## 1. Kinds of Associations



In taxonomizing the different associations to which we typically
belong, we should note the contrast drawn in the literature between
*intimate associations* and *collective associations*.
This contrast is somewhat forced since, in reality, these association
types are fluid. First, our various collegial, fraternal, romantic,
political, creedal, professional, recreational, and philanthropic
associations can have both intimate and collective aspects (Alexander
2008: 13). Falling in love at work or at school can change the meaning
of those associations for the people involved. Second, all
consequential associations--be they intimate or
collective--are sites in which our beliefs are formed and their
expression germinated (Shiffrin 2005: 841). Third, interesting
contrasts--such as the contrast between voluntary and
non-voluntary associations or between hierarchical and
non-hierarchical associations--cut across any distinction we
might draw between intimate and collective associations. Both
non-voluntary associations and hierarchical associations are to be
found in intimate settings, educational settings, and national
settings, to name just a few, and these have constitutive power over
the ways we view our lives (Walzer 2004: 1-20). Finally, a key
argument for protecting associations--that they help to safeguard
our individual freedom--applies to all manner of
associations.



Consequently, our associations are possibly better understood as
falling along a continuum that ranges from the more intimate and
non-instrumental at one end to the more impersonal and instrumental at
the other (Brownlee 2015: 269). Despite this fluidity, the distinction
between *intimate associations* and *collective
associations* remains useful since it identifies the central
function of a given association. For instance, while it is possible to
meet our spouse at work and to form friendships at work, doing these
things is not the primary function of work environments and workplace
associations. The fact that workplace settings can serve this
secondary, or unintended, function of fostering intimate ties should
not dictate or, in some cases, even influence the forms that workplace
associations take. Hence, this entry retains the traditional contrast
between intimate associations and collective associations in order to
highlight the conceptual and normative issues that are particularly
salient to specific paradigmatic forms of associations.


### 1.1 Intimate Associations



Paradigmatically, our intimate associations with friends, family, and
loved ones are persistent, meaningful connections marked by frequent
direct interactions animated by affection, interest, care, concern and
love. As such, they form a core part of our lives. A central feature
of such associations is that they exist for the acts and goods of the
associations themselves, rather than as instruments for public
expression or further advantage. As Justice Douglas says of family in
*Griswold v Connecticut*, "It is an association that
promotes a way of life, not causes" (381 U.S. 479 (1965)). 



*Families* are often held up as the paragon of intimacy,
love, and affection. Throughout human history, our spousal, parental,
and sibling relations have been our primary forms of association.
However, love and affection need not be the principal reasons for
forming families. Security, financial advantage, and avoiding worse
alternatives can all be reasons for us to marry and form families.
Nonetheless, when children are raised in families conspicuously
lacking in love and affection, children are denied the kinds of
associations that are vital to their present well-being and their
emotional, social and cognitive development (Liao 2006; 2015: ch.
3).



*Friendships* are also important parts of our childhood and
adult experience. Without them, we struggle to discover, shape, and
pursue our ideas of what constitutes a good life. But, again,
friendships can take many forms for many reasons, not all of which are
grounded in mutual affection and convivial warmth (Aristotle,
*Nicomachean Ethics*, Book VIII). Friendships can be rooted in
mutual advantage, status, and convenience.



As this implies, the "ways of life" afforded to us by our
intimate associations can lack emotional intimacy. When they do lack
it, the qualifier "intimate" is a placeholder for our
"personal", "individual", or
"dyadic" associations, rather than a description of the
quality and value of our associative bonds. Given that emotional
closeness--true intimacy--is an important part of our
well-being, its presence or absence can identify the limits of the
rights, powers, and duties we have within our intimate
associations.


### 1.2 Collective Associations



"Collective" is a catchword for a smorgasbord of
associations, from chess clubs, to trade unions, churches and
businesses, which are usually not dyadic, and which have a primary
function other than associating as such. We can distinguish different
collective associations according to their primary functions, again
recognizing that a given association can perform multiple functions,
including those functions closer in spirit to intimate
associations.



*Educational associations* are an important early form of
association outside the family and perhaps, more than any other,
illustrate the fluidity of associational types. Children associate
non-voluntarily with teachers (hierarchical) and with peers
(non-hierarchical), and thereby learn many of the social skills needed
to make good on their rights of association within the wider world.
School is most often assessed with a view to its important
instrumental purposes, particularly for future, work-related
imperatives, but is equally a site of often intense and long-lasting
intimate relationships.



*Expressive associations* aim to give a larger microphone
to a set of people than they would have individually, and can thus
often serve to check the powers of other associations, interest
groups, governments, and state bureaucracies (Craiutu 2008:
266-7). Expressive associations include not only advocacy groups
and civil rights groups, but also segregationist groups and xenophobic
groups. Examples of expressive associations include the ACLU, the
NAACP, Amnesty International, the LGBTQIA community, the NRA, and the
KKK. In addition to lending people a larger microphone, such
associations can also serve a simpler, cathartic or identify-affirming
function, enabling members to solidify through joint expression their
sense of what they value (Farber 2001: 1494ff).


 *Recreational associations* for the joint enjoyment of
hobbies are not paradigmatically expressive, but instead are
pleasure-oriented or progress-oriented. The members of a chess club do
express a fondness for chess, but the primary function is to play and
learn about chess, not to express that fondness.


*Commercial and professional associations* often consume
more time in our day than our intimate connections do. Work
associations can include collegiate relationships, trade unions,
guilds, networking groups, and business groups. Such connections are
almost invariably shaped by important associative asymmetries between
employees' and employers' rights to decide about
membership and associative activities (White 1998: 337).


*The free association of producers*, as it occurs in
Marxism and some anarchist literature, points to a variation in the
idea that employees have associative freedom, highlighting a deeper
critique of the very concept of *freedom of association*. Given
that work is, for most of us, an associational form of activity that
we are compelled to undertake--on pain of potentially severe
suffering--and over which we often have little control, Marxists
wonder how free we can really be in our associative decisions (Gorz
1997 [1999]; James 2017: 285).


*Intentional communities* sit somewhere between clans and
neighborhoods and nations. Such communities lack the organic
spontaneity that usually typifies residential communities. Instead,
these communities arise when people with similar interests,
ideologies, and concerns come together to share those things in
substantial ways. Often this sharing has an ecological aspect, as with
communes, or a concern with security and property values, as with
gated communities (Low 2003: 151-172). But, it can also be
enacted by far-right political groups looking to preserve racial
cultures which they perceive as under threat by the majority
culture.


*National and state associations,* like our childhood
family environments, are non-voluntary. We are born within a nation or
state's jurisdiction, and are compelled to associate at some
level with the other people who fall under that jurisdiction. If we
have adequate resources, we may leave. But, we will only end up within
the circle of another such association (Dworkin 1986: 192-193).
Similarly, if we are forced out, we will find ourselves within another
state's jurisdiction. Our state or national associations
inevitably impact on our other associations, the social norms that
define our families, the associative interests we develop, and the
patterns of socialization we undergo at school, in churches, in clubs,
and at work (Walzer 2004: 14-15). Moreover, the ways that
nations and states are organized, being defined with and restricted by
borders, limits who we, as employers, workers and potential partners,
get to interact with and who gets to interact with us (Carens 1987:
253; Kukathas 2005: 210).


### 1.3 Related Phenomena: Interactions and Assemblies



Our persistent associations differ from, but intersect with, our
practice of engaging in ordinary interactions with each other and our
practice of assembling together.


*Interacting*: Interactions of some sort are a
pre-requisite for associations. Two "friends" are hardly
friends if they opt never to interact with each other when they could.
Within large collectives, of course, many members won't know or
interact with each other at all. But, each member must interact with
some other member for them to count as a member and for their
collective to count as an association. Interactions are also a domain
of interpersonal engagement unto themselves apart from associations.
Our average day is full of incidental interactions with strangers and
non-associates, on buses, in the streets, in parks with children, and
in buying milk from the local shop. These micro-moments of connection
constitute a significant portion of our experience of living together
with other people (Fredrickson 2013: Part I; Speck 2012: 49; Cacioppo
& Patrick 2008: 237). While philosophers tend to focus on
larger-scale, substantive and active forms of association, they have
reason to analyze as well the ambient sociability (or lack of it) that
is available to us within our general environment, and the ways that
our incidental interactions (or lack of them) can resonate with the
rest of our associational life. For example, the phenomena of
"neighborhood effects" on voting behavior, our attitudes
to strangers, and our own self-esteem, are important in thinking about
the associative value in our routine connections that fall short of
thicker forms of association (Sampson 2011). These interactions and
the incidental communities they create provide resources that can
build up to, and support, the more substantive goods that flow from
meaningful association (Fleischacker 1998: 273; Fredrickson 2013: Part
II). Importantly, the quality and number of these incidental
micro-interactions is subject partly to our control. We limit our
opportunities for such moments if, for example, we choose to shop
online, to commute alone in our car, or to retreat into a gated
community with vigorous vetting processes for residents.


*Assembling*: Association and assembly are often discussed
in the same breath. International agreements such as the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (Article 20.1) lump the two
together to declare that "everyone has the right to freedom of
peaceful assembly and association". Commentaries on the drafting
of the UDHR acknowledge that drafters conjoined these two activities
in a single Article because drafters were thinking principally about
how to protect political associations such as trade unions (Scheinin
1999: 418-419). Subsequent international agreements such as the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights enumerate our
rights to association and rights to assembly within different
Articles. One reason for this could be to acknowledge that assembling
is but one activity in which certain associates might partake and,
equally, it can be done by people who are not associates. Assembling
can be both a product of, and a Petri dish for, intimate and
non-intimate associations. A second reason to divorce assembling from
associating is to recognize properly that associative freedom includes
intimate associations as well as collective and expressive
associations (Scheinin 1999: 420). *Assembling* has political
connotations. We prefer to speak of family members or congregations
"gathering", for example, or to describe an audience as
being together "in attendance" (though we do speak of
school "assemblies"). "Assembly" we tend to
reserve for activists, protesters, town hall members, or lobbyists. In
politics, people assemble in a physical space (we do not (yet) speak
of people "assembling" on social media) usually to empower
themselves individually and collectively, and to make non-participants
aware of their energy, numbers, and intentions (Graeber 2013:
35-54).


## 2. Kinds of Freedoms



Section 1
 above focuses on the nature and value of different kinds of
associations, within the home, at work, in the marketplace, at places
of worship, and in the pub or club. It does not distinguish
*associating* from the *freedoms* to associate and
dissociate. Here,
 SS2
 explores the nature of our associative *freedoms*, while
 SS3,
 SS4, and
 SS5
 explore these freedoms' forms, force, and value, as well as
their various limitations.



Prominent liberal philosophers such as John Stuart Mill defend a broad
notion of *freedom of association*. Freedom of association is,
for Mill, one of the core domains of individual freedom. Mill says
that we have the freedom, in combination with other people, "to
unite for any purpose not involving harm to others: the persons
combining being supposed to be of full age and not forced or
deceived". He also says that we have "...the right to
choose the society most acceptable to us", free from government
interference (Mill 1859: ch. IV). The other core freedoms he
identifies are (1) freedom of thought, conscience, opinion and
feeling, that is to say, complete control over our own inner domain of
consciousness; (2) freedom of expression in speech and writing; and
(3) freedom to shape our own lives according to our tastes and
pursuits in line with our character and inclinations; he embraced the
idea that we engage in different "experiments in living".
Unlike freedom of thought and opinion which are largely immune to
Mill's "very simple principle" which we now know as
the *harm principle*, freedom of association is subject to this
harm principle that we are permitted to interfere with someone's
conduct only to prevent harm to others.



Mill's strong endorsement of associative freedom leaves many
questions unanswered since it pertains only to consenting adults
acting with full information. As
 SS1
 makes clear, many of our core associations have a different
structure, as we could not consent to them. Especially in early
childhood, we do not choose, though we often come to embrace, our
familial arrangements. Also, many of our closest, familial
associations can produce some often-unintended harm to others, since
these associations are necessarily exclusive and, hence, disregard
non-members' associative needs. Moreover, Mill's
endorsement of free association among consenting adults may be too
strong. Not all mutually consensual associations can be protected by
*freedom* of association. Some consensual
associations--such as a violently abusive marriage which neither
spouse wishes to leave--do not automatically fall under the gaze
of Mill's harm principle, since his principle makes space for
action that does affect other people with their free, voluntary, and
undeceived consent and participation (Mill 1859: ch. I). But, such
connections are too morally opprobrious to merit protection from
third-party interference.



Many contemporary moral and political philosophers analyze our
individual rights and freedoms with a conceptual apparatus developed
by Wesley Hohfeld (1919), who identified eight normative positions
which together make four pairs of correlates and four pairs of
opposites. *Claims* correlate with *duties*.
*Liberties* (or *permissions*), which are the opposite
of duties, correlate with *no-claims*. *Powers*
correlate with *liabilities*. And, *disabilities*, the
opposite of powers, correlate with *immunities*, which are the
opposite of liabilities. Using this Hohfeldian terminology,
*freedom of association* can refer to any one of the following
positions and its correlate:


1. *Permission*: We might be at liberty, i.e., have a moral or
legal permission, to associate or dissociate with other people. When
we have a permission to associate with, or dissociate from, someone,
we have no duty not to act, and, hence, correlatively, other people
have no claim upon us that we act otherwise. Moral and legal
permissions do not always go hand in hand. An adult might have a legal
permission to marry a child, but he has no moral permission to do
so.
2. *Claim-right*: We might have a moral or legal claim-right
against others interfering with our conduct, which issues in a
protected sphere of action to associate with, or dissociate from,
people in certain ways even if we commit moral wrongs by doing so.
When we have such a claim, others have a duty not to interfere, and
may have a duty positively to protect our sphere of action.
3. *Power*: We might have a moral or legal power to alter our
associative status in relation to other people. The power to join an
association can produce new rights and duties, or remove previously
valid rights and duties. When we marry someone, we exercise a power to
alter both their normative status and our own by creating new claims,
rights, duties, and powers. As parents, we have the power to decide
whether our children will be friends with other kids. If we divorce,
we exercise a power to alter our children's associative position
in relation to us and possibly each other. When we have such powers to
affect others' normative associative position, they have a
*liability* to be affected by how we use our power.
4. *Immunity*: We might have a moral or legal immunity against
other people exercising their rights to association or dissociation in
ways that would alter our associative status. When we are immune,
other people are disabled from exercising a power over us (Brownlee
2015: 271; 2016a: 362). For instance, once we mature, our parents no
longer have the power to decide whether we'll associate with
certain people or not.



This Hohfeldian apparatus can be used to assess the specific rights
that comprise our freedom of association. These specific rights can be
parsed as the right to exit, the right to exclude, and the right to
organizational autonomy. Since our permissions, claim-rights, powers
and immunities shift depending on the type of association under
discussion, these rights will be discussed in connection with the
different associational types outlined in
 SS1.



Importantly, these three rights--to exclude, to exit, and to
exercise organizational autonomy--do not include a positive right
to associate. These three rights all presuppose, however, that we
already belong to at least one association, since these rights can
only be exercised from *within* associations. If someone is
excluded from all associations, then the above framework does little
to guarantee her any of the goods of associational life. The rights of
association are important because they allow us some degree of control
over how our lives go. However, precisely because the focus of these
rights is our interpersonal relations, they can have the consequence
of comprehensively excluding some people. There is, thus, an important
tension between freedom of association and other possible goods of
association. In getting to grips with this tension, it is necessary to
assess the impact of employing the rights to exclude, exit, and
exercise organizational autonomy across the different associational
forms outlined above.



Sections
 SS3,
 SS4, and
 SS5
 consider, respectively, the content of the rights to exclude, exit,
and exercise organizational autonomy, followed by considerations of
possible limits to these rights which are necessary to protect or
advance other values.


## 3. The Right to Exclude


### 3.1 Intimate Associations



At some level, we must be able to exclude others from our
associations, especially our intimate associations: Families
wouldn't be families if the competent members couldn't
exercise some control over membership. Moreover, family members as
individuals would lack all manner of meaningful personal freedoms if
they could not control at least their own membership. Traditionally,
and in many families today, not all competent family members enjoy
equal power to determine membership. Patriarchs have long controlled
who is welcome within the family: for instance, casting out children
who failed to meet some standard of virtue. Denying other competent
family members (equal) say over membership has far-reaching
implications. As much feminist literature confirms, to have even
minimal control over their bodies and their lives, women need a right
to exclude, where that includes the right to refuse a marriage
proposal, the right to access contraception, the right to divorce, and
indeed the right to choose not to spend private time with certain
people (Baylis and McLeod 2014). Arguably, both women and men also
need a positive right to reproductive assistance where that includes
meaningful rights to try to *include* new family members,
namely rights to try to bear children or to adopt children. Taking
these rights seriously means recognizing that they are all
concomitants of freedom of intimate association (Karst 1980; Mill
1859).


#### Limits to intimate exclusion



A given family member's rights to exclude must, however, be
checked by other family members' rights to retain membership
and, indeed, checked also by some non-members' rights to be
sufficiently protected and cared for. First, parents have duties to
ensure that their children are adequately associatively-embedded,
especially if they're not going to be primary carers themselves.
Even with the parents involved, there may be good reason to mitigate
parents' "monopolies of care", by requiring
state-funded early-years childcare. Such mandatory childcare would
reduce parents' abilities to control the terms of familial
association, in effect obliging them to permit state intervention at
the level of the household (Gheaus 2018: 60).



Second, divorcing spouses cannot excuse themselves from all duties to
their former partners, especially if that partner is caring for their
children. There are, and should be, limits on the impact they can have
on other family members' associations with each other.



Third, more contentiously, families might also have duties to look to
the associative needs of people who are bereft of close connection,
for example by fostering vulnerable children or housing refugees. In
crises situations such as the Blitz in Britain, many families living
outside targeted areas were recruited to house evacuees, sometimes for
the duration of WWII. Given the urgency of the situation, these
families contributions are plausibly described in the language of
*duties* and *rights* rather than that of
*supererogation*. Our "obligatorily gregarious natures
give us basic needs to be with other people, especially when we are
highly dependent or vulnerable" (Cacioppo & Patrick 2008:
52). Put more strongly, our deep social needs identify a potential
limit both to our freedoms of association and dissociation and to our
control over the terms of our associations, to guarantee the goods of
association to everyone when they need them (Liao 2015: ch. 3). A
person shunned by everyone when everyone exercises their right to
exclude is denied these important goods (Brownlee 2016b). These basic
needs demand association with others, and this claim-right might
override others' permissions, claim-rights, and immunities to
refuse such association.



Technology or the market might provide a way for us to "have our
cake and eat it too", as they might offer us the means to
navigate simultaneously the often painful, boring, frustrating and
demanding labor of carrying out our associative duties *and*
maximizing our associative freedoms. For example, in a situation where
robots could be programmed to simulate, approximate or perhaps even
surpass in some ways, the kinds of reactions and behaviors typical of
human beings, we can ask whether this could effectively replace the
need for humans to take on such work. In Japan, for instance, some
care homes have robots that can mimic human responses--tilting
heads to express sympathy, blinking to indicate
receptiveness--which are being used to comfort lonely people, in
lieu of their absent children or partners. In Japan again, busy adult
children can hire actors to visit their aging parents, instructing the
actors to pretend to be them. By doing so, both sides--children
and parents--can perceive this as an effective means of
negotiating filial duties. Can such practices--technological or
market-based--meet our basic associative needs while also
maximizing our associative choices, meaning that we get to spend time
only with those people with whom we really want to spend time? Or will
such replacements inevitably fall short and, worse, eventually change
the meanings of what it means to care, such that we, in the words of
Sherry Turkle, come to expect more and more of technology and less and
less of each other (Turkle 2011)? These thorny questions may become
easier to answer as the relevant technologies and market initiatives
come into their own.


### 3.2 Collective Associations



The importance of exclusion goes beyond the intimate settings of the
family and friendships. It is also an integral part of
*collective* associations. For a devotional community,
recreational club, business club, union, or even nation to be what it
is and to represent particular values, beliefs, or interests, it must
be able to determine, at least broadly, the criteria by which members
are selected. This fact has limited states' rights to interfere
with certain groups' decisions about membership (Gutmann 1998a:
6). However, the purposes of an association are open to reasonable
disagreement, and this often necessitates judicial interpretation and
decision (see *Roberts v. United States Jaycees* 468 U.S. 609
(1984); *Dale v. Boy Scouts of America* 530 U.S. 640 (2000);
Johnson 2001: 1641ff; Linder 1984).



One approach is simply to collapse all distinctions among different
types of collective associations: associations are associations
regardless of whether they are primarily expressive, commercial, or
creedal, and they should enjoy an absolute right over whom to admit,
for whatever reason they decide (Epstein 2008: 155). On this view, a
nation, sports club, church, or business should devise its own rules
on who is in and who is out (Lomasky 2008: 184-186). One
argument for such a strong right is that only near or absolute freedom
to exclude people adequately honors the great, inherent value of free
association as something integral to the lives of free human beings
(Kateb 1998: 37).



But, there are dangers in thinking that the right to exclude remains
the same, or even looks similar, across all forms of collective
association. Exile from a nation differs radically from exclusion from
a sports club, which in turn differs markedly from ex-communication
from a devotional community. A second approach interprets the scope
and value of the right to exclude according to the primary goods and
functions served by the relevant kind of association.



*Expressive associations* are distinct for several reasons.
First, they are intertwined with other basic rights of expression such
as freedom of speech and freedom of religion (UDHR Articles
18-19). A creed's right to exclude people, sometimes
cashed out in terms of shunning, where excommunication involves being
excluded from familial associations as well (Greenawalt 1998: 142) is
often justified in the name of worshipful or spiritual identity (i.e.,
the right of the Jews to be "separate" or view themselves
as "chosen", the right of the Catholic Church to refuse to
appoint women as bishops) as well as the secondary functions of a
creed to promote common identity, enhance internal harmony, expand the
flock, raise funds, and gain further insight (Kymlicka 1995; Taylor
1995). The limits of creeds' rights to exclude (or expel) are
usually found in their harmfulness to non-members, whose interests,
when push comes to shove, must take priority, in the name of equality
of moral worth (White 1997: 383ff; Fine 2010: 352-3).



Second, expressive associations "are credited with enhancing the
quality of democracy by cultivating citizenship and promoting open
fora for public deliberation and self-government", opening up a
"parallel polis" through a "plurality of non-state
social groups", by which the state can be kept in check and its
powers limited (Craiutu 2008: 263-4; Levy 2014: 27). Put
differently, one core function of many expressive associations or
"intermediate" associations is to check the power of the
state. Intermediate groups give people an alternative to acting
through the state. They enable people to act in concert and thereby
more easily resist the wrongful threats to personal freedom that
governments can pose (Levy 2014: 1). An important part of preserving
this function of such associations is for a citizenry to become
accustomed to the art of association, and to join with like-minded
people in the pursuit of what they perceive, in competition with
others, as the common good. This can only occur when groups are
allowed to exclude people who have different understandings of that
good. In other words, to create genuine space for democratic dissent,
groups must be allowed to exclude people based on a principle of
expressive discrimination: such "expressive exclusion"
sits at the intersection of speech, association, *and*
democracy (Bedi 2010).



Third, expressive associations also have a role to play in increasing
the various "experiments of living" to which people have
access. A plurality of opinions, creeds and ideologies increases the
chance that people will find ways of life that suit them (Mill 1859:
ch. III). The diversity of ways of life that is fermented by allowing
groups to exclude people who fail to conform to their way of life, is
something which also has collective value (Galston 1995: 523).
However, Seana Shiffrin has argued for an alternative emphasis. In
responding to *Dale v The Boy Scouts of America*, in which the
right of the Boy Scouts to exclude James Dale because of his
homosexuality was upheld, she suggests that we should think of such
associations less in terms of the messages they express to others,
i.e., that the Boy Scouts as an institution does not endorse
homosexuality, and more in terms of the space that associations
provide. Specifically, associations offer a space for a person 



> 
> 
> to control what influences she is exposed to, to what subjects she
> directs her mind, and whether she, at all times, directs her mind
> toward anything at all or instead "spaces out" and allows
> the mind to relax and wander. (Shiffrin 2005: 841; cf. Farber 2001)
> 
> 
> 
> 



If we are constantly exposed to people or subjects with which we are
unfamiliar or uncomfortable, or reminded of lifestyles or values that
unsettle us, then a prime function of association is being upset. Of
course, as we will see below, this associative protection might have
adverse effects on other kinds of associative duty.



*Commercial associations* vary from direct, tight-knit teams to
looser, long-distance networks. Commercial enterprises have as their
main purpose making, providing and selling goods and services to make
a profit. Employers have an interest in excluding people whom they
regard as incapable of doing the job well because their work
won't be profitable. For the same reason, employers can have an
interest in excluding rabble rousers who aim to mobilize an otherwise
compliant workforce. Employees may well take a different view of their
own interests with respect to their share of the profits, the optimum
patterns of inclusions and exclusion within the enterprise, and the
degree of control they should have over shift-patterns, workload, and
working conditions (Nichols & Armstrong 1976: 82).



The differences in bargaining power between employees and employers
have led, historically, to the formation of particular kinds of
associations within the workplace. Trade unions form to protect
employees' position *vis-a-vis* their bosses, and
thereby introduce some parity between these groups. In industries
where conflict between capital and labor is pronounced, this can also
issue in the right of unions to operate closed shops. In other words,
anyone wishing to take employment must join the relevant union and,
thus, employers can be denied access to potential employees who refuse
(White 1998: 346-347). Here then is a group right to compel
association amongst a set of people--with possible provisos for
conscientious objectors--to achieve the overall good of this
associational form, which is to make good on workers' basic
rights (Rosenblum 1998; cf. Moreno 2008). However, implicitly, these
mechanisms assume a particularly adversarial understanding of economic
relations, such that granting people this kind of group right can
serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy, exacerbating what might otherwise
be congenial and mutually beneficial employer-employee relations. On
such a view, the state might have to prevent freedom of association
among the owners of capital, leading us into situations of monopoly.
But, beyond those kinds of provisions, the state should avoid
interfering with the spontaneous orderings that emerge from unimpeded
association (Lomasky 2008; Epstein 2008; cf. Brody 1992 [1994:
386]).



Expressive and commercial associations are but two paradigms of
collective associations. The arguments for their right to
exclude--such as First Amendment-style rights or democracy in the
case of expressive associations and bargaining power within an
adversarial relationship in the case of unions--do not readily
apply to the activities of other collective associations such as
recreational groups, national groups, or cultural groups, which do not
necessarily qualify as expressive associations.



*Recreational associations:* Members of a recreational group
like a chess club have interests in excluding people who would join
without any intention of learning about chess or playing chess, but
with the (admittedly bizarre) desire to disrupt other people's
enjoyment of the game. Minimal rules of inclusion are likely to refer
to basic decency and decorum: a club might exclude people who swear
profusely during matches or react badly to losing. The right to
exclude ensures the group can pursue such values as teamwork,
competitive advantage, cohesiveness, autonomy, self-determination, and
self-respect (McKinnon 2000: 498). In certain cases, a group may also
wish to see a traditional pursuit continue because it is in danger of
not having enough adherents. Yet, the group might desire not just that
the pursuit survive, but that it survive for *their* group.
They might exclude some would-be participants so as to ensure the
activity is pursued by their specific community only. Were the
practice to survive because of an increase in adherents outside this
group, this might--in the minds of members--be a less
valued, even worthless result. Among other things, the group might
regard the pursuit as a uniquely powerful means by which to bond
together. This wish, though understandable at one level, becomes
especially troubling if exclusion is rooted in bigotry. The limits of
such groups' rights to exclude turn largely on potential harms
to non-members.



*Cultural associations:* Like commercial associations, cultural
associations vary from tight-knit clans to loose, anonymous
collectives. Cultural groups, sharing a common history, ethnicity,
language, and set of traditions, typically have distinct, persistent
ways of life. The Romani people, whose lifestyle is traditionally
nomadic, are an example. Histories of colonization, conquest and
annexation have destroyed many such groups' ways of life. Many
countries have laws banning, or hindering, a nomadic existence.
However, though ravaged, the cultural practices and associational
forms that make sense of members' conception of the good often
remain in force. By preserving the associational forms of life that
are organic to different communities, including their political
decision-making procedures and their patterns and practices of
inclusion and exclusion, these cultural practices can also be made
sustainable (Kymlicka 1995).



*National and state associations:* Given their size and nature,
states and nations seem to be peripheral examples of associations.
Nonetheless, if they are stable and enduring, they tick many of the
boxes of meaningful association by offering a persistent, exclusive
social context laden with common purposes that heavily inform our
sense of identity. States use borders and border-control to exclude
non-members from their territories and to prevent them from acquiring
membership (Dagger 1985; Goodin 1988; Mason 1997: 442). Borders limit
the associative rights of people both within and without states'
boundaries. Such exclusion might be necessary to preserve a form and
quality of citizenry-association that is conducive to a functioning
political community. Of particular importance might be the need to
sustain those forms of solidarity necessary to underpin social welfare
provisions (Miller 2016: 27). However, such exclusion can find its
limits when it bumps up against the basic human rights of would-be
immigrants. A state must justify its exclusionary practices before it
can justify treating its members better than it treats non-members. If
a state denies someone membership unjustifiably, it cannot appeal to
that person's non-membership to justify treating her less well
than it treats its members (Frick forthcoming).


#### Limits to collective exclusion



*Meeting Basic Needs:* As noted above, our freedom to associate
(and disassociate) can often prevent particular people from enjoying
the goods of association since a person's positive right to
associate is shaped partly by other people's desire to associate
or not with her. For some associations, this is not always
problematic. Friendship, for example, operates according to a mutual
desire to spend time together. Where this is lacking, a desire for the
friendship to be sustained, even from the person scorned, will likely,
though not always, dissipate. Unrequited love is another matter
altogether. But, nobody believes that *requiting* love should
be imposed on anyone (though other associative duties might
nonetheless emerge, perhaps with the end of letting the rejected
person down gradually).



However, in certain contexts, our right to refuse to associate is
highly morally complex, such as when, for example, the excluded person
has a legitimate interest in the set of non-associative goods that we
are denying her by excluding her. Take for example the right to
education. The Little Rock Nine who were turned away by National
Guards at the doors of their school were primarily after a set of
goods, the value of which had nothing to do with association (Baldwin
1958). The associational aspect was of little importance to either the
students or their parents. Their right to an education and its
opportunities conflicted with the alleged dissociative and expressive
rights of the people who sought to deny them access to those goods.
Here then, freedom of association was not really what was at stake.
Rather, the association was the means (more rightly perhaps, the
*cost*) of claiming some other kind of right. The same
principles can be applied to cases where someone seeks employment
amongst people with whom she would otherwise choose not to associate
(cf. Lomasky 2008: 193ff).



Take as another example the purposes served by recreational clubs.
Should chess clubs be allowed to discriminate based on gender, for
example, in a boys' club that deprives interested girls of the
opportunity to learn amongst peers and mentors, especially if no other
chess club exists for girls to join? To suggest that the interested
girl is always free to set up her own chess club without trained
mentors misses the point that chess is a game we learn best from
people already schooled in the activity and its tradition, and this
can often require resources to which she as an individual simply does
not have access (MacIntyre 1981 [1985: 194]). Given persisting biases
about whether girls can play chess well, a girls-only club, staffed by
female mentors and peers, would be less problematic than a boys-only
club--although there remain practical questions about how, in any
given community, these are to be encouraged, established and
maintained. But, if perceptions changed such that society came to
doubt boys' ability to play chess at the highest levels, then
girls-only clubs would be more problematic than boys-only clubs. All
that said, new associations sometimes do form in reaction to the
perceived prejudices of existing groups. In the wake of *Dale v The
Boy Scouts of America*, new Scouting groups developed with more
inclusive membership policies and more liberal ideas about who can be
a leader. While these groups might lack the historical prestige of the
Boy Scouts of America, they at least solve the problem of
scarcity.



Take as a final example asylum seekers' fundamentally important
needs for assistance. Should nations' interests in
self-governance take priority over such seekers' basic needs?
Given the intensity and severity of their needs, asylum seekers'
rights arguably take precedence over national interests in restricting
people's rights to free movement and association (Miller 2007;
cf. Wellman 2008: 109). On the ground, this means that states must
process applications of those asylum seekers who have reached their
jurisdiction. But, they do not have to open their borders to every
person anywhere in the world who is seeking refuge. Moreover, they may
be able to meet their obligations to such people without admitting
them to their own territories.



*Associative Aspects of Other Personal Freedoms*: When our
right to exclude people prevents them from exercising other personal
rights and freedoms, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion,
and rights to educational opportunities, then a tension arises between
these competing freedoms. If someone is excluded from well-resourced
groups because of the color of her skin, then her ability to develop
her "political opinions, engage in literary and artistic
pursuits and other cultural, economic and social activities" (UN
Human Rights Council resolution 15/21, preamble) is undermined.
Ensuring that her rights to equal respect, consideration, and fair
opportunity are secured means protecting her from unjust
discrimination by checking others' rights to be exclusive (White
1997: 383ff).



In commercial domains, businesses can form, or refuse to form,
associations with certain customers through commercial exchanges. A
business might assert a right not to engage in certain kinds of
exchanges with customers: the Christian owners of the Ashers Bakery in
Northern Ireland refused to bake a cake with a slogan supporting
gay-marriage. Their objection, they said, was to the *message*
for the cake, not to the customers requesting the cake. By contrast, a
black photographer might assert a right to refuse a commission to
photograph a Neo-Nazi group that is holding a conference on their
views. In that case, her objection would be both to the message and to
the customers seeking her services.



*Compelling State Interest I (Equality):* The state has a
compelling interest in ensuring that its citizens have access to those
goods that allow them to participate fully in the life of the
community. As such, the state has its own claim-rights and powers
grounded in these interests. Women's rights to gain access to
the privileges and advantages bestowed on members of commercial
institutions, ethnic minorities' rights to live in safe
neighborhoods irrespective of what local neighborhood associations
might fear (Anderson 2010), children's rights to attend properly
equipped schools despite the racial prejudices of other students or
their parents, and the rights of traditionally excluded groups to have
employment opportunities, all count as state interests that are
compelling enough to limit our rights to be exclusive. 



Another potentially compelling interest we have is in being protected
against the consequences of membership in our *own*
associations. There is a tension, for instance, between the demands a
community makes of its citizens and the impact that parental authority
can have on children's ability to learn about those demands.
Focusing on the case of *Wisconsin v Yoder* (406 U.S. 205
(1972)), which ruled that Amish parents' constitutionally
protected freedom of religion allowed them to take their children out
of state education after the eighth grade, Richard Arneson and Ian
Shapiro note that these parents' wishes to remove their children
from school after the eighth grade might interfere with their children
learning about the civic duties necessary to be effective members of
the wider political community, rendering them ill-equipped to
participate in that community. In such cases, Amish children's
associative rights and concomitant duties as US citizens are adversely
affected by their parents' desires to sustain their own
associative preferences (Arneson & Shapiro 1996; cf. Galston 1995:
518-520). More broadly, we can speak of children having a right
to an "open future", which includes rights to freedom of
association. As Joel Feinberg puts it, a proper education
"equips the child with the knowledge and skills that will help
him choose whatever form of life fits his native disposition and
mature disposition" (Feinberg 1980 [1992: 84]). This open
future, with its range of associative opportunities, is effectively
foreclosed when a child is removed from a sufficiently advanced,
formal education.



If the imperative to keep a child's future open is not weighed
appropriately against parents' rights to influence their
child's development, oppressive consequences can follow. In
Xinjiang province in North West China, the state has taken active
measures to prevent young people from the Uighur majority from
engaging in Islamic practices, forbidding people under 18 from
entering Mosques and preventing them from using their native tongue in
classrooms. In defending these policies, the Chinese state argues that
it does this both to prevent what they perceive as the threat of
terroristic activities (see d) below) and to keep open
children's possibilities to grow up with a more open future than
they would have if they are inculcated in traditional Islamic
practices. We can test the credibility of such defenses, specifically
as they relate to threats of terrorism, by examining the community
history, attitudes, and general behaviors of the people who are denied
access to those religious practices.



*Compelling State Interest II (Keeping the Peace):* Exclusion
can serve the development of associations which make it their target
to destroy the state and the social peace. Terrorist groups for
example will exclude people who are unsympathetic to the violent means
they advocate, even though they may share doctrinal or creedal
similarities. Exclusion here thus allows particular beliefs and
intentions to thrive unchallenged. Such exclusion conflicts also with
both other people's general rights to associate as they please
and the other goods that social peace makes possible. As a result, a
"compelling state interest" can prevent certain
associations from forming or staying together. In some cases, the
state has a compelling interest to compel, i.e., force, associations,
such as those achieved through desegregation, even when desegregation
can (and historically did) trigger violent responses. In other cases,
the state might claim that it has a compelling interest to prevent the
free associations of, for example, communists or anarchists of various
stripes (Hook 1953; Whittington 2008).



However, in connection with this "keeping the peace"
interest, an array of other interests can be served or hindered when
we seek to justify state action against particular associations. For
instance, states and power-players sometimes use accusations of
"moral disorder" and "threats of anarchy"
against workers assembling for their rights to vote. Matthew
Arnold's reaction to the 1866 Hyde Park demonstrations, for
instance, described such demands as "tending to anarchy"
and called that order be imposed on such assemblages for the sake of
civilization (Mitchell 2003: 13-14). Perception is an important
part of "keeping the peace". Where a group of people
perceive another group as a threat, keeping the peace might involve
appeasing them in their false picture of reality. Alternatively, other
people might view seemingly disruptive associations as agitating for a
more just political settlement. What this shows is that an
association's intentions always come with a certain level of
opacity, which complicates the task of adjudicating between legitimate
and illegitimate exercises of associative rights. It also complicates
the task of drawing the limits of those rights: When struggles ensue
between certain groups and the state, the state often uses intrusive
tactics to render those groups' aims transparent, such as police
infiltration, surveillance, discrediting, and disrupting, to manage,
undermine or destroy such organizations. How we judge these state
measures will ultimately depend on the seriousness of the perceived
threats that these groups pose.


## 4. The Right to Exit



Notwithstanding the threats posed by certain freely formed groups, the
right to exclude is grounded in the belief that, for our associations
to be valuable, they must be freely chosen in some measure (Kateb
1998: 36). However, since not all associations operate according to
either implicit or explicit declarations of consent, exactly what
counts as *consent* is a difficult thing to assess: How do we
know when association is free (Okin 2002)? This problem is exacerbated
by the hierarchical form that many associations take. The paradigmatic
example of a hierarchical association is that between parents and
children. But, hierarchy pervades other connections--between
older and younger siblings, employers and employees, states and
citizens, and spouses. For some, the fact of acquiescence is
sufficient for consent: if a person remains in an association, then
she seems to provide evidence that she consents to continued
membership. Regardless of how high the cost of leaving an association
might be, the person who remains does not exercise her right to exit,
which she meaningfully has so long as she is not being physically
restrained, and, thus, she is properly describable as free (Kukathas
2003: 113). According to this line of thought, a wife who is
psychologically tormented by her spouse, suffering from extreme
poverty, and terrified by the outside world as an inhospitable place,
remains free to leave her husband.



For those who doubt that this extreme view is persuasive, the question
becomes how to make rights of exit realistic. Galston identifies four
conditions for a meaningful right to exit: knowledge, capacity,
psychological independence, and fitness. The first condition refers to
brute awareness that alternatives exist; the second refers to an
ability to assess those alternatives; the third to freedom from
pernicious forms of brainwashing and freedom to act on the results of
that assessment; and the fourth to the ability to move into and
participate in other forms of life (Galston 1995: 525). When these
conditions are met, we can conclude that the person has a meaningful
right to exit, and the association passes a threshold that should be
acceptable to liberals. Such conditions show that in many fundamental
associations, such as young children's family arrangement, it
makes no sense to talk of a right--a freedom--to exit.
Children are liable to the associative powers of their guardians, and
usually this serves their best interests.



In the case of employer-employee associations, the right to exit
merits special attention since, for most of us, work is something we
have to do, though we have varying degrees of control over the kinds
of work we do and, consequently, the people with whom we do it. When
our choice is between doing truly awful work and starvation, our
options are severely limited. If we *must*--on pain of
severe privation--say "yes" to dirty, dangerous,
dull, or degrading work, then we lack a meaningful option to exit. On
this view, genuine, or even minimal, freedom of association at work
requires that we have the ability to say "no" to all and
any work (Widerquist 2013; Pateman 2007).



In the same way that we have limited exit-rights in our work lives, we
have limited exit-rights in our political lives as members of states
and nations. As noted above, we cannot exit entirely from the realm of
state jurisdiction. We will always fall within the jurisdiction of
some state. And, to have a meaningful right to exit any one
state's jurisdiction, we must meet, if not exceed,
Galston's tests of knowledge, capacity, independence, and
fitness. In a nutshell, we must not only have the resources to leave,
but also be sufficiently appealing--or be in sufficient
need--that another state will accept us.


### Limits to the right of exit



The points above note some of the physical and psychological limits to
our rights to exit. There are normative limits to these rights
too.


*Supporting Dissent: The rights to remain*: Over and above
questions of when exit is truly available, we can ask why excluders
and people who push "exiters" out by imposing enormous
costs on them to stay, should have so resounding a say on cultural and
group organization. For instance, instead of focusing on the
importance of women having the freedom to exit from their home,
community, or culture, we could focus instead on securing them a
significant voice within their family's or culture's
formations and practices (Okin 2002: 207). For example, we could focus
on why devout Catholic women who care deeply about their Church are
denied a significant role in the ecclesiastical affairs of that group,
for no reason other than their gender. For another example, we could
ask why empirically dubious claims about homosexuals' inability
to lead should prevent people like James Dale from becoming Scout
masters. By focusing on the right to exit as an adequate measure of an
association's members' freedom, we ignore the goods that
could be captured, and the justice done, by instead strengthening
people's rights*within* an association, which could force
change from within. Undeniably, this argument that people be supported
to remain must be qualified, since it invites the state to dictate
both the membership and the internal rules of associations (an issue
explored below).


*Responsibilities to Dependents*: In family life,
caregivers have responsibilities to dependents, both young and old,
which can limit their rights to exit from those family connections.
Even when caregivers do successfully pass the caregiving torch to
others, by outsourcing or formally transferring care duties, they
usually cannot release themselves from all associative responsibility,
but must pay financially for the care of their (former) associates.
Additionally, if we adopt a strong view of the binding force of vows
and promises, then caregivers lack the same kinds of exit rights that
non-caregivers have, or at the very least caregivers do serious moral
wrong when they assert their exit rights.


*Importance of Education*: As noted above, parents'
desires for their children can often conflict with the important forms
of socialization that children usually experience at school. The
United Kingdom and France offer two different approaches to how far
parents' control should impact on children's educational
experiences. France, with an undergirding principle of
*laicite*, offers an especially restrictive
understanding of how far freedom of association may impact on the
curriculum, dress code and purposes of education (Laborde, 2006;
Galeotti, 2002: 115-137). At the other end, the UK's
support of religious schools, although somewhat restricted with
respect to curriculum, permits broader scope for freedom of
association. That said, both the UK and France, like most
jurisdictions, limit children's own right to exit from school
before they reach a certain age of maturity. Whichever of these two
educational strategies contributes best to forms of association more
conducive to democratic citizenship is preferable in that respect to
alternatives. This is potentially not a question that can be answered
without attending to the economic, historical, and social fabric of
the community in question.


*Lifestyle Decisions and Social Good*: Members of gated
communities exercise both rights of exit and of exclusion: they leave
behind the communities to which they did belong, often with the
express intention of withdrawing contributions to which they believe
their former communities have no entitlement. They also, as a
community, then decide on who gets to live in their newly formed
communities. Indeed, the two rights, exit and exclusion, often exist
either in tandem or as a fall-back. When parents remove their child
from a desegregated school, their lack of a right to exclude prompts
them to exercise their presumably less preferred option of
exiting.



When people are segregated from one another for whatever reason, there
can be important reasons to limit their freedom of association, to
encourage social mixing across class and race lines among other
things. When people employ their rights of exclusion and exit too
readily, and for reasons that conflict with equal citizenship, a
society may need to resort to socially engineering certain forms of
association, such as mixing rent-controlled and private housing, and
shaping social space to encourage interactions among people of
different races, ages and classes. If trust is a necessary feature of
democratic life, then the citizenry's habits and living patterns
become an important resource. To generate this resource, a society
must attend to the concrete spaces of interaction wherein trust,
rather than distrust, is more likely to emerge (Ryan 1998: 322). A
community divided into gated communities, racially-segregated suburbs
and stigmatized ghettos is ill-equipped to provide space within the
wider political association for trust to emerge (Anderson 2010: 34;
Allen 2004: 165).


## 5. The Right to Organizational Autonomy



The right to organizational autonomy intersects with both the right to
exclude and the right to exit since, typically, associates want not
just to do certain things together, but to do those things with
certain people and not other people. Indeed, in the eyes of many
associations, the things they do wouldn't be those same things
if they couldn't exclude unwanted people from joining them, or
if they couldn't exercise control over their own
participation.



Maintaining rights to organizational autonomy does not necessarily
issue in liberal practices (Alexander 2008: 14). The right of the
family to operate, unimpeached, according to patriarchal values, the
right of unions to maintain hierarchical decision procedures, and the
rights of churches to refuse women access to positions of authority,
are all consequences of those associations being allowed to shape
their organization without outside interference. These rights find
their limits when they do indefensible harm to members, particularly
to those members who cannot consent.



Focusing on mutually voluntary associations, what kinds of
associations do we have the right to consent to join? And, what kinds
of conduct do we have the right to engage in as associates? For
instance, can we have a right to voluntarily become a slave and our
associate the master, an association that would deny us all prospects
to make other associative decisions even if our master treats us
kindly? Less radically, do we have a right to consent to harmful
relations, such as sadomasochistic sexual relations, or to
life-threatening connections, such as a marriage with a highly
contagious asymptomatic carrier of typhoid or a marriage with a person
who suffers from psychopathy? Our answers will depend partly on how we
conceive of *autonomy*. If autonomous agency cannot be
self-negating, then we cannot voluntarily enslave ourselves or enter
self-destructive relations. But, if we can autonomously do things that
eliminate all prospects for future autonomous agency such as seek
voluntary euthanasia, then why could we not autonomously form
associations that do or threaten the same thing?



Consent can do the work to protect the internal operations of many
associations, even when the associates pose severe risks to each other
and to themselves. But, there will be natural limits to these rights
of organizational autonomy, despite worries about paternalism.


### Limits to the right to organizational autonomy



When associations lack full rights to exclude or exit, they will
inevitably lack full rights over their organizational autonomy. For
many years, orchestras have been required by convention to have
candidates audition behind a screen to ensure anonymity. The result
has been that orchestras have hired far more musicians from
traditionally under-represented groups than they did previously. In
the eyes of defenders of an all-male preserve like the Vienna
Philharmonic (which delayed admitting women as full members until
1997, far later than any other leading orchestra), this changes the
character of the enterprise, and, some would say, costs it the vital
comradery and cohesion necessary for great orchestral work.
Unsurprisingly, leading orchestras have found that wonderful work can
be produced by a diverse company of musicians. What matters is the
performers' musical ability and their ability to work well
together. Their gender and ethnicity are, or should be, irrelevant to
those things.



In other spheres, however, features such as sex, gender or nationality
are not irrelevant. A Taiwanese students' club at an American
university might accept, or be required to admit, non-Taiwanese
students who are interested in that country. But, if non-Taiwanese
students make up the majority of the club members or are running the
show, this will undoubtedly change the club's character and
possibly compromise its intended organizational identity.



As already noted in connection with the right to exclude, the
state's compelling interests can justifiably limit
associations' rights to organizational autonomy (Johnson 2001).
In some respects, state interference with organizational autonomy is
inevitably going to be more complex than state interference with
associations' efforts to exclude people: Here, the state is not
simply refusing, for instance, to give schools permission to bar
students of color. Instead, the state is setting down limits to how
far a group can decide to organize itself. When the state gives an
organization a quota that dictates how many women or people from
different ethnicities it must include, the state then insists on
particular patterns of inclusion. Quotas might thus be taken as an
instance of the state attempting to achieve more substantive forms of
integration. For instance, insisting on the inclusion of sufficiently
large numbers of women in political parties and representative bodies
can aim to improve the democratic credentials of an overall
institutional structure (Phillips 1998; Mansbridge 1999). Similarly,
having a quota for the number of corporate board members who must be
women, 40% in the case of Norway, can aim to achieve greater
integration as well as better working conditions for all women. In
another example, the US government worked to create less segregated
schools, with programs such as Moving to Opportunity (MTO), and more
integrated neighbourhoods, with Chicago's Gautreaux Program.
Such actions can be described as attempts to bring about certain
patterns of inclusion and connection within especially formative
associations, even though they sometimes go against the wishes of some
participants (Anderson 2010: 119-120).



A potential limit to this imperative is presented by Tommie Shelby, in
explicit response to Elizabeth Anderson's argument for
integration. Shelby suggests that, in deeply unjust societies, ghettos
perform important survivalist functions for their residents. They are
spaces in which people can nourish a sense of community and a feeling
of security from the familiarities of their own space, against a
seemingly hostile outside world. To expect these residents, as
Anderson does, to integrate into white neighborhoods is to potentially
sacrifice those goods in the name of correcting for wider injustices,
for which these people are not responsible. Even if additional
(though, empirically, potentially spurious) access to a wider field of
social capital can become available by integrating, the people most
burdened by injustice should not have to make additional sacrifices in
order to amend those structural failures (Shelby 2016: 49-79).
Here, the freedom to associate, and the functions served by already
existing associations, are given priority over the possibly beneficial
associative relations that could be developed once existing
associations are weakened. In addition to this freedom of association
against interferences from the state, Shelby also describes the
associative *duties* and *solidarities* that come with
living in and belonging to ghetto communities (2016: 61).


## Conclusion



This entry has distilled from the vast array of associations to which
we belong a taxonomy that highlights paradigmatic forms of association
while noting how those forms overlap with each other. The entry
details the values protected by the rights to exclude, to exit, and to
exercise organizational autonomy, while also noting how, only by
limiting these rights, can other specific values, goods, and rights be
achieved.



The values of association go far beyond what can be captured by
reference to freedom of association and the rights and duties that
give shape to this freedom. Given our constitutive sociality, we are
creatures that come together with one another for all sorts of
reasons: some good, some benign, and some nefarious. By looking to the
wider field of values and functions performed by association, we can
situate freedom of association within a proper appreciation of the
complex realm of associative life, and thereby gain a full sense not
only of the value of this freedom, but also of why such freedom might
need to be limited in order to pursue other values. Some of these
alternative values will also be associative in nature (such as
ensuring simple connection to other humans, free or otherwise) and
some will go beyond associative values altogether, to include the
values of security, equality or economic efficiency.