Exiles as Co-Authors

This chapter explores shared identity as a basis for exile politics. It provides a dialogical account of individual and social or collective identities that conceives of these as a narrative. It then provides an overview of associative obligations and argues that shared identity generates special duties that can account for why exiles go beyond the minimal duty to assist. Shared identity can help address obstacles to collective action and make these more extensive efforts practicable and effective. Exile complicates identity, however. Exile engenders greater pluralism in exile and exile provides a site for identities suppressed back home to survive and flourish, ensuring that marginalized perspectives are given some expression. This pluralism, however, can hinder prospects for collective action, and lead to systematic divergences between the homeland and those in exile. Exile politics’ ameliorative function back home is in tension with, although not necessarily fatal to, its ability to perform a corrective function abroad.

Distributing State Responsibility

Chapter 5 contrasts the intentional participation framework with other accounts, builds on the normative and empirical findings of the previous chapters, and develops a viable model for the distribution of remedial responsibility within the state. It examines five alternative principles that could justify a nonproportional distribution: “national responsibility,” democratic authorization, benefiting from state wrongdoing, having a special capacity to address it, and having special associative obligations to the victims of the wrongdoing. While each of these principles has important limitations, under some circumstances they can play a role in explaining citizens’ obligations with respect to their state’s wrongdoings. The chapter then outlines a context-sensitive process for determining how a state’s responsibility should be distributed between its citizens in specific cases. Typically, this process will conclude that in democratic states, a nonproportional distribution is overall justified, while in many authoritarian states it is not.

Political Obligation

Political obligation refers to the idea that there is a duty to obey the law as well as to support one’s state in a number of other ways—for example, by promoting its interests, by defending it when attacked, by voting, and, more generally, by being an active citizen. These duties can be very demanding and seriously interfere with one’s capacity to autonomously choose how to lead one’s life. As such, their existence deserves close scrutiny. The main attempts to justify the existence of political obligation appeal to the ideas of consent, fair play, gratitude, natural duties of justice, and associative obligations. Each of these theories is shown to struggle either with underinclusiveness or with overinclusiveness. It is normally thought that all and only the citizens of a given state have a duty to obey its laws and support its political institutions, but none of the classic theories seem to be able to justify a duty of this kind. In light of this, two responses are available: one is to give up the idea that there is political obligation, thereby becoming a “philosophical anarchist”; the other is to revise the traditional understanding of political obligation.

The Liberalism of Diversity

As the most important chapter in the book, it shows that the political turn should be completed with a commitment to diversity rather than to autonomy. Pro-toleration liberalism, in fact, combines the politicization of liberalism with a general pro-diversity orientation. Chandran Kukathas’s ‘liberal archipelago’ model is assumed as an instance of PT liberalism. It is deeply analysed and criticized. It becomes acceptable only after some substantial amendments. In particular, after an enquiry into the kind of obligations binding individuals to groups and to the mainstream society (and to the state), the chapter claims that understanding such obligations as associative obligations can render PT liberalism more tenable. This view is increasingly defensible when it is completed with a much more extended account of the mainstream society and of the role of the state.

National Partiality, Immigration, and the Problem of Double-Jeopardy

A foundational conviction of contemporary liberal thought is that all persons matter equally. However, states frequently pursue policies that are strikingly partial towards compatriots over foreigners. A common strategy for justifying this partiality appeals to associative obligations incurred by standing in special relationships with fellow citizens. Such arguments face an important hurdle. This chapter argues for a “Boundary Principle”, according to which special relationships among members of a group cannot justify strong forms of partiality, unless the boundaries of this group can also be justified. Hence, arguments from associative obligations are, by themselves, incomplete. Most states limit migration, and thereby prevent willing people from entering into those relationships with us that would generate associative obligations on our part. A successful defense of national partiality in terms of associative obligations is therefore more closely tied to the question of what restrictions can be placed on immigration than most political philosophers have recognized.

Integrity in Law’s Empire

In this paper I focus on Dworkin's arguments for the distinctive political virtue of integrity, arguing that we have serious reasons to doubt that the case for integrity has been made. I approach Dworkin’s complex argument in two main steps, following his two main arguments for the distinct value of integrity. The first, and more direct argument, is based on what Dworkin takes to be the grounds for rejecting “checkerboard laws”. The second argument is the one that ties the value of integrity to political legitimacy by way of articulating the value of integrity in light of its affinity with Fraternity, the idea of a “true community”, and the associative obligations such communities engender. I try to show in this paper that both of these lines of argument are not convincing.

Sovereignty and Associative Obligations

Conservative American jurisprudence often staunchly maintains that each society—and especially the United States—enjoys an absolute right of sovereignty as against the constraints of international law. This position is often maintained in a philosophically dogmatic way—as a morally unsupported assertion that political authority can only have a domestic source. Yet the social contract tradition, especially in the work of Thomas Hobbes, but also in contemporary arguments by Michael Walzer, offers something of a principled defense of this view. This chapter will outline a fundamental alternative to this conservative position, also located within the social contract tradition. Domestic political authority, on this rival view, partly has its source in the larger state system that constitutes and defines the right of sovereignty with a political social practice of global scope.

Introduction

Chapter 1 begins with the role that political theory can play in public debate about immigration. Political theory can identify values and principles that can serve as guides to public judgment, clarify the sources of our disagreement, and perhaps even reduce the extent of disagreement about specific issues. The chapter then discusses four key dynamics in the politics of immigration: majoritarian politics, nationalism, capitalism, and liberal constitutionalism. It presents the idea of associative obligations and advances an intermediate position on immigration between closed borders and open borders rooted in an ethic of membership. It concludes with a roadmap of the book.