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Do Legitimate States Have a Right to Do Wrong?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2021

Christopher Heath Wellman
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Abstract

This essay critically assesses Anna Stilz's argument in Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration that legitimate states have a right to do wrong. I concede that individuals enjoy a claim against external interference when they commit suberogatory acts, but I deny that the right to do wrong extends to acts that would violate the rights of others. If this is correct, then one must do more than merely invoke an individual's right to do wrong if one hopes to vindicate a legitimate state's right to commit injustices. Of course, there may be distinctive features of legitimate states that explain why they enjoy moral protections that individuals lack, but I argue that the value of collective self-determination is not up to this task. And even if these arguments fail, self-determination would at most explain why legitimate states enjoy a right to commit injustices against their own citizens; it would provide them no moral protection when they violate the rights of outsiders.

Keywords

rightsjusticeinjusticepolitical legitimacyself-determinationterritory
Type
Book Symposium: Territorial Sovereignty
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , Winter 2021 , pp. 515 - 525
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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References

NOTES

1 Waldron, Jeremy, “A Right to Do Wrong,” Ethics 92, no. 1 (October 1981), pp. 21–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 One might ask the same question of democratic states. On that related (and perhaps connected) issue, see Øverland, Gerhard and Barry, Christian, “Do Democratic Societies Have a Right to Do Wrong?,” Journal of Social Philosophy 42, no. 2 (Summer 2011), pp. 111–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Stilz, Anna, Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All parenthetical page references to Stilz in this essay refer to this book.

4 Waldron, “A Right to Do Wrong,” p. 29.

5 Ibid., p. 21.

6 As William Galston states, “Only moral wrongs that do not involve the violation of others’ rights can possibly fall within the purview of Waldron's thesis.” William A. Galston, “On the Alleged Right to Do Wrong: A Response to Waldron,” Ethics 93, no. 2 (January 1983), pp. 320–24, at p. 320.

7 Following Julia Driver (“The Suberogatory,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70, no. 3 [1992], pp. 286–95), I understand a suberogatory act to be a permissible action that nonetheless reflects poorly on the agent's character.

8 Waldron, “A Right to Do Wrong,” p. 24.

9 Ibid., p. 37.

10 Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).

11 John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

12 Shelby, Tommie, Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 A competing vision is offered by Robert P. George, for instance, in Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

14 W. D. Ross defends an ethical pluralism that features multiple, potentially competing prima facie obligations in The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930). While Stilz does not specifically invoke Ross, her view is similarly pluralistic insofar as it involves the competing values of justice and legitimacy.

15 As Stilz emphasizes on page 89 of Territorial Sovereignty, “Because legitimacy and justice are importantly distinct values, someone may have the correct view about justice, yet lack the right legitimately to enforce that view.”

16 On page 132 of Territorial Sovereignty, Stilz confirms Denmark's right to remain independent of Sweden even if Danish and Swedish legal institutions and values are indistinguishable, by explaining: “As I have stressed throughout, normally a shared political will involves not only a commitment to support certain institutions, but also a commitment to associate politically with a group of fellow citizens.” Incidentally, in addition to its apparent implications for immigration, this reasoning, along with Stilz's clear statement that “the innate Kantian right to independence (i.e., the right to determine our lives in accordance with our own judgments) gives people standing to reject alien state coercion whenever that coercion is not necessary to securing basic justice for others” (p. 117), seems to pave the way for a more permissive right to secede grounded in self-determination than Stilz is willing to endorse.

17 Again, it is striking that Stilz does not attach similar conditions to Denmark's right to reject a potential merger with Sweden.

18 Insofar as Stilz insists that legitimate states act unjustly, as opposed to merely uncharitably, when they deny nonharmful immigration, her view is importantly distinct from that which Michael Blake defends in Justice, Migration, & Mercy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).