Title: Your money or your life
Description: This dissertation develops an account of the moral status of coercion and then uses that account to develop a justification for the state's use of coercion. Consider the mugger who says to his victim, "Your money or your life." Chapter One argues that the mugger wrongs his victim by impermissibly constraining her options. The mugger thereby makes her unable to exercise 'normative authority' through actions like consenting, promising, and contracting. This constitutes a further wrong and reveals a sense in which the victim's responsibility is mitigated. Chapter Two extends this account by showing how certain kinds of warnings can wrong recipients in a similar way. This account of coercion undermines the social contract strategy in political philosophy, which attempts to justify the state's use of coercion through pre-political rights that are transferred to the state via some kind of contract. Chapter Three argues against views that specifically include a pre-political right to punish. Chapter Four argues against the general strategy of justifying the state's use of coercion via an actual or a hypothetical contract.

Chapter Five argues against one dominant interpretation of Kant's Formula of Humanity, the 'possible consent interpretation'. This clears the way for my new interpretation of Kant's moral and political philosophy in Chapter Six. Rather than giving us direct guidance regarding how to treat others, the Formula of Humanity justifies the requirement of equal freedom that Kant uses as the foundation for political philosophy. The requirement of equal freedom provides a justificatory basis for the norms governing the state's use of coercion that does not rely on the idea of a contract. Rather than seeing rights as pre-existing and transferred to the state, this view suggests that rights are brought into existence by the state. Once rights have been established, we have a framework within which our other duties can be explicated. This account suggests a view of the relationship between moral and political philosophy: political philosophy must turn to moral philosophy to justify its foundational principles while moral philosophy must look to political philosophy to generate concrete duties to others.