Listen up! In defence of a robust right to petition

Abstract

Rights to petition occupy an unusual position in political theory. Legally speaking, few political rights are as long-established or ubiquitous. Yet, philosophers have rarely, if ever, engaged in a sustained analysis of their contents or justification. On the rare occasions when such rights have been discussed, they are also often treated with a degree of quietism, if not outright scepticism. If there is a right to petition, so the thinking goes, then it must be a relatively minimal right, which is to say, one that secures for its holder no more than that to which they are already entitled under, say, their right to free speech. In this article, I reject this view. Instead, I argue that, unlike rights to free speech, citizens’ rights to petition secure a duty on public officials to engage in a certain decision-making process with regards to petitioners’ petitions. In short: they have a duty to listen. In this way, I claim citizens enjoy a far more ‘robust’ right to petition than many polities currently recognise.