Michael Blake: Justice, Migration, & Mercy
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Michael Blake: Justice, Migration, & Mercy New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Hardcover (ISBN 9780190879556) € 25.54. 266 + ix pp. Mario Josue Cunningham Matamoros 1 Accepted: 5 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Joseph Carens' (1987, 2013) view of restrictive citizenship as the modern equivalent of feudal privilege in Western liberal democracies has shaped much of the contemporary debate of migration ethics. If this view is right, then liberal justice requires open borders to avoid the unwanted outcomes of this arbitrary privilege (Bertram 2018). Nonetheless, many scholars argue against this position. The right to exclude would-be immigrants through closed borders, they say, follows from the right to democratic self-determination (Song 2019), from freedom of association (Wellman 2008), and moreover, such a right is necessary for liberal democratic societies to flourish (Miller 2016). In “Justice, Migration, & Mercy” (2020), Michael Blake criticizes earlier attempts to ground the right of states to exclude would-be immigrants and offers a novel justification for it: the jurisdictional theory. According to Blake, the book pursues two main goals: i) to offer a full-fledged version of his jurisdictional theory as a justification of the right to exclude, and ii) to introduce the concept of political mercy into migration policy discussions. Thus, he divides the book into ten chapters. The first three discuss the main arguments for and against the right to exclude. The following four chapters present and flesh out the jurisdictional argument in favor of exclusion. Finally, the last three develop the concept of political mercy. In the first chapter, Blake sets out the scope, methodological commitments, and underlying assumptions of the book. Regarding its scope, this book does not develop a complete moral theory of migration. On the contrary, it has a clear focus on states’ right to exclude, and its limitations. Methodologically, Blake follows the institutional conservative approach by taking real existing institutions as a given and focusing on their justification in light of liberal principles. Now, as for the conceptual premises underlying Blake’s argument, they comprise a) a conception of autonomy as a fundamental right; b) the view of the state as a necessary institution for the enforcement of collective norms; c) the assumption that all coercion requires a context-dependent justification; and, d) a structural distinction between human and civil rights.
* Mario Josue Cunningham Matamoros [email protected]
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KU Leuven, Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte (RIPPLE), Kardinaal Mercierplein 2, 3000 Leuven, Vlaams-Brabant, Belgium
M. J. Cunningham Matamoros
Chapter 2, then delves into the arguments against the right to exclude and classifies them in four groups: arbitrariness (Carens 2013; Kukathas 2012), distributive justice (Carens 2013; Oberman 2015), coherence with mobility rights (Carens 2013), and coercion (Abizadeh 2007). Blake points out that none of these arguments for open borders suc
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