Abstract This article argues that the approach to political theory articulated by Shmuel Nili’s Philosophizing the Indefensible needs to be modified to address non-ideal political circumstances in illiberal political societies in deep conflict. Building on Nili’s analysis of Israeli politics as a paradigmatic example, and with the moral catastrophe of October 7 and the Gaza war in mind, I argue that the burdens of politics under these circumstances are likely to make repugnant views commonplace; that worldviewing – the attempt to engage with the strongest version of our interlocutor’s arguments – is an overly charitable exercise, allowing repugnant views to appear non-repugnant; and that, counter-intuitively, the imperative to engage with repugnant views is stronger, not weaker, under these non-ideal circumstances.
In the literature on global justice, the issue of economic growth in developed countries has received only scant attention. Where addressed, it is widely presumed to be either detrimental or irrelevant from the perspective of the world's poor. This contribution aims to challenge this disregard by arguing that affluent countries have a duty of global justice to pursue economic growth deriving from their widely recognised obligation to eradicate global poverty.
Most interpretations of Hume's political philosophy cast him as either a conservative sceptic or a proto-utilitarian theorist of public utility. This paper argues instead that Hume's central contribution lies in his realist account of political legitimacy and collective judgement as grounded in sentiment rather than rational justification. This interpretation illuminates both Hume's distinctive position in the history of political thought and contemporary challenges to democratic authority. Against contractarian and deliberative theories, Hume shows that political obligation emerges from shared public sentiment shaped through sympathy, custom, and sustained institutional experience. Public opinion, on this view, is not primarily a set of beliefs but a socially cultivated structure of affective commitment. Reconstructing Hume's distinction between violent passions and calm sentiments, the article shows how his political psychology anticipates key dynamics of contemporary populism while also diagnosing its intrinsic instability. Populist mobilization, from a Humean perspective, derives its power from the rapid circulation of violent political affects while simultaneously undermining the slow institutional formation of calm democratic sentiments on which durable political authority depends. The result is a form of political realism that illuminates contemporary democratic pathologies without collapsing into cynicism about political possibility.
This paper examines the ethics of public shaming, both online and in person, from the perspective of freedom of speech. Current work on public shaming conceptualises it as a form of social punishment and principally examines its effects. In contrast to that, the paper considers shaming as a form of wrongful treatment. The argument proceeds in two stages. First, I emphasise the importance of uptake for free speech to have the worth it has for speakers. Though there is no right to uptake, persons do have duties not to undermine its prerequisites. Second, I maintain that shaming represents an attempt to deny the shamed person the basic eligibility conditions for social membership. With these pieces in place, I argue that public shaming, by labelling a person as socially unworthy, violates the duty to respect the conditions for uptake. The badge of shame is a signal not to give speakers' views due weight. This applies particularly to the interest in self-presentation, an important aspect of speech.
This paper explores how felt subjection - the vivid awareness of subordination to another in a power hierarchy - undermines relational equality by eroding egalitarian regard, the disposition to conceive of oneself and others as equals. While relational egalitarians often focus on objective or structural social conditions, I argue that the subjective experience of power matters to relational egalitarian justice in a way which has been undertheorized. To this end, I define egalitarian regard and clarify its role in relational equality, identify properties of power's expression which tend to evoke felt subjection, and summarize empirical evidence linking it to inegalitarian regard. Finally, I present a moral-psychological mechanism to explain this connection, showing it as a reasonable outcome of human psychology. I conclude by applying the insights of this paper to the case of the workplace, showing how the framework developed provides relational egalitarians with new tools for analyzing institutions and the relations that constitute them.
Prioritarianism is claimed to fare badly in variable-population comparisons. This is so, I argue, because it is understood as absolute prioritarianism, as invoking an increasing, strictly concave function of absolute welfare. That misunderstands Parfit's priority view by considering the absolute welfare rather than the welfare gains and losses. Therefore, it implies a super-repugnant conclusion and the desirability of welfare diffusion by creating people. However, both implications are implausible - at least if we reject that people can be better off by coming into existence. I present an alternative - comparative prioritarianism - which is concerned only with individual gains and losses. I argue that this avoids the implausible implications, it can be supplemented with further principles that solve the problems of population ethics, and it prevents cyclical orderings if we adopt a set-wise approach to comparing outcomes. Therefore, comparative prioritarianism is better suited to capture the core intuition of the priority view.
In this paper, I introduce the concepts of ontic erasure and moral social kinds to account for a type of ontological injustice that extends beyond Katharine Jenkins's notion of ontic injustice. While much of critical social ontology has focused on how oppressive structures constitute wrongful race and gender kinds, this paper explores how oppressive structures constitute wrongful forms of seemingly neutral moral kinds, such as the refugee. Moral social kinds are anchored in practices that function to manage justice-related resources according to operative conceptions of justice, with the kind 'refugee' as a paradigmatic example. Ontic erasure refers to situations where moral social kinds are wrongful because they also track features that are irrelevant from the perspective of justice, and as a result, often only safeguard the moral entitlements of those who are socially privileged. Ontic erasure wrongs individuals who, due to this bias, fail to be socially constructed as members of a moral social kind. At its worst, ontic erasure, like ontic injustice, amounts to moral injury that puts people at risk of life-threatening violence and destitution.
What justifies the demand for public justification? Recent critics - Anthony Taylor and Collis Tahzib - read Gerald Gaus as grounding public justification in Strawsonian reactive attitudes, and they argue this reading renders Gaus's sufficient reason test either replaceable or counterintuitive. I offer a charitable, reconstructive reading that draws a different conclusion. On my interpretation, reactive attitudes supply the descriptive context of interpersonal moral life, but the normative warrant for converting affect into second-personal demands rests on a proto-Kantian principle of moral autonomy in Gaus's account. I show how this bridge justifies Gaus's sufficient reason condition, explain why Wallace/Taylor's susceptibility to reason alternative either conflicts with moral autonomy or collapses into Gaus's test under a moderate reading, and answer Tahzib's "rationalized evil" charge (Goebbels's case) by showing the example fails Gaus's capacity requirements. This paper thus clarifies and salvages the normative core of Gaus's public justification project.
Illiberal and antidemocratic political forces, for example, in the form of far-right populism, are on the rise. Such politics, commonly referred to as 'unreasonable' in political philosophy, is widely seen as a threat to democracy. Many argue that an adequate response must involve listening to, that is, understanding and seriously considering the perspective of the unreasonable. I disagree. I argue that as democratic citizens, we should not listen to the unreasonable; we should, in a sense, ignore them, that is, refuse to understand and seriously consider their perspective, although continue to monitor their activities. Listening to the unreasonable is not instrumentally required for countering unreasonable politics. In addition, the unreasonable likely have no moral claim to be listened to. Finally, listening to them is disrespectful to reasonable citizens whose voice is ignored for the sake of paying attention to the unreasonable. For these reasons, we should ignore the unreasonable.
The algorithmic curation of social media content and advertisements has a significant impact on many people's behaviour. This influence is leading to increasing moral unease, calling for ethical reflection. A common analysis conceptualises problematic online influence as a form of manipulation. This paper argues that this analysis is flawed, since standard accounts of manipulation presuppose a manipulative intention or attitude, which cannot be identified in many cases of algorithmic curation. Instead, it is argued that an account of problematic online influence should focus on the risks posed to social media users' personal autonomy. An outline of such an account is sketched by identifying two conditions for personal autonomy and arguing that algorithmic curation is likely to undermine both conditions. First, personal autonomy requires the capacity to act for normative reasons. However, social media algorithms often make users act for nonreasons and may erode capacities needed to recognise normative reasons. Second, personal autonomy requires that the reasons for which someone acts cohere with that person's commitments and life plans. However, social media algorithms invite users to act for reasons isolated from their broader commitments. The conclusion is that social media platforms create wrongful risks to their users' autonomy.
In the problem of dirty hands, agents must choose between two incompatible moral demands, thereby inevitably violating an important moral value. While dirty-hands cases can arise in all areas of life, it has been argued that they are particularly pressing in the realm of politics. To illustrate the issue at hand, the paper introduces the real-life case study of the cover up of the Claudy Bombing in Northern Ireland. With the help of this example, the aim of the paper is to suggest a shift in the literature to turn our focus to what is owed to the victims of dirty hands. In particular, it defends the claim that public officials owe reparations to those that have been negatively affected by their dirty-handed decisions. To support this, the paper addresses two worries that opponents of reparations in this context might have, discusses a number of responses, and finds that at least some of them are credible ways of answering these worries. The paper concludes by outlining some key considerations when envisioning what reparations for dirty hands could look like.
This paper argues that Katharine Jenkins's theory of ontic injustice lacks a fully satisfactory conceptual and moral foundation. Specifically, it fails to provide a compelling account of when and why social kind membership constitutes a moral wrong. I first critique the tension in Jenkins's framework between an implicit commitment to moral essentialism and an overly positivist ontology of social kinds. I then advocate for moderate practice idealism, which employs counterfactual constitutive standards to better distinguish between just and unjust social kinds. Next, I analyze Jenkins's account of the wrong-making features of ontic injustice, reconstructing it into three distinct approaches: the expressive harm account, the respect-based account, and the improvement-claim account. While each offers valuable insights, I argue that none provides a sufficiently robust moral foundation of ontic injustice.
Nowadays, many new agents, structures and dynamics make human rights insecure - think of TNCs or climate change. Yet states as they currently are seem unable to tackle these threats effectively. So what should an appropriate human-rights regime, that is, one that protects them securely and legitimately, look like, today? This article argues that republicanism provides the regime we need: a constitutional demoi-cracy. This new, mixed human-rights regime is a demoicracy for, even if states remain the primary locus where human rights are realised, they bind themselves to a union that governs together the new agents, structures and dynamics that threaten them, without their demoi merging into one global demos. It is constitutional, for this governing together gives rise to a thin but binding supranational apparatus, whose point is, similar to domestic constitutions, to constrain state power over human rights and at the same time to empower states to protect them.
I argue that a people as an intergenerational group has a self-directed duty of ecological sustainability that is a precondition, and even a correlate, of its own right to self-determination. Conceptualizing ecological sustainability as a self-directed duty of self-determination offers several advantages. First, it avoids the nonidentity problem, since the identity conditions of intergenerational peoples do not depend on which specific individuals will become members. Second, it better captures the normatively valuable relationships knitting different generations into a single political community than theories that ascribe rights to self-determination or sovereignty to discrete generations. Third, grounding a duty of ecological sustainability in self-determination not only responds to a distinct demand of legitimacy but also sidesteps problems that arise when appealing instead to justice, especially egalitarian distributive principles. Lastly, I reply to the worry that a duty grounded in the right to self-determination cannot be a genuinely binding duty insofar as a people can simply waive its right to self-determination. I contend that a people cannot permanently waive its right to self-determination while continuing to exist, and even when a people chooses to dissolve, it is still bound by its self-directed duty of ecological sustainability until it ceases to exist.
In this paper I initiate an important dialogue between the phenomenology of social perception and analytic social ontological discussions of how our perception of others (and concurrent conferrals of social kinds) can be sites of ‘ontic injustice’. Katharine Jenkins develops the concept of ontic injustice to theorise how your being of a social kind can consist, at least in part, of wrongful constraints and enablements. Taking Jenkins’s discussion of interpersonal kinds as the focus, I argue that the phenomenological concept of style enables a more experientially accurate account of how such (oftentimes unjust) interpersonal kinds come into being. My central claim is that Jenkins’s indicator/base property distinction performs a theoretical abstraction from actual embodied lived experience and that these properties are experientially subordinate to how other subjects are first and foremost given stylistically in experience, that is, as unified meaningful wholes. To support this claim, I engage with Jenkins’s example of gender presentation and show how its misalignment with base properties is better made sense of through the tripartite distinction of style, indicator properties, and base property. Introducing this phenomenological perspective enriches the experientially descriptive aspects of Jenkins’s social ontology.
This paper critically analyzes the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the general will (GW), proposing a practical, three-dimensional approach to address the challenges posed by these technologies to democratic governance. The current dominance of automated systems controlled by a few digital giants (“Big Tech”) threatens to undermine collective and democratic decision-making. Building on Rousseau’s notion of the general will as a collective and sovereign expression of the common good, I identify four ways AI erodes the GW: (1) the privatization of the public debate; (2) the individualization of practices; (3) the erosion of personal and collective will; (4) the risk of technological despotism. I then discuss possible pathways to address these challenges and recover the sense of the GW. First, education and mediatization of AI issues would enable the (re)formation of the GW. Then, public participation platforms could allow its expression. Finally, coming back to Rousseau, I call for a renewal of the terms of the social contract through public participation in AI choices. By linking Rousseau’s democratic ideals with modern challenges, the paper presents actionable pathways to align AI technologies with democratic principles and collective representation.
In this introductory essay to the special issue on relational equality and migration, I first introduce a familiar way of conceiving of the connection between equality and migration, one that focuses on distributive inequality. I then provide an overview of the state of the debate concerning relational equality and migration. I conclude by summarizing the contributions to this special issue.
Upon reading Free Market Fairness , it is apparent that John Tomasi’s defence of market democracy relies on a certain conception of political personality qua citizenship in which the idea of self-authorship is afforded a primary role. With the goal of both clarifying and assessing the merits of said conception, this article begins with a delimitation of Rawls’s and John Tomasi’s account of political personhood qua citizenship. It then moves on to provide several interpretations of the central causality clause associated with Tomasi’s first moral power, favouring a so-called ontological interpretation. Building upon this, the article goes on to argue that Tomasi’s account brings to light problems of exclusivity and metapluralism which afflict, and cast doubt upon, the broader project of political liberalism.
According to a widely accepted thesis, all rights violations wrong the right-holder. According to another widely accepted thesis, rights protect interests. But many conventional rights protect morally trivial interests. Hence, the two theses taken together lead to the puzzling conclusion that one can wrong another by frustrating a trivial interest. In this essay, I first introduce this “moral magic” problem and show why the interest theory of rights has no resources to address it.
In the 80s and 90s political liberals debated whether it is legitimate for a state to fund the arts on the grounds that art is a public good. The public goods model is only one way in which the state might justify funding for the arts. Indeed, throughout history, liberal societies have employed artists on behalf of the state and for the benefit of the state. In this paper, I argue that it is, in principle, permissible for the state to fund the arts for the good such funding can provide the state. I sketch a state arts program which has the purpose of producing pro-state art, art which helps to legitimize the state. The state is permitted to do this in order to execute its duty of stability. I defend the permissibility of such a program against the claim that it would be objectionably propagandistic or that it would be too easy to abuse such a program for nefarious means.
