The (potentially) disturbing role of money in politics has received quite a lot of attention in both scholarly and public debate. But these discussions typically focus on domestic contexts. Sometimes, as in the case of the Dutch billionaire Steven Schuurman, wealthy individuals donate money to politics abroad. In this article, we ask: Is there anything distinctively wrongful about billionaires and other wealthy individuals using their financial resources to influence foreign as opposed to domestic democratic institutions? Surprisingly, we find that there is nothing distinctively wrongful—of either a democratic or nondemocratic nature—about such donations. Our discussion thereby suggests that if foreign political donations are wrong, they are wrong for the same reason(s) as domestic donations. We should thus treat them symmetrically, all else equal. This means that to the extent that we want to oppose (large) foreign donations in politics—as we suspect many people want to—we should equally oppose (large) domestic donations in politics.
In this article, I reinterpret political conceptions of human rights as grounding explanations, according to which facts about human rights practices ground facts about human rights. I first argue that this grounding interpretation of political conceptions clarifies their key claims and reveals how they are a genuine alternative to moral conceptions of human rights. I then develop a detailed grounding model of political conceptions to show how they can address some common objections, as well as to expose some previously overlooked gaps in their arguments. Finally, to close such gaps, I supplement political conceptions with an account of conceptual facts, which explains how human rights facts can be grounded in facts about practices without making political conceptions normatively unattractive. Taken together, these arguments seek to vindicate political conceptions as distinct and plausible accounts of human rights.
Are there functions that a state must do for itself instead of relying on others to perform on its behalf? Some argue that suppressing private violence and enforcing the law are powers that only the state may exercise, meaning the state is responsible not only for ensuring that they are discharged but for discharging them itself. In this article, I challenge the do-it-yourself principle that animates much of the recent philosophical literature on privatization. In its place, I defend a rights-based theory of delegated state power. A state’s consistent failure to adequately protect rights is a reason for the state to voluntarily delegate powers to a third party that is better placed to use them to protect rights. This account grounds the legitimacy of delegation on the protection of rights rather than on state consent. I illustrate the theory by showing how it could justify delegating policing and penal powers to charter cities, semiautonomous cities run by a guarantor country or private developer. I consider the conditions under which a charter city developer is likely to adequately safeguard the rights of its residents. Finally, I argue that neither sovereignty nor democratic legitimacy prohibits the state from delegating its coercive powers. When a state is incapable of protecting rights, delegation is not a betrayal of sovereignty and democracy but a step toward their realization.
How can moral theory make room for the existence of acts that are beyond the call of duty? This issue has become known as the problem of supererogation, and philosophers have provided various accounts of how to solve it. We have provided a recent answer to this question that draws on the work of the eleventh-century Persian philosopher Abū Alī Miskawayh and holds that we can make sense of supererogatory actions by appealing to a form of moral caution. In a recent response to this article, Alireza Kazemi argues that this cautionary account cannot explain the existence of supererogatory acts. In this short reply, we defend the cautionary account against Kazemi’s criticisms. We start by briefly outlining our cautionary account and Kazemi’s criticisms before providing our own arguments as to why the cautionary account should not be rejected.
In a recent article, Alexander Motchoulski offers a novel relational egalitarian view of reparations for historical injustice. Motchoulski argues that we ought to prefer the relational egalitarian view to available harm and inheritance theories because it avoids epistemic uncertainty. I argue that Motchoulski’s theory involves ambiguity that limits it in avoiding this epistemic uncertainty. I offer an amendment to Motchoulski’s theory that insulates it from this ambiguity and epistemic uncertainty.
On a popular philosophical view, moral and epistemic normativity are two species of the same genus: we can give unified accounts of normative properties pertaining to both domains. The case of praiseworthiness poses a challenge. Under a compelling theory, what makes us morally praiseworthy is that our action manifests morally good will. However, I argue that an explanation of epistemic praiseworthiness in terms of the manifestation of epistemically good will fails. Nonetheless, as I then go on to show, the correct explanation of what makes us praiseworthy is unified on a more structural level: the manifestation of morally good will is the manifestation of moral sensitivity. And there is a structurally analogous notion of epistemic sensitivity, which I make the core of a view about epistemic praiseworthiness. In both domains, then, what makes an agent praiseworthy for her response is that it manifests a sufficient degree of sensitivity—moral sensitivity in the moral domain and epistemic sensitivity in the epistemic one. This novel view of the still underexplored property of epistemic praiseworthiness elucidates important aspects of our beliefs’ evaluation: how difficulty bears on the degree of praise we merit for our knowledge and under which conditions we merit praise for knowledge acquired via testimony.
What is owed to individuals who find themselves in a stateless condition? This article addresses this question by providing a novel republican account of the human right to legal citizenship. I argue that such individuals are owed citizenship and that this duty corresponding to their human right to legal citizenship falls primarily on the entire international community and only derivatively on single states. I then show that those owed citizenship as a matter of human rights are not only the formally stateless but also, surprisingly, refugees, some displaced people, and arguably, some long-term migrants too. This view contributes to the literature on human rights by showing that the standard view of states as primary duty bearers, and international institutions as only secondary duty bearers, needs improvement, for some duties correlated with human rights are primarily international. It also advances the debate in the political theory of migration on the duty to naturalize the formally and de facto stateless by clarifying this duty’s nature, grounds, scope, international dimension, and implications.
Mainstream news journalism faces a practical dilemma founded on a theoretical mistake about objectivity. In this article, we bring this mistake to light and propose a new model for its practice. Mainstream news journalism has over the past century attempted to achieve its ultimate democratic goals—informing citizens and holding those in positions of power to account—by adhering to objectivity as a master value. This commitment to objectivity can be specified in terms of principles, such as the principle of reporting “just the facts,” without interpretation. But, we argue, taking principles like this to be maxims that must be followed in every circumstance tends to undermine the democratic goals of mainstream news journalism. Practitioners of mainstream news journalism therefore face a dilemma: either jettison objectivity as a master value or shirk the pursuit of its ultimate democratic goals. We argue that they should take the former route and instead adopt a conception of mainstream news journalism as a form of democratic political agency. Under this conception, mainstream news journalism aims at informing citizens and holding those in power to account while eschewing the partisan agendas of politicians and advocacy groups. We defend this conception against alternatives, including characterizations of mainstream news journalism as mere propaganda and the mistaken conflation of the democratic goals of mainstream news journalism with those of so-called activist journalism. In so doing, we provide the outlines of a philosophical approach to journalism, a profession that philosophers have largely ignored despite its social importance.
Suppose I say, “I am a woman.” Many people agree that in almost all cases, it is wrong in some way to challenge this claim because I have some kind of first-person authority over my own gender. Being able to recognize this first-person authority is a key desideratum for accounts of how gender claims function in trans-inclusive contexts. However, there is disagreement about exactly what kind of first-person authority needs to be recognized. Talia Mae Bettcher argues that we should recognize ethical rather than epistemic first-person authority over gender. Critics argue that ethical first-person authority, as generally understood, is not enough. I argue that Bettcher’s influential account of gender claims as acts of existential self-identification has the resources to recognize nonabsolute metaphysical, ethical, and epistemic first-person authority over gender. Moreover, I argue, this kind of nonabsolute metaphysical, ethical, and epistemic first-person authority is exactly what we should want an account of gender practices to recognize. It gives plausible results about tricky cases and enables us to clearly identify the ways in which someone is wronged when their gender claim is wrongfully challenged. I identify the features of Bettcher’s account that enable it to recognize this first-person authority and Graham use Bex-Priestley’s account as a model to show that we can identify these features in other promising accounts of gender. I finish by discussing the implications of Bettcher’s recent monograph, in which her earlier arguments are situated within an account of interpersonal spatiality.
This discussion note establishes a previously overlooked connection between significant results in the literature on Millian superiorities. I demonstrate that weak independence is sufficient for weak superiority to collapse into strong superiority, a result previously assumed to require the stronger axiom of independence. I then argue that this strongly restricts the possibilities of Millian value theory.
Self-sexualizing Black women rappers have been criticized as being agents in their own oppression. However, criticism of self-sexualizing rap is just one evaluative response to it. Another response lauds self-sexualizing rap for its empowering effects. In this article, I introduce a framework for understanding these competing evaluative responses to self-sexualizing rap by using Sukaina Hirji’s analysis of oppressive double binds. I argue that self-sexualizing rappers are caught in oppressive double binds, and this framework helps us to understand the dialectical stalemates that emerge in evaluating Black women rappers’ self-sexualization by offering new insights into the complexities involved when Black women rappers self-sexualize. Trapped between the norms of respectability and stereotypes of hypersexuality, it is impossible under conditions of oppression for self-sexualizing rappers to fully realize their sexual autonomy and agency. Articulating this helps to focus our progressive critiques on these constraining norms and on the media that perpetuates them rather than on individual rappers who engage in self-expression.
This article argues that in certain contexts, unreciprocated speech can be an important form of care for persons who would otherwise find it difficult to retain their place in shared worlds of linguistic meaning, such as those who lose capacities for linguistic expression due to illness. Philosophers and political theorists often underscore the importance of reciprocated speech for sharing in a human world. Hannah Arendt makes this point especially forcefully in The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, in which she suggests that “speechless” persons are excluded from the linguistic “web of relationships.” I reconstruct several of Arendt’s analyses of speech and speechlessness and argue that they are prima facie exclusionary to nonspeaking persons. After responding to several objections against attributing this exclusionary position to Arendt, I identify resources in Arendt’s own writing, as well as that of Iris Marion Young and Aristotle, for theorizing unreciprocated speech as a way of offering listeners footholds in the linguistic spheres of meaning around them.
Although proxy agency is a common social phenomenon (consider, e.g., a landlord selling property through a real estate agent or a jury delivering a verdict through a foreperson), the conditions under which principals and proxies can be held responsible for their participation in proxy actions remain underexplored in contemporary social philosophy. This article addresses this gap by offering a comprehensive account of proxy agency: it clarifies the elements that constitute proxy actions and examines the normative basis for attributing responsibility to principals and proxies for their contributions to the corresponding intentional collective acts. Building on this analysis, it proposes a general framework for proxy responsibility, grounded in the intentional participation that underpins both constitutive agency and authorship attribution. The article thereby provides a systematic conceptualization of the normative structure of proxy relations and their role in enabling key forms of institutional activity, particularly state and corporate actions.
Directive authorities (for example, political authorities with powers of command and coercion) pose a problem of legitimacy, but there are different ways of understanding the problem. On the one hand, it has been thought to rest on the inequality of social power between ruler and ruled. On this view, proprietorial authority (the authority possessed by an owner over the things that they own) creates much the same problem as directive authority, at least where property is unequally distributed. On another view, which I endorse, the problem of legitimacy arises instead from the threat that directive authority poses to the liberty of those subject to it. To grasp the point, we must distinguish freedom from liberty. While restrictions on your freedom limit your options, deprivation of liberty deprives you of responsibility for compliance. With this distinction in place, we can see why philosophers like Locke think that political authority curbs our liberty in a way that proprietorial authority does not.
Sometimes oppressed people resist their oppression through actions that are themselves morally fraught, such as theft, deception, or violence. This article considers what might be said in favor of such actions, which I call imperfect resistance, from the point of view of ethics. Against the expectation that oppressed people must remain “perfect victims” for their resistance to be admirable, I argue that oppression often constrains agency in ways that leave people with no wholly unproblematic options. Resisting oppression well under these conditions requires the capacity to navigate moral risks with practical wisdom—to discern which moral risks are worth taking and how best to negotiate the limited and morally fraught options available. Some acts of imperfect resistance can express a virtue I call audacious integrity—a willingness to take moral risks in order to defend one’s values for good reasons. It occupies a middle ground between moral purism, which treats moral considerations as decisive, and moral nihilism, which rejects them altogether. Those exhibiting audacious integrity take moral considerations seriously but are willing to stretch the limits of morality to maintain their agency and pose formidable challenges to their oppression. It is a virtue exercised when agents retain the capacity to resist but cannot do so without moral compromise.
We owe young people special moral consideration in virtue of their developmental immaturity: we must not foreclose their futures by impeding the development of capacities they need for autonomous agency. I argue that providing children with extreme cognitive assistance—help that is ubiquitously available, very domain general, and largely substitutive of their own cognitive effort—violates this obligation. When children routinely rely on such assistance, they systematically fail to exercise core regulatory skills (inhibitory control, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and planning), and capacities that go unexercised predictably fail to develop normally. This matters urgently: building artificial systems capable of providing exactly this kind of assistance to children is the explicit, stated goal of the world’s largest technology companies, who are investing hundreds of billions of dollars toward achieving this aim. Worse, they may already have succeeded: cognitive assistance need not be maximally substitutive, available, and domain general to impede development. I conclude by considering whether compensating demand for cognitive exercise might arise elsewhere and argue that the prospects are dim.
I develop a novel contractualist defense of a limited moral equality of combatants thesis, on which just and unjust combatants enjoy equal moral status in some wars. This possibility reveals overlooked conceptual space for intermediary positions between orthodox just war theory and revisionism. I argue that following a limited moral equality of combatants thesis foreseeably protects both civilians’ and combatants’ strong interests in survival more robustly than alternative pacifist and revisionist principles. So such a thesis cannot be reasonably rejected. Contractualism therefore entails a limited moral equality of combatants thesis. In defending this thesis, I also address the concern that contractualism cannot be applied to just war theory due to the massive noncompliance inherent to warfare. I conclude by contrasting my contractualist approach with the recent contractarian one by Yitzhak Benbaji and Daniel Statman. I demonstrate that the contractualist approach avoids several counterexamples that plague Benbaji and Statman’s contractarian account.
Recently, Stina Björkholm proposed a novel solution to the problem of lost disagreement on behalf of metaethical contextualists. The solution builds on the notion of an opaque question, which admits of both affirmative and negative answers that are semantically compatible. In this article, I challenge the notion by showing that Björkholm’s arguments fail to establish the existence of such questions. I also argue that opaqueness, in its more ordinary sense, can provide us with a promising way of solving the problem of disagreement. The opaqueness resides not in the nature of questions but in how speakers conceive of those questions.
Ritwik Agrawal and Allen Buchanan argue that the fundamental wrong of colonialism is a denial of autonomy to those who are colonized. They claim that earlier discussions of colonialism, including those by Lea Ypi, Anna Stilz, and Massimo Renzo, mischaracterize the fundamental wrong of colonialism as something else. I argue that Agrawal and Buchanan incorrectly charge Ypi, Stilz, Renzo, and others with looking for the fundamental wrong of colonialism. The goal of these thinkers is instead to articulate the per se wrong of colonialism, which is a separate question. I also argue that Agrawal and Buchanan do not identify the fundamental wrong of colonialism, because paradigmatic cases of wrongful colonialism fail to instantiate the wrong that Agrawal and Buchanan label fundamental.
In this article, I expand our understanding of the normative profile of stereotype threat and point where to take that inquiry next. My focus is the realization of the threat of stereotype threat, a phenomenon I call succumbing to stereotype threat. I show that in cases of stereotype threat that present us with the threat of what Sally Haslanger identifies as epistemic self-objectification, succumbing to stereotype threat is characterized by a corrupt relation of the individual to herself. That baneful relation, I argue, is what stereotype threat is a threat of. We also learn that that relation is facilitated by the individual’s social environment, in which the individual is an active participant. The individual, then, contributes to the forces that set her against herself. That social dimension is the area that stands in need of further investigation. To carry on that task, I suggest we harness the notion of alienation as understood by Marx. This notion neatly captures the corrupt relationship at the heart of succumbing to stereotype threat while acknowledging the individual’s role in the social forces that contribute to that plight; and it is a notion that is nested in a tradition that is well attuned to the ontological and normative nuances of social environment. The notion of alienation, then, lends a name to the wrong of succumbing to stereotype threat and thus to the threat of stereotype threat, and it has the credentials to lead further research into those phenomena.
