Karl Popper discovered the link between the open society and scientific dis- covery with the help of his analysis of growth of scientific theories (Popper, 1945, 1959). Only in an open society can hypotheses or models be falsified. His principle of falsification applies not only to scientific argument but also to social science beliefs and political propaganda. Thus, democracy nourishes an open society seeking the truth. Actually, democracy is the sole political re- gime that promotes the truth in an open (...) society. The rationale for democracy is to be found in game theory, in particular the principal agent framework in the economics of information. (shrink)

One central objection to philosophical defences of liberal neutrality is that many neutrally justified laws and policies are nonetheless discriminatory as they unilaterally impose costs or confer unearned privileges on the bearers of a particular conception of the good. Call this the false neutrality objection. While liberal neutralists seldom consider this objection to be a serious allegation, and often claim that it rests on a misunderstanding, I argue that it is a serious challenge for proponents of justificatory neutrality. Indeed, a (...) careful examination of recent French and Canadian laws which impede the members of cultural minorities from freely practising their religion reveals that the state can hide its discriminatory aims by cloaking the policies it enacts in neutral language. In order to avoid the problem of false neutrality, I contend, liberal neutralists should defend a combination of neutrality of justification and neutrality of aim and operationalize neutrality of aim through a practical test that has been a defining feature of American jurisprudence on religious freedom in the last thirty years: the general applicability requirement. (shrink)

Reciprocal libertarianism is a version of left-wing libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an egalitarian distribution of resources according to reciprocity. In this paper, I show that reciprocal libertarianism is a coherent and appealing view. I discuss how reciprocal libertarians can handle conflicts between self-ownership and reciprocity, and I show that reciprocal libertarianism can be realised in a framework of individual ownership of external resources or in a socialist scheme of common ownership (libertarian socialism). I also compare reciprocal libertarianism with left-libertarian (...) approaches: I argue that a reciprocity-sensitive version of left-libertarianism (reciprocal left-libertarianism) is coherent and morally superior to traditional left-libertarianism, on grounds of incorporating a distinctively solidaristic and recognition-oriented aspect of equality. The policy implications of reciprocal libertarianism will differ depending on which rights people can have over external resources, but all reciprocal libertarian views acknowledge the existence of social rights that people have as co-operators. (shrink)

Most political liberals argue that only rules, policies and institutions that are part of society’s basic structure need to be justified with so-called public reasons. Laws enacted outside this set are legitimate if and when public reasons can justify the procedure that selects them. I argue that this view is susceptible to known problems from social choice theory. However, there are resources within political liberalism that could address them. If the scope of public reason is extended beyond the basic structure (...) it could order people’s preferences in a way that circumvents the identified issues. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 281-292, January 2022.

Realists criticise the moralised approaches that inform ideal political theory for being unable to handle the brute facts of disagreement that constitute political reality. As a result, such approaches are insufficiently political, too ambitious in terms of the substantive unanimity that can be expected to emerge from political differences, and naive in the proposals they make. In this paper, I use Brian Barry’s ‘moralised‘ approach – as developed in ’Justice as Impartiality’ – to argue that ideal theory can be reformulated (...) to make it capable not only of responding to realist criticisms, but of offering a moralised approach to politics that has significant realist pedigree. As an instance of this pedigree, I argue thus understood, ideal theory can provide us the tools to distinguish between the making of compromises and the acceptance of capitulation and thereby contribute to an understanding of our political worlds. (shrink)

Aumann’s theorem states that no individual should agree to disagree under a range of assumptions. Political liberalism appears to presuppose these assumptions with the idealized conditions of public reason. We argue Aumann’s theorem demonstrates they nevertheless cannot be simultaneously held with what is arguably political liberalism’s most central tenet. That is, the tenet of reasonable pluralism, which implies we can rationally agree to disagree over conceptions of the good. We finish by elaborating a way of relaxing one of the theorem’s (...) axioms that arguably lends itself to a coherent account of political liberalism, namely the condition of indexical independence. (shrink)

How do we determine whether individuals accept the actual consistency of a political argument instead of just its rhetorical good looks? This article answers this question by proposing an interpretation of political argument within the constraints of political liberalism. It utilises modern developments in the philosophy of logic and language to reclaim ‘meaningless nonsense’ from use as a partisan war cry and to build up political argument as something more than a power struggle between competing conceptions of the good. Standard (...) solutions for ‘clarifying’ meaning through descriptive definition encounter difficulties with the biases of status quo idioms (long noted by theorists like William Connolly and Quentin Skinner), as well as partisan translations and circularity. Collectively called linguistic gerrymandering, these difficulties threaten political liberalism’s underlying coherency. The proposed interpretation of political argument overcomes this with a new brand of conceptual analysis that can falsifiably determine whether rhetoric has hijacked political argument. (shrink)

A globalized world, some argue, needs a global democracy. But there is considerable disagreement about whether global democracy is an ideal worth pursuing. One of the main grounds for scepticism is captured by the slogan: “No global demos, no global democracy.” The fact that a key precondition of democracy—a demos—is absent at the global level, some argue, speaks against the pursuit of global democracy. The paper discusses four interpretations of the skeptical slogan—each based on a specific account of the notion (...) of “the demos”—and concludes that none of them establishes that the global democratic ideal must be abandoned. In so doing, the paper (i) systematizes different types of objections against global democracy, thus bringing some clarity to an otherwise intricate debate and (ii) offers a robust but qualified defense of the global democratic ideal. (shrink)

Just as different sciences deal with different facts—say, physics versus biology—so we may ask a similar question about normative theories. Is normative political theory concerned with the same normative facts as moral theory or different ones? By developing an analogy with the sciences, we argue that the normative facts of political theory belong to a higher— more coarse-grained—level than those of moral theory. The latter are multiply realizable by the former: competing facts at the moral level can underpin the same (...) facts at the political one. Consequently, some questions that moral theories answer are indeterminate at the political level. This proposal offers a novel interpretation of John Rawls’s idea that, in public reasoning, we should abstract away from comprehensive moral doctrines. We contrast our distinction between facts at different levels with the distinction between admissible and inadmissible evidence and discuss some implications for the practice of political theory. (shrink)

El artículo sostiene que la teoría liberal está tensionada por una pretensión de universalidad normativa y su implementación institucional en el contexto de los Estados nacionales. Esta tensión se expresa claramente en el caso de la inmigración con la demanda estatal de control discrecional de las fronteras. El artículo desarrolla cuatro argumentos a favor de la relevancia normativa de las fronteras, y sostiene que no son conclusivos. Correspondientemente, desde una perspectiva liberal se dispondría de menos argumentos para justificar el cierre (...) discrecional de las fronteras. (shrink)

This paper challenges one of the main contributions of Political Liberalism (PL), namely the burdens of judgment (BoJ), on the grounds that it is superfluous to the project of excluding matters of the good from politics and it makes PL susceptible to a scepticism objection. From Rawls’s PL, we can extract two arguments for epistemic restraint in the public realm. The first is a moral argument based on the principles of fairness and reciprocity. The second is an epistemic argument derived (...) from the idea of the insurmountability of BoJ. The second of these arguments, I contend, is superfluous for two reasons: (i) BoJ, as a descriptive claim cannot itself explain why citizens should uphold a form of toleration that requires them to honor their epistemic restraint in politics. (ii) The moral argument alone is sufficient to justify epistemic constraint in the public realm through the reasonable exercise of political power. -/- Moreover, acceptance of the BoJ is incompatible with subscribing to a reasonable comprehensive doctrine (RCD) with a degree of certainty that is required to be convinced of any such doctrine. The relation between BoJ and scepticism has been addressed before but these thinkers assume that it is the implication of BoJ namely, reasonable disagreement that entails scepticism. This paper lays new sceptical challenges at the doorstep of PL and these new challenges focus on the very idea of the insurmountability of BoJ. Furthermore, it argues that scepticism is not an appropriate epistemic commitment for PL as it is incompatible with the aim of freestanding political conception of justice. Also, it is subversive of the purpose of an overlapping consensus because the idea underpinning an overlapping consensus is that citizens should not only appreciate liberal political principles as reasonable but they should also accept them as true on the basis of their own religious or philosophical reasons. Provided that BoJ entails scepticism, BoJ makes citizens’ religious and philosophical truth claims utterly irrelevant to the stability of society. Accordingly, I argue that the Rawlsian account of reasonableness must relinquish the epistemic component, BoJ; instead it should articulate how the moral component of reasonableness entails the principles of epistemic restraint in politics and acting from public reasons. (shrink)

Me propongo analizar críticamente la idea de abstinencia epistémica desarrollada por un importante grupo de teóricos liberales a partir de los años ochenta del siglo pasado. Para los propósitos del liberalismo político la propuesta de la abstinencia epistémica desempeña un papel crucial. Consiste en garantizar el consenso en torno a las reglas procesales y principios públicos de justicia, exigiendo que la pluralidad de intereses y concepciones sustantivas que coexisten en la sociedad se abstengan de realizar atribuciones de verdad sobre sus (...) propias concepciones morales cuando éstas son debatidas en la esfera pública. Mi argumento es que esta estrategia fracasa toda vez que la abstinencia epistémica no resiste la aplicación de sus propias cláusulas a sí misma. (shrink)

This paper intends to explain the problem of structural injustice. The Rawlsian theory of justice is problematic due to the reality of positional differences. The assumptions of Rawls are put into question. Oppression, according to Iris Marion Young, is social in character. Fair opportunity is not enough. To elaborate this critique, this study presents the exclusion of individuals with handicap, the problem of global justice, and the situation of women in patriarchal cultures. Some social rules and the behavior of people (...) discriminate the powerless. For instance, particular standards in society promote the high sense of respectability for professionals but not the respect for the equal dignity of persons. Procedures, laws, and policies manifest the prejudice against others. Beyond Rawls, the pursuit of justice and democratic inclusion, it is argued, requires overcoming unjust structures. (shrink)

In Beyond Neutrality, George Sher criticises the idea that state neutrality between competing conceptions of the good helps protect society from oppression. While he is correct that some governments are non-neutral without being oppressive, I argue that those governments may be neutral at the core of their foundations. The possibility of non-neutrality leading to oppression is further explored; some conceptions of the good would favour oppression while others would not. While it is possible that a non-neutral state may avoid oppression, (...) it is argued that the risks are so great that it is better to bet on government being neutral, thereby minimizing the possibility of oppression. (shrink)

Those who wish to abolish or restrict the use of non-human animals in so-called factory farming and/or experimentation often argue that these animal use practices are incommensurate with animals’ moral status. If sound, these arguments would establish that, as a matter of ethics or justice, we should voluntarily abstain from the immoral animal use practices in question. But these arguments can’t and shouldn’t be taken to establish a related conclusion: that the moral status of animals justifies political intervention to disallow (...) or significantly diminish factory farming and animal experimentation. In this paper, we set out to do two things: First, we argue that while the arguments mentioned above may establish the moral impermissibility or injustice of the practices they condemn, they are not sufficient to justify political interventions or social policies to abolish or restrict such practices. It is one thing to argue that some moral imperative or imperative of justice exists, and quite another thing to call for the use of political power to induce compliance with that imperative. Our second task is to assess the prospects for developing an argument that is sufficient to justify political interventions to restrict or abolish the use of non-human animals in factory farming or experimentation. Beyond establishing the immorality or injustice of animal consumption or experimentation, one must show that the interventions in question constitute legitimate use of political power. Would prohibiting or discouraging animal use be legitimate? We attempt to answer this question within the context of fundamental liberal constraints on the legitimate use of coercive political power. (shrink)

Political liberalism holds that political decisions should be made on the basis of public considerations, and not on the basis of comprehensive religious, moral, or philosophical views. An important objection to this view is that it presupposes doubt, hesitation, or skepticism about the truth of comprehensive doctrines on the side of reasonable citizens. Proponents of political liberalism, such as John Rawls and Jonathan Quong, successfully defend political liberalism against several objections of this kind. In this paper, I argue that recent (...) developments in the epistemology of disagreement require us to revisit these skeptical concerns. I will argue that the correct understanding of political liberalism’s epistemic commitments, in combination with a conciliatory view about peer disagreement, lead to a new skeptical problem for political liberalism. All reasonable citizens who also hold a set of religious, moral, or philosophical beliefs, I will argue, suffer from a breakdown of epistemic rationality. I will show that existing answers to skeptical objections fail to resolve this problem. (shrink)

In this paper, two claims are made. The main claim is that a fruitful approach for theorizing the political legitimacy of global governance and the proper normative role of civil society actors is the so-called ‘function-sensitive’ approach. The underlying idea of this approach is that the demands of legitimacy may vary depending on function and the relationship between functions. Within this function-sensitive framework, six functions in global governance are analyzed and six principles of legitimacy defended, together constituting a minimalist account (...) of political legitimacy. This account suggests that civil society actors may strengthen political legitimacy by performing five of these functions under certain conditions and insofar as the proposed normative political principles are fulfilled: problem identification, agenda-setting, implementation, enforcement and monitoring, and evaluation. The second claim is critical and is chiselled out against the backdrop of this function-sensitive account, through which I demonstrate that much vagueness and confusion with regard to the proper role of civil society actors for strengthening the political legitimacy of global governance could be traced to the so-called ‘transmission belt’ model, which has gained popularity in international political theory. This model depicts civil society as a transmission belt between the public sphere and decision-making loci, where it is assumed that civil society actors contribute to the strengthening of political legitimacy by transmitting peoples’ preferences, beliefs, and opinions from the former to the latter space by indirectly or directly influencing the decision-making. It is argued that this picture is misleading and generates erroneous prescriptions of how civil society actors should act to increase political legitimacy. (shrink)

Joel Feinberg’s Offense to Others is the most comprehensive contemporary work on the significance of offense in a liberal legal system. Feinberg argues that being offended can impair a person’s liberty, much like a nuisance, and that it is therefore legitimate in principle to regulate conduct because of its offensiveness. In this article, I discuss some overlooked considerations that give us reason to resist Feinberg’s conclusion, even while granting this premise. My key claim is that the regulation of offense can (...) inadvertently increase the incidence of offense, by nurturing offense-taking sensibilities. In the course of defending this claim and spelling out its implications, I explain why concerns about the inadvertent nurturing of offense are now more pressing, given the identity–political character of contemporary offense-based social conflicts, and I discuss why a reluctance to legally regulate offensive conduct need not be insensitive to the identity–political issues that animate those conflicts. (shrink)

The corruption of public officials and institutions is generally regarded as wrong. But in what exactly does this form of corruption consist and what kind of wrong does it imply? This article aims to take stock of the current philosophical discussion of the different senses in which political corruption is wrong in a general sense, beyond the specific negative legal, economic, and social costs it may happen to have in specific circumstances. Political corruption is usually presented as a pathology of (...) the public order. Therefore, the senses in which political corruption has been presented as wrong have varied depending on the normative theory of the public order that is presupposed. In this article, we offer a critical presentation of two major interpretations of the wrongfulness of political corruption that draw respectively on a neo-republican and a liberal account of the public order. Finally, we show how the analytical distinction between these approaches has important normative implications for the identification of relevant cases of political corruption. (shrink)

It is plausible to think that practices of caring are partly constituted by a caregiver's commitment to a cared-for. However, discussions of caring often contain no explicit discussion of such commitments, and do not attempt to draw any philosophical conclusions from the nature of caring relations as committed. A discussion of caring practices that emphasizes the importance of commitment therefore has the potential to generate important new insights for our understanding of caring. This essay begins that project by arguing that (...) a commitment-centric conception of caring entails the truth of moral partialism. Although many care-ethicists are sympathetic to partialism, the arguments in its defense remain controversial. As I show in this article, however, partialism is necessarily true given the committed nature of caring. This is because the concept of commitment is itself a necessarily partial one: to say that we are equally committed to everyone or everything is equivalent to saying that we are not committed to anything. Thus, when viewed as a species of commitment, it is part of the concept of caring that it requires us to put the needs of those we care for before the needs of those unknown to us. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the moral concept of harm in the context of the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage. This paper delineates between two concepts of wrongful harm: interactional versus architectural. It then examines these options with an eye toward developing a satisfactory normative approach for policy. While the interactional view of wrongful harm supports powerful arguments about moral responsibility, it has some clear limitations. This paper makes a case for the architectural view by underlining that it (...) is not only compatible with the features of the Paris Agreement but also supports a distinctive conception of justice. (shrink)

We present an experiment designed to investigate three different mechanisms to achieve impartiality in distributive justice. We consider a first-person procedure, inspired by the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and two third-party procedures, an involved spectator and a detached observer. First-person veiled stakeholders and involved spectators are affected by an initially unfair distribution that, in the stakeholders’ case, is to be redressed. We find substantial differences in the redressing task. Detached observers propose significantly fairer redistributions than veiled stakeholders or involved spectators. (...) Risk preferences partly explain why veiled stakeholders propose less egalitarian redistributions. Surprisingly, involved spectators, who are informed about their position in society, tend to favour stakeholders holding the same position as they do after the initial distribution. (shrink)

With a book as wide ranging and insightful as Barry'sJustice as Impartiality, it is perhaps a little churlish to criticize it for paying insufficient attention to one's own particular interests. That said, in what follows I am going to do just that and claim that in an important sense Barry does not take utilitarianism seriously. Utilitarianism does receive some discussion in Barry's book, and in an important section which I will discuss he even appears to concede that utilitarianism provides a (...) rival though ultimately inadequate theory of justice. Nevertheless, utilitarianism is not considered a rival to ‘justice as impartiality’ in the way that ‘justice as mutual advantage’ and ‘justice as reciprocity’ are. One response, and perhaps the only adequate response, would be to construct a rival utilitarian theory. I cannot provide such a theory in this paper, and I certainly would be very cautious about claiming that I could provide such a theory elsewhere. What I want to suggest is that utilitarianismisa genuine third theory to contrast with ‘justice as mutual advantage’ and ‘justice as impartiality’ – ‘justice as reciprocity’ being merely a hybrid of ‘justice as mutual advantage’, at least as Barry presents it (pp. 46–51). I also want to argue that it poses a more significant challenge to a contractualist theory such as Barry's than his discussion of utilitarianism reveals. (shrink)

Obwohl seit einiger Zeit ein verstärktes Forschungsinteresse an Emmanuel Levinas’ Denken des Politischen, verbunden mit einer genaueren Inblicknahme der zentralen Begriffe des Dritten und der Gerechtigkeit aufgekommen ist, blieb bislang unklar, inwiefern aus Levinas’ intrinsisch ‚ethischem‘ Denken in konkreterer Weise normative Konsequenzen zu ziehen sind. Diesem Desiderat versucht der vorliegende Beitrag nachzukommen. Das Levinas’sche Gerechtigkeitsdenken wird dabei so eingeführt, dass es zugleich als alternativer Entwurf und als produktive kritische Provokation für gegenwärtige Gerechtigkeitstheorien lesbar wird. Ausgehend von einer Rekonstruktion des alteritären (...) Verständnisses ethischer Subjektivität, wie es Levinas insbesondere in Jenseits des Seins erarbeitet, wird ausgelotet, wie tragfähig Levinas’ ethische Konzeption plural alteritär durchfurchter Subjektivität für normative Gerechtigkeitsfragen ist. Aus einer Reflexion auf den Begriff des ‚Dritten‘ werden einige konkrete Konsequenzen für das Denken gerechter Institutionen gezogen. (shrink)

In their strife for designing a moral system where everyone is given equal consideration, cosmopolitan theorists have merely tolerated partiality as a necessary evil (insofar it means that we give priority to our kin opposite the distant needy). As a result, the cosmopolitan ideal has long departed from our moral psychologies and our social realities. Here I put forward partial cosmopolitanism as an alternative to save that obstacle. Instead of demanding impartial universal action, it requires from us that we are (...) equally responsive in all the relationships we stand in. That goes from the local to the cosmopolitan sphere, since I defend that we are related with strangers as co-members of the global community. Thus, partiality not only is accommodated by cosmopolitanism, but actually supports it: only by having meaningful personal relationships we become able to care for distant strangers. (shrink)

This article outlines the foundations of a nomos-observing theory of social justice, termed ‘rule egalitarianism’, that explains how the seemingly contradictory merger of classical liberalism and s...

This article takes a new idea, ‘normative behaviourism’, and applies it to global political theory, in order to address at least one of the problems we might have in mind when accusing that subject of being too ‘unrealistic’. The core of this idea is that political principles can be justified, not just by patterns in our thinking, and in particular our intuitions and considered judgements, but also by patterns in our behaviour, and in particular acts of insurrection and crime. The (...) problem addressed is ‘cultural relativism’, understood here not as a meta-ethical doctrine, but as the apparent ‘fact’ that people around the world have culturally varying intuitions and judgements of a kind that lead them to affirm different political principles. This is a problem because it seems to follow (1) that global agreement on any substantial set of political principles is impossible, and (2) that any political theory in denial of this ‘fact’ would be, for that reason, deeply unrealistic. The solution argued for here is that, if domestic political principles (i.e. principles intended to regulate a single state) could be justified by normative behaviourism, and in reference to culturally invariant behaviour, then an international system supportive of such principles is justifiable by extension. (shrink)

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argues that self-respect is ‘perhaps the most important’ primary good and that its status as such gives crucial support to controversial ideas like the lexical priority of liberty. Given the importance of these ideas for Rawls, it should be no surprise that they have attracted much critical attention. In response to these critics, I give a defense of self-respect that grounds its importance in Rawls’s moral conception of the person. I show that this (...) understanding of self-respect goes well beyond giving support to the lexical priority of liberty, also supporting Rawls’s still more controversial view of public reason. On my account, taking self-respect seriously requires the coercive enforcement of public reason. This is a novel argument for public reason, in that it grounds the idea in justice as fairness and mandates its coercive enforcement. (shrink)

This essay argues that whereas ‘analytic’ political philosophy is focussed on generating reasons that are oriented to the issue of articulating norms of justice, legitimacy and so on, that guide political judgements about institutions and/or forms of conduct; ‘Continental’ political philosophy is oriented to critically assessing the practices of reasoning that characterise our social and political institutions and forms of conduct as well as our first-order normative reflection on them. It explores the distinction between the two orientations in terms of, (...) what are called, their ‘structural problematics’: the guidance problem and the critique problem, before considering briefly ways in which they may be combined. (shrink)

This article provides an ethical evaluation of the CIA's use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to target so-called terror suspects and insurgents. It utilises Christian informed deontological and virtue-ethical criteria to assess this practise. These criteria include just intent, charity, proportionality, moral consistency, truthfulness, mercy, courage and prudence. The article concludes that the UAV target programme is morally problematic. The United States’ ‘kill not capture’ policy as exemplified in the use of ‘signature’ strikes defies the virtues at stake. By using UAV's (...) as tools for preventive warfare, utilising armed UAV's that are weapons of war outside areas of armed conflict and disregarding the principles of transparency, last resort and proportionality, the United States is employing UAV's in a morally illegitimate and imprudent way, and is setting precedents that might have dire consequences for global peace and the security of future generations. (shrink)

When individuals receive benefits as a result of the burdens assumed by other people, they are expected to make a return in similar form. To do otherwise is considered as a failure to treat those other people with appropriate respect. It is this which justifies the expectation that individuals share in the labour that is necessary to preserve just institutions and productive practices that characterise complex schemes of social cooperation. In this paper, I argue that where benefits do not meet (...) thresholds specifying the expected function and efficacy of those benefits, this does not simply issue in a ‘downward adjustment’ in the work expectations and reciprocal demands that are made of people. Rather, it legitimates refusal to engage in productive labour even where limited benefits are still being received. Other costs and obligations emerge that contribute to the creation of disruptive political, economic and social associations. These not only replace the demands of reciprocity but actively target and disrupt the practices and exchanges that give form to reciprocity. (shrink)

Kant limits cosmopolitan right to a universal right of hospitality, condemning European imperial practices towards indigenous peoples, while allowing a right to visit foreign countries for the purpose of offering to engage in commerce. I argue that attempts by contemporary theorists such as Jeremy Waldron to expand and update Kant’s juridical category of cosmopolitan right would blunt or erase Kant’s own anti-colonial doctrine. Waldron’s use of Kant’s category of cosmopolitan right to criticize contemporary identity politics relies on premises that upset (...) Kant’s balanced right to hospitality. An over-extensive right to visit can invoke “Kantian” principles that Kant himself could not have consistently held, without weakening his condemnation of European settlement. I construct an alternative spirit of cosmopolitan right more favorable to the contemporary claims of indigenous peoples. Kant’s analysis suggests there are circumstances when indigenous peoples may choose whether to engage in extensive cultural interaction, and reasonably refuse the risks of subjecting their claims to debate in democratic politics in a unitary public. Cosmopolitan right accorded respect to peoples; any “domestic” adaptation of cosmopolitan right should respect indigenous peoples as peoples, absent a serious public explanation by a democratic state for why it has now become appropriate to treat indigenous peoples merely as individual citizens. (shrink)

A conception of global citizenship should not be viewed as separate from, or synonymous with, the cosmopolitan moral orientation, but as a primary component of it. Global citizenship is fundamentally concerned with individual moral requirements in the global frame. Such requirements, framed here as belonging to the category of individual cosmopolitanism, offer guidelines on right action in the context of global human community. They are complementary to the principles of moral cosmopolitanism — those to be used in assessing the justice (...) of global institutions and practices — that have been emphasised by cosmopolitan political theorists. Considering principles of individual and moral cosmopolitanism together can help to provide greater clarity concerning individual duties in the absence of fully global institutions, as well as clarity on individual obligations of justice in relation to emerging and still-developing trans-state institutions. (shrink)

Unlike his theory of justice as fairness, John Rawls’s political liberalism has generally been spared from critiques regarding what is due to the disabled. This paper demonstrates that, due to the account of the basic ideas of society and persons provided by Rawls, political liberalism requires that the interests of numerous individuals with disabilities should be put aside when the most fundamental issues of justice are settled. The aim is to accommodate within public reason the due concern for the disabled (...) while upholding political liberalism. To achieve this aim, a revision of the basic ideas of persons and society is proposed. The idea of persons should be regarded as more fundamental than that of social cooperation, and persons should be defined in terms of minimal moral powers. (shrink)

Over the years, consequentialism has been subjected to numerous serious objections. Its adherents, however, have been remarkably successful in fending them off. As I argue in this paper, the reason why the case against consequentialism has not been more successful lies, at least partly, in the methodological approach that critics have commonly used. Their arguments have usually proceeded in two steps. First, a definition of consequentialism is given. Then, objections are put forward based on that definition. This procedure runs into (...) one of two problems. Substantive criticisms of consequentialism can only be formulated, if the posited definition is sufficiently concrete and narrow. In that case, however, consequentialists can defend themselves using a strategy that I call “interpretive divergence”. They can simply point out that the critic's definition does not accord with their understanding of consequentialism to which criticisms do not apply. If, on the other hand, an all-encompassing definition is used, it is so abstract that it is doubtful whether any substantive criticisms can be formulated. To escape this dilemma, I sketch a methodological approach which drops the assumption that consequentialism should be defined. It assumes, rather, that the term “consequentialism” should be interpreted as a Wittgensteinian family resemblance term. (shrink)

What do the living owe those who come after them? It is a question nonsensical to some and unanswerable to others, yet tantalizing in its persistence especially among environmentalists. This article makes a new start on the topic of intergenerational justice by bringing together human rights and environmental justice arguments in a novel way that lays the groundwork for a theory of intergenerational environmental justice based in the human rights to clean air, water, and soil. Three issues foundational to such (...) a theory are explored here. First is the broad question of whether justice is applicable to future (or past) generations in any real sense, or do such issues fall under the rubric of superogation. Second, can environmental goods properly be contained in a theory of distributive justice at all, since, superficially at least, they seem different in kind than the usual objects of justice? I will discuss them as “emergent” goods in fact central to contemporary justice distributions. Third, what is the relationship of justice to rights, and how can environmental human rights be included in justice distributions? (shrink)

Cosmopolitanism is concerned to disclose the ethical, cultural and legal basis of political order in a world where political communities and states matter, but not only and exclusively. In circumstances where the trajectories of each and every country are tightly entwined, the partiality, one sidedness and limitedness of ‘reasons of state’ need to be recognized. While states are hugely important vehicles to aid the delivery of effective public recognition, equal liberty and social justice, they should not be thought of as (...) ontologically privileged. They can be judged by how far they deliver these public goods and how far they fail; for the history of states is marked, of course, not just by phases of bad leadership and corruption but also by the most brutal episodes. A cosmopolitanism relevant to our global age must take this as a starting point, and build an ethically sound and politically robust conception of the proper basis of political community, and of the relations among communities. (shrink)

The local food movement is, increasingly, becoming a part of the modern American landscape. However, while it appears that the local food movement is gaining momentum, one could question whether or not this trend is, in fact, politically and socially sustainable. Is local food just another trend that will fade away or is it here to stay? One way to begin addressing this question is to ascertain whether or not it is compatible with liberalism, a set of influential political theories (...) that have shaped and continue to shape our political system. In this paper, I argue that the local food movement is partially compatible with forms of liberalism that accept the limited application of the principle of neutrality, as there are two directions or trends within local food: (1) The systems based direction and (2) the individual focused direction. The systems based direction is not compatible while the individual focused movement is largely compatible with liberalism. I go on to argue that the two directions form a dialectic that increases the political and social sustainability of the movement as a whole. Conceiving of the individual focused and the systems focused directions as in opposition to one another is, itself, a mistake. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that neo-Hobbesian contractarianism cannot yield direct moral standing for marginal humans and animals. However, it has been argued that marginal humans and animals can have a form of direct moral standing under neo-Hobbesian contractarianism: secondary moral standing. I will argue that, even if such standing is direct, this account is unsatisfactory because it is counterintuitive and fragile.

In this article, I argue that G. A. Cohen’s defense of the feminist slogan, “The personal is political”, his argument against Rawls’s restriction of principles of justice to the basic structure of society, depends for its intelligibility on the ability to distinguish—with reasonable but perhaps not perfect precision—between those situations in which what Nancy Rosenblum has called “the logic of congruence” is validly invoked and those in which it is not. More importantly, I suggest that the philosophical shape of Cohen’s (...) critique makes it difficult for him to supply the required criterion, and that the methodological “intuitionism” he claims to be committed to is at odds with his larger argument against Rawls concerning the subject of justice. (shrink)

Peter Jones has consistently defended the position that liberalism must maintain the distinction between the right and the good if it is to be qualitatively different from alternative political theories, and thus resist the charge that liberals are just like any other political theorists in wanting to impose their views on others. In this paper, I not only add my voice to the many who have already challenged the viability of that distinction, but also additionally argue that it is both (...) unnecessary and undesirable to hold that so much of importance hangs on whether or not it can be sustained. I suggest that the dichotomy between neutralist or impartialist liberalism, on the one hand, and what Jones characterizes as the desire ?merely to impose a favoured form of life upon others?, on the other hand, is too sharp, and hence at best misleading and at worst mistaken. This is because, or so I argue, not all forms of favouring some values or ideals over others can plausibly be presented as the imposition of a favoured form of life. Rather, we risk trivializing what is objectionable about imposing a particular form of life on people against their will if we treat every departure from strict liberal neutrality as necessarily instances of such an illiberal imposition. (shrink)

The Confucian tradition is famous for its family value. This tradition emphasizes that, after one's moral sentiments are cultivated in the family, one is capable of caring for people outside the family. However, since the early 2000s, there has been a debate in the Chinese Philosophy community about how to understand the ?the father-covering-son? story in the Analects. The story tells that a father covers for his son's stealing a sheep. This is a puzzle because while Confucius's virtue theory implies (...) that concealing a theft is wrong, Confucius contends that a father's covering is right. In this paper I discuss two arguments, the tree argument and the argument of the whole, implicitly held by the Confucian scholars for the priority of the family love in this debate. I argue that none of the arguments are convincing. (shrink)