The boundary problem in normative democratic theory is the problem of who should be entitled to participate in which democratic decision-making. The boundary problem is at the heart of many pressing political issues, including voting rights of resident aliens in their host countries and of expats in their home countries, the legitimacy of border regimes, the justifiability of global democracy, and the democratic representation of future generations. The two most popular answers to the boundary problem are the all-affected interests principle and the all-subjected principle. According to the all-affected interests principle, all (and only) persons whose interests are affected by a democratic decision should be entitled to participate in making that decision. According to the all-subjected principle, all (and only) persons who are subject to a democratic decision should be entitled to participate in making that decision, where being subject is spelled out either in terms of being legally bound or in terms of being exposed to coercion. A well-known challenge for the proposed solutions to the boundary problem is posed by tourists. Tourists seem to be affected in their interests and subject in the relevant sense by democratic decisions in their host countries. But we would not normally consider tourists entitled to participate in the making of such decisions. In this paper, I examine the most natural responses to the challenge of tourists and argue that both the all-affected interests principle and the all-subjected principle are on the horns of a dilemma. The dilemma arises because responses that yield intuitively plausible verdicts about tourists on the other hand commit their advocates to implausible verdicts about dying citizens.

This book develops an original version of act-consequentialism. It argues that act-consequentialists should adopt a subjective criterion of rightness. The book develops new arguments which strongly suggest that, according to the best version of act-consequentialism, the rightness of actions depends on expected rather than actual value. Its findings go beyond the debate about consequentialism and touch on important debates in normative ethics and metaethics. The distinction between criterion of rightness and decision procedures addresses how, why, and in which sense moral theories must be implemented by ordinary persons. The discussion of the rationales of "ought" implies "can" leads to the discovery of a hitherto overlooked moral principle, "ought" implies "evidence", which can be used to show that most prominent moral theories are false. Finally, in the context of discussing cases that are supposed to reveal intuitions that favour either objective or subjective consequentialism, the book argues that which cases are relevant for the discussion of objectivism and subjectivism depends on the type of moral theory we are concerned with (consequentialism, Kantianism, virtue ethics, etc.). From Value to Rightness will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in normative ethics and metaethics.

Some philosophers hold that unstructured groups themselves, as opposed to the members of these groups, can have moral duties. There are different accounts of how such collective duties might be grounded in facts about individual duties of the group members. In this paper, I highlight and discuss some questions for these accounts that seem to warrant more exploration than they have received so far. First, if there is a collective duty to ϕ that is grounded in individual duties, how does ϕ-ing feature in the individual duties? The accounts that ground a collective duty to ϕ in individual duties specify these individual duties with reference to ϕ-ing. But if a collective duty to ϕ is grounded in individual duties, then, on pain of circularity, the individual duties cannot be specified in terms of a collective duty to ϕ . Second, are the individual duties that ground collective moral duties themselves also moral duties? Or are the individual duties, rather, rational duties? I will suggest that the individual duties should be classified neither as purely moral nor as purely rational, but rather as rational duties of moral agents. Finally, are the grounding individual duties perspective-dependent, i.e., do they depend on the epistemic situation of the members, as several philosophers have suggested? I argue that accounts of collective obligations should not commit themselves to an answer to this question, but rather leave the question to general ethical theories that do not focus on contexts of collective duties.