Suchergebnisse

AbstractForeign exile has often served as an important solution to high-stakes standoffs between opposition forces and beleaguered autocrats. I assess the moral status of autocratic exile, by focusing on the tension between exile's contribution to domestic peace and its threat to global deterrence against autocracy. I begin by contending that transitioning societies normally have the moral prerogative of accepting an exile arrangement for their autocrat, even though such an arrangement harms global deterrence against autocracy. I then suggest that, in the absence of clear evidence of majority opposition to an exile arrangement within the transitioning society, foreign countries who have been entangled in an autocrat's rule will normally have a decisive duty to facilitate his exile, despite exile's repercussions for global deterrence. I explain why such foreign entanglement, particularly on the part of affluent Western democracies, is inevitable in the case of kleptocrats. But I also show that the entanglement argument for exile extends even to murderous autocrats, whose crimes fall under the purview of the International Criminal Court. Countries entangled in a murderous autocrat's rule ought to prioritize their particular duties toward his victims over their general moral reasons to advance international criminal justice.

Foreign exile has often served as an important solution to high-stakes standoffs between opposition forces and beleaguered autocrats. I assess the moral status of autocratic exile, by focusing on the tension between exile's contribution to domestic peace and its threat to global deterrence against autocracy. I begin by contending that transitioning societies normally have the moral prerogative of accepting an exile arrangement for their autocrat, even though such an arrangement harms global deterrence against autocracy. I then suggest that, in the absence of clear evidence of majority opposition to an exile arrangement within the transitioning society, foreign countries who have been entangled in an autocrat's rule will normally have a decisive duty to facilitate his exile, despite exile's repercussions for global deterrence. I explain why such foreign entanglement, particularly on the part of affluent Western democracies, is inevitable in the case of kleptocrats. But I also show that the entanglement argument for exile extends even to murderous autocrats, whose crimes fall under the purview of the International Criminal Court. Countries entangled in a murderous autocrat's rule ought to prioritize their particular duties toward his victims over their general moral reasons to advance international criminal justice.

My aim in this essay is to advance discussion of how to justify the sacrifices that reforms combating global poverty might entail for the world's better-off. I begin from the assumption that we should not try to motivate such sacrifices solely through the hope that they will produce significant poverty gains. Instead, we should also explore whether the affluent actually have compelling moral claims to the goods that they might be asked to relinquish as part of certain global reforms. This alternative strategy forms the background for my discussion of two influential global reform proposals. The first proposal is to tax the natural resource wealth enjoyed by various affluent countries in order to ameliorate global poverty. The second proposal is to prohibit the resource corporations based in affluent democracies from purchasing natural resources controlled by extreme kleptocrats. I argue that once we examine the relationship between these proposals from a sacrifice-sensitive perspective, we find that they genuinely conflict with each other, and that there are sacrifice-related reasons to put aside the canonical proposal for a global redistribution of natural resource wealth.

My aim in this essay is to advance discussion of how to justify the sacrifices that reforms combating global poverty might entail for the world's better-off. I begin from the assumption that we should not try to motivate such sacrifices solely through the hope that they will produce significant poverty gains. Instead, we should also explore whether the affluent actually have compelling moral claims to the goods that they might be asked to relinquish as part of certain global reforms. This alternative strategy forms the background for my discussion of two influential global reform proposals. The first proposal is to tax the natural resource wealth enjoyed by various affluent countries in order to ameliorate global poverty. The second proposal is to prohibit the resource corporations based in affluent democracies from purchasing natural resources controlled by extreme kleptocrats. I argue that once we examine the relationship between these proposals from a sacrifice-sensitive perspective, we find that they genuinely conflict with each other, and that there are sacrifice-related reasons to put aside the canonical proposal for a global redistribution of natural resource wealth.

AbstractMultiple normative theorists currently link political authority to democratic political procedures. I explore how proponents of this influential view can address a fundamental, but overlooked, puzzle. The puzzle begins from the firm judgment that even a government that keeps democratic procedures intact loses its general authority if it enacts abhorrent major laws. This judgment means that the moral failure of some laws can dissolve the moral authority of other laws—even ones that are quite distinct in their content. But how can we explain these systemic effects of specific laws? I confront this challenge by introducing a global perspective into the discussion of political authority. First, I suggest that we should only adopt an account of systemic effects that can explain how the worst global conduct dissolves a government's general authority. Second, after developing such an account, I use it to reflect on thornier global cases.

AbstractOne of the enduring problems in democratic theory is its inability to specify who should belong to the demos. In recent years, several scholars have been arguing that democratic theory should try to overcome this "boundary problem" through different kinds of global reform. I argue, however, that the boundary problem is an analytical distraction in thinking about global reform. I begin with general doubts as to whether the boundary problem can ground global reform. I then join the developing conversation on Arash Abizadeh's and Robert Goodin's boundary problem arguments. I offer new reasons for why both arguments encounter fundamental difficulties. I conclude by anticipating the concern that my argument does not take the need for global reform seriously enough.

I present a new challenge to the Rawlsian insistence on ideal theory as a compass orienting concrete policy choices. My challenge, focusing on global politics, consists of three claims. First, I contend that our global ideal can become more ambitious over time. Second, I argue that Rawlsian ideal theory's level of ambition might change because of concrete policy choices, responding to moral failures which can be identified and resolved without ideal theory. Third, I argue that we currently face such potentially transformative choices. I conclude that these choices are analytically prior to, rather than derivative from, global ideal theory.

Should global political theory "get real," focusing on real-world moral failures? I argue that, insofar as we think it important to reflect on global morality in a world of separate states, the answer is yes. In the article's first stage, I set up the argument by suggesting that our only convincing reasons to reject the idea of a world state are non-ideal—these reasons concern failures to comply with moral duties, rather than ideal visions of a perfectly just world of full compliance. Therefore, any theory assuming a world of separate states must itself be a non-ideal theory focusing on compliance failures. In the article's second stage, I contend that this necessary focus should lead global political theorists to make more use of social-scientific knowledge than they typically do, while recognizing the structural obstacles confronting global social science. In the article's third stage, I indicate some under-studied normative implications of these obstacles, tying the debate on ideal and non-ideal global theory to other methodological questions in global political philosophy.

My aim in this article is to show that there is distinctive normative value to thinking about a liberal polity as an agent with integrity that can be threatened, paralleling the integrity of an individual person. I argue that the idea of liberal integrity organizes and clarifies important moral intuitions concerning the policies of liberal democracies, especially with regard to their global conduct. This idea provides a novel organizing framework for liberal values that currently seem disparate. It also captures important moral intuitions as to how the tainted histories of actual liberal societies should bear on their global conduct. Finally, this idea explains, in a way that a simple appeal to familiar liberal values arguably cannot, why liberal polities have identity-based moral reasons not to entangle themselves in manifestly illiberal practices beyond their borders—reasons whose significance becomes apparent in scenarios and real-world cases that global political theory overlooks.