Way back in July, I announced a “forthcoming” discussion here on a bunch of papers that had just been presented at the 36th annual conference of the North American Society for Social Philosophy in San Francisco. Unlike about half of the promises I make at PoT, it looks like I will deliver on this one, so “forthcoming” means “imminent.” Yes, my track record here is about as bad as the Trump Administration’s, but trust me: I have reliable intelligence that all of this is really about to happen.

The first of the two papers will be Jesse Spafford’s “Initial Appropriation and Duty-Creation,” accepted for publication (and yes, imminently about to be published) in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. It’s a response to Bas Van der Vossen’s “Imposing Duties and Initial Appropriation,” Journal of Political Philosophy 23 (2015): 64-85, so you might want to take a look at that beforehand.

Procedure: Jesse has written up a brief summary of his argument with links to Van der Vossen’s paper as well as his own. I’ll post that summary tomorrow, and give Jesse “Author” privileges at PoT. Jesse’s waiting for JESP to go live with the paper, but we’re expecting that will happen…imminently, i.e., within the next few days. As the APA Eastern is happening now (it ends on the 11th), I’ll probably wait until next Monday the 13th to start the discussion. Once it does, we can use the combox below Jesse’s summary for discussion, unless and until it gets too messy, in which case I’ll start a new post.