Papers

Forthcoming in Social Philosophy and Policy, 2024

It is widely accepted among egalitarian political philosophers that distributive justice should be promoted by the state. This paper challenges this presumption by making two key claims. First, the state is not the only possible mechanism for attaining distributive justice. We could rely alternatively on the voluntary efforts and interactions of individuals and associations in civil society. The question of which mechanism we should rely upon is a comparative and empirical one. What matters is which better promotes distributive justice. We cannot settle the question a priori in favor of the state. Second, several considerations suggest a presumption in favor of civil society.

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2022

What motivates citizens to maintain their shared commitment to public principles of justice, particularly in diverse societies lacking a common national culture? This article considers a distinctive and surprisingly little-studied answer of John Rawls. In the last third of a Theory of Justice, he provides several arguments for how political cooperation to secure justice can generate its own motivational force, even in the absence of national ties. Much of these arguments survive Rawls’ turn to political liberalism. Rawls’ account is a sophisticated attempt at showing how a constitutional patriotism might be viable, making it worthy of considertation. I subject it to critique in this paper, arguing that it ultimately fails. My critique is distinctive in that it identifies not disagreement as the principal barrier to political unity around justice, but epistemic opacity between citizens in the context of an impersonal society.

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2021

The nature of state governance in consolidated liberal democracies has important implications for the ideal theory debate. The states of these societies are polycentric. Decision-making power within them is disaggregated across multiple sites. This rules out one major justification for ideal theory. On this influential view, the ideal furnishes a blueprint of the morally perfect society that we should strive to realise. This justification is not viable in consolidated liberal democracies because their states lack an Archimedean point from which the institutional structure as a whole can be designed to accord with the true ideal – whichever it might be. However, knowledge of the ideal can still aid agents in those societies to determine the worth of more modest political objectives other than the ideal itself.

Book Chapters

Forthcoming in Governance and Order in a Complex Society, (expected 2025) edited by David Thunder and Pablo Paniagua. Lexington Books

One of the perennial questions of political theory is how to stabilize a just regime. This “stability question” is pressing, particularly with respect to the contemporary Weberian state that monopolizes the power of legitimate coercion, and anchors society under a single structure of governance. The question of how we could constrain the state to exercise its great power in just ways could not have higher stakes. As a political form, it has given us both liberal democracy and the various totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. Many philosophers think we can solve the stability problem by socializing citizens into strongly affirming liberal democratic values. Vigilant citizens would then maintain a just state. However, the efficacy of this solution has become questionable in recent years, during which liberal democracy has been threatened by polarization and various populisms. In this essay, we provide a novel solution to the stability problem. Trying to stabilize a centralized regime with citizen virtue is not effective political-risk-management; it is putting all the proverbial eggs in one basket. We instead advocate polycentric democracy. Such democracy is characterized by plural and overlapping centres of governance. This renders a polycentric system more resilient in the face of diverse views, including “illiberal” ones, than a monocentric one, just as a variegated ecology is more robust than a monoculture. A polycentric regime can then afford to be more tolerant of diversity, which provides various benefits in addition to stability.