---
bibtex: @article{simmons2013democratic,
title={Democratic Authority and the Boundary Problem},
author={Simmons, A John},
journal={Ratio Juris},
volume={26},
number={3},
pages={326--357},
year={2013},
publisher={Wiley Online Library}
}
---
Modern states are territorial entities that claim rights. One type of right is the claim of territorial sovereignty & political authority within borders. Simmons contends that functional or structural accounts of a state's political authority (a la Kant & Rawls) cannot solve the boundary problem.
His argument is thus: the democratic Kantian may succeed in justify why we must obey some democratic state but fails to explain why we must obey this democratic state.
His conclusion is to bite the bullet and accept that ideal theory can't deal with the boundary problem, but non-ideal theory can claim the pressing matters of distributive justice can counter the ideal problems raised by the Boundary Problem.
"Both historical and structural factors seem to most of us relevant to determining what counts as a just distribution of, say, property." p327
"theories of political authority can similarly locate the source of states’ (or governments’) rights in either structural features of states for instance, in the justice of their distributive institutions or in their democratic constitutions or in historical facts about how they acquired their control over persons and territories." p327
"It is this kind of pluralism in our account of territorial authority that I think is resisted by the Kantian tradition in political philosophy." p328
"The particularity requirement states that theories of political obligation ... must ... explain why a person’s political obligations are owed specially to one particular political society ... over all others" p328
Utilitarian or other accounts that show why we have obligations to an authority don't show which authority. "Domestic utility is not to be preferred to foreign utility, except for purely circumstantial reasons." p328
"A theory of political obligation and authority should explain why all and only those naturally identified as a political society’s members are specially bound to that particular political society." p329
"A theory of political obligation and authority should explain why all and only those naturally identified as a political society’s members are specially bound to that particular political society. The boundary problem is the problem faced by such a theory of providing an argument that draws the “boundaries” of political obligation, political authority, and territorial sovereignty in the correct place." p329
The neo-kantian school is partly a backlash against contemporary skeptiscism about political authority and would include "David Estlund (2008), Thomas Christiano (2008), Scott Shapiro (2002), Anna Stilz (2009), Jeremy Waldron (1999a, esp. chap. 5), " p330
"In order to create a “districted” solution in a world of more-or-less continuous population, however, boundary lines between districts will have to be drawn in more-or-less arbitrary ways—or, at least, in ways no longer guided simply by “natural” facts about who will inevitably interact with whom." p332
"If existing political boundaries fail to reflect “morally respectable” solutions to the problem of the need for localized justice, why should we take the legitimate territorial jurisdictions of existing states or the genuine political obligations of their claimed subjects to be determined by such a morally tainted process?" p332
"Kantian option, one state looks to be as good as another for first-stage purposes (within obvious limits); what is called for by the first-stage argument is only membership in a state (with a certain acceptable structure), not membership in any particular established state." p333
" In the first place, so long as boundaries need to be drawn somewhere in a world in which population is virtually continuous over the face of the earth, there are indefinitely many ways to draw such boundaries that will respect the command to district people with those with whom they are side by side." p335
"Legislative or judicial intent alone cannot give authority or ground obligation." p336
"Great argumentative ingenuity has been employed in explaining why democratic solutions to disagreements within some group are to be preferred to alternative solutions. But there is little attention focused on explaining why any particular grouping of persons counts as one to which any single conflict-resolution procedure, democratic or not, may be legitimately applied." p339
"The nature of the problem for democratic theory is clear. Democratic solutions to conflicts of interest (or preference) are plainly not naturally authoritative. " p339
"What they lack, of course, is the prior authority to impose on the class any procedure—democratic or not—for resolving disagreements in the group which consists of them plus me." p339
"The nature of the group—and how one comes to be a part of the group—makes all the difference in whether or not any conflict-resolution procedure can be authoritative for the group" p340
"The fact that democratic procedures are not naturally authoritative is, of course, what produces the boundary problem for theories of democratic authority." p341
"Whatever we may think of those standards, forcible subjection still looks like a palpable moral wrong even independent of the standards, a wrong that simply cannot result in the wronged parties having exactly the same obligations toward the state that has wronged them as do the native-born citizens to whom (we can allow here) no such wrong has been done." p341
"And democratic participation can only success- fully retain its “consensual look” if participation actually alters the moral position of those who participate, relative to the position of those who decline to do so" p345
"It is rather the prior problem of determining who is legitimately included in the collective in the first place, and so who is legitimately subject to whatever conflict-resolution procedure is utilized by the collective." p346
"Political authorities are tasked to solve distinctive kinds of coordination problems and prevent catastrophic social chaos, and these problems (their “urgent tasks”), while global, must be solved locally." p347
"One cannot be obligated to do one’s fair share in a cooperative enterprise unless one legitimately counts as a member of the cooperating group in the first place." p349
"one simply cannot defend a plausible theory of domestic justice and legitimacy without first identifying the persons and territories that count as rightfully inside and rightfully outside a state’s boundaries of authority." p351
"One could argue, for instance, that while nonideal theory should aim at the eventual achievement of a political ideal that includes both full structural and full historical political rightness, the most imperative of the permissible and feasible steps on the path toward that ideal is structural change in the domestic institutions of states. " p355
"But it would be an issue on which we should not now concentrate our attention in the nonideal theorizing that should govern practical politics." p356