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Do motivational limitations due to human nature constrain the demands of justice? Among those who say no, David Estlund offers perhaps the most compelling argument. Taking Estlund’s analysis of ‘ability’ as a starting point, I show that motivational deficiencies can constrain the demands of justice under at least one common circumstance – that the motivationally deficient agent makes a good faith effort to overcome her deficiency. In fact, my argument implies something stronger; namely, that the demands of justice are constrained by what people are sufficiently likely to be motivated to do. Thus, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, it is the business of ideal theory – not just nonideal theory – to work with the motivational capacities people are likely enough to have.

Do motivational limitations due to human nature constrain the demands of justice? Among those who say no, David Estlund offers perhaps the most compelling argument. Taking Estlund’s analysis of ‘ability’ as a starting point, I show that motivational deficiencies can constrain the demands of justice under at least one common circumstance – that the motivationally deficient agent makes a good faith effort to overcome her deficiency. In fact, my argument implies something stronger; namely, that the demands of justice are constrained by what people are sufficiently likely to be motivated to do. Thus, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, it is the business of ideal theory – not just nonideal theory – to work with the motivational capacities people are likely enough to have.

Extant theoretical work on the political resource curse implies that dependence on resource revenues should decrease autocracies’ likelihood of democratizing but not necessarily affect democracies’ chances of survival. Yet most previous empirical studies estimate models that are ill-suited to address this claim. We improve upon previous studies, estimating a dynamic logit model using data from 166 countries, covering the period from 1816 to 2006. We find that an increase in resource dependence decreases an autocracy’s likelihood of being democratic over both the short term and long term but has no appreciable effect on democracies’ likelihood of persisting.

Recent work on the resource curse argues that the effect of resource wealth on development outcomes is a conditional one: resource-dependent countries with low-quality institutions are vulnerable to a resource curse, while resource-dependent countries with high-quality institutions are not. But extant models neglect the ways in which the inflow of resource revenue impacts the institutional environment itself. In this paper, I present a formal model to show that where domestic institutions do not limit state leaders' discretion over policy prior to becoming fiscally reliant on resources, those leaders have little incentive in the wake of resource windfalls to establish institutional mechanisms that limit their discretion. Importantly, this shows that simple calls for domestic institutional reform are unlikely to be effective. Among other things, future prescriptions to mitigate the resource curse must focus on decreasing rulers' fiscal reliance on resources. © The Author(s) 2013.