The Bloomsbury Companion to Political Philosophy (Bloomsbury Companions) 9781847065544, 9781441142177, 9781441114341, 1847065546

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
INTRODUCTION
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, UTOPIA, AND REALISM
CLASSIFICATION SCHEMES AND ASSUMPTIONS
METAPOLITICS, POLITICAL THEORY, AND APPLIED POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
UTOPIAN CONTEMPLATION AND PRACTICAL REASON
HUMANITIES OR SOCIAL SCIENCE?
JUSTICE, THE GOOD LIFE, AND POLITICAL EXHORTATION
PRECIS/SYNOPOSIS
1 THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
2 SOVEREIGNTY
GENEALOGY OF THE CONCEPT OF SOVEREIGNTY
CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THEORY AND EMERGING ISSUES
CONCLUSION
3 COSMOPOLITANISM
INTRODUCTION
COSMOPOLITANISM: TWO IMPORTANT DISTINCTIONS
WHAT DOES COSMOPOLITAN JUSTICE REQUIRE?
ARE COMPATRIOTS SPECIAL?
MUST COSMOPOLITANS REJECT ANY FORM OF PARTIALITY?
IS THE MATTER OF LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY IN THE GLOBAL DOMAIN PROBLEMATIC?
COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE REAL WORLD
4 HUMAN RIGHTS
POLITICAL THEORIES OF HUMAN RIGHTS
MORAL RIGHTS AND INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS
CONSTRAINTS ON THEORIES OF HUMAN RIGHTS
FIVE CHALLENGES AGAINST NATURALISTIC THEORIES
HUMAN RIGHTS AS A CULTURAL PHENOMENON
CONCLUSION
5 DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
A LIBERTARIAN APPROACH TO DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
RAWLS’S EGALITARIAN VIEW
OTHER SCHEMES OF DISTRIBUTION
DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE AND EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY
FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE
GLOBAL DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
JUST DISTRIBUTION IN THE GLOBAL SPHERE
WHY NOT GLOBAL RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE AND COMPENSATION
GLOBAL DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
PRACTICES AND AIMS OF GLOBAL DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE PROJECTS AND INITIATIVES
6 REASSESSING PUNISHMENT: RETRIBUTIVE VERSUS RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
JUST RETRIBUTION
QUESTIONING RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
7 WAR
THE STATE-CENTRIC CONCEPTION OF WAR (REALISM) AND ITS PRESUPPOSITIONS
RECENT CHALLENGES TO THE STATE-CENTRIC MODEL
“MILITARY ETHICS” AND THE LAWS OF WAR
JUS IN BELLO AND PROFESSIONAL MILITARY ETHICS
CONCLUSION: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE UNDERSTANDING OF POSTMODERN WAR
8 PEACE
THE NATURE OF PEACE AND THE STATE OF NATURE
HISTORICAL AND MULTICULTURAL PRECEDENTS
PACIFISMS
THE PEACE OF LIBERAL, DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM
9 LIBERAL TOLERATION
NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT CONDITIONS FOR INDIVIDUAL TOLERATION
SO-CALLED PARADOXES OF TOLERATION
TOLERATION, THE LIBERAL STATE, AND NEUTRALITY
THE DUTY OF CIVILITY AND PUBLIC REASONS
JUSTIFICATIONS OF TOLERATION
FURTHER ISSUES FOR RESEARCH
10 DEMOCRATIC THEORY
EQUALITY AND AUTONOMY
A THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS: WHO IS A CITIZEN?
A THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS: THEORIES OF DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION
JUSTIFICATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC WAY OF GOVERNANCE
11 FEMINISM AND GENDER
INTRODUCTION
RELATIONAL IDENTITIES AND THE ETHICS OF CARE
JUSTICE AND GENDER
DEMOCRATIC THEORY AND GENDER
POLICY AND FEMINIST THEORY
GLOBAL JUSTICE AND GENDER
NEW FRONTIERS
12 IMMIGRATION AND BORDERS
INTRODUCTION
ARGUMENTS FOR THE STATE’S RIGHT TO EXCLUDE
SELF-DETERMINATION ARGUMENTS
THE FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION ARGUMENT
THE ASSOCIATIVE OWNERSHIP ARGUMENT
ARGUMENTS FOR OPEN BORDERS
THE LUCK EGALITARIAN ARGUMENT
FEMINIST ARGUMENTS
CONCLUSION
13 THE FUTURE(S) OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
INTRODUCTION
THE LAST 20 YEARS
POLITICAL THOUGHT: APPROACHES AND CONCERNS
THE RAWLS INDUSTRY
APPLIED POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
REALITY CHECK: THE DIMINUTION OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
CONCLUSION
APPENDIX A
14 GLOBALIZATION, COSMOPOLITICS, DECOLONIALITY: POLITICS FOR/OF THE ANTHROPOCENE
DECOLONIZING POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE
CHRONOLOGY
BEFORE THE COMMON ERA
COMMON ERA
GLOSSARY
RESEARCH RESOURCES
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Index

Citation preview

The Bloomsbury Companion to Political Philosophy

Other volumes in the series of Bloomsbury Companions Aesthetics, edited by Anna Christina Ribeiro Analytic Philosophy, edited by Barry Dainton and Howard Robinson Continental Philosophy, edited by John Ó Maoilearca and Beth Lord Epistemology, edited by Andrew Cullison Ethics, edited by Christian Miller Existentialism, edited by Felicity Joseph, Jack Reynolds and Ashley Woodward Hegel, edited by Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards Hume, edited by Alan Bailey and Dan O’Brien Hobbes, edited by S. A. Lloyd Kant, edited by Gary Banham, Dennis Schulting and Nigel Hems Leibniz, edited by Brendan Look

Locke, edited by S.-J. Savonious-Wroth, Paul Schuurman and Jonathan Walmsley Metaphysics, edited by Robert W. Barnard and Neil A. Manson Philosophical Logic, edited by Leon Horston and Richard Pettigrew Philosophy of Language, edited by Manuel Garcia-Carpintero and Max Kolbel Philosophy of Mind, edited by James Garvey Philosophy of Science, edited by Steven French and Juha Saatsi Plato, edited by Gerald A. Press Pragmatism, edited by Sami Pihlström Socrates, edited by John Bussanich and Nicholas D. Smith Spinoza, edited by Wiep van Bunge, Henri Krop, Piet Steenbakkers and Jeroen van de Ven

THE BLOOMSBURY COMPANION TO POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Edited by Andrew Fiala

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Andrew Fiala and Contributors, 2015 Andrew Fiala has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-84706-554-4       ePDF: 978-1-44114-217-7      ePub: 978-1-44111-434-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

CONTENTS

List of Contributors

vii

INTRODUCTION Andrew Fiala

1

  1. THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY James Alexander

19

  2. SOVEREIGNTY Andrew Fiala

33

  3. COSMOPOLITANISM Gillian Brock

47

  4. HUMAN RIGHTS Siegfried Van Duffel

61

  5. DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE Ovadia Ezra

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  6. REASSESSING PUNISHMENT: RETRIBUTIVE VERSUS RESTORATIVE JUSTICE Trudy D. Conway

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  7. WAR George R. Lucas, Jr

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  8. PEACE Andrew Fitz-Gibbon

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  9. LIBERAL TOLERATION Robert Paul Churchill

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10. DEMOCRATIC THEORY Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley

153

11. FEMINISM AND GENDER Anca Gheaus

167

12. IMMIGRATION AND BORDERS Shelley Wilcox

183

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contents 13. THE FUTURE(S) OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Matthew Voorhees and J. Jeremy Wisnewski

199

14. GLOBALIZATION, COSMOPOLITICS, DECOLONIALITY: POLITICS FOR/OF THE ANTHROPOCENE Eduardo Mendieta

213

Chronology Glossary Research Resources Annotated Bibliography Index

223 227 255 259 265

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Gillian Brock, PhD is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Her most recent work has been on global justice and related fields. Her books include: Debating Brain Drain (Oxford University Press, 2015), Cosmopolitanism versus NonCosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press, 2013), Global Heath and Global Health Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (Oxford University Press, 2009), Necessary Goods: Our Responsibilities to Meet Others’ Needs (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), and Current Debates in Global Justice (Springer, 2005).

James Alexander, PhD is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. Originally a Cambridge historian, educated in the era of Cowling, Skinner, and Dunn, he shifted, as many did, to political philosophy, and is still trying to make philosophical sense of the distinctively historical approach to politics. He is the author of “The Contradictions of Conservatism,” Government and Opposition (2013); “Notes Towards a Definition of Politics,” Philosophy (2014); and “The Major Ideologies of Liberalism, Socialism and Conservatism,” Political Studies (2014). Andrew Fiala, PhD is Professor of Philosophy, Chair of the Philosophy Department, and Director of the Ethics Center at California State University, Fresno. He is the author of a number of books and articles on ethics, religion, and political philosophy including: The Just War Myth (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), Public War, Private Conscience (Continuum, 2010), Against Religions, Wars, and States (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), Civility and Education in a World of Religious Pluralism, co-edited with Vincent Biondo (Routledge, 2013), and Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues, eighth edition, with co-author Barbara MacKinnon (Cengage Publishing, 2014).

Siegfried Van Duffel, PhD has taught Ethics and Political Theory at the University of Groningen, the University of Hong Kong, and Nazarbayev University. He also held post-doc positions at the National University of Singapore and the University of Helsinki and was visiting Associate Professor at Huafan University and National Taiwan University. He is currently writing a book on human rights and cultural differences. He has published in journals such as The Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, The Journal of Political Philosophy, The Monist, and The European Journal of Philosophy. vii

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Ovadia Ezra, PhD is a senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University and a human rights activist. He was incarcerated several times in a military jail for refusing to serve reserve military service in the occupied territories. He writes on ethics, political, and social philosophy. He is the author of the books: The Withdrawal Of Rights: Rights from A different Perspective (Kluwer, 2002), Moral Dilemmas in Real Life: Current Issues in Applied Ethics (Spring, 2006), Justice and Equality: Affirmative Action Needed (Hakibutz Hameuhad-Sifriat Poalim, 2006). Trudy D. Conway, PhD is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Maryland; prior to that she taught at Shiraz (formerly Pahlavi University) in Iran. Her areas of specialization are contemporary philosophy, virtue ethics, especially virtues associated with cross-cultural understanding and dialogue, and cross-disciplinary studies of the death penalty. She is the author of Wittgenstein on Foundations (Humanities Press International, 1989), Where Justice and Mercy Meet (Liturgical Press, 2013), and Cross-Cultural Dialogue on the Virtues (Spring, 2014) and a range of articles on specific virtues and select issues in contemporary philosophy. George R. Lucas, Jr, PhD is Class of 1984 Distinguished Chair in Ethics in the Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the United States Naval Academy (Annapolis), and Professor of Ethics and Public Policy at the Graduate School of Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA). He is the author of Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology (AltaMira Press, 2009), Perspectives on Humanitarian

Military Intervention (University of California Press, 2001), Lifeboat Ethics: the Moral Dilemmas of World Hunger (Harper & Row, 1976), Poverty, Justice, and the Law: Essays on Needs, Rights, and Obligations (UPA, 1986), and a number of other books and articles. Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, PhD is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Professor of Philosophy, Chair of the Philosophy Department, and Director of the Center for Ethics, Peace and Social Justice, at the State University of New York College at Cortland. He is the author, co-author, or editor of ten books, numerous book chapters, and articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Social Philosophy Today, The Journal for Peace and Justice Studies, The Acorn, Peace Review, and Philosophical Practice. He is an associate editor, VIBS, Editions Rodopi, B.V., where he edits the Social Philosophy Series. Robert Paul Churchill, PhD is Elton Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University where he has also served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Director of the Peace Studies Program. He is the author or editor of five books and has published dozens of book chapters and journals and encyclopedia articles on a variety of subjects including altruism, civil disobedience, crimes against humanity, genocide, humanitarian intervention, human rights, just war theory, nonviolence, pacifism, tolerance, and violence. His most recent book is Human Rights and Global Diversity (Pearson, 2005).

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Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, PhD is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Bakersfield. She is author of Josiah

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Matthew Voorhees, PhD is currently an associate professor of Political Science at Hartwick College, where he teaches courses on the history of political thought, democratic theory, American political thought, the philosophy of law and American Constitutional law. He has published work on the relationship between Rousseau’s musical and political theory and his current research focuses on African-American autobiographical writing as a form of political discourse in American political thought.

Royce in Focus (Indiana University Press, 2008) and Genuine Individuals and Genuine Communities: A Roycean Public Philosophy (Vanderbilt University Press, 1997). She is an author and editor of Genetic Knowledge, Human Values and Responsibility (Paragon, 1999)  and Persuasion and Compulsion in Democracy (Lexington, 2013). She was President of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy from 2010 to 2012 and a recipient of the Herbert Schneider Award for outstanding contributions of American Philosophy.

J. Jeremy Wisnewski, PhD is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hartwick College. He is the author of numerous publication in phenomenology and moral and political philosophy. His books include Wittgenstein and Ethical Inquiry (Continuum, 2007), The Politics of Agency: Toward a Pragmatic Philosophical Anthropology (Ashgate, 2008), and Understanding Torture (Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

Anca Gheaus, PhD works at the universities of Umea in Sweden and Sheffield in the United Kingdom. Her main research is in caring relationships and what they mean for distributive justice, in the nature and value of childhood and in gender justice. A recent publication on the latter topic is “Gender Justice” in the Journal for Ethics & Social Philosophy 6(1) (2012). She is currently working toward a monograph on justice in childrearing.

Eduardo Mendieta, PhD is Professor of Philosophy, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is the author of The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002)  and Global Fragments: Globalizations,Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (SUNY Press, 2007). He is also co-editor with Jonathan VanAntwerpen of The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia University Press, 2011), and with Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen of Habermas and Religion (Polity, 2013), and with Stuart Elden of Reading Kant’s Geography (SUNY Press, 2011). His book The Philosophical Animal will be published by SUNY Press in 2015.

Shelley Wilcox, PhD is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. She works in the areas of social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and applied ethics, with a special interest in immigration, global justice, and urban environmental issues. She has published articles on the ethics of immigration and globalization in Philosophical Studies, Social Theory and Practice, Journal of Social Philosophy, Philosophy Compass, and The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, as well as in numerous anthologies. She is currently serving as Book Review Editor for Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.

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INTRODUCTION Andrew Fiala

important names in the history of philosophy in general: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Mill. The problems of political philosophy have inspired and troubled the best minds in the philosophical canon; and issues in political philosophy are connected to issues in the rest of philosophy. Contemporary political philosophy builds upon this history, while also criticizing it. Contemporary authors including feminists, cosmopolitans, anarchists, and others are pushing boundaries and challenging the assumptions of the discipline—including the Eurocentric assumptions of the canon of political philosophy. Political philosophy develops along with the rest of culture. Political philosophy impacts political reality, as political philosophers such as Locke or Marx have inspired revolutions. But political philosophy must also respond to the political world. Issues in the contemporary world drive philosophical inquiry. Locke or Marx, for example, were responding to the concerns of their contemporary political actuality—including issues arising out of the Reformation, colonialism, or the development of capitalism. Today’s emerging issues include secularization, modernization, globalization, democratization, liberalization, and the lingering problems of Eurocentrism and postcolonial development.

Political philosophy is a broad field of inquiry with a deep history, a vexing set of problems, and a contested methodology. Political philosophy can also have important practical impacts. The field includes a variety of questions about the legitimacy and optimal structure of states, the role of citizens within these states, the proper behavior of governing authorities, relations between states, and the status of norms—such as justice and rights— in both domestic and international contexts. Beneath this set of issues are profound questions about human nature. Are human beings individuals first, whose membership in social groups is only legitimately derived from individual consent by a social contract? Or are states and other associations historically, ontologically, and normatively more significant than the individuals who constitute them? Are we warlike and competitive or are we cooperative and reasonable? Can we live well without social interaction and legal regulation or do we benefit from the benevolent control of ruling authorities? How ought we regulate our lives, structure our social organizations, and relate to one another across the globe? How do we define and ground key concepts such as human rights, justice, equality, and liberty? It is no surprise that the big names in the history of political philosophy are, indeed, the 1

Andrew Fiala inquiry is itself part of the political landscape engaged in struggles for power and recognition, subject to the changing turmoil of social, cultural, and historical circumstance. While Marx and others would view philosophy as ideology and thus would locate philosophizing in the struggles of political life, others—perhaps following Plato or Hegel— view philosophy as speculative reflection hovering outside of political life. A middle path is found in the work of pragmatists such as Dewey or in the democratic theorizing of someone like Joshua Cohen who maintains that “the point of political philosophy is to contribute reflectively to the public reasoning about what we ought to do that always already forms one part of political life” (Cohen, 2009, 4). Political life involves both power struggles and reason-giving. Cohen, Dewey, and others maintain that political philosophers can help to contribute to this process of reasoning, even if we give up on the quest to escape from Plato’s cave. A related issue is the political danger of doing political philosophy in a political environment that is not conducive to philosophical reflection. Socrates was killed for political reasons. Locke had to flee the country. Marx inspired a global revolution. Those who question the norms and structures of political life continue to find themselves in a precarious situation with regard to life in the polis. This is especially true in parts of the world where authoritarian regimes continue to rule. The freedom to philosophize that we take for granted in the liberal-democratic world is not shared in other political milieus. The problem is found at the heart of Plato’s foundational cave allegory. Plato implies that there will be no rest from troubles until philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers. But he also implies that when the philosopher returns to the cave to impart wisdom to

Our thinking about borders, immigration, and sovereignty is being revised. Our understanding of the power of nonviolence, the norms of warfare, and the role of international law is changing. Also we continue to question the status (and application) of principles of retributive and distributive justice, human rights concepts, and ideas about basic norms of political decision making. Contemporary issues inform contemporary political philosophy, and contemporary political philosophers—from Foucault and Rawls to feminism—inspire political action. This volume attempts to offer an overview of the field and the depth of the issues. No single text can offer full coverage of a subject as broad as political philosophy. The chapters collected here range across the topic, while attempting to provide sufficient depth to inspire further reflection.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, UTOPIA, AND REALISM There is no single method of political philosophy. Pluralism is implicit in the topic, since there is an ambiguity exposed in the two terms that make up the name of the subject, “political philosophy.” On the one hand, philosophy is often conceived as reflection on transcendent categories of being and thought that are contemplated from a disembodied vantage point outside of Plato’s cave. On the other hand, political life includes the tumult and change of history, including the rise and fall of cities, civilizations, states, and forms of life. One of the deepest challenges for political philosophy is the question of whether there are transcendental categories, eternal truths, and transcultural norms. A related question is the extent to which philosophical 2

INTRODUCTION political philosophy. The liberal idea of overlapping consensus acknowledges that diversity is a fundamental fact of political life, while other more idealistic political theories aim to eliminate diversity by establishing a normative theory grounded in fundamental truth. The tough question of political philosophy is whether political philosophy is grounded in fundamental truth or whether it is grounded in the fundamental fact that we disagree about fundamental truth. This leaves us either with intractable conflict, with a mere modus vivendi that simply avoids violence while giving up hope for agreement, or with a more substantial but similarly fragile overlapping consensus that establishes coexistence and cooperation without deeper agreement. We see this problem in the very etymology of the term political philosophy—which is a term loaded with European baggage. It is common to begin a discussion of political philosophy by acknowledging that both terms, political and philosophy, come to us from Greek origins. The root of the word political is the word polis, the name of the city-states of ancient Greece. The word philosophia can be literally translated from the Greek as “love of wisdom.” Combining these terms gives us love of wisdom about the city-state. One wonders whether the endeavor to philosophize about the political is merely a product of Western culture. Can there be a political philosophy articulated in Chinese, Navajo, or Swahili? Would those who do not live in cities need a political philosophy? Would those who do not philosophize in the Greek sense—say, religious fundamentalists—be receptive to political philosophy? A significant worry in our postcolonial era is whether the enterprise of political philosophy is inescapably Eurocentric. Does political philosophy describes states, justice, human rights,

the enslaved masses, the masses will laugh, mock, and kill him. Plato asks us to consider whether political philosophers can be understood and whether it is possible for political philosophers to change the world. A central question of political philosophy is whether Plato’s paternalistic view of philosophical wisdom is really appropriate in an age of democracy. It might be that there is no a priori vantage point—no access to the world outside of the cave—as Dewey, Rorty, and other pragmatists and postmoderns imply. Platonic political philosophy is utopian: it imagines an ideal of political life and imparts its wisdom from the outside. Some may reject this entirely and locate philosophy itself within political struggle. Thrasymachus, Marx, and Nietzsche point in this direction, understanding philosophy as simply another form of ideology. Most contemporary political philosophy is found somewhere between these extremes. Consider Rawls’s understanding of political philosophy as “realistically utopian”: political philosophy extends the limits of practical political possibility while also reconciling us to our political and social condition (Rawls, 2001). Utopian thought extends by imagining ideals and aspirations, while realism reconciles us to political reality. Political philosophy involves a process of balancing between extension and reconciliation, idealism and realism. The idealists and utopians will argue that philosophizing about political life should aim to provide us with true answers and a correct or optimal theory of political reality. But realists will argue that, given the fact of diversity, no such agreement is possible and the best we can do is to establish a pragmatic and partial accommodation and agreement. Again Rawls is helpful: his idea of overlapping consensus is an account of how we might agree to disagree. But this points toward an intractable problem at the heart of 3

Andrew Fiala fall of man, political authority is necessary to prevent human beings from falling further, with political dominion understood as protective care for those who are ruled by a benevolent statesman who cares for his subjects as a father cares for his family. Thomistic political thought tends to hold that political authority is less focused on negative restriction as a remedy for sin and more oriented toward promoting human flourishing and the common good. This dispute has implications for how we think about the relation between divine (or natural) law and civil law and for ideas about the separation of church and state. Religious speculation about the origins of political life directs our attention to questions about paternalism and the common good. Also the ideal of genuine community as imagined in some Edenic paradise has often inspired utopian political aspiration. Leaving religion aside, we might still wonder whether political hierarchy, division of labor, and the social and political structures of civilization are merely contingent ways of organizing human life. Could there be a political philosophy of hunter–gatherers that ignores or rejects the idea of the nation-state? If we continue to evolve beyond the era of nation-states in a cosmopolitan direction, what would a political philosophy of the future look like? The modern Western tradition assumes that humanity made a necessary, logical, and progressive step when it left the state of nature and created the original social contract, which left us with a world carved up into nation-states. But critics have pointed out that the leap into political life cannot be assumed to be unequivocally good and that the move toward the social contract often served the interests of the powerful. Cosmopolitan critics add that the modern emphasis on nation-states may impede us from delivering on the promise of global justice.

and human nature from a privileged vantage point? Or can political philosophers transcend the blinders of the citadels of power and see political reality without ideological and historical limitation? Rousseau and other radical critics (such as the neoprimitivist “green anarchists”) have suggested that the norms of political philosophy only make sense within the context of “civilization” (another value-laden Eurocentric concept)—and that uncivilized people in the state of nature may have no use for these concepts. Of course, it is nearly impossible for us to imagine what life would be like for “noble savages” in a Rousseau-ian state of nature. But the primitivists remind us that we ought not take civilization and political life for granted: it is possible at least to imagine Homo sapiens in a prepolitical state—and indeed Homo sapiens lived quite well for long millennia without developing cities. The city, the state, and political philosophy are quite late developments in the life of our species. Thus political philosophers ought to pay attention to the findings of sociobiologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists who offer suggestions about the evolutionary roots of social cooperation and the stability of hunter–gatherer social structure. While the musings of contemporary anarcho-primitivists may seem like a minor current in the ocean of political philosophy, the question of whether human beings are naturally political beings is a serious philosophical concern. We often take it for granted that Aristotle was right that to be human is to live in cities and to be political. But Christian authors from Augustine to Aquinas and Ockham wondered whether political life was merely a necessity of our post-lapsarian condition. Augustinian political philosophy tends to hold that after the 4

INTRODUCTION The deeper methodological question is whether the supposed truths of political philosophy are members of the same species as the truths of other sciences. We don’t think that geometry is a uniquely Greek or Pythagorean science. But what about political philosophy: is it merely “political” or do the truths of political philosophy have a nonpolitical status similar to the truths of geometry? This points toward a fundamental disagreement about the very nature of the topic under discussion and the method of inquiry. Can political philosophy arrive at knowledge, truth, and wisdom? Or do the concepts of political philosophy merely reflect the contingent ideologies of a particular and limited form of life? How do we ground values and normative concepts such as liberty, human rights, democracy, equality, etc.? Do these concepts point to real things: are “rights” real—grounded perhaps in the endowment of some Creator? Or are “rights” merely conventions of the Hobbesian sort—or even worse, “nonsense on stilts” as Bentham argued? The significant problem here is methodological: how do we know what we are talking about in political philosophy—and what access do we have to the objects of political ontology? This methodological problem comes to a head in the question of normativity: what provides the normative impetus of political thinking? Is there a natural law of some sort that helps us understand and ground a normative hierarchy of political structures and values? Or are the norms of political philosophy merely the product of a historically contingent perspective subject to the deflationary critique of conventionalists and nominalists? What method should we employ to work our way through these sorts of questions: empirical political science or speculative political metaphysics? Other branches of

Critics also contend that the contemporary global system of nation-states rests upon an often sordid history of colonial and imperial domination of the rest by the West. One might argue that the categories of political philosophy are universal and are thus not liable to the sort of genealogical criticism that wants to throw Western political philosophy baby out with the Eurocentric bathwater. In this volume, James Alexander suggests, for example, that “Europe is to the World what Greece was to Rome.” He means that we cannot deny the historical source of political philosophy, even though we have developed a global political philosophy that has developed beyond its European roots. Critics will wonder whether the categories of political thought are tainted by this historical origin. Eduardo Mendieta argues in this volume that contemporary political philosophy ought to reimagine and reconstruct the colonialist narratives of our philosophical inheritance. He worries that “the future remains mortgaged to the vision of progress projected by both Occidentalism and Orientalism.” There is a deep methodological question here. On the one hand, we do not suspect that mathematical truths are tainted by their Greek origin in Euclid or Pythagoras. So why should the truths of political philosophy be tainted by their origin in Plato or Aristotle—or Augustine, Hobbes, Locke, and Kant for that matter? On the one hand, those who suspect a taint here will point out that the ideas of European political philosophy have been used to support crusades, colonialism, imperialism, and other pernicious endeavors. But, on the other hand, it may not be fair to lay blame for the misbehavior of political agents on the philosophers whose ideas were appropriated (and often distorted) by unphilosophical political agents. 5

Andrew Fiala parts of the world continue to refuse the liberal-democratic impetus of the modern age, maintaining that monarchic (or even theocratic) rule is best. Another approach in political philosophy resists analytical schematism, focusing instead on the nature of “the political” as a sphere of conflict, domination, and social struggle. This more radical approach is associated with a tradition running from Heraclitus and the Cynics to Marx, Nietzsche, Schmitt, Arendt, Marcuse, and Foucault. From this perspective, the analytical effort to classify constitutional schemes is insufficient since it ignores the motive force of political life, which is power or the struggle for recognition. The analytical effort of the radical theorists is to understand and describe ways that power is organized and channeled. Again the normative problem arises and some of the efforts to describe social conflict slide over toward social theory and sociology (in so far as they resist the effort to impose norms on “the political”). Another tradition turns away from the political entirely either to focus on the next world (as Christian anarchists have occasionally done) or to focus on a simple life of a-political domesticity (as Epicureans of all ages have done). While apolitical and anarchist trends in political philosophizing are often ignored as merely rejectionist, the challenge from outside of the city is to show why participation in political life is either necessary or optimal for human flourishing. Indeed, some of the most radical anarchist critics reject the basic claim, which goes back to Aristotle, that man is a political animal (zoon politikon). This idea may itself be an ideological imposition used to condemn the outsiders. Aristotle suggested that only gods or beasts live outside of cities—and since human beings are not gods, this includes an

philosophical inquiry have begun to turn toward empirical and naturalistic explanations and accounts of value. Perhaps political philosophy ought to be reduced to social science and give up on its normative aspirations. Others may argue, following Wittgenstein (or Rorty), that since we cannot make progress toward fundamental truth about politics, we should give up on the effort (perhaps, after going through appropriate Wittgensteinian therapy). Yet, nothing seems more important than finding ways to ground the norms of political life. Without such a grounding—in natural law, social contract, dialectical materialism, or some other approach—we are left unable to criticize political life, unable to justify revolutionary activity, unable to justify and legitimate states and constitutions.

CLASSIFICATION SCHEMES AND ASSUMPTIONS A primary concern of political philosophy has traditionally been the classification, organization, and justification of structures of power. A very basic method found in Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel is to apply mathematical notions to political structures, leaving us with an account of ruling power that says either that one rules (monarchy), some rule (oligarchy), all rule (democracy), or that there is no rule whatsoever (anarchy). Such a metapolitical analytic is compelling in its purity. But analysis without norms leaves us merely with a cold and abstract calculus that is unable to rank the mathematical alternatives. Is rule of one better than rule by all—and how would we know? So disputes continue about which basic constitution is better. While the European sphere of interest has embraced the idea of democracy, other 6

INTRODUCTION private sphere of domestic life, which was often viewed as the domain of women and slaves). However, the term political has further connotations that include both power struggles within private affairs (marriages, families, friendships, and careers contain an element of the political in this sense) and the question of international, global organization (as in the somewhat oxymoronic term cosmopolitan—the city of the whole cosmos). While the ancient Greeks wrangled about the relation between law, morality, and religion—and about the proper structure of society, the family, and the polis—profound puzzles remain, as indicated by recent work by Žižek and others who call the ontology of “the political” into question. Žižek indicates that our use of the term “political” presumes a fundamental ontology containing a normative hierarchy. As Žižek puts it, drawing upon insights found in the work of Arendt, “in human society, the political is the englobing structuring principle, so that every neutralization of some partial content as ‘nonpolitical’ is a political gesture par excellence” (Žižek, 2000, 191). From this vantage point, everything is political (love, ethics, religion, Darwinian evolution, and so on). Even when we attempt to identify a nonpolitical sphere of concern (say in domestic life or in the private sphere or in “the state of nature”), the effort to isolate the nonpolitical is connected to “the political.” It is certainly “political” in this sense to say that femininity is private, domestic, and nonpolitical. The political is a primary term and starting place so that attempts to find something a-political or nonpolitical can only proceed by negation. Our concepts and categories are laden with political significance (it is curious that “the state of nature” includes the word “state,” for example). A related point is made by Raymond Geuss who cautions against

implicit condemnation of the “barbarians” who live outside city walls. The claim that “man” is a “political animal” (as Aristotle’s anthropos is often translated) is also loaded with gendered assumptions, as feminists will point out. The idea that “man” is political is also loaded with theological assumptions about the fallen or imperfect nature of political life (as Augustine argued). While Aristotle suggests that human beings flourish in political communities, there is no doubt that political formations are only a part of a larger whole of human life that includes the domestic sphere that was traditionally associated with the female. Aristotle locates political philosophy within the broader inquiry of ethics and what he calls the “philosophy of human affairs” (anthropeia philosophia) at the end of his Nicomachean Ethics (1181b). This reminds us that political philosophy is only a portion of a larger inquiry into human nature or anthropology. As Aristotle explains in Book I of Nicomachean Ethics, a student of politics must study the nature of happiness, the nature of human activity, the nature of virtue, and the nature of the soul. Thus political philosophy includes an open and difficult question about what is natural for human beings. It may be that only gods and beasts do not live in cities—but we are still working out the details of whether we ought to strive to become more divine or more beastly, and whether we should be content with our middle position as zoon politikon. That deep normative question is central to the spirit that animates inquiry in political philosophy. Who are we? How ought we to live? And how should we organize our communal life? The term “political” contains a variety of connotations and denotations. The political may be viewed as merely focused on issues of “public” concern (as opposed to the 7

Andrew Fiala the philosophical tradition he inspired were intent on proving Thrasymachus wrong: the philosophers looked (and continue to look) for knowledge and wisdom about the political that transcends political struggle. But the Thrasymachus–Socrates dialectic continues to unfold. Millennia later, when Hegel maintained that the modern European state represented the end of history, Marx viewed this as an ideological claim that failed to account for its own economic, social, and political basis. One philosopher’s truth-claims will be viewed by another as a political ploy. Thus one might worry that the whole endeavor of political philosophy is fraught with hypocrisy, double standards, and Machiavellian/ Orwellian manipulations. Political philosophy may be merely the voice of patriarchy, of capitalism, or Christianity, of Eurocentrism, and so on. Radical critics worry that the more strenuously a political philosophy denies its political motivations, the more reason we have to be suspicious. One wonders whether the philosopher’s voice can be adequately distinguished from the voice of the politician and whether political philosophy can be distinguished from mere politics (see Fiala, 2002). After Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, and others suspicious hermeneuts, it is no longer possible to simply accept that we even know what we are talking about (or what we are inheriting and perhaps obfuscating) when we employ the language of political philosophy. This postmodern conclusion may be understood either as the nadir or as the zenith of political philosophy. For those who are interested in simply making “progress” in political philosophy, the deep question of the meaning and extent of “the political” creates an impediment (indeed, asking us to pause and reconsider what we mean by “progress” as well as by “the political”

any simplistic distinction between concepts and their application in political philosophy (Geuss, 2008). He reminds us that ideal theories often fail to account for the reality of political life (and its motivating forces). We also underestimate the power of ideals in political life. Political philosophy in its broadest sense includes just this sort of speculation about human nature, the nature of the political, and the status of our ideals. Political philosophy thus connects with questions of psychology, sociology, and anthropology—and even biology and theology. But within the modern academic discipline of political philosophy, the topic is often more narrowly circumscribed, as a discussion of justification and legitimation of governmental organization and social power. A philosophical inquiry into justification and legitimation would seem to rise above the merely empirical question of who is in power or what constitution is in place. Such a “philosophical” inquiry would not itself be political—that is engaged in political struggle. Rather, it would be focused on logical analysis, claims about truth, and concern for justice. When we assert a truth about political life—for example, that democracy is the best form of governance—we appear to rise above political squabbling and reach the level of justification. However, radical critics of the truths that are articulated and defended in political philosophy may argue that the truth-claims and justifications of political philosophy are themselves merely political—based upon partial perspectives and engaged in a struggle for power and legitimation that falls short of the discourse of philosophical justification and truth. Thus Thrasymachus defined justice as what is in the interest of the stronger party and denied that there was any discourse of justification beyond the political. Socrates and 8

INTRODUCTION natural law, or Kantian deontology). Applied ethics applies these normative theories to various problems. This tripartite scheme is useful for organizing political philosophy as well. Political philosophy in its broadest sense (similar to metaethics—and thus perhaps properly called metapolitics) asks about the nature of the political and about methods of justification. At this level, we might find questions about human nature and problems familiar from metaethics, such as the issue of relativism. At the level of normative political theory, we find concrete theories of justice and political organization: socialism, capitalism, democracy, communism, and so on. These normative theories often simply assume that the metapolitical issues have been resolved and proceed with a definition of what is best or just. While normative political theory makes up the majority of what students of political philosophy study, we ought not forget that metapolitical issues arise as we attempt to compare and judge the different normative theories. When we evaluate the difference between negative liberty and positive liberty, for example, we discover a metapolitical question (the meaning of the concept of liberty) that is resolved in diverse ways by proponents of different normative political theories. Applied political philosophy occurs when we employ normative political theories to resolve concrete problems such as immigration, crime, or economic issues. As in applied ethics, there is often quite a bit of interplay between our intuitions about specific problems and the way we understand and justify our normative theories. Thus if we think that distributive justice and moderating inequality are fundamental, we may adjust our theory of political life accordingly (and adopt some version of socialism). But if our intuition is that liberty is more important than

and whose interests are being served by our definitions). Yet, it is commonplace— especially in Anglo-American thought—to hold that we have made progress and that we are making progress in both political philosophy and in the world of political reality. The work of Rawls, for example, is viewed as ground-breaking and progressive, since he reconstructed the social contract in a way that worked better than previous iterations. With the advent of the United Nations and the end of the Cold War, it is thought that we are making progress in disseminating ideas about human rights, in developing secular governments, and in developing institutions of international law (cf. Fukuyama’s [1992] once triumphant claim about the end of history). There is no denying that Rawls’s work is influential and creative, and there is no denying that the world looks quite different today than it did in prior centuries. However, political philosophy that is not merely an apology for the status quo continues to encourage deep questioning with regard to liberal political theory and the world that is developing. Are we better? Is political philosophy better? While it certainly seems that we are doing better, philosophers recognize the difficulty of drawing final conclusions.

METAPOLITICS, POLITICAL THEORY, AND APPLIED POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Ethicists generally recognize a distinction between metaethics, normative theory, and applied ethics. Metaethics focuses on conceptual problems (such as relativism and absolutism). Normative theory focuses on concrete theories of ethics that provide a definition of what is good (such as utilitarianism, 9

Andrew Fiala points toward two ways of understanding the purpose or end of political philosophy: as a practical inquiry with useful applications in the real world (as a means to an end) and as a critical, utopian, and even paradoxical inquiry that creates wonder (as an end in itself). Many view political philosophy (and ethics and anthropology more broadly construed) as merely practical wisdom. Aristotle suggests in Nicomachean Ethics that ethical and political inquiry ought to provide a way to live a good, productive, and happy life. However, Aristotle also notes (in Book X of Nicomachean Ethics) that there is a higher good for human beings, which is contemplation. While one expects contemplation to have some practical significance, the contemplative act of philosophizing may be an end in itself. This contemplative side of philosophy grows out of the experience of wonder, which was described by Plato in Theatetus (155d) as the origin of philosophy, an idea that was reiterated by Aristotle in Metaphysics (1933a, 982b). In his discussion of wonder in Metaphysics, Aristotle notes that wonder and speculation grow out of a feeling of ignorance and the experience of being perplexed or bewildered. Moreover, he notes that speculative contemplation develops out of leisure time, as a “recreation and pastime,” such as “when practically all the necessities of life were already supplied” (982b). The contemplative and wondering side of political philosophy is connected to metapolitical questions. This may be understood in contrast with the more practical set of concerns that we encounter as political agents within applied political philosophy. The first more practical approach finds its roots in Aristotle’s book Politics (1933b). Aristotle suggests that the philosophical study of politics should aim to be scientific in the sense of analytical comprehension of

inequality, we may end up adopting some version of libertarianism. This process of adjusting our theories to our intuitions and vice versa is similar to what Rawls described as “reflective equilibrium.” One important lesson to be learned from the field of applied ethics is that contexts and circumstances matter. Euthanasia and abortion are issues that depend in part on the sorts of technologies that are available. Likewise, political topics such as the status of international law or the problem of cross-border immigration and refugees depend upon historical contingent circumstances, technological development, access to information, basic economics, climate, geography, and so forth. Most will agree that our theoretical and normative commitments ought to be responsive to changing circumstances. However, some may worry that this responsiveness is a sign of relativism and inconsistency. This directs us back to the metapolitical question of whether there are absolute and true answers to the questions of political philosophy or whether the very nature of political theory is such that it ought to be responsive to historical, economic, or cultural variations. This book contains both metatheoretical considerations (e.g. in the chapters on sovereignty and human rights), chapters focused on concrete or normative political theory (e.g. in the chapters on democracy and cosmopolitanism), and chapters focused on applied issues (distributive justice, retributive justice, war, peace, immigration, and so on).

UTOPIAN CONTEMPLATION AND PRACTICAL REASON What is the goal or telos of political philosophy? The Greek tradition of philosophy 10

INTRODUCTION compact, they simplified the actual history of state formation. The idea of the social contract is as ideal and utopian as Plato’s philosopher-king: there never was a social contract of the sort imagined by Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau. However, this process of simplification helps to clarify ideals and normative principles. This sort of speculative idealization continues in the work of more contemporary political philosophers such as John Rawls, who imagines an even more explicitly ideal sort of social contract situation—known as the original position under the veil of ignorance. Rawls admits that this is merely a heuristic—a device for imagining how impartiality, rationality, and fairness work in theorizing about justice. It is important to clarify ideals in this way. The effort to imagine political ideals in this way may be an end in itself—an act of wondering. One wonders whether political philosophy must always have a practical impact or whether philosophizing about the political should be free to wander in the fields of imagination. While we may expect political philosophy to result in prescriptions that ought to change the world, as Marx put it in his critique of Hegel, we should also acknowledge that speculating and reflecting on political reality is intrinsically fascinating. We might acknowledge, as Hegel attempted to show, that there is a kind of enlightenment and freedom that can arise from contemplation of political reality that does not dare to articulate a plan for how the world ought to be. Political philosophers are often pulled back down into Plato’s cave and passionately motivated to change the world. But it might be that one way to change the world is to stimulate the sort of wonder that is associated with contemplation. Indeed, Aristotle suggests in Book X of Nicomachean Ethics that contemplation is based in leisure and peace and is closely

the origins and organization of political reality. For Aristotle, the knowledge provided by political science has practical import insofar as statesmen and politicians can employ this knowledge both in the construction of constitutions and in the technical task of ruling. This leads Aristotle to suggest in Book IV of Politics that the technical art and science of governing ought to be supplemented by an analysis of what the best form of constitution is and how different constitutions are adapted to different people in different ways. But Aristotle notes that the science of politics ought not to stray too far into an inquiry into the ideal that neglects the question of what is practical and useful. As Aristotle puts it, we must examine both what is best and what is possible. But a different conception of political philosophy sees it as an exploration of ideas that is primarily speculative and engaged in the philosophical art of wondering. This approach may be more closely associated with Plato, who explores utopian schemes and plays with myths in his discussion of political subjects. In Apology, Plato’s Socrates speculates about the afterlife, refers to the Delphic oracle, and invokes his daimon. In Crito, Socrates imagines an encounter with the personification of the Laws. In Republic, Socrates imagines a perfect state based upon the fantastical idea of the philosopher-king and a eugenic project intended to create a just and harmonious social order. While Plato may have become more practical in his later work—as in Laws—the speculative impulse of political philosophy continues to inspire. Political philosophers attempt to apply reason and order to the world of human reality, which may indeed be resistant to this process. When modern political philosophers imagined the creation of states from out of the state of nature by way of the social 11

Andrew Fiala the focus of political philosophy per se, which addresses metapolitical issues in ways that are informed by work in epistemology, metaphysics and ontology, ethics, and philosophical logic. In the academy in the United States, the divide between the humanities and the social sciences helps to explain the divide between political theory and political philosophy (although this generalization admits a variety of exceptions). While the social sciences employ empirical reasoning including quantitative techniques of analysis, the humanities tend to be more focused on conceptual analysis, textual hermeneutics, and normative theory. As one facet of the social scientific discipline of political science, political theory in the social sciences is more closely allied with empirical methodologies and less inclined toward normative claims of humanities scholars (although political theorists are more normative and “philosophical” than other scholars in the social sciences). On the other hand, political philosophy—as a subfield within the discipline of philosophy, which is usually located in the humanities—is more deeply grounded in the history of ideas, more concerned with the status of normative claims, and not as reluctant to imagine utopian alternatives to the status quo. As a discipline within philosophy and the humanities, political philosophy is connected with other philosophical concerns: epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and even psychology and aesthetics. Thus political philosophy wonders how (and whether) we know what we think we know about political reality. It asks about the foundations of political phenomena, including the ontological status of political entities, the origin of these things, and their purpose or teleology. It is concerned with questions about justice and the good, as well as questions about human happiness

connected to happiness. Of course, the more active political philosophy of someone like Marx would say that there is a fundamental injustice when the majority of people lack the leisure to contemplate, while others are free to wonder about how those who lack freedom provide a material basis for the leisurely contemplation of the philosophical class.

HUMANITIES OR SOCIAL SCIENCE? In addition to considering whether political philosophy is a means to an end or an end in itself, we ought also consider the proper method for engaging in political philosophy. Should political philosophy be an enterprise of idealization abstracted from political reality or should it arise from within political reality and primarily be empirical reflection on practical, lived experience? The issue of method leads to a loose distinction between political science, political theory, and political philosophy. “Political science” (as it is called in the United States) is an established discipline in the social sciences that is based upon empirical methods. While political scientists may want to remain neutral and refrain from making prescriptive claims, political scientists do offer advice and evaluation of policies and institutions. But these normative claims are usually limited by advice that works within a given political framework. Political theory is the more theoretical or philosophical side of political science—often grounded in a more historical orientation and more interested in normative claims and connection with larger moral and historical issues. Political theorists are thus more willing to question the frameworks that political scientists take for granted. The larger metapolitical questions are exclusively 12

INTRODUCTION and what a perfect or ideal world might look like. Political philosophy tends to be concerned with analysis of meta-level norms. Thus Rawls defines justice as fairness and provides an analysis of this definition. Thus democratic theory is often focused on the status of the norms of democracy such as legitimation or participation. This exercise in conceptual analysis aims to clarify what we mean when we are discussing topics in political philosophy. Conceptual analysis of this sort is usually understood as a central feature of philosophy as a discipline in the humanities. This method is similar to related efforts at conceptual analysis in discussing philosophy of mind or philosophy of science and so on. Philosophy of science, for example, studies how knowledge claims are made in scientific disciplines—including the question of what distinguishes science from other forms of thought. In a similar fashion, philosophy of politics studies the way that norms function in political life and the question of what distinguishes “the political” from other aspects of human life. It is important to note that philosophers of science are not scientists engaged in the act of discovery and hypothesis testing that scientists are engaged in. In the same way, political philosophers are not engaged in the effort of political science, conceived as a discipline in the social sciences. Political scientists focus on discovery and hypothesis testing in the realm of the political. But political philosophers wonder whether the empirical approach of political science is valuable, while also reflecting on the very subject matter and asking what is (or is not) political. Consider another example: the question of justice. In the social sciences, one studies justice in an empirical fashion. Criminologists, for example, study the nature of criminal

and flourishing. It may also be interested in questions about taste, inclination, and meaning. While these topics are also the concern of political science (and other social sciences— such as economics and sociology), political philosophers are interested in deep and broad reflection on these concerns and issues. They are also interested in the hermeneutical and phenomenological questions that arise when we realize that inquiry in political philosophy implicates the inquirer. When we contemplate political reality, we must also contemplate the fact that such contemplation arises within a political context that limits and determines norms and knowledge. Consider one example: the question of how political constitutions are organized. As Plato and Aristotle did, political scientists may categorize and analyze various sorts of constitutions. There is quite a bit of social scientific work to be done that involves reflection on the various ways that human beings have organized our lives politically. Such work can often be grounded in highpowered empirical methods and can provide useful information about voting methods, voter participation, cycles of political power, the relation between the economy and political movements, how leaders succeed, and so on. However, political philosophers ask deep questions about the meaning and purpose of all of this: why do we need constitutions, is voting really important, why can we not agree about power, should economic concerns be included, what virtues should a good leader possess, and so on. While political philosophy should not ignore the findings of empirically oriented political science, political philosophers should not loose sight of the importance of a deeper set of questions about the sorts of beings we are, what our purpose and function is, how we know what we claim to know about these things, 13

Andrew Fiala they can also offer admonishments, inspiration, and incite us to act. In Republic (Book II), Glaucon suggest that justice is a middle path between unbridled power and abject suffering. As Glaucon asserts, echoing Thrasymachus, the best thing would be to get away with unjust actions but not be punished, while the worst thing would be to suffer injustice without hope of retaliation. He further suggested that justice is a lesser evil. As he puts it, no one would willingly submit to the rule of law if he had the power to get away with injustice with impunity. This points toward one of the deepest questions of political philosophy—why we accept social and political norms. Socrates attempt to provide an explanation throughout the rest of Republic, ultimately pointing toward a myth at the end of Book X, where he suggests that justice is somehow linked to happiness both in this life and in the next. This is an answer to the question of why we should care about the norms and concepts of political life. Plato’s Republic ultimately exhorts us to be just. Political philosophy points beyond the mere analysis and dispassionate inquiry of empirical political science. Several of the books of Republic offer analytical discussion of the virtues and vices of various forms of government: the famous story about the dissolution of the perfect state through aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and on to tyranny. Such analysis is important. But political philosophers will also wonder why this matters—what is at stake for us in analyzing political reality in this way? Plato’s answer in Book X of Republic provides a key. He implies that an inquiry into the nature of justice and political life will have an existential impact. It will make us better persons. This points us toward a final problem in terms of defining the field of political

justice, asking what works or does not work in terms of crime reduction and punishment. Philosophers wonder, however, how we define crime and why it deserves punishment. Or, in political science, one might study the structure of a particular constitutional system or the emerging norms of international law. The inquiry of political science will be informed by history and interested in empirical questions about popular opinion, about conflicts arising within structures of political life, and about the lived implications of certain structures and institutions. However, political philosophers will be interested in questions about whether history matters with regard to politics (or whether the political realm ought to be considered under the rubric of a-historical and universal norms). Political philosophers will ask fundamental normative questions about the status of institutional frameworks—including the question of which framework is better or best.

JUSTICE, THE GOOD LIFE, AND POLITICAL EXHORTATION Let’s return to the idea that political philosophy is part of the larger inquiry into human life. This fact reminds us that political philosophy ought to have some existential impact: it ought to transform our lives. While there have been significant discussions of philosophy as therapy or philosophy as a way of life (e.g. in works by Pierre Hadot), we often forget that philosophizing about the political is central to such projects of philosophical transformation. One underappreciated form of discourse connected to political philosophy is what we might call political exhortation. While philosophers analyze and argue, 14

INTRODUCTION polemical and tendentious. Philosophical reflection would seem to be more ecumenical, universal, and abstract. Liberatory political exhortations on the Left call for revolutionary action, reminding us that we’ve got nothing to lose but our chains. But those on the Right will remind us to hold fast to traditions and ideas that are threatened with disruption by the forces of revolution. One reason we might want to claim that exhortative texts are not properly political philosophy is that they are one-sided in this way. Political philosophy per se would seem to look beyond a particular political agenda and take in the whole of the field. But one may argue—following Marx’s critique of Hegel or following feminist critiques of contemporary philosophy—that the disembodied vantage point privileges a certain class–gender–culture matrix. It thus might be that abstract Platonic (or Hegelian) political philosophy is itself a sort of exhortation—that inspires us toward a certain form of life (even while it denies its own tendentiousness). A very narrow version of political philosophy would deny that exhortative texts count as political philosophy. But a broader understanding of the existential import of political philosophizing would find such texts to be primary examples of what political philosophy ought to do, which is to help us live better lives. As we’ve discussed in this introduction, political philosophy also recognizes that there are no easy and obvious answers to the question of how best to organize our lives and how best to live.

philosophy. Do explicitly activist speech-acts qualify as political philosophy? A standard anthology of political philosophy will include examples of activist exhortation, for example: Machiavelli’s Prince, Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence,” Marx’s Communist Manifesto, or King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Each of these documents was written in reaction to a specific political context, directed toward a specific audience, and aimed at stimulating political action. Do such texts count as political philosophy? They are not purely disembodied considerations of abstract truth—even though they contain claims about truth, justice, and other norms. But they are central texts for considering key questions about governance and power, about revolutionary action, and about equality, ideology, and justice. One key feature of exhortative texts is that they raise our consciousness—directing our attention to unspoken features of our lives (including our own double standards and hypocrisy). The idea of consciousness-raising is a central one for feminists, who think that women must be given the opportunity and freedom to properly experience and understand their oppression. A similar effort is found in Marxism, which wanted to bring class struggle out of the ideological shadows and make it an explicit theme of thinking. On the cutting edge of this effort of political philosophy as consciousness-raising today are those who are exploring globalization and Eurocentrism. We take certain linguistic and social categories for granted: patriarchal, racist, classist (or bourgeois), and Eurocentric language and concepts permeate our thinking and our institutions. One seemingly universal exhortation of political philosophy is that we ought to be aware of how our language and culture limits our political thinking and activity. A remaining problem is that political exhortation is seemingly one-sided—it is

PRECIS/SYNOPOSIS The chapters collected in this volume examine the sorts of questions discussed here, while also extending reflection more deeply 15

Andrew Fiala and others, Ezra examines arguments about inequality and the role of the state in redistributing wealth, ensuring equality of opportunity, and managing social and economic difference. Ezra links his consideration to the emerging problem of global environmental justice, showing how the question of distributive justice is applied in a vexing global context to deal with the problem of resource distribution and risk mitigation in the face of climate change. The question of justice and distributions of harms and benefits becomes concrete in discussion of immigration. Taking up a different thread with regard to justice, Trudy Conway examines a different aspect of concern for justice by considering retributive justice and alternative models of viewing punishment. She situates this in the history of political philosophy, with a particular focus on Plato and Kant, while also examining contemporary issues such as the problem of mass incarceration. She reminds us that the question of the justice of punishment is a central concern for political life and for political philosophy. The question of domestic crime is related to the question of international aggression, warfare, and international law. George Lucas develops the discussion of justice by considering the topic of war. Lucas focuses our attention on the way that the evolution of warfare in the contemporary era requires that we reassess our understanding of just war theory, the status of international law, and the military profession. In each of these chapters, it is important to notice how philosophical accounts develop together with and in light of developments in the real world of political actuality. While punishment and justice in war are traditional concerns of applied political philosophy, an alternative point of view is that of pacifism. Andrew Fitz-Gibbon provides an overview of the topic of peace and

into specific topics. This volume begins with James Alexander’s reflection on the history of political philosophy. Alexander considers the very question of whether it is important to consider political philosophy from the vantage point of history or whether political philosophy can be understood in a-historical terms. He concludes that both historical depth and a-historical reflection are of use: “If philosophy without history is a desert, and history without philosophy is a jungle, then we certainly need something of both.” Andrew Fiala considers the question of sovereignty, while pointing toward problems of civil disobedience, the challenge of anarchism, and development of international law and what some are calling a “post-sovereignty” era. Gillian Brock explores related issues under the topic of cosmopolitanism. Brock is concerned with the question of defining the concept of cosmopolitanism and with the question of what a cosmopolitan world would look like. She wonders whether cosmopolitanism is inevitable as a matter of normative theory. The issues considered by Brock are connected with questions about human rights and the ground of political life and justice. These concerns are taken up by Siegfried Van Duffel, who explores the status of human rights in both domestic and international contexts. Van Duffel suggests that there is a major dispute between moral theories of rights and more politically oriented theories. He further suggests that a middle path can be found by way of limited descriptive theories of rights. A central concern for political philosophy—especially liberal-democratic political philosophy—is the question of justice. Several chapters take a look at specific notions of justice and their application. Ovadia Ezra considers the topic of distributive justice. Dealing with important recent work by Rawls, Dworkin, Hayek, Nozick, 16

INTRODUCTION Gheaus’s concern represents an approach to issues in political philosophy that develops feminist concern in a way that is different than that considered by Kegley. Following this thread and returning to issues found in the discussion of cosmopolitanism, Shelley Wilcox examines the issue of immigration, asking whether liberal-democratic states have a right to exclude immigrants, while also considering the rights of foreigners who are in need of aid. She points toward a vexing circularity haunting this discussion, in the issue of who is able to express consent and benefit from the right of self-determination. It might be, she suggests, that central liberal-democratic principles such as liberty and equality point toward open borders or cross-border redistribution. But proposed solutions are problematic, and these issues become more complicated when we take into account class and gender disparities—such as “global care chains” involving domestic labor—in immigration and cross-border relations. Near the end of this book, coauthors Jeremy Wisnewski and Matthew Voorhees discuss the future of political philosophy. They examine current trends in the discipline by providing an empirical analysis of recent publications. They identify ongoing concern for liberal theory and the work of John Rawls, as well as emerging issues of diversity/ difference and cosmopolitanism. They remind us that political philosophy ought to be grounded in hope and concern for the future: “If political philosophy has no bearing on our political future, then political philosophy will itself have no future—save being a boutique hobby for intellectuals who are predisposed to considering its themes.” They note that philosophical inquiry develops in response to political reality (ex. torture emerges as a topic after Bush permits it—and other emerging applied topics: surveillance and high tech,

nonviolence, exploring the power of nonviolence as a method of political activism, including a brief history of pacifism and an account of recent and successful examples of nonviolence. In a related chapter, Paul Churchill examines the notion of toleration, which is a key value for liberal political regimes and a vexing topic for liberal political philosophy. Churchill provides a historical overview of the development of the concept as well as a contemporary account of remaining problems. He works through so-called paradoxes of toleration and the concept of state neutrality, while touching upon a variety of concrete and applied issues: freedom of speech, hate speech, pornography, and the challenge of religion. Churchill and Fitz-Gibbon remind us of a certain brand of contemporary political life associated with liberal regimes that value toleration, nonviolence, and the like. Developing the idea of liberal political philosophy further, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley examines emerging issues in democratic theory. She considers the problem of social contract theory, consequentialist justifications of democracy (what she calls democratic instrumentalism), and the ideas of deliberative democracy and public reason. She reminds us of the breadth and complexity of the concept of democracy and its linkage to other moral/ political concepts such as equality, autonomy, and authenticity. She shows how democratic theory develops as a critique of paternalism. She considers feminist critiques and so-called agonistic pluralism—a radical view of political life as an unavoidable field of contested values and struggles for power and recognition. The consideration of feminism is taken up in more detail by Anca Gheaus in her chapter. Gheaus offers an examination of feminist critiques of political philosophy with a special focus on care ethics and practical effort to respond to the demand for gender equality. 17

Andrew Fiala — (1933a), Metaphysics in Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vols. 17, 18, trans. H. Tredennick. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1933, 1989; from Perseus digital library: www.perseus.tufts. edu/hopper/. — (1933b), Politics in Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 21, trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1944; from Perseus digital library: www. perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/. Cohen, J. (2009), Philosophy, Politics, Democracy: Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fiala, A. (2002), The Philosopher’s Voice: Philosophy, Politics, and Language in the 19th Century. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Fukuyama, F. (1992), The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press. Geuss, R. (2008), Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rawls, J. (2001), The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Žižek, S. (2000), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology. London: Verso.

intellectual property, income inequality, terrorism, etc.). Thus they conclude by reminding us that the discipline will undoubtedly change as new issues emerge and philosophers turn their attention to them. Finally, Edouardo Mendieta provides an afterword to this volume that reminds us that philosophy is historically and culturally located. Eurocentrism remains a problem—and indeed a central challenge of political philosophy. Could there be a truly global political philosophy? As our globe shrinks and cosmopolitan concern grows, can we reimagine political philosophy from a perspective that is not haunted by the shadow of Eurocentrism? This book concludes with several appendices that provide resources for researchers: a chronology, a glossary of key terms, a list of research resources, and an annotated bibliography.

WORKS CITED Aristotle (1894), Nicomachean Ethics from Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea, N. J. Bywater (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press; from Perseus digital library: www. perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/.

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1 THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY James Alexander

to his Caesar, but he may also be Jesus to his Lazarus. The consequence of this extreme indeterminacy is that there is no way to legislate for the history of political philosophy which cannot be immediately contradicted. In this chapter, therefore, I seek not to legislate for it, but instead to clarify some of its constitutions, conditions, and contradictions. The first thing to observe is that each of its three substantive terms—“history,” “politics,” “philosophy”—is contested. Politics, before the twentieth century, was always subjugated to something else—to the polis, or to empire, church, or state. But in the twentieth century, there were attempts to define politics (or the category of “the political”) as something in itself. This was evident in classic works like Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, Collingwood’s New Leviathan, Arendt’s The Human Condition, Oakeshott’s On Human Conduct, and even in more quixotic works like Badiou’s Metapolitics and Rancière’s Dis-Agreement. The consensus now, however, seems to be that politics has no simple meaning: it can mean more or less anything (Alexander, 2014). In the last half century or so, almost everything has become subject to what we could call the last laugh of Protagoras—the possibility that everything is

Oakeshott once wrote that political philosophy concerns the relation “between politics and eternity.” “At all other levels of reflection on political life we have before us the single world of political activity, and what we are interested in is the internal coherence of that world; but in political philosophy we have in our minds that world and another world, and our endeavour is to explore the coherence of the two worlds together.” This is a vivid conception of political philosophy. But it is one which is challenged by history. Oakeshott rather blithely claimed that the history of political philosophy is simply the recognition that political philosophy so defined has a “continuous history in our civilisation” (Oakeshott, 1991, 225). But if history is the antithesis of eternity, then the history of political philosophy may be nothing other than the death of political philosophy so defined. History has an essentially contradictory nature. We may write history after we have lost something, as Acton suggested, or in order to lose it, as Goethe suggested (Goethe, 1904, 158). The historian may bury the past by writing about it, but he may also bring it back to view. This is why the philosopher is never sure whether the historian is his friend or his enemy. The historian may be Brutus 19

James Alexander History complicates everything. It places everything in the framework not of truth but of time: and so raises questions about whether we are telling a story or set of stories about what was thought true rather than trying to establish whether it is true or not. Consciousness of time makes us aware of broken traditions, of literatures canonical and uncanonical, of discontinuities and silences in our stories, and of the difficulty of assessing the motives behind and meanings of the relics which survive of older thoughts, theories, and philosophies. Perhaps it also increases our consciousness of the fragility of our own understanding, generating a caution about saying anything at all. And then there is also, as Condren has observed, the fact that we read historic works of political philosophy for a variety of reasons: sometimes because they are original, sometimes because they are coherent, and sometimes because they are influential. It should be obvious to everyone that what is original may not be coherent or influential; that what is coherent may not be influential or original; and that what may be influential may not be original or coherent (Condren, 1985). The problem of history was evident to Aristotle when he distinguished poetry and history. On the one hand, philosophy, like poetry, has always been with the gods, while history has always been human, all too human. Hegel wrote in the Phenomenology that “philosophy moves essentially in the element of universality” (Hegel, 1977, 1). History, on the other hand, moves essentially in the element of particularity. Within the “fundamental category of historical thought,” as Collingwood put it, we no longer look “for a changeless and knowable something.” We suppose that there is “no unchanging substrate behind the changes, and no unchanging laws according to which the changes took place” (Collingwood, 1945, 10–13). This is clear.

relative, that there is nothing true about politics. It is in this situation that we attempt to make sense of politics in historical or philosophical terms, or both. Philosophy is, I have argued elsewhere, any attempt to respond to the world, or any part of it, in terms of wonder, faith, doubt, or skepticism (Alexander, 2012). It is, of course, a rather high specification for thought: it appears to exclude ordinary thought, while being related to it. I think we have to admit that political philosophy cannot always be very securely distinguished from political theory or political thought. When they are distinguished it is usually on the grounds that political thought includes any judgment, no matter how fragmentary or incoherent (e.g. “Legislate!”), that political theory is something more ordered so it includes justifications of certain ideas used in politics (e.g. “Liberalism”), and that political philosophy is something further narrowed and intensified so it includes all attempts to understand and explain what politics is and where it stands in relation to other human concerns (e.g. Leviathan). It would be a mistake to distinguish them too severely: to only suppose, say, that ideas do not matter in politics, or that ideas matter in politics only in terms of what purposes they serve, or that ideas are only of significance when they enable us to understand politics without regard to purpose. But if the three were blurred together without argument, then we would be unable to distinguish prescription, justification, and explanation. There would be no distinction between “We should do this,” “We should do this for this set of reasons,” and “We say ‘We should do this for this set of reasons’ for this set of reasons” (Oakeshott, 2008, 193). Where all this leaves political philosophy is, of course, unclear: which is why we sometimes turn to history. 20

THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY with a new future” (Koselleck, 1985, 16). In this modernity, politics is neither natural nor artificial but emergent. As Marx put it, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx, 1963, 15). In this continually changing situation, and one recognized as such, it becomes much harder to postulate a foundation of politics. Aristotle simply assumed that politics must be in harmony with the laws of nature: it was our nature to be political. Hobbes thought this too complacent. He suggested that politics had another foundation, namely, the brutal necessity imposed on us by nature to find some artifice by which we can achieve order. Many contemporary philosophers still begin with Aristotle or Hobbes. But this is to ignore the fact that political philosophy since at least the time of Hegel has begun with the lack of any certain foundation. Hegel did not think that this was a problem, since his philosophy was meant to explain everything without depending on any foundational assumptions. But Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Marx all criticized Hegel’s philosophy in very different ways, and those who have followed—apart from the scientists who can continue on Cartesian or Baconian assumptions—have made these criticisms their starting point. This is still not understood as well as it should be. It explains why political philosophy is generally now so fragmentary, and why it blurs into political theory and thought, and their histories. Most modern writings are indirect testimony to our failure to sketch a total understanding of politics in relation to what we have done in history and in relation to what we can think in philosophy. It is unlikely we could understand this without the history of political philosophy. Some

But such an emphasis on change may seem to undermine philosophical certainty altogether. Oakeshott noticed that “almost imperceptibly, Collingwood’s philosophy of history turned into a philosophy in which all knowledge is assimilated to historical knowledge, and consequently into a radically sceptical enquiry” (Oakeshott, 2007, 199). Skepticism is a form of philosophy, and perhaps the most influential one now (though we resist it), because of our tendency to think historically. But the history of political philosophy draws our attention to the fact that most political philosophers were concerned with essences, ideas, and truth, and rarely concerned themselves with history. History itself, therefore, seems to ask whether the historian always has to think historically. Certainly, no one until the last few centuries could have imagined the possibility that history might be the fundamental category of thought. It is important to recognize that the emergence of our historical consciousness has a history. In The Idea of Nature, Collingwood argued that at certain critical points in the past there has been a ruling analogy which has enabled men to explain nature—and also, we may add, politics. The first was an analogy between nature and man, so that nature was macrocosm and man microcosm. When this analogy was brought into politics, it suggested that politics was natural, in harmony with the universe. The second was an analogy between God as the creator of the world and man as creator of machines. When this analogy was brought into politics, it suggested that politics was artificial. The third was an analogy between the history of nature and the history of man, so that nature was seen to be historical, subject to change (Collingwood, 1945, 3 ff). This third analogy “detached early modernity from its past and at the same time inaugurated our modernity 21

James Alexander Vincent divides the different attitudes to foundations somewhat differently. In his book he distinguishes, first, those who believe in transcendental foundations: foundations of politics derived from some external sources, such as divine revelation, natural law, and even perhaps, although more ambiguously, historical inevitability and scientific generalization; secondly, those who believe in immanent foundations, which are foundations found within politics itself: what these are is highly contested, since writers are torn between universal claims, usually constructed abstractly or in terms of discourse, and “conventional” claims which depend on particular historical traditions; and, thirdly, those who do not believe in foundations, since they consider that everything is conventional and therefore particular (Vincent, 2004, 3–14). If we combine these two schemes together, then I think we have something like a complete scheme. There are five possible claims:

modern writers have understood it: Andrew Vincent in The Nature of Political Theory, a book which deals with everyone but the marxisant French; and Olivier Marchart in Post-Foundational Political Thought, a book which deals only with the marxisant French. Marchart distinguishes modern political philosophers into three categories. First, there are foundational philosophers, who posit some foundation for politics. Most philosophers before the nineteenth century fit into this category. It survives into the present, although heavily modified: since instead of simply postulating that there are foundations, philosophers like Rawls and Habermas have instead sought to construct them. Yet this classical tradition has come under severe assault. For there are also anti-foundational philosophers who claim that such foundations do not exist, and so instead propose theories that tend to be relativistic, skeptical, or nihilistic. Thirdly, there are post-foundational philosophers, who posit that the “lack” or “absence” of foundations is itself constitutive of political philosophy, which then becomes “a constant interrogation of metaphysical figures of foundation—such as totality, universality, essence and ground” (Marchart, 2007, 2). This involves paradoxes which have to be accepted as a matter of faith. If one accepts them, then one can adopt the obscure terminology of Baudrillard, Badiou, and the rest; if one does not, then one can, as many do, ignore it. Most moderate commentators, such as Vincent, think that the best we can do is to adopt the sort of position sketched by Gadamer, who simply says we cannot escape our traditions and prejudices. But it is far from clear what the consequence of this would be, or that Gadamer, despite his sophistication, has done as much as Collingwood, Koselleck, Arendt, Oakeshott, and MacIntyre have done to dramatize its difficulties in relation to politics.

1. The claim that there are foundations, which are transcendental and universal, and that these can be known. 2. The claim that foundations can be somehow constructed through or for the sake of universal agreement, so we can avoid contingency. 3. The claim that the foundations are contingent and conventional, so not universal but particular (and traditional). 4. The claim that since everything is contingent there are no foundations. 5. The claim that there are no foundations, but that our need for foundations is so fundamental that it may still be considered constitutive of whatever we think about the world. Each suggests a different purpose for the history of political philosophy. The first suggests that history is unified in terms of the 22

THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Lecky, Freeman, Maine, Bryce, and Bury was threatened in the mid-twentieth century by the positivistic view that ideas were of no significance in explaining politics (Momigliano, 1977, 1). It was in answering this sort of claim that certain figures tried to justify the status of history of political philosophy within the modern academic study of politics. In the early part of the twentieth century, the history of political philosophy and political science were rarely distinguished: they were part of a single study of politics. But the establishment of politics as a science forced what were now rival branches of political study to justify themselves. Justification for the history of political philosophy came, Vincent suggests, in two waves. Those of the first wave of the 1940s and 1950s—Strauss, Arendt, Oakeshott, and even to some extent others like MacIntyre later—suggested that if the history of political philosophy was correctly carried out it would enable us to establish what was of permanent philosophical significance. The books of these writers were still meant to be contributions to political philosophy. But the writers of the second wave of the 1960s and after—Pocock, Skinner, and Dunn—suggested that, since historians could only show what was of historical significance, nothing was of permanent philosophical significance (Vincent, 2004, 37–51). This position was associated with the intensification of historical study found in The Political Thought of John Locke (1969), The Machiavellian Moment (1975), and The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), which are still taken to be models for the subject. A subject was legislated for: methods established, enemies identified, and books written. Skinner and Pocock between them drew our attention to two different ways of writing the history of political philosophy. Either we can write the history of the uses of argument found in the works of

understanding and misunderstanding of the truth, and otherwise in terms of the continual failure to enact this truth in the past in any particular politics. The second suggests that history is a repository of earlier constructions, which are only to be studied for the sake of better construction. The third suggests that history is a constitutive form of study, since the supposition here is that we can only understand politics in terms of our own historical finitude: although here there is no secure way of distinguishing history from tradition. The fourth goes further and suggests that history is anything and everything. The fifth suggests that history is evidence for the intractable nature of our condition of being permanently committed to certainties we can neither wholly believe nor wholly abandon belief in. All of these except the first would have struck everyone before Burke as possibilities to be avoided. This is one reason why we still read the classics: for the reason that, even if we cannot agree with them, we recognize that our own writings are in certain respects inferior to them. This is, perhaps, a minimal justification for the continued study of the history of political philosophy. But here we return to the original contradiction. We may study the history of political philosophy because our commitment to a historical form of understanding makes it impossible to believe in the certainties held about politics in the past by the political philosophers we study. The history of political philosophy both enables us to emancipate ourselves from the past and encourages us to recover it. We are in the interesting situation of remembering something we have chosen to forget. The history of political philosophy is only a few centuries old. Momigliano notes that the English were rather good at it in the nineteenth century. But the tradition of Grote, 23

James Alexander us of older ideas. In the end, it may be that most histories of this type are nothing more than archival compilations complicated by the subjectivity of the historian, in which case the history of political philosophy is nothing more than a high form of literature for failed politicians and frustrated philosophers. This may seem like a dead end. So it is interesting to note that Dunn recanted. He saw that the revolution associated with the “Cambridge” contextualizing methods of Skinner and Pocock was no revolution at all, and that reaction was necessary if the history of political philosophy was to have any significance (Dunn, 1996). He argued that the study of politics should be

political philosophers, so emphasizing the particularity of each argument, the question it was meant to answer, and the supposed use to which the argument was meant to be put; or we can write the history of the changes in the languages or discourses of political philosophy in terms of the longue durée. In practice, the difference between these may not be very great, although they may register slight differences in temperament and even in political inclination. If Foucault’s historical writings were tainted with a radical hue, and Koselleck’s with a reactionary hue, Skinner’s and Pocock’s have been tainted with the hues of moderate reformism and restraint. Even though their works are meant to be good history, they are also meant to offer something to contemporary political philosophers. Skinner has suggested that the value of history is in recovering past ideas in order to challenge present ones (Skinner, 1997). Pocock has suggested that its value is in performing “the liberal-conservative function of warning the ruler on the one hand, and the revolutionary on the other, that there is always more going on that either can understand or control” (Pocock, 2009, xiii). These, though not unreasonable, hardly require an elaborate apparatus of historical learning. What we may observe is that, unlike Koselleck, the leading figure of the German philological tradition of Begriffsgeschichte, who was mainly concerned to characterize what is distinctive about our modernity—the modernity constituted by a distinctive historical consciousness—Pocock and Skinner have concerned themselves with earlier eras. So they have had to face difficult questions about how their study relates to the present which Koselleck did not have to face. They are not characterizing our world, so they are perhaps explaining its origins, merely characterizing an earlier era for its own sake, or even only reminding

committed by its central tasks to a rejection of the intellectually, educationally, and politically disastrous divorce between a purely historicist history of political ideas, a style of political philosophy committed to political inconsequence by the self-conscious purity of its methods, and a political science ludicrously aping the sciences of nature and uninformed by any coherent conception of political value (and thus at the mercy of the most superficial of local ideological perspectives and sentiments). (Dunn, 1985, 2) This is the broad justification for the continued study of the history of political philosophy over against the almost deliberately unhistorical political philosophy of Rawls and Habermas. The major significance of Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1971) was that it established a form of political philosophy that confined itself to a sphere in which it was untroubled or uncomplicated by history and that, within the modern university, could exist alongside political science. Oakeshott once said that philosophy is “radically subversive” (Oakeshott, 1993, 24

THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY enthusiasm and skepticism. It is necessary to say something about this. In a short chapter, it is only possible to sketch some of the antinomies involved. These antinomies are not symmetrical, and do not form a logical set. They are the alternatives which arise as soon we attempt to reflect in the present on thought which is supposed to have come from the past. These antinomies cannot be resolved unless we settle for arbitrary compromises which only conceal the contradictions. It is more important to recognize contradictions than try to resolve them. So we have:

141), but academic political philosophy is at best moderately subversive and at worst radically supportive of whatever is going on politically. Bevir and Adcock say that political philosophy has always been “the locus of hostility—whether conservative, radical or some curious blend of them—to the scientific aspirations of the discipline’s new mainstream” (Adcock and Bevir, 2010, 90). But this is only true of political philosophy when it is reinforced by the history of political philosophy. History to Rawls was no more than the conflict of Protestants and Catholics in the sixteenth century, and to Habermas little more than the newspapers and clubs of the eighteenth century. Both, of course, paid some attention to their own heritage: Rawls lectured on Hobbes, Kant, Sidgwick, and others, while Habermas has written about almost everyone from Hegel to Derrida. But this has all been a lot less reflective, and a lot less subversive, than the work of others—such as Oakeshott, Arendt, MacIntyre, Cowling, Dunn, and Geuss—who have seen history as less anticipatory of, or exemplary for, modern trends. My own view is that the theories of Rawls and Habermas are nothing but moments, or arrests, in what is possible— footnotes to Kant, say, or worth a page or two of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Geuss (2008) has recently made this sort of claim respectable. The claim, in short, is that the political philosopher should not ignore the history of political philosophy. But it is never easy to see where the history of political philosophy points with any clarity (which is a particular matter of despair for any impatient academics who seek “outputs” and “impacts” from political philosophy): I think this is because an openness to history involves an openness to fundamental difficulties. It opens us to both the transcendent and the immanent, to both the universal and the particular, to both

1. Either history is the objective past, or history is whatever the historian subjectively believes about the remains of the past. 2. Either history can be written of the entire past, or history can only be written of partial pasts. 3. Either history is concerned with the past for the sake of the present, or history is concerned with the past for its own sake. 4. Either history is conditioned by something which does not itself have a history because it exists outside of time and is eternal, or history is not conditioned by anything outside time, so history has to be understood only in terms of its own conditions. 5. Either not everything can be studied historically (not all objects are historical), or everything can be studied historically (all objects are historical). 6. Either the history of political philosophy is a form of study which is secondary to political philosophy: a mere retrospective study of the earlier attempts to generate a philosophical view of politics, or the history of political philosophy is a form of study which is inseparable from and therefore not secondary to political philosophy because it is the study of what constitutes political philosophy, perhaps 25

James Alexander at any time, and certainly, now at a time when we suppose that everything is constituted by its history.

Arendt but also Derrida. On the other side, Hegel was equally fascinated with Indian and Chinese philosophy, and incorporated both of the great Eastern civilizations of China and India into his philosophy of history and even, although more as preliminaries than anything else, into his history of philosophy. Schopenhauer, on the one hand, suggested that there is a dilemma: we have to choose either a Pelagian, ethical, or world-affirming form of philosophy, or an Augustinian, antinomian, or world-denying form. Hegel, on the other hand, suggested that there was a dialectic whereby the simple unities of Chinese thought were logically opposed by the simple multiplicities of Indian thought and whereby both were reconciled through the complicated unity-in-multiplicity of Greek thought into the distinctive and familiar tradition of the Christian West. These are two magnificent and influential myths, and we have not entirely abandoned them. It is of course significant that Hegel and Schopenhauer wrote in a century when it was thought that the history of humanity could be told as one story. If we scale down our ambition, as we have tended to do since what Thomas Mann called the “bad nineteenth century,” then a story less tendentious is necessary. Perhaps the best available one is the one sketched in The Nomos of the Earth, where Schmitt argued that there was no unity in history until there was unity in geography. It was the contingent achievement of the Europeans to unite the world geographically. (Hegel would have said it was a constitutive achievement.) But we could say, with Schmitt, that this achievement, though contingent, was imaginatively decisive. There was a consciousness which arose in Europe, which was taken across the world so that the unity of the world was forged in relation to it, and which then was separated from its origin to become a complete world

Some of these antinomies are very close— the fourth and fifth, for instance—and all are related. They raise great difficulties. To take only the second antinomy, we may ask whether it is possible to write a history of political philosophy for the entire world or only for part of it. If we suppose that the history of political philosophy is contingent and largely discontinuous, then it can include whichever elements we happen to find exemplary. These have always tended to be the “European” or “Western” traditions of Classical, Christian, and Enlightened thought, but there is no reason to exclude others if we are skeptical about the importance of our tradition. If the history of political philosophy is continuous and therefore constitutive of our current political philosophy, then the question is a much harder one. Yet it is possible to answer it, and again in terms of history. I mentioned earlier that a historical consciousness emerged in the eighteenth century. The impact of this on how philosophers saw the history of philosophy was total, whether or not they thought history was contingent or constitutive. By the time of Hegel and Schopenhauer, it was common to see philosophy historically. Both were interested in the discovery of other traditions besides their own. But Schopenhauer still saw history as contingent: indeed, of no significance at all. His philosophy was in large part a Western or Kantian reinterpretation of Buddhistic recognitions, as he himself saw: he took elements of Indian religion to be exemplary of a correct philosophical understanding. Much later, with less verve and more obscurity, Heidegger saw pre-Socratic philosophy as equally exemplary—a view which influenced not only 26

THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY something deeper, more intractable. I think it is fair to say that the first ends in triviality and the second absurdity, taken separately. According to the former, the history of political philosophy would simply be a category into which we collect anything and everything which remains of earlier thought: a category of the relics of political philosophy perhaps modified by the insistence that we understand them historically. This certainly would not require any of the historical subtlety we have acquired since the eighteenth century. According to the latter, the history of political philosophy would depend on something like a philosophy of history. Here history would be unified not through facts, but in terms of a theory or event which relates everything—a theory such as, say, natural selection or historical materialism, or an event such as crucifixion-resurrection. If any theory or event of this sort were to be believed, then clearly it would change our idea of history, which would no longer be “one damned thing after another” but many damned or saved things, one after another, or, at least, many things ordered according to one structuring principle. The point is that such a theory or event would not itself be historical but abstract or timeless or eternal. “Modern historians have always reacted, understandably, against philosophies of history,” comments Perry Anderson. But philosophies of history “have not gone away, and are unlikely to, as long as the demand for social meaning over time persists” (Anderson, 1992, 284–285). It seems that historians of political philosophy are always in danger of turning into philosophers of history—or turning back into mere historians. In this situation, I think we have to admit that there is no way to legislate for the history of political philosophy which is not arbitrary. Yet if philosophy without history

consciousness, and which has been reflected back into Europe (Schmitt, 2003). There is reflexivity here: this consciousness is now no longer that of Europe, but that of the world; yet, for contingent reasons, the European story is the only one into which all other traditions can be placed to form a unity. It is common for writers of the history of political philosophy to emphasize that they are writing about the Western tradition only: but this is, for the most part, just good manners. For the moment, the Western tradition is the only unitary tradition. Everything else, so far, is partial (Dunn, 1996, 15). This does not mean that there could not be alternative traditions, say, Confucian or Vedic or Islamic. But these would involve revolutions in thought of which there is as yet no sign. Europe is to the World what Greece was to Rome. Indeed, there is good historical justification for the claim that the Greeks invented politics, that the Romans invented law—that is, they invented the habit of treating them separately from religion, ethics, and each other—and that Europeans conveyed these two paradigms of politics and law to the world, along with, eventually, a third paradigm of a separately treated economics (McCloskey, 2010, Schiavone, 2012, 11). But we have to admit that there is nothing in this dual or triple legacy which prevents an evangelical interruption of the sort which came with Christianity—although it could come in the future from Islam, Buddhism, or elsewhere. The point is that the antinomies are inescapable: we exist between simple and coherent positions which we cannot possibly entirely adopt. The most immediately relevant antinomy here is of course the sixth. This is the question of whether we suppose the history of political philosophy is simply an additional way of reflecting upon texts we already reflect upon philosophically, or is 27

James Alexander of study concerned to establish speculatively why the ideas came in the form that they did; and, fourthly, “doxology”: by which he meant simply textbook history. Rorty did not think much of the fourth, although it is still by far the most common. (Consider any “History of Political Thought” you have ever read.) He thought the third is the most interesting, since it “meets needs which neither unphilosophical history not unhistorical philosophy is likely to fulfil,” since it establishes the nature of the canons of our ideas. It is “parasitic on, and synthesises, the first two genres.” He even added a fifth, which is the general intellectual history or history of ideas which offers the “raw material” for the other four (Rorty, 1984, 59, 61). In a different register, MacIntyre has distinguished, first, “encyclopaedia,” an unhistorical form of understanding in which systematic order is sought, on the belief that all knowledge is related to all other knowledge; secondly, “genealogy,” a historical form of understanding in which everything is to be explained in terms of contingent continuities and discontinuities, especially in terms of uses and powers; and, thirdly, “tradition,” which is a form of understanding neither straightforwardly historical nor unhistorical, in which everything is to be explained in relation to a tradition which has a truth at its core (MacIntyre, 1990). The first is enlightened: it requires history to be treated as no more than a set of cases. The second is critical: it requires history to be treated as a set of past particulars. The third is neither enlightened nor critical: it requires history to be taken seriously enough to see whether we can find any certainties there that can survive enlightenment and criticism. To take the second, the most influential now, Nietzsche claimed that history as genealogy was a weapon to be used against other forms of history for the

is a desert, and history without philosophy is a jungle, then we certainly need something of both. There is certainly nothing to be gained by being too concerned with historical or philosophical correctness. To some extent, the “methodological” writings of the last half century came out of anxiety caused by the requirement to be exact. Skinner was too subtle to simply encourage a mindless concern with “historical context” but there is no question that at least part of his legacy is the view that we should not look at philosophical works without some historical awareness of context (Tully, 1988). What he left to one side was, as Leavis put it, that “context, as something determinate is, and can be, nothing but [the historian’s] postulate; the wider he goes in his ambition to construct it from his reading in this period, the more it is his construction (in so far as he produces anything more than a mass of heterogeneous information alleged to be relevant)” (Leavis, 1968, 293). Oakeshott famously suggested in his introduction to Hobbes’s Leviathan that if Hobbes had written a masterpiece, as he had, then its context should be nothing other than the entire history of political philosophy (Oakeshott, 1991, 223). If we agree with this, then we end up in circularities, for the history of political philosophy is whatever we suppose it to be. Awareness of what we are doing is not the same as doing it. But it is important to be aware of different ways of carrying out the history of political philosophy. Rorty distinguished, first, “rational reconstruction”: which is the study of older ideas in terms of their truth, with the intention of saying them better; secondly, “historical reconstruction”: which is the study of older ideas, whether or not we consider them true, in terms what they meant at the time of writing; thirdly, “geistgeschichte”: by which he meant a form 28

THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY the relations between its different elements. Even the great philosophers in our tradition did not always know how to relate them. Just to take one instance, Hume and Hobbes were rather untroubled by hypocrisy in politics when writing philosophically, but were far more censorious about it when writing historically (Runciman, 2008, 17). The distinctions I have drawn in this chapter should indicate that history discloses no simple attitude to political philosophy. We are torn, finally, between two main theoretical possibilities:

sake of our present unhistorical ends. In his later writings, he did not quite answer the question he had posed in his earlier writings, which is whether to think historically is to think ironically and therefore to damage our capacity to act. But in his earlier writings he also suggested that we might write history for any of three reasons: and, following him, we could say that we might write the history of political philosophy for these three same reasons: because it inspires us to strive to write great works of political philosophy, it enables us to preserve the older traditions of political philosophy we revere, or it enables us to overcome our suffering in politics by studying historically the means of delivering ourselves philosophically from it (Nietzsche, 1997, 67). Much is still written in all of these categories in our time by those who seek some authority in the history of philosophy for their explanations, justifications, and prescriptions. We might ignore this if we were only to follow a narrow contextualist method or limit ourselves to a study of Skinner’s or Pocock’s methodological writings. The tension between historical and unhistorical approaches to political philosophy is still a great matter of concern to political philosophers. This is not only because history puts the certainties of philosophy into question, but also because for some time it has seemed as if the unhistorical political philosophy of Rawls and Habermas has failed to adequately theorize politics as it really is (Floyd and Stears, 2011). Arguments about these matters are likely to be repeated, especially by those who do not know how old they are. The truth is, of course, that “the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure” (Nietzsche, 1997, 63). But the history of political philosophy will always face questions about the adequacy of

Either the history of political philosophy is simply an assemblage of useful or amusing materials about politics: written to amuse and edify readers, and used, when we are neither amused nor edified, by sociologists, protestors, journalists, politicians and dictators as evidence for the particular points they want to make: it is a fragmentary set of materials, valuable because exemplary. Or the history of political philosophy is the only correct way to understand the continuing fragility of our attempts to impose political order on the world by ordering it philosophically: it is not fragmentary but complete, even if impossible, since it is a bringing into consciousness of the highest elements of the history by which our own thought about politics is constituted. In short, it may be exemplary or constitutive: we may study it to find examples of great political philosophy, or we may study it because the history of philosophy is a conscious emanation of some philosophy of history. In the first our relation to the past is discontinuous, in the latter it is continuous. These seem the only wholly coherent possibilities, even if one risks triviality, the other 29

James Alexander Floyd, J. and Stears, M. (eds) (2011), Political Philosophy Versus History? Contextualism and Real Politics in Contemporary Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geuss, R. (2008), Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Goethe, J. W. von (1904), Criticisms, Reflections and Maxims of Goethe, trans. W. B. Rönnfeldt. London: Walter Scott. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977), The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Koselleck, R. (1985), Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Leavis, F. R. (ed.) (1968), A Selection from Scrutiny, Vol. II. London: Cambridge University Press. McCloskey, D. (2010), Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacIntyre, A. (1990), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. London: Duckworth. Marchart, O. (2007), Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marx, K. (1963), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. New York: International Publishers. Momigliano, A. (1977), “A Piedmontese View of the History of Ideas,” in Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–7. Nietzsche, F. (1997), “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 59–123.

absurdity. There is no way to completely harmonize them. Compromises will continue to be sought, and contradictions will continue to be found. The history of political philosophy is both the recollection of our former attempts to understand politics philosophically and the explanation of why we no longer fully understand it philosophically. It is not political philosophy, but political philosophy is nothing without it.

WORKS CITED Adcock, R. and Bevir, M. (2010), “Political Science,” in R. Backhouse and P. Fontaine (eds), The History of the Social Sciences since 1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 71–101. Alexander, J. (2012), “The Four Points of the Compass,” Philosophy, 87: 79–107. — (2014), “Notes Towards the Definition of Politics” Philosophy, 89: 273–300. Anderson, P. (1992), “The Ends of History,” in A Zone of Engagement. London: Verso, pp. 279–376. Collingwood, R. G. (1945), The Idea of Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Condren, C. (1985), The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts: An Essay on Politics, Its Inheritance and the History of Ideas. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Dunn, J. (1969), The Political Thought of John Locke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — (1985), Rethinking Modern Political Theory: Essays 1979–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — (1996), “The History of Political Theory,” in The History of Political Thought and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11–38. 30

THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Schneewind, R. Rorty, and Q. Skinner (eds), Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Runciman, D. (2008), Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schiavone, A. (2012), The Invention of Law in the West, trans. J. Carden and A. Shugaar. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Schmitt, C. (2003), The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press. Skinner, Q. (1978), The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — (1997), Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tully, J. (ed.) (1988), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vincent, A. (2004), The Nature of Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Oakeshott, M. (1991), Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, T. Fuller (ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press. — (1993), Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, T. Fuller (ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. — (2007), The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence: Essays and Reviews 1926–51, L. O’Sullivan (ed.). Exeter: Imprint Academic. — (2008), The Vocabulary of a Modern European State, L. O’Sullivan (ed.). Exeter: Imprint Academic. Pocock, J. G. A. (1975), The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. — (2009), Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, J. (1971), A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rorty, R. (1984), “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” in J. B.

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2 SOVEREIGNTY Andrew Fiala

a right to command. The normative account holds that the sovereign power has the de jure authority to use coercive power within a territory, including the right to kill, and freedom from intervention when it exercises that right. The sovereign is often conceived as the person or institution that constitutes the law. On some interpretations the sovereign is understood as residing outside the law, retaining the de jure right (or de facto power) to make exceptions to the law. Other interpretations establish a basic limit to the exceptional power of the sovereign located in the normative primacy of something like natural law. While the natural law tradition provides a guide for the proper exercise of sovereign power, natural law may also be used to support the idea of civil disobedience in which violators of the law assert allegiance to the sovereign natural law; related claims are made about the sovereign authority of the individual conscience. A less metaphysical notion of positive law (associated with legal positivists such as Hart) identifies a de facto sovereign in a legal regime or (in ideas found in Hayek) in common law as a spontaneous but evolving source of authority. Sovereignty is a threshold or liminal concept, which can inspire contemplation, awe, wonder, and fear. The sovereign—whether the political executive or the conscientious

One of the most important and vexing issues in political philosophy is the question of who or what should have supreme ruling authority within a territory. While some have dreamed of identifying a single ultimate source of authority, in reality there are multiple relationships and directions of power as well as plural sources of normative authority. Often there are layers and levels of sovereignty: superior power is concentrated and centralized in larger structures, but inferior powers still retain some autonomy, resulting in jurisdictional conflict and instability. Sovereignty may describe the de facto supremacy of a particular institution or person—the entity to which others defer. In international law, sovereignty is primarily understood as a descriptive feature of states that mutually recognize one another, without appeal to any metaphysical or normative ground. But de facto sovereignty ignores normative evaluation. As Francis Fukuyama notes in some cases—as in Afghanistan or Somalia—sovereignty is a “fiction or a bad joke” (Fukuyama, 2004, 97). Indeed, the international community appears to agree that violations of “sovereignty” in the case of failed states is morally permissible. Thus sovereignty often also includes a normative ideal of legitimacy: sovereign power is justified power that ought to be obeyed and has 33

Andrew Fiala 92). In the Bible, the account of God’s lordship or sovereignty shows up, for example, in Psalm (71:16), where the Sovereign Lord God is praised for his mighty deeds and as the sole source of justice. We see this in the phrase “the Almighty” which is also used to describe God, even occasionally piling on epithets to emphasize power, as in the phrase, “Lord God Almighty” (kyrios theos pantokratōr) found in Revelation. Revelation makes clear the hope, foreshadowed in the Psalms, that at some point God will rule over the kingdoms of the world (Revelation 11). Thus sovereignty can have a metaphysical and religious significance. Even though we take sovereignty as “the sine qua non of political life,” as Jean Elshtain puts it, the concept reflects a complex interplay between theology and political philosophy (Elshtain, 2008, xiii–xvi). The debate about sovereignty reflects a conflict between Platonic (and later Christian) views of political authority as grounded in a moral and metaphysical hierarchy, on the one hand, and the modern liberal, democratic idea of citizen or individual sovereignty, on the other hand, as the revolutionary antithesis to religious paternalism and political despotism. Sovereignty has been a primary focus for political philosophy since Plato. The catalogue of regime types in Republic can be understood as a catalogue of the varieties of sovereign power. Bloom points out that the debate between Thrasymachus and Socrates at the beginning of Republic is about sovereignty— about whether there is some principle superior to strength that could limit its exercise (Bloom, 1991, 326–327). In his translation of Republic, Bloom points toward an interpretation of Plato’s cave allegory (Republic 517c) as a discussion of sovereignty: the good (or sun) in the cave allegory is kyrios or sovereign—the source of light and of truth. Arendt explains that Plato thus suggests that politics ought to

individual—may retain the right to break the law. Sovereignty is thus a trump that prevents criticism or intervention. The focus on supremacy at the outside edge of the legal system has religious overtones. God (or the Church) was once viewed as the sovereign, symbolized in the coronation of the monarch by Pope or bishop. But in the modern period, the state emerged as sovereign, with secular governments asserting sovereignty over religious institutions. Sovereignty is a practical concept used to describe structures of power and deference in international law and domestic political science. But the hierarchies of authority, power, and obedience continue to provoke philosophical reflection. This chapter examines the concept of sovereignty by explaining (1) how the concept of sovereignty evolved in Western political philosophy and (2) how the concept functions in contemporary legal theory, political science, and Anglo-American political philosophy.

GENEALOGY OF THE CONCEPT OF SOVEREIGNTY The sovereign is the supreme or superior authority: superanus in Vulgar Latin; souverain in French; in German rendered either as Souveränität or with two words, Staatshoheit und Staatsgewalt indicating the majesty/dignity and power of the state (see Bluntschi, 1892, Beaulac, 2004). Behind this is the Greek terms kyrios, which is most frequently translated as “Lord” or “sovereign” in the Bible (along with the Hebrew Adonai). The term kyrios was employed to identify the Roman emperor—as in the title Kyrios Kaisar (Lord Caesar), which was countered by Christians who denied that Caesar was Lord and affirmed Kyrios Christos (see Jongeneel, 2009, 34

SOVEREIGNTY of sovereignty (as traditionally understood). Arendt suggested that revolutionary political activity—as in the American (and French) revolutions—aimed to abolish sovereignty entirely (Arendt, 2006, 144). Arendt suggests that the early American experiment in self-government showed that political societies and bodies could enjoy power and claim rights “without possessing or claiming sovereignty” (Arendt, 2006, 159). One wonders whether there could be a political organization that does not possess or claim sovereignty. Arendt’s suggestion that sovereignty and tyranny are the same is a hint in the anarchist direction, which holds that sovereignty is primarily about domination, dominion, and paternal or despotic rule. However, for the mainstream of the Western tradition in political philosophy, which develops after Plato, political philosophy has often primarily been concerned with the justification of sovereignty. Discussions of sovereignty emphasize that there is (or ought to be) a supreme authority in a territory, whose rulings trump those of other lesser authorities. There are two rival directions of the evolution of the idea: (1) toward centralization in modern bureaucratic states and (2) away from central power in liberal democratic theory. In feudal organization, the king was said to be sovereign over the princes and other feudal lords within his territory. In federations and federal systems— as in the United States—the federal authority and its bureaucracy is said to have sovereign power, which trumps the authority and power of the confederated states and local authorities. At the same time, democratic states are based upon some notion of popular sovereignty, which is the decentralized notion of governmental legitimacy as based upon the consent of the governed. Liberal political philosophy also tends to hold that

be subordinated to philosophy (Arendt, 2005, 130). Not only is the philosopher-king the paradigm of the wise, virtuous, and just sovereign authority, but also his knowledge of the truth connects him with the sovereign power of the universe. This metaphysical conception of sovereignty is linked to Christian ideas about the divine right of kings and idea of absolute sovereignty. Bodin explained in the sixteenth century that the prince’s power is derived from the absolute sovereignty of God (Bodin, 1992, 34–35). At the turn of the twentieth century, Figgis argued that during the medieval period, God and church were held to be superior to the state. It was only in the transition to modernity that the notion of divine right of kings developed—as an attempt to stipulate that the state was independent of the church. Nonetheless, Figgis followed Bodin and others in arguing that the best place for sovereignty to rest was in the will of the monarch and that the idea of a limited monarchy was a contradiction in terms (Figgis, 1914, 6). Hobbes and the social contract tradition developed in a different direction, not grounded in a metaphysical or religious account of divine right. Rather, for Hobbes, the absolute power of the sovereign was grounded in the original contract. From Hobbes, it is a short leap to modern democratic revolutionary politics that calls hierarchical and absolutist accounts of sovereignty into question. Absolutist ideas can be found in the work of Schmitt, whose theory of sovereignty—as the exception beyond the law— was related to Hobbesian notions (Schmitt, 1985, 2008). But Schmittian absolutism has been opposed by a more radical development of the social contract idea. In its most radical iteration, liberal, democratic ideas are revolutionary and may even aim at the abolition 35

Andrew Fiala 1960, 67). Indeed, anarchists often hold that individual autonomy (or “self-sovereignty” or “personal sovereignty” as it is variously called) is absolute and inviolable. Thus for the anarchist, political sovereignty is, at best, an oxymoron, since political organizations ultimately undermine the sovereignty of the self. The anarchist challenge forces us to confront the question of where sovereignty resides: in the self or in the state. The mainstream tradition assumes— contra the anarchists—that some form of supreme ruling authority is justified. The question was not usually whether sovereign authority ought to exist but, rather, how best to conceive and organize it—whether sovereignty was absolute or not, whether sovereignty was focused internally or externally, and who—monarch or demos—should properly hold supreme authority (see Philpot, 2011). The deepest question in this tradition has to do with the moral limit of sovereignty—whether sovereignty ought to be grounded in virtue, wisdom, and the natural law, whether sovereignty is best conceived as limited by fiduciary relations (as in modern liberal-democratic ideas about the state), or whether sovereignty is an amoral concept merely identifying who has de facto power. Political sovereignty is a concept closely associated with the idea of the supremacy of “the state.” A state is an entity that exists in a delimited geographic area, consisting of a more or less permanent group of people, organized under the authority of a centralized and hierarchical government who has the power ultimately to decide on questions of life and death. While anarchists may argue against the sovereignty of states, states have de facto and often de jure power and authority that routinely trumps the power and authority of individuals and their voluntary local associations. Jackson explains, “when

sovereignty should include a foundation in human rights, which can be understood as asserting the sovereignty of the individual as a person with inherent dignity and the right to obey the authority of conscience. While the notion of individual sovereignty is the most radical, since it asserts that each individual possesses supreme authority, a related (and more limited) notion of “citizen sovereignty” also appears in the literature (see Dworkin, 2002, Vanberg, 2007). Citizen sovereignty is the liberal, democratic idea that political power is derived from and legitimated by the choices and consent of citizens; individual sovereignty points beyond citizenship toward the purity of conscience and individual autonomy. The idea of human rights and related ideas about of the sovereignty of citizens or individuals can call the political notion of sovereignty into question along with related notions of authority, obedience, loyalty, patriotism, and national identity. In a cosmopolitan world of diverse allegiances entered into voluntarily by sovereign individuals, it is unclear that the political notion of sovereignty can remain useful. Indeed, one might argue that the most important question of political philosophy is whether there should be any sovereign political authority at all. Nozick writes, “The fundamental question of political philosophy, one that precedes questions about how the state should be organized, is whether there should be any state at all. Why not have anarchy?” (Nozick, 1974, 4). Anarchism represents one extreme on the continuum of answers about who should rule and how ruling should be organized: for the anarchist, the answer is that no one should rule—there should be no sovereign authority in the political sense. As Goldman explained, anarchism is “the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual” (Goldman, 36

SOVEREIGNTY liberal, democratic theorists who hold to one extent or another that individuals are born free and retain sovereign power over themselves. The modern idea that natural right and individual conscience is sovereign has been developed in a libertarian (and nearly anarchist) direction by authors such as Machan, who explains, “the libertarian view is that each individual is a sovereign person, in possession of basic negative rights to life, liberty, and property (and whatever other rights are implied by these). None may violate these. If one needs to protect these rights, the option exists of doing so oneself or hiring others” (Machan, 2008, 63). One significant implication of this idea is that individuals may be permitted (or even obliged) to disobey the law. The notions of civil disobedience and conscientious refusal—as developed in the work of Thoreau, Gandhi, and King— imply that political authority is not ultimate. The usual defense of civil disobedience is grounded in the idea that the authority of natural law trumps the authority of the positive law. Civil disobedience does not usually, however, eliminate the notion of political sovereignty, nor does it necessarily lead to anarchism. Rather, civil disobedience usually depends upon what Rawls (Rawls, 1971, sections 55–59) calls “fidelity to law” or what Walzer explains as the need for public justification and dialogue about the status of rights, laws, responsibility, and sovereignty (Walzer, 1970, Chapter 1). Civil disobedience is not usually an argument against sovereign power, rather it is an argument for just government grounded in respect for natural law. The idea that natural law provides a trump that may override sovereignty is a central idea in modern liberal-democratic regimes and in evolving notions about humanitarian intervention across borders. This idea is grounded in the claim that individuals have a

the government of a state is said to be sovereign, it holds supreme authority domestically and independent authority internationally, at one and the same time” (Jackson, 2007, 6). We should note that the ideal of supreme and independent authority is merely an ideal. In reality, state sovereignty is limited in a variety of ways: domestic culture and tradition, international treaty, and moral law. The idea that there is an absolute and independent sovereign power that can trump all other historical, social, and moral norms in an arbitrary act of political will is quite unrealistic and ideal. One might argue, following Elshtain, that the notion of absolute sovereignty can be derived from a sort of nominalism and voluntarism about power and law that can be traced back to medieval nominalists such as Ockham (Elshtain, 2008, 36–39). Elshtain argues that the more coherent notion of sovereignty—even of God’s sovereignty—is less focused on arbitrary (voluntaristic) power and better understood as law governed and reasonable activity. This idea of sovereign power as reasonable and law-governed is connected with Aquinas and the natural law tradition, which developed into the modern notion of human rights (see Philpot, 1996). When, for example, Locke offers a revolutionary challenge to government, he appeals to the importance of natural rights. Locke is also arguing—in his less studied First Treatise of Government—against Filmer’s notion of absolute monarchic sovereignty. Filmer held that Adam’s sovereign power was a gift from God, that men are not naturally born free, and that political power is based upon patriarchal sovereignty. Locke describes this notion of sovereign power as “absolute, arbitrary, unlimited, and unlimitable” (Locke, 1764, section 9). The idea of unlimited and arbitrary sovereign power is rejected by Locke and other 37

Andrew Fiala individuals might transfer sovereignty to the state, which then has the power to trump the sovereignty of the individual—even though the anarchists have long complained that this violates the sovereignty of the self. The notion of sovereignty provides a rich metaphorical framework for discussions of a variety topics in religion and metaphysics. Agamben and Derrida have shown that sovereignty is an ontological concept. Derrida says, “The sovereign, in the broadest sense of the term, is he who has the right and strength to be and be recognized as himself, the same, properly the same as himself” (Derrida, 2011, 66). Agamben writes, “Potentiality . . . is that through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding or determining it other than its own ability not to be. And an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself” (Agamben, 1998, 32). Pursuing the metaphor of sovereignty after Agamben and Derrida reminds us how thick and rich the notion of sovereignty is. However, we will confine our discussion in what follows primarily to political sovereignty within the mainstream of AngloAmerican political philosophy. A fuller genealogy would include a more extended discussion of Plato—as well as Aristotle, the Cynics, and the Stoics. It would consider Augustine and Aquinas. It would examine Hobbes and Bodin in more detail. It would consider Weber’s account of power and charisma, while also including further discussion of Schmitt’s account of the sovereign exception. It would include an extensive discussion of revolutionary liberal-democratic ideas and Westphalian international law as found in Grotius, Locke, Pufendorf, Rousseau, and others. It would also include more details about the idea of individual sovereignty as

kind of sovereignty that states ought not violate. Donnelly quotes former UN chief Kofi Annan to make the point that “individual sovereignty, rooted in human rights, is taking its place in international relations along side state sovereignty” (Donnelly, 2003, 251). Annan’s idea is that traditional notions of state sovereignty should not prevent interventions intended to protect individuals from being harmed by their states. This idea culminated in the newly evolving international idea of a “responsibility to protect” as articulated by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which provided a framework for understanding the relationship between sovereignty and human rights. The ICISS report of 2001 redefined state sovereignty in a way that emphasizes the state’s responsibility to defend human right. As the report states, “State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself” (ICISS, 2001, ix). The report indicates that this idea and the sorts of international interventions implied by it “herald a new world in which human rights trumps state sovereignty” (see Badescu, 2009, 2). Some worry that this will be misused by imperialistic power. But the idea that human rights trump state sovereignty is an important one, connected to the idea that individuals have a sort of sovereignty that cannot be violated by the political sovereign. Hoffman suggests that the idea of the sovereignty of individuals is a central feature of liberal political theory: “liberalism conceives of individuals as having a sovereignty which is independent of the state” (Hoffman, 1998, 85). The problem, however, is that this notion of individual sovereignty is “abstract” and ahistorical as Hoffman puts it. In reality, political forms preexist the individual. The social contract theory shows how and why 38

SOVEREIGNTY during the past several centuries. While these ideas developed in the European sphere, they were gradually exported globally through European colonialism and imperialism. In the postcolonial era, former colonial holdings were released from bondage and granted sovereignty. The present world is carved up into sovereign states, which are held to have basic rights to territorial control, noninterference, and a sort of equality as members of the United Nations. One significant problem is that sovereign states often include minority groups who may want sovereign power for themselves. Some want control in autonomous regions within a sovereign territory; others contest for supremacy in the whole of a state’s territory. A related problem is that ethnic, religious, and other affiliations transcend national borders, creating claims to authority, loyalty, and obedience that point beyond national boundaries and sovereignty understood in political terms. Nonetheless, the international system in the postcolonial era is based upon a community of sovereign nations, which assumes that each state has an equal sovereign right to selfgovernance and self-defense. The notion of sovereign equality idea is foundational in the United Nations Charter, which stipulates in Article 2, Paragraph 1: “The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members” (also see Article 78). Sovereign equality in international law views states externally, treating them as individual entities. This means that domestic political arrangements of states are ignored (along with internal disputes and minority claims), with the status of sovereign statehood providing equal recognition at the international level. The emphasis on sovereign equality is pluralistic. It aims toward a system in which states with quite different domestic arrangements are equally recognized as having a

developed by Thoreau and other defenders of conscientious refusal and civil disobedience. Finally, it would include a critique of sovereignty as ideological and the result of power—from a Marxist or Nietzschean vantage point, from ideas found in the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and from Foucault’s critique of so-called governmentality. But let’s turn our attention to contemporary Anglo-American theory and emerging issues.

CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THEORY AND EMERGING ISSUES In recent years, sovereignty has been reevaluated in light of developments in international law and international institutions. In the post-World War II era, states have joined monetary and defensive unions, have ceded sovereignty to federations, and have been invaded and reconstructed by international forces which justify their actions in the name of human rights. These developments have led some to urge rejection of the concept of sovereignty or, at least, to allow for the emergence of a post-sovereignty era and the end of traditional notions of political sovereignty. The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648, created a system of nation states in Europe based upon a notion described as Westphalian sovereignty which holds that states have the right to determine and organize themselves without external intervention. This right is based upon a claim to territorial supremacy: a sovereign state has a right to defend its borders and exert control within those borders. The international order has slowly come to respect basic principles of noninterference, equality among states, and related notions constitutive of the system of nation states 39

Andrew Fiala genocide. The notion of “responsibility to protect” (discussed earlier) has evolved to explain why, in some circumstances, state sovereignty is not absolute and ought not be used to protect injustice and allow oppression. The modern Westphalian notion of sovereignty has evolved in other ways in recent decades, as borders became more permeable under globalization, as national identity is challenged by the fact of internal diversity, and as international institutions developed as restraints on the sovereignty of nations. For example, the Breton Woods agreements about international monetary policy and other economic integration resulted in a loss of sovereignty—as a state’s domestic economic and fiscal policies were pegged to international monetary arrangements. Moreover, as capital and labor flows across borders in the era of globalization, it is no longer clear that territoriality remains an important concept for political organization. Global corporations and international banking and trade organizations (such as the World Trade Organization and the World Bank) point toward a changed understanding of borders, territory, and how this relates to human development and structures of authority. Remaining conflicts in international relations and domestic politics often involve disputes among those who defend traditional notions of Westphalian sovereignty and those who see an evolving “post-sovereign” era. While several centuries of political philosophy simply presume that something like Westphalian sovereignty is natural and normal, this notion is collapsing from within (by the challenges of immigration, multiculturalism, and differential sovereignty for various autonomous regions and groups); it is also being challenged from without by the evolving cosmopolitan scene. We are left with sovereignty as a muddy and vague concept. Krasner has shown that

certain political status. This notion has been described and defended as a form of sovereign state realism, which accepts state sovereignty as a fact of political life. From this perspective, once a sovereign power is established and acknowledged by the international community, there is no justification for foreign interference. Such interference is conceived as a violation of sovereignty. Critics of this approach will argue that this permits rogue states and outlaw regimes to have an equal place at the international table. Such critics may advocate liberal internationalism, cosmopolitan norms, natural law, and human rights ideals—holding that the idea of de facto state sovereignty must be qualified by other values and norms including the idea of domestic legitimacy (as understood in liberaldemocratic terms). Critics of sovereign state realism will argue that sovereignty is not merely a fact about who holds power and authority—it also includes a normative claim about what the responsibilities and obligations of legitimate sovereign power ought to be. One crucial contemporary issue is how we evaluate the conflict between the normative idealism of sovereignty as conceived by liberal internationalists and the descriptive and historically grounded account of sovereignty as conceived by less idealistic realists. This conflict comes to a head with regard to the question of intervention and the right of self-defense. The UN Charter admits that “members” (conceived as sovereign states) retain a right of self-defense (as in Article 51). This implies that sovereign states are entitled to defend themselves against external interference. But some will argue that there are good reasons to think that interventions ought to be employed to defend citizens against the misdeeds of their own states, especially to prevent crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and 40

SOVEREIGNTY be wary of pernicious ideology and possible double standards in rejecting sovereignty. Cohen writes that sovereignty in the “classic, absolutist (predatory) sense remains alive and well, but only for very powerful states— including those controlling global governance institutions .  .  . The direction of the new world order is, in other words, toward hierarchy not sovereign equality, and the appropriate concepts are not cosmopolitan constitutionalism but ‘grossraum,’ regional hegemony, neo-imperialism, or empire” (Cohen, 2012, 4). In other words, one should note that the concept of sovereignty is used (and criticized) for ideological purposes. Rich and powerful states may argue that weak states lack sovereign protection against foreign intervention in our post-sovereignty era, but the rich and powerful states would protest if a weaker state were to invade and violate their own sovereignty. Despite these problems, the concept of sovereignty continues to be employed. We’ve already noted that the concept of sovereignty may be either a descriptive or a normative concept. Sovereignty may also be understood as either a concern of domestic hierarchy and legitimacy or a matter of external relations among states. This distinction is connected to the distinction between domestic and comparative political theory and international relations theory. Sovereignty must be understood in its relation to different types of political/legal theory: positive law, natural law, and contractual or constitutional theory. Finally, sovereignty points toward the ontological problem of limits and borders. A serious philosophical question of sovereignty remains: whether the sovereign is subject to the law or outside of the law. The idea that sovereign power is subject to the law is typical of constitutional regimes and natural law accounts (whether liberal or otherwise) and

there are a variety of ideas that can be gathered together under the term sovereignty. Krasner identifies four types of sovereignty: domestic sovereignty, Westphalian sovereignty, international legal sovereignty, and interdependence sovereignty. These can be grouped together as a “family resemblance” concept along Wittgensteinian lines: sovereignty may be understood as a basket or bundle of properties. As Fowler and Bunck explain, “while every state has a basket, the contents are by no means the same” (Fowler and Bunck, 1995, 70, see Krasner, 1999, 220). The basket or bundle approach to sovereignty is grounded in an empirical method that begins with facts and works toward generalizations. It does not start from an a priori or absolute notion of sovereignty. The a priori notion of sovereignty as the ultimate or supreme source is most properly defended by those who adopt a less empirical approach to political theory. Some theorists argue that sovereignty is a dirty word—imposed by those in power and grounded in ideological claims—that ought to be discarded as we move in the direction of international institutions and cosmopolitan political theory. Henkin writes of sovereignty: “Its birth is illegitimate, and it has not aged well. The meaning of ‘sovereignty’ is confused and its uses are various, some of them unworthy, some even destructive of human values” (Henkin, 1999, 1). Cohen explains, “it is alleged that the concept of sovereignty is useless as an epistemological tool for understanding the contemporary world and that it is normatively pernicious” (Cohen, 2012, 2). This allegation is made from the standpoint of cosmopolitan political theory, which wants to reconceive the global political scene in a way that looks beyond the limits of sovereign states as traditionally understood. But Cohen argues that we must 41

Andrew Fiala of arms or at the ballot box. The theory of “legal positivism” in the philosophy of law provides one approach to a merely descriptive account of sovereignty. The great legal positivist Austin, for example, maintains that the concept of law can be defined in terms of the commands of a sovereign, which are backed up by appropriate sanctions. The sovereign is the source of the commands of law, which include commands of punishment for disobedience. Austin further maintains that there can only be one sovereign—as the idea that there is a limitation on sovereignty points toward a regress of authorities. This regress must stop at some point, at which we then find the sovereign power or supreme authority. As Austin puts it, “supreme power limited by positive law is a flat contradiction in terms” (Austin, 1873, 270). Within the scope of positive law, the sovereign is the source of command to which (or to whom) obedience is required by law. Said differently, from the standpoint of positive law and descriptive political science, the sovereign is the source of de facto habitual obedience. As Austin concludes, “In respect of positive law, a sovereign political government which is established or present, is neither lawful or unlawful: in respect of positive law, it is neither rightful nor wrongful, it is neither just or unjust. Or (changing the expression) a sovereign political government which is established or present, is neither legal or illegal” (Austin, 1873, 336). Austin’s account of positive law focuses on the fact of the obedience-authority structure, without inquiring into the normative question of whether obedience ought to be given or whether sovereignty is legitimate or justified. Related to this is the more nuanced legal positivism of Hart, who notes that laws constitute their own authority. Hart defines sovereignty in terms of the vertical structure of command and obedience. The

an emphasis on positive law, while the idea that sovereign power lies outside the law is associated with dictatorships and with what is called legal voluntarism. This issue has practical implications in the era of torture, extrajudicial rendition, and ubiquitous surveillance. Does the sovereign have the right to violate the law (including the moral law) to ensure the stability and continuity of the state? Sovereignty also delimits geographic regions, creating territories defined by borders. But the ontological and legal status of those borders are themselves subject to philosophical skepticism: are they merely conventional or does geography and ethnic identity have a deeper source in some transcendent political reality? This question points toward issues related to transnational labor and capital markets, the problem of immigration and citizenship, and emerging trans-border issues concerning the environment. Is a global sovereign need to resolve our global issues? Ophuls once suggested a dilemma: either a global state or environmental collapse—as he put it “Leviathan or Oblivion” (Ophuls, 1973). Will our ideological and metaphysical commitment to sovereign states leave us unable to solve global issues? Or will we find a way to resolve these problems within the current system of diffused sovereignty? Methodological issues regarding the study of sovereignty remain unresolved. Ought we take sovereignty as a given fact of empirical political theory? Should we appeal to a normative theory that transcends political fact? Can we imagine alternatives and a standpoint from which to critique such a central concept? At the level of empirical description, the idea of sovereignty may be used to describe who or what has effective control over a territory. From the descriptive standpoint, it does not matter how power and control are achieved—whether by force 42

SOVEREIGNTY While such a positivist approach to sovereignty is useful in its own way, one wonders whether it allows for any critical space from which to criticize norms or structures of sovereignty. Hayek’s critique of positive law is relevant here. Hayek argued that legal positivists had no way to avoid the sorts of transformations of law that occurred, for example, in Nazi Germany: if law is entirely a matter of human creation or arbitrary assertion of sovereign power, there is no way to criticize a totalitarian legal system. While Hayek does not suggest a simplistic return to traditional natural law accounts, he does see some value in the idea that law is not simply created, but also found (Hayek, 1960/2011). Hayek’s approach emphasizes the fact that the rule of law arises spontaneously out of orderly interactions among people. But unlike natural law theorists, Hayek does not appeal to an external law that provides a critique of positive or constructed laws. Rather, Hayek decentralizes sovereignty as the spontaneous creation of free people involved in free exchange. Unfortunately, this still leaves us with the challenge of the sovereignty of natural law and conscience. It is not clear how a legal positivist such as Hart or a libertarian critic such as Hayek would deal with the challenges of the anarchists and individualists with whom we began—those who claim a right to violate the law based upon a claim grounded in natural law and the sovereignty of conscience.

people must obey the sovereign authority, but the sovereign authority owes obedience to no other. However, Hart argues that this is an extremely simplistic image of the law (Hart, 2012). Hart notes that legal systems persist through time—beyond the lives of individual law-givers and their subjects. One explanation of this is that obedience (and the related notion of compulsion) is inadequate to describe the way that persons accept the legal system (we mostly accept it as a habit or custom, e.g. taken implicitly without any explicit notion of “acceptance”—the sovereign is thus the one who is customarily deferred to). Furthermore, Hart explains that the idea of a sovereign as a single person who resides outside of the legal framework (as found, e.g. in Hobbes or Schmitt) is misleading and in some cases false—as in the case of democratic governments with a constitutional division of power (Hart’s examples are the United States and Australia). As Waldron notes, Hart “knocked the stuffing out of the presupposition of absolute Hobbesian sovereignty” (Waldron, 2008, 82). Sovereignty after Hart—from a legal positivist point of view—is merely a notion describing the status of authoritative norms within a social system along with the recognition that the social structure and its norms are part of a complex language game or form of life (to make Wittgensteinian themes in Hart’s work explicit here) which is not easily reduced to the will of a single person or to a singular command-obedience hierarchy (see Azmanova, 2012). As Shapiro explains, Hart’s idea is not that the sovereign makes the rules but that “the rules make the sovereign” (Shapiro, 2009, 2011). Moreover, Hart emphasizes the normative power of law (as opposed to habits, customs, etc.) in the social recognition of certain institutions, standards, and principles as legally binding.

CONCLUSION Thousands of years of political philosophy held that there was a law-giver behind the law and a normative structure that provided a proper grounding for the law (in the idea of the Good, in God’s will, in the notion of justice or natural law, or in the social 43

Andrew Fiala Badescu, C. G. (2009), “The Responsibility to Protect: Embracing Sovereignty and Human Rights,” in N. Shawki and M. Cox (eds), Negotiating Sovereignty and Human Rights. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. Beaulac, S. (2004), The Power of Language in the Making of International Law. Leiden, The Netherlands: MartinusNijhoff. Bloom, A. (1991), “Interpretive Essay,” in The Republic of Plato, 2nd edn, trans. A. Bloom. New York: Basic Books. Bluntschi, J. C. (1892), The Theory of the State, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bodin, J. (1992), On Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, J. L. (2012), Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, J. (2011), The Beast and the Sovereign. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Donnelly, J. (2003), University Human Rights in Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dworkin, R. (2002), Sovereign Virtue. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Elshtain, J. B. (2008), Sovereignty: God, State, and Self. New York: Basic Books Figgis, J. (1914), The Divine Right of Kings, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fowler, M. R. and Bunck, J. M. (1995), Law, Power, and the Sovereign State. University Park, PA: Penn State Press. Fukuyama, F. (2004), State-Building: Governance and World-Order in the 21st Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

contract, etc.). But in our postmodern era, the normative and metaphysical ground of the law is not clear. We may be moving into an era in which Westphalian political sovereignty has lost its luster. Political philosophers have directed our attention to the queer, questionable, and quaint ideas related to the notion of sovereignty. But the concept remains important—for understanding international relations, for understanding domestic power structures, and for thinking about the value of individual conscience in opposition to political power. Given contemporary movements that point in rival directions—toward centralized hierarchies and toward decentralized individualism—it is clear that we are in the middle of a transition that will result in a serious transformation of our understanding of sovereignty. Future work in political philosophy must consider and criticize the metaphysical, ontological, and normative status of the concept of sovereignty.

WORKS CITED Agamben, G. (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Arendt, H. (2005), The Promise of Politics. New York: Random House. — (2006), On Revolution. New York: Penguin Books. Austin, J. (1873), Lectures On Jurisprudence: The Philosophy of Positive Law. London: John Murray. Azmanova, A. (2012), The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment. New York: Columbia University Press.

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SOVEREIGNTY Philpot, D. (1996), “On the Cusp of Sovereignty: Lessons from the Sixteenth Century,” in L. E. Lugo (ed.), Sovereignty at the Crossroads? Morality and International Politics in the Post-Cold War Era. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. — (2011), “Sovereignty,” in G. Klosko (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. (1971), A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schmitt, C. (1985), Political Theology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — (2008), The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shapiro, S. J. (2009), “What is the Rule of Recognition (and Does it Exist)?” in M. D. Adler and K. E. Himma (eds), The Rule of Recognition and the U.S. Constitution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (2011), Legality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vanberg, V. J. (2007), “Democracy, Citizen Sovereignty, and Constitutional Economics,” in J. C. Pardo and P. Schwartz (eds), Public Choice and the Challenges of Democracy. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgard Publishing. Waldron, J. (2008), “Hart and the Principles of Legality,” in M. Kramer, C. Grant, B. Colburn, and A. Hatzistavrou (eds), The Legacy of H.L.A. Hart: Legal, Political, and Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walzer, M. (1970), Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Goldman, E. (1960), “Anarchism,” in E. Goldman (ed.), Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Dover. Hart, H. L. A. (2012), The Concept of Law, 3rd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hayek, F. (1960/2011), The Constitution of Liberty, Definitive edn. Chicago: University of Chicago. Henkin, L. (1999), “That ‘S’ Word: Sovereignty, and Globalization, and Human Rights, Et Cetera,” Fordham University Law Review, 68, 1–14. Hoffman, J. (1998), Sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ICISS (2001), Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (http://responsibilitytoprotect. org/ICISS%20Report.pdf. Jackson, R. (2007), Sovereignty: The Evolution of an Idea. Cambridge: Polity Press. Jongeneel, J. A. B. (2009), Jesus Christ in World History. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Krasner, S. D. (1999), Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Locke, J. (1764), First Treatise of Government in Two Treatises of Government, T. Hollis (ed.), London: A. Millar et al.; accessed from http://oll. libertyfund.org/title/222. Machan, T. R. (2008), “Reconciling Anarchism and Minarchism,” in R. T. Long and T. R. Machan (eds), Anarchism/ Minarchism. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. Nozick, R. (1974), Anarchy, State, Utopia. New York: Basic Books. Ophuls, W. (1973), “Leviathan or Oblivion,” in H. Daly (ed.), Toward a Steady State Economy. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.

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3 COSMOPOLITANISM Gillian Brock

INTRODUCTION

the points of tension between cosmopolitans and those resistant to such approaches, we need to cover more ground. One fear about cosmopolitanism is that it might give too little weight to (or possibly even ignore) people’s important affiliations and identities, especially those that stem from their membership in states. This leads to a set of concerns that have attracted much attention which we might phrase in terms of the following set of questions: in endorsing global obligations must we also thereby reject special obligations to those in our state? How, if at all, does membership in states matter to our obligations to assist non-compatriots? Is partiality toward compatriots justified in a world filled with the more pressing needs of non-compatriots? Is there any proper scope for patriotic concern? Does respecting political self-determination conflict with commitments to global justice? In this chapter, we survey some current debates among cosmopolitans and their critics. We begin in the next section, “Cosmopolitanism: Two Important Distinctions,” outlining some common distinctions typically drawn among kinds of cosmopolitanisms, before canvassing some of the diverse varieties of cosmopolitan justice in the section “What Does Cosmopolitan Justice

Early cosmopolitans, such as the Stoics, proclaimed that they were “citizens of the world” (Kleingeld, 2006). These cosmopolitans hoped to reject several dominant ethnocentric ideas prevalent at the time and to proclaim instead that they were members of a community of human beings bigger than one’s city of origin, with important responsibilities to others in a wider and larger human community. Drawing on these ideas of world citizenship, contemporary cosmopolitans also encourage us not to let local obligations crowd out responsibilities to distant others. Cosmopolitans highlight the responsibilities we have to those whom we do not know, but whose lives should be of concern to us. Contemporary cosmopolitans typically emphasize that every person has global stature as the ultimate unit of moral concern and is therefore entitled to equal respect and consideration no matter what her citizenship status or other affiliations happen to be.1 But if cosmopolitanism requires us to recognize everyone’s equal moral worth and show all equal respect, surely all normatively defensible views must be cosmopolitan in flavor, someone might wonder. Is cosmopolitanism trivially true, then? In order to locate 47

Gillian Brock one about responsibility. As a thesis about identity, being a cosmopolitan indicates that one is a person who is influenced by various cultures. Cosmopolitanism as a thesis about identity also maintains that belonging to a particular culture is not an essential ingredient for personal identity or living a flourishing life: one can select elements from diverse cultures, or reject all in favor of noncultural options that are perceived as yet more important to particular people in living a flourishing life, as Jeremy Waldron (1992) maintains. Cosmopolitanism as a thesis about responsibility generates much debate, as discussed later. Roughly, the idea is that as a cosmopolitan, one should appreciate that one is a member of a global community of human beings. As such, one has responsibilities to other members of the global community. As Martha Nussbaum elaborates, one owes allegiance “to the worldwide community of human beings” and this affiliation should constitute a primary allegiance (Nussbaum, 1996, 4). We discuss responsibility cosmopolitanism in more detail in several sections later.

Require?” The section “Are Compatriots Special?” explores the grounds on which compatriots might be thought to be special and therefore deserving of considerably more weight in our responsibilities to one another. We then explore some common concerns about cosmopolitanism—such as whether cosmopolitan commitments are necessarily in tension with other affiliations people typically have (the section “Must Cosmopolitans Reject Any Form of Partiality?”) and how we should deal with issues concerning a perceived lack of authority in the global domain (the section “Is the Matter of Legitimate Authority in the Global Domain Problematic?”). In the section “Cosmopolitanism in the Real World,” we look briefly at how the concern with feasibility of normative ideals has led some to take up the challenge of devising public policy that is cosmopolitan in outlook before offering some concluding remarks on future directions in these debates. In a variety of ways, we come to appreciate that the topics dealt with by cosmopolitans and their critics encompasses a broad range of issues of central concern to political philosophers.

2. Moral and institutional cosmopolitanism The core idea of moral cosmopolitanism is a commitment to everyone’s equal moral worth and equal consideration of their interests. Thomas Pogge has an influential and widely cited synopsis of the key ideas, as he sees them:

COSMOPOLITANISM: TWO IMPORTANT DISTINCTIONS We begin by reviewing some of the key distinctions widely in use in the literature.

Three elements are shared by all cosmopolitan positions. First, individualism: the ultimate units of concern are human beings, or persons—rather than, say, family lines, tribes, ethnic, cultural, or religious communities, nations, or states. The latter may be units of concern only indirectly, in virtue of their individual members or citizens. Second, universality: the

1. Identity and responsibility cosmopolit­anism Being a cosmopolitan is most often characterized in terms of being a citizen of the world. This idea of being a citizen of the world captures the two central aspects of cosmopolitanism, as it is frequently understood today, namely it involves a thesis about identity and 48

COSMOPOLITANISM status of ultimate unit of concern attaches to every living human being equally—not merely to some sub-set, such as men, aristocrats, Aryans, whites, or Muslims. Third, generality: this special status has global force. Persons are ultimate units of concern for everyone—not only for their compatriots, fellow religionists, or such like (Pogge, 1992, 48).

possibilities for discharging cosmopolitan duties globally that would not amount to a world state (as discussed in the section “Is the Matter of Legitimate Authority in the Global Domain Problematic?”).

WHAT DOES COSMOPOLITAN JUSTICE REQUIRE?

Considerable debate surrounds what the cosmopolitan commitment requires. Indeed, cosmopolitanism’s force is often best appreciated by considering what it rules out. For instance, it rules out positions that attach no moral value to some people, or weights the moral value some people have differentially according to their race, ethnicity, or nationality. Furthermore, assigning ultimate rather than derivative value to collective entities such as nations or states is prohibited. If such groups matter, they matter because of their importance to individual human persons rather than because they have some independent, ultimate (say, ontological) value. A common misconception is that cosmopolitanism requires a world state or government. To avoid this mistake, a distinction is often drawn between moral and institutional cosmopolitanism. Institutional cosmopolitans maintain that fairly deep institutional changes are needed to the global system in order to realize cosmopolitan commitments adequately and such transformations would yield a world state. Moral cosmopolitans need not endorse that view, in fact many are against radical institutional transformations. Such theorists maintain that our cosmopolitan commitments (such as protecting everyone’s basic human rights or ensuring everyone’s capabilities are met to the required threshold) can be effectively discharged, via several suitable arrangements. There are various

Accounts of justice that characterize themselves as cosmopolitan can originate from a number of theoretical perspectives. There are, after all, many different conceptions of how to treat people equally especially with respect to issues of distributive justice, and this is often reflected in these different accounts. Cosmopolitan justice could be argued for along various lines, including: utilitarian (prominently, Singer, 1972); rights-based accounts (Shue, 1980, Jones, 1999, Caney, 2005, Pogge, 2008); Kantian (O’Neill, 2000); Aristotelian or capabilitiesbased (Nussbaum, 2000, 2006); contractarian (Beitz, 1979, Pogge, 1989, Moellendorf, 2002, Brock, 2009); and sometimes using more than one approach (Pogge, 1989, 2002, Beitz, 1979, 2009). There are several different ways of arguing for cosmopolitan justice widely used in the literature. One common divide in accounts of cosmopolitan justice exists between those who argue for “humanist” and “associativist” or “relational” approaches. Humanists, such as Simon Caney, believe that our duties of justice track our shared humanity. We have duties of justice toward all human beings in virtue of our humanity. Associativists or relational theorists, by contrast, believe duties of justice track co-membership in some association, such as political or economic association. Unless we are members of some important association, we have no justice duties toward 49

Gillian Brock that Rawls believes should govern relations among peoples in the international domain is that we should respect each people as free and equal. Goods such as self-determination and political autonomy are therefore prominent in this account. In respecting equality among peoples (rather than individual persons), liberals will need to adopt a foreign policy that tolerates much diversity, especially in allowing non-liberal peoples to be admitted as full and equal members of the international community of states in good standing. Rawls believes that we have a duty “to assist burdened societies to become full members of the Society of Peoples and to be able to determine the path of their own future for themselves” (1999, 118) but this duty should not take the form of a Global Difference Principle as such a principle would not have a target or a cutoff point, and these targets and cutoffs are provided by his account which aims at all people’s political autonomy. Cosmopolitans have expressed many criticisms of these views. For instance, they claim that Rawls ignores both the extent to which unfavorable conditions may result from factors external to the society and that there are all sorts of morally relevant connections between states, notably that they are situated in a global economic order that perpetuates the interests of wealthy developed states with little regard for the interests of poor, developing ones. Such facts mean that there is a context of global cooperation such that distribution according to a Global Difference Principle is appropriate (Beitz, 1979, Moellendorf, 2002). Thomas Pogge, arguably the most prominent contemporary cosmopolitan, has done much to advance arguments which show our involvement in perpetuating poverty in developing countries (1994, 2001, 2002, 2008, inter alia). The international borrowing

such persons. On such accounts, if we happen to come across persons existing on some distant planet, with whom we have no prior interactions, we could not have any duties of justice toward such people (though there might be some more minimal humanitarian obligations that we have toward them). Associativists, such as Darrel Moellendorf, tend to emphasize that all persons are part of at least one relevant association namely a global economic association and this is especially salient in our current era of economic globalization. Cosmopolitan approaches to justice are often contrasted with “statist” accounts.2 For statists, states are an important factor in determining our duties of justice and they frequently maintain that the kinds of duties we have to fellow members of our state are different from and typically stronger than the duties we have to nonmembers. Cosmopolitans tend to place individuals front and center of their theorizing about justice, though there might well be derivative implications concerning duties for states that flow from their analyses (Moellendorf, 2009). Statists, however, give the fact of membership in a state a certain kind of primacy of standing which cosmopolitans do not. There is a prominent debate between John Rawls and his critics that nicely follows these tracks and will provide a good illustration of the differences between the two approaches. Furthermore, this debate has been enormously influential in current debates on cosmopolitan justice, so we discuss this very briefly next. In Rawls’s theory of justice for the international realm, our membership in a “people” makes for a very different justice context, when compared with the views Rawls famously argues for in A Theory of Justice (1971). One of the core principles 50

COSMOPOLITANISM ARE COMPATRIOTS SPECIAL?

privilege and the international resource privilege provide good examples. Any group that exercises effective power in a state is recognized internationally as the legitimate government of that territory, and the international community is not concerned with how the group came to power or what it does with that power. Oppressive governments may borrow freely on behalf of the country (the international borrowing privilege) or dispose of its natural resources (the international resource privilege) and these actions are legally recognized internationally. These two privileges can have disastrous implications for the prosperity of poor countries (for instance) because these privileges provide incentives for coup attempts, they often influence what sorts of people are motivated to seek power, they facilitate oppressive governments being able to stay in office, and, should more democratic governments get to be in power, they are saddled with the debts incurred by their oppressive predecessors, thus draining the country of resources needed to firm up new democracies. Local governments have little incentive to attend to the needs of the poor, since their being able to continue in power depends more on the local elite, foreign governments, and corporations. Because foreigners benefit so greatly from the international resource privilege, they have an incentive to refrain from challenging the situation (or even to support oppressive governments). For these sorts of reasons, the current world order largely reflects the interests of wealthy and powerful states. Those in affluent developed countries have a responsibility to stop imposing this unjust global order and to make various institutional reforms to better align the global order with justice. A number of institutions should be reformed including the international resource and borrowing privileges (Pogge, 2008).3

Even the most staunch defenders of views which advocate favoring the interests of compatriots do not believe that non-compatriots count for nothing. If one came across a small child drowning in a shallow pond in a so-called easy rescue case, one would have a responsibility to perform the life-saving act of pulling the child to safety, no matter whether the child were a compatriot or not (Singer, 1972). We have some basic (even positive) duties to everyone, irrespective of their citizenship status. Everyone would concede this much, at least in the abstract. However, it seems equally clear, to some at least, that in certain kinds of matters we may defensibly favor the interests of our compatriots, typically in decisions concerning the distribution of resources, such as the distribution of state benefits with respect to health care or education (Tamir, 1993, Miller, 1995). In defense of such decisions, it is frequently claimed that the connections between compatriots are more substantial and of the right kind to generate stronger obligations of justice (R. Miller, 1998, Hurka, 1997, Blake, 2002). For instance, because we cooperate in a shared institutional order from which we derive benefits or which involves significant coercion, we owe compatriots more concern. Some theorists have argued that positions such as compatriot favoritism can be justified in virtue of the special relations in which we stand to fellow citizens as well as the special projects we undertake together, such as governing ourselves and building a common life together (Tamir, 1993, D. Miller, 1995, R. Miller, 1998). What relevance does co-membership in a state have to our obligations and can it justify having more substantial responsibilities to those with whom we share a state? 51

Gillian Brock Another attempt to justify distinguishing between duties to compatriots and duties to non-compatriots proceeds from an awareness that social cooperation grounds special duties (Freeman, 2006, Sangiovanni, 2007). A democratic society is one in which there is fair social cooperation and in which fair social cooperation is understood in terms of the idea that the arrangements that govern citizens’ lives should be ones that they can reasonably endorse. Members of a state owe egalitarian duties of justice to one another because each member plays a part in upholding and sustaining the collective goods of the society, such as maintaining a stable system of property rights or doing their part to ensure society’s security. Reasonably endorsable social arrangements do not create morally arbitrary social inequalities. Since there is no scheme of global social cooperation of the same type or scale as a state, there is no similar requirement at the global level. Several cosmopolitans have challenged the view that there is no set of global institutions based on social cooperation (Beitz, 1979, Moellendorf, 2002). Others contest the normative view that duties of egalitarian justice arise only when there is social cooperation, maintaining instead that justice can require the very establishment of such institutions of social cooperation (Abizadeh, 2007, Caney, 2008). Sufficient interaction among agents may obligate them to ensure that their interactions proceed on fair terms, and this might require establishing institutional arrangements that can secure or protect such fair terms. At any rate, those who defend claims that our duties to co-members are more extensive than those to others with whom we do not share membership in a state point to several key features in attempting to justify their position. The fact that we are involved

According to several prominent theorists, membership in particular states can be relevant to what we owe one another. One current debate rages between those who believe that full egalitarian justice applies within the state but not outside it, and those who believe that the state does not and cannot make this kind of difference to one’s commitment to egalitarian distributive justice. There are several forms of the argument. Here I outline two variants of this position. One kind emphasizes the fact that states are legally able to coerce, whereas this is purportedly not the case in the global sphere, and so the lack of a global legal coercive authority rules out the need for global equality (R. Miller, 1998, Blake, 2002). The idea here is that legal coercion, if it is to be legitimate, must be justifiable to those whose autonomy would be restricted. Legal coercion would be justifiable if no arbitrary inequalities were permissible in the society and this is the idea central to traditional egalitarian conceptions of distributive justice. This form of argument has been criticized from several directions. For example, one strategy is to challenge the idea that coercion is necessary for grounding a concern with egalitarian distributive justice, and contends that there are other reasons to care about equality in the absence of coercion. Another line of attack emphasizes that even if we agree that coercion triggers egalitarian duties of justice, in fact coercion is pervasive at the global level if we consider the scope of international law and the ways in which powerful institutions (such as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank) impose policies (such as the terms of trade) on weaker parties, as a condition of belonging to the organization or being able to benefit from it. Thus the necessary condition for egalitarian duties of justice is met (Cohen and Sabel, 2006, Abizadeh, 2007). 52

COSMOPOLITANISM by the luck egalitarian view. This leaves us with a number of questions:

in mutually beneficial cooperation or a coercive institutional scheme seems very important to many statists. Others draw attention to features such as shared national identity, shared history, or shared efforts in creating a community or set of institutions which instantiates much value. In elaborating on the kind of importance these features should have, such theorists might point to the independent value of democracy, selfdetermination, or living a life that gives shared expression to important aspects of one’s identity. Some theorists (e.g. Tamir, 1993, D. Miller, 2007)  argue that national membership can be very important to people and, moreover, people are entitled to national self-determination. We therefore need to make space in any account of our obligations to one another for respecting nations and the political autonomy they need. Cosmopolitans often take as their point of departure a so-called luck egalitarian intuition. Consider how it is a matter of luck whether one is born into an affluent, developed country or a poor, developing nation. Yet where one happens to have been born tends to have such an important bearing on how one’s life will go. The current distribution of global wealth and opportunities does not track persons’ choices and efforts, but rather is greatly influenced and distorted by luck. What is thought to be objectionable here is that existing social and political institutions have converted contingent brute facts about people’s lives into significant social disadvantages for some and advantages for others. Persons as moral equals can demand that any common order that they impose on one another start from a default assumption of equality and departures from this be justified to those who stand to be adversely affected. Many cosmopolitans are persuaded

• Should “the moral arbitrariness of birthplace” be a factor in determining the nature of our duties to one another? Alternatively, • Should we take as our starting point important facts about situatedness in particular societies that many of us seem to care about a great deal, albeit that this is somewhat arbitrary from the moral point of view? • What weight should membership in states have and is such weight necessarily in tension with cosmopolitanism? • Is there a way to navigate between duties to those within states and those beyond them, so we can accommodate the force of each?

MUST COSMOPOLITANS REJECT ANY FORM OF PARTIALITY? Critics of cosmopolitanism often maintain that cosmopolitans cannot accommodate special attachments and commitments that fill most ordinary human beings’ lives with value and meaning. It is commonly thought that cosmopolitans must reject attachments to those in local or particular communities in favor of an ideal of impartial justice that the individual must apply directly to all, no matter where they are situated on the globe. But this is not a position advocated by many cosmopolitans.4 Indeed, most contemporary cosmopolitans recognize that for many people, some of their most meaningful attachments in life derive from their allegiances to particular communities, be they national, ethnic, religious, or cultural. Their accounts often seek to define the legitimate scope for such partiality, by situating these attachments 53

Gillian Brock indeed compatible with having many other particular commitments and attachments, including attachments to compatriots and commitments to co-nationals.

in a context which clarifies our obligations to one another. Cosmopolitan justice provides the basic framework or structure and thereby the constraints within which legitimate patriotism may operate (see, for instance, Tan, 2004, 2005). Cosmopolitan principles should govern the global institutions, such that these treat people as equals in their entitlements (regardless of nationality and power, say). However, once the background global institutional structure is just, persons may defensibly favor the interests of their compatriots (or co-nationals, or members of other more particular groups), so long as such partiality does not conflict with their other obligations, for instance, to support global institutions. So cosmopolitan principles should govern the global institutions, but need not directly regulate what choices people may make within the rules of the institutions. One of the strengths of Tan’s view (e.g. 2004)  is that even though cosmopolitan justice provides the justification for the limits of partiality toward group members, the value of those attachments is not reduced to cosmopolitan considerations, which is arguably a flaw with other attempts (e.g. Nussbaum, 1996). Cosmopolitanism is essentially committed to these two central ideas:

IS THE MATTER OF LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY IN THE GLOBAL DOMAIN PROBLEMATIC? There are some who are skeptical of the cosmopolitan idea of obligations of justice that extend globally, at least given our current circumstances. Grounds for such skepticism include the fact that since there is no way to enforce obligations of justice at the global level, there can be no such obligations (Nagel, 2005). Another concern revolves around fears that often accompany undesirable results which can ensue when there is a concentration of power (Kukathas, 2006). Underlying these concerns is an assumption that obligations concerning cosmopolitan justice require a world state, and since we have reason to fear the potential for world government to lead to oppressive consequences, we have reasons to fear cosmopolitanism. While some cosmopolitans do advocate for a world state (Falk and Strauss, 2001, Cabrera, 2004, 2011, Deudney, 2007, Lu, 2008), many (probably the vast majority) reject the assumption that a world state is necessary or desirable and differentiate between global government and global governance (Held, 1995, Caney, 2005, Nussbaum, 2006, Brock, 2009). Although we may need some ways to coordinate management of our transnational affairs, this need not amount to world government. Supra-state organizations need not replace state-level ones, such as currently exists with the European Union or the United

1. The equal moral worth of all individuals, no matter what borders separate them from one another. 2. The idea that there are some obligations that are binding on all of us, no matter where we are situated. Acknowledging these two claims leaves plenty of room to endorse additional obligations that derive from more particular commitments. So, we see that cosmopolitanism is

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COSMOPOLITANISM as those who advocate education for world citizenship might maintain (e.g. Nussbaum, 1996).5

Nations. In these cases, transnational institutions complement rather than replace states. Different models are available for thinking through a “post-sovereign” political world order, which incorporate scope for statelevel institutions, as well as ones which are sub-state and supra-state level (Pogge, 1992, Held, 1995). A frequently raised issue concerns how divided authority and sovereignty arrangements might work in practice. In fact, we have examples of divided and delegated authority that work reasonably well in practice. States in a federation (such as in the United States), local and regional authorities within a state, and the European Union, all involve divided authority and often function effectively on a day-to-day basis. Forms of global governance can be diffuse and overlapping, so long as they have clear sites of accountability. Indeed, whether we like it or not, we already have a system of global governance that is just like this, given all the international bodies that have authority over various domains that govern our lives (such as the United Nations, World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, or World Bank). Cosmopolitans might instead focus their arguments on how to reform this system to make it more responsive to the ideals of moral equality or other goals of global justice. As Thomas Nagel (2005) notes, we have transitioned to more just arrangements in the past by demanding that the existing concentration of power be exercised more justly, that is, by working on what is already there. It is likely that there will be a similar path to global justice. People might be motivated to demand more legitimacy of the institutions that dominate their lives if their sense of global solidarity, compassion, or empathy for others is increased,

COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE REAL WORLD Increasingly, philosophers have turned their attention to making recommendations for improvements in global policies, arrangements, and institutions often, in the process, advocating for important changes. I have already noted some of the proposals Pogge has made concerning reforms to international borrowing and resource privileges in the section “What Does Cosmopolitan Justice Require?” Barry and Reddy’s work (2008) also provides a noteworthy attempt to outline detailed proposals for how Just Linkage arrangements can promote fair trade, creating desirable trading opportunities for those who offer improved employment conditions. Several others have detailed proposals concerning institutional reforms, for instance to promote global health (Pogge, 2011) or improved taxation and accounting arrangements (Pogge, 2008, Brock, 2009, Moellendorf, 2009). In many ways, the widespread and growing commitment to the importance of human rights in regulating our international affairs is something of a cosmopolitan achievement in the struggle for global justice. The fact that we have documents that clearly specify the entitlements that all human beings have is quite remarkable, given the diversity of worldviews and perspectives represented among the world’s people. Furthermore, we have an international legal order that has certain commitments to uphold these

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Gillian Brock • How, if at all, does equality matter at the global level? What kinds of reforms to our global and local institutions do cosmopolitan concerns require? • Are these reforms feasible, even if normatively desirable? • What account of feasibility ought we to embrace in discussing which cosmopolitan proposals could feasibly be implemented in our world? • What might the cosmopolitan recommend as just policy in specific domains such as climate change, immigration, fair trade, health care, taxation, and the like?

entitlements. All those states that are members of the United Nations have signed up to respecting human rights in at least certain contexts. The cosmopolitan idea that each person has equal moral worth and deserves some fundamental protections and entitlements is not just a theoretical position but has made some significant inroads in international law and global policy making, though this is not to deny that we still have far to go before the cosmopolitan vision is adequately instantiated in the world. In each of the preceding sections, I have highlighted current points of tension in debates and shown how one might navigate a range of issues and challenges that are presented for cosmopolitanism. However, by offering possible ways cosmopolitans could resolve issues or respond to challenges, this should not mask the fact that all these matters are still the subject of lively debate. Indeed, none of the debates raised here are settled. Every aspect of cosmopolitanism treated here is still the subject of critical engagement: from the very ways in which one ought to define cosmopolitanism to what cosmopolitan commitment entails (see for instance, The Monist 94, no.4 and Brock, 2013). In addressing the main issues identified as salient to various kinds of cosmopolitans and their critics, more work is needed on a range of central questions, including:

These kinds of questions emphasize that much work remains for all normative theorists concerned with justice in the global domain and show how the cosmopolitan position is central to much contemporary work in political philosophy.

Notes For more on this convergence, see Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse (eds), The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Gillian Brock, “Cosmopolitanism Versus NonCosmopolitanism: The State of Play,” The Monist, 94 (2011), 455–465. 2 A note about terminology might be in order before we proceed. Those identified as statists include quite a diverse variety of different positions including liberal nationalist, civic nationalist, or other conventional statist accounts. I use the term “statist” to include all of these positions, since what they have in common is the view that membership in a sub-world community (such as a state, people, or nation) matters in determining our obligations to one another. 3 In the space provided, I cannot possibly do justice to all the complexities of Rawls’s 1

• How does membership in global and national associations influence our duties to one another in the global context? • To what extent are cosmopolitan and special duties reconcilable? • What significance, if any, does the moral arbitrariness of birthplace have to accounts of global distributive justice? • Do forms of coercion matter to the nature of our duties to one another and if they do, how and why does coercion matter? 56

COSMOPOLITANISM sophisticated account or that of his critics, but for some more detailed exposition, critical discussion, and defense of the views, see Martin and Reidy (2007), Samuel Freeman (2006), David Reidy (2006), Moellendorf (2002), Tan (2004), and Brock (2009). 4 See, for instance, the essays in Brock and Brighouse (2005). 5 See, for instance, the Council for Education in World Citizenship at: http://www.cewc.org.

Defenses, Reconceptualisations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brock, G. and Brighouse, H. (eds) (2005), The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cabrera, L. (2004), Political Theory of Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State. London: Routledge. — (2011), “World Government: Renewed Debate, Persistent Challenges,” European Journal of International Relations, 16: 511–530. Caney, S. (2005), Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (2008), “Global Distributive Justice and the State,” Political Studies, 57: 487–518. Cohen, J. and Sabel, C. (2006), “Extra Republicam Nulla Justitia?” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 34: 147–175. Deudney, D. (2007), Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from Polis to the Global Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Falk, R. and Strauss, A. (2001), “Toward Global Parliament (Citizen Input on Globalization),” Foreign Affairs, 80: 212–218. Freeman, S. (2006), “The Law of Peoples, Social Cooperation, Human Rights, and Distributive Justice,” Social Philosophy and Policy, 23: 29–68. Held, D. (1995), Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hurka, T. (1997), “The Justification of National Partiality,” in R. McKim and J. McMahan (eds), The Morality Of Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 139–157.

WORKS CITED Abizadeh, A. (2007), “Cooperation, Pervasive Impact, and Coercion: On the Scope (Not Site) of Distributive Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 35: 318–358. Barry, C. and S. Reddy (2008), International Trade and Labor Standards. New York: Columbia University Press. Beitz, B. (1979), Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. — (2009), The Idea of Human Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blake, M. (2002), “Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 30: 257–296. — (2005), “International Justice,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/internationaljustice/. Brock, G. (2009), Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (2011), “Cosmopolitanism Versus NonCosmopolitanism: The State of Play,” The Monist, 94: 455–465. — (ed.) (2013), Cosmopolitanism versus Non-Cosmopolitanism: Critiques, 57

Gillian Brock — (2006), Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. O’Neill, O. (2000), Bounds of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pogge, T. (1989), Realizing Rawls. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. — (1992), “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” Ethics, 103: 48–75. — (1994), “An Egalitarian Law of Peoples,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 23 (3): 195–224. — (2001), “Priorities of Global Justice,” Metaphilosophy, 32: 6–24. — (2008), World Poverty and Human Rights. Cambridge: Polity Press. — (2011), “The Health Impact Fund,” in S. Benatar and G. Brock (eds), Global Health and Global Health Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, J. (1971), A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. — (1999), The Law of Peoples. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Reidy, D. (2006), “Political Authority and Human Rights,” in R. Martin and D. Reidy (eds), Rawls’s Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia? Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 169–188. Sangiovanni, A. (2007), “Global Justice, Reciprocity, and the State,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 35: 3–39. Scheffler, S. (2001), Boundaries and Allegiances. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shue, H. (1980), Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Singer, P. (1972), “Famine Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1 (3): 229–243.

Jones, C. (1999), Global Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kleingeld, P. (2006), “Cosmopolitanism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ international-justice/. Kukathas, C. (2006), “The Mirage of Global Justice,” in E. Paul, F. Miller, and J. Paul (eds), Justice and Global Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–28. Lu, C. (2008), “World Government,” in E. N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford. edu/archives/fall2008/entries/worldgovernment. Martin, R. and Reidy, D. (2006), Rawls’s Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia? Malden, MA: Blackwell. Miller, D. (2000), Citizenship and National Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. — (2007), National Responsibility and Global Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, R. (1998), “Cosmopolitan Respect and Patriotic Concern,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 27(3): 202–224. Moellendorf, D. (2002), Cosmopolitan Justice. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. — (2009), Global Inequality Matters. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Nagel, T. (2005), “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33: 113–147. Nussbaum, M. (1996), “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in J. Cohen (ed.), For Love of Country: Debating The Limits of Patriotism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. — (2000), Women and Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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COSMOPOLITANISM of Cosmopolitanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 164–179. The Monist (2011), special issue on Cosmopolitanism, 94 (4). Waldron, J. (1992), “Minority Rights and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 25: 751–793.

Tamir, Y. (1993), Liberal Nationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tan, K. (2004), Justice Without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — (2005), “The Demands of Justice and National Allegiance,” in Brock and Brighouse (eds), The Political Philosophy

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4 HUMAN RIGHTS Siegfried Van Duffel

which we would have had even if these protections didn’t exist. This point seems intuitively so obvious that it is hard to see how anyone could deny it. Slavery violates a human right, not just because some UN body agreed on a document that says that slavery violates a human right. Surely those who were enslaved before the second half of the twentieth century had their human rights violated as well. Not everyone, however, has shared this intuition. Some have thought that it is at least awkward, perhaps even downright incoherent to think of human rights as somehow “existing” independent of the declarations that affirm them, or independently of any legal framework which brings them into existence (I take it that this is the point of Bentham’s famous denouncement of human rights as “nonsense upon stilts”). The idea that human rights are essentially connected to institutions has recently taken a different form. Under the influence of John Rawls, several philosophers have developed what are now called “political theories of human rights.” A prominent feature of several of these theories is the suggestion that human rights are misconceived if taken as an ethical doctrine rather than part of a distinctly political morality. Since this position has become influential, I shall first discuss two prominent

As I’m writing this, Christians are brutally murdering Muslims in the Central African Republic; people in Syria are being bombed, starved, and tortured; and homosexuals still face the death penalty in Iran as well as long prison sentences in countries like Uganda and Nigeria and persecution by thugs in many countries. These atrocities and many other disturbing phenomena are often called “human rights violations.” What gives them this status? That is a question about which there has been a surprising amount of disagreement among political philosophers. Not so long ago, the question “What are human rights?” would most likely have been answered with a simple definition. Something like “Human rights are the rights that we have simply by virtue of being human.” The phrase “simply by virtue of being human” may be harder to unpack than it seems at first, but one of the commonly held ideas was that the possession of human rights is not dependent on any convention or institution. Human rights, in other words, are moral rights. This doesn’t prevent them from becoming enshrined in treatises and conventions or from receiving protection through legal mechanisms, but legally protected human rights are also moral rights—rights 61

Siegfried Van Duffel remarked that according to Rawls’s account, to prevent women or members of a particular racial or ethnic minority from getting an education, from voting, or from holding public office would not count as a violation of their human rights (Buchanan, 2010, 21). Rawls’s motivation seems to have been to avoid charges of parochialism. He remarked that human rights “as thus understood, cannot be rejected as peculiarly liberal or special to the Western tradition” (Rawls, 1999, 65). This raises two questions: First, why should we refrain from affirming “peculiarly liberal” human rights? Rawls does not seem to think much needs to be said in defense of the need for a “non-parochial” list of human rights. He simply states that if all societies were required to be liberal “then the idea of political liberalism would fail to express due toleration for other acceptable ways .  .  . of ordering society” (59). He presents a hypothetical example of a regime, Kazanistan, which—though it is not perfectly just— seems to Rawls decent because it protects this limited number of human rights (and is not expansionist and has a consultation hierarchy) and then appeals to the reader’s intuition to agree with his judgment (76–78). There is little else by way of an argument. The other question is how Rawls arrives at his peculiar list of human rights. It would not be possible (nor does Rawls intend) to argue for this selection from actual agreement: even if such agreement were to exist, it would not carry the normative weight necessary to justify a list of human rights. He seems to think that the list can be justified by employing the idea of a system of social cooperation. When these rights are regularly violated, he writes, “we have command by force, a slave system, and no cooperation of any kind” (68). Again, however, this is merely stated, not argued. It is not clear why, say, a state that used public

versions of this account. The relative merit of political theories versus alternatives will ultimately depend—among other things—on how they accommodate our most firmly held beliefs about the topic. Beitz, in particular, has argued that his theory provides a better fit with human rights doctrine and practice than traditional approaches to human rights. If he is right, we should indeed abandon the traditional approach to human rights and adopt some version of the political theory. As we shall see, however, the case in favor of political theories is at least overstated and the case for abandoning the traditional approach to theorizing human rights perhaps misguided. More positively, I shall suggest another approach—what I call a “descriptive approach”—that promises to do better on most of the criteria put forward to evaluate theories of human rights.

POLITICAL THEORIES OF HUMAN RIGHTS One of the most controversial elements in Rawls’s theory of international relations is the truncated list of human rights. Rawls mentions rights to the means of subsistence (but not to health care or education); to freedom from slavery, serfdom, and forced occupation, and to a sufficient (but not necessarily equal) measure of liberty of conscience; to personal property; and to formal equality as expressed by the rules of natural justice (i.e. that similar cases be treated similarly) (Rawls, 1999, 65). Many commentators have found Rawls’s list of human rights objectionably illiberal. Such crucial rights as freedom of expression and association, as well as the right to democratic participation are missing from the list. Buchanan has 62

HUMAN RIGHTS particularly influential. His general approach to the topic, however, has received considerable following. Charles Beitz, for example, presents what he calls a “practical approach” to human rights that is inspired by Rawls. He suggests that “human rights” is an emergent political practice, rather than a normative idea (Beitz, 2009, xii). Consequently, talk about human rights being possessed by humans “simply in virtue of their humanity” is at best a confusing way of indicating that they apply to all human beings—confusing because it falsely suggests that these rights have some existence independently of the practice. His approach shares two crucial features with Rawls’s account. One is that human rights have a distinctly political role. According to Beitz, human rights apply in the first instance to the political institutions of states, but they may become a matter of international concern when governments fail to carry out their duties. When they do so, human rights have an interference-justifying role. This role is central to understanding the discursive functions of human rights, Beitz maintains, even if it does not exhaust the range of measures for which human rights violations might provide reasons. The second feature that this account shares with Rawls’s is that it denies that we can adequately theorize human rights through ordinary moral reasoning. Since human rights is a practice, we can only understand the concept of human rights by analyzing what is inherent in it. If successful, the analysis would represent a consensus among competent participants in the practice, but not necessarily a consensus about the practice’s normative contents. Beitz uses the Rawlsian distinction between concept and conception to clarify this thought. Different people who have different conceptions of human rights may nevertheless share the same concept, because

resources to support a hereditary elite in luxury and keeps everyone else at the level of subsistence (Buchanan, 2010, 21)  would count as a system of social cooperation, even if this state had a decent consultation hierarchy, or why personal property is a prerequisite for social cooperation. Human rights perform a specific function in Rawls’s theory: their violation can justify military intervention by foreign powers (Tasioulas, 2009). He does recognize a broader set of rights—which he calls liberal constitutional rights—that are genuinely possessed by all, but are not properly human rights because their violation does not give rise to a (defeasible) reason for the international community to forcefully intervene in a society. This is highly revisionist: while humanitarian intervention is increasingly accepted in international law, justifying it is by no means the only, or even the main, function of human rights. Liberal and decent societies, says Rawls, have the right not to tolerate outlaw states, and they have a duty of assisting burdened societies (i.e. societies which are unable to become well-ordered on their own). The duty of assistance must—within the contractarian framework of the law of peoples— be derived from the self-interest of liberal and decent societies (Steinhoff, 2012). Similarly, we might think that the specific list of human rights could somehow be derived from the interest of well-ordered societies, perhaps in creating an international environment free from instability. However, even if we can readily think of situations where intervention to protect human rights serves the interest of other states in international stability and peace, it again remains completely unclear how this interest would ground the specific list favored by Rawls. Some of this may explain why Rawls’s specific treatment of human rights has not been 63

Siegfried Van Duffel separate phenomena. Moral human rights (HR) are the subject of traditional, naturalist, theories of human rights, while international human rights (IHR) are the preoccupation of political theories of human rights. But this is obviously unsatisfactory. If moral theorizing strives to be relevant to our actual goingabout in the world, as it certainly should, then theories of moral human rights should have the ambition to bear on actual attempts to legally protect human rights, and hence on IHR. For example, a theory of HR may find that some human rights are not yet protected by international institutions, even though they ought to be. Or it might conclude that many of the supposed human rights enshrined in international declarations and conventions are not real (moral) human rights. This may or may not be a problem. It could be a problem, for example, if the promotion of otherwise worthwhile social goals under the guise of human rights damages the sense of urgency that is properly attached to a claim that a human right is not sufficiently protected or has been violated. If it is implausible or undesirable to think of moral human rights as entirely independent of IHR, it would be equally misguided to shift to the other end of the spectrum. That is, it would be equally wrong to think that the rights protected by IHR can only be justified if for each legal human right there is a corresponding moral human right. The international system of human rights treatises and conventions may serve several goals. One of those goals should obviously be to further the protection of moral human rights, but another possible goal served by IHR could be to promote peace. Preventing war is of course also likely to decrease the violation of moral human rights, but the mere avoidance of human suffering may be an independent and sufficient ground for promoting peace

they could agree on the role of human rights in practical reasoning about the conduct of global political life (99). There is something strangely odd about this account. While it seems very empirically oriented, it is also clearly revisionist. The problem is not with the claim that past theories of human rights have misdescribed something essential. It is rather with the thought that the authors of these theories could have been mistaken about the very fact that they were discussing a normative idea. To this, Beitz might respond that these authors could well have been discussing a normative idea, but that they were mistaken in identifying this normative idea with the idea (or practice) of human rights. Such a response, however, is inconsistent with linguistic practice, even with the language used in UN declarations and conventions. More importantly, however, it would only turn the disagreement into a terminological quibble that could be easily resolved by distinguishing—as, for example, Wellman (2011) does—between “moral human rights” and “international human rights.” Beitz, of course, would resist the conclusion that a mere terminological decision could resolve the issue, since he thinks that conceiving human rights as natural rights has contributed much of the distortion in philosophical understandings of human rights.

MORAL RIGHTS AND INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS How should we conceive the relation between moral human rights and international human rights—meaning the existing global legal-institutional phenomenon of human rights? (Buchanan, 2010). At one end of a spectrum, one could think that these are 64

HUMAN RIGHTS that the strong moral force attached to many or most of the rights acknowledged by IHR is due to the fact that they are (also) preexisting moral rights, as I think they do, then the illumination of HR is not just a luxury but quite simply an essential element of a proper assessment of IHR.

through international human rights legislation. Again, IHR may have as one of its aims to further social justice and in the pursuit of that aim some of its agents could well promulgate rights that are not moral human rights. Clearly, the mere fact that some of the rights incorporated in IHR are not moral human rights is not in itself sufficient ground to conclude that the inclusion of those rights in IHR is illegitimate. Nor does this stance imply that theories of moral human rights have no practical consequences. If we found, for example, that the introduction of certain legal rights in IHR in pursuit of otherwise worthy goals would undermine the system’s effectiveness in protecting genuine moral human rights, this would raise serious questions regarding the desirability of these legal rights. The protection of moral human rights may not always take priority over the pursuit of other goals, but it certainly does in many cases. It seems that we have reason to value IHR, whether or not we find that it is best seen as nothing more than a straightforward attempt to enforce moral human rights. Hence, even a significant divergence of HR from IHR would not automatically justify a demand to reform the latter. In fact, any theory of moral human rights would bear a significant burden of justification if it recommended drastic changes in IHR. None of this, however, warrants the dismissal of normative theories of HR as irrelevant or misguided when they aspire to provide a yardstick for the assessment of IHR. The language of the UDHR and of the most important other conventions shows that the drafters of these documents thought of human rights as preexisting moral rights. If moral philosophers have been mistaken in thinking that moral human rights are relevant, they are surely in good company. But if the majority of current participants in the practice of IHR share the idea

CONSTRAINTS ON THEORIES OF HUMAN RIGHTS How should we evaluate a theory of human rights? A helpful starting point is Allen Buchanan’s list of desiderata: 1. Consonance. A theory of HR should be consonant with our most stable intuitions on the topic. 2. Reasonable fit. It should fit reasonably with the doctrine and practice of human rights. 3. Constraint. It should curb human rights inflation. 4. Content. It should help us determine the content of various human rights. 5. Guidance. It should help us resolve conflicts among human rights. 6. Non-parochialism. It should include a response to the parochialism objection. Anyone who agrees with the suggestion that moral human rights is a distinct idea that deserves to be taken seriously because of the influence it (still) has on the practice of human rights will also agree that desideratum #1 should take priority over desideratum #2. However, I shall suggest that even the natural rights theories that perform best on this criterion (say, those of Gewirth, 1978, Griffin, 2008) fail the desideratum of consonance in important respects. The main reason for this is that our intuitions regarding human rights 65

Siegfried Van Duffel theories. Libertarians typically deny that we have any innate moral right to such things as basic health care or elementary education. For some political theorists, this in itself serves to show that the libertarian is not talking about (international) human rights. The libertarian, however, is unlikely to be impressed by this, for she is unlikely to share the political theorist’s view of the relation between HR and IHR. Most libertarians would condemn the practice of levying tax on citizens in order to finance a system of universal health care or education as a violation of the property rights of the wealthy. This is not even a case of a conflict of rights—the rights of property owners on the one hand and the rights of the needy on the other—since the libertarian denies that the needy have moral rights to such provisions. To the extent that IHR stimulates states to finances systems of universal health care through taxation, the libertarian will view it as complicit in the large-scale violation of the human rights of property owners rather than attempting to protect human rights. If the political theorist wants to insist that the libertarian is talking about natural rights rather than human rights, she may well do so but it will seem little more than a word game to the libertarian. After all, the crucial function of libertarian natural rights is to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate uses of government force, which is also the most important function of human rights for the political theorist. So while the political theorist may think that the libertarian has not even addressed human rights, the libertarian will obviously disagree. The criterion of consonance as applied to scope is also likely to leave us begging the question when intuitions differ. Given that most right-libertarian theories do not acknowledge such rights as health care and education, most of us may find that these

are the historical offspring of two very different (traditions of) natural rights theories: theories of property rights (in a very broad sense) and theories of welfare rights (in a very broad sense). So even if we find that no particular natural rights theory satisfies desideratum #1, it doesn’t rule out the possibility that different natural rights theories together satisfy the criterion. However, since these theories are incompatible in their practical consequences, the only way we could regard them as satisfying the criterion of consonance together is to abandon the perspective of normative theorizing. As long as we are merely trying to find out what human rights are, that is no objection. I shall point out later that this way of asking the question what human rights are will affect the desiderata and hence what we expect from a theory of human rights rather dramatically.

FIVE CHALLENGES AGAINST NATURALISTIC THEORIES Theories of HR can be (and have been) challenged on most of these criteria. Four of the most significant challenges have to do with scopes (#1 and #3), the political nature of human rights (#2), the distribution of correlative duties (#4), and the relation between human rights and their justification (#6). 1. At the most general level, the issue of scope is about whether any naturalist theory of HR is able to give a satisfactory answer to the question which rights we have. But there is a problem. Anyone’s view on whether a particular theory has given a satisfactory answer to the question which rights we have obviously depends on one’s view of what counts as a satisfactory answer. Take, for example, contemporary libertarian natural rights 66

HUMAN RIGHTS protesters. When we talk about rights that we have against other people, we usually have legal rights in mind. Most of us would not ordinarily speak of yourself as having a right against your friend that she goes to the movies with you because she promised to do so. I gather that even philosophers who are prone to talk about promises generating rights would not use the word “right” in ordinary life when describing the situation created by a promise. Compared to this, it is perhaps a remarkable feat about our linguistic intuitions that talk about promises generating rights doesn’t come across as awkward at all. Because the notion of a right of a promise doesn’t strike us as a category mistake, the divergence in philosophical work from ordinary linguistic practice is not normally considered a ground for rejecting theories that construe promises as generating rights. This is important because the idea that human rights are distinctly political rather than moral could be seen as receiving support from linguistic practice in a similar manner. We are more likely to use phrases like “human rights violations” when confronted with large-scale violence and oppression committed by government agents against civilians, especially because these incidents are also far more prevalent than, say, similar violence committed by rogue militia. Still, since the label “human rights violations” does not induce a conceptual shock when applied, for example, to the atrocities committed by nongovernmental militia in Syria, we should resist the temptation to take linguistic practice as sufficient basis for theoretical claims about human rights. Another argument brought forward by proponents of political theories of human rights is that some human rights presuppose the existence of modern states. Such rights as the right to asylum, or to a nationality

theories are not consonant with “our” most stable intuitions on the topic. This doesn’t seem to bother most libertarians, and it is not immediately clear that it should. Instead, they may well scorn the suggestion that the truth about human rights should depend on the intuitions of even a majority of people. Unfortunately, the role of intuitions in discovering ethical truth raises problems far too complex to be pursued here. What if we take for granted that most of us (non-libertarians) agree sufficiently on the scope of human rights for there to be a benchmark to compare theories of human rights with? Let us further assume that this quasi-consensus is fairly close to the list of human rights endorsed by the most important human rights treaties and conventions. Would this give us a reason to discard naturalist theories of human rights because the list of rights they generate is simply too short to be recognizable as a list of human rights? It would if all naturalist theories were of the libertarian variety. But that is not the case: philosophers like Gewirth and Griffin have built theories that imply much more extensive sets of human rights. So the complaint about the limited normative reach of naturalistic theories rests on a disregard for the considerable variety in this group of theories. The problem of scope takes on a different form for several of these theories, though, because it is unclear whether they are able to prevent rights inflation (#3; see later). 2. What reason might we have to think that human rights are in the first instance rights against states? Philosophers are used to thinking of some rights as moral entities. In daily life, however, we think of ourselves as exercising rights primarily in legal/political contexts. The main idea that comes to mind when we think of a right to protest is a duty of the government not to persecute 67

Siegfried Van Duffel or flourishing, but merely to what is needed for human status” (34). This suggests a very minimalist interpretation of the requirements of human rights. Most of us will grow up to be autonomous beings even without a formal education. People living in severe poverty are normally able to act, even if they may not be able to derive much satisfaction from their life or achieve many of their goals. Again, people who are imprisoned may be prevented from pursuing many of their projects, but not necessarily to such an extent as to be deprived of their personhood. Thus it seems that the set of human rights generated by Griffin’s theory must be exceedingly small—so small as to be hardly recognizable as a list of human rights. In fact, the criterion of personhood may not even prohibit most forms of torture. Griffin realizes that a strict interpretation of the agency criterion doesn’t produce a plausible list of human rights, but he denies that this is the conception at the core of his theory. Instead, he claims to have in mind a “somewhat ampler picture” of someone autonomous “who, within limits, is not blocked from pursuing his or her conception of a worthwhile life” (34). The crucial question is where to draw the line. For example: we are told that education is necessary because it is a condition for effective agency, but that there are levels of education beyond what is required by human rights (53). Since education is almost never needed for a human being to become an agent, and since Griffin insists that we do not have a right to education sufficient for human flourishing, the theory should be able to tell us something about the amount of education necessary for “effective” agency. Griffin, unfortunately, tells us nothing of the kind, and he is equally silent regarding the level protection required by minimal provision. These problems are not specific to Griffin’s theory. Other versions of

are not even conceivable outside the framework of modern nation-states. Does this show that human rights are specifically modern, and hence that they cannot possibly be rights imagined by natural rights theorists which human beings could have even in a state of nature? There is a simple answer to this objection. Such rights as the right to asylum are derived from more fundamental rights which do not presuppose the existence of a state system (see, e.g. Wellman, 2011, 41–70). One of the main grounds for granting refugees asylum is that they risk persecution. It is thus easy to see that the right not to be persecuted is more fundamental than the right to asylum. Even more fundamental than the right not to be persecuted is the right to physical integrity. This right surely could conceivably exist in a world that has no modern system of sovereign states (but see Beitz, 2009, 55). 3. The first complaint against natural rights theories was that their scope is much more restricted than that of contemporary human rights practice. As we saw, this may be true of some naturalistic theories, but is certainly not true of all of them. For some of these theories, the opposite may well be true. That is, they fail to constrain the proliferation of human rights. Consider, for example, Griffin’s recent defense of rights based on personhood. “Human rights,” Griffin writes, “can be seen as protections of our human standing, or, . . . personhood” (Griffin, 2008, 33). To be a person or agent in the fullest sense of which we are capable, we need three things: autonomy (being able to choose one’s own path through life), minimal provision (so that we are able to act upon our choices), and liberty (others not forcibly stopping us from pursuing what we see as a worthwhile life) (33). Griffin also tells us that human rights “are rights not to anything that promotes human good 68

HUMAN RIGHTS someone who has a duty to provide necessities when they are lacking. The problem is that most people also believe that you can have a duty to do something only when you are able to do it. If a train is about to crash into a crowd and kill dozens of people, I certainly have a duty to stop it if I can, but it doesn’t make sense to say that I have such a duty if I am unable to fulfill it. A significant difference between negative duties and positive duties, however, is that it is always possible for everyone to abstain from murdering someone, but we may often be unable to provide food or education or health care for everyone in need. If we can only have a duty when we are able to fulfill it, then we cannot have a duty to provide health care for everyone, and if we don’t have this duty then there can be no human right to health care. Some have hence concluded that the idea of social and economic human rights is incoherent (see Cranston, 1967). This criticism has given rise to an extensive literature, much of which has been devoted to defending such human rights as the right to subsistence, to education, to health care. Some have questioned the practical import of the distinction between negative and positive rights, claiming that protecting a right to bodily integrity requires that governments maintain a police force and a judicial system. Others have pointed out that positive rights only require that we support institutions that provide for the needy. Yet others have maintained that human rights only require that we do what is in our power to provide the things that people have a right to. A fourth suggestion is to restrict the use of the phrase “human right” to legally enforceable claims. I have argued elsewhere (Van Duffel, 2013)  that none of these responses are satisfactory, and so we are left with a problem. Our intuitions regarding moral human rights

the theory that aims to ground rights in personhood (like those of Gewirth or Plant) suffer the exact same weaknesses. They start out with the idea that human rights only require that we have the things that allow us to be agents, but—realizing that this is insufficient for a plausible theory of human rights—continue that we should have the means for the effective exercise of our agency. Of course, no theory could be plausible if it required that we should have the means for any or all of our actions to be effective. The problem is that these theories lack the theoretical resource to nonarbitrarily limit the amount of support that human rights require. Griffin appeals to “practicalities” to plug the gap, but he doesn’t provide much insight as to how these are supposed to work (Van Duffel, 2013). Thus the best contemporary natural rights theories fail to provide a convincing cure for the proliferation of rights. The proliferation of human rights and the inability of natural rights theories to stop that proliferation may be a serious cause for concern, but it is not a reason to embrace political theories of human rights. The phenomenon of human rights proliferation that disturbs many is internal to the IHR practice. Some political theories may rule out certain candidates as incompatible with the idea of human rights as it is inherent in IHR, but these theories have as yet not given us a credible instrument to constrain the proliferation of human rights. 4. Many of the rights that we have are correlative to duties of other people. Some of these duties—so-called negative duties, like the duty not to kill—can be fulfilled simply by abstaining from certain actions. Some rights, however, are correlative to positive duties, which require others to actually provide a good or a service. A human right to subsistence is only meaningful if there is 69

Siegfried Van Duffel theories and the cultural experience from which they have emerged have had a significant influence on the development of the human rights movement, how do we know that the idea of human rights is not culturally specific as well? Can we just take for granted that discarding the theory and replacing the phrase “natural rights” with “human rights” suffices to shrug off the cultural baggage that came with the former? This raises another issue: Is it legitimate to set non-parochialism as a criterion for a proper concept of human rights? In one sense, human rights are of course necessarily universal: nothing is a human right if it is not held by all human beings. But if we think that an idea or a theory can be parochial, it can hardly be satisfactory to assume from the outset that nothing can count as an idea of human rights unless it is non-parochial. The demand that it must be non-parochial makes sense if one intends to build a normative theory, but it is unwarranted when one is primarily interested in understanding the concept itself.

seem incoherent because these rights demand more of us than we might at times be able to provide. As far as I can see, this problem is not solved by political theories of human rights. The fact that they allocate primary duties to states which are generally better able to respond to standard threats than individuals is not sufficient to render the idea of positive human rights coherent. 5. No matter how dominant the language of human rights has become in the public arena, doubts regarding the universality (or, better, non-parochialism) of human rights have never entirely disappeared. Indeed, one of the prime incentives for the development of political theories may have been the desire to detach the idea of human rights from substantive commitments to the liberal tradition or to any particular normative theory. Christians, Muslims, and atheists, as well as conservatives and socialists may agree on most fundamental human rights even though they share few or no other normative beliefs. From a practical point of view, disagreement on the grounds of these rights is quite unimportant as long as we agree on at least the basic rights. Even though agreement on a comprehensive list of human rights in the IHR practice may sometimes seem hard enough to reach and is likely to remain precarious, it is certainly easier to attain than agreement on any substantive theory of moral rights. Whether naturalist theories of human rights are indeed parochial is a controversial matter. In fact, those who assume that they are usually don’t find it necessary to substantiate their assumption. The reason for this, I suspect, is that it is not at all clear what it means to say that a theory is parochial or culturally specific. Another problem is this: Suppose that we accept, for the sake of argument, that existing natural rights theories are culturally specific. Assuming that these

HUMAN RIGHTS AS A CULTURAL PHENOMENON Although this overview was much too brief to establish any firm conclusions, the foregoing discussion may nevertheless motivate us to explore an alternative to both naturalist and political theories of human rights. I suggest that an illuminating way to study the idea of human rights is to probe the structure of our beliefs about human rights. Rather than asking which rights we might have, I shall suggest that we might profitably ask which rights we think we have. Call this the descriptive approach. Another way to put this is that we should think of the idea of human 70

HUMAN RIGHTS This opens up a tangle of thorny questions, like: Is there a group of people whose beliefs on the topic are similar enough to allow amalgamation? But answers to such questions cannot be settled in advance: they must be the result of the description. This brings us to the third point, which is that we may treat normative theories themselves as a source of knowledge about the idea of human rights. Normative ­theorists are rarely interested in merely stating what others think: they want to argue what human rights are, not what we think they are. However, most normative theorists have attempted to appeal to widely shared ideas about human rights, the many articles and books that they have written on the topic provide a convenient source of information for anyone who wants to access these ideas. That is not to say that the process of basing claims about what “we” believe about human rights on a sample of these theories is entirely unproblematic. The fourth point will be controversial: normative theories of human rights not only provide a good source for studying human rights as a cultural phenomenon, but also provide the best available source of its kind. Studying human rights as a cultural phenomenon essentially is studying the practical experience which brought into being the tradition of human rights theories. The descriptive approach studies theories as theoretical reflections on this practical experience (though these theoretical reflections of course helped in turn to shape that experience). Fifthly, the description of human rights theories must be historical in its scope. This is because the complex development of the idea of human rights has left us with theoretical problems which can only be fully untangled by taking into account intuitive remnants from past incarnations of these theories.

rights as a cultural phenomenon. How is the descriptive approach different from that of (naturalist and political) normative theories? I can only briefly mention five points. First, the descriptive approach is not committed to taking a position regarding the truth-value of normative claims. Normative theories of human rights strive to answer questions such as “Which human rights do we have?” “What grounds our rights?” and “Who has duties to provide the things to which we have rights?” They attempt to ground rights, for example, in claims about human nature, or claims about prerequisites for the legitimacy of states. The descriptive approach is not interested either in affirming, or in rejecting the truth-value of normative claims. It does not deny that normative questions are important in their own right, but it leaves these questions aside. Secondly, normative theories are (or can be) revisionist with regards to commonly accepted beliefs about human rights. A normative theory could make a case for the existence of certain human rights that haven’t made it to any widely accepted list. Or it could entail that we do not really have a human right to some of the things that are widely claimed to be human rights. There clearly is only a limited stretch on the ability of normative theories to redraw the boundaries of human rights. If a theory entails too many claims that run counter to what most of us are inclined to believe—for example, if its list of human rights is too sparse or too capacious—we may conclude that the theory doesn’t capture the idea of human rights adequately. For obvious reasons, the descriptive approach cannot be revisionist in the same way as a normative theory. A descriptive approach cannot take beliefs of individuals as basic, but must take as its subject a cultural tradition as a whole. 71

Siegfried Van Duffel plague the other approaches. I shall, again all too briefly, indicate how it might do this. 1. The account generated by the descriptive approach will be consonant with our most stable intuitions on the topic if these intuitions are nontrivially shaped by the two traditions of natural rights theories, as indeed they are. One way in which it is easy to see the superiority of this approach is that it can accommodate the fact that our intuitions were formed by two theories which are practically incompatible and have generated conflicting sets of rights (fundamental property rights of pharmaceutical companies versus rights of patients, for example, or rights of democratic majorities versus rights of individuals). 2. An account of human rights should be able to accommodate both the sense in which these rights are conceived as interactional (held by all against all individuals) as well as the special place of governments both in IHR and in our intuitions regarding human rights. One way in which the descriptive approach is again superior to both naturalist and political theories is that it can do this by showing that these seemingly conflicting intuitions are the result of the influence of two conflicting theories of natural rights and the result of the historical development of the theory of welfare rights. 3. The descriptive approach does not aim to curb human rights inflation, but rather aims to explain both the phenomenon of human rights inflation and the intuition that this inflation is deeply problematic. It does this by showing how inflation is the result of the secularization of the theory of rights to subsistence (for this point and the next, see Van Duffel, 2013). 4. The problem of assigning duties correlative to positive rights can also be explained by the same account. Historically, rights to subsistence were negative rights, not positive

Unfortunately I can only give the briefest possible outline of the story that would emerge if we put this approach to work. The experience which has brought human rights theories into being is that of a culture which has for some time been influenced by a monotheistic religion. In such a religion, the basic ethical requirement is to obey the commands of the author of the universe. This has engendered a shift in ethical outlook from a virtue ethics to a law-like morality (Anscombe, 1958, Williams, 1985). A necessary component of this ethical outlook is the idea that human beings have a will, and hence that all genuine actions are intentional actions (Dihle, 1982). Religion further spreads the idea that human beings have a role to play in God’s plan, and hence that certain sets of actions are morally necessary. From this ethical outlook and its conception of the requirements of agency, two distinct (traditions of) natural rights theories have emerged (Tuck, 1979, Van Duffel, 2010). The first is a theory of rights to subsistence or “welfare rights” (in a very broad sense). It starts from the idea that people must be able to make decisions and act upon them. In the religious version, it requires people to maintain the conditions created by God that enable people to act upon His will. The secular version requires us to generate the conditions that allow people to realize their goals. The second is a theory of “property rights” (again in a very broad sense). It starts from the idea that our acts of will have normative consequences for others. It secularizes the idea of God’s authority over his creation by suggesting that human beings create as well and that they must have a similar authority over their creation. A full defense of this approach involves showing that it resolves the problems that 72

HUMAN RIGHTS rights. Hence the correlative duties could not be excessively demanding. Again the descriptive approach helps us describe human rights without violating crucial intuitions. 5. The descriptive approach explains the persistent suspicion that the idea of human rights is culturally specific, but it does this without entailing cultural relativism. Although we may be indeed feel compelled to reconsider the soundness of current human rights theories, none of this implies that we should tolerate cruelty or persecution in the name of culture.

Political Theory and the Rights of Man. Minneapolis, MN: Indiana University Press. Dihle, A. (1982), The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gewirth, A. (1978), Reason and Morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Griffin, J. (2008), On Human Rights. New York: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. (1999), The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Steinhoff, U. (2012), “Unsavory Implications Unsavory Implications of A Theory of Justice and The Law of Peoples: The Denial of Human Rights and the Justification of Slavery,” The Philosophical Forum, 43(2): 175–196. Tasioulas, J. (2009), “Are Human Rights Essentially Triggers for Intervention?” Philosophy Compass, 4 (6): 938–950. Tuck, R. (1979), Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Duffel, S. (2010), “From Objective Right to Subjective Rights: The Franciscans and the Interest and Will Conceptions of Rights,” in V. Mäkinen (ed.), The Nature of Rights: Moral and Political Aspects of Rights in Late Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy. Helsinki: The Philosophical Society of Finland. — (2013), “Natural Rights to Welfare,” The European Journal of Philosophy, 21 (4): 641–664. Wellman, C. (2011), The Moral Dimensions of Human Rights. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, B. (1985), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CONCLUSION Proponents of political theories are right when they point out shortcomings of naturalistic theories of human rights. However, political theories certainly do not fill the gap left by theories of moral human rights. At most, they might fill a hiatus in our theorizing about IHR. Although the case for the descriptive approach is tentative and as yet underdeveloped, this approach may help further our understanding of human rights and the culture in which theories of human rights developed.

WORKS CITED Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958), “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy, 33: 1–19. Beitz, C. (2009), The Idea of Human Rights. New York: Oxford University Press. Buchanan, A. (2010), “The Egalitarianism of Human Rights,” Ethics, 120: 679–710. Cranston, M. (1967) “Human Rights, Real and Supposed,” in D. D. Raphael (ed.), 73

5 DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE Ovadia Ezra

the meaning of this concept in recent usage relate to the content of the distributed goods, to the criteria according to which they should be distributed, by whom, and recently, to which range the distribution scheme should apply. Past discussions of this term limited its range to the borders of nations, states, or societies, assuming that goods should be distributed only among people who belong to the same political or social framework. Many of the current discussions, however, extend the scope of distribution to the world as a whole. Those who oppose the concept and implementation of distributive justice at the domestic sphere also oppose its implementation at the global level. Here I present some common theoretical approaches to this concept, and then, consider some ways and practices involved in promoting just distribution, both at the domestic and global levels. Like any other discussion in political philosophy, the meaning and interpretation of any term is connected to our understanding of related terms, within the same context. Dworkin expresses this idea by presenting his theory of rights as one which is “relative to the other elements of political theory” (Dworkin, 1986, 370). In the same way, Postema thinks that: “to understand the language of rights we need to mark out its distinctive place in this complex of fundamental

The concept of distributive justice has been continuously modified since its first appearance in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. According to Aristotle, distributive justice is a kind “which is manifested in distribution of honour or money or the other things that fall to be divided among those who have a share in the constitution (for in these it is possible for one man to have a share either unequal or equal to that of another)” (Aristotle, 1947, 1130b). In his view, retributive justice “plays a rectifying part in transactions between man and man” (ibid.). Aristotle maintains that “what is just in distribution must be according to merit in some sense” (ibid.) What Aristotle meant to say is that justice is a way of suiting one’s possession or share, to one’s merit and/ or entitlement. If one deserves a larger share of something, distributive justice requires that his share in the distribution scheme will represent his or her privileged position. In this chapter, I point out the radical changes in meaning that this term has undergone, and the different understandings of its current usage. One thing that has not been changed with regard to the usage of this concept is the comprehensive agreement that distributive justice refers to the way assets, goods, wealth, capital, resources, benefits, burdens, and so on should be distributed within political or social frameworks. The differences in opinion regarding 75

Ovadia Ezra distribution of goods or benefits requires justification. Sometimes an equal distribution that neglects other considerations is wrong, inappropriate, or even unjust. Even Aristotle’s concept of distributive justice insisted on differential distribution, according to merit. Justice requires that we should distribute different shares to different people, in accordance with their entitlements. Equal distribution is sometimes inappropriate. Think of a party in which we distribute the birthday cake. If we give an adult and a 3-year-old child a piece of the same size, we are probably making two mistakes. While the adult may receive a piece that is smaller than he wants or needs, the young child will probably get a much larger piece than he or she can actually eat, and we should not regard such a distribution as justifiable. The same piece may be too small for the adult and too big for the child. However, we still presume an essential equality between human beings, and this assumption forces us to refer to the idea of equality in every distributional scheme we wish to justify. Dworkin, who deals with the basic demands for equal treatment of human beings, makes a distinction between what he calls the right to equal treatment, and the right to treatment as an equal. The former is “the right to an equal distribution of some opportunity or resource or burden” (Dworkin, 1977, 227), such as a person’s right to an equal vote in democracy. The latter, the right to treatment as an equal, is not the right to receive the same amount of burden or benefit which is distributed, but the right “to be treated with the same respect and concern as anyone else” (ibid.). To elaborate this idea, Dworkin gives an example where one has two children, and one of them is dying from a disease, while the other, even though he suffers from the same disease,

normative notions” (Postema, 1989, 109– 110). “With regard to distributive justice, I can paraphrase Thomson, who creatively suggests that we think of morality as a continent, and of rights as a territory or realm within that continent” (Thomson, 1990, 3). The same can be said regarding distributive justice, and following Thomson we can say that understanding what is within the realm of distributive justice requires getting a sense of where it is situated in the continent of morality in general, and of justice in particular. Thus, we must have a general idea of our moral and political conceptions, and then we should locate the concept of distributive justice in its appropriate place. In order to decide in favor of any of the competing theories regarding justice, we have to check the suitability of the concept of distributive justice in relation to our deepest moral and political beliefs and presumptions, regarding human nature, justice, equality, mutuality, and so on. The most fundamental presumption which lies at the basis of any modern discussion within the Western tradition of political thought regarding distributive justice is that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” as stated in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.1 This presumption presents our deepest belief that in spite of contingent differences between people, there is an essential and fundamental equality in value between them, in the sense that they are all endowed with reason and conscience (as the cited article reminds us). What many theorists, as well as politicians and decision makers deduce from this presumption is that equal concern should be the one and only principle of any distributional scheme, and the sole requirement of such a scheme. Current debates regarding distributive justice are aware of the fact that equal 76

DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE in favor of equality, or any other overall end, state or patterning. It cannot merely be assumed that equality must be built into any theory of justice” (Nozick, 1974, 233). Nozick opposes any consideration of equality in the concept of justice. He also opposes the whole idea of distributive justice that redistributes current assets and goods. Nozick denies that there is any central distribution or any person or group who is entitled to control resources within the state, or to jointly decide how the resources should be “doled out” (Nozick, 1974, 149). The only justice he believes should prevail is what he calls “justice in holdings.” According to this concept:

merely feels unwell or uncomfortable. The father has only one dose of the medicine. Equal treatment requires that he should flip a coin to decide which of the children will have the only dose of the drug. However, such a way of deciding on the appropriate distribution of that medicine will not show equal concern to the children’s future. Dworkin concludes from this example that the right to treatment as an equal is fundamental while the other right, the right to equal treatment is only derivative. Sometimes the right to treatment as an equal entails equal treatment, but many times not. This is one of the fundamental intuitions that grounds most of the contemporary discussions regarding distributive justice. Most of us understand that if we really want to realize justice through distribution of goods, benefits, assets, or burdens, we have to go beyond the formal scheme of equality and search for a more progressive and enlightened distribution mechanism.

1. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding. 2. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding. 3. No one is entitled to a holding except by (repeated) applications of 1 and 2 (ibid., 151).

A LIBERTARIAN APPROACH TO DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

What Nozick wishes to say is that the complete principle of distributive justice would say simply that a distribution is just “if everyone is entitled to the holdings they possess under the distribution” (ibid.). Accordingly, he rejects any external or governmental attempt to regulate or control future possession of goods, since there is no legitimate principle of distribution other than everyone’s entitlement to their current possession. Any other distribution might disregard the fact that there should be a link between the rights of those who produce goods and wealth, and are thus entitled to enjoy them, and the way others decide to distribute those goods.

Even though the earlier claim is widely accepted, there are still modern theorists who believe that the whole concept of an upper framework (the state or society) which regulates or controls the distribution of benefits and burdens among its citizens or members, or that there are common goods whose distribution should be decided by that framework, does not cohere with or is not fitting for any satisfying or moral concept of justice. One of the most familiar versions of this approach is Nozick’s theory of justice, which is based on the idea of entitlement in holdings. Nozick insists that “The entitlement conception of justice in holdings makes no presumption 77

Ovadia Ezra justice, he presents his view that the phrase social justice is not “an innocent expression of good will towards the less fortune” as most people feel, but “a dishonest insinuation that one ought to agree to a demand of some special interest which can give no real reason for it” (ibid., 97). To express the deterioration of the current political discourse and the endless violence to language when the term social justice (which he believes to be meaningless and empty) has given rise to the expression of “global justice,” when an ecumenical gathering of American religious leaders referred to its opposite, namely to “global injustice,” “as characterized by a dimension of sin in the economic political social sexual and class structures and system of global society” (ibid., 80). Hayek argues that the understanding of people as separate individuals denies the relevance of using the term justice in the context of a distribution scheme even within the state or society. He is upset by the thought that people start thinking of distributive justice in the global sphere. For Hayek, the concept is fraudulent and intellectually dishonest. Hayek’s negative approach to social justice, and his denial of the appropriateness of applying the term “justice” to social frameworks can be a good starting point for understanding his objection to what he calls the “near universal acceptance” of the term. Starting with Mill’s understanding of “social and distributive justice” gives Hayek a clue to the meaning of current use of the term. Hayek says that appropriate reading of Mill leads to understand the demand for social justice as “a demand that the members of society should organize themselves in a manner which makes it possible to assign particular shares of the product of society to the different individuals or groups” (ibid., 64). This is roughly the way most theorists

Another libertarian objection to the idea that there should be a collective aggregate of resources that should be distributed justly was raised by Hayek, who believes that justice should remain an attribute of human conduct, without any collective or social meaning. Accordingly, the terms “just” or “unjust” refer only to human conduct, and “to apply the term ‘just’ to circumstances other than human actions or the rules governing them is a category mistake” (Hayek, 1976, 31). Hayek mentions the current use of social justice and distributive justice as synonyms, and maintains that since justice has meaning only as a rule of human conduct, there is no distribution which could be meaningfully described as just or unjust (Hayek, 1978, 58). For Hayek, the phrase social justice is completely empty, since “no agreement exists about what social justice requires in particular instances .  .  . there is no known test by which to decide who is right if people differ . . . no preconceived scheme of distribution could be effectively devised in a society whose individuals are free” (ibid.). Hayek says that the commitment to social justice has unfortunately become “the chief outlet for moral emotion, the distinguishing attribute of the good man, and the recognized sign of the possession of a moral conscience” (Hayek, 1976, 66). His recommendation is to regard social justice as religious superstition which people “must fight when it becomes the pretext of coercing other men” (ibid.). Hayek complains that the idea of social justice, in our current understanding of the term as a synonym for distributive justice, has received “a near universal acceptance,” and warns us that “the prevailing belief in ‘social justice’ is at present probably the gravest threat to most other values of a free civilization” (ibid., 66–67). In the conclusion of his discussion regarding “social” or “distributive” 78

DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE there is a need for a more egalitarian scheme of distribution. Current theories of distributive justice, which share the ideas that Hayek accuses them of holding, attempt to find the substantive content of what should be distributed. They also consider the extent of distribution and those who should be the target of the distribution scheme. The most influential theory of justice in general and of distributive justice in particular, for several decades, is Rawls’s theory of justice. According to Rawls, the main answers to the earlier question is that we should distribute what he calls “primary goods,” to the extent that enables each person to develop his or her moral capabilities, and that the distribution scheme should be aimed at improving the most deprived groups in society.

have been dealing with distributive justice during the last four decades. Hayek’s analysis of the common use of the term “social” (with reference to social justice) considers it to be not a natural product of society or of social process, but a conception which some thinkers wish to impose on society (ibid., 78). Indeed, the comprehensive use of social or distributive justice today seems more like a prescriptive term rather than descriptive. Hayek argues that when this term came into general use it meant to convey an appeal to the ruling classes to concern themselves more with the welfare of numerous poor people whose interests had not received appropriate consideration. It was an appeal to the conscience of the upper classes to take responsibility for the welfare of the poor. Gradually, social policy became, according to Hayek’s analysis, “the chief concern of all progressive and good people, and ‘social’ came increasingly to displace such terms as ‘ethical’ or simply good” (ibid., 79). Even though Hayek exaggerates the dimensions of the process, his claim is provocative—that the concept has expanded from the demand to recognize the unfortunate ones as members of the same society, to the demand that society ought to hold itself responsible for the particular material position of its members (ibid.). Hayek misleads his readers by saying that society wants to assure that each member receives what is “due” to him, but he is right in his claim that the current understanding of society is that of a framework which is capable of being guided in its operation by moral principles. Approaches such as those of Hayek or Nozick that deny that justice ought to be concerned about inequality, and thus, are indifferent regarding any inequality within the society, the state, or the nation. Those who do believe in such equality feel that

RAWLS’S EGALITARIAN VIEW Rawls’s concept of justice is first and foremost political and not metaphysical. This means that justice relates to what Rawls calls “the basic structure of society,” which is “the fundamental social institutions and their arrangement into one scheme” (Rawls, 1979, 9). He refers to those institutions which regulate or affect the distribution of wealth, power, and status in society. Barry gives a few examples for institutions which fall under the basic structure, among which he includes the rules which allocate fundamental rights and privileges, the rules that specify how access to political decision-making power is gained, the rules that allow the concentration of private decision-making power, the institutions that determine access to professions and occupational positions, and “the whole complex of institutions (.  .  . including rules for the acquisition and inheritance of property 79

Ovadia Ezra conception of the good as best they can, whatever it may be” (ibid.). Rawls’s basic idea is that people should have the minimal requirements for developing their moral abilities, and the difference principle should be used by the institutions of the basic structure for fulfilling these requirements. When Rawls tries to characterize the necessary requirements for developing the two moral powers, he uses the term basic goods, which he divides into five sections (ibid., 526):

and the system of taxation and transfers) that determine the distribution of income and wealth in society” (Barry, 1989, 146). According to Rawls’s view, these institutions, which basically determine the access to resources and means within the social framework, should follow two principles of justice, the first of which governs the assignment of rights and duties, and requires that: 1. “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others” (Rawls, 1971, 60). The second principle regulates the distribution of social and economic primary goods, and requires that: 2. “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity” (ibid., 83). This second principle, which is known as the difference principle, can be accommodated to the general conception of justice, which is its application to all primary goods. Rawls, who in many senses holds a Kantian conception with regard to human nature, considers human beings as rational, free, and equal, and as such he ascribes to them two moral powers. The first is the capacity for an effective sense of justice which is the capacity to understand to apply and to act from the principles of justice. The second moral capacity is “to form, to revise and rationally to pursue a conception of the good” (Rawls, 1980, 525). This power expresses people’s autonomy. Correspondingly, Rawls presumes that moral persons are motivated by two highest order interests: to realize and to exercise these powers. In addition they have another interest, not a highest but a higher interest “in protecting and advancing their

1. The basic liberties (freedom of thought, liberty of conscience, etc.) 2. Freedom of movement and free choice of occupations 3. Powers and prerogatives of offices and positions of responsibility 4. Income and wealth, understood broadly as they must be 5. The social bases of self-respect. Just institutions are those institutions which regulate the distribution of these primary goods according to the difference principle, and thus enable moral persons to develop their moral powers. What should be clarified at this point is that neither Rawls, nor other theorists intend to achieve substantive at the end of the social process. They all want to assure the minimal welfare, resources, or opportunities (in Rawlsian terminology, the minimal amount of primary goods) that enable human beings to realize their essential nature as moral persons. In other words, to provide moral persons with the minimum they need for maintaining their moral capabilities. Such an approach, that considers justice as related to institutions rather than to individual outcomes, identifies distributive justice with social justice, as for example Barry does (Barry, 1989, 355). Accordingly, justice 80

DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE between Equality of Welfare and Equality of Resources is one of the most illuminating (Dworkin, 1981). Equality of welfare is the attempt to make people equal “in terms of happiness or the extent to which people’s desires are satisfied” (McKerlie, 1989, 475). Equality of resources relates to the distribution of possessions and services like wealth, property, medical care, and so on (ibid.). Dworkin prefers the version of equality of resources, mainly since we cannot really decide which of people’s desires and expectations would be considered as legitimate, for whom, and how should we compare the extent to which people realize their expectations and desires. Equality of resources is more applicable and measurable, and can function as a criterion for comparison between people. Thus, for the context of social justice, we should suit our distributional scheme to the concept of equality of resources. However, unlike Rawls, who compares between groups and imposes his distributional scheme on groups, Dworkin denies that groups should function as the reference for distribution or comparison between people’s classes. In any event, he considers Rawls’s difference principle as an interpretation of equality of resources, but insists that any distribution of resources should apply only to individuals and not to classes (Dworkin, 1981).

becomes an attribute of institutions, and the justice of institutions deals with the way they distribute benefits and burdens. For Barry, “the currency of social or distributive justice is one of rights and disabilities, privileges and disadvantages, equal or unequal opportunities, power and dependency, wealth (which is a right to control the disposition of certain resources) and poverty” (ibid.). To some extent, distributive justice regards institutions as creators of burdens and benefits, and is aimed at their appropriate distribution. The content and meaning of “appropriate” or “just” distribution and what should be distributed, to what extent and range is the subject matter of each theory of distributive justice. We have already mentioned Rawls’s view which refers to “primary goods” as what should be distributed, and the least advantaged groups as those who should have priority in the distribution. His justification for this approach was that primary goods are necessary for the development of a person’s moral abilities, and that it is rational or logical for people who want to reduce risks, to choose this distributional scheme. He uses the model of people behind a veil of ignorance who use the maximin principle which leads them to make a rational choice based upon enlightened self-interest, which leads them to favor of a principle that distributes resources to the least advantaged group, and which promotes equality of opportunity.

THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH (OR THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT APPROACH) This approach was developed and elaborated by Sen and Nussbaum, and roughly defined as “an approach to comparative quality-oflife assessment and to theorizing about social justice” (Nussbaum, 2011, 18). This approach focuses on choice and freedom, and maintains that the key question for comparing

OTHER SCHEMES OF DISTRIBUTION DWORKIN’S VIEW Among many ways of interpreting what should be distributed, Dworkin’s distinction 81

Ovadia Ezra these capabilities and enjoy a dignified and flourishing life. Unlike Rawls’s theory, which concentrates on the distribution of primary goods, Sen’s view concentrates on opportunities. In The Idea of Justice, Sen presents the capabilities approach as a “general approach, focusing on information on individual advantages, judged in terms of opportunities rather than a specific ‘design’ for how a society should be organized” (Sen, 2009, 232). Thus, he rejects Rawls’s idea of primary goods, as a means for other things, while emphasizing that distributional scheme should be concentrated on opportunities (ibid., 234). The capability approach is based upon two concepts. The first is functioning, which reflects the spectrum of things which a person may value doing or being. This spectrum includes very basic desires such as being protected against avoidable disease and complex states or activities such as being part of a community. The other concept is capability, which refers to combinations of functionings which are actually feasible for a person. This makes capability the substantive freedom to achieve various lifestyles (Sen, 1999, 75). The capability approach is demanding us to expand the alternative functioning combinations from which a person can practically choose. For this, there is a need for two types of information: one is what a person is able to choose, and the other is what this person actually does, that is which alternative he or she practically realizes. The assessment of the realization of justice according to the capability approach should not be measured in terms of the resources or primary goods people actually hold, but in terms of “the freedom they actually enjoy to choose the lives they have reason to value” (Sen, 1992, 81).

between societies and for assessing basic decency and justice is “what is each person able to do and to be” (ibid.). Regarding each individual as an end this approach does not deal with the total or average well-being, but with the opportunities which are open to each individual. Since individuals’ capabilities differ between different individuals not only in quantity but also in quality, this approach requires that we try to understand each person’s capabilities and demand that government and public policy improve the quality of peoples’ lives as defined by their individual capabilities (ibid.). Similar to Rawls’s demand that people should have the minimal quantity of primary goods to develop their moral capabilities, Nussbaum believes that each government has to enable its citizens to pursue a dignified and minimally flourishing life. Thus, a decent or just political framework should provide all its citizens with at least a threshold level of what she calls Central Capabilities. She mentions ten such capabilities:   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.

Life Bodily Health Bodily Integrity Senses, Imagination, and Thought Emotions Practical Reason Affiliation Other Species (in the sense of being able to live with concern for animals, plants, and the world of nature)   9. Play 10. Control Over One’s Environment (ibid., 33–34). However, this approach insists that we should think of each individual’s specific capabilities, and enable him or her to develop

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exclusion is an exclusion which is based on irrelevant, inappropriate, irrational, or unreasonable grounds in obtaining the limited goods in question (Williams, 1962, 124– 125). Irrelevant grounds include race, gender, color, and socioeconomic background. In any event, what we seek when we translate distributive justice to equality of opportunity is to reduce inequalities in people’s accessibility to goods which are necessary for the realization of their essence as human beings.

The prescriptive demands of many of the current theories of distributive justice can be reduced, either directly or indirectly, to the demand to provide people with real equality of opportunity. Rawls argues this explicitly when insisting on terms of fair equality of opportunity in his differential principle of justice, while Sen demands it indirectly by insisting on people’s freedom to choose, and this practically means a demand to enlarge people’s opportunities. The first and foremost implication of the interpretation of distributive justice in terms of equality of opportunity is the claim that distributive justice does not intend to achieve equality in consequences, results, or achievements. It does require that people be able to realize certain capabilities or essential characteristics we ascribe to them while regarding them as human beings. Translating this idea into political theory means that we try to reduce inequalities in people’s access to goods which they need, value, or desire (depending on the theory of distributive justice with which we deal). Williams, for example, argues that the concept of equality of opportunity is designed to secure certain goods for every member of society. This term becomes relevant to political discourse when we deal with access to three kinds of goods: (1) goods desired by all or most people; (2) goods which are said to be earned or achieved; or (3) goods which are not available to all who desire them. What we try to assure through a distributional policy which tries to promote equality of opportunity, according to Williams’s view, is that limited goods will not be distributed in a way that a priori excludes any person who may desire them. What he means by a priori

FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE For those who consider distributive justice not only as a theoretical issue but also as a policy that should be applied, governmental action is acutely necessary for promoting justice. However, governmental control of the just distribution of benefits and burdens, as well as policy that aims at promoting distributive justice are not the only means for achieving this aim. Indeed, the state as the major framework within which people consider themselves as sharing common (and often mutual) obligations and loyalties is the main factor in regulating the distribution of benefits and burdens among its citizens, first and foremost through legislation and official practices, statutes, and policy. But a significant role in reducing social and economic inequalities in society is fulfilled by nongovernmental and private bodies and organizations. Many social and economic practices have their roots in the idea of distributive justice, and they became so frequent and familiar that their comprehensive acceptance causes us to forget their principal grounds. The idea of differential taxation, which takes a larger

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Ovadia Ezra backgrounds the chance of being full-fledged members of their society. In any event, many governmental initiatives to promote distributive justice remain within the boundaries of nation-states, expressing social responsibility for citizens, assuming that this is the duty of the government. However, many of the current programs that promote distributive justice are carried out either by private or by public nongovernmental bodies and institutions (sometimes with governmental support or coordination, and many times separately and free of any governmental involvement). The withdrawal of governments from many social and welfare domains on the one hand, and the rise of the civil society as a significant factor in society and communal life, imposes social responsibility on many nongovernmental organizations, some of which are local, but many are part of international movements and organizations. These organizations take responsibility and try to improve the welfare of people, not only in their own countries, but also in other deprived areas.

share of taxes from those who earn more and exempts those who earn a minimal wage, or even the whole idea of social security, expresses the concept of distributive justice. In Rawlsian terms, we have already inserted certain requirements of distributive justice into the basic structure of society. However, there are other, more controversial, policies, such as affirmative action programs (either through hiring for desired positions or through the acceptance of members of deprived groups to prestigious programs in higher education institutions), became familiar practices in society, while being backed, promoted, and even supported by governments. Another controversial practice is the estate tax or inheritance tax. This tax in its various versions becomes an effective, as well as available instrument to redistribute the incredible wealth which is sometimes held by a few people in many modern countries. This tax is one of the most significant means for reducing economic inequalities in society. There are many other practices, statues, regulations, and policies through which governments, directly and indirectly, try to minimize poverty, reduce inequality, and promote distributive justice among their citizens. The acceptance of these practices as well as of many others during the last two generations resulted partly from the acknowledgment of basic welfare rights that should be assured to every human being in an enlightened society, but mainly from the immense accumulation of wealth which is held in many countries by very few people and causes incredible inequalities between people who belong to the same social and political frameworks. These inequalities pushed governments to carry out rehabilitation initiatives and legislation that were meant to reduce these inequalities, and give people from deprived groups and

GLOBAL DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE The moral principles that justify distributive justice within the state can also be used, to some extent and with appropriate modifications, at the international level. These principles become relevant to the global sphere if we adopt the idea of the essential equality in value between all human beings, as such, regardless of the question where they live or act. Considering all people as sharing this essential characteristic enables us to say that the mutual responsibility and solidarity among human beings should not end or stop at the borders of their own political 84

DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE question, the discussion should concentrate on the extent to which rich countries should help the poor, and why, after all, the duty to help the poor remains within the framework of national states and international organizations, rather than being understood as a duty which is imposed on every human being wherever he or she lives. There are several ways to deal with the first question, regarding the need to disregard the boundaries of states when distributing resources. One is the humanitarian approach which was offered by Singer and elaborated and developed by Barry. This argument presumes:

framework or state. The situation where there are huge differences in the very basic elements of human life, first and foremost in life expectancy and nutrition, between people in different countries, has made the demand for international efforts to reduce such inequalities an urgent moral imperative. In the background of this urgency lay the appalling statistics on people’s welfare around the world, which indicate marked differences between rich and poor countries even in the twenty-first century. For example, while the World Bank defines the level of $2 (US) a day as the global poverty line, and the level of $1.25 as the extreme poverty line, in 2005, about 900 million people lived under this line.2 Other statistics indicate a difference of 30 years in life expectancy between rich countries and poor countries.3 In 2008, about 8.8 million children under the age of 5 years died, and about 40 percent of them came from three countries: India, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.4 These and other distressing data raised the demand for global justice, and not only charity, benevolence, or good will.

1. That the suffering or dying from lack of food, shelter, or medical care is morally bad. 2. If we can prevent something bad from happening with a minimal sacrifice, we morally ought to do it. This rationale brings Barry to follow Singer and conclude that “humanity requires that rich countries give aid to poor ones” (Singer, 1972, Barry, 2008). Another way to justify the transfer of resources from rich countries to the poor comes from the concept of justice. Here there are several ways of justifying this transfer. One is the claim that there should be a global distribution of resources, since their natural location is arbitrary, and in the same manner that we try to repair the arbitrariness of distribution of resources and wealth within the state, we should do so at the global level. This argument presumes that nationstates have no exclusive rights on the natural resources which are located on their territory, and these resources should be globally redistributed. Such an argument is raised, for example, by Beitz (2008).

JUST DISTRIBUTION IN THE GLOBAL SPHERE For those who principally accept the idea of distributive justice within the state, there is still a need to show why people in a certain country should care about people in other countries, with whom they allegedly do not have any formal or legal relations, and thus do not feel any communion. In other words, why should distributive justice and mutual social responsibility expand beyond the borders of the nation-state? After giving a reasonable or accepted answer to this 85

Ovadia Ezra or the dominant political conception. Indeed, cosmopolitanism gives the strongest ground and justification for a global distributive justice, since its central idea is “that every human being has a global stature as an ultimate unit of moral concern” as Pogge puts it (Pogge, 2002, 169). Pogge, whose central interest is promoting human rights in the global sphere, suggests the idea of cosmopolitanism as a ground for assuring human rights for individuals wherever they are. His ethical concept of Interactional Cosmopolitanism refers to the conduct of persons and groups, and assigns responsibility for the fulfillment of human rights on other individuals. However, for the matter of justice, he needs a political concept: Institutional Cosmopolitanism. This concept postulates certain fundamental principles of social justice, and assigns the responsibility for the fulfillment of human rights on international schemes (ibid., 170). However, even Pogge realizes that “so long as there is a plurality of self-contained cultures, the responsibility for unfulfilled human rights does not extend beyond their boundaries” (ibid., 171). In such a world, instead of imposing principles of justice on rich states, assuming that it is their moral obligation, the fulfillment of (mainly welfare and economic) human rights in developed countries remains dependent on their benevolence, and many times is turned into charity. Pogge’s first and foremost justification for the demand to impose global justice, that is, “to eradicate the severe poverty that currently blights the lives of nearly half of the human population,” seems to many, particularly in rich countries, as someone else’s problem (Pogge, 2010, 12). Even though, as Pogge estimates, a 2 percent shift in the distribution of global household income can achieve this aim, there is a need for a more convincing reason for recruiting a global effort to redistribute wealth and

The idea of Global Distributive Justice has a more comprehensive view not only on the distribution of benefits and burdens, but also on the way we consider peoples’ mutual interactions and interrelations on this planet. The essential core of the demand for a global distributive justice is our belief that the traditional separation of intranational and international relations should be broken. Pogge, one of the most profound current theorists of Global Justice, and Follesdal give moral and geopolitical reasons for this conceptual reorientation. Their political claim is that the traditional concept of international relations as consisting only of states is untenable due to the stature of other factors in the international stage, such as multinational corporations, international organizations, regional associations, NGO’s, and so on (Follesdal and Pogge, 2005, 5). The ethical implication of this political situation is that people’s lives are now affected by decisions of external institutions and bodies (the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, etc.), so that it is no longer morally plausible or adequate to consider the state governments’ interests as the only moral and political considerations relevant for international relations. There is less and less sense in considering nation-states as unique and ultimate whether as the owners of the resources within their territories, or the unique and ultimate bodies who represent the interests of their citizens (particularly in developing countries where governments rule their citizens by force). Thus there is a need for expanding both the discussion and practice of justice beyond the borders of states, and to consider distributive justice as something which should be implemented in the global sphere. This does not necessarily require that we should adopt cosmopolitanism as the only 86

DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE WHY NOT GLOBAL RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE AND COMPENSATION

income between the rich and poor countries, since the moral conception of social justice is still far from being universalistic or universally accepted. Pogge thinks that in order to be universalistic, a moral conception (such as that of social justice) has to fulfill three conditions: First, it subjects all persons to the same system of fundamental moral principles; second, these principles assign the same moral benefits and burdens to all; and third, these benefits and burdens are formulated in general terms so as not to privilege or disadvantage certain individuals or groups arbitrarily (Pogge, 2002, 92). So far, the global share of moral principles is far from being a reality, and still people feel a lot more kinship and relation to people from their own nationality, culture, religion, and even race and language. Thus, moral cosmopolitism is still far from being acceptable, and is currently considered as a utopian vision. Pogge may be right in his claim that the traditional realm of international relations has undergone two major transformations—the proliferation of international, transnational, supernational, and multinational actors (UN, EU, IMF, etc.) and the profound influence of rules and activities of these organizations on the domestic life of national societies (Pogge, 2010, 14). However, this process has not yet been expressed in the ethical and political spheres. Thus, a sincere effort to promote global distributive justice should remain within the political frameworks of states and governments, within which people still feel a certain measure of solidarity and mutuality. However, it should find common denominators where people in different states feel that their lives are linked together, and that they share some segments of life. This can establish, at least to some extent, mutual responsibility between people, through the intermediation of their governments.

One way to justify the demand for justice for the peoples of developing countries is to appeal to principles of retributive justice. Such an appeal presumes that “many things which are done in a world of international trade and economic activity should be changed because they are in themselves unjust” (Dower, 1993, 274). This injustice results from the exploitation of resources and of cheap labor in the developing countries, and the demand that rich countries, as beneficiaries of this injustice, should “stop active injustice as well, and also make recompense for what has been done” (ibid., 275). This call for compensation encounters several difficulties that raise doubts about its ability to establish a solid moral obligation on the part of the rich countries, and an appropriate moral entitlement or a valid claim for justice on the part of the poor countries. The main problem is that the acknowledged principles of retributive justice, since their first use in Aristotle’s writings, require that compensation be demanded from the person, institution, or group who is directly or indirectly responsible for the damage to be compensated. Additionally, the compensation should be given to the direct or indirect victim of the evil which grounds the demand for compensation. However, since we demand justice and not charity (which is usually an appeal to individuals, and requires mercy, kindness, and compassion), we wish to impose the duty to carry out justice on states. However, even though it is clear that many of the residents of rich countries were beneficiaries of past exploitation, it is not easy to transfer the duty of compensation to the state. Additionally, some of the current rich countries were not involved in past 87

Ovadia Ezra the current attempts to justify the assistance of poor countries by the rich are frequently grounded on principles of distributive justice, with the appropriate adjustments and modifications of such principles to the global sphere.

exploitation, and some did not exist until recently as independent states, so imposing the duty to compensate for something in which they were not involved would be an injustice in itself. This problem exists also on the part of the recipients of the compensation. A country which was not exploited in the past, but currently is extremely poor, will not be assisted according to the principles of retributive justice. In any event, the two main reasons for insisting on the demand for global distributive justice rather than on demanding retributive justice are related to the desire to include as many countries as possible both on the part of the giving states, as well as on the receiving states. Currently rich countries which were not involved in past atrocities or exploitation (such as Norway, e.g. whose wealth comes from oil fields which just recently were discovered in its territory) bear the duty to help poor countries not because of their past guilt, but because of demands for global distributive justice (which will soon be presented). The other reason refers to the identity of the receiving countries. There are many poor countries, whose misery does not necessarily result from exploitation, and sometimes it even results from internal conflicts and civil wars. If the assistance to poor countries will be dependent on past (or present) exploitation, such countries will not have a claim to be assisted, something which might starve their citizens. The desire to impose the duty to help poor countries on every rich country on the one hand, and to include every poor country on the receiving side, makes retributive justice insufficient to establish a demand for imposing principles of global justice. We should demand justice from rich states regardless of their liability or accountability for past evils, and assist poor countries regardless of past exploitation. Thus

GLOBAL DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE The urgent need for a global cooperation and governmental responsibility for global acute issues was not raised in the context of world hunger or extreme poverty (which is Pogge’s and Singer’s main concern) but in the context of the environmental crisis in general, and the danger of global heat in particular. Until the end of the twentieth century this crisis had been considered, like many other global issues, as something that should be dealt with exclusively by the developed and industrialized countries. Most of the countries considered as the main human cause of global warming, due to their massive share in greenhouse gas emission to the atmosphere, believed that it is their responsibility to reduce that emission and to reduce the risk of global heat. Indeed, the last international official document before the twenty-first century that dealt with this issue, the Kyoto Protocol, was an agreement that imposed burdens only on countries which were part of “Annex I” to the protocol, which were basically the industrial countries.5 On developing countries, this protocol did not impose any obligations to reduce emissions. This protocol expressed the separation of the world into rich, industrialized, and developed countries on the one hand, and poor and developing countries on the other. Accordingly the world order, including the share of benefits and burdens, 88

DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE domination to the industrial countries on distributing global burdens and benefits. Not surprisingly, even at this meeting there was a secret document that was prepared by the Danish delegation and a few members of developed countries, which was called “the Danish Text.” This document gave the rich countries the power to dominate the distribution of the huge amount of money that was supposed to be distributed to poor countries for their share in the final agreement. However, this time the developing countries rejected the idea that the distribution of benefits and burdens would exclusively be decided by rich countries, and demanded to have a say in global issues, maintaining that their preferences and needs should be seriously considered at the global level. That conference ended with an informal agreement between the United States, and “the BASIC countries,” China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, which threatened that they walk out of the conference if the developed countries forced their own terms on the developing countries. Even though the final agreement was imperfect, it raised, for the first time, the need to associate also poor countries in decisions regarding the global distribution of benefits and burdens.6 This event established a new way of considering global distributive justice. Previous environmental disputes such as the deforestation of rain forests, referred only to the countries that should be involved in the solution to those disputes (in this example, those countries within which there are rain forests). With regard to the problems that might be caused by climate change, every country is involved, at different levels and to different extents, both in causing the problem, and more importantly, in resolving it. The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions even in poor countries raised other

was considered as something that should be arranged, controlled, and dominated by the rich and developed countries. Adopting the traditional attitude toward the global distribution of benefits and wealth, which left the developing countries outside the circle of decision making, this protocol regarded developing countries as passive, and thus, left them outside the circle of the international efforts to reduce the danger of global heat. Global distribution of wealth was still considered to be charity and dependent on the good will and benevolence of the rich countries that control the world, for better or for worse. In the same manner, global distribution of burdens, such as greenhouse gas emissions, remained a problem for rich countries to deal with. The results of the Kyoto Protocol were disappointing, largely because the major country responsible for greenhouse gas emissions at that time, namely the United States, did not join and sign the protocol. Another factor that raised the need to expand the circle of states which should reduce greenhouse emissions was the rapid industrial development in some developing countries, first and foremost, in the most populated states in the world: China and India. This development caused an increasing use of energy both for private use (such as private cars and home electricity) and for the use of huge industrial corporations and factories which were immensely enlarged. At this point, developing countries became a factor that was no longer marginal when considering the global distribution of benefits and burdens, at least with regard to greenhouse gas emission. This made the Copenhagen conference on climate change in December 2009, a unique opportunity for developing countries to express their presence in the global political sphere, and their objections to the concept that gave 89

Ovadia Ezra are located up in the atmosphere becomes a factor in considering the common destiny down on earth, as well as beneath it. This is the new and promising way to enforce global distributive justice on those for whom morality and ethical considerations of justice were not convincing enough until the recent crisis of climate change appeared. Utterances such as that of the former US President George H. W. Bush, that “the American way of life is not negotiable”7 became no longer relevant when it was realized that the Chinese and Indian way of life should also be negotiable.

problems, such as poverty, health, life expectancy, child mortality, illiteracy, and so on, as problems that should be globally solved, through genuine global distributive justice, and not through charity. In this manner, the demand that poor countries should share the burden of reducing emissions to the common atmosphere would be balanced by the demand that the rich countries should share the burden of reducing absolute poverty on the common planet. The connection between Global Distributive Justice and Global Environmental Justice follows previous attempts to challenge the exclusive rights of countries to benefit from the resources which are found within their territories. These attempts refer to the arbitrariness of the distribution of natural resources such as oil and minerals among states, and demand that at least a small part of the benefits from these resources should be globally distributed. Politicians in rich countries (as well as many libertarian theorists) have difficulties in accepting or even understanding this type of argument, in the same manner as politicians in developing countries such as Brazil have difficulties in considering the rain forests as something whose treatment and use should involve global considerations. However, the dangers of the new environmental crisis are much easier to understand. It is much easier to consider the atmosphere as common, and the greenhouse gas emissions as something whose usage should involve global considerations, and should be distributed under conditions of justice and fairness. The territorial myth about the exclusiveness of national countries to use the natural resources beneath their land is no longer convincing when we speak about resources which are located above those countries’ land. Thus, the common destiny that results from dangers which

PRACTICES AND AIMS OF GLOBAL DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE PROJECTS AND INITIATIVES We saw earlier that in Domestic Distributive Justice the minimal demand is only to reduce outrageous inequalities and to provide each member of society with the minimal welfare necessary for developing moral abilities and preserving human nature. In the same manner, we do not look for global equality; nor do we ask that developing countries enjoy the welfare and standard of living in developed countries (which is significantly varied among and within the rich countries too). We also content ourselves with minimizing greenhouse gas emissions in industrial countries, but we do not expect them to reach the levels of developing countries. We will be satisfied with reasonably and responsibly restricting the use of energy, and with restraining uncontrollable irresponsibility in the matter of greenhouse gas emissions. The same modesty and minimalism characterizes current initiatives and practices of global distributive justice. The first comprehensive and sincere initiative to reduce extreme poverty began in 90

DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE pricing in exchange for a reward based on the global health impact of their new medicines. Companies who register with this project sell the medicine globally at cost, and in return receive for a fixed time, payments based on the product’s assessed global health impact. Since this project has a huge budget, which is divided up in proportion to the assessed health impact of each product each year, firms have an interest to earn a share of the money by developing and distributing new medicines to obtain the largest possible global health impact.9 This project promotes global distributive justice by encouraging medicine producers, as well as state governments to go beyond the usual market economy and consider a more comprehensive and considerate way to benefit from their products. Such projects have more chance of being successful, since they offer a model that gives profit to the producers of goods, and make these goods available for many who otherwise would not be able to enjoy them. Another project is The United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries. This program was launched in September 2008, and is aimed at Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) in developing countries. This project connects many organizations, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).10 Together with its continuing program REDD+, this project hopes to help developing countries not only to reduce emissions but also to internalize the ideas of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.11

1970, and demanded that the governments of the rich countries should commit 0.7 percent of their Gross National Product (GNP) to the Official Development Assistance (ODA) project for the poor countries. This target had not yet been achieved (and will not be achieved until 2015), but in 2002, the United Nations began a comprehensive and ambitious project that expresses a genuine desire to realize global solidarity and mutual responsibility through distributive justice: the UN Millennium Project.8 This project has 8 goals and 18 targets. The first goal is to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty. This aim is to halve the number of people who live in extreme poverty and hunger between the years of 1990 and 2015. The second goal to be achieved by 2015 is that every girl and boy everywhere will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling. Another goal is to reduce by two-thirds childhood mortality rates between 1990 and 2015, and by three-quarters maternal mortality rates. Other goals are to combat HIV/AIDS and malaria, and more. What we see is that when we speak of Global Distributive Justice, we content ourselves with minimal demands such as reducing extreme poverty, hoping that even on these minimal goals, the international community will be able to establish a consensus, and allocate financial and material resources. Today there are many projects that are run by private institutions and NGO’s that are much smaller than the UN Millennium Project, but many of them are quite successful. One example of such a project is The Health Impact Fund whose president is Pogge. This project tries to make new medicines which are protected by patents accessible also to poor people in poor countries. The project is financed by governments and donors and offers patentees the option to forgo monopoly 91

Ovadia Ezra WORKS CITED

Projects such as the REDD shows that the environmental crisis puts people around the world under common dangers, exposes them to common threats, and in some sense creates a common destiny for all people. Overcoming these threats requires a new concept of social justice which regards people as both subjects and addressees of the demands for justice. The traditional approach in which distributive justice was limited only to the national or domestic boundaries becomes less and less relevant, and in many senses has already been replaced by a more global concept.

Aristotle (1947), “Nicomachean Ethics,” in R. McKeon (ed.), Introduction to Aristotle. New York: The Modern Library. Barry, B. (1989), Theories of Justice. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. — (2008), “Humanity and Justice in Global Perspective,” in T. Pogge and D. Moellendorf (eds), Global Justice. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House. Beitz, C. R. (2008), “Justice and International Relations,” in T. Pogge and D. Moellendorf (eds), Global Justice. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House. Dower, N. (1993), “World Poverty,” in P. Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Dworkin, R. (1981), “What is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10 (3) (Summer): 185–246; and “What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10 (4) (Fall): 283–345. — (1986), A Matter of Principle. Oxford: Clarendon Press. — (1977), Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Follesdal, A. and Pogge, T. (2005), “Introduction,” in A. Follesdal and T. Pogge (eds), Real World Justice. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Hayek, F. A. (1976), Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2. London and Henly: Routledge & Kegan Paul. — (1978), New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas. London and Henly: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McKerlie, D. (1989), “Equality and Time,” Ethics, 99 (April): 475–491.

Notes http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ http://www.adb.org/Documents/Presentations/ New-Poverty-Estimates/Poverty-DataImplications.pdf 3 http://www.commondreams.org/ archive/2007/09/07/3697 4 http://www.unicef.org/childsurvival/ index_51095.html 5 For the English version of the protocol see: http://unfccc.int/key_documents/kyoto_protocol/items/6445.php 6 It demanded of the United States, for example, to reduce only 4 percent greenhouse gas emission between 1990 and 2020, while China should reduce emissions between 25 percent and 40 percent between the years of 2005 and 2020, and India between 20 percent and 25 percent between 2005 and 2020. 7 http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ 2012/jun/19/rio-20-earth-summit-19922012 8 http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/goals/gti. htm#goal1 9 http://healthimpactfund.org/the-health-impactfund-a-summary-overview/ 10 http://www.un-redd.org/About UNREDDProgramme/tabid/583/Default.aspx 11 http://www.un-redd.org/AboutREDD/ tabid/582/Default.aspx 1 2

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DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE Politics and Society, 5th edn. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. — (1980), “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” Journal of Philosophy, LXXVII (9): 515–572. Sen, A. (1992), Inequality Reexamined. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. — (1999), Development as Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. — (2009), The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Singer, P. (1972), “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1(3): 229–243. Thomson, J. J. (1990), The Realm of Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, B. (1962), “The Idea of Equality,” in P. Laslett and W. G. Runciman (eds), Philosophy, Politics and Society (Second Series). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Nozick, R. (1974), Anarchy, State and Utopia. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Nussbaum, M. C. (2011), Creating Capabilities. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Pogge, T. (2002), World Poverty and Human Rights. Cambridge: Polity Press. — (2005), Global Institutions and Responsibilities: Achieving Global Justice. Malden, MA: Blackwell. — (2010), Politics as Usual. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Postema, G. J. (1989), “In Defense of `French Nonsense: Fundamental Rights in Constitutional Jurisprudence,” in B. Zenon and M. Neil (eds), Enlightenment, Rights and Revolution. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Rawls, J. (1971), A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (1979), “A Well-Ordered Society,” in P. Laslet and J. Fishkin (eds), Philosophy

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6 REASSESSING PUNISHMENT: RETRIBUTIVE VERSUS RESTORATIVE JUSTICE Trudy D. Conway

Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions. (Foucault, 1983)

In June 2013 Paula Cooper, a ­16-year-old sentenced to death by electrocution, was released from an Indiana prison at the age of 43. Cooper had been sentenced to death for the 1985 petty robbery and brutal murder of Ruth Pelke, a 78-year-old Bible teacher. Initially passionately supportive of Cooper’s execution, Pelke’s grandson Bill became an equally passionate participant in national and international efforts to overturn Cooper’s death sentence (King, 2003, Pelke, 2003). In 1989, the Indiana Supreme Court commuted Cooper’s sentence to 60  years, a sentence further reduced for good behavior and engagement in educational and service activities. During her imprisonment, Cooper completed a high school and college degree correspondence program and served as a trainer of companion dogs for disabled persons and inmate counselor. Based on her behavior, Paula received permission to participate in a work release program enabling her to contribute earnings to victim support programs. Meeting with Cooper upon her

Punishment is clearly an institutional practice worth questioning. Yet most of us, rarely notice or think about it, let alone rigorously question its rationale, reach, and repercussion. Removed from the everyday activities of our lives, we are not struck by questions raised behind the secured doors of courtrooms and prisons. Yet the questions remain, haunting lives shaped by the work of these institutions. Are these institutions focused on retributive justice (the assigning of what is justly due to violators of the law), restorative justice (the reparative healing of persons and relations damaged by offenders), or the avoidance of injustice (the deterring of disorder causing misery); are courts and prisons institutions for manifesting the power of the state, furthering individual and communal well-being or maintaining entrenched societal structures and orders? Victims and offenders are thrust into questions not surfacing within the daily concerns of many persons. *** 95

Trudy D. Conway of such action. Social biologists argue that instinctual responses of anger are a result of our evolutionary development, for human survival required responses conveying that harmful wrongdoing would not go unaddressed. The call for punishment appears to be traceable to this elemental and visceral response. In raising children, failures to care about and respond to harmful wrongdoing, be it by children or caretakers, justifiably elicit concern. Callous indifference to harms done to others reveals a narrow focusing on self-concern. Aristotle describes anger as a response to perceived injustice, slight, or injury, while recognizing the challenge of responding with righteous anger to the right person, at the right time, to the right extent, for the right duration, in the right manner, and for the right reason (Aristotle, 1941, 1380–1381, 1999, 61–62, 80). Avoiding the extremes of indifference or inappropriately tepid anger and the varied forms of excessive anger, persons are called to work on cultivating virtuous anger described as a righteous response leaning more toward the deficient and evidencing a propensity toward mildness and away from revenge (Aristotle, 1999, 26). A person who has cultivated such a response “is ready to pardon, not eager to exact a penalty” (61). While adumbrating the contours of such virtuous response, Aristotle cautions us to recognize the difficulty of hitting such a mean, resulting in the virtuous response being “rare, praiseworthy, and fine” (29). Such righteous anger requires the exercising of practical wisdom, seasoned deliberation about how to respond to the anger-evoking offender. In a similar way, citizens hold states responsible for responding to harmful wrongdoing. This development took the power to impose punishment away from private individuals, establishing a legal system which retained a

release, Pelke reiterated his commitment to supporting her efforts to begin life anew following 28 years of imprisonment. In a 2004 Indianapolis Star interview, Cooper stated that, “Everybody has a responsibility to do right . . ., and if you do wrong, you should be punished,” adding that “rehabilitation comes from you. If you’re not ready to be rehabilitated, you won’t be.”1 JUST RETRIBUTION Paula Cooper’s punishment, commutation, and release focus well a range of responses to fundamental questions about state responses to illegal wrongdoing. They also bring us to address the fundamental questions—why and how should the state punish? Since the time of Socrates’s imprisonment and execution, philosophers have grappled with questions regarding punishment on both theoretical and practical levels. Historical, sociological, economic, psychological, and legal considerations have only deepened our awareness of the complexity of punishment and our responses to it. The three decade span of the Paula Cooper case reveals the reassessments of approaches to punishment found in deliberations about punishment since the trial of Socrates. Shifting historical emphases on retribution, deterrence, and restoration characterize our deliberations about this human practice and institution. The last half century of American society mirrors such shifting understandings of why and how the state should punish. There appears to be agreement that harmful wrongdoing does and should evoke response; such reasoning is found within relationships, families, communities, and civil societies. Failure to respond manifests a callous disregard of persons who are, could have been or could still be the targets 96

REASSESSING PUNISHMENT through deliberative institutions with codified guidelines and procedures. Punishment exacted through a criminal justice system is thus seen as a matter of just retribution or deserved “payback” for victims and members of society. Some retributivists argue that in feeling anger and demanding just retribution, society shows a level of respect for persons committing crimes in holding them to be free and responsible agents. Just retribution is thus seen as a matter of rectificatory justice, whereby we right wrongs, measure for measure, by making the convicted suffer as the victim suffered. On the basis of this reasoning, graver crimes evoke greater anger and demand greater punishment. Given this, punishment must entail the infliction of some kind of pain, harm, deprivation, or something normally considered undesirable and unpleasant. Such punishment must be administered by some rightful authority according to reasonable standards and procedures to a person judged guilty of an offense against some publically codified law or rule. In focusing on the goal of just retribution, such a conception of punishment has a clear retrospective orientation. Herein punishment focuses on condemning and righting past wrongs by giving offenders what they deserve. Thus retributive justice (pay back for wrongs done) allows for just rectification (righting of wrongs). Kant, a strong retributivist, sharpens the focus of such a retributive approach to punishment, laying the foundation for modern retributivist approaches.2 While recognizing a type of natural punishment through which the evil ways of persons result in their own suffering, Kant focuses on juridical punishment imposed by the state on offenders. The state punishes offenders simply and only because it is the right thing to do, because justice demands that it render to each what

retaliatory principle, requiring that wrongdoers suffer for their actions, but transferred its application from victims to the state. In doing so, the legal system asserted the power of the state against the law-violating offender, allowing victims and affiliated persons to play a role solely as witnesses in a process focused on due process and the rights of offenders in the meeting out of punishment for legal violations. Such a state versus offender approach conducted through the adversarial roles of prosecutors and defense attorneys often sidelines the needs and concerns of victims and affiliated persons, thereby resulting in the state focusing on a violation of the legal system. Private response came to be replaced by a civic, suitably restrained system of public punishment directed by the state through a legal system providing for trials and punishment of convicted offenders. States were invested with the responsibility of responding to wrongdoing codified as illegal. In violating laws binding citizens across and within generations in ways that make shared civic life possible, offenders anger members of society who refuse to commit such offenses. Such offenders not only harm victims, but also violate the trust, goodwill, and solidarity essential to communal life. Acting as moral free-riders, they benefit from, while violating, the rule of law enabling civic life. The desire for retaliatory punishment stems from the expectation that such persons must be held accountable for the wrongs they have committed against fellow persons. Offenders are seen as the proper targets of righteous anger, followed by the desire to retaliate and make wrongdoers pay for their crimes in terms of just reciprocity. Law-abiding citizens seek to be avenged by and through the law. The legal system came to be the surrogate of personal judgment and response channeled 97

Trudy D. Conway the right of retaliation must be the only principle regulating the decisions of judicial deliberators. The principle of equality—like with like—must set the mode and measure of punishment thereby ensuring “pure and strict legal justice” (139). Offenders can thereby come to recognize, “Accordingly, any undeserved evil that you inflict on someone else among the people is one you do to yourself. If you vilify, you vilify yourself; if you steal from him, you steal from yourself; if you kill, you kill yourself” (138). Thus the right of retaliation (ius talionis), when properly understood, is the only principle which, in regulating a public court as distinguished from private, individual judgment, can assign both the quality and quantity of just punishment. Kant’s strong retributivist reasoning is shown most clearly in his succinct justification of capital punishment—“if .  .  . he has committed a murder, he must die.” Persons convicted of murder must be executed because “there is no juridical substitute that will satisfy the requirements of legal justice” (139). There is no equality between life, however miserable, and death, and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. Kant goes so far as to argue that even if a civil society is to be dissolved through the consent of its citizens, execution of murderers must occur prior to such dissolution, for otherwise the former citizens will bear bloodguilt as accomplices in a public violation of legal justice. Justice demands that no wrong go unrectified through juridical punishment. But, very importantly, Kant adds the requirement that such punishment must be kept free of all inhumane maltreatment and be administered in accordance with a system of law that insures that only the deserving

each deserves. Thus guilt is the necessary and sufficient condition of punishment. According to Kant’s reasoning, in refusing to constrain their actions within the law and taking advantage of others’ law abiding, offenders willed their own punishment. In unbalancing the scales of justice, offenders obligate a legal rectifying of their wrongs. The standard guiding the determination of justice must be ius or lex talionis, the right or law of retaliation, governed by the principle of equality. Violations of societal laws are seen as rationally demanding commensurate retaliation according to the talionic principle. The courts must use reason to determine a punishment that fits and thereby equalizes the crime. Hegel reinforces such retributive reasoning: “[T]he universal feeling of peoples and individuals toward crime is, and always has been, that it deserves to be punished, and what the criminal has done should be done to him .. . . [E]quality remains merely the basic measure of the criminal’s essential desert, but not of the specific external shape which the retribution should take .. . . It is then . . . a matter for the understanding to seek an approximate equivalence” (128–129). The exclusive focus of punishment for retributivists must be justice in response to an offender having been found guilty of a criminal offense. As Kant emphasizes, “Juridical punishment can never be administered merely as a means to promote some other good for the criminal himself or for civil society, but instead it must in all cases be imposed on him only on the ground that he has committed a crime; for a human being can never be manipulated merely as a means to the purposes of someone else .  .  . ” (138). Justice demands that convicted criminals pay in due measure for the crimes they have committed. Consequentialist preoccupations must not mar the singular focus of punishment; 98

REASSESSING PUNISHMENT that entail acts that degrade the punisher or the punished. Thus the range of punishment must be set within moral limits. In seeking just retribution, we must not allow the humanly degrading acts of offenders to dictate our punitive response. We stop short of punishments that cross a moral boundary, even if such punishment meets out what is retributively deserved. Thus on the basis of evolving standards of decency, a proportionate, rather than a strict, retributivism, is required. In upholding such standards, society clearly states a refusal to retaliate in kind in all cases. Such refusals clearly demarcate the difference between the punished and punisher. Such reasoning, drawing a limit to kinds of morally acceptable punishments, can be seen in the constitutional reviews of punishment in light of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution (“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted,” and no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of the law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”). To be declared unconstitutional, punishments need only be shown to be cruel and unusual or to violate due process. Heinously cruel acts cannot be punished by equally cruel responses; punishments cannot be arbitrarily and randomly applied in unjust ways. Numerous Supreme Court deliberations have seen the Justices reverse previous rulings upholding the constitutionality of types of punishment, in light of such evolving standards of decency as shown in, for example, Atkins v. Virginia overturning Penry v. Lynaugh, Roper v. Simmons overturning Stanford v. Kentucky/Thompson v. Oklahoma and Justices Stevens, Powell, and Blackmun’s reversals on the death penalty in the decades following Furman v. Georgia (Cohen, 2013).

are punished following fair procedures of judicial deliberation. Kant’s caveat is clear: justice and justice alone must determine the justification, end, procedures, and means of punishment. Interestingly, attentiveness to these Kantian stipulations brings some retributivists to critique forms of punishment judged by Kant to fulfill the requirements of retributive justice.3 The history of forms of punishment clearly manifests evolving standards of decency. We look with horror on past punishments such as torturous stretching on the rack, public stockades, chain gang labor, stoning, disemboweling, quartering, gassing, and electrocuting. Over time, our ways of punishment have shifted from corporeal forms of punishing to forms restricting the exercising of rights and range of freedom. Even in response to extremely heinous crimes, a retributive approach as articulated by Kant does not necessarily require doing the same kind of retaliatory act. It is thus reasoned that retributive justice requires proportionate, not strictly identical, punishment. In some cases, it would be logically impossible to follow a strict retributivism, for example in the case of a serial killer. In other cases, moral concerns restrict our punishment possibilities. Such a proportionate retributivist approach assumes there is a range of punishment. A punishment beyond what is deserved would be unjust to the convicted offender; a degree of punishment below what is deserved would be unjust to the victim. The upper limit of retributive punishment would strictly equal the crime, fitting the demands of ius talionis exactly or as close as is possible. While retributively just, such punishment would be unacceptable if it was judged to violate morally acceptable forms of punishment. Just as we refuse to rape rapists and torture torturers in punishing them, so we must exclude all punishments 99

Trudy D. Conway In 2008, Baze v. Rees ruled that Kentucky’s triple cocktail lethal injection method did not violate the Eighth Amendment, upholding the primary execution method used in the then current 35 retention states. Yet seven Justices wrote separate opinions in this case, indicating that the Court is far from having reached a consensus regarding this method of punishment. It is expected that new challenges will emerge, as the Court continues to grapple with the standard expressed in In re Kemmler in 1890 and still upheld that consistent with the Eighth Amendment, capital punishment must result in nothing more than “the mere extinguishing of life” in response to the heinous taking of life. In an interesting twist on retributive justification of types of punishment, retired Justice John Paul Stevens argued that Justice John Roberts’s opinion in this ruling evidenced that the Court rejected the premise that capital punishment serves a retributive purpose. Drawing on challengeable assumptions about the practice of execution by lethal injection, Justice Stevens reasoned that The Eighth Amendment has been construed to prohibit needless suffering and significant risks of harm to the defendant. As a matter of constitutional law, what was once a gruesome event has been transformed into a procedure comparable to the administration of anesthesia in a hospital operating room. By requiring that an execution be relatively painless, we protect the inmate from enduring any punishment that is comparable to the suffering inflicted on his victim. We have thus undermined the premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based. (218)4 In an ironic twist of reasoning, lethal injection, viewed as a more humane punishment in

comparison with execution by electrocution or asphyxiation, is seen by some retributivists as not fulfilling the demand for retaliatory justice for heinously cruel offenses. Such current punishment is here interpreted to fail to return like with like for capital crimes. Responses such as this reveal the extent to which American society continues to wrestle with the pure demands of retributive justice, while strongly emphasizing such an approach. QUESTIONING RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE The Pelke family’s immediate response to Ruth’s murder was to demand punishment equal to the crime committed. For them, anything less than that would be a travesty of justice. Some relatives expressed relief that the judge “had the guts” to give Paula exactly what she deserved—a death sentence. Over time Bill Pelke, Ruth’s grandson, became deeply troubled by the demands of such retributivist reasoning which seemed to cast the state in the role of Ruth’s righteous avenger. While Kant esteemed the purity and clarity of retributive justice, Pelke came to question the narrow restrictedness of this retrospective approach to punishment. Pelke began a journey of inquiry bringing him to take a far more holistic and prospective approach to punishment and to examine the concrete realities at play in the powerful application of punishment. He came to reason that a conception of punishment exclusively and narrowly focused on the state’s righting past wrongs not only fails to address the human suffering caused by wrongdoing, but also results in compounding human suffering over time. He grew increasingly concerned that a purely retributive conception of punishment bracketed questions about the sources of criminal behavior and the consistency of application of punishment. Pelke

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REASSESSING PUNISHMENT began to delve deeper into questions about the powerful reach of institutions exacting punishment and its impact on communities. He suspected the narrow focus of just retribution masked a more elemental desire for retaliatory, anger-driven revenge. He recognized that no punishment could ever truly right the horrific wrong done to his grandmother. Drawing on the principles that shaped her deepest convictions, Bill sought more than a retrospective punishment. He sought a prospective punishment that might transform Paula Cooper—what he described as a civilized type of punishment that also had a civilizing effect on the offender and society. Recognizing Paula’s insight that she would have to be the agent of such transformation, he advocated a type of punishment that would set up conditions encouraging such an effect over time. Bill sought out members of Paula’s family to understand her past and the possibility of such transformation; his contact with Paula encouraged such development. As his understanding of an alternative approach to punishment deepened, he worked to create a number of murder victim family member organizations focused on what came to be termed “restorative justice.” Through one of them, he encountered persons like Azim Khamisa who, on their own, had shaped an alternate understanding of justice and a way to live this understanding. Like Bill, Azim was thrown into reflection on punishment due to a personal tragedy (King 250–273). On January 21, 1995, a 19-year-old California University student named Tariq Khamisa began the final run of his pizza delivery shift. Realizing he has been set up for a pizza-jacking, Tariq attempted to drive away. At that moment, a bullet shattered the window taking his life. His father described the news of his son’s death as a nuclear

bomb detonating within him, shattering him into pieces. Tony Hicks was quickly named a suspect. Shortly before the murder, California had passed a “tough on crime” law allowing adolescents under the age of 16 to be prosecuted as adults. The new ruling changed everything in Tony’s life. Egged on to hold a pistol, angered by Tariq’s refusal to give up the pizzas, and encouraged to shoot, Tony fired the fatal shot. Azim found it incredible that three 14-year-olds and an ­18-year-old had been arrested in connection with his son’s killing. Azim began to be troubled by the chorus of voices crying for just retribution. From the paralysis of his grief came his inspiration. Rather than having Tariq’s killer be the target of his anger, he would target the forces that contributed to this senseless act of juvenile violence. Rather than demanding retaliatory justice, Azim threw his energy into building a foundation committed to ending youth violence. With the support of Tony’s grandfather Ples and eventually Tony himself, the Tariq Khamisa Foundation began to thrive. Their shared commitment to the foundation transformed their lives, helping them to heal and Tony to accept responsibility. Tony pleaded guilty to first-degree murder to avoid the pain a trial would cause these two families. Expressing deep regret for his senseless act of violence, he hoped for Azim’s forgiveness, which in turn filled Azim with hope for this young man’s moral transformation. After hearing the sentence of 25  years to life, Azim’s response focused on restorative rather than retributive justice. He sought to relieve his anger by working to heal and restore all persons affected by Tariq’s murder, and to work to address conditions contributing to youth violence and prison recidivism. Azim and Ples collaborated on a school-based program teaching that violence is an evil choice

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Trudy D. Conway with tragically irrevocable consequences for a wide range of persons. Tony participated through letters explaining his regrettable choices and their wide-ranging repercussions. The program’s success led to national recognition and funding and even more importantly Tony’s deepening commitment to living a better life. Azim encouraged Tony to participate in educational programming and walk a straight path in prison, leading toward the possibility of his parole after 25 years and eventual work at their foundation. Azim gained strength through persons like Bill Pelke who helped from an organization, Murder Victims for Reconciliation, which works to reorient the justice system from retributive toward restorative justice. Over time both Bill and Azim came to explore the complex contributing factors of crime and the gravely unequal functioning of the criminal justice system as tied to hierarchies of race and class. The pure demands of retributive justice began to ring hollow the more they learned of the power of the state in selectively and inequitably prosecuting and punishing lower and upper class criminal behavior set across a racial divide. Both began to recognize competing strands of discourse found within their Christian and Muslim traditions on the purpose and methods of punishment, pulling toward a purely, strictly retributive understanding or toward a more restorative understanding.5 Since the late 1970s, there has been growing national and global interest in programs focusing on restorative justice.6 Yet the philosophical reasoning underlying such programs has been part of the philosophical tradition since its origins in ancient Greece. Aspects of the broader restorative approach to punishment affirmed by Pelke and Khamisa are traceable to the writings of Plato (1963). In the Laws, Plato issues a

cautionary note regarding the risk of righteous anger sliding into moral outrage and issuing in vengeance, since vengeance “is not judgment—for judgment is, like justice, a good.” Rather vengeance is a consequence of moral failing (“iniquity”) and results in further suffering, for “[h]e that meets it and he that misses it are alike unhappy, the one because he gets no healing . . ., the other in that he is cut off for the salvation of many another” (Laws, V. 728c). Plato’s comments on punishment in numerous dialogues do not deny an important retributive dimension in punishment, but speak to the need to avoid reducing punishment solely to this dimension. Plato clarifies that ideally “judgment by sentence of law is never inflicted for harm’s sake. Its normal effect is one of two; it makes him that suffers it a better man, or failing this, less of a wretch” (Laws 854d). Punishment must be more than an exercise in retributive justice, and retribution itself must be transformed from mere retaliative matching of “like with like” to bringing offenders to recognize the harm they have done and the debt they owe to the victim and community harmed by their crime. Here, the emphasis shifts from what the state does to offenders to what offenders owe to victims. What is done to offenders is transformed into what offenders must sacrifice and do.7 Retribution is thus transformed into restitution and restoration. Plato emphasizes that “one ought not to return a wrong or an injury to any person, whatever the provocation is” (Crito 49d). Herein the focus subtly shifts from doing retaliatory harm to offenders suffering loss, pain, or sacrifice to compensate for harm done by them to their victims. To be so transformed, punishment must engage offenders as moral beings. In arguing that punishment must encourage recognition of both wrongs done and

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REASSESSING PUNISHMENT the need for restitution to victims for such wrongs, Plato emphasizes that, the purpose of the penalty is not to cancel the crime—what is once done can never be made undone—but to bring the criminal and all who witness his punishment in the future to complete renunciation of such criminality, or at least to recovery in great part from this dreadful state. For all these reasons, and since it has all these ends in view, the law must take careful aim at its mark; it must be exact in determining the magnitude of the correction imposed on the particular offense, and, above all, the amount of compensation to be paid. (Laws 934b) A purely retributive approach always risks masking what is rightly termed retaliatory vengeance. In the Protagoras, Plato explains, In punishing the wrongdoers, no one concentrates on the fact that a man has done wrong in the past, or punishes him on that account, unless taking blind vengeance like a beast. No, punishment is not inflicted by a rational man for the sake of the crime that was committed—after all one cannot undo what is past—but for the sake of the future, to prevent either the same man or, by spectacle of his punishment, someone else from doing wrong again . . . Whoever stays outside the lines [of the law], it punishes, and the name given to this punishment both among yourselves and in many places is correction, intimating that the penalty corrects or guides. (324b, 326e) Repeatedly in numerous dialogues, Plato presents arguments in support of punishment that is more a matter of restorative justice rather than merely reducible to retributive justice. Restorative justice programs, although varied in practice, focus on a constellation

of convictions and principles consistent with the orientation revealed in Plato’s comments. Rather than narrowly focusing on retributive responses to legal violations, they focus on addressing human harms and needs—the needs of crime victims, local communities, and offenders. Crime victims need the disclosure of truth—a recognition and acknowledgement of the harm done by agents and a need to rectify the wrong in some way. Communities need recognition of the fact that crime violates shared values and damages all of us, rendering us more vulnerable and less secure and trusting. Offenders need to recognize and be held accountable for the harm they chose to do to persons and provide restitution or reparation, even if only partial and symbolic due to penal restrictions on their actions. Our adversarial judicial system works against addressing such multiple needs. Often even when sentenced, offenders are not encouraged to take responsibility for their action, face the harms their actions have produced, and act to rectify their offenses. Moral reparation for wrongs and harms often goes unattended. Aristotle describes shame as a quasi-virtue which opens the possibility of transformation. But this quasi-virtue in no way entails reducing the person to a shameful act in a way that counteracts transformation. Agents who feel shame recognize they could have chosen otherwise and can now do so; without this, there is no reason for associating this response with the virtues. At the same time recognition of contributing factors in crime, even the extent to which harms done to offenders contributed to their choices, plays a role in the promotion of self-examination and transformation of offenders. Punishment should thus focus not exclusively on retribution, but on bringing offenders to recognize and respond to the

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Trudy D. Conway need for moral, and in some cases material, reparation for harms done to persons and communities. Such a restorative approach to punishment is far more demanding than a retributive one. While the American penal system remains focused on an adversarial approach strongly oriented toward retributive justice, a variety of programs and practices inside and outside prisons foster a far more restorative justice approach. At the center of restorative justice is the recognition of crime as entailing harms done to persons within communities rather than mere legal transgressions. Restorative justice entails a paradigm or “lens” shift from exclusively punitive responses to reparations for harms done by persons to persons. Such harms include material and psychological damage to victims and affiliates, the erosion of social trust and security, and damage done by offenders to themselves and their affiliates. Restorative justice programs require that members of society address ways of preventing crime and of rehabilitating persons who commit crimes, holding them responsible and accountable, but also capable of transformation. Refusing to reduce offenders to their worst acts, such a restorative justice approach opposes punitive measures that give up on offenders, defining them reductively and permanently as criminals. Many restorative justice programs also offer the option of restorative mediation between offenders and victims when voluntarily chosen and carefully counseled. Such encounters play a significant role in both the moral transformation of persons sentenced to punishment and the healing process of crime victims. From such a broad perspective, punishment must serve multiple interwoven ends—(1) protection of the common good of persons in society, (2) restoration of public order, (3) restitution for wrongs done

to persons, and (4) rehabilitation of offenders. Howard Zehr, a leading spokesperson of this model, emphasizes that we should conceive of systems of punishment along a continuum between retributive and restorative justice approaches and attentively work to move our criminal justice systems increasingly toward the restorative end of the spectrum. Zehr also stresses that the common focus of both approaches is rectificatory justice—the righting of wrongs; they differ in terms of their account of what actually rights wrongs. Retributive justice is seen as righting the wrongs done through legal violations by inflicting proportionate suffering on the culpable offender. In contrast, Restorative justice theory argues that what truly vindicates is acknowledgment of victims’ harms and needs, combined with an active effort to encourage offenders to take responsibility, make right the wrongs, and address the causes of their behavior. By addressing this need for vindication in a positive way, restorative justice has the potential to affirm both victim and offender and to help them transform their lives. (Zehr, 2002, 59) Herein the focus shifts to harms done to victims and communities and offenders coming to acknowledge the human consequences of their actions and the need to make restitution for such harms. Restitution to and support of victims conveys their suffering is being taken seriously and encourages offenders to respond constructively. From such a perspective, punishment would not be solely retributive, retrospectively righting wrongs from the past but would be prospectively directed to human transformation and restoration in the context of community. As John Braithwaite emphasizes,

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REASSESSING PUNISHMENT [R]estorative justice involves a shift toward an active conception of responsibility, while still finding a more limited place for passive responsibility than is standard in criminal jurisprudence. While passive responsibility means an offender being responsible for a wrong he has committed in the past, active responsibility is a virtue, the virtue of taking responsibility for repairing the harm that has been done, the relationships that have been damaged. Restorative justice is about creating spaces where not only offenders, but also other concerned citizens will find it safe to take active responsibility for righting the wrong done. (342) Some scholars argue that we must choose between a punishment paradigm and a restorative paradigm (Ashworth, 1999). But Zehr’s continuum would seem to argue against such forced options. As Plato emphasized, we can reconceive punishment as being a part of or aiming at restoration of the offender and the community. In the United States, restorative justice approaches have been focused largely on juvenile offenses and minor adult offenses. A reorientation toward restorative approaches to major adult offenses would entail a foundational shift in this criminal justice system. At present, restorative approaches tend to supplement rather than replace retributive approaches. Such a supplemental approach recognizes that a restorative approach may be unworkable in all cases, given that recalcitrant offenders and excessively vindictive victims may undermine the possibility of such an approach. While recognizing this, the wide range of innovative restorative practices developing in specific countries (such as New Zealand and Canada), local communities, and particular corrections facilities further a restorative reorientation that balances

the settled tendency toward a purely retributive approach to punishment. Much can be said in favor of such a restorative approach to punishment and efforts to move the criminal justice system in that direction. Movement toward such an approach would modify, supplement, or provide alternatives to the state-pitted-againstthe-offender adversarial model. In other societies such a restorative model has long been the norm, as exemplified in the Afghani jirga practice, Navajo peacemaking courts, Maori conferencing practices, and aboriginal sentencing circles in native Canadian communities. In recent years, international attention has been directed to noteworthy models of restorative justice, such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and indigenous practices fostering reconciliation following grave violence, such as the Fambul Tok practice following the Sierra Leone internecine war, and the reconciliation practices following the Rwandan massacres.8 Numerous communities and local courts in the United States have begun to institutionalize incrementally such restorative practices.9 Awareness of this alternative model has very gradually increased in the United States, but for the most part American citizens continue to conceive criminal justice solely in terms of the retributive model. The stark contrast between indigenous practices of restorative justice in other parts of the world and the predominant Western model of punishment, which now tends in a far more retributive direction, raises another set of questions. Is it the case that more restorative models tend to be embedded in communities holding a far more communitarian conception of persons in contrast to more liberal conceptions emphasizing autonomous selves and procedural justice focusing on protecting individuals’ rights? The indigenous restorative

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Trudy D. Conway practices emphasized in response to grievous harms found in the societies of South Africa, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone appear to be deeply rooted in the conception of Ubuntu which conceives persons as inextricably embedded in an interconnected network of interpersonal relations.10 Emphases on restoration, reconciliation, rehabilitation, and reconstruction stem from this fundamental core conception. Is it the case that a more liberal polity pulls toward one end of Zehr’s spectrum and a more communitarian polity toward the other, lending toward more retributive or restorative conceptions of punishment? While we have seen increased awareness of the theory and practice of restorative justice in the United States, significant changes in the American criminal justice system work dramatically against moving this system in a restorative direction. Mass incarcerations due to three-strike and rigid mandatory minimum sentencing practices have resulted in prisons being transformed into massive human warehouses of convicted felons.11 Such practices have resulted in the United States: having the highest incarceration in the world with 2¼ million prisoners; while having 5  percent of the world’s population, having 25 percent of the world’s prison population; 1 in every 107 adult Americans being in prison. The escalating prison population over the past three decades has resulted in massive overcrowding and fiscal burdens, during a period of declining crime rates.12 Overcrowding and stretched resources work against restorative approaches. In recent times, the outsourcing of prisons to for-profit corporations that seek to minimize costs and maximize profits decreases the availability of counseling, spiritual ministry, and rehabilitative, educational, vocational, and reentry programming which contribute to the personal

transformation seen in Paula Cooper and Tony Hicks. Such for-profit prisons risk reducing offender responsibility, transformation, and reintegration in communities. A profit-making business model, an overcrowded penal environment, and increasing budgetary pressures work against the orientation Zehr and Braithwaite encourage. In addition, relocating prisons from local communities to remoter rural settings diminishes the possibility of familial and communal relations which so often play a role in personal transformation and reintegration. The constellation of such factors greatly increases the likelihood of prisons being transformed into debilitating and crime ridden holding cells for recidivist offenders. Failure to reorient the criminal justice system in a restorative direction will likely result in pushing this system toward the other end of the spectrum—toward a punitive system that increasingly warehouses an endlessly increasing supply of offenders whose actions once evoked justifiable anger, who have been removed from local communities, and are seen now as best forgotten, so long as they get their just deserts. Such an approach fosters recidivism, indifference to the plight of both victims and offenders, and manifests a glaring failure to address the complexity of the sources, realities, and consequences of crime that harms persons. Such a system tragically ends up only remotely connected with the noble concern of justice. Foucault’s warning is right. To be committed to justice requires us to devote ourselves to examining ceaselessly our conceptions and practices of it. This alone enables us to live justly with one another. We fail to do so at the risk of perpetuating a current criminal justice system only remotely focused on justice. To do so

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REASSESSING PUNISHMENT diminishes not only our practicing of justice but also in the end our capacity for even thinking about justice. As Plato rightly recognized in response to Socrates’ punishment, our humanity is in peril if we fail to attend closely to justice.



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Notes See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2343663/Paula-Cooper-released-GrandsonBible-studies-teacher-murdered-1986-wantskiller-meal-shops-released-prison-yesterday. html 2 See Kant’s Metaphysical Elements of Justice, 2nd edn (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999). This chapter focuses on retributive approaches and contrasting restorative approaches. Overall, there have been three broad modern approaches to punishment. From 1780 to 1860, debates focused on Kantian/Hegelian retributive approaches and Bentham’s utilitarian approach. From 1860 through 1960, utilitarian approaches were emphasized, followed by a more retributive approach from the 1960s through today. Restorative justice approaches began to gain attention in the 1980s. For such a broad historical overview, see Michael Tonry’s “Thinking about Punishment,” in Why Punish? How Much? (Tonry, 2011). 3 Jeffrey Reiman offers an example of this reasoning in his “Justice, Civilization and the Death Penalty,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 130. 4 Justice Stevens went on to add in his separate opinion, “Quoting from an earlier opinion by Justice White, I stated that the death penalty represents ‘the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social and public purposes’” (218). 5 Pelke still witnesses the divided Christian conceptions of punishments as played out in the Southern Bible Belt’s fundamentalist enthusiasm for the death penalty versus the abolitionist activism of other Christian denominations. Khamisa’s Pakistani background discloses tensions between fundamentalist demands for strict Sharia-based applications

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of severe punishments and Sufi understandings of Islamic punitive justice as being strictly applicable only in societies that have already fulfilled the demands of distributive and economic justice. The last four decades have produced a range of philosophical and theological writings plus more recent jurisprudence writings such as John Braithwaite’s Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation (New York: Oxford, 2001), Clifford Dorne’s Restorative Justice in the United States (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2007), Johnstone and van Ness’s Handbook of Restorative Justice (Cullompton, UK: Wilan, 2006), and Sullivan and Tifft’s Handbook of Restorative Justice: A Global Perspective (London: Routledge, 2008). This shifts the interpretation of “an eye for an eye” from the punisher damaging the offender’s eye to retaliate his damaging of the victim’s eye to the punished restoring the damage done to the eye of the victim. See Buck for an analysis of the commonly misunderstood phrase. Documentaries have recorded these varied practices found in South African, Rwandan, and Sierra Leone communities. See Facing the Truth with Bill Moyers (www.films.com), As We Forgive (www.asweforgivemovie.com), and Fambul Tok (www.fambultok.com). Howard Zehr’s works offer a good introduction to restorative justice programming models. See Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999) for a discussion of Ubuntu (31–32). In 2003, Ewing v. California ruled that a 25 year-to-life sentence for a third offence consisting of the theft of three golf clubs did not violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment (583 U.S. 11). All principled retributivists would condemn the injustice of such a grossly disproportionate punishment. http://www.economist.com/blogs/economistexplains/2013/08/economist-explains-8. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that California must drastically reduce its prison population to relieve extreme overcrowding that exacerbates risks of violence, illness, and death.

Trudy D. Conway WORKS CITED Aristotle (1941), “Rhetoric,” in The Collected Works of Aristotle, trans. R. McKeon. New York: Random. — (1999), Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Ashworth, A. (1999), “Some Doubts about Restorative Justice,” Criminal Law Forum, 4: 277–299. Braithwaite, J. (2011), “In Search of Restorative Jurisprudence,” in M. Tonry (ed.), Why Punish? How Much? New York: Oxford, pp. 337–352. Buck, R. (2013), “Hebrew Scriptures—‘An Eye for An Eye,’” in V. Schieber, T. Conway, and D. McCarthy (eds), Where Justice and Mercy Meet. Collegeville, MI: Liturgical Press. Cohen, A. (2013), “Why Don’t Supreme Court Justices Ever Change Their Minds in Favor of the Death Penalty?” The Atlantic (December 10). Available online: http://www.theatlantic. com/national/archive/2013/12/ why-dont-supreme-court-justicesever-change-their-minds-in-em-favor-emof-the-death-penalty/282100/ (accessed September 23, 2014). Foucault, M. (1983), “Vous êtes dangereux,” in Libération (Paris, June 30), 20. Repr. in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, 1989; tr. 1991.

Hegel, G. (1999), “Wrong [Das Unrecht] from Elements of the Philosophy of Right,” A. Wood (ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. In re Kemmler (136 U.S. at 447, 34 L. Ed. 519, 10 S. Ct. 930). Kant, I. (1999), Metaphysical Elements of Justice, 2nd edn. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. King, R. (2003), Don’t Kill in Our Names, Families of Murder Victims Speak Out Against the Death Penalty. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers. Pelke, B. (2003), Journey of Hope . . . From Violence to Healing. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris. Plato (1963), The Collected Dialogues of Plato, E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (eds). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reiman, J. (1985), “Justice, Civilization and the Death Penalty,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14 (2), 115–148. Schieber, V., Conway, T., and McCarthy, D. (2013), Where Justice and Mercy Meet. Collegeville, MI: Liturgical Press. Stevens, J. (2011), Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir. New York: Little, Brown. Tonry, M. (2011), Why Punish? How Much? New York: Oxford. Tutu, D. (1999), No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Doubleday. Zehr, H. (2002), The Little Book of Restorative Justice. Intercourse, PA: Good Books.

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7 WAR George R. Lucas, Jr

While the topic of this chapter stands most obviously in sharp relief to the companion chapter on “Peace,” it bears significant connection to other topics in this Companion, ranging from Sovereignty and Cosmopolitanism, to Immigration and border control, to revolutions fought for the sake of liberty, equality, justice, and human rights. War—conventionally understood as the opposite of peace, tranquility, security, and stability—represents a form of conflict among nations and peoples in which armed force, or the threat of armed force, is used by a nation’s political leadership and elites in order to further their nation’s (and perhaps also their allies’) interests in one or more of the areas cited earlier. War, in particular, is thought to represent a form of political conflict between adversaries in which everyday modes of conflict resolution—such as diplomacy, negotiation, sanctions, and compromise—have proven ineffective or futile. Armed force is finally resorted to instead, in order to compel the recalcitrant adversary to comply with a more powerful nation’s will or ambitions (Orend, 2006, 2008). The nineteenth-century Prussian military strategist, Clausewitz (1830/1976: book I: chapters 1–2), provided the classic summative assessment of war as precisely such a “continuation of State policy

by other means.” The goal of armed conflict in pursuit of a nation’s political objectives is, he argued, to defeat the enemy’s armies, occupy his cities, and break his will to fight or resist.

THE STATE-CENTRIC CONCEPTION OF WAR (REALISM) AND ITS PRESUPPOSITIONS This conventional or “classical” understanding of what warfare itself is, as well as when it might be expected to occur, is highly analytical, rationalistic, and heavily dependent upon the underlying paradigm of the nationstate. Indeed, Clausewitz’s own treatment of the subject is frequently characterized as a “Newtonian” conception, steeped in the metaphors of classical physical mechanics, in which the political interests of well-defined nation-states collide like billiard balls, and the competing “forces” of rival national armies are exerted like opposing vectors upon some political “center of gravity” in order to force political affairs into some final desired configuration. Thus, in this conventional or classical understanding, conflict itself arises almost inevitably, due to the multiplicity and the

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George R. Lucas, Jr frequent incompatibility of more or less reasonable state interests (e.g. in acquiring territory or natural resources, providing for their own individual safety and security, or expanding profitable trade relations). Moreover, while an individual nation-state’s policies, predicated on the pursuit of these interests, may represent a perfectly rational or logical course of action for that particular nation (or coalition of allies), the multiplicity of such interests virtually guarantees incessant conflict between rival sets of interests and their competing policy objectives. Hence an occasional resort to armed force in order to resolve at least some of these conflicts is all but inevitable. This conventional conception of warfare as stemming inevitably from the perpetual rivalry among competing state interests is implicit in the thought of Hobbes (1660), and is rendered explicit simply by substituting the condition of individual states in place of the condition of biological individuals in a “state of nature.” The implication of this conception was more clearly and fully articulated in essays on war and international relations by the Swiss political philosopher, Rousseau (1755a, 1755b, circa 1756), and is largely presupposed as incontrovertible fact by Clausewitz. In the contemporary era, this view of political realism or “international anarchy” has been championed by political scientists like Waltz (1954). Realism or international anarchy has largely supplanted rival theories regarding the origins of warfare, including conceptions grounded in the propensities of human behavior, or, alternatively, in the internal political structure of specific individual states. Those rival theories variously attempted to portray warfare as arising from factors such as the corrupt or misguided policies of defective or morally unjust states (Marx, 1844, 1845,

1848); from defects in the nonrepresentative structure or internal political organization of authoritarian and non-rights respecting states (Kant, 1795); or, most enduringly, from the competitive, aggressive, or otherwise perverse and self-destructive nature of human beings themselves (ranging from Augustine [ca. 410 ce] to a host of twentieth-century social psychologists and cultural anthropologists, notably Freud [1915, 1930/2002], Allport [1937, 1954, 1960], Morris [1967], and Jaynes [1976]). While popular in the middle of the last century, the conceptions of war that attribute its frequency and pervasiveness to features of human psychology or biology have especially fallen into disfavor. In contrast to these rivals, the virtue of the conventional conception of international anarchy is that it both serves to explain the historical pervasiveness and ubiquity of warfare, and offers a foundation for alternative strategies to avoid it through persistent recourse to less-violent management of competing state interests. Importantly, the classical conception scrupulously avoids offering a moral evaluation of the activity of warfare itself, or of the adversaries or enemies who resort to it. While not at all minimizing the propensity of armed conflict to inflict great human suffering, misery, or destruction, the theory of “international anarchy” does not seek to morally decry or condemn this feature of armed conflict, so much as it attempts to account for it. Specifically, the classical conception of international anarchy presupposed in Clausewitz’s description of war, in particular, does not attribute the causes of armed conflict strongly to deviant state structure, nor rely implausibly on preventing war through forcing a uniform political organization on all nations and societies. Neither does it rest upon a “theory” of “human nature,”

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WAR nor otherwise propose (or desire) that individual human beings be other than they are. Instead, the structure and function of individual states, like the variant natures and interests of individual human beings themselves, is simply taken for granted as a random background feature of the international community. As remarked earlier, just as this feature of ungoverned or lawless individuals in a hypothetical state of nature is a formula for ceaseless conflict in Hobbes, so the actual fact of an ungoverned multiplicity of states in the international area is a formula for constant conflict in Rousseau. The formation of alliances and political coalitions, as well as the pursuit of modes of conflict resolution that can defuse the most extreme competition or bring competing interests into greater alignment or equilibrium represent procedural approaches that follow logically from the analysis of nation-state competition and conflict offered by the resulting “realist” model of the international system itself. One glaring conceptual weakness of this theory is its reliance on the underlying paradigm of the nation-state as the fundamental unit of agency in the international arena. Yet humankind’s historical experience of war considerably antedates the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) that gave rise to the nation-state system itself—a system that, indeed, was itself devised as a proposed “cure” for, or solution to, the perpetual wars of religious Reformation and counterReformation in Europe that predated it. The rational foundations of the theory in the collective or common pursuit of the self-interest of discrete states, in addition, runs afoul of the problems that plague similar rationalistic theories in other behavioral disciplines like economics: namely, that the beings whose behavior is hypothetically governed

by rational principles do not always seem to behave in accord with such principles in actual practice. In particular, with respect to war, there seem to a variety of other, less “rational” causal factors that nonetheless play a powerful role in fomenting armed conflict, including contrasting moral or religious beliefs, collective or widely shared feelings of ethnic or national solidarity and pride (sometimes even in the absence of a formal state structure), coupled with lingering resentment over past experiences of cruelty or injustice (often inflicted during previous armed conflicts), or the present infliction of cruelty and injustice by one national or ethnic group on the members of other, rival groups, or societies. The classical conception of war as arising from the competition of rival nation-state interests, moreover, is not especially effective in explaining wars of insurgency and revolution, in which internal competition for control of the state itself and its cultural or political institutions and policies seem to constitute the paramount factors of conflict that lead to violence and the use of armed force.

RECENT CHALLENGES TO THE STATE-CENTRIC MODEL World Wars I and II in the twentieth century, along with the subsequent Korean War (1950–1953), certainly represent paradigmatic instances of conventional or classical warfare of the sort Clausewitz characterized, based upon his own experiences of the Napoleonic wars and the campaigns of Frederick the Great in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The American war of intervention in Vietnam, and likewise the intervention of the Soviet

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George R. Lucas, Jr Union in Afghanistan toward the end of the last century, however, constitute less clear-cut cases (although both were, at the time, thought to be conventional conflicts, or at least “proxy wars” for such interstate “superpower” rivalries during the so-called Cold War). Perhaps the paradigmatic case of classical or conventional war was the Falklands War of 1984, in which two sovereign nationstates, Argentina and Great Britain, led the leaders of each to focus their rival international interests on control of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas). Their unresolved conflict over the ownership and control of this otherwise remote and relatively insignificant territory resulted in a highly choreographed and symmetric escalation of the use of armed force against one another, until the stronger and more determined military power finally prevailed. In the final analysis, this conflict constituted nothing short of a perfectly choreographed Clausewitzian ballet (Regan, 2013). The armed conflict between the nation of Iraq under the leadership of President Saddam Hussein, and a UN coalition force under the command of the United States in early 1991, however, may well have constituted the last instance of thoroughly conventional or “classical” warfare of the Clausewitzian sort for the foreseeable future. The clashing armies of the two powers initially appeared to be of comparable size, material constitution, and technological might. What proved in fact to be the vastly superior military technology, training, and tactical leadership of the ground forces under US command, however, led to so devastating a defeat and destruction of the opposing army in the deserts of Kuwait as to raise serious questions, especially among competitors and adversaries of this coalition, about the viability of conventional armed

conflict for the resolution of any future such political disputes. Two military strategists in the Peoples’ Liberation Army of China (PLA), for example, writing in the immediate aftermath of the (First) Persian Gulf War, all but prophesied the end of any future attempts at a full-scale conventional use of armed conflict, certainly if directed against the United States or its allies (Liang and Xiangsui, 1999). Their monograph, entitled “unrestricted warfare,” acknowledged that, for the foreseeable future, no nation could any longer plausibly expect to oppose the conventional or nuclear military power of the United States. Far from eschewing interstate conflict, however, the authors recommended that the only way forward for China (and, by implication, other adversaries) was to develop offensive and defensive capabilities in other areas, including economic and legal competition (or “lawfare;” see Dunlap, 2001), and especially in the new domain of cyberspace. All of these sectors, but particularly the cyber domain, were areas in which developed nations like the United States were themselves highly vulnerable and by no means dominant. Political adversaries of such nations, the Chinese military theorists argued, must be willing to use their own capabilities to exploit their opponents’ vulnerabilities in the pursuit of their national interests. Thus were born the relentless, state-sponsored campaigns allegedly carried out by a top-secret branch of the PLA, “Unit 61398,” based in Shanghai, of cyber espionage, as well as of alleged covert actions, such as the planting of trap doors and logic bombs in vital civilian infrastructures, as well as massive theft of industrial and classified military technologies from many nations throughout the world (Lucas, 2014c). During roughly the same period, armed attacks against civilian targets in the United

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WAR States, Tanzania, Kenya, the United Kingdom, France, Mali, Spain, and in the Russian Federation by so-called Islamic extremist terrorist organizations (like al-Qaeda) are likewise thought to have ushered in yet another new form of unrestricted, “irregular,” or unconventional warfare, undertaken this time by organizations with no formal state affiliation whatsoever, and often absent any recognizable or well-articulated political interests or objectives, other than fomenting fear and undermining security and the rule of law itself. Anger, moral and religious outrage, or festering frustration and resentment, rather than conventional self-interest or the pursuit of discernable state policy, seem to constitute both the cause of, and the apparent justification for, these new forms of armed conflict. Importantly, in any case, all these forms of armed conflict appear to lie entirely outside the predictive or explanatory power of the nation-state paradigm, and of Clausewitz’s attendant conception of conventional military strategy. Perhaps most tragically, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the putative end to the half-century of the Russo-American “Cold War,” what was at first heralded as a new era of global peace and prosperity quickly degenerated into a succession of humanitarian crises and acts of genocide in failed and inept states throughout the world. Nations in a position to assist or prevent these crises, meanwhile, often had no compelling “state interests” or policies at stake, nor had they any compelling desire to intervene militarily in conflicts not of their own making. The United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, enacted in the aftermath of World War II in response to disclosure of the horrors of the Holocaust in Germany and Eastern Europe, proved to be ineffective in marshaling the needed military

and humanitarian support from the international community. Despite widespread and gravely erroneous assumptions to the contrary, it turned out that the 1948 Convention required little concrete action on the part of signatory nations other than a pledge to refrain themselves from committing or otherwise sponsoring acts of genocide, and to assist both in actively apprehending, and refusing to grant either political asylum or safe harbor within their borders to, individuals charged with fomenting or carrying out such acts elsewhere (Lucas, 2014a). This tragic lacuna led, in the ensuing decade, to an international movement to define the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P, or R to P) as an additional military obligation on the part of otherwise sovereign states (Pattison, 2010, Scheid, 2014). These manifestations of irregular or “postmodern” war (Eco, 1991, Lucas, 2010)  are deeply disturbing, in part because they seem immune to normal “rationalistic” appeals to state interests that might resolve or ameliorate the conflicts, such as compromise or appeasement (on one hand) or threats of punishment and retaliation that might normally serve as deterrents (on the other). They have proven highly destabilizing, because the source of the dangers are often unclear, and the tactics employed by the proponents of violence are difficult to detect and to defend against. The horrific Rwandan Genocide of 1993– 1994, for example, was preceded by only a few months of sinister political unrest and the public broadcast of ethnic hate messages throughout the country whose significance was, for the most part, unrecognized by outsiders. The armed violence that suddenly erupted, in turn, was carried out largely by unorganized mobs armed with clubs and machetes rather than sophisticated

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George R. Lucas, Jr armaments, who nonetheless managed in only a short time to massacre nearly 1 million victims. Likewise, the determined al-Qaeda operatives who secretly mastered flight control, overpowered flight crews, and subsequently flew commercial aircraft as suicide weapons into the Trade Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC on September 11, 2001 proved extremely capable and resourceful in avoiding detection or apprehension by security and law enforcement officials. Their activity could at best be understood as at least analogous to a highly organized but unique international criminal conspiracy of the sort that lies utterly outside the boundaries of conventional Clausewitzian conceptual framework of conventional warfare. This, in turn, provokes a final striking feature of unconventional or “irregular” warfare (Lucas, 2009, 2011). First, adversaries and insurgent interest groups, frustrated by the radical asymmetries in military power stacked in favor in conventional forces, adopt new tactics of disrupting social systems and attacking the weak links in logistical supply chains through the use (for example) of suicide bombers and IEDs, or of cyber attacks, that throw conventional military forces seriously off balance. Subsequently, new technologies owned initially by the besieged conventional forces become the optimal response. Drone attacks, for example, are “systemic” in precisely the same sense as are IEDs and suicide bombers, disrupting the insurgent’s command structure, relentlessly hunting him out where he lives and hides, and so demoralizing him in return, and hopefully breaking his ability and will to fight. Massive cyber surveillance on an almost inconceivable scale likewise frustrates the most determined attacker, and carries the cyber fight back to its source.

A host of legal and ethical questions and conundrums arise primarily from this relentless tactical arms race, even as the conventional, Clausewitzian understanding of war is radically transformed by this perennial “give and take” between political adversaries, and even more between coalitions of security forces upholding the rule of law, and international criminals intent on circumventing that rule.

“MILITARY ETHICS” AND THE LAWS OF WAR The comparatively unrestrained use of deadly force, resulting in widespread destruction and devastation of property and the death or injury of hundreds of thousands of human beings, both combatants and noncombatants, may hardly seem fertile territory for talking about morality or legal governance. Indeed, war, in either its conventional or postmodern manifestations, seems to represent a dramatic breakdown of the normal rule of law, together with the (temporary) abandonment of moral judgment and restraint. Clausewitz, indeed, famously warns against allowing moral scruples to play a role in the conduct of war. Ethics, and especially “benevolence born of philanthropy” he writes,

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. . . is an error which must be extirpated; for in such dangerous things as War, the errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst. As the use of physical power to the utmost extent by no means excludes the co-operation of the intelligence, it follows that he who uses force unsparingly, without reference to the bloodshed involved, must obtain a superiority if his adversary uses

WAR if all the male population of a country, capable of bearing arms, exercise this calling, still it always continues to be different and separate from the other pursuits which occupy the life of man ..  . . However much pains may be taken to combine the soldier and the citizen in one and the same individual, whatever may be done to nationalize Wars, and however much we may imagine times have changed since the days of the old Condottieri, never will it be possible to do away with the individuality of the business; and if that cannot be done, then those who belong to it, as long as they belong to it, will always look upon themselves as a kind of guild, in the regulations, laws and customs in which the “Spirit of War” by preference finds its expression (Book III, chapter V).

less vigour in its application (Book I, chapter 1).1 Interestingly, Clausewitz does not overtly question the validity of the reasons, let alone the authority of the State, that lead it to declare war. But once war is decided upon as the appropriate course of action, one ought (he argues) to prosecute the war as fully, efficiently, effectively, and (presumably) as mercilessly or pitilessly as possible, lest the war itself drag on too long, do far too much damage on its own, and squander the political opportunities and purposes for which it was fought. Yet, in Book III, when continuing his analysis of strategy, Clausewitz waxes eloquent upon the importance of “moral force” and the moral qualities of wars, and of the nations that wage them. Some of this interesting but somewhat chaotic discussion has to do (at least indirectly) with the qualities of the reasons of State that lead it to declare and prosecute war. Presumably, some reasons are better than others, while some states behave more admirably and prudently than others in pursuing their chosen military strategy, and hence their militaries can be counted upon to pursue the fight with more vigor, courage, and enthusiasm on that account. Presumably, this is a theoretical reflection on the remarkable but imprecise saying, often attributed to Napoleon, that: “In War, the Moral is to the Physical as Three to One.”2 In most other respects, however, Clausewitz’s “ethical focus” (if we are even entitled to call it that) is on the military itself (his focus is almost exclusively upon land forces, and on the individuals that comprise a nation’s Army). He observes: War is a special business, and however general its relations may be, and even

This seems to offer at least a rudimentary reflection on what might be termed “professional ethics,” or “the virtues of the profession of arms.” It is the sort of observation about the norms, rules, customs, and principles that guide and constrain practice, and inform the members of a specific practice, of which MacIntyre writes (1981, 1988, 1990). The norms that govern the aspirations, best practices, and limits of acceptable practice arise from the experience of that practice, and reflections on it, as carried out by members of the profession. We will return to this intriguing suggestion concerning war and “professional ethics” in conclusion. Otherwise, it is helpful to note that these various comments and reflections can be taken to suggest that there are two broad moral issues to be addressed with reference to war. The first concerns when it is appropriate and justifiable for a nation or an alliance of nations to abandon other procedures for conflict resolution, and decide to pursue

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George R. Lucas, Jr their military options. Historically, this first question (or set of questions) has come to be designated in the Latin terminology of medieval law as jus ad bellum, the justification for entering into war. The second concerns what primarily interests Clausewitz himself: namely, what he seems to think of as the “professional” question of how a war is best waged by those actually involved in fighting it. This second discussion of the conduct of war, and of the preparation, training, character, and conduct of combatants in war, is commonly designated by the Latin legal idiom, jus in bello. Historically, there is considerable reflection, especially in the philosophical literature of Western culture, on both sets of questions, which are thought to be conceptually distinct, although obviously related. The first, jus ad bellum, is thought to be the purview primarily of statesmen and political leaders, charged with the welfare and defense of the State. The second, jus in bello, pertains primarily to the military forces of the state, and seems to entail or encompass reflections on the ethics of the profession of arms itself. Clausewitz is prescient in hinting at their interconnection, however, at least in implying that statesmen and nations which collectively comport themselves well and honorably, and exercise prudent judgment in declaring war, are likely to inspire their militaries to best professional practice in the field of combat. Discussion of war and ethics, and (separately) of military ethics, are nonetheless often disparaged as irrelevant, or worse, as disadvantaging the side that takes such issues to heart (as Clauswitz himself initially seems to imply) by constraining them to use their physical power and material forces more sparingly, and hence less effectively than their adversary. The latter is an empirical observation, however, and there is little evidence,

historically or otherwise, that militaries that honor professional customs (such as refraining from attacking noncombatants, or mistreating prisoners of war) fare any less well in determining the outcome of the war than those forces who ignore such customs and constraints. Indeed, once again, Clausewitz’s subsequent observations on “moral force” and the importance of professional demeanor in Book III seem to imply just the opposite in practice: that well-trained and professional military forces (including attention to the moral principles, customs, and traditions of the profession of arms) perform with greater enthusiasm, effectiveness, and hence efficiency in the field than do their adversaries who lack such “moral force.” Three decades after the posthumous publication of vom Krieg, Lieber, a Germanborn American legal scholar well acquainted with Clausewitz’s views on professionalism, was asked by President Abraham Lincoln to draft a series of regulations and guidelines for troops in the Union Army during the US Civil War. The result, “General Orders #100” (known traditionally as the “Lieber Code”) enshrined a great many of these principles of professional decorum and constraint regarding the use of force, noncombatant immunity, treatment of prisoners, and other matters touched upon earlier. Interestingly, the result was so admired for enshrining military professionalism along the general outlines that Clausewitz had first proposed, that the American document was subsequently adopted as doctrine by Clausewitz’s own military force, the Prussian Army, from whence it spread to the military services of other European militaries and policy-making communities, where key elements of the Lieber Code then served as the foundation for the first Geneva Conventions of the late nineteenth century, prescribing limits or

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WAR constraints on the appropriate conduct of armed hostilities (Reichberg et al., 2003). This kind of reasoning about war, to be certain, has a long history in Western culture, but it is as far from being merely a Western cultural artifact as the practice of war itself (Hensel, 2010). Warfare constitutes a highly variable form of what anthropologists sometimes term “cultural performance,” and (one might also observe) such performances are routinely accompanied by equally unique forms of cultural discourse concerning the circumstances under which the performance is to be staged, and to what extent, and by whom, against whom, and most importantly, for what ends (French, 2003, Robinson, 2003). Hence, we find the principal characters, Arjuna and Krisna, debating precisely these questions in the Bhagavad Gita, while laws in ancient India clearly defined those who were to be exempt from attack in the midst of war (Morkevicius, 2010, Roy, 2012). The Confucian military strategist, Sun Tzu (whose much earlier reflections are often compared with those of Clausewitz), famously offers delicately nuanced and understated views on precisely these questions in The Art of War (1994). In twentiethcentury China, Chairman Mao denounced his own culture’s earlier forms of discourse and limitations on the practice of combat as “asinine,” but then proceeded to proclaim his own “Eight Points for Attention” governing the conduct of his own insurgency forces in their conduct of guerilla war in 1938. The Qur’an and its accompanying Hadith declaim frequently and at length upon when, how, and to what extent to make war upon unbelievers, along with when, if ever, Muslims should raise the sword against fellow Muslims (Kelsay, 2009). The renowned political philosopher,Walzer, writes “For as long as men and women have

talked about war, they have talked about it in terms of right and wrong . . . . Reiterated over time,” he observes, “[these] arguments and judgments shape what I want to call the moral reality of war—that is, all those experiences of which moral language is descriptive or within which it is necessarily employed” (Walzer, 1977). The “necessity” of this moral discourse, moreover, is not one born of compulsion, but seems quite instead to reflect the individual or collective agency of human beings themselves—that is, their freedom, and their ability, individually and collectively to deliberate, decide, choose among alternative courses of action, and finally both act or refrain from acting, and offer better or worse accounts of what they have finally chosen to do, and why. Similar to MacIntyre’s account of the origins of professional norms in deliberative discourse, as noted earlier, “just war theory” represents the norms collectively elicited through such reflective discourse by its practitioners on better and worse forms of the practice of war itself. Indeed, one could argue even more plausibly that the discourse about war and its conduct in any culture is very much akin to the discourse about a variety of actions or practices with which all persons of all cultures and epochs are all too familiar—killing, lying, breaking solemn promises or violating contracts, betraying loyalty, disobedience, and law-breaking, for example—all of which, including going to war, represent the kinds of practices from which persons in every known culture and every known historical epoch have been exhorted to refrain. Yet individuals do these kinds of things all the time. Usually, such actions are thought to be wrong, and those engaging in them are held liable under prevailing principles of law, morality, and customary behavior for having engaged in wrongdoing. In what

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George R. Lucas, Jr are unquestionably culturally and historically dependent fashions, the wrongdoers are punished, excoriated, imprisoned, exiled, or executed—unless, that is, they can be found by their peers to have had justificatory (or at least, exculpatory) reasons, motives, or intentions in engaging in the otherwise-prohibited practices. We hold law-breakers (like Gandhi or King) accountable for violating established legal norms; we hold “whistle-blowers” (like Edward Snowden) accountable for violating obligations of loyalty and betraying their trust; we hold killers accountable under law and morality for taking the lives of others. But in every case, we are led to wonder if the civil disobedient, the whistle-blower, the killer, or the liar had good cause for deliberately engaging in what seems to us, prima facie, as wrongdoing. Warfare, precisely on account of its devastation, death, and destruction, is thought to be foremost among these things that we ordinarily are not supposed to do, even when we nonetheless proceed to do so anyway. In fact, the theological, political, or intellectual leadership, or members of the society in general who are witness to, and presumably wronged collectively, by such actions may have a right to pose two significant kinds of questions to the wrongdoer: (1) “did you have good and sufficient reasons—justified cause—for your actions? And, (2) did you go about deciding and carrying out these normally-prohibited actions in the right fashion?” In the case of jus ad bellum, or decisions to go to war, the justifying reasons, while not identical, are roughly similar to those governing decisions to override prevailing norms in these other cases: • One should have a compelling reason (or “just cause”) for overriding the prohibition against fighting and killing.

• One should have taken every possible measure short of war itself to resolve the conflicts addressed (“last resort”). • One’s intentions in resorting ultimately to warfare must be benevolent rather than malevolent—the restoration of peace and satisfaction of the demands of justice, for example, as opposed to revenge, terror, or self-aggrandizement. • There must be some measure of commensurability (or “proportionality”) between the justifying cause and the ends to be sought through war, and the damage and destruction it will surely bring about. • Finally, such reasoning on the part of the responsible decision makers, the “moral agents,” must be capable of withstanding “peer review” or judicial review (i.e. they must meet the test of “Publicity,” in which impartial, reasonable observers confronted with the same situation could be expected to elicit the same or similar judgment). Exclusive focus in some, more philosophically inclined cultural traditions on the problem of warfare has produced additional, nuanced conditions or criteria that should be considered, such as, in the case of going to war, requiring an advance, public declaration to do so, coupled with some reasonable expectation that satisfactory or successful resolution of the conflict is indeed possible and feasible. However, such demands seem compatible in principle with the other instances of what I term a morality of “exceptions,” such as civil disobedience, so-called whistle-blowing, or decisions to engage in strategies of promisebreaking, disloyalty, secrecy, deceit, or deception. The moral justification of any and all of these otherwise-distinct actions or policies requires good justificatory reasons embodying “right intention,” and must be undertaken only after exhausting less-extreme options,

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WAR determining the proportionality between the harm that will ensue and the good to be achieved thereby, and usually only if publicly acknowledged, likely to succeed, and capable of post-facto review and consensus on the part of disinterested others (e.g. Lucas, 2014b). Warfare, unlike the other categories of activities from which moral agents should normally refrain, however, embodies some unique elements that arise from a fundamental equivocation over agency: that is, over the “one” or the “we” that makes these determinations. Decisions to deceive, blow the whistle, or break the law most often reside with individual human beings (or at most, a small group of persons) capable both of making them, and of being held accountable for the results. The question of collective agency—that is, “sovereignty,” or possessing the “legitimate authority” to make decisions that commit a society to a course of action threatening the entire body politic with harm, and with being held accountable for the infliction of harm— is considerably more vexed. This is especially true with respective recent developments in “irregular warfare,” terrorism, and insurgency, in which decisions reached by individuals and small groups may unknowingly or unwillingly commit a much wider society to the risk of harm. In conventional thinking, “sovereignty” (and hence, legitimate authority) resides with a representative leader—king, prime minister or leader of parliament, elected president—who symbolizes, and is at least tacitly deputized to speak for, the body politic. Increasingly in the past century, such authority is even thought to exceed that of the heads of individual nation-states, and requires a collective judgment on the part of a representative congress of nations, such as

the United Nations, in which the Principle of Publicity is inherently vested and guaranteed. This makes unilateral decisions by individual nations to declare war (other than in exigent circumstances of armed self-defense in response to an unprovoked attack) deeply suspect, let  alone decisions by nonstate actors or organizations (such as the radical Sunni Islamic organization, al-Qaeda) to declare war upon others. Indeed, we might observe that the question of sovereignty and “legitimate authority” in just war doctrine now constitutes the single most vexed and contentious issue in international relations in the twenty-first century (Johnson, 2014). Otherwise—and quite unlike an individual’s personal decision to blow the whistle, break a promise, or deliberately violate the law—the decision to go to war commits a subset of the society, nation, or coalition (normally its designated military and security forces) to carry out this general will on behalf of the declaring authority. Thus, if we customarily hold individuals accountable for making themselves exceptions to the normal constraints on their justifiable behavior, how does this accountability translate into a canon of expectations and constraints imposed upon the designated subset of agents empowered, on the state’s behalf, to wage its wars? And, even more problematically, to what extent may one anticipate that the conventional or traditional answers to this important question in the past will automatically “carry over” into the realm of unrestricted or “irregular” warfare in the present, especially when irregular warfare is waged by agents of the State against terrorists or insurgents, who utterly lack any legitimate authority to wage war themselves, and who are therefore often contemptuous of any constraints on their own behavior?

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George R. Lucas, Jr JUS IN BELLO AND PROFESSIONAL MILITARY ETHICS Although not nearly so clearly demarcated, such reflections on better and worse practice, and on the limits of acceptable practice in the conduct of war (jus in bello) likewise pervades the literature and lore of many historical eras and cultural traditions, and even predates the more formalized, reflective, and systematic discourse pertaining to decisions to engage in war (jus ad bellum). Once again, in contrast to the mistaken stereotype that these discussions are of limited scope and origin in Western culture (let alone that their provenance lies wholly within some specific theological tradition), we find these discussions infused in the reflective literature and philosophy of cultures and religions stretching from China through India, to the Middle East and beyond (Kaplan, 2002). Some of the earliest examples (in addition to the many cited earlier) are those of Sun-Tzu (The Art of War) and Socrates (Plato, The Republic), concerning issues such as: when to fight, and when to refrain from fighting, the proper targeting of enemy combatants, noncombatant immunity, and the distinction between true “military necessity” and indiscriminate and largely gratuitous destruction: a fundamental principle often labeled, “the Economy of Force.” These and other cultural sources down through the ages opine, in addition, on who is liable to attack, the degree of force to be expended against enemies (once more, the general consensus is, as little as possible, and no more than is absolutely necessary to achieve the legitimate military objective), and importantly, on who is exempt from attack (usually those thought to represent no threat of harm, such as women, children, the elderly, or enemy prisoners rendered hors de combat through imprisonment or injury). As often as not, the impetus for such considerations is a

much a matter of prudence and common sense as of morality, per se. Why on earth, Sun-Tzu wonders, would a commander risk harm to his army if the military objective could be achieved without a single battle? Why on earth, Socrates asks his students, as they reflect upon the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, would we slaughter the innocent bystanders and helpless family members of the enemy, or raze their cities and lands, when we hope to restore friendly, and economically viable relationships with them following their defeat? Perhaps the most famous and fascinating of these ruminations is found in William Shakespeare’s play, Henry V, which has long figured among the required reading of military academy students in many parts of the world. The larger play is read for a variety of reasons, as discussing, for example, that elusive topic of “moral force” to which Clausewitz averred (espirit de corps; morale). But it is the debate among two ordinary infantry captains in Act IV, Scene vii, after King Henry has ordered the execution of French prisoners of war, which is the focus of our attention. What is striking is that this drama was at least loosely based on history concerning a very popular king, and directed at an audience primarily of laypersons who would have known the history and largely shared this respect and fondness for “King Harry.” And in the incident itself, it is not knights, peers, or noblemen, but two ordinary commoners, two captains of the infantry, charged with organizing and carrying out the execution, who comment on it: Henry V (dialogue of two infantry captains: Act IV, scene VII) (1) “Kill the prisoners?? ‘Tis expressly against the law of arms, as arrant a piece of knavery, mark you now, as can be offer’t.

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WAR (2) Tis the King himself hath ordered it . . . O, tis a gallant king! (1) Aye! And them as fled the fight before, now eagerly comply!” These lines would have been delivered to an audience who knew the history, and would have to be intelligible to them. Here we find this behavior condemned in the early seventeenth century, referring to a war in the sixteenth, and using the phrase “law of arms” as if this were a commonly understood term well before modern legal scholars, such as Grotius, Vattel, and Pufendorf (Reichberg et al., 2003), would publish their initial reflections, let alone centuries before formal standards, such as the International Laws of Armed Conflict, would find themselves enshrined in treaty and black-letter law. This notion of humane treatment of prisoners is thus an example of a once-emergent, and now wellestablished professional norm among soldiers at arms. Such principles, dimly discerned, nonetheless survive the ages in the subsequent reflections of philosophers, theologians, and statements in many cultures, languages, and religions. It was that body of reflection that Lieber sought to embody in “General Orders #100.” And in so codifying these intuitions, the Lieber Code incorporated what the Dominican priest, Francisco di Vitoria (1539), decrying the harsh treatment inflicted on indigenous populations during the Spanish Conquest, had earlier described as the “customs and habits of civilized peoples and nations” (jus gentium). Such fundamental norms and long-prevailing intuitions thus find their circuitous way into contemporary international law. They are often mandated in the legislative language of specific treaties and conventions, such as those banning the use of certain kinds of weapons as part of what is termed “the Law of Armed

Conflict” (LOAC), intended to constrain and manage the application of armed force, or else mandating proper treatment of war’s victims, such as refugees and prisoners of war, under provisions designed to alleviate some of the worst forms of suffering among war’s victims. This latter body of legislation is usually termed “International Humanitarian Law” (IHL). The demarcation is not sharp, nor always well observed or understood by lawyers and even legal scholars, sometimes resulting in a conflation of, or confusion between the two distinct legal regimes, the former emanating primarily from Hague Conventions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the latter contained primarily in Geneva conventions adopted following both World War I and World War II. More broadly, however, the central moral principles underlying both distinct sets of concerns and drawn, in turn, from the centuries of reflection encompassed in the just war tradition itself, are enshrined in what are often termed the “Five Pillars” of International Law. These are: • Prevention of Superfluous Injury and Unnecessary Suffering • Military Necessity (the Economy of Force) • Proportionality • Distinction (Discrimination or Non­ combatant immunity) • Command Responsibility (Accountability)

CONCLUSION: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE UNDERSTANDING OF POSTMODERN WAR Space does not permit more than a brief mention of two of the most recent developments in the just war tradition, both of which bear

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George R. Lucas, Jr importantly on the advent of postmodern war. The first is now commonly termed jus post bellum, and describes the need to end wars properly, so as to inhibit the likelihood of future outbreaks of violence and armed conflict. While often attributed to the recent pioneering work of Brian Orend, an eminent Canadian scholar of international relations (2000, 2006), Orend himself attributes the origins of this concern to Kant, particularly in the late essay, Perpetual Peace (1795). Kant, in turn, although often understood to be a critic of conventional just war thinking (e.g. Grotius), nonetheless outlined some conditions and prerequisites for winding up wars so as not to have the end of one serve as cause for the next. In the contemporary era, Orend cites the excessively punitive nature of the Treaty of Versailles (1918), ending World War I, as an example of precisely what Kant sought to avoid, while the Marshall Plan in Europe following World War II serves as a recent example of ending war successfully, in a manner to inhibit future conflict among the warring parties (Patterson, 2012, 2013). Jus post bellum became a prominent feature in the wars fought in Afghanistan and Iraq by the United States, NATO, and their allies during the first decade of the present century. Often variously called “peace-keeping and stability operations,” nation-building, hybrid war, or MOOTW in military circles, jus post bellum and its proper military and post-military dimensions now constitute a principal focus of military training and leadership development. The importance of proper education, training, and leadership development among the world’s prominent military forces, in turn, is the focus of the other (less thoroughly explored) dimension of postmodern war. Termed variously jus ante bellum, or

“just preparedness for war,” this new development directly addresses the responsibility of reasonably just, responsible, and at least minimally rights-respecting nations to equip and train military forces to properly carry out their new responsibilities in accordance with international law, and specifically, to know how they are expected to behave and carry out both military and stability/peacekeeping duties properly, and avoid policies and actions that will inflame or reignite the conflict they are attempting to resolve. Principal among the formulators of this new dimension of military preparedness for postmodern war are scholars Wertheimer (2010) and Van der Linden (2010), while the assessment, evaluation, and reform of various national programs of military education in the world’s principal developed nations has constituted the work and publication of the “Military Ethics Education Network,” led by British scholars and military education reformers Paul Robinson, Don Carrick, and James Connelly (see Robinson 2008, 2009). The topic of warfare—what it is, as well as when and how it is to be waged, brought to an end, and even prepared for—is understandably a complex and somewhat inchoate topic, owing in part to its longstanding historical ubiquity and its multitude of sources and experiences. It is not to be wondered that individuals might find themselves confused, especially regarding topics like the justification of war, the limitations placed upon combatants engaged in it, let  alone a topic such as “military ethics” as a species of professional ethics and the emergent norms of practitioners. All have, over the centuries, been the objects of an extraordinary degree of confusion, misinformation, and outright error, perhaps none more so than the nature and origin of the “just war tradition” itself. A clear, comprehensive, and authoritative

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WAR account of these important matters, however, might one day prove sufficient to dispel, once and for all, the remaining vestiges of that confusion.

Notes Clausewitz’s views on ethics are complicated and thoroughly unsystematic. He eschews benevolence and pity, but believes that restrains (such as not killing the enemy’s prisoners of war) arise instead as a result of prudence and the civilizing effects of intellect. He talks extensively of “moral force” and “character,” but usually intends the former in the sense of morale, or esprit de corps, while “character” refers to those traits and habits, like courage, calmness, and steadfastness, that aid in the pursuit of conflict. 2 Although frequently invoked, and presumably constituting one of Napoleon’s “115 Maxims” on statecraft, I have never seen this famous quote properly cited. 1

WORKS CITED Augustine (ca. 410) (1998), The City of God against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson. New York: Cambridge University Press. Allport, G. (1937), Personality: A Psychological Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. — (1954), The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. — (1960), Personality & Social Encounter. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Clausewitz, K. (1830/1976), On War, trans. Howard and Paret (ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dunlap, C. (2001), “Law and Military Interventions: Preserving Humanitarian Values in 21st Conflicts.” Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. http://people.duke. edu/~pfeaver/dunlap.pdf. Eco, U. (1991), “Reflections on War,” La Rivista dei libri (April 1, 1991); reprinted in Eco, Five Moral Pieces, trans. McEwen. New York: Harcourt, Inc. French, S. E. (2003), The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values, Past and Present. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Freud, S. (1915), “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Reflections on War and Death, trans. A. A. Brill and A. B. Kuttner. New York: Moffat, Yard & Co. Freud, S. (1930/2002), Civilization and Its Discontents. London: Penguin. Hensel, H. M. (2010), The Prism of Just War: Asian and Western Perspectives on the Legitimate Use of Military Force. London: Ashgate Press. Hobbes, T. (1660), The Leviathan. http:// oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/ hobbes/leviathan-contents.html. Jaynes, J. (1976), The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. New York: Houghton Mifflin & Co. Johnson, J. T. (2014), Sovereignty. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Kant, I. (1795), Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. T. Humphrey. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Kaplan, R. (2002), Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos. New York: Random House. Kelsay, J. (2009), Arguing the Just War in Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Liang, Q. and Xiangsui, W. (1999), Unrestricted Warfare. Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House.

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George R. Lucas, Jr Lucas, G. R., Jr (2009), “‘This is Not Your Father’s War’: Confronting the Moral Challenges of ‘Unconventional’ War,” Journal of National Security Law and Policy, 3 (2): 331–342. — (2010), “Postmodern War,” Journal of Military Ethics 9 (4) (December): 289–298. — (2011), “New Rules for New Wars: International Law and Just War Doctrine for Irregular Warfare,” Case-Western Review of International Law, 677–705. — (2014a), “Revisiting Armed Humanitarian Intervention: A 25-year Retrospective,” in D. Scheid (ed.), Ethics of Armed Humanitarian Intervention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 26–45. — (2014b), “The Case for Preventive War,” in D. K. Chatterjee (ed.), The Ethics of Preventive War. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 46–63. — (2014c), “Military Ethics and Cyber Warfare,” in J. T. Johnson and E. Patterson (eds), Ashgate Handbook of Military Ethics. London: Ashgate Press. MacIntyre, A. (1981), After Virtue. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press. — (1988), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press. — (1990), First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues. “Aquinas Lecture.” Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. Marx, K. (1844/2007), Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. M. Milligan. Mineola, NY: Dover Books. — (1845/1939), The German Ideology (w/F. Engels). Moscow: The Marx-Engels Institute. — (1848/2012), The Communist Manifesto (w/F. Engels). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Morkevicius, V. (2010), “Hindu Perspectives on War,” in H. M. Hensel (ed.), The Prism of Just War. London: Ashgate Press, pp. 169–191. Morris, D. (1967), The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal. New York: Random House. Orend, B. (2000), War and International Justice: A Kantian Perspective. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Lauier University Press. — (2006), The Morality of War. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. — (2008), “War,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, E. N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ fall2008/entries/war/. Patterson, E. (2012), Ending Wars Well. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. — (2013), Ethics Beyond War’s End. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Pattison, J. (2010), Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect: Who Should Intervene? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Regan, R. (2013), “The Falklands War,” in Just War: Principles and Cases, 2nd edn. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Reichberg, G., Syse, H., and Begby, E. (2003), The Ethics of War: Classical and Contemporary Readings. London: Blackwell Publishers. Robinson, P. (2003), Just War in Comparative Perspective. London: Ashgate Press. — (2008), Ethics Education in the Military, P. Robinson, J. Connelly, and D. Carrick (eds). London: Ashgate Press. — (2009), Ethics Education for Irregular Warfare, in P. Robinson, J. Connelly, and D. Carrick (eds). London: Ashgate Press.

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WAR Rousseau, J. J. (1755a/1997), The Origins of Inequality Among Men. ‘The Discourses’ and Other Early Political Writings, trans. V. Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — (1755b/1997), The Political Economy. ‘The Discourses’ and Other Early Political Writings, trans. V. Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — (c. 1756/1962), “A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe,” and “The State of War,” in C. E. Vaughan (ed.), The Political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Oxford: Blackwell. Roy, K. (2012), Hinduism and the Ethics of Warfare: from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheid, D. (ed.) (2014), The Ethics of Armed Humanitarian Intervention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sun-Tzu (ca. 6th Century bce/1994), The Art of War, trans. R. D. Sawyer. New York: Basic Books. Van der Linden, H. (2010), “Just Military Preparedness,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy, http://works.bepress. com/harry_vanderlinden/43/. Vitoria, F. di (1539/1991), “Di Indis et Di Juri Belli.” Vitoria: Political Writings, A. Padgen and J. Lawrance (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waltz, K. N. (1954), Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press. Walzer, M. (1977), Just and Unjust Wars. New York: Basic Books. Wertheimer, R. (2010), Empowering our Military Conscience: Transforming Just War Theory and Military Moral Education. London: Ashgate Press.

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8 PEACE Andrew Fitz-Gibbon

THE NATURE OF PEACE AND THE STATE OF NATURE Just as history by and large is the history of wars, so in political philosophy more is written on war than on peace. In political philosophy, peace is most often a negative concept, being the absence of something else—the absence of war. More fruitful for political philosophy has been the analysis of conditions for, conduct of, and the justice of war, with an assumption that war, if not a necessary aspect of social life, is more common than not. Yet, peace is the backdrop to the commonly discussed areas within political philosophy—human and civil rights, contracts, justice, property rights, and law. Without peace, these aspects of common human life make little sense. Nonetheless, despite the predominance of war in political affairs, peace and nonviolence were central ideas behind much political activism in the twentieth century. M. K. Gandhi was the first to use techniques of nonviolent resistance, first in South Africa (1893–1914) and then in India (1915–1947). For Gandhi, nonviolent protest required as much courage as warfare. The satyagrahis— those who practice satyagraha, “truth force” or “love-force”—were to resist oppressive sanctions by absorbing the violence of their

oppressors in their own persons (2001, 3ff). In time the oppressor would cease violence, having had a fill of it. He called this the “law of self-sacrifice,” the “law of nonviolence,” and the “law of suffering.” Just as the requirement of the military is training in how to use violence effectively, satyagrahis needed to be trained in how not to be violent (ibid., 92 ff). Gandhi even called for an official “non-violent army” of trained volunteers numbering the thousands who could put themselves in harmful way to end violence (ibid., 86). Martin Luther King, Jr relied extensively on Gandhi’s developed nonviolent techniques (see his “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in King 1986, 54–62). In his “My Trip to the land of Gandhi,” King says, “True nonviolent resistance is not unrealistic submission to evil power. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be a recipient of violence than the inflictor of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart” (1986, 44). King’s understanding of nonviolence led him eventually to oppose all war and to make significant protest of the Vietnam War. He said, “I have come to the conclusion that the

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Andrew Fitz-Gibbon potential destructiveness of modern weapons of war totally rules out the possibility of war ever serving as a negative good. If we assume that mankind has a right to survive then we must find an alternative to war and destruction” (ibid., 60). Gandhi and King held in creative tension the notion that nonviolence was a “good,” an end in itself—something akin to love or truth—with the notion of nonviolent resistance as a political strategy. In other words, nonviolence was not merely a political technique, but the outworking of a deeper metaphysics. Since King, nonviolence as a political tool has been developed most especially by Gene Sharp (1973a–c, 2005). Sharp analyzed different techniques for using nonviolent protest as a means of achieving political ends. He suggested 198 different methods of nonviolent action in order to bring about social change. Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall (2000) built on the pioneering work of Sharp. Ackerman and Duvall analyzed 12 different movements in the twentieth century which accomplished social and political change by direct nonviolent action. On close analysis, many of the movements were not as clearly nonviolent as Ackerman and Duvall suggest. Such change is accomplished by seizing the initiative to control a conflict to make the opposition give-in to demands against their will. In practice, nonviolent direct action is far from “peaceful.” Nonetheless, their conclusion is persuasive: nonviolent direct action is a powerful means of social and political change. Their organization, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, through its publications and DVDs was influential in the overthrow of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, and Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych in 2004–2005. Their techniques were extensively used in the

Arab Spring revolutions of 2010–2011 (see Gan, 2013, 70). However, some on the Left criticize nonviolent direct action as politically ineffective and not going far enough. Ward Churchill in his Pacifism as Pathology says, “Pacifism as a strategy of achieving social, political, and economic change can only lead to the dead end of liberalism” (Churchill and Ryan, 2007, 33). Yet, in Eastern Europe, it was just such liberalism that the masses pursued as Soviet Communism faded. Those who see nonviolence as more than a sociopolitical strategy also have criticized the direction that Sharp, Ackerman, and Duvall have taken. Barry L. Gan notes a distinction between “selective nonviolence” and “comprehensive nonviolence” (2013, 73 ff). Selective nonviolence rejects the use of violence for pragmatic reasons in order to accomplish a political aim. The “good” is not nonviolence itself, but rather the political goal. If violence could achieve the goal more effectively and quickly, then violence would be used. However, some selective nonviolentists consider nonviolence as always a better strategy than violence, and so make no resort to violent tactics. Nonetheless, nonviolence is still considered merely a tool to use toward some other goal. Comprehensive nonviolence is the rejection of violence in all its forms; nonviolence being considered a good in itself. A comprehensive nonviolentist will attempt to practice nonviolence in all aspects of personal, social, and political life. Comprehensive nonviolentists reject some of the techniques suggested by Sharp as being inherently violent. Gan also suggests that between the extremes of selective and comprehensive nonviolence is a wide spectrum of understandings and practices. He places Tolstoy, Gandhi, and King toward the pole of

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PEACE comprehensive nonviolence, and Sharp, Ackerman, and Duvall toward the pole of selective nonviolence.1 Feminism has contributed to understandings of peace through the ethics of care and other feminist philosophical writing (see Ruddick, 1990, Noddings, 2003, Held, 2007). Ethicists of care argue that it is, in part, the impersonal masculinist themes of political philosophy and ethics (contracts, rights, and duties) that allow even the contemplation of war as a good. The ethics of care, focused on networks of personal caring relationships, would make war and violence less likely than other ethical schemes. Notable organizations involved in pacifism and antiwar are the Fellowship of Reconciliation, founded in 1914 as a Christian antiwar movement. It has since become an interfaith organization involving all faiths and includes those who have no formal faith commitment (see the collection of writings from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Wink, 2000). Concerned Philosophers for Peace is the largest organization of antiwar philosophers in the United States. According to William Gay: Since its inception in 1981, Concerned Philosophers For Peace has become the largest and most active organization of professional philosophers in North America oriented to the critique of militarism and the search for a just and lasting peace. Currently, Concerned Philosophers For Peace has over 500 members in North America (2003). Concerned Philosophers for Peace has a book series in the Rodopi, Amsterdam, Value Inquiry Books Series, Philosophy of Peace Series (16 volumes at the time of writing with 3 more in preparation), and a semiannual

newsletter. This 16-volume collection is the largest published collection of papers by philosophers on the philosophy of peace. In some recent political philosophy, a distinction has been made between “negative peace” and “positive peace.” Negative peace is the mere absence of war. Positive peace has taken on a more full conceptualization, a condition more akin to the Jewish notion of Shalom and is a state of well-being, free from violence. In different presentations, positive peace is a eudemonic, or else, a loving state. Duane L. Cady says of positive peace, “the point is always to build on and broaden our sense of community by stressing interdependence, respect, tolerance, common aspirations, and understanding” (2010, 86). Johan Galtung analyzes negative peace as: (a) the absence of violence of all kinds (physical and psychological; (b) structural violence (violence embedded in institutions); and (c) cultural violence (attitudes and values that tolerate harm) (1996, 31). In moving the discussion of violence beyond the bounds of physical violence (to psychological, structural, and cultural harm), Galtung moves the discussion of negative peace beyond the notion of the absence of war. Although a nation may not be at war, its citizens may be subject to internal strife and various harms that Galtung classifies as violence. Positive peace, then, is not only the absence of war together with these diverse violent harms, but also a different kind of human interaction. Michael Allen Fox suggests that positive peace includes four aspects: (a) subjective (a state of well-being); (b) objective (a goal with a process to reach the goal); (c) cosmic (unity with a larger whole—not merely peace between human beings, but with other sentient beings and with the environment); and (d) prescriptive/visionary (guiding principles and outlook) (2014, 188–193).

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Andrew Fitz-Gibbon HISTORICAL AND MULTICULTURAL PRECEDENTS From ancient times, war has been an accepted part of human interaction. In the ancient world, arguments against war are few and far between, though in the Crito Plato argues that we should never return evil for evil. One interpretation of Plato would be to say that retaliation is morally wrong. As the conduct of war is largely retaliatory, often with extreme violence, Plato’s argument might be taken as an early argument against war (2011, Crito 48b–c). However, even if this is a true construction, Plato’s suggestion is a mere drop of war resistance in a bucketful of the political acceptance of, and justifications for, war. It is not that notions of peace were absent from the ancient world. The Epicureans pursued ataraxia as the goal of human life—a state of tranquility untouched by the chances and changes of life—hence peace. Yet ataraxia belongs to peace as an inner state. The pursuit of ataraxia was engaged in with the knowledge that the world is one of conflict and war. There was no Epicurean antiwar movement in any political sense. In the East, early Daoist writings can be interpreted as antiwar. Although in some interpretative traditions, the Daodejing is considered a military text, it tends toward peace, personally and socially, rather than war (Zhang, 2012). The Daodejing sees peace as the natural way. War begins with desire and the dao is to move beyond desire toward a life of harmony with “the ten thousand things”—all that is. Chapters  30 and 31 of the Daodejing are especially antiwar seeing weapons as “ominous instruments,” sometimes translated as “instruments of evil.” The good ruler “will oppose all conquest by force of arms” (Waley, 2010, 149). However,

it is not true to say that the Daodejing is a pacifist text. In exceptional circumstances, when attacked, the good ruler may use force of arms, but minimally so and with much regret. In the Zhuangzi, the treatment of war and peace is more complex than in the Daodejing. Scholars now realize that the Zhuangzi is a text from a number of writers in different periods, and so it does not speak with merely one voice (see Lynn, 2008). Those chapters most likely written by Master Zhuang accept that war is a fact of life and is best avoided. When government becomes tyrannical, it is acceptable to enter war as a last resort to overthrow such governments. In common with much other Daoist writing, the Zhuangzi refrains from making value judgments about the rightness or wrongness of actions, and looks rather to a way to manage the many changes of life, which includes violence. However, the “anarchist chapters” of the Zhuangzi, on the contrary, suggest that war is always morally wrong, even to alleviate the sufferings of others. Mozi makes a different argument than the Daoists against war. He roots his antiwar sentiment in universal love. Even so, Mozi is not totally antiviolence. He makes an argument for war against oppressors on the basis of justice. Universal love may, at times, require the strong to act violently on behalf of the weak (Mo Tzu, 1963, 50–61). Ancient Buddhism and Jainism share the concept of ahimsa—nonharm—and from the sixth-century bce onward had a direct influence on Hindu thought. Yet, in Buddhist thought the notion that all of life is suffering, and that the eightfold path leads one away from suffering have tended toward a social conservatism and individualism. As suffering will be always a part of the human condition, why try to eradicate it? The best hope

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PEACE is to become personally nonattached, and hence avoid suffering. The political attempts to embrace Buddhism as public policy, and hence antiwar, have been few and far between. A notable exception is Aśoka who ruled most of India from c. 265 to 238 bce (see Cortwright, 2008, 186). However, more recently a new tradition, known as engaged Buddhism, has taken the Buddhist notion of metta—loving-kindness, as a starting point for engaged social action to alleviate suffering and protest war. Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh (1992) and the Dalai Lama (1999) are notable in this regard. The Western world had to wait for the early Christian movement for its first brief hiatus looking toward an antiwar philosophy. For its first 250  years of existence, Christianity was a pacifist movement (Hershberger, 1981, 64–70). Christians were forbidden from being soldiers in the army of empire until around 174 ce, under the reign of Marcus Aurelius, though it must be remembered that early Christianity was a movement composed of slaves, women, and subaltern Jewish males. However, when Constantine embraced Christianity in the early fourthcentury ce, the pacifist religion became the favored religion of Empire and began its own justifications for war. Besides some elements of monasticism and a few minor sects in the medieval period, Christianity was at ease with violence, either enacted by the state against other states in war, or in pogroms, inquisitions, and crusades. Some Christians returned to pacifist roots, but not until the early sixteenth century (see later). In political philosophy, the possibilities and procedures for peace depend, in part, on an understanding of the human condition. What would human nature look like in its natural state? Philosophers have been divided. For Thomas Hobbes, the state of nature is one of

war of all against all. Peace, in a Hobbesian world, is only possible by the imposition of peace by a Leviathan, a governing authority that guards against the excesses of the natural state through imposition of law, backed by force. For John Locke, whose state of nature is more benign than Hobbes’s—a tabula rasa—natural reason shows humanity to be social, and therefore tending toward peaceful intercourse rather than violence. In response to Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives us a third, more romantic view of the state of nature. Human beings, neither good nor bad by nature, tend toward the development of peace when unaffected by the trammels of civilization. Although in each view of the human condition peace is a “good,” the Hobbesian view tends toward a realism that rejects pacifism, preferring an enforcing of limited peace. The Lockean views something closer to a liberal and reasonable searching for peace. Romanticism tends toward an unrealistic utopian view of society where peace would reign, if only we let it. Modern philosophers built their understanding of human nature—whether fundamentally aggressive or pacifistic—from a careful reading of ancient texts, by observation of human behavior, and sometimes because a certain view of human nature matched well with a religious or ideological viewpoint. However, recent developments in brain science have challenged the oftenheld view that human beings are ineluctably aggressive by nature. Suggestions, backed by science, that human beings are an empathic species have caused some controversy (see Rifkin, 2009). At the very least psychologists seem to have established that the human being rather than being either always aggressive, or else pacifistic, has the potential for predation, vengeance, and violence on the

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Andrew Fitz-Gibbon one hand, and for compassion, reason, and peacefulness on the other (see Pinker, 2011, 483–696).

PACIFISMS Pacifism is generally taken to mean something like “opposition to war.” However, there is no single understanding of pacifism in the literature. Scholars note these main types of pacifism: (a) principled opposition to war in all its forms, but not to all forms of violence; (b) principled opposition to all kinds of violence, which includes war; (c) principled opposition to some kinds of war, such as in nuclear pacifism, but not to “conventional” war. However, Duane L. Cady (2010) suggests a moral continuum from warism to pacifism, with the different versions of pacifism melding into each other with no clear boundaries. The early sixteenth century saw profound changes in the political and social landscape of Europe. Besides the major reforms produced by Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, and others, a number of small radical sects arose—loosely termed Anabaptist—in part in the wake of the breaking of the hegemony of the Roman church, and in part as a reaction to the slow progress of reform by the magisterial reformers. Once characterized as violent revolutionaries (in some tellings as proto-Marxist), the sixteenthcentury radicals were rebranded as pacifists in the historiography of Mennonite scholars from the 1940s onward (see Estep, 1963, Hershberger, 1981). Careful, and non-partisan, scholarship places the radicals somewhere in between. The beginning of religious and political freedom in the sixteenth century was fertile ground in which many varieties of

religious and political groups thrived. Some radicals were truly revolutionary, though more often than not of an apocalyptic bent, while some embraced the pacifism of a nonviolent Christ (Stayer, 1976). Those groups that gradually embraced pacifism were historically longer lived as movements than the violent revolutionaries. Although both types of radical were persecuted by both Catholic and Protestant state authorities, the peaceful sects continued through migration, first to Eastern Europe, and then to the new world. These groups we know now as the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Hutterites, the historic peace churches. They have been largely pacifist groups who see themselves as islands of holiness in the vast sea of godlessness—what Stayer terms “separatist nonresistance.” Those within the radical communities see themselves as within “the perfection of Christ.” The rest of society is outside “the perfection of Christ.” The world is characterized mostly by violence, which the Anabaptists eschew. Although pacifists, the Anabaptists had a generally pessimistic view of society and of political authority, though most viewed the government as God-given. They did not expect society to become more peaceful (Brock, 1981, 20). Nonetheless, the peaceful sixteenth-century radicals influenced the pacifist groups of the seventeenth century—most notably the Quakers—and many pacifists since. Whereas the Anabaptists tended to withdraw from society, the Quakers under William Penn’s leadership attempted the “holy experiment” of a pacifist colony in the new world— Pennsylvania. The pacifist colony was in part successful (in relationships with native Americans and in its generally humanitarian approach to law), but following Penn’s death Pennsylvania gradually moved away from its pacifist roots (Brock, 1981, 43–46).

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PEACE Anabaptist pacifism was of an absolute kind and has been termed nonresistance, based on an interpretation of the gospel text where Jesus says, “Do not resist evil.” The text was interpreted to include not only opposition to war or any government violence—“the sword”—but also any interpersonal violence. The Anabaptists took the injunction to “turn the other cheek” quite literally. Even self-defense was considered morally wrong. Although few have followed the Anabaptist extreme of nonresistance, most notably Leo Tolstoy embraced such radical pacifism in the late nineteenth century (1984). Tolstoy differed from the Anabaptists in holding a more hopeful view of the world. The Anabaptists considered the world unredeemable until some great apocalyptic event. Hence they did not try to change society, and simply withdrew into closed communities. Tolstoy, on the other hand, argued that all in society should embrace nonresistance. The Anabaptist stance has often been considered politically irrelevant—though in the twentieth century Anabaptist were also conscientious objectors (see Brock and Young, 1999). However, scholars have used Anabaptist-like arguments, that is religious, to protest war (see, e.g. Hauerwas, 1983, 2004, Yoder, 1994, 1996, 1997). A different argument against war and for a peaceful life is the brief but influential tract by Henry David Thoreau, On The Duty of Civil Disobedience written originally in 1849, in part as protest both to slavery and to the Mexican war. Thoreau’s basis is not a religious one, but is based on the inviolability of the individual conscience. Government has no right to demand anything from citizens (for Thoreau the best form of government is no government at all). As government demand citizens to enter the military, it is the citizen’s duty to resist, to disobey government

nonviolently. Thoreau’s view is significant for political philosophy in its direct challenge of the legitimacy of government. Libertarians and anarchists alike have used Thoreau as a justification for an antigovernment stance. Thoreau (along with other New England pacifists) influenced Tolstoy. In turn, Thoreau and Tolstoy’s work had a direct effect on the young Mohandas Gandhi, then in South Africa, and later on Martin Luther King Jr. In process of time, the religious argument of the teaching of the New Testament—to not resist evil, to love enemies, and to bless persecutors—was conjoined with Thoreau’s notion of civil disobedience, based on conscience, to become the social political strategy of nonviolent resistance, sometimes termed simply nonviolence.

THE PEACE OF LIBERAL, DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM In 1795, Immanuel Kant published his influential treatise To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. Kant was not a romantic. With Hobbes, he assumed that “the natural state is one of war” (1983, 111). For this reason the state of peace “must therefore be established,” and is not merely the suspension of hostilities. Derived from this little tract, and other parts of the Kantian canon, political philosophers now speak of the Kantian Triad—the mutual interplay of: (a) democracy (which Kant calls a republican constitution, meaning freedom, equality, and the rule of law, 112); (b) a “federation of free states” (115); and (c) cosmopolitanism and the right of universal hospitality. Although in Kant’s paper cosmopolitanism is the third of his conditions for peace, the triad is usually completed rather with trade and international cooperation (perhaps after Adam

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Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Smith who argued in Book 5 of The Wealth of Nations against wars of imperialism as being too expensive to maintain (see 2000, 277ff). The argument suggests that the best hope for a peaceful world is one in which nations favor democracy, international federations, and free trade. In brief, the argument is that democracies do not go to war with each other. The notion has provoked debate. Much depends on what counts toward a nation being considered democratic. However, from careful research Bruce Russett and John Oneal, in 2001, presented evidence that, over time, democracies favor peace over war (see discussion in Gartzke, 2007, Pinker, 2011, 278–288). Although before its time, Kant’s view of an international federation is something like the United Nations to which member states devolve at least some of their sovereignty for the sake of all—effectively a social contract between nations. Just as individual citizens give up their right of the lawful use of violence to the police force and military, so individual states give up their lawful use of violence to an international body. Just as citizens make up the police force and military of any particular state, so the peacekeeping force of the United Nations is made up of military units from member states. Democratic nations, joined in loose international confederation, will also freely trade with each other. This argument is that those who rely on trade with others are less likely to go to war with them. Erik Gartzke makes such an argument, though it is debated. In simple terms, you do not engage in war with those upon whom you depend for trade. Before the wars of the twentieth century, if a powerful state needed resources, and another nonstate or less powerful state has those resources, the first state would simply take what it needed. This was the dominant

story of European imperialism from the Renaissance until the decolonization begun after the Second World War. Now, even the most powerful nations must practice peaceful trade with those whose goods and services they require. For all the suggested ills of multinational corporations, because of the fiscal peace they create between nations (often in conflict in the recent past), some argue that they may yet be the best hope for a world free of wars, and hence at peace.2 In 1982, Michael Novak published his The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Although initially largely ignored in the West, in Eastern Europe the book became a key text in the overthrow of Soviet Communism (first published underground in Poland in 1984). His conception of democratic capitalism was a triad—the three liberations of liberalism—of a democratic polity, a capitalist system, and a humanitarian culture of freedom. Missing from the Kantian triad is the notion of a humanitarian and free culture. If the Kantian and Novakian are combined, a tetrad is produced: democratic polity, an international federation of nations, free trade between nations, and a humanitarian culture. However, such an approach is not a pacifist stance. Theorists who suggest that such is the best hope for a peaceful world also suggest that war is sometimes a necessity, often in self-defense, and, less frequently, to effect regime change. Such a conception of peace is not comprehensively pacifist in the total opposition to war, but might be realistically pacifist in seeking to restrain rogue nations— through force of arms if necessary. A broad political philosophy of peace would need to consider all of the earlier. It would be a synthetic construct that would include the Kantian triad, combined with a humanitarian culture. It would take notice of the various movements of nonviolent direct

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PEACE action. It would include, too, a consideration of comprehensive nonviolence and an emphasis on the work of subjective peace. Political philosophers, who ordinarily do not take much notice of pacifism, would do well to look at the work of scholars of war resistance. Pacifists and war resisters, whose aim must surely be the end of warfare, would be helped by a more thoughtful analysis of the Kantian Triad and its contribution to world peace.

Notes For an extended essay on the implementation of non-violence, see Nagler (2004). For the history of peace movements, see Cortwright (2008). For an eclectic collection of essays on non-violence, see Zinn (2002). For the history of non-violence, see Kurlansky (2009). For a general introduction to peace studies, see Fox (2014). For an historical collection of essays on non-violence, see Holmes and Gan (2005). 2 On capitalism and peace, see Gartzke (2007). For Hegel’s contrary view to Kant—that perpetual peace is undesirable, that war is inherent in the dialectic method, see Armstrong (1933) and Smith (1983). For Rousseau’s less optimistic view of international peace through a federation of nations, see Hoffmann (1963). 1

WORKS CITED Ackerman, P. and Duvall, J. (2000), A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict. Palgrave: New York. Armstrong, A. C. (1933), “Hegel’s Attitude on War and Peace,” The Journal of Philosophy, 30 (December 25): 684–689. Brock, P. (1981), The Roots of War Resistance: Pacifism from the Early Church to Tolstoy. Nyack: The Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Brock, P. and Young, N. (1999), Pacifism in the Twentieth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cady, D. L. (2010), From Warism to Pacifism: A Moral Continuum. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Churchill, W. and M. Ryan (2007), Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America. Oakland: A.K. Press. Cortwright, D. (2008), Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Estep, W. R. (1963), The Anabaptist Story. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Fox, M. A. (2014), Understanding Peace: A Comprehensive Introduction. New York and London: Routledge. Galtung, J. (1996), Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization. Oslo: PRIO International Peace Research Institute, and London: SAGE. Gan, B. L. (2013), Violence and Nonviolence: An Introduction. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Gandhi, M. K. (2001), Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha). Mineola, NY: Dover. Gartzke, E. (2007), “The Capitalist Peace,” American Journal of Political Science, 51 (1): 166–191. Gay, W. (2003), A History of Concerned Philosophers for Peace. http:// peacephilosophy.org/?page_id=97 (accessed December 19, 2013). Hanh, T. N. (1992), Peace in Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Every Day Life. New York: Bantam. Hauerwas, S. (1983), The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

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Andrew Fitz-Gibbon — (2004), Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press. Held, V. (2007), The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political And Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hershberger, G. F. (1981), War, Peace, and Nonresistance; A Classic Statement of a Mennonite Peace Position in Faith and Practice. Scottdale: Herald Press. Hoffman, S. (1963), “Rousseau on War and Peace,” The American Political Science Review, 57 (2) (June): 317–333. Holmes, R. L. and Gan, B. L. (2005), Nonviolence in Theory and Practice. Longrove, IL: Waveland. Kant, I. (1983), Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Indianapolis: Hackett. King, M. L., Jr (1986), I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World, J. M. Washington (ed.). San Francisco: Harper. Kurlansky, M. (2009), Non-Violence: The History of a Dangerous Idea, foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. New York: The Modern Library. Lama, D. (1999), Ethics for a New Millennium. New York: Berkley. Lynn, R. J. (2008), “View of War As Seen in the Zhangzi as Interpreted by Guo Xiang,” in H.-G. Möller and G. Wohlfart (eds), Philosophieren Über Den Krieg— War in Eastern and Western Philosophies. Berlin: Parega Verlag. Mo Tzu. (1963), Basic Writings, trans. B. Watson. New York: Columbia University Press. Nagler, M. N. (2004), The Search for a Nonviolent Future: A Promise of Peace for Ourselves, Our Families, and Our World. Maui, HI: Inner Ocean Publishing.

Noddings, N. (2003), Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Novak, M. (1982/1991), The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit. Pinker, S. (2011), The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. London: Penguin. Plato (2011), The Last Days of Socrates. London: Penguin. Rifkin, J. (2009), The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World of Crisis. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin. Ruddick, S. (1990), Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. London: Women’s Press. Sharp, G. (1973a), The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Part One Power and Struggle. Boston, MA: Porter Sargent. — (1973b), The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Part Two The Methods of Nonviolent Action. Boston, MA: Porter Sargent. — (1973c), The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Part Three The Dynamics of Nonviolent Action. Boston, MA: Porter Sargent. — (2005), Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential. Boston, MA: Porter Sargent. Smith, A. (2000), The Wealth of Nations. New York: Penguin. Smith, S. B. (1983), “Hegel’s View on War, the State, and International Relations,” The American Political Science Review, 77 (3) (September): 624–632. Stayer, J. M. (1976), Anabaptists and the Sword. Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press.

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PEACE Tolstoy, L. (1984), The Kingdom of God is Within You: Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Theory of Life, trans. C. Garnett. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Waley, A. (2010), Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching The Way and Its Power and Its Place in Chinese Thought. London: The Folio Society. Wink, W. (ed.) (2000), Peace is the Way: Writings on Nonviolence from the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Yoder, J. H. (1994), The Politics of Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

— (1996), When War is Unjust: Being Honest About Just War Thinking. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. — (1997), For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Zhang, E. Y. (2012), “Weapons are Nothing But Ominous Instruments: The Daodejing’s View of War and Peace,” Journal of Religious Ethics, September, pp. 473–502. Zinn, H. (Introduction) (2002), The Power of Nonviolence: Writings by Advocates of Peace. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

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9 LIBERAL TOLERATION Robert Paul Churchill

Toleration is indispensable for liberal democracy, both as a public recognized attitude and disposition among citizens to engage publicly with one another on the basis of what Rawls (1993) called the “duty of civility,” and as an accepted principle that a liberal democratic state must be neutral between competing conceptions of the human good. Individual tolerance, as a personal or civic virtue, is not the same as neutrality as an institutional norm; this is because, while individuals can be tolerant only by choice, constitutional provisions, laws, or appellate court rulings can, by imposing limits on government power, thereby establish an effective measure of neutrality. The majority of literature on toleration has assumed it to pertain to individuals, particularly beliefs about the proper behavior of citizens, and appropriate attitudes and dispositions within a liberal state. Here, we consider toleration as a matter relating to individuals before considering liberal neutrality and related issues.

NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT CONDITIONS FOR INDIVIDUAL TOLERATION In general, toleration can be understood as the disposition to forbear from interfering

with or using coercion to prevent the expression of beliefs, views, behaviors, or practices that one considers seriously objectionable. To count as serious the objection must be based on more than personal interest, prudence, preference, or taste; rather it reflects a considered judgment that something is seriously wrong because of its nature or consequences. For example, a citizen who believes same sex civil unions are objectionable on moral or religious grounds is tolerant if she believes, as well, that her objections—as strong as they may be—do not provide sufficient grounds for the legal prohibition of same sex civil unions or coercive interference with LBGT partnerships. These reflections show that, as Rainer Forst (2012b) indicates, tolerant beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, and behaviors must have an “objection component” requiring that the objection be nontrivial for the tolerant individual, as well as an “acceptance,” or “forbearance” component that, though in tension with the objection, prevails, or “trumps,” the objection. The forbearance condition does not cancel out the objection; rather, the tolerant individual believes that the objection is reasonably grounded, but accepts other, higher-order reasons, to guide her attitudes and actions. The higher-order reasons may include, for example, respect for

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Robert Paul Churchill others’ autonomous choices, respect for the importance of certain beliefs and practices in other people’s lives, or beliefs about the value of a reciprocal give-and-take in a pluralistic society. By accepting the objection and forbearance components as necessary conditions for liberal toleration, we can reduce much of the ambiguity, and hence, vacuity that accompanies many uses of “tolerance” (Churchill, 1997). Thus, because of the objection condition, we cannot regard one’s forbearance as a genuine instance of toleration unless the forbearance is voluntarily chosen and capable of being reasonable. If one grudgingly endures or puts up with something without having considered that being reasonable recommends forbearance, then one’s attitude or behavior is not tolerant as understood here. Indeed, citizens who appear willing to “go along” but offer no plausible reasons for voluntarily doing so and express annoyance and disapproval, for having to “put up” with a situation, can be suspected of interfering with or obstructing what they object to should they have the ability to do so. If the difference between one’s letting others be versus obstructing them turns on power, or capacity, alone, then one can hardly be regarded as tolerant. By contrast, it is not necessary that tolerant persons have the power to prevent or to interfere with something they find seriously objectionable (Williams, 1996). There is no contradiction in conceiving of a powerless minority, for instance, having serious moral objections to a practice, such as gambling, adult theatres, or dog racing, but nevertheless tolerating a majority’s interests in these practices. It is sufficient that members of such a minority believe that even if they did have the requisite capacity, they would not interfere, and that others accept such claims as sincere.

There are other attitudes or dispositions, variously called “indulgence,” “permissiveness,” “indifference,” and “promiscuity” or “indiscriminateness,” that are carelessly used as synonymous for “toleration.” However, by keeping the objection and forbearance conditions in mind, we can see why these terms do not connote the same attitudes and dispositions as liberal toleration. Those who are indulgent or permissive allow the expression of views and behaviors they themselves might not engage in, but either they have formed no objections or whatever objections they do form fail to rise to a threshold of significance. Because they are not motivated to object, the indulgent and permissive likewise need no reasons for forbearance. Similarly, those who are indifferent and indecisive should not be confused with the liberally tolerant. The indifferent and indecisive lack reasonable grounds for either objection or acceptance, and are therefore, hardly tolerant in a liberal sense. What can be said then, about the happygo-lucky who have an open-handed “live and let live” outlook? Such generous souls represent, in Plato’s view (c. 320 bc), both the flowering beauty of democracy and the primary reason for democracy’s self-destructiveness (Republic, IX). Whatever the merits of Plato’s political philosophy, his criticism of the promiscuity and profligacy of a democracy cannot be counted as a criticism of liberal toleration. Those, like Plato’s democrats, who believe themselves committed in principle to equally accepting everything cannot be truly committed to tolerance. Toleration requires boundaries; if nothing can be conceived to be in the realm of the intolerable and to be rejected, then toleration is a vacuous concept. This last consideration indicates that, while necessary, the objection and forbearance

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LIBERAL TOLERATION conditions are not sufficient for toleration. A third condition, what Forst (2004, 2012b) calls the “rejection” condition, needs to be added to our conception of liberal toleration. Toleration thus lies in the middle ground between two boundaries. If the tolerable consists of the realm of beliefs and practices one finds wrong but still marked by reasons for forbearance, then a limiting boundary “above” this consists of the realm of the nonobjectionable. The other boundary separates the tolerable middle realm from the realm “below” for which reasons for rejecting certain beliefs and practices are stronger than the reasons for forbearance. The addition of the “rejection” condition in no way commits us to a static view of the content of toleration. Deciding whether and where to draw boundaries is the perennial subject of debate, dispute, lobbying, influence, and political compromise. Moreover, there may be many different reasons for drawing the boundary line in one place rather than another. Consider, for example, a dispute over tolerating the desecration of the flag but not of religious icons such as the crucifix or the Qur’an. This issue involves which type of freedom ought to prevail—whether freedom of expression or religious freedom, but there may be other reasons involved as well, such as respect for religious or even national security inasmuch as desecrating holy books and religious icons can inflame violence (Newey, 1999).

SO-CALLED PARADOXES OF TOLERATION Those skeptical that the concept of toleration is coherent, or that being tolerant is psychologically possible, occasionally speak of one or more “paradoxes of toleration.” The most

widely cited “paradox” is the “paradox of moral tolerance” (Mendus, 1988, Horton, 1994). A paradox seems to arise when both the reasons for objection and the reasons for acceptance are held to be “moral.” In such cases, it then seems to be morally required or right to tolerate what is morally wrong. As the discussion earlier indicates, the solution to this puzzle (and thus dissolution of the apparent paradox) requires a distinction between various kinds of “moral” reasons and a ranking of those reasons. For instance, with respect to abortion, meat eating, gambling, pornography, handgun ownership, and so forth, persons can consistently (both conceptually and psychologically) regard these activities as immoral and believe and act on the conviction that higher-order moral reasons justify their forbearance. A second “paradox” of toleration arises out of the apparent possibility of conceiving of an intolerant person as tolerant, which seems contradictory. The so-called paradox of the tolerant racist presumes it possible for a racist, an anti-Semite, a xenophobe, and so on to be tolerant of persons against whom he has an irrational hatred or prejudice. Should we be tempted to suppose that a racist might be tolerant if he could curb his desire to discriminate against a group he regards as inferior, and moreover, that he would become increasingly tolerant the stronger his racist impulses as long as he does not act them out? The effort to formulate this puzzle reveals why such a “paradox” is fatuous. In the first place, we must presuppose that the racist harbors an irrational hatred for members of the target group, and consequently, it is extremely unlikely, if not impossible, that the racist’s objections to the target group will be reasonable in the minimal sense required by the objection condition. Second, it makes no

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Robert Paul Churchill sense to regard someone as tolerant or intolerant of the characteristics of persons over which the latter have no control, such as age, conditions of birth, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexual orientation (Churchill, 2003, 2007). As persons (generally) are not at liberty to change or alter such ascribed characteristics, it makes no sense to hold them to blame for possessing them. Third, persons prejudiced against a group based on a shared group characteristic, such as being a Jew or a Muslim, cannot specify how members of the group could change or behave to be “tolerable,” except, of course, to cease being members of the despised group (by conversion) or by being displaced or removed (by deportation or ethnic cleansing). This shows that, in addition to a blind prejudice, biased persons are really opposed to toleration itself. A third so-called paradox is thought to arise out of efforts to draw boundaries between what is tolerable and what is intolerable (Fish, 1997, Forst, 2004). The socalled paradox of drawing the limit arises because drawing limits against things designated as “intolerable” will be contested in an open and pluralistic society, thus making line drawing arbitrary. Yet why presume it impossible to draw the limits of toleration in a nonarbitrary, justifiable way? There is a consensus based on reasonable grounds that some behaviors, such as child pornography, smoking in workspaces shared with nonsmokers, bullying in schools, racial profiling, are intolerable. Some policy issues are indeed fraught with difficulty—handgun ownership in America is certainly one—but arbitrary line drawing can be avoided if both sides accept that they must not confuse members of the other side with the ideas or practices they find objectionable, and both sides accept the necessity of offering public reasons, as will be noted in the next section.

To be sure, those zealously engaged in efforts to demarcate the limits of the “intolerable” may appropriate the rhetoric of tolerance to purse their own one-sided, intolerant objectives. Such slogans as “no toleration for the intolerant” (Forst, 2004) reveal the error, once again, of assuming that persons are possible “objects” of tolerance or intolerance. Those inclined to be intolerant of persons with whom they disagree (the “intolerant”) signify their opposition to accepting the norm of toleration in the first place. Hence, because they deny the basic norm, they signify a willingness to settle the issue “outside the game,” as it were, and disparage reasonable debate and (often) democratic processes for settling disagreements. If a group remains intransigent in its denial of the norm of toleration, then those who seek to uphold the norm are not thereby “intolerant” of the detractors, but only of their destructive views and actions.

TOLERATION, THE LIBERAL STATE, AND NEUTRALITY A liberal state is one characterized by the public acceptance of freedom, equality, and fairness as foundational political values. Consequently, a liberal state must accord equal respect to autonomous choices regarding the good and right. It is a practical necessity therefore that a liberal state must accommodate a plurality of interests, value orientations, and commitments in religion, ethics, and so on as well as competing comprehensive visions of human flourishing. Moreover, it must be expected that, in addition to a plurality of incompatible interests and values, some disagreements over the human good will be intractable. As

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LIBERAL TOLERATION Rawls (1993) notes, despite the challenges of accommodating such deep disagreements, they are perfectly reasonable, for they result from the free exercise of human reason under the conditions of open inquiry and freedom of conscience the liberal state is committed to safeguarding. Toleration is thus a necessary norm for a well-ordered and successfully functioning liberal democracy, and we can distinguish two ways in which toleration serves as an indispensable regulative norm. Roughly speaking, there must be toleration with respect to the public use of force or coercion. Secondly, citizens must be tolerant among themselves. No liberal state can equally respect a plurality of conflicting values and visions of the human good unless there is forbearance regarding the public use of force or coercion to deter, interfere, prevent, or punish. In other words, unlike an illiberal state including an illiberal democracy, the coercive powers of the liberal state must not be used in efforts to legislate morality, to be paternalistic, or to promote one conception of the good life against others. The need for restraints on government power is generally expressed in democratic liberal theory as the principle of neutrality where “neutrality” is understood as the requirement that the liberal state must be neutral between competing conceptions of the good (e.g. Simmons, 2007). While neutrality is a necessary requirement for the liberal state, it is incorrect to regard neutrality as a public norm for citizens. As the conceptual analysis earlier indicates, toleration as an individual attribute cannot be compelled. However, the power of the government is limited. Typically, liberal and democratic polities such as France and the United States have a written constitution establishing a separation of powers and checks and balances, clauses

or provisions protecting individual rights, and bodies empowered to strike down laws or decrees as unconstitutional (e.g. the Supreme Court in the United States, and the Constitutional Council in France). In some polities, notably the United Kingdom, the constitution is not codified but is made up of many limitations of power dating back to Magna Carta (1215) and many reservations of rights, such as the English Bill of Rights (1689). In addition, while it is expected that the liberal state will not penalize beliefs or practices some citizens, even if a majority, find repugnant (e.g. X-rated adult films or hate speech) usually the object of opprobrium is arguably within a realm legally or constitutionally protected against government interference (e.g. free speech). These considerations show that a liberal and neutral state is “tolerant” only in a secondary sense, that is, in terms of the arrangements for the use of public power citizens agreed to be justified. It is conceivable that liberal outcomes may be the consequences, or effects, of the forbearance of a benevolent despot or autocrat. However, liberalism cannot be contingent on the good will of an autocrat. The stability and continuity of a liberal state depends, in some meaningful way, on the consent of the citizens who comprise the civil society supporting the state. While consent is often discussed as relevant to the justification of the foundational principles of the liberal sate, the necessity of accepting the actual procedures that keep the liberal state running is less often remarked. Yet, unless a majority of citizens consent (in some way) to the same “rules of the game” and on a day-to-day basis, a genuinely liberal polity would be impossible. Hence, liberal states need to be democracies. Citizens must accept as binding democratic procedures even when they know that those

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Robert Paul Churchill procedures may produce outcomes they find seriously objectionable. In this sense, then, citizens must be tolerant of “losses” they experience within a system they consent to as formally, or procedurally, just. In addition, citizens must accept it as a public good that just democratic procedures can justly resolve difficult issues, and they must accept it as reasonable to attach greater importance to the outcomes of democratic procedures than to manipulating procedures to advance their own special interests. Toleration as a general norm for democratic citizens within a functioning democracy is far more implicit than explicit. Yet reliance on just procedures is manifest every time there is shared understanding of the reasonable limits of contested interests and policies. Once all interested parties have had a fair opportunity to advocate, to express their views, to vote, to appeal, or to compete for office and a specific outcome has been reached through democratic means (e.g. as results of elections, or Supreme Court decisions), then contestation must cease. An example is the decision by Vice President Al Gore to accept the Supreme Court decision (in Bush v. Gore) that enabled George W. Bush to become the president-elect in 2000, even though a continuing recount of Florida ballots might have shown that Gore carried Florida and won the presidency. As this example illustrates, accepting the results of a democratic outcome as final and reasonable mirrors the combination of the objection and forbearance conditions necessary for toleration. Whereas a very strong and principled objection to an outcome may remain, it is nevertheless accepted. In this connection, we also see how critically important it is that most citizens accept foundational principles—and neutrality most importantly—as providing the framework within which

democratic processes operate. For unless citizens are confident that they will not be subject to loses concerning their deepest comprehensive visions of human good, they will not consider themselves able to tolerate their uncertain fortunes at the ballot box or as a result of democratic politics. This feature of toleration can be regarded as a social capital, or civic virtue, within a liberal democracy, as we will discuss in the next section.

THE DUTY OF CIVILITY AND PUBLIC REASONS There is a second specification or feature of the implicit norm of citizen toleration. Tolerance is not only required to accept functioning democratic procedures, but also as a form of public interaction in a liberal democracy. Toleration requires that in debating policy options we recognize one another as equal participants in self-government. Toleration also requires that citizens respect each other’s reasonableness and decision-making capacities. The willingness to take this view toward fellow citizens and to be reasonable in debate must be a form of tolerance, for we would certainly consider citizens intolerant if they acted as if they believed that they did not accept the principle of equal respect, or did not respect autonomously made decisions when they found them objectionable in content or result. This aspect of toleration bears some resemblance to the form of social capital called civic virtue (Almond and Verba, 1989, Putnam, 2004). It certainly requires that citizens make every effort to practice what Rawls called the “duty of civility” (1993); this is the duty to offer one’s fellow citizens

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LIBERAL TOLERATION public reasons when deliberating with them about the public good. Knowing that controversy occurs against the backdrop of deep, possibly intractable, disagreements, we must be able to explain the basis for any law or policy we advocate by appealing to public reasons. Reasons are “public” in the required sense when they are consistent with everyone else’s status as a free and equal fellow citizen. Public reasons are thus those reasons whose status as reasons is shared equally among citizens. For instance, debates over the spanking of children may not advert to religious convictions or cultural traditions, as these are not public reasons. Their force as reasons relies on faith or on cultural memberships that can be reasonably rejected. By contrast, public reasoning may advert to reasons relating to parental childrearing practices that alternatively foster or diminish the optimal development of children as democratic citizens. Reasons of the latter kind, open as they are to empirical investigation, are public for they do not draw on deep, controversial conceptions of human flourishing. In addition, the well-being and civic virtue of children is an objective which we can expect all citizens— whatever their other commitments—to share as reasons. But reasons adverting to faith or cultural traditions can be reasonably rejected, for it can be expected that fellow citizens with different fundamental values will regard them as unreasonable. Rawls claimed that a liberal state retains its legitimacy only if citizens, in their public capacity, commit to the “ideal of public reason” (1993). Hypothetically, the legitimacy of a law or a policy decision would be a result of its justification being impossible to reasonably reject. Given the importance of toleration for democratic and liberal states, it is not surprising that the historical emergence

of toleration as normative corresponded (roughly) with the rise of democratic and liberal forms of governance. All three—toleration, democratic theory, and liberalism— arose in tandem with increasing claims about the rights of man, respect for the dignity of the individual, awareness of the epistemic limitations of knowledge, and awareness of the differences between the ineluctable subjectivity of personal experience versus public responsibilities (Creppell, 2003).

JUSTIFICATIONS OF TOLERATION Up until the twentieth century, arguments against intolerance have been more prominent than positive arguments for toleration. Despite the fact that “intolerance” and “tolerance” are not strictly contradictory, the case against intolerance often has furnished reasons for greater tolerance. Historically, there have been two major lines of argument against intolerance. One has been primarily epistemic and emphasizes the fallibility of human reason. Montaigne’s (1533–1592) widely influential Essays marked a watershed in the development of humility and moral psychology. For Montaigne, it is via the human body through which we engage and judge the world (Creppell, 2003), and our sensory perspectives are always relative to some time and place, and inevitably subjective. We thus cannot pretend to encounter life in terms of some grand prearranged plan. The value of life must be comprehended in terms of the individual’s encounter with it: “Life must be its own objective, its own purpose. Its right concern is to rule itself, govern itself, put up with itself” (Essays III, 12, 1191). For Montaigne, “Nature brought us forth free and unbound: we imprison

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Robert Paul Churchill ourselves in particular confines” (Essays III, 9, 1101); society constricts persons through the habits, tastes, and customs it imprints upon us. For Montaigne, the mind’s inquiries, when freed from artificial strictures, are “shapeless and without limits; its nourishment consists in amazement, the hunt and uncertainty” (Essays III, 13, 1211). Montaigne’s cultivation of openness to new experiences, and his sensitivity to his own uncertainties filled Montaigne with respect for diversity as well as natural equality. He reminds us wittily that even “upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses” (Essays III, 13, 426). Montaigne argued, in addition, that “There is a porousness between the self and others that prevents defining oneself and persons one encounters in unchanging categories” (Creppell, 2003, 89). In Montaigne’s words, “there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people” (Essays II, 1, 380). Thus, in consequence of his humanism, skepticism, and belief in natural equality, Montaigne condemned the prejudice, cruelty, and intolerance lying behind the wars of religion, witchcraft persecutions, the use of torture, and the Spanish colonization of the Americas. A willingness to resort to violence presupposes infallibility about good and bad, right or wrong that defies the human condition. “To kill people, there must be sharp and brilliant clarity; this life of ours is too real, too fundamental, to be used to guarantee these supernatural and imagined events” (Essays III, 11, 1167). And Montaigne continues, “After all, it is to put a very high value on your surmises to roast a man alive for them” (Essays III, 11, 1169). Whatever the credulity persons attach to their convictions, they cannot be more probably true, Montaigne surmises, than the inherent value each of us attaches to his or her bodily existence in the here and now.

In the Philosophical Commentaries of 1685, Bayle also offered an epistemic argument against intolerance that significantly influenced the Enlightenment and the moral sense theorists. Whereas Montaigne argues that fallibility must be acknowledged as a result of accepting the human condition itself, Bayle maintains that fallibility must be inferred from the limitations of the intellect itself. What Bayle called the “natural light” of practical reason discloses its own limitations including an inability to discern ultimate truths. In addition, Bayle argued positively for toleration as based on moral considerations. For Bayle, all humans possess this natural light, which reveals certain moral truths to those who consult it with humility and sincerity of heart. It matters not, Bayle, claimed what religious faith one professes, or even whether one is an atheist. The principles of moral respect and reciprocity revealed by the natural light cannot be trumped by the claims of religion because the latter are of an entirely different epistemological character. Religion is based on faith, and therefore its “truths” are those of faith and trust, and not apprehensions of an objective world. By far the most important and far­reaching argument concerning toleration in the seventeenth century was Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Continuing the logic of limited government to protect natural rights for which Locke had argued in The Second Treatise of Government (1689), in the Letter Locke turns to the proper separation between state or institutional power versus the freedom of the individual to autonomously determine for herself what religious beliefs and obligations she will take on. Thus Locke argues that, while it is the duty of the state to protect the natural rights of citizens, the “care of the soul” cannot be the state’s business. As a subjective matter of faith and

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LIBERAL TOLERATION belief, true conviction cannot be produced by coercion; only an outward pretense of conformity can result from coercion, and such a show cannot be pleasing to God. Hence the state must respect a God-given and inalienable right to the free exercise of religion. Moreover, as churches themselves exist only as voluntary associations of their members, churches have no right to use force to require membership or to prevent apostasy. Allowing churches to exercise such powers is inconsistent with a political order based on the consent of the governed. Locke’s argument for respect for autonomy underlying freedom of religion was incomplete, however. Locke himself believed it necessary to draw limits to toleration, disallowing religions that do not accept limitations on their place in civil society (the problem with Roman Catholicism, in Locke’s view). In addition, still believing that morality depended on belief in a higher being, the state need not tolerate atheists whose beliefs threaten the basis of social order. Thus, Locke’s primary contribution to liberal toleration was his separation between public and private “domains” and an argument for limited state power that foreshadowed development of the principle of neutrality. Yet, because Locke continued to think of morality as derived from religion, he did not offer an account of how individuals—including atheists—were capable of using reason alone to achieve a secular understanding of morality. It was Mill who was to make that contribution in On Liberty (1859). Although he rarely uses the terms “toleration” or “tolerance,” Mill is often regarded as having offered an extremely insightful and practical way of relying on public reasons to settle disputes. Mill distinguished between “self-regarding” activity, a realm of action in which the individual should be free from

interference of the government and social pressure, and “other-regarding” activity, or the realm of action the government and public may reasonably take an interest in. Mill’s main argument for this distinction is based on his “harm principle,” according to which the exercise of social or political power is legitimate only if necessary to prevent harm done by one person to another (non-consenting) individual. It is never permissible, Mill argued, for the state to be paternalistic, presuming it knows the good for an individual better than the individual knows for herself. Likewise, it is not permissible for a majority to use law to restrict beliefs, actions, or practices it finds offensive or immoral, in the absence of evidence of real harm. Mill offered two additional sets of arguments that, although expressly presented in defense of a maximum of individual liberty, also support political (state) and citizen toleration. Thus Mill argues for the free expression of all thought and opinion on utilitarian grounds balancing the benefits of open inquiry and social progress against social stagnation and blind prejudice as a result of the suppression of belief, thought, and discussion. Likewise, Mill argues for the toleration of “experiments in living” as providing educational lessons as to the best ways of enhancing individuality, originality, and living a fulfilling life. Many contemporary debates today over the proper limits of law and public morality take their starting points from Mill’s On Liberty. To be sure, whether or not legal restrictions are enacted against expressions or behaviors some regard as intolerable (e.g. abortion, hate speech)—some citizens, and possibly many, will merely go along with, endure, or put up with what they find seriously objectionable. As noted earlier, it would be a mistake to consider passive and unenthusiastic

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Robert Paul Churchill fellow travelers to be tolerant. Nevertheless, many important controversies have not been resolved, or resolved to the satisfaction of all: among these are physician-assisted suicide, biomedical engineering, the use of marijuana and other recreational drugs, high-risk sports, pornography, and gun ownership. The resolve of many to resort only to public reasons and to disagree respectfully about which side of the debate on each particular issue is morally correct bespeaks the continuing relevance of toleration. Among contemporary political philosophers, the justification of toleration looms large, given its centrality both for a neutral government and for the civility and civic duties of citizens. Yet because toleration is a fundamental norm of liberalism and is justified, in turn, by reference to conditions necessary for liberalism, it is far from clear that there can be a noncircular or nontrivial justification of liberal toleration. According to Kymlicka (1995), for instance, toleration derives from the respect owed to individuals as personally and ethically autonomous beings with the requisite capacities for choosing and realizing individual conceptions of the good life. However, Kymlicka’s claim appears already to presuppose that the good life must be an autonomously chosen way of life. Therefore, Kymlicka’s definition seems to beg the question as nonliberals (e.g. communitarians) could regard it as reasonably questioned. In Forst’s (2012a) view, the problem of justification is best approached through what he calls a “discursive principle of justification.” In Forst’s view “every norm that is to be binding for a plurality of persons, especially norms that are the basis of legal coercion, must be justifiable with reasons that are reciprocally acceptable to all affected as free and equal persons” (Forst, 2012b). Principles

of liberal toleration are norms that certainly satisfy this principle of justification. However, Forst’s justificatory principle is really just the reintroduction of Rawls’s ideal of public reason except that, in Forst’s case, the justification made through offering and accepting public reasons are for fundamental norms, rather than for policies or other outcomes of public deliberation. Thus it is not clear that Forst’s justification takes us very far toward overcoming the problem of liberal partiality or circularity.

FURTHER ISSUES FOR RESEARCH Certainly liberal political theorists, their critics, and philosophers will continue to be interested in whether and how liberal toleration can be justified. One possible way forward is to proceed as Rawls did in Political Liberalism (1993) with his “Idea of public reason revisited” (1997). One might then maintain that toleration, along with freedom, equality, and fairness, is a public political value that will be secured by the ideal of public reasoning. The difficulty with this suggestion is that those participating in the selection process must already be tolerant if political reasoning is to proceed purely in terms of public reasons, that is, in terms of reasons that do not draw upon deep, controversial conceptions of human flourishing. Nor does it do to expect toleration to emerge from an “overlapping consensus” (Rawls, 1993), unless toleration is already present within deep and comprehensive accounts of human flourishing. Forst has claimed that toleration is a “normatively dependent concept” (2012b) and certainly Forst is correct insofar as the principle of liberal toleration does not come

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LIBERAL TOLERATION ready made with substantive reasons for objection, forbearance, and rejection. In this way, toleration appears to be formal and much like the Categorical Imperative which does not supply us with maxims of action and good intentions, or like the principle of utility which does not come with substantial reasons for preferring one policy or one rule over others. Yet, while we cannot have reasons for objection, forbearance, or rejection unless we know what situation or condition we face, toleration may have some moral content after all. In other words, Forst may be mistaken in saying that “toleration is not a virtue or value” and that it “can only be a value if backed by the right normative reasons” (2012b). On the contrary, toleration may acquire some moral content from natural human responses of reciprocity, as well as dispositions to resist free riding and cheating. Studies by cognitive psychologists (Haidt, 2012)  and in evolutionary biology (Pinker, 2011) indicate that these basic values are among the “modules” with which humans are programmed. This subject requires further research but points toward a basis in human psychology for moral responses. If this approach proves correct, then it would be clear why reciprocal practices of tolerating the values of those who have accepted your own would be attractive, and why cheating by attempting to acquire public benefits by special pleading (e.g. insisting on the truth of one’s “privileged” comprehensive account of the good) would be condemned. If there is a biological basis for toleration, there still remains the age-old riddle of the chicken and the egg. Is a pluralistic and tolerant civic society a precondition for a liberal democratic regime? If so, then what must be done to create and nurture a civil society in a place such as Albania,

Belarus, Somalia, South Sudan, and so on until it can sustain a liberal democracy? This is a critical question for many societies presently rent by tribal, clan, or ethnic, or religious strife. A number of additional questions also are relevant to the relationship between a tolerant civil society and a liberal democracy. One is the status of toleration as an individual virtue (Heyd, 1996, Newey, 1999, Churchill, 2003, 2007)  and the relationship between this virtue and civic virtue. Can toleration be taught as organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which distributes the magazine Teaching Tolerance, presume? Perhaps the most significant research issue concerns applications of principles of liberal tolerance and their limits, both domestically (McKinnon, 2006)  and internationally to what Rawls (1999) called hierarchical but “decent” peoples. In this connection, Catriona McKinnon (2006) has helpfully suggested that the harm principle be interpreted such that a violation of rights constitutes a political harm that ipso facto registers concern about the limits of toleration. On this suggestion, the way forward in hard cases (e.g. defamatory expressive acts) is to “consider whether the complaints of parties in opposition to one another could be made in terms of their rights” (McKinnon, 2006, p.  173), where complaints must be advanced by adverting to public reasons. Although the most fundamental rights, human rights, are far from fully determinate in scope, the advantage of McKinnon’s approach is to bring decisions about the limits of toleration into line with arguments about entitlements and correlative obligations that, though far from uncontroversial in application, have already incorporated the universalizing and equal respect ideals of public reason.

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Robert Paul Churchill WORKS CITED Almond, G. A. and Verba, S. (1989), The Civic Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bayle, P. (1685/1987), Philosophical Commentaries, trans. A. G. Tannenbaum (ed.). New York: Lang. Churchill, R. P. (1997), “On the difference between non-moral and moral conceptions of toleration: the case for toleration as a moral virtue,” in M. Ravazi and D. Ambuel (eds), Philosophy, Religion, and the Question of Intolerance. Albany, NY: State University of New Your Press, pp. 189–211. — (2003), “Neutrality, and the virtue of toleration,” in D. Castiglione and C. McKinnon (eds), Toleration, Neutrality and Democracy. Dordrecht and London: Kluwer Academic, pp. 65–76. — (2007), “Toleration and deep reconciliation,” Philosophy in the Contemporary World, 14 (1) (Spring): 100–113. Creppell, I. (2003), Toleration and Identity. New York: Routledge. Fish, S. (1997), “Mission impossible: setting the just bounds between church and state,” Columbia Law Review, 97: 2255–2333. Forst, R. (2004), “The limits of toleration,” Constellations, 11: 312–325. — (2012a), The Right to Justification. New York: Columbia University Press. — (2012b), “Toleration,” in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 edn), http:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/ entries/toleration. Haidt, J. (2012), The Righteous Mind. New York: Vintage. Heyd, D. (ed.) (1996), Toleration: An Elusive Virtue. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Horton, J. (1994), “Three (apparent) paradoxes of toleration,” Synthesis Philosophica, 9: 16–18. — (1996), “Toleration as a virtue,” in D. Heyd (ed.), Toleration: An Elusive Virtue. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Horton, J. and Mendus, S. (eds) (1991), John Locke: ‘A Letter Concerning Toleration’ in Focus. London: Routledge. — (eds) (1999), Toleration, Identity, and Difference. New York: St. Martin’s. Kymlicka, W. (1995), Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Locke, J. (1689/1983), A Letter Concerning Toleration, J. H. Tully (ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. — (1689/1988), Second Treatise of Government, P. Laslett (ed.), Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. McKinnon, C. (2006), Toleration: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. Mendus, S. (ed.) (1988), Justifying Toleration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — (1989), Toleration and the Limits of Liberalism. Basingtoke: Macmillan. Mill, J. S. (1859/1974), On Liberty, G. Himmelfarb (ed.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Montaigne, M. de (1958), The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. D. M. Frame. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Newey, G. (1999), Virtue, Reason, and Toleration. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pinker, S. (2011), The Better Angels of Our Nature. New York: Penguin.

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LIBERAL TOLERATION Plato (c. 320 BC/1964), Republic, trans. P. Shorey, in E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (eds), The Collected Dialogues of Plato. New York: Pantheon. Putnam, R. D. (ed.) (2004), Democracies in Flux. New York: Oxford University Press. Ravazi, M. and Ambuel, D. (1997), Philosophy, Religion, and the Question of Intolerance. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Rawls, J. (1993), Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

— (1997), “The idea of public reason revisited,” Chicago Law Review, 64: 765–807. — (1999), The Law of Peoples. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Simmons, A. J. (2007), Political Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, B. (1996), “Toleration: an impossible virtue?” in D. Heyd (ed.), Toleration: An Elusive Virtue. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 18–27.

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10 DEMOCRATIC THEORY Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley

Democratic theory concerns, among other things, the nature of the democratic idea, the distinctive characteristics of the democratic process including the notion of representative democracy, and justification of a democratic form of government. Justification of democracy can take three forms: focus on consent in social contract theory; focus on beneficial consequences in various forms of democratic instrumentalism; and emphasis on a notion of public reason. Some political theorists, such as Dahl (1989), have also taken an empirical approach to justification arguing that the idea of democracy when fully adopted by a people generally produces the best feasible (workable) political system in comparison to feasible nondemocratic alternatives. This chapter addresses these central concerns while also identifying some key issues needing further research. The democratic idea encompasses notions of moral and political autonomy and that of intrinsic equal worth, which also involves a concept of justice or fairness in the distribution of society’s goods. These notions are central to democratic processes and to any justification of democracy as well as to discussions of the democratic “public,” since democracy, in its essential meaning, invests political power in principle in the people, the demos. Developing the idea of “the power of

the people” brings to fore issues of effective participation, enlightened understanding, “public reason,” and principles of “reasonableness” and “reciprocity.” This also leads to discussion of current theories of democratic processes and topics such as liberalism, deliberative democracy, and more radical theories including contemporary feminist critiques and agonistic pluralism. Closely connected to this discussion is the notion of citizenship. Is citizenship a matter of legal status, political agency, or self-identity, or all three? A traditional theory of citizenship focuses on citizen as agent while a current liberal model emphasizes constitutional and legal matters. Key problems of citizenship theory are inclusion, pluralism, and expansion. Discussion of the question of “political legitimacy” leads to an overview of social contract theory, and its concept of justice as well as contemporary criticisms and of theories of democratic instrumentalism which emphasizes beneficial consequences of democracy. All these topics interweave in many ways and encompass as well the question: should political theory be a normative, theoretical activity or an empirical, scientific one. All of this leads also to key issues demanding exploration by those who wish to research democratic theory: (1) What does “rule by the people” ultimately mean in today’s diverse, and contentious society?

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Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley (2) As globalization and migration of peoples increase what should be the parameters of citizenship? (3) How does a democratic society handle controversy and varieties of political rhetoric? (4) Are views of democracy which are dependent on a Kantian view of autonomy with its key focus on rationality adequate to deal with socially embedded human beings with variable rationality and who may suffer differing degrees of dependence and disability in their life process?

EQUALITY AND AUTONOMY As stated by one political theorist, one feature of democracy is the desire of each and every citizen to stand to other citizens in a relation of fundamental moral equality, where any notion of significant moral differences between persons is decisively rejected (Fairfield, 2008). A major problem for democratic theory is to give substance to the notion of “equality.” Political theorists describe equality and its worth in various ways. The notion of equality also relates to ideas of autonomy, intrinsic moral worth, and justice. Foundational for much democratic theory is the Kantian notion of autonomy as a capacity to impose an objective moral law on oneself. Autonomy involves the ability to speak for oneself, to choose one’s actions, and to be responsible for one’s acts. It implies independence in choice and deliberation and thus to be free of manipulation by others. To be autonomous requires two kinds of conditions: (1) competency and (2) authenticity. Authenticity involves awareness of one’s desires and values, the capacity to reflect upon them and in practice to endorse them (Frankfurt, 1987, Dworkin, 1988, Feinberg, 1989). There is considerable

disagreement about authenticity. Some argue for a notion of critical self-reflection, that is, a rational appraisal of one’s desires, values, and so on which includes some test for internal consistency and comparison to so-called reliable beliefs (Haworth, 1986). Others criticize the heavy emphasis on the rational which ignores affective elements of decision making and issues like relationships, and commitment to and care for others (Meyers, 2004). Concerning the competency requirement, there are issues of social oppression and inhibiting conditions of personal history and their impact on authenticity and autonomy (Christman, 1991, Mele, 1991)  and Nussbaum argues that a Kantian account proposes an account of rationality not satisfied by the mentally disabled and maybe not even by those temporarily dependent or disabled (Nussbaum, 2007). The competency condition for autonomy leads to the issue of paternalism, that is, interference with the choice or deliberation of another person, against their will on the grounds that the person interfered with will be better off or protected from harm. It is assumed that some persons are not competent in their own right to make the choice. A widely accepted example is that of children up to a certain age. More controversial examples include the mentally challenged, the mentally ill, those suffering from severe Alzheimer’s, or the withholding of relevant information concerning a person’s condition by physicians. In the political arena one encounters examples of state paternalism, namely, the belief that the state “knows best” how persons should act and moves to protect them. Plato argued for a paternalistic government led by philosopher-kings, while government in contemporary Singapore seeks to oversee a broad range of behaviors of its citizens. Some argue that the state engages in paternalism when it seeks

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DEMOCRATIC THEORY to protect its citizens through legal restrictions on various elements of personal behavior such as drug use, wearing seatbelts in cars, using helmets while riding motorcycles. Persons treated in a paternalistic manner are assumed to be less than fully rational. Kant, for example, argued that only rational beings qualify as moral persons and thus he excluded humans who lacked rational capacity as well as nonhuman beings as moral persons. This leads to important questions for a democracy, especially one established on principles of justice or rational discourse. Thus John Rawls argues (1971) that justice is owed to all moral persons, but in Kantian fashion, he sees persons in the “original position” in the social contract as equal, free, and independent and capable of public reason. Again, Nussbaum argues that this excludes the mentally disabled and those even temporarily dependent or disabled from citizenship and from fair distribution (Nussbaum, 2007). One hardly need to be reminded that throughout human history various human beings have not been accorded full human and/or moral status whether women, persons of color, persons of various minority groups, and still today, children. This impacts on concepts of citizenship and on questions of effective participation in the democratic process. Dworkin (2006) argues that in American democracy most people, in spite of many great and evident differences, share two very basic principles that constitute the notion of “human dignity”: the “principle of intrinsic value” and the “principle of personal responsibility.” The first principle asserts that each human life has a special kind of objective value, a potentiality that demands to be realized. The second principle holds that each person has a special responsibility to realize the success of his/her own life, a responsibility that includes the notion that each person

exercises his or her own judgment about what kind of life would be successful. Dahl (1989) also argues for the idea of “equal intrinsic worth” as central to the notion of democracy as “rule by the people,” that is, rule by a “demos” for it is assumed that the demos consists of members who are considered equal for the purposes of arriving at governmental decisions. Dahl is more specific arguing that this means that “during a process of collective decision-making, the interests of every person who is subject to the decision must (within the limits of feasibility) be accurately interpreted and made known” (Dahl, 1989, 87). This notion will be discussed further in our overview of issues related to the democratic process. The notion of personal responsibility implies certain obligations of citizens to others. Thus, Dworkin cites Kant’s notion that one cannot act in a way that denies the intrinsic importance of any human life without insulting your own self-respect. This means, argues Dworkin, that you have to act in a way that your actions do not show contempt for the value of other people’s lives. This principle is crucial for understanding how democracy can deal with diversity and pluralism and for an understanding of what constitutes a “democratic process.” Finally reverting back to autonomy and the issue of paternalism, Dahl asserts a strong principle of equality that assumes that ordinary people are in general qualified to govern themselves. This returns us to the notion of competence and to equal consideration of interests and both are encompassed in what Dahl calls the “presumption of personal autonomy,” namely, the view that “no one is likely to be more qualified than you to be a better judge of your own good or interest to act to bring it about” (Dahl, 1989, 99). You, of course, may choose to delegate choices to others whom you deem qualified to decide

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Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley the most appropriate means to fulfill your personal interests. This presumption of personal autonomy has significant implications for democratic theory. First, paternalism needs to be attacked head on. In the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, everyone should be assumed to be the best judge of his or her own good or interests; the burden of proof is always placed on those who propose to replace personal autonomy by paternalism. It should be clear that anyone whose personal autonomy is permanently replaced by paternalistic authority would be maintained in a perpetual state of childhood and dependence and their intrinsic worth as human person denied. Thus, it also argues that every adult member of groups claiming to be democratic should be considered sufficiently well-qualified to participate in making binding collective decisions that affect his or her good or interests, that is, they should be considered full citizens of the demos. This brings us to a discussion of democratic process and the notion of citizenship.

A THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS: WHO IS A CITIZEN? In developing a theory of the democratic process, we will first do so on an ideal level, that is, we will set out the ideal for such a process, taking for granted that a perfect democratic process and a perfect democratic government may not have or ever will exist in actuality. Fairfield (2008) argues that democracy “dreams of being an ideal deliberation community,” one that is radically egalitarian and that engages in a fully rational conversation in which all participate as respected equals, where differences are acknowledged and all voices brought to the table. This is the

ideal, but the real question is a question of inclusion: Does the demos include all adults (competent persons?) Are all members of the demos autonomous and capable of fully participating in a rational conversation while remaining tolerant of all participants and allowing all voices to be heard? Political theorists generally agree that one of the important criteria for a democratic process is effective participation by those engaged in the democratic decisionmaking process. Dahl describes effective participation in terms of two aspects of a binding decision-making process: setting the agenda and deciding the outcome. In terms of agenda setting, this means that all citizens ought to have adequate and equal opportunity for placing questions on the agenda. Decision making can be delegated but ultimately it needs to be the demos, the people, who set the agenda. However, in the face of pluralism, diversity, and disagreements, control of the agenda may not be in actuality a possibility for many citizens in contemporary democracies. In fact, the mechanics of politics, certainly in the United States where power distribution is often dramatically unequal, demonstrates that control of agendas more frequently reflects particular interests and the control of various advocacy groups and that, in fact, particular elites exercise almost continual influences over the agendas and the decision-making processes. These particular elites include entrenched bureaucrats, a small selection of partisan elites, an unrepresentative selection of appointed judges, and a plutocratic hierarchy of corporate capitalism. Democracy falters when political agendas for deliberation are set by the power elite (Scott, 1998). The second component of decision making is the decisive stage where voting produces

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DEMOCRATIC THEORY an outcome. Ideally, again, in a truly democratic process each citizen should have an equal opportunity to express their choice and that choice should be counted as equal in weight to the choice expressed by any other citizen (Dahl, 1989). This stated principle does not require a particular method of voting or election. Democratic theory provides no definitive answer to the question of democratic decision-making processes. Is majority rule necessary or problematic? Dworkin, for example, does not believe majority rule is a particularly sound method of reaching truth or securing equality of political power (Dworkin, 2006). In fact, Schumpeter argues that democracy is a method of generating political decisions by granting power to elites by electoral means (Schumpeter, 1976). Majority decision making and minority participation in democratic processes continue to be major issues for democratic theory. Another key decision-making element concerns the characteristics of the decider, particularly of competency and autonomy of citizens. Dahl (1989) suggests the notion of “enlightened understanding,” which entails that citizens are capable of comprehending the issues and are afforded adequate and equal opportunities to understand means and ends for achieving their interests and for grasping expected consequences of proposed policies and decisions for all. This requires, at minimum, that there be in a democracy such rights as freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. Adequate and relevant information and discussion opportunities are crucial. Another key question, then, for democratic theory is what constitutes a people and who is a citizen? A citizen is generally defined as a member of a political community who enjoys the rights and assumes the duties of membership. However, citizenship can have three distinct dimensions. First, it can be seen in terms

of a legal status and in terms of certain civil, political, and social rights which a citizen can claim and for which they can seek protection. Often this can be claimed by right of birth. Second, a citizen is a political agent and the question of participation in a society’s political institutions comes to the foreground. Third, citizenship has historically and even today been considered a matter of identity, both psychological and sociological, conveying a sense of belonging and seeming to demand a form of loyalty. There have been two traditional models of citizenship. The first, called the “republican model,” is derived from the experiences of Athenian democracy, Republican Rome, the Italian city-states, and various workers councils. The key principle is civic self-rule. This model stresses political agency and active participation in deliberation and decision making. The model has been labeled impractical for today’s world of social complexity and increasing diversity. The argument is that today’s heterogeneity does not allow the kind of “moral unity” and “mutual trust” that existed in the Greek or Italian city-states (Walzer, 1989). The “Liberal model” stresses citizenship as a legal status and as membership in a community of shared or common law. This model emphasizes “negative freedom”; the role of government is to protect individual freedoms from interference from other individuals or authorities. This allows citizens to exercise their freedoms primarily in the world of private associations and attachments rather than in the political domain. Some political theorists have argued that such a view of citizenship fosters passivity because ordinary citizens see political activity as insignificant. This seems to be the case today in the United States. Further, such passivity can be dangerous for maintaining legal status for if citizens grow inattentive, the legal and governmental

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Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley security provided by the authorities may dwindle. This security must be continually secured, sometimes against these authorities, and thus the passive enjoyment of citizenship requires that at least intermittently citizens engage in political and legal action (see Constant, 1819). Mill, Constant, and other political theorists have argued that the regular exercise of political liberty is the best means of moral improvement, which also opens the minds of the public to the public interest and to the importance of defending their freedoms (Constant, 1819, Mill, 1861). This is an instrumentalist defense of democracy. A more sustained attack on the liberal view comes from feminist political theorists. This model gives primacy to the private sphere and to the notion of noninterference in the pursuit of particular interests. However, feminists contend that separating the private and public political sphere leads to the definition of the private domain as one of necessity and inequality which impacts on the citizen status of women. Further, they argue that the private and public spheres are intimately connected as is exemplified by the fact that there are laws and policies that structure the personal and private such as laws about rape and abortion, childcare, and the allocation of welfare benefits. Further, some personal problems have wider significance that can only be solved collectively through political action (Pateman, 1989). At issue here is the challenge of internal diversity which demands that a citizen appears as situated in a social world characterized by differences of gender, class, language, race, ethnicity, and culture. Feminists and others argue that a universal notion of citizen defined in terms of legal status and blind to various social differences has led to the extension of rights to some groups but

exclusion for others and thus full equality and integration into the political structure have not occurred for all citizens. Political theorists such as Young (1989, 2000) argue that the “people” must be seen as a “heterogeneous public.” Citizens as political participants start from their situated positions and attempt to construct a dialogue across differences. This, however, requires citizens to have certain characteristics. Young speaks of participants who are “public spirited,” who are open to the claims of others, and who are not single-mindedly self-interested. This raises the question: what “virtues” are required of citizens in a pluralist liberal democracy? There are, of course, different answers (Macedo, 1990, Galston, 1991, Callan, 1997). One virtue advocated by those from the liberal tradition is “public reasonableness.” This seems to be the ability to listen to others while formulating a position in a way that is sensitive to and respectful of different experiences and identities of fellow citizens. John Rawls speaks of “reasoned consensus” among citizens; this involves agreement on general reasons but can allow disagreement about interpretations (Rawls, 1993). Feminists, of course, oppose a rational consensus notion because it tends to stifle diverse voices as well as to exclude some persons. To speak of citizen virtues, of course, requires education in democratic values as John Dewey recognized in his book, Democracy and Education (1916). Indeed, many political theorists have given attention to the role of education in securing democracy as well as to the kind of education required (Gutmann, 1999, Brighthouse, 2006). The questions in this area are many: Is a common curriculum required and what is or should be the common knowledge and values for all citizens? Should it be a curriculum that teaches

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DEMOCRATIC THEORY respect for difference while also providing the necessary skills for democratic discussion across differences? (Leydet, 2011). The question of “democratic education” also raises the question of paternalism in cases of children whose parents or culture is not democratic.

A THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS: THEORIES OF DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION It seems clear that a particular kind of deliberative process is required for any society or organization to be properly called “democratic.” Democracy, in theory, puts faith in the power and wisdom of the people. Rousseau (1993), for example, speaks of the “general will.” Green and Blanshard argued that the general will is the foundation of democracy (Blanshard, 1961, Green, 1986, Fairfield, 2008). However, the concept of the “general will” is open to many interpretations and not free from controversy. Joseph Schumpeter, for example, argues that the general will as it actually functions in a democratic order represents an abstraction and that the general will cannot be the will of any identifiable set of people (Schumpeter, 1976, Fairfield, 2008). Dewey and Lippmann engaged in an extensive debate about the nature of the “democratic public” in the 1920s (Lippmann, 1925, Dewey, 1927). Lippmann argued that there was no such entity while Dewey sought to describe the characteristics needed of the public if democracy as a way of life and system was to survive. The difficulty for democratic theory is that to speak of the public as an “agent” seems somewhat spurious because agency presupposes consciousness, intentionality, and volition at a minimum. Given the various degrees of participation and

information possessed by a public as well as the facts of diversity, disagreement, and often apathy, how should democratic deliberation be characterized? Again we find a range of positions on this question. One position on this issue is “deliberative democracy.” Benhabib provides a clear statement of this position when she states that a legitimate collective decision-making process in a polity is present when the institutions of this polity are so arranged that what is considered in the “common interest of all results from processes of collective deliberation conducted rationally and fairly among free and equal individuals” (Benhabib, 1996, 69). Rawls sees citizens as reasonable deliberators who are able to appeal to shared standards of public reason. This view is related to the notion of citizenship as a legal status for the requisite standards is embodied in institutions and institutional documents. Rawls declares: “Our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution, the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may be reasonably expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason” (Rawls, 1993, 137, Fairfield, 2008). There are three basic elements of deliberative democracy as set out by Rawls. First, there is “public reason,” which is a form of rationality that limits reasons that citizens may give in supporting their public opinion. These reasons must be consistent with seeing other citizens as equal. Here, of course, we have the Kantian understanding of how respecting others reflects back on one’s own self-respect. Secondly, of course, the framework of constitutional democratic institutions that is the setting for democratic deliberative processes (Fairfield, 2008). Finally, there is embedded in the notion of “public reason” the idea that citizens will

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Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley know and desire to follow public reason and seek to realize its ideal in their political conduct (Rawls, 1999b, 578, Fairfield, 2008). Guttmann and Thompson stress the “reason-giving” requirement of deliberative democracy, namely, that leaders should give reasons for their decisions and should respond to reasons citizens give in return. These reasons also ought to appeal to principles such as reciprocity, publicity, accountability, and equality. Although followers of the deliberative democracy camp disagree about the values, status, aims, and scope of deliberation, they all seem to agree that deliberative politics involves “working together in a more cooperative “first-person plural spirit” (Gutmann and Thompson, 2004, 7). Deliberative democrats assume that arguments are made in ways everyone can respect; and that such mutually respectful deliberation will often lead to discovery of areas of agreement. Two emphases are present in deliberative democracy: one on procedure, on the process of deliberation, and an emphasis on cognitive validity. These aspects are best captured by Habermas (1962, 1971, 1975, 1987, 1990, 1996, 1998), who understands democracy as an institutional order and whose legitimacy depends on collective will-formation through discourse. He develops a theory of communicative reason that locates rationality in structures of interpersonal linguistic communication. He argues that all speech acts have an inherent telos, namely, the goal of mutual understanding and that human beings possess the communicative competence to bring about such understanding. Habermas imagines discourse occurring in the “public sphere,” an arena in which individuals participate in discussions about matters of common concern. He focuses on consensus and views the lack of consensus as a “failure.” Habermas’s

ideal of discursive democracy relies heavily on the cognitive dimension of the self; there is a cognitive demand embedded in speech. Little attention is given to the affective and other dimensions of self and deliberation in the public sphere seems immune to the forces of chaos, diversity, and conflict present in the real world of human life. Two schools of criticism thus emerge. The communitarians focus on the political subject as socially embedded. Sandel, for example, rejects any notion of a Kantian disembodied subject and argues for the notion of a “wider subject,” a subject marked by community, a common vocabulary of discourse, and a background of implicit practices and understandings (Sandel, 1982). MacIntyre and Taylor argue that the self is embedded in a social context (MacInytre, 1984, Taylor, 1985). Taylor asserts “Man is a social animal, indeed a political animal, because he is not self-sufficient alone, and in an important sense is not self-sufficient outside the polis” (Taylor, 1985, 1290). For communitarians, the emphasis in democratic deliberation is on community values; participants in the dialogue focus on their social obligations and thus a sense of loyalty to a community takes precedence over individualistic, egoistic calculations, and strategic rationality. However, communitarian views are criticized because of their overemphasis on society, which fails to honor a proper balance between individualism and community. Feminist critiques of contemporary moral and political theory have focused on two contemporary views of the self—the Kantian and “homo economicus.” The Kantian ethical subject uses abstract pure reason to transcend cultural norms and to discover absolute moral truth whereas the homo economicus uses instrumental reason to rank desires in a coherent order and to figure out

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DEMOCRATIC THEORY how to maximize desire satisfaction. Both these views isolate the individual from personal relationships and larger social forces. Feminists argue that this minimizes the personal and moral import of circumstances about which one has little or no choice and interpersonal relationships. Feminist theorists believe political theories based on a Kantian or economic view of the self are inadequate because they eclipse family, friendship, passionate love, and community, and downplay the difficult of resolving conflicts that arise between these commitments and personal values and aspirations. They also ignore the multiple, sometimes fractious sources of social identity constituted by one’s gender, sexual orientation, race, class, ethnicity, and so forth. Their homogenized rational subject is not prey to ambivalence, anxiety, obsession, prejudice, hatred, or violence and thus they overestimate the immunity of the self to noxious influences, and the reliability of reason as a corrective to distorted moral judgment. A better account of self for moral and political theory is one understood as socially situated and murkily heterogeneous (Meyers, 1989, Benhabib, 1992, Jaggar, 1998). For example, Young is skeptical that democratic deliberative processes could lead to outcomes that would be acceptable to all; deliberation as defined by Habermas is too reason-based, and thus excludes forms of communication that women and other marginalized people tend to use, such as greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling (Young, 1990). Young’s approach is similar to that of the group labeled as “agonists” or “agonistic pluralists.” Agonism is a political theory that emphasizes the potentially positive aspects of certain (but not all) forms of political conflict, namely, in the ability to enforce or reenforce democratic inclusion. This view accepts a permanent place for such conflict, while

seeking to show how we might accept and channel this positively. The agonists argue that deliberative democracy theorists ignore the inequalities that set agenda priorities and constrain the alternatives that political actors may consider in their deliberations. Common discourse is itself a complex product of structural inequality; it is hegemonic discourse and often leads to false or distorted agreement. Young argues that the theory and practice of deliberative democracy have no tools for raising the possibility that deliberations may be closed and distorted in this way—it lacks a theory of ideology as well as an account of the genealogy of discourses and their manner of helping to constitute the way individuals see themselves and their social world (Young, 2001). In this context, Fairfield argues that what is needed is an adequate phenomenology of democratic speech which does not oversanitize the language of politics (Fairfield, 2008, 53–78). Agonistic feminism is represented in the works of Honing, Mouffe, and Ziarek (Honing, 1992, 1993, 2001, Mouffe, 1992, 1993, 2005, Ziarek, 2001). Agonistic views see the nature of politics as inherently conflictual, with battles over power and hegemony being the central tasks of democratic struggle. Advocates of agnostic politics believe that the “consensus” sought by both liberalism and deliberative democrats leads to oppression or injustice by silencing new struggles. It often leads to paternalism which etymologically has a male cast, and women and minority groups have often been characterized as less “rational.” Mouffe argues that “every consensus exists as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power, and that it always entails some form of exclusion” (Mouffe, 2000). Agonists seek to re­orient political theory to the question: How should we deal with irreducible difference?

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Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley Adequate political theory should conceptualize democracy so as to optimize the opportunity for people to express their disagreements and should recognize that conflict may not be eliminated even given sufficient time for deliberation. The agonists argue that politics crafted in the knowledge of the inevitability of conflicts is paradoxically freer than one which seeks to shy away from this fact.

JUSTIFICATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC WAY OF GOVERNANCE Political legitimacy is about explaining why the use of political power by a particular body is permissible and why there is a moral duty to obey its commands (Rawls, 1993). A typical way of approaching this question is via consent: what social arrangements can we all accept as free persons who have no authority over one another? The mechanism is a hypothetical agreement, a social contract, a model of the reasoning of citizens. It embodies the reasons a person would have for recognizing and accepting a constraint that is independent of his desires. The contract can be seen either in a prudential manner or in an idealized moral manner. The Hobbesian contract is prudential, based on instrumental, practical rationality. The aim of the contract shows that agreement is an effective way to further one’s nonmoral aims and interests. Thus Hobbes would argue that one chooses between a form of government and life under anarchy. The Kantian contract is focused on a moral or political principle that meets certain basic moral demands such as treating all as free and equal and not subjecting any person to the will or judgment of another (D’Agostino et  al., 2012). In his social contract theory, Rawls emphasizes the principle of justice “as

fairness.” The “original position” of the contract is designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in reasoning about fundamental principles of justice. It includes a “veil of ignorance”; the parties are deprived of all knowledge of their personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances. There is an “overlapping consensus,” a term referring to how supporters of different comprehensive normative doctrines (those of religion, political ideology, or morality)—that entail apparently inconsistent conceptions of justice—can agree on particular principles of justice that underwrite a political community’s basic social institutions. The overlapping consensus depends, in effect, on there being a morally significant core of commitments common to each of the main comprehensive doctrines in the community. The emphasis is on a notion of “public reason,” in that it identifies central core commitments that all, despite many disagreements, could in principle accept. Some political theorists see the liberalist and deliberative democracy position as purely procedural, for the deliberative situation is set up so that whatever principles are generated are by the fact of the generation: fair. Political legitimacy is created by appropriately constrained decision-making procedures (Fabienne, 2008). As noted earlier, much of the criticisms against Rawls and liberalism are against this rationalized, idealized, procedural notion of democracy. Again, Nussbaum focuses on the notion that the individuals in the original position are equal, free, and independent; they are not socially embedded but idealized rational deciders; they are not, therefore, subject to the complexities of human emotions, social commitments, and dependencies that occur not just for the disabled but for all persons in their lifespan.

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DEMOCRATIC THEORY In addition to social contract theories, there are also instrumentalist defenses of democracy. Mill and others, such as Sen, Habermas, and Dewey, argued that the democratic method is strategically and epistemologically better and that it improves the moral character of the participants (Mill, 1861). Strategically, democracy forces decisionmakers to take into account the interests, rights, and opinions of most people in society (Sen, 1999). Epistemologically, it is generally more reliable in helping participants discover right decisions because it emphasizes discussion and boarder bases of information. Finally, Mill, Dewey, and Habermas argued that democracy tends to enhance autonomy, rationality, and even the morality of the participants. Another somewhat instrumentalist defense of democracy is the observations of Jaspers that democratic institutions are able to manage change and transformation in myriad ways (Jasper, 1953). Democracy is also a method for managing disagreements through peaceful means (Fairfield, 2008, xiv). It should be clear by now that most theorizing about democracy is idealized and on the strictly theoretical level. However, there are some political theorists who give empirical arguments for democracy. Thus Dahl undertakes a comparison of democracies to other types of governments, and argues that democracies tend to produce the best political systems taken all around (Dahl, 1989). His criteria of judging the various forms of government include producing maximum flexible freedom, promoting human development, protecting personal interests, and the ability for self-correction. Major questions and issues remain for future democratic theory research. (1) What does “rule by the people” ultimately mean in today’s diverse and contentious society? Consensus may not be achievable and

conflict may be inevitable. A burning question for many nations today is the role of religion in the public sphere. (2) As globalization and migrations of peoples increases what should be the parameters of citizenship? Will citizenship be expanded to the global level? Can democracy exist at the global level? Central questions that emerge are: will new forms of citizenship develop such as multicultural citizenship or post national citizenship? (Kymlicka, 1995). Will the concept of nationhood be reconstructed? (Miller, 1995). (3) How does a democratic society handle controversy and varieties of political rhetoric? The issue of compulsion and persuasion in democratic processes is a crucial one (Kegley and Skowronski, 2013). Should we be developing a phenomenology of political rhetoric as well as of political protest? (4) Are views of democracy which are dependent on a Kantian view of autonomy with its key focus on rationality adequate to deal with socially embedded human beings with variable rationality and who may suffer differing degrees of dependence and disability in their life process? How is democratic theory to handle the growing social, economic, and other inequalities present today? Those interested in democratic political theory research have much fertile ground to plow.

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Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley Blanshard, B. (1961), Reason and Goodness. London: Allen & Unwin. Brighthouse, H. (2006), On Education. London & New York: Routledge. Callan, E. (1997), Creating Citizens. New York: Oxford University Press. Christman, J. (1991), Autonomy and Personal History. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 21 (1): 1–24. Constant, B. (1819), “The Liberty of Ancients Compared to Moderns,” trans. A. Phillips (ed.), The Political Writings of Benjamin Constant. New York: Oxford University Press. D’Agostino, F., Gaus, G., and Thrasher, T. (2012), “Contemporary Approaches to the Social Contract,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/ contractarianism-contemporary. Dahl, R. (1989), Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dewey, J. (1916), Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: Macmillan. — (1927), The Public and Its Problems. New York: Holt Publishers. Dworkin, G. (1988), The Theory and Practice of Autonomy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dworkin, R. (2006), Is Democracy Possible Here? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fabienne, P. (2008), Democratic Legitimacy. New York: Routledge. Fairfield, P. (2008), Why Democracy? Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Feinberg, J. (1989), “Autonomy,” in J. Christman (ed.), The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Autonomy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Frankfurt, H. (1987), “Freedom of Will and the Concept of a Person,” in H. Frankfurt (ed.), The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galston, W. (1991), Liberal Virtues, Citizenship Virtues and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Green, T. H. (1986), Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Other Writings, P. Harris and J. Morrow (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gutmann, A. (1999), Democracy and Education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gutmann, A. and Thompson, D. (2004), Why Deliberative Democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Habermas, J. (1962), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. — (1971), Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. Shapiro. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. — (1975), Legitimation Crisis, trans. T. McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. — (1987), The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. T. McCarthy. Boston, MA: Bacon Press. — (1990), Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. C. Lenhardt and S. W. Nicholson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. — (1996), Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg (trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. — (1998), The Inclusion of the Other. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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DEMOCRATIC THEORY Haworth, L. (1986), Autonomy: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology and Ethics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Honing, B. (1993), Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. — (2001), Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jaggar, A. (1988), Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Jasper, K. (1953), The Origin and Goal of History, trans. M. Bullock. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kegley, J. and P. Skowronski (2013), Persuasion and Compulsion in Democracy. New York: Lexington Press. Kymlicka, W. (1995), Multicultural Citizenship. New York: Oxford University Press. Leydet, D. (2011), “Citizenship,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ fall2011/entries/citizenship/. Lippmann, W. (1925), The Phantom Public. New York: Transactions Publishers. Macedo, S. (1990), Goods, Virtues & Diversity in the Liberal State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacIntyre, A. (1984), After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: Indiana University Press. Mele, A. (1991), “History and Personal Autonomy,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 23 (1): 271–280. Meyers, D. (1989), Self, Society, and Personal Choice. New York: Columbia University — (2004), Being Yourself: Essays on Identity, Autonomy and Social Life. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Mill, J. S. (1861, 1958), Considerations on Representative Government. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Press.

Miller, D. (1995), Nationality. New York: Clarendon Press. Mouffe, C. (1992), Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community. London; New York: Verso. — (1993), The Return of the Political. London; New York: Verso. — (2000), The Democratic Paradox. New York: Verso. — (2005), On the Political, Thinking in Action. Abingdon; New York: Routledge. Nussbaum, M. (2007), The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Pateman, C. (1989), The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rawls, J. (1971), A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. — (1993), Political Liberalism, 2nd edn. New York: Columbia University. — (1999b), “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” in S. Freeman (ed.), The Collected Papers of John Rawls. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rousseau, J. J. (1993), The Social Contract, trans. G. D. H. Cole. New York: Knopf. Sandel, M. (1982), Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schumpeter, J. (1976), Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. London: Allen & Unwin. Scott, J. (1998), Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Conditions Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sen, A. (1999), Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf.

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Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley Taylor, C. (1985), Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walzer, M. (1989), “Citizenship,” in T. Bell, J. Farr, and R. Hansen (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, I. (1989), “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universalist Citizenship,” Ethics, 99: 250–274.

— (1990), Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. — (2000), Inclusion and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. — (2001), “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory, 29 (5) (October): 670–690. Ziarek, E. (2001), An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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11 FEMINISM AND GENDER1 Anca Gheaus

INTRODUCTION Gender makes a difference to many central questions in political philosophy: the way we understand the demands of distributive and relational justice, the ideal form of democracy, the division between the private and the public domains, and the normative issues raised by the acceleration of globalization. We live in societies that are structured by gender in various ways: most obviously, we inherit a tradition of differential treatment of women and men, which bestowed numerous political, economic, and social privileges on the latter. The legal discrimination of women has been the main object of so-called first wave feminism. Pioneered by philosophers such as Wollstonecraft and Mill, feminists of the first wave have insisted on the illegitimacy of excluding women from political and economic life and legally confining them to the private sphere of the family (or monastery). In many countries, women are still subject to legal discrimination, and therefore the aims of first-wave feminism continue to be highly relevant in some parts of the world. Women who live in liberal democracies today have the same legal standing as men: for instance, they enjoy the same legal rights as men with respect to voting, standing for election, holding property and occupational

freedom. Yet, they tend to be underrepresented in politics—particularly at the top levels—in many professions that are considered traditionally male and from the higher end positions of most professions. They also tend to be more affected by poverty than men are and receive less pay; they are the victims of most rapes and domestic violence and do most of the housework and childrearing—both in their homes and in commodified form. Finally, their bodies are objectified through pornography and commodified through prostitution to a much larger extent than men’s. Therefore, women appear to have a lesser share than men in political and social power, economic assets, and social recognition. The core belief of feminism is that people should not suffer disadvantage by dint of belonging to a particular gender, and therefore the earlier facts represent core concerns for feminist political philosophy. Indeed, current feminist political philosophy offers a thorough analysis of all these issues and their ramifications. According to Jaggar’s (1983) helpful classification, feminist thinking comes in several varieties—liberal, socialist, and radical—reflecting the diversity of feminist authors’ value and methodological commitments. More recently added broad categories include ecofeminism and postcolonial feminism. Not all normative feminist thinking

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Anca Gheaus is properly understood as a contribution to political theory which, traditionally, focuses on questions concerning the legitimate limits and uses of state power. Because it is restricted to political philosophy, this chapter mainly draws on work belonging to liberal and socialist feminism. By contrast, the traditions of radical feminism, ecofeminism, and postcolonial feminism are more obviously relevant to ethics and social philosophy, or else they contain suggestions for political changes that are too radical to assess within the framework of liberal, egalitarian, and democratic states. This chapter is also limited to a presentation of the contribution made by feminism to political philosophy at the most general level. It discusses the two main issues in contemporary political philosophy: justice—comprising theories of fair distributions and of equal relationships between citizens—and democratic theory. Theories of justice and democratic theory are the two main areas of political philosophy: the first is about substantial requirements of justice, and the second is about the procedures through which legitimate political decisions can be reached. Gender plays a role in both, and, in particular, the gendered division of labor raises difficulties for mainstream theories in both areas. The last section outlines new developments in feminist theory: explorations of the phenomena of implicit bias, and stereotype threat and thinking about epistemic injustice in the context of gender; I explain their potential import for theories of justice and democratic theories.

RELATIONAL IDENTITIES AND THE ETHICS OF CARE Both in their professional and in their private lives, women tend to carry most of the

responsibilities of meeting other people’s needs: they are often the main caregivers for children, ill and disabled individuals, and the frail elderly. They are also often expected to take responsibility for maintaining good relationships between friends, peers, and colleagues. All these are aspects of the gendered division of labor which, as I will show in the following sections, is the source of much political inequality between women and men (Okin, 1989a). Unlike other ­inequalities—resulting, for instance, from violence or outward discrimination—liberal political philosophy has difficulties identifying the normative status of inequalities flowing from the gendered division of labor, because the individual choices that generate them are typically uncoerced. One of the main contributions of feminist philosophy over the past 30  years was to uncover the moral and political importance of caregiving. The general conclusion of this body of work is that the practical and emotional labor done by women as caregivers should be acknowledged as essential to social cooperation and rewarded adequately. First, on the moral importance of caring. Most generally, care is defined as the activity of meeting another person’s needs, whether material or emotional (Tronto, 1993). The majority of care ethicists follow Noddings (1982) in the belief that, to qualify as care, the activity in question must be hands-on (rather than, say, meeting someone’s needs indirectly, by paying someone else to provide necessary services). Others further restrict the definition to needs that cannot possibly be met by the person in need herself (Bubeck, 1995). The moral value of meeting needs can be accounted for by major ethical traditions, yet direct reference to needs does not figure in the most influential test of assessing individual moral development, devised

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FEMINISM AND GENDER by the psychologist Kohlberg (1981). In the early-mid-1980s, the psychologist Gilligan made two important observations: first, that Kohlberg’s scale of moral development— according to which reaching moral maturity depends on individuals’ ability to outgrow particular attachments to other people and to reason in terms of rights and duties—was developed using only male subjects. Second, that women typically engaged in moral reasoning in which others’ needs and relationships between people played a central role. The female, but not male, subjects of this research systematically tended to describe their identities as relational (Giligan, 1982, 1995). Gilligan did not conclude that women’s absence from Kohlberg’s studies was inconsequential for his theory and that those female subjects who talked about needs and relationships were morally less developed than subjects able to reason in terms of rights and duties. Instead, she thought that in her conversation with girls and women she heard a different “moral voice,” one equally important yet different from the moral “voice of justice” more familiar from men’s moral reasoning. She did not think—as some critics believe—that women and men are structurally unable to speak both “moral languages” but merely noted the gendered aspect of moral reasoning, whatever their explanation may be (Gilligan, 1995). At the time when Gilligan wrote her book, the topic of caregiving—that is, a large part of women’s traditional work—was absent from philosophy. Gilligan’s work broke new ground in reevaluating the moral importance of care; following her, many feminists went on to explore “the ethics of care,” which has since evolved into a large body of moral and political theory. Much of it has to do with practices of caregiving within the family, mostly in

childrearing. Ruddick (1989) argued that people who are primarily responsible for the hands-on tasks of childrearing—and whom she calls “mothers” whether they are female or male—confront three specific tasks: the physical preservation of the children; their physical, emotional, and intellectual development; and their socialization into acceptable members of their group. To accomplish these tasks successfully, mothers develop, ideally, a number of distinct virtues and the ability to address daily dilemmas involving the negotiation of conflicting needs as well as conflicts between the different tasks of childrearing. She thought that the moral experience of mothers, and the specific virtues they develop can be a valuable resource in thinking about peaceful conflict resolution in the political realm. This idea has been further elaborated by Bubeck (1999). More specifically, Ruddick argued that “maternal thinking” identifies each individual as being, first and foremost, the result of someone’s loving work of care, thus providing a specific justification and motivation for pacifism. Others relied on the fact that everybody is “some mother’s child” (in Kittay’s words) to argue for a politics of responsibility; the thought is that we all have duties to support others in their caregiving activities because none of us could have survived and thrived without it (Kittay, 1999, Engster, 2007). Not only is our physical, intellectual, and emotional well-being the result of the care we received at the beginning of our lives, but also care is essential to our very identity as moral beings. Held drew attention to the fact that the mothering activity is not merely reproductive, but a creative activity because “in bringing up children, those who mother create new human persons” (Held, 1997, 634). Held describes the relationship between parents and children as a paradigm

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Anca Gheaus case of moral relationships: it is, par excellence, a situation in which the parents’ exercise of power is voluntarily limited by moral reasons. This is the ideal context for a child to learn that might is not right and hence to get a grasp on the essence of morality (Held, 1993). Other feminists looked beyond the realm of childrearing and noted that the moral development of adults also requires close relationships such as friendship (Friedman, 1993). Yet others examined the importance of caring relationships for creating a climate of social trust, which in turn is necessary for working political communities and even more so for just institutions (Baier, 1994). Beyond the differences in what they choose to emphasize, care ethicists convey the general conclusion that care is necessary if we are to survive and develop into functioning and moral adults who together can run a just political community. Yet, this very important activity has often been seen as instrumental in keeping women out or on the margins of the public domain of politics and the economy, and for a long time failed to earn women the status of equal and fully participating citizens. Echoing de Beauvoir’s (1949) famous claim that one becomes a woman by taking on the functions of reproduction and mothering, some contemporary philosophers warned that feminists should not embrace an ethics of care (Dietz, 1985, Card, 1990). Part of the criticism to the ethics of care—that it is inherently parochial because it cannot account for duties owed to strangers with whom we have no caring relationship, nor the interest or hope to develop one—is easily addressed: some care ethicists have aimed from the very beginning to integrate the importance of care with that of justice (Tronto, 1993), and others have revised or extended their theories in this sense (Noddings, 2002, Held, 2006). It

is more difficult to refute the criticism that an ethics of care is potentially oppressive, by glorifying the private, and ideally selfless activity of caregiving. Yet, care ethicists do not uphold the value for strategic reasons, but because they believe it is genuinely ethically essential. One way to avoid injustice to caregivers may be to directly compensate them—through various public policies—for the work of care they do (Okin, 1989a). The ideal way, however, is to encourage men to share equally in the work of care. To bring men into care as full partners has been on the political feminist agenda at least since the late 1960s, and in spite of some degree of change it still sounds utopian. Most care work is different from other types of work due to its emotional and personal element; for this reason, one cannot (typically) do it well if one does not wish to engage in care. Having a relational self—genuinely valuing connection to others—may in general be a necessary characteristic of a good caregiver. Feminist psychoanalysis offers an explanation of why women, rather than men, tend to take on caregiving: as babies and then small children we form ourselves in reaction to the parent who cares for us most of the time, that is the mother. Thus, female children find it easier to identify with their mothers and therefore form a relational self, while male children strive to separate from the mother (Chodorow, 1978). On this view, the overburdening of women with care work and their ensuing social marginalization as well as their lack of social recognition and susceptibility to being dominated (Benjamin, 1988)  are rooted in the psychosexual relationships between women and men. The direct involvement of both women and men in the care for babies and infants holds the key to change; much of the action, therefore, is in the private sphere. But, as we shall see,

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FEMINISM AND GENDER this does not mean that state involvement is unwarranted.

JUSTICE AND GENDER Is state intervention in the private sphere legitimate, and in what form? How can we make sense of the gender component of distributional justice? How does gender affect other aspects of justice beyond the distributive one—how does gender figure in the problem of relational justice? I now turn to these questions. The Public and the Private Many of the problems mentioned in the introduction are at least partly caused by decisions made by individuals who interact with each other in the private sphere: women (living in liberal democracies) cannot be legally coerced to do housework and childcare; yet they often make career decisions that lead to lower lifetime earnings than those of men, are more reluctant than men to engage in politics, or compete for prestigious and powerful positions in various organizations and end up more often than men making a living out of pornography or prostitution. To the extent to which patterns of interaction are coerced—for instance, in cases when prostitution is embedded in modern forms of slavery, or in cases of domestic violence—they are obviously wrong, and easily addressed by liberal theories of justice. (Indeed, in such cases gender seems incidental, rather than essential, to the problem.) By contrast, when they result from freely made decisions of people interacting in their private capacity they raise difficulties to liberal theories of justice. Traditionally, liberal

thinking has been relying on a distinction between the public life of individuals, which is a legitimate subject to regulation, and their private life, which ought to be free from state intervention. Feminist philosophy challenges this foundational liberal belief. The criticism mounted by Okin (1989a, 1994)  to Rawls’s theories of justice (1971, 1993) on the question of justice in the family is the clearest expression of the difficulty that political–liberal theories of justice have with integrating feminist concerns. The family is a prime example of “the private.” Traditionally, the institution of the family has been particularly instrumental for keeping women outside political and economic life, socializing them into subordination and justifying various forms of violence against them, including marital rape. An obvious feminist requirement then is that the family ought to be internally just in order to be legitimate. Yet, according to Rawls—who formulated the most influential account of liberal justice in contemporary philosophy—the justice of a society is determined by the justice of its basic structure, which is that society’s major political, economic, and social institutions. These institutions—rather than individual action or private associations such as the family—come under the purview of justice. Rawls’s earlier thinking about justice— before he moved on to defend political liberalism—is more amenable to feminist concerns. Okin (1989a, b) argued that gender concerns are internal to the logic of Rawls’s early theory of justice (1971) in two distinct ways. First, she thought that, in order for the veil of ignorance—Rawls’s device for determining the principles of justice—to work in practice, individuals in the original position have to be able to exercise empathy as well as reason. Without a concern for others, the process of deliberating

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Anca Gheaus under the veil of ignorance would come to a standstill. As a consequence, she thought that Rawls’s theory should be modified to give up the requirement of mutual disinterestedness. Given the limited knowledge about the self that characterizes the parties in the original position, plus the fact that choices in the original position are supposed to be made under the condition of uncertainty (the parties cannot attach probabilities to particular outcomes), the requirement of mutual disinterestedness will make deliberation impossible. Second, the family as the site of childrearing is the first school of justice. Individuals who choose principles of justice in the original position must be endowed with a sense of justice, which cannot be developed in the absence of the bonds of care that exist between parents and children and that go beyond parental duty. Therefore, a theory of justice needs to acknowledge the merits of care work and the necessity of caring relationships; in this sense, justice is rooted in care. But the bonds of care are not enough to ensure that children acquire a sense of justice; for this, one also needs to be socialized in just families, in which the distribution of resources and burdens between women and men is fair. However, from the perspective of political liberalism as defended in Rawls’s later thinking (Rawls, 1993), it is not clear in which way should the family respond to the requirements of justice. Specifically, the earlier considerations about the importance of care and justice in the family are not sufficient to show that the family should be internally regulated by justice (Okin, 1994, Lloyd, 1995). On the one hand, the family should be regarded as part of the basic structure of the society because, as the main site of childrearing, it obviously influences everybody’s life chances from the start. On the

other hand, as voluntary associations, different families legitimately reflect a variety of conceptions of the good, some of which may indeed be inimical to feminist values. The principles of justice are supposed to regulate the basic structure in order to ensure that the interaction among a society’s major political, economic, and social institutions is just. A safe conclusion is that, at a minimum, political liberalism will rule out families that deny women their basic freedoms. But this does not get close to the feminist aspiration to see families shaped by internally just arrangements. A current debate within political philosophy concerns the question of whether individual actions should also come under the purview of justice. A positive answer will be friendlier to feminist goals (Cohen, 1997). But even some defenders of a negative answer take the side of Okin in considering it legitimate to regulate certain aspects of the family. Most prominent examples are regulating conditions of divorce, including financial settlements between breadwinners and homemakers and institutions concerning childcare, which are meant to enable both women and men to compete for desirable social and economic positions (Neufeld, 2009). The latter include flexible working hours for parents, parental rather than maternal leaves and subsidized childcare, all of which have a direct effect on the internal organization of the family. These proposals however fall short of addressing the riddle of how a theory of justice that relies on individuals’ sense of justice could allow individuals to be socialized in internally unjust families. If the family and, in general, the outcomes of private interactions ought to come under the purview of justice—either because justice concerns the internal organization of the family as part of the basic structure, or because

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FEMINISM AND GENDER justice concerns individual action—how can we assess them as gender just or unjust? Distributive Justice Both the metric (resources in general, primary goods in particular, welfare, capabilities, outcomes) and the principle (equality, sufficiency, priority) of distributive justice are contentious issues. This is reflected in the variety of accounts of gender justice. Some feminists such as Kittay (1999) follow Rawls in the belief that primary goods are the correct metric of justice. Like Okin, she believes that Rawls’s theory of justice is amenable to a modification that would let it accommodate feminist concerns. Kittay notes that dependency is not the exception, but the norm of social life—we all are, at times, dependent on others’ care for survival. Hence she criticizes the mutual disinterestedness of parties in the original position as a normatively unacceptable distortion of social life. According to Kittay, care is akin to a primary good: it is necessary for individuals to survive, let  alone develop and pursue their idea of a good life. A proper understanding of social life represents individuals as nodes in a network of care, in which the burden of care renders those who carry it particularly vulnerable and needy. Their vulnerability results from the emotional charge of care and from the need to defer their own interests for the sake of meeting the needs of their charges. Informal caregiving does not carry economic rewards, and as a market service care is underpaid (Tronto, 1993, 2002, Bubeck, 1995, Kittay, 1999). Caregivers ought to be able to depend on people and structures that support them, and the support should be made available as a matter of justice. Kittay, and more recently Engster (2007) took this account of dependency and

care as a justification of the welfare state. Bubeck (1995, 1999), who came from a Marxist background concerned with avoiding exploitation rather than from a Rawlsian distributive paradigm, gave an account of gender justice similar in its starting and ending points. Starting from the assumption of the universal dependency on care, she suggested the creation of a state-run civil service of caregiving, which would be similar to, or even replace, the military service. Kittay’s account may be read as an attempt to improve the justice of the basic structure by ensuring that the primary good of care is fairly distributed via the institutions of the welfare state, while Bubeck’s suggestion of a mandatory universal system of caregiving is obviously at odds with political liberalism. But in both accounts gender plays an incidental, rather than constitutive role: they are accounts of gender justice only because caring is a highly feminized activity. Other philosophers consider directly the gendered aspect of typical distribuenda: opportunities, welfare, outcomes, capabilities. As already discussed, women fare worse with respect to at least some desirable social goods such as political and economic advantage. Much contemporary thinking about distributive justice relies on the belief that it is unjust for people to be disadvantaged by factors that are not under their control and for which they cannot be held responsible. By contrast, different outcomes resulting from individual uncoerced and informed choices are just, as long as they reflect individuals’ level of talent and ambition (but for a defense of equality of outcomes, including between women and men, see Phillips, 2004). This is the difficult question, then: is there anything unjust in women’s lesser political participation and economic power if they result from women’s decision to

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Anca Gheaus focus on childrearing and family making? Some believe the answer is negative, that we should take women’s preferences for a particular combination of work and family at face value and strive to accommodate them (Hakim, 2000). Yet, in a world like ours, with a history of formal discrimination against women’s participation in politics and economic life, women’s domesticity is not likely to be a merely individual choice but rather a significant symptom and future cause of gender injustice (Williams, 2000). It is not all history. First, social institutions are structured such that it is difficult to combine work and family. Second, ambition itself is socialized and so, to the extent that gender norms nudge women into domesticity, their lower political and economic ambition and unequal outcomes in these spheres ought to come under criticism (Arneson, 1998, Mason, 2000). The likely conclusion of this debate is that gender justice is incompatible with gender norms. (An important question, which cannot be addressed here, is whether all gender norms are incompatible with gender justice.) Arneson (1998) suggested that gender justice obtains when social practices and individual conduct are regulated such that gender does not affect one’s life prospects. According to Robeyns (2007) a society is gender just when women and men have the same capability sets, are free to choose without gender-related constraints on choice, and enjoy “payoffs” which are also unstructured by gender norms. Gheaus (2012) argued that a society is gender just only if the costs of leading a gender-neutral lifestyle are, for both women and men, lower than, or at most equal to, the costs of gendered lifestyles. Costs in this context are to be understood very broadly, to cover financial burdens, time, effort, psychological discomfort, and so on.

Relational Justice It is counterintuitive that all kinds of social injustice in general, and gender injustice in particular, are distributive in nature. Some of it is relational, concerning how individuals relate to each other rather than how much each has compared to others. The demand that women’s work of care be socially recognized and rewarded is perhaps the most widespread concern of relational justice and gender. But recognition is not all there is to relational justice. Young (1990) famously distinguished between several forms of injustice that do not fit naturally in the “distributive paradigm.” Together they explain, according to her, how women are being oppressed and dominated. The “five faces of oppression” identified by Young are exploitation, marginalization, cultural imperialism, powerlessness, and violence. Indeed, women’s oppression and domination are at least as salient concerns for feminists as unequal outcomes in politics and the economy; Haslanger (2000) has proposed that the very definition of “woman” incorporates this concern: “S is a woman iff (df) S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction” (Haslanger, 2000, 39). Yet, antifeminists may express skepticism about the very existence of gender oppression in liberal societies, pointing out that women are active perpetrators of various mechanisms said to oppress them. Cudd (2006), who takes the oppression of women by men to be the paradigmatic example of oppression, answers this potential criticism by pointing out that often the best overall pay

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FEMINISM AND GENDER off for women in particular circumstances depends on their compliance with oppressive norms. A bigger worry with an account of gender justice in terms of oppression is that the same patriarchal gender norms that hurt women’s interests can also hurt, in other circumstances, men’s interests: for instance, they result in men being more vulnerable to extreme violence in the public space (particularly in war) and in men having less access to family life (because there are no “daddy job tracks,” men are more likely to lose custody battles, etc.).

DEMOCRATIC THEORY AND GENDER Relational equality is called by some political philosophers “democratic equality” to signal its importance for the well functioning of a democratic community (Anderson, 1999). This indicates that, alongside with living in a society whose institutions, individuals, and relationships are just, we also care about the way in which society is being shaped, namely, through democratic procedures. Feminists made distinct contributions to democratic theory by drawing attention to the importance of deliberative and communicative democracy in giving women power and voice and analyzing the way in which the gendered division of labor has systematically excluded women from democratic participation. Deliberative Democracy Benhabib’s work, influenced by critical theory, focuses on the process of shaping particular social and institutional arrangements. On her account, norms of social coexistence are valid only if they are reached through a process of deliberation in which all affected

parties participate under conditions of equality—that is, are equally enabled to voice their opinions on the issues at stake. Other conditions necessary for the democratic process to lead to legitimate outcomes are that all participants be equally able to bring new issues into discussion and challenge the very rules of how the deliberative process is conducted (Benhabib, 1996). This ideal of democracy goes hand in hand with Benhabib’s conception of cultures as constantly changing through dialogue, as well as a conception of cosmopolitan multiculturalism that strives to combine diversity and robust equality. She argued that all citizens of multicultural societies ought to have the same civil, political, and economic rights and should not be enrolled, against their will, in the culture of their parents. Rather, she claims that individuals should retain an ability to exit it at any time (and the right to be accepted by other cultural groups if, for instance, they marry one of their members) (Benhabib, 2004). Benhabib’s ideal of democratic society is feminist because it gives women a voice in every aspect of their lives and tries to delegitimize patriarchal practices without requiring women to repudiate their culture; instead, it indicates the conditions in which multiculturalism need not be bad for women (to appreciate the complexity of the debate on feminism and multiculturalism, see Okin et al., 1999). Other feminists working on democracy, such as Young (1990), are less optimistic than Benhabib about women’s voice in politics, given their historical marginalization. Young’s solution to this problem is that democratic practices should go beyond the deliberative—and hence rational—element and include forms of communication that have been traditionally practiced by women (such as storytelling). Another solution for making

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Anca Gheaus democracies more women-friendly is introducing female quotas in politics (Phillips, 1995). The Gendered Division of Labor and Democracy The gendered division of labor is also important for understanding the role of gender in democratic theory. Pateman (1988) explained how the tradition of the social contract theory presupposes the existence of families: women’s work in the home makes possible the political activity of the polity’s members (male citizens, typically) by providing for their daily needs. Without such support, they would lack the time and resources needed to engage in politics; thus, the social contract between citizens requires a second, sexual—or marriage—contract between women and men. One result is the exclusion of women from political participation. Pateman’s account is similar to Okin’s claim that “major contemporary Anglo-American theories of justice are to a great extent about men with wives at home” (Okin, 1989a, 110). But, while Okin’s main concern is with the requirements of justice in the context of a gendered division of labor, Pateman’s work focuses on women as citizens. Unlike the first contract, the second went unrecognized by political philosophers, thus rendering women and their contribution to political life invisible. Pateman’s ultimate goal is to cast doubt that an organization of social life based on contracts between individuals can be an emancipatory strategy for women. As a consequence of her view, she became one of the main advocates of the introduction of a universal, unconditional basic income as a path toward women’s independence from men (Pateman, 2004).

POLICY AND FEMINIST THEORY As already mentioned, feminist political philosophers support a variety of policy proposals aimed at ensuring a fairer distribution of the burdens and benefits of social cooperation between women and men, and also at improving the relational status of women. Many of these proposals have to do with a better distribution of care work, like the earlier mentioned civil service (Bubeck, 1999)  and with the creation of safety nets for caregivers (Kittay, 1999). In other cases, the policy justification lies in enabling both women and men to engage equally in paid work and family life. As we have seen, the gendered division of labor is considered the source of distributive inequalities between women and men, lower recognition of women and their work, and women’s impaired citizenship. Such policies could result in the generalization of a “caregiving parity” model of social organization which, according to Fraser (1994), would be better at addressing most of the concerns discussed earlier: it would help eliminate female poverty and income inequality, exploitation, marginalization, and lack of recognition. A comprehensive policy proposal that would make it possible for women and men to engage in both paid work and family care was advanced by sociologists Gornick and Meyers (2003). The next logical step for feminist democratic theory was to devise an understanding of citizenship that transcends the gendered division of labor and can therefore equally empower—perhaps in spite of Pateman’s skepticism—women and men. Building, among others, on the ethics of care and Bubeck’s proposal, Lister (2002) argued for a redefinition of citizenhood to include an obligation of caregiving. Lister thinks that an adequate understanding of citizenship

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FEMINISM AND GENDER ought to include the private sphere and so her policy proposals partly overlap with those of Gornick and Meyers: employment regulations to allow parents to combine paid work and care, including parental leaves and childcare services. Other policy proposals are especially useful for including women as citizens on an equal standing to men, such as those concerning parliamentary design, pay and employment equity legislation, and the creation of adequate safety nets for women escaping domestic violence. Another issue on which feminist political theory can directly feed into public policy is that of pornography. Pornography is a likely area that feminists would want regulated for its effects on women. Some feminists believe that there is a direct causal connection between pornography and violence, including sexual violence, against women (MacKinnon, 1987). Others think that pornography is, in effect, a way of subordinating women because pornographic images and words have the illocutionary force of communicating that women may be subject to degrading practices (Langton, 1995). They may also silence women by conveying the idea that women’s explicit opposition to engage in sex (saying “no”) does not constitute a refusal (Hornsby, 1995). If there are such causal connections—especially the more direct ones—they constitute reason for regulating pornography. Any all-thingsconsidered judgment would have to take into account powerful reasons to refrain from its criminalization: for instance, that this would deprive of choices women who do not have many choices in the first place (Nussbaum, 1999). Recently, there has been much philosophical interest in more radical policy proposals meant to improve the general distribution of wealth in society: the introduction of a universal, unconditional basic income, or a move

toward property-owning democracy. Both proposals are very tempting to feminists since they would lift many women from poverty, empower all women economically, at least in the short run, and free them from oppressive marriages and market demands, allowing them to engage in caring (if they wish to) without the threat of economic dependency and poverty (Elgarte, 2008). The introduction of an unconditional basic income could also lead to more recognition for care work and support people’s freedom to enjoy care in non-commodified form (Baker, 2008). Yet, the very last features are also potentially inimical to feminist goals because a basic income would serve as an incentive for some women to forgo careers and hence eventually regroup at the lower end of economic distributions (Robeyns, 2001, Gheaus, 2008). If a universal basic income or a property-owning democracy were to replace, rather than supplement, institutions such as (egalitarian) parental leaves and subsidized childcare, the detrimental effects on women would be larger (Bergmann, 2004).

GLOBAL JUSTICE AND GENDER All the earlier concern domestic politics, but the acceleration of globalization is pressing new issues on the feminist agenda: duties to women living in nonliberal cultures, women’s migration and transnational employment, the revival of a culture of domestic servants, the global transformation of caregiving, and reproductive tourism. One debate takes place between cosmopolitan feminists and those who are more skeptic about the prospects of intercultural understanding. Starting from her version of the capabilities approach rooted in a universalistic account of human values, Nussbaum

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Anca Gheaus (2000) argued that we ought to promote women’s capabilities independently from the cultures in which these women happen to live. Nussbaum’s project is to draw the attention of middle-class feminists from liberal democracies to the plight of poor women from developing countries and explain why the liberal convictions of the first commit them to the goal of advancing the capabilities of the second. Yet, where there are cultural barriers, it is not obvious that there exist legitimate means for doing this. Jaggar (2005) has argued that in order to create such means we must avoid the assumption that oppression by illiberal cultures is the gravest injustice suffered by distant women. Material deprivation for instance—itself a feminized phenomenon—may be a much more salient injustice in many cases. The international migration of women continues to provide cheap labor for domestic services—primarily care services for children, disabled, and elderly persons. The often exploitative employment conditions of migrant women came under feminist criticism (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002). But, given that even in developed countries welfare states fail to provide sufficient care services, cheap migrant labor is often the only solution for enabling women to pursue a career. This generates dilemmas for feminists. Some believe, for example, that feminist commitments to social justice are incompatible with relying on domestic servants (Tronto, 2002). The feminization of migration in combination with the gendered division of labor has created shortages of care in migrants’ countries of origin. Because this phenomenon— often referred to as “care drain”  —happens against a background of stark global inequalities, it represents an issue of global gender justice (Gheaus, 2013). Care drain harms not only children and others in need of care but also parents who are physically separated

from their children, often for many years (Hochschild, 2005). An ideal solution to the problems of global care drain would be the creation of a global caring society such that adequate care is provided locally to all those who need it (Weir, 2005, Kittay, 2008). Increased mobility across borders also enables well-off women to obtain cheaper reproductive services using the labor of poorer women. Thus, women from the so-called third world countries increasingly serve as surrogate mothers to children who are then raised in richer countries. This expanding practice raises moral and political issues for all participants in the transaction: does using a surrogate necessarily exploit her? (Panitch, 2013) What are the conditions in which surrogate women can be said to make an autonomous choice to engage in surrogacy? Arguing that conditions such as adequate income, education, and healthcare, as well as freedom from environmental hazards and state violence are necessary for autonomous decisions, Bailey (2011) concluded that oppression is often unavoidable in surrogacy contracts.

NEW FRONTIERS Gender, Implicit Bias, and Stereotype Threat We have seen why gender raises a difficult problem—at least for liberal theories of ­justice—when inequalities between women and men arise through free interaction. The liberal theory assumes that individuals could take full responsibility for such interactions. But what if free decisions are to a large extent driven by unconscious judgment and/or emotional reactions? Psychological research indicates that even people who hold explicit and

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FEMINISM AND GENDER sincere egalitarian views make choices that reflect negative biases against women or racial minorities. (The best-known test measuring this is freely available at .) Experiments show that both men and women evaluate differently vitas and job applications that are otherwise identical depending on whether they are believed to be from men or from women. Stereotype threat refers to people’s tendency to confirm negative stereotypical expectations that others have of them, especially in social contexts that make the stereotypes salient. A growing body of literature explores the effect of stereotype threat and implicit bias for inequalities between women and men in academic philosophy (see, for instance, Saul, 2013). But the possible application of these findings is much wider: some of the inequalities between women and men are likely to result from unconscious processes that characterize both the people who engage in competition for political and economic positions and those who are supposed to evaluate the former. In this case, it is far from clear that individuals can be held fully responsible for their achievements (or lack thereof). This means that the “different conceptions of the good” cannot be straightforwardly invoked to justify the feminization of certain jobs, women’s lower earnings, and other kinds of gender inequalities. Similarly, to the extent to which mechanisms to reduce implicit bias and stereotype threat are being discovered, there may be a strong case for their use in social practices and state institutions (such as, for instance, job interviews or courts). Gender and Epistemic Injustice According to Fricker (2007), epistemic injustice is a distinct kind of injustice that harms

individuals in their capacity as knowers; it arises when people are being wrongly treated as unreliable sources of information due to the hearers’ prejudice. Epistemic injustice can be testimonial—for instance, when someone is not believed because she is a woman; or it can be hermeneutical, when insufficient collective interpretive resources generates disadvantages—for instance, when a woman’s complaint that she has been the subject of sexual harassment cannot be made sense of in a linguistic community that lacks the concept of sexual harassment. Epistemic injustice bears on most of the issues discussed in this chapter, including fair distributions, deliberative democracy, and women’s oppression. First, there is an interesting question about the nature of the harms at stake in testimonial injustice. According to Fricker, the deepest harm of epistemic injustice is preventing people to become who they really are, as knowers. So does the injustice arise because we have a moral right to become who we are? And does the injustice have a distributional side: is there a right to become who you are as much as others do? Second, the existence of epistemic injustice has direct implications for thinking about democracy, in particular its deliberative component, since testimonial injustice can prevent some individuals from having an equal voice. Similarly, it has consequences for thinking about domination and exploitation, since having a voice is a main strategy for avoiding these forms of injustice: if you suffer from persistent epistemic injustice or from hermeneutical injustice, you are likely to be seriously disadvantaged in negotiations. In conclusion, feminist political philosophy has been making distinctive contributions to the central issues of justice and democracy. Over the next years, it is likely that new

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Anca Gheaus developments in our understanding of nonconscious forms of discrimination and of nonconscious reactions to discrimination are likely to fuel debates about gender justice and about the relationship between gender and democratic exercises of power.

Note 1

I am thankful to Sine Bagatur, Andrew Fiala, Lisa Herzog, Lindsey Porter, and Cristina Roadevin for comments on an earlier draft.

WORKS CITED Anderson, E. (1999), “What is the Point of Equality?” Ethics, 109 (2): 287–337. Arneson, R. (1998), “What Sort of Sexual Equality Should Feminists Seek,” Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues, 9: 21–36. Baier, A. C. (1994), Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Bailey, A. (2011), “Reconceiving Surrogacy: Toward a Reproductive Justice Account of Indian Surrogacy,” Hypatia, 26 (4): 715–741. Baker, J. (2008), “All Things Considered, Should Feminists Embrace Basic Income?” Basic Income Studies, 3 (3) Benhabib, S. (ed.) (1996), “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. — (2004), The Rights of Others. Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Benjamin, J. (1988), The Bonds of Love. Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon Books. Bergmann, B. R. (2004), “A Swedish-Style Welfare State or Basic Income: Which Should Have Priority?” Politics and Society, 32 (1): 107–118. Bubeck, D. E. (1995), Care, Gender, and Justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press. — (1999), “A Feminist Approach to Citizenship,” in O. Hufton and Y. Kravaritou (eds), Gender and the Use of Time. The Hague: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 401–428. Card, C. (1990), “Caring and Evil,” Hypatia, 5 (1): 101–108. Chodrow, N. (1978), The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley, CA: University of California. Cohen, G. A. (1997), “Where the action is: On the Site of Distributive Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 26 (1): 3–30. Cudd, A. (2006), Analysing Oppression. New York: Oxford University Press. De Beauvoir, S. (1949), Le Deuxième sexe. Paris: Gallimard. Dietz, M. (1985), “Citizenship with a Feminist Face: The Problem With Maternal Thinking,” Political Theory, 13 (1): 19–37. Ehrenreich, B. and A. R. Hochschild (eds) (2002), Global Women: Nannies, Maid and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Holt. Elgarte, J. (2008), “Basic Income and the Gendered Division of Labour,” Basic Income Studies, 3 (3). Engster, D. (2007), The Heart of Justice. Care Ethics and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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FEMINISM AND GENDER Fraser, N. (1994), “After the Family Wage. Gender Equity and the Welfare State,” Political Theory, 22 (4): 591–618. Fricker, M. (2007), Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Friedman, M. (1993), What Are Friends For?: Feminist Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gheaus, A. (2008), “Basic Income, Gender Justice and the Costs of GenderSymmetrical Lifestyles,” Basic Income Studies, 3 (3). — (2012), “Gender Justice,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 6: 1–24. — (2013), “Care Drain As An Issue of Global Gender Justice,” Ethical Perspectives, 20 (1): 61–80. Gilligan, C. (1982), In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. — (1995), “Moral Orientation and Moral Development,” in V. Held (ed.), Justice and Care. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gornick, J. C. and M. K. Meyers (2003), Families That Work. Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment. New York: Russel Sage Foundation. Hakim, C. (2000), Work Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century: Preference Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haslanger, S. (2000), “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?” Noûs, 34 (1): 31–55. Held, V. (1993), Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago. — (1997), “Feminism and Moral Theory,” in D. T. Meyers (ed.), Feminist Social Thought: A Reader. New York: Routledge.

— (2006), The Ethics of Care Personal, Political, and Global. New York: Oxford University Press. Hochschild, A. R. (2005), “Love and Gold,” in L. Ricciutelli, A. Miles, and M. H. McFadden (eds), Feminist Politics, Activism and Vision: Local and Global Challenges. London, Toronto: Zed/Innana Books, pp. 34–46. Hornsby, J. (1995), “Speech Acts and Pornography,” in S. Dwyer (ed.), The Problem of Pornography. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Jaggar, A. (1983), Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. — (2005), “‘Saving Amina’: Global Justice for Women and Intercultural Dialogue,” Ethics & International Affairs, 19 (3): 55–75. Kittay, E. F. (1999), Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge. — (2008), “The Global Heart Transplant and Caring across National Boundaries,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, XLVI: 138–165. Kohlberg, L. (1981), The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Langton, R. (1995), “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” in S. Dwyer (ed.), The Problem of Pornography. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Lister, R. (2002), Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives. New York: New York University Press. Lloyd, S. A. (1995), “Situating a Feminist Criticism of John Rawls’s Political Liberalism,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, 28: 1319–1344. MacKinnon, C. (1987), Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law.

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Anca Gheaus Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mason, A. (2000), “Equality, Personal Responsibility, and Gender Socialisation,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 100 (3): 227–246. Neufeld, B. (2009), “Coercion, the Basic Structure, and the Family,” Journal of Social Philosophy, 40: 37–54. Noddings, N. (1982), Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982. — (2002), Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nussbaum, M. (1999), Sex and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (2000), Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Okin, S. M. (1989a), Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books. — (1989b), “Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice,” Ethics, 99 (2): 229–249. — (1994), “Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender,” Ethics, 105 (1): 23–43. Okin, S. M., Cohen, J., Howard, M., and Nussbaum, M. (1999), Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Panitch, V. (2013), “Surrogate Tourism and Reproductive Rights,” Hypatia, 28 (2): 274–289. Pateman, C. (1988), The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Polity Press. — (2004), “Democratizing Citizenship: Some Advantages of a Basic Income,” Politics and Society, 32 (1): 89–105.

Phillips, A. (2004), “Defending Equality of Outcome,” Journal of Political Philosophy, 12: 1–19. — (1995), The Politics of Presence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. (1971), A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (1993), Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Robeyns, I. (2007), “When Will Society Be Gender Just?” in J. Browne (ed.), The Future of Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — (2001), “Will a Basic Income Do Justice to Women?” Analyse und Kritik, 22 (2): 88–105. Ruddick, S. (1989), Maternal Thinking. Towards a Politics of Peace. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Saul, J. (2013), “Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Women in Philosophy,” in K. Hutchison and F. Jenkins (eds), Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tronto, J. (1993), Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge. — (2002), “The ‘Nanny’ Question in Feminism,” Hypatia, 17 (2): 34–51. Young, I. M. (1990), Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weir, A. (2005), “The Global Universal Caregiver: Imagining Women’s Liberation in the New Millennium,” Constellations, 12 (3): 308–330. Williams, J. (2000), Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It. New York: Oxford University Press.

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12 IMMIGRATION AND BORDERS Shelley Wilcox

ARGUMENTS FOR THE STATE’S RIGHT TO EXCLUDE

INTRODUCTION Within the past three decades, the ethics of immigration has emerged as a topic of considerable interest among political philosophers. The subject includes normative questions related to various dimensions of global migration, including territorial admissions, admission to citizenship, and the rights and duties of non-citizen residents. The central question in these debates is whether liberal democratic states have a moral right to restrict immigration.1 On the one side of the issue, philosophers argue that states have a broad moral right to select whatever immigration policies serve their national interest, excluding wouldbe immigrants as they see fit. On the other, proponents contend that a commitment to fundamental liberal values, such as freedom and equality, requires states to maintain open borders. This chapter surveys the main lines of argument in this debate, beginning with arguments in defense of the state’s supposed right to exclude would-be immigrants.

The Conventional View Early work on the ethics of immigration typically defends the common intuition that states have a broad right to control their borders, including a right to regulate immigration in accordance with national priorities. Walzer offers the best-known philosophical defense of this position (Walzer, 1983). He understands political membership as a social good, constituted by the shared understandings of a political community. This implies, Walzer believes, that members of a political community should be free to decide who is admitted to their political community in accordance with their own understandings of it. It follows that we must know something about the nature of liberal democratic communities in order to determine what sorts of immigration policies are appropriate for them. However, since political communities tend to be large and abstract, their natures can be difficult to grasp. Thus, Walzer compares

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Shelley Wilcox liberal democratic societies to other, smaller associations that we understand more readily. By examining neighborhoods, clubs, and families, and the membership policies that govern them, we can determine which immigration policies are appropriate for liberal democracies. The first model Walzer considers is that of the neighborhood, a loose association of individuals living in close proximity to one another. Neighborhoods have no formal legal admissions policies; although residents may choose not to welcome newcomers, the state does not prevent individuals from settling in whatever neighborhood they choose. Should liberal democratic societies adopt membership policies analogous to those of neighborhoods? That is, should liberal states maintain open borders, permitting prospective immigrants to settle in whatever country they wish? Walzer argues that they should not. Since citizens are deeply committed to protecting their culture and political life against perceived threats by outsiders, free migration at the state level would almost certainly be resisted at the local level. Such local closure is undesirable liberal societies; thus, states must be able to regulate immigration as necessary to protect the freedom, welfare, and culture of current citizens. Based on these considerations, Walzer suggests that liberal democratic societies are like clubs: both are free to choose their own admissions decisions, admitting and excluding would-be members in accordance with collective understandings. However, despite these parallels, Walzer believes the club analogy fails to capture an essential moral feature of liberal societies. Unlike club members, citizens have moral obligations to certain unchosen groups of outsiders, such as those with whom they share significant cultural or ethnic ties. In this sense, liberal democratic

societies are like families, “for it is a feature of families that their members are morally connected to people they have not chosen, who live outside the household” (ibid., 41). This kinship affinity has important implications for immigrant admissions policies. In particular, it implies that the relatives of current citizens and displaced ethnic nationals should receive admissions priority. Walzer also acknowledges an additional constraint on liberal immigration policies. Since admissions decisions regulate relationships between members and foreigners, they are governed by the principle of collective mutual aid. This principle maintains that a society is obligated to aid needy outsiders if the need is acute and the cost of providing aid is comparably negligible. Affluent societies can usually fulfill these duties by transferring some of their wealth to poorer societies as economic aid. However, in the case of political asylum-seekers—­individuals who are fleeing their countries to escape political or religious persecution—the duties of mutual aid can be fulfilled only through territorial admission. Thus, Walzer concludes that liberal states have a broad right to regulate immigration in accordance with collective self-understandings, provided they accept at least some refugees, narrowly defined.2 Several commentators have raised objections to Walzer’s argument. One prominent line of criticism takes issue with the analogies he draws between liberal democratic states and other associative organizations (Cole, 2000, Higgins, 2013). For Walzer’s argument to be persuasive, they argue, it is not enough for states simply to be like the associative organizations he identifies; they must be like them in all morally relevant respects. However, this simply is not the case. Consider the analogy between states

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IMMIGRATION AND BORDERS and clubs. These associations may share some idealized features, such as a collective identity or shared sense of purpose. However, they differ in several morally relevant respects: most obviously, membership in states is typically nonvoluntary; states possess territorial jurisdiction that clubs do not; and states provide a much wider range of basic goods to their members than clubs. Given these differences, critics insist that Walzer cannot simply derive the right of liberal democratic communities to choose their membership policies from the fact that most clubs are free to choose their own members.3 He can only offer the observation that states and clubs are alike in this respect, but in absence of further argument, this begs the question of whether political communities have a legitimate right to choose any membership policies they wish.

SELF-DETERMINATION ARGUMENTS For reasons such as these, most liberal philosophers reject Walzer’s defense of the state’s supposed right to exclude would-be immigrants. Nevertheless, some insist that his argument contains a valuable insight: membership decisions are tied to collective self-determination. Recently, several of these philosophers have attempted to draw out the normative implications of this connection, arguing that the right to collective selfdetermination includes the right to exclude would-be immigrants. I will discuss two prominent arguments here.4 The first maintains that the state’s right to exclude follows from collective right to freedom of association, and the second attempts to derive the right to exclude from the collective ownership of public institutions.

THE FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION ARGUMENT In a widely discussed article, Wellman argues that the collective right to self-determination includes a right to close borders, excluding all would-be immigrants, including refugees (Wellman, 2008, Wellman and Cole, 2011). His argument proceeds in two stages. The first seeks to establish that states have a general right to self-determination, which includes a presumptive right to exclude would-be immigrants. The second aims to show that this right is not outweighed by standard egalitarian and libertarian considerations, and thus that states may legitimately close borders in practice. The argument begins with the relatively uncontroversial claim that individuals have a basic right to self-determination, which includes a right to freedom of association. Using the examples of religion and marriage, Wellman further argues that freedom of association has both inclusive and exclusive aspects. Freedom of marital association, for example, includes both the right to marry one’s willing partner and the right to refuse to marry any given suitor or to remain single altogether. He then suggests that the citizens of states also have a collective right to self-determination, which includes the right to choose which would-be immigrants are admitted into the state or to exclude immigrants altogether. In his words:

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Just as an individual has a right to determine whom (if anyone) he or she would like to marry, a group of fellow-citizens has a right to determine whom (if anyone) it would like to invite into its political community. And just as an individual’s freedom of association entitles one to remain single, a state’s freedom of association entitles it to exclude all foreigners from its political community (Wellman, 2008, 110–111).

Shelley Wilcox Wellman is quick to point out that the state’s right to exclude would-be immigrants is a presumptive right. As such, it can be outweighed by competing moral claims. In particular, two types of cosmopolitan moral duties—samaritan and relational egalitarian—could, in theory, place limits on the right to exclude. Samaritan duties, which are generated by the principle of collective mutual aid, require affluent states to assist foreigners living in abject poverty. Relational egalitarian duties require states to mitigate inequalities that contribute to oppression within transnational structural relationships. However, Wellman insists that in practice, neither samaritan nor relational egalitarian duties require states to open their borders because these obligations can be met by “exporting justice” in the form of material aid or through military intervention rather than by admitting immigrants (Wellman, 2008, 129). By attempting to derive the right to exclude would-be immigrants from uncontroversial liberal rights rather than through analogies between liberal states and other associative organizations, Wellman’s argument evades many of the objections to which Walzer’s position is subject. However, it is not without its critics. Some reject Wellman’s claim that the right to freedom of association includes the right to exclude would-be immigrants. For instance, Fine points out that the right to self-determination protects only self-regarding actions; individuals—and importantly, groups—are not morally free to engage in behavior that harms others, in the sense of setting back their significant interests (Fine, 2010). Yet this is precisely what some immigration exclusions do: many would-be immigrants have substantial interests in living in a new state, and barring their entry thwarts

these vital interests. Wellman acknowledges that individuals who cannot live a minimally decent life in their home countries have a substantial interest in moving to a new state in which their basic needs could be met, but he insists that states can fulfill their duties to help these needy individuals by transferring material aid. However, Fine argues that individuals may also have significant “familial, social, religious, cultural, political, or economic” interests that can be met only by moving to a new state and immigration restrictions wrongly thwart these interests. Thus, in many cases, the right to self-determination does not give liberal states the right to exclude would-be immigrants. Other critics object to the second stage of Wellman’s argument. Wellman acknowledges that some relationships between citizens and outsiders are robust enough to generate relational egalitarian duties, but he contends that societies can fulfill these duties by transferring aid. However, I have argued that exporting aid is often an inappropriate means of fulfilling relational egalitarian duties because aid transfers tend to create the sorts of oppressive relationships that relational egalitarians reject (Wilcox, 2014). For instance, contributing economic aid can enable donor nations to dominate recipient nations, by setting conditions for its use or by leveraging the possibility of continued aid to gain an unfair advantage in negotiations over other policies. Moreover, aid transfers alone often cannot remedy the injustices that generate relational egalitarian duties in the first place, since these injustices are maintained by ongoing, unfair economic policies. Critics also reject Wellman’s claim that samaritan duties can be discharged by military intervention on similar grounds (Cavallero, 2014).

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IMMIGRATION AND BORDERS THE ASSOCIATIVE OWNERSHIP ARGUMENT Pevnick shares Wellman’s conviction that the prima facie right to exclude immigrants is connected to the right to collective self-determination (Pevnick, 2011). However, his account of this connection differs from Wellman’s in two important respects: he derives the right to exclude from claims to collective ownership rather than the right to freedom of association; and he acknowledges that in practice, a broad range of moral duties to outsiders could outweigh the presumptive right to exclude. Thus, Pevnick’s version of the self-determination argument yields something of a middleground position on immigrant admissions. Pevnick argues that the right to self-determination is grounded in the special ownership relationship between citizens and their institutions. Citizens contribute to the creation and maintenance of state institutions in numerous ways—through their labor and tax payments and by obeying the law—and as result of these efforts, they may claim ownership in state institutions and the benefits that flow from them. Collective ownership supplies citizens with a right to self-determination with respect to these institutions, including a presumptive right to decide who will have access to them and the benefits they produce. Since access to state institutions is inextricably linked to access to territory, Pevnick concludes that collective ownership claims include the right to exclude would-be immigrants. Pevnick contends that liberal states considerable discretion over immigration policies; however, he acknowledges that some would-be immigrants have moral claims to admission that outweigh the right to exclude, and in such cases, states must grant admission to these immigrants. Refugees,

defined as “those fleeing political persecution and those trapped in abject poverty” are an obvious case (Pevnick, 2011, 92). Pevnick also acknowledges four cases of global inequality that generate stringent moral duties to outsiders: (a) if one group falls below some minimal standard of decent living while another enjoys an excess of wealth; (b) if inequalities are a direct result of the past illegitimate actions of a betteroff group; (c) if inequalities threaten to undermine fair interaction among parties in robust transnational relationships; and (d) if inequalities result from the unfair distribution of benefits or burdens within a selfsupporting scheme of social cooperation. While Pevnick does not explicitly argue that states must admit immigrants in order to fulfill these moral duties, he also does not rule out this possibility. Thus, for example, if opening borders were a suitable means for rectifying ongoing inequalities resulting from a state’s past illegitimate actions, then the victims of such injustices would have a strong claim to admission. Although some commentators applaud Pevnick for developing a more moderate position on immigration than many of the other theorists who defend the right to exclude, critics worry that his arguments leave many questions unanswered. Pevnick contends that citizens develop ownership claims in public institutions by contributing to their creation and maintenance, and that these claims include a right to selfdetermination with respect to these institutions, including the right to determine who will have access to them. Some critics doubt that Pevnick’s theory can offer a satisfactory account of the extent of original citizenship in a newly founded state (Hudson, 2011). Others focus on his position on

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Shelley Wilcox undocumented immigrants, which, they claim, commits him to circular view. For instance, I point out that Pevnick’s associative ownership account seems to imply that undocumented immigrants, who also contribute to public institutions in various ways, have legitimate ownership claims in these institutions, and thus a corresponding right to help to choose the membership policies that apply to them. However, Pevnick denies that undocumented immigrants have legitimate ownership claims in public institutions because, in his view, they entered the country without the consent of citizens. This, I suggest, commits his account to a problematic circularity, according to which the consent of citizens is necessary to establish a right to self-determination (because consent is required for ownership and ownership supplies the right to self-determination) and the right to self-determination supplies citizens with the right to consent (Wilcox, 2012).

ARGUMENTS FOR OPEN BORDERS Some liberal thinkers, most notably Carens, have raised a broad challenge to arguments in favor of the state’s supposed right to exclude immigrants. They argue that fundamental liberal principles, such as freedom and equality, entail not that liberal democratic states have broad authority to restrict immigration, but rather that states have a prima facie duty to maintain open borders. I will discuss two well-known lines of argument here. The first derives the duty to maintain open borders from the purported right to freedom of international movement, and the second draws upon luck egalitarian ideals to establish the duty to admit all wouldbe immigrants.

The Freedom of Movement Argument Proponents of the freedom of movement argument maintain that the liberal commitment to liberty requires that states to recognize a basic right to freedom of international movement. In his early work, Carens defends this view by arguing that each of the three main theoretical approaches to liberalism—utilitarianism, liberal egalitarianism, and libertarianism—implies that liberal states should maintain open borders (Carens, 1987). Of these approaches, Carens is most interested in Rawlsian egalitarianism. According to his cosmopolitan reading of Rawls, parties in the original position are charged with selecting global principles of justice rather than domestic principles that apply only within a particular state. Like parties in the standard original position, representatives in the global original position would choose a scheme of equal basic liberties, prioritizing these freedoms over other principles of justice. Importantly, Carens contends, they would include a right to freedom of international movement in this scheme of basic liberties. Thus, since right to free international mobility includes the right to cross national borders, he concludes that liberal states should maintain open borders. More recently, Carens has developed a version of the freedom of movement argument that foregoes specifically Rawlsian concepts, drawing instead on the analogy between domestic freedom of movement and international freedom of movement (Carens, 1992). Liberals widely acknowledge domestic freedom of movement as a basic right of liberal citizenship. Carens argues that international freedom of movement is an equally important freedom because every reason one might have for moving to a new state

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IMMIGRATION AND BORDERS within a particular country could also apply to moving across national borders. To name just a few: one might want a job; one might fall in love with someone from another country; one might belong to a religion that has few adherents in one’s native state and many in another; one may wish to pursue cultural opportunities that are only available in another land (Carens, 1992, 28). Thus, since the same fundamental human interests that support the case for considering freedom of domestic movement to be a basic right also support the case for considering freedom of international movement to be a basic right, Carens concludes that liberal states should respect the right to free international mobility, opening their borders to would-be immigrants.5 Carens believes that the right to freedom of international movement establishes a strong presumption for open borders. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that certain limitations on immigration will sometimes be justified. In his view, restrictions on particular liberties, including freedom of international movement, are legitimate if they are necessary to preserve those liberties in the long run. However, because such limitations involve overriding a basic right, they can be justified only by the weightiest of reasons and only on the basis of rationales that are compatible with liberal commitments. Given these considerations, Carens suggests that states may legitimately limit immigration insofar as is necessary to maintain public order, ensure national ensure national security, and protect liberal institutions from erosion by immigrants with illiberal political values.

The freedom of movement argument has been enormously influential. However, it has also been subject to a number of forceful objections. Some critics charge that Carens overstates the moral importance of free international mobility, and thus fails to establish that freedom of international movement is a genuine human right. One prominent formulation of this objection, developed by Miller, rests on the distinction between a basic interest and a bare interest (Miller, 1995). On the one hand, a basic interest refers something that is vital to human well-being, such as the means of subsistence, and thus warrants protection by a moral right. A bare interest, on the other hand, is a legitimate interest, but is generally not important enough to deserve such protection. Carens maintains that there is no morally relevant difference between free domestic movement and free international movement; both satisfy basic human interests. Miller acknowledges that people have a basic interest in free domestic movement, and he concedes that free international movement may also be a basic interest in some cases, such as when immigration is the only way to escape political persecution or avoid starvation. However, he insists that most of the world’s people have only a bare interest in freedom of international movement. Certainly, many people wish to move to another country in order to pursue economic opportunities there or to participate a culture that does not exist in their home country. Yet as long they have an adequate range of opportunities in their home country—that is, a reasonable choice of occupations, cultural activities, and so on—then their interest in free international movement does not warrant protection as a basic moral right. Thus, Miller concludes, freedom of international movement is at best a remedial right of those persons whose basic rights cannot be secured

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Shelley Wilcox in their home country; it is not a basic human right as Carens claims.

THE LUCK EGALITARIAN ARGUMENT A second leading argument for open borders draws upon luck egalitarianism. Luck egalitarians maintain that distributive arrangements are just to the extent that they track the distinction between choice and luck.6 More specifically, they argue that social benefits and burdens should be allocated on the basis of people’s responsible choices and not on the basis of circumstances over which they have no control. Distributive justice requires minimizing the effects of factors attributable to brute luck, such as one’s race, native abilities, intelligence, and the wealth of the family into which one is born, on the allocation of social benefits and burdens. Thus, luck egalitarians tend to endorse redistributive policies that involve transferring social benefits from luck-advantaged persons to those disadvantaged by bad brute luck. Most luck egalitarians are concerned with justice within a single, democratic political community. However, cosmopolitan luck egalitarians believe that a commitment to moral equality entails that distributive principles should be applied globally, without regard to political borders.7 In their view, justice among citizens of different countries does not differ significantly from justice among co-citizens; people have as strong distributive obligations to foreigners as they have to their fellow citizens. The luck egalitarian argument for open borders draws upon this cosmopolitan insight, together with a commitment to luck equality, which maintains that the goal of distributive justice

is to eliminate inequalities based on factors attributable to brute luck. The argument begins with the uncontroversial claim that the country into which one is born is a matter of brute luck, just as one’s race or family wealth. Proponents then argue that since global economic inequalities among individuals are determined primarily by the countries into which they are born, these inequalities are also attributable to brute luck. It follows, they claim, that justice requires eliminating global economic inequalities among individuals. Borders maintain such inequalities by preventing individuals born in poor countries from accessing the opportunities and social benefits available in affluent societies. Thus, the argument concludes, global justice requires affluent societies to maintain open borders. Some of the most prominent liberal advocates of the open borders position endorse versions of the luck egalitarian argument. For instance, Carens condemns immigration restrictions as tantamount to a geographical caste system, in which national borders serve to protect and preserve the underserved wealth of affluent countries. As he puts it, “[c]itizenship in Western liberal democracies is the modern equivalent of feudal privilege—an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances. Like feudal birthright privileges, restrictive citizenship is hard to justify when one thinks about it closely” (Carens, 1987, 252). Furthermore, Carens argues, immigration restrictions cannot be justified “on the grounds that those born in a given territory or born of parents who were citizens are more entitled to the benefits of citizenship than those born elsewhere or born of alien parents. Birthplace and parentage are natural contingencies that are ‘arbitrary from a moral point of view’” (Carens, 1987, 261).

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IMMIGRATION AND BORDERS The luck egalitarian argument for open borders successfully evades the most prominent objection to the freedom of international movement argument—namely, that free international movement is not a genuine human right. However, the argument has been subject to a number of forceful objections. Some critics, such as Wellman, contend that the argument overstates the normative force of luck equality (Wellman, 2008). To defend this claim, Wellman appeals to a familiar thought experiment comparing two cases of inequality. The first case, which represents luck equality, includes two independent societies, A and B. Members of A are considerably better off than members of B, but no one in either society is aware of the disparity between them. The second case, which represents another form of equality, relational equality, includes a single society, C. Members of C are aware that some of their fellows are faring considerably better or worse than they are and these disparities affect the relationships among them, rendering some individuals vulnerable to oppression. Wellman believes that the inequalities in the second case are significantly more troubling than those in the first. Thus, he concludes, although moral claims generated by relational equality are stringent enough to outweigh the state’s interest in excluding immigrants, those generated by luck equality are not. Other critics of the luck egalitarian argument acknowledge that affluent states have weighty redistributive duties to outsiders, but deny that opening borders is an appropriate way to fulfill these obligations. For instance, Pogge argues that migration will not solve the problem of poverty, for two reasons (Pogge, 2006). First, the number of needy persons in the world far exceeds the number of immigrants that affluent countries

could admit. Thus, open borders would leave much poverty unmitigated. Second, increased migration to affluent countries will not help the worst-off. Assuming that affluent countries may legitimately place some upper limit number of immigrants they admit, prospective immigrants will have to compete for the available positions. Affluent countries are likely to prefer immigrants with the skills, education, and native endowments that are perceived to be in the national interest. Since the better-off are typically relatively advantaged in terms of these characteristics, they are more likely to be admitted. This advantage also extends to remittances. It is often argued that remittances by those who have been admitted to and allowed to work in one of the affluent countries help to ease poverty in their home country. While it is true that many immigrants send money home, the families to whom this money is being sent are often among the more privileged in the poor country in question.

FEMINIST ARGUMENTS Many of the feminist philosophers who have written on immigration also are critical of the mainstream arguments for open borders. In particular, they charge that these arguments fail to account for the gendered aspects of immigration and the normative implications that follow from these features. Thus, although they tend to support open borders policies, most feminist philosophers defend these policies on alternative grounds. Early feminist philosophers of immigration typically argue that formally genderneutral immigration restrictions often work to the detriment of women immigrants in practice. For instance, I have argued that

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Shelley Wilcox recent US immigration admissions policies disproportionately disadvantage women migrants (Wilcox, 2005).8 During the 1980s and early 1990s, the United States enacted a series of legislation designed to limit the entry of unskilled immigrants by shifting the balance from family-based to employment-based immigration preferences, and by restructuring the latter to favor highly skilled and well-educated immigrants. This legislation is formally gender neutral in the sense that it does not explicitly make distinctions on the basis of sex or gender. However, it disproportionately disadvantages women migrants in practice because women comprise the majority of immigrants who enter on family reunification visas. Moreover, in the context of a society that devalues work traditionally performed by women, laws aiming to exclude unskilled workers also disproportionately disadvantage women labor migrants in practice, since feminized lines of work, such as childcare and domestic labor, are typically considered to be unskilled. Many recent feminist arguments focus on what theorists refer to as “global care chains” (Hochschild, 2000, 2002, Kittay, 2008, 2009, Weir, 2008). These chains, which link women around the world, are established through the transnational exchange of domestic services. Global care chains are often initiated when relatively well-off northern or Western women enter the paid labor force and hire other women, usually poorer women from developing countries, to care for their children and other dependents. Migrant careworkers often must leave their own children behind in their home countries to be cared for by even poorer careworkers or family members who may already have caregiving responsibilities or be engaged with paid labor. Many factors have contributed to the production of global care chains. In wealthy countries, the entry

of women into the paid workforce, without corresponding increases in public provisions for childcare or the redistribution of caring responsibilities between genders, has created a high demand for paid domestic labor. In poor countries, the supply of domestic labor has been stimulated by a scarcity of well-paying jobs and in many cases, a growing reliance on remittances. Cuts in public services in developing countries have also encouraged women to migrate as a means for earning the income to pay for newly privatized services for their children, such as healthcare and education. Feminist critics of global care chains typically argue that traditional theories of justice have difficulty articulating the precise nature of the harm that they produce. Most cosmopolitan theories of justice focus on unjust global distributions, but it is not clear that care should be understood as a distributive good. Other features of care chains also resist traditional ethical evaluation. Careworkers are not overtly coerced to migrate, and each party in the global care chain appears to benefit from her participation: women who employ migrant caregivers are able to pursue opportunities in the public sphere; migrant caregivers are able to send money home; and their children and sending nations benefit economically from these remittances. Migrant caregivers are uniquely vulnerable to exploitation and workplace abuses, and they and their children suffer from their long absences. However, it could be argued that each of these harms is counterbalanced by significant gains (Kittay, 2008, 2009). Some feminists, such as Kittay and Weir, argue that a feminist ethics of care is better suited to theorizing global care chains (Kittay, 2008, 2009, Weir, 2008). In particular, care ethics emphasizes several key normative features and practices that traditional

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IMMIGRATION AND BORDERS theories tend to overlook: concrete specificity; acknowledgement of human dependence and vulnerability; and a relational understanding of the self. Care ethics focuses on the ethical significance of relationships formed through dependency, such as those between caregivers and their charges. For instance, Kittay argues that intimate relationships between specific individuals, in which caring and affection are the norm, play a vital role in forming and sustaining individuals’ self-identities. When these relationships are disrupted, people suffer harm to their sense of self and self-respect. It follows, she contends, that the harm involved in global care chains lies in their threat to the core relationships that are constitutive of self-identity. To protect dependents and caregivers from the harms that are generated by fractured relationships, Kittay believes the right to give and receive care should be recognized as a basic human right (Kittay, 2008, 2009).9 However, she insists that the recognition of a properly formulated right to care would not eliminate global care chains on its own. Care chains will persist until care, whether provided by professionals or within family networks, is socially recognized and economically supported. Caregiving responsibilities should also be more fairly distributed between genders and paid work should be organized with the recognition that all workers—male and female, rich and poor— are responsible for providing care. Unlocking care chains will also require mitigating the unjust background conditions that force women to choose between providing financial support for their families and being with and providing face-to-face care for them. However, open immigration policies will also play an important role. To begin, specific open borders provisions should be adopted to make it easier for careworkers and their

families to move freely across national borders. Ultimately, however, eliminating care chains will require restructuring the global economy so that no one is forced to leave her home country to find decent working and living conditions.10 By including the unjust background conditions that shape current migration flows in their analyses, feminist philosophers are able to offer nuanced normative recommendations concerning real-world immigration policies. However, some critics may object to the nonideal theoretical methodologies that these analyses employ. To determine the ways in which background injustices bear on immigration arrangements, feminists must take certain features of the current, nonideal world as given, at least for the time being. These features include the background injustices that are relevant to immigration, such as sexist assumptions about value of carework and the relative importance of family life and economic production. Feminists also tacitly presuppose additional features of the current political landscape, such as a presumptive right to regulate immigration. To the extent that these assumptions preclude critical inquiry into the fundamental morality of such features, critics contend, feminist arguments inadvertently contribute to the legitimization of unjust arrangements.

CONCLUSION As globalization has intensified, the ethical issues raised by global migration have become increasing urgent. Philosophers of immigration have helped to clarify these issues and to chart a normative course toward their successful resolution. Their efforts have broadened the discipline of political philosophy,

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Shelley Wilcox directing us away from questions pertaining solely to the nation-state, toward those that arise within global contexts. In doing so, philosophers of immigration challenge many of the core assumptions in political philosophy—for instance, that territorial borders are morally justified—while joining forces with other theorists of global justice to develop persuasive accounts of our duties to outsiders. Notes Other questions concern what states owe to refugees (see Shacknove, 1985, Dummett, 2001, Kukathas, 2002, Benhabib, 2004, Gibney, 2004, Nine, 2010) and non-citizen residents, including guestworkers and undocumented immigrants (see Bauböck, 1994, Dummett, 2001, Wilcox, 2004, 2005, Bosniak, 2006, Miller, 2008, Shachar, 2009, Pevnick, 2011); what selection criteria states may legitimately use to guide admissions policies (see Carens, 1988, Joppke, 2005, Miller, 2005, Wilcox, 2007, 2008, 2014, Wellman, 2008, Blake, 2012); and what states may require of immigrants seeking citizenship (Wilcox, 2004). These philosophers consider these questions within the context of liberal democratic states, asking, for instance, whether such states can legitimately refuse to admit would-be immigrants who are committed to illiberal political values. However, many of these issues also arise with regard to non-liberal states. For instance, philosophers may be interested in the ethics of guestworker programs in China or Qatar. 2 The previous summary of Walzer’s view draws upon Wilcox (2009). 3 Some critics also reject Walzer’s claim that clubs are morally free to choose any membership policy they wish. See Cole (2000) and Higgins (2013). 4 For a third, liberal nationalist version of the self-determination argument, see Miller (1995). Fine provides an excellent overview of the self-determination arguments for the right 1

to exclude in her recent survey of the debate (Fine, 2013). 5 Philip Cole offers an alternative version argument of freedom of international movement argument. In his view, acknowledging the right to exit any state as a core liberal right commits one to recognizing a corresponding right to freedom of international movement because without a right to enter and settle in a new state, the right to exit is useless (Cole, 2000). 6 Rawls’s work initiated the contemporary discussion of the role of luck in theories of justice. Prominent luck egalitarians include Arneson (1989, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2006), Cohen (2000, 2008, 2011), Dworkin (2000, 2002, 2003), Tan (2008, 2012), and Tempkin (1993, 2003a,b). 7 Cosmopolitan luck egalitarians include Beitz (1979), Caney (2005), and Tan (2008, 2012). 8 See also Narayan (1995). 9 See also Weir (2008). 10 The previous summary of feminist approaches to migration draws upon Parekh and Wilcox (2014).

WORKS CITED Arneson, R. J. (1989), “Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare,” Philosophical Studies, 56: 77–93. — (1999), “Egalitarianism and Responsibility,” Journal of Ethics, 3: 225–247. — (2000), “Luck Egalitarianism and Prioritarianism,” Ethics, 110: 339–349. — (2001), “Luck and Equality,” Proceedings of Aristotelian Society, 75: 73–90. — (2006), “Luck Egalitarianism: An Interpretation and Defense,” Philosophical Topics, 32: 1–20. Bauböck, R. (1994), Transnational Citizenship: Membership and Rights in International Migration. Aldershot: Edward Elgar.

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IMMIGRATION AND BORDERS Beitz, C. (1979), Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benhabib, S. (2004), The Rights of Others Asylum, Residents and Citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blake, M. (2012), “Immigration, Association, and Antidiscrimination,” Ethics, 122: 748–762. Bosniak, L. (2006), The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Caney, S. (2005), Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carens, J. (1987), “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” The Review of Politics, 49: 251–273. — (1988), “Nationalism and the Exclusion of Immigrants: Lessons from Australian Immigration Policy,” in M. Gibney (ed.), Open Borders, Closed Societies, The Ethical and Political Issues. Westport, CA: Greenwood Press, pp. 41–60. — (1992), “Migration and Morality: A Liberal Egalitarian Perspective,” in B. Barry and R. Goodin (eds), Free Movement: Ethical Issues in the Transnational Migration of People and of Money. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State Press, pp. 25–47. Cavallero, E. (2014), “Association and Asylum,” Philosophical Studies, 169: 133–141. Cohen, G. A. (2000), If You’re An Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? Cambridge: Harvard University Press. — (2008), Rescuing Justice and Equality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. — (2011), On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice and Other Essays in Political

Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cole, P. (2000), Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dummett, M. (2001), On Immigration and Refugees. London and New York: Routledge. Dworkin, R. (2000), Sovereign Virtue. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. — (2002), “Sovereign Virtue Revisited,” Ethics, 113: 106–143. — (2003), “Equality, Luck and Hierarchy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 31: 190–198. Fine, S. (2010), “Freedom of Association is Not the Answer,” Ethics, 120: 338–356. — (2013), “The Ethics of Immigration: SelfDetermination and the Right to Exclude,” Philosophy Compass, 8: 254–268. Gibney, M. (2004), The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Higgins, P. (2013), Immigration Justice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hochschild, A. R. (2000), “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value,” in W. Hutton and A. Giddens (eds), On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism. London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 131–146. — (2002), “Love and Gold,” in B. Ehrenreich and A. R. Hochschild (eds), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Metropolitan Books, pp. 15–30. Hudson, J. (2011), Review of Immigration and the Constraints of Justice: Between Borders and Absolute Sovereignty, by Ryan Pevnick, Notre Dame

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Shelley Wilcox Philosophical Reviews: https://ndpr. nd.edu/news/24785-immigration-andthe-constraints-of-justice-between-openborders-and-absolute-sovereignty/. Joppke, C. (2005), Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the Liberal State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kittay, E. (2008), “The Global Heart Transplant and Caring across national Boundaries,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 46: 138–165. — (2009), “The Moral Harm of Migrant Carework: Realizing a Global Right to Care,” Philosophical Topics, 37: 53–73. Kukathas, C. (2002), “Immigration,” in H. LaFollette (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 567–590. Miller, D. (1995), On Nationality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. — (2005), “Immigration: The Case for Limits,” in A. Cohen and C. H. Wellman (eds), Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 193–206. — (2008), “Immigrants, Nations, and Citizenship,” The Journal of Political Philosophy, 16: 371–390. Narayan, U. (1995), “‘Male-Order’ Brides: Immigrant Women, Domestic Violence, and Immigration Law,” Hypatia, 10: 101–119. Nine, C. (2010), “Ecological Refugees, States Borders, and the Lockean Proviso,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 27: 359–375. Parekh McGushin, S. and Wilcox, S. (2014), “Feminist Perspectives on Globalization,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/sum2014/entries/feminismglobalization/. Pevnick, R. (2011), Immigration and the Constraints of Justice: Between Open

Borders and Absolute Sovereignty. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pogge, T. (2006), “Migration and Poverty,” in R. Goodin and P. Pettit (eds), Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 710–720. Shachar, A. (2009), The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shacknove, A. (1985), “Who Is a Refugee?” Ethics, 95: 274–284. Tan, K.-C. (2008), “A Defense of Luck Egalitarianism,” Journal of Philosophy, 105: 665–690. — (2012), Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The Site, Ground and Scope of Equality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Temkin, L. (1993), Inequality. New York: Oxford University Press. — (2003a), “Egalitarianism Defended,” Ethics, 113: 764–782. — (2003b), “Exploring the Roots of Egalitarian Concerns,” Theoria, 69: 125–151. Walzer, M. (1983), Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books. Weir, A. (2008), “Global Care Chains: Freedom, Responsibility and Solidarity,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 46: 166–175. Wellman, C. H. (2008), “Immigration and Freedom of Association,” Ethics, 119: 109–141. Wellman, C. H. and Cole, P. (2011), Debating the Ethics of Immigration: Is There a Right to Exclude? New York: Oxford University Press. Wilcox, S. (2004), “Culture, National Identity, and Admission to Citizenship,” Social Theory and Practice, 30: 559–583.

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IMMIGRATION AND BORDERS — (2005), “American Neo-Nativism and Gendered Immigrant Exclusions,” in B. Andrew, J. Keller, and L. Schwartzman (eds), Feminist Interventions in Ethics and Politics: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 213–232. — (2007), “Immigrant Admissions and Global Relations of Harm,” Journal of Social Philosophy, 38: 274–291. — (2008), “Who Pays for Gender De-Institutionalization?” in A. M. González (ed.), Gender Identities in

a Globalized World. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, pp. 53–74. — (2009), “The Open Borders Debate on Immigration,” Philosophy Compass, 4: 1–9. — (2012), Review of Immigration and the Constraints of Justice: Between Borders and Absolute Sovereignty, by Ryan Pevnick, Ethics, 122: 617–622. — (2014), “Do Duties to Outsiders Require Open Borders? A Reply to Wellman,” Philosophical Studies, 169: 123–132; article initially appeared as 10.1007/ s11098-012-9902-y in 2012.

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13 THE FUTURE(S) OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Matthew Voorhees and J. Jeremy Wisnewski

INTRODUCTION Everyone knows that predictions can be wildly mistaken. From Margaret Thatcher’s proclamation that she would not live to see a female Prime Minister in Britain to Einstein’s claim that nuclear power is impossible, we get things wrong—and often with gusto. This seems to be true across the board, but perhaps nowhere near so visibly as in the academy—and within the academy, predicting the future of philosophy is perhaps as dubious an enterprise as one is likely to find. Kant claimed to have solved the crucial problems of philosophy. Not so many years later, Hegel claimed the same thing, pronouncing an end to the history of philosophy. In the following century, oblivious to the errors of his predecessors, Wittgenstein once again claimed to end philosophy—and he had the audacity to claim to end it on two different occasions, in two different ways. It will come as no surprise, then, that the following is in one respect a work of conceit. No one can say with any certainty what the future of an academic discipline will be. Sometimes forecasters get things right, but such success is usually a matter of luck. To undertake to describe the future(s) of political

philosophy is a guessing game, and one that is likely to be characterized by a good deal of wishful thinking.1 Could Plato have anticipated work in political philosophy concerned with, for example, the role of the internet and social media in fostering a deliberative democracy? Could Locke have predicted the current debate over intellectual property, or Hobbes the debate over the use of public funds for stem cell research? These rhetorical questions point to the central limitation on any prediction we might offer: Political philosophy, at least in part, must respond to the world in which it finds itself. To predict its future accurately would thus require predicting the future of the world itself—its changing social arrangements, technological feats and challenges, and emerging issues. We cannot possibly hope to do that here, or frankly, anywhere else. Our aim in what follows is thus a more modest one. While we cannot know the future(s) of political philosophy, we can highlight areas of emerging and continuing interest, as they appear at this particular historical moment in time, from our particular points of view. This does not mean that we have only our hunches to go on. Recent

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Matthew Voorhees and J. Jeremy Wisnewski computer software makes it possible to identify broad patterns in political philosophy by algorithmically examining academic databases (such as JSTOR). We have used such software in our attempt to identify trends in publications over the past two decades. This sort of technology-driven empirical research, on the rise in recent years, may itself become more common in the future. Our approach is thus largely descriptive rather than prescriptive. There are certainly areas that we think ought to be explored in the future. Our task, however, is to describe those areas that seem likely to be important in years to come. Because political philosophy itself reflects and speaks to events in the political world, we should expect certain questions and problems to be more prominent than others. Issues involving cosmopolitanism, diversity, democratic politics, surveillance, cyber conflict, and human rights are sure to garner the attention of philosophers and political theorists in the future. The extent to which any of these issues gains prominence, of course, depends on a variety of factors, including the important challenges faced by higher education: budget cuts, legislative pressures, and the apparent rise of online courses. We consider some of these issues at the end of this chapter.

THE LAST 20 YEARS In an attempt to assess the future(s) of political philosophy in a way that is grounded in the state of the discipline, we endeavored to analyze the publication record of six leading journals in political philosophy over the past two decades.2 Obviously, deciding on a list of journals is itself a political undertaking. Journals tend to favor certain kinds of

questions, certain kinds of analysis, as well as certain historical figures over others. In an attempt to limit our own theoretical biases, we opted to utilize a well-established academic resource: JSTOR. The journals available through JSTOR are some of the most visible in political philosophy and political theory, and thus represent some of the favored sources for many working in the field. Utilizing JSTOR also provided a relatively accessible source for data on publishing trends over the last two decades.3 There are obvious limitations to both the number of journals we chose to examine, as well as the range of topics typically treated in these journals. Much excellent work in political philosophy is published in venues not available through JSTOR—indeed, some might even argue that most truly excellent work is found elsewhere. Nevertheless, the high visibility of the journals in JSTOR makes it a good resource for examining what is happening in mainstream political philosophy, even if the snapshot provided does not allow us to see what is happening in the discipline as a whole. There is of course nothing magical about the number of journals chosen. We might have just as easily chosen 30 high-quality journals, or we might have chosen only 5. Despite only examining six journals, these journals nevertheless span work in both historical and contemporary political philosophy, both Anglo-American and “continental” traditions, and include venues publishing work in critical race theory and feminist philosophy. There will undoubtedly be many who find the list inadequate. There is a straightforward reason for this: the list is inadequate, as any list must be. Political philosophy is a wide river, and excellent research appears in a wide variety of venues. Important articles sometimes appear in journals that are less

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THE FUTURE(S) OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY well-known, or in well-known journals that do not focus on political theory. Moreover, much important work in political philosophy is done in scholarly monographs (rather than articles). For all of these reasons, the results we report here are tentative at best. They represent the simple fact that any sampling, by definition, will be selective. Nevertheless, while selectivity encourages recognizing the fallibility of one’s results, it need not entail inaccuracy. We collected articles for the previous 20 years from six journals available through JSTOR. We then utilized the program MALLET4 to produce some basic algorithmic topic modeling. We set our topic list at 20. MALLET then analyzed our collection of texts and generated topics—a list of which can be found in Appendix A. The term “topic” is standard in these kinds of approaches to textual analysis, though the term “discourse” might in fact be better. As a quick look at Appendix A will show, a “topic” in this context is a set of terms used together in predictable ways. As Ted Underwood suggests, “The great thing about topic modeling is that it maps the actual discursive contours of a collection, which may or may not line up with ‘concepts’ any writer ever consciously held in mind.”5 In this respect, the “topics” generated by MALLET are often orthogonal to the standard topics we talk about in political philosophy. As one might expect, automated analysis often produces messy results. Common terms are linked with topics in multiple ways, and the links are not always useful (the term “moral,” e.g. appears in 5 of the 20 topics; “university” appears in 66). The data, as usual, require interpretation.7 The topics that resulted from the analysis were in many ways predictable: liberalism, justice, and Rawls, as one might expect,

appeared frequently.8 Work on the history of political philosophy frequently dealt with the social contract tradition—with Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Mill and Nietzsche also appeared with greater frequency than other notables from the history of philosophy (e.g. Montesquieu, Cicero). Judging by word counts within topics, at least three topics crucially involved the history of political philosophy (9, 13, 14). Of the topics generated by the program, two centered on issues related to sex, gender, and race (8, 10).9 This is perhaps a product of the inclusion of the journal Hypatia in our set of six journals, and likely does not reflect the actual percentage of work being done on these topics (it might be more or less, depending on one’s sample). Nevertheless, given the reasons for using JSTOR journals given earlier, the result is still rather significant: critical race theory and feminist political philosophy have made advances toward entering the mainstream. Likewise, work in applied political philosophy appears to be rather healthy: issues regarding labor practices, political parties, egalitarian social policies, welfare, and healthcare were significant enough to generate two topics roughly devoted to such areas of interest (15, 18). In what follows, we will make some educated guesses about the future of political philosophy, drawing on the analysis we have utilized where appropriate to contextualize our claims.

POLITICAL THOUGHT: APPROACHES AND CONCERNS To undertake a philosophical endeavor, in one respect, is to work out one’s relationship with the past. The great questions of

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Matthew Voorhees and J. Jeremy Wisnewski previous generations are, with stunning frequency, very similar to the questions we find ourselves confronting. It is thus not surprising that traditions develop in all of the fields of philosophy—that any general philosophical area will have its own historical conversations and trajectories, and that one will be called upon to respond to this tradition to the extent that one decides to ask such questions at all. The future of political philosophy, we thus have reason to believe, will not involve abandoning its past. There is little doubt that Hobbes will still be read and responded to even as the central positions in political philosophy evolve in a way that reflects the changing social and political reality around us. This stands to reason. The history of philosophy provides the background against which certain questions make sense, certain answers can be given, and certain objections raised. In this respect, asking about the future of political philosophy involves asking not only what will be different from the past, but also how the past itself will be dealt with, appropriated, and utilized. Thus we expect that scholars will continue to be interested in historical approaches to political philosophy, and to illuminate the ways in which political ideas reflect their historical and cultural contexts. Of course, such historical approaches are not cut off from contemporary controversies and concerns; if anything, these approaches help us better understand the ways in which contemporary political philosophy is itself an outgrowth of and response to the practical problems and questions that animate contemporary politics. However, the history of political thought is but one of the many approaches available to scholars; proscriptive and critical approaches associated with particular authors or political projects will continue to be essential to

political thought. For example, as we discuss later, Rawlsian scholars continue to develop his ideas and bring them to bear on new questions and political concerns. Postcolonial thinkers will continue to explore the legacies of colonial rule and the challenges of national sovereignty in developing countries. Of course, it is a mistake to think of the study of political philosophy in either/or categories, as if political thought is historical, or proscriptive, or critical; such approaches are neither discrete nor mutually exclusive. Thus, for example, feminist interrogations of canonical texts and authors promise to shed important light on the history of political ideas and to guide our critical reexamination of core political concepts. In light of the different approaches to the study of political ideas, it therefore might make more sense to think about the future of political philosophy in terms of areas of concern that are likely to be approached from a variety of theoretical or methodological perspectives. These areas themselves overlap in interesting and important ways. Three areas seem especially promising. One area of political philosophy that is generating scholarly interest and spurring vigorous debate concerns the global and international dimension of politics. We expect that cosmopolitanism will continue to be an important area of scholarly concern in the years to come. What many scholars see as the hegemony of Neoliberalism has linked the political and economic fates of the Western and developing worlds, and although the nation-state remains the primary location of sovereignty and citizenship, political theorists are increasingly attuned to the political and economic dimension of core political concepts at the global level. Cosmopolitan approaches to political thought are prompting important new ways

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THE FUTURE(S) OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY of rethinking political institutions so as to understand both the possibilities and the challenges of global governance, and these approaches suggest significant revisions to Westphalian conceptions of sovereignty that are necessary if we are to envision the conditions of international political institutions. As the political and economic forces that shape our lives become more global and trans-national in scope, so must the concepts through which we examine and understand these forces. As such, cosmopolitan political thought promises to make important contributions to a wide range of related topics: the possibilities of global justice and ethical judgment, concerns about global inequalities, the promises and limitations of human rights discourses, and the meaning of democratic citizenship and institutions. A second ongoing area of scholarly interest concerns questions about inclusion, exclusion, and difference as political communities become increasingly pluralistic and multicultural—or in some cases, increasingly recognize the ways in which they already are pluralistic and multicultural. Scholars working in feminist, critical race, and queer theory have long sought to problematize the overly tidy distinction between public and private that characterizes liberal politics and have helpfully questioned liberalism’s universalist pretensions. We have no reason to doubt that the insights of scholars in these traditions will continue to inform discussions about difference and inclusion, and to help us theorize more inclusive approaches to politics that are both sensitive to the demands of equality and alert to the dangers of essentialism. Much recent work on multicultural politics has been done by scholars in countries with long (although by no means unblemished) histories of cultural diversity, like the United States and Canada.

A growing sensitivity to the political claims of the First Nations has been particularly noticeable in Canada, informing the work of a range of important political thinkers (see Taylor, 1994, Kymlicka, 1995, Tully, 1995). However, pluralism and multiculturalism are also becoming important in countries— especially in, but by no means limited to, Europe—that have not had the same history of internal cultural diversity but which are increasingly developing such diversity due to immigration and the legacy of colonialism. The insights of postcolonial and non-Western theorists are likely to figure prominently as these debates unfold. Finally, we expect that democratic theory will continue to generate significant scholarly interest. The waves of popular protests across the Middle East and the implications of these protests for the potential democratization of political institutions in the region will raise important questions about popular sovereignty, democratic deliberation, and civil society, and political philosophy has much to contribute to these questions. In addition to Rawls, Habermas remains an important touchstone for democratic theorists, who continue to show interest both in working out the details of his ideal speech situation and in translating the formal conditions that guide his theory into concrete institutions and practices. Additionally—and particularly in the context of formal political institutions that do not privilege democratic accountability—the role of civil society in locating and fostering forms of democratic deliberation promises to be an especially important area of democratic thought. In this area of political philosophy, we can clearly see the ways in which the future directions and topics of political philosophy are inextricably linked. For example, feminist and critical race scholars continue to highlight the ways in which

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Matthew Voorhees and J. Jeremy Wisnewski ideal speech conditions reflect privileged forms of discourse and serve the interest of those who use these forms. Cosmopolitan theorists raise questions about the qualities of, and opportunities for democratic citizenship in an increasingly globalized politics: How can citizens take action on problems that are global in their scope and implications? To what extent are international institutions and governmental bodies responsive to citizens’ input? How might we conceive of civil society in a cosmopolitan context? The important questions in democratic theory will benefit from a robust exchange among various philosophical schools and approaches.

THE RAWLS INDUSTRY It is a truism in the United States that John Rawls reinvigorated political philosophy— that he pulled it, barely alive, from the death grips of positivism. This is undoubtedly an overstatement, but one that contains a particular truth. Few books have had the kind of influence that A Theory of Justice had. Rawls continues to hold a prominent place in political philosophy and theory, and there is little reason to think that this will change in the near future. This prominence speaks to the general ascendency of liberal democracy as both a practical ideal and a theoretical commitment; not surprisingly, the words “Rawls” and “Rawlsian” appeared most frequently in the topic associated with liberalism and justice (topic 5 in our MALLET analysis). Rawls’s attempt to reconcile classical liberalism’s emphasis on individual liberty with a vision of justice which privileges economic equality and the welfare state remains an attractive project to many political thinkers, particularly in the United States

where—unlike many other Western democracies—such reconciliation remains politically contentious. In the years following the publication of A Theory of Justice, and with Rawls’s various amplifications and restatements of that project in his subsequent work, a sizeable and vigorous scholarly debate has developed and it shows no real signs of slowing down. We have little reason to doubt that scholars associated with the Rawlsian project will continue to refine, develop, and extend his core arguments. Of course, Rawls’s project has—and doubtless will continue to have—its critics and detractors, and the development of Rawlsian scholarship will likely be driven in large part by these critiques and the responses to them. One particular area of critique has been especially important and will likely continue to drive Rawls scholarship. Although Rawls explicitly contextualizes his project within what he call the “fact of reasonable pluralism,” we expect that scholars will continue to debate the compatibility of Rawlsian liberalism (and no doubt, liberalism more generally) with robustly pluralistic and multicultural societies. Feminist and critical race scholars have long drawn attention to the ways in which the “veil of ignorance” which grounds Rawls’s social contract theory serves to bracket precisely those kinds of embodied experience that such critics insist must be central to an inclusive view of equality and justice. Rawls’s view of the original position thus reiterates the difference blindness of classical liberalism at a time when critiques of formal equality are increasingly gaining ground.10 Rather than representing a vision of justice that is compatible with a variety of particular conceptions of the good (what Rawls refers to as “comprehensive doctrines”), such scholars suggest that Rawls’s conception of justice turns on a kind

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THE FUTURE(S) OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY of liberalism that itself functions as a comprehensive doctrine—one which precludes the meaningful inclusion of racial, sexual, and cultural difference (see Pateman, 1988, Okin, 1994, Abbey, 2007). A second area of critique of Rawlsian thought—one which we only mention here—has to do with the relevance of his theory of justice to the increasingly international and cosmopolitan dimensions of politics. Although Rawls has attempted to handle some of these dimensions in his later work, many continue to find his account problematic (see Reidy, 2004). This may speak to some of the broader difficulties of applying classical liberalism’s understanding of citizenship and government to global political practices and institutions, but in light of the continued prominence of Rawls’s political thought, and the growing importance of international political institutions; we expect this to be a robust area of scholarly debate.

APPLIED POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Political theory has never been shy about weighing in on the issues of the day. Plato made arguments about the legitimacy of censorship, the proper role of education, the distribution of wealth, and much more besides. It would be quite surprising if this traditional occupation of political philosophers ceased being an area of intense theoretical work. A core question, of course, concerns which topics are likely to be of interest in the future. It’s quite difficult to ignore those topics that are currently of much interest: intellectual property, domestic spying, privacy, income inequality, torture, and the relationship between money and politics are all ripe for continued

theoretical work. This reflects an underlying reality: namely, the topics that will interest political philosophers will be those that present themselves as the most pressing concerns of the day. This can be illustrated by considering the state of research on the ethics and politics of torture. Prior to 2002, ethics research on torture was quite rare. Some work was of course done on the historical arguments given for torture, as well as the position various philosophers had taken on the practice. Nearly no one was investigating why torture was wrong, and even fewer were arguing that it was in fact acceptable in particular instances.11 When torture came forcefully into public view during the Bush administration, things changed dramatically. In the years during and since the Bush administration, many academic books and dozens of articles have been published on torture—some defending its use, some claiming that it is never acceptable. A relative silence has been replaced with what becomes a highly technical and nuanced debate about nearly every aspect of torture—what it is, when it might be used, how one is to understand its effects on persons, its relationship to state authority, what it reveals about the nature of pain, and so on. Had someone written this chapter in 2000, it seems doubtful that this explosion of work would have been predicted. It is even doubtful that it could have been predicted.12 Our current political predicaments may thus not be much indication of what theoretical interests will occupy the attention of future philosophers. Certain current topics nevertheless seem to merit some attention, simply given the extent to which they have garnered the attention of theoretical work in recent years. In what is sometimes called “the

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Matthew Voorhees and J. Jeremy Wisnewski digital age,” it is hardly surprising to find that several current topics in political philosophy have been on the rise. Surveillance has been much in the news in the United States (and elsewhere) recently, and has been at the heart of a good deal of public debate. The extent to which citizens are entitled to private lives—and the extent to which our activities are to be understood as part of these private lives—will likely continue to be the subject of intense debate in coming years. The ability to collect information about citizens is at an all-time high—one that makes Foucault’s panopticon seem more prescient than ever. The subsequent use of this information in planning things like unmanned drone strikes makes the issue of surveillance much more pressing. Indeed, the increased use of remote combat by governments like the United States has already sparked a good deal of public debate. Political philosophy has followed suit. As this debate continues in the public sphere, it is likely that increased attention will be paid to the theoretical issues underlying the use of these technologies, as well as the arguments used both in favor of and against them. The digital age has also spawned what has come to be known as “cyberwarfare”: the use of computer software for spying, hijacking, destroying, or disrupting those computing systems essential to the operations (military, commercial, and otherwise) of a given country. The US Department of Defense has recognized this venue as another theater of conflict (or “operational domain,” as the Pentagon has called it), and has established a formal organization (US Cyber Command) to counter cyber attacks—attacks that have been increasing exponentially in recent years. According to the US Deputy Secretary of Defense, William J. Lynn III, “the danger of cyberwarfare rivals that of traditional war”

(Lynn, 2010, 2011). Given the resources being poured into developing both cyber weapons and defenses against those weapons, it is likely that this thoroughly contemporary form of conflict will be of increasing importance in the future. It is thus reasonable to suspect that political philosophy will become increasingly concerned with understanding it—what it is, when it is justified (if ever), how it relates to traditional just war doctrine (if it does), and how current international law applies to it. A fair amount of work has emerged on this topic in recent years. It is likely that the energy devoted to these topics will only increase.13 Events of the recent past have also produced new work on issues involving terrorism, income inequality, and the relationship between religion (in particular, Islam) and politics. The continuing relevance of these issues suggests that work in applied political philosophy will continue to be devoted to their exploration and elaboration.14

REALITY CHECK: THE DIMINUTION OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE The issue of the future of political philosophy is not simply an issue of what topics will be explored, or what theoretical developments we should expect to see. The question of the future of political philosophy is also a question about the place political philosophy will come to occupy in our cultural conversations. In the United States, things do not look good. The most common political philosophy explicitly appealed to by those in government appears to be that of novelist Ayn Rand, the patron saint of the US “Tea Party.”

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THE FUTURE(S) OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY The standards of argumentation and reasoning that professional philosophers maintain find little accommodation in current political discourse. Persons appeal to their favored first principles, and seem to regard such appeal as ultimately simply a matter of preference. Grand-standing about the validity of particular principles thus appears to coexist with a strange subjectivism about the justification of these first principles. Appeals to evidence are present, but it is often an appeal to evidence reminiscent of the sophistic traditions rather than the philosophical ones: one appeals to what helps the conclusions one wants, and ignores whatever evidence does not (see MacIntyre, 1981). Could political philosophy play a role in the legislative bodies of the United States? Our faith in this possibility is by no means high at present—but it is at least a possibility. In many respects, the future of political philosophy will be determined alongside the role that political philosophy plays in a given culture. The more value a culture places in political theorizing, the more resources it will place in fostering and maintaining a robust political discourse. The less such things are valued, the less we should expect to see political theory in a state of relative health. There have been historical instances in which political philosophy was prized by the political leadership or by the populace at large. In such contexts, it will come as no surprise, we discover some of the most fruitful and lasting contributions to political philosophy. This point has an immediate bearing on the question of the future of research in political philosophy. First, the esteem in which a culture holds any intellectual pursuit will partially determine the resources it devotes to that enterprise, and also the number of persons drawn to it. Second, if political philosophy has no bearing on the political

deliberations of legislative, executive, and judicial bodies—such as is the case in times when political theory is held in ill-repute— the very point of political philosophy seems to be called into question. Consider the following: if we can have no hope that political philosophy might have some affect on political reality, even if quite indirect, what is the point in engaging in it? The issue is more pressing in the case of political philosophy, perhaps, than in other areas of philosophy. There may well be a point to studying Platonic dialogues regardless of their applicability to modern day problems. But presumably an investigation of justice, or legitimate authority, or power, has as its aim more than merely comprehension and the improvement of one’s analytical skills. Presumably one attempts to construct a theory of justice, for example, in order to contribute to the construction of a just society (even if only indirectly). If political philosophy has no bearing on our political future, then it will itself have no future—save being a boutique hobby for intellectuals who are predisposed to considering its themes. In this respect, the future(s) of political philosophy are connected in certain fundamental ways with how political philosophy is perceived—as well as used and abused—by both the general public and those in the halls of power. The issue of the perception of political philosophy looms large in recent events in higher education as well. For political philosophy to make any significant impact, we require a culture characterized by a literacy of political theory. The chances of creating such a culture seem increasingly endangered by developments in higher education. Two major issues worth considering in the current context are (1) budget cuts in traditional areas of humanities research and (2) the rise

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Matthew Voorhees and J. Jeremy Wisnewski of “MOOCs”—massive open-enrollment online courses. It would be foolish to think that these largely practical concerns will have no affect on the future of research in political philosophy. As departments are cut down in (to) size, course offerings scaled back, and PhDs forced out of the academic community, we should likewise expect to see less diversity in the kinds of research conducted within the political theory community. While this will not automatically result from a decrease in the number of those engaging in political philosophy research, it is nevertheless likely: as fewer people tackle the questions of political philosophy, we will see either fewer questions addressed or fewer novel answers given to the questions addressed—and very likely, we will see both. Worries like this one were among the motivations of the philosophy department of San Jose State University when they decided to reject the call to utilize MOOCs in 2013.15 To maintain a standardized, internet-delivered course in political philosophy (regardless of its source) would diminish the diversity essential to healthy philosophical discourse. Crucially, at no point was the issue over the quality of the course lectures the department was being asked to use. The course (“Justice”—still available freely online) was one developed by Harvard Professor Michael J. Sandel, who ultimately agreed with the worries expressed about the mandatory use of his course.16 To limit the number of perspectives in political philosophy, to reiterate, is to risk diminishing its future. As funds to departments are cut, faculty lines replaced by technological innovations, and resources moved away from those who are actually conducting research in political theory, we should expect to see a subsequent diminution

in both the quality and the diversity of political theorizing. The core issue here is not that one can watch Sandel’s lectures on Justice. It is surely a good thing that these lectures (and other lectures by political philosophers at other institutions) are freely available for anyone who is interested and who has internet access, regardless of economic standing, geographical location, or even background education. The issue here—and both the members of the philosophy department at San Jose State University and Sandel seem to agree on this point—is with the use of free resources to replace actual faculty members, each with their own perspectives on issues in political theory, and each taking part in the ongoing dialogue that is philosophical reflection. To lose participants in this dialogue, by whatever means, is to threaten the future of political philosophy itself.

CONCLUSION As we have emphasized throughout this chapter, if political philosophy takes its cue from events and controversies in our political world, any prediction about the future is inescapably speculative—clearly, there is no crystal ball we can consult to foresee the events and controversies that will arise. We live in a world in which environmental changes confront us with difficult questions about the sustainability of our energy, food, and communities, in which the possibility of vast and sudden economic crises force us to rethink the function and extent of governmental regulation, and in which terrorism and counterterrorism require us to reflect on the political and legal implications of surveillance, technology, and warfare. No doubt, the various approaches to political philosophy

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THE FUTURE(S) OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY will continue to help us critically examine political developments and frame our responses to them. There is a certain irony in the fact that as the world faces the kinds of challenges that political philosophy is most qualified— and indeed necessary—to explain, the study of political thought is itself being undermined by the budgetary considerations and curricular priorities of legislators and university administrators. This is likely to be an important additional area for political theorists to reflect on and speak to in coming years.17

APPENDIX A 0 social science knowledge theory human scientific epistemic research view work cognitive nature theories important empirical evidence epistemology world questions 1 law constitutional legal court constitution judicial review government american supreme state public power rights justice madison courts laws speech 2 harm case cases person moral responsibility people morally act life make claim killing argument responsible wrong risk affairs death 3 university political review philosophy journal professor science john theory editor book published articles david volume ethics sage politics international 4 moral book social theory human chapter ethics ethical rights view essays work account argues philosophical issues philosophy university discussion 5 moral human book theory mill justice liberal practical political legal view ethical ethics social university argues law good principles 6 rights justice moral freedom state human theory political principles principle rawls

law argument basic conception claim people respect idea 7 power body subject human identity difference relation experience language world theory terms trans work discourse order sense form meaning 8 women sexual men social gender black family white sex woman children race racial male marriage female child rape lesbian 9 political natural de rousseau locke hobbes nature university power state men man human ed people liberty government civil law 10 feminist women press philosophy hypatia feminism university work feminists gender philosophical ed theory studies ethics beauvoir philosophers issues social 11 life people make time story sense experience world art made great find kind feel fear things long past live 12 moral reason reasons good rational view account action practical agent person theory make sense claim argument fact kind kant 13 political politics theory history modern social american thought historical work book world intellectual ideas pp review philosophy contemporary arendt 14 human religious political philosophy religion politics god life good socrates aristotle nietzsche christian man plato nature divine strauss pp 15 social economic people equality labor resources market welfare work public society property individuals poor distribution egalitarian health level equal 16 war international states state national global world rights united military human western european foreign power violence nation nations economic 17 political public democratic liberal democracy social citizens politics liberalism theory

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Matthew Voorhees and J. Jeremy Wisnewski religious cultural community groups university citizenship society group deliberative 18 political policy american party state public government politics national support democratic presidential republican parties congress states president members university 19 moral care human ethics love book life caring virtue relationships trust person children friendship nature good part university relationship

Notes The phrase “political philosophy” is typically utilized in philosophy departments, while “political theory” is typically utilized in political science departments. Although these phrases may reflect differences between disciplines, we regard these differences as less important than the shared set of concerns that animate each. For this reason, we use the terms interchangeably in what follows. 2 The journals reviewed, in alphabetical order, are as follows: Ethics, Hypatia, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Political Theory, Polity, Review of Politics. These are, admittedly, only a handful of the journals in the disciplines of philosophy and political science that publish work on political philosophy (The American Political Science Review, e.g. typically publishes an article by a political theorist in each volume), but in our selection of journals we wanted to privilege those journals available through JSTOR that often emphasize political philosophy. 3 Indeed, JSTOR provides a website specifically for such data: http://about.jstor.org/service/ data-for-research. 4 For information on the program, please visit http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/. For an introduction to topic modeling, see Mark Steyvers and Tom Griffiths, “Probabilistic Topic Modelling,” in T. Landauer, D. McNamara, S. Dennis, and W. Kintsch (eds), Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis: A Road to Meaning (Hove: Psychology 1

Press, 2007). The article is available here: http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/papers/ SteyversGriffithsLSABookFormatted.pdf (last accessed December 26, 2013). 5 http://tedunderwood.com/2012/04/01/whatkinds-of-topics-does-topic-modeling-actuallyproduce/ (last accessed December 26, 2013). 6 This is presumably due to in-article citations listing university presses. MALLET does not distinguish all significant terms from all insignificant ones in its analysis. This is actually useful, as it allows surprising correlations to emerge which might not otherwise. For our purposes, though, it is likely best to ignore this particular term as it appears through the topics. 7 See Appendix A for the raw topic lists produced by our use of MALLET. The order of the topics is irrelevant to the frequency of said topics. 8 According to the Google citation index, Rawls’s work has been cited nearly 100,000 times in the texts in Google’s database (as of December 2013). Rawls’s name appeared in topic 5 nearly 8,000 times. 9 One might well count topic 19 as well, given the prominence of the terms “care” and “virtue,” which arguably represents care ethics—an ethical approach historically associated with feminism. 10 Our Mallet study appears to support this point about feminist critiques of Rawls. The words “Rawls” and “Rawlsian” appear most frequently in the topic associated with liberalism and justice (topic #5), but their second most frequent appearance is in the topic associated with gender and race (topic #8). 11 Stephen Kershnar was making the argument that torture ought to be used as punishment prior to 2002, and Michael Levin was arguing that it was acceptable in ticking-bomb cases. On the other side of things, Henry Shue and Christopher Tindale were examining what was morally problematic about the practice. 12 It is worth mentioning that our MALLET analysis was blind to this development. The term torture appeared nearly 2,000 times—1,100 of which in association with topic 4—far less than many other terms. This reflects, at least in part, the sample journals available through JSTOR. It also reflects the fact that many of articles on torture have appeared in the last

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13



14



15



16



17

6–7 years. To see the increase in publications on torture would require a diachronic analysis. This is, of course, a prediction. The term “cyber” appears only rarely in our MALLET analysis (under 50 times in its various forms). Various (minimal) references to surveillance and the use of computing are also present. The term “religion” appears approximately 10,000 times in our MALLET analysis. Variation of the term “terror” and the term “inequality” likewise occur several thousand times. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Document-anOpen-Letter/138937/ http://chronicle.com/article/Michael-SandelResponds/139021/ We would like to thank Mark Wolff for his expertise in carrying out our MALLET analysis. We would also like to thank Robert Tracey for some initial data collection.

WORKS CITED Abbey, R. (2007), “Back toward a Comprehensive Liberalism? Justice as Fairness, Gender, and Families,” Political Theory, 35 (1) (February): 5–28. Kymlicka, W. (1995), Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lynn, W. J. III (2010), “Defending a New Domain: The Pentagon’s Cyberstrategy,” Foreign Affairs (September/October). http://www.foreignaffairs.com/ articles/66552/william-j-lynn-iii/ defending-a-new-domain. — (2011), “The Pentagon’s Cyberstrategy, One Year Later,” Foreign Affairs (September 28). http://www. foreignaffairs.com/articles/68305/williamj-lynn-iii/the-pentagons-cyberstrategyone-year-later. MacIntyre, A. (1981), After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Okin, S. M. (1994), “Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender,” Ethics, 105 (23): 23–43. Pateman, C. (1988), The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Reidy, D. A. (2004), “Rawls on International Justice: A Defense,” Political Theory, 32 (3) (June): 291–319. Taylor, C. (1994), Multiculturalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tully, J. (1995), Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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14 GLOBALIZATION, COSMOPOLITICS, DECOLONIALITY: POLITICS FOR/OF THE ANTHROPOCENE Eduardo Mendieta

DECOLONIZING POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Closing a book of this type calls for a consideration of the tasks ahead for political philosophy. In the following, therefore, I aim to provide a map of the conceptual and philosophical challenges we must meet in order to develop a political philosophy for our times and for the future that we should be collectively constructing. In light of the most recent debates within political philosophy in particular and social theory in general, the main agenda is how to “provincialize” and “historicize” Europe and the West, while also undertaking the project of epistemological, conceptual, and theoretical decolonization. I will approach this agenda through the reconstruction and exegesis of Enrique Dussel’s call for “destruction” of the history of political philosophy (Dussel, 2011, xv). In the second half of the chapter, I consider the contemporary material conditions of possibility for the projection and imagining of collective futures in terms of a discussion of the Anthropocene, the proposed name for a new era in the history of our planet, which I argue

allows us to focus the challenges we face in a world that has grown ever more interdependent and also more fragile. It may be argued that philosophy is not only the compendium of humanity’s dialogue with itself across time, but also the encyclopedia of utopias, unfilled hopes, and dreams of an undamaged and dignified humanity. Hegel’s famous formulation that “philosophy . . . is its own time apprehended in thoughts” (Hegel, 2008, 15)  meant also that philosophy is a portrait of humanity at a given time. Philosophy is always in relationship to time. Philosophy, we could claim, is the autobiography of human thinking, but like all autobiographies, it is thus a particular type of temporal device. Therefore, all philosophy is by definition historicized and historically material. Philosophy is caught in time, it is of time, and it is for time. It is temporalized and it temporalizes. This is what Hegel’s phrase means, for “apprehended” (gefasst), can also be translated as to cease, to grasp, to gather and grab, to bring together and join. Philosophy gathers the time of humanity in thought. For this reason, we can also see why and how philosophy is caught in the politics

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Eduardo Mendieta of time, of making time, of keeping time, of giving time, of closing time. In these closing reflections, I would like to think about the time from which we think and the time for which we think. We think from a temporal juncture that we are trying to diagnose. This temporal diagnosis, however, is meant to have some future consequences. Keeping time and mapping time—a chronology is a map of time, after all—are ways in which we set temporal trajectories, that is, ways in which we temporalize our future. The future is constructed, just as much as the past is always fabricated. Where are we when we are keeping world time, the time of humanity? In what time are we when we philosophize about the future of humanity? The last three decades have spawned a series of very intense and contentious debates about the name we ought to give our time. Some have argued that we live in the age of postcolonialism and postmodernity. Others have argued about the unfinished project of modernity and the second, or reflexive modernity. Others have argued in favor of naming our times as the age of globalization. Others have, instead, urged a name that also implies a moral and political imperative: the age of cosmopolitanisms. Others, yet, argue that we live in an age of post-Americana Pax and post European hegemony. There are many more proposed names, including a newly emerging name, “the Anthropocene,” which focuses on the global impact that human civilization, culture, and politics has had on the biosphere. These names are all contentions because they are all partial and they all reflect a particular place on the map of the earth and the chronology of world history. Every place on a map is also a conjuncture of world time. When we try to name our times, we are also placing ourselves in relationship to our geotemporal

location and those of other societies and cultures. This means that any form of philosophical self-reflexivity has also to involve a reflection about how we describe, “comprehend,” cease our times, and thus those of others. All timelines or periodization that facilitate and mediate any philosophizing or theorizing are temporalizing practices. Theory is a chronotopological dispositif (Mendieta, 2001). To this extent, all theorizing must engage in a critique of its own temporalizing, or by the same token, detemporalizing effects. This is precisely what Argentine-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel has invited us to do in his monumental A Politics of Liberation: A Critical World History, first published in 2007 and translated in 2011 (Dussel, 2011). In the introduction, Dussel calls for a “destruction” or “deconstruction” of the extant histories of political philosophy in order to properly put in perspective the tasks ahead. In order to be able to construct a proper world history of political philosophy, we are called to dismantle those with which we are familiar, or those with which and through which we think, without even being away that we assume them. In order to dismantle the existing history of political philosophy, Dussel identifies seven limits, or let us call the distorting prejudices. The first limit is a deeply rooted Hellenocentrism that suffuses all histories of political philosophy. The Greeks, Athens, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics are taken as the point of departure for all political thinking, neglecting not only the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, but also the extent to which Confucianism and the Semitic religious traditions prior to the time of Athenian enlightenment had already inaugurated a critique of politics, political power, political authority, raising questions of legality and legitimacy. Dussel notes, for

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GLOBALIZATION, COSMOPOLITICS, DECOLONIALITY instance, that demos is an Egyptian word that means village. The word’s etymology is neither Greek nor Indo-European. He also notes that the etymology of the word dike, justice, lies in duku, from the Akkadian, which is a Semitic language. Dussel has made a stronger claim in the introduction to his Ethics of Liberation, which also provides us with a world history of ethical systems, which begins with the Egyptians, and their Book of the Dead, namely that Hellenocentrism cuts us off from a long history of intense ethical, political, and philosophical reflection that is the very source of what we take to be original in the Greeks (Dussel, 2012). In fact, the time between 800 and 200 bc, which Jaspers called the “Axial Age,” was period in human history when religious critique was also political critique, which is also evident in the work of the Greeks (Jaspers, 1953). The second chronotopological distortion or limit that must be transgressed is the Westernization of political philosophy. By this, Dussel means that most histories of political philosophy, in the West and Europe, marginalize, at best, or excise, at worst, the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium, and the role of Constantinople, Venice and Genoa in the evolution of political thinking from the collapse of the Roman Empire through the Renaissance. Along with many other scholars, Dussel has argued that the Renaissance itself would not have been possible without the massive migrations from Byzantium to Venice, Florence, and Genoa due to the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. The third limit that needs to be overcome is the relentless Eurocentrism of most histories of political philosophy, which exclude consideration of the contributions from non-European and non-Western philosophical traditions, such as the Egyptian,

Mesopotamian, Chinese, Islam, as well as the Aztecs, Mayan, and Incas. Generally, the consideration of these cultures is left to anthropology, ethnography, or “Area Study” specialists, who engage these cultures in very circumscribed and delinking perspectives. This inveterate Eurocentrism is always married to an Orientalism that is as distorting of Europe as it is of its putative “others.” Both the Westernization and Eurocentrism of histories of political philosophy project what has been called Occidentalism, a fiction as false and distorting as that produced by Orientalism, a fiction that proclaims that the “occident” is the pinnacle of human civilization and the avant-garde in the time line of universal history (Dussel, 1994). Overcoming Eurocentrism, thus, requires that we dismantle both Occidentalism, and its shadow, Orientalism (Mendieta, 2010). The fourth limit that Dussel identifies is that of very self-serving periodizations. These periodizations follow invidious, selfcongratulatory, and self-aggrandizing temporal distinctions. It is taken for granted that the history of political philosophy should follow the trajectory that tells a very specific “occidentalist” narrative. It begins with the Greeks, continues with the Romans, the beginning of the Middle Ages, which sometimes is divided into late Antiquity and/or early Middle Ages, and Late Middle Ages, which then is followed by the Renaissance, generally only circumscribed to the Italian city states, then to be followed by the birth of the Modern period with Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau to then be followed by the German and French Enlightenments, and so on. This chronology has become so de rigueur as to become pedestrian. This chronology, however, reveals to what extent all similar chronologies are chronotopological maps. For this chronology privileges Central Europe to

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Eduardo Mendieta the detriment of Mediterranean and Eastern Europe (Byzantium). Here we only need to note that this chronology makes no sense if we place ourselves in China, the modern Middle East, India, or pre-Colombian America. In fact, what the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences did for the Social Sciences needs to be done for both political philosophy in particular and philosophy in general, namely to correlate the disciplinarization of knowledge into certain “faculties” that unconsciously but effectively excluded the non-West from the production of knowledge (Wallerstein et al., 1996). The fifth conceptual limit that must be superseded, or at least made explicit, is the secularism that is sine qua non to most histories of political thought. This secularism is an ideological effect of a certain view not only of the political, but also of the relationship of societal progress and the legitimacy of political institutions. In the West, rationalization qua modernization has been tied to the thesis of the secularization of society. Religion(s) persists, however, and yet societies, whether Western or non-Western, are only considered “modern” if they are allegedly secular. Yet even a country, as modern as the United States, is nonetheless deeply religious and could hardly be considered fully secular, or the paragon of secularity. It is always the religion of the “other” that we find objectionable, even as we are blind to our own religious commitments. The sixth conceptual limit Dussel identifies is what he calls theoretical, intellectual colonialism that continues to neglect both the philosophical political concerns of the socalled global South, and the persistent privileging of the Metropolitan preoccupations, narratives, and chronologies. Even when thinkers are thinking in postcolonial contexts, they continue to orient their research

through the agendas and canons established in the colonial and imperial universities and think tanks. This is the type of thinking and philosophizing that is of our time, but that at the same time is out of our time. It belongs to the age of postcolonialism, globalization, and different forms of cosmopolitanism, but it remains “colonized” political philosophy. Colonized political philosophy detemporalizes by naturalizing and dehistoricizing Western and Eurocentric narratives and chronologies. The seventh limit has to do with what Dussel himself has called somewhere else the “myth of modernity,” a myth that entails the exclusion of the discovery of the Americas from the narrative of “modernity” (Dussel, 1994). For Dussel, there is no way to discuss the “project of modernity” without a careful consideration of the ways in which colonialism provided the material conditions of possibility for economic development in Europe. But more than providing the material wealth that would underwrite the economic growth of Europe, the so-called New World also provided the intellectual, theological, and philosophical impetus for the development of some of the foundational doctrines and concepts that constitute the philosophical ground for modern political philosophy. Figures such as Bartolomé de las Casas, Ginés de Sepúlveda, Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez, argues Dussel, should be considered and studied as the first political philosophers of modernity, before Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. They are after all the first philosophers, theologians, thinkers who tried to develop a political philosophy that would address the plurality of peoples and religions in a context in which the Judeo-Christian religions had become one religion among many others. The “Americas” have been constitutive of the very project of Europe, both

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GLOBALIZATION, COSMOPOLITICS, DECOLONIALITY materially and conceptually; yet these roles have been either neglected or entirely denied. We have to do a history of political philosophy in reverse, to use the expression by Germán Arciniegas, or read back into Europe what it took from America while erasing that appropriation (Arciniegas, 1986). The persistence of this neglect and denial have to do with what Anibal Quijano has called the “coloniality of power,” by which he means at the very least that contemporary power relations among colonial powers, and between imperial and postcolonial nations and cultures are suffused and always already refracted by their colonial past, which is hardly part, and that remains ever present (Quijano, 2000). The coloniality of power is the persistence of modes of thinking racial, sexual, and ethnic relations established during the colonial period. For Quijano, as well as for Dussel, we cannot speak of modernity without coloniality, and thus we should always speak of the modernity/coloniality duet. The coloniality of power, we could add, conditions what could be called “the coloniality of epistemology,” or “coloniality of knowledge” (Lander, 2000). By this we mean that metropolitan, colonial, and imperial interests and perspectives set the agenda for political philosophy; colonial and imperial institutions are taken to be normative and the culmination of allegedly exemplary and putative “normal” paths of development, which methodologically and conceptually perpetuate an agnotological process (i.e. the active process of the production of ignorance, erasure, and forgetfulness of the expropriation of knowledges from other cultures) that expropriates the contributions to political philosophy by subalterns and former colonial outposts. Decolonizing political philosophy thus requires that we acknowledge and confront the “epistemology of ignorance” imposed by

the “coloniality of knowledge” (Sullivan and Tuana, 2007). Decolonizing political philosophy thus requires that we be attentive to the “coloniality of power” and the “coloniality of epistemology” that condition the kinds of questions we ask, the kinds of narratives we assume and project, and the kinds of knowledges we expropriate or appropriate without acknowledging their sources. Dussel’s call for a “deconstruction” of contemporary histories of political philosophy turns out to be in fact a call for the decolonization of political philosophy. The seven limits that he identifies have to do with the ways in which political philosophy in general wittingly or unwittingly, overtly or covertly, avowedly or disavowedly relies on and projects chronologies and temporalizing narratives that either recognize or deny what Fabian has called the “coevalness” of other cultures (Fabian, 1983). To decolonize political philosophy then requires that we dismantle political philosophy as a chronotopological dispositif that relegates some to an immemorial and stagnant past and other to the very avant-garde of a future that is only theirs. This means ceasing to philosophize the political without theodicies and soteriologies or triumphalist and developmentalist narratives of progress.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE One succinct definition of the political is that which has to do with the creation of collective possibilities through deliberation, in which a collectivity addresses itself both a subject and object of its deliberations. In this sense, the political is about projecting and making possible collective or communal

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Eduardo Mendieta futures. The future is always the product of politics. But there is no future that is not projected from some actuality, some present. When we think about what kind of future we can project and construct today, we have to begin with the present conditions of possibility. There is no better way than to survey the present conditions of possibility than through the term “Anthropocene,” a term recently coined by Nobel Prize winner Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen in an essay in Nature (Crutzen, 2002). This new age in the history of the planet refers to the human-induced massive, irreversible, and unpredictable transformation to the earth’s environment, en toto, from the atmosphere to the seas. According to Crutzen, in the last three centuries the world population has increased by a factor of 10 to more than 7 billion. The United Nations estimates that by 2050 the world population will reach 9.6 billion. The cattle needed to feel this teeming humanity, which produces the methane that affects the atmosphere, has risen to 1.4 billion. Humans exploit close to half of the land surface of the planet. Tropical forests are rapidly being cut to clear space for cattle and farming, decreasing the ability of green areas to absorb carbon dioxide. Half of the available potable water in the world is already being used. The burning of fossil fuels and the expansion of agriculture have accelerated the concentration of “green house” effects—carbon dioxide by 30 percent and methane by more than 100  percent—climbing to the highest levels in the last 400 millennia. Crutzen points out that most of these severe and irreversible trends have been “largely caused by only 25% of the world population” (Crutzen, 2002, 23). The accumulation of all these green house gases has resulted and will continue to impact the rise of the temperature of the earth. The Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the planet’s atmosphere will warm up between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees centigrade. Some of the most immediate and evident consequences of such warming are the unleashing of severe weather and the transformation of global climates. Something that Crutzen does not point out is that now most of humanity lives in cities, and that most of the growth in urban areas will take place in the global south. Something else that is not noted by Crutzen but which should be part of the diagnosis of the Anthropocene is that the warming of the planet is accelerating desertification in already very vulnerable areas of the planet. This means that more and more humans will be displaced from the countryside into the growing cities of the planet. The megaurbanization of the planet is de facto turning into a megaslumization of humanity. Finally, while Crutzen does note that only 25 percent of the world population is responsible for most of the pollution and consumption that is driving the ecological crisis, he fails to note that some of the causes of the present ecological crisis have to do with global relations and trends established when Europe began the process of colonization of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Whoever speaks of the contemporary ecological crisis must also address the colonial and imperial archeology of the forms of power that condition how world resources are consumed and by whom. The ecological crisis is itself a political effect of the world colonialism and imperialism built over the last 600 years. Whether we call this a “new period” or “age” of the planet the “Anthropocene” or the “anthropozoic” era is itself a political question. The “facts” and “trends” of this new age are also the battleground of political deliberation. Yet, it is clear that whatever horizon of futurity we want to deliberate

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GLOBALIZATION, COSMOPOLITICS, DECOLONIALITY about must include all the evidence about the cataclysmic and irreversible changes in the earth due to anthropogenic factors. These “planetary” factors have to be considered against the background of a series of framework conditions for the interaction of humanity in the coming future. Here, we can only identify these new social–political framework conditions and indicate how they impact and condition the development of a political philosophy for the anthropocene, beyond Eurocentrism and after the decolonization of political philosophy. We now live, although not equitably and within the same temporalities, in what Luhmann called the “world society” (Luhmann, 2012). We may be citizens of specific nation-states, but we are all part of thick and overarching webs of institutions, from the economy and transnational legal systems to the projection of a global imaginary through world cinema, literatures, and music. This means that our fates, hopes, and imaginaries are now interlinked in ways never before possible or imagined. This “world society” is made ever more cohesive and interdependent through the emergence of a “global public sphere” that is partly enabled by the world wide web, and also by the numerous nongovernment organizations (NGOs) that are continuously bringing to the attention of the world public crises, crimes, and challenges in many different regions of the world, which nonetheless have global impact. It is part of this global public sphere to be heterogeneous, decentered, and ever emergent (Mendieta, 2013). At the same time, we have the emergence and growing institutionalization of what can be called a “global order guided by human rights.” Human rights have become the gold standard for all kinds of legitimate political and legal orders. Interestingly, the juridification of human rights and the

growing “soft power” (power of persuasion and suasion, rather than military or violent power) of the world court and world criminal court has given rise to what could be called the “Human Rights-Politics Paradox.” On the one hand, it is only within nation-states, with their respective constitutional guarantees of citizenship rights, that can effectively enforce the moral and legal principles embodied in human rights; on the other hand, the sovereignty of these nation-states is questioned and challenged from the standpoint of human rights. To this extent it could be claimed we live in a post-national age, but not yet in the age of a global constitutionalism that guarantees and secures for all human beings their basic human rights. Finally, we live in an age in which the inequities between the poor and the wealthy have grown abysmally, exacerbating questions of global justice. Enduring global inequities, established during the colonial and imperial periods, furthermore, is being exacerbated by what could be called the “monetization of financial risk” at the global level. This is in fact one dimension of the “world society” of which we have become unwilling members, namely the emergence of a global economy that now includes the financial sector as a productive element of the economy. This is why economic crises in one country, or even one part of the world, can no longer be contained within nations or even economic blocs. The integration of financial markets at the global level means that incurring financial risks, such as betting on hedge funds and derivatives, can tap national economies by shifting failures to local national budgets, while privatizing the profits derived from these risks. In the age of the world society, the globalization of financial markets has become the latest tool of neoimperialist expropriation. Economic crises are the latest form of imperial pillage.

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Eduardo Mendieta We live in an age of unprecedented interdependence and asymmetrically lived vulnerabilities. We live in the age of new assemblages and also massive expulsions, to use Sassen’s language (Sassen, 2014). Political philosophy is called to rethink its basic categories of analysis and to dismantle its methodological Eurocentrism and conceptual colonialism, as Kerner put it very aptly (Kerner, 2013). One way in which it can begin to do both things is by engaging in a reflection about how all thinking is a chronotopological device, a method for granting time, or taking time away. The narratives that have guided most of political philosophy over the last 500  years, those of secularization, enlightenment, modernity, progress, development, have placed the invented West and homogenized Europe at the zero hour of world history, at the 12 o’clock of the day on the clock of universal history, the time from which all others can be seen as lagging behind, always too late, never ever able to be on time. Appadurai has written about the future as a cultural fact (Appadurai, 2013). Echoing him, I have argued here that political philosophy is precisely about imagining, projecting, and constructing collective futures. We cannot do this collectively so long as the colonial past continues to frame how we think about our challenges and the future remains mortgaged to the vision of progress projected by both Occidentalism and Orientalism. A political philosophy that dismantles this chronotopogical matrix may be one that thinks from the standpoint of developing global institutions that take as a point of departure the achievements of the regime of human rights; it would also be one that takes up the unfinished tasks of the constitutionalization of a global legal regime that secures the self-determination of peoples while also juridifying the new globalized financial market. It will

thus have to be a political philosophy that calls for more democracy, and the renewed task of submitting global economy to the political regulation of political actors.

WORKS CITED Appadurai, A. (2013), The Future as a Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. New York and London: Verso. Arciniegas, G. (1986), America in Europe: a history of the New World in Reverse. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Crutzen, P. J. (2002), “Geology of Mankind” Nature, 415: 23. Dussel, E. (2012), Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. — (2011), Politics of Liberation. A Critical World History. London: SCM Press. — (1994), 1492. El Encubrimineto del Otro. Hacia el origen del “mito de la modernidad” Conferencias de Frankfurt. Octubre de 1992. La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores. Fabian, J. (1983), Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (2008), Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaspers, K. (1953), The Origin and Goal of History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kerner, I. (2013), “Differences in Inequality: Tracing the Socioeconomic, the Cultural and the Political in Latin American Postcolonial Theory,” desiguALdades. net Working Papers Series 60. Berlin:

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GLOBALIZATION, COSMOPOLITICS, DECOLONIALITY desiguALdades.net International Research Network on Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America. Lander, E. (2000), La colonialidad del saber. Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Buenos Aires: UNESCO-CLASCO. Luhmann, N. (2012), Theory of Society, Vol. 1. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 83–99. Mendieta, E. (2001), “Chronotopology: Critique of Spatiotemporal Regimes,” in W. S. Wilkerson and J. Paris (eds), New Critical Theory: Essays on Liberation. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp. 175–197. — (2010), “Postcolonialism, Postorientalism, Postoccidentalism: The Past That Never Went Away and the Future That Never Arrived,” in May, T., Emerging Trends in Continental Philosophy. Vol. 8. The History of Continental Philosophy, A. D. Schrift (ed.). Durham: Acumen, pp. 149–172.

— (2013), “World Society, Public Sphere and Cosmopolitanism,” in R. Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, H. Schelkshorn, and F. Gmainer-Pranzl (eds), Auf dem Weg zu einer Gerechten Universalität: Philosophischen Grundlagen und Politischen Perspektiven. Aachen: Wissenschaftsverlag Mainz, pp. 127–139. Quijano, A. (2000), “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South, 1 (3): 533–580. Sassen, S. (2014), Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sullivan, S. and Tuana, N. (eds) (2007), Race and the Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Wallerstein, I. (1996), Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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CHRONOLOGY

BEFORE THE COMMON ERA ca. 650: Draco the Lawgiver 638–558: Solon 495–425: Pericles 470–399: Socrates 460–395: Thucydides 445–365: Antisthenes (founder of Cynicism) 431–404: Peloponnesian War 427–347: Plato 412–323: Diogenes the Cynic 384–322: Aristotle 336–323: Reign of Alexander the Great 334–262: Zeno of Citium (founder of Stoicism) 106–43: Cicero 100–44: Julius Caesar (reigned from 49–44) 63 bce—14 ce: Augustus Caesar (reigned form 27 bce–14 ce) 27 bce–180 ce: Pax Romana

COMMON ERA 4 bce—65 ce: Seneca 55–135: Epictetus 121–180: Marcus Aurelius 306–337: Reign of Constantine 354–430: Augustine 534: Justinian’s Code

800: Charlemagne crowned emperor 1215: Magna Carta 1221–1274: Aquinas 1285–1347: William of Ockham 1469–1527: Machiavelli 1478–1535: Thomas More 1483–1546: Martin Luther 1516: Thomas More publishes Utopia 1517: Luther’s 95 Theses 1583–1645: Hugo Grotius 1588–1653: Robert Filmer 1588–1679: Thomas Hobbes 1618–1648: Thirty Years War 1625: Grotius publishes On the Laws of War and Peace 1648: Peace of Westphalia 1651: Hobbs publishes Leviathan 1632–1694: Samuel von Pufendorf 1632–1704: John Locke 1642–1651: English Civil War 1688: Glorious Revolution 1689: Locke publishes Two Treatises of Government and Letter Concerning Toleration 1689–1755: Charles de Secondat, Baron Montesquieu 1712–1778: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1724–1804: Immanuel Kant 1729–1797: Edmund Burke 1732–1790: Adam Smith 1743–1826: Thomas Jefferson 223

CHRONOLOGY 1748–1832: Jeremy Bentham 1748: Montesquieu publishes The Spirit of the Laws 1754: Rousseau publishes Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men 1756: Burke publishes A Vindication of Natural Society: A View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind From Every Species of Artificial Society 1756–1836: William Godwin 1759–1797: Mary Wollstonecraft 1762: Rousseau publishes Of The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right 1770–1831: George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1775–1783: American Revolution 1781: Bentham publishes Principles of Morals and Legislation 1789–1799: French Revolution 1791: Godwin publishes Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness 1790–1859: John Austin 1790: Burke publishes Reflections on the Revolution in France 1792: Wollstonecraft publishes Vindication of the Rights of Women 1795: Kant publishes Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch 1797: Kant publishes The Metaphysics of Morals (including Science of Right) 1806–1873: John Stuart Mill 1809–1865: Pierre Proudhon 1814–1876: Mikhail Bakunin 1817–1862: Henry David Thoreau 1818–1883: Karl Marx 1821: Hegel publishes Elements of the Philosophy of Right 1840: Proudhon publishes What is Property? 1844–1900: Friedrich Nietzsche 1848: Marx and Engels publish Communist Manifesto

1849: Thoreau publishes Civil Disobedience 1859: Mill publishes On Liberty 1859–1952: John Dewey 1860–1935: Jane Addams 1861: Mill publishes Considerations on Representative Government 1864–19020: Max Weber 1869–1940: Emma Goldman 1869–1948: Mohandas K. Gandhi 1882: Bakunin publishes God and the State 1887: Nietzsche publishes On the Genealogy of Morals 1888–1985: Carl Schmitt 1895–1973: Max Horkheimer 1898–1979: Herbert Marcuse 1899–1973: Leo Strauss 1903–1969: Theodor W. Adorno 1905–1982: Ayn Rand 1905: Weber publishes The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 1906–1975: Hannah Arendt 1907–1992: H. L. A. Hart 1909–1997: Isaiah Berlin 1914–1918: First World War 1917: Russian Revolution 1919: Weber publishes Politics as Vocation 1919: Schmitt publishes Political Theology 1921–2002: John Rawls 1926–1984: Michel Foucault b. 1929: Jürgen Habermas 1930–2004: Jacques Derrida 1931–2013: Ronald Dworkin 1932: Schmitt publishes The Concept of the Political b. 1934: Enrique Dussel b. 1935: Michael Walzer 1938–2002: Robert Nozick 1939–1945: Second World War b. 1943: Chantal Mouffe 1944: Horkheimer and Adorno publish Dialectic of Enlightenment 1945: Founding of the United Nations b. 1949: Slavoj Žižek

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CHRONOLOGY b. 1947: Martha Nussbaum 1947–1991: Cold War 1949–2006: Iris Marion Young 1950: Adorno et al. publish The Authoritarian Personality 1951: Arendt publishes The Origins of Totalitarianism b. 1953: Michael Sandel b. 1953: Thomas Pogge 1953: Strauss publishes Natural Right and History 1959: Strauss publishes What is Political Philosophy? 1961: Hart publishes The Concept of Law 1962: Habermas publishes The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 1963: Arendt publishes On Revolution b. 1962: Will Kymlicka 1964: Marcuse publishes One-Dimensional Man 1969: Berlin publishes Four Essays on Liberty 1970: Arendt publishes On Violence 1971: Rawls publishes A Theory of Justice 1974: Nozick publishes Anarchy, State, Utopia

1975: Foucault publishes Discipline and Punish 1977: Walzer publishes Just and Unjust Wars 1981: Habermas publishes Theory of Communicative Action 1982: Sandel publishes Liberalism and the Limits of Justice 1983: Walzer publishes Spheres of Justice 1990: Young publishes Justice and the Politics of Difference 1993: Rawls publishes Political Liberalism 1995: Kymlicka publishes Multicultural Citizenship 1998: Nussbaum publishes Sex and Social Justice 1999: Rawls publishes The Law of Peoples 2000: Negri and Hardt publish Empire 2002: Pogge publishes World Poverty and Human Rights 2005: Mouffe publishes On the Political 2006: Nussbaum publishes Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership 2007: Dussel publishes Politics of Liberation (translated to English in 2011)

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GLOSSARY1

Absolutism:  Term used to describe regimes or systems of thought that are totalizing, exceptionless, and all-encompassing. Absolutist regimes are autocratic: all power is invested in the ruler. Absolutist monarchs ruled Europe in the eighteenth century. Defenders of enlightened absolutism argued that the best form of government was one in which a benevolent central authority had absolute power. See also totalitarianism. Alien:  A person residing within a country who is not a citizen of that country. Aliens may be permitted to visit, live, and work within a country based upon a process involving visas and official permits. Illegal aliens are those who are in a country in violation of that official permitting process. Anarchy/Anarchism:  A theory of government (and related political movements/parties) that denies the legitimacy of governmental rule. While anarchism is often skeptical and critical of political power, anarchism can also advocate the positive goal of creating a stateless society based on voluntary association. Anarchists emphasize individual autonomy, the importance of consensus and unanimity in deliberation, and a radical critique of structures of social and political control. From Greek an-archos (without rule or principle).

Aristocracy:  A form of governmental organization ostensibly focused on rule of the good or best (in Greek aristos means “good” or “excellent”). In practice, aristocracies are constructed as governments ruled by wealthy landowners and nobility. Asylum:  Those who suffer persecution under a given political organization may ask for asylum from another entity with political power (or religious power). When the right to asylum is invoked, the organization that provides sanctuary may offer protection for the asylum-seeker. International law recognizes the rights of asylum-seekers. Also certain spaces within sovereign states—such as embassies—may be places of asylum for those fleeing persecution. Authoritarian(-ism):  A form of government that emphasizes central control and hierarchical structures of power. Focused on structures of command and obedience that supersede individual judgment and personal autonomy. Contrasted with non-authoritarian structures and regimes, which are open to dissent, pluralistic, and individualistic. Autocracy:  A form of government that invests absolute power in one person—the autocrat, who rules autocratically (or without constraint). Autocracy comes from Greek: auto—meaning “self”—and—cracy/kra-

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GLOSSARY tos—meaning “rule”). Autocracy implies independence and self-sufficiency in ruling. While the term is not necessarily pernicious, autocracy has negative connotations, since autocratic rule tends to be despotic and absolutist. Autonomy/Autonomous:  Literally “self-rule” (auto = self; nomos = rule/law). As a normative principle autonomy establishes a right to self-rule, self-control, and self-determination, that is connected to claims about individual rights. It can also be employed to describe regions or groups that have a legal right to self-governance or national self-determination. Autonomy is a central concern for theories of human rights and for Kantian/deontological theories of morality and politics. Balance of Power:  A circumstance in which different sovereign powers or parts of government are held in check or balanced in opposition to other powers or parts. The balance of power can produce power sharing arrangements between various parties. In federal systems, there is a balance of power between local entities and the federal government. In mixed governments with a separation of power, there is a balance between the parts of government. In international affairs, the balance of power is understood in terms of opposing spheres of interest, alliances, and power differentials among nations. In international relations, the issue of balance of power is connected with questions about hegemony and structural conflicts understood in terms of unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar models. Buffer Zones:  Border areas that are established in order to prevent or inhibit interaction across borders. Often employed along contested international borders as a way of preventing border skirmishes and cross-border violence. Also described as areas of separation, zones of neutrality (or neutral zones), or demilitarized zones. In contemporary international relations,

buffer zones are often monitored by international peacekeeping forces. Bureaucracy:  Large organizations consisting of various offices (bureaus) and officials (bureacrats). Bureaucracy often refers to the system of unelected officials who make up the apparatus of government— the hierarchical structure of offices organized in what is called the civil service. Bureaucracy can be used pejoratively to indicate a set of excessively complicated rules, regulations, and procedures. Some social theorists follow Max Weber in understanding bureaucracy as part of efficient modernization necessitated by increasing complexity and the division of labor—creating what Weber described as the “iron cage” of bureaucratic life. Critics—notably the critical theorists of the Frankfurt school—argue that bureaucracies breed so-called bureaucratic rationality that tends toward conformism, legalism, and deference toward authority. Capitalism:  A form of economic organization that is based upon commitment to private ownership of property and the ability to make profit by exchanges of labor and goods in an open market. Capitalism is based upon wage labor, in which labor is exchanged for monetary compensation. Capitalism developed in the modern period out of previous feudalism. It was challenged as an economic system by communism in the twentieth century. Capitalism is often associated with liberal, democratic forms of government, since liberal democracies tend to emphasize the importance of the right to private property. Liberal democracies tend to embrace laissez-faire capitalism, while socialist governments tend to impose more regulations on the market. More authoritarian and centralized regimes (such as China) have also embraced a version of capitalism known as state capitalism.

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GLOSSARY Citizen/Citizenship:  A citizen is a person who belongs to a national political entity and has the rights, protections, and responsibilities of full members of that political group—related to the idea of nationality. Citizenship may be defined as mere belonging, often understood either as ethnic identity (so-called jus sanguinis or right of blood citizenship) or as a birth-right of native born persons (so-called jus soli or right of the soil citizenship). In the United States, those born within the borders of the United States are citizens by birth. In other nations, citizenship is defined by the blood of one’s parents. Citizenship can also be acquired through a process of naturalization: naturalized citizens are those who have acquired citizenship through a deliberate process by which they swear allegiance to their newly acquired nation. Citizens may have more rights than noncitizens in some nations—including rights to work, rights to education, healthcare, and so on. In this regard, citizens are protected by civil rights. Citizenship may also be accompanied by responsibilities including the duty to serve in the military, the obligation to vote, the requirement of jury service, and so on. Civilization:  An idea describing a level of political and economic development that involves the creation of cities, including sedentary people, division of labor, surplus wealth, political and religious hierarchy. The term “civilization” and “civilized” are sometimes used to indicate a distinction between more primitive forms of development. This way of organizing things indicates a developmental hierarchy, with civilization viewed as an advancement over less primitive forms of life. The term civilization is also used to identify broad trans-national cultural identities. This idea has been employed to describe a supposed clash of civilization (e.g. as found in the work of Samuel Huntington).

Civil Disobedience:  The act of disobeying a law, while accepting punishment for disobedience, employed in an effort to protest against unjust law. Civil disobedience is often employed as a nonviolent technique of social protest. Unlike in acts of conscientious objection or refusal, the laws violated in civil disobedience are not necessarily the laws viewed as unjust. Civil disobeyers may violate parade and assembly regulations, hoping to be arrested as an act of protest against other unjust laws. This method has been widely employed in civil rights protests around the world—inspired by ideas and activities of Thoreau, Gandhi, King, and others. Unlike violent revolution, which aims to overthrow the legal system, civil disobedience occurs out of what Rawls calls “fidelity to law”—with the idea that the legal system is basically just, even though the law being protested is unjust. Civil Liberties:  Civil liberties are basic liberties afforded to citizens. Often this includes rights or liberties, such as to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. These liberties are associated with the private choices of individual citizens. These rights are often primarily conceived of as negative rights. Civil liberties are usually extensively defended within liberal regimes. This concept is closely connected with the notion of civil rights and sometimes the terms are used interchangeably. However, the notion of civil liberties focuses more specifically on protecting individuals from governmental coercion in spheres of private concern. Civil Rights:  Civil rights are the rights of citizens. While civil liberties are understood in negative terms as the basic liberties of private individual citizens, civil rights can be understood to include a broader range of political rights and positive rights. They usually include the right to participate in governmental decision making through the right to vote and petition the govern-

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GLOSSARY ment, the right to due process including the right to have a speedy and fair trial by jury, and so on. Civil rights can extend toward a broader set of positive rights that includes a right to fair wages, fair housing, freedom from employment discrimination, the right to work, the right to education, and other welfare rights. Unlike human rights that extend to all humans, civil rights may only extend to citizens. Civil Society:  The sphere of human activity outside of governmental/political life. In Hegelian theory, civil society (Bürgerliche Gesellschaft) is located midway between merely private lives of individuals (where morality is a primary concern) and the political life of the national community (where law and legislation are primary concerns). This middle sphere includes business interests, unions, and other social organizations. A key component of civil society is the voluntary nature of its organizations. While laws regulate social and business life, participation in the institutions of civil society is voluntary. Some theorists—such as Walzer and Putnam—point out that robust civil society is an essential feature of stable polities, since civil society allows for the development of lateral relationships of trust that bind pluralistic polities together despite their internal diversity. One feature of the extra-legal and voluntary coordination of civil society is a set of virtues that allow for social interaction: tolerance, nonviolence, solidarity, and civility. See also public sphere. Civility:  A social virtue that allows for productive and harmonious interaction among diverse people. Civility includes basic norms of politeness and etiquette. It also includes more robust norms and rules for social interaction, political debate, and public deliberation. Closely related to tolerance, civility is understood as grounded in basic agreement about the norms of

civil society, which bind citizens together in a common project despite their differences. Collectivism:  A theory of social and political organization that emphasizes group cohesion and unity often focused on centralized and hierarchical political organization. Or collectivism may focus on the need for consensus and esprit de corps. Collectivism in mass society may be opposed to a more traditional, organic notion of community. In this sense, collectives are mere groups gather together en masse, while communities are groups who cooperate and share things in common. Communes or intentional communities are often understood in opposition to the collectives of mass society. Collectivism is also opposed to individualism. Colonialism:  A theory and practice of international expansion aimed at exploitation of either an occupied territory or resettlement in that territory by foreigners. Colonialism includes hierarchical and hegemonic social and political structures, similar to imperialism. Colonialism aims at establishing some form of governance over a foreign polity, while imperialism aims more at exploitation and military control. In some versions, colonialism (like imperialism) was justified by some version of the ideology known as the white man’s burden—the idea that European powers had a moral obligation to uplift, educate, and liberate backward and uncivilized peoples across the globe. Colonialism was ended with liberation movements around the globe, leading the development of post-colonial theory. Common Good:  The good as defined in terms of what is good for the community or collective. In traditional Christian social justice teaching, the common good is understood as the sum total of good for each individual as a whole. In utilitarianism, the common good can be understood in terms of the greatest happiness for the

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GLOSSARY greatest number. Related concepts include the public welfare, public interest, or ­commonweal. Commons:  The commons is what is not owned in a system of private property. It is shared resources and spaces that are open for communal use. Commons include oceanic and atmospheric resources. Some resources may be understood as commons within a nation, while other commons are open for international use. See also tragedy of the commons. Commonwealth:  A political order that is oriented around the common good, the commonweal, or public welfare. The term “commonwealth” is also used to indicate national identity (as in the Commonwealth of Australia) and federations of nations (as in the former British colonies that are associated in the Commonwealth of Nations—formerly the British Commonwealth). Commonwealth signifies an affiliation based on shared culture, language, and political values. As a name for a national government, “commonwealth” indicates a “republican” form of government—that is government focused on public welfare rather than the private satisfaction of the ruling nobility. Commune/Communalism:  A commune is a social group organized along cooperative lines and based upon notions of shared communal resources, mutuality, and reciprocity. In some cases, communes have been established as separate, counter-cultural communities that isolate themselves from the larger social whole. Communalism is an anarchist or radically decentralized alternative to state-centered socialism/communism, which emphasizes the development of small scale and autonomous communes. Communism:  A form of economic (and political) organization that focuses on communal ownership of property, including the abolition of private property and ending the profit/market system of capi-

talism. Communism may be understood as the most radical development of socialism, which aims in the direction of substantive equality. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, communism developed especially through the influence of Karl Marx toward the call for global revolution against capitalism, which had a lasting impact on global politics. Communal ownership of goods and cooperation aims, in Marxist terms, to distribute goods to each individual according to their need. Unlike ancient and modern communalism, which focused on separate, local, and self-sufficient communes, communism is generally viewed as a global movement that aims at a global transformation of economic and social relations away from the class distinctions of capitalism toward the development of a class-less society in which workers share ownership in the means of production. Communitarianism:  A form of social and political organization that emphasizes the importance of community and tradition. Offered as a response to liberal individualism, communitarianism focuses on the connection between the individual and the community. Communitarians de-emphasize negative liberty and highlight the community’s role in establishing norms that define the meaning and purpose of individuality. Communitarians emphasize the need for responsibility, responsiveness, and reciprocity within a community. Communitarians may also emphasize the importance of community support for individuals based upon some notion of positive rights. Conscientious Objection/Refusal:  The act of refusing to comply with a legal command based upon a claim of private conscience. Unlike civil disobedience, conscientious refusal is not necessarily a strategic effort to break the law in order to foster social change (although it can be that as well). Instead, conscientious refusal and objec-

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GLOSSARY tion are acts of noncompliance based upon the claim that the command that is refused violates the objector’s moral judgment. Conscientious objection is often based upon religious principles or moral ideals that are in opposition to the law. Constitution:  The basis structure of a social/political organization. A constitution may be written or codified in a set of foundational documents, which clarify organizational structure, institutional responsibilities and power, and procedures. An un-codified or unwritten constitution exists (as in the United Kingdom or Canada) in the series of precedents and cases that make up the history of governmental organization. Written constitutions may also be supplemented by customary developments and case law precedents. Written constitutions may furthermore be altered by constitutional amendments. Conservatism:  The ideology of those who emphasize tradition and who are resistant to radical change. Conservatives are interested in preserving or conserving some traditional status quo. Historically, conservatism (as associated with Edmund Burke) was opposed to the radical and revolutionary changes that occurred during the era of the French Revolution. Conservatism is pejoratively described as reactionary. In liberal democratic polities, conservatism has tended toward libertarian domestic ideals and realist international values which are associated with right-wing parties. Conservatism is often understood in opposition to progressivism. Coup d’etat:  A revolutionary transfer of power that strikes quickly, often by violence (such as assassination or a mutiny of military officers). While revolutions often involve the movements and actions of the masses, coups usually involves the actions of small groups—often rival parties within the ruling classes.

Cosmopolitanism:  An ideal of trans-national community grounded in norms and values that unite people across the globe. Although it has ancient roots, cosmopolitanism has developed in modern European contexts with a focus on an international order that would preserve peace among nations, as developed out of natural law theory. In contemporary usage, cosmopolitanism is oriented around universal norms about human rights and shared humanity that develop out of liberal political theory. It is associated with the growth of international institutions, globalization, and a concern for global justice. Crime:  A violation of law that is liable to be punished. In positive law theory, a crime is an act that violates stipulated laws. The positive law approach includes the idea that if there is no law against something, then it is not a crime to do it, ruling out ex post facto and retroactive administration of new laws. The natural law theory differs in holding that there are some actions that are criminal violations of the natural law, even if there is no positive law deeming those actions to be criminal. Criminal law in liberal democracies usually includes the idea that criminal deeds must also be accompanied by criminal intent (so-called mens rea). A different notion of crime focuses only on the deed itself in a system of “strict liability.” Some violations of private law or common law—in torts and contracts—are not punishable by courts but are administered by civil law courts (as opposed to criminal courts). See also war crimes. Crimes Against Humanity:  A notion developed in international law which is used to condemn particularly odious assaults on human dignity, especially the systematic misdeeds of states associated with persecution, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. The notion of crimes against humanity developed through international war crimes tribunals held after World War II

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GLOSSARY (the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals), which clarified three categories of war crime: crimes against the peace, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Statute of 1998, and instituted in 2002 in The Hague. The Rome Statute clarifies that crimes against humanity include widespread and systematic murder, enslavement, sexual crimes, torture, apartheid, and so on. Critical Theory:  An approach to social, cultural, and political criticism associated with the Frankfurt School and authors such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and more recently, Habermas. By employing post-Marxist ideas about ideology, materialism, and the importance of dialectical reasoning, the critical theorists offer critical insight into contemporary political structures. Critical theory employs social scientific knowledge and historical data in a critical (non-neutral) fashion, usually with the aim of opposing domination and promoting liberation. Culture:  Social, moral, political, linguistic, and intellectual habits of a people or civilization. Culture is the product of education and habituation (cf. German Bildung) and can thus be understood as “secondnature,” as character, or as the ethos or way of life of a group. Culture can point toward hierarchical classification—as cultured (or civilized) individuals are viewed as superior to the uncultured. Culture is related to “cultivation”—as cultured individuals are cultivated or educated into the norms and customs of a people or civilization. Culture can thus be organized into high- and low-cultures (including popculture)—and dominant cultures can be resisted by various sub-cultures. Culture is often viewed as a unitary set of values, associated with a nation. However, there is a growing awareness of cultural diversity, the problem of cultural relativism, and the challenge of multiculturalism.

Cultural Relativism:  The idea that values and norms are relative to a given culture. This implies a meta-ethical and skeptical claim that there are no transculturally absolute values, which are accepted (or ought to be accepted) by all persons in all cultures. Cultural relativism is often asserted as a descriptive claim: it is a fact that some values are relative to culture. Defenders of objective and universal values will argue that there are some non-relative norms that transcend cultural diversity. Cultural relativism thus poses a challenge to claims about universal human rights. See also relativism. Deliberative Democracy:  A form of decision making based upon free and open public deliberation. Contrasted with merely preference- or interest-based voting (as is assumed in most secret balloting), deliberative democracy aims to establish consensus based upon public reasoning. Members are expected to provide and defend the reasons for their opinions and conclusions in public. Short of unanimity, the goal of deliberative democracy is to ensure that minority opinions are heard and responded to while finding ways to include multiple perspectives within a pluralistic polity, and while viewing members as rational co-participants in the endeavor of reasonable public discussion. Democracy:  A form of governmental organization based on rule by or of the people (in Greek demos means “people”). Democracy primarily identifies the structure of power in a political system: democratic governments will place power in the people to some degree and in some fashion. Direct democracy allows for direct voting by citizens. Representative democracy allows the people to elect representatives to the governing body. There are a variety of ways that democratic representation can occur, including winner-take all elections in single-member districts (as in the United States and the United King-

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GLOSSARY dom) and proportional representation of various sorts (as in many European countries). A variation is representation by lot or sortition (which is called demarchy). Another variant would base policy decisions upon random-sampling of public opinion. Democracy can also be used to describe the purposes and limits of political power, with democratic governments ruling in the interests of the people. Liberal democracy is a democratic form of government with limitations imposed by the rights of the people, including protections of individual rights. See also deliberative democracy; liberalism. Despotism:  Despotism is rule by a sovereign who has absolute, unlimited power. This sovereign may be a monarch or a group but the sovereign is despotic when its rule is absolute. Despotism often connotes arbitrary and cruel rule that is not restricted by moral or legal principles. However, it is possible for there to be enlightened or benevolent despotism, where the despot rules absolutely but in the interest or for the well-being of the people. See also autocracy, tyranny. Distributive Justice:  Concern for the distribution of social goods, including income, wealth, vocational and educational opportunity, health care, and other sources of well-being. Principles of distributive justice vary according to relative ranking of key values especially equality, efficiency, and liberty. Some forms of distributive justice want to ensure substantial equality. Other forms want to ensure fair and equal opportunity. Still others will emphasize the importance of liberty and free exchanges, even if this results in unequal distributions. Distributive justice can be strictly utilitarian—aiming to maximize the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Or it can emphasize (as John Rawls does) maximin rationality. Divine-Right:  A principle of ruling that grounds the sovereign’s power and

l­egitimacy in a religious claim that gives the sovereign the “divine right” to rule. As such, the sovereign who rules by divine right has no human limits on power: his power is only limited by God, who grants him the right to rule. Division of Labor:  The way that specific tasks and roles are coordinated in a society. This results in specialization and can produce class distinctions. The division of labor can be necessitated by the nature of technology and production; and it can reflect differences in talent and ability among persons. However, Marxists complain that the division of labor is also structured by ideology and differential social power. Adam Smith and Emile Durkheim held that progress and advancement result from increased specialization leading to a complex division of labor. Dynasty:  A historical sequence of rulers who come from the same family or group. In traditional hierarchical societies, dynasties consist in lines of power that are passed down from one generation to the other, usually according to patrilineal rules of succession. In more contemporary settings, the term dynasty can be used to describe ongoing political success of a party or group, which may or may not have a familial connection. Egalitarian/ism:  A basic commitment to equality. It can be a descriptive claim about basic equality among human beings, for example, maintaining the human beings are created with equal rights or equal dignity. It can be a normative claim about the need to create equality (by removing social/ political barriers that produce inequality). Equality can be understood in a variety of ways. It can be understood as substantive equality, in which individuals should have the same amount of things; or equality of outcome, which focuses on eliminating unequal results from social transaction. It can be understood as political equality, in which individuals should have the equal

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GLOSSARY opportunity to influence political outcomes (as in the principle of “one person, one vote”) or in which persons should be treated equally by the law. It can also be understood in terms of equality of opportunity, in which barriers to education, careers, and other opportunities should be eliminated. Egalitarianism is opposed to caste, class, ethnic, and racial hierarchies that are based upon unequal treatment and unequal consideration for individuals of these different groups. Egalitarianism may also be opposed to meritocracy, when meritocracy creates unequal social hierarchies—however, the idea of equality of opportunity may permit unequal outcomes that have meritocratic results. Empire:  A hierarchical transnational or super-national power, ruling over other nation-states, provinces, and sub-national geographic units. Empires can be established by conquest or by less violent transfers of sovereignty (as in feudal marriages). Empires can use military and police power to establish direct rule over imperial possessions. Or empires can use less overt means of influence to establish hegemonic control—including both economic and cultural power. Empires vary in terms of the amount of centralized authority exerted on client states and imperial possessions—from loose alliances to direct control. A recent theory of globalization (by Hardt and Negri) describes the emerging capitalist global order as an Empire. Enlightenment:  Enlightenment literally signifies awareness, awakening, or edification. In the history of Western Philosophy, the Enlightenment (also called the Age of Reason) was a period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries during which philosophers criticized traditional systems of religious, social, and political authority. In European political philosophy, the Enlightenment is the time during which Medieval and feudal ideas about society

and government were superseded by liberal, democratic, and capitalist theories. Some enlightenment authors (such as Voltaire) thought that enlightened despots might rule in the interest of the people. But enlightenment political philosophers such as Locke supported revolutionary movements against despotic rule based in ideas about human rights and the importance of liberal and democratic reform of government. Environmentalism:  A social movement or set of concerns directed beyond mere concern for human beings and toward concern for the broader surrounding world. Environmental concern can include or be focused on anthropocentric concerns—as in the idea of environmental justice, which seeks to apply principles of social justice and distributive justice to environmental harms and benefits. Environmentalism can also be nonanthropocentric, in which case it is concerned with the well-being of nonhuman beings including inanimate objects, individual animals, animal species, habitats, ecosystems, the biosphere, or even the planet itself. Environmentalism shows up in political philosophy in terms of the problem of representing the interests of nonhuman beings, in terms of the problem of environmental justice, and in terms of thinking about international solutions to global environmental problems such as climate change. Ethics:  The study of behavior derived from the Greek word ethos which means habits, customs, or character traits. Philosophical ethics has three main branches. Metaethics focuses on problems arising in the analysis of ethical concepts and ethical reasoning. Normative ethics focuses on concrete theories of what is good or justice. Applied ethics focuses on the application of normative theories to concrete problems. Although some want to distinguish ethics from morality, there is

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GLOSSARY no firm distinction between the two. See also mores/moral/morality. Ethnic Cleansing:  See genocide. Fascism:  An autocratic or dictatorial form of social and political organization that emphasizes national unity, military strength, and centralized authority. Fascism developed in the twentieth century as a reaction against both international communism and liberal democracy. Associated with Mussolini and Hitler, fascism is oriented around mythic symbolism about power and ethnic/national identity. Fascism does not tolerate opposition or minority parties. In recent decades, fascism has been used as a pejorative term to describe centralized political power that relies upon security apparatus, secretive surveillance, and military force. See also totalitarianism. Federalism:  A theory of sovereign power and political hierarchy that distinguishes between constitutive part (localities, states, provinces, regions, etc.) that are united together in one federation. The balance of power between the parts and the federal government may be worked out in various ways. Most federal systems allow for local control of a range of issues. Federalism has been contrasted with imperialism and with the unitary state as a strategy for maintaining unity and control over large geographic areas. Federalism is often presumed to result from negotiated settlement among the confederated parties and not merely out of military domination. Federalism allows for greater pluralism by allowing local populations or subnational groups to maintain autonomy and self-determination, including religious and linguistic autonomy, as well as local control of fiscal policy, taxation, and criminal justice. Feminism:  A critical social and political theory that focuses on the oppression and exclusion of women. Feminism can be understood as an activist social move-

ment that aims to liberate women. It can also be understood as a broadly focused critique of male-dominance as it shows up in patriarchal social institutions, popular culture, religion, and philosophy. Some feminists (so-called liberal feminists) emphasize that the liberation of women must be grounded in an expansion of human rights in a way that includes issues that concern women. Other feminists (so-called radical feminists) focus their critique on hierarchical structures based on “gendered” concepts, such as cultural norms about masculinity and femininity. See also gender. Feudalism:  A form of social, political, and economic organization typical of Europe during the so-called Medieval period. This system emphasized a hierarchy of nobilities tied together by pledges of military support and by economic centralization through the manorial (or seigniorial) system in which peasants were tied to land possessed by the Lord of the Manor. Feudalism also included a third class— the clergy. The three classes or estates of medieval or feudal social system were the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners/peasantry. In feudal social structures, membership in a class was determined by birth (with the exception of the clergy). Feudalism in Europe gave way to liberalism and capitalism. Free market:  See Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Freedom:  A condition in which there is lack of restriction, constraint, or necessity. The word “freedom” can be traced to Germanic roots—as related both to Freiheit (freedom) and Friede (peace). Freedom is a condition in which choices are not determined, in which one is permitted or licensed to choose to act. The Latin root for the same idea gives us the synonym liberty, from which we derive ideas about civil liberties. Freedom includes related notions such as independence, self-control (autonomy), and self-governance. Liberty and freedom

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GLOSSARY can be defined either as negative or positive (following a distinction made popular by Isaiah Berlin). Negative freedom or negative liberty is understood as lack of constraint, grounded in protection against the interference of others and the interference of the state. Positive freedom or positive liberty is understood as the ability to direct actions toward ends of one’s own choosing. Liberal political regimes tend to emphasize negative freedom—aiming to restrict state interference in the actions of individuals. Communitarians and socialists tend to emphasize positive freedoms and rights—asserting that freedom must be supported by economic opportunity, education, and political rights. Game Theory:  Game theory examines the ethics, logic, economics, and psychology behind decision strategies. Various models and hypotheses are explored in game theory in order to understand the costs and benefits of decision procedures. Much depends on how the game theoretic situation is constructed. For example, one must consider whether a game is a zerosum game (in which gains and losses are balanced among losers and winners) or whether there can be a net gain shared by the players. The game theoretic situation must also consider the number of players, issues related to power sharing, and the question of knowledge and decisionmaking in conditions of ignorance. These models are often applied both in domestic political theory—to understand voting, power sharing, and political strategy— and in international relations theory—to understand strategic issues related to alliances, war-making, and issues related to the balance of power. See also prisoner’s dilemma, tragedy of the commons. Gender:  Gender is located in the basic dichotomy between male and female, masculine and feminine. There are important debates about the status of gender: whether it is biological or socially con-

structed, and about the extent to which gender should enter into questions of distributive justice. Some radical theorists hold that there is a continuum disguised by the simple dichotomy between masculine and feminine, arguing that gender is a socially constructed set of norms intended to organize human life into simplistic categories. Others—natural law theorists, for example—argue that gender distinctions reflect natural phenomena and that basic gender distinctions are essential for reproduction. Gender is also reflected in the division of labor in society, with roles, tasks, and careers viewed as either feminine or masculine. The gendered division of labor is connected with historical exploitation of women, poor wages for female occupations, degradation of the private sphere, and feminine virtues (such as caring and nurturing) and other aspects of inequality for women. See also feminism. Genocide:  Genocide is literally the killing of a people (a genos). While there are many examples from history of mass killing based on ethnic and national identity, the term was coined during the 1940s to describe the Nazi’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. Modern centralized political conditions, mechanized means of killing, and racist ideology make contemporary genocide a sui generis problem. The designation of acts of killing as genocide is a politically fraught process, as genocide is viewed as one of the worst crimes. Related terms include ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Ethnic cleansing may be viewed as a more limited effort to purge a land of certain sorts of people (which may include massacre or only forced deportation), while genocide aims more deliberately at the physical destruction/extermination of that people. See also war crimes. Globalization:  A process by which the world’s markets, cultures, and political systems are

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GLOSSARY becoming united and homogenized. One interpretation of globalization highlights the increasing integration of global financial systems and other economic interrelation. Other interpretations of globalization focus on cultural and technological interrelatedness along with the spread of a common political ideology. Globalization is often understood as a descriptive fact about the integration of the global economy and the world’s cultures. But critics of globalization argue that this is a pernicious force driven by the self-interest of dominant economic forces. Defenders of globalization argue that globalization increases productivity, profit, and global development, while also fostering progressive social and political change. Government:  The system by which political power and control are organized. In a narrow sense, government refers to the specific administration of power at a given time, focused primarily on the party and persons who are governing. This narrow sense of the term is often employed in British English; in American English, this sense of the term is associated with the term administration. In a broader sense, government is the entire political system organized across time and including a variety of administrations (or governments in the narrow sense). The broader concept of government includes the laws, the bureaucratic apparatus, as well as the specific persons and parties who share power within that system. Group Rights:  See identity politics. Hegemony:  To have hegemony is to have power and control over something. The Greek term hegemon means leader. While the idea of leadership may be value-neutral, hegemonic power is often understood as external power undergrided by manipulation, force, and threats of force. Hegemony can be based upon military supremacy. But hegemony can also rest upon cultural and economic power. The

notion of cultural hegemony, as described by Gramsci, is used to explain how dominant social groups dominate the masses by way of ideology. However, hegemony may be understood in a more neutral way to describe the structure of power, allegiance, and obedience—whether freely consented to or not. Human Rights:  Human rights are moral and legal entitlements, which create a duty on the part of others. A right is a claim to a certain sort of treatment that establishes a responsibility for others to respond to that claim. Negative rights establish protections against infringements by others and by the state (related to the idea of negative freedom or negative liberty). Positive rights make claims for more proactive support for agency, dignity, and autonomy. Human rights are supposed to universal and inalienable, which implies that they are more than merely civil rights (which are rights guaranteed to citizens within a polity). Human rights apply to all human beings, regardless of citizenship. They thus establish basic norms that limit and direct legitimate state power. In recent decades, a body of human rights policies and international law has developed, with the United Nations’s “Declaration of Human Rights,” for example, mandating recognition of the inherent dignity of all human beings. Often human rights claims are grounded in natural law and understood in terms of natural rights. Idealism:  In general, idealism is oriented around the idea that ideas should guide judgment and behavior. In political philosophy and especially in theories of international affairs, idealism is the claim that ideas have power in political life and that moral norms ought to guide judgment and behavior. This idea is opposed to realism—which either denies that ideas are efficacious or that they ought to be used as a guide for behavior. Idealists generally believe that concepts like jus-

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GLOSSARY tice or human rights should be considered as primary concerns. They also tend to hold that political life ought to be guided by disinterested reason—as opposed to manipulation and self-interest. As a corollary, idealists tend to believe that people are both reasonable and motivated by moral notions. Idealism tends to be linked to liberal internationalism, such as the approach supported by Woodrow Wilson, which holds that states ought to intervene in the domestic affairs of other states in pursuit of democratizing changes that will produce a just and stable international order. Related to this is the democratic peace thesis in international relations, which holds that as polities become liberal and democratic—and thus share moral and political norms—they will tend not to fight one another. Related to this is the neo-conservative idealism of the early twenty-first century that sought to create regime change by interventions aimed at nation-build and democratization. Critics of idealism will claim that it can be an ideological façade that betrays interest in empire and hegemony. Ideology/Ideological:  An ideology is the set of ideas, beliefs, and norms that are shared by a group. While the term ideology can be employed in a value-neutral fashion to describe a set of beliefs (similar to the term Weltanschauung, world-view, or orientation), the term can also be employed in pejorative fashion to describe beliefs that are not held for legitimate reasons. This pejorative understand of ideology is often transformed into the adjective ideological. Ideological beliefs are not grounded in truth or reason, rather they serve specific interests. Ideology, in the pejorative sense, can be understood as delusion, self-deception, or false-consciousness. In Marxism, ideology is associated with the idea that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class—serving the interests of the ruling class and accepted by oth-

ers because of the hegemonic power of that class. Building upon this relativistic notion of ideology, some defend the creation and dissemination of ideology as a way of promoting social cohesion and development. Identity Politics:  The politics of identity (or identity politics) describes social and political movements that are focused on recognition of the claims and rights of socalled identity groups, which are social groups organized and defined by certain characteristics or traits: homosexuals, blacks, Christians, women, and so on. Identity politics has primarily been associated with struggles for recognition of minority and disempowered groups. Identity politics includes consciousness-raising and developing solidarity among members of the group. It also includes working for official recognition and inclusion of group members in political institutions and organizations. Sometimes it is connected to claims about differential group rights, understood as rights that allow social groups to maintain their identity. See also struggle for recognition; multiculturalism. Imperialism:  A political effort to create empire by extending control over a foreign territory—usually by military conquest. Imperialism is also a historical term used to designate the era of European expansion especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (the so-called age of imperialism), during which the British Empire grew along with other imperial ventures by European powers (and later by the United States). A related term is the idea of cultural imperialism (similar to cultural hegemony), which is the idea that cultural ideas—religious, moral, economic, and so on—are disseminated by a dominant power, often accompanied by military power. While empires and imperialism have existed since ancient times, modern imperialism develops

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GLOSSARY out of previous colonialism. As Hannah Arendt explains in Origins of Totalitarianism, imperialism has a more totalitarian orientation—seeking to establish total control over the occupied territory—than colonialism, which permits some form of local autonomy. A newer version of imperialism—known as neo-imperialism— uses economic power and nontraditional military power to establish hegemonic control. See further discussion at empire. Individualism:  A normative theory that emphasizes the importance of the individual—as opposed to an emphasis on the community or social whole. Liberal political systems tend to be individualistic since they recognize the rights of the individual as defenses against social interference in the life of the individual. Communitarian and socialist regimes tend to emphasize the connections that individuals have as well as responsibilities that individuals have to the community. Individualism can also be understood as indicating methodological and ontological presuppositions. Ontological individualism and methodological individualism in the social sciences assume that the individual is the basic unit of social reality or social ­analysis—the atomic parts who join together to make up social wholes (as in so-called atomic individualism). Jus cogens:  Peremptory (or overriding) norms of international law, related to the law of peoples and to natural law. Jus gentium:  See law of peoples. Jus naturale:  See natural law. Justice:  Justice is the concept of what is right (or wrong and therefore unjust). There are a variety of accounts of justice and what is just. Some theories of justice focus on social organization, including Plato’s account of the proper hierarchical organization of society. Other theories of justice focus on what is owed to people in light of basic rights and laws. Justice can be concerned with retribution for past wrongs.

It can also be focused on redistributing social goods in a way that is fair or equitable. Justice can also be considered as a virtue for individuals. Justice is generally held to be the minimal requirement of social organizations and behavior, with benevolence and goodness understood as going beyond mere justice. Justice is often qualified by the specific area of concern: as in “distributive justice,” “retributive justice,” and so on. Just War Theory:  An account of justice in war that focuses on two primary concerns: jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Jus ad bellum is concerned with the justification of warfare and focuses on considerations such as just cause, right intention, proportionality, and legitimate authority. Jus in bello is concerned with justice within warfare and focuses on considerations such as discriminating between combatants and noncombatants, respect for prisoners of war and other conventions of war, and avoiding the use of intrinsically immoral means (such as rape). The just war theory developed along with the natural law theory’s idea of the law of peoples, holding that moral principles ought to regulate international behavior including warfare. Laissez-Faire Capitalism:  The idea that markets should be left alone, free from interference by the government. Laissezfaire principles can be applied domestically and internationally. The hope of the laissez-faire ideal is that markets and the free enterprise system will regulate themselves in light of basic laws of supply and demand, if the state would merely allow them to function by their own logic. Opposed to laissez-faire economies are command economies (also known as planned economies) in which the state controls production and distribution of goods. Law of Peoples:  A theory of law and ethics that holds that there are customary norms that hold across or between

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GLOSSARY peoples, nations, and individuals from diverse political and legal frameworks. In Roman and Christian natural law tradition, this was known as jus gentium— the law of peoples or nations—which is merely customary and is not as binding as jus naturale or natural law—and which could also be distinguished from civil law in terms of its inter-national scope. Related to the idea of the law of peoples is the concept of jus cogens, which is the set of so-called peremptory (absolute and invariable) norms that ought to govern international law. In contemporary settings, the law of peoples has been connected with the notion of international humanitarian law, including human rights doctrines. The idea of the Law of Peoples may also be understood (as in John Rawls’s later work) as developing from some form of international contractarian account. Leftism/Left-Wing:  The Left (or Leftism) in political discourse is associated with a concern for equality and social justice. The designation of Leftism developed out of the arrangement of parties in the Estates General during the French Revolution: anti-monarchist parties were situated on the left. Leftism has generally been opposed to hierarchical social and political arrangements. In the nineteenth Century historical context, Leftists shared much in common with liberals who emphasize liberty and equality, although Leftists have usually been understood as residing further out on the political spectrum, associated with communism and anarchism. In contemporary political life, less extreme Leftism has come to be associated with socialist and progressive political concerns (as opposed to libertarian and conservative concerns currently associated with the Right). These contemporary Left-Wing concerns include a concern for the environment, opposition to militarism, sympathy for feminism, as

well as critical perspective on capitalism and globalization. See also right-wing/ rightist. Legal Positivism:  A theory in the philosophy of law and political theory that holds that the power of law is grounded in the social, political, and legal institutions that posit the law. Unlike the natural law tradition, which holds that there is a natural law that transcends legal systems, legal positivism either denies or ignores supposedly transcendent sources or standards of justice. Legal positivism is often understood as viewing the law as a social construction and attempting to keep legal concerns distinct from moral concerns. See also positive law. Liberalism:  Liberalism is primarily concerned with liberty and equality. Liberalism asserts the importance of human and civil rights and is thus connected with democratic political structures. While there are variations on liberalism—from the classical liberalism of John Locke to John Rawls’s political liberalism—the liberal ideal aims to create a just and fair society that is not grounded on hierarchical and static social and political arrangements. There is substantial variation among liberals, with some liberals endorsing laissez-faire capitalism and others defending the idea of the welfare-state. In general, a liberal political position will emphasize both liberty and equality, while offering various ways of adjusting these values along with other political concerns. Liberal regimes tend to emphasize state neutrality and official toleration—allowing diverse groups (religious or sub-cultural) to exist without the state picking sides in disputes about morality, religion, and so on. Libertarianism:  Libertarianism is the idea that liberty is the primary political value. Libertarians generally advocate a minimal state—with some libertarians advocating a version of anarchism. Libertarianism may be focused primarily on economic policy,

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GLOSSARY emphasizing laissez-faire capitalism. But libertarian concerns may also extend to social policy, with libertarians emphasizing individual choice with regard to religious, moral, and other issues. In general, libertarians emphasize individualism and the importance of individual autonomy as opposed to collectivism and socialism. Liberty:  See Freedom. Marxism:  A radical revolutionary form of socialism associated with the philosophy of Karl Marx. See Communism. Meritocracy:  A political system in which ruling power is concentrated in the hands of those with special talents, knowledge, and capabilities. Meritocracy is opposed to traditional nepotistic and dynastic forms of political hierarchy that are based upon patronage, cronyism, and other distributions of power not based upon merit. Meritocracies allow for social mobility based upon merit. While some meritocracies may create inequalities and hierarchies, true meritocracies should be receptive to the achievement of talented and ambitious individuals. Meritocracies usually include some mechanism for testing and evaluating talent—as in civil service examinations, licensing procedures, and other forms of educational sorting that are associated with modern bureaucracies and the civil service. Mixed Government:  Any form of political organization structured by combining different types of ruling bodies chosen among various possibilities: democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy, monarchy, and so on. Ancient political philosophers such as Aristotle and Cicero imagined both pure and mixed constitutional forms and frameworks. These authors argued that mixed government might work to avoid negative outcomes associated with the pure forms of government. In modern political philosophy, the idea of mixed government is associated with Montesquieu and with the constitutional ­framework of the

United States. The idea of mixed government is connected with the idea of a separation of power and a system of checks and balances through which the parts of government limit one another. Modus Vivendi:  Literally “means of life,” a modus vivendi represents an accommodation among people that permits coexistence without substantial agreement, as in a truce, détente, or overlapping consensus. A modus vivendi does not require deep agreement, although it can produce civil peace and an end to violence. See also toleration. Monarchism:  Monarchism is literally the idea that there is one ruling person—the monarch. Defenders of monarchy—from Plato to the present—will argue that sovereign power ought to be united in one person. In Plato’s vision of the philosopher-king, the monarch would be a wise and virtuous person who ruled for the good of the common wealth. Similar ideas can be found in modern ideas about enlightened absolutism or benevolent despotism. The notion of “the monarchy” is often used to describe a system of royal and dynastic power. Constitutional monarchies (or limited monarchies) are political structures in which the monarch presides as the head of state but in which the monarch’s power is effectively limited by other parts of government and by established principles relating to the rights of citizens. In some polities, the monarch (and the nobility more broadly construed) has been demoted to a merely ceremonial function, such that the monarch has no effective power but is still retained as a figurehead and symbol of the nation. See also autocracy. Mores/Moral/Morality:  The term mores is used to describe the customs, conventions, dispositions, and typical behavior and beliefs of a people. Mores is a Latin version of the Greek concept ethos. Moral may be used as a normative term ­implying good-

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GLOSSARY ness: as in a “moral person.” But moral may also be used as a merely descriptive term indicating that questions of goodness (or evil) are at stake: as in a “moral dilemma,” which is a question concerning what is good or evil. Morality may be used as a descriptive term to account for the customary comportment of people. But morality may also be understood as a more theoretical framework of norms. For further discussion of theoretical distinctions in moral theory and the study of morality, see ethics. Multiculturalism:  As a descriptive term multicultural refers to the fact of diversity, indicating that there multiple cultural frameworks exist. A multicultural society is one that includes plural cultures. Multiculturalism is a normative theory about how best to deal with cultural diversity. Multiculturalism is pluralistic in the sense that multiculturalism tolerates, accommodates, and even celebrates diversity. Multiculturalism is understood in terms of various solutions to issues of cultural identity and power-sharing that point beyond mere nondiscrimination and bare toleration. Multicultural societies may allow for differential rights depending upon ethnic or cultural identity—as in the different rights permitted to First Nations in Canada or in the case of power-sharing among linguistic, cultural, and religious minorities in places such as Switzerland or India. Sub-national groups may be permitted to have different rights regarding a range of issues—family structure, religious observance, military service, and so on—including limited sub-national sovereignty (perhaps related to a version of federalism). Opposed to multiculturalism is a vision of national unity, inclusivity, and unitary citizenship. See also pluralism, relativism, identity politics. Nation:  A nation is a collection of people who share something in common. It often connotes geographical and ­political

unity and can be used as a synonym for country, commonwealth, or state. However, nation—and the related term nationality—can be used to connote ethnic, tribal, or cultural identity that ranges across state borders. Similarly, a political entity or state can include more than one nationality—as in the case of so-called multinational states. Opposed to this is the idea of the nation-state, which presumes a more homogeneous sort of ethnic and political unity. Nationalism:  Nationalism can be understood as ideas and beliefs emphasizing national-level political organization. Nationalism can be understood as synonymous with patriotism. However, nationalism can have the negative connotation of unquestioned loyalty to and irrational identification with the nation conceived along ethnic lines. Another negative connotation associates nationalism with ideas about the superiority of one’s own nation. In a less negative sense, nationalism can be understood as asserting self-determination and independence—in opposition to imperial or colonial domination or forms of multinational grouping. Nationalism can also be understood as asserting national identity claims across local and regional differences. Natural Law:  A tradition in thinking about the normative source of morality and law, which holds that moral, legal, and political norms can be found in nature and understood by reason. The natural law tradition is opposed to the idea of positive law, which holds that law is merely man-made and transient. The natural law tradition maintains that there are eternal and immutable laws, which have a normative power that transcends particular legal frameworks and customary morality. The natural law tradition may be associated with Christian thinking about divine sources of normativity. The Christian and European source of natural law has led to

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GLOSSARY criticisms of the natural law theory (and related notion of natural rights) in contemporary international law. However, non-theological natural law accounts may be developed based upon claims about human nature, which may avoid the charge of Eurocentrism and Christocentrism. In general, the natural law theory holds that there are objective values which can be used to criticize positive law and which establish universal norms. Also see Law of Peoples. Natural Rights:  Natural rights are entitlements that we have “by nature” in accord with some form of natural law theory. Natural rights are viewed as transcending merely civil rights or legal rights—which are rights afforded by the legal or political system. Some attempt to contrast natural rights with human rights by arguing that natural rights are grounded in God and the natural law, while human rights are merely human creations. However, most view natural rights and human rights as virtually synonymous. See also human rights. Negative Rights:  Rights that involve protections against harms and encroachment, as opposed to positive rights. See also civil liberties. Nonviolence:  Nonviolence is a basic commitment to avoid violence in social and political life. It is often a central tenet of pacifism. However, nonviolence is also a strategy that can be employed by those who are not committed (or absolute) pacifists. Nonviolent civil disobedience and nonviolent social protest aim to transform social and political life by employing nonviolent methods, which can include strikes, rallies, sit-ins, walk-outs, boycotts, noncooperation campaigns, and so on. Strategies of nonviolence have been developed in the past century following especially the work of Gandhi and King, both of whom led nonviolent social justice campaigns. Gandhi’s concept of ahimsa

(non-violence) is a source—and is derived from Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religion and philosophy. See also pacifism, peace. Oligarchy:  Rule by the few. Oligarchy usually implies rule of those who have wealth and property. But plutocracy is a more precise term for rule of the rich. Other forms of oligarchy can be based upon rule by military junta, a committee of elders, a racial elite, or even a group of noble families (as in aristocracy). Oligarchies may be more efficient than more broadly democratic systems. But oligarchies typically have to employ some form of coercion or ideology to restrict governmental power from more broadly democratic structure. Oppression:  Cruel and unjust treatment based upon differentials of social power. Oppression can be temporary or systematic and enduring. Oppression can be overt or implicit. In some cases, oppression results from institutionalized structures and ideologies—such that oppressed people do not imagine things differently. Oppression that encounters resistance may be reacted to with repressive measures. Although oppression and repression are closely related, repression is better understood as overt effort to prevent resistance to oppression, while oppression is more sustained and systematic power. Overlapping Consensus:  A concept associated with John Rawls’s approach to political philosophy and his ideas about reasonable pluralism. Rawls suggest that it is possible for diverse people to find common agreement about political frameworks and principles of justice despite substantial disagreements about morality, metaphysics, and religion. Overlapping consensus occurs when there is agreement despite such differences. See also modus vivendi, toleration. Pacifism:  A commitment to peace. Pacifism can be understood as a principled and absolute opposition to war and violence. But pacifism can also be understood as an

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GLOSSARY opposition to violence and war in particular circumstances. See also nonviolence, peace. Patriotism:  Patriotism is identification with and loyalty to a country, including a sense of duty and obligation for the good of the nation. Patriotism may be connected to ethnic and nationalistic identity claims. But a broader form of liberal or constitutional patriotism may be possible, which is grounded in loyalty and dedication to the more abstract and less nationalistic norms of a constitutional system. See also nationalism. Peace:  Peace can be understood as a mere cessation of violence, such as results from a truce that creates a mere modus vivendi. Or peace can be understood to require a more substantial agreement about basic goods, including a shared sense of justice and social harmony, as described, for example, in the Catholic tradition as the tranquility of order. See also nonviolence, pacifism. Pluralism:  Pluralism may be understood as a descriptive claim about the fact of diversity. Pluralistic approaches to theory utilize diverse methodologies and concepts. Pluralistic societies contain diverse groups. Pluralism may also be understood as a normative ideal that claims that there is value in diversity and that celebrates multiplicities of perspectives and ideas. Rawls and other contemporary liberal political philosophers maintain that it is possible to develop overlapping consensus from out of so-called reasonable pluralism. See also multiculturalism, relativism. Polarity:  A concept in international relations used to describe power relationships, concentrations of power, and various forms of achieving balance of power. Unipolar models of international relations maintain that there is one dominant hegemon or superpower. Bipolar models emphasize two-sided power structures. Multipolar models focus on more than two parties engaged in a balance of power.

Political Rights:  Those rights that are related to political representation and participation, including the right to vote, the right to organize political parties, the right to petition the government, the right to ­assemble and demonstrate, and so on. Also see civil rights. Positive Law:  Positive law consists of laws established by political authorities and legal systems, also called statutory law. Positive law has been posited, that is, proclaimed and established. Positive law is often opposed to natural law, which is not necessarily posited by any authority or contingent upon an agency or institution that posits the law. Positive law is the primary concern of legal positivism. Positive Rights:  Entitlements that involve more than merely negative prohibitions against harm and encroachment; as opposed to negative rights. See civil rights, welfare rights. Postcolonial Theory:  An approach to social and political theory that focuses on power differentials and cultural structures and that responds to European colonialism and Western imperialism. Postcolonial theories attempt to make sense of global disparities, revolutionary politics, and other issues from a perspective interested in historical Eurocentrism and dialectical relations between center and periphery. Prisoner’s Dilemma:  A scenario imagined in game theory that is used to model problems in strategic decision making, especially the difficulty of cooperative behavior for selfinterested parties. The model involves two criminals who are arrested and offered a deal for betraying each other. Given the initial set-up rational, self-interested parties end up betraying each other, thus failing to cooperate and ending up with less than optimal outcomes. This model has been used to explain political phenomena including failures to cooperate in domestic and international circumstances. See also tragedy of the commons.

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GLOSSARY Privacy:  Privacy concerns what is outside of public scrutiny and regulation. While privacy and private relations may be narrowly construed in terms of what individuals do with their own bodies, thoughts, and relationship, privacy may also be extended to include non-public matters conducted by clubs, unions, and business interests. Privacy rights include the right to keep secrets, the right to be free from surveillance, and the right to associate with others without supervision or scrutiny. Privacy is an important value in modern liberal political systems, along with related ideas about the importance of tolerance and freedom of conscience (and religion). Private Sphere/Private Sector:  The non-political realm of domestic and individual life—as opposed to the public sphere. The private sphere is often construed in a broad enough fashion to include the life of business and the economy, as well as the rest of what is often called, following Hegel, civil society. Most narrowly, the private sphere is what individuals are concerned with in their own lives and in the life of the family (often pejoratively associated with a gendered distinction that views the private sphere as “feminine”). In contemporary usage, the phrase “private sector” is often used to describe non-governmental business interests and economic transactions (where some portion of the economy is also run by the government—the so-called public sector)—and there is an ongoing debate about the appropriate relation between these sectors in an economy. See civil society, privacy, public sphere Progressive/Progressivism:  Progressivism may be understood as the enlightenment faith in progress in history, especially the development of republican and democratic forms of government. In contemporary political rhetoric, “progressive” is often used as a synonym for liberal or Left-wing.

While the term appears to be opposed to conservatism, some conservatives describe themselves as ­progressive—as in the Canadian “Progressive Conservative” party. A more appropriate antonym for progressive is regressive, which indicates a deliberate turn away from progress. The term progressive is also used to describe a structure of taxation in which richer people pay more—for example, when those with a higher income pay a higher percentage in taxes. This form of taxation is progressive in the political sense insofar as it redistributes wealth and moderates inequality. See also reactionary. Public Sphere/Public Reason:  The public sphere is opposed to the private sphere, as the place of public deliberation. Habermas’s history of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) indicates that a robust public sphere develops along with liberal political institutions and technologies of publication including news media and educational systems. In the liberal public sphere, norms of tolerance and civility allow for dialogue about public goods based upon shared principles and norms of public reason. There is a debate about the status afforded to official public deliberation (in political assemblies) as opposed to informal and non-official public reflection (in the media, etc.). One may differ with regard to the status of the norms that govern official political deliberation and public (but not official) discourse. Race/Racism:  Race is a category that attempts to classify individuals by biological features (usually phenotypic differences in skin tone, facial features, hair texture, etc.). Racial categorization has been central to colonialism, the slave trade, apartheid regimes, and ongoing inequality (both domestic and global). At one time, racial differences and a racialized hierarchy were supposedly grounded in empirical science (as, e.g. in Nazi race science).

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GLOSSARY However, empirical science indicates that racial differences are usually merely superficial differences and family resemblances among human beings. The emerging field of critical race studies attempts to understand the history of the concept of race and its lasting impact on social and political institutions and practices. Racism is unjustifiable and pernicious discrimination against (or in favor of) a racial group. Some focus on racial distinctions can be used for benevolent purposes (as with regard to efforts to study and alleviate disparate health or educational outcomes for diverse racial groups). Racism can be overt and explicit—and written into the law (as in an apartheid regime). Or racism can be implicit, in social norms, customs, and practices that produce unequal results for member of different racial groups—in which case, it is best described as structural racism. See also structural discrimination. Reactionary:  Reactionary parties or opinions are opposed to social and political change and want to move back toward more traditional forms of social and political organization. In contemporary usage, the term reactionary is often used pejoratively by progressives who reject far-right version of conservatism that is opposed to liberal, socialist and other “progressive” social and political ideas. See progressive. Realism:  In international affairs, realism emphasizes the struggle for power. Realists view the international realm as lacking any legal or moral framework that could limit the pursuit of power and selfinterest. Realists recommend strategies that respond to this fact, while avoiding idealism and optimism about political behavior. Realists assess the world in terms of balances of power, hegemonic structures, spheres of influence, and so on. They advise the use of both soft and hard power to increase influence, without worrying about moral limits on the use

of propaganda, surveillance, or violence. Realists focus on pragmatic and strategic concerns such as deterrence, supremacy, and containment of threats. Realist often ground their criticism of moralistic idealism in empirical generalizations about history and the nature of political life (and human psychology). Structural realist will also note that the structure of international relations remains anarchic—because there is no international sovereign who could resolve international conflict—while denying the importance of international law and other cosmopolitan forms of international cooperation. Realism can also be used to describe an approach to the ethics of war, which holds that there are no moral limits to what can be done in war. In this usage, realism is understood as the opposite of pacifism. See also idealism. Realpolitik:  An idea about how political parties strategize and take action that is grounded in realism about the nature of social and political life, where realism is understood as offering an assessment of political reality that is not subject to idealistic or moralistic interpretation. Realpolitik offers a point of view on political reality that recognizes the struggle for power and recognition. It counsels manipulation of social and political forces in the effort to consolidate power. See also realism. Recognition:See struggle for recognition. Refugee:A refugee is a person who has escaped from a conflict by taking refuge or seeking sanctuary in a neutral country or specified locale, where they seek to be free from harm. Moral and legal regulations governing the treatment of refugees include basic rules of hospitality and humanitarian law as well as developing international law, regulated by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (the UNHCR). However, refugees often remain displaced and

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GLOSSARY dispossessed in camps and with ambiguous political status while conflicts continue. See also asylum. Regressive:  As the opposite of progressive, regressive means moving in a backward direction (see also reactionary). In discussion of taxation, a regressive tax is one that taxes the rich at a lower rate (the strict opposite of a progressive tax). Other forms of taxation—a sales tax, for ­example—can have regressive outcomes— since this creates the worst impacts for those with less income, who pay a larger percentage of their income on sales taxes than richer individuals. Relational Justice:  An idea of justice focused on stabilizing and nurturing relationships. Rather than applying abstract law and focusing on desert and retribution, relational justice focuses on building and supporting those relationships that constitute social and political identity (drawing especially upon ideas found in feminist theory). Relational justice is similar to restorative justice. Relativism:  Relativism is a theory about the status of norms, which holds that there is no absolute, eternal, or objective standard for normative evaluation. Relativists hold that values are best understood in relation to specific contexts: values are “relative to” historical or cultural contexts. Relativism can be understood as a merely descriptive claim about diversity of values, which holds that empirical research shows us that values vary according to context. Metaethical relativism builds upon this descriptive fact to conclude that there are no culturally transcendent or unconditional values. See also cultural relativism, multiculturalism, pluralism. Repression:  See oppression. Republic/Republican:  A republic is a form of political organization focused on the good of the commonwealth or the public good. This is opposed to political organization that exploits people or that is

grounded the private claims of a ruling party or family; republican forms of government emphasize equality before the law. Republicanism is usually understood as closely related to democratic governance. But the primary focus of a republican form of government is the well-being and legal equality of the people who make up the commonwealth. Thus non-democratic forms of government may claim to be republics (e.g. as in the “People’s Republic of China”). One issue is the question of who counts in terms of the people to be included within the public (with republican movements occasionally understood as aiming to unite a people divided by colonial power or in some instances aiming to drive out foreign rulers or minority ethnic groups). Another issue is the extent to which equality and hierarchy are permitted within republican states. The Roman Republic, for example, was hierarchically organized. So-called republican states have allowed slavery or denied rights to women. Contemporary republican movements tend to be opposed to monarchy and aristocracy and the arbitrariness of non-constitutional rule (whether monarchic or popular), while focusing on legal equality. In the United States, Republican is the name for one of the two major parties (the Democratic party is the other major party) and in American political discourse Republicanism is associated with both fiscal and social conservatism grounded in a claim about the primacy of basic liberties and the common good. Restorative Justice:  Restorative justice is focused on finding ways to heal and restore communities that have been damaged by crime. It can include strategies of forgiveness, mercy, and rehabilitation. While it offers a critical response to the more stringent approach of retributive justice, restorative justice accepts the facticity of crime, responsibility, and guilt.

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GLOSSARY But unlike retributive justice, restorative justice responds to those issues in a way that aims to find acceptable closure for both victims and offenders. Restorative justice is interested in developing productive alternatives to incarceration as well as rehabilitation for offenders. An example of restorative justice is the “truth and reconciliation” approach utilized in South Africa after the demise of apartheid. See also relational justice. Retributive Justice:  Retributive justice emphasizes retaliation based in a theory of just deserts. The principle of lex talionis (law of retaliation) is strictly retributive, requiring the return of harm for harm or—as in the idea of “an eye for an eye.” Retributive justice limits revenge by establishing an upper limit for punishment so that one does not exact more than is due. Retributive justice also establishes a lower limit of what sort of punishment gives due respect to the victim and his or her injury. Retributive justice can be contrasted with more consequentialist focus on restorative justice or prevention and deterrence—where the goal of the criminal justice system is to produce good consequences for the community in the long run. Retributive justice is less concerned with consequentialist reasoning and more concerned with giving criminals what they deserve. See also restorative justice. Rights:  See human rights; natural rights. Right-Wing/Rightist:  Right-wing parties and ideologies are conservative and/ or reactionary. The distinction between Right-wing and Left-wing parties (or Leftists and Leftism) derives from the French Revolution, where the parties seated on the right in the French parliament were supportive of the traditional hierarchy of the old regime. Some Right-wing parties are conservative supporters of libertarian ideas about free markets. Other “far right” parties may be racist and nationalistic and more sympathetic to state power.

Rightism (and a rightist) usually connotes an extreme Right-wing (reactionary, racist, etc.) position. See also Leftism/Leftwing. Satyagraha:  This Sanskrit term is associated with Gandhi’s strategies of nonviolent social protest. It can be translated as “truth force” or “soul force.” In Gandhi’s strategy of nonviolent protest, satyagraha is insistence on truth (and thus upon justice and fair treatment). It is not passive. Rather it is active resistance to injustice— but based upon principled commitment to nonviolence and the idea of unity between means and ends—where truth, nonviolence, and justice are viewed as both the only appropriate means for political action and the goal of such action. Separation of Powers:  The idea of distinguishing among political powers—typically focused on the distinction between legislative, executive, and judicial power. This idea of what Cicero called “mixed government” attempts to avoid concentration of power in one person or branch of government in order to avoid despotic abuse of power. The idea was developed by Montesquieu and is a fundamental principle of the Constitution of the United States of America, where the idea—associated with James Madison—is that the different branches of government should restrain one another through a system of checks and balances. Social Contract:  A theory of social organization that explains the origin and legitimacy of government. Some versions of social contract (or compact) theory (as in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau) attempt to imagine a historical account of the emergence of civil society and government from out of the state of nature, which would have involved the consent of those who agree to transfer their natural rights to a central governing force. Other more contemporary versions of the social contract theory (as in Rawls) acknowledge

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GLOSSARY that there may not have been a historical contracting event but still employ a version of the social contract idea as a heuristic to explain how agreement about moral and political values might occur and to describe what that agreement might consist in. Social contract theories point in a liberal direction since they ground the authority of the government on the consent of the governed, often assuming that the importance of consent is grounded in some basic idea of natural rights. Social Democracy:  A political ideology and movement intended to transform society in a socialist direction through the use of peaceful, democratic means (as opposed to the proposed violent transition imagined by Marxists). Social democrats emphasize communitarian values and are critical of capitalism and the emphasis on merely negative rights associated with socalled libertarian democracy. Social democrats are not fundamentally opposed to restrained forms of capitalism, as socalled democratic socialists often are. Social democracy is based upon commitment to political processes of inclusion, nonviolence, and social welfare, often arguing that these ideas enhance democracy by increasing the quality of participation and civic virtue. Post-war European countries have been largely influenced by social democratic ideas. See also welfare state. Social Justice:  Social justice is a commitment to welfare grounded in respect for the dignity of persons and the common good. The idea of social justice is central to natural law and Catholic social teaching, which includes a broad commitment to alleviating poverty, improving the quality of life, labor, and healthcare, and diminishing violence. Social justice is often connected with the idea of distributive justice, focused on reducing inequality and providing fair access to social goods and economic opportunities. While

social justice concerns can be found in the Christian tradition, social justice emerges as a concern in contemporary utilitarianism and socialism. Socialism:  Socialism is a political theory and movement concerned with the societal ownership and distribution of basic goods. Socialism is usually understood as being opposed to capitalism, when capitalism is understood as defending private ownership, marketplace distributions, and libertarian social and political policies. Socialists want to restrain markets and control private property, with the goal of minimizing inequality and empowering the majority of the working class. Socialism comes in a wide variety of types—from anarchist and separatist socialism (sometimes described as communalism) to radical revolutionary state-centered socialism (i.e. twentieth-century Communism) to reformist and democratic socialism that wants to find ways to accommodate capitalism and private property without giving up on labor rights and social equality. See also communism. Sovereignty:  Supreme authority or power within a territory including the right to make law and administer justice. This includes the right to take life, liberty, and property in the name of social order and justice. Sovereignty is an important concept for international relations—as sovereign states are understood as individual entities and afforded sovereign equality. In domestic terms, sovereignty can be organized and understood in a variety of ways: as the will of the monarch (voluntarism), as the will of the people (popular sovereignty), or as a mix of forms and institutions. Sovereignty may also be understood in absolute terms (as a basic right of nonintervention that ought not be violated) or a contingent upon the legitimacy or justice of domestic political arrangements or recognition by the international community.

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GLOSSARY State:  A state is a basic entity of political organization. In Weber’s influential description, a state is a political organization that possesses a monopoly on the use of force in a given territory—which implies autonomy from external control and the ability to defend borders. States can be organized into larger structures— empires, confederations, and so on. States can contain smaller organizational units. This diversity of levels of organization makes it difficult to establish with precision exactly what counts as the basic unity of political organization. A further problem is that states can contain internal division and strife that prevents effective control or the exercise of the sorts of rights and responsibilities associated with states (as in so-called failed states). State Capitalism:  A form of economic and political organization in which the state owns and runs business enterprises for profit. Unlike socialist political organizations in which state ownership is aimed at social welfare, equality, and the like, state capitalism is oriented toward making a profit. Unlike free-market (laissezfaire) or liberal capitalism, where the state avoids undue interference in private business ventures, state capitalism can involve substantial control over the domestic economy. While the concept may focus primarily on domestic organization, state capitalism may also be used to describe the role of state-based economies in international markets. Advocates of global free trade may argue that state capitalism (e.g. as in China) is inefficient and prevents fair competition on the international market. Defenders of state capitalism will argue that state control of profit-seeking ventures allows for greater control and greater distribution of social benefits. State of Nature:  A pre-political condition described by social contract theorists, who explain in various ways how political organization developed out of primi-

tive conditions. Descriptions of the state of nature may have some basis in archaeological and anthropological fact. However, the early modern social contract theorists often based their understanding of the state of nature on generalizations not grounded in the historical record: for example, in Hobbes’s description of the state of nature as a state of war in which life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, or short; or in Rousseau’s description of the state of nature as belonging to his idealized conception of the noble savage. The state of nature is best understood as an imagined or constructed thought­experiment which is used to express fundamental conceptions about human nature and political life. Statelessness:  Some refugees, displaced persons, and exiles end up in the politically tenuous position of being stateless. Stateless persons have lost citizenship rights either through their own voluntary renunciation of their original citizenship or through coercive expulsion or through the dissolution of a previous political affiliation (as when a state collapses, dissolves, or is incorporated into another state). Stateless persons are often refugees who are unable to find a country with whom they can affiliate. Stateless persons exists outside the boundaries of ordinary political life and especially vulnerable to human rights violations. Agamben equates the stateless condition with the idea of homo sacer—the “sacred man” who is liable to being killed because he resides in an extralegal limbo. The United Nations has taken steps to eradicate statelessness. Structural Discrimination:  Structural discrimination (including structural racism) is discrimination that occur not because of overt expressions of bias or prejudice but, rather, because of structural problems that create unequal outcomes. It can also be described as institutional or organizational discrimination. Institu-

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GLOSSARY tions can be organized in ways that can create sexist, racist, or classist results. Unlike overt racism or sexism, the negative results of institutional structures may not be intended by any agent operating within the system. For example, a system in which it is easier for men to succeed than for women (because of childcare and family leave regulations) may not intend to discriminate against women or produce inequality, even though inequality results. Related to this are discriminatory outcomes resulting from stereotypes and media caricatures that can disempower members of minority groups. See also racism. Struggle for Recognition:  The concept of the struggle for recognition is associated with the master–slave dialectic as found in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel suggested that social life could be understood as a struggle for recognition. This concept was developed in Marxism, Critical Theory, and the work of Francis Fukuyama who argued that liberal-democracy provided a solution to the struggle for recognition. The usual solution is mutual recognition, which does not involve domination and hierarchy. The importance of the concept is that it claims that social struggle cannot be merely understood in terms of the pursuit of material selfinterest. Rather, social struggle is about the desire to be recognized as an agent worthy of respect. Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth use this idea to explain so-called identity politics. Nancy Fraser has explained that social problems occur when persons suffer the burden of subordination of status. See also multiculturalism, identity politics. Suffrage:  The ability to vote; also known as “the franchise” as in “political franchise.” Suffrage also includes the idea of being eligible to be elected. In the history of democracy, suffrage has gradually been expanded toward universal suffrage,

which opens voting and office holding to all citizens. Tyranny:  Tyranny is understood as a pernicious, predatory, cruel, despotic, and oppressive government. The term derives from the Greek tyrannos, which at one time simply meant ruler. A tyrannical government is usually understood as monarchical or autocratic—headed by a tyrant, who is a despotic ruler, especially one who rules for his own self-interest. However, specific laws and policies (of a variety of government) can be condemned as tyrannical when they are oppressive. See also autocracy, despotism. Theocracy:  A theocracy is government based on religion. Theocratic regimes are run by clerics, under religious law and with an implicit or explicit claim about legitimacy based in the will of God. In a less precise usage, the term theocracy or the adjective theocratic can be used as a description for laws or policies that are based on religious ideas or religious law. Tolerance/Toleration:  The terms tolerance and toleration are often used interchangeable, although there is an important distinction between tolerance as a virtue (which can be developed within individuals or associations) and toleration as a constitutional or legal policy of neutrality and impartiality. Tolerance as a virtue implies the habit of non-judgmentalism. It may be understood as a minimal sort of modus vivendi, which grudgingly accommodates the fact of diversity. But it can also be a more robust affirmation of difference. Toleration as a political and legal principle implies that the state is neutral in moral or religious disputes. The terms are also applied in discussions of racial and ethnic issues—as ideas that encourage acceptance of racial and other differences and overcoming prejudices and stereotypes. Toleration is typically thought to be an essential feature of liberal regimes. See also liberalism.

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GLOSSARY Totalitarianism:  Totalitarianism is used to describe systems of governance that aim for complete control over the lives of the populace. Totalitarian government does not tolerate dissent and requires conformity. Totalitarian governments aim beyond mere external conformity and obedience toward ideological purity and unanimity. Totalitarian regimes are opposed to openness, nonconformity, and liberty. Totalitarian ideology is closely related to fascism, often understanding the polity as an organic whole which must be coordinated and organized in an all-encompassing and comprehensive fashion. Tragedy of the Commons:  A problem that arises in discussions of economic rationality and game theory, which holds that self-interested individuals will tend to overuse common areas and shared resources, since no one will want to obey limits that are not also obeyed by others. Without an authority able to impose limitations on use, tragic outcomes result as the productivity and sustainability of common resources will be destroyed by overuse. See also prisoner’s dilemma. Unitary State:  A state in which sovereignty and control are strictly organized by centralized power. Unlike a confederation or a system based on federalism, in which power is shared between local and provincial structures and the national government, a unitary state avoids this sort of power sharing. Unitary states may be monarchic and absolutist or democratic, liberal, and/or republican. The question of unity is about issues such as federalism or a separation of powers. Utopia:  A utopia is an idealized form of social or political organization. The term utopia was coined by Thomas More in the sixteenth century as a play on two Greek terms: atopia (no place) and eutopia (good place). A utopia is thus understood as an ideal that is also fictional and perhaps unattainable. Utopian specula-

tion involves imagining ideal worlds and can help clarify values and principles. Critics of utopian speculation in political philosophy argue that speculative utopias are too focused on a priori ideals and that utopias distract us from real-world concerns. A related term dystopia is used as the opposite of utopia, to describe negative worlds and bad outcomes. War:  War is a sustained armed struggle with political intent, usually focused on the goal of obtaining control over territory. However, there are a variety of wars— from international wars involving federations of nations allied against one another to civil wars, cross-border incursions, and small skirmishes and battles. Theories of the morality of war include just war theory, realism, and pacifism. War Crimes:  War crimes violate principles governing proper behavior in war. Disputes about the status of the norms governing behavior in war ask whether war crimes are merely conventional (a result of treaties and agreements among nations) or whether there is a natural law or law of peoples which transcends conventional morality. The concept of a war crime is related to the norms of the just war theory. The concept of war crimes has developed in recent decades with the advent of post-war tribunals (e.g. the Tokyo and Nuremburg tribunals) and with the development of international law and institutions. These tribunals and treaties establish that war crimes include crimes against the peace (unjustified aggression), crimes against humanity, and genocide. War crimes include mistreatment or slaughter of prisoners, the use of poison gas, the use of civilians as shields, rape, ethnic cleansing, and so on. A remaining difficulty is how war crimes are to be tried and punished. See also just war theory. Welfare State:  The welfare state is concerned with promoting social welfare. Mod-

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GLOSSARY ern bureaucratic welfare states generally include a system of social security, social insurance, or a social safety net, as well as a system of public health care, public education, unemployment compensation, nutritional support, and so on that provide basic welfare benefits for all citizens. A key idea is that the state ought to be concerned with social justice and the welfare of its citizens. Critics of welfare states will argue that welfarism undermines individual initiative and promotes dependency. Communist/socialist critics will argue that capitalist welfare states do

not go far enough in terms of social redistribution of goods. Defenders will argue that social welfare is one of the primary purposes of political association and that capitalist economies benefit in the long run from public welfare. See also social democracy, social justice.

Note Special thanks to Chisanga Chanda for her work on this glossary.

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RESEARCH RESOURCES1

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Philosophy Papers Online

One of the best internet resources in philosophy features lengthy scholarly entries on a wide variety of topics and philosophers. Entries are written by leading scholars in the field and updated regularly. Contains a search engine and extensive cross references between entries. Articles include extensive bibliographies. Includes other academic tools including those that teach how to cite and format bibliographies. Entries on the website can be read on via PDFs, Kindle, iPhone, and Android applications.

Philosophy Papers Online, also known as PhilPapers, is project of the Center for Digital Philosophy. It provides an online research tool in philosophy. PhilPapers is an extensive index of scholarly articles and books in philosophy, with a useful search engine and outline that organizes content according to subjectmatter. Useful for students interested in the History of Western Philosophy; African and Asian Philosophy; Continental Philosophy; European Philosophy; Philosophies of the Americas; Anthropologies; and so on. While links to some entries may be unavailable or may require permission, this website is still a valuable resource that can be supplemented by libraries that provide access to electronic journal.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Another online database of peer-reviewed articles. The Internet Encyclopedia has information similar to the Stanford Encyclopedia; however, it is not clear that the articles are updated with the frequency of the Stanford Encyclopedia. Entries in the IEP focus on topics such as the History of Philosophy; Metaphysics and Epistemology; Philosophical Traditions; Science, Logic, and Mathematics; and Value Theory.

The Online Library of Liberty A useful internet resource that includes an extensive archive of primary source material, especially classic texts concerning the philosophy of liberty and political philosophy in general. The website has free electronic

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RESEARCH RESOURCES versions and EBooks of classical and contemporary books about Individual liberty and Limited Government from disciplines of Economics, History, Law, Literature, Philosophy, Political Theory, Religion, War, and Peace. The online library is very well organized and easy to use. It categorizes its entire collection by the Latest Additions; Authors by Period; Women on Liberty; and Titles by Subject. The American Philosophical Association

The American Philosophical Association is an organization of philosophers in the United States. The website allows Student Association Membership for students at accredited American and International colleges and universities. Valuable for research concerning contemporary issues in philosophy such as Feminism, Hispanic/Latino Issues, Indigenous Issues, LGBT Issues, the Black Experience, Technology, Law and Medicine. The APA website includes information about proceedings, addresses, newsletters, and meetings of the American Philosophical Association in its three divisions: Eastern, Central, and Pacific. The European Association

Philosophy

of

Science

The European Philosophical Association is also an organization of philosophers in Europe. The European Association is very similar to the American Philosophical Association. It was recently established (2007) and does not have a variety of publications, journals, and newsletters as the APA. Nonetheless, it is useful for students interested in European Philosophy. The website is also great for links

and dates regarding conferences and major activities of the organization. The British Philosophical Association The British Philosophical Association is an important organization and internet resource for articles, journals, and books centering on European contemporary philosophical issues. What makes the British Philosophical Association distinctive is that its membership gives access to Oxford journals and books published by Routledge. Radical Philosophy Association The Radical Philosophy Association is a membership-based organization that publishes peer-reviewed articles on the adverse effects of capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, disability discrimination, and environmental damage around the world. The North American Association for Social Philosophy The North American Association for Social Philosophy (NASSP) is one of the largest associations focused on social and political philosophy. The organization holds annual meetings and publishes Journal of Social Philosophy. The organization also sponsors the Social Philosophy Today book series. International Society for Military Ethics

The International Society for Military Ethics (ISME) holds an annual conference

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RESEARCH RESOURCES on military ethics and issues related to the ethics of war. The ISME website includes links to case studies, publications, and other resources in the field of military ethics and the ethics of war. Association for Political Theory The Association for Political Theory is an organization whose aim is to promote teaching and research in political theory and political philosophy. The organization hosts an annual meeting. The APT website includes links to journals publishing in the field of political theory as well as calls for papers for other organizations and journals. Concerned Philosophers for Peace Concerned Philosophers for Peace is an organization of philosophers interested in the philosophy of peace and nonviolence. The organization meets annually as well as holding sessions at the divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association. The organization publishes a newsletter and also sponsors a philosophy of peace book series. The American Political Science Association

The American Political Science Association (APSA) is the disciplinary association for political scientists in the United States. Its website provides an excellent internet research tool. It publishes three leading peerreviewed journals: The American Political Science Review; Perspectives on Politics; and

Political Science and Politics. These journals may be beneficial for students interested in contemporary topics in political science. This is a membership-based Association. Students interested in opportunities in government and politics may find this organization useful. International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy The International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR—for Internationale Vereinigung für Rechts-und Sozialphilosophie) is an international organization that host a world congress focused on topics in philosophy of law, social philosophy, and political philosophy. The IVR includes national branches including a UK branch (http://www.law.qmul.ac.uk/ research/centres/clsgc/ivr/index.html) and the American Section of the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (AMINTAPHIL) http:// amintaphil.philosophy.utah.edu/. Both the UK branch and AMINTAPHIL hold meetings focused on a topic in social, legal, or political philosophy. The American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy The American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (ASPLP) is a scholarly organization dedicated to scholarship in legal and political philosophy. It publishes NOMOS an annual volume dedicated to cutting edge research in these areas. According to the ASLP website, “The ASPLP leadership has included some of the most distinguished and accomplished

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RESEARCH RESOURCES scholars in political and legal philosophy including John Rawls, Lon Fuller and Judith Shklar.”

United Nations Human Development Report

Open Library Open Library has over 1 million free EBooks available online. Students of philosophy and politics may take particular interest with the website because it gives instant access to books that may no longer be in print or might be difficult to find at popular online and local bookstores.

The annual Human Development Report by the United Nations is the best of several sources for students interested in economic analytical data concerning the alleviation of Global Poverty; Building Democratic Societies; Preventing Crisis; Protecting the Environment; Halting and Reversing HIV/ AIDS; Empowering Women; Growing National Capacity; and so on.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights creates a wide range of publications on topics related to human rights. This is a great research tool for students interested in or concerned about human rights violations around the world. The website is also great because it provides free access to publications and handbooks from other active organizations such as Freedom House ; Amnesty International ; Human Rights Watch .

The Carnegie Council publishes the journal Ethics and International Affairs. They hold meetings and support research in topics of concern for political philosophers. The Carnegie Council website includes useful links and information, including links to lists of films of interest and a monthly column on current events/issues.

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Thanks to Chisanga Chanda for her assistance.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arendt, H., The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951). An account of the development of totalitarian political organization focused primarily on Nazism and Stalinism. The book also contains important discussions of anti-Semitism, racism, and the function of ideology and terror within a lawful government grounded on oppression and domination. — On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1962). An examination of American and French revolutions that explores the importance of liberty and pluralism and a robust public sphere. A central problem is the contrast between the dynamic revolutionary spirit of the revolutionary generation, which aims to found a new constitution, and the less dynamic and anti-revolutionary result of constitutionally bound political life. — On Violence (New York: Harcourt, 1970). An attempt to define and explain the differences between violence, power, force, strength, and authority. Arendt suggests that violence is a tool that can create obedience; but authority and power are not merely created by violence. Beitz, C., Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). Concerned with

extending principles of distributive justice to the international realm. Denies the Hobbesian assumption that states are entities that can be considered in isolation from principles of justice. An important text for understanding cosmopolitanism. Berlin, I., Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1969—reprinted as Liberty, Oxford, 2002). Contains the important essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” which clarifies the distinction between positive and negative liberty. Berlin argues that these two concepts are often confused and that the distinction indicates the need for a pluralistic approach that recognizes rival goods. Cohen, J. L., Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). A book considering the newly emerging international order under the United Nations, including critiques of hegemony and hierarchy and a call for international norms respecting human rights, political autonomy and sovereignty, as well as constitutional principles. Cohen, J., Philosophy, Politics, Democracy: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Cohen

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ANNOTATED Bibliography defends and describes the relation between democracy and reasoned discourse, while opposing cynicism about political life (which holds that politics is merely about power struggles). Dussel, E., Politics of Liberation: A Critical Global History (London: SCM Press, 2011). Dussel is a prominent Latin American philosopher who has published several major works in which he criticizes the Eurocentric bias in political philosophy and in philosophy generally. In this book, Dussel attempts to deconstruct the Greek-centric and Eurocentric lenses that structure our thinking about philosophy and politics, while applying insights gleaned from liberation theology. Dworkin, R., Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). Dworkin argues against the sort of legal positivism he associates with H. L. A. Hart. Dworkin maintains that there are norms of consistency and interpretation that apply beyond merely historical positivism. These norms include keeping faith with institutional and historical precedent. Dworkin uses the example of Judge Hercules as an ideal adjudicator who should in principle be able to reach a correct conclusion in hard cases of law. — Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). A book focussed on equality as a primary value in both political structures and distributive justice. A clear articulation of the idea of liberal egalitarianism, in which governmental redistributions seek to remedy disadvantages resulting from bad luck. Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977—originally published in French in 1975). This

book is a genealogical account of the development of modern technologies of power and discipline—and their relation to the emergence of subjectivity—with a special focus on prisons and schools. Fukuyama, F., The Origins of Political Order: From PreHuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2011). An account of the evolution of political organizations. The first of a two volume account of the evolution (and potential devolution) of democracy. Geuss, R., Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). A critical examination of political philosophizing that criticizes abstract, idealizing approaches, while emphasizing politics as a craft or skill that is historical located and motivated by various interests, forces and needs. Gewirth, A., The Community of Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). An account of universality and equality in human rights, which maintains that state intervention and active community support are necessary components of rights protection. Habermas, J., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989—originally published in German in 1962). Habermas’s account of the development of the public sphere during the Enlightenment and beyond. This demonstrates the historical basis of Habermas’s ideal of public deliberation and legitimation. — Theory of Communicative Action, vols I and II (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1984/7—originally published in German in 1981). Habermas’s theory of how norms and legitimation develop within communicative acts and within

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ANNOTATED Bibliography communities of discourse. The shared assumption of linguistic communication is the goal of understanding, which involves mutuality. — Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996—originally published in German in 1992). Habermas’s account of the relation between public discourse/deliberation and the legal system. One focus is the derivation of “rights” from principles of intersubjectivity and public discourse. Another focus is the legitimation of law as a concretion of mutual understanding (and not merely as external authority). Hart, H. L. A., The Concept of Law, 3rd Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012—originally published 1961). One of the most important works defending the idea of legal positivism. Hart argues that laws and legal institutions have a normative power that results from general recognition of their validity. Hayek, F., The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944). An argument against centralized governmental control of the economy (socialism) and defense of free market libertarianism. — The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). A defense of classical liberalism in political thought focused on protecting individual liberty against coercion by others or by the state. Protection of liberty occurs best under the “rule of law”: public law helps to limit the arbitrary will of despotic government. Horkheimer, M. and T. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947; English translation in 1972 by John Cumming; more recent translation by Edmund Jephcott—Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 2002). A seminal text of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Focused on development of totalitarian social and political systems, with a related interest in propaganda and the culture industry. Kymlicka, W., Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). A defense of minority group identity and rights, including specific representation and legal exemptions for certain racial, religious or ethnic groups. Marcuse, H., One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1964). An important work of critical theory, which argues against the tendency of large social and political entities to reduce and eliminate opportunities for critique, while dominating thought through both productive activity and consumer culture. The solution is refusal and negation. Miller, D., On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). A defense of nationalism and national identity— against both liberals and globalists who view nationalism as old-fashioned and multiculturalists who advocate for subnational identity. Mouffe, C., On the Political (New York: Routledge, 2005). Mouffe defends agonistic pluralism—or antagonistic political struggles—against idealizing attempts to avoid the reality of political struggle. For Mouffe, reconciliation and consensus are not sufficient to rule out the unruly aspects of democracy and political life. Negri, A. and M. Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Examines the imperial aspects of the emerging unipolar world. Focused on the institutional structures of contemporary globalization, the book

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ANNOTATED Bibliography argues that there is a new post-national capitalist structure called “Empire” that dominates the globe. Nozick, R., Anarchy, State, Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). Nozick’s libertarian text offers a reconstruction of social contract/state-of-nature arguments. Nozick argues in defense of what is called a “minimal state.” Nozick presents arguments against distributive justice, including a critique of John Rawls’s work. Nussbaum, M.C., Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). A feminist approach to international justice issues, focused on the “capabilities approach.” This attempts to be sensitive to local and cultural differences, while also providing a critical framework for discussing the oppression of women. — Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). An extension of Rawlsian liberal ideas to “marginal cases,” including considerations of the disabled, immigrants and noncitizens, and nonhuman animals. Oakeshott, M., On Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). An analysis of political life based upon the idea of civil associations as voluntary and reciprocal associations based upon human intelligence and understanding (and thus not compulsory association or organic holism). Pocock, J. G. A., Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). An explanation and defense of the history of political thought. Brings contemporary historical methodologies to

bear on the texts of the canon of political philosophy. Pogge, T., World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002—revised second edition, 2008). Pogge’s analysis of global injustice results in a call for redistribution of global income and wealth. This is a now classic text in the growing literature of cosmopolitanism. Popper, K., The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1945). An analysis of illiberal political philosophy from Plato to Hegel and on to twentieth-century totalitarianism. Popper defends democracy and liberal “open societies” against the utopian hope of totalitarian idealisms. While Popper’s reading of the history of philosophy is tendentious, his advocacy of the open society (and his mis-reading of Hegel) has been influential. Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). The definitive modern liberal account of distributive justice (and “justice as fairness”) based upon a hypothetical contract made by rational agents who agree upon principles of justice under a “veil of ignorance” in what Rawls calls “the original position.” Two principles of justice are derived: the liberty principle and the difference principle. — Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Extension of Rawls’s ideas about justice as fairness that develops out of “reasonable pluralism.” Examines the possibility of establishing “overlapping consensus” among people who fundamentally disagree about their “comprehensive schemes” or worldviews. — The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

262

ANNOTATED Bibliography Rawls’s consideration of international law and relations. Rawls imagines an international agreement arising out of an international “original position” in which representatives of “peoples” deliberate about international relations. Discusses the difference between ideal theory and non-ideal theory (including how well-ordered liberal states should relate to “decent hierarchical societies” and “burdened states” and “outlaw regimes”). Sandel, M., Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). A critique of liberal political theory that is one of the primary texts associated with so-called communitarian criticism. Sandel argues that the thinness of Rawls’s veil of ignorance divorces us from our most deeply held values including our commitment to a vision of the good life. Schmitt, C., Political Theology (originally published 1919; Schwab translation first published by the University of Chicago Press, 1985). Theory of sovereignty that relates secular political power to religious ideas. Schmitt examines the limits of law in a so-called state of emergency to indicate that sovereign power resides outside of the law. A theory of sovereignty that was influential for antiliberal political movements during the twentieth century. — The Concept of the Political (first published 1932; Schwab translation first published by the University of Chicago Press, 1996). Schmitt’s notorious defense of extra-legal dictatorship. Schmitt argues that a central political distinction is the difference between enemy and friend in the state of war. This distinction leads to a critique of liberal polities, which permit non-friends to be citizens. The solution is

a more organic polity in which citizenship and friendship are closely intertwined. Sen, A., The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Sen’s contribution to the critique of liberalism and Rawlsian political philosophy. Sen’s focus is comparative justice, grounded in actual arrangements in the real world—as opposed to an idealized theory of justice. Strauss, L., Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). Strauss’s historical inquiry into the question of whether there is something called “natural right” which transcends history or whether “historicism” and related skeptical ideas such as “positivism” and “nihilism” are correct. Related to this is the question of whether political philosophy itself is possible—as a theory of abstract and absolute truth about political life—or whether political philosophy is merely historically located. — What is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1959). Several important essays by Strauss are collected here, including the title essay, which argues that political philosophy is enquiry about the good life. Walzer, M., Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977). Walzer’s now classic restatement of the just war tradition, with significant examples taken from recent history. Walzer examines controversial topics such as war crimes, terrorism and supreme emergencies. Several newer editions have appeared with updates related to contemporary issues. — Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Walzer’s account of the complexity

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ANNOTATED Bibliography of justice, based upon the notion of “complex equality” and various spheres in which—and across and through which— justice is considered and distributed. Walzer reminds us that domination across spheres is unjust and that distributions within each sphere should be based upon independent criteria. Weber, M., The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (originally published 1905—Kalberg translation 2010, Oxford: Oxford University Press). Work of sociology and political philosophy that relates economics to religion and spiritual, ethical practice. Influential on subsequent sociology of religion and theories of economics. — The Vocation Lectures: Science As a Vocation, Politics As a Vocation (originally published 1917/1919—Livingstone translation 2004, Indianapolis: IN: Hackett). Theory of political life and leadership, as well as theory of science. The “Politics as

Vocation” essay is famous for introducing the idea that political authority possesses a monopoly on the use of violence; as well as the idea of administration or bureaucracy. Young, I. M., Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). An important contribution to feminist theory of politics. Young argues that democratic theory has too long assumed a homogeneous polity (usually defined by and in terms of the white, male ruling class). Young calls for more participation and for more opportunities for participation for groups previously excluded. — Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Feminist lens applies to issues in political philosophy, especially democratic theory and liberalism. Focuses on the way that certain modes of discourse exclude (or include) marginalized groups. Includes a call for global democratic institutions.

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Index

absolutism  35, 227 Adorno, T.  233, 261 agonism  153, 161–2, 261 ahimsa  130, 244 see also nonviolence anarchy/anarchism  4, 6, 36–8, 133, 162, 227 Daoist  130 international  110 anthropocene  213–20 anthropocentric/-ism  235 anthropology  4, 7–8, 10, 110, 117, 215, 251 Aquinas, T.  4, 37, 38 Arendt, H.  7, 34–5, 239–40, 259 Aristocracy  227, 244, 248 Aristotle  4, 6–7, 10–13, 20–1, 75–6, 96, 103, 214, 242 associative ownership argument  187–8 asylum  67–8, 113, 184, 227 Augustine  4, 5, 7, 38, 110 Austin, J.  42 authoritarian(-ism)  2, 110, 227 autocracy  227, 234 autonomy  228 and democracy  153–63 Kantian  154 of individuals  36, 68, 80 of political groups  50, 52–3 and surrogacy  178 and toleration  140–8 Beitz, C.  49–52, 62–4, 85 Benhabib, S.  159, 161, 175 Berlin, I.  237, 259

Bodin, J.  35, 38, 216 bureaucracy,  35, 156, 228 Cambridge School  23–4, 28 Canada  105, 203, 242 capitalism  133–5, 156, 228, 240, 251 and communism/socialism  231, 250 care chains  192–3 care ethics  129, 168–71, 192–3 Carens, J.  188–90 China  26, 89, 112, 117, 120, 216, 228, 248, 251 Cicero  201, 242, 249 citizenship  229, 238, 243, 251 cosmopolitanism  47, 51, 55, 163, 202, 204–5 democracy  153–8, 203 immigration  183, 187–90 sovereignty  36 women  176 civil disobedience  33, 37, 118, 133, 229, 231, 244 civility  139, 144–5, 148, 230 civilization  4, 131, 214–15, 229 civil rights  127, 229–30, 238, 241, 244 civil society  84, 230 cosmopolitan  204 democratic theory  203 Kant on crime in  98 liberal-democratic  142, 149 Locke and religion  147 private sphere  246 social contract  249 Clausewitz, C.  109–17, 120

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Index Cohen, J.  2, 259 Cohen, J. L.  41, 259 collectivism  230 colonialism  5, 39, 230 Eurocentrism  3, 213–20 see also postcolonial communism  231 and capitalism  228 Soviet  128 see also Marxism; socialism communitarianism  105–6, 148, 160, 231 Confucianism  27, 117, 214 conscientious objection/refusal  33, 37, 39, 133, 229, 231 conservatism  232, 239, 241, 246 constitution/constitutionalism  6, 8, 11, 41, 153, 232 democratic deliberation  159 division of power  43, 143 globalized  220 Kantian  133 Rawls  159 rights  63, 219 toleration  139 U.K.  143 U.S.  99–100, 143 contract/contractarian  see social contract/ social compact cosmopolitan/cosmopolitanism  4, 7, 16–18, 47–56, 202–5, 232 distributive justice  86 Eurocentrism  214, 216 feminism  175, 177 immigration  186, 188, 190, 192 peace  133 sovereignty  36, 40–1 coup d’etat  51, 232 crimes against humanity  40, 232–3, 237, 252 critical race theory  200–4, 246–7 critical theory  39, 175, 233, 252 cultural imperialism  174, 239 cynicism  6, 38 Dahl, R.  153, 155–7, 163 Daoism  130 democracy/democratic  2, 6, 8, 13, 14, 37, 53, 153–63, 203–4, 233–4

capitalism  228 cosmopolitanism  51, 190 deliberative democracy  153, 159–61, 175, 233 distributive justice  76 feminism/gender  167–8, 171, 175–80 immigration  183–5 peace  133–5 right in  62, 72 social contract  35–6 toleration  139–46, 149 despotism  34, 234 Dewey, J.  2, 3, 158–9, 163 distributive justice  9, 16, 49, 52 Chapter 5 (75–93), 234, 240, 250 environmentalism  235 feminism and gender  173–4, 237 luck  190 divine right of kings  7, 35, 234 division of labor  4, 228, 234, 237 gender  168, 175–6, 178 domination  6, 35, 89, 174, 179, 233, 236, 252 Dunn, J.  23–4, 27 Dussel, E.,  213–16 Dworkin, R.  36, 75–7, 81, 155, 157 egalitarian/ism  234–5 closed/open border  185–6, 188 cosmopolitanism  52–3 democracy  156 distributive justice  79–81 luck  190–1 see also equality empire  235 see also imperialism enlightenment (and The Enlightenment)  28, 146, 215, 220, 235 environment/environmentalism  42, 88–90, 208, 235 equality  204 cosmopolitanism  50, 53, 55 democracy  154–6 distributive justice  76–7, 79–80, 83 feminism  158, 168, 173 global equality  52, 90 punishment principle  98

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Index relational  175 rights  62 sovereign equality  39, 41 see also egalitarian/ism ethics  7, 9–10, 235 feminism  168–71, 192 military  114–22 rights  61, 67, 72 torture  205 ethnic cleansing  40, 142, 232 Eurocentric/Eurocentrism  1, 3–5, 8, 15, 18, 215–17, 219–20, 244–5 Europe  5–6, 8, 26–7, 39, 111, 113, 116, 122, 128, 132, 134, 203, 213–5, 220, 227, 230, 232, 234–6, 239, 243, 245 European Union  54–8

Galtung, J.  129 game theory  237, 245, 253 Gandhi, M.K.  37, 118, 127–8, 133, 244, 249, 2239 gender  167–80, 237 see also feminism genealogy  5, 28–9 and agonism  161 of sovereignty  34–9 genocide  40, 113, 232, 237, 253 Geuss, R.  7, 25 Gewirth, A.  65, 67, 69 globalization  40, 50, 154, 163, 167, 177, 193, 213–20, 237–8, 241 global justice  4, 47, 55, 78, 85–91, 177–8, 190, 219 see also cosmopolitan/cosmopolitanism

fascism  236, 253 federal/-ism  35, 228, 236, 253 feminism  7, 17, 167–80, 202–3, 236, 237 consciousness-raising  15 democracy  153, 158 immigration  190–3 Kant critique  160–1 peace  129 Rawls critique  204 feudalism  35, 190, 228, 235, 236 Foucault, M.  6, 8, 24, 39, 95, 106, 206 freedom  2, 11, 12, 15, 81–2, 236–7 assembly  157, 229 association  185–6 conscience  143 expression  141 feminism  172, 177 Kant  133–4 movement  188–90 negative  157; see also negative liberty under liberty open borders  183 press  157 punishment  99 Rawls  62, 80 religious  132, 141, 146–7, 229 speech  17, 229 see also liberty Fukuyama, F.  9, 33, 252

Habermas, J.  24–5, 160–1, 163, 203, 233, 246 Hart, H. L. A.  33, 42–3 Hayek, F.  33, 43, 78–9 Hegel, G.W.F.  2, 6, 8, 11, 15, 20, 21, 25–6, 98, 199, 213, 230, 246, 252 hegemony  41, 161, 228, 235, 238–40 Hellenocentrism  214–15 Hinduism  26, 117, 130 Hobbes, T.  5, 11, 21, 28–9, 35, 43, 110–11, 131, 133, 162, 202, 215–6, 249, 251 homo economicus  160 Horkheimer, M.  233 human rights  3, 9–10, 36–40, 61–73, 200, 203, 228, 230, 232, 233, 235, 236, 238, 239, 241, 244, 251 cosmopolitanism  49, 55–6 distributive justice  86 Eurocentrism  219–20 toleration  149 idealism  238–9, 247 identity politics  239, 253 ideology/ideological  2–4, 8, 39, 41–2, 131, 161–2, 216, 233, 234, 239 immigration  10, 17, 40, 183–94 imperialism  39, 41, 134, 218, 230, 236, 239–40, 245 India  85, 89–90, 117, 120, 127, 131, 243 267

Index individualism  43–4, 48, 130, 160, 231, 240, 242 international law  2, 9–10, 14, 16, 33–4, 39, 206, 227, 232, 238, 240, 241, 244, 247, 253 of armed conflict  121 cosmopolitanism  52, 56 humanitarian law  121, 241 human rights  63, 122 International Monetary Fund (IMF)  52, 87, 96 Islam  27, 102, 113, 117, 119, 142, 206, 215 jus ad bellum  116, 118, 120, 240 jus ante bellum  122 jus cogens  240, 241 jus gentium  121, 241 see also law of peoples jus in bello  116, 120–1, 240 jus natural  240–1 see also natural law jus post bellum  122 just war theory  16, 117–22, 206, 240 Kant, I.  25, 80, 97–100, 122, 133–5, 154–5, 159–62, 199, 228 King, M.L.  15, 37, 118, 127–8, 133, 229, 244 Kittay, E.  169, 173, 176, 178, 192–3 Kymlicka, W.  148, 163, 203 law of peoples  63, 240–1, 253 legal positivism  33, 42–3, 241 legal voluntarism  37, 42 legitimacy  33, 35, 40–1, 55, 71, 133, 145, 153, 160, 162, 216 lex talionis  98, 249 liberal/liberalism  3, 17, 203–5, 228, 229, 232, 234–5, 237, 239–41, 245–6, 250–2 cosmopolitanism  50 democracy  153, 157, 162 feminism  158, 167–8, 171–4, 178 human rights  62–3 immigration  183–90 internationalism  40 peace  133–4

punishment  105 sovereignty  34–7 toleration  139–49 libertarian/-ism  9–10, 241–2, 249–50 distributive justice  77–9 rights  66–7 sovereignty  37, 43 liberty  236, 241–2 civil  229 democracy  158 distributive justice  234 movement  188 negative/positive  9, 231, 236–8 Rawls  80, 204 rights  37, 62, 68, 238 toleration  147 totalitarianism  253 US Constitution  99 see also freedom Locke, J.  1–2, 11, 37, 131, 146–7, 235, 241, 249 luck egalitarian argument  190–1 MacIntyre, A.  22–3, 28, 115, 117, 160, 207 marginalization  161, 170, 174–6, 215 Marx, K.  1–3, 6, 8, 11–12, 15, 21, 110, 231 Marxism  22, 29, 132, 173, 231, 233–4, 239, 242, 250, 252 meritocracy  235, 242 migration  154, 163, 177–8, 183–4, 191, 193 military ethics  114–21 see also just war theory Miller, D.  51, 53, 163, 189 mixed government  228, 242, 249 modus vivendi  3, 242, 244, 245, 252 monarchy/-ism  6, 34–7, 227, 234, 242, 248–50, 252–3 Montesquieu, Baron de  201, 242, 249 morality  24–3, 230, 235 democracy  163 distributive justice  76, 90 human rights  61, 72 immigration  193 military  114, 117–18, 120 parents  170 religion  147

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Index toleration  143, 147 see also ethics multiculturalism  175, 203, 233, 239, 243, 245 nationalism  243, 245 nation-state  4–5, 68, 84–6, 109–11, 113, 119, 194, 202, 219, 235, 243 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)  122 natural law  4–6, 33, 36–7, 40–1, 43, 232, 237–8, 240–1, 243–5, 250, 253 natural rights  37, 64–6, 68–70, 72, 146, 254 see also human rights negative rights  37, 72, 229, 238, 244–5, 250 see also liberty positive rights Nietzsche, F.  3, 6, 8, 28–9, 39 nonresistance  122–3 nonviolence  2, 16–7, 127–9, 133, 135, 244–5, 249–50 Nozick, R.  16, 36, 77, 79 Nussbaum, M.  48–9, 54–5, 81–2, 154–5, 162, 177–8 Oakeshott, M.  19–25, 28 Occidentalism  5, 215, 220 Okin, S.  168, 170–3, 175–6 oligarchy  6, 14, 242, 244 oppression  15, 40, 67, 154, 161, 174–5, 178–9, 186, 191, 236, 244 Orientalism  5, 215, 220 overlapping consensus  3, 148, 162, 242, 244–5 pacifism  16–7, 127–35, 169 paternalism  3–4, 17, 34, 143, 147, 154–6, 159, 161 patriotism  36, 47, 54, 243, 245 peace  127–35, 242, 244–5 crimes against  233, 253 democratic  133, 239 global/cosmopolitan  113, 232 human rights  63–4 Kant  122, 133

peace-keeping  122, 228 peacemaking  105 peace of Westphalia  39 positive/negative  129 see also war Plato  1–3, 5, 6, 10–11, 13–6, 34–5, 38, 102–3, 105–6, 120, 130, 140, 144, 205, 207, 214, 240, 242 pluralism  2, 39, 140, 142, 149, 153, 155–6, 158, 161, 203–4, 230, 233, 236, 243–5 Pocock, J. G. A.  23–4, 29 Pogge, T.  48–51, 55, 86–8, 91, 191 political theory  9–10, 12–14, 20–2, 41, 153, 160–1, 168–9, 200–1, 205, 207–8, 210n. 1 political science  5, 12–14, 23–5, 34, 42 popular sovereignty  35, 113, 250 positive law  33, 37, 41–3, 232, 243–5 see also legal positivism positive rights  69, 82, 229–31, 238, 254–5 see also liberty negative rights postcolonial  1, 3, 39–42, 167–8, 202–3, 214, 216–7, 245 see also colonialism prisoner’s dilemma  237, 245, 253 private/public spheres  7, 91, 147, 157–8, 167–8, 170–2, 177, 203, 246 progressive/-ism  232, 246, 248 property  intellectual  199, 205 personal/private  62–3, 228, 231, 250 property-owning democracy  177 right to  37, 52, 62, 66, 72, 79, 99, 127, 167 public reason/deliberation  2, 142, 144–5, 147–9, 153, 155, 158–60, 162, 230, 233, 246 punishment  14, 16, 42, 95–107, 113, 229, 249 race/racism  49, 83, 87, 102, 142, 158, 161, 190, 201, 246–7, 251–2 see also critical race theory Rawls, J.  3, 9–11 civil disobedience  37, 229 contract  11 269

Index cosmopolitanism  50 democracy,  155, 158–60, 162 distributive justice  79–84, 234 feminism  171–3 history of philosophy  22, 24–5 human rights  61–3 immigration  188 law of peoples  241 liberalism  241 pluralism  245 the Rawls industry  204–5 toleration  139, 144–5, 148–9 see also overlapping consensus realism  2–6, 40, 109–11, 131, 238, 247 Realpolitik  247 recognition  see struggle for recognition reconciliation  102, 105 Fellowship of Reconciliation  129 Truth and Reconciliation  105 see also restorative justice refugee  10, 68, 184–5, 187, 247 relational justice  49, 167–71, 174–6, 186, 248 relational egalitarianism  181, 186 relational selfhood  193 relativism  9–10, 22, 73, 233, 248 repression  see oppression republic/republican  133, 157, 231, 246, 248–9 responsibility to protect  38, 50, 113 restorative justice  95–106, 248–9 retributive justice  75, 87–8, 95–106, 240, 249 rights  see human rights; natural rights Rorty, R.  3, 6, 28 Rousseau, J.J.  4, 21, 38, 110–11, 131, 159, 249, 251 Ruddick, S.  129, 169 Sandel, M.  160, 208 satyagraha  127, 249 Schmitt, C.  19, 26–7, 35, 38, 43 Schumpeter, J.  157, 159 Sen, A.  81–3, 163 separation of powers  143, 228, 242, 249 Singer P.,  49, 51, 85, 88 Skinner, Q.  22–9

social contract/ social compact  1, 4, 6, 9, 11, 35, 38, 134, 153, 155, 162–3, 176, 201, 204, 249–51 social democracy  250 socialism  9, 231, 242, 250 social justice  65, 78–81, 86–7, 92, 178, 230, 235, 241, 244, 250 Socrates  2, 8, 11, 14, 34, 96, 120 sovereignty  33–44, 55, 119, 202–3, 219, 243, 250 state of nature  4, 7, 11, 68, 110–11, 127, 131, 249, 261 structural discrimination/racism  247, 251–2 structural inequality  161 structural violence  129 struggle for recognition  6, 239, 252 suffrage  252 see also vote/voting territoriality  39–40, 90, 185 theocracy  6, 251 Thoreau, H.D.  37, 39, 133, 229 tolerance/toleration  17, 62–3, 139–49, 230, 241–4, 246, 252 torture  17, 42, 68, 99, 146, 205, 233 totalitarianism  43, 227, 236, 240, 253 tragedy of the commons  231, 237, 245, 253 tyranny  14, 35, 130, 234, 252 unitary state  236, 253 United Kingdom  113, 143, 232–3 United Nations  9, 39, 55–6, 91, 113, 119, 134, 218, 238, 247, 251 United States  12, 35, 43, 55, 89, 105–6, 112, 122, 129, 143, 156–7, 192, 203–4, 206–7, 216, 229, 233, 239, 242, 248 Universal Declaration of Human Rights  76, 238 utopia  2–6, 10–12, 87, 131, 170, 213, 253 Vincent, A.  22–3 virtue  7, 13–4, 36, 72, 103, 105, 115, 139, 144–5, 149, 158, 169, 230, 237, 240, 250, 252 Aristotle  7, 103 270

Index civic virtue  139, 144–5, 149, 150, 230, 250 democratic  158 feminism  169, 237 forms of government  14 justice  240 leadership  13 professional ethics  115 responsibility  104–5 shame  103 sovereignty  36 tolerance  139, 144, 149, 252 virtue ethics  72 Vitoria, F.  121, 216 vote/voting  13, 62, 66, 144, 156–7, 167, 229, 233, 235, 237, 245, 252 Walzer, M.  37, 117, 157, 183–6, 230 war  2, 16, 109–23, 232–3, 237, 240, 244, 247, 253 civil war  88, 116

cyberwar  206 irregular/unconventional war  113–4, 119 war crime  232–3, 253 see also just war theory peace Weber, M.  38, 228, 251 welfare rights  66, 72, 84, 230, 245 welfare state  173, 178, 204, 241, 253–4, 260 Wellman, C.H.  64, 68, 185–7, 191 Westphalian Peace/sovereignty  38–41, 44, 111, 203 Williams B.  72–3, 140 Wittgenstein, L.  6, 41, 43, 199 World Trade Organization (WTO)  40, 52, 55, 86 World War  111, 113, 121–2, 134, 232 Young, I. M.  158, 161, 174–5

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