Defending a cosmopolitanism without illusions. Reply to my critics

This essay engages with several critiques of my project a ‘cosmopolitanism without illusions.’ Who is the subject of rights? What are the objects of rights? Is there a distinction between human and moral rights? Furthermore, what is prior in this cosmopolitan account: democracy or human rights? Do democratic iterations exhaust the meaning of principles of rights? Finally, does the ‘scarf affair’ really signify the return of ‘political theology’ or have not such disputes always accompanied secularization and modernity? I argue that moral rights comprise more than human rights and that non-human beings such as animals can have moral rights claims against us. Democratic iterations and rights complement one another; neither is prior and that although debates about religion and secularization have been endemic to modernity, the return of references to Carl Schmitt’s ‘political theology’ is rather new.     

Reply to critics

Abstract

This article provides a response to the contributors of this symposium. Notably, I respond to challenges pertaining to whether my account can: accommodate collective goods and collective choice and the complexities pertaining to intergenerational justice; be reconciled with the insights of relational egalitarianism and non-ideal theory; meet the requirement that it provides political action guidance instead of being practically irrelevant; be grounded in Rawls’ considerations about luck and justice; avoid implausible implications regarding ‘concern monsters’ and offensive preferences.     

Migration and justice: a reply to my critics

In this response to six critics, I begin by clarifying the sense in which my approach to the issue of immigration is ‘realistic’. I also explain why a realistic approach must place immigration in a nation-state context, although without treating it as primarily reparative for historic injustice. I suggest that it is implausible to regard global equality of opportunity, as opposed to global sufficiency, as setting limits to national self-determination. I then defend my use of the distinction between refugees and economic migrants to frame the discussion of immigration against the charge that all migrants are potentially vulnerable to the decisions of admitting states, since these may determine the fate of their life-projects. And I also defend the claim that, in the case of refugees, justice requires only that each state should discharge its fair share of the burden of admitting them; doing more than this would require popular consent. Finally, I consider the case of irregular migrants, and explain in what sense they have taken unfair advantage of other potential migrants; I defend offering a conditional amnesty to people in this category.     

Structural injustice and alienation: a reply to my critics

ABSTRACT

This author’s reply addresses critiques by Reinhard Wolf, Alasia Nuti, and Kimberly Hutchings of my 2017 book, Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics. First, I restate the normative and practical significance of focusing on challenges of structural injustice for resolving many serious and pressing problems in world politics, including climate change. Second, I begin to resolve some puzzles about the concept of alienation and its relationship to justice and reconciliation, by outlining two concepts of alienation, and distinguishing them from alienation as a cognitive-affective experience. Third, I clarify the limits and potential of decolonial political theory.     

Exploring Sovereignty in Scotland

It is often said that sovereignty is ever less meaningful in the modern world. Yet, sovereignty claims continue to proliferate. There are two elements: the subject of self-determination (sovereignty) claims and the object. Scottish independence and Brexit are two examples, yet they differ in important ways. Brexit postulates that the British people are the subject and complete sovereignty is the object. The Scottish independence movement claims the Scottish people is the subject but now places the object (independence) in a European context of shared sovereignty. Analysis of questions placed in the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey (2021) shows that, in spite of Scottish politics being polarised around the issue of independence vs. union, voters show flexibility about what each of these actually means.     

Occupancy rights: dynamic as well as located

ABSTRACT

Anna Stilz’s Territorial Sovereignty (2019) aims to be a revisionist account of territorial rights that puts the value of individual autonomy first, without giving up the value of collective self-determination. In what follows I examine Stilz’s definition of occupancy rights and her emphasis on the moral relevance of what she calls ‘located’ life plans. I suggest that, if it aims at being truly revisionist, her theory should work with a broader definition of occupancy. So long as it doesn’t, these rights will be mainly the preserve of groups of settlers and peoples with predictable patterns of movement. Moreover, insofar as occupancy rights ground collective rights to self-determination, they actually have the potential to trump individual rights to what I call ‘dynamic’ or non-located occupancy. This is worrying, I claim, for at least two reasons. First, rights to dynamic occupancy are arguably as central for respecting individual autonomy as rights to located occupancy. And second, rights to dynamic ocupancy should be seen as key in helping to form the kind of political allegiances required to overcome the most pressing collective action problems that humanity faces.     

Recognition as if sovereigns? A procedural understanding of indigenous self-determination

In the last two decades we have witnessed a growing global acknowledgement of indigenous rights – manifested in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – challenging the traditional nation-state-centred understanding of political rights and democracy. In this paper, the author argues that indigenous self-determination is to be understood as a way to level the balance of power between indigenous peoples and the nation-states in which they live. Without a solid legal foundation for indigenous peoples to define self-determination in their own languages and to negotiate the conditions of their relation with the nation-states on their own terms, the colonial past (and present) of violent conquest and domination might continue. Indigenous peoples' right to self-determination ought in this perspective to imply recognition of indigenous peoples as having a standing equal to nation-states, i.e. as if they were sovereigns. What self-determination means in political practice would thus be the outcome of negotiations between two (or more) equal political entities. In this way, the right to self-determination has to be interpreted procedurally rather than substantially.     

BEPS,tax sovereignty and global justice

The base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) initiative of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and G20 countries marks an important development in the reform of the international taxation regime. In this paper I argue that the initiative nevertheless fails to provide a coherent account of what global justice requires in the realm of fiscal policy. While the OECD’s ostensible aim to increase and protect the tax sovereignty of states is commendable, there is insufficient attention for the distribution of relative tax sovereignty. I show that current global income inequality is correlated with significant inequality of tax sovereignty, that this inequality is unjust on a plausible conception of what global justice requires, and that the BEPS initiative is unlikely to meaningfully address this injustice. I close by suggesting that an internationalist conception of justice concerned with securing the tax sovereignty of independent polities may need to prescribe the creation of globally redistributive institutions.     

The future of self-determination and territorial integrity in the Asian Century

Abstract

The twentieth century saw the rise of two important and interrelated norms. The first is the norm of self-determination, which advances the right of stateless nations to govern themselves. The second is the norm of territorial integrity, which upholds the principle that political borders should be respected. A consequence of these norms has been an increase in secessionism, a decline in conquest, and a proliferation of states. This paper will examine the development of these norms, their interrelationship, and their prospects for the future. Attention will be given to three important questions: (1) Under what conditions does a norm endure beyond a power transition? (2) How likely is an ascendant China or India to support the norms? (3) What does a power transition and the corresponding support of these norms augur for the future of secession, conquest, and the number of sovereign states?     

Reframing incrementalism: A constructive response to the critics

The concept of incrementalism has been widely cited over the past three decades, yet it has not served as the basis for a cumulatively developing line of empirical and theoretical inquiry. As a result, the highly promising incrementalist framework has contributed surprisingly little to improving our understanding of how decision-making processes can better adapt to humans' cognitive limitations. One indicator of the lack of progress is that policy scholars have never made a sustained attempt to explain how practitioners can become better incrementalists. To see whether the concept's original formulation may be obscuring the way to further progress, we summarize and appraise four enduring criticisms of incrementalism: its alleged lack of goal orientation, conservatism, limited range of applicability, and negative stance toward analysis. While questioning the validity of the critics' claims, we nevertheless propose a way to reframe the incrementalist endeavor, with the intention of stimulating both its critics and defenders to get on with the task of learning more about how individuals, organizations, and societies can proceed relatively intelligently despite the fact that humans rarely have a good understanding of complex social problems and policy options.     

Occupancy rights: life planners and the Navajos

ABSTRACT

This Comment focuses on the limitations of Stilz’s individualist conception of occupancy rights. Her account of occupancy is critical to her attempt to answer the question of where one holds territorial rights as well as related place-related rights like the right of return. Her account appeals to the geographical location of individual life plans. This Comment argues that this fails to distinguish between Indigenous People who are connected historically and in many other ways to a place and individual Life-Planners: it treats the two as equivalent, which I argue is counter-intuitive. I also argue that Stilz’s occupancy account fails to explain the scope of occupancy rights in a number of cases that she appeals to in her examples, such as the Navajos’ expulsion from the area in which they lived. What she needs, I argue, is a group based conception of occupancy rights, in addition to the idea of individual rights of residency.     

On the logic of productive cooperation: a response to critics

This paper identifies and responds to four critiques of democratic contractarianism, as advocated in Democratic Justice and the Social Contract, to be found in this symposium. The first is that, as a contingent practice-dependent account of justice, democratic contractarianism lacks the capacity to explain civic cooperation. The second is that, despite its intentions, Democratic Justice does not lay out an authentic contractarian theory. The third is that the theory is incompatible with our considered judgements about justice. And the fourth is that the ambition of Democratic Justice to use the empirical method to compensate for the failures of hypothetical contract theory fails because all social science needs interpretation. To each of these critiques, replies are offered, drawing attention to the way in which democratic contractarianism exemplifies a logic of social cooperation to mutual advantage that is compatible with justice provided the cooperation emerges from a bargaining situation of roughly equal power.     

Reply to Lowe

The concept 'community' is underspecified in the political theory literature — it must have a more specific reference than just some collectivity or some network of social relations. But attempts to specify what is specific about the relation of community are unsatisfactory. And references to 'actual physical' communities overlook the symbolic and imagined aspects of community, which furthermore destabilise putative communities as much as they stabilise them. Analysis of social relations and networks, and theories of what patterns of relations are conducive to human flourishing should deploy more precise sociological categories.     

JISB Interview: The Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

Dr Aidan Hehir interviewed Dr Francis Deng, UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, in New York on 20 August 2009