A Forward-Looking Justification of Territorial Rights
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321715619432 |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
| Author | Kim Angell |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
619432PSX0010.1177/0032321715619432Political StudiesAngell
research-article2016
Article
Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(1) 231 –247
A Forward-Looking Justification
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321715619432
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Kim Angell
Abstract
According to a prominent forward-looking justification of territorial (jurisdictional) rights, people
may establish such rights over a piece of land if they develop economic and/or religious-cultural life
plans the satisfaction of which requires controlling it. This argument suffers from a gap problem.
The relevant life plans can be satisfied without granting their holders jurisdictional authority.
Having lesser entitlements, such as occupancy rights, is sufficient. In this article, I offer a new
forward-looking justification which plugs this justificatory gap. It follows the general framework of
life plans-arguments, but develops a new category of plans: a person’s political plan to exercise her
democratic autonomy as a citizen of the state under which she (or her group) has lived, or is living.
Keywords
life plans, territorial rights, jurisdiction, occupancy, basic liberties
Accepted: 20 October 2015
Introduction
The justification of territorial rights has received much attention recently. Much of the
debate has thus far been inspired by John Locke’s (1988) well-known labour theory of
appropriation. On one prominent interpretation, which is backward-looking in character,
collective agents may come to deserve territorial rights over lands they have laboured to
improve (Miller, 2007; Nine, 2008a). But the labour theory has also inspired a forward-
looking justification of such rights. This justification starts with the idea that people may
labour on external objects by incorporating them into their economic and/or religious-
cultural life plans. When this has happened, respect for people’s interest in authoring their
own lives requires non-interference with established plans (Waldron, 1992: 16–20).
Insofar as people develop plans that revolve around controlling particular lands, they
need rights over those lands in order to sustain their ways of life, presently and for the
Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Corresponding author:
Kim Angell, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1097, Blindern, NO-0317 Oslo,
Norway.
Email: kim.angell@stv.uio.no
232
Political Studies 65 (1)
future (see e.g. Gans, 2008; Meisels, 2009; Miller, 2012; Stilz, 2011, 2013; Waldron,
1992, 2004).
Such forward-looking justifications confront the following difficulty. In principle,
people do not need territorial (jurisdictional) rights1 to satisfy their economic and/or reli-
gious-cultural life plans (Miller, 2012: 263). In other words, the justification based upon
such plans – which I shall call non-political life plans (NLPs) – faces a gap problem:
the normative concerns it identifies can be satisfied without establishing the rights-
distribution the NLP-argument sets out to justify. It has been sought to plug this justificatory
gap in various ways. However, because those attempts, as we shall see, rely upon normative
considerations external to the NLP-argument, they are, at best, ad hoc solutions.
My main contribution in this article is to demonstrate that a purely life plans-based
theory can carry us all the way. I offer a justification which follows the general structure
of life plans-arguments, but develops a new category of plans. What I call a political life
plan (PLP) refers to a person’s plan to exercise her democratic autonomy as a citizen of
the state under which she (or her group) has lived, or is living. I shall argue that PLPs, if
and when they exist, cannot be satisfied without granting (collective) jurisdictional rights
to their holders. If this is correct my account solves the gap problem. Moreover, it does so
without relying upon further normative concerns than those already appealed to by any
life plans-approach.
The PLP-account provides an independent justification of jurisdictional rights. But it
need not stand alone. It is compatible with existing NLP-approaches, and can be incorpo-
rated as an improvement which enables them to close the justificatory gap. My account
can also benefit from such a combined approach, where the PLP-category complements
NLP-categories, instead of replacing them. I address this towards the end.
Clearly, developing a remedy for the gap problem does not amount to a full-blown
defence of the PLP-account (nor of a combined account). My aim is not to provide such
a defence. As I present it here, the PLP-account is offered as an improvement over exist-
ing NLP-accounts, as viewed from within the general framework accepted by all life
plans-approaches. Issues that must ultimately be addressed by any argument that appeals
to the moral significance of life plans are therefore put aside here.2
This article proceeds as follows. I start by outlining the NLP-justification and its gap
problem. I briefly consider three recent ad hoc attempts to close the gap, and point to
some weaknesses with them. I then turn to develop my non-ad hoc solution to the gap
problem, which introduces the novel PLP-category. I give an account of what it means to
have a PLP, and why the existence a PLP may plug the gap. I then outline a foundation for
the claim – made by life plans-approaches generally – that individuals have a weighty
interest in plan satisfaction. I also explicate how the PLP-account can justify collective
rights based upon such individual interests. I then address some issues pertaining to the
application of my PLP-justification, before I conclude.
The NLP-Argument
The NLP-argument is found in several recent theories of jurisdictional rights, including
the prominent theories of David Miller (2012) and Anna Stilz (2011, 2013). The account
given by Stilz is especially detailed, so I shall focus mostly on her work when I now
reconstruct the argument.
As I understand it for present purposes, the NLP-argument has four main components.
The first is the claim that people have a morally weighty interest in sustaining their
Angell
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existing projects and pursuits (Stilz, 2013: 334–339). For now, I shall provisionally
assume this first claim, and regard people’s interest in realising their life plans as gener-
ally weighty. When I later discuss how that moral weight can be accounted for, I specify
how principles of justice constrain the weight of certain life plans. One thing we can note
right away, however, is that a plan’s weight tends to vary according to its place in a plan
hierarchy all else equal. As Stilz puts it, our most weighty plans are comprehensive.
They ‘organize many choices, and are fundamental to our sense of our lives as our own’
(Stilz, 2013: 336–337). Because ‘[o]ur goals are hierarchically organized’ the compre-
hensive plans give direction to our ‘everyday choices’; the latter are made ‘in part because
they contribute to the achievement of more abstract, pervasive aims’. As an example of
comprehensive plans, Stilz mentions careers, friendships and religious and cultural activ-
ities. Examples of non-comprehensive, or peripheral, plans are ‘[w]hat color to paint my
house and which supermarket to shop in’. To the extent that ‘our flourishing is not threat-
ened by interference with [such] peripheral plans’, our interest in sustaining them takes
on correspondingly less moral weight.
The NLP-justification’s second main feature is its claim about which categories of life
plans people typically establish. Miller (2012: 258–260) and Stilz (2013: 338) both oper-
ate with a distinction between economic (or ‘material’) plans and those that are religious-
cultural (or ‘symbolic’). As Stilz (2013) puts it, ‘economic practices’ refer to activities
which generate income and subsistence for their practitioners, ranging from ‘hunting wild
buffalo’ to ‘modern […] white collar professional jobs’. Plans revolving around ‘mem-
bership in religious, social, and cultural organizations’ include partaking in activities in
‘churches, mosques, schools, meetinghouses, and so on’.3
The third feature is the claim that NLPs are typically connected to (particular) places.
Stilz illustrates the claim as follows:
Suppose you run a dairy farm, an economic practice that structures much of your life. You could
not continue to pursue this practice if you were moved, say, to the Brazilian rainforest or the
American Southwest. Our religious, cultural, or recreational activities also often have territorial
components: think of how sled-dog racing belongs in the Arctic and surfing in coastal areas,
or of how religions incorporate places or natural formations into their rituals of observance
(Stilz, 2013: 335–336).
With a helpful term, Stilz suggests that we ‘call these situated goals, relationships,
and projects our located life plans’ (Stilz, 2013: 336). In Miller’s preferred formulation,
‘material’ and ‘symbolic’ value become ‘embodied’ in a piece of land in the sense that
controlling that land has become necessary for sustaining the ways of life which its occu-
pants find valuable (Miller, 2012: 263).
It is important to emphasise that satisfaction of a located NLP typically requires giving
its holder control over particular located objects (Miller, 2012: 260–261; Stilz, 2013:
334–340). A person’s NLP is interfered with...
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