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AbstractOriel College persists in displaying a statue of Cecil Rhodes, despite his role in British colonialism and despite opposition from the Rhodes Must Fall movement. This article considers arguments in support of Oriel's position—including three versions of the charge that removing the statue might distort history—and show that they all fail. I argue that the conclusion that the statue should be removed, despite possible costs and complexity, follows once we realise that the statue makes demands on our attention and once we correctly understand that the descendants of those previously oppressed by Rhodes and who are currently subject to racism have a special insight, standing and claim to shape the environment in which they study, work and live.

Abstract
Theorists of liberalism put forward diverse conditions for what makes a state just and legitimate. In what follows I examine Cécile Laborde's suggestion that a just and legitimate liberal state may have an established religion. Such a state may take the form of what she calls Divinitia: a state with some symbolic recognition of religion, conservative laws in matters of bioethics including abortion, religious accommodation from general laws, and religious references in public debate. I argue that Laborde's requirement that public justification of policies by public officials is conducted in terms of accessible reasons either rules out too many or too few policies. I then suggest that not only justice but also the legitimacy of states can be ensured only if concern for justice has a greater role to play in the selection of state policies than Laborde suggests. We have good reasons to doubt that Divinita would qualify as just and legitimate.

Abstract:This essay offers an account of feasible actions. It criticizes the conditional
account of feasibility and offers instead what I call the constrained account of
feasibility. The constrained account is superior, I argue, on account of how it
deals with the problem of motivational failure to act and with collective
action. According to the constrained account, roughly put, an action is feasible
when the agent or agents performing it know how to perform it and are
appropriately responsive to incentives. The essay shows that some collective
requirements for action that appear feasible are not in fact feasible.

When, if at all, can the fact that a person is responsible for his or her disadvantage justify leaving him or her to bear that disadvantage? Possibly no other question has caused more controversy among political theorists of egalitarianism in the last two decades. This article aims to show that it is possible to move beyond the answer to this question that is usually (rightly or wrongly) attributed to luck egalitarians without accepting the conclusion that a concern with responsibility is only marginal to theories of egalitarian justice. I identify the conditions under which disadvantage brought about through the exercise of responsibility should be accepted as just and show why egalitarians concerned with fair shares must sometimes accept as just even grave disadvantages.

A crucial question for egalitarians, and theorists of distributive justice in general, is whether people can be held responsible for disadvantages they bring upon themselves. One response to this question states that it would be inegalitarian to hold people responsible on the basis of their actions if their actions are not ultimately under their control and reflect instead the good or bad luck the agent had in being the type of person who happens to act in a given way. I argue that even if we accept that there is something inegalitarian about holding people responsible on the basis of actions they did not ultimately control, the alternative (that is, not holding people responsible) is even more inegalitarian. Therefore, egalitarians, including so-called luck egalitarians, can and should hold people responsible on the basis of their actions, even if people lack free will and their actions are ultimately a matter of luck.

A striking aspect of the initial reception of John Rawls is that he was embraced by leading market-liberal theorists such as Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan. This article investigates the reasons for the free-market right's sympathetic interest in the early Rawls by providing a historical account of the dialogue between Rawls and his key neoliberal interlocutor, James Buchanan. We set out the common intellectual context, notably the influence of Frank Knight, that framed the initial work of both Buchanan and Rawls and brought them together as seeming allies during the early 1960s. We then analyze a significant theoretical divergence between the two in the 1970s related to their contrasting responses to the politics of those years and to differences over the importance of ideal theory in political thought. The exchanges between Buchanan and Rawls demonstrate that Rawlsian liberalism and neoliberalism initially emerged as entwined critiques of mid-twentieth-century political economy but could not sustain that alliance when faced by the new claims for civil and social rights that became a marked feature of politics after the 1960s.