Suchergebnisse

Who should have a right to participate in a polity's decision-making? Although the answers to this 'boundary problem' in democratic theory remain controversial, it is widely believed that the enfranchisement of tourists and children is unacceptable. Yet, the two most prominent inclusion principles in the literature – Robert Goodin's 'all (possibly) affected interests'-principle and the 'all subjected to law'-principle – both enfranchise those groups. Unsurprisingly, democratic theorists have therefore offered several reasons for nonetheless exempting tourists and children from the franchise. In this paper, I argue that their attempts fail. None of the proposed rationales can do the job without having unacceptable implications for the voting rights of other groups. I then develop a new specification of the affected interests-view, one that avoids such problems. According to my life plan-principle, a person is entitled to participate in a polity's decision-making if and only if its decisions will actually affect her autonomously chosen life plans, or prevent her from developing or revising plans of that kind. I show that this principle straightforwardly avoids enfranchising tourists and children, and thus improves upon its two prominent rivals. The paper ends by considering and rejecting two objections to my new principle.

"Property and Territorial Rights in Political Philosophy" published on by Oxford University Press.

Anthropogenic climate change is an existential threat to the people of sinking island states. When their territories inevitably disappear, what, if anything, do the world's remaining territorial states owe them? According to a prominent 'nationalist' approach to territorial rights – which distributes such rights according to the patterns of attachment resulting from people's incorporation of particular territories into their ways of life – the islanders are merely entitled to immigrate, not to reestablish territorial sovereignty. Even GHG-emitting collectives have no reparative duty to cede territory, as the costs of upsetting their territorial attachments are unreasonable to impose, even on wrongdoers. As long as they allow climate refugees to immigrate, receiving countries have done their duty, or so the nationalist argues. In this article, I demonstrate that the nationalist's alleged distributive equilibrium is unstable. When the islanders lay claim to new territory, responsible collectives have a duty to modify their way of life – gradually downsizing their territorial attachments – such that the islanders, in time, may receive a new suitable territory. Importantly, by deriving this duty from the nationalist's own moral commitments, I discard the traditional assumption that nationalist premises imply a restrictive view on what we owe climate refugees.

According to a prominent forward-looking justification of territorial (jurisdictional) rights, people may establish such rights over a piece of land if they develop economic and/or religious-cultural life plans the satisfaction of which requires controlling it. This argument suffers from a gap problem. The relevant life plans can be satisfied without granting their holders jurisdictional authority. Having lesser entitlements, such as occupancy rights, is sufficient. In this article, I offer a new forward-looking justification which plugs this justificatory gap. It follows the general framework of life plans-arguments, but develops a new category of plans: a person's political plan to exercise her democratic autonomy as a citizen of the state under which she (or her group) has lived, or is living.

In this article we defend the view that, on the All Affected Principle of voting rights, the weight of a person's vote on a decision should be determined by and only by the degree to which that decision affects her interests, independently of her voting weights on other decisions. Further, we consider two recent alternative proposals for how the All Affected Principle should weight votes, and give reasons for rejecting both.

In this article we defend the view that, on the All Affected Principle of voting rights, the weight of a person's vote on a decision should be determined by and only by the degree to which that decision affects her interests, independently of her voting weights on other decisions. Further, we consider two recent alternative proposals for how the All Affected Principle should weight votes, and give reasons for rejecting both.

Theories of voting rights differ quite sharply with regard to whether or not they support (rapid) enfranchisement of irregular immigrants. In this paper, we first outline these theories and their implications. We then assess a number of reasons against rapidly enfranchising irregular immigrants. We find, on reflection, that none of these reasons are persuasive. While this result is not in itself sufficient to draw strong conclusions, it does offer some support to the more inclusive theories of voting rights, and poses a challenge to the less inclusive ones.