Esta ponencia se propone demostrar que, para John Locke, el individuo posee derechos inalienables, pero que la misma naturaleza humana tiende a establecer ciertas relaciones de poder que lo esclavizan. La constatación teórica e histórica de este postulado lleva a Locke a sostener que la salida del hombre de esa situación de enfermedad debe liberarlo no de las relaciones de poder, que pueden ser legitimadas, sino de sus propias pasiones que lo llevan a juzgar con parcialidad sus derechos y a (...) intentar someter a otros a los designios de su amor propio. Para ello, el contrato social lockeano busca elaborar un equilibrio entre los derechos inalienables de los hombres y la construcción de un espacio comunitario que haga posible la justicia en las relaciones humanas y, por lo tanto, emancipe al hombre del estado de enfermedad en el que se encontraría si no existiese el poder político. La función del poder político surgido en el contrato social es, pues, la de respetar-reestablecer el equilibrio entre libertad e igualdad que debe primar entre los hombres. (shrink)

My essay “Responsibility to Protect and Militarized Humanitarian Intervention: When and Why the Churches Failed to Discern Moral Hazard” (JRE 40.2) called for more questioning engagement with R2P than the broadly uncritical welcome given by the churches to the doctrine between September 2003 and September 2008. In response to Luke Glanville's reply, this essay identifies further reasons for caution before accepting R2P and so-called humanitarian wars alongside defensive wars as paradigmatically justified. It is structured with reference to the tests in (...) A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, the Report by the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, as recommended to the General Assembly when considering whether to authorize or apply military force: seriousness of risk, intention, last resort, proportional means, balance of consequences. (shrink)

Conventionalists about promising believe that it is wrong to break a promise because the promisor takes advantage of a useful social convention only to fail to do his part in maintaining it. Anti-conventionalists claim that the wrong of breaking a promise has nothing essentially to do with a social convention. Anti-conventionalists are right that the social convention is not necessary to explain the wrong of breaking most promises. But conventionalists are right that the convention plays an essential role in any (...) satisfactory account of promising. A new conventionalism can explain this by appealing to special features of social conventions. Two of these special features have important implications for any moral requirements they mediate, such as the requirement to keep one's promises and the moral requirements attached to social or occupational roles. First, these requirements will not depend on features of a situation that are inaccessible to typical participants in the convention. Second, these requirements often cannot be tailored to fit the overly unusual circumstances of participants. (shrink)