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AbstractEthics constrains us. But ethics can also act as an 'enabler', helping to secure compliance with public policies. Basing policies on ethical principles helps the public know what is required of them by public policies. Framing policies in those ways also primes people to think in terms of their own ethically based reasons for action. Basing policies on ethical principles can assist in securing the cooperation of potential veto players by creating cooperative norms and a culture of trust.

For cosmopolitans, global democracy is valuable both in itself and as a means to global justice. Their preferred principle of political enfranchisement is the All Affected Principle which, given global interdependencies, means that virtually everyone should have a vote virtually everywhere. Anti-cosmopolitans want to resist that conclusion. They try to do so by appealing instead to the All Subjected Principle. But you are subject to a law whenever it claims to apply to you, and in contemporary practice states typically claim authority to make many laws that apply even to non-nationals abroad. On the All Subjected Principle, they too should have a vote over those laws. The All Subjected Principle would thus have similarly expansionary implications for the franchise as the All Affected Principle, contrary to the fondest hopes of anti-cosmopolitans.

Everyone agrees we have duties of charity, however restrictive a view they take of our duties of justice. But duties of charity can sometimes be stronger than duties of justice, and where they are, those owed duties of justice cannot complain when the duty-bearer discharges that duty of charity instead. Furthermore, duties of charity, being imperfect, require institutional specification to render them into perfect duties making clear who owes what to whom. Institutions do that by "consolidating" imperfect duties of charity. Such institutions would be very similar to those required by robust duties of justice. Anyone who takes appropriately seriously the duties of charity that everyone agrees we all have would thereby be led to prescribe broadly the same institutions as advocates of robust duties of justice.

There are many different ways of responding to wrongdoing: person-centered or object-centered, victim-centered or perpetrator-centered, and fault-oriented or not. Among these approaches, requiring innocent beneficiaries to disgorge the fruits of historical wrongdoings of others is attractive because it is informationally the least demanding. Although that approach is perhaps not ideal, at least it is feasible where other responses are not, and doing something is better than doing nothing in response to grievous historical wrongdoing. Depending on circumstances, disgorgement can be in whole or in part, in kind or in cash. Even without the full information that disgorgement itself requires, general redistributive taxation might be justified as a tolerably close approximation.

One of the most exciting innovations within 'practical democratic theory' in recent years has been the emergence of deliberative democracy, as a theoretically refined ideal with by now some well‐honed mechanisms for its implementation on a small scale. Its greatest remaining challenge is to figure out some way to connect those highly controlled, small‐scale deliberative exercises to the 'main game', politically. I sketch some limited and indirect ways in which that might happen in national politics, before going on to propose a more novel way in which such deliberative events might be used literally to make international law of a certain sort.

Lawyers talk of the common law offence of 'perverting the course of justice' by bribing or intimidating judges or jurors, lying to the police or court, concealing or destroying or fabricating evidence. This article argues that the same things are wrong, and wrong for the same reasons, politically as judicially: they prevent people from knowing and applying for themselves the rules by which they are ruled. The sort of excuses typically offered for those perverse practices in politics – that 'it made no difference', that 'they could and should have resisted' or that it is merely a matter of 'fair adversarial competition' – would be laughed out of a court of law, and they should be shunned politically for the same reasons as judicially.

Many who discuss global democracy think in terms of a Reform-Act model of democracy, with the ideal being 'one person one vote for all affected by the decisions' as in, for example, a second popularly apportioned chamber of United Nations. Politically, that is dismissed as wildly unrealistic. Remember, however, the Reform Acts came very late in process of democratization domestically. Among early steps that eventually led to full democratization of that sort domestically were: (a) limiting the arbitrary rule on the part of the sovereign; and (b) making the sovereign accountable to others (initially a limited set of others, which then expanded). Globally, there are moves afoot in both those directions. Crucially, once those pieces are in place, the circle of accountability basically only ever expands and virtually never contracts.