Stanka Radović's work explores space and urban environments in contemporary dystopian fiction, postcolonial literatures and diasporic/migrant literatures, focusing on the interplay between social space and spatial imagination. Marxist, psychogeographic and heterotopian approaches to space inform Radovic's understanding of dystopian, weird and neo-gothic literatures, which are at the center of her current research. Radovic's training and long-standing interest in postcolonial studies (primarily of the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean) permeate her approach to spatial theory by directing her attention to questions of social normativity, class structures and mechanisms of marginalization. Radovic’s first monograph, Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2014) examined narratives of postcolonial spatial dispossession and the contemporary legacies of colonial history in the work of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick Chamoiseau, Baryl Gilroy and Raphael Confiant.

Democracy can be very broadly defined as rule by the people – but who is included in ‘the people’? This problem has become particularly acute in an era of globalization, wherein political boundaries often seem to arbitrarily exclude many individuals from participating in political decisions in which they are deeply invested. Can this exclusion be democratically justified? This question refers to what is often called the ‘boundary problem’ in democratic theory. The intuition among theorists is that the principles which justify democracy might also shed light on the question of who ought to be included in the collective decision-making. In this paper, I will look at two of these principles: Robert Goodin’s all-affected interest principle and Arash Abizadeh’s coercion principle. The problem with these accounts is that they lead to a radically inclusionary conclusion (e.g. a world demos) which fails to take into account the conditions necessary for a properly functioning democracy. This critique seems, however, to suggest that there is an irreconcilable tension at the heart of democratic theory: boundaries are required for democracy to function, but boundaries violate principles internal to democracy. I will argue that this tension is not irreconcilable. Goodin and Abizadeh’s principles misidentify what is undemocratic about boundaries. I contend that boundaries are undemocratic, not because they exclude affected interests, or that they are coercive, but because they violate a principle of political equality. That is, our current system of boundary formation (i.e. border controls) allows for applicants to be discriminated against on the basis of personal attributes. I will argue that this violates a principle of political equality. However, political equality does not require that boundaries be eliminated (thereby violating the conditions necessary for democracy). Rather, the principle of political equality is satisfied if the state uses random selection to determine who from the pool of applicants will be admitted. Mary Jo MacDonald completed a BA in political science and philosophy at McGill University in 2017 and is currently finishing an MA in philosophy at Queen's University. Mary’s research focuses on questions about nationalism and political boundaries in democratic theory.

Much of the discussion in political philosophy has assumed that citizenship in a political community depends upon requisite linguistic and cognitive capacities. Meeting this threshold of cognitive capacity (i.e. the capacity contract) has been a longstanding marker of political inclusion throughout the history of political philosophy. However, the membership model of citizenship has emerged as an alternative to the capacity contract. This model presents a more expansive notion of citizenship and is able to include the historically disenfranchised – namely, children and the cognitively impaired – into the political sphere since the model does not require a threshold of capacities to be met for political inclusion. I will first spell out some of the traditional claims of the capacity contract model. I will then introduce the social membership model, highlighting its more inclusive conception of moral agency. Next, I will offer a way of extending the social membership model to include another non-human species lurking amongst us – namely, robots. I will spend some time showing how robots have been socially integrated into human life and will then examine some different ways that the social membership model might be extended to treat robots as moral agents within human environments. Finally, I will conclude by using the concepts of ‘rights’ and ‘duties,’ which are typically associated with citizenship, to evaluate the presence of robots under these definitions. I will conclude that while robots may have the potential to eventually become right-holders and duty-bearers under both the capacity contract and social membership models of moral agency, we need to safeguard human life from the threat of tyranny that accompanies robot presence by excluding them from our political community. Arjun Sawhney is pursuing his MA in philosophy at Queen’s University and is writing his thesis on robot citizenship. He did he is BA here at the University of Toronto, earning a Specialist in Philosophy.

Global climate change has already begun displacing communities and making refugees of individuals and families, but in the near future, the world is likely to be confronted by climate refugees of a new sort: those whose states are literally flooded into nonexistence by rising sea levels. These “submerged states” would be a new and tragic nexus of a global problem with local consequences—that of erasing the locality altogether. This problem creates special problems for its victims, who I call “climate refugee peoples”—that are irreducibly non-individualistic and cannot be effectively addressed by the individualistic solutions standard in current debates about the human rights of refugees. Moreover, though local self-determination is the crucial issue, it can only be protected through coordinated global action. I focus on climate refugee peoples’ potential claims to stay together, and to stay self-determining. I begin by outlining the problems faced by states vulnerable to submersion and the proportional responsibility of the large, wealthy, polluting states to address these claims. Next, I argue that the Arendtian “right to have rights” may be extended from the individual’s right to belong to some political community to individuals’ right to remain with their own political community when possible, and furthermore to the community’s right to remain intact. I then examine the nature of a people and argue that both shared environment and shared politics form and sustain a people, even after territory loss. Finally, I examine four ways states may attempt to discharge duties owed refugee peoples: resettlement en masse, land cession, semi-autonomous admission, and land reclamation. All four represent great burdens on the discharging states and imperfection solutions for refugee communities, underscoring the need for global coordination to prevent and mitigate the circumstances that will force peoples into refugee status. Alex R. Steers-McCrum is a PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He works on social and political philosophy and critical race theory, with emphases on environmental and indigenous issues.

This essay discusses immigration exclusion on the grounds of cultural preservation. I begin by delineating Joseph Carens’ argument for open borders and his view that democratic policies ought to reflect the values of freedom and equality. Next, I discuss arguments that defend nation-states’ rights to practice immigration exclusion. Miller and Walzer, for instance, both agree that exclusion allows for collective self-determination and the preservation of collective national identity. Furthermore, Stilz’ harm calculus contends that nation-states have a conditional right to immigration exclusion if evidence suggests the potential for political, economic, and social harms to the nation-state and its inhabitants. I proceed to argue against Walzer’s and Miller’s anxieties about cultural preservation, since both physical and virtual travel render true cultural preservation impossible, thereby delegitimating their defenses of immigration exclusion. I also suggest that Walzer’s and Miller’s attachment to the preservation of “national consciousness” may unintentionally support virtual censorship, and that their notions of cultural preservation raise concerns about essentialism. I use Denmark as a case study to show that cultural preservation is not merely a concern about preserving a political culture, but rather that it can also be an anxiety about preserving ethnic culture. I also briefly discuss the ties between cultural preservation, fascism, and nativist ideology. Turning to Stilz’s anxieties about harm, I distinguish between political, economic, and social harms in her calculus. I agree that immigration exclusion on the basis of political and economic harms is legitimate, but argue that the anxiety about social harms suffers from similar pitfalls as cultural preservation. Not only does Stilz wrongly assume that “homogenous” societies hold a single, harmonious conception of “the good”; her harm calculus is also insufficiently robust to distinguish between real and perceived harms. The latter, for instance, are often invisible and deeply rooted in negative stereotypes, but can nonetheless shape important social policy decisions, as seen in the “Muslim Ban” and neo-nativism in the US. Finally, I argue that some cultures are justified in immigration exclusion on the grounds of cultural preservation. These cultures must have been victims of historical, systemic, and systematic marginalization and cultural imperialism, such as indigenous populations and communities of color. I condone a position that is between Carens’ open borders and Stilz anxiety about political and economic harms. In other words, migrants should be protected in their freedom of movement between nation-states, provided nation-states will not suffer from significant political or economic harms. Ultimately, immigration exclusion – i.e. rejecting migrants on the grounds that they are culturally disparate – is not justified on the basis of the anxiety about cultural preservation or the anxiety about social harm. Hilda Loury is a master's student, instructor, and Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. She completed her bachelor's degree in philosophy, with a minor in cognitive science, at the University of California, Los Angeles. She works primarily in aesthetics, cognitive science, and feminist philosophy.

Stanka Radović's work explores space and urban environments in contemporary dystopian fiction, postcolonial literatures and diasporic/migrant literatures, focusing on the interplay between social space and spatial imagination. Marxist, psychogeographic and heterotopian approaches to space inform Radovic's understanding of dystopian, weird and neo-gothic literatures, which are at the center of her current research. Radovic's training and long-standing interest in postcolonial studies (primarily of the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean) permeate her approach to spatial theory by directing her attention to questions of social normativity, class structures and mechanisms of marginalization. Radovic’s first monograph, Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2014) examined narratives of postcolonial spatial dispossession and the contemporary legacies of colonial history in the work of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick Chamoiseau, Baryl Gilroy and Raphael Confiant.

Democracy can be very broadly defined as rule by the people – but who is included in ‘the people’? This problem has become particularly acute in an era of globalization, wherein political boundaries often seem to arbitrarily exclude many individuals from participating in political decisions in which they are deeply invested. Can this exclusion be democratically justified? This question refers to what is often called the ‘boundary problem’ in democratic theory. The intuition among theorists is that the principles which justify democracy might also shed light on the question of who ought to be included in the collective decision-making. In this paper, I will look at two of these principles: Robert Goodin’s all-affected interest principle and Arash Abizadeh’s coercion principle. The problem with these accounts is that they lead to a radically inclusionary conclusion (e.g. a world demos) which fails to take into account the conditions necessary for a properly functioning democracy. This critique seems, however, to suggest that there is an irreconcilable tension at the heart of democratic theory: boundaries are required for democracy to function, but boundaries violate principles internal to democracy. I will argue that this tension is not irreconcilable. Goodin and Abizadeh’s principles misidentify what is undemocratic about boundaries. I contend that boundaries are undemocratic, not because they exclude affected interests, or that they are coercive, but because they violate a principle of political equality. That is, our current system of boundary formation (i.e. border controls) allows for applicants to be discriminated against on the basis of personal attributes. I will argue that this violates a principle of political equality. However, political equality does not require that boundaries be eliminated (thereby violating the conditions necessary for democracy). Rather, the principle of political equality is satisfied if the state uses random selection to determine who from the pool of applicants will be admitted. Mary Jo MacDonald completed a BA in political science and philosophy at McGill University in 2017 and is currently finishing an MA in philosophy at Queen's University. Mary’s research focuses on questions about nationalism and political boundaries in democratic theory.

Much of the discussion in political philosophy has assumed that citizenship in a political community depends upon requisite linguistic and cognitive capacities. Meeting this threshold of cognitive capacity (i.e. the capacity contract) has been a longstanding marker of political inclusion throughout the history of political philosophy. However, the membership model of citizenship has emerged as an alternative to the capacity contract. This model presents a more expansive notion of citizenship and is able to include the historically disenfranchised – namely, children and the cognitively impaired – into the political sphere since the model does not require a threshold of capacities to be met for political inclusion. I will first spell out some of the traditional claims of the capacity contract model. I will then introduce the social membership model, highlighting its more inclusive conception of moral agency. Next, I will offer a way of extending the social membership model to include another non-human species lurking amongst us – namely, robots. I will spend some time showing how robots have been socially integrated into human life and will then examine some different ways that the social membership model might be extended to treat robots as moral agents within human environments. Finally, I will conclude by using the concepts of ‘rights’ and ‘duties,’ which are typically associated with citizenship, to evaluate the presence of robots under these definitions. I will conclude that while robots may have the potential to eventually become right-holders and duty-bearers under both the capacity contract and social membership models of moral agency, we need to safeguard human life from the threat of tyranny that accompanies robot presence by excluding them from our political community. Arjun Sawhney is pursuing his MA in philosophy at Queen’s University and is writing his thesis on robot citizenship. He did he is BA here at the University of Toronto, earning a Specialist in Philosophy.

Global climate change has already begun displacing communities and making refugees of individuals and families, but in the near future, the world is likely to be confronted by climate refugees of a new sort: those whose states are literally flooded into nonexistence by rising sea levels. These “submerged states” would be a new and tragic nexus of a global problem with local consequences—that of erasing the locality altogether. This problem creates special problems for its victims, who I call “climate refugee peoples”—that are irreducibly non-individualistic and cannot be effectively addressed by the individualistic solutions standard in current debates about the human rights of refugees. Moreover, though local self-determination is the crucial issue, it can only be protected through coordinated global action. I focus on climate refugee peoples’ potential claims to stay together, and to stay self-determining. I begin by outlining the problems faced by states vulnerable to submersion and the proportional responsibility of the large, wealthy, polluting states to address these claims. Next, I argue that the Arendtian “right to have rights” may be extended from the individual’s right to belong to some political community to individuals’ right to remain with their own political community when possible, and furthermore to the community’s right to remain intact. I then examine the nature of a people and argue that both shared environment and shared politics form and sustain a people, even after territory loss. Finally, I examine four ways states may attempt to discharge duties owed refugee peoples: resettlement en masse, land cession, semi-autonomous admission, and land reclamation. All four represent great burdens on the discharging states and imperfection solutions for refugee communities, underscoring the need for global coordination to prevent and mitigate the circumstances that will force peoples into refugee status. Alex R. Steers-McCrum is a PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He works on social and political philosophy and critical race theory, with emphases on environmental and indigenous issues.

This essay discusses immigration exclusion on the grounds of cultural preservation. I begin by delineating Joseph Carens’ argument for open borders and his view that democratic policies ought to reflect the values of freedom and equality. Next, I discuss arguments that defend nation-states’ rights to practice immigration exclusion. Miller and Walzer, for instance, both agree that exclusion allows for collective self-determination and the preservation of collective national identity. Furthermore, Stilz’ harm calculus contends that nation-states have a conditional right to immigration exclusion if evidence suggests the potential for political, economic, and social harms to the nation-state and its inhabitants. I proceed to argue against Walzer’s and Miller’s anxieties about cultural preservation, since both physical and virtual travel render true cultural preservation impossible, thereby delegitimating their defenses of immigration exclusion. I also suggest that Walzer’s and Miller’s attachment to the preservation of “national consciousness” may unintentionally support virtual censorship, and that their notions of cultural preservation raise concerns about essentialism. I use Denmark as a case study to show that cultural preservation is not merely a concern about preserving a political culture, but rather that it can also be an anxiety about preserving ethnic culture. I also briefly discuss the ties between cultural preservation, fascism, and nativist ideology. Turning to Stilz’s anxieties about harm, I distinguish between political, economic, and social harms in her calculus. I agree that immigration exclusion on the basis of political and economic harms is legitimate, but argue that the anxiety about social harms suffers from similar pitfalls as cultural preservation. Not only does Stilz wrongly assume that “homogenous” societies hold a single, harmonious conception of “the good”; her harm calculus is also insufficiently robust to distinguish between real and perceived harms. The latter, for instance, are often invisible and deeply rooted in negative stereotypes, but can nonetheless shape important social policy decisions, as seen in the “Muslim Ban” and neo-nativism in the US. Finally, I argue that some cultures are justified in immigration exclusion on the grounds of cultural preservation. These cultures must have been victims of historical, systemic, and systematic marginalization and cultural imperialism, such as indigenous populations and communities of color. I condone a position that is between Carens’ open borders and Stilz anxiety about political and economic harms. In other words, migrants should be protected in their freedom of movement between nation-states, provided nation-states will not suffer from significant political or economic harms. Ultimately, immigration exclusion – i.e. rejecting migrants on the grounds that they are culturally disparate – is not justified on the basis of the anxiety about cultural preservation or the anxiety about social harm. Hilda Loury is a master's student, instructor, and Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. She completed her bachelor's degree in philosophy, with a minor in cognitive science, at the University of California, Los Angeles. She works primarily in aesthetics, cognitive science, and feminist philosophy.

Stanka Radović's work explores space and urban environments in contemporary dystopian fiction, postcolonial literatures and diasporic/migrant literatures, focusing on the interplay between social space and spatial imagination. Marxist, psychogeographic and heterotopian approaches to space inform Radovic's understanding of dystopian, weird and neo-gothic literatures, which are at the center of her current research. Radovic's training and long-standing interest in postcolonial studies (primarily of the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean) permeate her approach to spatial theory by directing her attention to questions of social normativity, class structures and mechanisms of marginalization. Radovic’s first monograph, Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2014) examined narratives of postcolonial spatial dispossession and the contemporary legacies of colonial history in the work of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick Chamoiseau, Baryl Gilroy and Raphael Confiant.

Democracy can be very broadly defined as rule by the people – but who is included in ‘the people’? This problem has become particularly acute in an era of globalization, wherein political boundaries often seem to arbitrarily exclude many individuals from participating in political decisions in which they are deeply invested. Can this exclusion be democratically justified? This question refers to what is often called the ‘boundary problem’ in democratic theory. The intuition among theorists is that the principles which justify democracy might also shed light on the question of who ought to be included in the collective decision-making. In this paper, I will look at two of these principles: Robert Goodin’s all-affected interest principle and Arash Abizadeh’s coercion principle. The problem with these accounts is that they lead to a radically inclusionary conclusion (e.g. a world demos) which fails to take into account the conditions necessary for a properly functioning democracy. This critique seems, however, to suggest that there is an irreconcilable tension at the heart of democratic theory: boundaries are required for democracy to function, but boundaries violate principles internal to democracy. I will argue that this tension is not irreconcilable. Goodin and Abizadeh’s principles misidentify what is undemocratic about boundaries. I contend that boundaries are undemocratic, not because they exclude affected interests, or that they are coercive, but because they violate a principle of political equality. That is, our current system of boundary formation (i.e. border controls) allows for applicants to be discriminated against on the basis of personal attributes. I will argue that this violates a principle of political equality. However, political equality does not require that boundaries be eliminated (thereby violating the conditions necessary for democracy). Rather, the principle of political equality is satisfied if the state uses random selection to determine who from the pool of applicants will be admitted. Mary Jo MacDonald completed a BA in political science and philosophy at McGill University in 2017 and is currently finishing an MA in philosophy at Queen's University. Mary’s research focuses on questions about nationalism and political boundaries in democratic theory.

Much of the discussion in political philosophy has assumed that citizenship in a political community depends upon requisite linguistic and cognitive capacities. Meeting this threshold of cognitive capacity (i.e. the capacity contract) has been a longstanding marker of political inclusion throughout the history of political philosophy. However, the membership model of citizenship has emerged as an alternative to the capacity contract. This model presents a more expansive notion of citizenship and is able to include the historically disenfranchised – namely, children and the cognitively impaired – into the political sphere since the model does not require a threshold of capacities to be met for political inclusion. I will first spell out some of the traditional claims of the capacity contract model. I will then introduce the social membership model, highlighting its more inclusive conception of moral agency. Next, I will offer a way of extending the social membership model to include another non-human species lurking amongst us – namely, robots. I will spend some time showing how robots have been socially integrated into human life and will then examine some different ways that the social membership model might be extended to treat robots as moral agents within human environments. Finally, I will conclude by using the concepts of ‘rights’ and ‘duties,’ which are typically associated with citizenship, to evaluate the presence of robots under these definitions. I will conclude that while robots may have the potential to eventually become right-holders and duty-bearers under both the capacity contract and social membership models of moral agency, we need to safeguard human life from the threat of tyranny that accompanies robot presence by excluding them from our political community. Arjun Sawhney is pursuing his MA in philosophy at Queen’s University and is writing his thesis on robot citizenship. He did he is BA here at the University of Toronto, earning a Specialist in Philosophy.

Global climate change has already begun displacing communities and making refugees of individuals and families, but in the near future, the world is likely to be confronted by climate refugees of a new sort: those whose states are literally flooded into nonexistence by rising sea levels. These “submerged states” would be a new and tragic nexus of a global problem with local consequences—that of erasing the locality altogether. This problem creates special problems for its victims, who I call “climate refugee peoples”—that are irreducibly non-individualistic and cannot be effectively addressed by the individualistic solutions standard in current debates about the human rights of refugees. Moreover, though local self-determination is the crucial issue, it can only be protected through coordinated global action. I focus on climate refugee peoples’ potential claims to stay together, and to stay self-determining. I begin by outlining the problems faced by states vulnerable to submersion and the proportional responsibility of the large, wealthy, polluting states to address these claims. Next, I argue that the Arendtian “right to have rights” may be extended from the individual’s right to belong to some political community to individuals’ right to remain with their own political community when possible, and furthermore to the community’s right to remain intact. I then examine the nature of a people and argue that both shared environment and shared politics form and sustain a people, even after territory loss. Finally, I examine four ways states may attempt to discharge duties owed refugee peoples: resettlement en masse, land cession, semi-autonomous admission, and land reclamation. All four represent great burdens on the discharging states and imperfection solutions for refugee communities, underscoring the need for global coordination to prevent and mitigate the circumstances that will force peoples into refugee status. Alex R. Steers-McCrum is a PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He works on social and political philosophy and critical race theory, with emphases on environmental and indigenous issues.

This essay discusses immigration exclusion on the grounds of cultural preservation. I begin by delineating Joseph Carens’ argument for open borders and his view that democratic policies ought to reflect the values of freedom and equality. Next, I discuss arguments that defend nation-states’ rights to practice immigration exclusion. Miller and Walzer, for instance, both agree that exclusion allows for collective self-determination and the preservation of collective national identity. Furthermore, Stilz’ harm calculus contends that nation-states have a conditional right to immigration exclusion if evidence suggests the potential for political, economic, and social harms to the nation-state and its inhabitants. I proceed to argue against Walzer’s and Miller’s anxieties about cultural preservation, since both physical and virtual travel render true cultural preservation impossible, thereby delegitimating their defenses of immigration exclusion. I also suggest that Walzer’s and Miller’s attachment to the preservation of “national consciousness” may unintentionally support virtual censorship, and that their notions of cultural preservation raise concerns about essentialism. I use Denmark as a case study to show that cultural preservation is not merely a concern about preserving a political culture, but rather that it can also be an anxiety about preserving ethnic culture. I also briefly discuss the ties between cultural preservation, fascism, and nativist ideology. Turning to Stilz’s anxieties about harm, I distinguish between political, economic, and social harms in her calculus. I agree that immigration exclusion on the basis of political and economic harms is legitimate, but argue that the anxiety about social harms suffers from similar pitfalls as cultural preservation. Not only does Stilz wrongly assume that “homogenous” societies hold a single, harmonious conception of “the good”; her harm calculus is also insufficiently robust to distinguish between real and perceived harms. The latter, for instance, are often invisible and deeply rooted in negative stereotypes, but can nonetheless shape important social policy decisions, as seen in the “Muslim Ban” and neo-nativism in the US. Finally, I argue that some cultures are justified in immigration exclusion on the grounds of cultural preservation. These cultures must have been victims of historical, systemic, and systematic marginalization and cultural imperialism, such as indigenous populations and communities of color. I condone a position that is between Carens’ open borders and Stilz anxiety about political and economic harms. In other words, migrants should be protected in their freedom of movement between nation-states, provided nation-states will not suffer from significant political or economic harms. Ultimately, immigration exclusion – i.e. rejecting migrants on the grounds that they are culturally disparate – is not justified on the basis of the anxiety about cultural preservation or the anxiety about social harm. Hilda Loury is a master's student, instructor, and Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. She completed her bachelor's degree in philosophy, with a minor in cognitive science, at the University of California, Los Angeles. She works primarily in aesthetics, cognitive science, and feminist philosophy.

Stanka Radović's work explores space and urban environments in contemporary dystopian fiction, postcolonial literatures and diasporic/migrant literatures, focusing on the interplay between social space and spatial imagination. Marxist, psychogeographic and heterotopian approaches to space inform Radovic's understanding of dystopian, weird and neo-gothic literatures, which are at the center of her current research. Radovic's training and long-standing interest in postcolonial studies (primarily of the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean) permeate her approach to spatial theory by directing her attention to questions of social normativity, class structures and mechanisms of marginalization. Radovic’s first monograph, Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2014) examined narratives of postcolonial spatial dispossession and the contemporary legacies of colonial history in the work of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick Chamoiseau, Baryl Gilroy and Raphael Confiant.

Democracy can be very broadly defined as rule by the people – but who is included in ‘the people’? This problem has become particularly acute in an era of globalization, wherein political boundaries often seem to arbitrarily exclude many individuals from participating in political decisions in which they are deeply invested. Can this exclusion be democratically justified? This question refers to what is often called the ‘boundary problem’ in democratic theory. The intuition among theorists is that the principles which justify democracy might also shed light on the question of who ought to be included in the collective decision-making. In this paper, I will look at two of these principles: Robert Goodin’s all-affected interest principle and Arash Abizadeh’s coercion principle. The problem with these accounts is that they lead to a radically inclusionary conclusion (e.g. a world demos) which fails to take into account the conditions necessary for a properly functioning democracy. This critique seems, however, to suggest that there is an irreconcilable tension at the heart of democratic theory: boundaries are required for democracy to function, but boundaries violate principles internal to democracy. I will argue that this tension is not irreconcilable. Goodin and Abizadeh’s principles misidentify what is undemocratic about boundaries. I contend that boundaries are undemocratic, not because they exclude affected interests, or that they are coercive, but because they violate a principle of political equality. That is, our current system of boundary formation (i.e. border controls) allows for applicants to be discriminated against on the basis of personal attributes. I will argue that this violates a principle of political equality. However, political equality does not require that boundaries be eliminated (thereby violating the conditions necessary for democracy). Rather, the principle of political equality is satisfied if the state uses random selection to determine who from the pool of applicants will be admitted. Mary Jo MacDonald completed a BA in political science and philosophy at McGill University in 2017 and is currently finishing an MA in philosophy at Queen's University. Mary’s research focuses on questions about nationalism and political boundaries in democratic theory.

Much of the discussion in political philosophy has assumed that citizenship in a political community depends upon requisite linguistic and cognitive capacities. Meeting this threshold of cognitive capacity (i.e. the capacity contract) has been a longstanding marker of political inclusion throughout the history of political philosophy. However, the membership model of citizenship has emerged as an alternative to the capacity contract. This model presents a more expansive notion of citizenship and is able to include the historically disenfranchised – namely, children and the cognitively impaired – into the political sphere since the model does not require a threshold of capacities to be met for political inclusion. I will first spell out some of the traditional claims of the capacity contract model. I will then introduce the social membership model, highlighting its more inclusive conception of moral agency. Next, I will offer a way of extending the social membership model to include another non-human species lurking amongst us – namely, robots. I will spend some time showing how robots have been socially integrated into human life and will then examine some different ways that the social membership model might be extended to treat robots as moral agents within human environments. Finally, I will conclude by using the concepts of ‘rights’ and ‘duties,’ which are typically associated with citizenship, to evaluate the presence of robots under these definitions. I will conclude that while robots may have the potential to eventually become right-holders and duty-bearers under both the capacity contract and social membership models of moral agency, we need to safeguard human life from the threat of tyranny that accompanies robot presence by excluding them from our political community. Arjun Sawhney is pursuing his MA in philosophy at Queen’s University and is writing his thesis on robot citizenship. He did he is BA here at the University of Toronto, earning a Specialist in Philosophy.

Global climate change has already begun displacing communities and making refugees of individuals and families, but in the near future, the world is likely to be confronted by climate refugees of a new sort: those whose states are literally flooded into nonexistence by rising sea levels. These “submerged states” would be a new and tragic nexus of a global problem with local consequences—that of erasing the locality altogether. This problem creates special problems for its victims, who I call “climate refugee peoples”—that are irreducibly non-individualistic and cannot be effectively addressed by the individualistic solutions standard in current debates about the human rights of refugees. Moreover, though local self-determination is the crucial issue, it can only be protected through coordinated global action. I focus on climate refugee peoples’ potential claims to stay together, and to stay self-determining. I begin by outlining the problems faced by states vulnerable to submersion and the proportional responsibility of the large, wealthy, polluting states to address these claims. Next, I argue that the Arendtian “right to have rights” may be extended from the individual’s right to belong to some political community to individuals’ right to remain with their own political community when possible, and furthermore to the community’s right to remain intact. I then examine the nature of a people and argue that both shared environment and shared politics form and sustain a people, even after territory loss. Finally, I examine four ways states may attempt to discharge duties owed refugee peoples: resettlement en masse, land cession, semi-autonomous admission, and land reclamation. All four represent great burdens on the discharging states and imperfection solutions for refugee communities, underscoring the need for global coordination to prevent and mitigate the circumstances that will force peoples into refugee status. Alex R. Steers-McCrum is a PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He works on social and political philosophy and critical race theory, with emphases on environmental and indigenous issues.

This essay discusses immigration exclusion on the grounds of cultural preservation. I begin by delineating Joseph Carens’ argument for open borders and his view that democratic policies ought to reflect the values of freedom and equality. Next, I discuss arguments that defend nation-states’ rights to practice immigration exclusion. Miller and Walzer, for instance, both agree that exclusion allows for collective self-determination and the preservation of collective national identity. Furthermore, Stilz’ harm calculus contends that nation-states have a conditional right to immigration exclusion if evidence suggests the potential for political, economic, and social harms to the nation-state and its inhabitants. I proceed to argue against Walzer’s and Miller’s anxieties about cultural preservation, since both physical and virtual travel render true cultural preservation impossible, thereby delegitimating their defenses of immigration exclusion. I also suggest that Walzer’s and Miller’s attachment to the preservation of “national consciousness” may unintentionally support virtual censorship, and that their notions of cultural preservation raise concerns about essentialism. I use Denmark as a case study to show that cultural preservation is not merely a concern about preserving a political culture, but rather that it can also be an anxiety about preserving ethnic culture. I also briefly discuss the ties between cultural preservation, fascism, and nativist ideology. Turning to Stilz’s anxieties about harm, I distinguish between political, economic, and social harms in her calculus. I agree that immigration exclusion on the basis of political and economic harms is legitimate, but argue that the anxiety about social harms suffers from similar pitfalls as cultural preservation. Not only does Stilz wrongly assume that “homogenous” societies hold a single, harmonious conception of “the good”; her harm calculus is also insufficiently robust to distinguish between real and perceived harms. The latter, for instance, are often invisible and deeply rooted in negative stereotypes, but can nonetheless shape important social policy decisions, as seen in the “Muslim Ban” and neo-nativism in the US. Finally, I argue that some cultures are justified in immigration exclusion on the grounds of cultural preservation. These cultures must have been victims of historical, systemic, and systematic marginalization and cultural imperialism, such as indigenous populations and communities of color. I condone a position that is between Carens’ open borders and Stilz anxiety about political and economic harms. In other words, migrants should be protected in their freedom of movement between nation-states, provided nation-states will not suffer from significant political or economic harms. Ultimately, immigration exclusion – i.e. rejecting migrants on the grounds that they are culturally disparate – is not justified on the basis of the anxiety about cultural preservation or the anxiety about social harm. Hilda Loury is a master's student, instructor, and Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. She completed her bachelor's degree in philosophy, with a minor in cognitive science, at the University of California, Los Angeles. She works primarily in aesthetics, cognitive science, and feminist philosophy.

Stanka Radović's work explores space and urban environments in contemporary dystopian fiction, postcolonial literatures and diasporic/migrant literatures, focusing on the interplay between social space and spatial imagination. Marxist, psychogeographic and heterotopian approaches to space inform Radovic's understanding of dystopian, weird and neo-gothic literatures, which are at the center of her current research. Radovic's training and long-standing interest in postcolonial studies (primarily of the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean) permeate her approach to spatial theory by directing her attention to questions of social normativity, class structures and mechanisms of marginalization. Radovic’s first monograph, Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2014) examined narratives of postcolonial spatial dispossession and the contemporary legacies of colonial history in the work of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick Chamoiseau, Baryl Gilroy and Raphael Confiant.

Democracy can be very broadly defined as rule by the people – but who is included in ‘the people’? This problem has become particularly acute in an era of globalization, wherein political boundaries often seem to arbitrarily exclude many individuals from participating in political decisions in which they are deeply invested. Can this exclusion be democratically justified? This question refers to what is often called the ‘boundary problem’ in democratic theory. The intuition among theorists is that the principles which justify democracy might also shed light on the question of who ought to be included in the collective decision-making. In this paper, I will look at two of these principles: Robert Goodin’s all-affected interest principle and Arash Abizadeh’s coercion principle. The problem with these accounts is that they lead to a radically inclusionary conclusion (e.g. a world demos) which fails to take into account the conditions necessary for a properly functioning democracy. This critique seems, however, to suggest that there is an irreconcilable tension at the heart of democratic theory: boundaries are required for democracy to function, but boundaries violate principles internal to democracy. I will argue that this tension is not irreconcilable. Goodin and Abizadeh’s principles misidentify what is undemocratic about boundaries. I contend that boundaries are undemocratic, not because they exclude affected interests, or that they are coercive, but because they violate a principle of political equality. That is, our current system of boundary formation (i.e. border controls) allows for applicants to be discriminated against on the basis of personal attributes. I will argue that this violates a principle of political equality. However, political equality does not require that boundaries be eliminated (thereby violating the conditions necessary for democracy). Rather, the principle of political equality is satisfied if the state uses random selection to determine who from the pool of applicants will be admitted. Mary Jo MacDonald completed a BA in political science and philosophy at McGill University in 2017 and is currently finishing an MA in philosophy at Queen's University. Mary’s research focuses on questions about nationalism and political boundaries in democratic theory.

Much of the discussion in political philosophy has assumed that citizenship in a political community depends upon requisite linguistic and cognitive capacities. Meeting this threshold of cognitive capacity (i.e. the capacity contract) has been a longstanding marker of political inclusion throughout the history of political philosophy. However, the membership model of citizenship has emerged as an alternative to the capacity contract. This model presents a more expansive notion of citizenship and is able to include the historically disenfranchised – namely, children and the cognitively impaired – into the political sphere since the model does not require a threshold of capacities to be met for political inclusion. I will first spell out some of the traditional claims of the capacity contract model. I will then introduce the social membership model, highlighting its more inclusive conception of moral agency. Next, I will offer a way of extending the social membership model to include another non-human species lurking amongst us – namely, robots. I will spend some time showing how robots have been socially integrated into human life and will then examine some different ways that the social membership model might be extended to treat robots as moral agents within human environments. Finally, I will conclude by using the concepts of ‘rights’ and ‘duties,’ which are typically associated with citizenship, to evaluate the presence of robots under these definitions. I will conclude that while robots may have the potential to eventually become right-holders and duty-bearers under both the capacity contract and social membership models of moral agency, we need to safeguard human life from the threat of tyranny that accompanies robot presence by excluding them from our political community. Arjun Sawhney is pursuing his MA in philosophy at Queen’s University and is writing his thesis on robot citizenship. He did he is BA here at the University of Toronto, earning a Specialist in Philosophy.

Global climate change has already begun displacing communities and making refugees of individuals and families, but in the near future, the world is likely to be confronted by climate refugees of a new sort: those whose states are literally flooded into nonexistence by rising sea levels. These “submerged states” would be a new and tragic nexus of a global problem with local consequences—that of erasing the locality altogether. This problem creates special problems for its victims, who I call “climate refugee peoples”—that are irreducibly non-individualistic and cannot be effectively addressed by the individualistic solutions standard in current debates about the human rights of refugees. Moreover, though local self-determination is the crucial issue, it can only be protected through coordinated global action. I focus on climate refugee peoples’ potential claims to stay together, and to stay self-determining. I begin by outlining the problems faced by states vulnerable to submersion and the proportional responsibility of the large, wealthy, polluting states to address these claims. Next, I argue that the Arendtian “right to have rights” may be extended from the individual’s right to belong to some political community to individuals’ right to remain with their own political community when possible, and furthermore to the community’s right to remain intact. I then examine the nature of a people and argue that both shared environment and shared politics form and sustain a people, even after territory loss. Finally, I examine four ways states may attempt to discharge duties owed refugee peoples: resettlement en masse, land cession, semi-autonomous admission, and land reclamation. All four represent great burdens on the discharging states and imperfection solutions for refugee communities, underscoring the need for global coordination to prevent and mitigate the circumstances that will force peoples into refugee status. Alex R. Steers-McCrum is a PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He works on social and political philosophy and critical race theory, with emphases on environmental and indigenous issues.

This essay discusses immigration exclusion on the grounds of cultural preservation. I begin by delineating Joseph Carens’ argument for open borders and his view that democratic policies ought to reflect the values of freedom and equality. Next, I discuss arguments that defend nation-states’ rights to practice immigration exclusion. Miller and Walzer, for instance, both agree that exclusion allows for collective self-determination and the preservation of collective national identity. Furthermore, Stilz’ harm calculus contends that nation-states have a conditional right to immigration exclusion if evidence suggests the potential for political, economic, and social harms to the nation-state and its inhabitants. I proceed to argue against Walzer’s and Miller’s anxieties about cultural preservation, since both physical and virtual travel render true cultural preservation impossible, thereby delegitimating their defenses of immigration exclusion. I also suggest that Walzer’s and Miller’s attachment to the preservation of “national consciousness” may unintentionally support virtual censorship, and that their notions of cultural preservation raise concerns about essentialism. I use Denmark as a case study to show that cultural preservation is not merely a concern about preserving a political culture, but rather that it can also be an anxiety about preserving ethnic culture. I also briefly discuss the ties between cultural preservation, fascism, and nativist ideology. Turning to Stilz’s anxieties about harm, I distinguish between political, economic, and social harms in her calculus. I agree that immigration exclusion on the basis of political and economic harms is legitimate, but argue that the anxiety about social harms suffers from similar pitfalls as cultural preservation. Not only does Stilz wrongly assume that “homogenous” societies hold a single, harmonious conception of “the good”; her harm calculus is also insufficiently robust to distinguish between real and perceived harms. The latter, for instance, are often invisible and deeply rooted in negative stereotypes, but can nonetheless shape important social policy decisions, as seen in the “Muslim Ban” and neo-nativism in the US. Finally, I argue that some cultures are justified in immigration exclusion on the grounds of cultural preservation. These cultures must have been victims of historical, systemic, and systematic marginalization and cultural imperialism, such as indigenous populations and communities of color. I condone a position that is between Carens’ open borders and Stilz anxiety about political and economic harms. In other words, migrants should be protected in their freedom of movement between nation-states, provided nation-states will not suffer from significant political or economic harms. Ultimately, immigration exclusion – i.e. rejecting migrants on the grounds that they are culturally disparate – is not justified on the basis of the anxiety about cultural preservation or the anxiety about social harm. Hilda Loury is a master's student, instructor, and Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. She completed her bachelor's degree in philosophy, with a minor in cognitive science, at the University of California, Los Angeles. She works primarily in aesthetics, cognitive science, and feminist philosophy.

Stanka Radović's work explores space and urban environments in contemporary dystopian fiction, postcolonial literatures and diasporic/migrant literatures, focusing on the interplay between social space and spatial imagination. Marxist, psychogeographic and heterotopian approaches to space inform Radovic's understanding of dystopian, weird and neo-gothic literatures, which are at the center of her current research. Radovic's training and long-standing interest in postcolonial studies (primarily of the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean) permeate her approach to spatial theory by directing her attention to questions of social normativity, class structures and mechanisms of marginalization. Radovic’s first monograph, Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2014) examined narratives of postcolonial spatial dispossession and the contemporary legacies of colonial history in the work of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick Chamoiseau, Baryl Gilroy and Raphael Confiant.

Democracy can be very broadly defined as rule by the people – but who is included in ‘the people’? This problem has become particularly acute in an era of globalization, wherein political boundaries often seem to arbitrarily exclude many individuals from participating in political decisions in which they are deeply invested. Can this exclusion be democratically justified? This question refers to what is often called the ‘boundary problem’ in democratic theory. The intuition among theorists is that the principles which justify democracy might also shed light on the question of who ought to be included in the collective decision-making. In this paper, I will look at two of these principles: Robert Goodin’s all-affected interest principle and Arash Abizadeh’s coercion principle. The problem with these accounts is that they lead to a radically inclusionary conclusion (e.g. a world demos) which fails to take into account the conditions necessary for a properly functioning democracy. This critique seems, however, to suggest that there is an irreconcilable tension at the heart of democratic theory: boundaries are required for democracy to function, but boundaries violate principles internal to democracy. I will argue that this tension is not irreconcilable. Goodin and Abizadeh’s principles misidentify what is undemocratic about boundaries. I contend that boundaries are undemocratic, not because they exclude affected interests, or that they are coercive, but because they violate a principle of political equality. That is, our current system of boundary formation (i.e. border controls) allows for applicants to be discriminated against on the basis of personal attributes. I will argue that this violates a principle of political equality. However, political equality does not require that boundaries be eliminated (thereby violating the conditions necessary for democracy). Rather, the principle of political equality is satisfied if the state uses random selection to determine who from the pool of applicants will be admitted. Mary Jo MacDonald completed a BA in political science and philosophy at McGill University in 2017 and is currently finishing an MA in philosophy at Queen's University. Mary’s research focuses on questions about nationalism and political boundaries in democratic theory.

Much of the discussion in political philosophy has assumed that citizenship in a political community depends upon requisite linguistic and cognitive capacities. Meeting this threshold of cognitive capacity (i.e. the capacity contract) has been a longstanding marker of political inclusion throughout the history of political philosophy. However, the membership model of citizenship has emerged as an alternative to the capacity contract. This model presents a more expansive notion of citizenship and is able to include the historically disenfranchised – namely, children and the cognitively impaired – into the political sphere since the model does not require a threshold of capacities to be met for political inclusion. I will first spell out some of the traditional claims of the capacity contract model. I will then introduce the social membership model, highlighting its more inclusive conception of moral agency. Next, I will offer a way of extending the social membership model to include another non-human species lurking amongst us – namely, robots. I will spend some time showing how robots have been socially integrated into human life and will then examine some different ways that the social membership model might be extended to treat robots as moral agents within human environments. Finally, I will conclude by using the concepts of ‘rights’ and ‘duties,’ which are typically associated with citizenship, to evaluate the presence of robots under these definitions. I will conclude that while robots may have the potential to eventually become right-holders and duty-bearers under both the capacity contract and social membership models of moral agency, we need to safeguard human life from the threat of tyranny that accompanies robot presence by excluding them from our political community. Arjun Sawhney is pursuing his MA in philosophy at Queen’s University and is writing his thesis on robot citizenship. He did he is BA here at the University of Toronto, earning a Specialist in Philosophy.

Global climate change has already begun displacing communities and making refugees of individuals and families, but in the near future, the world is likely to be confronted by climate refugees of a new sort: those whose states are literally flooded into nonexistence by rising sea levels. These “submerged states” would be a new and tragic nexus of a global problem with local consequences—that of erasing the locality altogether. This problem creates special problems for its victims, who I call “climate refugee peoples”—that are irreducibly non-individualistic and cannot be effectively addressed by the individualistic solutions standard in current debates about the human rights of refugees. Moreover, though local self-determination is the crucial issue, it can only be protected through coordinated global action. I focus on climate refugee peoples’ potential claims to stay together, and to stay self-determining. I begin by outlining the problems faced by states vulnerable to submersion and the proportional responsibility of the large, wealthy, polluting states to address these claims. Next, I argue that the Arendtian “right to have rights” may be extended from the individual’s right to belong to some political community to individuals’ right to remain with their own political community when possible, and furthermore to the community’s right to remain intact. I then examine the nature of a people and argue that both shared environment and shared politics form and sustain a people, even after territory loss. Finally, I examine four ways states may attempt to discharge duties owed refugee peoples: resettlement en masse, land cession, semi-autonomous admission, and land reclamation. All four represent great burdens on the discharging states and imperfection solutions for refugee communities, underscoring the need for global coordination to prevent and mitigate the circumstances that will force peoples into refugee status. Alex R. Steers-McCrum is a PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He works on social and political philosophy and critical race theory, with emphases on environmental and indigenous issues.

This essay discusses immigration exclusion on the grounds of cultural preservation. I begin by delineating Joseph Carens’ argument for open borders and his view that democratic policies ought to reflect the values of freedom and equality. Next, I discuss arguments that defend nation-states’ rights to practice immigration exclusion. Miller and Walzer, for instance, both agree that exclusion allows for collective self-determination and the preservation of collective national identity. Furthermore, Stilz’ harm calculus contends that nation-states have a conditional right to immigration exclusion if evidence suggests the potential for political, economic, and social harms to the nation-state and its inhabitants. I proceed to argue against Walzer’s and Miller’s anxieties about cultural preservation, since both physical and virtual travel render true cultural preservation impossible, thereby delegitimating their defenses of immigration exclusion. I also suggest that Walzer’s and Miller’s attachment to the preservation of “national consciousness” may unintentionally support virtual censorship, and that their notions of cultural preservation raise concerns about essentialism. I use Denmark as a case study to show that cultural preservation is not merely a concern about preserving a political culture, but rather that it can also be an anxiety about preserving ethnic culture. I also briefly discuss the ties between cultural preservation, fascism, and nativist ideology. Turning to Stilz’s anxieties about harm, I distinguish between political, economic, and social harms in her calculus. I agree that immigration exclusion on the basis of political and economic harms is legitimate, but argue that the anxiety about social harms suffers from similar pitfalls as cultural preservation. Not only does Stilz wrongly assume that “homogenous” societies hold a single, harmonious conception of “the good”; her harm calculus is also insufficiently robust to distinguish between real and perceived harms. The latter, for instance, are often invisible and deeply rooted in negative stereotypes, but can nonetheless shape important social policy decisions, as seen in the “Muslim Ban” and neo-nativism in the US. Finally, I argue that some cultures are justified in immigration exclusion on the grounds of cultural preservation. These cultures must have been victims of historical, systemic, and systematic marginalization and cultural imperialism, such as indigenous populations and communities of color. I condone a position that is between Carens’ open borders and Stilz anxiety about political and economic harms. In other words, migrants should be protected in their freedom of movement between nation-states, provided nation-states will not suffer from significant political or economic harms. Ultimately, immigration exclusion – i.e. rejecting migrants on the grounds that they are culturally disparate – is not justified on the basis of the anxiety about cultural preservation or the anxiety about social harm. Hilda Loury is a master's student, instructor, and Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. She completed her bachelor's degree in philosophy, with a minor in cognitive science, at the University of California, Los Angeles. She works primarily in aesthetics, cognitive science, and feminist philosophy.