The human rights to water and sanitation have come up for a fair amount of discussion in the last 15 years, especially among lawyers, social scientists, and human rights activists. Relatively little foundational normative work has been done in support of such human rights. The present paper...

Increasing political and economic interconnectedness draws much philosophical attention to the question of the conditions under which such stringent claims arise. Do claims of justice arise only among those who share membership in a state? Alternatively, do they arise among all those who are...

In recent work I have tried to revitalize the standpoint of humanity's commonly owning the earth. This standpoint has implications for a range of problems that have recently preoccupied us at the global level, including immigration, obligations to future generations, climate change, and human...

In my paper "Arrow's Theorem, Indeterminacy, and Multiplicity Reconsidered" (published in "Ethics" in 2001) I argue that, contrary to many skeptics, majoritarian democracy is indeed conceptually coherent. I do so by submitting a majoritarian method of decision making that is not disqualified...

Left-libertarian theories of justice hold that agents are self-owners and that natural resources are owned in some egalitarian manner. Unlike egalitarianism, left-libertarianism endorses full self-ownership, and thus places strict limits on what others may do to one's person without one's...

In an increasingly interconnected world it has become hard to say what actually is so special about the state, and why there would be duties of any sort that apply among fellow citizens, but not among those who do not share a state. This study explains how dealing with this problem has become...

Concerns about fairness leave champions of free trade puzzled. First, to some, talk about fairness in trade is conceptually muddled. Ideas of fairness seem tied to the image of “leveling the playing field” and thus concerned with equalizing background conditions, whereas trade thrives on...

Majority rule is often adopted almost by default as a group decision rule. One might think, therefore, that the conditions under which it applies, and the argument on its behalf, are well-understood. However, the standard arguments in support of majority rule display systematic deficiencies....

Much current thinking about justice concerns the place of responsibility within an overall account of justice. Theorists of justice such as John Rawls have been criticized for their inability to make their conclusions accord with our intuitions about responsibility. This paper argues that such...

Are there principles of distributive justice that apply within but not across states, principles that only hold among some but not all human beings? This is perhaps the central question of contemporary political philosophy. This paper introduces a set of distinctions to make clear what the...