This article addresses the puzzle of enforceability: why are some moral duties enforceable and others not—and which are which? After raising doubts about “duty-first” approaches that approach the puzz...

Authenticity is widely invoked as a central force in modern politics. Yet contemporary philosophical accounts usually portray authenticity as a distinctly individualistic ideal, arising from a Romanti...

Should political theorists engage in ethnographic fieldwork? This paper offers a new argument in favor of adopting an ethnographic sensibility: it helps ‘democratize’ political theory in two ways. Fir...

Theoretical and empirical work provides us with multiple models for explaining why people perpetrate or are complicit in injustice, and a familiar taxonomy distinguishes models of injustice which appe...

I defend a security-based account of how the state should address intimate partner violence. Protection of basic security against violence must have a high priority in liberalism. Violence in intimate...

This article develops the concept of “vindictive tolerance” to describe a political pathology in which the language and institutional apparatus of tolerance, rights, and the rule of law are weaponized...

Markets are often portrayed as amoral realms of self-interest, yet empirical evidence shows that people in market societies consistently act morally. What explains the discrepancy? I argue that market...

Markets are often portrayed as amoral realms of self-interest, yet empirical evidence shows that people in market societies consistently act morally. What explains the discrepancy? I argue that market...

Some theorists maintain that democracy is a condition in which citizens have authority over matters of common concern. But just what kind of authority citizens have proves difficult to describe. Under...

Contemporary power is often opaque. People may be made vulnerable by arrangements whose sources and mechanisms are difficult to identify. This article argues that opaque power raises a problem of poli...

Philosophers of migration claim asylum seekers’ location is normatively arbitrary. They claim it is irrelevant whether asylum seekers are inside or outside their own state, and that it does not matter...

This article responds to an argument in this journal by Monaghan who contends that creating “territory” is a crucial part of a just urban environment but claiming “turf” – claiming and attempting to e...

This article introduces and begins to defend a relational account of the connection between dignity and recognition. First, I argue that a relational account offers a robust alternative to familiar in...

This article offers a normative defence of using neighbourhood demographic quotas to deconcentrate residential clusters of advantage. It develops the case by detailing problems of inequality that aris...

Queues are pervasive in our world, determining our entitlement or order of access to goods ranging from hospital appointments and organ transplants to concert tickets and supermarket tills. This paper...

This paper revisits the debate on ideal and nonideal theory by taking seriously Charles Mills’s suggestion that it should be understood as a dispute between idealism and materialism. I argue that by u...

The orthodox position in the literature on positional goods posits that although positional competitions are socially undesirable, inefficient, and unfair, individuals are reasonable and justified to ...

An appealing account of dishonesty subsumes it under the paradigm of lying. However, the account faces clear trouble from a wide range of cases, including cases of bullshit and brazen dishonesty. Such...

Contrary to the conventional view that a state’s moral right to exclude is limited in various ways but unconditional, it’s been claimed that each state’s possession of such a right depends on the legi...

The concept of "the hinge of history" suggests a unique period in which human actions have unprecedented and potentially irreversible consequences for the long-term future of civilization. This paper ...

Given the current and future suffering associated with human-made climate change and the lack of political action in response to it, it seems only natural to feel despair. However, despair has a bad r...

Free speech is a core value of liberal democracies, but for 1.8 million incarcerated Americans, it is largely inaccessible. Incarcerated people have scarce access to phone calls and in-person visits, ...

Contemporary philosophers have argued that framing new concepts can bring about both moral and epistemic progress. In this paper, I argue that such intelligibility also has downsides. This paper intro...

Faced with the failures of existing democracies, many democratic theorists conclude from recent empirical work in political science critical of the functioning of electoral institutions that citizens ...

Recent literature in political philosophy has argued that protesting against police brutality can permissibly involve uncivil conduct, including damage to property and confrontation with police office...

Democratic politics in practice often lags far behind the democratic ideals that justify democracy in theory. Where democratic theory postulates the equality of citizens and the accountability of elec...

The Diversity Trumps Ability theorem suggests that, under certain conditions, more diverse groups outperform groups of more individually competent members. Despite initial excitement about the theorem...

The ideas of “territory” and “turf” are important parts of both our folk theory and scholarly treatments of the city. Our territory is where we feel at home and have a measure of control outside of ou...

Many institutions and organizations now delegate important decisions to algorithms. These algorithms promise greater predictive accuracy, at a lower operating cost than the human decision-makers they ...

Given the current and future suffering associated with human-made climate change and the lack of political action in response to it, it seems only natural to feel despair. However, despair has a bad r...

The doctrine of effective occupation was developed by colonial powers to justify their sovereignty over newly annexed territories and was measured by animus occupandi, the will to be sovereign; and co...

According to the informational model, journalism’s primary function is to provide the public with information and help it acquire knowledge and understanding. Opinion journalism appears to conflict wi...

This article investigates how future climate governance might be made legitimate and compatible with collective self-determination. I develop an original account of international legitimacy through a...

In a typical clinical trial, researchers are required to obtain participants’ informed consent. But for some policy experiments, it is impracticable to obtain informed consent. As a result, these tria...

A recent view in legal epistemology holds that since knowledge is the standard for proof of criminal guilt, and since there is pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, contrary to current trial practice j...

What could ground normative restrictions concerning cultural appropriation in cases where they are not grounded by independent considerations such as harm? This paper argues that such claims are best ...

Most leading philosophical accounts of discrimination theorize discrimination as a causal notion: roughly, an action discriminates on the basis of X (e.g., race, sex) if X causes (in the right way) th...

What is the relationship between liberalism and socialism? Partisans of each political tradition often focus on the shortcomings of the other, with socialists charging liberals with defending merely f...

Democratic theorists have developed a rich literature exploring why winning democratic elections gives representatives the moral right to occupy public office. However, they have largely ignored the q...

Philosophers have been paying increasingly more attention to the notion of manipulation. Perhaps surprisingly, however, most of the recent literature has focused on the conceptual question of identify...

Freedom of occupational choice represents people as choosing their occupations according to their personal values and preferences, of which pro-social preferences are one possible type among many. I a...

Democratically, the permission of any candidate or party to occupy office is based on consent conferred upon them by voters in the previous election. This article examines why and how political misinf...

A recurring methodological mistake within the ‘dirty hands’ literature, the view that politicians must sometimes justifiably commit real moral wrongs, has been to assume that only a specific kind of c...

We propose an account of the subject’s cognition and its relation to the world that allows for an articulation of the phenomenon of ideology. We argue that ideology is a form of what we call ‘a priori...

There has been a resurgence of interest recently in the nature of solidarity. A problem, however, bedevils any attempt to defend any one view against another. What makes disagreement about the nature ...

Many moral theories hold individuals responsible for their marginal impact on massive patterns (for instance overall value or equality of opportunity) or for following whichever rules would realise th...

This essay outlines and responds to the problem of appropriate piling-on. Suppose that a person is responsible for having acted wrongly. It seems apt for you to blame that person. Now suppose that I a...

In light of mounting concerns about democratic backsliding, Rawls’s work – which has an unusual focus on considerations of stability – is now being mined for insights about democratic fragility. This ...

When selecting between applicants for a job, when and how should we take into account the reactions that they elicit from others? On one hand, applicants’ “reaction qualifications” often speak to thei...

Directive authorities such as police officers, judges and employers demand our obedience. Demands for obedience come in two forms. First authorities issue commands meant to bind us to obey. Second aut...