Showing papers in "Philosophy & Public Affairs in 2013"

A New Philosophy for International Law

Abstract: Dean, Secretary General, professors, students, friends, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for this honor. By awarding me a degree of this university you make me one of you and I’m proud to join you and I thank you. As for professor Alegre’s summary of my work, may I say, I never liked my ideas so much as when I heard him describe them. So I’m very glad for that, it was very quite wonderful. I wanted this evening to say a little bit about international law. I represent a citizen of one country, I come here, you are part of the international community, more responsive and aware of your role in that respect than most citizens of my country are. And international law, I believe, will become a matter of increasing importance, indeed perhaps one day of paramount importance to the survival of our civilizations. When I was first taught about international law I was in Oxford, as you can gather, almost a hundred years ago. And at that time the most important question that my teachers addressed was “is there any such thing as international law?” That was a question bound to appear on the examination paper, so we paid a lot of attention to it. That doesn’t seem any longer to be a pertinent question. All international lawyers or statesmen or Ministers of State seem to assume that there is international law and that, for example, the statutes and edicts of the United Nations are part of international law. But old philosophical puzzles are never solved. They simply go out of fashion. And the worries that come to the question “is there any such thing as international law” are still vivid. The great importance to my mind and thinking about what international law properly understood really is, comes when we must interpret what we say is international law, we must interpret it and apply it to the most politically charged issues. For example, just now there is much debate about the status under the laws of war and under the Geneva Conventions of international terrorist organizations, that don’t occupy any territory and whose soldiers do not wear uniforms. The question arises:

Immigration, Jurisdiction, and Exclusion

Abstract: When states assert the right to exclude unwanted would-be immigrants, they are asserting a right to use coercive force. Those who attempt to cross the borders of the state will be met with violence; borders have guards, after all, and these guards have guns. That these facts are rarely questioned in our world does not mean that they are not morally exceptional. Those who propose to use violence must justify to others, in a manner that respects the moral equality of all, why they have a right to do so. If the state demands the right to use coercive force in repelling would-be immigrants, it has to justify its right to do so.

Exploitation, Vulnerability, and Social Domination

Abstract: This article attempts to revive a research program by criticizing it. Its object of criticism is the powerful research agenda of analytical Marxism. I shall attempt this revival by criticizing the views of two of the most influential members of that research program, G. A. Cohen and John Roemer. I will argue that they are mistaken in their identification of exploitation with exchange against the background of injustice in the distribution of assets. Exploitation should be conceived, instead, as a form of domination, that is, domination for self‐enrichment. The latter conception captures intuitions surplus to the traditional analytical Marxist view, provides a richer and more plausible understanding of socialist goals, is more amenable to integration into a rigorous Marxist social science, and brings Marxism closer to radical democracy. If I am right, then the idea of exploitation will have received a new lease on life, and the Marxist armory will have been enriched by renewed focus on vulnerability and domination. The article is structured as follows. Section I offers a general definition of exploitation as the self‐enriching instrumentalization of another's vulnerability. Section II restricts the purview of this definition to the economic structure of society. Section III defines domination and argues that exploitation, as conceived antecedently, is a form of domination. Section IV discusses the connection between exploitation and class domination. Section V sketches the Cohen/Roemer distributive‐injustice conception of exploitation. Section VI argues that exploitation as domination for self‐enrichment supplies a better account than exploitation as distributive injustice. Section VII responds to an objection raised by Roemer against the domination‐based account. Section VIII concludes.

What's Wrong with Colonialism

Abstract: This article was written with the support of the Australian Research Council DP110100175, for which I am grateful. Earlier versions were presented at Bristol, Princeton, San Diego, Uppsala, Dublin, Sheffield, LSE, ANU, Darmstadt, Copenhagen, Melbourne, and Queen's University at Kingston. I am grateful to participants at these events and especially to Chris Armstrong, Anne Barron, Chris Bertram, Garrett Brown, Dan Butt, Amandine Catala, Paige Digeser, Chris Essert, Graham Finlay, Katrin Flikschuh, Bob Goodin, Leigh Jenco, Catherine Lu, David Miller, Margaret Moore, Avia Pasternak, Nic Southwood, Tim Waligore, and Jonathan White for very helpful conversations and comments. I am particularly indebted to Annie Stilz for reading several drafts and to the editor and reviewers of Philosophy & Public Affairs for helping me prepare the final version.

Occupancy Rights and the Wrong of Removal

Abstract: In 1864, the United States Army removed ten thousand Navajo Indians from their homeland in Arizona to a reservation in New Mexico. Two hundred people died on the trek, which the Navajos still refer to as their “Long Walk.” Prior to the Long Walk, the Navajos had been a raiding society, stealing livestock from white settlements. To stop the raiding, the United States moved them to an isolated location. But the removal was not a success: the Navajos were unused to farming and their crops failed; they were required to live in adobe villages rather than their traditional hogans; and they had to share their reservation with the Apaches, tribal enemies. During their time at the reservation, the Navajos became dispirited and suffered from hunger, drought, and disease. Many tribe members died, and more ran away. Finally, in 1868, the United States allowed the survivors to return to their lands in Arizona, unlike most other tribes it relocated during the War for the West. The moral issues raised by the Navajo case are typical of territorial removals, including the expulsions of Germans and Poles following

Human Dignity in the Theory of Human Rights: Nothing But a Phrase?

Abstract: The idea of human dignity is ubiquitous in the contemporary discourse of human rights. It occupies a prominent place at the beginnings of the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of 1948. Both international covenants state, in identical passages, that human rights “derive from the inherent dignity of the human person,” and most of the international human rights instruments adopted subsequently include similar provisions. The Helsinki Final Act goes so far as to say that “all” human rights (“civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other”) “derive from the inherent dignity of the human person.” Reflecting thirty years ago about human dignity in international legal thought, an eminent international lawyer could write, “No other ideal seems so clearly accepted as a universal social good.” Although the framers of modern human rights declined to propose a philosophical view about their foundations, many friends of human rights believe that we cannot understand their special importance without a grasp of the value of human dignity. On the other hand, it is easy to be suspicious of the idea that human dignity can do useful work in our thinking about the nature and basis of human rights. It might

The Case Against Privatization

Abstract: The privatization of government functions has for the most part given rise to instrumental questions concerning the desirable ways of providing for these functions. In particular, current discussions typically frame the issue as a trade-off between two forms of executing certain functions or services: public bureaucracy and private entrepreneurship. Proponents of privatization emphasize the benefits of deploying the latter in service of more efficiently executing government objectives. Opponents of privatization, by contrast, insist that the private form of executing government functions is a liability, rather than an asset, due to the loose commitment on the part of private entities to the promotion of the public good. The shared assumption of both advocates and opponents of privatization is that the service or the function in question can, in principle, always be performed by either private or public bodies and that the

Rousseau's Critique of Economic Inequality

Abstract: My aim in this article is to reconstruct Rousseau’s philosophical position regarding the legitimacy of social inequality, especially economic inequality, in a way that reveals its relevance to contemporary discussions of inequality. I focus on his view as presented in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (the Second Discourse), but his full position cannot be understood without bringing in ideas from The Social Contract. I emphasize that I am interested in Rousseau’s philosophical position because I believe both that he has a coherent position worthy of our attention and that the philosophical significance of the Discourse has been only vaguely understood by the many interpreters who have written about it. I argue that although Rousseau’s position is robustly egalitarian in the sense that it places severe limits on permissible inequalities in wealth, he values economic equality exclusively instrumentally, as a means for promoting citizens’ freedom and for securing the social conditions that make satisfactory recognition, an essential component of human well-being, available to all. In previous work, I reconstructed Rousseau’s view concerning the origin of inequality—one of the two questions the Discourse announces as its principal concern. Although his answer to this question is complex, its core idea is that inequality is pervasive in human societies because a specific form of self-love—amour propre, the desire to acquire a recognized standing for others—plays a fundamental role in human motivation and because this passion easily turns into a desire to be recognized as superior to others, providing us with a