This essay develops an account of when migration is voluntary. I point out that the decision to migrate is often made by groups, not individuals, and argue that these groups are often best understood as plural agents. I offer a definition of voluntarism in migration apt to cases of singular and plural agency. (Paper is undergoing R&R. Draft available on request.)

Philosophers tend to think of migration as an expression of individual agency. By contrast, migration policy decisions are cast as matters of collective self-determination. In this essay, I argue that we’ve gotten the accounts wrong: economic migration is a collective practice, and may both express and enable the collective self-determination of sending communities.

I argue that remittance-oriented migration embodies the agency of groups, specifically, the shared agency of sending communities. Sending communities condition individual migrant-choice via norms that encourage remittance-oriented migration. These norms likely function as a solution to a collective action problem faced by communities threatened by economic crisis. Accordingly, I argue that remittance-oriented migration is best understood as a collective practice, one that is crucial to the communities’ continued occupancy and capacity for self-determination on the land.

In this essay, I argue that geographic communities, and not just individuals, bear occupancy rights. These community rights are jurisdictional rights to manage land-use, including corporate land-use, in the relevant territory. Drawing on the work of Annie Stilz and Paulina Ochoa Espejo, I argue that these community rights are grounded in the shared “choreography” of the community, understood as the spontaneous infrastructure that emerges when many individual located life-plans mesh in shared space.

This essay reconstructs the concept of persecution in the context of asylum. Received accounts of persecution in the context of asylum define it as demonstrative of a state failure. I argue that these accounts rest on misconceptions about the state, and introduce foreign policy considerations that tend to bias asylum rulings. I contend that persecution in the context of asylum is better understood as serious targeted harm.

Legitimacy and justice are the concepts we typically use to evaluate law. This essay argues that we ought to add absurdity to our conceptual toolkit. The essay engages with paradigm cases of absurd law to present an original account of absurd law's characteristic features: (1) Unintelligibility, (2) Surreality, and (3) Paradox. Drawing on extant work on absurdity in literary studies, I argue that absurd law is fundamentally anti-democratic. Absurd law obscures substantive injustices from the public, impedes public accountability, obstructs compliance among the poor, and enables abuses in the domain of enforcement. Identifying absurdity in the law is important both to evaluating whether the law is just, and to explaining low rates of compliance.

What are we licensed to do when the law is absurd? Philosophers have argued that disobedience to the law is only justified when it is principled, i.e., it is motivated by a sense of injustice. I argue that this need not be the case when the law that is broken is absurd. Absurd laws often have characteristics that make it difficult to ascertain whether they are just, e.g., they may be convoluted, unintelligible, or paradoxical. That means it may be easier to recognize a law’s absurd-making features than to determine whether the law is substantively just. I argue that when persons choose to disobey the law in response to its absurd-making features, the act constitutes justified political disobedience, regardless of whether the law-breaker conceptualizes themself as responding to injustice. What justifies the act in such cases is that it is an apt response to absurdity. I take irregular migration in the U.S. as a paradigm case of disobedience that may be justified as an apt response to the absurdities of migration law

In this essay, we make the case that the effective altruism movement is best understood as a political institution, and as such, is subject to principles of justice, not merely ethical principles of altruism. This framing raises new questions about the relationship between EA institutions, background political structures, and peer political institutions.