On the shared-ends account of close friendship, proper care for a friend as an agent requires seeing yourself as having important reasons to accommodate and promote the friend's valuable ends for the friend's own sake. However, that friends share ends doesn't inoculate them against disagreements about how to pursue those ends. This essay defends the claim that, in certain circumstances of reasonable disagreement, proper care for a friend as a practical and moral agent requires allowing your friend's judgment to decide what you are to do, even when you disagree with that judgment (and even when the judgment is in fact mistaken). In these instances, your friendship can make it the case that you may not act on your own practical and even moral judgments because, at those times, you have a duty as their close friend to defer to their judgments. As a result, treating your friend properly as a responsible agent can require that you assist them in committing what may in fact be serious moral wrongs.

In his recent book Democratic Authority, David Estlund defends a strikingly new and interesting account of political authority, one that makes use of a distinctive kind of hypothetical consent that he calls 'normative consent': a person can come to have a duty to obey another when it is the case that, were she given the chance to consent to the duty, she would have a duty to consent to it. If successful, Estlund's account promises to provide what has arguably so far remained elusive: the basis for the authority of suitably democratic laws. In this paper, I argue that, despite its promise, the account Estlund develops is, in a crucial respect, incoherent: the principle of normative consent that he offers relies on a claim about a hypothetical situation, but the hypothetical situation at issue is one that, according to the principle itself, is morally impossible.

According to Kant’s assurance argument, I am not bound in the state of nature to restrain myself from violating your rights, for I cannot be confident that you will similarly restrain yourself when it comes to my rights. Our status as equals requires that, if I am to be bound to respect your rights, I must have assurance that you will similarly respect mine, and this assurance is something that can only be provided by some entity whose coercive power over us is not only clearly dominant over us both but also directed at us equally. I argue that Kant’s assurance argument provides the basis for an important challenge to the American legal system’s claim to legitimate authority. This is, in one sense, a surprising result, since Kant is infamous for holding a particularly undemanding conception of legitimacy. I use the example of wage and hour laws: though the law define a worker’s wage rights, the legal system fails to enforce them against employers, thus leaving the worker without the assurance of the security of her rights that, on Kant’s assurance argument, she is entitled as a free and equal citizen.

Recent debate in the literature on political obligation about the principle of fairness rests on a mistake. Despite the widespread assumption to the contrary, a person can have a duty of fairness to share in the burdens of sustaining some cooperative scheme even though that scheme does not represent a net benefit to her. Recognizing this mistake allows for a resolution of the stalemate between those who argue that the mere receipt of some public good from a scheme can generate a duty of fairness and those who argue that only some voluntary action of consent or acceptance of the good can generate such a duty. I defend a version of the principle of fairness that holds that it is the person’s reliance on a scheme for the provision of some product or service that generates duties of fairness to share in the burdens of sustaining the scheme. And, on this version, the principle of fairness is politically significant: regardless of whether the citizen has a duty to obey the law, she will still have important political duties of fairness generated by her reliance on the various public goods provided by those society-wide cooperative schemes sustained by the sacrifices of her fellow citizens.

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