Silvennoinen (2025) analyzes the stored sequence going forward as an adverb that inherits adverb-class morphosyntax. This reply challenges that categorization on empirical grounds. The construction fails the key distributional test for adverbs: it cannot occur in integrated-medial position between subject and verb (*We going forward will prioritize replication), the diagnostic slot for core adverbs (We certainly will prioritize replication). Analysis of Silvennoinen’s corpus (n = 1,517) confirms this restriction – apparent ‘medial’ tokens prove either to be NP-internal modifiers or parenthetical supplements, never integrated clausal constituents. Instead, going forward patterns with PP adjuncts, occurring clause-initially, clause-finally, or as supplements. Internally, deverbal going heads the construction and licenses a directional complement forward(s), parallel to established deverbal prepositions like according [to …] and depending [on …]. The construction thus projects PP, not AdvP, aligning with The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’s flexible-complement analysis of prepositions. This case demonstrates that storage and semantic specialization do not force categorical reanalysis.

Shmuel Nili’s Beyond the Law’s Reach? is an inquiry into the moral duties of the world’s established democracies in a world rife with violent and undemocratic states. Nili argues that these “consolidated” democratic states are “entangled” with the leaders of such violent polities—and uses this entanglement to derive an elegant and plausible series of political duties. In response, this essay seeks to undermine the distinction between the established democracies and the violent states, by showing that some democratic states—including, most centrally, the United States—are as violent as those societies considered by Nili as the focus of international moral obligation. This fact, however, does not impugn the moral obligations identified by Nili; instead, it demonstrates that Nili’s duties might demand something like a necessary form of moral hypocrisy—in which a democratic state might be effectively able to undermine violence abroad, even while incapable of effectively eliminating that violence on its own territory.

In Beyond the Law’s Reach? Shmuel Nili examines the moral responsibilities of affluent democracies toward poorer countries to whose misfortunes they contributed. Because of their entanglement, Nili argues, affluent democracies are (often, but not always) morally barred from pursuing policies more obviously aligned with their moral preferences when another policy would benefit the weakened state more. In this essay, I discuss some of the challenges of trying to repay a moral debt between states. The affluent democracy has incentives to underestimate the extent of its moral debt, while the weakened state benefits from overestimating the harm it suffered. Moreover, since the state is not a unitary actor, different members of a state might disagree on which actions should count as proper forms of atonement. I argue that moral debts cannot ever be fully repaid, but that such impossibility does not undermine the moral requirement to try to pay them; and, further, that the inability to fully settle a moral debt is not a shortcoming to lament, but closer to a blessing in disguise, because acknowledging past misdeeds and embracing the moral implications of deep entanglement may foster greater reciprocity and solidarity in the international realm.

Michael Blake, Yuna Blajer de la Garza, and Alex Zakaras offer insightful critiques of several arguments central to my book Beyond the Law’s Reach? In the process, they raise large questions in political philosophy more generally, especially as it pertains to global affairs. Blake is skeptical about the distinction, driving much of the book, between consolidated liberal democracies and jurisdictions where the “shadow of violence” prevails. Blajer de la Garza worries that the international reparative duties that the book highlights may linger indefinitely, and, consequently, be exploited by cynical political actors. Finally, whereas Beyond the Law’s Reach? argues that liberal democracies’ collective integrity is affected by their entanglement in violence and corruption abroad, Zakaras doubts whether this collective moral problem carries over into the individual level, given individual citizens’ reasonable ignorance of policy details. I offer responses to each of these critiques in turn. I conclude by highlighting the picture of democratic civic responsibility that emerges from these responses.

In his new book Beyond the Law’s Reach? Shmuel Nili shows how affluent democracies have become entangled with violent autocratic regimes and brutal international cartels, and have thereby become complicit in serious global injustices. This essay asks who bears responsibility for this complicity. It argues that citizens of affluent democratic societies often share responsibility for their own government’s unjust entanglements and explores the conditions under which this holds true. It focuses in particular on the challenge posed by relatively “obscure” injustices, which even well-informed citizens cannot be expected to know about. In addressing these cases, this essay outlines a theory of civic obligation that can help explain when citizens have a duty to take action against government injustice and clarify how much they can be expected to know about their representatives’ wrongdoing.