¹ Benhabib, Seyla, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² The term “boundary problem,” as Robert Goodin rightly notes, makes the problem appear more geographic than it necessarily is. See Goodin's “Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 35 (2007): 40Google Scholar. Yet given its ubiquity in the literature, I will employ this term here as well.

³ Goodin, “Enfranchising,” 46.

⁴ Dahl, Robert, After the Revolution? Authority in a Good Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 60–61 Google Scholar.

⁵ Hannah Arendt notes how the term “constitution” refers both to an act and to its result in On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), 145Google Scholar; Charles Taylor admits that “there is something paradoxical about a people that can preside over its own political birth.” See his Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 176Google Scholar. See also Mouffe, Chantal, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁶ Whelan, Frederick G., “Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem,” in Nomos XXV: Liberal Democracy, ed. Pennock, J. R. and Chapman, J. W. (New York: New York University Press, 1983), 42Google Scholar.

⁷ Näsström, Sofia, “The Legitimacy of the People,” Political Theory 35 (2007): 626Google Scholar. See also Doucet, Marc G., “The Democratic Paradox and Cosmopolitan Democracy,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34 (2005): 137–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Arrhenius, Gustaf, “The Boundary Problem in Democratic Theory,” in Democracy Unbound: Basic Explorations, ed. Tersman, Folke (Stockholm: Filosofiska Institutionen, Stockholms Universitet, 2005), 22.Google Scholar

⁹ Agné, Hans, “Why Democracy Must Be Global: Self-Founding and Democratic Intervention,” International Theory 2 (2010): 383CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Goodin, “Enfranchising.”

¹¹ Abizadeh, Arash, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders,” Political Theory 36 (2008): 38, 45, 48Google Scholar.

¹² “The unbounded demos thesis does not, of course, rule out the potential legitimacy of political borders and differentiated jurisdictions. It simply confirms that the existence of political borders and their regimes of control require [democratic] justification” (Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion,” 49).

¹³ See Espejo, Paulina Ochoa, “People, Territory, and Legitimacy in Democratic States,” American Journal of Political Science 58 (2014): 466–478 Google Scholar, and the references therein.

¹⁴ See, e.g. Carens, Joseph, “Aliens and Citizens,” Review of Politics 49 (1987): 251–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carens, , The Ethics of Immigration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ When speaking of democratic theory “specifying the composition of the demos” (or when speaking of “specifying the demos democratically”), I will be referring both to the direct question of who is included in the demos and to the indirect question of what are the criteria in light of which individuals are included in the demos. We might employ democratic theory to try to specify answers to either, or both, of these questions.

¹⁶ In fact, I believe that the arguments I will advance here are compatible with any sensible definition of democratic political theory. But it will nonetheless be useful to have even this fairly brief definition in hand, if only in order to fix terms.

¹⁷ This seems to be the general thrust of Goodin's view, implicit for instance in his emphasis on the fact that “constituting the demos is the first step in constructing a democracy…. Until we have an electorate we cannot have an election” (Goodin, “Enfranchising,” 43). The same sense of urgency underlies Näsström's repeated insistence that democrats must care about “the legitimacy of the people” just as they care about the legitimacy of government.

¹⁸ Consider Rawls's theory of justice, for example. Rawls takes a government's duty to treat all citizens with equal respect as a fundamental point of departure. But would we say that Rawls's theory remains incomplete unless it employs the original position, the veil of ignorance, or some other key idea internal to the theory itself to explain why equal respect must be our point of departure?

¹⁹ In saying this, I do not mean to deny that different people might have different pretheoretical “fixed points,” and more generally that normative judgments intuitive for some might be less intuitive for others. Yet I am nonetheless going to assume that even philosophers who explicitly aim to “liberate” us from the hold of certain intuitions ultimately have to appeal to other intuitions in order to do so. One especially clear example among many from the literature on global affairs is Unger, Peter, Living High and Letting Die (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Hence even the most ardent defenders of states’ rights to exclude would-be immigrants admit that these rights are not absolute but can be overridden when confronted with absolute calamities (see, e.g,. Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice [New York: Basic Books, 1983], 62Google Scholar; Wellman, Christopher, “In Defense of the Right to Exclude,” in Debating the Ethics of Immigration: Is There a Right to Exclude?, by Wellman, Christopher and Cole, Phillip [New York: Oxford University Press, 2011], 36)Google Scholar.

²¹ Another way of making the same point: would we think that the boundary problem deserves much philosophical scrutiny, if we knew that these moral judgments are the most we can hope to derive from such scrutiny?

²² This metaethical view obviously applies beyond the particular issue of how to compose the demos, and is relevant to moral philosophy in general. Bernard Williams, for example, expresses a very similar view when insisting that our judgments about basic moral prohibitions are more fundamental than any systematic theory that might be employed to try to explain them. This insistence drives Williams's famous quip: “‘You can't kill that, it's a child’ is more convincing as a reason than any reason which might be advanced for its being a reason” ( Williams, , Moral Luck [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

²³ Goodin, for example, is worried about such an approach in “Enfranchising,” 46–47.

²⁴ Note that if this reasoning is cogent, then it is somewhat beside the point to debate (as Dahl and Schumpeter for example have) whether political institutions or practices that clearly violate our most basic moral norms can count as democratic under certain circumstances (see Schumpeter, Joseph, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. [New York: Harper, 1950], 244–45Google Scholar, and Dahl's response in “Procedural Democracy,” in Philosophy, Politics and Society, ed. Laslett, Peter and Fishkin, James [Oxford: Blackwell, 1979], 111–12)Google Scholar. Thus, for instance, since we rule out blatantly racist political institutions and practices ab initio, there is little need to debate whether the internal decision procedures of a racist ruling group can ever qualify as “democratic,” as if this adjective could provide us even with pro tanto moral reasons that we then need to defeat through countervailing moral reasons. Morality as such clearly tells us that racist politics are never an option to begin with. We need go no further.

²⁵ See, e.g., Cohen, Joshua, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Benhabib, Seyla (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 102Google Scholar.

²⁶ Proponents of BPR often take it for granted that exclusion as such is morally illegitimate—that it is necessarily illegitimate “to delimit the people through a political process which begins with the exclusion of some people” (Agné, “Why Democracy Must Be Global,” 387). And of course some kinds of exclusion require justification (see, e.g., Michael Blake, “The Right to Exclude,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 17 [2014]: 521–37). Upon reflection, however, few would be willing to say that all exclusion is illegitimate as such (thus, for instance, the fact that academic institutions routinely exclude job candidates whose research interests do not fit institutional priorities is certainly not illegitimate as such). Exclusion is not automatically morally reprehensible simply qua exclusion.

²⁷ Näsström, “Legitimacy of the People,”  626 and passim.

²⁸ Song, Sarah, “The Boundary Problem in Democratic Theory: Why the Demos Should Be Bounded By the State,” International Theory 4, no. 1 (2012): 39–68 Google Scholar.

²⁹ Cabrera, Luis, “Individual Rights and the Democratic Boundary Problem,” International Theory 6, no. 2 (2014): 224–54Google Scholar.

³⁰ Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion,” 44–45.

³¹ Ibid., 38, 45, 48.

³² Ibid., 41.

³³ Ibid., 57.

³⁴ Abizadeh, , “On the Demos and Its Kin: Nationalism, Democracy, and the Boundary Problem,” American Political Science Review 106 (2012): 878Google Scholar.

³⁵ Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to address this objection.

³⁶ For example, that even a single family member who proves minimal linguistic competence can “win” legal residence and ultimately citizenship for his/her entire family; or that those who can prove special difficulties in acquiring linguistic competence—say, owing to medical reasons—will be exempted from the linguistic competence requirement altogether; or that this requirement will be dropped in case an outsider marries a citizen.

³⁷ This might be a good place to note how my argument to relates to Wellman's critique of Abizadeh's position (See Wellman, “In Defense of the Right to Exclude,” 97–98). Wellman holds that agents can permissibly coerce others in order to protect their rights over those things regarding which they “occupy a privileged position” (such as property rights), even without democratic approval by the coerced. Wellman thus shares my claim that something other than coercion must be driving Abizadeh's argument. Yet there are three key differences between Wellman's position and my own. First, Wellman's view actually presupposes, rather than defends, the “privileged position” that is key to his argument. It might be true, for instance, that one's “privileged position” with regard to one's property permits one to coercively exclude others from the property. But Abizadeh might say that this permission depends on the property regime being enacted democratically. Since the “symmetrical world” scenario is less vulnerable to this rejoinder, it shows better why the burden rests with Abizadeh to motivate his coercion argument. Second, Wellman's position pivots on the freedom of association of citizens of would-be receiving states: Wellman holds that this freedom is morally significant to such a degree that it would almost always trump potential immigrants’ moral claims to entry, even when these potential immigrants “desperately want to enter” (ibid., 13). But, as Michael Blake for example notes, it is far from obvious why we should see freedom of association as so overwhelmingly important (see Blake's “Immigration, Jurisdiction, and Exclusion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 41 [2013]: 106–7). This is another vulnerability that my argument avoids. Third, unlike Wellman, my argument is compatible with thinking that the needs of the world's impoverished and oppressed generate very strong, and typically decisive, reasons to provide them with legal rights of residence in countries they wish to enter. My point is simply that these reasons are entirely independent of the democratic boundary problem.

³⁸ David Miller accordingly tries to show, against Abizadeh, that although immigration controls constrain individual freedom, they should not be thought of as coercive (see Miller, David, “Why Immigration Controls Are Not Coercive: A Reply to Arash Abizadeh,” Political Theory 38 [2010]: 111–20Google Scholar). I do not wish to take a stance on whether Miller's argument succeeds: I believe one can be persuaded by my claims here independently of what one makes of Miller's reasoning.

³⁹ See for example Buchanan, Allen, “Political Legitimacy and Democracy,” Ethics 112 (2002): 689–719 Google Scholar; Christiano, Thomas, “The Authority of Democracy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 12 (2004): 266–90Google Scholar; Christiano, , The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Viehoff, Daniel, “Democratic Equality and Political Authority,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 42 (2014): 337–75Google Scholar; Kolodny, Niko, “Rule Over None II: Social Equality and the Justification of Democracy,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 42 (2014): 287–336 Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ As Viehoff (“Democratic Equality and Political Authority,” 337–38) puts it, “we can at least sometimes respond to someone who asks why she ought to obey a law: ‘Because this law was made democratically, via procedures in which all of us had an equal say; and by disobeying it you fail to respect our equality.’”

⁴¹ It is important to be precise about what this duty and does not mean. To hold that (in certain circumstances) citizens have a moral duty to obey the law qua law is to hold that citizens ought to treat the law as having practical authority over them: for practical purposes, citizens must (normally) suspend their own judgment on the matters that the law regulates, and treat the directives of the legal system as binding (see the seminal discussion in Raz's, Joseph The Morality of Freedom [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986]Google Scholar; see also Shapiro, Scott, “Authority,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law, ed. Coleman, Jules L. and Shapiro, Scott [New York: Oxford University Press, 2002])Google Scholar. Therefore, if we are saying that under certain conditions the duty to obey the law qua law does not obtain, we are not necessarily licensing disobedience. Rather, we are only saying that citizens should no longer have the strong presumption that they must suspend their own practical judgment when confronted with the law.

⁴² I am putting aside the question of how best to explain this more radical idea (for example, whether this idea is best grounded in solidarity with the victims of grave injustice, in a moral right not to be complicit in such injustice, or in some alternative reason).

⁴³ To be clear: I am not trying here to commit Abizadeh to the view that both of these cases are equally morally wrong. Abizadeh could perfectly argue that one of these cases is—all things considered—morally worse than the other. My claim is only that, given Abizadeh's premises, both wrongs would undermine the law's general authority, and therefore citizens’ general political obligation (to compare: we may think that all serial human rights violations undermine the general authority of the states perpetrating these violations, even if some such violations are clearly worse than others). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

⁴⁴ Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion,” 58.

⁴⁵ Abizadeh, “On the Demos and Its Kin,” 868. This interpretation also goes against the thrust of Abizadeh's argument more generally. For Abizadeh continually strives to show (including in a detailed appendix) that all foreigners, “even those who never present themselves at the border or never seek citizenship,” are “really subject to border coercion” (Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion,” 57).

⁴⁶ Cf. Simmons, A. John, “Consent Theory for Libertarians,” Social Philosophy & Policy 22 (2005): 330–56Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ These claims follow Shapiro, Ian, Democratic Justice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 32–34 Google Scholar; Christiano, “Authority of Democracy,” 277–80. We can perhaps imagine yet another objection to my reductio. Some may want to say that we can think about the legal system in a more differentiated manner: citizens’ ordinary duty to pay their taxes, for example, could remain intact even if neither they nor outsiders have a moral duty to obey a unilaterally imposed border control regime. But the essential point here concerns the legal system's general claim to authority, rather than the question whether the balance of moral reasons ultimately favors compliance with some specific laws (recall note 41). More precisely, the thought is that laws made through egalitarian procedures have special authority, which legal systems without egalitarian credentials cannot claim. However, the egalitarian basis for this special claim to general authority clearly goes away when the content of fundamental laws flatly contradicts any defensible interpretation of the value of equality itself. A legal system that instantiates official racial segregation, for example, cannot claim to embody the value of equality, and therefore cannot demand in the name of equality that citizens obey any laws they believe to be unjust. Yet, on Abizadeh's reasoning, a border control regime that is unilaterally imposed on outsiders presumably has a similar systemic effect. If we believe that respect for outsiders’ equal moral standing requires giving them a say over border control regimes, then legally coercing billions of outsiders through such regimes, without giving them such a say, takes away the basic egalitarian credentials of the relevant legal system as a whole—and thus takes away the relevant legal system's general claim to authority.

⁴⁸ Goodin, “Enfranchising,” 50. Arrhenius (“Boundary Problem in Democratic Theory,” 21–23) also holds that the “all affected principle” is “a promising candidate” for defining the demos, emphasizing its prevalence in contemporary democratic theory.

⁴⁹ Carol Gould has given much critical attention to these problems. See for example her Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, esp. chaps. 7 and 9. Rogers Smith emphasizes other problems with the principle of affected interests in his “The Principle of Constituted Identities and the Obligation to Include,” Ethics & Global Politics 1 (2008): 139–53Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ See, e.g., Dworkin, Ronald, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, chap. 4.

⁵¹ Arneson, Richard, “Debate: Defending the Purely Instrumental Account of Democratic Legitimacy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 11 (2003): 126CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² Some may want to object that even if X is instrumentalists’ first priority, they still need to answer the question “X for whom?” But there is no reason to think that this answer will come from the democratic boundary problem. It is much more likely to come (indeed, arguably, it will have to come) from a normative argument that is entirely independent of the problem. In Goodin's case, this argument might be traced to a certain view of the universal impartiality that is constitutive of morality, and that shows how our duties to our fellow citizens have crucial universal foundations. Goodin holds that “special duties,” that is, those duties “that we have toward particular individuals because they stand in some special relation to us,” turn out to derive “the whole of their moral force” from the “moral force of the general duties that we have toward other people, merely because they are people.” See Goodin, , “What Is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?,” Ethics 98 (1988): 663, 679CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ See, e.g., Griffin, Christopher, “Democracy as a Non-Instrumentally Just Procedure,” Journal of Political Philosophy 11 (2003): 111–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁴ E.g., Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy.”

⁵⁵ E.g., Gould, Carol C., Rethinking Democracy: Freedom and Social Cooperation in Politics, Economy, and Society (New York: Cambridge University Press: 1988)Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ “A people,” Rousseau writes, “is in any case always master to change its laws, even the best of them; for if it pleases to harm itself, who has the right to prevent it from doing so?” ( Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Gourevitch, Victor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 80Google Scholar).

⁵⁷ Here, as in many other points, I concur with Saunders, Ben, “Defining the Demos,” Politics, Philosophy & Economics 11 (2011): 280–301 Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ See Dahl's protests against “guardianship” as quintessentially antidemocratic in Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ See, e.g., Cabrera, “Individual Rights and the Democratic Boundary Problem.”

⁶⁰ Goodin, , Utilitarianism as Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 127–29Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Ibid., 129.

⁶² Goodin does want to argue that these views are compatible with democracy. Thus for example he writes, “being judged by voters in the longer term and in a more general way for their superintendence of the citizenry's interests, representatives can do for the people what is truly in their interests but which they would find it psychologically difficult to do for themselves. Being ultimately democratically accountable, they would be unable to do too much that was not in the citizenry's longer-term and more general interests, otherwise they would not win re-election” (Utilitarianism as Public Philosophy, 129). But it is unclear what is the basis of these claims. One may argue that many people consistently vote against what could be understood as their interests from certain “objective” viewpoints, and, at least in these contexts, it remains unclear why Goodin's utilitarian approach would endorse democracy at all.

⁶³ See Owen, David, “Constituting the Polity, Constituting the Demos: On the Place of the All Affected Interests Principle in Democratic Theory and in Resolving the Democratic Boundary Problem,” Ethics & Global Politics 5 (2012): 134–35Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ Saunders, “Defining the Demos,” 281.