Accounts of political responsibility for structural domination from Young and in recent republican accounts separate blame and responsibility. Many of the ways agents interact with structural injustice appear to create exemptions or excuses from blameworthiness. I argue, contrarily, that blame is attributable precisely for failing in a structural responsibility and eliminating many of the excuses and exemptions identified. Philosophers of moral responsibility maintain the role of blame. Drawing on reason-responsive theories of a Strawsonian origin and recent signaling theories of blame, this paper defends blame as both appropriate and important for its ability to reveal emerging norms, improve their uptake, undermine dominating sources of power and transform structures. Blame is crucial in developing agents’ sensitivities to normative reasons. Blame is crucial to effect political and personal change such as is required to undermine and transform dominating or unjust sources of power. Rescuing blame may make opaque structures transparent – in particular, where norms are emerging. This paper attends to the role of agents in the creation of sources of power which allows domination to persist.
In our response to our commentators, we address four main issues. First, the role and purpose of our account of voluntariness in migration, and how it differs from the notion of voluntariness employed in the ideal theory of liberal egalitarian justice. Second, where our account of receiving states’ obligations towards migrants stands with respect to a cosmopolitan right to free immigration on one hand, and the discretion of receiving states in deciding the conditions of admission on the other. Third, our reasons for insisting on special rights for those who engage in temporary migration projects, rather than relying on frameworks of supranational citizenship rights. Finally, our choice to frame our account of receiving states’ duties to temporary migrants without relying on strong transnational assumptions.
Does the principle of liberal accommodation require states to create special rights regimes for temporary migrants, or can it be satisfied through universal protections? Ottonelli and Torresi argue that liberal democracies must accommodate voluntary temporary migration plans by introducing tailored policies and corresponding rights that align with migrants’ temporariness preferences. They contend that failure to provide such accommodation violates liberal commitments to supporting autonomous life choices. This commentary challenges whether their principle of liberal accommodation necessitates the specific differentiated rights they propose. I examine whether accommodating temporary migration requires special provisions or whether universal worker protections combined with enhanced portability mechanisms better serve liberal principles. The analysis reveals that liberal accommodation might actually oppose rather than require differentiated treatment, since creating separate rights categories risks the subordination and exploitation of temporary migrants. Drawing on comparative analysis with EU citizenship arrangements, I argue that universal protections ensuring equal status while facilitating crossborder coordination better realizes liberal accommodation principles by avoiding the creation of not just differentiated but also hierarchical rights regimes that may undermine rather than support autonomous choice.
This paper responds to critical comments offered by G. Favara and R. Sala, T. Andina, M. Iser, and G. Pellegrino on Sovereignty Across Generations. Constituent Power and Political Liberalism. The response is structured around four main themes: a) the relation of the sovereign transgenerational people to its living segments, and whether the normativity that constrains the transgenerational people’s constituent power and its single segments’ amending power remain equally responsive to context (Favara and Sala); b) the appropriate way of representing the nolonger and the not-yet present segments of “the people” and especially the appropriate way of imagining the profile of future generations (Andina); c) the normativity, more contextual and authenticity-based or instead more “deontological” and context-independent, to which the legitimacy of constitutions is responsive (Iser); and d) an alleged threefold “privilege” of the founding generation vis-à-vis the subsequent ones, to be possibly remedied by rescuing serial democratic sovereignty while mitigating its consequences via vertical reciprocity (Pellegrino).
This commentary focuses on the methodological issue of the relevant context of justice for the discussion of Temporary Migration Projects and on drawing out the implications of this issue for the arguments of The Right Not To Stay. It contends that the methodologically nationalist approach to specifying duties of justice to persons engaged in TMPs that Ottonelli and Torresi adopt leaves their argument exposed to a number of challenges that a methodologically transnationalist approach would not confront.
This paper explores Alessandro Ferrara’s concept of transgenerational sovereignty within liberal political theory. It argues that “the people” must be understood ontologically as a political subject that includes past, present, and future generations. Drawing on social ontology and aesthetic theory, it examines how representation and constituent power form the basis of enduring democratic legitimacy. The essay highlights the role of institutions, such as constitutional courts, in ensuring justice across generations and challenges presentist conceptions of political agency.
Ottonelli and Torresi defend the reasonable thesis that migrants should be treated as moral agents rather than passive recipients. However, they seem to imply that moral agency is related to voluntary migration. I contend that the voluntariness or involuntariness of migration is irrelevant to the normative thesis that we should treat migrants as moral agents. I also argue that the concept of voluntary migration is elusive and that the authors’ intentions in defending it are unclear. Finally, I express reservations about their political proposals for temporary migrants and the arguments supporting them.
In this paper I argue that in his otherwise important theory of sequential sovereignty accorded to an intergenerational people Alessandro Ferrara unduly privileges the founding generation. For him this first generation is the only one to have the constituent power to create a demos by accepting specific identity-defining commitments in light of an already given ethnic identity. With regard to the amending power of future generations these constitutional essentials determine what can and cannot count as authentic expressions of this demos going forward in time. However, Ferrara goes wrong when he includes specific institutional designs in these identity-defining commitments. Rather, I maintain that the idea of intergenerational justice requires that the founding generation restricts itself to a much narrower set of constitutional essentials. Fundamental commitments that are hard to amend or cannot be amended at all should only include those features that form the necessary normative core of the liberal political project: namely to cooperatively share a political order on fair terms no one can reasonably reject. This institutionally more open-ended proposal is better in line with what non-overlapping generations owe to each other as equals with regard to their joint cooperative project.
This paper argues that Ottonelli and Torresi’s immanent critique and revision of liberal inclusivism ultimately fail to deliver their promise: a proposal to tackle temporary migrant workers’ vulnerability that remains faithful to liberal inclusivists’ normative commitments. After briefly introducing Ottonelli and Torresi’s critique and revision of liberal inclusivism (section 1), the paper parses the concept of life plans to explain how migration can be conceptualized as part of a life plan that deserves accommodation from states (section 2). Then, the paper scrutinizes the principle of accommodation and shows that Ottonelli and Torresi endorse an inflated interpretation of this principle at odds with liberal inclusivists’ normative commitments. This conceptual endorsement suffices to call Ottonelli and Torresi’s special rights account into question as an immanent critique of liberal inclusivism.
This paper critically examines Alessandro Ferrara’s concept of Sequential Sovereignty (SAG), which holds that constitutions are co-authored by past, present, and future generations, thereby limiting the constituent and amending powers of any single generation. The critique targets SAG’s founders’ privilege – the notion that founding generations alone possess full constituent power and can define political identity without being bound by the past, unlike later generations who are constrained by historical constitutional commitments. This asymmetry, the author argues, results in intergenerational inequality, diminishing the sovereignty and democratic agency of non-founder generations. Further, Ferrara’s reliance on future validation for constitutional changes introduces contingent legitimacy, making later generations’ political autonomy dependent on historical and future acceptance. The author contends that such a framework risks domination by the past and conflicts with liberal-democratic ideals of equal political agency. To address these issues, the paper proposes a revised principle of constitutional legitimacy grounded in intergenerational equality and reciprocity, allowing each generation full constituent power so long as it respects the freedom of future ones.
In his latest book, Sovereignty Across Generations: Constituent Power and Political Liberalism, Alessandro Ferrara explores the grounds, norms and scope of liberal constitutions’ legitimacy. Specifically, Ferrara develops Rawls’s political liberalism by exploring liberal legitimacy in a constitutional direction. Indeed, while the grounds of constitutions’ legitimacy were not the primary focus of Rawls’s own investigations, Ferrara believes that political liberalism must now be extended in this direction – for both theoretical and political reasons. In this review, we examine Ferrara’s proposal, bearing in mind his project’s Rawlsian roots. Specifically, we examine the relationship between reasonableness and constitutional legitimacy; we suggest that some of Ferrara’s conclusions – especially his intergenerational conception of the people as sovereign – might stand in tension with the Rawlsian framework within which he has drawn them.
The immigration policies adopted by European states are required to recognise migration processes as a structural phenomenon and, in the health sphere, to implement inclusive interventions capable of promoting integration and well-being for all people living in and/or transiting through Europe. At the national level, despite the forward-thinking measures put in place by the legislator and the establishment of the National Health Service, access to the right to health still seems far from fully inclusive for the more vulnerable segments of the population, particularly people from foreign countries. This article intends to propose an innovative model for ethics of care aimed at the implementation and optimisation of healthcare practices towards migrants living in our country, whether temporarily or more permanently.
This article delves into the intricacies of the uses of the words and concepts of borders, boundaries, frontiers, and limits, to address epistemological difficulties related to linguistic and philosophical confusions, sometimes used to target migrants populations. These confusions accordingly can and should be ended to coherently pose and sufficiently address social and ecological difficulties whose interrelatedness is increasingly acknowledged. This objective can be attained by criticizing the confusion of borders as frontiers and borders as outlines, which tends to lead to conceiving of (unrestrictive) limits as (restrictive) boundaries and inversely. Assumptions about languages (as English, French, Turkish, etc.) according to which some languages could somehow be as such inherently provided with expressive resources that could somehow be as such inherently lacking within other languages are necessarily misled and misleading: expressive resources necessary and sufficient to account for interrelated uses of the mentioned concepts are available in and across different languages. The establishment of such availability suffices to cast into doubt the projection of an inherent lack of such expressive resources on other languages. Analysis of language uses can manifest that distinctions between applications of the mentioned concepts can be achieved without a one-to-one correlation of concepts and words within and across languages.
Maeve McKeown’s With Power Comes Responsibility (WPCR) convincingly argues that discussions of structural injustice and responsibility for it should integrate discussions of power relations. Powerful agents have different responsibilities than “ordinary individuals” because they have access to more resources and have more “elbow room” to make changes. However, WPCR focuses on one form of power – the power agents have in virtue of their structural position – and assumes that this form of power always translates in power to change structures. This is a mistake because the structurally privileged are not necessarily better able to change structures. Men, for example, are not necessarily better able than women to change sexist structures. All occupants of structural positions arguably control resources. In some cases, the subordinates have a monopoly over important resources. In a society that assigns caregiving responsibility exclusively to women, for example, women have a monopoly over caregiving skills and knowledge. This control of resources gives the subordinate – understood as a collective, not individual agent – the power to change the structure in virtue of which they have those resources by acting in ways that do not conform to their mandated use in the structure.
This commentary argues that McKeown’s use of examples draw out philosophical commitments of her account that are not explicitly thematized in that account. Developing this argument in relation to her reflections on solidarity, it is argued, illustrates how her account negotiates and overcomes a potential tension between two different conceptions of solidarity.
The propagation of fake news has given rise to a pervasive sense of apprehension regarding its ramifications for democratic societies. The disruptive influence of digital technologies has intensified the repercussions of information manipulation and eroded the epistemic foundations of democratic deliberation to an unprecedented degree. Consequently, the dissemination of fake news poses a substantial threat to fundamental democratic values such as freedom, autonomy and equality, giving rise to pressing questions regarding the optimal balance between safeguarding these principles and preserving freedom of expression. These issues were addressed in a funded research project “Deceit and Self-Deception: How We Should Address Fake News and Other Cognitive Failures of the Democratic Public” (PRIN 2017), conducted by a team of scholars from four Italian universities (UPO, UNIGE, UNIPV, LUISS). The primary findings of this research were presented in a workshop, which was held at Luiss on 26-27 October 2023. A selection of the papers presented at the workshop have been selected fort his special section of Philosophy and Public Issues.
In her new book, Meave McKeown integrates a systematic analysis of power into Iris M. Young’s structural injustice paradigm, providing it with the tools to illuminate different agents’ relative capacities to reproduce structural injustices (SI). While much needed, this investigation – along with the moral responsibility attributions for SIs (instead of parts of them) it aims to enable – accentuates a tension central to SI theory. On the one hand, McKeown unapologetically questions the aptitude of Young’s original notion, “pure” SI in McKeown’s words, to capture any real-world injustice altogether. While Climate Change (CC) seems a candidate, other usual suspects – i.e., global poverty and sweatshop labour – would instantiate, respectively, “avoidable” and “deliberate” SIs. On the other hand, these categories sound like oxymorons, considering that these are still to count as “structural” injustices. If it is distinctive of structural causation that it cannot be reduced to the mere aggregation of all contributing agents’ conducts, at least some features of the resulting unjust outcomes should be impossible to lay at any specific agent’s feet – no matter how extensive and significant their contribution to the overall process. If so, we should only be able to attribute moral responsibility to powerful agents for some – however big – parts of structural injustices rather than the injustices tout court.
Even with events like the Capitol attack, it is misguided to focus too much on the possible epistemic failures of individuals. Instead, the focus should be on the collective underpinnings of bad beliefs (such as false beliefs about a stolen election), and especially on the collective agents who peddle in misinformation. We can divide the collective agents that pollute our epistemic neighborhoods roughly into those that do so for ideological or other such reasons (misbelievers), and those that do so for instrumental reasons (disinformers), although in practice these categories can overlap. These two motivations impact the responsibility of the collective agents that help to create bad epistemic neighborhoods. While misbelieving is more culpable in a purely epistemic sense, being a disinformer is more culpable in a moral sense. Epistemic institutions present a special case for the responsibility of collective agents. Although collective agents can present us with clear cases of culpability in epistemic matters, when dealing with consumers of fake news and misinformation, we should proceed with a certain level of epistemic humility.
This increasingly salient risk of false information has bearings on philosophy too. The focus of the article is on the ongoing philosophical exchange on the idea of ‘democratized’ or of ‘democratizing’ expertise. The article starts out with presenting three philosophically grounded proposals regarding the democracy-expertise relationship: science in democracy – an approach primarily concerned with safeguarding independent scientific institutions positioned within a larger democratic system; direct democratization – an approach that focuses on expert arrangements more broadly and the need for direct measures of democratization; and partisan expertise – an approach which questions the possibility of independent, politically neutral expertise. The next section of the article provides a preliminary assessment of these proposals, before sketching a preferable fourth option: epistemically justified expertise – an approach focused on facilitating democratization measures which can be defended on epistemic grounds. The final section elaborates on the problem of false information and discusses whether the preliminary proposal assessment stands, or should be revised, confronted with this problem. Contrary to what is frequently claimed, it is argued that the problem of false information does not alter the calculus significantly. The problem of false information raises complex causal questions, and urgent questions of policy and regulation. It may also raise philosophical questions, but the specific philosophical discussion of how to (re-)design democracy-expertise relations, seems largely untouched.
This symposium on my book With Power Comes Responsibility: The Politics of Structural Injustice raised many interesting and important points. I divide my response into two sections. First, friendly amendments. In this section, I discuss David Owen’s points about the role of counter-finalities, symmetrical vs. asymmetrical solidarity, and an ideal theory of justice. I also discuss Vittorio Bufacchi’s points about engaging with more theories of structural injustice than just Young’s and saying more about intentionality. In the second section, I engage with the critiques of my book. I divide these into two groups. First, Bufacchi and Mara Marin make a similar point about an ostensible binary between the powerful and the powerless in my argument, which I reject by emphasising the different kinds of power that differently positioned agents have within structures. Second, Bufacchi, Marin and De Bernardi all question whether my introduction of intentionality and agency into my account of structural injustice renders the “structural” part redundant. I argue that it doesn’t. Drawing on De Bernardi’s interpretation of my argument, I restate my case that structural injustice is characterized by structural causation and structural constraint, but that story is incomplete without an analysis of the ways in which powerful agents operate within and manipulate those structures.
