Shmuel Nili’s Beyond the Law’s Reach? is an inquiry into the moral duties of the world’s established democracies in a world rife with violent and undemocratic states. Nili argues that these “consolidated” democratic states are “entangled” with the leaders of such violent polities—and uses this entanglement to derive an elegant and plausible series of political duties. In response, this essay seeks to undermine the distinction between the established democracies and the violent states, by showing that some democratic states—including, most centrally, the United States—are as violent as those societies considered by Nili as the focus of international moral obligation. This fact, however, does not impugn the moral obligations identified by Nili; instead, it demonstrates that Nili’s duties might demand something like a necessary form of moral hypocrisy—in which a democratic state might be effectively able to undermine violence abroad, even while incapable of effectively eliminating that violence on its own territory.

This article argues that inequitable access to interventions capable of dramatically extending human lifespans would undermine individual and collective upkeep of civic virtue. Specifically, intervention maldistribution that normalizes the expectation of differential lifespans based on socioeconomic status undermines the moral agency of persons living with poverty and the commonality of lifespan experiences, such as milestones and events. As a result of their greater access to interventions that significantly increase lifespan, those with wealth might be tempted to regard persons living with poverty as biologically distinct, physiologically inferior, and less deserving of moral consideration than themselves.

Theories of liberal justice depend upon ideas of how much we can expect ordinary people to be motivated by the moral interests of others; there are limits to the motivational power of such notions as altruism and sympathy. This means, however, that the theories of justice we have may have difficulty in understanding how to rightly respond to the moral claims that might emerge in the face of widespread migration in response to climate change. This essay argues that liberal states may face a dilemma in response to this migration—one in which a state must do what cannot be justified toward either the migratory or the sedentary. This claim, further, might represent a new site of intergenerational injustice, in which future generations are given political problems to which our best theories of political justice can provide little assistance.

Lucia Rafanelli's analysis of reform intervention is both timely and philosophically powerful. This paper asks two questions about the limits, and proper implications, of her methodology – both of which have to do with the notion of modesty, understood as a moral virtue. The first asks whether or not principled illiberal regimes have a moral right, on her account, to reform intervention against the liberalism of liberal democratic states. The second asks about the extent to which persuasive and discursive modes of reform intervention are rightly understood as respectful, when such intervention begins with an unshakeable moral commitment held by the intervenor and used as justification for the intervention itself.

Much modern discussion of the morality of migration begins with the concept of coercion, and takes the coercive nature of border enforcement as especially salient in the moral analysis of migration policy. Much migration control, however, begins not with overt coercion, but with what I term manipulations; these are ways of making migration more difficult that do not resemble canonical cases of coercion. Examples include the alteration of the physical pathways between states, attempts to deceive or mislead prospective migrants about what they will discover upon arrival, and the deliberate use of abstract and complex rules to make legal migration difficult or impossible. I argue that these manipulations are worthy of independent moral examination—and that the tradition of classical liberalism has resources with which to undertake this examination.

Prior to the pandemic of 2020, global tourism accounted for over ten percent of global GDP, for a total of $9.6 trillion USD; one in every four jobs created that year, across the globe, was in the travel and tourism sector. And yet the figure of the international tourist is often regarded with an attitude ranging from bemusement to outright contempt so much so that a series of books exists to guide tourists on how to avoid looking or acting like tourists. Why, though, is the figure of the tourist —especially the international tourist— so disreputable? Given the sheer number of such tourists (over 1.4 billion, in 2018 alone) it seems odd to think that there is something shameful or problematic about tourism as a practice. What accounts for our seeming disdain for the tourist, even as so many of us engage in tourism ourselves?There are, of course, many obvious answers to this question. The tourist —especially the international tourist— is often a figure of some wealth and privilege; that tourist is likely to be clumsy, at best, in his or her navigating of a foreign society; and he or she is often likely to be less careful in her caretaking of the physical and social spaces into which she travels, given the fact that she is as it were on vacation. These facts may be enough to engender some antipathy towards the tourist especially one who, as Jarvis Cocker noted thirty years ago, regards the local inhabitants as somehow amusing. Tourists are likely to be —as the British aphorism had it about American GIs— oversexed, overpaid, and over here. In this paper, though, I want to suggest a slightly different story for our ethical disquiet with the figure of the tourist. I will argue that the practice of international tourism raises two distinct sorts of ethical worries —both of which reflect the fact that international tourism requires a local industry in which cultural difference is curated and made consumable by the foreign tourist—. This fact may lead to ethical disquiet, I argue, because it can represent a site at which there is a maldistribution of the benefits and burdens of intercultural conversation; the local who works in the tourism industry must become adept at performing his or her culture for the outsider, while that outsider gains the benefits of intercultural conversation without bearing a similar burden of epistemic labor. A second reason for concern, however, stems from the ways in which this demand for epistemic labor can end up deforming and destabilizing local forms of citizenship and political agency. Those who spend their days performing a debased and simplified version of their cultural identity for outsiders may be, I believe, marked by that effort and their own ability to engage in political conversations with fellow local members may be made more difficult as a result. International tourism, in short, may be a site from which both distributive and political injustices might emerge. These concerns, I should note, may exacerbate already objectionable relationships reflecting colonial legacies of oppression; but they may exist even in the absence of any history of colonialism. The mere fact of a market in the curated experience of cultural difference may be enough to raise these worries; and international tourism, I believe, often involves exactly this form of market.

The claims of those who are compelled to migrate are, in general, taken to be more urgent and pressing than the claims of those who were not forced to do so. This article does not defend the moral relevance of voluntarism to the morality of migration, but instead seeks to demonstrate two complexities that must be included in any plausible account of that moral relevance. The first is that the decision to start the migration journey is distinct from the decision to stop that journey, through resettlement; the latter may involve voluntary choice, without that voluntarism impugning the involuntary nature of the former. The second is that the migration decision of the individual might be voluntary, even while that individual's family or social network might be compelled to insist upon some particular individual member's migration. That is, the fact that any particular person might be free to refuse migration does not contradict the fact that the group in question does not have the effective freedom to avoid the migration of some group members. Once these two complexities are understood, I argue, the moral relevance of voluntarism in the ethics of migration becomes more complex and nuanced than is generally understood.

I have argued that citizenship tests are not, in principle, unjust, were they to accurately test the acquisition of those particular aspects of local history and vocabulary necessary for participation in the local political community. Daniel Sharp disagrees, and argues that such tests are always unjust; they impose unjustifiable burdens against all and only migrants seeking admission to political citizenship. In this paper, I defend the possibility of a just test. I argue, first, that the burden on prospective citizens is not an undue or unjust one, were we to have some reason available to us by which that burden might be justified; and, second, that some such reason is available, given the relevance of local knowledge to political discourse – a relevance acknowledged in both current law and in theories of public reason.

Households in developing countries commonly engage in risk sharing to cope with shocks. Despite this, the residual risk they remain exposed to — often due to aggregate events such as droughts and floods — is considerable. To mitigate these risks, governments, NGOs and multilateral organizations have introduced index insurance. To appreciate its welfare implications, however, it is necessary to assess how insurance interacts with pre-existing risk sharing. We ask to what extent the demand for index insurance — as compared to standard indemnity insurance — depends on the level of pre-existing risk sharing. We contribute by developing a simple theoretical framework which shows that, relative to a state of autarky, risk sharing between agents increases demand for index insurance and decreases demand for indemnity insurance. In an artefactual field experiment with Ethiopian farmers who share risk in real life, we test and confirm these predictions.

The increasing political salience of the sanctuary city has not yet been met with adequate philosophical examination of that concept. This article argues that there are at least two models of how the sanctuary city ought to be understood. The first model, the wholesale model, understands the sanctuary city as a standing check against federal overreach; the city ought to refuse to participate in deportation, even when the federal government is morally correct in how and when it deports. The second model, the piecemeal model, understands the sanctuary city instead as one particular site of resistance to particular forms of federal wrongdoing. This article does not seek to vindicate one model over the other, but argues that both models raise significant philosophical worries. More philosophical attention will help us understand both what the sanctuary city is and what might be said in its defense.

Abstract In Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration, Anna Stilz argues that legitimate political authority requires the actual—rather than hypothetical—consent of the governed. I argue, however, that her analysis of that consent is inconsistent, in the weight it ascribes to the felt desire to refrain from doing politics with some particular group of people. In the context of secession and self-determination, the lack of actual consent to shared political institutions is weighty enough to render such institutions presumptively illegitimate. In the context of migration, however, a lack of actual consent to the presence of newcomers is ascribed nearly no weight, and instead is taken as evidence of irrationality or immoral preferences. I argue that this apparent contradiction must be clarified before Stilz's overall account of self-governance can be accepted.