This short text discusses the main aspects of Ottonelli and Torresi’s book The Right Not to Stay: Justice in Migration, the Liberal Democratic State, and the Case of Temporary Migration Projects, focusing on their argument for recognizing temporary migration as a legitimate life plan. It also presents a series of objections raised by David Owen, Mario Cunningham, Ingrid Salvatore, and Dimitrios E. Efthymiou, who critically engage with the book’s normative foundations, methodological choices, and proposed policy implications.

Accounts of political responsibility for structural domination from Young and in recent republican accounts separate blame and responsibility. Many of the ways agents interact with structural injustice appear to create exemptions or excuses from blameworthiness. I argue, contrarily, that blame is attributable precisely for failing in a structural responsibility and eliminating many of the excuses and exemptions identified. Philosophers of moral responsibility maintain the role of blame. Drawing on reason-responsive theories of a Strawsonian origin and recent signaling theories of blame, this paper defends blame as both appropriate and important for its ability to reveal emerging norms, improve their uptake, undermine dominating sources of power and transform structures. Blame is crucial in developing agents’ sensitivities to normative reasons. Blame is crucial to effect political and personal change such as is required to undermine and transform dominating or unjust sources of power. Rescuing blame may make opaque structures transparent – in particular, where norms are emerging. This paper attends to the role of agents in the creation of sources of power which allows domination to persist.

This commentary focuses on the methodological issue of the relevant context of justice for the discussion of Temporary Migration Projects and on drawing out the implications of this issue for the arguments of The Right Not To Stay. It contends that the methodologically nationalist approach to specifying duties of justice to persons engaged in TMPs that Ottonelli and Torresi adopt leaves their argument exposed to a number of challenges that a methodologically transnationalist approach would not confront.

In his latest book, Sovereignty Across Generations: Constituent Power and Political Liberalism, Alessandro Ferrara explores the grounds, norms and scope of liberal constitutions’ legitimacy. Specifically, Ferrara develops Rawls’s political liberalism by exploring liberal legitimacy in a constitutional direction. Indeed, while the grounds of constitutions’ legitimacy were not the primary focus of Rawls’s own investigations, Ferrara believes that political liberalism must now be extended in this direction – for both theoretical and political reasons. In this review, we examine Ferrara’s proposal, bearing in mind his project’s Rawlsian roots. Specifically, we examine the relationship between reasonableness and constitutional legitimacy; we suggest that some of Ferrara’s conclusions – especially his intergenerational conception of the people as sovereign – might stand in tension with the Rawlsian framework within which he has drawn them.

This commentary argues that McKeown’s use of examples draw out philosophical commitments of her account that are not explicitly thematized in that account. Developing this argument in relation to her reflections on solidarity, it is argued, illustrates how her account negotiates and overcomes a potential tension between two different conceptions of solidarity.

This paper argues that the harm of fake news lies partly in its inequality-reinforcing effect. It shows how fake news interacts with two background inequalities, namely the unequal distribution of opportunities to become competent knowers and the unequal social status of oppressed minorities. First, I argue that fake news reinforces epistemic inequality among its recipients. The epistemic harm of believing fake news does not uniformly affect all members of society. Instead, epistemic inequality makes some citizens more vulnerable to believing fake news. In turn, believing fake news amplifies epistemic inequality by making those who fall for fake news increasingly less competent as knowers. Second, I argue that fake news amplifies status inequality within society by downgrading the status of minorities who are negatively represented in fake news stories. A significant subset of fake news targets minorities who are not recognized as equal within society, such as immigrants, Muslims and Roma minorities. The harm of being negatively portrayed in anti-minority fake news stories falls asymmetrically on members of the targeted minorities, reinforcing their oppression. Focusing on anti-immigrant fake news as the most widespread and paradigmatic example of anti-minority fake news, I show how it amplifies cultural imperialism, marginalization and systemic violence against members of immigrant minorities. Anti-minority fake news is also specifically harmful to members of targeted minorities as political agents because it contributes to denying their equal status as members of the democratic political community. This subset of fake news stories is therefore particularly corrosive to the democratic system and its core values.

Extraordinarily high levels of funding, together with action on many other fronts, are needed for achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. According to John Broome and Duncan Foley, global decarbonization requires that fossil fuel assets be bought up, which requires establishing a new international financial institution, a World Climate Bank (WCB). However, as I argue here, important political and economic realities, including those on which Henry Shue rightly bases his moral arguments for political action to address climate change, support my case against the Broome-Foley proposal (BFP) and in favor of a crucially different financial institution, a World Climate Bank for Mitigation, Adaptation, and Resilience (WCB-MAR). Like the bank described in the BFP, a WCB-MAR would function together with a carbon price so as to draw investors’ money away from the brown economy by selling World Climate Bonds; however, unlike the bank described in the BFP, a WCB-MAR would use its revenues only for climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resilience, not for buying up fossil fuel assets. A bank of this new type, if properly designed and implemented, could play a significant role in facilitating decarbonization of the global economy and achievement of the Paris Agreement’s goals.

In her new book, Meave McKeown integrates a systematic analysis of power into Iris M. Young’s structural injustice paradigm, providing it with the tools to illuminate different agents’ relative capacities to reproduce structural injustices (SI). While much needed, this investigation – along with the moral responsibility attributions for SIs (instead of parts of them) it aims to enable – accentuates a tension central to SI theory. On the one hand, McKeown unapologetically questions the aptitude of Young’s original notion, “pure” SI in McKeown’s words, to capture any real-world injustice altogether. While Climate Change (CC) seems a candidate, other usual suspects – i.e., global poverty and sweatshop labour – would instantiate, respectively, “avoidable” and “deliberate” SIs. On the other hand, these categories sound like oxymorons, considering that these are still to count as “structural” injustices. If it is distinctive of structural causation that it cannot be reduced to the mere aggregation of all contributing agents’ conducts, at least some features of the resulting unjust outcomes should be impossible to lay at any specific agent’s feet – no matter how extensive and significant their contribution to the overall process. If so, we should only be able to attribute moral responsibility to powerful agents for some – however big – parts of structural injustices rather than the injustices tout court.