Are States Moral Agents?

Scott, Gary L.; Carr, Craig L.

doi:10.5840/soctheorpract198612116

Cited by 3 publications

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“…A nation that knows people are lost at sea in their territorial waters has an obligation to try and rescue them and is morally responsible for the decisions it makes. This responsibility may be borne by many individuals of the nation such as public servants and members of the civilian government or military who have the knowledge, power, freedom and duty to act (Scott & Carr 1986). A nation that genuinely does not know what is occurring or is not able to act on knowledge is less morally responsible for harms.…”

Section: Turtles All the Way Down: Automaticity Involuntariness And T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Fake News, Conspiracy Theorizing, and Intellectual Vice

Meyer¹,

Alfano²

2022

Social Virtue Epistemology

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This collection of 19 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time and written by an international team of established and emerging scholars, explores the place of intellectual virtues and vices in a social world. Relevant virtues include open-mindedness, curiosity, intellectual courage, diligence in inquiry, and the like. Relevant vices include dogmatism, need for immediate certainty, and gullibility and the like.The chapters are divided into four key sections: Foundational Issues; Individual Virtues; Collective Virtues; and Methods and Measurements. And the chapters explore the most salient questions in these areas of research, including: How are individual intellectual virtues and vices affected by their social contexts? Does being in touch with other openminded people make us more open-minded? Conversely, does connection to other dogmatic people make us more dogmatic? Can groups possess virtues and vices distinct from those of their members? For instance, could a group of dogmatic individuals operate in an open-minded way despite the vices of its members?Each chapter receives commentary from two other authors in the volume, and each original author then replies to these commentaries. Together, the authors form part of a collective conversation about how we can know about what we know. In so doing, they not only theorize but enact social virtue epistemology.

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Section: Turtles All the Way Down: Automaticity Involuntariness And T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Fake News, Conspiracy Theorizing, and Intellectual Vice

Meyer¹,

Alfano²

2022

Social Virtue Epistemology

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“…This authority rests on the moral contract of “citizenship”; individuals, as citizens, assume the state is supposed to offer protection against “foreign” threats. As Scott and Carr (1986:83) put it:…”

Section: Thinking Geopolitics Thinking Geo‐economics: Whither a “Chimentioning

confidence: 99%

What You See Is (Not) What You Get? The Taiwan Question, Geo‐economic Realities, and the “China Threat” Imaginary

Lim¹

2011

Antipode

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Despite emergent trends of geo-economic integration between nation-states, the role of realist-driven geopolitical calculation appears highly enduring. This paper explores the potential contradictions between state-centric geopolitical concerns and transnational geo-economic formation through an exploration of China-US tensions over Taiwan, a territory of indeterminate geo-legal status and which China regards as its own province. I consider how the Taiwan Relations Act, a domestic public law of the US that frames US-Taiwan relations and has a major influence on East Asian geopolitics, could contradict emergent "China region", and possibly even China-US, geo-economic integration. This is because the US-sustained arms sales to Taiwan rest on imagining and containing China as a "threat", while geo-economic integration entails enrolling China as a strategic partner, if not an ally. Consequently, the Taiwan issue could stifle the enhancement of Sino-American relations at a historical juncture when the Chinese and American economies are more intertwined than ever.

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World Justice, Global Politics and Nation States: Three Ethico-Political Problems

Kaldis¹

2002

The European Legacy

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This paper identi es three sets of problems of a speci c ethico-political type, generated by the interrelationship between ethics and politics in the areas of world justice and global politics. One instance in which this interrelationship is tested is that of the con ict of duties and values as it appears in the particular domain of the relations amongst sovereign nation states as well as between them and other social groups. Following the general Introduction, the main body of the paper contains the following three sections. (1) Without elaborating on the detailed mechanics of Kant's theory of perpetual peace, Section II discusses criticisms against the Kantian version of world peace in the context of which the rst problem is encountered. The problem identi ed here is the ambiguity as to whether the establishment of a federated kind of peaceful co-existence between sovereign nations depends on the moral improvement of mankind or whether it is the other way round-i.e. whether ethical progress is a necessary presupposition or, rather, a consequence of political peace. That is, what is here identi ed as worrying is that the direction of dependence is not clear in such a proposal. Furthermore, such an approach, when applied to certain cases of inter-state differences, yields a rather alarming result as to the de-politicization of national states (Section II.2). (2) Yet such a type of international federalism requires a certain, peculiar, kind of legal enforcement of order without recourse to a supra state. So a re-examination of the notion of a legal order in general is needed. Given these requirements, Section III moves on to discuss moral con ict from the standpoint of relativism as it appears in the ethical and in the legal spheres. The second of our problems, identi ed in this section, is that, before discussing world justice we must rst acknowledge the special relation and asymmetry between ethical standards and legal rules required by such a world order. (3) Finally, Section IV asks whether, given the above two problems, it is possible to envisage theoretically the logical possibility of moral con ict-resolution by postulating unchanging and encompassing super-norms of conduct. These special norms, if possible, would be able to direct action unequivocally when confronted with ethical or other dilemmas of duties (involving equally valid but con icting demands among sovereign nations). This is the third problem. The Conclusion offers an evaluation of the whole discussion.These three ethico-political problems are shown to be interrelated. The overall thrust of the discussion is that it points to a number of philosophical dif culties in understanding the changing role of national states in a globalized political, economic and cultural environment. Accordingly, such dif culties have repercussions for any moral criticism of issues of world justice and global politics. I must make clear at the outset, though, that the discussion does not concern international relations theories per se.

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Are States Moral Agents?

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Fake News, Conspiracy Theorizing, and Intellectual Vice

Fake News, Conspiracy Theorizing, and Intellectual Vice

What You See Is (Not) What You Get? The Taiwan Question, Geo‐economic Realities, and the “China Threat” Imaginary

World Justice, Global Politics and Nation States: Three Ethico-Political Problems

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