Global Equality and Open Borders

Egalitarians disagree about the extent to which states should have open borders. Sometimes, this disagreement is due to a deeper disagreement about the scope of egalitarian justice. Egalitarians holding that equality has domestic scope only may be inclined to favor restrictive immigration policies to protect the welfare state. Egalitarians holding that equality has global scope, on the other hand, may be inclined to support more open borders in order to reduce global inequality. This chapter argues that equality has global scope and then considers the implications of global egalitarianism for the issue of open borders. Furthermore, the chapter provides an argument for why (more) open borders can be expected reduce global inequality. Then some objections to this argument are considered, based on brain drain, threats to welfare states, and in-group bias. Finally, the chapter considers the suggestion that (more) open borders is not the best (or most efficient) way of reducing global inequality.

The Right to Stay as a Control Right

This chapter sides with those who believe that a right to stay should be counted among fundamental human rights. However, it also acknowledges that there are good reasons for objecting to the most popular justifications of the right to stay, which are based on the assumption that people have valuable ties to their community of residence and that people’s life plans are located where they live. In response to these qualms, this chapter argues that the best way to make sense of the right to stay is to conceive it as belonging to the category of “control rights”; these are the rights that protect people’s control over their own bodies and personal space, which is an essential condition for personhood and human dignity. This account of the right to stay can overcome the most pressing objections to its recognition as a fundamental human right.

Duties to the Dead

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.

National Partiality, Immigration, and the Problem of Double-Jeopardy

A foundational conviction of contemporary liberal thought is that all persons matter equally. However, states frequently pursue policies that are strikingly partial towards compatriots over foreigners. A common strategy for justifying this partiality appeals to associative obligations incurred by standing in special relationships with fellow citizens. Such arguments face an important hurdle. This chapter argues for a “Boundary Principle”, according to which special relationships among members of a group cannot justify strong forms of partiality, unless the boundaries of this group can also be justified. Hence, arguments from associative obligations are, by themselves, incomplete. Most states limit migration, and thereby prevent willing people from entering into those relationships with us that would generate associative obligations on our part. A successful defense of national partiality in terms of associative obligations is therefore more closely tied to the question of what restrictions can be placed on immigration than most political philosophers have recognized.

Free Speech and the Embodied Self

Democratic theories of free speech hold that the right to free speech is grounded in the nature of collective self-governance. The legitimacy of imposing laws on those who disagree with them depends on giving all citizens an equal right to participate in the lawmaking process, including the right to express their opposition. Ronald Dworkin argues that views of this kind are in tension with hate speech regulation. If we forbid the expression of prejudice, we undermine the legitimacy of laws protecting minority groups. The aim in this chapter is to diffuse the tension Dworkin sees between a democratic justification of the right to free speech and hate speech regulation. This is done by developing an account of how our bodily rights constrain the right to free speech.

Relevance Rides Again?

Often institutions or individuals are faced with decisions where not all claims can be satisfied. Sometimes, these claims will be of differing strength. In such cases, it must be decided whether or not weaker claims can be aggregated in order to collectively defeat stronger claims. Many are attracted to a view, which this chapter calls Limited Aggregation, where this is sometimes acceptable and sometimes not. A new version of this view, Local Relevance, has recently emerged. This chapter seeks to explore and evaluate this view. In order to do so, the chapter offers a more precise interpretation of this basic approach, calling it ‘Sequential Claims-Matching’. The chapter shows how Sequential Claims-Matching avoids problems that dog other Limited Aggregation views but suffers from difficulties and ambiguities of its own. In particular, the chapter shows that it is hard to accommodate some core Limited Aggregation intuitions around tie-break cases within the Local Relevance view.

What Normative Facts Should Political Theory Be About?

Just as different sciences deal with different facts—say, physics versus biology—so we may ask a similar question about normative theories. Is normative political theory concerned with the same normative facts as moral theory or different ones? By developing an analogy with the sciences, this chapter argues that the normative facts of political theory belong to a higher—more coarse-grained—level than those of moral theory. The latter are multiply realizable by the former: competing facts at the moral level can underpin the same facts at the political one. Consequently, some questions that moral theories answer are indeterminate at the political level. This proposal offers a novel interpretation of John Rawls’s idea that, in public reasoning, we should abstract away from comprehensive moral doctrines. The chapter contrasts its distinction between facts at different levels with the distinction between admissible and inadmissible evidence, and discusses some implications for the practice of political theory.

Getting Rights out of Wrongs

Sometimes, we can gain new moral rights by acting wrongly. Sometimes, we can gain new moral rights (in addition to restitution rights) from other people acting wrongly. This chapter presents a typology of these rights. It then analyses why some wrongs can change the moral ballgame in this way to give us new rights, and other wrongs cannot. The chapter focuses on three factors that are relevant to moral ballgame-changing cases: (1) legitimate expectations; (2) personal investments; and (3) piggybacking on others’ interests. Finally, the chapter examines two ultimately unsuccessful strategies to resist this analysis of wrong-generated rights. The first strategy pertains to the defeasibility of rights. The second strategy pertains to their conditionality.