ABSTRACT
The picture that I have set out above is one through which rights holders in civil society (civilians) gain added ethical standing by becoming citizens within a democratic state which is itself but a component of the wider practice of democratic and democratizing states. On this view the state is not, as liberals would have it, merely a mechanism whereby the ethical rights created in civil society are protected. Instead, its great ethical significance is that it creates ethical statuses not available to people in civil society on its own. What is being offered in this text, then, is not an account of how the rights citizens enjoy in democratic states are somehow derived from the rights which they have in some state of nature. What is being offered is an account of how the freedom enjoyed by people constituted as rights holders in civil society is augmented through their concurrently being constituted as holders of a different set of rights (citizenship rights) in the wider practice of democratic states. One set of rights (civilian rights) is supplemented by another set of rights (the rights of citizens). For this account of ethical supplementation to work, it must be shown that the sets of rights established in the two institutions are compatible. It must be shown that it is not the case that the set of citizenship rights created in democratic states undermines or eradicates the rights enjoyed by civilians within civil society. To use Hillel Steiner’s phrase, such rights must be compossible.20
