Anarchy, state, and utopia

The Law of Peoples John Rawls Harvard 1999 John Rawls, the great political philosopher, has turned his reflections to questions of international justice, much as his philosophical ancestor Kant did toward the end of his career. Indeed, Kant's conception of a "pacific federation" of states in Perpetual Peace is Rawls's acknowledged model for the "realistic utopia" sketched in The Law of Peoples, which expands upon his 1993 essay by the same title (without, however, revising its basic argument). Despite differing philosophical constraints and geopolitical conditions, both Kant and Rawls aim to develop an ideal normative framework for international law that accommodates a measure of realism and rejects the idea of a world-state. Unfortunately, in its uncritical acceptance of so-called "decent hierarchical societies" even at the level of ideal theory, the normative claim of Rawls's Law of Peoples is undermined. This philosophical appeasement, meant to secure perpetual peace in our time through a moderately demanding Law of Peoples that liberal and "decent" hierarchical societies alike can endorse, departs fundamentally from Kant's cosmopolitanism. For Kant, the "First Definitive Article of a Perpetual Peace-as opposed to a temporary interruption of hostilities-is that each member state of the foedus pacif cum must have a republican form of government, which is partly founded upon "the principle of legal equality for everyone (as citizens)." By contrast, Rawls weakens his ideal of international justice to buy the assent of hierarchical societies, which by definition lack equality among citizens, at the price of sacrificing a theoretical basis for justifying reforms of the practices and institutions of these hierarchical societies above a minimal level of decency. Rawls's complex argument begins by extending the original position, in which principles of justice for the basic structure of society are chosen under epistemic constraints that ensure fairness, from a single liberal society to what he calls the Society of Liberal Peoples. In a second step, though still within ideal theory, he argues that the substantive principles comprising the Law of Peoples are also acceptable to decent hierarchical societies, which possess decent consultation hierarchies and common good conceptions of justice. Despite being inegalitarian, decent hierarchical societies do respect basic human rights, allow some dissent, and at least consult with representatives of groups whose members are denied full citizenship rights. …

The Law of Peoples

Binding of drugs by albumin and plasma protein

Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International

Rogues: Two Essays on Reason

Existentialism as a cultural movement

A theoretical framework for considerations of women's health is pro- posed, the central premise of which is that "women's health" at the core means taking women's lived experience as the staning point for all health efforts. Elaboration of this, thesis involves: (I) surveying our philosophical roots for an understanding of what the lived experience means, (2) exploring the methodological consequences of a focus on the lived experience, and (3) applying these insights to the situations of woman as mother and of the overweight woman.

Theoretical Underpinnings for Women's Health

Introduction One. Beginnings Two. First Ethics Three. The Masterful Though Unfinished Critique: Background and Introduction Four. The Critique: Methodology, Ontology, and the Individual- World Relationships Five. Politics and History Six. The Last Two Decades Notes Index

Sartre's political theory

The concept of justice has always been among the foremost concepts of concern to political theorists. So it was at the beginning with Plato, whose Republic is a ten-book-long effort at defining justice in the state and in the individual. So it is as Western civilization, at least in the narrowly geographical sense of the term, enters into its period of decline, as John Rawls's A Theory ofJustice and the many articles parasitic upon that flawed but monumental work dominate the attention of American political theorists. For those of us who find Plato compelling but fundamentally wrong, and Rawls charming and admirable but anachronistic and abstract, Karl Marx is the most obvious theorist to whom to look for clarification. Surely, one is moved to suspect, there must be much wisdom about the concept of justice in those obsessively voluminous writings, published and unpublished, that Marx bequeathed to the twentieth century. Marx was thoroughly versed in the writings of classical politics, and was thus aware of the place that justice occupied in them; he knew his Hobbes, at least to some extent, and he was therefore aware of what we today would call the extreme legal positivist position on the subject. He also had some familiarity, at least second-hand, with Immanuel Kant's legal philosophy, in which justice is again the key term. Unfortunately for us, a perusal of Marx's writings yields practically nothing that might satisfy these expectations. Perhaps a sophisticated scanning device might some day be employed to ferret out all the instances in which the word Gerechtigkeit appears in his works. I am. confident that the yield would be amazingly impoverished-much smaller than the results of a similar analysis of practically any popular journalistic columnist of whom one could think. Marx wrote extensively about innumerable topics of interest to political theorists, even though he does, it is true, regard the whole domain of politics as somehow dependent upon that of economics and upon historical, material conditions. Therefore, it seems reasonable to speculate, it must have involved a considerable effort to keep his references to justice so sparse.

William L. McBride

Papers

Existentialism as a cultural movement

Theoretical Underpinnings for Women's Health

Sartre's political theory

The Concept of Justice in Marx, Engels, and Others

Marxism and Human Rights