1.. HARD CASES 5. Legal Rights A. Legislation . . . We might therefore do well to consider how a philosophical judge might develop, in appropriate cases, theories of what legislative purpose and legal principles require. We shall find that he would construct these theories in the same manner as a philosophical referee would construct the character of a game. I have invented, for this purpose, a lawyer of superhuman skill, learning, patience and acumen, whom I shall call Hercules. I suppose that Hercules is a judge in some representative American jurisdiction. I assume that he accepts the main uncontroversial constitutive and regulative rules of the law in his jurisdiction. He accepts, that is, that statutes have the general power to create and extinguish legal rights, and that judges have the general duty to follow earlier decisions of their court or higher courts whose rationale, as l

Taking Rights Seriously

Начала политической экономии и податного обложения = The principles of political economy and taxation

Scientific realism is the doctrine that scientific theories should be understood as
putative descriptions of real phenomena, that ordinary scientific methods
constitute a reliable procedure for obtaining and improving (approximate)
knowledge of the real phenomena which scientific theories describe, and that the
reality described by scientific theories is largely independent of our theorizing
Scientific theories describe reality and reality is “prior to thought” (see Boyd
1982)

How to be a Moral Realist

The argument that the EU is a humanitarian – normative, civilian, civilizing – power has gained considerable attention Echoing discussions about recent developments in the international system towards a post-Westphalian order, the EU's actual foreign policy is in many ways a test case for such developments However, much remains to be done in terms of finding a satisfactory theoretical basis from which to examine this argument The study of the putative humanitarian dimension to the EU's foreign policy may benefit from legal and normative theory and from sociological insights into modern politics On this basis we may find a better starting point for examining whether the EU's humanitarian dimension is comprehensible as well as justifiable

What kind of power

The victory of Western liberal states ending the Cold War inspired the hope that international relations could be guided by the ideals of democracy and the rule of law. In the early 1990s, a group of thinkers developed the political project of cosmopolitan democracy with the aim of providing intellectual arguments in favour of an expansion of democracy, both within states and at the global level. While some significant successes have been achieved in terms of democratization within states, much less has been attained in democratizing the global system. The aim of this review article is twofold — on the one hand, to reassert the basic concepts of cosmopolitan democracy; on the other, to address the criticisms coming from Realist, Marxist, Communitarian and Multicultural perspectives.

Cosmopolitan Democracy and its Critics: A Review:

As each power vies for its national interests on the world stage, how do its own citizens' democratic interests fare at home? Alan Gilbert speaks to an issue at the heart of current international-relations debate. He contends that, in spite of neo-realists' assumptions, a vocal citizen democracy can and must have a role in global politics. Further, he shows that all the major versions of realism and neo-realism, if properly stated with a view of the national interest as a common good, surprisingly lead to democracy. His most striking example focuses on realist criticisms of the Vietnam War. Democratic internationalism, as Gilbert terms it, is really the linking of citizens' interests across national boundaries to overcome the antidemocratic actions of their own governments. Realist misinterpretations have overlooked Thucydides' theme about how a democracy corrupts itself through imperial expansion as well as Karl Marx's observations about the positive effects of democratic movements in one country on events in others. Gilbert also explodes the democratic peace myth that democratic states do not wage war on one another. He suggests instead policies to accord with the interests of ordinary citizens whose shared bond is a desire for peace. Gilbert shows, through such successes as recent treaties on land mines and policies to slow global warming that citizen movements can have salutary effects. His theory of "deliberative democracy" proposes institutional changes that would give the voice of ordinary citizens a greater influence on the international actions of their own government.

Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy?: Great-Power Realism, Democratic Peace, and Democratic Internationalism

The government itself, which is the only mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable [with the standing army] to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.Henry Thoreau, in “Civil Disobedience”It is easy to say — and often is said — that we cannot have tolerable relations with new revolutionary regimes. The problem is that our anticommunist paranoia has made it impossible to find out. We do not know whether Mao's declared interest in a relationship with the Americans in the 1940s or Ho Chi Minh's were sincere. And the reason we don't know is that we never tried to find out. Those who reported it was a possibility were hounded out of the foreign service because of our suspicion and fear of communism. The legacy of that era brings to mind Ivan the Terrible's practice...

Must global politics constrain democracy

of rich and poor. Marx is better understood as defending a version of moral objectivity or moral realism. The paper begins with an example from the recent debate about justice in the international distribution of wealth to highlight the implausibility of a relativist or reductionist account. It then describes alternative views of the status of justice and equality in Marx and Engels and explores the logical structure of Marx's critique of Proudhon. A fourth section examines the analogy between Marx's and Engels's realism in the philosophy of science and their realist arguments in ethics, focusing on Marx's and Engels's non-relativist and non-reductionist conception of moral progress. The conclusion sets Marx's use of concepts of exploitation in the context of his overall moral judgments and suggests that Marx's social or historical theory rather than his moral standards are the most controversial part of his ethical argument.

An Ambiguity in Marx's and Engels's Account of Justice and Equality'

Rights and resources

HN MARX'S MOST GENERAL formulations of historical materialism, he regarded the development of humanproductive powers as the driving force of social transformation over whole historical epochs. In the process of social transformation, class struggle, political activity, and moral argument play an important dialectical role, for instance in maintaining the repressiveness and legitimacy of an existing order or in forging the politics and moral justification of a new one. (As I have argued elsewhere, in developing specific historical explanations or political strategies, Marx provided a far wider leeway for political action and social and political alternatives than his general formulations appear to permit.)' But Marx's general argument can serve as a basis for criticizing the ethical conceptions of an "eternal" or "natural" justice which prevail in particular historical periods. Whether employed by defenders of an existing order or by radicals, such conceptions tend to coincide with specific modes of production, to stimulate their advance, and to wear thin as the relevant productive system declines. Marx's critique of prevailing moralities can, however, be mistakenly interpreted as denying any separable sphere of moral argument and reflection. In this view, which I will call the historicist critique of morality, Marx saw all moral judgments including his own as inextricably contextor origin-dependent.2 Not only do prevailing moralities shift

Alan Gilbert

Papers

Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy?: Great-Power Realism, Democratic Peace, and Democratic Internationalism

Must global politics constrain democracy

An Ambiguity in Marx's and Engels's Account of Justice and Equality'

Rights and resources

Historical Theory and the Structure of Moral Argument in Marx