State system legitimacy, assigned responsibilities, and the moral right to exclude

Contrary to the conventional view that a state’s moral right to exclude is limited in various ways but unconditional, it’s been claimed that each state’s possession of such a right depends on the legitimacy of the state system of which it is part. I argue against this ‘holistic legitimacy thesis’, but defend a different way in which a state’s moral right to exclude is conditional, namely, on its fulfilment of a range of potentially demanding obligations. I do so by drawing upon the assigned responsibilities model of the state system, which holds that allocating the world’s population to separate sovereign states, and giving each state primary responsibility for its own citizens, is the most effective way of promoting just outcomes across the globe. I argue that this model can be supplemented with an account of states’ duties under non-ideal circumstances that coheres with it. Even though the illegitimacy of the state system does not directly undermine states’ moral rights to exclude, the defects that make that system illegitimate may indirectly affect an individual state’s moral right to do so since its fulfilment of these duties is a condition on possessing that right or, at least, on its permissible exercise. Close