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• Leif Wenar, ‘The Nature of Rights’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 33, no. 3 (2005), Introduction and Part I (14pp)
  To understand what we're talking about, you need to understand the idea of a Hohfeldian power and its relation to the other Hohfeldian incidents. The first part of Wenar's article is an excellent introduction.
• Allan Buchanan, ‘Political Legitimacy and Democracy’, Ethics vol. 112, no. 4 (2002), Part I (6pp)
  Again, you need only read Part I for now. Buchanan distinguishes authority, legitimacy, and some nearby concepts, although his choice of terms for the concepts in question aren't shared by everyone, so do be cautious. The aim is for you to be comfortable making the same distinctions, whether you adopt his terminology or not.
• R.P. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (1970), Part I (10pp)
  Wolff argues on Kantian grounds that authority relations are always objectionable. Aim to figure out which premisses are doing what work in his argument, and think about how plausible each is.
• Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Clarendon, 1986), chapters 2–4 (82pp)
  Raz sets out his influential 'service conception' of justified authority and then applies it to the case of state authority. Raz's view is in part a direct response to Wolff's anarchist challenge.
• Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty (Princeton, 2009), chapter 2 (30pp)
  In this beautifully clear chapter, Stilz sets out a Kantian defence of state authority, casting Lockean anarchists such as A. John Simmons as her opponents.

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• David Copp, ‘The Idea of a Legitimate State’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 28, no. 1 (1999)
  Copp argues for the authority of the state via the idea of 'societal basic needs', which are, he argues, best furthered by means of a system of law, whose effectiveness in turn calls for the moral powers associated with legitimacy.
• Christopher Heath Wellman, ‘Toward a Liberal Theory of Political Obligation’, Ethics vol. 111, no. 4 (2001)
  Wellman defends what he calls a 'samaritan' account of political legitimacy as a step towards his account of political obligation. The basic idea is that it's permissible to coerce some at reasonable cost in order to get them to save others from desperate peril, and that's what's going on in the case of (legitimate) state coercion. Since our interest this week is only in state authority, you can stop reading after p. 747.
• Jonathan Quong, Liberalism without Perfection (Oxford, 2010), chapter 4, sections 4.4–4.5 (pp. 126–35)
  Quong offers a clear defence of the 'natural duty of justice' account of political authority, presenting it as a modification of Raz's account. Quong's account and Wellman's have some similarities, but they appear to yield very different conclusions about the scope of legitimate state action.
• David Schmidtz, ‘Justifying the State’, Ethics vol. 101, no. 1 (1990)
  Schmidtz distinguishes and assesses a number of different methods of justifying the state that, he claims, are often conflated.
• Arthur Isak Applbaum, ‘Legitimacy without the Duty to Obey’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 38, no. 3 (2010)
  Applbaum elaborates the interesting idea that legitimacy consists in a Hohfeldian moral power, not to impose moral duties to do as the law says, but to alter the normative standing of subjects in other ways—e.g. by altering the configuration of their Hohfeldian privileges and claims against each other.
• Niko Kolodny, ‘Political Rule and Its Discontents’, in Sobel, Vallentyne, and Wall (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 2 (Oxford, 2016)
  Kolodny argues that the presumption against state rule as a prima facie infringement of individual freedom, which drives a great deal of writing on state authority, is mistaken. Instead, he suggests, if there's any problem with relations of rule at all, has to do with worries about relations of equality.

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• John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Harvard, 1999), sections 2–4, 24, 26, 39 (36pp)
  In these sections of his masterpiece, Rawls sets out the main ideas of his theory of 'justice as fairness' and explains how the contractualist apparatus of the 'original position' yields the liberal priority of the basic liberties. All of chapters I, III, and IV are relevant, but these sections will give you the basics.
• Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Clarendon, 1986), chapters 14–15 (60pp)
  In these final chapters of Raz's influential Millian defence of liberalism, Raz describes an ideal of individual autonomy and its relation to value, and then explains how it underpins liberal institutions, including a version of J.S. Mill's famous Harm Principle.
• Martha Nussbaum, ‘Aristotelian Social Democracy’, in Douglass, Mara, and Richardson (eds.), Liberalism and the Good (Routledge, 1990) (50pp)
  Nussbaum defends a liberal democratic political theory on the basis of a 'vague thick' account of the good for humans. Nussbaum's Aristotelian perfectionist liberalism puts her somewhere between Rawls and Raz.
• Judith Shklar, ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, in Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life (Harvard, 1989) (17pp)
  Rosenblum argues for a conception of liberalism that founds it on the principle that above all else, the weak are to be protected from the cruelty of the powerful. Although she eschews seemingly more exalted defences, her account nevertheless has interesting points of contact with public reason liberalism and republicanism, as well as conservativism.
• Philip Pettit, On the People's Terms (Cambridge, 2012), chapters 1–2 (104pp)
  Pettit has been defending and developing a republican political theory over the past two decades. In this recent statement of his view, he makes it clear that the characteristic republican emphasis on freedom as non-domination provides a moral basis for key liberal political commitments.

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• John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), chapters 1–5, 7–11 (For more accessible but still scholarly revision, see here.)
  Locke's liberalism is founded on an account of natural rights, which give the end of government—to secure them in a way that is unlikely in the state of nature—and set its limits. Locke is the grandfather of one important strand of contemporary libertarianism.
• J.S. Mill, On Liberty (1859), chapters 2–4
  Mill's On Liberty is one of the great defences of liberalism. Mill argues for some of the central liberal freedoms on several grounds, including: that self-direction and self-development according to one's own ideas is intrinsically valuable; that it is also the best route to well-being, since no one way of life is best for everyone; and that the conditions of freedom of speech and way of life are necessary for truths to be discovered and false orthodoxies challenged.
• Ronald Dworkin, ‘Liberalism’, in his A Matter of Principle (Harvard, 1985)
  Dworkin defends liberalism (which, in the contemporary US tradition, he contrasts with conservatism) on the basis of an interpretation of the principle of 'equal concern and respect' that takes it to require neutrality on questions of the good life.
• Jeremy Waldron, ‘Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism’, The Philosophical Quarterly vol. 37, no. 147 (1987)
  Waldron argues that liberalism is essentially a view about enforcement of a political order legitimate, and that its fundamental commitment is to the idea that the social order should be capable of being made acceptable to every individual member of it.
• John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness (Princeton, 2012), chapters 1–2
  Tomasi sketches an engaging, intentionally tendentious account of the development of liberalism, contrasting the classical liberalism of Locke and (later) Hayek with the contemporary 'high liberalism' of Rawls and Dworkin. His purpose is to motivate his own hybrid view, 'market democracy', but for now you can treat these chapters simply as a readable overview of some central conflicts within liberalism.

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• F.A. von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Routledge, 2006), chapters 1–3 (38pp)
  Hayek is one of the intellectual founders of contemporary free-market conservatism (although see The Constitution of Liberty's Postscript). In these chapters he argues for the individual liberties associated with capitalism on the basis that the market activities of individuals exercising these liberties produces enormous material, cultural, and intellectual benefits that it is beyond the capacity of any central organiser to produce.
• Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), pp. 26–35, 48–51, 150–174 (39pp)
  Nozick defends libertarianism on Kantian deontological grounds, arguing from an account of individuals as bearers of stringent self-ownership rights against others' interference (in the first two extracts) to the view that "taxation of earnings from labour is on a par with forced labour" (in the third extract). The book is written in lively, engaging prose, and is perhaps the most influential treatise in contemporary Anglophone academic political philosophy after Rawls's A Theory of Justice.
• Nancy Fraser, ‘Behind Marx's Hidden Abode’, New Left Review 86 (2014) (18pp)
  Fraser updates the Marxist critique of capitalism, arguing that capitalism depends not only on exploitative modes of production, but also various other objectionable background conditions: expropriation, oppressive systems of social reproduction, ecological destruction, and anti-democratic distributions of political power. She thus brings together a range of apparently different political causes, casting them all as forms of anti-capitalism.
• G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism? (Princeton, 2009) (82 very small pp)
  G.A. Cohen was one of the most important political philosophers of the last few decades and the most prominent defender of socialist ideas in contemporary political philosophy. In this short book, he argues that socialist principles constitute a more desirable ideal than capitalism offers, and considers its feasibility.
• Jason Brennan, Why Not Capitalism? (Routledge, 2014) (97pp)
  Brennan's book is a reply to Cohen's Why Not Socialism?. Brennan argues that Cohen tendentiously contrasts ideal socialism with real-world capitalism and accordingly offers an example of an ideal capitalist scheme that, he argues, is just as attractive as the camping trip example to which Cohen appeals to defend socialism. He points out that real-world socialism fosters base motives no less than real-world capitalism does, suggests that capitalism does not in principle depend on such motives, and argues furthermore that the freedoms made possible by the private property rights that are essential to capitalism make capitalist principles more attractive than socialist principles.
• John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness (Princeton, 2012), Introduction and chapter 4 (53pp)
  Tomasi argues for a view that he calls 'market democracy', according to which the property and economic rights usually associated with capitalism are prioritised within an account of social justice as fairness (with an emphasis on improving the position of the worst off) that is more commonly associated with left-liberal views such as that of John Rawls. Tomasi defends this priority of substantial economic liberty by appeal to the idea that such liberty is needed for citizens to develop the moral powers they have as 'responsible self-authors'. Thus, he hopes to combine the insights of classical liberalism with the left-liberal stress on social justice in the defence of a capitalist order.

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• Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford, 2000), pp. 85–94 ('Alienated Labour') and 547–561 ('Results of the Immediate Process of Production')
  The first of these extracts is from Marx's early writings, and summarises Marx's account of the alienation of a wage labourer, which constitutes one of his most powerful criticisms of capitalist economics. The second sets out Marx's analysis of the way in which capitalism exploits workers and thereby alienates them. This analysis is based upon the study of capitalism that precedes it in Capital, Marx's masterpiece. Both of these extracts are fairly complex; for helpful summary, see Jonathan Wolff's Why Read Marx Today? (Oxford, 2002), especially chs. 1–2.
• F.A. von Hayek, Law, Liberty, and Legislation (Routledge, 2013), chapters 9–10, 14–15
  This book is more advanced than The Constitution of Liberty. Hayek explains the way in which his defence of capitalism underpins opposition to claims of social justice (ch. 9), elaborates on the nature and operation of the economic system he defends (ch. 10), and offers more detail on the justifiable scope and purpose of non-market (ch. 14) and market (ch. 15) interventions by governments.
• Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 2002), chapters 1–2
  Friedman was primarily an economist rather than a political theorist, but Capitalism and Freedom has nevertheless been tremendously influential. Chapter 1 states with admirable simplicity the case for capitalism as a necessary condition of liberal and political freedom. Chapter 2 discusses the permissible scope of government: Friedman sees it primarily as an enforcer and umpire of property rights, but also allows it to intervene to preserve competitive market conditions.
• John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Harvard, 1999), section 42; and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Harvard, 2001), sections 41–42
  Rawls distinguishes various regimes, from laissez-faire capitalism to liberal socialism, and further distinguishes two dimensions in which they may differ: ownership of the means of production, and proportion of total social resources devoted to public goods. Rawls himself favours 'property-owning democracy', but in any case the distinctions he makes are useful.
• David Schmidtz, ‘The Institution of Property’, Social Philosophy and Policy vol. 11, no. 2 (1994)
  Schmidtz casts property systems as ways to internalise externalities, and assesses private and communal property systems in respect of their success on that score. His discussion includes analysis of fascinating historical examples, including that of the Jamestown Colony, which was run as a commune from 1607 to 1614, and that of the Hutterites, who form small communes on the Canadian prairies. Schmidtz's argument emphasises the need to consider incentive effects in defences of property systems, and prioritises pragmatic considerations over ideological ones.
• Albert O. Hirschmann, ‘Rival Views of Market Society’, in his Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays (Harvard, 1986)
  Hirschman contrasts accounts of free market society that attribute to it the tendency to foster social virtues (the 'doux commerce thesis') with accounts that attribute to it the tendency to foster attitudes that ultimately undermine the capitalist order (the 'self-destruction thesis'). He traces the popularity and development of the two theses and related views. Hirschman's essay is an invaluable survey of some of the most important critiques and defences of capitalism in terms of the attitudes it engenders, from Smith and Mandeville to Coleridge and Schumpeter.
• Michael Otsuka, Libertarianism without Inequality (Oxford, 2003), chapter 1
  Drawing on the work of G.A. Cohen and Robert Nozick, Otsuka argues that a libertarian commitment to self-ownership does not have the inegalitarian consequences usually associated with it, thanks to the distinction between self-ownership and world-ownership and the plausibility of applying egalitarian principles to the latter.
• Mark R. Reiff, ‘Two Theories of Economic Liberalism’, Adam Smith Review vol. 10 (2017). Draft available here
  Reiff distinguishes two heirs to the economic liberalism of Adam Smith: neoliberalism and ‘ordoliberalism’, which draws inspiration from Hegel too. Reiff traces the historical development of the two theories, and places Smith in historical context, clarifying some of the concepts associated with him, such as the ‘invisible hand’. Reiff's core thesis is that ordoliberalism, which lacks neoliberalism's “knee-jerk” opposition to governmental regulation, has a better claim than neoliberalism to be faithful to Smith's thinking, and so neoliberals' appeals to Smith do not support their policy proposals as much as they suppose.
• Samuel Bowles, ‘Is Liberal Society a Parasite on Tradition?’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 39, no. 1 (2011)
  Bowles discusses the idea that 'traditional' moralities, broadly construed, are needed to sustain liberal institutions. He examines seemingly conflicting experimental evidence, and argues that it can be explained by supposing that (a) markets crowd out norms and identities which are unhelpful to the functioning of markets, and (b) markets promote compensating virtues and habits which sustain their functioning.

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• Marilyn Frye, ‘Oppression’, in Terence Ball, Richard Dagger, and Daniel I O'Neill (eds.), Ideals and Ideologies: A Reader, Ninth Edition (Routledge, 2016). Text also available online here. (9pp)
  Frye defends an account of oppression as subjection to a certain structure of freedom-restriction on the basis of group membership and in order to further the interests of other groups, and distinguishes oppression so understood from various other forms of unfreedom and disadvantage. She is particularly concerned to debunk the reply to claims that women are oppressed that consists in arguing that men are too.
• Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 1990), chapters 1–2 (61pp)
  This is a classic of contemporary political philosophy, arguing against the 'distributive paradigm' of theorising about justice, according to which justice is always a matter of who gets what. Young argues that justice is also a matter of culture, political decisionmaking, and division of labour. In the second chapter, she analyses the notion of oppression, which she takes to be essential for identifying non-distributive injustices, and distinguishes five ways in which oppression is manifested.
• Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, 1997), chapters 1–2 (82pp)
  A ferocious, coruscating critique of contemporary liberal theory and politics. Mills argues powerfully that liberalism developed within the historical frame of a 'racial contract' that violently excluded and exploited non-whites, and that its central commitments continue to reflect the oppressive and exploitative features of that contract.
• Anita Silvers, ‘No Talent? Beyond the Worst Off! A Diverse Theory of Justice for Disability’, in Brownlee and Cureton (eds.), Disability and Disadvantage (Oxford, 2009) (37pp)
  Silver argues that traditional social contract theories of justice deal badly with cases of 'outliers', who don't conform to the paradigm of normality that the theories assume. She defends an approach that prioritises cultivating the trust required for cooperation, and argues that this approach allows the embracing of difference in a way that the traditional approaches do not.
• Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford, 1999), chapter 2 (26pp)
  Nussbaum defends liberalism against a variety of feminist criticisms, arguing that feminists should embrace liberalism's core commitments and press for liberal practice to be made more consistent with them, rather than abandoned.
• Anca Gheaus, ‘Gender Justice’, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy vol. 6, no. 2 (2012) (23pp)
  Gheaus defends a novel principle of 'gender justice' designed to capture the nature of a wide range of gender-based injustices, founding it on core liberal ideas of autonomy and freedom. The flagship claim is that a society is unjust if a gender-neutral lifestyle is more costly than a gendered lifestyle.

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• Catharine McKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Harvard, 1989), chapter 8
  McKinnon argues that the liberal state's law reflects and entrenches women's subordination by assuming the kind of social equality that obtains only among men, even in areas where it would seem to be progressive in this respect.
• Clare Chambers, Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice (Penn State, 2008)
  Chambers makes a distinction between first-order and second-order autonomy and argues that attention to the distinction reveals certain kinds of injustice that core liberal commitments should make them willing to legislate against, despite the apparent illiberalism of such legislation.
• Sally Haslanger, ‘Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?’, Noûs vol. 34, no. 1 (2000)
  Haslanger proposes analyses of gender and race for the purposes of critical feminist and antiracist politics, setting aside attempts to find some biological or other naturalistic basis for gender or race terms and attempts to capture everyday understandings implicit in the use of those terms.
• Lawrence Blum, "I'm not a Racist, But..." The Moral Quandary of Race (Cornell, 2002), chapter 8
  Earlier in this book, Blum argues that there is no scientific underpinning for the concept of race and that it provides a morally troubling way of thinking about people even when not accompanied by racism. In this chapter he claims that we must nevertheless recognise the way in which certain groups of people have shared experiences of oppression as a result of the fact that they have been treated as if they were members of a single race, and proposes referring to such groups as ‘racialised’ rather than ‘races’ as a way to do this.
• K. Anthony Appiah, ‘Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections’, in Appiah and Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, 1996)
  Appiah traces some of the history of the concept of race and argues that there is no clear set of criteria or underlying biological basis that will do the job of discriminating between the people the concept is used to discriminate between. He goes on to propose an account of racial identity that makes central a history of association with presumed racial essence, but remains sceptical about the value of such identities.
• Naomi Zack, ‘Can Third Wave Feminism Be Inclusive? Intersectionality, its Problems and New Directions’, in Alcoff and Kittay (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy (Blackwell, 2007)
  Zack describes, first, the critique of feminism that it has excluded the experience of non-white women, and, second, the emergence of the ideas of 'intersectionality' and anti-essentialism in response. She expresses doubts about the response, and proposes a relational definition of 'woman' that addresses the doubts without falling foul of the original critique.

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• Raymond Plant, ‘Religion: A Challenge to Liberalism’, Religion and Values in a Liberal State (Gresham College, 2005) (7pp)
  Plant sets out the basic theoretical challenge that religious identity poses for liberalism: to explain why religious citizens should regard liberal institutions as authoritative even in light of the fact that these institutions may impose duties that conflict with commitments that many religious citizens will regard as more fundamental than their attachment to liberal institutions.
• Charles Larmore, ‘Political Liberalism’, Political Theory vol. 18, no. 3 (1990) (22pp)
  In an early defence of public reason liberalism, Larmore appeals to a Kantian ideal of equal respect for persons as a basis for liberal neutrality. The basic idea is that equal respect demands that the coercive institutions of a state must be justifiable from the point of view of each person, because otherwise they are a matter of mere coercion, which treats others as mere means, not ends. In this way, Larmore hopes to find a moral basis for the traditional liberal separation of church and state that avoids appealing merely to pragmatic considerations, or to scepticism about religious claims, or to controversial conceptions of individual autonomy.
• Christopher Eberle, Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics (Cambridge, 2002), chapters 4–5 (68pp)
  Eberle argues that respect for her fellow citizens does not, contrary to the claims of Rawlsian public reason liberals, require a person to refuse to support coercive laws for which she can offer no public justification.
• Martha Nussbaum, ‘Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberalism’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 39, no. 1 (2011) (42pp)
  Nussbaum defends public reason liberalism against the criticisms of comprehensive liberals such as Joseph Raz. Helpfully, she devotes special attention to the difficult question of what distinguishes a 'reasonable' view according to public reason liberals, who argue that political institutions must be justifiable from all reasonable points of view, but need not be from unreasonable points of view.
• David Enoch, ‘Against Public Reason’, in Sobel, Vallentyne, and Wall (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, vol. 1 (Oxford, 2015) (30pp)
  Enoch trenchantly criticises public reason liberalism in general, arguing that although its proponents are motivated by powerful concerns about authority and liberty, they misunderstand these, and cannot address them adequately within their favoured framework.
• Japa Pallikkathayil, ‘Neither Perfectionism nor Political Liberalism’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 44, no. 3 (2016) (26pp)
  Pallikkathayil defends a ‘comprehensive anti-perfectionist’ Kantian approach to the kinds of problems that are the focus of the debate between perfectionists and political liberals. She argues that this approach avoids certain objections to political liberalism and at the same time does a better job than political liberalism of explaining what‘s wrong with perfectionist liberalism and policies.

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• John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Harvard, 2001), Parts I and V
  In this overview of his version of public reason liberalism, Rawls sets out the main ideas he employs in building a political conception of justice, and explains how the conception can be the focus of an 'overlapping consensus' of conflicting reasonable moral views. Rawls argues in more detail for the public reason liberalism summarised in these sections in Political Liberalism (Columbia, 1996), and elaborates his account of public reason in particular in ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited&rsquo, in The Law of Peoples (Harvard, 1999).
• Sri Aurobindo, ‘The Right of Association’, in The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 1997), vol. 8, pp. 67–83
  In the course of a defence of the revolutionary Anushilan Samiti pro-independence organisation, Aurobindo casts liberal freedoms as necessary preconditions for the achievement of moksha (Hindu spiritual liberation), and so provides a religious justification for liberalism and some support for Rawls's claims. The idea that Eastern ideas of spiritual freedom and Western ideas of external freedom are complementary is a theme of Aurobindo's political writings; see also his Complete Works, vol. 13.
• Hamid Hadji Haidar, Liberalism and Islam (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 187–192 ('Conclusion')
  Haidar's book considers the compatibility of Shiite Islam and the liberalisms of, first, J.S. Mill and, second, John Rawls. Haidar finds Shiite Islam theoretically incompatible with Millian liberalism and partially compatible with Rawlsian liberalism, although neither is justifiable from the Shiite point of view. At the practical level, Haidar draws the interesting conclusion that there is no practical incompatibility between Shiite Muslim citizens' commitments and fully liberal institutions within a pluralistic society, but there is such an incompatibility within a Muslim society. This extract summarises these conclusions.
• Joseph Raz, ‘Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 19, no. 1 (1990)
  Rawls's public reason liberalism is officially committed to 'epistemic abstinence' (taking no stand on the truth claims about the good and the right), 'shallow foundations' (working from certain values that are already present in public political culture), and the 'autonomy' of the political view from wider moral questions. Raz objects to all these features of public reason liberalism, and concludes that Rawls's approach is to be rejected. You need not read beyond page 31.
• Gerald F. Gaus and Kevin Vallier, ‘The roles of religious conviction in a publicly justified polity;, Philosophy & Social Criticism vol. 35, no. 1–2 (2009)
  Gaus and Vallier argue for a 'convergence' conception of public reason liberalism that is, they suggest, less hostile to religious reasons in the justification of laws and policies than 'consensus' conceptions, such as Rawls's, are.
• Henry Rosemont, Jr., ‘Whose Democracy? Which Rights? A Confucian Critique of Modern Western Liberalism’, in Shun and Wong (eds.), Confucian Ethics (Cambridge, 2004)
  Rosemont argues that Confucianism provides insight into the possibility of a universalistic but non-liberal theory of rights and democracy. This theory deprioritises the notions of autonomy and individualism as it is construed within liberal theory, together with the associated 'first-generation' negative rights (including rights of economic freedom) stressed by liberalism—at the cost, Rosemont argues, of social and economic well being. Instead, the Confucian account emphasises the socially constituted aspects of the self and their accompanying responsibilities of care, and accordingly prioritises positive social and economic rights. Rosemont also sees the value of self-government as potentially better realised within a Confucian system than under Western liberal democratic institutions.

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• John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Harvard, 1999), sections 11–17 (41pp)
  In these sections, Rawls argues for what he calls 'democratic equality', which comprises the 'difference principle' and the principle of 'fair equality of opportunity'. He defends democratic equality against some competing interpretations of the general idea that if there are to be any inequalities, they must work to everyone's advantage, which he takes to be justified by the contractualist approach. Rawls's arguments here have been hugely influential, spawning the two most prominent contemporary theories of political egalitarianism, 'luck egalitarianism' and 'relational egalitarianism'.
• T. M. Scanlon, ‘The diversity of objections to inequality’, in his The Difficulty of Tolerance (Cambridge, 2003) (17pp)
  Scanlon surveys a number of different reasons for objecting to inequality, and offers some analysis of the ways in which these feature in Rawls's arguments. He ends with some reflections on the nature of one of the reasons he identifies, that it is an evil for people to be treated as or made to feel inferior.
• Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Luck Egalitarianism (Bloomsbury, 2016), chapter 1 (34pp)
  Lippert-Rasmussen summarises the core commitments of the luck egalitarian view and traces its development from some aspects of Rawls's argument via three of the philosophers most prominently associated with the view.
• Elizabeth Anderson, ‘What is the Point of Equality?’, Ethics vol. 109, no. 2 (1999) (51pp)
  In this hugely influential article, Anderson attacks luck egalitarianism as a betrayal of egalitarian aims, and defends a version of what came to be known as relational egalitarianism instead. Addressing the objections she raises immediately became a necessary condition of a defensible luck egalitarianism.
• Zofia Stemplowska, ‘Making Justice Sensitive to Responsibility’, Political Studies vol. 57, no. 2 (2009) (22pp)
  Stemplowska defends the inclusion of responsibility-sensitivity in the standards of egalitarian justice against the critiques of relational egalitarians, pointing out that luck egalitarians can advocate implementation of responsibility-sensitive equality within a framework of prior rights and duties, and making the crucial point that the payoffs associated with choices should not be viewed simply as a given.
• Zoltan Miklosi, ‘Varieties of Relational Egalitarianism’, presented at the 2016 workshop for Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Available here. (32pp)
  Miklosi surveys various conceptions of relational egalitarianism and asks whether they really entail a rejection of the ‘distributive’ approach to justice. He argues that most don't entail such a rejection, and that the only conceptions that do are implausible.
• Chiara Cordelli, ‘Justice as Fairness and Relational Resources’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 23, no. 1 (2015) (25pp)
  Cordelli argues that certain interpersonal relationships, such as friendship, can be regarded as productive resources that are appropriately regarded as subject to principles of distributive justice. In this way, she seeks to show that distribution-focused conceptions of egalitarianism nevertheless offer reasons of justice for caring about how people relate to one another.

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• Serena Olsaretti, ‘Responsibility and the Consequences of Choice’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society vol. 109, part 2 (2009)
  Olsaretti focuses on the key distinction between accepting choice-sensitivity and accepting what we might think of as the 'natural' consequences of choice.
• Samuel Scheffler, ‘What is Egalitarianism’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 31, no. 1 (2003)
  Alongside Elizabeth Anderson's ‘What is the Point of Equality?’, this is the seminal relational egalitarian critique of luck egalitarianism. Scheffler raises doubts about the importance and moral implications of the distinction between luck and choice that luck egalitarians place such weight upon, and sketches the relational egalitarian ideal as an alternative. He concludes with an analysis of Rawls's relationship to luck egalitarianism and some responses to objections. Scheffler elaborates these ideas further in ‘Choice, Circumstance, and the Value of Equality’ (Politics, Philosophy & Economics vol. 4, no. 1 [2005]) and ‘The Practice of Equality’, in Fourie, Schuppert, and Wallimann-Helmer (eds.), Social Equality (Oxford, 2015).
• Hugh Lazenby, ‘One Kiss Too Many? Giving, Luck Egalitarianism and Other-affecting Choice’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 18, no. 3 (2010)
  Lazenby explores a central instance of the problem of 'other-affecting choice' for luck egalitarianism, arguing that the problem highlights tensions between the value of equality as luck egalitarians conceive it and a range of other important values, and that the luck egalitarian position must be very carefully worked out if it is to avoid devastating objection. Lazenby's is one of a number of articles criticising luck egalitarianism not so much for its unpalatable intuitive implications or for its core commitments so much as for the tensions or incoherences that are immanent within it.
• Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘(Luck and relational) egalitarians of the world, unite!’, presented at the 2016 workshop for Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Available here.
  Lippert-Rasmussen attempts to transcend the dispute between luck and relational egalitarians by formulating a view that purports to incorporate insights from both views, and argues that this 'ecumenical view' is most naturally motivated by luck egalitarian motives.
• Derek Parfit, ‘Equality or Priority?’, given as The Lindley Lecture (University of Kansas, 1991)
  Parfit's seminal lecture describes and defends 'the priority view', one of the two leading rivals (alongside sufficientarianism) to strictly egalitarian accounts of broadly egalitarian political commitments. Parfit motivates the priority view in large part by appeal to the 'levelling down objection' to egalitarianism. Both the priority view and the levelling down objection have since played large roles in debates about distributive justice and the value of equality. There is now an large literature on the priority view and its plausibility as an alternative to equality.
• Robert Huseby, ‘Sufficiency: Restated and Defended;, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 18, no. 2 (2010)
  Huseby describes and defends 'sufficientarianism', the other of the two leading rivals (alongside prioritarianism) to strictly egalitarian accounts of broadly egalitarian political commitments. Huseby describes a distinctive 'two-threshold' sufficientarianism and defends it from several of the objections that sufficientarianism has attracted. Huseby's is one of a number of articles on sufficientarianism, inspired primarily by an article by Harry Frankfurt (‘Equality as a Moral ideal’, Ethics vol. 98, no. 1 [1987]).
• Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, chapter 7, section I (Basic Books, 1974)
  Nozick criticises 'end-state' theories of distributive justice, which must, he argues, "forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults", as well as operating a scheme of taxation—something that he suggests is "on a par with forced labour". Instead, Nozick argues, the correct theory of distributive justice is an historical 'entitlement theory'.

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• Onora O'Neill, ‘The dark side of human rights’, International Affairs vol. 81, no. 2 (2005) (13pp)
  In this influential article, O'Neill notes that it is unclear how many human rights' correlative obligations are to be allocated, and suggests that determining this must involve either giving up the idea that human rights are anything more than 'aspirations' or else the idea that they are universal; and with this latter move, she argues, comes unwelcome acquiescence in problematic imbalances of power.
• Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 131–52 (22pp)
  After clarifying the concept of a right (beware here of his idiosyncratic use of the term 'subjective'), Geuss argues that human rights are either merely one type of legal right or else non-existent. He goes on to suggest that human rights discourse is "otiose and pointless".
• James Griffin, On Human Rights (Oxford, 2008), chapters 2 and 5 (44pp)
  In chapter 2, Griffin gives an outline of his 'personhood account' of human rights, which conceives of human rights as protections for personhood. In chapter 5, Griffin considers who bears the correlative duties, responding to O'Neill's objection in the course of his discussion.
• Charles Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights (Oxford, 2009), sections 1–2, 9–11, 15–22 (79pp)
  In the first of these three extracts, Beitz provides a helpful overview of the questions that human rights philosophically interesting. In the second, he argues against 'naturalistic' theories of human rights, such as that of James Griffin. In the third extract, he sets out his own positive view, which is a 'political' conception, inspired by Rawls's international theory.
• S. Matthew Liao and Adam Etinson, ‘Political and Naturalistic Conceptions of Human Rights: A False Polemic?’, Journal of Moral Philosophy vol. 9, no. 3 (2012) (26pp)
  Liao and Etinson defend naturalistic conceptions of human rights against some of the most important objections to them that have been levelled by proponents of political conceptions. They go on to argue that the political conception needs supplementing with the resources of a naturalistic conception in order to generate substantive content.

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• Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 59–105
  Nussbaum elaborates and defends her influential 'capabilities' approach to justifying human rights, which can be understood as a kind of pluralistic naturalistic conception, and claims for it a cross-cultural content that makes it capable of being accepted by individuals of all moral and religious views.
• Joseph Raz, ‘Human Rights without Foundations’, in Samathan Besson and John Tasioulas (eds.), The Philosophy of International Law (Oxford, 2010)
  Raz criticises naturalistic conceptions of human rights and describes and defends his favoured political conception.
• John Rawls, ‘The Law of Peoples’, in The Law of Peoples (Harvard, 1999), especially section 10
  In section 10, Rawls argues for a relatively short list of human rights as essentially triggers for external intervention, but the section is difficult to make much sense of without familiarity with ‘The Law of Peoples’ as a whole.
• Adam Etinson, ‘Human Rights, Claimability and the Uses of Abstraction’, Utilitas vol. 25, no. 4 (2013)
  Etinson explores O'Neill's 'claimability' critique in detail. He argues that the critique is best understood as a critique of appeals to abstract rights, and then argues that it interprets the necessary claimability of rights too strongly.
• John Tasioulas, ‘Taking the Rights out of Human Rights’, Ethics vol. 120, no. (2010)
  Tasioulas criticises Griffin's theory of human rights, arguing that Griffin fails to supply an explanation of what distinguishes human rights from important human interests, and that once we have such an explanation, much of Griffin's personhood account turns out to be implausible.
• Bernard Williams, ‘Human Rights and Relativism’ and ‘Humanitarianism and the Right to Intervene’, in In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton, 2005)
  In these short chapters, Williams gives an account of human rights violations as something like unmediated coercion, and associates them with the distinction between political legitimation and its absence. He also emphasises the political nature of any decision to intervene in the face of human rights violations, as contrasted with small-scale 'rescue cases'.

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• Zofia Stemplowska, ‘What's Ideal About Ideal Theory?’, Social Theory and Practice, vol. 34, no. 3 (2008) (21pp)
  Responding to influential critiques of ‘ideal theory’, Stemplowska defends a conception of ideal theorising as developing theories that do not issue recommendations that are at present desirable and achievable. She argues that such theorising enables us to reveal our values to ourselves, to identify evaluative standards that are necessary for formulating practical recommendations, and to avoid excessive permissiveness towards the unwilling.
• Charles W. Mills, ‘“Ideal Theory” as Ideology’, Hypatia vol. 20, no. 3 (2005) (20pp)
  Mills argues that various abstractions and idealisations employed by Rawls and others in their ‘ideal theorising’ are not innocent; on the contrary, they are ideological, in the sense that they reflect dominant groups' privilege and serve to perpetuate it at the expense of the oppressed, whose oppression-relevant characteristics are ignored as a result of the abstractions and idealisations.
• Bernard Williams, ‘Realism and Moralism in Political Theory’ and ‘The Liberalism of Fear’, in In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton, 2005) (27pp)
  Williams argues against political theorising that treats it as merely applied moral philosophy, and for understanding political philosophy instead primarily in terms of the “first political question” of securing the conditions of cooperation and meeting the associated ‘basic legitimation demand’. He defends a ‘liberalism of fear’ within this frame, as uniquely flexible and aware of the nature of the political.
• Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993), chapter 5 (36pp)
  Honig claims that Rawlsian justice ‘closes down political spaces’ in assuming that justice as fairness and its assumptions can be made to fit those upon whom it is imposed “without remainder” and then treating symptoms of a lack of such fit as loci for punishment rather than politics. Inclusive, democratic commitments are better served, she argues, by institutions that “shift and proliferate the sites of politics.”
• Alice Baderin, ‘Two forms of realism in political theory’, European Journal of Political Theory vol. 13, no. 2 (2014) (22pp)
  Baderin distinguishes two strands in realist critiques: the “detachment” strand, which argues that political philosophy is too abstract and infeasible, and the “displacement” strand, which argues that political philosophy threatens or disregards real politics. She analyses and identifies tensions between the two strands.
• Lorna Finlayson, The Political is Political (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), chapter 5 (26pp)
  Finlayson criticises the realist and non-ideal theory trends in contemporary political philosophy on the grounds that they preclude “deep dissent” by placing limits “on the extent to which deviation from dominant modes of political philosophy iis even thinkable”. This, she says, effectively forces a false choice between utopian criticism of the status quo or realistic acceptance of it.

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• John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Harvard, 2001), section 1.
  Rawls distinguishes four roles for political philosophy: to identify a basis for agreement to underpin social cooperation on a footing of mutual respect; to enable us to understand ourselves as members of a political community; to reconcile us to our social world; and to probe the limits of practical political possibility. Rawls focuses in particular on these roles in the context of the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’.
• Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (Routledge, 2005), chapter 2
  Mouffe argues that antagonism is an eradicable condition of political association, and therefore that the aim of democratic politics is not the establishment of rational consensus, contrary to what Mouffe sees as the dominant liberal theoretical approach, but of ‘agonistic relations’: a way of taming destructive enmity through adversarial political institutions.
• Jeremy Waldron, ‘Political Political Theory’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 21, no. 1 (2013)
  Waldron argues for greater emphasis on the study of institutions and political processes as opposed to the great political ends (justice, liberty, equality, etc.), and in particular on the question how to choose between various political institutional possibilities, as for example when thinking about devolution in the UK—a question about which "the 57 different varieties of luck-egalitarianism" studied in Oxford have nothing to say.
• Amartya Sen, ‘What do we want from a theory of justice?’, The Journal of Philosophy vol. 103, no. 5 (2006)
  Sen argues for ‘comparative’ over ‘transcendental’ theorising about justice. He argues that the latter is neither necessary nor sufficient for the former, and that emphasis on the transcendental approach may indeed stand in the way of addressing injustice. As part of the comparative approach, he defends ‘fair arbitration’ over contractualist approaches as a way to achieve the theoretical impartiality required by justice.
• Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a Politics of Compromise (Routledge, 2002), chapter 2
  Bellamy argues that Rawls fails to appreciate the way in which citizens' religious affiliations may be in tension with liberal political principles as well as tensions within those political principles (e.g. between different liberties) that cannot be resolved philosophically. He claims that this analysis reveals the way in which the Rawlsian model fails to see how the political sphere itself is contested, and argues that this demonstrates a need to make the ‘real politics’ of negotiation and compromise central if the public sphere is not to be delegitimised. Bellamy offers a similar analysis of two other seemingly contrasting theorists, Hayek and Walzer, in chapters 1 and 3 respectively.
• William A. Galston, ‘Realism in political theory’, European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 9, no. 4 (2010)
  Galston surveys the various strands of realist critique of ideal theorising, identifying a focus on avoiding evils, confining one's ends to the feasible, and a conception of the political as involving ineliminable conflict as the basic elements. He endorses much of the realist critique, but highlights several ways in which it is, he thinks, nevertheless lacking.
• Anca Gheaus, ‘The Feasibility Constraint on the Concept of Justice’, The Philosophical Quarterly vol. 63, no. 252 (2013)
  Gheaus argues that the feasibility of implementing a conception of justice is not a constraint on the theory's adequacy, identifying some implausible implications of the constraint and offering an account of the aspirational value of theorising unconstrained by a feasibility constraint. She also proposes a debunking account of the attractions of taking theorising about justice to be, as a conceptual matter, subject to a feasibility constraint.
• David Estlund, ‘Utopophobia’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 42, no. 2 (2014)
  Estlund defends what he calls “hopeless aspirational theory”: the elaboration of standards of justice that will almost certainly never be met. He proceeds in large part by rejecting various grounds for supposing that hopeless aspirational theory counsels the impossible.
• Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, 2008)
  Geuss defends a realist approach to political theory that views politics through the lens of questions about power, historical feasibility, and prevailing mechanisms of legitimation. He identifies five tasks for political philosophy based upon this approach, and then critiques the approach of contemporary ‘analytic’ political philosophy, focusing on the case of Rawls.

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• Thomas Pogge, ‘Moral Universalism and Global Economic Justice’, Politics, Philosophy & Economics vol. 1, no. 1 (2002) (30pp)
  Pogge argues that the thesis of ‘moral universalism’ creates a demand for the justification of the discrepancy between the minimal criteria of justice that we apply to the global order and the more substantial criteria of justice that we apply to the domestic order. He goes on to argue against three different proposed justifications in response to the demand.
• Thomas Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 33, no. 2 (2005) (35pp)
  Nagel defends what he calls the ‘political conception’ of justice, which sees egalitarian social justice as a standard applicable only to sovereign schemes of social cooperation, against cosmopolitanism, which sees egalitarian social justice as a prior aim, applicable at the global level. He argues that the standard's special scope is explained by the “special involvement of agency or the will that is inseparable from membership in a political society.”
• Samuel Freeman, ‘The Social and Institutional Bases of Distributive Justice’, in Brock (ed.), Cosmopolitanism versus Non-Cosmopolitanism (Oxford, 2013) (24pp)
  Emphasising the productive aspects of social cooperation, Freeman develops the Rawlsian thesis that distributive justice is a standard applicable only to certain kinds of cooperative institutions, and in particular not at the international level, contrary to cosmopolitan claims.
• Simon Caney, ‘Global Distributive Justice and the State’, Political Studies vol. 56, no. 3 (2008) (32pp)
  Caney clarifies the structure of the debate between cosmopolitans and non-cosmopolitans, and offers a useful taxonomy of the various arguments that might be adduced in support of non-cosmopolitanism. He goes on to focus on two in particular (the ‘Argument from Cooperation’ and the ‘Argument from Coercion’), rejecting them both and then extending his objections to suggest that none of the arguments can succeed.
• Andrea Sangiovanni, ‘On the Relation between Moral and Distributive Equality’, in Brock (ed.), Cosmopolitanism versus Non-Cosmopolitanism (Oxford, 2013) (20pp)
  Sangiovanni explores two common arguments that attempt to establish a presumption in favour of global distributive egalitarianism on the basis of the fundamental moral equality of persons. He argues that they fail, before going on to suggest that appealing to alternative theoretical renderings of the idea of fundamental moral equality is unlikely to help.
• Miriam Ronzoni, ‘The Global Order: A Case of Background Injustice?’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 37, no. 3 (2009) (27pp)
  Ronzoni argues that problems of ‘background justice’ that arise at the international level call for the establishment of global institutions. Hence, even from a basically ‘relational’ perspective, we have duties of global justice even though there may be no global basic structure. However, Ronzoni is careful to emphasise that these duties are not simply those we take ourselves to have to fellow citizens, extended so as to cover everyone in the world.

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• John Rawls, ‘The Law of Peoples’, in The Law of Peoples (Harvard, 1999)
  Rawls argues for eight principles of international justice (together constituting ‘the law of peoples’) via an ‘original position’ argument that is in many ways analogous to the original position argument familiar from his domestic theory of justice. Crucial disanalogies mean, however, that the conclusion of the argument does not include endorsement of an egalitarian principle of distributive justice such as the difference principle.
• Thomas Pogge, ‘An Egalitarian Law of Peoples’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 23, no. 3 (1994)
  Pogge briefly articulates a case for what he calls his ‘Global Resource Tax’, before offering a critique of Rawls's international theory that is all the more powerful because Pogge accepts some of Rawls's key premisses. He argues that delegates to the first of Rawls's international ‘original positions’ will have interests other than those Rawls takes them to have, and that they would choose principles other than those that Rawls thinks that they would choose.
• Laura Valentini, ‘Cosmopolitan Justice and Rightful Enforceability’, in Brock (ed.), Cosmopolitanism versus Non-Cosmopolitanism (Oxford, 2013)
  Valentini argues that global disagreement about global egalitarianism undermines the legitimacy of enforcing it, which undermines its pretensions to articulate a standard of global justice at all. Instead, she argues, global justice requires a combination of global socioeconomic sufficientarianism and global procedural egalitarianism.
• Andrea Sangiovanni, ‘The Irrelevance of Coercion, Imposition, and Framing to Distributive Justice’, Philosophy & Public Affairs vol. 40, no. 2 (2012)
  A widespread non-cosmopolitan strategy is to identify the distinctive non-voluntariness of political arrangements as a triggering condition for the applicability of special standards of justice. Proponents of this strategy include Michael Blake, Thomas Nagel, Mathias Risse, Laura Valentini, and others. Sangiovanni argues that this strategy fails, because it does not explain the content or scope of the special standards that are supposedly justified by the triggering condition in question.
• David Miller, ‘Justice and boundaries’, Politics, Philosophy & Economics vol. 8, no. 3 (2009)
  Miller dismisses some common arguments for cosmopolitanism before reviewing three of the most prominent positive accounts of the basis of non-cosmopolitanism (which he calls ‘particularism’). He rejects each of these as a stand-alone account, but suggests that they combine to make a good case for non-cosmopolitanism—albeit one that breaks down in the circumstances of globalisation, calling for novel thinking about the resultant new contexts.
  
• Andrea Sangiovanni, ‘Justice and the Priority of Politics to Morality’, The Journal of Political Philosophy vol. 16, no. 2 (2008)
  Sangiovanni introduces and explores the idea of practice-dependence, according to which we must develop principles of justice from an understanding of existing practices' point and purpose, and argues that it takes the circumstances of politics seriously in a way that practice-independent approaches do not. He suggests that practice-dependent approaches explain why the cosmopolitan challenge (even from a ‘relational’ cosmopolitan) is mistaken.

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