The theory of pure restitution claims that a state should not punish offenders, and instead it should be limited to exacting restitution from offenders. I begin the paper by assessing and rejecting Jesper Ryberg’s critique of pure restitution. I then assess David Boonin’s defense of pure restitution. I argue that Boonin’s theory of pure restitution fails because it cannot rely on carceral nonmonetary interventions. After evaluating Boonin’s theory, I advance three novel versions of common objections to pure restitution. I conclude that there are strong objections to any theory of pure restitution that have yet to be overcome.

Robert Nozick and Eric Mack have tried to show that a minimal state could be just. A minimal state, they claim, could help to protect people’s moral rights without violating moral rights itself. In this article, I will discuss two challenges for defenders of a minimal state. The first challenge is to show that the just minimal state does not violate moral rights when taxing people and when maintaining a monopoly on the use of force. I argue that this challenge can be met. The second challenge is to show that the just minimal state has political authority, including, most importantly, the moral power to impose duties on citizens. I argue that both Nozick and Mack lack the resources to meet that challenge, and that political authority cannot be deflated. This is an important problem, because a lack of political authority also undermines a state’s justness.

Many high-income countries have skill-selective immigration policies, favoring prospective immigrants who are highly skilled. I investigate whether it is permissible for high-income countries to adopt such policies. Adopting what Joseph Carens calls a “realistic approach” to the ethics of immigration, I argue first that it is in principle permissible for high-income countries to take skill as a consideration in favor of selecting one prospective immigrant rather than another. I argue second that high-income countries must ensure that their skill-selective immigration policies do not contribute to the nonfulfillment of their duty to aid residents of low- and middle-income countries.

This paper advances a Millian concept of care by re-evaluating his defense of the “common arrangement,” or a gendered division of labor in marriage, in connection with his views about traditionally feminine capacities, time use, and societal expectations. Informed by contemporary care ethics and liberal feminism, I explicate the best argument Mill could have provided in defense of the common arrangement, and I show that it is grounded in a valuable concept of care for care-givers. This dual-sided concept of care theorizes care-giving both as a domain of human excellence and as labor with accompanying burdens. Liberal feminists should adopt this Millian concept of care, which can then inform principled thinking about distributive arrangements.

Recent epidemiological research on the social determinants of health has been used to attack an important framework, associated with Norman Daniels, that depicts healthcare as special. My aim is to rescue the idea that healthcare has special importance in society, although specialness will turn out to be mainly limited to clinical care. I build upon the link between Daniels’s theory and the work of John Rawls to develop a conception of public justification liberalism that is applicable to the field of justice and health. I argue that, from the perspective of public justification liberalism, (clinical) healthcare deserves special status.