonomy of recent contributions of the tax justice literature. This taxonomy not only opens up an original angle of interpretation on global tax justice, but also provides a vantage point from (...) which to evaluate recent reforms by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (shrink)

This article grounds the morality of secession on two forms of collective self-determination: one manifests the communal goods of secessionists and the other the value of shared political institutions. Secession is morally valuable when the two are incompatible such that the claimant confronts persistent alienation. For remedial rights theories, only ‘strict violations’ permit secession. For primary rights theories, ‘broad violations’ grant secession as a last resort, and so this thesis, ‘collective self-determination as nonalienation’, should be accepted regardless. First, as the (...) two collective forms of self-determination develop two forms of territorial rights, it supplements cogent accounts of territorial justification for, and claims to, secession. Second, as persistent alienation can have both strict and broad interpretations, it also provides moral grounds shared by remedial and primary rights theories if they concede the value of collective self-determination. The strict sense refers to persistent coercion that violates personal autonomy and nullifies state legitimacy. The broad interpretation denotes long-term political frustration caused by unreasonable prevention of greater collective autonomy that even legitimate states may achieve. Third, to verify whether this amounts to long-term political frustration and to address persistent alienation, secession should be regarded as a last resort, despite its support from the primary rights account. (shrink)

This article substantiates the common intuition that it is wrong to contribute to dangerous climate change for no significant reason. To advance this claim, I first propose a basic principle that one has the moral obligation to act in accordance with the weight of moral reasons. I further claim that there are significant moral reasons for individuals not to emit greenhouse gases, as many other climate ethicists have already argued. Then, I assert that there are often no significant moral (or (...) excusing) reasons to emit greenhouse gases. In any such trivial-cost – but not necessarily trivial-impact – cases, the individual then has an obligation to refrain. Finally, I apply the moral weighing principle to everyday situations of emitting and establish two surprisingly substantial implications: the relevance of virtues to the interpersonal assessment of environmentally harmful actions and the extensive individual ethical obligations that exist short of moral purity. (shrink)

According to the beneficiary-pays principle, the involuntary beneficiaries of injustice ought to disgorge their unjustly obtained benefits in order to compensate the victims of injustice. The paper explores the effectiveness of the above principle in establishing a robust and unique normative connection between the rectificatory duties of the beneficiaries and the rectificatory rights of the victims of injustice. I discuss three accounts of the beneficiary-pays principle according to which the rectificatory duty of the beneficiaries towards the victims is grounded in (...) (a) their duty to oppose injustice and mitigate its effects, (b) their duty to give up benefits that are causally linked to an act of wrongdoing, or (c) their duty to not sustain wrongful harm against the victims. By criticizing these accounts, I intend to highlight the complexities of articulating a distinct rectificatory duty that applies uniquely to the beneficiaries of injustice qua beneficiaries. I conclude that, while it may seem complicated to defend the beneficiary-pays principle as an independent moral principle, it is more plausible to think of it as being derivative of more general principles such as the principle of fair play. (shrink)

This article discusses the self-respect argument for basic liberties, which is that self-respect is an important good, best supported by basic liberties, and that this yields a reason for the traditional liberty principle. I concentrate on versions of it that contend that self-respect is best supported by basic liberties for reasons related to the recognition that such liberties convey. I first discuss the two standard approaches loosely associated with John Rawls and Axel Honneth. Here self-respect pertains to traits and conduct (...) (Rawls) or to one’s personhood (Honneth). It is argued that these approaches fail to show why self-respect is better supported by the liberty principle than certain alternatives worth taking seriously – unless (in the case of personhood self-respect) self-respect is construed in such a narrow way that it is not a condition for autonomy or welfare in any plausible sense. I then identify a self-attitude that I call “a sense of competence”, which at least shows that the liberty principle is more important to autonomy than what we might otherwise have reasons to believe. (shrink)

This article argues that military conditioning (MC) systematically violates the human dignity of soldiers. The argument relies on an absolute deontologist account of human dignity understood as a claim-right to live in self-respect, which is a right to decide on one’s own behalf about, and to be in control of, essential aspects of one’s own life. The article claims that MC violates soldiers’ dignity so understood because the largely automatic physical killing reflex that MC instills aims to remove their freedom (...) of choice to kill or not to kill, while the MC practices that rationalize the killing of opponents aim to subvert soldiers’ moral deliberation in relation to this behavior. MC thus aims to take away soldiers’ control over a very essential aspect of human life: the decision whether to take life in war. Thereby, MC systematically violates their human dignity. The article concludes with a proposal for an amendment to international law that would allow legal institutions to do more justice to soldiers’ dignity. (shrink)

InLegitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World, I offer both a conceptual analysis of legitimacy, the power-liability view, and a substantive moral theory, the free group agency view. Here, I defend my account against three challenges brought by Kjarsten Mikalsen. First, though I argue that conceptual analysis should not prematurely close open moral questions, it is not my view that conceptual analysis must have no substantive implications. Second, though I acknowledge that free group agencyordinarilysupports a moral duty to (...) obey, it is a feature, not a bug, that my conceptual analysis is consistent with moral theories that disagree with my preferred moral theory. Third, I argue that Mikalsen’s proposed explanation of justified civil disobedience, which sees law in such cases as creating a moral claim-right that entails a merelypresumptiveduty, is less perspicuous than the explanation given by the power-liability view. Along the way, I emphasize that the distinction between felicitous moral power and justified causal power is as important as the distinction between moral liability and moral duty. (shrink)

In this critical comment, we argue that nondemocratic, but decent regimes fail to constitute legitimate governance under Applbaum’s free group agency account. To make this case, we first introduce the three principles of liberty, equality and agency that Applbaum takes to flow directly from his free agency conception of legitimacy. Against this backdrop, we discuss Applbaum’s claim that a nondemocratic regime along the lines of a Rawlsian decent consultation hierarchy could meet the threshold of legitimacy. Contrary to this suggestion, we (...) argue that nondemocratic, but decent regimes cannot claim legitimacy under Applbaum’s account because they are constitutively inegalitarian, thus failing to adequately grant citizens the equal normative power without which legitimacy is unattainable under the free group agency account. (shrink)

One potentially morally justified use of torture is found in philanthropic torture of a perpetrator (PTP): scenarios in which a perpetrator has instigated significant pending suffering against innocents and in which the suffering can be prevented by means of the perpetrator’s cooperation. These situations involve a clash of two intuitions: that torture is in some strong and obvious sense absolutely morally wrong, and that torture or harm of an immoral perpetrator may be permissible to prevent equally abhorrent, if not greater, (...) moral wrongs. My view is that a dually grounded view—permissible on theoretical grounds but wrong on practical grounds—can do justice to the conflicting intuitions we have about torture in cases of PTP. Further, I hold that practical “absolutism” will only be “mostly” or “likely” absolute, but that we should accept as adequate this “near absolutism”—it will give us the practical result we seek while also satisfying the intuition that we may act in otherwise untoward ways to prevent horrific moral harms. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that any competent group agent must be a wanton. The impetus for this claim is an argument Arthur Applbaum makes in Legitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World that a formal institution (in this case, a government) can, under the right conditions, function as a free moral group agent. I begin by explaining Harry Frankfurt’s classic account of wantonism—not just for the benefit of readers who might not be familiar with the concept, but (...) also to emphasize aspects of the concept relevant for the consideration of group agency. I then draw on the contemporary literature on group agency to argue that any successful group agent will be a wanton. I then turn to Applbaum’s account of group agency to argue that his proposed mechanisms for free moral group agency do not successfully overcome the challenge of wantonism. I close the essay by briefly addressing some of the ramifications of my argument for Applbaum’s larger project in Legitimacy. I argue that, after rejecting the flawed account of free moral group agency, we can productively recover some of Applbaum’s key insights within a revised account of political legitimacy. (shrink)

While the energy transition is needed more than ever, for some agents it brings significant losses. This article investigates whether fossil fuel owners could refer to promises to avoid having their assets stranded. It explains how authors, in the context of just transitions, have argued for the normative relevance of Rawlsian legitimate expectations, which refer to promissory entitlements. However, it argues that the normative relevance of promises towards fossil fuel owners is limited, because there are only few promises about what (...) will be permissible in the future and because these promises should be just before they can lead to entitlements. (shrink)

In this paper, I take issue with Arthur Isak Applbaum’s power-liability view of political legitimacy. In contrast to the traditional view that legitimate rule entails a moral duty to obey, here called the right-duty view, Applbaum argues that political legitimacy is a moral power that entails moral liability for the subjects of political rule. According to Applbaum, the power-liability view helps us explain how responsible citizens in some cases can act contrary to law while still recognizing the claims of law. (...) Against Applbaum’s attempt at establishing the power-liability view through conceptual analysis, I argue that we cannot specify the moral implications of de jure legitimacy without considering the moral argument that justifies the right to rule. I further argue that Applbaum’s normative account of political legitimacy implies commitment to a normative idea that forms the basis of a strong case in favor of the right-duty view. Finally, I argue that the present defense of the right-duty view has resources to account for the moral phenomena that prompt Applbaum’s advocacy of the power-liability view. (shrink)

Democratic alternation in power involves uncontrolled policy experiments. One party is elected on one policy platform that it then implements. Things may go well or badly. When another party is elected in its place, it implements a different policy. In imposing policies on the whole community, parties in effect conduct non-randomized trials without control groups. In this paper, we endorse the general idea of policy experimentation but we also argue that it can be done better by deploying in policymaking randomized (...) controlled trials. We focus primarily on the democratic benefits of using randomized trials in policymaking and on how they can enhance the democratic legitimacy of policy. We argue that randomized trials resonate well with three key democratic principles: non-arbitrariness, revisability and public justification. Randomized trials’ contribution to non-arbitrariness and revisability is not unique; other types of evidence can advance these democratic principles as well. But through their peculiar democratic scrutability, randomized trials are well-equipped to contribute to the public justifiability of policy. (shrink)

This paper advances a Marxist critique of the politics of cancellation and raises concerns about the possible development of a cancel culture. Rather than delving into debates on freedom of speech, crucial though they are, this paper focuses on the pragmatics of the political tool – its goals, mechanisms, effects, and the underlying reasoning. From a Marxist perspective, it is essential to analyse cancellation and cancel culture holistically, considering their rationale, the mechanism, the objectives, and the impacts, along with their (...) relationship to the material conditions of society. Such an analysis provides a comprehensive understanding of any historical development and argues that addressing political problems in the long term requires such a holistic approach, including the development of relevant productive forces. If cancellation evolves into a culture, it may give rise to a polity that reinforces market relations. Within the framework of historical materialism, this would be a case of the superstructure supporting the base, turning politics into a matter of private opinions, which is far from ideal. The paper concludes with some practical considerations. (shrink)

This paper advances a Marxist critique of the politics of cancellation and raises concerns about the possible development of a cancel culture. Rather than delving into debates on freedom of speech, crucial though they are, this paper focuses on the pragmatics of the political tool – its goals, mechanisms, effects, and the underlying reasoning. From a Marxist perspective, it is essential to analyse cancellation and cancel culture holistically, considering their rationale, the mechanism, the objectives, and the impacts, along with their (...) relationship to the material conditions of society. Such an analysis provides a comprehensive understanding of any historical development and argues that addressing political problems in the long term requires such a holistic approach, including the development of relevant productive forces. If cancellation evolves into a culture, it may give rise to a polity that reinforces market relations. Within the framework of historical materialism, this would be a case of the superstructure supporting the base, turning politics into a matter of private opinions, which is far from ideal. The paper concludes with some practical considerations. (shrink)

This article proposes a metaethical route from neo-Aristotelian naturalism, as developed in particular by Philippa Foot, to virtue-ethical longtermism. It argues that the metaethical assumptions of neo-Aristotelian naturalism inherently imply that a valid description of the life-form of a species must satisfy a formal requirement of internal sustainability. The elements of a valid life-form description then serve as a normative standard. Given that humans have the ability to influence the fate of future generations and know about their influence, this article (...) posits that our future as a species becomes a part of the description of the human life-form. Consequently, in our case, the sustainability requirement is extended into the future, leading to a minimal and humanist version of longtermism. As in Rosalind Hursthouse’s naturalistic virtue ethics, the focus of the proposed virtue-ethical longtermism remains on developing virtues as the only reliable way for the agent to achieve the good life. However, since what can count as virtue must be compatible with a life-form description that, taken as a whole, facilitates the long-term survival of our species, this position still implies a genuine longtermism, although it contrasts with the quantifying and maximizing logic of consequentialism. (shrink)