Debates about freedom traditionally focus on a few central themes. The chapters of this volume update those debates and launch new ones. Whether the freedom worth pursuing is one or many, whether it conflicts with equality, whether it can be secured by the institutions of the modern state, and whether it is compatible with a deterministic understanding of the universe are some of the central questions that animate the chapters in this volume. Our contributors show both that we have made real progress in our understanding of the many faces of freedom and its enabling conditions, and that threats to our freedoms remain various, serious, and real.
Cosmopolitanism and nationalism are at war, if the criticism they relentlessly direct at each other is any guide. The current debates between defenders of these two views tend to solve their disagreements by showing that one view is incoherent and assigning victory to the other. I argue instead that cosmopolitanism and nationalism do not fail on their own, but are rather incomplete facets of the truth, because each reflects demands of morality that are in permanent tension with one another. Moreover, there may be no way in principle to establish a binding order of priority between nationalistic and cosmopolitan claims, even if in practice we will find various ways to negotiate between them.
Citizens in rich countries should shoulder the burden of alleviating global poverty because they are harming the poor, or so many argue. But the baseline for assessing harm is often unclear.This paper recommends a baseline for harm as rights violations.This baseline makes it clear that many of the attributions of harm made by proponents of the harm argument, instead of representing cases of harms caused, are rather instances of benefits withheld from the poor. A moral case can be made that benefits should be extended by the rich countries toward poor ones, but this case will look very different from a case for responsibility for harm.
Anarchy is often contrasted with law, order, or security. But anarchist societies, by which I mean societies that lack a monopoly of coercive force, need not be lawless. They can develop sophisticated legal systems that regulate the behavior of their members and protect their rights. International law, market anarchism, and other models of anarchism such as the one proposed by Chandran Kukathas already exhibit or could plausibly exhibit complex legal rules and institutions. I will show that insofar as these models rely on consent, they all share similar structural flaws, namely, that they cannot meet basic rule-of-law values such as equality before the law and access to legal remedies for wrongs that embody and respect individual moral equality, even minimally conceived. The implication of this argument is not to vindicate state-based legal systems. Rather it is to show that legal systems, state-based or not, must have a strong nonconsensual, coercive element: the process of making, applying, and enforcing law must, to some extent, be severed from consent if law is to perform its function of providing for minimal justice.
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