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Reply to My Critics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2021

Anna Stilz Open the ORCID record for Anna Stilz [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

This essay replies to three critics of my book Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration. First, in response to Kit Wellman, I defend the claim that states sometimes have a right against external interference even when their decisions depart from the requirements of social justice. This “right to do wrong” is grounded in respect for a legitimate procedure of collective self-determination, in which the state's members have an important interest. Second, I reply to Michael Blake's concern that there is an inconsistency in my treatment of people's actual wills in politics. I clarify that my view places weight on the actual wills only of “cooperators” (a technical term), and that cooperators’ actual wills matter because they have claims against alien rule. There is no inconsistency in treating political annexation differently from immigration since immigrants rarely threaten to impose alien rule on cooperators. Finally, I address Adom Getachew's concerns about the imperial dimensions of the states system, arguing that my book contains resources for theorizing remedial claims to land in settler colonial societies and other reparative duties of global justice.

Keywords

territoryself-determinationlegitimacycolonialismimmigration
Type
Book Symposium: Territorial Sovereignty
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , Winter 2021 , pp. 527 - 541
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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References

NOTES

1 All Kit Wellman quotes in this essay are taken from his contribution to this symposium: Wellman, Christopher Heath, “Do Legitimate States Have a Right to Do Wrong?,” Ethics & International Affairs 35, no. 4 (Winter 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Wellman, p. 516.

3 Stilz, Anna, Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Niko Kolodny, “Rule over None II: Social Equality and the Justification of Democracy,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 42, no. 4 (Fall 2014), pp. 287–336.

5 Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, p. 107.

6 Ibid., pp. 110, 130.

7 Zofia Stemplowska and Adam Swift, “Dethroning Democratic Legitimacy,” in David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne, and Steven Wall, eds., Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, vol. 4 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 3–27.

8 Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, p. 98.

9 As argued in Stemplowska and Swift, “Dethroning Democratic Legitimacy.”

10 Wellman, p. 517.

11 Ibid., p. 519.

12 Ibid., pp. 518–519.

13 All Michael Blake quotes in this essay are taken from his contribution to this symposium: Michael Blake, “Unwanted Compatriots: Alienation, Migration, and Political Autonomy,” Ethics & International Affairs 35, no. 4 (Winter 2021).

14 A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).

15 Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, p. 115.

16 Ibid., pp. 115, 134.

17 Ibid., p. 115.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., p. 98.

20 A note on terminology: I believe a group of individuals can share an actual will to support their political institutions. Here their shared will refers to both: (a) their separate aggregated wills as individuals, and (b) their joint will to support their institutions as a group. I will use the term “actual will” of a people (singular) to denote the latter. Of course, there is a third option, (c), in which some individuals on a territory might not share in the joint will to support governing institutions—as individuals they might desire entirely different political arrangements. I will use the term “actual wills” to denote the political preferences of individuals, who may either (a) support or (c) dissent from existing arrangements.

21 Blake, p. 493.

22 Ibid., p. 495.

23 Ibid., p. 496.

24 Ibid., p. 497.

25 Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, p. 193.

26 Blake, p. 499.

27 All Adom Getachew quotes in this essay are taken from her contribution to this symposium: Adom Getachew, “The State's Imperial Shadows,” Ethics & International Affairs 35, no. 4 (Winter 2021).

28 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019).

29 Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty, p. 12.

30 Ibid., p. 138.

31 Getachew (2021), p. 510.

32 Francis Paul Prucha, The Indians in American Society: From the Revolutionary War to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); and Colin Gordon Calloway, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2019).

33 Getachew (2021), p. 508.

34 Bacon, David, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), p. 64Google Scholar.

35 Massey, Douglas S., “Why Does Immigration Occur? A Theoretical Synthesis,” in Hirschman, Charles, Kasinitz, Philip, DeWind, Josh, eds., The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999)Google Scholar; and National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2017)Google Scholar.