Protecting Vulnerable Languages

This chapter explores an important but understudied argument in favor of protections for vulnerable languages. The argument observes that speakers of such languages can face a collective action problem. The question is what interventions by the state to correct such a problem would be consistent with, or even required by, a broadly liberal and egalitarian conception of justice. The chapter identifies two principles that are relevant to answering this question: the unanimity principle, which places strict limits on interventions, and the principle of correction, which licenses a more extensive range of interventions on behalf of vulnerable languages. The principles are in tension with one another but derive from a common source in liberal egalitarian thought. Overall, the right approach is to forge a compromise between the two principles, thus allowing for some interventions on behalf of vulnerable languages to protect against collective action problems.

Injustice, Reparation, and Legitimacy

Legitimate states have the right to rule over specific people and territory. This right to rule is not immutable. A state’s wrongdoing can undermine its legitimacy. Likewise, acts of reparation can bolster a state’s legitimacy. Because injustice and reparation can directly affect a state’s legitimacy, any adequate theory of political legitimacy must be able to explain these phenomena. However, many prominent theories of legitimacy cannot straightforwardly account for the significance of injustice and reparation. We demonstrate this point by analyzing A. John Simmons’s voluntarist theory of legitimacy. Although Simmons accepts many of the effects we identify, his theory ultimately fails to explain how injustice can compromise and reparation can bolster a state’s legitimacy. We then describe four strategies for explaining the significance of injustice and reparation, two of which seem particularly promising. We conclude by highlighting some broader implications of our insights for theorizing legitimacy.

Justifying Uncivil Disobedience

A prominent way of justifying civil disobedience is to postulate a pro tanto duty to obey the law and to argue that the considerations that ground this duty sometimes justify forms of civil disobedience. However, this view entails that certain kinds of uncivil disobedience are also justified. Thus, either a) civil disobedience is never justified or b) uncivil disobedience is sometimes justified. Since a) is implausible, we should accept b). I respond to the objection that this ignores the fact that civil disobedience enjoys a special normative status on account of instantiating certain special features: nonviolence, publicity, the acceptance of legal consequences, and conscientiousness. I then show that my view is superior to two rivals: the view that we should expand the notion of civility and that civil disobedience, expansively construed, is uniquely appropriate; and the view that uncivil disobedience is justifiable in but only in unfavorable conditions.

Power and Equality

Several democratic theorists have recently sought to vindicate the ideal of equal political power (“political equality”) by tying it to the non-derivative value of egalitarian relationships. This chapter critically discusses such arguments. It clarifies what it takes to vindicate the ideal of political equality, and distinguishes different versions of the relational egalitarian argument for it. Some such arguments appeal to the example of a society without social status inequality (such as caste or class structures); others to personal relationships among equals, like friendship. Each strategy faces problems. After discussing what social status consists in, the chapter argues that social status equality does not require an equal distribution of power, but only that unequal distributions are not justified on grounds incompatible with the citizens’ fundamental equal moral standing. By contrast, personal relationships among equals do require equal power; but establishing that their norms apply to our political community is challenging.

Localized Restricted Aggregation

This chapter defends a restricted aggregationist view about harm prevention. Restricted aggregationist views claim that preventing an aggregation of smaller harms to many people can justify failing to save a smaller number of people from larger harms in cases where the difference between the harms is not too great. The view defended here is that even if preventing an aggregation of smaller harms cannot justify failing to save a person from a much larger harm by counting against preventing the larger harm, they can justify the decision not to save a person from a much larger harm by counterbalancing other reasons there might be to save the person from a much larger harm. This view is shown to be preferable to a more familiar restricted aggregationist view, where the prevention of smaller harms makes no contribution to the decision not to save a person from a larger harm at all.

Discrimination and Subordination

This chapter develops an original account of what unjust subordination consists in. It then uses this account to argue that both direct and indirect discrimination are often wrongful because of their contribution to unjust subordination. The chapter begins by arguing that we need to move away from individualistic conceptions of subordination and to consider subordination as something that happens to a person by virtue of her membership in social groups. It then lays out a set of four common and morally salient features of situations in which one social group is subordinated by others, and it uses these to help analyze cases of discrimination. In particular, the chapter calls attention to the role of “structural accommodations.” These are policies, practices, and physical structures that tacitly accommodate a more privileged group’s needs at the expense of subordinated groups. Structural accommodations help us understand how indirect discrimination, too, can be wrongfully subordinating.

Rescuing Public Justification from Public Reason Liberalism

Public reason liberals from John Rawls to Gerald Gaus uphold a principle of public justification as a core commitment of their theories. Critics of public reason liberalism have sometimes conceded that there is something compelling about the idea of public justification. But so far there have not been many attempts to elaborate and defend a “comprehensive” liberalism that incorporates a principle of public justification. This chapter spells out how a principle of public justification could be integrated into a comprehensive liberalism, and it rebuts three objections: That the idea of public reason could not be sustained in a comprehensive liberalism, that public justification would lose its point (be it to provide stability, express respect, or form a community), and that the principle of public justification could not work on the right theoretical level. The chapter concludes that everything worthwhile about public justification can be extracted from public reason liberalism.