Facebook, Territory, and the Demos

"The reason we think that territorial or historical or national groups ought make decisions together is that, typically if not invariably, the interests of individuals within those groups are affected by the actions and choices of others in that group. Those common reciprocal interests in one another’s actions and choices are what makes those groups appropriate units for collective decisionmaking, at least in a rough-and-ready way.  Rough-and-ready, because (as flagged by the recurring qualifier, 'typically if not invariably') the correlation between territoriality or nationality or history and shared interests is far from perfect. Not every person who lives in a given territory is affected by the actions and choices of every other person in that territory; not every person in the territory is affected by every collective decision of the demos constituted on the basis of residence in that territory. Ditto for historical or national groups. Constituting a demos on the basis of shared territory or history or nationality is thus only an approximation to constituting it on the basis of what really matters, which is interlinked interests."

Robert Goodin
"Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives"
Philosophy & Public Affairs 35/1 (2007), pp. 40-68

Liberal Imperialism

Jedediah Purdy 

“Liberal Empire: Assessing the Arguments”

Ethics & International Affairs 17/2, (Fall 2003) 

Purdy defines imperialism as the view that 

(1) states or peoples are politically unequal, and 

(2) this inequality can help justify military intervention.  

There are two kinds of imperialism. Weak imperialism holds that states are unequal in their ability to represent the will of their peoples. Strong imperialism holds that peoples are unequal in their capacity for self-rule.  Weak or strong, liberal imperialism holds that states might justifiably impose democratic political arrangements on foreign peoples in order to render them capable of self-rule.  Purdy aims to undermine what he takes to be the three central arguments for liberal imperialism.  I'll summarize Purdy's objections to liberal imperialism in subsequent posts; here I will simply outline his gloss of the arguments he will attack. (Names for the arguments are my addition.)

1. The Global Security Argument. Liberal imperialists argue that imperial policy is prudent, because it promotes global security.  The combined threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction mean that “global security may require that entire regimes be brought forcibly to heel” (37).  He does not mention the so-called "Democratic Peace Hypothesis," which suggests that liberal societies tend not to go to war with one another, but presumably he has something like this in mind.

2. The Human Flourishing Argument. Liberal imperialists argue that the promotion of (a specific conception of) human flourishing justifies imperial policy: “Such a consideration begins from an idea of what the most basic and general human interests are, and proposes that the domination of one people by another, at least for a time, may be necessary to achieve them” (37).  

3. The Duty of Assistance Argument. Finally, liberal imperialists argue, along deontological lines, that imperial policy may be justified as a means to stop or prevent certain prohibited actions, such as genocide or other severe wrongs.  Purdy does not appear to explain why the prohibition of genocide and similar atrocities would help support a specifically liberal imperialism, but presumably such an argument would need to claim that state violations of democratic rights are severe enough in kind to warrant coercive intervention by external force. 

Preventive War

Summary of Whitley Kaufman.
"What's Wrong with Preventive War? The Moral and Legal Basis for the Preventive Use of Force."
Ethics and International Affairs 19/3 (2005) pp. 23-38.

Here Kaufman argues that both commonsense morality and the just war tradition support preventive--and not just preemptive--war. That is, he argues that war against a future, but not yet imminent, threat is morally permissible, but only under the legitimate authorization of the UN Security Council.

Kaufman argues that Just War Theory does not univocally prohibit preventive war--in fact, he claims, a series of reputable philosophers of international relations have supported preventive war, with some caveats. Kaufman cites Augustine, Grotius, Gentilli, Pufendorf, Vattel, and Vitoria as scholars who have supported, in one form or another, the permissibility of preventive war. Modern readers often project their own idealistic, pacifist agendas onto historical just war theorists. Kaufman mentions a resolution passed by the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, an article by Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane, and an essay by Gary Wills as examples of philosophers who apparently take for granted that the Just War tradition straighforwardly condemns preventive war. While historical scholars were often wary of the potential for abuse of preventive war, Kaufman claims, they were not such staunch opponents of it as modern scholars generally believe.

He disregards consequentialism as capable fof providing a complete moral framework from which to address the question of preventive war. The central argument for preventive war is the same that justifies war in self-defense: "One is entitled by natural law and natural right (within limits, of course) to protect oneself and one's citizens against unjust harm"(Kaufman 28). If war is necessary to avert a future wrong, then it makes no moral difference whether the war happens sooner or later. Thus, if imminence is taken to mean temporal proximity, then future attacks need not be imminent to warrant anticipatory response. If, however, the real worry motivating the importance of temporal proximity is that of epistemic certainty, this provides no principled argument against preventive war either. First, even imminent attacks are not certain, since the attacker could be bluffing, or could simply "change his mind and withdraw." Second, says Kaufman, "one can surely be reasonably certain (at least in some cases) that the attack is forthcoming even before the moment of imminence"(Kaufman 30).

Next, he persues an argument from analogy between domestic coercion and the international use of force. Preventive force is used domestically in restraining orders, prohibitions on carrying weapons, and conspiracy laws. In the context of domestic law, individuals are justified in using force only in self-defense precisely because state coercion tkes care of prevention; if there were no such institutions, individuals would have greater leeway to exercise preventive measures against perceived threats. If international relations, therefore, is similar to a state of nature, then individual states are justified in using preventive force against likely attackers. Of course, the representation of international relations as a state of nature is changed somewhat by the creation of the UN, and Kaufman turns to that next.

Finally, Kaufman argues that the UN's authority, and specifically that of the security Council, has assumed the role played by a state government in the domestic analogy: it possesses a monopoly on the use of force, especially the use of preventive and retributive force. Kaufman recognizes that some legal scholars (Glennon, Franck, and Ramsey in particular--see p. 34-36) have questioned the legitimate authority of the UN, and have argued that the UN's recent failure effectively to protect states from aggressors--through the use of preventive force, where necessary--represents a return to the state of nature. It is argued that this, in turn, grants states the moral authority to exercise the preventive use of force. Kaufman responds that the UN Security Council's refusal to use preventive force in recent cases had more to do with the perception that war, in those cases, was not necessary, rather than with a prohibition on preventive war.

Kaufman concludes that while Just War Theory does not prohibit preventive war, the legitimate authority to engage in it rests with the UN Security Council, and not with particular states. The rule of law requires that states submit to the UN's legal authority whether they agree with its judgments or not.

The Genderless Capacity to Choose a Life

Martha Nussbaum.
Sex & Social Justice.
Oxford University Press (1999).

"Think what real people usually hold in awe: money, power, success, nice clothes, fancy cars, the dignity of kings, the wealth of corporations, the authority of despots of all sorts--and, perhaps most important of all, the authority of custom and tradition.  Think what real women frequently hold in awe, or at least in fear: the physical power of men, the authority of men in the workplace, the sexual allure of male power, the alleged maleness of the deity, the control males have over work and shelter and food.  The liberal holds none of these things in awe.  She feels reverence for the world, its mystery and its wonder.  And she reveres the capacity of persons to choose and fashion a life.  That capacity has no gender, so the liberal does not revere established distinctions of gender any more than the dazzling equipment of kings.  Some liberal thinkers have in fact revered established distinctions in gender.  But, insofar as they did, they did not follow the vision of liberalism far enough.  It is the vision of a beautiful, rich, and difficult world, in which a community of persons regard one another as free and equal but also as finite and needy--and therefore strive to arrange their relations on terms of justice and liberty.  In a world governed by hierarchies of power and fashion, this is still, as it was from the first, a radical vision, a vision that can and should lead to revolution.  It is always radical to make the demand to see and to be seen as a human rather than as someone's lord or someone's subject.  I believe it is best for women to embrace this vision and make this demand." (79-80)

Hampton on Authority

Jean Hampton
Political Philosophy, p. 5:

To summarize, we can define political authority along the lines suggested by one recent philosopher [Joseph Raz] as follows:

Person x has political authority over person y if and only if the fact that x requires y to perform some action p gives y a reason to do p, regardless of what p is, where this reason purports to override all (or almost all) reasons he may have not to do p.

Stop or I'll Secure Compliance

Buchanan & Keohane
'The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions':

Legitimacy has both a normative and a sociological meaning. To say that an institution is legitimate in the normative sense is to assert that is has the right to rule--where ruling includes promulgating rules and attempting to secure compliance with them by attaching costs to non-compliance and/or benefits to compliance. An institution is legitimate in the sociological sense when it is widely believed to have the right to rule.

Abizadeh, 'On Coercion'

Arash Abizadeh
(Political Theory 36/1):

P’s threat subjects Q to coercion only if

• P communicates to Q his intention to cause outcome X if Q undertakes action A.
  
• Q believes that X ∩ A is worse for her than (⌐X) ∩ (⌐A),’ such that X provides Q a reason not to do A.
  
• P’s reason for threatening X is his belief that X provides Q a reason not to do A.
  
• Q believes that P has the capacity to cause X and intends to do so if Q does A.
  

But P’s threat actually coerces Q’s (in)action only if two further conditions are met as well:

• Q does not do A.
  
• Part of Q’s reason for not doing A is to avoid X.
  

Philosophical Anarchism

A. John Simmons
Wellman & Simmons, Is There a Duty to Obey the Law?

The conclusion to which those arguments point...is that there is (for most persons in most states) no moral duty to obey the law.  This is the position commonly referred to as philosophical anarchism.  Most nontheorists, I've suggested, are probably initially disinclined to accept such a conclusion, perhaps because they think it implies that legal disobedience is routinely or always morally justifiable.  And in one technical sense this is correct. If "disobedience" means literally "not obeying the law"--that is, not doing what the law commands because the law commands it--then the denial of a duty to obey does in fact entail that disobedience... is normally justified.  But if by "legal disobedience"we mean simply "not performing the act (or forbearance) identified by the law as obligatory," then nothing so dramatic about the moral justification for disobedience to law in fact follows from my conclusion.