Christopher Heath Wellman

Immigration and Freedom of Association

In this article I appeal to freedom of association to defend a state’s right to control immigration over its territorial borders. Without denying that those of us in wealthy societies may have extremely demanding duties of global distributive justice, I ultimately reach the stark conclusion that every legitimate state has the right to close its doors to all potential immigrants, even refugees desperately seeking asylum from incompetent or corrupt political regimes that are either unable or unwilling to protect their citizens’ basic moral rights. This article is divided into four sections. First, I argue for a presumptive case in favor of a state’s right to limit immigration as an instance of its more general right to freedom of association. In the second and third sections, I respond to egalitarian and libertarian cases for open borders. Finally, in the fourth section, I consider the permissibility of screening immigrants based upon their race, ethnicity or religion.

A liberal theory of international justice

1. Introduction 2. Democracy and Self-Determination 3. Secession 4. International Criminal Law 5. Armed Intervention and Political Assassination 6. International Distributive Justice 7. Immigration 8. Conclusion References

Toward a Liberal Theory of Political Obligation

In this article I advance a liberal account of political obligation. I divide my analysis into four sections. First, I briefly explain the liberal problem of political obligation and the inadequacy of existing attempts to solve this problem. In the second section, I propose a new solution. Next, I explain how my approach borrows from, but avoids the pitfalls of, earlier accounts. Finally, I respond to two potential objections.

Gratitude As A Virtue

In my view, gratitude is better understood as a virtue than as a source of duties. In addition to showing how virtue theory provides a better match for our moral phenomenology of gratitude, I argue that recent work in the area of the suberogatory, our considered judgments concerning the role of third parties, our reluctance to posit claim-rights to gratitude, and the observations of preceding studies of the subject all lend support to my contention that the language of duties is ill-suited to describe the moral dynamics of gratitude.

The Rights Forfeiture Theory of Punishment

Punishment is notoriously difficult to justify because it involves visiting hard treatment upon those who are punished. The rights forfeiture theory of punishment contends that punishment is justified when and because the criminal has forfeited her right not to be subjected to this hard treatment. Because of a number of apparently devastating objections, this account has very few advocates. In this essay I aim to rehabilitate the rights forfeiture account by offering responses to the standard criticisms.

From humanitarian intervention to assassination: Human rights and political violence

An international consensus has begun to take shape around that idea that the cross-border use of armed force by states is morally permissible if such force is required to stop or prevent human-rights abuses amounting to a supreme humanitarian emergency. At the same time, it is widely believed that political assassination is a form of murder and so morally impermissible in principle, regardless of the ends for which it is done. In this article, we reject these views. We argue that armed intervention is morally permissible when (1) the target state is illegitimate and (2) the risk to human rights is not disproportionate to the rights violations that one can reasonably expect to avert. Moreover, once one accepts that such intervention is sometimes permissible, it becomes untenable to hold that political assassination is impermissible in principle. The article is divided into six main sections. In the first two sections,

POLITICAL OBLIGATION AND THE PARTICULARITY REQUIREMENT

In my view, the “particularity requirement” presents the most pressing obstacle to defending a plausible account of our duty to obey the law.1 To see why, notice that approaches to political obligation can be divided into three groups: (1) transactional, (2) associative, and (3) natural duty.2 Transactional accounts “derive the duty to obey the law from what has been done by or for those persons who are said to be bound by the duty.” Theories of this kind are rightly rejected because when valid moral principles are invoked, they do not match the transactional history of citizens of actual states.3 Associative approaches “derive the duty to obey the law from the legal or political identity or role of the one bound.” These theories stumble as well either because they posit descriptively inaccurate accounts of citizenship or, more often, because they rely on suspect normative principles.4 If transactional and associative theories are both inadequate, then the prospects of constructing a defensible account of political obligation hinge

A defense of international criminal law

In this article, we critically examine the prevailing justification of international criminal law and defend an alternative approach. We share the prevalent view that a system of such law is both possible and in the process of being created. However, we reject the conventional arguments offered in support of this system. Our alternative line of thinking has the consequence that a justifiable international criminal law can be much broader in scope than its conventional advocates presume. Our view is that it is permissible to prosecute and punish persons under international law when there are sufficiently widespread or systematic violations of basic human rights in a state. The rights violations need not constitute genocide, crimes against humanity, or any such “supercrime.” Instead, the violations may simply be ordinary criminal acts,

Is There a Duty to Obey the Law?: The Problem and Its Significance

I n one sense, of course, there is a very easy answer to the question “Is there a duty to obey the law?” Imposing duties is an important part of what the law is for . Legal systems, especially in their criminal law components, specify the duties of those who fall within the relevant jurisdictions, typically backing those assignments of duty with the threat of legal sanction for nonperformance. So, of course, there is (at least normally) a duty to obey the law. But the duty at issue in this easy answer to our question is a legal duty, a duty internal to the system of norms that is law. These legal duties are just one of many kinds of duties internal to many kinds of normative systems, from small clubs and associations to societal codes of conduct. All such duties can be referred to as “institutional,” “positional,” or “conventional” duties. The existence of these kinds of duties is a simple function of what is required by the rules or conventions according to which the institutions or organizations operate. The question to be addressed here, however, has to do not with the existence of such institutional duties (which nobody questions), but rather with their moral weight. Our question is whether or not there is a moral duty to discharge our assigned legal duties, and if so, why. We want to know whether there is an external, neutral moral duty (or obligation) to discharge the internal duties imposed by law.

Is There a Duty to Obey the Law?: The Theories

The central question in political philosophy is whether political states have the right to coerce their constituents and whether citizens have a moral duty to obey the commands of their state. Christopher Heath Wellman and A. John Simmons defend opposing answers to this question. Wellman bases his argument on samaritan obligations to perform easy rescues, arguing that each of us has a moral duty to obey the law as his or her fair share of the communal samaritan chore of rescuing our compatriots from the perils of the state of nature. Simmons counters that this and all other attempts to explain our duty to obey the law fail. Concentrating especially on refuting Natural Duty accounts of the duty to obey, he ultimately defends the view that there is no strong moral presumption in favor of obedience to or compliance with any existing state.