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.
