This paper explores why victims who provoke their aggressors seem to compromise their right to self-defence. First, it argues that one proposed answer – the victims are partially responsible for the threats they face – fails. It faces counterexamples that it cannot adequately address. Second, the paper develops the Protective Duty View according to which we incur protective duties towards others when we interfere with their reasonable opportunities to avoid suffering harm. Since provokers wrongfully interfere with prospective aggressors’ opportunities to (...) avoid posing a threat and thus to be defensively harmed, they incur protective duties towards the aggressors. This can require that they significantly limit or even refrain from using defensive force. The paper ends by drawing out some of the implications of the Protective Duty View for issues related to war and punishment. (shrink)

Today’s culture tells us to respect, even celebrate, the many ways in which we are different from each other. These are moral claims about how to relate to people, given that they are different. But does it also matter whether we are different in the first place? I argue for the intrinsic value to us of individuality, understood in terms of our differences from others. Past defences of individuality often unhelpfully conflate it with autonomy or authenticity, but these can come (...) apart from individuality. Individuality is also distinct from numerical identity and moral status, and cannot be fully captured in terms of rarity, diversity, or irreplaceability. Most current theories of well-being leave it open that lives utterly lacking in individuality might be wonderfully good. These theories, I argue, fail to account for what Valéry called ‘the evil of not being unique’. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 596-606, Fall 2024.

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 500-531, Fall 2024.

China’s rise to global power status is set to be amongst the primary shapers of politics and life more broadly in the 21st century. Yet despite its immense significance, political philosophers have been surprisingly quiet on the normative implications of China’s rise. This, I will argue, is a mistake. Not only does China’s rise generate interesting normative questions in its own right; it also upends some basic assumptions that many of us have hitherto adopted in our thinking about international distributive (...) justice. In the philosophical literature, the international order is often characterised by two sorts of states – developed and developing – with the former owing demanding duties and the latter having expansive permissions to further their own development. China’s status as both a genuine superpower and a middle-income country facing significant development challenges calls into question the continued functionality of such simplifying assumptions. Against the backdrop of China’s rise – and, to a lesser extent, that of other large emerging economies – this paper develops a more fine-grained account of how to conceive of states’ differential levels of advantage, distinguishing between states that are incapable, precariously capable, and robustly capable of realizing a minimally decent standard of domestic justice. This account reaffirms the assignment of the most onerous international duties to developed states, but also assigns duties and claims to developing states in a scalar fashion, with the upshot that better-off developing states in particular bear positive duties of international justice, owed to least-developed countries (LDCs). (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 397-429, Fall 2024.

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 532-564, Fall 2024.

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 565-595, Fall 2024.

Constituent power is an idea with a long tradition in modern political thought but has been largely abandoned since the middle of the twentieth century. Here I offer a new account of constituent power that avoids problems of the classical account, including the paradox of constitutionalism, and clarifies how individuals contribute to creating their shared political order. I argue that constituent power should be understood as an individual power-with: the agential power to constitute a legal order with others. Our individual, (...) banal acts of law-abidingness each partially effect the collective outcome. We generally exercise constituent power unconsciously and automatically, guiding our actions to succeed as defined by law and relying on the legal system to take up our contributions and effectively combine them with others. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 3, Page 327-357, Summer 2024.

This paper identifies a theoretically neglected reason why cultural appropriation can be wrong and examines how this wrong is connected to a broader concern about cultural colonialism. Cultural appropriation is wrong if it perpetuates the lack of social recognition of certain groups, namely those that were colonized or otherwise oppressed, as cultural contributors despite their participatory role in the development of valuable cultural objects. This pernicious effect occurs through the phenomenon of detachment: as cultural objects developed among these groups gain (...) broader social uptake, these objects are appropriated in ways that obscure, denigrate, or crowd out the participatory role of the oppressed groups responsible for their development. This analysis sheds light on several other important theoretical issues, including why cultural appropriation is more contentious in certain social contexts, whether and how the issue of authenticity bears on the wrong of cultural appropriation, and what forms of cultural engagement avoid wrongful appropriation. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 221-250, Spring 2024.

As part of recent epistemic challenges to democracy, some have endorsed the implementation of epistemic constraints on voting, institutional mechanisms that bar incompetent voters from participating in public decision-making procedures. This proposal is often considered incompatible with a commitment to political equality. In this paper, I aim to dispute the strength of this latter claim by offering a theoretical justification for epistemic constraints on voting that does not rest on antiegalitarian commitments. Call this the civic accountability justification for epistemic constraints (...) on voting. On this view, voters stand to one another in a normative relation of reciprocal accountability that requires them to uphold an epistemically responsible conduct. Modest epistemic constraints on voting are justifiable because they secure that participation in voting is conforming to this normative requirement. Thanks to its distinctive features, the civic accountability justification can overcome two problems that egalitarians commonly associate with the idea of epistemic constraints on voting: the disrespect problem and the hierarchy problem. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 106-146, Spring 2024.

Majority rule is often regarded as an important democratic principle. But modern democracies divide voters into districts. So if the majority should rule, which majority should rule? Should it be the popular majority, or an electoral majority (i.e., either the majority of voters in the majority of districts, or the majority of voters in districts that contain the majority of the population)? I argue that majority rule requires rule by the popular majority. This view is not novel and may seem (...) obvious. But it is rarely defended, and often rejected. I defend it by arguing that this view about which majority should rule is best supported by the arguments for why the majority should rule, and best avoids the arbitrary and perverse verdicts of rule by electoral majorities. I close by considering the significant practical implications of the view. The Electoral College is often criticized on the basis that the winner of the popular vote doesn’t always win the election. But all district-based democracies have this feature, so all district-based democracies must be reformed if they are to satisfy the principle of majority rule. (shrink)

Suppose that it would be best if some set of people all did A, significantly worse if they all did B, and worst of all if some did A while some did B. Now suppose that they’re all going to do B, regardless of what the others do. It seems as though each of these people ought to pick B, given what the others are going to do. Yet it also seems as though something has gone wrong. This leads to (...) a puzzle: how can it be wrong for everyone to act as they ought? In this paper, I resolve this puzzle by arguing that there are joint ‘oughts’ which apply irreducibly to pluralities of agents, and which can pull in different directions to ‘oughts’ holding of given individuals; even if everyone individually ought to pick B, what they jointly ought to do is all pick A. (shrink)