A Moderate Statism of Justice

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Demystifying Political Obligation

The traditional question of political obligation is whether citizens have a moral obligation to comply with the law. While various theories have defended an affirmative answer (with qualifications), the debate seems largely stalemated, partly due to the narrow focus of the existing discourse. I propose to expand our explananda regarding political obligation by taking seriously the fact that states not only assert citizens’ political obligation but also attribute three crucial features to such obligation: involuntariness, enforceability, and dual-directionality, i.e., that political obligation could be owed to particular right-holders and the citizenry at the same time. I show that prominent existing justifications for political obligation fail to accommodate all three features mentioned above. I then provide a novel defense for political obligation based on an epistemically grounded moderate Kantian statism of rights. According to it, legal rights established by legitimate political decisions are ipso facto moral rights. Thus, citizens are morally obligated to comply with the law because they are morally obligated to respect others’ rights. I demonstrate that my account offers a cohesive and compelling explanation for the above three features of political obligation widely embedded in state practice.

The Exclusionary Power of Legitimate directives

The traditional question of political obligation is whether citizens have a moral obligation to comply with the law. While various theories have defended an affirmative answer (with qualifications), the debate seems largely stalemated, partly due to the narrow focus of the existing discourse. I propose to expand our explananda regarding political obligation by taking seriously the fact that states not only assert citizens’ political obligation but also attribute three crucial features to such obligation: involuntariness, enforceability, and dual-directionality, i.e., that political obligation could be owed to particular right-holders and the citizenry at the same time. I show that prominent existing justifications for political obligation fail to accommodate all three features mentioned above. I then provide a novel defense for political obligation based on an epistemically grounded moderate Kantian statism of rights. According to it, legal rights established by legitimate political decisions are ipso facto moral rights. Thus, citizens are morally obligated to comply with the law because they are morally obligated to respect others’ rights. I demonstrate that my account offers a cohesive and compelling explanation for the above three features of political obligation widely embedded in state practice.

Taming the Right to Do Wrong

Theorists have defended the right to do wrong, e.g., the right to vote for illiberal parties or to give hate speech, based on the value of autonomy. I argue that this autonomy-based defense fails. I further draw on the moderate Kantian statism of rights to demonstrate that many perceived rights to do wrong (e.g., the right to vote for illiberal parties, to engage in hate speech, or to abstain from supporting those in need) may not have moral bases independent of the fact that those rights are established by potentially legitimate political decisions. Thus, whenever such legitimate decisions are unjust, the citizenry can and should collaborate to improve the law and eliminate the excessive freedom the polity grants its citizens. However, my account does not entail that the state should obliterate all the right to do wrong since just laws may grant citizens more freedom than what is permissible based not on the value of individual autonomy but on other pertinent considerations, such as administrative costs.

When Immigration Law is Unjust but Legitimate

This paper focuses on immigration law dealing with opportunity migrants, i.e., those who intend to immigrate even though they enjoy an adequate set of rights in their home states. I first argue that immigration law that excludes opportunity migrants with weighty interests to immigrate can be unjust based on even moderate cosmopolitanism, according to which non-citizens’ interests matter even though states are permitted (or even required) to be partial toward their citizens to some extent. However, I further defend a broadly Kantian account for states’ right to control precisely as a right to do wrong, implying that within reasonable limits, unjust immigration law can nonetheless be legitimate. Finally, I contend that despite the legitimacy of unjust immigration laws, would-be migrants with weighty interests to immigrate are often morally permitted to cross the borders unlawfully, which—I demonstrate—does not trivialize states’ right to control as a right to do wrong. Based on these premises, I recast immigration amnesty as a mechanism where a state corrects the injustice of its migration policies through due process instead of one that rewards wrongdoing.