“One person, one vote” (OPOV) is a widely accepted axiom of democratic theory. But it is often left undefined, and when we look for definitions we find dissensus without debate. Worse yet, I argue, none of the four prominent accounts of OPOV in political science, law, and philosophy identifies a formal, procedural condition of political equality which explains why certain practices—plural voting and vote dilution—are inegalitarian. This makes what it means to have an “equal vote” or an “equal say” an urgent problem in democratic theory. I close by showing why OPOV, which is often taken to be a modest and minimal condition of political equality, may also turn out to be fairly radical.

Many citizens of liberal democracies are both wedded to fundamental tenets of liberal political morality and robustly committed to democracy. Recent liberal arguments for instrumentalism about democracy have sought to cast doubt on the compatibility of these allegiances, charging that core elements of liberal political morality disallow the procedural justifications of democracy on which robust democratic commitments rest. This essay shows that these arguments fail: we can accept the liberal principles and values to which these arguments appeal, and yet invoke democratic procedural goods in the justification of democratic arrangements. By delineating the space that remains for procedural considerations within a broadly liberal political morality, this essay provides an outline for justifications of democracy that take equally seriously the democratic and the liberal commitments many citizens of liberal democracies endorse.

This paper defends the Limited Use View of our duties to save. This view holds that a claim to be saved is a claim to make use of another person (and her resources) for one’s own sake. But we have only limited claims to make use of others and their resources. We are not entitled to make use of others when doing so is either unreasonably costly for them or conflicts with their duties to others. Hence, our claims to be saved are limited. By the same token, our duties to save are also limited. We need not save when doing so is unreasonably costly for us or conflicts with our duties to others, since others have no claim to make use of us when doing so is unreasonably costly for us or conflicts with our duties to others. One upshot of the Limited Use View is that it can sometimes be permissible to defensively harm for one’s own sake, or for the sake of special others, even though it would be impermissible to do so for the sake of a stranger.

Public reason liberals from John Rawls to Gerald Gaus uphold a principle of public justification as a core commitment of their theories. Critics of public reason liberalism have sometimes conceded that there is something compelling about the idea of public justification. But so far there have not been many attempts to elaborate and defend a ‘comprehensive’ liberalism that incorporates a principle of public justification. This article spells out how public justifiability could be integrated into a comprehensive liberalism and defends the claim that what is worthwhile about public justification can be extracted from public reason liberalism.

Abstract: This essay has three parts. First, I develop a causal account of individual complicity in collective injustice. Second, drawing on this account, I argue that citizens are often complicit in their government’s injustices, even when they do nothing more than obey the law, pay taxes, and lead ordinary, private lives. Though this claim has become relatively commonplace in the recent theoretical literature on global justice, it is seldom justified adequately. I maintain that citizens can be complicit despite the fact that their participation in collective injustice is typically coerced, and I consider the conditions under which state coercion might exonerate them. Third, I suggest that citizens’ complicity gives rise—especially in democratic polities—to an obligation to participate responsibly in politics.

When distributing an indivisible harm or benefit between multiple individuals, all of whom have an equal claim to avoid the harm or receive the benefit, it is commonly thought that one should hold a lottery in order to give each claimant an equal chance of winning. Moreover, it is often said that, by holding a lottery, one makes the resultant outcome inequality between those who receive the harm or benefit and those who do not less unfair than it would otherwise have been. The stated view – the ‘egalitarian mixed view’ – claims that the unfairness of a brute luck ex post distribution is a function of both the degree of inequality in the ex post distribution itself, and the degree of inequality in the ex ante distribution of chances from which it is derived. Versions of the view have been prominently endorsed by a number of authors, including Arneson, Broome, Diamond, Lang, Otsuka, Parfit, and Temkin. The appeal of the view is linked to its apparent promise to accommodate intuitions that have been thought to threaten views which link the fairness of an outcome either solely to the ex ante distribution or solely to the ex post distribution. I argue, to the contrary, that the egalitarian mixed view is mistaken. In particular, I argue that the distinction at the heart of the view – that between outcomes and changes to probabilities – is morally arbitrary at best and incoherent at worst. I consider possible responses to the charge and find them wanting. I note that the failure of the egalitarian mixed view has significant consequences for policy, including most importantly for how we should interpret the goal of fair equality of opportunity.