Justified Coercion, Political Cooperation, and Exemption from General Laws
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10189261 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ian Macmullen (0000-0002-0923-1855, California University of Pennsylvania, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 85 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 153-165 |
| Publication date | 2022-04-14 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Politics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-3816 • E-ISSN: 1468-2508 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/720328 |
| OpenAlex | W4224068283 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
When, if ever, should people be exempted from a law because they cannot, given their particular beliefs and values, see the force of the reasons for that law? Such exemptions, often requested by religious and cultural minority groups, enhance the cooperative character of democratic government by eliminating instances in which some citizens must experience their subjection to state power as mere coercion. I defend three claims. First, the value of political cooperation is sometimes but not always pivotal in the moral evaluation of mere coercion. Second, political cooperation has both intrinsic and instrumental value, but the latter should not usually determine judgments about exemptions. Third, the relational costs of subjecting someone to mere coercion are neither binary nor proportional to the extent of that coercion. My model of these costs reveals the types of cases in which the absence of accessible reasons is most and least likely to warrant exemptions
Coercion (linguistics · Democracy · Economics · Government (linguistics · Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Warrant · Free Will and Agency · Law · Political Philosophy and Ethics · War, Ethics, and Justification
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |