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Just Waiting: The Ethics of Queues and Waiting Lists

https://politicalphilosophyjournal.org/article/id/27910/

Published: April 17, 2026 04:53

Queues are pervasive in our world, determining our entitlement or order of access to goods ranging from hospital appointments and organ transplants to concert tickets and supermarket tills. This paper argues that queues have an important role to play in…

Ideal Theory as Fetishism

https://politicalphilosophyjournal.org/article/id/27637/

Published: April 15, 2026 21:07

This paper revisits the debate on ideal and nonideal theory by taking seriously Charles Mills’s suggestion that it should be understood as a dispute between idealism and materialism. I argue that by understanding different sides of the debates as relying…

Lean Out! On the Morality of Engaging in Positional Competitions

https://politicalphilosophyjournal.org/article/id/26050/

Published: February 20, 2026 21:04

The orthodox position in the literature on positional goods posits that although positional competitions are socially undesirable, inefficient, and unfair, individuals are reasonable and justified to engage in them. Contrary to that position, this paper…

Honesty and Bad Faith

https://politicalphilosophyjournal.org/article/id/24835/

Published: February 18, 2026 13:23

An appealing account of dishonesty subsumes it under the paradigm of lying. However, the account faces clear trouble from a wide range of cases, including cases of bullshit and brazen dishonesty. Such cases show not only that lying is inessential to…

State system legitimacy, assigned responsibilities, and the moral right to exclude

https://politicalphilosophyjournal.org/article/id/26181/

Published: January 9, 2026 09:41

Contrary to the conventional view that a state’s moral right to exclude is limited in various ways but unconditional, it’s been claimed that each state’s possession of such a right depends on the legitimacy of the state system of which it is part. I argue…

Survey Article:  When and What Is the “Hinge of History”?

https://politicalphilosophyjournal.org/article/id/24674/

Published: December 22, 2025 21:57

The concept of "the hinge of history" suggests a unique period in which human actions have unprecedented and potentially irreversible consequences for the long-term future of civilization. This paper critically examines the coherence and utility of this…

The Value of Climate Despair

https://politicalphilosophyjournal.org/article/id/19788/

Published: December 12, 2025 08:50

Given the current and future suffering associated with human-made climate change and the lack of political action in response to it, it seems only natural to feel despair. However, despair has a bad reputation among climate ethicists and in the wider…

How Prisons Silence

https://politicalphilosophyjournal.org/article/id/25033/

Published: November 27, 2025 03:49

Free speech is a core value of liberal democracies, but for 1.8 million incarcerated Americans, it is largely inaccessible. Incarcerated people have scarce access to phone calls and in-person visits, are prohibited from using social media, and face severe…

Over-intelligibility

https://politicalphilosophyjournal.org/article/id/24931/

Published: October 28, 2025 14:26

Contemporary philosophers have argued that framing new concepts can bring about both moral and epistemic progress. In this paper, I argue that such intelligibility also has downsides. This paper introduces the phenomenon of [...]

Survey Article: Unfounded Pessimism about Electoral Accountability

https://politicalphilosophyjournal.org/article/id/23037/

Published: October 28, 2025 08:00

Faced with the failures of existing democracies, many democratic theorists conclude from recent empirical work in political science critical of the functioning of electoral institutions that citizens are too ignorant to hold office-holders to account and…