The author raises the question of whether secret uses of power by democratic states can form a legitimate exercise of democratic authority. On the face of it, the answer seems negative. First, it is commonplace to think that in a democracy, political decisions are legitimate only if they are authorized by citizens. From this perspective, secret uses of power seem to lack democratic authority because, one argues, people cannot authorize what they are denied knowledge about. Second, the exercise of democratic (...) authority requires that citizens be able to hold officials accountable, and to do that citizens must know what officials are doing and why. Yet how can citizens call their representatives to account for secret political decisions and processes if they are denied knowledge of them? The author analyses each of these two dimensions of democratic governance and argues that secrecy, under certain conditions, may be a legitimate form of democratic governance. (shrink)

Under what conditions, if any, do those the law addresses have a moral duty or obligation to obey it simply because it is the law? In this essay, I identify five general approaches to carrying out this task, and offer a somewhat detailed discussion of one or two examples of each approach. The approaches studied are: relational‐role approaches that appeal to the fact that an agent occupies the role of member in the political community; attempts to ground the duty to (...) obey the law in individual consent or fair play; natural duty approaches; instrumental approaches; and philosophical anarchism, an approach that denies that most subjects of contemporary states have a duty to obey the law simply in virtue of its status as such. (shrink)

The author argues that only when the two harms are morally relevant to one another may an agent take into account the number of people he can save. He defends an orbital conception of morally relevant harm, according to which harms that fall within the of a given harm are relevant to it, while all other harms are not. The possibility of preventing a harm provides both a first-order reason to prevent that harm, and a second-order reason not to consider (...) preventing irrelevant harms. This understanding of a morally relevant harm avoids two objections to such a concept recently raised by Alastair Norcross: identifying a point along a continuous scale of harms at which the divide between relevant and irrelevant harms occurs, and the entailment that the mere possibility of preventing harm that one is morally forbidden from preventing can determine which of two other actions morality requires. (shrink)

While many contemporary political philosophers agree that citizens of a legitimate state enjoy a moral right to civil disobedience, they differ over both the grounds of that right and its content. This essay defends the view that the moral right to civil disobedience derives from a general right to political participation, and the characterization of that right as precluding the state from punishing, but not from penalizing, those who exercise it. The argument proceeds by way of rebuttals to criticisms of (...) both claims recently advanced by Kimberley Brownlee. While in some cases those criticisms fail on their merits, in other cases the responses offered here reveal that the dispute over the ground and content of a moral right to civil disobedience reflects deeper disagreements regarding two foundational issues: first, whether moral rights are best conceived of as defeasible evaluative principles or conclusive normative ones, and second, whether principles of justice should be theorized on the basis of full or partial compliance. (shrink)

Many retributivists appear to presume that the concept of blame that figures in their accounts of just punishment is the same one people employ in their interpersonal moral relationships. David Shoemaker contends that this presumption is mistaken. Moral blameworthiness, he maintains, tracks only the meaning of a person's action––his reasons for acting as he did––while criminal blameworthiness, which he equates with liability to punishment, tracks only the impermissibility of an agent's action. I contest the second of these two claims, and (...) in doing so defend the retributivists’ presumption. First, I argue that the purpose of a criminal trial can be plausibly construed as establishing that the defendant is morally blameworthy for criminal conduct by eliminating reasons to think she is not. Second, I defend the claim that the criminal law should punish people for their failure to act with proper regard for others’ legally protected interests against Shoemaker's arguments to the contrary. Finally, I show that.. (shrink)

This essay argues that there can be a duty to obey the law when it is produced by the evolutionary forces at work in the customary and common law. Human beings' inherent epistemic limitations mean that they must rely on the trial and error learning built into the common law process to discover rules that facilitate peaceful social interaction. Hence, a duty to obey the law produced by the common law process can arise from individuals' natural duty to promote social (...) peace. This argument cannot be extended to ground political obligation. It does not give rise to a duty to obey the state. (shrink)

In this paper I critically assess David Lefkowitz’s view that the right to political participation encompasses a right to suitably constrained civil disobedience. I claim that his argument is not successful because it has an explanatory gap. I then examine two strategies for repairing his argument. The first attempts to show that acts of civil disobedience fulfill the duty to obey the law. The second attempts to establish that the moral value of civil disobedience outweighs the moral value of obeying (...) the law. I argue that both strategies may be successful—to a certain extent—but only the latter can establish a right to civil disobedience. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses a debate about the proper relationship between democratic theory and institutions. The debate has been waged between two rival approaches: on the one side is an aggregative and economic theory of democracy, known as constitutional economics, and on the other side is deliberative democracy. The two sides endorse starkly different positions on the issue of what makes a democracy legitimate and stable within an institutional setting. Constitutional economists model political agents in the same way that neoclassical economists (...) model economic agents, that is, as self-regarding, rational maximizers; so that evaluations of democratic legitimacy and stability depend on the extent to which the design of institutional rules and practices maximize individual utility by promoting efficient schemes of collective choice. Deliberative democrats, on the other hand, understand political agents as communicative reason-giving subjects who justify their preferences and positions on issues that jointly affect them in a process of consensus-directed discourse, or deliberation; so that evaluations of democratic legitimacy and order depend on the degree to which institutional norms and practices promote deliberation and draw upon deliberated public judgment. I argue that despite the numerous incompatibilities between constitutional economics and deliberative democracy—which amount to a 'deep divide'—an opportunity to produce a genuine synthesis of the two approaches arises inasmuch as it is possible to overcome several points of opposition in their separate research programmes. The central thesis of the dissertation is that it is possible to construct a bridge spanning the divide between constitutional economists and deliberative democrats, and that Dewey and Bentley's transactional view can facilitate this bridge-building project. Pursuant to this end, the points of opposition between the v research programmes are mediated by way of five concepts which, on balance, favor deliberative democracy and its feasible institutionalization. (shrink)