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ABSTRACT: In this article I challenge the interpretation of refugees as passive beneficiaries of political decisions and make a case for their enfranchisement. Starting from literature regarding the boundary problem of democratic theory, I make a republican case for including refugees in the demos. My novel approach emphasizes that bestowing electoral rights upon refugees is a separate question from offering them full citizenship. Enfranchising the refugees is a separate, and temporary prior measure of ensuring that their freedom is protected and that their rights are not imperiled by arbitrarily imposed decisions, at least in a world which is operating under a regime of controlled, closed borders. This preoccupation with feasibility constraints also aims to separate this article from recent contributions that defended the enfranchisement of refugees.

Constructivism is the metaethical position stating that although we cannot have direct access to moral facts, we can still come up with a set of principles that can be justified and that ought to be respected by individuals. The strength of these moral principles derives from the fact that they are the result of a procedure respecting certain desirable conditions. Constructivism concerns the methodology of political philosophy, being preoccupied with the process of generating and justifying moral principles. In this review article I present the main contentions of constructivism (focusing especially on the Kantian constructivism advanced by Rawls and Scanlon), describe its positioning on the realist–antirealist axis, and compare it with its main competitor in the field of metaethical views, intuitionism. I dedicate a separate section to the method of reflective equilibrium, which represents an important part of several metaethical accounts, be they constructivist, realist, or intuitionist. I show how reflective equilibrium represents the main instrument constructivists can employ in order to capture the appeal of relying on intuitions in moral theorizing, without leaning toward intuitionism. Toward the end of the article I present G. A. Cohen's (2003, 2008) criticism of constructivism. I focus on the replies Ronzoni and Valentini (2008), Hall (2013), de Maagt (2014, 2016) and Rossi (2016) give to Cohen, ending with a criticism of my own.