S
forces, the establishment of international tribunals,
Sanctions
WENDY C. HAMBLET
Department of Liberal Studies, North Carolina
Agricultural and Technical State University, Greensboro,
NC, USA
Sanctions are punishments or penalties that are imposed
upon an offending party to force compliance with
prevailing codes of behavior. In the international commu-
nity, the responsibility for enforcing common rules of
behavior, from human rights standards to trade treaties
and political agreements, resides with national govern-
ments, monitored by various Non-Governmental Organi-
zations (NGOs) and overseen by the global community,
through institutions such as the United Nations. Sanctions
are important to the theme of global justice because they
represent one of very few nonviolent ways that the inter-
national community can communicate its disgust with
another states behaviors, while respecting its sovereignty
in domestic matters.
Since World War II, nations have come to appreciate
how the misbehavior or mismanagement of a problem
within a single country has overflow effects for all mem-
bers of the global community. Nations also share an
awareness that many challenges, such as terrorism, global
criminal networks, human trafficking, and poverty, are
better understood as global challenges, and are best man-
aged through global cooperation.
When the global community has determined that one
nation is contravening global codes of behavior, by terror-
izing its own people, encroaching upon the rights of
another sovereign nation, or threatening international
peace, a number of approaches may be taken to pressure
the recalcitrant nation into moral conformity. A soft
approach would include inquiries, exposing violations,
empowering the victims, and/or damaging the nations
reputation among its global peers. A harder or coercive
approach would include direct interventions by light-
armed peacekeeping troops or heavily armed peacemaking
Deen K. Chatterjee (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Justice, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5,
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
referral to international courts, and the imposition of
sanctions.
Sanctions widely relied upon for putting pressure on
one state or a group of states that refuses to abide by
widely accepted global compacts of behavior. Sanctions
may be imposed by a single state or by a group of states,
and are usually agreed upon by the global community, or
forced by the Security Council of the United Nations.
During the Cold War (19451991), unilateral sanctions,
imposed by a single country on another or others, was the
primary form of sanction. Since the end of the Cold War,
multilateral sanctions have become the norm.
Sanctions can take the form of violent or nonviolent
penalties, though most sanctions are nonviolent. Nonvio-
lent sanctions can be economic, diplomatic, or cultural in
nature, with economic sanctions comprising the most
common countermeasures. Economic sanctions involve
limiting the nations trade activity, reducing its access to
global financing and investment, and freezing or seizing
the countrys bank and other assets and sometimes those
of its citizens. Diplomatic or political sanctions seek to
shame the government and thereby limit its influence and
interactions within the global community. Cultural sanc-
tions can send the clearest message about universal moral
expectations within human communities, though they
take the softer approach of limiting cultural and tourist
exchanges, freezing educational liaisons, and excluding
their athletes from sporting events.
A broad complexity of political, economic, and mili-
tary factors affect whether sanctions will be imposed on an
offending country, and if imposed, whether they will be
effective. For this reason, sanctioning tends to be unique
to the individual situation and is differentially effective in
each case.
Sanctions have the practical effect of isolating the
offending nation in one or more respects from full inclusion
in the global community, separating it from its neighbors
until it abandons its unacceptable behavior. Increased inter-
national cooperation, since the end of the Cold War (1991),
has encouraged the use of sanctions in place of military
interventions to force compliance to global standards.
976 S Secession
However, the threat of sanctions does not always have
the desired effect of altering wrongful behavior. One rea-
son for this failure is that the sanctioning of an ally is seen
by most nations as counter to their own interests, so
securing the necessary votes from the global community
to effect the sanctioning of a powerful ally is extremely
difficult. Sanctions lose their credibility among all parties
when they can be imposed only on weak states, unallied
with the powerful, and when they are never imposed on
leading nations, however reprehensible their actions by
global standards of behavior. Since the worst culprits of
global misbehavior are often exempt from sanctions
because of their global stature and their influential allies,
sanctions may only highlight the tenuousness of global
codes of behavior.
Furthermore, economic sanctions, the most preva-
lently employed type of sanction, can prove highly coun-
terproductive. They may have no purchase on altering the
behavior of government and other leaders in the offending
country, while they can have devastating effects on the
civilian populations. In some cases, as in the US-led sanc-
tions against Iraq (August 6, 1990, until the US invasion in
May 22, 2003) and in the US sanctions against Cuba
(strengthened by the Bush administration in 2004 and
again in 2007), sanctions have had the paradoxical effect
of stimulating nationalism and increasing domestic sup-
port for the offending government, since food and medi-
cine shortages render the leaders the sole suppliers of life
necessities for the suffering people, while outsiders are
seen as the source of their hardship.
Globalization entwines the interests of countries to
such a degree that sanctions, however narrowly targeted,
can penalize many parties beyond the offender, including
the countries that impose them. For this reason, sanctions
can be a hard sell in the international community, and
may be opposed or undermined by actors beyond the
offending country. In Darfur, for example, economic ties
between the powerful genocideurs and China, India, and
other invested countries have continually undermined
the United Nations sanctions imposed in 2007 to deter
genocide.
Related Topics
Basic Needs
Beneficence, Principle of
Decent Society
Duties to the Distant Needy
Economic Rights
Food
Foreign Policy
Quality of Life
References
Alston P (2005) Non-state actors and human rights. Oxford University
Press, New York
Green M, Mitchell D (2007) A new approach to Burma. Foreign Aff
86(6):147158
Guilhot N (2005) The democracy makers: human rights and international
order. Columbia University Press, New York
Haass RN, OSullivan ML (eds) (2000) Honey and vinegar: incentives,
sanctions and foreign policy. Brookings Institution Press,
Washington, DC
Hufbauer GC, Schott JJ, Elliott KA (2007) Economic sanctions
reconsidered. Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics,
Washington, DC
Hunter S, Malik H (eds) (2006) Modernization, democracy, and islam.
Praeger, Westport
Strauss S (2005) Darfur and the genocide debate. Foreign Aff
84(1):123133
Secession
FRED E. FOLDVARY
Civil Society Institute, Santa Clara University,
Santa Clara, CA, USA
Secession is the withdrawal of persons and land from the
jurisdiction of the original governing unit. The seceding
territory, the new realm, becomes independent of the
jurisdiction it was part of, the old realm. Secession can
be either complete or partial. For example, in St. Louis, the
residents of a neighborhood are legally able to privatize
their street, exercising partial secession from the city
government (Foldvary 1994).
For those who advocate the legal ability to secede, the
moral right to secession derives from human equality. If
each adult human being has the moral right to consent to
the government, then one not only has a right to vote, but
more fundamentally, the right to emigrate or secede. In
this view, global justice requires the right of individual
secession.
If emigration is prohibited, then the residents are
enslaved by the state, forced to abide by the laws or be
penalized. But emigration has a high cost, as those leaving
must let go of territory and heritage they cherish. The
moral issue in secession is the question of what endows
the old realm with the right to that territory rather than
the seceding realm.
Utilitarian ethics may provide an answer in the greater
utility of the majority who oppose secession; but from an
individualist natural rights perspective, the preferences of
the majority are irrelevant. In the Lockean natural-law and

natural rights perspective, and also in the contractarian
perspective, the state itself has no moral rights, but only
the powers delegated to it by the citizens. Thus a state has
no moral right to territory; its territory is rightfully the
lands held by the citizens who form the social contract that
is government.
An application of ethics and global justice to secession
needs to be consistent in order for the secession to be
morally legitimate. When secession is justified by the
individuals right to consent to the governance, then
those in the seceding territory who do not wish to be
citizens of the new realm should also have a right to the
governance of their choice. For example, if the majority of
the residents of Quebec wish to secede from Canada, then
those in Quebec who do not wish to belong to Quebec
should be free to remain Canadian, or else be free to form
their own state. The logic and ethics of secession extends
this principle down to individual secession.
There can be economic incentives for secession, such
as the attempt by the seceding residents to obtain more of
the revenues from natural resources. If only one area of
a country has oil, secession would give the new realm
a higher per capita income at the expense of the old
realm. Since global justice is grounded in equality, justice
in secession requires that the new real obtain the benefits
of the natural resources in proportion to its population.
From an egalitarian perspective, the ideal for global justice
is for all peoples of the earth to share equally in the rents
from all natural resources. However, given that policy is
being made only for that country, an equal sharing of the
rent of the natural resources would satisfy justice within
those realms.
For secession to be just, the new realm must accept its
proportionate share of the liabilities as well as the assets of
the old realm. For example, if there is a government debt,
and 10% of the population secedes, the secession should
transfer 10% of the debt to the seceding realm, or some
other formula such as the proportion of wealth or land
value in the new realm. For unfunded liabilities such as
social security, the secession agreement could either let the
participants remain in the system of the old realm, or
transfer the assets and liabilities to the new realm.
Secession in History
The American Revolution was a war of secession. The
Declaration of Independence in 1776 was in effect
a secession from the British Empire. Likewise, the Spanish
colonies in America fought wars of liberation to secede
from the Spanish Empire.
Successful struggles for secession also include Irelands
independence from British rule, Kosovos secession from
Secession S 977
Serbia, and the independence of Bangladesh from
Pakistan. In Iraq, after the Gulf War of 1991, the Kurds
obtained a large degree of autonomy, while the Kurds in
Turkey and Iran have not had self-rule.
Examples of unsuccessful wars of secession include the
Confederate States of America, Biafras attempt to secede
from Nigeria, Katangas war of secession from the Congo,
and Chechnyas war of secession from Russia. Many of the
residents of Kashmir have sought secession from both
India and Pakistan.
In seceding from the USA, the leaders of southern
states reasoned that since the states voluntarily entered
into the federation, they should be free to leave it. The
U.S. Constitution was silent on the subject of secession.
One could argue that since the federal government only
has those powers authorized by the Constitution, and the
Constitution does not authorize the federal government to
prevent secession, it is permitted. However, President Lin-
coln believed that the union was meant to be permanent.
The Civil War settled the legal issue in favor of
a permanent union, although there are small secession
movements in several states.
Economic historian Jeffrey Hummel has written that
had the North allowed the South to secede, slavery would
have vanished within two decades. Hummel (1996) argues
that without the Norths enforcing the return of runaway
slaves, the escape of slaves to the North would have led to
the abolition of slavery. The Civil War had a profound
effect on the structure of government in the US and its
political culture. It enhanced nationalism and laid the
foundations for the income tax, federal currency, the mil-
itary draft, and the centralization of power in the federal
government.
The British and French colonies in Africa and Asia
mostly gained independence and secession by peaceful
means, with agreement by colonial power. In South Africa,
the government initiated the partial secession of home- S
lands as autonomous nations, but when apartheid fell,
the new government brought them back into the union.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be analyzed in the
context of secession. The Jews of British Palestine fought
for independence to secede from the restrictions on immi-
gration imposed by the British. Many Arabs regarded this
as an improper secession of Israelis from the Arab realm
that includes the land of Palestine. After the 1967 war
during which Israel obtained Gaza and the West Bank
(which Israelis call Judea and Samaria), the Arab
Palestinians have struggled to secede from Israel, and
some still seek to abolish the State of Israel even in its
1948 borders. One proposed solution would be
a confederation of Israel and Palestine, in which each
978 S Secession
state would have autonomy, while the confederation
would handle common resources such as water. If the
confederation also collects the land rent, then those who
occupy territory would compensate others for exclusive
possession. Thus, the Israeli settlers could remain where
they are so long as they paid rent, and the Palestinians
would both be compensated for not having that territory
and also benefit from the rent income.
Some old realms have split into pieces rather than
experience secession. When the old USSR split into its
constituent republics, this was not really secession, since
the old realm ceased to exist. The case of Yugoslavia was
more like secession, as Slovenia and then the other repub-
lics split from a shrinking old realm, until finally there
remained only Serbia and Montenegro, which then split
into two countries. Likewise, Czechoslovakia experienced
a division rather than secession. Kosovo, however, had
a violent secession from Serbia.
Partial Secession
Partial secession has been more common than complete
secession. Some countries such as Spain have established
autonomous regions, such as that of the Basques, where
the residents have greater local governing authority than
those of nonautonomous regions. Many of the residents of
Tibet seek autonomy from China, a partial secession that
would preserve Tibet as part of China internationally but
let the Tibetans control their own institutions.
Partial secession involves devolution, a transfer of gov-
ernment functions as well as taxation to lower levels of
government. The Turkish Empire prior to World War I
had a millet system under which autonomous non-
Muslim religious communities were formed. The princi-
ple of subsidiarity, which many Europeans advocate, is
that government programs be implemented at the lowest
level of government for which the provision is efficient.
Devolution would include tax substitution, as the
transfer of functions would be associated with the transfer
of the public financing. For example, if a city lets
a condominium provide its own garbage collections ser-
vice, the condominium would not pay the taxes that
finance the city service. There have similarly been pro-
posals for tax credits for parents who pay for private
school tuition.
Fractured land jurisdiction can be dealt with by
having a joint regional government under the jurisdic-
tion of both the new and old realms, as well as mutual
agreements for services, as cities do when they permit
police and other services from neighboring cities to
enter and contract out services from neighboring
municipalities.
Privatization is the most widely practiced form of
partial secession. Public works and civil services devolve
from government to a private community. Worldwide,
thousands of condominiums, homeowners associations,
housing cooperatives, land trusts, and proprietary com-
munities are providing public goods such as streets, tran-
sit, parks, security, and recreation. Many of the new
housing developments in China, for example, are orga-
nized as contractual communities.
Some of the private communities are gated, providing
much greater security than provided by the government.
In South Africa, plagued by violent crime and robbery, the
more affluent residents provide their own personal secu-
rity with high walls and contracts with security services,
and they have been organized into gated communities.
Critics accuse these communities of establishing a new
version of apartheid, but they can also be regarded as
a response to government failure.
Secession and Government Failure
The private communities and their services turn the con-
ventional public goods theory in economics on its head.
The conventional theory states that there is market failure
in the provision of public goods, since free riders cannot be
made to pay. However, gated communities arise from the
failure of government to provide adequate security from
crime. They are an example of the market responding, as
entrepreneur developers create secure communities.
Indeed, secession, in general, is a response to govern-
ment failure and oppression, as ethnic minorities and
colonized peoples have sought to be free of the tyranny
of the dominant power. Global justice may be achieved not
just by internal reforms but by providing an exit option for
all peoples. The ability to secede legally and peacefully is
the strongest institutional safeguard for justice, since the
possibility of secession works to limit the unjust applica-
tion of state power.
Short of secession, a deep decentralization of
power would also promote social peace. For example,
Switzerland includes several nationalities, and the country
has had social peace by decentralizing power into the local
cantons. If complete independence is not politically
feasible, then a radical devolution of power to those com-
munities seeking greater autonomy may well promote
global justice and social peace.
Related Topics
Communities
Majoritarianism
Moral Legitimacy
Political Autonomy

References
Bookman M (1992) The economics of secession. St. Martins Press,
New York
Buchanan A (1991) Secession. Westview, Boulder
Foldvary F (1994) Public goods and private communities. Edward Elgar,
Aldershot, UK
Foldvary F (2005) The ethical, governmental, and economic elements of
secession, Santa Clara Journal of International Law Vol III, No. 2.
http://www.scu.edu/scjil/archive/v3_FoldvaryArticle.shtml
Hummel JR (1996) Emancipating slaves, enslaving free men: a history of
the American civil war. Open Court, Peru, IL
Tullock G (1985) A new proposal for decentralizing government activity.
In: Milde H, Monissen HG (eds) Rationale Wirtschaftspolitik in
komplexen Gesellschaften. Verlag W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart,
pp 139148
Second Original Position
ALYSSA R. BERNSTEIN
Department of Philosophy, Ohio University, Athens,
OH, USA
Many criticisms of John Rawlss conception of interna-
tional justice and human rights, the Law of Peoples, fail
due to misinterpretations of Rawlss use of the original
position (see the entry on Original Position in this
encyclopedia). Rawls agrees with Immanuel Kants idea
that a constitutional regime must establish an effective law
of peoples in order to realize fully the freedom of its
citizens, and he undertakes to follow Kants lead as
sketched in his Toward Perpetual Peace (first published in
1795), including his idea of foedus pacificum (pacific
league). Rawls says that he interprets Kants idea of
a pacific league to mean that we are to begin with the
social contract idea of the liberal political conception of
a constitutionally democratic regime and then extend it by
introducing a second original position, at the second level,
in which the representatives of liberal peoples agree upon
basic principles and norms to guide their foreign policy.
Rawls introduces a second and then a third original posi-
tion; in the third, the parties represent non-liberal
though decent peoples. The principles and norms accept-
able to all decent peoples constitute the Law of Peoples to
regulate the most inclusive political subject, the Society of
Peoples (Rawls 1999).
Peoples, as Rawls uses the term, are political societies
(or states) that have certain moral characteristics that
others lack. If a state is rational but not reasonable (i.e.,
if a state ignores the criterion of reciprocity in dealing with
other societies) and if it constantly seeks power (military,
Second Original Position S 979
economic, etc.) in order to dominate other societies, to
enlarge its empire and/or to convert other societies to the
states religion, then there is an enormous difference
between such a state and a people (Rawls 1999).
A people is a political society that is reasonable; it deals
with other societies according to principles that meet the
criterion of reciprocity, and its understanding of its own
basic interests is shaped by its conception of justice. Every
people, whether liberal or non-liberal, is a political society
that meets certain moral criteria, which Rawls calls the
criteria of decency.
Rawlss criteria of decency may be summarized as
follows: (1) A decent people must honor the laws of
peace. (2) Its domestic system of law must follow
a common good idea of justice that takes into account
what it sees as the fundamental interests of everyone in the
society; also, the legal system must be such as to respect
human rights and to impose duties and obligations on all
persons in its territory; further, the judges and other
officials must sincerely and not unreasonably believe that
the law is indeed guided by a common good idea of justice.
When states are thought of as pursuing power, they are
thought of as acting for reasons. This is a familiar idea in
the social sciences and history. What is controversial,
according to the school of thought called political real-
ism, is the idea that states can and will act not only
rationally (in the narrow sense) but also reasonably.
Rawls argues that political societies that meet his proposed
criteria for decent societies could act reasonably and
would tend to do so under certain conditions which are
realistically possible, and also that it is realistically possible
for political societies, non-liberal as well as liberal, to meet
the criteria of decency.
Participants in fair cooperation must, logically, be
agents that are both capable of cooperating on fair terms
and motivated to do so. In Rawlss view, the participants in
a reasonably just international order must be political S
societies that are reasonable as well as rational, that is,
peoples. Using the device of the original position, Rawls
considers what terms of cooperation among peoples
would be chosen, behind a suitably characterized veil of
ignorance, by rational parties representing peoples and
responsible for their fundamental interests. Rawls argues
that no decent society, liberal or non-liberal, would have
good reason to reject the eight principles of his proposed
Law of Peoples (listed in the entry on Rawls, John in this
encyclopedia), which modify certain long-standing prin-
ciples of international law and practice so that basic
human rights can be better secured globally.
In the first step of the argument for the principles,
the parties in the original position are rational
980 S Second Original Position
representatives of liberal-democratic peoples. Behind the
veil of ignorance, they do not know any particulars about
their society, such as the size of its territory, its level of
economic development, its natural resources, its popula-
tion, or how powerful it is as compared to other societies.
What each party knows is that the represented society is
liberal (i.e., liberal-democratic). Rawls provides the parties
with this knowledge because their deliberation about the
proposed principles is to be guided by the fundamental
interests of a liberal people; Rawls stipulates this, because
the question to which he is seeking an answer, at this
point, is: Do liberal societies have reason to reject the
proposed principles? In the second step of the argument,
in which the parties are rational representatives of decent
non-liberal societies, the question is: Do decent non-
liberal societies have reason to reject the proposed
principles?
The parties representing peoples in the second and
third original positions choose between different inter-
pretations of eight proposed principles. They are all,
Rawls says, principles of equality among peoples: they
establish equality among peoples by ascribing the same
fundamental rights and duties to them all (Rawls
1999). Rawls holds that when seeking fair principles it is
appropriate to start from a baseline of equality. He con-
tends that the representatives of decent, well-ordered peo-
ples would see no reason to prefer any set of principles that
did not ascribe equal status and rights to all decent
peoples.
Inequality of status is clearly unacceptable, in Rawlss
view. He says that a classical, or average, utilitarian prin-
ciple would not be accepted by peoples, since no people
organized by its government is prepared to count, as a first
principle, the benefits for another people as outweighing
the hardships imposed on itself (Rawls 1999). A peoples
representatives will, he says, aim to preserve the equality
and independence of their own society, since they each,
like trustees, have the job of securing their own societys
fundamental interests; and by insisting on equality among
themselves as peoples, they rule out any form of the
principle of utility (Rawls 1999). Evidently regarding this
as obvious, Rawls focuses on the questions concerning the
freedom of peoples: the moral basis, content, and limits of
peoples rights of sovereignty. According to Rawls, what-
ever rights peoples are to have, these rights must be the
same for them all, and these equal rights must be secure,
not contingent in the ways that rights grounded in utility
can be contingent.
What the parties in the second and third original
positions debate is how to interpret the principles. They
can be variously interpreted, depending on how one
conceives human rights and the other criteria of decency,
as well as how one understands the relations between the
principles. Rawls outlines a minimal list of basic human
rights that must be included in a reasonable law of peoples.
His argument focuses mainly on the two most controver-
sial principles: (6) Peoples are to honor human rights, and
(8) Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under
unfavorable conditions that prevent their having a just or
decent political and social regime.
The representatives of liberal peoples in the second
original position consider, Rawls says, the following ques-
tion(s): What kind of political norms do liberal peoples,
given their fundamental interests, hope to establish to
govern mutual relations both among themselves and
with non-liberal peoples? What moral climate and politi-
cal atmosphere do they wish to see in a reasonably just
Society of well-ordered Peoples? (Rawls 1999). The answer
is that the powers of sovereignty should be limited: the
representatives of liberal peoples would choose an inter-
pretation of the eight proposed principles according to
which the freedom and independence of peoples, as
declared in principle (1), and the duty of non-interven-
tion, as declared in principle (4), are constrained by the
requirement to honor human rights, as stated in principle
(6); and while principle (5) (which states that peoples have
the right of self-defense but no right to instigate war for
reasons other than self-defense) is included, it is
interpreted as permitting humanitarian military interven-
tion in cases of grave violations of human rights.
In the second step of the argument, Rawls proposes
criteria for a decent society and argues that if they are
satisfied by any society, whether liberal or not, it is to be
recognized as a bona fide member of a politically reason-
able Society of Peoples and, in this sense, tolerated
(Rawls 1999). Rawls argues that rational representatives
of decent non-liberal peoples behind a veil of ignorance in
an original position, deliberating about the proposed
principles and guided in their deliberations by the funda-
mental interests of any decent non-liberal people, would
endorse the same interpretation of these principles as
would the rational representatives of the liberal peoples.
If this argument succeeds, it shows that the principles of
Rawlss Law of Peoples can reasonably be proposed and
endorsed by all decent peoples. It also shows (if the criteria
for a decent society are properly justified) that the Law of
Peoples does not strike a compromise, neither among
comprehensive doctrines nor among liberal and illiberal
conceptions of justice, and that the justification of the
principles of the Law of Peoples does not rely on any
premise about toleration (see the entry on Original
Position in this encyclopedia and Bernstein 2007).

Rawlss argument for the principles of the Law of
Peoples hinges on his views about the fundamental inter-
ests of decent peoples, non-liberal and liberal. To under-
stand these views one must carefully attend not only to
Rawlss definition of a decent people but also to his dis-
tinction between liberal and non-liberal decent peoples.
Liberal peoples belong to the category of decent peo-
ples, but satisfy additional criteria, as required by liberal
conceptions of justice. The criteria for decent hierarchical
societies (meaning societies in which the members are not
equal citizens, as in liberal societies) include
a specification of which rights must be included among
the human rights. Rawls provides an open-ended list
which does not include all of the basic rights of citizens
of liberal societies, and states that the criteria of decency
do not presuppose the liberal political conception of the
person (according to which persons are regarded as free
citizens with equal rights as individuals), but presupposes
only the (not-exclusively-liberal) political conception of
the person according to which persons are regarded as
responsible and cooperating members of their respective
groups, able to recognize, understand, and act in accor-
dance with their moral duties and obligations as members
of these groups (Rawls 1999). Thus Rawls makes clear that
his formulation of the criteria for decent societies does not
logically preclude their being satisfied by non-liberal
societies.
A liberal peoples conception of justice differs from
that of a decent hierarchical people in that the former
requires a constitutional democratic government that is
effectively under the citizens political and electoral con-
trol and that protects their fundamental interests, under-
stood according to a liberal political conception of
persons. A society with a regime that meets the require-
ments of a liberal conception of justice may not count as
a people unless it also satisfies two additional conditions:
its citizens must share a culture in the sense that they are,
in Rawlss words, united by common sympathies and
a desire to be under the same democratic government,
and the society must have a moral character such that it is
willing to cooperate on fair terms with other peoples,
offers such terms, and honors them when assured that
other peoples will do so as well (Rawls 1999). These
conditions are related; arguably satisfaction of both of
the first two conditions (1) a just liberal regime, and
(2) a shared culture is sufficient, although not necessary,
for satisfaction of the third (a moral character).
The fundamental interests of a liberal people as
a people, Rawls explains, are specified by its political
conception of justice and the principles in the light of
which liberal peoples agree to the Law of Peoples. Liberal
Second Original Position S 981
peoples strive, he says, to protect their political indepen-
dence and their free culture with its civil liberties, to
guarantee their security, territory, and the well-being of
their citizens. In addition, liberal peoples want other peo-
ples to show a proper respect and recognition of their
equality; this interest is, in his words, a peoples proper
self-respect of themselves as a people, resting on their
common awareness of their trials during their history
and of their culture with its accomplishments (Rawls
1999). In order to realize fully the freedoms of their own
citizens, liberal peoples seek a stable peace secured by a law
of peoples that restricts the war powers of governments,
and in order to secure basic human rights for everyone
worldwide, they seek to set limits to states autonomy in
dealing with their own populations. Therefore, liberal
peoples support a law of peoples that both limits a states
right to engage in war and limits a states right of internal
sovereignty by recognizing a right to intervention against
outlaw states that gravely violate human rights.
Rawls conceives the fundamental interests of decent
non-liberal peoples similarly, although not identically.
Their rational representatives in the original position
strive to maintain their security and independence. And
since decent non-liberal peoples are well-ordered in terms
of their own ideas of justice, which satisfy Rawlss criteria
for decent societies, their rational representatives in the
original position strive also to protect the human rights
and the common good of the people they represent. Rawls
ascribes only to liberal peoples the aim of securing basic
human rights for everyone worldwide, but contends that
decent non-liberal peoples will see no reason to reject the
principles proposed by the liberal peoples.
In each original position of peoples, what the parties
deliberate about is whether the proposed principles,
understood in terms of Rawlss interpretations of the
ideas of the equality and the freedom of peoples, are
acceptable for governing the relations among peoples S
through application to international law and practice.
Rawls argues that neither liberal nor non-liberal decent
peoples will see any reason to reject the proposed princi-
ples if they conceive themselves as free and equal peoples.
If a political society is capable of acting for reasons, it is
free in a certain sense. If it is independent, it is free in
another sense: it is not obligated to obey any other political
society, although it is obligated to obey certain principles
and laws. If it makes and follows its own laws and policies,
then it is free in a further sense: it is self-determining or
autonomous. Rawls conceives peoples as political societies
that are both capable of acting for reasons and indepen-
dent, and he holds that self-determination, duly
constrained by appropriate conditions, is an important
982 S Second Original Position
good for a people. However, he opposes the position
that international law should regard the rights to
self-determination and independence as unlimited
(Rawls 1999).
Rawls specifies an interpretation of the idea of the equal-
ity of peoples. He ascribes to liberal peoples an interest in
receiving from other peoples a proper respect and recogni-
tion of their equality. Here, equality is understood as equal
status based on equal rights. Rawls ascribes this same interest
to decent non-liberal peoples, and argues that a reasonable
basis for cooperation among societies is equality of status
and rights: the fact that a decent society is not a liberal
democracy is not by itself a sufficient reason for liberal
societies to refuse to cooperate with it on fair terms or to
refuse to grant it the equal status and rights of members in
good standing in the Society of Peoples (Rawls 1999).
Who is to be represented by the parties in an original
position depends on what practical question the theorist is
addressing, that is, what kind of cooperation (for what
purposes and among what kinds of agents) is to be eval-
uated as to its fairness. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls uses an
original position in which the parties represent individual
citizens, because he is addressing a question about fair
cooperation among persons in their role as citizens of
a self-governing society. Analogously, in the Law of Peo-
ples Rawls uses an original position in which the parties
represent peoples, because he is addressing a question
about fair cooperation among peoples in their role as
members of a Society of Peoples; that is, he is addressing
a question about justice in international relations, and
more specifically, a question about how to secure basic
human rights globally.
Charles Beitz, criticizing The Law of Peoples (1993),
claims that it takes societies as fundamental and aims to
identify principles that are acceptable from a point of view
in which the prospects of each society or people, instead of
the prospects of each person, are equally represented
(Beitz 1999). Darrel Moellendorf asserts that Rawlss Law
of Peoples is based on the assumption of respect for
peoples rather than respect for persons, and subordinates
the interests of persons to those of peoples (Moellendorf
2002). Similarly, Thomas Pogge contends that in the Law
of Peoples the ultimate units of moral concern are peoples;
according to Pogge, Rawls gives no weight to individuals
and their interests, which do not count at all in the Law of
Peoples (Pogge 2006). All of these criticisms imply that
Rawls offers an entirely unsatisfactory conception of
human rights, denying that they are of fundamental
importance for international justice. However, Rawls
does not deny this; quite the contrary (see the entry on
Law of Peoples in this encyclopedia).
Criticisms such as these apparently assume that to use
the original position as a test of the fairness of proposed
terms of cooperation is to make a claim about the moral
status or moral importance of the participating agents
represented by the parties: specifically, the claim that
those represented are, or should be regarded as, the ulti-
mate or fundamental units of moral concern. However,
this is false. Using the original position as a test of fairness
does not determine the moral status, moral importance,
moral capacities, or moral characteristics of those
represented by the parties: it does not make it the case,
or make it true, that they have any particular moral status,
importance, capacities or characteristics, nor is it a way of
arguing for the truth of any such claim; nor is it a way of
finding out what moral status, importance, capacities or
characteristics they have. What the test determines (i.e.,
finds out) about those represented is what their relation to
each other would be if they were engaged in cooperation
according to the proposed principles. It determines
whether their relation to each other would be a relation
of equals, that is, whether, in cooperating according to the
principles proposed as terms of cooperation, they would
all have equal status (as specified by those terms). Of
course, those represented by the parties (whether individ-
ual citizens or political societies) must be assumed to be
agents capable of fair cooperation, for otherwise there
would be no point in proposing fair terms of social coop-
eration among them. To dispute that political societies can
be agents capable of fair cooperation would require either
denying (implausibly) that any organized groups can take
part in fair cooperation with any other organized groups,
or denying that any political societies can do so.
According to Rawls, decent societies meet criteria that
include securing and fulfilling the basic human rights of
their members, and only societies that respect these basic
rights of individuals are reasonable and entitled to the
rights of members of the Society of Peoples, including
the right of nonintervention. Thus the rights of peoples
in relation to each other are contingent on their fulfillment
of the rights of individual human beings. The ultimate
units of moral concern in Rawlss Law of Peoples are not
peoples but individual persons. Rawlss goal, to which he
hopes his Law of Peoples will provide a means, is global
justice, which he construes in terms of a world of politi-
cally autonomous, well-ordered societies that all honor
and together secure universal human rights.
Related Topics
Contractarianism
Law of Peoples
Moral Cosmopolitanism

Original Position
Political Cosmopolitanism
Political Liberalism
Public Reason
Rawls, John
Social Contract
References
Beitz C (1999) Political theory and international relations. Princeton
University Press, Princeton
Bernstein AR (2007) Justifying universal human rights via Rawlsian
public reason. Archiv fur Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie/Archive
for Legal and Social Philosophy 108(Suppl):90103
Bernstein AR (2009) Kant, Rawls, and cosmopolitanism: toward perpet-
ual peace and the law of peoples. Jahrbuch fur Recht und Ethik/Annu
Rev Law Ethics 17:352
Freeman S (2006) The law of peoples, social cooperation, human rights,
and distributive justice. Social Philos Policy 23(1):2968
Freeman S (2007) Rawls. Routledge, New York
Moellendorf D (2002) Cosmopolitan justice. Westview Press, Boulder
Pogge T (2006) Do Rawlss two theories of justice fit together? In: Martin R,
Reidy D (eds) Rawlss law of peoples: a realistic utopia? Blackwell,
Oxford, pp 206225
Rawls J (1993) The law of peoples. In: Shute S, Hurley S (eds) On human
rights: the Oxford amnesty lectures. Basic Books, New York
Rawls J (1999) The law of peoples. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Reidy D (2007) Political authority and human rights. In: Martin R, Reidy
D (eds) Rawlss law of peoples: a realistic utopia? Blackwell, Oxford,
pp 169188
Self-Determination
DIMITRIOS (JIM) MOLOS
Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Law, Queens
University, Kingston, ON, Canada
Self-Determination
Self-determination is an indispensable instrument in the
United Nations struggle to save succeeding generations
from the scourge of war as it seeks to develop friendly
relations among nations based on respect for the principle
of equal rights and self-determination of peoples (Char-
ter of the United Nations). At its most basic, the principle
of self-determination affirms that all peoples should be
free to determine their economic, social, and political
development. No contemporary norm of international
law has been so vigorously promoted or widely accepted
as the right to self-determination, even though the mean-
ing and content of that right remain as vague and impre-
cise as when they were enunciated by President Woodrow
Wilson and others at Versailles (Hannum 1990: 27).
Self-Determination S 983
There are two central issues for the meaning and content
of the right to self-determination relating to the self and
the determination components, respectively: (1) What
type of collective entity is entitled to self-determination?
(2) What type of determination, autonomy, or control
may be exercised by this type of collective entity in the
name of self-determination?
The Principle of National
Self-Determination
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, the prin-
ciple of national self-determination emerged as a central
tenet of nationalism, and was heralded by those opposing
the increasingly assimilationist policies promulgated by
the central authorities of the Ottoman, Austrian, German,
and Russian empires. In this context, the principle of self-
determination was thought to provide nations with the
right to establish their own sovereign states. During this
early period of its history, the success or failure of nation-
alist struggles for self-determination depended on the
external support of the Great Powers, and this support
was based more on realpolitik and prudential political
calculation than on the content of the claims under inter-
national law.
The principle of self-determination continued to be
applied intermittently and inconsistently leading up to the
First World War. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919,
the principle of national self-determination was seen as an
obvious vehicle for the re-division of Europe after the
disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman
empires, but here again, it was not applied consistently.
In a League of Nations report on the Aaland Islands
Question, it was clarified that there was no right to
national self-determination for any minority groups
under international law, that such a right would be incom-
patible with the territorial and political integrity of states, S
and that such a right would lead to the destruction of
peace, order, and stability within states and the inaugura-
tion of anarchy at the international level. In short, at the
time of the Paris Peace Conference, there was no right to
self-determination under international law.
The Right to National Self-Determination
It was not until the post-Second World War decoloniza-
tion effort that the vague principle of self-determination
was transformed into a right under International Law.
In 1960, with the General Assemblys adoption of Resolu-
tion 1514 (XV) or the Declaration on the Granting of
Independence to Colonial Countries and Persons, the
UN proclaimed the necessity of bringing to a speedy
984 S Self-Determination
and unconditional end colonialism in all its forms and
manifestations, and to this end, it declared that all peo-
ples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that
right they freely determine their political status and freely
pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
With this pronouncement, the determination compo-
nent was expanded beyond sovereign statehood to include
a wide variety of other possible political arrangements.
The expansion of the determination component opened
up the possibility for forms of self-determination compat-
ible with the political unity and territorial integrity of
sovereign states.
Nonetheless, at this time, there was no right to self-
determination for all peoples because the self compo-
nent was interpreted within the decolonization
framework to be comprised solely of dependent peoples
in the European colonies. The General Assembly guarded
against expanded interpretations of the self component
with its reaffirmation of the principle of the sovereign
equality of states, and its warning that any attempt to
partially or totally disrupt the political unity or territorial
integrity of sovereign states is incompatible with the
purposes and principles of the Charter of the United
Nations. In 1970, this position was repeated in the Decla-
ration on Principles of International Law concerning
Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in
accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.
Despite the references to all peoples, the right of self-
determination in practice had been limited to colonial
contexts.
Objections to the Arbitrariness of the
Right to Self-Determination
The restriction of the right to self-determination to colo-
nial contexts alone raised significant political and moral
objections. After all, to grant a right to self-determination
to only non-European colonized peoples whose territory
is external to the European colonizer state appears to be
conceptually and morally arbitrary. It is conceptually arbi-
trary because the UN has singled out, without a principled
basis, only a subset of previously self-governing peoples
who were forcibly incorporated into a larger state. Critics
allege that the UN has erred by mistakenly privileging the
political unity and territorial integrity of sovereign states
over the principle of self-determination, and the result is
a conceptual confusion culminating in a moral injustice.
The core of the challenge is simple: what is the principled
basis for granting the right to self-determination to some,
but not all, colonized peoples? In particular, why is the
right to self-determination not granted to indigenous
peoples who were settled by European settlers in Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, and the USA?
The United Nations Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples
In 2007, in Articles 35 of the United Nations Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), the
General Assembly recognized a right to self-determination
of indigenous peoples, and this right entitles them to freely
determine their political status and freely pursue their
economic, social, and cultural development. It grants
a right to autonomy or self-government in their internal
and local affairs, while retaining the right to participate
fully in the political, economic, social, and cultural life of
the larger state. It is still too early to assess the long-term
impact of the UNDRIP for the right to self-determination,
but this declaration does seem to be correct for part
of the conceptual and moral arbitrariness of earlier
interpretations.
While there is room for optimism, a cautionary note is
warranted too. Since the UNDRIP does not provide
a definition or conceptualization of indigenous peoples
or a method by which to determine whether a group
counts as indigenous for the purposes of the declaration,
the self component has become vague and imprecise
again, and this produces a precarious threat to the recent
gains of indigenous peoples. The threat arises when pre-
viously self-governing peoples who were forcibly incorpo-
rated into a larger state through conquest claim to be
indigenous peoples with a right to self-determination,
and the mobilization of these groups under the banner
of decolonization has the potential to cause domestic and
regional instability. With enough pressure on the category
of indigenous peoples, the international community may
retreat from its commitments to indigenous peoples
under international law. While the future of the right to
self-determination remains promising, it is clear that the
international community must find a way to specify in
greater detail the type of collective entity entitled to self-
determination.
Related Topics
Group Rights
Indigenous Rights to Land
Liberal Nationalism
National Self-Determination
Nationalism
Political Autonomy
Post-Colonialism
Sovereignty

References
Aaland Islands Question (1921) Report presented to the council of the
league by the commission of rapporteurs, League of Nations
Doc. B.7.21/68/106
Cassese A (1995) Self-determination of peoples: a legal appraisal.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Charter of the United Nations (1945) Can TS 1945 No 7
UN General Assembly (1960) Declaration on the granting of indepen-
dence to colonial countries and peoples, A/RES/1514
UN General Assembly (1970) Declaration of principles of international
law concerning friendly relations and co-operation among states in
accordance with the charter of the United Nations
UN General Assembly (2007) United Nations declaration on the rights of
indigenous peoples: resolution/adopted by the General Assembly,
A/RES/61/295
Hannum H (1990) Autonomy, sovereignty, and self-determination: the
accommodation of conflicting rights. University of Pennsylvania
Press, Philadelphia
Kymlicka W (2007) Multicultural odysseys: navigating the new interna-
tional politics of diversity. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Shelton D (2010) Self-determination in regional human rights law: from
Kosovo to Cameroon. Am J Int Law 105(1):6081
Sellers, Mortimer
JOSHUA J. KASSNER
Division of Legal, Ethical, and Historical Studies,
University of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA
Mortimer Sellers (M.N.S. Sellers) is a philosopher and
legal scholar whose work primarily concerns the theoret-
ical and practical implications of global justice. Sellers
interests and publications are interdisciplinary, crossing
professional and theoretical boundaries. His contribu-
tions to the larger discourse on global justice can be
divided into three categories. First, as the director of the
University of Baltimores Center for International and
Comparative Law, he has provided a prominent forum
for the discussion of global justice. Second, in his own
research he has sought to connect global justice with the
institutional structures necessary to make a more just
world possible. Lastly, through his work as an educator,
an administrator, and through his service as an editor he
has fostered the inquiry of others.
Sellers was educated at Harvard College and at
Harvard Law School, and as a Rhodes Scholar and Frank
Knox Fellow at University and Wolfson Colleges, Oxford.
He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is married
to the journalist, Frances Stead Sellers. Sellers has been
Sellers, Mortimer S 985
Regents Professor of the University System of Maryland
since 2003 and Professor of Law of the University of
Baltimore since 1989.
The Center for International and
Comparative Law
Mortimer Sellers was the founding director of the
Baltimore Center for International and Comparative
Law. The Center was created in 1994 as an Academic
Research Center of the University of Baltimore and of
the University System of Maryland. The Centers central
purpose is to advance global justice by clarifying through
transcultural conversation what it is that justice requires of
contemporary laws and legal systems, both national and
international.
The Center has been particularly active in working
with judiciaries, law faculties, legislatures, and NGOs.
The main publication of the Center is Ius Gentium:
Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice, issued first
as a journal and more recently as a book series published
by Springer Verlag. Ius Gentium is a cooperative effort with
editors and contributors among the Centers overseas
partners, seeking to understand different areas of law
and justice through intercultural dialogue. Topics consid-
ered have included such questions as Federalism, Inter-
nationalization, and Paritary Rights.
The Center has also been the editorial home of
the American Society of International Law publication
International Legal Theory, which also began as a journal
and has become a book series, published by Cambridge
University Press. The purpose of the series has been to
clarify and improve the theoretical foundations of inter-
national law and to strengthen the fundamental connec-
tion between international law and international justice.
Topics considered in the ILT series have included Human
Rights, Customary Law, and Distributive Justice.
Sellers is the general editor of International Legal Theory S
with Elizabeth Andersen, executive director of the
American Society of International Law.
The Center also hosts the John Stead Seminar on
Global Justice and a public lecture series on International
and Comparative Law. Scholars and practitioners from
a wide range of disciplines and professions work in the
Center, both as temporary visitors and as permanent staff.
Republicanism and International Law
Sellers research is interdisciplinary in nature. He has
written numerous books and articles on moral theory,
political philosophy, the philosophy of law, and interna-
tional and comparative law. His main focus has been the
986 S Sellers, Mortimer
connection between global justice, republican theory, and
international law. Sellers has argued forcefully for the
adoption of a republican understanding of the normative
foundations of law both national and international.
He identifies republican principles as providing the
ultimate foundation for international law and legal doc-
trine in two separate ways: first, because republican prin-
ciples and ideas sparked the development of modern
international law in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies; and second, because republican legal theory still
best justifies and identifies the actual requirements of
international law today.
For Sellers, the second point is more important than
the first, because even if international law had no repub-
lican antecedents, it should be made to be more republi-
can, and therefore more just. That international law does
in fact have republican sources makes this task much
easier, because the basic structure and history of interna-
tional law is already substantially republican and, there-
fore, substantially just. Sellers argues that the importance
and binding force of international law depends on viewing
the law of nations in the light of the republican ideology
that has supplied and justified its fundamental principles
from the start.
Republican, in this context, is the belief that law is
justified only to the extent that it advances the common
good of all those subject to its rule. This concept of justice
is republican for Sellers because it equates justice with
the common good of the people. Sellers emphasizes that
the specific republican viewpoint he endorses has a long
and well-documented history. He has explored the history
and theory of republicanism in a series of books on
American Republicanism (1994), The Sacred Fire of Liberty
(1998), Republican Legal Theory (2003), and Republican
Principles in International Law (2006). Specifically, in rela-
tion to international law, Sellers argues that republican
doctrine finds law in those rules of conduct which reason
deduces, as consonant to justice and the common good,
from the nature of the society existing among independent
nations.
Sellers points out that international law differs from
many other legal systems in that no single sovereign
body can presume to create or to enforce its require-
ments. The law of nations is often clarified or elaborated
(and generally enforced) by opinion rather than by
power. International government hardly exists. This
means that while republican principles have long
been dominant in international legal discourse, those
legal institutions best designed to serve republican ideals
and advance the common good have yet to be fully
established.
Sellers recognizes that the most pressing issue for
republicans will be how best to discover the requirements
of justice and the common good in practice. Republican
forms of government are designed to guide laws and
public officials towards creating a society that treats all
its members with equal concern and respect, so that all can
live worthwhile and fulfilling lives. As a practical matter in
the political setting, this requires popular sovereignty, the
rule of law, independent judges, individual human rights,
and other checks and balances designed to serve and
advance the common good.
Sellers argues that the history of the development of
international law is the history of the struggle to establish
(first) republican principles and eventually republican
forms of government as widely as possible, to expand
and deepen the rule of justice in the world. International
law has always regarded states as moral persons, with
understanding, will, power, rights, and duties deriving
from the rights and duties of their subjects. This analogy
between states and persons is not exact, and there are
obvious differences between the rights and duties of states
and the rights and duties of natural persons, but the
analogy has been strong enough to determine the central
elements of the law of nations.
In his work, Sellers cites Hugo Grotius in the seven-
teenth century, Emmerich de Vattel in the eighteenth
century, and Henry Wheaton in the nineteenth century
as advocates of the republican principles embraced in
the twentieth century by the United Nations Charter.
The central principles and many of the doctrines of inter-
national law are well settled, but its institutions are weak.
Sellers suggests that the future of international law
depends on developing better structures or forms
of legal process at the international level, to match the
republican principles that justify the international legal
order as a whole. The structural imperfections of institu-
tions such as the United Nations undermine their moral
authority, while also limiting their power to act.
Sellers stresses that these structural imperfections of
the international legal system make the strict correspon-
dence between prevailing doctrine and actual justice more
important for international law, which relies heavily on
public opinion and self-regulation to secure compliance,
than it is in domestic legal systems with more robust
enforcement mechanisms. He contends that states and
others will not and should not defer to international
law unless it has a strong basis in substantive justice.
The institutional weakness at the heart of international
law can best be remedied by recurrence to the same repub-
lican principles that first justified international law to its
subjects. If states deserve sovereignty and independence in

virtue of the citizens they serve and represent, then
the equality, sovereignty, and independence of national
governments should also depend on their actually serving
and representing their citizens and should diminish when
governments do not.
According to Sellers, commitment to the fundamental
doctrines of republican justice has been present from
the beginning in international law, because republican
doctrines are necessary to justify the enterprise. Without
this plausible claim of justice, international law would
have no legitimate influence or authority over powerful
states and nations. The republican foundations of inter-
national law provide a constitution of justice for the
world, and as a practical matter, he contends that lawyers
and scholars should be more attentive to its requirements.
One important implication of Sellers argument is
that the legitimacy of any legal institution, domestic or
international, depends entirely on the extent to which it
serves justice. International law exists to establish global
justice. To the extent that international law does not do so
it has failed. The main conclusions of Sellers discussion of
international law are that this principle of justice is at the
heart of modern international law (the moral principle),
that this requires service to the common good (the
republican principle), which entails recognizing the
equal liberty and independence of all persons and states
(the egalitarian principle), which may not be dimin-
ished (the liberal principle) except in service to the
common good.
Support for the Work of Others
Through his teaching, scholarship, and his administration
of the Center for International and Comparative Law
Sellers has provided others with the support needed to
advance the discussion of global justice and the develop-
ment of the legal and political institutions that make
global justice possible. In addition to its publications,
lectures, and seminar series, the Center for International
and Comparative Law has a number of programs and
research initiatives that provide support for the work of
others. Specifically, the Center sponsors an LL.M. program
for non-US lawyers and has research initiatives in Human
Rights, Democratic Institutions, Environmental Law,
Competitive Markets, Intellectual Property, and Commer-
cial Transactions.
Sellers former students are prominent in law and legal
academia throughout the world, particularly in the United
States, China, Ukraine, the Netherlands, and Brazil, where
the Center for Internal and Comparative Law has
longstanding academic partnerships. Under his direction,
the Ius Gentium and International Legal Theory book series
Sen, Amartya S 987
have become leading fora for the discussion of global
justice and the philosophical foundations of national and
international law.
Related Topics
Global Basic Structure
Global Governance
Grotius, Hugo
International Law
International Law, Normative Foundations of
References
Sellers MNS (1994) American republicanism: roman ideology in the
United States constitution. Macmillan and NYU Press
Sellers MNS (ed) (1994) An ethical education: community and morality
in the multicultural university. Berg
Sellers MNS (ed) (1996) The new world order: sovereignty, human rights,
and the self-determination of peoples. Berg
Sellers MNS (1998) The sacred fire of liberty: republicanism, liberalism
and the law. Macmillan
Sellers MNS (2003) Republican legal theory: the history, constitution and
purposes of law in a free state. Palgrave Macmillan
Sellers MNS, Reidy D (2005) Universal human rights: moral order in
a divided world. Rowman & Littlefield
Sellers MNS (2006) Republican principles in international law: the
fundamental requirements of a just world order. Palgrave Macmillan
Sellers MNS (ed) (2007) Autonomy in the law. Springer
Sellers MNS, Klabbers J (eds) (2008) The internationalization of law
and legal education. Springer
Sellers MNS, Tomaszewski T (eds) (2009) The rule of law in comparative
perspective. Springer
Sellers MNS (2011) Parochialism, cosmopolitanism, and the foundations
of international law. Cambridge
Sen, Amartya
DEEN K. CHATTERJEE1, LYNETTE E. SIEGER2
1
Department of Philosophy, University of Utah, S
Salt Lake City, UT, USA
2
Gallatin School, New York University, New York,
NY, USA
Throughout his academic career spanning over 5 decades,
Amartya Sen has informed and challenged the world with
his global vision, humanism, and emphasis on reason in
public discourse. By drawing attention to the expanded
ethical, global, and policy dimensions of important eco-
nomic, philosophical, and legal issues and showing their
implications for the debate in political philosophy and
theory, he has transformed our study and understanding
of ethics and political philosophy. His idea of justice is no
988 S Sen, Amartya
exception. It is global in dimension and rich in normative,
practical, and policy implications of vital concerns of our
time, such as democracy, human rights, poverty, violence,
gender, human development, and war and peace. His
multidimensional contribution to these debates, like all
his other ideas, has gone beyond the domain of a wide
range of expanding academic discourse, shaping and
enriching public and policy discussions on domestic and
global issues.
Sens theory of justice is directed to addressing ques-
tions of enhancing justice and mitigating injustice without
reference to the idea of perfect justice. Injustice has many
faces such as persistent poverty and deprivation that are
remediable, gender inequity, exploitation, torture, and
violation of personal liberties. Their causes can be local
or global, often both. Todays entrenched global order
affects all nations, especially the poor ones, and thus
indirectly their citizens. It has been well documented
that the pervasive state-failure to respond to its citizens
broader human needs is linked to the inequity in the
global order itself. Sens early work on poverty has inspired
a leading group of global justice theorists to call for global
recognition of endemic poverty and systemic inequity as
serious human rights concerns, with the objective of put-
ting pressure on individual countries for internal demo-
cratic reforms and making vivid the need for more just
and effective international institutional directives. Indeed,
over several decades, Sen himself has pioneered a major
shift in the focus of global development from economic
growth to peoples lives and capabilities. For that, he has
put emphasis on the need for democracy, both procedural
and participatory, and has provided valuable guidelines
for the democratization of globalization.
In view of the pervasive asymmetry of power and
freedom so starkly evident in the world, Sen reminds us
of the need for a more nuanced, expanding, and context-
sensitive obligation that would go beyond the limitations
of an ideally construed self-interested cooperation among
equals. In contrast to this contract-based reciprocity
among self-sufficient individuals that, for Sen, does not
reflect the vulnerabilities, needs, and dependencies of real
people, Sens approach is practical and pluralistic, based
on the discipline of social choice that pays attention to the
lives of people as lived in the real world. For that,
according to Sen, one need not be focused on a theory of
perfect justice and ideal institutional arrangements, but on
the need for promoting enabling institutions and viable
social realizations to ensure mitigation of injustice.
Sen objects to the social contract model of ideal justice
that serves liberal theorists to justify disparate standards
of justice between fellow citizens and outsiders. The
contractarian model predicated on special egalitarian
requirements toward co-nationals is construed on the
claim of duties generated due to citizenship in a liberal
political community. On this view, self-governance in a
democratic polity creates shared obligations that are col-
lectively binding, unlike that with outsiders with whom we
do not have such binding contracts. For Sen, however, a
statist paradigm of justice would be arbitrary, especially in
todays world where human associations breach political
boundaries. Accordingly, Sen reframes the debate by
reconfiguring the notion of relationality with a globalist
tilt, with the aim of rescuing the discourse on justice from
its limitations of the social contract framework. The stat-
ism/globalism divide is one example of this limitation and
stalemate. For Sen, the global world needs an adequate and
expanded theory of global justice.
Social contract based on reciprocity presupposes a
relational view of justice, so contractarian justice is not
open to the idea of abstract globalism based on the
demand of moral personhood independent of institu-
tional and cooperative affiliations. The statism/globalism
divide of contractarian liberalism is rooted in this per-
ceived non-feasibility of a global social contract because of
the lack of relevant institutional arrangements of a shared
and participatory global governance with sufficient coer-
cive power. But Sen is not necessarily advocating an
abstract globalism either, for he recognizes the need for a
theory of justice that would meaningfully take note of the
expanding human associations and encounters in todays
global world. For that, he concludes, the pursuit of iden-
tifying a perfectly just social arrangement based on reci-
procity among equals, as embedded in the social contract
framework and as championed by John Rawls, is inade-
quate for the task. Consequently, in a major departure
from the dominant trend in contemporary political phi-
losophy, Sen rejects the social contract theory of justice,
especially that of John Rawls, while offering his own.
In his landmark book, The Idea of Justice (2009), Sen
calls his own idea of justice a theory in a very broad
sense, not aimed at determining the nature of perfect
justice at an ideal level, but an exercise that aims at
guiding practical reasoning about what should be done
(Sen 2009: ix). For Sen, to be focused on identifying the
demands of perfect justice is an exercise in futility. Perfect
justice in theory is a difficult if not impossible pursuit
due to the possibly divergent priorities over competing
demands such as the utilitarian, the egalitarian, and the
libertarian, none of which stands out as more reasonable
than the others from the perspective of reason and open
impartiality. Even if we can determine what perfect justice
demands, remedying existing injustices by aspiring toward

perfect justice via ideal arrangements is by no means
guaranteed. Accordingly, instead of offering yet another
grand theory of justice at an ideal level, Sens approach
focuses on assessing the comparative merits of available
states of affairs. For him, we do not need to know or
agree on what perfect justice is in order to be able to
identify a particular state of affairs as unjust and how it
stands in relation to some other state of affairs. This
comparative approach can guide us in assessing and rank-
ing available alternatives without the need to speculate on
all possible outcomes. Even if this procedure cannot
resolve all competing claims at times, valuational plural-
ity makes public reasoning challenging, to be celebrated
than shunned in a democracy. Too strict a commitment to
definitive terms of justice risks neglecting injustices that
fall outside of the preconfigured ideal and crowds out
potential resolutions to injustice that do not fall under
the ideal model yet may nevertheless prove valuable to the
pursuit of a more just state of affairs.
Sen refers to the Rawlsian contractarian approach as
transcendental institutionalism, focused on the idea of
perfect justice via ideal institutional arrangements, rather
than on actual societies and real lives of people. In con-
trast, Sens comparative and pluralistic method is primar-
ily about rectifying injustices, not locating perfect justice.
Though institutions play a crucial role in Sens idea of
justice, his focus is not on ideal arrangements. Rather,
his concern is more practical, guided by the realities of
peoples lives and capabilities. It is also more inclusive in
its enunciation of what counts as reasonable, putting more
emphasis on open public deliberation in the democratic
process than the direction taken and typified by Rawls.
The Rawlsian conception of reciprocity under reason-
able pluralism is the idea of reasonable agreement
endorsing an arrangement that all can allegedly agree
with. This is the civic face of prudential rationality of
self-interested free people in the Rawlsian original posi-
tion that was meant to produce, for Rawls, a unique set of
principles of justice, yielding the Rawlsian basic structure
of a just society (Rawls 1971). Though Rawls himself has
championed the connection between liberal justice and
the practice of democracy, democratic theorists contend
that the Rawlsian reasonable pluralism is not sufficiently
reasonable or pluralistic. In fact, though Rawlss transition
from his earlier robust egalitarianism to his political lib-
eralism took place partly in response to this challenge,
democratic theorists have still critiqued Rawls for not
working at the grassroots level due to his liberal
precommitments, thus challenging him for not being
sufficiently impartial and open. On the other hand,
some liberal theorists have critiqued Rawlss political
Sen, Amartya S 989
liberalism for being much too negotiable and not suffi-
ciently substantive.
Rawls himself has raised doubts in his restatement of
justice as fairness about whether his matrix of impartiality
is poised to yield only one set of principles uniquely suited
to his ideally just institutional arrangements. Early on,
Sen, along with Kenneth Arrow and other economists,
raised this same concern. In contrast to Rawlss closed
impartiality, Sen introduces the idea of open impartial-
ity, compatible with a multiplicity of competing
principles. Citing Thomas Scanlons non-rejectability
thesis not what all can agree with but what nobody can
reasonably reject Sen makes the case for a plurality of
unbiased principles that would meaningfully relate to
the idea of democracy as public reasoning, or what he
calls government by discussion (Sen 2009: 40810).
This is meant to be an inclusive and non-parochial idea
of reasonable pluralism that is set to accommodate public
discussion among disparate groups in a diverse world,
thus catering to the democratic challenges of deliberation
and difference.
Thus, Sen draws our attention to the need for recog-
nizing the existence of different approaches to the pursuit
of reasonable behavior, not all of which must be based on
the reciprocity-based reasoning of mutually beneficial
acts. He would like us to go beyond the Rawlsian limits
of reasonable pluralism to the plurality of impartial rea-
sons embedded in todays expanding circle of global dem-
ocratic human rights approach. Because the notion of
human rights is predicated on our shared humanity,
Sens version of public reason is meant to take us beyond
reasoning among fellow citizens across cultural divides, as
well as beyond the limitations of national or state bound-
aries. He argues that we have responsibility to the global
poor precisely because of the asymmetry between us our
power and their vulnerability and not necessarily
because of any symmetry that takes us to the need for S
cooperation and reciprocity. This turn in approach makes
Sens idea of justice open to the world.
Though relational, Sens notion of justice reframes the
discourse through a reconfiguration of the idea of
relationality, not necessarily in terms of Rawlsian reciproc-
ity between equals but with a more critical look at the
realities of entrenched inequalities. The result is a vastly
expanding obligation holding between individuals within
a shared political community as well as among people
everywhere. Drawing from the story of the Good Samar-
itan in the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus questions the idea
of fixed neighborhood, Sen concludes that there are few
non-neighborhoods left in the world today (Sen 2009:
173). If our neighborhood is our wide open world, then,
990 S Sen, Amartya
for Sen, the scope of justice needs to be broadened and
reframed, with recognition of overlapping spheres of
engagement and interaction in the global world.
The social choice matrix in Sens theory is a measured
response to the demandingness of justice predicated glob-
ally. Unlike Peter Singers principle of beneficence in his
demanding cosmopolitanism that was roundly critiqued
for its moral rigorism (Singer 1972), Sens idea of justice is
based on social realization which, unlike Singers utilitar-
ianism, is broad, situated, and agent sensitive. It is a theory
of justice as practical reason, as Sen calls it (Gotoh and
Dumouchel 2009: 299), relying on broad consequential
evaluation of need, ability, choice, responsibility, and
other features in a comprehensive scheme (cf. Sen
2000). As a theory of justice, it distinguishes between
beneficence and justice. Though beneficence is an
important consideration in promoting justice, pursuit of
justice for Sen is based on social choice mechanism where
the focus on beneficence needs to be balanced against the
fairness of the process.
Rawlss limitations in responding to the demands of
democratic pluralism in his political liberalism are evident
in his law of peoples. For Rawls, while egalitarian justice
with demanding obligations holds among members
within a liberal polity, he sees a rather limited scope for
international obligation, comprising only a duty of assis-
tance to burdened societies. Sen notes that Rawlsian closed
impartiality generates exclusionary neglect, leaving open
the possibility of parochialism in neglecting all voices
from everywhere. In contrast to this Rawlsian interna-
tional justice that relies on partitioning of the global
population into distinct nations or peoples, Sen trump the demand for procedural equity. (Sen 2009: 295
seeks to secure global justice, which, for him, caters
primarily to actual lives of peoples and less on peoples as
a political or cultural unit (Sen 2009: 388415). Sens idea
of open impartiality in the process of public reasoning is
that the interests and needs of all affected persons,
irrespective of their political or cultural membership or
relation, are given due and impartial considerations.
Ingrained in Sens idea of open impartiality is the
universal mandate of broader humanity that makes
room for multi-faceted and overlapping identities of indi-
viduals and groups. Sen has shown us how the exclusivity
of any singular identity can lead to confrontation and
violence (Sen 2006). He is hopeful that the universal
mandates of human rights would trump the claims of
oppressive practices in the name of religious and cultural
identity by the leaders claiming to be speaking for the
group. The global forces of exposure and interaction are
at work in all societies, making it difficult for societies to
remain insular and for groups to be unexposed to evolving
global human rights culture. In fact, Sens own studies
have shown that the claim that there are unjudgeable
differences across cultures on such issues as human rights
is in fact overblown, thus making it easier for human
rights theorists, including Sen, to claim that any undue
restriction of rights in the name of local culture would
be difficult to sustain in a globally vigilant and
interconnected world (Sen 1997, 1999, 2004). Indeed,
Sen has been instrumental in drawing attention to the
multiple identities of human beings across the world,
and he sees no reason why national, group or cultural
divisions should have any automatic, hence undue, prior-
ity over other categorizations. Public reason, qua public,
responds well in cutting through the rigidity of exclusive
identities because it is predicated on open impartiality.
Sens capabilities approach highlights his idea that the
demands of a shared humanity require a broadening of the
human rights model from its state-centric institutional
limitations. Along with this global tilt, the neutral capa-
bilities agenda gives the rights discourse the substance it
needs, thus providing a broad appeal across cultures and
political boundaries. However, Sen points out that because
capabilities are certain indicators of individual function-
ing and opportunities only, they by themselves cannot
adequately account for the fairness or equity of the process
involved in justice. For Sen, equality has multiple dimen-
sions, including equality of capabilities, so equality is a
concern in distributional equations, and enhancement of
equality is an important consideration in promoting jus-
tice. But pursuit of justice for him is a nuanced and
complex procedure where the focus on equality cannot
98; see also Sen 2005)
Thus, Sens theory of justice caters to both the fairness
of the process and the enhancement of freedom and
opportunities. For Sen, these two demands are to be
understood and realized in their comprehensive outcomes
through the matrix of social choice. Though Sen appre-
ciates the republican idea of freedom as nondomination, i.
e., freedom from interference, direct or indirect, and
would agree to the need for guaranteed and realistic pro-
visions for ensuring such freedom wherever possible, he
realizes that in the real world of interdependence and
injustice, we cannot exercise control over every aspect of
our life. Hence, he would emphasize the importance of
understanding freedom as substantive opportunity
opportunities that we can actually have to lead the
kind of life we want and value (Gotoh and Dumauchel
2009: 3023; see also Sen 2009: 3049). Thus, the capabil-
ities approach, though not inconsistent with the republi-
can idea of freedom as nondomination, is more nuanced

and realistic, opening up a wider dimension in our under-
standing of freedom. Sens comparative methodology,
conjoined with his capabilities approach, tells us that
even when we cannot have freedom as an available option
in the republican sense, some option can still give us more
freedom than other options, thus helping us in the pursuit
of the idea of justice as Sen understands it. Social choice
mechanism decides how this expanded idea of freedom fares
in relation to other competing ideas of equality, and how the
idea of equality measures in the matrix of justice where
equity of the process is the other important consideration.
Sens idea of justice makes it clear that though the
issues of justice should not be defined or determined by
cultural claims or group imperatives, they ought to be
contextually sensitive if they are meant to have any sway
over peoples lives and imaginations. Thus, claims of jus-
tice ought to be understood and evaluated against the
backdrop of a variety of cultural, social, historical, and
other considerations that may often be unique to the
groups or nations concerned. Indeed, by making the deci-
sion procedure informationally sensitive (Sen 2009:93),
the social choice mechanism in Sens comparative
approach helps us in responding to these concerns. It
shows us, for instance, that one need not be unduly def-
erential toward cultural demands by making liberalism a
vacuous doctrine, as Rawls has been accused of doing in
his political liberalism, nor should liberalisms pursuit of
fairness and impartiality ignore cultural identities and
variations. Thus, Sen demonstrates that liberalism can be
both substantive and negotiable. In this sense, Sens ideas
have a pronounced advantage over the contractarian the-
ory of justice, which is not embedded enough in empirical
research because it operates in the ideal domain with fixed
and unreal categories. But attention to the empirical details
can boost the efforts of the theorists to prescribe realistic
and achievable directives, thus narrowing the gap between
theoretical pronouncements and practical impediments.
Sens approach helps us in deciding that the narrow
conundrum of statism versus globalism need not be an
irreconcilable dilemma. If a pluralistic theory of justice for
Sen has several dimensions based on the demands of social
realization, then statist claims may indeed play their part
in deciding on justice, but they need not by themselves be
decisive. Indeed, attention to claims of political or cultural
communities would be no different from taking note of
other relevant claims in responding to the comparative
merits of available alternatives. Accordingly, the two
camps of statism and globalism should not pose a case of
conflicting loyalties but that of multiple loyalties. Claims
of statism may sometimes compete with wider objects of
loyalty such as globalism, but nested multiple loyalties,
Sen, Amartya S 991
like our plurality of identities, is a challenge that we
negotiate all the time. Consequently, Sens idea of justice
is nuanced enough to resist fixed labels. Though justice for
Sen is predicated on the global world, he is not a globalist
or a cosmopolitan if this is understood to require a single
global standard of distributive equality or a global appli-
cation of principles of domestic justice.
Moral inequalities due to bad, brute luck generally
referred to as moral luck are a much debated topic
among the liberal egalitarians. For the contractarian the-
orists, including Rawls, inequalities due to moral arbitrar-
iness are a concern of justice only among co-nationals who
are bound by the shared obligations of reciprocity due to
the duties of citizenship. For them moral luck, if under-
stood in the context of abstract globalism, is not an issue
of justice. For Sen, too, the issue is not whether abstract
globalism based on the demand of moral personhood can
create special provisions against bad, brute luck. But for
Sen, moral luck is a concern of global justice because
mitigation of oppression, injustice, and vulnerabilities
are matters of moral priorities that defy national bound-
aries in a world that is interconnected and interdependent.
So Sen would argue that to leave the claims of justice on
the existing arrangements of inequitable state system is
question-begging. For him, the burden of proof would fall
on a relational view of justice based on the claims of
sufficiency of reciprocity predicated on the contingency
of national boundaries in generating a distinct principle of
egalitarian justice only among fellow citizens, especially in
a globalized world. Our shared humanity calls for global
solidarity that turns vulnerability into empowerment in a
way that social contract cannot.
Instead of looking for perfect justice through ideal
institutional arrangements, Sen proposes enhancement
of justice and mitigation of injustice through a compara-
tive approach that focuses on comprehensive social
realization. This calls for empowerment of existing insti- S
tutions, both global and domestic, that would be demo-
cratically responsive and open to unconstrained public
scrutiny through global public reasoning. Sens theory of
justice is a theory of normative social choice (Sen
2009: 296), catering to both the equity of the process and
enhancement of freedom, leading to comprehensive out-
comes. In fact, over the decades Sen has been instrumental
in drawing the worlds attention to the limitations of
rational choice and the virtues of social choice. Though
Rawls made a strong case for including moral constraints
in rational choice, Sen takes us beyond Rawls. Sens theory
of justice is a prime example of this.
Thus, though Sen does not focus on an ideal theory in
the Rawlsian sense and on an ideal set of institutional
992 S Sen, Amartya
arrangements, he in no way disregards the importance of
institutions or the need for an appropriate normative
theory. But instead of going top-down with ideals first,
his approach is to provide a comprehensive method that is
pluralistic. Like the just-war doctrine where no single
component decides for the entire set or for an ideal
resolution, and where the push is for a comparative,
comprehensive, and practical approach that responds to
the need for deciding when it is okay to resort to war and
how to go about it in the real world, Sens idea of justice
calls for a nuanced balancing led by public reasoning of
several vital components none of which by itself is meant
to be decisive.
Even in the sciences the comparative model is gaining
credence. In biology, for instance, in responding to the
central question of what biology tells us about being
human, comparative biology holds much promise due
to variations in factors depending on social and environ-
mental conditions, rather than looking for an ideally
construed evolutionary model that is supposed to be pre-
dictably accurate.
Sens justice project is centrally tied to the viability of
democracy in a global world both in the global order
itself and in individual nations. He and Joseph Stiglitz
(2002), among others, have been providing the conceptual
framework for the slowly emerging trend of democratiza-
tion of globalization. Indeed, one great achievement of
development ethicists like Sen, Stiglitz, and Martha
Nussbaum (2006) is that they have shown a viable way
to shift the focus of global development from things to
people. Accordingly, it is the task of an empirically
informed liberal theory to conceptualize how to promote
the democratic norms of equality and fair political partic-
ipation on the domestic front and in the global system. At
the least, it would call for an institutional rearrangement
in the international order that would be democratically
responsive and reflect the fluid dynamics of collaboration
and interdependence in todays global world. For that,
according to Sen, one need not be focused on ideal justice
and ideal institutional arrangements, but on the need for
enabling institutions. Normative pronouncements,
empirical analysis, and strategies of enforcements must
go together to make viable the theories of global justice
and human rights. Cross-disciplinary dialogue and cross-
fertilization of ideas are also needed for introducing an
enriched and substantive vocabulary in the debate. Sens
work is a prime example of all this.
Amartya Sens contributions to global justice reach the
spheres of economic, social, and political justice, with
special concern for and attention to the worlds poorest,
most vulnerable, and most disadvantaged members. Sens
work has been a catalyst for change in how the world
conceives of and the United Nations measures develop-
ment in terms of human, rather than purely material,
goods. By focusing on human rights and the freedom to
develop flourishing lives, combined with social choice
matrix and open impartiality, Sen has provided a new
framework for individual and collective empowerment
through international organizations, nongovernmental
organizations, and governments within and across socie-
ties. This framework emphasizes multidimensional iden-
tity and human motivations and commitments. This
formulation has produced ideas on justice that challenge
conventional economic modeling centered on self-inter-
ested motivations and the divisive politics of narrow iden-
tity. Sens approach expands the locus of justice from the
confines of states and institutions, though they maintain
an important role, to the sphere of agent-sensitive out-
comes. It is a theory of justice that is descriptively and
prescriptively attuned to the world and human interac-
tions as they are and for the world as it might be.
A champion of reason and rational public discourse,
Sen is also a great admirer and connoisseur of cultures all
around the world. This makes Sen, one of the foremost
public intellectuals of our time and a leading critic of
culture, also a passionate global citizen who embraces
the best in all cultures. The seamless blending of dimen-
sions is well reflected in his idea of justice. Influenced and
inspired by the other Nobel laureate from his native Ben-
gal, Rabindranath Tagore the poet-humanist who also
integrated and celebrated these dimensions and who
founded the special school in which Sen had his early
education Sen, like Tagore, rejoices in the shared
humanity of the global world.
Related Topics
Asian Values Debate
Basic Rights
Capabilities Approach
Co-National Partiality
Contractarianism
Cosmopolitan Democracy
Democracy, Deliberative
Development Ethics
Duties to the Distant Needy
Equality
Fairness
Global Justice
Global Public Reason
Human Right to Democracy
Human Rights
Justice and Reciprocity: Local and Global
 Seneca S 993

Luck Egalitarianism cosmopolitan community governed by a global ethics. As

Nussbaum, Martha C. a Stoic, Seneca conceived of the world as a single living,
Pluralism rational animal. This world animal had earth at its center
Poverty and was identified with the Roman god Jupiter whose
Preference-Satisfaction mind was perfectly and completely rational. Apart from
Quality of Life the gods, the only other rational animals were humans.
Rawls, John The power of reason not only was a bond between humans
Reciprocity and the gods, but it also provided a sense of solidarity and
Relativity of Well-Being common purpose for all of humanity. This was at the core
Singer, Peter of Senecas Stoic philosophy and the basis for his under-
Social Contract standing of natural law. For Seneca, the natural law made
Stiglitz, Joseph Eugene humans capable of reason and thereby able to form
Tagore, Rabindranath a universal community that transcended geographic
place, social position, or national citizenship. Even slaves
References were able to partake in this universal, philosophical com-
Basu K, Kanbur R (eds) (2008) Arguments for a better world: essays in munity, as Seneca wrote in On Benefits, for the slave was
honor of Amartya Sen, vols I and II. Oxford University Press, New York bounded to his master only in body but not in mind. This
Gotoh R, Dumouchel P (eds) (2009) Against injustice: the new economics
universal or cosmopolitan community was available to
of Amartya Sen. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Morris C (ed) (2010) Amartya Sen. Cambridge University Press,
every human who was willing to actualize his or her
Cambridge, UK potential of rationality.
Nussbaum M (2006) Frontiers of justice: disability, nationality, and Seneca continued this theme of the cosmopolitan
species membership. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA community in two other essays: On the Private Life and
Rawls J (1971) A theory of justice. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
On Peace of Mind. Addressing the question whether the
Rawls J (1993) Political liberalism. Columbia University Press, New York
Rawls J (1999) The law of peoples. Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
philosophical or political life was superior, Seneca wrote
MA the need for both kinds of lives in order to flourish fully as
Rawls J (2001) Justice as fairness: a restatement, ed. Kelly E. Harvard a human being. Both philosophy and politics represented
University Press, Cambridge, MA two aspects of a single world to which humans simulta-
Sen A (1997) Human rights and Asian values. The New Republic 10:
neously belong: the world of politics was the particular
3340
Sen A (1999) Development as freedom. Knopf, New York; Clarendon
and local realm in which humans lived; the world of
Press, Oxford philosophy was the universal and cosmopolitan world
Sen A (2000) Consequential evaluation and practical reason. J Philos of which humans were members. Philosophy enabled
97(9): 477502 humans to partake in the universal community of reason,
Sen A (2004) Elements of a theory of human rights. Philos Public Aff
restored a peace of mind in the contemplation about such
32(4): 315356
Sen A (2005) Human rights and capabilities. J Hum Dev 6(2): 15166
truths as virtue was the only good, and provided humans
Sen A (2006) Identity and violence: the illusion of destiny. W.W. Norton, a code of ethics to guide their actions. Politics was the
New York practice of performing good deeds to people in
Sen A (2009) The idea of justice. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA a particular community as ones ethical duty required. S
Singer P (1972) Famine, affluence, and morality. Philos Public Aff 1(2):
Although Jupiter may control the course of nature, this
229243
Stiglitz J (2002) Globalization and its discontents. Norton Press, New York
did not mean that humans should confront life passively;
rather, as endowed with reason, humans should use it to
take control over their lives as much as possible. Thus, the
choice between the philosophical or political life was
Seneca a false one for Seneca: both were needed to be a human
being in ones community and in the world.
LEE TREPANIER However, it is important to note that the actual out-
Department of Political Science, Saginaw Valley come of ones action was inconsequential to Seneca. After
State University, University Center, MI, USA recognizing the norms that nature had laid out for them
from their reason, humans should strive to realize these
values in social and political action. But if they were
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ca. 4 BCAD 65) was a late, unable to achieve those objectives, failure was not the
Roman Stoic who contributed to the concept of a outcome, for the gods did not intend it (of course, if one
994 S Seneca
were successful, then life would have been better than
before). Senecas beliefs included a deeply embedded
recognition that once someone has done his or her fullest
and best, the outcome always would be positive for that
person irrespective of the result because what counted the
most was the development of ones capacity of reason.
Whether the actual outcome was successful was immate-
rial as long as ones reason continued to be cultivated. The
criterion for good or bad therefore ultimately rested upon
the development and use of ones rational capacities.
Senecas cosmopolitanism consequently was funda-
mentally apolitical in spite of his requirement for political
action since outcomes are inconsequential. Not surpris-
ingly Seneca has no conclusions for the authority and
forms of government, institutional reform, or divisions
of powers because what matters more was the moral
character of rulers and citizens. The development of
ones rational capacities provided a path of liberation
and entry into a cosmopolitan community in a way
that politics could not. Whereas the political life was
dependent upon circumstances for success, the philosoph-
ical life was not and therefore allowed humans fully to
control this aspect of their existence. The political life was
necessary for human flourishing, but Seneca recognized
that humans could not control this aspect of their life
completely, unlike the philosophical life. The result was
that Senecas writings have the character not only of
a moralist but of an inward-looking moralist.
According to Seneca, the ideal person did not have
emotions because emotions were irrational and therefore
harmful to the development of ones rational capacities.
Instead of emotions, one had rational affective reactions
and dispositions. The passions, such as anger, were the
greatest threat to the development of ones rational capac-
ities. In On Anger Seneca rebutted the position that anger
was necessary for both political and military life as an
appropriate public response to evil. For Seneca, humans
were born for mutual aid, while anger aimed for destruc-
tion. Furthermore, one can be motivated to action by duty
and virtue alone: anger was not necessary to prompt
a public response to evil. In fact, when one stepped outside
the boundaries of reason and lost control, one was prone
to excessive violence and cruelty as sparked by anger.
Anger therefore was not only unnatural but it was not
necessary.
Because the ideal person was motivated by duty and
virtue as dictated by reason, he or she can perform positive
social and political actions like mercy, as Seneca urged
rulers like Nero to do in On Mercy. The practice of
mercy not only honored the ruler but ensured the safety
of the state by promoting friendship even among enemies.
One should punish people for either consolation of the
injured party, improvement of the guilty party, or for
future security; however, since the ruler has no equal, he
cannot strengthen his position by punishing others and
therefore should consider mercy as a viable option. Some
other social and political actions Seneca advocated were
benefiting others (On Benefits) and to be useful in public
life as much as possible after one retires (On the Private
Life). Although Seneca had concern for others and the
well-being of the state, he ultimately believed that these
goals were internal to a persons character and, as a result,
one should spend the most time on cultivating ones
rational capacities.
Senecas contribution to global justice was his under-
standing of a cosmopolitan community based on the
development of a persons rational capacities. The recog-
nition that regardless of social position or national citi-
zenship all humans have this potential to develop their
reason and therefore deserve dignity and respect made
Seneca a forerunner in the development of human rights.
Although Seneca had a universal code of ethics as
informed by natural law, he was not a forceful advocate
for its implementation because his conception of cosmo-
politanism was fundamentally apolitical. Thus, he has
little to offer in addressing questions of distributive equal-
ity or institutional reform. Nonetheless, Seneca provided
the path toward answering these questions in his Stoic
philosophy that called for the fellowship and solidarity of
all rational beings.
Related Topics
Cosmopolitanism
Global Citizenship
Global Ethic
Moral Cosmopolitanism
References
Bartsch S (2009) Seneca and the self. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge
Cooper J (2004) Moral theory and moral improvement: Seneca. In:
Cooper J (ed) Knowledge, nature, and the good: essays on ancient
philosophy. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 309334
Griffin M (1992) Seneca: a philosopher in politics. Oxford University
Press, Oxford
Inwood B (2005) Reading Seneca: stoic philosophy at Rome. Oxford
University Press, Oxford
Nussbaum M (1994) The therapy of desire. Theory and practice in
Hellenistic ethics. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Seneca LA (19132004) Works: Loeb editions. Harvard University Press,
Cambridge
Strange S (2004) Stoicism: traditions and transformations. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge

Separation of Church and State
LAWRENCE TORCELLO
Department of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of
Technology, Rochester, NY, USA
Religious freedom and the separation of church and state
are prominent ideas among the philosophical concepts of
the enlightenment, and they continue to provide
a foundation and buttress to modern politically liberal
approaches to government. The concept of separation
between church and state found its great laboratory
during the formative years of the United States. Following
the American Revolution, religious orthodoxy was offi-
cially sanctioned in a number of colonial states. Chief
among the American colonies embroiled in issues of the
relationship between church and state was Virginia.
Foremost among eminent Virginians advocating for the
separation of church and state were James Madison and
Thomas Jefferson. In 1785, James Madison authored
Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assess-
ments. This document, which was supported by Thomas
Jefferson, argued against a Virginia bill introduced by
Patrick Henry, which called for a tax to support teachers
of Christianity. The bill was defeated, and not long
afterward the state adopted Jeffersons earlier Bill for
Establishing Religious Freedom, which was originally
penned in 1777 but not enacted until 1786. Jeffersons
bill, championed in Virginia by James Madison, was to
become a source for Madisons 1789 Bill of Rights, which
was enacted in 1791. Jeffersons bill has since
become a major influence on discussions and documents
regarding religious freedom around the world.
The legal doctrine of church and state separation
inspired by Jeffersons bill, and articulated within it, is
perhaps most famously framed in the United States Bill
of Rights, which consists of the first ten amendments to
the United States Constitution. The Constitution,
which was authored principally by James Madison,
edited through legislative deliberation, and ratified in
1788, makes no reference to any deity in its main text or
preamble. Furthermore, Article 6 of the Constitution
establishes the Constitutions national jurisdiction, and
forbids religious requirements for holding public office
under authority of the United States. The First Amend-
ment to the Constitution contains what is commonly
referred to as the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses,
which (1) prevent congress from making any laws respect-
ing an establishment of religion, or (2) preventing the free
Separation of Church and State S 995
exercise of religious practice. The Constitutions Bill
of Rights, drafted by James Madison, was ratified in 1791
(5 years after Jeffersons bill was enacted in Virginia)
and ratified through state conventions, a process that
established the United States as a constitutional democ-
racy, which officially embraced the separation of church
and state at the federal level. Thomas Jefferson, who was
a staunch supporter of the United States Bill of
Rights, influentially described the First Amendment as
establishing a clear separation between church and state,
in his 1801 letter to the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut.
The larger context of Jeffersons letter to the Danbury
Baptists is a sympathetic response to their expressed
concerns that religious toleration ought not to be left to
the whims of state government.
The document most explicitly supporting the secular
foundations of the United States and the separation of
church and state intended by the First Amendment is the
Treaty of Tripoli (1797). The Treaty of Tripoli established
protections from piracy against US ships sailing along the
Barbary Coast of North Africa. The Eleventh Article of
the document, which was drafted largely by Consul-
General to the Barbary Coast Joel Barlow, essentially
states that the United States is in no way founded upon
the Christian religion, and thus neither implicitly
condones nor sanctions religious hostility against Muslim
nations. The Treaty of Tripoli was read aloud in the United
States Senate and a copy was provided to every senator; the
treaty was unanimously ratified and the vote officially
recorded June 7, 1797. The document was affirmed and
signed by President John Adams who publicly announced
the treaty to the nation on June 10, 1797. The Constitution
has been amended 25 times in order to clarify or expand
the protection of civil rights. The Fourteenth Amendment
to the Constitution ratified in 1868 guarantees that con-
stitutional protections in the Bill of Rights cannot be
contravened by states. The Fourteenth Amendment there- S
fore insures that the separation of church and state must
apply equally at the federal, state, and local levels of the US
Government.
Historical Context
In Europe, the latter half of the sixteenth century and early
half of the seventeenth century were marked by religious
warfare and persecution. The period following the
protestant reformation gave rise to the French Wars of
Religion, the 30 Years War throughout different European
domains, and the English Civil War; all of these wars were
exacerbated and in part instigated by religious tensions
between Catholics and Protestants. As the religious
warfare in Europe gradually diminished, persecutions
996 S Separation of Church and State
did not. Throughout Europe, those in power typically had
little tolerance for religious dissent. The Treaty of West-
phalia, which brought an end to the 30 Years War, deter-
mined that any given region would be subject to the
religious orthodoxy of whichever power ruled it. In the
British Isles, freedom of religious expression was limited to
those subjects whose religious practice was in accord with
the reigning orthodoxy at any given time, which fluctuated
from the Anglican reign of Charles I (16251649) to the
Protestant de facto government of the Cromwellian
Protectorates (16531659), and then back to the
Anglicanism of Charles II (16491685 de jure). While
Charles II showed interest in religious tolerance, his
predilections were not indulged by the less tolerant
English Parliament. Under these circumstances, the
seventeenth century was a time of emigration to the
so-called New World, particularly by those unable to
find religious tolerance in Europe. These religious refugees
formed the nucleus of the original English colonies in
America. Once in America, the Puritan settlers, though
the victims of persecution themselves, wasted no time in
establishing intolerant religious standards for colonial
society. One notable exception to this tendency was the
settlement at Providence, which was to become the Colony
of Rhode Island founded by Roger Williams.
Roger Williams
An early advocate of religious tolerance, fair relations with
native inhabitants, and the abolition of slavery, the Baptist
theologian Roger Williams settled in Massachusetts in
1631. Williams argued that the Anglican Church was cor-
rupt, and from the very beginning of his time in the
Massachusetts colony Williams supported the separation
of church and state. His views were tolerated and even
supported by many colonists at the time, but Williams
came to be viewed as an agitator and a heretic by leading
colonial authorities. Forced into exile, Williams fled
Massachusetts in 1636 and eventually settled in what is
Providence, Rhode Island. Williams built a settlement on
land peacefully secured from Narragansett Native
Americans living in the area. Claiming that God had led
him to the place, Williams called his new settlement
Providence. Williams Providence became the first
recorded political entity to maintain the separation of
church and state based upon principles of religious
freedom. The colony attracted likeminded settlers who
sought an atmosphere of religious tolerance unavailable
in other English settlements. Despite opposition from the
colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut,
Williams received an official charter from England
to found a colony under the name of Providence
Plantations in 1644. Williams book, The Bloudy Tenent
of Persecution (1644), lays out the egalitarian principles at
the heart of his church and state separatist position. In that
work, Williams argues for the necessity of people with
differing commitments of conscience to learn how to live
peaceably if they are to survive. Williams emphasizes this
point especially in light of the harsh conditions that
colonials faced in their new undertakings. Williams main-
tains that the individuals journey of conscience, in which
all people must struggle to find meaning, is among the
most sacred hallmarks of the human soul. Therefore,
Williams argues, to coerce against any persons freedom
of conscience is an act of violence upon that persons soul.
Much of Williams arguments regarding religious freedom
anticipate the now better-known arguments found in John
Lockes Letter Concerning Toleration. Yet Williams
acceptance of Catholicism as well as non-Christian
religious views, including Native American paganism,
and his unequivocal opposition to slavery set him apart
from Locke.
John Locke
John Lockes Letter on Toleration was first published in
1689, a time when it seemed as though Catholicism
would once again come to dominate England. The letter
was published, without Lockes knowledge, by his friend
the Dutch theologian Phillipp Van Limborch. In his letter,
Locke argues that the roles of government and religion are
essentially separate. It is the task of the government,
according to Locke, to care for civil interests such as
property, material security, and protection. It is the
task of religion to care for the interests of the soul.
Reminiscent of Roger Williams, Locke argues that force
cannot truly change the inner belief of an individual,
regardless of what they may declare publicly or out of
fear. Thus, Locke argues that religion cannot truly convert
through force, since it is unable to engender belief appro-
priate to religious salvation. Furthermore, Locke argues
that state establishments of religion cannot guarantee
salvation among subjects even if they succeed in forming
the beliefs of citizens. To the contrary, Locke suggests, state
religious orthodoxy tends to hinder salvation. Indeed,
state religious orthodoxy tends to shape individual
minds, not through forceful conversion as much as the
inculcation of dull habits. Locke therefore argues that
since most subjects hold in common the views of their
fellow countrymen with little or no reflection, state
religious orthodoxy becomes an arbitrary guarantor or
hindrance to salvation depending on the orthodoxy of
a given state. Moreover, there is no guarantee that state
orthodoxy is the harbinger of the true religion.

Locke maintains that only the free reign of reason can
protect against false religion and superstition; he,
therefore, concludes that religious toleration is necessary
to protect the freedom of conscience with which human
beings are endowed in the state of nature. Locke shows
that the results of his findings entail the probability that
the state endorsement of religion would in many cases
hinder the freedom of conscience necessary to find
salvation. The toleration of various Christian sects
prevents any one sect from obtaining too much influence,
and thus increases the chances subjects have of discovering
the correct path to salvation through the free exercise of
conscience. In contrast, Magistrates, none of which, Locke
asserts, are appointed by God, cannot rightfully demand
that citizens turn control or care of their souls over to any
earthly authority. The attempt by state powers to dampen
freedom of conscience through state oppression is an
unnatural use of power, which tends toward civil unrest
and instability. For all of these reasons, it is important that
government and religion operate separately from one
another and with respect for religious toleration.
John Lockes toleration, however, was limited to
Christian religious sects, with the exception of
Catholicism. Famously, Locke argues that neither Catho-
lics nor atheists ought to be tolerated in civil society.
The former, in Lockes view, have already pledged them-
selves to a papal prince, thus subjecting themselves to
a form of tyranny Locke views as unnatural, and as
incompatible with legitimate state power. The latter
cannot be tolerated, Locke argues, because atheism
removes any ultimate reason to honor oaths, and so
renders atheists unfit to partake in the social contract
necessary for civil law and society.
James Madison and Thomas Jefferson
As was suggested above, following the American
Revolution the state of Virginia was the most notable
seat of debate regarding the separation of church and
state. Thomas Jefferson drafted his Bill for Establishing
Religious Freedom largely under the influence of Lockean
philosophy. After Jefferson proposed that bill, it took 9
years for it to garner enough support to be enacted into
law (originally proposed in 1777 the bill was not passed
until 1786). It was only after Patrick Henrys A Bill for
Establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian
Religion was proposed (while Jefferson was serving as
ambassador in Paris) that James Madison was able to stir
enough opposition to defeat Henrys bill, and since it had
come close to passing, to muster enough newly mobilized
support to pass Jeffersons original Bill for Religious
Freedom.
Separation of Church and State S 997
Key in his efforts to defeat Henrys bill to establish state
support of religion was Madisons Memorial and
Remonstrance (1785). The document makes clear how
the separation of church and state was understood by the
principle author of the First Amendment. In it, Madison
argues vigorously against Henrys proposed bill,
maintaining that it follows from freedom of conscience
that it is the unalienable right to exercise religious
convictions as reason dictates. Furthermore, Madison
contends that the very idea of religious establishment
runs counter to Christian doctrine, which above all
maintains that Christian spirituality is independent of
the powers of this world. Importantly, Madison also
argued that if the state were granted the power to support
Christianity generally, it would be an easy matter for the
state to extend its power to support some particular sect of
Christianity to the exclusion of others, as the English
practice. Madison thus argues that Henrys bill is a direct
threat to religious freedom. In closing, Madison reminds
his audience that justice requires that minorities be
protected from the oppressive whims of majority belief.
Madisons writing echoes and reasserts arguments similar
to those made in Jeffersons bill, and smoothed the way for
the eventual passage of that bill.
Jeffersons Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom is
a crucial, foundational piece of political philosophy, which
exerted considerable influence on the creation of
Madisons first amendment and consequent arguments
in Memorial and Remonstrance. The Bill ranks as one
of only three accomplishments, from a lifetime of
distinguished political achievement, which Jefferson
himself thought worthy of mention on his tombstone
(the other accomplishments being the writing of
the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, and
the founding of the University of Virginia, which was
established in 1819). Jefferson, who was a definitive
enlightenment thinker in his own right, was a careful S
student of Lockean philosophy and enlightenment
thought as a whole. Indeed, Jefferson considered (as stated
in a 1789 letter to the British philosopher Richard Price)
John Locke, along with Sir Francis Bacon and Sir Isaac
Newton, as one of the three greatest men to ever live, with
no exceptions. It is thus to be expected that Jeffersons
document on religious freedom would echo and elaborate
arguments originally put forward in Lockes Letter on
Religious Toleration.
Jefferson argues that it is outside the natural jurisdic-
tion of magistrates to exert coercive influence over
religious opinion. Elaborating on Lockes view that state
religious orthodoxy may hinder actual salvation, Jefferson
suggests that religious orthodoxy over the majority of the
998 S Separation of Church and State

earth has led human beings to hold false religious senti- Religious Freedom Act, which was signed into law by
ments, as a result of the mistaken beliefs held by imperfect President Bill Clinton. The act makes it a point of United
legislators. Jefferson, as later echoed by Madison, argues States foreign policy to advocate for religious freedoms
that it is wrong for the state to compel financial support of around the globe. The policy is principally enforced
religious creeds regardless as to whether or not they are through sanctions placed on countries sustaining religious
otherwise endorsed. Jefferson argues further that political oppression. Supporters of the policy argue that it
rights have no more bases in religion than does the find- strengthens United Nations declarations defending reli-
ings of science. Subsequently Jefferson argues against any gious freedoms. Such declarations include Article 18 of
religious test for holding public office, an ideal afterward The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human
reflected in Article 6 of the Constitution. Furthermore, Rights (UDHR). The UDHR declares freedom of thought,
Jefferson argues any such requirement would only serve to conscience, and religion to be unequivocal human rights.
encourage hypocrisy, thus corrupting both religion and The UDHR was adopted by the United Nations General
citizens alike. Jefferson therefore argues that all citizens Assembly on December 10, 1948. Additionally, the United
must be given free and unmolested reign to state and argue Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political
their religious opinions. As does Locke, Jefferson Rights (ICCPR), which was adopted by the United
maintains that the best guard against error is to allow Nations General Assembly on March 23, 1976, requires
free, open, and reasoned argument and debate on all signing nations to recognize freedom of religion, as well as
matters of conscience. What is perhaps most interesting other civil and political rights.
about Jefferson regarding the topic of religious freedom is
not where he agrees with Locke, but in the clear points Related Topics
of departure from Lockean philosophy on the Basic Rights
topic. Jefferson reserves no exceptions for religious Cairo Declaration of Human Rights
tolerance, whether Catholic, atheist, or other. Civil Rights
In Jeffersons Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), we Cosmopolitanism
are given a clear view of his philosophical departures from Crimes Against Humanity
Lockes more limited understanding of tolerance; and Crimes Against Peace
indeed the position Jefferson clarifies in Notes on the Democracy, Constitutional
State of Virginia sheds light on the ideas informing the Democratic Equality
foundational documents of the Unites States. Jefferson Democratic Legitimacy
clearly departs from Locke by emphasizing that there Difference Principle
should be no exceptions to religious tolerance, whether Equality
religious beliefs are monotheistic, polytheistic, or Global Democracy
atheistic. Jefferson maintains that any efforts to suppress Human Rights
freedom of conscience only result in harms. In a further International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
departure from Locke, Jefferson suggests that a citizens International Covenant on Economic, Social, and
failure to uphold an oath rests on the breakdown of their Cultural Rights
own integrity, which is irrelevant to religious belief or Jefferson, Thomas
disbelief. Around the globe, wherever religious toleration Justice and Religion: Buddhism
is politically framed, Jeffersons ideas have found Justice and Religion: Christianity
expression. Justice and Religion: Confucianism
Justice and Religion: Daoism
Global Religious Toleration and Justice and Religion: Hinduism
International Rights Justice and Religion: Islam
Religious liberty remains an important issue in terms of Justice and Religion: Judaism
global justice. Religious intolerance and state-sanctioned Law of Peoples
religious oppression prevent political stability, while Legal Rights
inspiring acts of violence. Consequently, a number of Liberal Democracy
nations encourage religious toleration as a matter of polit- Liberal Pluralism
ical practice. The United States was the first modern Liberalism
nation to completely disestablish religion. On October Libertarianism
27, 1998, the United States passed the International Liberties

Locke, John
Mill, John Stuart
Natural Rights
Nussbaum, Martha C.
Pluralism
Political Liberalism
Positive Rights
Rawls, John
Toleration/Tolerance, Liberal Principle of
Treaty of Westphalia
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
References
Church F (ed) (2004) The separation of church and state: writings on
a fundamental freedom by Americas founders. Beacon Press, Boston
Davis JC (ed) (2008) On religious liberty: selections from the work of
Roger Williams. Belknap Press, Cambridge
Jefferson T (1999) Jefferson: political writings, eds. Appleby J, Ball T.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Jefferson T, Madison J et al (2010) Declaration of independence,
constitution of the United States of America, bill of rights and
constitutional amendments. CreateSpace
Locke J (1689a) A letter concerning toleration. Prometheus Books,
New York
Locke J (1689b) Two treatises of government. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge
Madison J (1999) James Madison: writings 17721836, 2nd edn. Library
of America
Mill JS (1989) J.S. Mill: on liberty and other writings, ed. Collini S.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Nussbaum M (2010) Liberty of conscience. In defense of Americas
tradition of religious equality. Basic Books, New York
Rawls J (1993) Political liberalism. Columbia University Press, New York
Shiva, Vandana
SALLY J. SCHOLZ
Department of Philosophy, Villanova University,
Villanova, PA, USA
Vandana Shiva (born 1952) is an internationally renowned
environmentalist and feminist activist as well as an influ-
ential leader in the anti-globalization movement. Based in
India, Shiva holds a PhD in physics but left academics in
order to establish the Research Foundation for Science,
Technology and Ecology, a public interest research orga-
nization, as a counterweight to the dominant research
institutes which she perceived as serving only the power-
ful. She furthered her commitment to cooperative,
Shiva, Vandana S 999
anti-corporate ecological research and practice by
establishing Navdanya International, an organization
that protects the rights of farmers, strives to ensure biodi-
versity, and promotes organic farming methods. Shiva
also initiated the Living Democracy Movement and is
a leader in the International Forum on Globalization.
Shivas work interweaves a number of themes perti-
nent to global justice. Among other things, on the theo-
retical level, her analysis of globalization incorporates an
analysis of Western conceptions of development; on the
practical level, she demonstrates the short- and long-term
damage of agribusiness on food production. She shows
how globalization has negatively impacted gender justice,
turning nature and women into passive fields for sowing
in the masculinization of agriculture. Shiva also argues
that recovering indigenous knowledge from the control
of corporate and legal mechanisms that aim to restrict
access to it is instrumental for a sustainable, democratic,
just ecological future.
Anti-Globalization Movement
Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Shivas
1997 book, is frequently considered one of the touchstone
pieces in the anti-globalization movement but her critique
of globalization permeates all of her writings. Shiva notes
that the dominant measure of development according to
globalization relies on the rather limited understanding of
economic development. In the globalized marketplace,
development becomes what Shiva calls a corporate
hijacking. Economic development focuses on economic
growth and capital accumulation. Nature, natural pro-
cesses, and social interactions that are not part of the
market are rendered invisible by such an understanding.
Using the production of wheat in India as an example, she
shows how the concept of development is skewed toward
the corporations of the global North that import technol-
ogy and packaging to create artificial standards of value. S
Such standards are antithetical to the fresh, local produce
and the cooperative production processes used for centu-
ries. This economic, market-based conception of develop-
ment has deleterious effects on human beings, especially
women, and human society. In addition, nature becomes
a resource no longer life self-regenerating but raw
ingredients waiting to be transformed by industry.
Globalization imports Western concepts of individu-
alism, ownership, and the marketplace into cultures that
thrived on community, cooperation, and respect for
nature. It further degrades these cultures by calling them
backward and in need of development, and then it permits
corporations to plunder local resources, removing capital
from local hands.
1000 S Shiva, Vandana
In addition to criticizing the globalization of corporate
capitalism based in the global North, Shivas participation
in the anti-globalization movement also targets the
outsourcing of pollution. Again turning to India, she
notes the effects of steel production in India. Land tradi-
tionally farmed by peasants is snatched up for factories
and the eventual manufacturing of cars. Shiva further
integrates the conditions of the workers as she draws
attention to the ecological destruction of globalization.
The Commons and Critique of
Agribusiness
Shiva draws heavily on the notion of the commons in her
work. A commons is something owned and shared collec-
tively by the community. In particular, the commons are
the collective economic assets of the poor (2005: 40).
Shiva applies the concept not only to land but also to
knowledge. The commons implies cooperation and
interdependence while its opposite, private property,
implies isolation and individualism (usually for the pur-
poses of maximizing ones own profit). The movement to
enclose land in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
destroyed the commons and serves as an important turn-
ing point in human history because it changed the human
relationship with nature according to Shiva. Nature no
longer bestowed its gifts on humans but instead emerges
as terra nullius (empty land, belonging to no one) awaiting
human industry to transform it into something valuable;
it becomes, in short, raw materials. Moreover, the poor
lose a valuable resource while the wealthy create systems
that maximize their ability to accumulate more wealth.
A modern form of enclosure of the commons may be
seen in agribusiness. International corporations, usually
based in the global North, privatize not only land but also
seeds, and methods of agricultural production. These cor-
porations turn natural processes into chemical processes.
They tamper with the genetic makeup of seeds to create
patented varieties touted as more efficient or more pest-
resistant, but that also require massive amounts of fertil-
izer, which they also sell.
Shiva coined the term biopiracy to highlight the theft
of naturally occurring biological processes or materials
from indigenous sources by corporations or countries
through patents. When a scientist in the United States
obtains a legal patent on a seed or plant, they steal from
the indigenous knowledge for profit. Often, patents on
living things, like seeds, are seen by advocates of globali-
zation as positive signs of development, rescuing the
global South from so-called backward practices where
seeds were saved and regenerated naturally. Shiva shows
how biopiracy destroys biodiversity, exploits indigenous
knowledge with no compensation, and harms farmers as
well as women.
Shiva defends not only seed sharing and natural seed
generations but also knowledge as a commons, something
shared openly and freely. Patents and other practices of
corporate control privatize knowledge and turn it into
property for the commercial gain for a limited few. Indig-
enous knowledge, that is, is stolen, commodified, and
made the exclusive purview of patent holders. As she
explains, when seed corporations rob local communities
local women of the knowledge of seeds that has passed
from generation to generation, they replace the rich diver-
sity of plant life with monoculture. Shiva argues that this
monoculture is a masculinization of agriculture it
adversely affects women and children most severely
because most farmers are women and girls (Shiva 2009:
1820), but it also robs women of social status as knowledge
bearers. Moreover, patents on seeds criminalize the tradi-
tional and natural processes of seed-saving and sharing.
Finally, the World Trade Organization (WTO),
according to Shiva, is guilty of suicidal and genocidal
economic policies that force small farmers to cease oper-
ation while global agribusinesses take over. WTO policies,
heavily supported by the United States, grant global
corporations control by deregulating international trade,
thereby liberalizing exports and imports and providing
market openings that in turn drive local producers out
of business. Shiva argues that globalization is the ultimate
enclosure of the commons. It encloses not only land, water,
and living organisms but also our minds and imaginations.
The promise of globalization a more connected, peaceful
world belies the reality of a more factionalized, domi-
nated, and war-filled world. The local connections that were
once considered valuable are understood as undeveloped or
backward according to globalization.
Feminism and Gender Justice
Feminism and gender justice are inseparable from ecology
in Shivas life and work. As she describes, she got her start
in the ecological movement through the Chipko move-
ment in the Himalayas. By hugging trees, women kept
them from being cut down; Chipko explicitly embraced
the principles of satyagraha, nonviolent resistance made
famous through Gandhis advocacy during the struggles
for Indian liberation.
Shivas commitment to feminism appears in her anal-
ysis of sexist imagery used in science and nature, which,
she adds, often take the guise of rape and torture. Francis
Bacon (15611626) is one of her most cited examples of
a thinker who employs sexist domination in scientific
inquiry. As Shiva explains, controlled manipulation,
 Shue, Henry S 1001

repeatable experiments, and testing hypotheses are Much of the now canonical literature on global justice
presented by Bacon using sexist metaphors. Additionally, comes from academics in the United States and Europe
the masculinization of agriculture, the association of commenting on the global South. Vandana Shiva is
women and nature with passivity, and the privatization a powerful voice challenging the privileged knowledge
of knowledge that assumes indigenous knowledge as back- claims, provincial approaches, and biased framing of
ward are all examples of Shivas incisive feminist criticism issues in global justice that fail to hear, understand, or
of globalization. value input from the global South.
Feminism, however, is not confined to critique. Shiva
also contributes significantly to shaping feminist theory in Related Topics
the wake of globalization. Most notably, her articulation of Bioprospecting and Biopiracy
a living democracy presents ten theses that make explicit Ecofeminism
appeal to feminist ideas of care, life-nourishment, and Environmental Sustainability
community. Feminist Ethics
Globalization
Living Democracy/Earth Democracy Human Rights
The organizations and movements Shiva has founded, her Indigenous Peoples
extensive writings, and her activist commitments assert Population Politics
that nature is intrinsically valuable, that food and water Solidarity
are human rights, that natural food models are the key to Sustainable Development
maintaining these rights as well as the right to a just and
References
decent job, and that women are central knowledge bearers.
Shiva V (1988) Staying alive: women, ecology and development. Zed
Local democratic control of seeds, food production, and Books, London
biodiversity, more generally, re-inscribes indigenous Shiva V (1991) The violence of the green revolution. Third World
knowledge with its proper value and helps to defend Network, Penang
communities of the global South from corporate control Shiva V (1993) Monocultures of the mind. Zed Books, London
Shiva V (1997) Biopiracy: the plunder of nature and knowledge. South
and exploitation.
End Press, Boston
Living Democracy, a movement to bring about the Shiva V (2000) Stolen harvest: the hijacking of the global food supply.
transformation to a sustainable, interconnected existence, South End Press, Boston
embraces subsidiarity in which people make the decisions Shiva V (2001) Protect or plunder? Understanding intellectual property
about all those things that affect them (e.g., their food rights. Zed Books, London
Shiva V (2002) Water wars: privatization, pollution, and profit. South End
production, livelihood, water, health, etc.). Earth democ-
Press, Cambridge, MA
racy builds on a living democracy and unites humans with Shiva V (2005) Earth democracy: justice, sustainability, and peace. South
all living things. As Shiva presents it, it is based on the End Press, Cambridge, MA
following ten principles (2005: 911): Shiva V (2009) Women and the gendered politics of food. Philos Topics
37(2):1732
All species, peoples, and cultures have intrinsic
worth S
The earth community is a democracy of all life
Diversity in nature and culture must be defended
All beings have a natural right to sustenance
Shue, Henry
Earth Democracy is based on living economies and
ROBERT PAUL CHURCHILL
economic democracy
Department of Philosophy, Columbian College of Arts &
Living economies are built on local economies
Sciences, George Washington University, Washington,
Earth Democracy is a living democracy
DC, USA
Earth Democracy is based on living cultures
Living cultures are life nourishing
Earth Democracy globalizes peace, care, and
The American philosopher Henry Shue is widely regarded
compassion
as among the most influential philosophers working at the
Shivas vision with Earth Democracy is to unite intersections of philosophy, human rights, international
a number of diverse movements for sustainability, peace, relations, and public policy. Shues landmark book Basic
and social justice in solidarity. Rights is often mentioned with Charles Beitzs Political
1002 S Shue, Henry
Theory and International Relations (Beitz 1999) and John
Rawls The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999) as among the
seminal works in forming the field of studies known as
international political theory. Shues central argument in
Basic Rights was not intended to be a defense of human
rights so much as an argument for subsistence rights and
a criticism of foreign policy. Nevertheless, Basic Rights
together with James Nickels Making Sense of Human
Rights are the most frequently cited works on human
rights apart perhaps from the UN Universal Declaration
on Human Rights and John Lockes Second Treatise of
Government. In addition to rights, Shue has authored
highly influential and accessible works on torture as well
as global warming and environmental ethics.
Basic Rights and Subsistence
Shues major contributions in Basic Rights are four. First,
by arguing for an important distinction between a small
set of human rights that are basic and other less funda-
mental human rights, Shue moved the debate beyond the
seemingly unproductive debates over which rights
belonged on the list of genuinely human rights, that is,
whether some set of human rights was too inconclusive or
exclusive. Second, drawing on this distinction between
basic and other rights, Shue argues persuasively that
some subsistence tights are every bit as basic as security
or liberty rights. Third, Shue offers a persuasive argument
against a distinction that was widely accepted at the time
between so-called negative and positive rights. Shues
fourth major contribution in Basic Rights was to offer
a clear and sensible analysis of the structure of obligations
correlative to human rights. This analysis made it possible
to appreciate the complexities in the relationships between
rights-holders and those who have correlative obligations.
In Basic Rights, Shue advances a conception of a right
that has three key components: (1) a right affords its
possessor with the rational basis for a justified demand,
(2) the justified demand is for the actual enjoyment of
some substance or object of the right, and (3) the justified
demand is for some social guarantee against standard
threats. What Shue calls basic rights are rights that must
be protected in order for persons to be able to enjoy any
other rights at all. In other words, unless persons are
assured the enjoyment of their basic rights against stan-
dard threats, then they will not be able to enjoy any other
rights. There are, Shue argues, just three rights that have
this status as basic: the right to subsistence, the right to
security, and the right to liberty.
Basic rights are basic in two ways. First, the three basic
rights are necessary for the enjoyment of nonbasic rights.
For instance, one cannot be guaranteed in enjoying a right
to vote without subsistence, liberty, and security, or be
guaranteed enjoyment of religious expression without
freedom and security. Second, each of the basic rights is
a necessary prerequisite for the other two in the triad. For
example, subsistence is as basic for freedom and security as
security is for freedom and subsistence. While the rela-
tionship among rights and between rights and correlative
obligations is a logical relationship, the presence or
absence of standard threats or deprivations is a contingent,
or empirical, matter. However, given what we know about
the necessities for a minimally decent human existence
and the sorts of standard threats that can make
a minimally decent life impossible, basic rights are practi-
cal necessities for the enjoyment of other rights. Basic
rights therefore must receive priority in protection.
In Basic Rights, Shue does not analyze the concepts of
subsistence, security, and liberty in detail, nor argue for
what subsistence entails beyond a minimal notion of what
is necessary for persons to sustain themselves. In addition,
he does not wish to detract attention from the central
arguments of the book the standing of subsistence as
basic along with security and liberty and his criticism of
US foreign policy for violating subsistence rights as
a consequence of pursuing military and Cold War policies.
The success of Shues argument for subsistence rights thus
depends on his challenge to the traditional distinction
between positive and negative rights and his insightful
analysis of the correlative obligations generated by rights.
Ending the Positive and Negative
Distinction
Traditionally, the distinction between negative rights and
positive rights had been maintained by skeptics of positive
rights. The distinction was allegedly based on the moral
claims that rights entail on others, namely, whether these
obligations were primarily omissions (forbearance and
noninterference) in the case of negative rights or positive
actions (giving or providing) in the case of positive rights.
It is an accepted logical feature of rights that they impose
correlative obligations on at least some other persons.
Some critics of the UN Declaration of Human Rights
and the International Covenant on Economic, Social,
and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) found it implausible to
entertain the notion that persons have positive rights
including subsistence rights. By contrast, these critics
had far less difficulty accepting the civil and political
liberties set forth in the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights (ICCPR) because the latter are nega-
tive rights.
If one does indeed possess a right, then it must follow
that there is at least one other person who has a correlative

obligation vis-a-vis the rights-holder. Thus it seemed
compelling to critics that where countries or others lack
the capacity to provide goods and services needed for
subsistence, there could be no such rights. This criticism
of positive rights seems to benefit from the intuition that
ought implies can, and certainly, any government unable
to provide for its citizens subsistence needs, despite its
good faith efforts, deserves sympathy and assistance rather
than censure. On closer inspection, the critics position
rests on a fallacy, however. Obviously, if one does not have
a right, then no corresponding correlative obligation is
imposed on another. It is a simple fallacy to affirm the
consequent by supposing that if you cannot specify exactly
who has the correlative obligation then persons claiming
an entitlement do not have a right after all. Thus the
skeptic confuses the logical relationship between rights
and correlative obligations with empirical and hence
wholly contingent descriptions of present respect or
disrespect for rights and their relative protection. The
critic cannot logically claim that governments or others
are in principle incapable of assuming these obligations,
that is, that it is logically impossible for governments
ever to fulfill these obligations or for others (in wealthy
countries, for example) to fulfill them for the poor and
hungry.
The weakness of the skeptics criticism of subsistence
rights raises the suspicion that the criticism is a cover,
then, for more deeply held theoretical commitments that
are generally anti-cosmopolitan and antiliberal or biases
about basic obligations being limited to co-nationals
within ones own nation. It is an interesting feature of
Shues strategy in Basic Rights to forego engaging skeptics
on deeper underlying commitments in favor of appealing
to the incoherency of insisting on a distinction between
negative and positive rights given the empirical evidence.
Thus Shue calls attention to the underappreciated
complexities of recognized correlative obligations. Shue
points out that security rights are far more positive than
they are often thought to be. That is, depending on
circumstances, it is necessary for government to make
considerable provision of goods, including institutions
such as courts, prisons, and even extensive militaries, to
ensure that citizens enjoy security rights. In addition, Shue
argues that often the most important element in
protecting so-called positive rights such as subsistence is
to fulfill obligations not to interfere, and not to harm. For
example, in a compelling thought experiment, Shue
describes the implementation of a government plan to
raise export revenue by switching its agrarian economy
from one based on the small-scale production of food
stuffs for domestic consumption to one based on
Shue, Henry S 1003
a monoculture flowers for export. The economy is
devastated when the global demand for flowers decreases
due to recession and the countrys peasants suffer severely.
Correlative Obligations and Foreign
Policy
It follows from Shues demonstration of the relative irrel-
evance of the positive rights/negative rights distinction
that there is no neat way to parse types of rights with
types of obligations. Thus Shues fourth major accom-
plishment in Basic Rights was to argue that all basic rights
need to be understood as implying a tripartite division of
duties, or obligations. Shue argues that we assess the
effects of US foreign policy on the subsistence efforts of
persons abroad in terms of three kinds of correlative
obligations as follows: duties to avoid depriving, duties
to protect from deprivation, and duties to aid the
deprived. The relationships may be complex depending
on the circumstances but, in general, duties not to deprive
are the most rigorous, and to the extent that one does not
deprive others, that is, a multinational corporation or
state does not engage in practices or policies that result
in deprivation of people in a country or region such as
Nigeria or Southern Sudan, then the less stringent are
ones duties, other things being equal, to provide aid.
By requiring that we think more carefully and
discriminatively about the complex connections between
policies, their consequences, and persons enjoyments of
rights, Shue advances a helpful way persons could come to
think about their duties to distant others. Shues approach
contrasts in important ways with the utilitarian argument
made by Peter Singer in his widely read essay Famine,
Affluence, and Morality (Singer 1972). Quite apart from
the question whether human rights or utilitarianism
afford the best justification for duties to aid, Singers
approach requires that we regard national membership
as morally irrelevant. Moreover, Singers utilitarian focus S
is on the redistribution of goods that have marginal utility
for the individual, leading to aid in kind food for those
hungry, antiviral drugs for those suffering from HIV/
AIDS, and so forth. By contrast, Shues approach is both
more nuanced and flexible. Rather than each person trans-
ferring income directly to the hungry, better results might
be attained if some persons become more politically active
in their own countries and work to end foreign policies
that deprive others of subsistence or exploitative practices
by corporations, or by working to gain passage of foreign
aid that will increase a countrys capacity to raise its
productivity, or by dedicating a few years of ones life to
servicing in community development through the Peace
Corps or an NGO.
1004 S Shue, Henry
Shue on Torture and Environmental
Ethics
While Shue makes a powerful case for subsistence rights,
he is equally concerned with security rights. In 1978, Shue
wrote a now classic paper on torture. Shue presents
a strong case for an almost absolute prohibition of torture.
What is most innovative, however, is Shues methodolog-
ical objection to basing ethical decisions on improbabil-
ities such as those posed by the notorious ticking bomb
scenario (TBS). Shue reminds us of the principle in juris-
prudence that hard cases make bad law and urges us to
accept the analogous principle that relying on artificial
and concocted hypothetical cases leads to unsound ethical
decisions. We ought not to draw conclusions about the
permissibility of torture and base policies on those deci-
sions by relying on far-fetched scenarios such as the TBS
which depend on the convergence of extremely improba-
ble circumstances.
While in the 1978 paper Shue allows torture might be
permissible if there was a case exactly like the TBS, in
revisiting the issue in 2006 Shue unequivocally proclaims
that cases exactly like the TBS are impossible because the
key conditions defining the TBS require that it be an
exceptional emergency measure and not an institutional-
ized practice, and that torture be used only as a last resort
by a conscientious, reluctant interrogator (Shue 2006).
This is impossible, Shue believes, because a government
that countenances torture, even as a last resort, must plan
for the procedure and prepare skilled torturers. As noted
by David Luban (2009) who agrees with Shue, a torturer is
not an improviser but an apparatchik in a torture bureau-
cracy. A TBS without a torture bureaucracy is impossible.
Shue was among the pioneering philosophers to dis-
cuss the international dimensions of environmental deg-
radation. In Exporting Hazards (1981), Shue argues
against exporting hazardous wastes or the production of
poisonous effluents as a violation of our duty not to harm.
In addition, since the early 1990s, Shue has written a series
of insightful papers about climate change, including per-
suasive arguments relating to international policy. In par-
ticular, Shue has argued that developing countries are
entitled to make subsistence emissions that require
affluent and industrialized countries to make radical cuts
in their emissions of greenhouse gas. Shue has also offered
ethical evaluation of some of the treaty agreements on
climate change, objecting in particular to the clean devel-
opment mechanism in the Kyoto Protocol.
With rare exception, Shue has been consistent in
presenting arguments on climate change and the environ-
ment that are logically independent of the position he took
in Basic Rights. For the most part, Shue believes that
ethical policies in these areas are to be based on consider-
ations of fairness and justice, as well as notions of
a guaranteed minimum owed to each person. However,
in their edited collection on Shues philosophy, Beitz and
Goodin (2009) call attention to two possible ways of
linking Shues arguments for basic rights and the necessity
of environmental sustainability, by considering the threats
climate change and environmental disasters pose for secu-
rity, or alternatively, by conceiving of a right to a livable
environment as itself a basic right. These are consider-
ations pursued further by Simon Caney (2009).
Shues Influence
Henry Shue certainly must be counted among the ethicists
and public philosophers most responsible for having
made the discourse of human rights the primary norma-
tive theory for the assessment of international politics.
According to Charles Beitz and Robert Goodin (2009),
Shues Basic Rights was primarily responsible for shaping
human rights as a coherent subject in political philosophy.
They likewise claim that positions regarded as heretical
when the book was published now come close to philo-
sophical orthodoxy. Thomas Pogge (2009) reports that
Shues work is read and discussed widely among NGO
activists and officials in foreign aid and development pro-
grams. In addition, Shues arguments have had a profound
impact in shaping the language of rights in subsequent UN
documents such as rights to adequate food and health.
Shue is often credited with a decisive role in breaking the
logjam blocking broader acceptance of economic and
social rights. Thus, despite his initial parsimonious inter-
pretation of subsistence rights, Shue is cited as a major
inspiration for 1997 UN Conferences Vienna Declaration
about the unity and inseparability of universal human
rights.
While both Shue and Peter Singer were pioneers in
demonstrating that the relation of the affluent to the poor
had to be conceived in terms of moral obligation rather
than charity, human rights has been far more frequently
cited as the basis for such duties than utilitarianism or
other ethical theories. Another rough measure of Shues
influence can be seen in the tendency of major theorists to
analyze problems of global justice, including distributive
justice, more frequently in terms of human rights norms,
rather than in terms of principles based on a global orig-
inal position, such as a global difference principle. Finally,
Shue has continually exemplified the role of the public
philosopher, beginning early as a professional when he and
his colleagues at the Center for Philosophy and Public
policy at the University of Maryland organized Congres-
sional hearings and summer institutes on public policy for
 Singer, Peter S 1005

college teachers, through his timely interventions in for- Shue H (2001) Climate. In: Jamison D (ed) Companion to environmental
ethics. Blackwell, Oxford, pp 449459
eign policy debates, including the ongoing controversies
Shue H (2004) A legacy of danger: the Kyoto protocol and future gener-
over climate change and, especially after the post-9/11 ations. In: Horton K, Patapan H (eds) Globalization and equality.
concern over security, the revival of debate over torture. Routledge, Malden, pp 164178
Shue H (2006) Torture in dreamland: disposing of the ticking bomb. Case
West Reserv J Int Law 37:231239
Related Topics Singer P (1972, 1985) Famine, affluence, and morality. In: Beitz CR et al
Basic Rights (eds) International ethics. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Beitz, Charles
Caney, Simon
Climate Change
Development Assistance Singer, Peter
Duties to the Distant Needy
Duties, Positive and Negative LAWRENCE TORCELLO
Environmental Sustainability Department of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of
Food Technology, Rochester, NY, USA
Foreign Policy
Global Difference Principle
Global Poverty The work of Peter Singer spans the entirety of
Global Warming major applied ethics topics. It is no coincidence that
Human Rights the development of Singers career runs parallel to
Human Security the development and growing prominence of the
Negative Rights aforementioned discipline. Singers work both helped to
Nickel, James define the range of concerns in applied ethics, as well as to
Pogge, Thomas elevate the standard of intellectual rigor in the field. Singer
Rawls, John has made major and lasting contributions on issues of
Rights bioethics, environmental ethics, and global poverty. Part
Singer, Peter of Singers effectiveness as a philosopher, as well as his
Subsistence Rights influence outside of the academy, rests on the fact that his
Torture most powerful arguments require only that one accept
Vienna Declaration on Human Rights a seemingly innocuous set of premises, most of which
his readers are likely to hold implicitly (e.g., suffering
References and death from lack of proper nutrition and medical
Beitz CR (1999) Political theory and international relations. Princeton
care is bad; if one can prevent something bad from
University Press, Princeton happening without compromising something of similar
Beitz CR, Goodin RE (2009) Introduction: basic rights and beyond. In: moral significance, then one ought to do so). Following
Beitz CR, Goodin RE (eds) Global basic rights. Oxford University from these established premises, Singer then leads his S
Press, New York, pp 124
readers through their logical and practical implications,
Caney S (2009) Human rights, responsibilities, and climate change. In:
Beitz CR, Goodin RE (eds) Global human rights. Oxford University
to a conclusion he hopes will impact their behavior. All of
Press, New York, pp 227247 Singers principal insights are consistently grounded in
Luban D (2009) Unthinking the ticking bomb. In: Beitz CR, Goodin RE (eds) utilitarian considerations.
Global human rights. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 181206
Nickel JW (1987) Making sense of human rights. University of California
Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles
Universality and Preference
Pogge T (2009) Shue on rights and duties. In: Beitz CR, Goodin RE (eds)
Utilitarianism
Global human rights. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 113130 The form of utilitarianism that Singer adopts, following his
Rawls J (1999) The law of peoples. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Oxford mentor R. M. Hare, is preference utilitarianism. In
Shue H (1978) Torture. Philos Public Aff 7:124143 Practical Ethics (1979; 3rd edition, 2011), Singer argues
Shue H (1980, 1996) Basic rights: subsistence, affluence and US foreign
that thinking ethically implies endeavoring to take
policy. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Shue H (1981) Exporting hazards. Ethics 91:579606
a universal stance. In so doing, one accepts that ones
Shue H (1993) Subsistence emissions and luxury emissions. Law Policy interests count for no more than anyone elses; thus, in
15(1):3953 thinking ethically, one implicitly takes into consideration
1006 S Singer, Peter
the interests of others. Likewise, when considering alter-
native courses of action, such ethical thinking leads one to
favor those which, all things being equal, tend to satisfy the
greatest number of interests among ethically relevant
beings (i.e., those capable of having interests). Therefore,
on Singers account, the universalizing nature of ethical
thinking implies a baseline form of utilitarianism. It is this
initial and minimalistic form of utilitarianism that Singer
associates with preference satisfactions. Preference utili-
tarianism, as opposed to classical utilitarianism, does not
assume that any one prefatory interest (e.g., hedonic plea-
sure satisfaction) can be consistently universalized.
Instead, the preference utilitarian judges that, given due
diligence, our actions ought to be consistent with the
various, maximal preference satisfactions of ethically
relevant beings. Put negatively, this means that insofar
as our actions unjustifiably thwart otherwise benign pref-
erences held by others with moral interests, our actions
are wrong. Singer applies this approach unswervingly in
his writings on applied ethical issues, with profound
implications for global justice.
Equal Consideration of Interests and the
Welfare of Nonhuman Animals
In order to have an interest, Singer argues, one must have
a capacity to feel pain and to suffer. Objects without the
capacity to suffer, say a slab of tofu or a shoe, have no
interests. The fact that something has an interest in not
suffering is enough to give it ethical relevance, consistent
with the preference utilitarian model discussed above.
A sentient being, if taken to mean a being with the capacity
to feel pain, or more broadly to feel pain and pleasure, has
interests, and therefore is an ethically relevant being. This
standard applies to nonhuman animals with a capacity to
feel pain and to suffer. Accordingly, equal consideration of
interests must extend to nonhuman animals and human
beings alike. To many critics, this proposition is inherently
problematic, as it is taken to belittle the ethical significance
of human beings. Such a response is a misreading of
Singers thought, for this approach does not imply any
degradation of human interests, but an elevation of
nonhuman interests, as is consistent with the insight that
having the ability to suffer is ethically significant. Singer
argues that if one is to maintain that human suffering is
inherently of greater ethical significance than nonhuman
suffering, simply because it is human suffering, then one is
guilty of speciesism. In Animal Liberation (1975; reprinted
with a new preface, 2009), his central work on animal
welfare, Singer uses the term speciesism to convey
a bigotry parallel in logical form to racism. Singer argues
that the sentient status of nonhuman animals demands
that most of us reconsider the nature of our interaction
with animals and our dietary habits. Given an abundance
of other nutritionally wholesome options, our gustatory
pleasure in eating meat does not outweigh the great
suffering that most nonhuman animals experience as
they are raised and slaughtered for consumption. Singer
is acutely critical of modern factory farming techniques,
which keep animals in densely populated confinement
areas and squalid conditions. Singer has been less critical
about more humane forms of animal husbandry and
slaughter. Still, he advocates vegetarianism or veganism
as the easiest method of avoiding unethically produced
animal products.
Concerning animal experimentation, Singer opposes
experiments that cannot be shown to have tangible
benefits which outweigh the suffering of the animals
used in experimentation. Indeed, in cases of human and
animal experimentation alike, the amount of suffering
should be weighed against relative gains for sentient
beings as a whole. As a utilitarian, Singer does not argue
for the traditional sense of rights, nevertheless Animal
Liberation is widely credited with prompting the modern
animal rights movement, and thus promoting global jus-
tice concerns that expand beyond confinement to the
human sphere.
The Embryo, the Fetus, and the Infant
The term human can be used to identify any member of
the species Homo sapiens, and the term person is com-
monly used in the same sense. Singer, following a trend
among philosophers that dates to John Locke, uses per-
son exclusively to identify a self-aware, future-oriented
rational being. This means that human beings need not be
persons, and that a person need not be a human being.
Singer accepts the view that persons, by virtue of their self-
awareness, complex social relationships, and future plans,
have a potential to suffer greater psychological stress than
nonhuman animals or human beings lacking personhood.
The implications of this view are clearly demonstrated
when he addresses the topic of abortion. An embryo
without a fully developed central nervous system and
associated ability to feel pain is without interests, and
therefore, no morally significant harm is done in aborting
an embryo, nor is there harm done in destroying embryos
in the process of stem-cell research or other forms of
embryonic research. To the degree that a fetus may feel
pain (a matter which remains uncertain), fetuses have
interests like those of nonhuman animals; however,
their interests do not outweigh the interest of the mother
with personhood. Therefore, Singer has a completely
permissive view on abortion and birth control. Singer

argues that no sharp distinction can be drawn between
the fetus and the newborn infant. Prior to the develop-
ment of personhood, a newborn infant has ethical inter-
ests similar to those of nonhuman animals lacking
personhood.
End of Life Issues
Consistent with the dictates of preference utilitarianism,
Singer holds a permissive view regarding physician-
assisted suicide. Because of the consequentialist nature of
preference utilitarianism, there is no reason to draw
a moral distinction between the identical result achieved
when a patient is helped to die, and when a patient is
allowed to die in the absence of life-sustaining treatment.
If a terminally ill person holds an accurately informed and
reasoned understanding of his or her medical prognosis,
and based on such an understanding wishes to be helped
to die, it is wrong not to provide such assistance. This
conclusion is made all the more obvious when passively
allowing a patient to die prolongs suffering. In Practical
Ethics (1979), Singer argues that in cases involving
a patient born or rendered incapable of having interests
(or in the latter case, having communicated previously
held preferences), nonvoluntary euthanasia is a permissi-
ble means of ending suffering. Controversially, but not
alone among philosophers, Singer recognizes that this
view includes terminally ill and disabled infants, and
others who have profound disabilities rendering them
intellectually equivalent to an infant. Such a view is con-
sistent with Singers general views on euthanasia and
abortion. The age of the patient in these cases is less
important than the patients suffering coupled with the
patients lack of personhood, although if the patient was
once a person, his or her prior wishes are relevant. It is
worth noting that Singers views on this issue have
garnered condemnation, especially from religious conser-
vatives. Singer is also criticized by those on the political
left, in particular among a subset of disabled activists who
mistakenly take Singer to be arguing against the value of
their lives. To the contrary, Singers position derives from
his egalitarian views regarding suffering, and is consistent
with his considerations regarding other nonhuman
animals (including the human fetus), which lack person-
hood. Such critics oppose Singer on the alleged grounds of
social justice, but their expressed position is too often
undermined by a blatant, if not deliberate, disregard for
his actual writings. Unfortunately, and not without rele-
vance to free speech as an issue of global justice, Singers
more militant critics achieved a measure of success in
1989, when several academic venues in Germany were
intimidated into canceling his speaking engagements.
Singer, Peter S 1007
Contrary to the claims of the aforementioned antagonists,
Singer does not condone the killing of persons who wish
to continue living.
The Great Ape Project
In 1993, The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity
was published. The book, which Singer coedited with
Paola Cavalieri, brings together a diverse collection of
essays promoting the extension of human rights to all
nonhuman Great Apes (Chimpanzees, Gorillas, and
Orangutans). The work contains a declaration calling for
protections that extend, but are not limited to, a right to
life, liberty, and freedom from torture. As a result of
the ideas contained in the book, the Great Ape Project
(GAP) was founded in 1994, as an international campaign
to extend human rights to our closest evolutionary
relatives. The extension of human rights to great apes is
consistent with Singers concern for animal suffering in
general, and with the distinction he advocates between
being a member of the human species on one hand, and
the possession of personhood on the other. Great
apes demonstrate self-awareness, a capacity for symbolic
language, and rich emotional lives. It is apparent that
nonhuman great apes have, or in varying degrees exceed,
the intellectual capabilities of young human children or
severely intellectually disabled adults. To extend basic
human rights to one group and not the other, it is argued,
can only be the outcome of unjustified speciesism.
Ethics and Sociobiology
In The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (1983;
reprinted with a new Afterword, 2011), Singer explores
the evolutionary foundations of ethics and speculates on
the role reason plays in the development of altruism. The
evolutionary advantage in recognizing kin relationships
and engaging in ethical reciprocity is obvious; acting
altruistically toward those outside of ones tribe or kin S
group is more difficult to reconcile. Singer argues that
altruism remains part of human behavior because it is
rooted in the development of higher reasoning, which is
of evident advantage. Singer argues that if one recognizes
the need to evoke the neutral ethical standards necessary
for peaceful existence among ones kin and community,
then it is a matter of logical extension to recognize relevant
similarities among others outside of ones communal cir-
cle. Thus, Singers support of the Great Ape Project and
preference utilitarianism is itself consistent with his
understanding of how ethics evolved. This is not to
imply that Singer attempts to derive an ought from an
is. Staking a claim as to how altruism arises is distinct
from making value claims about altruism itself, or
1008 S Singer, Peter
normative claims about how impartial approaches to
ethics should be developed and implemented. Neverthe-
less, any normative approach to ethics must conform to
the realities of evolutionary aptitudes if it is to have any
real bearing on behavior. Singer develops this theme fur-
ther in A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooper-
ation (2000). In that work, Singer argues that leftist values
can best be served by taking a realistic and scientifically
grounded view of human nature as rooted in our
evolutionary past.
Global Poverty
In 1972, Singers article Famine, Affluence, Morality
appeared in the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs.
The article was written in part as a response to a hunger
crisis in India created by refugees fleeing what is currently
Bangladesh. In the article, Singer posits a now famous
thought experiment involving a drowning child. He asks
the reader to imagine coming across a child drowning in
a small pond. Under the circumstances it is easy to wade in
and rescue the child but in doing so you must sacrifice
a pair of new shoes and ruin your suit. Given that most
readers recognize a duty to save the childs life regardless of
their clothing, Singer draws out the logical implication
that not acting to save a child who is dying of poverty is
similar to not acting to save a child who is drowning in
front of you. Singer supports this conclusion on the pre-
mises that there is no morally relevant distinction between
someone who is suffering nearby and someone who is
suffering on the other side of the world, insofar as we are
equally able to help them without sacrificing something of
moral equivalence. Singer defends the distinction between
relative and absolute poverty, arguing that those who are
well off in affluent nations ought to do far more to help
those suffering in absolute poverty elsewhere in the world.
Singer argues that in the modern world, it is as easy to
donate money to those suffering more at great distances as
it is to donate to those suffering less nearby. This, and the
fact that many charitable NGOs are able to make effective
use of donations received, removes two common objec-
tions to donating financial support to end global poverty.
Singer does not downplay the need for governments of
affluent nations to provide more aid against global pov-
erty, but emphasizes the responsibility of each individual
to act on his or her own. Singers thoughts on the topic are
further developed in a 1999 New York Times piece titled
The Singer Solution to Poverty and the 2002 One World:
Ethics and Globalization. Singer advocates giving as much
as one can without placing oneself in an equally bad
circumstance. He encourages giving luxury income away
after the cost of necessities. Yet Singer is cognizant that
a moral argument advocating such high standards of
altruism runs counter to what may be expected of most
people, given human psychology. For that reason, Singer
suggests that reasonably well off members of affluent
nations give 5% of their income to reduce global poverty,
while very rich members of such nations should give
more. This compromise is an acknowledgment that
sometimes a moral ought exceeds what can be expected
given what is the present case. Singer addresses numer-
ous objections to his position and refines his view further
in the 2009 book The Life You Can Save.
Globalization and Ethics
The responsibility affluent members of the globe have
to those in absolute poverty is, as aforementioned, taken
up in One World. As well, the book addresses global
climate change and legal, economic, and political issues
surrounding globalization. Singer presents each issue in its
most ethical terms. Regarding climate change, the fact is
that affluent nations of the world are most responsible per
capita for carbon emissions. This fact underscores
a further sense in which affluent nations have ethical
responsibility to those in less affluent societies; the poorest
of the world are the least responsible for, yet the most
vulnerable to, the impacts of climate change. One World
also argues for more internationally minded approaches
to law, the economy, and politics in general. Singer
advocates strengthening the global authority of the United
Nations, and he argues for an international criminal court
system. Singer maintains that the realities of globalization
demand an ethical point of view that takes into account
the entire global community. Once again, Singers case for
ethical approaches to globalization is consistent with his
other writings in its utilitarian concern for equal consid-
eration of interests.
Related Topics
Absolute Poverty
Animal Rights
Climate Change
Foreign Aid
Global Poverty
Global Warming
Globalization
International Criminal Court (ICC)
International Humanitarian Assistance
Killing and Letting Die
Oxfam International
Poverty
Preference-Satisfaction
Relative Poverty

Utilitarianism
Vegetarianism
World Bank (WB)
References
Jamieson D (ed) (1999) Singer and his critics. Blackwell, Oxford
Schaler J (ed) (2009) Peter Singer under fire: the moral iconoclast faces his
critics. Open Court Publishers, Chicago
Singer P (1975) Animal liberation. Random House, New York, reprinted
with a new preface, 2009
Singer P (1979) Practical ethics, 3rd edn. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 3rd edition, 2011
Singer P (1983) The expanding circle. Farrar Straus and Giroux,
New York, reprinted with a new Afterword, 2011
Singer P (2000) Darwinian left. Yale University Press, New Haven
Singer P (2002) One world: the ethics of globalization. Yale University
Press, New Haven
Singer P (2009) The life you can save: acting now to end world poverty.
Random House, New York
Singer P, Kuhse H (1985) Should the baby live? The problem of
handicapped infants. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Singer P, Mason J (2006) The way we eat: why our food choices matter.
Rodale, New York
Singularity
WAYNE B. HANEWICZ1, CHRIS WEIGEL2
1 may be one of the technological vehicles leading to
Department of Humanities/Philosophy, Utah Valley
University, Orem, UT, USA
2 more central to visions of life extension.
Department of Philosophy, Utah Valley University,
Orem, UT, USA
The Singularity: Basic Principles
How many generations have hoped for the end of disease
and disability, freedom from physical and mental suffer-
ing, the ability to learn any skill or the deepest and most
complex conceptual ideas, and the promise of such a life
for as long as one chooses? The Singularity might make
this vision a reality within three to four decades or sooner,
at least in the eyes of Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Cory
Doctorow, Justin Rattner, Victor Vinge, and a host of
artificial intelligence experts, neuroscientists, and their
scientific colleagues.
The term Singularity is most commonly used in
physics where it refers to the collapse of space-time at
the center of a black hole. At that point the normal rules
of physics break down, and it is impossible to predict the
behavior of a physical system within the boundaries of the
Singularity. In terms of technology and society, the Sin-
gularity refers to a point in the future where the impact of
Singularity S 1009
technologically driven changes will accelerate beyond
which we cannot predict the social, legal, economic, or
human consequences. Once passed, pre-Singularity
humans will be unable to effectively communicate with
post-Singularity humans. For some, the Singularity will be
the transition point from humanity to transhumanism.
The Singularity cannot be captured by any one idea,
rather, it centers on several interconnected visions and
technologies. The Singularity is characterized by (1) expo-
nential convergence, complexity, and unpredictability,
and (2) Super-Intelligent Machines.
Exponential Convergence and Singular
Complexity
Although the Singularity and transhuman intelligence
could be achieved with simple or minimal constant pro-
gress, nevertheless, a dominant characteristic of the Sin-
gularity is the exponential rate of machine evolution
resulting from the convergence of separate technologies.
Radical life extension: Life extension could be the result
of mind transfer or mind-uploading through neu-
roscience technology, cloning, stem cell technology, or
cryogenics. Life Extension is more a result, rather than
the driving meaning, of the Singularity.
Mind-uploading: As noted above, mind-uploading and
the Singularity are related but distinct. The former
both the Singularity and/or Transhumanism, but it is
Biomedical Technology: We directly increase our intel-
ligence and other human characteristics by improving
the human organism and the neurological correlates of
mind and consciousness, often with pharmacological
cognitive enhancers.
The Internet: Humanity combines information net-
works, computer processors, and global connectivity S
to create the meta- or super-brain. A variation is called
the Digital Gaia scenario.
Artificial Intelligence: This is most often assumed to be
the central technology for the Singularity. Sometimes
called intelligence enhancement, this requires excep-
tionally powerful processors, more advanced software,
and sophisticated human-to-computer interface.
Exponential convergence is characteristic of most technol-
ogy development from the Human Genome project to
weather prediction, and will continue to drive the self-
accelerating character of the Singularity. Exponential con-
vergence has led experts to project that we will reach the
Singularity no later than the first half of the twenty-first
century. Kurzweils crude comparison between the
1010 S Singularity
processing power of neurons in human brains and the
processing powers of transistors in computers will reach
a point at which computer intelligence will exceed human
intelligence. He predicts the crossover to Singularity by
about 2040.
In his 1993 manifesto, The Coming Technological Sin-
gularity, Victor Vinge argues that exponential growth in
technology will reach a point where the organization of its
parts produces behavior of the whole that is unpredictable
from its parts. For example, altering genes can have pro-
found effects on cell development during embryonic
development, which can produce dramatic and
unpredictable changes in the developing body. This is the
dominant characteristic of complex systems.
If complexity characterizes the Singularity, many of
the consequences will not be predictable or even specifi-
able. The Singularity entails complexity for two reasons.
First, technological evolution is increasingly driven by
complex technologies, and by the synergistic convergence
of separate complex technologies, which will produce even
more complex technological systems. Second, the sheer
ubiquity of complex technologies produces an environ-
ment or technology culture that is characteristic of
a complex system, therefore requiring the evolution of
new operating principles. The technological environment
of the twenty-first century is surely such a complex system,
and it carries the same unpredictable consequences as any
other complex system.
The Super-Intelligent Machine
The convergence of technologies including neuroscience,
genetic engineering, programmable matter, materials sci-
ence, nanotechnology, microprocessors, and advanced
software is the foundation for the Super-Intelligent
machine, and the Super-Intelligent machine is
a necessary, though insufficient, element for the fruition
of the Singularity.
The Super-Intelligent machine will be more intelligent
and, in the views of some, more moral than human beings.
In a self-accelerating curve approaching infinity, Super-
Intelligent machines would design and build machines
even smarter than they are, and so on, eventually creating
an intelligence that would literally be unimaginable to
humans. Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind
can be solved soon after building a supercomputer that
can identify the brains 100,000,000,000,000 synapses and
their function. In place of electric current and logic gates,
MIT physicist Neil Gershenfeld suggests that we might buy
computing cells by the pound, coat them on a surface, and
run programs that assemble them like proteins to solve
problems.
Experts in the computer intelligence field expect that
humans will build a computer with the raw processing
power of a human brain by 2030 or sooner, and the
software necessary to match or exceed human intelligence
in another decade or so. If the curves regarding
technologys exponential acceleration are borne out, we
will have constructed the first self-reproducing Super-
Intelligent machine no later than 2050, or sooner
(Kurzweil, Vinge, Cochrane). At that point, in the words
of one futurist, it really should be game over
(Cochrane).
Questions, Concerns, and Global
Dimensions
The Singularity, sometimes referred to as Rapture of the
Nerds, is dazzling, even tempting. Will we be able to
control a Super-Intelligent machine? When the first
version reproduces the second version, the second version
may or may not find mere humans of value; human to
Super-Intelligent machine communication would be very
difficult at best and practically impossible at worst. In
other words, the first Super-Intelligent machine could be
that last such machine we will ever need to build.
Will the Super-Intelligent machine be morally sensi-
tive and competent? Michael Pritchard asks if it can, with
Socrates, live the examined life? In what sense can such
machines acquire ethics? Will we own it? Even with unlim-
ited access to relevant information, options, and conse-
quences, can programming capture this moral character?
Can it even ask these questions?
Like all major technology in the twenty-first century,
the Singularity is a global, not a national, phenomenon.
This global dimension makes the human issues more
complex and profound. Optimistically, a super-
intelligence may be able to track the complexities, manage,
and disable potentially dangerous technologies better than
humans. Consider Bostroms pithy example. If one could
develop both advanced nanotechnology and a super-
intelligent machine, in what sequence should they be
developed? If we develop the super-intelligence first, we
may avoid this risk from nanotechnology. If we develop
nanotechnology first, we will have to face both the risks
from nanotechnology and, if these risks are survived, the
risks from super-intelligence. The overall risk seems to be
minimized by implementing super-intelligence, with great
care, as soon as possible (Bostrom).
Reengineering the brain presents its own complex
global issues. If we are going to engineer super-intelligent
machines to be more moral than us, whose moral model
shall we use? Will traditional Chinese morality be consis-
tent with traditional Western morality? Will Theocratic

Muslim countries agree to the moral rules of Democratic
Christian countries or Socialist Humanist countries?
How will we negotiate this global dilemma?
South Korea, Japan, and several universities have
already begun work on codes of ethics for the development
of robots, both for the protection of humans and the
protection of robots. Professional groups have begun to
form around ethical issues, such as the IEEE Technical
Committee on Roboethics; other groups, such as the
European Robotics Network (Euron), have begun engag-
ing in ethics and legislative activities.
The social consequences and the personal moral issues
will affect all of us. If one country seeks to control or
even prohibit one or more technologies necessary for
the Singularity, another country will proceed on schedule.
If the Singularity is feasible, it will find a life on the
human landscape. Once a need is identified, the drive to
find new knowledge seems to be more of a human
trait than a social characteristic, and given the right
conditions, we will all reach into ourselves for this drive
to know.
In a world where we cannot seem to keep from
killing ourselves over issues far less complex than the
way human brains work, how in that same world can
we design a transhuman acceptable to all of us? This
raises the disturbing prospect of different kinds of
super humans simply hurting each other at a more
damaging level. Perhaps we might expend more energy
in solving these problems using the current version of
ourselves first!
Related Topics
Ethical Globalization Initiative (EGI)
Genetic Engineering
Slavery
Technology
Transhumanism
References
Kurzweil R (2006) The singularity is near: when humans transcend
biology. Penguin, New York
Pritchard M (2010) Comments on moral machines: teaching robots right
from wrong. In: Paper presented at Utah Valley University, Ethics and
Technology Conference
Shulman C (2010) Digital intelligences and the evolution of superorgan-
isms. In: Paper presented at James Martin Advanced Research Sem-
inar Series, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University
Vinge V (1993) The coming technological singularity. Acceleration Stud-
ies Foundation. http://accelerating.org/articles/comingtechsin-
gularity.html, 20 February 2010. (The original version of this article
was presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA
Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, 3031
March 1993)
Slavery S 1011
Slavery
CHRISTIEN VAN DEN ANKER
Department of Politics, Philosophy and International
Relations, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
Introduction
Slavery is the term used for situations where a person
controls another person and their actions, including the
products they create and their children. This may be for
work, sexual services, and/or other forms of exploitation.
Traditionally a master would legally own a person enslaved
by them; yet in contemporary forms of slavery, this may or
may not be the case. Likewise, slavery used to be associated
with work for no pay, yet in contemporary forms of slavery
there may be little pay, yet when freedom to leave the
situation is lacking, many still define the situation as
slavery. In historic forms of slavery there was often
a reason behind vulnerability to become enslaved, for
example, in the case of prisoners of war or the people in
territories that lost a war. However, there could also be an
inherited factor due to belonging to a minority tradition-
ally treated as slaves.
The struggle to end slavery succeeded in outlawing it
in 1807. Yet despite a growing number of international
and national laws prohibiting slavery since then, large
numbers of people are still affected by the legacies of the
Transatlantic Slave Trade. Racism, poverty, and social
exclusion show that the effects of this longstanding and
widespread instance of slavery are still ongoing. To many
peoples surprise, according to reputable sources, even
more people are caught up in contemporary forms of
slavery. Anti-Slavery International estimates conserva-
tively that this figure is around 12 million people. This
raises some pertinent questions for debates on global S
justice, for example, on the ethics of our global institutions
and practices. We need to discover what are the root causes
of current slavery and slavery-like practices and theorize
why, despite the outlawing of slavery, it is still occurring.
As global justice requires normative deliberation, we need
to bring empirical research together with abstract debates
on principles of justice and then develop a view on what
steps forward can and ought to be taken by the multiplic-
ity of actors that can affect social transformation to stop
those practices. And in the opposite direction, working
out an ethical position toward ending the legacy of slavery
as well as all forms of contemporary slavery provides us
with information toward what a just world would look
like. Here I develop an overview of current debates on
1012 S Slavery
slavery, contemporary slavery, and proposals for global
justice that would assist in ending slavery yet would
also have more general beneficial effects on global equality.
The Root Causes of Contemporary Forms
of Slavery
Current debate recognizes the worst forms of child labor,
bonded labor, trafficking in human beings, forced labor,
slavery based on descent, forced marriage, and the abuse of
migrant domestic workers as contemporary forms of slav-
ery. These practices have some common causes and some
contextual differences. The globalization of capitalism, as
a deliberate neoliberal project, has affected all forms of
contemporary slavery negatively. Impoverishment of seg-
ments of local populations creates vulnerability and
dependency which is a necessary component of enslave-
ment. Economic pressures on producers create demand
for extremely cheap labor, which in human terms means
the exploitation of people achieved through the use of
coercion, often in the form of force, violence, threats,
and deception. Worldwide there are companies that ben-
efit from the low salaries that undocumented migrants are
paid for their work, and they use their power to suppress
migrant workers rights.
Restrictive and complex migration laws leave migrant
workers in a position where the fear of deportation is often
exploited by abusive employers even if a migrant has the
right to work legally in the country of destination. Unfair
labor conditions are harder to walk away from if the
migrant worker is not aware of the legal options of chang-
ing employers. Temporary schemes to register migrant
workers can also provide an opportunity for employers
to withhold documents and force the worker to accept
exploitative conditions.
Gender inequality is another root cause of contempo-
rary slavery. Poverty and gender inequality together are
strong determinants of the propensity to migrate, the type
of migration, and the consequences of migration for
women. Domestic violence is one of the contributing
factors that make women vulnerable to trafficking and
slavery-like exploitation due to its psychological impact
on self-esteem. Lack of opportunities in employment
drives many women to look for work abroad. While
migration can be part of womens empowerment, it also
holds the risk of exploitation and violence. Moreover,
abuse during a migration trajectory is often gender
specific. In the country of destination, the division of
migrant workers over industries and types of work are
mostly gendered, too.
Discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity, and
of indigenous peoples also form a root cause for
contemporary forms of slavery. Due to vulnerability
both in countries of origin and in countries of destination,
people from minorities are overrepresented in the cate-
gory of enslaved persons. Stereotypes lead to forcing peo-
ple into specific types of employment. In domestic work,
women from some countries are seen as particularly good
with children and end up as nannies, whereas others are
seen as especially good at house work and end up as
cleaners. The issue of multiple discrimination or intersec-
tionality is increasingly on the agenda of the international
community.
Policy Responses and Global Justice
At present, the debate on policy responses to contempo-
rary forms of slavery has focused a lot on anti-trafficking
measures. This is regrettable for several reasons. Firstly,
governments tend to draw trafficking into the security
discourse, which leaves the bulk of the intervention in
the realm of measures that are anti-immigration and
restrict other civil liberties. These create additional space
for traffickers and exploitative employers through peoples
increased dependence on others (for transport and docu-
ments). Secondly, the central place of trafficking in the
debate on combating contemporary forms of slavery takes
away the attention for human-rights violations of people
who do not travel between countries. Thirdly, the traffick-
ing debate is narrowly focused on trafficking for prostitu-
tion, whereas trafficking for forced labor in other
industries requires urgent attention.
In contrast, NGOs call for victim-centered
approaches which identify victims of all contemporary
forms of slavery and address their human-rights abuses.
These human-rights-based approaches move beyond
the area of trafficking in human beings and address
the violations of personal integrity, as well as labor
rights in all contemporary forms of slavery, for exam-
ple, in the campaign to get more signatures and ratifi-
cations for the Migrant Workers Convention. However,
despite their obvious good effects, human-rights-based
approaches are limited to lobbying for new interna-
tional law and implementing existing international
law. Their focus is therefore on the obligations of states
to the citizens of their own countries with some atten-
tion being paid to legal residents. However, undocu-
mented residents are vulnerable to detention and
deportation without legal redress.
A third framework for policy responses to combat
contemporary forms of slavery calls for a cosmopolitan
approach that recognizes the need for long-term
prevention of trafficking. This could be a useful way of
addressing all forms of contemporary slavery. In addition

to victim centered human-rights-based approaches,
a cosmopolitan perspective addresses the common root
cause of global inequality and incorporates the agency
of potential victims. Moreover, a cosmopolitan approach
can generate duties beyond state boundaries and duties
that apply to noncitizens, too. These international duties
go some way toward resolving the standoff between
human-rights law and state sovereignty in cases of
noncompliance.
Some specific proposals that have been found of inter-
est to cosmopolitans against slavery are the framework of
development assistance, the Tobin Tax, Fair Trade, and
reparations for Slavery. Development assistance, if
established in ways that are of help in reducing poverty,
would assist in taking away some of the root causes of
slavery. The debate on development ethics would contrib-
ute to an ethical debate on the duties people owe to others
on reducing poverty and on combating slavery. The Tobin
tax would generate funds that could be used to support
investment rather than speculation; it would reduce
currency volatility and therefore be a preventative measure
for currency crises; it would give greater freedom to gov-
ernments over their monetary policy, and it would raise
revenue to fund addressing global health and environmen-
tal problems.
Fair Trade (despite starting with a relatively small
segment of trade) has contributed to a change in thinking
of trade as (from a producers perspective) always being
about making maximum profit and (from a consumers
perspective) always paying the cheapest price for a good.
Moral considerations for small producers and the notion
of a fair price have permutated economic decision making.
Fair Trade has contributed to combating slavery by creat-
ing income generation opportunities and guarantees for
regular income of small producers. These in turn led
directly to children being sent to school rather than forced
to work. By criticizing the structure of the world economy,
Fair Trade also contributes to the wider debate of creating
fair trading on a larger scale. Finally, reparations for the
Trans Atlantic slave trade would contribute to a fund that
could be used for poverty reduction. It would also
highlight the moral wrong of slavery and could create
educational opportunities for campaigners against con-
temporary forms of slavery.
All these measures form part of a cosmopolitan agenda
which would contribute to the long-term prevention of
contemporary forms of slavery. The stress in this approach
on the importance of duties beyond national boundaries
supports the human-rights discourse yet emphasizes
a cosmopolitan rather than a state-based interpretation
of the human-rights doctrine.
Slavery S 1013
Conclusion
In this entry, I highlighted some of the ethical issues raised
by contemporary forms of slavery. I argued that
a cosmopolitan approach to global justice would be pref-
erable than a state-centered human-rights approach, as
cosmopolitanism would include duties across boundaries
to assist in the protection of human rights worldwide and
proposals such as development assistance, Fair Trade, the
Tobin Tax, and Reparations for the Transatlantic Slave
trade would be beneficial to reducing poverty and there-
fore avoiding the vulnerability that leads to enslavement.
Cosmopolitan proposals for global taxation other than the
Tobin tax might be of use here, too.
Yet, reducing the numbers of people affected by con-
temporary forms of slavery does not have to wait until
a cosmopolitan version of a just world has been
implemented fully. Support for human rights, stressing
labor and migrant workers rights, and combating dis-
crimination on the grounds of ethnicity, belonging to
indigenous peoples and gender, are all necessary first
steps. While a lot of emphasis in the debate on contem-
porary slavery is focused on specific forms like trafficking
in human beings and specific policies, it is useful to hold
out that an overarching cosmopolitan perspective on
reducing global inequality is not only relevant to people
interested in designing utopias, but would have real ben-
efits for people who are suffering from all current forms of
slavery and exploitation.
Related Topics
Cosmopolitanism
Development Ethics
Exploitation
Fair Trade
Global Justice
Human Rights S
Poverty
Reparations
Tobin Tax
References
Bales K (2005) Understanding global slavery Berkeley. California Univer-
sity Press, Los Angeles and New York
Lee M (ed) (2007) Human trafficking. Willan, Cullompton
Quirk J (2006) The anti-slavery project: linking the historical and con-
temporary. Hum Rights Quart 28(3):565598
Sage J, Kasten L (2006) Enslaved: true stories of modern day slavery.
Palgrave Macmillan, New York/Basingstoke
van den Anker C (ed) (2004) The political economy of new slavery.
Palgrave, Basingstoke
van den Anker C, Doomernik J (2006) Trafficking and womens rights.
Palgrave, Basingstoke
1014 S Social Contract
Social Contract
SALLY J. SCHOLZ
Department of Philosophy, Villanova University,
Villanova, PA, USA
Social contract theory experienced its heyday from the
sixteenth to the eighteenth century, but it can be traced
back as far as Socrates and it continues to influence con-
temporary moral and political theory. In general, social
contract theory holds that society forms as a result of
a contract between individuals for their mutual benefit.
Although many different political theories fall under this
general umbrella concept, they share a number of features
in common.
Social contract theorists begin with the presumption
that the individual is the primary social unit and logically,
if not also historically, prior to community. Most
social contract theorists posit a real or hypothetical state
of nature in order to justify political power. The state of
nature is a prepolitical state wherein individuals pursue
their own good but must also provide their own protec-
tions. There is no law or other formal system of rule in the
state of nature although some contract theorists (John
Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) do hold that individ-
uals have natural rights and are bound by the rules of
either natural law or virtue. In contrast, Thomas Hobbes
famously held that there can be no morality, no justice, no
right or wrong until there is a political power established
through the contract. He also says that although there was
never a time when particular men were in a state of nature,
in all times the sovereign authorities of nations are in
a state of nature with each other. There being no global
government, Hobbes contends that each nation competes
with and distrusts its neighbor nations.
Society emerges when individuals judge that, for their
own protection and prosperity, it would be better to unite
with others than to remain isolated in the state of nature.
The social contract, then, is the contract that unites oth-
erwise isolated individuals into a society. It may be a single
historical contract that marks a movement from the prim-
itive state of nature to civil society or a continually
renewed contract that requires new members to make
a formal or tacit commitment to abide by its terms. Indi-
viduals exchange some of their liberties for the protection
and rule of law provided by civil society. A second contract
is sometimes posited to establish government. The social
contract may be with other individuals or between indi-
viduals and a sovereign. The sovereign may or may not be
subject to the terms of the contract. Standards of justice
that bind civil society together, then, are a result of
a collective agreement and cannot be presumed to exist
prior to the formation of society itself.
Once formed, civil society under the social contract
ought to ensure a greater ability to exercise ones liberty
(Locke) or enjoy equality (Rousseau) than one would have
had had one remained in the state of nature. The contract
also establishes obligations for individuals within the civil
society or state. Most of these obligations are in the form
of negative duties of noninterference in the lives and
liberties of other contracting parties, but some positive
duties (e.g., to pay taxes in support of the state) are also
mandated by the contract.
The key is that the political community is artificial and
by agreement rather than natural as in communitarian
political theory or rooted in familial relations as in patri-
archy. No particular system of rule is required by the social
contract theory; rather the contracting parties determine
the form and extent of government. Hence, contract the-
orists advocate everything from a very powerful absolute
sovereign who is technically outside the contract but
established by it (Hobbes) to more democratic regimes
wherein the sovereign might be a representative of
the people entrusted to uphold their rights and protect
their interests (Locke) or the sovereign power consists of
people themselves in their active status as lawmakers
(Rousseau).
Although there are serious anthropological questions
about the actual status of the state of nature and the initial
contract, social contract theory still plays an important
role in helping to evaluate or legitimate political policies
and practices. The justification of political power resides
in the consent of the governed. With its foundation in
individualism, social contract theory encourages the
examination of the role individuals play in the formation
of law and the rights and responsibilities of individuals
confronting an unjust law or regime. The rights of indi-
viduals, more than the good of the community, motivate
political decision making.
Social contract theory as a moral theory is rooted in
the political contract theory (especially Hobbesian con-
tract theory), but the two also may be considered sepa-
rately. As a moral theory, social contract theory provides
a justification for moral norms as principles adopted
through mutual agreement. Rational, self-interested
actors agree upon moral norms that each believes will
best serve her or his individual aims. Or, as
a justificatory schema, moral norms ought to be able to
be agreed upon by rational, self-interested individuals
regardless of whether an actual contract was made.

Social contract theory continues to be relevant today
as one approach to international relations and interna-
tional law. All of the classic social contract theorists held
that, in the absence of some international governing body
or mutually agreed upon and enforceable international
law, nations remain in a sort of state of nature with respect
to each other. International law, then, can be approached
as a contract to which the participant nations consent.
Notice, however, that this does not account for individuals
within those consenting states. For this reason, the social
contract theory is better suited for international justice
pertaining to the relations between nation-states, rather
than global justice that concerns the economic, social, and
human rights and the overall well-being of individuals. So
too, the interdependence of societies today challenges any
theory of justice primarily oriented toward the establish-
ment of justice principles within a single society.
In The Law of Peoples, twentieth-century contract the-
orist John Rawls famously articulates a framework for
international justice by extending his theory of justice to
peoples rather than individuals (1999). Rather than a state
of nature, Rawls employed the concept of a veil of igno-
rance in the original position which kept individuals from
knowing their place in society. Using this logical instru-
ment, Rawls argued that individuals would agree to cer-
tain principles of justice. By replacing individuals with
peoples, Rawls offers a theory of political liberalism that
emphasizes toleration; international justice, then, is capa-
ble of addressing the obligations between and among
sovereign liberal societies and nonliberal decent socie-
ties. Rawls also addresses what he calls outlaw societies,
societies that do not meet the standard of toleration which
is the principal value of the law of peoples.
Also of interest to discussions of international affairs
are such issues as immigration policy, refugee status, envi-
ronmental policy, laws of war, and international trade
rules. Social contract theory has been applied to articulate
some standards of justice for these issues. Locke, for
instance, argues that enjoyment of the lands of a state
serves as a tacit consent to obey the laws of that state
regardless of whether the enjoyment is temporary. Indi-
viduals who travel, then, might be bound both by the laws
of their home state and by the laws of the state to which
they travel. Similarly, Locke and Hobbes both account for
the laws of trade albeit only briefly.
The laws of war include specifications for when to go
to war and when to refrain from active aggression, how to
justly engage in war, and the conditions for a just peace.
Whereas Hobbes counts the right to wage war among the
rights of the absolute sovereign, Locke appeals to a just war
tradition to explain the right to wage a defensive war in
Social Contract S 1015
order to protect the people or state. Aggressors act
unjustly by putting themselves into a state of war and
hence cannot legitimately attain rights over the con-
quered. Invasion and conquest by a foreign force violates
the very purpose of the social contract protection of the
people and thus is seen as a dissolution of the society.
Within a just war, combatants are clearly defined as state
actors and may be killed only when acting in this role;
noncombatants are not the appropriate targets of war nor
is the property of combatants or noncombatants. Simi-
larly, a just peace may entail reparations from the
vanquished in a just war (the former aggressor) but the
rights of the defensive conqueror are limited.
However, applying social contract theory to issues of
international justice also reveals some of its limitations.
For instance, defending a third party does not readily fit
the social contract discussion of war. In addition, although
Rawls expressly refers to peoples rather than states,
classic social contract theory is designed according to
a states model; individuals are members of states and
wars are acts between states. However, global problems
such as terrorism cut across national boundaries and
involve non-state actors, thereby posing a challenge to
any theoretical justification for international law that is
centered on nation-states. Similarly, many recent geno-
cidal campaigns were within states; the social contracts
emphasis on national sovereignty fails to account for
appropriate intervention into nations.
When it comes to economic development, environ-
mental degradation, and health and social welfare, states
often pose a serious threat to the well-being of their
inhabitants. Global justice seeks to respond to these vul-
nerabilities irrespective of national boundaries. By taking
states or peoples as their central focus rather than individ-
uals, the social contract model of international justice and
Rawls law of peoples fail to address adequately the
resource redistribution that is so important for accounts S
of global justice. Cosmopolitans critique the social con-
tract approach to international justice as insufficiently
oriented toward the person. Charles Beitz and Thomas
Pogge attempt a remedy of this by extending the veil of
ignorance globally. In this way, they broaden Rawls posi-
tion to accommodate some of the issues of global justice
relating social and economic well-being with the political
power and liberty of individuals. Martha Nussbaum fur-
thers the contractarian position with her capabilities
approach that expressly attends to human rights of indi-
viduals in the assessment of moral obligations in response
to global injustice.
As is evident, whether in its political or moral form,
social contract theory assumes a rational individual
1016 S Socialism
capable of exercising autonomy. Most versions also
emphasize that this individual acts in a self-interested
fashion in agreeing on moral norms or principles of jus-
tice. Some criticisms of social contract theory focus on this
conception of human nature as untenable because indi-
viduals are interconnected with others in communal and
familial relations, because self-interest is too limiting
a concept to describe the political subject, or because the
political subject that results from such a conception of
human nature is itself limited to only certain individuals
within the political community (see, e.g., Nussbaums
criticism of social contract). Nevertheless, social contract
theory remains an important contributor to theoretical
discussions and practical implications of political legiti-
macy, international relations, and global justice.
Related Topics
Cosmopolitanism
Global Contractarian Justice
Grotius, Hugo
Hobbes, Thomas
International Law
Law of Peoples
Locke, John
Rawls, John
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
War, Just and Unjust
References
Hobbes T (1982) Leviathan (with an introduction by MacPherson CB).
Penguin Classics, New York
Locke J (1960) Two treatises of government (with an introduction by
Laslett P). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Nussbaum M (2007) Frontiers of justice: disability, nationality, species
membership. Belknap, Cambridge
Rawls J (1971) A theory of justice. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Rawls J (1999) The law of peoples. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Rousseau JJ (1997) The social contract and later political writings.
(trans: Gourevitch V (ed)), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Socialism
PAUL WARREN
Department of Philosophy, Florida International
University, Miami, FL, USA
Modern socialism develops in the wake of the
Enlightenment and French Revolution and in response
to the profound social transformations brought by the
scientific and industrial revolutions and the emergence
of capitalism in Western Europe. From inception to the
present day, socialism has taken different forms, reflecting
a diversity of philosophical, political, and national
outlooks. It can refer to a body of thought or a theory; a
scheme of production or social cooperation; a movement,
political party, or political tendency; or actually existing
institutional arrangements governing whole societies.
Important figures in the history of socialism include
Gracchus Babeuf (17601797), whose radical egalitarian-
ism during the French Revolution was a harbinger of later
socialist and communist views; Henri de Saint-Simon
(17601825), Charles Fourier (17721837), and Robert
Owen (17711858), the three great utopian socialists; the
English Chartists, one of the first large-scale working class
movements, which drew on socialist ideas; Auguste
Blanqui (18051881), who preached a brand of insurrec-
tionary socialism; Karl Marx (18181883) and Friedrich
Engels (18201895), whose scientific socialism accorded
a pivotal role to working class self-emancipation;
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (18091865) and Michael
Bakunin (18141876) who were anarchist socialists of
different stripes, but opposed to Marxs conception
of socialism and suspicious of state power; and Ferdinand
Lasalle (18251864) and Louis Blanc (18111882), who
believed that capitalism could be transformed through
workingman suffrage and other progressive reforms. Of
these socialisms, Marxist socialism became the most
politically salient, becoming the guiding ideology of the
Second International Working Mens Association
(18891914) and German Social Democracy, both of
which emerged as significant political forces in the latter
part of nineteenth and early twentieth century.
The Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin
(18701924) polemicized against Eduard Bernstein
(18501932) and Karl Kautsky (18541938), influential
socialists of the period, for pursuing reformist and
evolutionary strategies rather than revolutionary ones.
Embracing Marxs notion of the dictatorship of the
proletariat and general analysis of the Paris Commune
(the workers state established during the short-lived
insurrection of 1871), Lenin argued that it was necessary
for workers to first gain state power through revolutionary
means, but then to smash the existing institutions of
the capitalist state and replace them with alternative
institutions suitable for the transformation toward
communism. Lenin adopted a distinction Marx had
made between different phases of communism and
emphasized the importance of socialism as transitional
to communism, rather than an end in itself.
The subsequent success of the Bolshevik Revolution in

Russia and failure of revolutionary socialism in the rest of
Europe led to a split that was manifested in the opposition
between the Soviet Communism and the more reformist
social democratic parties of Europe. The latter form of
socialism made temporary peace with capitalism and
sought to achieve socialist goals through expanding public
provision in the areas of health, education, transportation,
and welfare. The Soviet model abolished markets and
private property, embraced state ownership of productive
assets, and sought to coordinate production through
central planning, administered by the state and controlled
by the Communist Party. Lenin and the Bolsheviks
established the Comintern or Third International (1919
1943), which excluded reformist tendencies, supported
Communist Parties throughout the world, but generally
subordinated the interests of those parties to Soviet Com-
munism. The schism between Communism and Social
Democracy and indeed other forms of Western Marxism
and socialism became more pronounced during the
Cold War period and repression of the Stalinist era.
Since the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union (19891991), skepticism about socialism
has grown. Moreover, the political emergence of neoliber-
alism an individualist ideology touting deregulation of
capitalism and increased privatization of human affairs
in the 1970s and 1980s with the elections of Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan further contributed to the
crisis of social democracy. Yet adoption of neoliberal pol-
icies has not proven a panacea. Contemporary capitalist
democracies are beset with crises of their own, and mar-
ket-driven forms of globalization have provoked resistance
and inspired an alternative globalization movement, as
protests at WTO meetings in Seattle and Genoa and the
flourishing of the World Social Forum attest. Moreover,
China with its own brand of state socialism combined with
elements of market and private property has become
a powerful world political actor. Socialism remains alive
in officially socialist nations (China, Cuba, Viet Nam,
North Korea) and in socialist and social democratic
parties and policies, but also as a theoretical, moral, and
historical resource for challenging existing capitalist
policies and institutional arrangements.
All socialists are united in criticizing capitalism and in
the belief that genuine socialist alternatives to capitalism
are feasible, achievable, and would be normatively supe-
rior to capitalism. Apart from such general agreement,
socialists disagree about exactly why capitalism is wrong,
which normative principles should guide the critique of
capitalism and support socialism, the nature of socialist
economic and political institutions, and the means by
which socialism is to be achieved. Marxs account of
Socialism S 1017
socialism has been the most influential in the socialist
debate over these matters. His account of socialism centers
on the thesis that the proletariat (or working class) is
destined to become the collective agent with both the
interest and capacity to bring about the transformation
of capitalism to socialism. Marx locates that thesis within
a broader theory of human history as the story of increas-
ing levels of productive development corresponding to
distinct modes of production (Asiatic, ancient, feudal,
and modern bourgeois) and broader social, cultural, and
political structures. He argues that even though capitalist
society ends the forms of exploitation distinctive of
ancient and feudal modes of production, exploitation
persists due to its distinctive class structure. The only
way to eliminate that exploitation is to eliminate its
cause, which is the separation of workers from the means
of production via private ownership of the means of
production. Thus, Marxian socialism calls for
a de-privatization of the means of production that
eliminates the economic basis of workers exploitation.
Despite the fact that capitalism produces a number of
harms (inequality, exploitation, unnecessary suffering,
insecurity, alienation, social polarization), Marx viewed
it as progressive in relation to previous modes of produc-
tion. Its historical mission was to advance the productive
forces to the point at which socialism would be materially
feasible and ultimately necessary in virtue of intensifying
internal contradictions. Marxs critique of capitalism and
advocacy of socialism was not based on the latters
moral superiority, but on the formers long-term
unsustainability. This sets his account apart from those
utopian socialists who offered many valuable criticisms of
capitalism, but failed to understand its inner workings or
correctly identify the agency by which it was to be ended
and socialism initiated. But a consequence is that Marxs
conception of socialism is undeveloped and under
theorized. This lack of attention to the details and moral S
foundations of socialism is not simply an oversight, but
rests on Marxs principled unwillingness to concoct
recipes for the cook-shops of the future and confidence
in the ability of the associated producers to successfully
organize their common affairs. Marx also believed that the
socialist revolution would first require the workers seizure
of state power and a corresponding rupture with institu-
tional forms and practices of the capitalist state. He spoke
of the political form of the socialist state as a dictatorship
of the proletariat, such power being exercised on behalf of
the proletariats interests, in conjunction with distinctive
socialist institutions and increasing levels of worker par-
ticipation, leading the state finally to wither away into
a genuine cooperative association. But given the history of
1018 S Socialism
the twentieth century socialist revolutions, the anarchist
Michael Bakunins skeptical warnings of the possibility
forms of socialist authoritarianism seem prescient.
Other aspects of Marxs account of socialism also seem
faulty today. Whatever successes in modernization and in
scientific advance were made by Soviet socialisms use of
central planning, it is generally acknowledged, even by
many socialists, that the Soviet experiment was a failure.
Some locate the problem with the low level of develop-
ment of the productive forces in Russia at the time of the
Bolshevik Revolution, arguing that the revolution was
premature from a Marxist perspective. Others believe
that central planning failed for reasons related to deficien-
cies in information and incentives features possessed by
decentralized markets. Yet others think that the problem
lay with Soviet socialisms bureaucratic class structure
with its own distinctive mechanisms of exploitation and
more generally with its statism and link these faults to its
lack of genuine democracy and concern with human
rights.
Despite these difficulties, most contemporary social-
ists do not take the Soviet experience as a refutation of
socialism, but rather to imply the importance of striving
for a form of socialism that is genuinely democratic,
respectful of human rights, and efficient. One robust
contemporary debate among socialists concerns the
possibility of market socialism: forms of socialism that
would combine public ownership of the means of produc-
tion with the use of markets. Various models of market
socialism have been proposed and debate has ensued
about whether such models are coherent and feasible,
whether they are desirable from a socialist perspective,
and how they are to be achieved. This debate has
also sparked interest among socialists in the related
matter of defending the importance of public goods
education, recreation, transportation, public safety, the
environment, and health care against neoliberal efforts
at privatization. A number of contemporary socialists also
think it is important to clarify socialisms underlying
normative basis, including its critique of capitalism and
own positive ideal. This has led to engagement with
philosophical reasoning concerning principles of equality,
freedom, and community their content, coherence,
justification, and institutional expression. Lastly, contem-
porary socialist theorists are concerned with issues related
to transformation: the means for attaining socialism,
whether those means should prefigure socialism
itself, and whether socialist strategies for change should
focus on society, state, or both.
Contemporary socialist theorists are aware of the
dangers of utopianism, and in particular of wishful
thinking. Yet, they insist that a realistic utopianism about
socialist possibilities is important in order to avoid
politically debilitating fatalism. It is to sustain this realistic
utopianism that the socialist theorists efforts at
institutional design, normative philosophy, and
transformational theorizing are oriented. Debates over
the nature of socialism, its desirability and feasibility,
are sure to continue into the foreseeable future. They are
rooted in broader philosophical and social theoretical
debates about human nature, social causality, the human
good, and the limits of social possibility. These debates
intersect with the issues and concerns of global justice on
a number of points. Global distributive justice would seem
to most directly implicate socialist theory. It is concerned
with the possibility of principles of distributive justice that
would apply globally, outside the confines of domestic
society, which is the subject of traditional theories of
distributive justice. It concerns the content of such global
principles, their justification, and feasibility. Moreover
such theories must necessarily address global institutions
and interactions and putative causes of global inequality,
since both are relevant to normative assessment and to
possible institutional reform or political action.
Here socialist theorists have the task of writing their own
account of global distributive justice. Details will vary, but
socialist philosophical attempts to address these issues will
be generally skeptical of any approach to global inequality
that focuses on charitable contributions, individual duties
of the affluent, or individualistic explanations of inequal-
ity, and leaves out capitalism as a crucial structural cause
of global inequality or omits socialism as part of the
solution. Some argue, following an orthodox Marxism,
that developing societies must go through a capitalist
stage before socialism becomes feasible. However,
socialist underdevelopment theorists have argued that
the impact of capitalism on developing societies can
itself be a source of underdevelopment and that those
societies should seek an alternative noncapitalist path to
modernization. But notwithstanding these, as well as
other differences in the socialist camp, socialist theories
of global distributive justice, unlike most liberal and
cosmopolitan theories, will not simply assume capitalism
as a given, but will make the choice between capitalism
and socialism part of the debate of the requirements of
global justice.
There are other issues of global justice such as
human rights to which the socialist critique of capitalism
and the positive socialist ideal do not seem directly
relevant. Basic human rights, such as freedom of
expression, freedom of conscience, the rule of law, free-
dom of assembly, and civil and political rights generally,

would not seem to bear directly on the capitalism versus
socialism issue. It could be argued with justification that
actually existing socialist regimes have been worse
offenders of human rights than capitalist democracies.
Socialism in the sense of public or state ownership of the
means of production is no guarantor of civil and political
rights and, it might be argued that to the extent that
socialism takes a statist form, it makes human rights
abuses more likely. On the other hand, socialists
(and even some liberals) argue that reducing material
equalities is a necessary precondition for achieving
real freedom for all and for the effective exercise of
political rights. Moreover, some human rights are
a matter of economic justice. The Universal Declaration
of Human Rights includes the rights to work, free choice
of employment, just and favorable remuneration, form
unions, limitations on working hours, and an adequate
standard of living. Such rights would form part of most
socialist political projects in a global context.
The slogan another world is possible expresses the
essential socialist thought that institutions that would
better meet the ideals of equality, community, and
freedom are feasible and that the transformations that
would bring them into being are politically possible.
The important work of specifying the details of this
socialist thought is ongoing and remains to be
accomplished. But the aspiration expressed by the slogan
is alive in the world today.
Related Topics
Alterglobalization
Capitalism
Equality
Global Distributive Justice
Globalization
Marxism
Neoliberalism
World Social Forum
References
Albert M (2003) Parecon: life after capitalism. Verso, London
Cohen GA (2009) Why not socialism? Princeton University Press,
Princeton
Engels F (1935) Socialism: utopian and scientific. International
Publishers, New York
Lenin VI (1932) State and revolution. International Publishers, New York
Marx K, Engels F (2002) The communist manifesto. Penguin Books,
London
Newman M (2005) Socialism: a very short introduction. Oxford
University Press, Oxford
Roemer J (1994) A future for socialism. Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA
Soft Power S 1019
Sassoon D (1996) One hundred years of socialism. The New Press,
New York
Schweickart D (2002) After capitalism. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Van Parijs P (1995) Real freedom for all. Oxford University Press,
New York
Wright A (1986) Socialisms: theories and practices. Oxford University
Press, Oxford
Wright EO (2006) Compass points. New Left Review 41:93124
Soft Power
RYOA CHUNG
Department of Philosophy, University of Montreal,
Montreal, QC, Canada
The concept of soft power was coined and developed by
Joseph S. Nye Jr., a prominent scholar in international
studies who co-founded the neoliberal approach with his
colleague Robert Keohane. Nye is also known as a political
adviser and was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Inter-
national Security Affairs in the Clinton administration,
among other appointments. The notion of soft power
was first introduced in Nyes book Bound to Lead: The
Changing Nature of American Power (1990). Although
this idea immediately spread through the academic com-
munity and political sphere, controversial foreign policies
adopted by the United States in the post-911 context have
fueled renewed interest for this concept. In the midst of
the Iraq War, Nye published his book Soft Power: The
Means to Success in World Politics (2004) in which the
notion of soft power is sharply contrasted with the Bush
administration usage of hard power, i.e., military might, in
the name of Iraqi Freedom and in the broader context of
the War on Terror. In this context, the notion of soft S
power was mostly used as an analytical tool in order to
criticize the inadequacies of US foreign policy. However,
shortly after the election of President Obama and Hilary
Clintons nomination as Secretary of State, the term soft
power gained widespread public attention in a more
positive sense, as a guiding principle to follow in order
to orient US foreign policy according to Nyes understand-
ing of smart politics. Although the theoretical develop-
ment of soft power and smart politics are closely tied to
the conduct of the United States in foreign affairs, neither
notion is exclusively tailored for a peculiar state.
Therefore, they can offer valuable conceptual insights to
help us better comprehend the notion of power in our
information age, characterized by novel features of global
1020 S Soft Power
governance without world government and by the rising
acknowledgment of transnational issues that cannot be
successfully handled by sheer force alone.
Soft Power
According to Nyes definition, power is the ability to
influence the behaviors of others to get the outcomes
one wants. Traditionally, power has been defined as
hard power, i.e., military and economic might. Under
this light, the exercise of power is understood as the ability
to coerce the behaviors of others using violence, threats,
and sanctions or to induce them by using payments
and manipulating material incentives. In other words,
hard power is defined as the ability to coerce and
command the behaviors of others using sticks and
carrots. The golden rules of foreign policy in earlier
periods of international relations have thus been under-
stood as the rules of war or, as Richard Cash (Harvard
School of Public Health) would put it: who gets the gold,
sets the rule.
However, in our contemporary world, characterized
by modern information technology, power resources are
not reducible to, and as fungible as, tanks, missiles, and
money. This is the most important lesson that a critical
analysis of world politics in the age of globalization
can yield: information is power too. In this regard, the
reputation of an actor (be it a state, a NGO, or a terrorist
organization) counts as a type of information input to
be judged positively or negatively by agents in their
decision-making process. In terms of power resources,
soft power comprises less quantifiable, less tangible
means such as culture, values, and policies. When culture
and values are seen as attractive, they appeal to others.
When policies are considered consistent with those values
and are regarded as legitimate, they exert moral authority.
In behavioral terms, soft power is the ability to affect
others to obtain preferred outcomes by co-option and
attraction rather than coercion or payment. From the
point of view of costbenefit analysis, ruling through soft
power will actually end up being less costly than imposing
ones hard command at the cost of exhausting expensive
military, financial, and human resources.
Although the notion of soft power is commonly used
by numerous authors (whether they expound the idea or
criticize it), it is important to keep in mind Nyes caution-
ary remark to the effect that soft power is an analytical
tool, not a political theory or a comprehensive doctrine
of the good. In this regard, to label soft power a type
of political influence designed to foster attraction and
co-option is not a normative judgment per se. It simply
describes a sort of power resting on intangible resources
such as a countrys attractive culture, political values, and
foreign policies. It does not say that this principle of
foreign policy is better, from a moral point of view, than
some other principle. However, the concept of soft power
captures something important about the correlation
between a countrys moral authority and reputation and
its political influence in the global sphere. Soft power as an
analytical tool is not inherently attached to a liberal theory
of international affairs and can thus be incorporated in
a constructivist, or even a realist, account of international
relations studies.
Although Nye complains about Kenneth Waltz neo-
realist understanding of power being limited to quantifi-
able material resources, Nye acknowledges that classical
realism rested on a broader conception of power, including
the power of ideas and public opinion. Only an obtuse and
limited perspective on power can still uphold this kind of
concrete fallacy. What is deeply flawed in this misguiding
view, according to Nye, is the notion that power can only
be measured with concrete resources (money and missiles)
and sought after in hegemonic ways. But this conservative
account of power qua hard power cannot fully explain the
conversion problem that we can observe in world poli-
tics, i.e., imperfect power conversion from resources into
outcomes. Should it be true, as historical evidence dem-
onstrates, that military and economic superpowers have
not always been able to sustain their dominion and influ-
ence over smaller and poorer enemies, it might be the case
that some other component of power is missing from the
picture. Following his three-dimensional chess game met-
aphor, Nye argues that, traditionally, international players
have tried to dominate the top chessboard with military
power resources in pursuit of unipolar reign. However, in
the past 2 decades, economic power resources have been
divided between different actors in an increasingly multi-
polar context. At the bottom chessboard level of transna-
tional relations that spill outside governmental control,
and in the context of global issues (such as pandemics,
climate change, regional security), we must take into
account a wide-ranging variety of international agents
(bankers, multinational corporations, transnational insti-
tutions, terrorists, NGOs) who will determine the distri-
bution of power resources in a more diffuse and dispersed
way. If players fail to see and understand the dynamics of
the underlying layers of power, they will inevitably lose the
game. If players understand the complexity of the param-
eters of our contemporary world, they are most likely to
seize soft power as the new card of the winning hand.
Although the notion of soft power as an analytical tool
does not offer a theory of power transition, it enables us to
better understand the means of power diffusion.

Smart Power
Soft power is not meant to replace hard power but to
complement it. The skillful and strategic combination of
both is what Nye calls smart power. The term first appears
in his writings in 2004 and, although it is not clear that
Nye is actually the first author to coin the expression, the
concept is considered a natural and coherent extension of
his previous work on soft power. In 2006, the Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) appointed Nye
and his colleague Richard L. Armitage as co-chairs of the
bipartisan Commission on Smart Power with the mandate
to reassess the guiding principles of US foreign policy and
to issue general policy recommendations. Although the
expression smart politics gained widespread media
attention because of Secretary of State Hillary Clintons
frequent reference to this term in order to describe her
vision of US foreign policy, CSIS explicitly mandated the
commissioners to publish their findings the year preced-
ing the 2008 presidential elections. The report entitled
A smarter, more secure America (2007) starts with the
premise that Americas image and influence were severely
damaged in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and
that the exclusive focus and reliance on hard power com-
mand in the post-911 context was distorting the tradi-
tional values of US foreign policy (peace, justice, and
prosperity). The theoretical perspective of the report
draws heavily on Nyes definitions of hard and soft
power but puts emphasis on their indispensable and stra-
tegic articulation. Hard power is a necessary but not
a sufficient condition for national security: in our global
information age, it is best to be both feared and loved. The
ability to attract people and to influence their behaviors
without coercion and payments rests on a countrys moral
leadership. Smart power is the ability to combine military
and economic might with greater investments in soft
power (which can also be fostered within civil society
and the private sector) that will take into account the
values, the preferences, and interests of others in the pur-
suit of ones own national interests. The report analyzes
five critical areas in which the United States should
develop smart principles of foreign policy: (1) alliances,
partnerships, and institutions; (2) global development;
(3) public diplomacy; (4) economic integration; and
(5) technology and innovation.
Global Good
The notion of smart power is tied to the idea of global
good. Nyes understanding of global good differs from the
classical definition of public goods in economics (non-
rivalrous and non-excludable goods). According to Nye,
a powerful state (with the help of its allies) can, and
Soft Power S 1021
should, stand as an agent for good in the sense of
providing things that people and governments in all
quarters of the world want but cannot attain in the
absence of strong leadership (Nye and Armitage 2007).
In this respect, Nyes understanding of global good con-
verges with the global public goods approach that has been
explored by researchers of the United Nations Develop-
ment Program (Kaul et al. 1999), who study the problems
of collective action, international cooperation, and insti-
tutional coordination in the context of the globalization of
common risks and responsibilities. The general principle
consists of affirming that negative and positive externali-
ties (external consequences of social phenomena or local
public politics) flow over national boundaries that are less
and less secure in the context of globalization. The idea of
convincing state actors to internalize the external costs
and benefits of transnational issues within their domestic
politics, by means of international agreements and insti-
tutions, vouches for interests of one by way of cooperation
for all. It might seem that this attempt to focus on instru-
mental rationality, in the hope of producing greater inter-
national cooperation regarding transnational issues, runs
the risk of disregarding issues that are geographically
located in parts of the world, that do not cause negative
spillovers which directly affect the interests of the most
powerful and affluent. Some critics of the global public
goods approach therefore argue that public health issues
such as tropical and orphan diseases that plague sub-
Saharan Africa, for instance, wont get the attention and
international assistance that are morally required if we
only focus on prudential incentives to do so (by contrast
with the SARS pandemic that shook the world between
November 2002 to July 2003 and strongly mobilized the
international community because our own national pub-
lic interests were clearly in stake). It can be argued,
however, that Nyes approach of smart power, while
being explicitly grounded on prudential considerations S
that are tied to enlightened national self-interests,
broadens the scope of issues that merit greater invest-
ments in global public health by broadening the scope
of what smart and prudent politics entail in the
domain of global development, for instance. While
investing in global public health will contribute to
Americas security at home by promoting stability
abroad, Nye also stresses that in the long run,
Americas commitment to global development rein-
forces basic values (peace, justice, and prosperity) that
will benefit Americas good reputation and worldwide
leadership. In other terms, smart power builds on the
hypothesis that good moral reputation translates into
stronger political capital.
1022 S Solidarity
The question remains as to whether a lone global
powers understanding of peace, justice, and prosperity
is really open to critical public scrutiny and global debate if
we are to avoid the perils of ideological imperialism or
Gramscis notion of cultural hegemony in a capitalist
world (although Nyes notions of soft and smart powers
are supposed to take into account the values, preferences,
and interests of others in ones own decision-making).
Keeping the critical debate in mind, Nyes readers will
nonetheless appreciate how his analyses of power and of
the resources of power seem to capture salient features
of world politics today.
Related Topics
Afghanistan and Iraq Wars
Compatriot Partiality Thesis
Constructivism
Foreign Policy
Global Governance
Global Public Goods
Global Public Health
Globalization
Liberal Internationalism
Political Authority
Political Liberalism
Terrorism
References
Kaul I, Grunberg I, Stern M (eds) (1999) Global public goods.
International cooperation in the 21st century, United Nations
Development Programme. Oxford University Press, New York
Nye JS (1990) Bound to lead: the changing nature of American power.
Basic Books, New York
Nye JS (2004) Soft power. The means to success in world politics. Public
Affairs, New York
Nye JS (2010) The future of soft power in US foreign policy. In: Parmar I,
Cox M (eds) Soft power and US foreign policy. Theoretical, historical
and contemporary perspectives. Routledge, New York
Nye JS, Armitage RL (2007) CSIS commission on smart power. A smarter,
more secure America. Center for Strategic and International Studies,
Washington, DC
Solidarity
SALLY J. SCHOLZ
Department of Philosophy, Villanova University,
Villanova, PA, USA
Solidarity is a form of unity that mediates between an
individual and community and entails positive duties;
different forms of solidarity differ a great deal in how
they motivate and manifest these relations. Solidarity has
both descriptive and prescriptive roots. Emile Durkheim
provides the most complete account of its descriptive
functions but even as a concept describing the cohesive-
ness of a community, solidarity has some moral content.
The ties that bind a community together inform moral
obligations among members.
As a prescriptive or normative category, solidarity is
a moral relation often classified as a positive form of
collective responsibility that establishes networks of
accountability between individuals joined in solidarity,
between members and the goals of solidaristic activity,
and between those so joined and the wider political com-
munity. Many diverse moral relations are grouped under
the broad category of solidarity. Global justice theories
often appeal to both descriptive and prescriptive forms
when employing the concept of solidarity to help articu-
late the requirements of global justice. Perhaps the most
prominent form of solidarity for global justice is the
solidarity of all humanity.
Global justice asks us to expand the reach of our
responsibilities across borders and around the global to
expand our understanding of society while we also
ensure the rights and liberties of individuals. Global justice
theories rooted in the social contract tradition, especially
as articulated by John Rawls, explicitly highlight the values
of autonomy and social cooperation. Autonomy under-
scores the rights of individuals and social cooperation
informs responsibilities toward other citizens in ones
state or members of ones society, or, in the case of global
justice, throughout the world. The social contract tradi-
tion tends to limit social cooperation by that which
accords with mutual advantage and thus often pits social
welfare obligations against individual rights as if the two
are conflicted or mutually exclusive.
While not all accounts of social cooperation may be
classed as solidarity, the two concepts belong to the same
family of concepts that explain the motivation and justi-
fication for altruistic action. Solidarity is a longtime Euro-
pean value, even serving as the title of one of the chapters
in the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Although less common in the North American context,
the concept of solidarity has gained prominence through
Liberation theology, Catholic Social Teaching, the Polish
workers movements called Solidarnosc (Solidarity), and
leftist movements for social justice.
At least three forms of solidarity are evident in discus-
sions of global justice. The first form is the solidarity of all
humans on the basis of their humanity. That is, the social
solidarity of all humanity is based on the descriptive
category human. The second is civic solidarity, the

form of solidarity that undergirds the obligations of soci-
ety to provide for basic welfare, health care, and consumer
protection. The third form of solidarity, political solidar-
ity, is the oppositional solidarity that emerges in struggles
for social justice. Both civic and political solidarity may be
conceived across nation-state borders for viable, practical
accounts of forms of social cooperation (1) between indi-
viduals within states, (2) between individuals across state
borders, and (3) between states.
Global justice theories rest on the empirical fact of
global interdependence. Interdependence is evident in
everything from technology and communication to envi-
ronmental and health hazards, and, of course, includes
economic interdependence. We are intricately tied to one
another across the globe through our media and con-
sumer choices, use of natural resources, medical advances
and set-backs, and so much more. The recognition of that
interdependence yields a greater appreciation for the
moral responsibility we have for others and share with
others. Solidarity is sometimes used as the descriptive
term to mark or measure the cohesiveness of a group
and in this case the group is all of humanity. The more
cohesive we are as a human family, the more solidarity we
have. Alternatively, solidarity may be understood as the
moral relation based on global interdependence. That
relation requires certain moral attitudes and duties. In
some accounts of global justice, an expansive human sol-
idarity includes validation of the dignity of all human
beings, mutual respect, protection, and perhaps
reciprocity.
The solidarity of all humanity, that is, that all humans
are bound together in a manner that requires mutual
responsibility for one another, also poses some problems
for global justice. Kurt Bayertz, one of the most prominent
scholars working on developing theories of solidarity,
argues that one problem with universal human solidarity
is that it is hindered by factors such as conflict, animosity,
and egoism (1999). In addition, there is the problem of
cultural conceptions of humanity. Women are still not
considered full moral persons or even fully human in
some traditions and children are often seen as little more
than property. Other examples of social practices that
stand in the way of human solidarity because they fail to
see someone as human include racism, ageism, and class-
ism. Human solidarity is a unity, but these practices are
premised on a logic of exclusion.
Additional barriers to human solidarity include cul-
turally bound conceptions of reason that impede the uni-
versal acceptance of some people from the human family.
Further, it is possible that such things as sympathy and
empathy, arguably required for human solidarity, cannot
Solidarity S 1023
be extended beyond the bounds of ones local community
or nation-state. Some critics of solidarity also argue that
the individualism central to liberalism is an ideological
barrier to human solidarity. As a form of human togeth-
erness that requires individuals to act on positive duties
toward one another, solidarity may simply be contrary to
liberal democracy.
Regardless of whether the solidarity of all humanity is
prescriptively desirable or normatively possible, there are
other forms of solidarity already employed in the theory
and practice of global justice. States often pose a serious
threat to the well-being of their inhabitants. Global justice
gives individuals who are treated unjustly within their
states or by their governments an additional recourse
outside of these states. Civic solidarity on the global level
is one of the values that inform regional and global orga-
nizations in their efforts to bring about global justice. One
of the key elements of organizations like the United
Nations or the European Union is that they accept their
moral responsibility to those in need.
Civic solidarity underscores the role and responsibility
of the international and multinational communities to
protect and provide for the most vulnerable among us. It
is based on the normative ideals of the welfare state but
transformed for global justice to address the obligations of
the international community through the mechanisms of
global institutions and organizations. The vulnerable and
powerful alike would be identified through national, geo-
graphic, regional, or political groupings. A civic solidarity
encompassing humanity looks to the structures and pol-
icies of an international body charged with protecting the
most vulnerable and destitute among humanity but uses
regional or national governmental structures and proce-
dures for doing so.
In the language of the Charter of the European Union,
multinational, supranational, and international agencies
that work to enforce human rights are engaged in civic S
solidarity which focuses on strengthening civic society and
ensuring the well-being of members of a community. Each
person forms a relation to the communal whole and the
communal whole carries the responsibility of protection
against vulnerabilities that would inhibit full civic partic-
ipation or full human flourishing. Social policy is used to
decrease individuals vulnerabilities and presumes that
when individuals lack the basic necessities, the community
as a whole suffers. The civic whole carries the bulk of the
responsibility but individuals are in a reciprocal relation
with the whole through their exercise of democratic par-
ticipation and other avenues to support which hold
accountable the agencies of civic solidarity. Individuals
participate in, endorse, or critique the actions of these
1024 S Solidarity
agencies, to hold them accountable when they fail to act or
act inappropriately. Individuals may also appeal to these
agencies when their own nations stand as barriers to their
own entitlements.
Insofar as states maintain a posture of dominance or
superiority, civic solidarity remains somewhat elusive.
Civic solidarity requires something like an attitude of
humility that accepts our global interdependence as
regions and nations while also submitting to the formal
mechanisms that both allow for state sovereignty and for
infringement of state sovereignty when circumstances call
for it.
A related concept is the civic virtue of solidarity. The
civic virtue of solidarity identifies the moral obligations of
individuals in a civic public. These might include such
things as exercising voting rights, paying appropriate
taxes, and respecting the rights and liberties of fellow
citizens. World citizenship, too, entails some civic virtue
of solidarity insofar as it includes some widely distributed
obligations.
Political solidarity is a unique form of solidarity that
emerges when individuals commit to a cause for social
justice. Each person may be motivated by any number of
factors including but not limited to a concern for justice,
personal benefit, indignation, empathy for others, advo-
cacy, or some combination of these. Individuals from
diverse social and geographical locations become united
by their shared commitment to a cause and, through
collective action, work to bring about social change. Polit-
ical solidarity is oppositional in nature; it is often associ-
ated with struggle, protest, and resistance efforts.
Since it is oppositional, political solidarity is not likely
to be universal; however, it might be possible to imagine
a quasi-universal political solidarity in response to pollu-
tion, environmental degradation, global warming, or
other human-in-origin threats that endanger all human
beings. Nevertheless, as with the solidarity of all humanity,
universal political solidarity will likely remain a normative
ideal rather than an actualized phenomenon.
Nonuniversal global political solidarities are manifes-
tations of political solidarity that unite people across
national boundaries in struggles against social injustice.
Rather than a common feature, shared humanity, or basis
of human dignity, global or international political solidar-
ities link various nations, cultures, individuals, states, etc.,
insofar as a those nations, cultures, individuals, or states
share a response to suffering, plight, or injustice.
Global or international political solidarity can be con-
ceived in three different ways. First is an international
political solidarity that is an individuals commitment to
the cause that spans national borders. For instance, an
individual who is dedicated to promoting fair trade and
the rights of workers, holds that dedicated position
regardless of borders. Another way to conceive interna-
tional political solidarity is through individual commit-
ment to combat oppression, injustice, or vulnerability that
is itself located at a distance. Through protests, boycotts,
lifestyle changes, and direct questioning of international
development policy, among other things, people in the
United States join in solidarity to fight against poverty and
AIDS in Africa. In either case, international solidarity
might involve individuals from all over the globe. The
third conception of international solidarity involves
nations committing to a social justice cause and forming
bonds of collective action through their commitments.
Economic sanctions in protest of human rights violations
serve as a pertinent example. It is worth mentioning that
this last form of solidarity differs from civic solidarity of
humanity because it demonstrates a unity of nations com-
mitted to a particular cause. Such international coalition
building in political solidarity is likely to be ad hoc and
responsive; the civic solidarity of all humanity presumes
a sustained unity of all nations that obliges them to pro-
vide and protect the most vulnerable.
Global solidarity shifts from being a matter of relations
between the formal organizations of states to a multiple
and varied array of formal and informal organizations
(both governmental and nongovernmental) as well as all
the varied and collective actions of individuals.
In effect, what these forms of solidarity offer is a richer
account of social cooperation. They identify what ties we
might have to all humanity, what the international com-
munity and multinational communities can do to pro-
mote justice (civic solidarity), and what at least some of us
already do (political solidarity) in order to fight social
injustice and begin to meet some of the demands of global
justice.
Related Topics
Altruism
Collective Responsibility
European Union (EU)
Walzer, Michael
World Citizenship
References
Bayertz K (1999) Four uses of solidarity. In: Bayertz K (ed) Solidarity.
Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp 328
Beitz C (1999) Political theory and international relations. Princeton
University Press, Princeton
Brunkhorst H (2005) Solidarity: from civic friendship to a global legal
community. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Gould C (2007) Transnational solidarities. J Soc Philos 38(1):148164

Heyd D (2007) Justice and solidarity: the contractarian case against global
justice. J Soc Philos 38(1):112130
Mason A (2000) Community, solidarity, and belonging. Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, New York
May L (1996) The socially responsive self: social theory and professional
ethics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Scholz S (2008) Political solidarity. Penn State Press, University Park
Walzer M (1970) Obligations: essays on disobedience, war, and citizen-
ship. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Weale A (1990) Equality, social solidarity, and the welfare state. Ethics
100(3):473488
Sovereignty
KENNETH HENLEY
Department of Philosophy, Florida International
University, Miami, FL, USA
To be sovereign is to have supreme authority over some
domain. John Austin provided a positivist account of
political sovereignty: the sovereign is the person or
group habitually obeyed by the bulk of the society
and not habitually obedient to anyone else. The crucial
historical development of political sovereignty was the
restriction of political authority to a defined geographical
territory, in contrast to the Western medieval complexity
of feudal rule with multiple authorities: kings with partial
sovereignty over diverse, scattered territories, quasi-
sovereign lords, monarchial bishops, and conflicts
between Pope and Emperor. After the rise of absolutist
sovereignty (paradigmatically in France) and the disas-
trous wars of religion, there arose the system of sovereign
unitary territorial nation-states (standardly traced to the
Peace of Westphalia of 1648). Internally, many sovereign
territorial states became increasingly democratic (with
lapses into dictatorship), while externally they colonized
and dominated other lands and peoples, battling each
other in those distant lands, and then fighting each other
directly in devastating world wars. Decolonization and
then the collapse of the Soviet Union created many
additional modern territorial nation-states, leading to
the present array of approximately 200 (192 members of
the United Nations in 2010).
Political sovereignty faces in two directions, inward
toward the polity itself and outward toward other polities.
The nature of the internal and external faces of sovereignty
need not be identical. In constitutional democracies, there
may be no unlimited sovereign entity internally (the rule
of law, not of men), while externally the nation-state
Sovereignty S 1025
presents itself as a single sovereignty and deals as
a unitary entity with other nation-states.
Theories of internal sovereignty divide into two cate-
gories: absolutist and non-absolutist. The major absolutist
theorists are Jean Bodin (although retaining some
conflicting medieval elements), Thomas Hobbes, and
Carl Schmitt. The absolutist argues that there must be
within the state an undivided and unlimited (in terms of
positive law) single sovereign entity, either an individual
or a sovereign collective speaking with one voice. The
sovereign is not answerable to any other human authority
internal or external, although the sovereign is on some
absolutist theories answerable to God, or subject to ratio-
nal assessment in terms of maintaining order. The crucial
concept of absolutism is that complete obedience on the
part of subjects is the price for protection by the sovereign,
who ensures internal public order and defends against
external threats. On Hobbess account, each individual
contracts with each other individual to transfer all of
their rights (except the right of self-defense) to the Sover-
eign in order to secure peace and protect life and property.
The Hobbesist sovereign is not a party to the contract, but
rather the beneficiary, who thus incorporates within him-
self the personhood of each of his subjects. The sovereign
has no contractual obligations and is not under the posi-
tive laws he imposes. Since the contract does not transfer
the right of self-defense, there is one circumstance in
which the individual ceases to have a duty of obedience:
when the individuals life is directly threatened, he finds
himself back in a state of nature, free to defend himself
even against his former sovereign. Schmitt, however,
argues that inherent in sovereignty is the right to
kill both subjects and enemies, in peace and in war.
Sovereignty for Schmitt emerges most clearly during
emergency, when the state confronts an existential
enemy: the sovereign is the Decider unconstrained by
any law or norm. Absolutist sovereignty seems potentially S
inconsistent with international norms that protect funda-
mental human rights and prohibit wars of aggression.
The major non-absolutist theorists are Aristotle, John
Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, and James Madison. The
democratic forms of non-absolutist accounts formally
endorse popular sovereignty: full sovereignty ultimately
resides in the people of the nation. However, popular
sovereignty of the form found in Rousseau is absolutist,
for the General Will is considered infallible and indivisible.
Non-absolutist popular sovereignty requires the voice of
the people to be filtered through structures such as
a constitution, representative democracy, the recognition
of minority rights, and separation of powers, including an
independent judiciary. The people are the ultimate
1026 S Sovereignty
sovereign, but majority dictatorship is rejected, as is any
claim of an individual or collectivity to govern directly as
the voice of the General Will or the People. In federal
states, governmental powers are further divided by con-
stitutionally reserving some matters for the federal gov-
ernment and some for the subordinate governments.
Lockes account of government by consent of the governed
contrasts with Hobbess absolutism: the Lockean contract
of government is between a people (constituted by
a logically prior contract) and a limited government, insti-
tuted to protect not only life and property but also indi-
vidual natural rights and liberties. Government depends
for its legitimacy upon keeping to the contract with the
sovereign people. But even the ultimate sovereignty of the
people is limited by fundamental individual rights.
Regardless of the nature of internal sovereignty,
the modern sovereign nation-state exercises within its
territory a monopoly of legitimate force. This monopoly
is consistent with external relations through treaties
with other states. The fundamental principle of external
sovereignty is par in parem not habet imperium
(jurisdictionem) (an equal does not have command or
jurisdiction over an equal). Membership through treaties
in international organizations, preeminently the United
Nations, does not in itself diminish sovereignty. The U.N.
Charter proclaims that The Organization is based on the
principle of the sovereign equality of all its members.
Treaties and conventions may, of course, have the effect
of compulsory norms regarding a matter subsequent to
entering into the convention, just as a private contract has
compulsory effect regarding subsequent matters covered
by the contract. Treaties creating supranational unions,
such as the European Union, can be interpreted as
diminishing national sovereignty by ceding decisions on
some matters exclusively to the supranational body.
Even apart from treaties and conventions, sovereign
nations are obligated under international law to respect
the territorial integrity of other sovereign nations and
respect human rights that are established as jus cogens
(peremptory norms, such as the prohibition of genocide
and war crimes). Humanitarian intervention to prevent
severe human rights violations with armed force is con-
troversial, whether under the auspices of the United
Nations, organizations such as NATO, or states acting
apart from international institutions. The U.N. Charter
prohibits intervention in matters essentially within the
jurisdiction of any state, a phrase that allows of varying
interpretations. Military intervention is, of course, an
infringement of sovereignty, even if justified; however, in
some cases it is questionable whether a sovereign authority
even continues to function when there is extreme and
continuing chaotic internal strife. Military intervention
at the direction of the Security Council to secure peace is
directly authorized by the United Nations Charter, as is
self-defense by each state.
Judicial globalization has been seen by many as a threat
to national sovereignty. However, standing international
courts frame their jurisdiction carefully to avoid infring-
ing sovereignty. (Ad hoc tribunals such as the Interna-
tional Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
clearly either diminish national sovereignty or function
in place of fragmented or dysfunctional sovereignty.) The
International Court of Justice deals with disputes between
sovereign states as such (having no jurisdiction over indi-
viduals), but only in disputes submitted to its jurisdiction
or resting upon prior treaties. Individual persons may be
subject to prosecution, in defined circumstances and for
defined war crimes and crimes against humanity, by The
International Criminal Court (ICC). But this seems not to
infringe upon the sovereignty of either states who are
parties to the constitutive Statute of Rome or non-party
states. The jurisdiction of the ICC is secondary to munic-
ipal jurisdiction, under clearly specified procedures. The
ICC has no direct way to apprehend a suspect, but rather
depends upon extradition of persons under established
legal process of the sovereign state where he is
apprehended, just as is the case in extradition from state
to state under treaties. However, allowing international
judicial bodies direct, unmediated legitimate force to
apprehend a suspect within a state would not be consistent
with full sovereignty. For instance, in the United States the
overarching, ultimate sovereignty of the Federal govern-
ment over the states means that Federal law enforcement
and Federal courts reach to individuals unmediated by
state law enforcement and courts, with Federal courts the
final arbiter of whether an issue is properly reserved to the
states. If international or supranational institutions ever
come to have such unmediated powers of enforcement
within presently sovereign nation-states, their sovereignty
will then be likewise subordinated. This has not yet hap-
pened, for instance, in the relationship between Britain
and the European Union the application of European
Human Rights Law within Britain rests upon an Act of
Parliament that Parliament is free to repeal. And unlike the
states of the United States, the member nation-states of
the European Union are free to depart from the Union
without a war over secession.
Increasing economic globalization and international
efforts to protect the global environment have also raised
questions regarding the role of national sovereignty. How-
ever, organizations such as the International Monetary
Fund (an agency of the United Nations but with its own

charter), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization,
and the U. N. Framework Convention on Climate Change
(leading to the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen
Accord) are established by agreements among sovereign
nation-states. The emerging global order seems likely to
remain an order built upon continuing sovereign
nations, acting collectively through a complex web of
international, supranational, and bilateral treaties,
with occasional violations of sovereignty of various kinds
(military actions, mandates, occupations) by various
bodies (the United Nations Security Council, NATO,
individual states alone or in coalitions). The greatest
threats to sovereignty arguably seem to arise not from
international organizations, but from aggression, extreme
internal disorder, and severe human rights violations
within nation-states.
Related Topics
Cosmopolitanism
European Union (EU)
Global Governance
Globalization
Hobbes, Thomas
Humanitarian Military Intervention
International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty (ICISS)
International Criminal Court (ICC)
International Law
International Organizations
Law of Peoples
Locke, John
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Secession
Social Contract
Subsidiarity Principle
Treaty of Westphalia
References
Austin J (1995) The province of jurisprudence determined, ed. Rumble
WE. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Bodin J (1992) On sovereignty: four chapters from six books of the
commonwealth. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Hinsley FH (1986) Sovereignty. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Hobbes T (1982) Leviathan (with an introduction by MacPherson CB).
Penguin Classics, New York
Hume D (1987) Essays: moral, political, and literary, ed. Miller EF. Liberty
Fund, Indianapolis
Krasner S (1999) Sovereignty: organized hypocrisy. Princeton University
Press, Princeton
Madison J (2005) The federalist papers, numbers 10, 39, 50, 51, ed.
Pole JR. Hackett, Indianapolis
Montesquieu CL (1949) The spirit of the laws (trans: Nugent T).
MacMillan, New York
Special Obligations S 1027
Pogge T (1992) Cosmopolitanism and sovereignty. Ethics 103:4875
Rousseau JJ (1997) The social contract and later political writings, ed.
Gourevitch V. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Schmitt C (1985) Political theology: four chapters on the concept of
sovereignty (trans: Schwab G). University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Special Obligations
SUSAN P. MURPHY
School of Politics and International Relations,
University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Most human beings are in a wide range of special
relationships which may include families, communities,
workplace, church, nations, states, and so on. Such special
relationships reflect the richness and diversity of human
relations and connections. Although the boundaries of
special relationships are often arbitrary, contingent, and
subject to change, it is broadly accepted that participation
in such a special relationship is a source of special rights
and correlative obligations that are exclusive to the par-
ticipants of that relationship. Special obligations to those
with whom we share a special relationship, understood as
placing the demands and interests of one subset or group
of persons above those outside such relationships, or the
presumption of priority thesis, is widely held (see
Scheffler 2001). The priority of special obligations is cen-
tral to what is often referred to as common sense morality
(see Diane Jeske 2008 and Samuel Scheffler 2001 for
broader discussions of this term).
However, there is much philosophical debate within
the literature on global justice on the grounds of limits and
extent of special obligations. Improvements in modern
technology increase both our connectedness and our S
awareness of the needs of others outside our special rela-
tionships. The growing awareness of the connections and
interconnections that now exist across territorial and
national boundaries through ever increasing transnational
economic activity, and deepening international institu-
tional arrangements have generated much philosophical
debate (see Andrew Hurrell 2007 for an account of the
deepening and expanding nature of the relationships that
exist across territorial boundaries in recent decade). Issues
arise concerning the grounds, moral weight, limits and
extent of special obligations and how these fit with other
general duties that may hold more broadly. When conflict
arises between the demands of those relationships, and the
needs, claims, or demands of those outside it is not clear
1028 S Special Obligations
that special obligations to those inside the bounds of
a special relationship ought always to carry greater moral
weight than general duties to those outside.
The topic of special obligations lies at the heart of key
debates within the literature on global justice. Special
obligations are widely invoked in arguments against con-
sequentialist, utilitarian, and cosmopolitan accounts of
morality and moral obligation. There is much disagree-
ment firstly, regarding the normative grounds of special
obligations, secondly, regarding the form and content of
special obligations, and thirdly, regarding the moral
weight of special obligations and the presumption of pri-
ority thesis. How we balance the interests and obligations
of those we hold special with the interests and obligations
of humanity at large has become a critical question for
political philosophers in the face of increasing, deepening,
complex human connections and relations. The relation-
ships entailed in membership of a nation or state are
particularly at issue here. These debates have focused on
the weight and limits of obligations to compatriots, and
whether obligations of distributive justice ought to be
confined to compatriots and/or within territorial bound-
aries. Before providing an overview of these debates, the
following will provide a brief description of the concept of
special obligations.
What Are Special Obligations?
The term obligation refers to a course of action that one
(an agent) is required, bound, or obliged to perform.
Special obligations are one subset of obligations. The
term special obligation refers to an obligation that an
agent may owe to a specific group or subset of others, such
as a family, community, nation, or state. Special obliga-
tions can be contrasted to general or natural duties. Gen-
eral or natural duties are duties that are owed to all human
beings on the basis of our shared humanity. They are
sometimes referred to as the fundamental moral mini-
mum all human beings, as moral agents, bear and owe to
other human beings simply qua status as human being
(see Rawls 1971; Scheffler 2001; Simmons 1979). Such
duties are understood to be universal in form, that is, the
principles and derivative duties must hold for all cases;
and must also be universal in scope, that is, they are owed
to all persons everywhere (see ONeill 1996, 2000 and
Caney 2005 for consistent use of this distinction). Special
obligations, on the other hand, are particular in scope,
that is, they hold between a delimited set of persons. They
can be either particular or universal in form.
Although it is widely accepted that certain types
of obligations are grounded in choice and consent
(see Hart 1955; Rawls 1971), others, in particular, those
that derive from special relationships such as family do
not derive from voluntary actions or decisions (see
Scheffler 2001).
The Grounds of Special Obligations
to Compatriots
There are three main grounds offered by defenders
of special obligations and the presumption of priority
thesis special relationships based on connections that
are taken to be intrinsically valuable including blood,
ethnicity, nation (Miller 2007); special obligations arising
from cooperative schemes based on principles of reciproc-
ity (Rawls 1999); and justifiable participation in a closed
scheme of legitimate coercion (Miller 2004). These posi-
tions start from a situated account of obligation based on
a kind of concentric circle, or multidimensional model of
morality where there are strict divisions in the types and
weight of obligations owed to those in the inner core with
diminishing duties to those in outer levels.
Objections to this position primarily arise from those
starting from a cosmopolitan liberal (see Charles Beitz
1999 for distinction between social liberalism and cosmo-
politanism liberalism for social liberals the problem of
international justice is concerned with fairness between
societies, whereas for cosmopolitan liberals it is fairness
between individual persons) perspective. There are three
basic principles that those arguing from this perspective
defend. These are firstly individualism the unit of con-
cern is the individual human being rather than groups or
states; secondly, universality the equal moral status and
intrinsic value of all individual human beings; and thirdly,
generality that all individual human beings are the
ultimate unit of concern rather than a particular subset
of persons sharing some defining characteristic such as
skin color, nationality, or those sharing a special relation-
ship or territory (see Pogge 1994; Caney 2005; Tan 2004,
2005; ONeill 1996, 2000). Two core objections raised by
cosmopolitan liberals concern the empirical assumptions
that support the presumption of priority thesis and the
moral implications of this thesis. These are the member-
ship objection and the arbitrariness objection.
Firstly, the scope and boundaries of such special rela-
tionships may not be immediately obvious in a world as
interconnected as ours (see ONeill 2000). Agents share
special relationships based on political connections, social
connections (e.g., through diasporas), cultural or religious
values, economic interactions, and so on. Identifying
the scope and boundaries of special obligations within
such a continuously changing and shifting web of connec-
tions and interconnections is not only a complex task, but
an incomplete and ongoing process. According to this

objection, if the scope of special relationships is increas-
ingly difficult to determine, then it is not clear that special
relationships alone, in particular relationships beyond
familial ties, can ground special obligations to compa-
triots, co-nationals, or citizens.
The arbitrariness objection: The idea that special
obligations can be justified on the grounds of a morally
arbitrary fact such as place of birth, skin color, and so on,
is rejected by a wide number of philosophers within the
literature on global justice. As Jeremy Waldron (1993)
argues, special obligations are range-limited principles
and if we are to use such principles we must be able to
justify our use of them on morally relevant grounds.
Simon Caney (2005), Peter Singer (2004), Kok-Chor Tan
(2005), and many others simply reject a morally arbitrary
fact such as place of birth, nationality, or any other arbi-
trary fact as a morally acceptable justification for special
treatment. Special obligations justified on the basis of
morally arbitrary circumstances such as nationality, eth-
nicity, citizenship, race, or religious affiliation cannot, or
so they argue, carry greater moral weight than duties we
owe to humanity equally (see Pogge 1994, 2010; Singer
1972, 2004, 2009; Caney 2005).
However, cosmopolitan liberals do recognize the
importance of special relationships and special obligations
in everyday life. Thus, several philosophers have developed
accounts of how special obligations can be compatible
with general obligations and broader duties to humanity.
One method of grounding and justifying special obliga-
tions within a cosmopolitan liberal theory is to derive such
obligations from general obligations held by all, owed to
all. Within Robert Goodins (1998) account, for example,
special obligations derive their full moral force from gen-
eral obligations and as such, can be overridden by more
pressing general obligations under certain conditions.
Thus, special obligations are prima facie obligations. Spe-
cial obligations to compatriots, according to Goodin, can
be justified on an instrumental basis of efficiency as the
most effective administrative method of discharging gen-
eral obligations.
This account of the grounds of special obligation is
rejected by many on the basis that, seeing them as deriv-
ative, it simply fails to give sufficient consideration to
special relationships that are intrinsically valuable to ordi-
nary human beings. It is widely argued that in failing to
take seriously or provide adequate space for special
relationships and special obligations, such accounts are
implausible and untenable (see Scheffler 2001; Tan 2004).
An alternative account is offered by Samuel Scheffler
(2001) who defends special obligations arising from
special relationships that one has reason to value in an
Special Obligations S 1029
intrinsic rather than instrumental sense. According to
Scheffler, we have strong reasons to value certain kinds
of relationships; in valuing these relationships we see these
as a source of special obligation; therefore, we have strong
reasons to see ourselves as having special obligations to
those we share a special relationship that we have reason to
value. For Scheffler, any tenable moral theory or account
of human relationships must make sufficient space for
special relationships that people have good reasons to
value and the obligations to which these can give rise.
Thus the types of relationship and the reasons to value
these relationships are limiting conditions. However, they
do not provide a defense of boundaries such as nations,
states, and so on. Schefflers account seeks to balance
special obligations and those special relationships that
people hold to be on intrinsic value with general universal
obligations.
However, any account that seeks to promote the inter-
ests of any one group must be justifiable on reasons that
could be accepted by others beyond the range of such
a special relationship (Waldron 1993). Special obligations
are open to what is widely referred to as the unfair benefits
objections. This objection basically argues that special
obligations grounded on special relationships confer
unfair benefits simply due to an arbitrary fact such as
place of birth, level of wealth of parents, skin color, and
so on. According to Scheffler, however, this objection is
not problematical for the notion of special relationships as
such; rather it is an attack on preexisting inequalities that
are enhanced by such relationships. Thus the cumulative
effect of special relationships may not only reinforce, but
compound the levels of inequality between participants
and nonparticipants. This is not to say that consideration
must not be given to a fairer distribution of benefits and
burdens generally. Rather, special obligations should be set
in the wider normative landscape. There may be cases
where other general obligations may legitimately constrain S
certain actions. That is, general obligations could take
priority and carry greater weight in certain contexts.
Thus special obligations within cosmopolitan accounts
are prima facie obligations that can be overridden by the
demands of universal moral obligations.
The Nature and Content of Special
Obligations
A second dimension to the debates within the literature on
global justice and special obligations concerns the nature
and content of special obligations. It is broadly argued by
philosophers such as David Miller and John Rawls that the
types of obligations owed to those outside special relation-
ships are different to those inside such relationships. In
1030 S Special Obligations
particular, obligations of distributive justice and welfare
rights are not owed and ought not to be extended to others
beyond national or state boundaries. The justification for
this position is that nations/states represent closed systems
of cooperation where the members are collectively respon-
sible for their actions and the outcomes of their collective
collaboration. Thus the opportunities for well-being and,
conversely, cause of poverty, hardship, and under- or
maldevelopment are the responsibility of the group. The
special rights and correlative obligations deriving from
systems of closed and bounded mutual cooperation are
not owed or ought not to be extended to those outside this
group (i.e., those who have not participated in the social
cooperation necessary to the generation of social goods).
Outside the group, only limited general duties hold
between human beings.
However, such an account of the content of special
obligations is directly challenged by a wide number of
philosophers. Onora ONeill, for example, argues that
the porous nature of boundaries and the connections
and interconnections make the determination of the
membership of cooperative schemes highly problematical
(2000). The generation of wealth and social goods in one
part of the world directly and indirectly relies upon coop-
eration and collaboration from agents in other parts of the
world. If one accepts the Rawlsian or Millerian argument
that participants in a cooperative scheme for mutual
advantage share exclusive rights to the outputs of this
cooperation and obligations only to participants in this
process, then why would this be limited to co-nationals in
a global economy as interconnected as ours?
Thomas Pogge argues that the growth, reach, and
depth of the international institutional framework directly
influences and shapes domestic institutions. This is deeply
problematical for the priority thesis for two reasons.
Firstly, if international institutions influence the actions
and decisions of states at the domestic level, then it is
simply not true that responsibility for the shape of domes-
tic institutions and the outputs of social cooperation can
be solely attributed to domestic actors and actions. Rather,
these institutions generate systems of cooperation that are
porous and subject to the influence of international and
global factors. Secondly, within this international institu-
tional system, those with responsibility for shaping and
maintaining the institutional framework are responsible
for the output of this system (Pogge 2010: 13). This is not
limited to any single nationality or territory. Such institu-
tional connections generate obligations. Such obligations
could include positive duties of assistance, analogous to
special welfare rights shared within a group, as well as
negative duties of noninterference and non-harm.
Others within the broad cosmopolitan family such as
Robert Goodin (1988) argue that the form and content of
special obligations are derived from general obligations.
There is no difference in the types, nature, or content of
the duties. Peter Singer (1972, 2004, 2009) develops per-
haps the most forceful rejection of the notion that the
content of obligation can be altered by special relation-
ships. Singers account of morality is described as flat. He
argues that the same types of obligation can hold between
persons regardless of proximity or special relationships.
These include positive obligations of assistance.
The debate within global justice concerning the con-
tent and form of special and general obligations has
focused on the restriction of distributive justice to the
domestic domain closed groups, nations, peoples, all
representing closed cooperative schemes for mutual
advantage. Simon Caney (2005) examines the difference
between the domestic sphere and the global sphere, and
the nature of the boundaries that demarcate special obli-
gations of distributive justice. Caney finds that there are
no morally relevant differences between the domains that
would justify the restriction of distributive obligations.
Accepting that universal moral principles and general
obligations may be applied differently in different places
and require different actions from differently placed
agents, the basic form and content of such obligations
are themselves universal. Cosmopolitans, committed to
holding individuals as the basic unit of moral value enti-
tled to equal consideration are impartial with respect to all
contingencies such as nationality, citizenship, skin color,
and gender. This impartiality extends to all types of obli-
gations, including distributive justice. Contingencies such
as nationality or territory are simply not morally sufficient
reasons for limiting the types of obligations that can hold
across boundaries (see Tan 2005).
The Limits and Extent of Special
Obligations
Special obligations are widely invoked in arguments
against consequentialist, utilitarian, and cosmopolitan
accounts of morality and moral obligation. The general
claim is that in failing to take seriously or provide ade-
quate space for special relationships and special obliga-
tions, such accounts are implausible and untenable.
However, such a position requires justification and gives
rise to a central question regarding the task of political
philosophy in general. Is the task of the political philoso-
pher to explain and defend what is sometimes described as
common-sense morality, that is, commonly held con-
victions and beliefs? Or is the task of the political philos-
opher more critical, to engage in testing particular

commonly held convictions for their consistency and
compatibility with universal moral principles and obliga-
tions (see ONeill 2000; Caney 2005; Tan 2005 for wider
discussion of this question)? Cosmopolitans contributing
to the literature on global justice argue strongly in support
of this second position.
It would not be accurate to suggest that the cosmopol-
itan perspective rejects special obligations. It is difficult to
find any account within the literature on global justice that
does not acknowledge the special place and value of special
relationships and the central role these play in the lives of
ordinary people (see Goodin 1988; Nussbaum 2008; Tan
2004, 2005; Caney 2005; Scheffler 2001; ONeill 1996,
2000; Pogge 1994, 2010). Rather, their central concern is
with the limits and extent of these and how special obli-
gations should be balanced when they conflict with uni-
versal moral principles and general duties.
A number of philosophers have developed sophisti-
cated accounts demonstrating how the cosmopolitan
position and its concern for all individuals can be recon-
ciled with special obligations. Kok-Chor Tans work on
a cosmopolitan defense of limited patriotic partiality is
one such account (2004, 2005). Tan, in accepting the
intrinsic value of certain special ties and special relation-
ships, argues that special obligations arising from these
relationships have to be limited or constrained by
certain general moral principles. The moral legitimacy of
special obligations to compatriots is conditional on
their not violating other general duties owed to all. This
impartial justification of limited partiality seeks to balance
the demands of those in special relations to us,
with obligations and duties we owe to all individuals in
all places.
However, even within the cosmopolitan position there
continue to be a number of debates concerning the ques-
tion of limits. For example, does distance or proximity
matter morally in determining the limits of special obli-
gations (see Waldron 1993, 2003); does valuing the equal
moral worth of all individuals demand equal concern and
equal treatment for all individuals (see Miller 2004). These
debates will continue as the processes of globalization
continue to erode the boundaries not only between states,
but also between individuals.
Related Topics
Associative Duties
Citizenship
Communitarianism
Compatriot Partiality Thesis
Friendship
Global Impartiality Thesis
Special Obligations S 1031
Globalization
Liberal Nationalism
Miller, David
Nationalism
Partiality
Patriotism
Political Obligation
Rawls, John
Reciprocity
Singer, Peter
Special Rights
Tan, Kok-Chor
Thin Universalism and Thick Localism
References
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needy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
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98:663686
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Journal of Philosophy, University of Calgary Press, Canada
Special Rights
DAVID BOERSEMA
Department of Philosophy, Pacific University, Forest
Grove, OR, USA
Rights, broadly speaking, are a means of protecting and
enhancing the well-being of moral agents and, possibly,
moral patients (i.e, entities, such as animals, that cannot
act in moral ways but can be acted upon in moral ways by
moral agents). Although some people argue that rights are
inherent properties pertaining to moral agents, most
rights theorists identify rights as a social relation and as
a means of regulating the behavior of social agents. Special
rights are rights that pertain to a limited group of agents or
have a specified range of application. That is, special rights
are limited to a restricted set of rights holders or have
content that is restricted to certain rights holders. So, with
respect to legal rights that is, rights pertaining to citizens
within a given legal system certain specified groups or
individuals have certain rights that others do not. For
example, law enforcement officers (but not all citizens)
have the right to detain people in particular contexts. Or,
people who have been legally identified as physically
handicapped have the right to access to specific parking
areas that others do not. The thrust of calling such rights
special rights is that the scope and range of their appli-
cation is intentionally limited.
One way in which people speak of special rights is in
terms of the specified rights holders who enjoy such rights.
This includes various kinds of groupings of (purported)
rights holders, such as childrens rights, victims rights,
womens rights, etc. The point is that, say, children as
children not children as citizens or as humans or as
moral agents enjoy specific rights. Because such rights
pertain to specific groups or individuals, there is also
specific content to such rights. For instance, childrens
rights include the positive rights to be provided with
basic necessities that they are incapable of obtaining on
their own and they have such rights even though adults
might not. Likewise, when people speak of disability rights
(or, the rights of the disabled), they speak of specific
protective or compensatory claims that do not pertain to
all other citizens or humans.
The concept of special rights, as well as actions and
policies derived from them, is sometimes controversial.
Because special rights are not enjoyed by all, some people
have claimed that such rights are in contrast with, and
perhaps even trump, equal rights (i.e, rights that are
enjoyed by all citizens or agents). In various venues, for
example, the issue of gay and lesbian rights has been
portrayed as special rights vs. equal rights. That is, in
cases where legislation has banned same-sex marriage or
banned certain literature in public schools (e.g., literature
that promotes/supports/tolerates homosexual families),
opponents of such bans have argued that these bans vio-
late their equal rights, while supporters of such bans
have argued that legislation to overturn these bans
amounts to granting special rights to gays and lesbians.
Specific rights pertaining to other specified groups, such
as disability rights or childrens rights, have generated less
controversy.
The issue of special rights relates broadly to global
justice both in terms of what agents (or patients) are
said to have special rights as well as some specific content
or range of application of special rights. In terms of agents
(or patients), this can refer to, say, refugees who are driven
across national borders or persons seeking political asy-
lum. That is, there are particular persons, or groups of
persons, who, in the name of justice, need protection or
enhancement of their well-being outside of the normal
parameters of their legal systems of communities. These
concerns are, in effect, not simply matters of local or
intranational justice, but rather of global and international
justice. This applies not only to specific individuals, or
groups, but also to entire States or cultures in situations in
which the relevant parties are other States or cultures (that
is, for example, if a given State is threatened or overrun by
another State or in cases of ethnic cleansing). In terms of
specific content or range of application, special rights
relate to global justice in cases such as the right of
return, that is, the right of individuals to return to
their homes if circumstances force them to become refu-
gees. So, the content of the right of return or the applica-
tion of that content involves special circumstances and is
invoked in the context of international and global justice
concerns, as opposed to internal sovereign, intranational
concerns.

Related Topics
Basic Rights
Civil Rights
Gay Rights
Group Rights
Human Rights
Rights
References
Engel K (19971998) Whats so special about special rights? Denver U Law
Rev 75:12651303
Green P (1987) The logic of special rights hypatia. J Feminist Philos 2:6770
Kymlicka W (1992) The rights of minority cultures. Polit Theory
20:140146
Marcosson SA (1995) The special rights canard in the debate over
lesbian and gay civil rights. Notre Dame J Law Ethics Public Policy
9:137154
Nelson WN (1974) Special rights, general rights, and social justice. Philos
Public Aff 3:410430
Rubin PJ (1998) Equal rights, special rights, and the nature of
antidiscrimination law. Mich Law Rev 97:564598
Spinoza, Baruch
ERICKA TUCKER
Department of Philosophy, Cal Poly Pomona, Pomona,
CA, USA
We sometimes imagine that diversity of religion, culture,
and ethnicity is a problem of the present, one that sets our
time apart. However in the seventeenth century, at the end
of the Reformation and the wars of religion that divided
Europe, overthrowing medieval institutions, social, polit-
ical, and religious hierarchies that had dominated for
centuries, the question of how to govern a diverse multi-
tude of individuals was a pressing practical and theoretical
question. By taking human diversity as primary, Baruch
Spinoza proposed a theory of the state that does not
require preexisting unity among individuals and so pro-
vides a theory of justice, which can be scaled to the global.
Further, Spinozas theory of political and individual power
offers positive reasons why we may want to build global
democratic institutions to solve the problems of global
justice.
In 1632 Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, the largest
and most powerful city of what were then known as the
United Provinces. These provinces were united by their
resistance to the Spanish Empire, from which they had
Spinoza, Baruch S 1033
recently won independence, against the Catholic states to
the south, and the English incursions from the West.
Amsterdam was a great center of commerce and trade,
and the United Provinces themselves were known for their
relatively high levels of political and religious toleration.
Thus, the United Provinces were ethnically, religiously,
and linguistically diverse; home to refugees from the
wars of religion in France and Germany, and home to
a thriving Jewish community which had earlier fled the
Inquisition in Spain and Portugal. Their governmental
structure was that of a loose confederation, historically
headed by a member of the Orange family. However, due
to the early death of one Orange and the minority of
another, for most of Spinozas lifetime, the United Prov-
inces were headless. During the time known as the
Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, roughly 1648
1672, the de facto heads of state were the De Witt brothers,
the administrators of Holland, the most economically
powerful of the provinces. The De Witts ruled in uneasy
tension with the medieval institutions of the Estates Gen-
eral. Best known by most as occupying French tennis
courts in the late eighteenth century, the Dutch Estates
General sought to reestablish constitutional order by
finding a head of state, at one time offering the
position to Elizabeth I of England. Spinoza and like-
minded political theorists supported this new Republic
over a return to traditional quasi-monarchy. He sought
in earnest to design a political theory which would show
that even a headless state could be sovereign, stable, and
uniquely free.
In the background of Spinozas political theory always
looms the specter of religious dissention and the passion-
ate and chaotic conflict it could bring. Religious war had
dominated Europe in the sixteenth century, and many in
the United Provinces believed that the Reformation was
incomplete. Although the United Provinces were at that
point famous for religious diversity, the ruling classes were S
primarily Calvinist. The Dutch Calvinists sought to recre-
ate in the United Provinces a religious state, along the lines
of Calvins Geneva, and so were constantly at odds with the
republican leaders of Holland, the De Witts. In 1672,
a mob of citizens, whipped up into a frenzy by Calvinist
preachers, dragged the de Witts through the streets of the
Hague, dismembering them along the way, and finally
hanging them in the city square. This incident taught
Spinoza a powerful lesson: No matter how seemingly
powerless individuals are on their own, when they are
united they can use their collective power either for the
state or against the state.
The historical situation of Spinozas life provided him
with two primary aims: to devise a theory of the state that
1034 S Spinoza, Baruch
did not require a unified culture or religion and to create
a political theory which could organize the passions of the
multitude.
Spinozas Theory of Justice
Since Spinozas political theory had to account for the
reality both of religious and cultural diversity and the
role of the state in managing the passions of this diverse
multitude, he was initially attracted to Hobbess contract
theory. Spinoza saw Hobbes as having achieved what no
other political philosopher in history had he had created
a stable state without assuming the natural sociability of
human nature. Hobbes began with the most parsimonious
of posits, a state of nature where a multitude of individuals
followed only their appetites or desires, with no anteced-
ent social or natural bond. Then, by simply attending to
their own self-preservation, Hobbes showed that these
individuals could contract among one another to give up
their natural rights, will, and power and to authorize all
the actions of a sovereign, which their contract created.
This sovereign (or sovereign assembly) would have the
collective power and will of the individuals in the state at
its (or their) disposal and so the problem of diversity of
wills, religion, and culture and the problem of the insta-
bility of the passions could be solved at once. Fear of the
sovereign and fear of the chaotic state of nature would
ensure that individuals in the civil state followed the law,
and as the single source of normative, religious, and cultural
authority in the state, the sovereign could ensure unity.
Although Spinoza thought the notion of the contract
and Hobbes conception of the sovereign was theoretically
innovative and promising, he was skeptical of its practical
efficacy. Could a one-time contractual agreement really
bind the wills and power of real individual humans? Was
fear the sort of emotion that led to people acting reliably?
The answer to both, for Spinoza, was no. Fear, on
Spinozas view, is a passion that weakens individuals, to
the point that they may act in a way that is self-destructive.
So, even if it would be best for individuals to follow the
law, fear, if it is strong enough, could lead them to disrupt
the order of the state.
Spinoza was critical of Hobbes notion of transfer of
power and will for several reasons. First, he objected, one
never truly transfers ones will and power. As natural
human beings, we retain at least that power necessary for
moving ourselves around, and further, we cannot entirely
ever give up our capacity to judge. Our judgments, in
Spinozas view, are caused by the ways we are affected by
phenomena in the world. Each individual is affected in
slightly different ways by the natural forces impinging
upon them, and so their judgments and feelings will not
be exactly alike. Because our experiences, judgments, and
feelings are outside of our control, we cannot transfer our
feeling or judging to another, since we cannot give up
being individually affected by external phenomena. Effec-
tively then, for Spinoza, we cannot consent to the future
actions of the sovereign in advance. We always retain the
ability to reject the sovereigns decisions and to resist them
with whatever physical power we have.
Spinoza argued that Hobbes contract did not solve the
problem of instituting a stable political state once and for
all. Rather, contract theories mistook the real challenge of
political philosophy and governance, which is to find ways
to gain the consent and agreement of the people in the
state for each and every decision of the sovereign, so that
each might support this decision and coordinate their
actions accordingly. Consent was not something that
could be achieved once in the fictional origins of states
and then forgotten, but rather something that had to be
obtained over and over again.
Rejecting Hobbes juridical notion of natural right
as something that can be transferred, Spinoza redefined
natural right as coextensive with an individuals power
and desire. He argued that laws, whatever they may be,
required attention to human passions and desires.
No contract or agreement would stand without the effective
power to enforce it. So, to effectively govern, a sovereign
had to gain the consent of the multitude not just once, but
over and over again. To effectively govern, the sovereign had
to win over the hearts and minds of the multitude.
The central principle of Spinozas theory of justice can
be understood as follows: Outside the boundaries of effec-
tive political institutions, there is no right, wrong, justice,
or injustice. We have only as much right as we have power,
and if we wish to realize justice we need to ensure that we
have institutions powerful enough to do so. For Spinoza,
the power of the sovereign, and thus the power of the
state was a function of the power of the multitude, that
is, all the individuals in that state, and their degree of the
coordination.
Coordinating the Multitude
On Spinozas metaphysical view, we, humans, are part of
Nature. As part of Nature, we each have a small part of the
power of Nature, to act and achieve our aims in the world.
Each individuals power can be increased or decreased,
and different forms of coordination among individuals
can yield more or less power. The most powerful individ-
uals are those who are ruled by joy rather than by fear, and
who follow what Spinoza called the law of reason, which
means, that these individuals understood themselves as
part of the natural world, and understood their passions

and what was best for them, that is, what would increase
their power in any particular situation. The more one
knows about oneself and the natural world, the more
powerful one can become.
Alone, our power is very small, but if we join with
others in collective projects, we can increase our power
and achieve our collective aims. This is true, for Spinoza,
both for individuals and for states. The more states that
join together, the more their collective power to act within
Nature increases. Nature is indifferent to human ends,
individual or collective. There is no guarantee that our
projects will be successful. However, Spinoza argues that
the more power we have, the more likely we are to envision
projects and goals that are realizable and subsequently to
have the power to realize them. The more people we
coordinate our power with, the better knowledge and
understanding we will have of the world, yielding better
global policies. Further, the more people involved in
discussing and making these decisions, the more stake-
holders we will have committed to the realization of these
policies. For Spinoza, the bigger and more democratic
ones state, the more powerful it can become.
Multistate Dominion and the Conditions
of International Justice
For some political theorists today, the idea of a global state
is anathema. However, Spinoza believed that there are
positive reasons why we might consider a larger polity.
In his final work, the Political Treatise, he constructs
a model of how such a multistate polity would operate,
and what kinds of institutions would be required. Addi-
tionally, he provides conditions for when and why states
might join together in the first place.
States join together, on Spinozas view, for two reasons:
if a state is not self-sufficient on its own, or if a state cannot
flourish or increase on its own. In the second case, states
may be individually self-sufficient, but mutually depen-
dent for their individual flourishing. For Spinoza, the
cities of the United Provinces satisfied both conditions.
Individually, they were weak and required mutual protec-
tion, but more importantly, together they were much
stronger and could be a major economic and trading
power only with the cooperation of all. Today, most states
satisfy the second condition.
Spinoza argues that there are two ways that states can
join together to increase their power: (1) through
remaining sovereign and simply entering into alliances
with the assurance of pacts and (2) through creating
multistate dominions.
As for the first mode of alliance (1), Spinoza argued
that such alliances ensured only with the force of pacts
Spinoza, Baruch S 1035
were as weak as contracts, and without sufficient effective
power to enforce them they were invalid. Again, for Spi-
noza, justice between individuals and between states,
requires more than just a promise or contract, it requires
effective institutions to enforce those promises. One way
to bolster alliances between sovereign states, Spinoza
argues, is to increase the number of states involved in the
alliance. The more states allied, the more difficult it would
be for one state to defect. The problem with multistate
alliances, however, is that states, unlike humans, are for the
most part self-sufficient, and if a powerful enough state
wishes to invalidate a pact or break an alliance, it is still
possible for them to do so. This is a phenomenon we are
familiar with today.
The second (2), and more secure, way of joining states
together is to create a sovereign superstate above them. In
such a multistate dominion, individual states would be
sovereign over their internal affairs, property laws, etc.,
but there would be a superstate senate and court which
would be in charge of issues that concern the states in
common and disputes between states.
In order to ensure the stability of these superstate
institutions, Spinoza argues that they must recognize the
reality of inequalities between states. There will be some
states involved which are more powerful or populous, and
Spinoza argued they should have a proportionally larger
share of both the superstate senate and the superstate
judiciary. This multistate dominion is the strongest possi-
ble form of state, and would lead to empowering its
member states, and empowering the individuals within
them. Because the representation at the superstate level is
proportional, states would vie with one another for pop-
ulation, and each would compete to make their laws and
institutions more attractive to individuals in their own in
and other states. This competition for population would
yield better conditions for those within the states. So,
governance at the global level can bolster justice and S
empowerment for individuals in the local and national
context. Further, the more stable and powerful individual
states and alliances of states become, the better the likeli-
hood for a stable international order.
Justice, Sovereignty, and
Metaphysics: Spinozas Contribution
to Global Justice
Spinozas theory of justice, his conception of sovereignty,
and his understanding of human power provide unique
insights and potential solutions for contemporary theories
of global justice.
Spinozas theory of the state and his argument that the
power of a state is a function of the power and
1036 S Standard of Living
organization of the passions of those within the state was
designed to serve the needs of a diverse polity and thus can
be scaled beyond the nation. Spinozas theory of justice
entails that justice can only be realized in a dominion,
which suggests that if we seek justice beyond state borders,
we need to create effective institutions, and that those
institutions may need to be sovereign multistate domin-
ions. Finally, Spinozas metaphysical view that we are all
parts of Nature and his view that we can increase our
power and knowledge by joining together in large-scale
polities give us positive and unique reasons to join
together with other states.
We are living in a time of increasing global intercon-
nections and interdependence. Although most political
theorists fear that a global polity would be ineffective at
best and tyrannical at worst, Spinoza offers us a model of
a multistate polity that is neither, and which his theory of
sovereignty suggests is necessary if we truly wish to realize
global justice.
Related Topics
Global Federalism
Global Governance
Hobbes, Thomas
Natural Rights
Social Contract
Sovereignty
References
Blom H (1995) Morality and causality in politics: the rise of naturalism in
Dutch seventeenth century political thought. CIP-Gegevens
Koninkklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague
Curley E, Moreau P-F (eds) (1990) Spinoza: issues and directions. Brill,
Leiden
De La Court P (1746) Political maxims of the republic of Holland. John
Campbell, London
Goldenbaum U (2010) Sovereignty and obedience. In: Clarke D, Wilson C
(eds) Oxford handbook of philosophy in early modern Europe.
Oxford University Press, New York
Held D (1995) Democracy and the global order: from the modern state to
cosmopolitan governance. Polity, Cambridge
Hobbes T (1997) The collected English works of Thomas Hobbes.
Routledge, New York
Israel J (1998) The Dutch republic: its rise, greatness and fall 14771806.
Oxford University Press, Oxford
Lloyd G (ed) (1999) Critical assessments. Routledge, New York
Matheron A (1988) Individu et communaute chex Spinoza. Les Editions
de Minuit, Paris
Mugnier-Pollet L (1976) La philosophie politique de Spinoza. J Vrin, Paris
Mugnier-Pollet L (1977) Relations internationals et etat de nature
selon Spinoza. Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, vol. 8, no. 8,
OctoberDecember, pp 489499
Spinoza B (2002) Spinoza: complete works. Hackett, Indianapolis
Tuck R (1993) Philosophy and government 15721651. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge
Standard of Living
Development Ethics
Feminization of Poverty
Quality of Life
Relativity of Well-Being
State Terrorism
ROBERT P. ABELE
Department of Humanities and Philosophy, Diablo Valley
College, Pleasant Hill, CA, USA
Discussions of terrorism have always to deal with two
questions: what is it? and is it ever or always wrong?
Hence, discussions on state terrorism should deal with
those questions as well. This article will attempt to link
an operative definition of terrorism with state violence,
and apply the same concepts and moral parameters that
philosophers maintain for their moral evaluation of ter-
rorism, to the use of violence by the state.
First, then, what is terrorism? Definitions of terrorism
are nearly as numerous and varied as are the writers of
them. The USA alone has four official definitions of ter-
rorism: Defense Department, FBI, State Department, and
US Code. The United Nations does not have an official
definition, but maintains an academic consensus con-
ception of terrorism. Philosophers are no different, with
a plethora of definitions of terrorism themselves. But since
it is impossible to discuss state terrorism without defining
terrorism, it will facilitate the inquiry to take the com-
mon elements of the various definitions of terrorism and
apply them to the state. Thus, if we examine the US, UN,
and various philosophical definitions, we find that there
seems to be a general consensus that terrorism is the
organized use of violence against noncombatants in
a conflict, for a political end. It is a definition generally
shared by C.A.J. Coady, Igor Primoratz, and Michael
Walzer, among others, although it is by no means
a universally-agreed-upon definition (see Virginia Held
1991 and Alison Jaggar 2005 for substantive dissenting
views on this definition). We will take as our definition
of state terrorism, then, a direct attack on noncombatants
for a political purpose by a given state.
Second, is state terrorism always morally unjustifiable?
Here again, there is a general consensus that states may
respond to terrorist attacks with violence provided that

they respect the principles of discrimination/noncombat-
ant immunity and proportionality that is, the same
principles as the jus in bello formulation of Just War theory
advocates (e.g., Walzer, Coady, Primoratz, and Thomas
Pogge). Even here, however, there is no unanimity of
position: some philosophers, such as Alison Jaggar
(2005: 219) and Igor Primoratz (in SEP: 17; 2003:
117118) see some forms of non-state terrorism to be
less morally culpable than state terrorism while simulta-
neously holding state terrorism to be morally
unjustifiable, while other philosophers, such as Thomas
Pogge and C.A.J. Coady, reject all terrorism as morally
objectionable (hence, presumably, state terrorism). Fur-
ther still, Michael Walzer permits state terrorism under
conditions of the supreme emergency for the state, pro-
vided stringent moral conditions are set: if saving civilian
lives means risking soliders lives, the risk must be
accepted (1977: 156). For Coady, the supreme emergency
defense of state terrorism undervalues the depth of the
principle of discrimination and consequently invites abuse
of the principle (2002a: 1819).
Nevertheless, it may be said that there is a clear con-
nection between assessing state terrorism and the princi-
ples of the Just War tradition. But can state terrorism be
assessed simply by a states violation of the principles of
the Just War tradition? Is the violation, for example, of
noncombatant immunity in war the same as state terror-
ism? Douglas Lackey seems to hold to a very close con-
nection between state terrorism and the violation of Just
War principles. For example, when he discusses US
nuclear deterrence strategy, he states that the vast major-
ity of [the nuclear attacks] planned, would involve great
numbers of civilian casualties according to the Ratio of
Damage argument. . . [and] would be terrorist attacks
(2004: 135). But C.A.J. Coady seems to keep them as
separate but overlapping principles. Discrimination, for
instance, is to be used both in assessing state terrorism and
in assessing the conduct of a war by the state 2002: 1819).
Much of the literature on state terrorism since 9/11 has
been directed toward US actions regarding terrorists and
other nations. Significant attention has been paid to the
two US declarations of a war on terrorism, one under
President Reagan and the other under President George
W. Bush. Primoratz, for example, argues that the new US
war on terrorism is not state terrorism, because the war
(e.g., in Afghanistan) does not deliberately attack civilians.
However, he immediately and critically nuances that eval-
uation by stating that there are both serious concerns
regarding the proportionality of civilian deaths to terrorist
deaths in US bombing raids, and also that there must be
clearer attention paid to the proviso Walzer proffers that
State Terrorism S 1037
the harm to civilians must be deliberately reduced, includ-
ing accepting more risk to life and limb of our own
soldiers (1977: 124). In contradistinction to that posi-
tion, Douglas Lackey offers a detailed evolution of how US
foreign policy became progressively a state terrorist one,
from World War II city bombings to US nuclear strategy,
while Noam Chomsky regularly catalogs the clear cases of
US state terrorism across the globe (2003).
When bringing the question of state terrorism to the
level of global justice, one might engage in an analysis of
the institution of the state itself and its moral legitimacy.
The work of Noam Chomsky in regard to state terrorism
certainly takes this approach. As might be expected given
his political commitments (see the entry on Chomsky,
Noam in this encyclopedia), Chomsky focuses on specific
state-sponsored violent actions against other peoples, and
finds the USA to be the leading sponsor and activist in
state terrorism (1991, 1992). The basic principle of justice
Chomsky uses is the criterion of universality, or, as Kant
refers to it, reversibility. Using that measure, Chomsky
begins his analysis of state terrorism by stipulating two
forms of such analysis: literal or propagandistic (see the
entry on Propaganda in this encyclopedia). He opts for the
literal approach, by which one settles on a general defini-
tion, seeks instances of it, and then attempts to determine
causes and remedies for it. What he finds by such analysis
is that the USA is a primary source of state terrorism on
the world stage, and it engages in acts of state terrorism
due to its primary concerns to further the interests of the
corporate elites of the USA (1988, 1992).
In a related analysis, if one adopts the cosmopolitan
view of a Rawlsian position, such as Charles Beitz or
Thomas Pogge, one might well be tempted to reject
state terrorism on the grounds of the moral arbitrariness
of the state itself. These philosophers seek evidence of a
structure of international interdependence and social
cooperation, thereby demonstrating that state boundaries S
themselves have a merely derivative significance. Rather,
global justice would be concerned with the moral rela-
tions of members of a universal community (1999a: 181
182). While it is important to note that neither Beitz nor
Pogge apply these moral interests to state terrorism per se,
the ground remains fruitful for such work.
In general, one might conclude from this brief over-
view of the philosophical literature, there must be
a morally presumptive illegitimacy to the use of state
terrorism. The use of the traditional standards of Just
War principles is the only moral justification available to
the state for using violence against terrorists. This is not
without its problems, however, since it blurs a distinction
between war crimes and terrorism. One category applies
1038 S Stiglitz, Joseph Eugene
clearly to nation-states only, while the latter can be true of
states as well as organized groups.
Finally, nearly all contributors to the discussion
regarding state terrorism focus on the issue of morally
legitimate responses to terrorism (e.g., responses for
which the USA has moral justification in taking action
against terrorists after 9/11), but few write about state
actions that breed terrorism (a significant exception to
this observation includes Virginia Held; e.g., in 2004).
Rather, their analyses begin with the USA being attacked
(e.g., Walzer, Pogge, etc.) and reflect on what we can now
do to them. This starting point for the analysis of state
terrorism eclipses several issues, all of which concern the
creation of some of the conditions for terrorism against
a state: (1) state terrorism of one state against another that
may predate and even cause non-state terrorist attacks on
the state terrorized (e.g., US drone attacks in Pakistan;
Pogge does deal with this issue in 2008); (2) state enhance-
ment of terrorism that is, support of the terrorism of
other nations (e.g., US arming Israel to attack Lebanon
and Palestine; the School of the Americas); and
(3) whether state terrorism may be classed as
a nonviolent kind (e.g., US economic sanctions on Iraq
prior to the invasion of 2003 or USA putting military bases
in Saudi Arabia; both actions directly antagonize the civil-
ian population of each country, and in the case of Iraq
sanctions, were devastating to the innocent population).
Finally, preventing terrorism is seldom discussed in the
topic of state terrorism (again, Virginia Held is a notable
exception). One way to further this latter issue comes in
advocating the recognition of the need of peoples to
achieve maximal freedom, especially freedom of speech.
The latter will serve as a release valve from social and
economic pressures and prevent the felt need for violent
retribution against a state. That alone would be insuffi-
cient in preventing terrorism, however. In addition, one
would have to advocate some form of distributive justice,
since justice in this manner is predicated on notions of
freedom and equality. The end result would likely be both
that states would experience less non-state terrorism and
thus have less of a justification to engage in actions
approaching the level of state terrorism.
Related Topics
Chomsky, Noam
Enemy Combatant
Hague Conventions
Illegitimate States
International Law
Political Obligation
Rights
Terrorism
Torture
Walzer, Michael
War Against Terrorism
War Crimes
War, Just and Unjust
References
Beitz C (1979) Bounded morality: justice and the state in world politics.
Int Organ 33:405424
Chomsky N (1985) The morality of terrorism. Philosophy 60(231):4769
Chomsky N (1988) The culture of terrorism. Pluto Press, London
Chomsky N (1989) Realizing Rawls. Cornell University Press, Ithaca
Chomsky N (1991) International terrorism: image and reality. In: George
A (ed) Western state terrorism. Routledge, London, pp 1238
Chomsky N (1992) Deterring democracy. Verso, New York
Chomsky N (2002) Terror and just response. ZNet, July 2
Chomsky N (2003) Hegemony or survival. Metropolitan Books, New York
Chomsky N (2004) Terrorism and war. J Ethics 8(1):5975
Chomsky N (2005) Simple truths, hard problems: some thoughts on
terror, justice, and self-defence. Philosophy 80:528
Coady CAJ (2002a) Terrorism, just war and supreme emergency. Ethics
114:772789
Coady CAJ (ed) (2002b) Terrorism and justice: moral argument in
a threatened world. Melbourne University Press, Carlton
Frey RG, Morris C (eds) (1991) Violence, terrorism, and justice.
Cambridge University Press, New York
Held V (1991) Terrorism, rights, and political goals. In: Frey RG, Morris
CW (eds) Violence, terrorism, and justice. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, pp 5985
Jaggar A (2005) What is terrorism, why is it wrong, and could it ever be
morally permissible? J Soc Philos 36(2):202217
Lackey D (2004) The evolution of the modern terrorist state: area bomb-
ing and nuclear deterrence. In: Primoratz I (ed) Terrorism: the
philosophical issues. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp 128139
Pogge T (2008) Making war on terrorists reflections on harming the
innocent. J Polit Philos 16(1):125
Primoratz I (2003) State terrorism and counter-terrorism. Centre for
Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. University of Melbourne
Press, Melbourne
Walzer M (1977) Just and unjust wars. Basic Books, New York
Stiglitz, Joseph Eugene
CRISTIAN DIMITRIU
Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto,
Toronto, ON, Canada
Joseph Eugene Stiglitz is an American economist and
a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient
of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
(2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is also
the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of

the World Bank. He is known for his critical view of the
management of globalization, free-market economists,
and some international institutions like the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Although Stiglitz is
not strictly a philosopher, his contributions have been
relevant for global justice debates from several different
perspectives. Three of these contributions will be reviewed
in this entry.
Explanatory Nationalism
Global justice theorists have often claimed that the causes
of economic failure of countries are always domestic or
internal to those countries. This entails that international
institutions or foreign states do not play an important role
in the economic performance of countries. Rawls and his
defenders have recently adopted this position in their
writings on global justice. Following Pogge, we can call
this view explanatory nationalism. Stiglitz is important
in this context, as it lends empirical support to those who
think that explanatory nationalism is wrong. Stiglitz
shows that international institutions such as the World
Bank, the IMF, and the WTO have a powerful influence
on developing countries, which has often been harmful
for them. The way in which these institutions have
coercively shaped the policies of developing countries is
by imposing strong conditionalities in return for
loans, which included premature market liberalization,
privatization, unilateral trade liberalization, fiscal auster-
ity, and others. In many cases, these reforms have made
developing countries worse off. Also, policies proposed
within the WTO have thwarted development of poorer
countries, as they impeded or made it more difficult for
them to make progress through trade.
Fair Trade
Stiglitz has also contributed to the global justice debate by
developing an account of fair trade. On his view, current
international trade is unfair because in trade disputes, both
de iure and de facto, developed countries are in a better
position to prevail; and even if the less developing countries
prevail, the enforcement mechanism is asymmetric. Also,
trade tariffs are asymmetrically and disproportionately
structured in favor of developed countries interests. A fair
trade agreement, Stiglitz says, should (1) be assessed in
terms of the impact on developing nations; if the impact
is negative, it should be ruled out; (2) its benefits should be
distributed proportionately among members, which
implies that developed countries have the positive duty to
promote developing countries development; (3) the agree-
ment should be procedurally transparent, that is, in accor-
dance to Rawlss conception of procedural fairness; and
Stockholm Conference, 1972 S 1039
(4) boundaries of trade should be correctly defined; this
implies excluding unrelated aspects such as intellectual
property and protection to foreign investors.
Institutional Reform
Finally, Stiglitz has contributed to global justice by
suggesting practical paths for institutional reforms,
which include opening lowering tariffs of developed coun-
tries, reforming the patent system in a way that also
benefits the poor, allowing developing countries to
develop their own industries, debt relief, regulation of
international financial markets, and others. Stiglitz has
also encouraged and supported global justice movements
that advocated fair trade, debt relief or debt condoning.
Related Topics
Fair Trade
Free Trade
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Nationalism, Explanatory
Pogge, Thomas
Rawls, John
World Bank (WB)
References
Pogge T (2002) World poverty and human rights: cosmopolitan respon-
sibilities and reforms. Polity Press, London
Rawls J (1999) The law of peoples. Harvard University, Cambridge
Stiglitz J (2002) Globalization and its discontents. W.W. Norton, New York
Stiglitz J (2006) Making globalization work. Penguin Books, London
Stiglitz J, Charlton A (2006) Fair trade for all: how trade can promote
development. Oxford University Press, New York
Stockholm Conference, 1972
AVI BRISMAN
Department of Anthropology, Emory University, S
Atlanta, GA, USA
Concerned with transboundary pollution, particularly in
the form of acid rain, Sweden in 1968 proposed an inter-
national conference to address global environmental
problems. In announcing the 1972 UN Conference on
the Human Environment in Stockholm (the Stockholm
Conference), the UN General Assembly stated that
the main purpose of the conference was to serve as
a practical means to encourage and provide guidelines
for action by Governments and international organiza-
tions designed to protect and improve the human envi-
ronment. The UN General Assembly stated that the
1040 S Subsidiarity Principle
conference should endeavor to promote and advance
guidelines for action by Governments and international
organizations to remedy and prevent impairment of the
environment, by means of international cooperation,
while taking into consideration the particular importance
of enabling developing countries to forestall occurrence of
such problems.
By most accounts, the Stockholm Conference was
a success. One hundred and thirteen countries attended
the Stockholm Conference (although only India and host
country Sweden were represented by their head of state),
which generated three major products:
1. The Stockholm Action Plan (the Action Plan)
2. The United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP)
3. The Stockholm Declaration of the United Nations
Conference on the Human Environment (the Stock-
holm Declaration)
The Action Plan identified those environmental issues
requiring international attention and launched
Earthwatch the global environmental assessment pro-
gram that continues to be crucial for gaining information
about the biosphere. The Action Plans priority recom-
mendations and negotiation advice impacted the devel-
opment of subsequent international environmental
agreements (e.g., Convention on the International Trade
in Endangered Species, the Bonn Convention on Migrat-
ing Species, and the Law of the Sea Convention). The
Action Plan also helped shape the agenda for UNEP,
which is the primary UN organ with general authority
over environmental issues and which has played a crucial
role in the development and negotiation of major inter-
national environmental treaties.
Although the term does not appear anywhere in the
document, the Stockholm Declaration helped lay the
foundation for sustainable development. Among its 26
principles, the Stockholm Declaration stressed the impor-
tance of protecting and improving the environment for
present and future generations (Principle 1), safeguarding
natural resources and wildlife habitat (Principles 2, 4), and
preventing pollution and the discharge of toxic substances
(Principles 6, 7). While the Stockholm Declaration placed
the primary responsibility for environmental protection
on local and national governments, it also legitimized the
environment as an area requiring international action,
underscored the scientific and ecological reasons why
international cooperation was necessary (Principle 22,
which would be repeated almost exactly in the Rio Decla-
ration in 1992, and Principle 24), and highlighted the
linkages between environment and development issues,
which had been a point of contention between developing
and developed countries. Principle 21, which would
appear almost verbatim as Principle 2 of the Rio Declara-
tion, became an important statement of customary inter-
national environmental law, simultaneously granting
States the sovereign right to exploit their own resources,
while imposing upon them the responsibility to ensure
that the activities within their jurisdiction do not cause
damage to the environment outside their jurisdiction.
While the Action Plan, UNEP, and the Stockholm
Declaration were all to have implications for global justice,
perhaps the most significant impact of the Stockholm
Conference of 1972 for global justice was that it generated
more popular awareness about the potential degree and
scope of human influence on the worlds environment,
including its climate.
Related Topics
Rio Declaration
Sustainable Development
United Nations: Right to Development
References
Hulme M (2009) Why we disagree about climate change: understanding
controversy, inaction and opportunity. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge
Hunter D, Salzman J, Zaelke D (2002a) International environmental law
and policy 2/e. Foundation Press, New York
Hunter D, Salzman J, Zaelke D (2002b) International environmental law and
policy: treaty supplement 2002 edition. Foundation Press, New York
Sohn L (1973) The Stockholm declaration on the human environment.
Harvard Int Law J 14:423515
Speth JG (2004) Red sky at morning: America and the crisis of the global
environment. Yale University Press, New Haven/London
UN General Assembly Resolution on Human Environment Conference
(1969) U.N.G.A. 2581(XXIV) Jan. 8, 1970 (A/RES/2581(XXIV))
(unanimously adopted on 15 December 1969)
Victor DG, Raustiala K, Skolnikoff EB (eds) (1998) The implementation
and effectiveness of international environmental commitments: the-
ory and practice. MIT Press, Cambridge
Ward B, Dubos R (1972) Only one earth: the care and maintenance of
a small planet. W.W. Norton, New York
Subsidiarity Principle
JAMES R. MAXEINER
School of Law, Center for International and Comparative
Law, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA
The subsidiarity principle is a product of European Union
law of the last years of the twentieth century. The Treaty on

European Union, as amended by the Treaty of Lisbon of
2007, provides in Article 5(3) of the consolidated treaty,
that in areas where the European Union shares legislative
competence with its Member States, the Union shall act
only if and insofar as the objectives of the proposed action
cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States,
either at central level or at regional or local level, but can
rather by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed
action, be better achieved at Union level. The principle
consists of two tests. One is of national insufficiency:
Member States must not be able on their own to achieve
sufficiently the proposed objective. The other test is of
comparative efficiency: the Union must better be able to
achieve the objective.
The subsidiarity principle is concerned only with mat-
ters where both European Union and Member States have
legislative authority; it does not apply where either has
exclusive authority. This is seen to qualify it as a principle
of cooperative federalism, that is, of a federalism where
federal and state governments work together, as contrasted
to a principle of dual federalism, where federal and state
governments are separate sovereigns having exclusive
powers.
The subsidiarity principle does not mandate
a particular approach to power-sharing. For example, it
does not require a choice between American-style feder-
alism, where the federal government acts principally
through its own organs, or German-style federalism,
where the federal government acts principally through
organs of constituent states.
The subsidiarity principle does not lend itself to objec-
tive evaluation. It is thus viewed as a principle which
guides action, rather than as a rule which prescribes par-
ticular action. Until the Treaty of Lisbon came into effect
in 2009, the principle was largely hortatory. The European
Court of Justice only occasionally addressed subsidiarity.
Whether a particular step complied with the principle was
considered a political question and was left largely to the
European Unions law-making institutions. That led some
critics to regard it as a subsidiary principle or even as
a dead letter.
The Treaty of Lisbon gives greater form to the subsid-
iarity principle, but only in a procedural way. In the
Protocol on the Application of the Principles of Subsidi-
arity and Proportionality, the Treaty continues an earlier
requirement that European Union institutions address
subsidiarity and justifies legislative action as consistent
with the principle. The Protocol of the Treaty of Lisbon
goes further, however, and makes parliaments of Member
States watchdogs of subsidiarity. According to Article 6 of
the Protocol, each national parliament may, within
Subsidies S 1041
8 weeks of a release of a legislative draft, produce a rea-
soned opinion why it considers that proposed action does
not comply with the subsidiarity principle. If enough
legislatures object, the Union must reconsider the pro-
posal from the standpoint of subsidiarity. The national
parliaments do not, however, have power to block mea-
sures on subsidiarity grounds.
Related Topics
European Union (EU)
Global Federalism
Global Governance
Proceduralism
References
Bermann G (1994) Taking subsidiarity seriously: federalism in the Euro-
pean community and the United States. Columbia Law Rev 94:
331456
(2010) Consolidated version of the treaty on European Union (2010/C 83/
01) Off J Euro Union C 83/1
Great Britain Parliament House of Commons European Scrutiny Com-
mittee (2008) Subsidiarity, national parliaments and the Lisbon
treaty: thirty-third report of session 200708 report, together with
formal minutes, oral and written evidence: House of Commons
Papers 563
Schutze R (2008) Subsidiarity and economic reform in Europe. Springer,
Berlin/Heidelberg
Schutze R (2009) From dual to cooperative federalism: the changing
structure of European law. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Tridimas T (2006) The general principles of EU law, 2nd edn. Oxford
University Press, Oxford
Subsidies
GORDON A. BABST
Department of Political Science, Wilkinson College,
Chapman University, Orange, CA, USA S
The most common form of subsidy is when a government
provides an entire economic sector or specified businesses
within a sector with financial assistance in order to secure
for it an advantage in the face of competitors. The chief
financial effect of a subsidy is to lower production,
processing, distribution, or consumer costs so that the
economic sector or businesses can better compete with
rivals. A subsidy may also have a political objective, such as
maintaining an indigenous industry deemed vital for
security reasons, or an equity or welfare objective, such
as to reduce market prices of essential goods or services for
low-income groups in areas such as housing, foodstuffs,
1042 S Subsistence Resources
fuel for heating homes, and other essentials, or may be
deployed to correct for a market failure. Subsidies are also
called subventions, especially when a government subsi-
dizes a public utility that is running a deficit. In all cases
subsidies are interventions into the free market and so are
often viewed with suspicion as sound policy instruments.
Subsidies raise a host of issues, both economic and
moral. Economically, as interventions into the free market
undertaken usually by already wealthy countries, they tilt
the scales in favor of local industries or business concerns,
and against other countries with respect to the same eco-
nomic sector or enterprises. Subsidies allow a good to be
offered on the market at a price lower than its cost, and so
interfere with price and other market signals, and so tend
to be viewed unfavorably by economists. Subsidies
become a moral issue, one of justice, because in all likeli-
hood the subsidized industry or enterprise would other-
wise have to compete on a more level playing field, where
but for the subsidies it could not effectively.
Over $105 billion per year in subsidies is provided by
already developed countries to protect their agriculture
sector, where still developing countries would likely have
a comparative advantage in the absence of the subsidy,
making subsidies corrosive of the latters capacity to pur-
sue their comparative advantage, which is likely in agri-
cultural commodities and cheap rural labor. In developed
countries such as the United States, agricultural subsidies
keep food prices low for domestic consumers and effec-
tively transfer money from the general public to private
interests, allowing if not encouraging the agricultural
industry to continue planting, harvesting, and selling oth-
erwise unprofitable crops such as cotton and sugar;
outcompeting foreign imports; and even dumping
excess product on the world market, lowering the price
for all producers, distorting the market further, and cost-
ing developing countries an estimated $50 billion in lost
agricultural exports.
Developing countries tend not to have the tax revenue
or ready capital to subsidize their own agricultural sector
so that it can compete with developed countries, per-
versely contributing to their dependency on the latter for
food, a primary aspect of economic self-sufficiency. Agri-
cultural subsidies tend to go to large producers rather than
small family farms, with agricultural conglomerates argu-
ably benefitting the most. Agricultural subsidies, then,
increase self-reliance in the developed world, where the
fear of scarcity or poverty is the least threatening, and
stand in the way of self-reliance, rising out of poverty,
and development generally where destitution is a real
threat, if not already present. The unfairness of subsidies
is widely acknowledged in principle, but as with many
issues that involve large amounts of money, hypocrisy on
the part of developed countries is the norm, or so their
critics allege.
Related Topics
Free Trade
Third World Resistance
References
Peterson (2009) A billion dollars a day: the economics and politics of
agricultural subsidies. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken
Stiglitz (2007) Making globalization work. W. W. Norton, New York
Subsistence Resources
Absolute Poverty
Basic Needs
Basic Rights
Food Sovereignty
Poverty
Quality of Life
Subsistence Rights
LISA RIVERA
Department of Philosophy, University of
Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA
Subsistence rights rights to those things humans need to
lead minimally decent lives are often conceived of by
their supporters as a basic part of the demand for global
economic justice. Satisfying a persons subsistence rights
means ensuring that they securely possess enough food,
shelter, clean water, medical care, and unpolluted sur-
roundings to lead a decent life. Subsistence rights target
the basic welfare of human beings rather than their
flourishing. Defenders of subsistence rights regard them
as universal human rights in that they do not depend on
particular relationships, such as nationality, and are
guaranteed equally to every human being. They may cor-
respond to universal duties on everyones part to ensure,
to whatever extent possible, that no person is deprived of
these indispensable goods. Establishing institutions to
promote global justice is generally thought of as an essen-
tial part of the realization of subsistence rights. Thus, the

individual duty to meet subsistence rights could possibly
be discharged were there international mechanisms and
institutions to ensure that everyone has enough to meet
their basic needs.
Subsistence rights are among the most controversial
rights connected to global justice issues. The main con-
troversies focus on whether economic rights like subsis-
tence have the same legitimacy as civil and political rights
like liberty and security; on who, if anyone, is responsible
for meeting and enforcing subsistence rights globally; and
on whether it is feasible to meet subsistence rights.
The growing concern with global justice in the
twentieth century is reflected in several international
agreements that advance a right to subsistence. Article 25
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)
states a right to a standard of living that ensures health,
well-being, food, clothing, housing, and medical care. The
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights (ICESCR) commits governments to progressively
realize a right to an adequate standard of living, good
health, and social security and social insurance, as well as
various labor rights. Some national constitutions also
guarantee their own citizens rights to their basic needs.
The presence of national and international agreements
guaranteeing subsistence rights cannot eliminate skepti-
cism that subsistence rights are genuine. The UDHR and
the ICESCR do not clearly establish mechanisms to
enforce these rights or to enable rights-holders to claim
them nationally or internationally. Therefore, some argue
that these agreements express aspirational moral beliefs
rather than genuine rights.
Satisfying subsistence rights would curtail the acute
suffering and premature death of vast numbers of the
worlds people who lack the basic necessities for a decent
life. The World Bank estimates that almost half the worlds
people live in severe poverty, on less than two dollars a day.
Approximately 1.1 billion people, or one-sixth of those on
earth, live in extreme poverty, measured as less than one
dollar a day. Annually, approximately six million children
die of hunger and 18 million people die prematurely
from poverty-related causes. Virtually all extreme poverty
occurs in economically undeveloped or developing
nations. Globally, there are enough resources to eliminate
extreme poverty. In 2000, the United Nations set Millen-
nium Development Goals (MDGs) to cut extreme poverty
in half by 2010. This target was not met.
We are familiar with the idea that it is morally good for
the global rich to help the global poor for humanitarian
reasons. Part of the significance of subsistence rights to
debates about global justice is that, if such rights do exist,
current levels of poverty are not primarily a failure of the
Subsistence Rights S 1043
global rich to act on duties of beneficence but a gross
injustice. Thus, the global poor are entitled to relief from
their poverty, and the current global situation is as much
an infringement on the rights of the poor as a denial of
their liberty would be.
The enlightenment model of rights found in social
contract theories is a main historical foundation for
human rights. The idea that every human being has
a right to liberty and security has a strong foothold in
the ensuing liberal political tradition that shapes modern
democratic societies and international human rights dis-
course. The same conceptual justifications for other
human rights also justify subsistence rights. A basic level
of physical well-being is necessary for agency and auton-
omy. Severe economic deprivation denies people their
basic dignity.
Although some reject expansion of rights to include
economic rights like subsistence, Henry Shue argues that
subsistence rights are entailed by accepting other rights.
Subsistence, security, and liberty constitute a set of basic
rights: Each must be satisfied for a person to enjoy any
right whatsoever. For example, an ill or starving person
cannot participate effectively in politics or defend them-
selves in court. Some have argued that it is not literally
impossible for a person who suffers material deprivation
to exercise their other rights. Shues point is that rights
must be socially guaranteed and those in extreme want are
not secure in their possession of any rights.
One objection to the existence of subsistence rights is
that they are not enforced and are not currently enforce-
able, particularly internationally. If it remains impossible
for a person to remedy the failure to meet their rights, then
that right remains so useless as to be virtually meaningless.
This argument casts doubt on the universality of human
rights. In situations of widespread rights violations, like
those occurring under highly repressive regimes, it can be
impossible to enforce rights domestically or across S
borders.
The debate over whether subsistence rights exist and
who is required to meet them involves a traditional dis-
tinction between negative and positive rights and duties.
Given this contrast, subsistence rights are positive rights;
to satisfy them requires assistance from duty-holders such
as national governments or the international community.
Negative rights, such as the right to liberty, can be
respected by every person by not interfering with what
every other person has a right to do. While subsistence
rights also correspond to negative duties not to interfere
with peoples ability to provide for themselves, it is often
assumed that universal guarantees of them will require
providing aid or services to some people. One libertarian
1044 S Subsistence Rights
argument that subsistence rights are illegitimate is that
positive duties to satisfy them require coercive enforce-
ment that violates the right to liberty.
Shue argues that there is no real distinction between
positive and negative rights because actually securing lib-
erty, security, property, or any right whatsoever requires
extensive state action, such as a judicial system. A reply in
favor of the distinction is that positive and negative rights
differ with respect to the allocation of duties, particularly
globally. Onora ONeill argues that, transnationally, sub-
sistence rights cannot clearly be allocated to specific duty-
holders. On the assumption that rights must correlate
with duties, if person X has a genuine right to Y, then
some specific person or institution must be charged with
a duty to respect, protect, or provide Y. For a right to exist
in a particular situation, the rights-holder must be able to
claim it from a person or institution that possesses
a perfect (exceptionless) duty to satisfy it. We can easily
identify who has violated a persons right to liberty and
bodily integrity, when they have been sequestered and
tortured. In contrast, there is no one to hold directly
accountable when someone lacks for food, shelter, or
medical care. ONeill concludes that, until there are iden-
tifiable international agents or institutions that can pro-
vide people with what they need for subsistence, they do
not have a right to it globally. Their deprivation may be
otherwise unjust, but this is not due to a failure to respect
existing subsistence rights.
A response to this view is that it may not be possible to
immediately identify violators of negative rights. For
example, direct perpetrators of unjust imprisonment or
torture may not be the primary perpetrators of rights
violations when they are acting at the behest of political
figures in distant, more powerful states. Rights violations
of any type can require systemic political redress rather
than identification of direct perpetrators. Elizabeth
Ashford argues that negative rights would be no less vio-
lated if they involved complex causal chains with many
agents that result in multiplicative harms. She argues that
every affluent agent has as-yet-unspecified imperfect
global duties to do their share to reform and create just
institutional structures to address the multiplicative
harms of poverty. The poor can claim subsistence rights
from those in a position to press for these changes.
Thomas Pogge rejects this view and argues that global
justice with respect to global poverty can be conceived of
as a requirement on the part of wealthy nations to rectify
the harms caused by their longstanding injustices toward
poorer nations. Thus, the injustice of global poverty is not
a failure to meet positive rights to subsistence but a failure
to respect the negative rights of the global poor by
depriving them of subsistence. The extreme unfairness of
the global economic order and the institutions that sup-
port it produce severe poverty and its consequent harms.
The longstanding inability of the poor to meet their own
basic needs was never the result of natural circumstances
but arose historically through economic and political
arrangements designed to favor the elites of poor coun-
tries and the governments, corporations, and citizens of
affluent countries. Those who create, support, and benefit
from such arrangements are morally responsible for caus-
ing global poverty and required to alter these arrange-
ments to alleviate it.
The question whether it is feasible to meet subsistence
rights or to rectify past harms, as in Pogges view, is not
only economic but political and moral. For example, sat-
isfying an imperfect positive duty to secure subsistence for
every person would require substantial resources from
wealthier nations as well as reform within underdeveloped
and developing countries. Proposals such as the Tobin Tax
on international capital transactions or the Global
Resource Dividend could raise large amounts to meet
subsistence rights but do not have substantial political
support in wealthy countries. More modest goals such as
meeting the MDGs would require approximately 0.7% of
the Gross Domestic Product of developed countries, but
some countries have not paid. Satisfying the negative duty
not to deprive the poor of subsistence likely involves debt
forgiveness for developing countries, major reforms
of international institutions such as the World Trade
Organization (WTO), and alterations in the policies of
multinational corporations and wealthy nations. Such
reforms could be progressive but require greater political
will on the part of the citizens in wealthy democracies and
substantial empowerment for the global poor.
Assuming subsistence rights are feasible and legiti-
mate, their satisfaction would be an essential step in full
global economic justice. While arguments for these rights
do not directly address the many questions surrounding
what global justice requires in the way of economic redis-
tribution, successfully meeting these rights doubtless
involves some redistributive mechanism.
Related Topics
Absolute Poverty
Agency, Individual
Basic Rights
Capabilities Approach
Cosmopolitan Justice
Duties of Assistance
Duties to the Distant Needy
Duties, Perfect and Imperfect

Duties, Positive and Negative
Economic Rights
Essential Medicines, Access to
Foreign Aid
Global Basic Structure
Global Distributive Justice
Libertarianism
Negative Rights
Poverty
Shue, Henry
Special Rights
Tobin Tax
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
References
Ashford E (2006) The inadequacy of our traditional conceptions of the
duties imposed by human rights. Can J L Juris 19:217235
Caney S (2005) Justice beyond borders: a global political theory.
Cambridge University Press, New York
Copp D (1992) The right to an adequate standard of living: justice,
autonomy and the basic needs. Soc Philos Soc 9:231261
Geuss R (2001) History and illusion in politics. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge
Gewirth A (1996) The community of rights. University of Chicago Press,
Chicago
Hertzel S, Minkler L (eds) (2007) Economic rights: conceptual, measure-
ment, and policy issues. Cambridge University Press, New York
Kuper A (ed) (2005) Global responsibilities: who must deliver on human
rights? Routledge, New York
ONeill O (2000) Bounds of justice. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge
Pogge T (2002) World poverty and human rights. Polity Press, Cambridge
Pogge T (ed) (2007) Freedom from poverty as a human right: who owes
what to the global poor? Oxford University Press, New York
Shue H (1996) Basic rights: subsistence, affluence and U.S. foreign policy.
Princeton University Press, Princeton
Surrogacy, Transnational
AMRITA BANERJEE
Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon,
Eugene, OR, USA
Commercial transnational surrogacy can be described as
the practice of hiring a woman from a different country in
lieu of payment for carrying and giving birth to a child,
and then handing it over along with all parental rights to
the commissioning individuals. This practice constitutes
a significant part of the expanding international industry
in assisted reproductive technologies and fertility tourism.
The gendered nature of the work and its complex
Surrogacy, Transnational S 1045
economic, medical, legal, and political dimensions have
important implications for questions about global repro-
ductive rights, ethics, womens experience of globalization,
and international law and economic-political policy
all of which are vital issues in the contemporary debate
on global justice. This entry focuses mainly on some
feminist dilemmas around this issue, with special atten-
tion to questions about justice and ethics in todays global
world.
The Context
In contemporary times, India has emerged as the capital of
reproductive tourism, especially surrogacy-related fertility
tourism. On an estimate published in Marie Claire, Indian
surrogacy is considered already to be a $445-million-
a-year business. Part of this boom might be the result of
the fact that the Supreme Court of India has recognized
commercial surrogacy as legal since 2002. The Ministry of
Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, has also
drafted the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regula-
tion) Bill with an aim to secure clear legal guidelines for
the practice. The bill seeks to ensure the safe and ethical
use of assisted reproductive technologies. Feminists, legal
theorists, and medical practitioners alike have scrutinized
the draft bill closely. Some critics hold that the bill fails to
safeguard the interests of the surrogates, donors, and
children. Critics also take it as promoting reproductive
tourism in India. At present, however, commercial surro-
gacy in India continues to be governed by the National
Guidelines for Accreditation, Supervision and Regulation
of ART Clinics in India, issued by the Indian Council of
Medical Research in 2005.
Most of the surrogates working in the Indian clinics
are gestational surrogates (a surrogate who is genetically
unrelated to the baby she carries and is implanted by
someone elses fertilized egg) and not full surrogates
(a surrogate who has a genetic connection with the S
baby). In fact, the draft bill defines surrogacy as an
arrangement in which a woman agrees to a pregnancy,
achieved through assisted reproductive technology, in
which neither of the gametes belong to her or her hus-
band, with the intention to carry it and hand over the
child to the person or persons for whom she is acting as
a surrogate (The ART Regulation Bill, 4, 2aa). It also
defines a surrogate mother as a woman who is a citizen
of India and is resident in India, who agrees to have an
embryo generated from the sperm of a man who is not
her husband and the oocyte of another woman, implanted
in her to carry the pregnancy to viability and deliver the
child to the couple/individual that had asked for surro-
gacy (The ART Regulation Bill, 4, 2bb). The lack of
1046 S Surrogacy, Transnational
biological connection is emphasized so as to prevent
the surrogate from potentially developing an emotional
bond with the baby. More importantly, however, it
weakens the surrogates legal claims to parental rights
and ownership.
The Demographic
In the case of transnational surrogacy, the commissioning
individual/individuals tend to be from the First World,
while the transnational surrogates come from developing
nations. Anthropologist Kalindi Voras fieldwork reveals
that most of the Indian surrogates are day laborers from
rural communities with a middle-school or high-school
equivalent education (Vora 2009). Sociologist Amrita
Pandes fieldwork in Anand in 2006 and 2007 reveals
a similar pattern. Thirty-four of Pandes 42 interviewees
reported a family income below or around Indias official
poverty line, and the income from surrogacy for most of
them equaled to almost 5 years of total family income
(Pande 2009). The consumer demographic, on the other
hand, tends to be socially privileged in some way or the
other such as in terms of class, education, race, caste,
etc. The western consumer demographic includes nonres-
ident Indians as well.
The economic factor, of course, plays a significant role
in the outsourcing of commercial surrogacy. For example,
commercial surrogacy costs can be as high as $70,000 in
the United States, compared to $12.000 in India (includ-
ing medical expenses and the surrogates fee) (Haworth
2007). Factors such as legality of the practice, fewer legal
hassles, etc. are also important draws in addition to the
cost-factor for foreign individuals/couples to hire Indian
surrogates.
Arguments in Favor
The primary argument in favor of commercial surrogacy
in the west is based on the notion of autonomy or
choice. Raymond characterizes this camp as reproduc-
tive liberalism. In summary, the autonomy argument
believes that . . . in so far as women have the right to
decide whether, and how, to procreate, they have the right
to do so by contract and against payment. (Fabre 2006).
Interestingly enough, similar language is used while pro-
moting surrogacy-related fertility tourism and in market-
ing the services of transnational surrogates. It is urged that
transnational surrogacy creates immense opportunities
for the surrogates to exercise autonomy. With the money
she makes, she can give her family a better life. As for the
commissioning individuals, it opens up the possibility to
become a parent. By emphasizing its potential for
empowering both the surrogate and the commissioning
individuals, therefore, it is argued that this particular
practice across borders is beneficial to all that are
involved in it.
Arguments Against
Transnational surrogacy raises serious concerns from the
perspective of ethics and global justice. The first thing to
note is the basic asymmetry within the surrogacy relation,
so far as the location of the commissioning individuals
relative to the transnational surrogate is concerned. The
difference in the profile of consumers relative to the ser-
vice providers, in turn, raises important concerns about
the relation between the First World and the Third
World within processes of globalization. Reading the
transnational surrogates experience as empowerment on
the basis of decisional autonomy fails to interrogate the
problematics of consent and overlooks the realities and
constraints of the larger social world she inhabits
(Banerjee 2010). The asymmetry in location of the con-
sumers versus the service providers has yet another prob-
lematic implication. It calls us to attend to the political
and economic dimensions of the global division of repro-
ductive labor (Vora 2009).
Human rights violation is another area of concern
within the practice and has important implications for
global justice. The integrity of womens bodies is
compromised as they are exploited in the role of repro-
ducers. In the west, for instance, commercial surrogacy
has been critiqued as being prostitution in a new
guise (Dworkin 1978) and as reducing women to
a new breeder class (Raymond 1993). The surrogates
body is judged purely in terms of its use-value, and the
institutions of surrogacy emphasize the disposability of
these bodies. Commercial surrogacy is also being com-
pared to trafficking in organs. These arguments still
retain some force when surrogacy crosses international
borders.
The rights of the baby have been of serious concern to
theorists and activists as well. It is not unusual for oppo-
nents of commercial surrogacy to think of it as a practice
of baby-selling. From a global justice perspective too, the
rights of the child must be as much at issue as much as the
rights of the surrogate. These rights include, but are not
limited to the right to survival, the right to bonding, the
right to a safe home, the right to know her identity,
etc. (Qadeer 2010). In the absence of clear guidelines, the
baby becomes extremely vulnerable. This is especially true
for babies that are born with disabilities or are born of
a multiple pregnancy.
In recent years, serious concerns about transnational
surrogacy are raised from the perspective of womens

health. The medical procedures involved in surrogacy such
as hormone shots, artificial insemination, etc. are com-
plex, invasive, and entail risky consequences that may or
may not surface immediately after the pregnancy. Indeed,
the procedures put the surrogate in a much greater degree
of risk as compared to a normal healthy pregnancy.
Although the surrogates are kept under constant medical
supervision within the clinics during the course of preg-
nancy, a similar treatment does not necessarily await them
once they have delivered the service. Postnatal health care
and treatment of complications arising from the preg-
nancy are often not covered (Eyal 2010). The sheer geo-
graphical distance between the surrogate and the
commissioning individuals further complicates issues of
legality and responsibility. These factors make both the
surrogate and the baby extremely vulnerable within the
surrogacy relation.
Methodological Issues, Challenges, and
Directions
Transnational surrogacy embodies some of the central
quandaries of globalization, arising from the movement
of human capital across borders. As such it poses impor-
tant ethicalpolitical dilemmas and challenges for medi-
cal, legal, and economic policy. The gendered nature of the
work, along with race, citizenship, culture-specific dis-
courses about parenting, etc., intersects with and further
accentuates concerns about economic and political justice
in a global context. However, uncritically extending dom-
inantly Western paradigms of analysis such as Western
moral paradigms might be damaging to the surrogate in
the long run (Bailey 2009; Banerjee 2010; Pande 2009).
Apart from the moral lens for approaching transna-
tional surrogacy, feminist ethnographic engagements con-
stitute another contemporary framework for analyzing
this phenomenon. These ethnographic approaches focus
on the ways in which the surrogacy relation is lived and
negotiated in the bodies of the surrogates. On the basis of
her fieldwork, for instance, Pande uses Indian surrogacy to
highlight a new form of care work, which she calls sexu-
alized care work (Pande 2009). She argues that this way of
looking at surrogacy takes us beyond both the Euro-
centric and ethics-oriented frames of analysis.
Some of the ethnographic approaches, however, tend
to downplay issues concerning morality and justice. In
doing so, they have the danger of raising the specter of
moral absenteeism (Bailey 2009). In response to the
critique of moral absenteeism against feminist ethno-
graphic approaches, and that of discursive ethnocentrism
against the Western moral frameworks, Bailey adopts the
Reproductive Justice framework for approaching this
Surrogacy, Transnational S 1047
issue. Reproductive justice pushes us to attend to the
poor state of womens health in India. By doing so, it
makes us reconsider the moral implications of
outsourcing pregnancy there.
The feminist pragmatist philosophical model
(Banerjee 2010) is another recent framework of analysis.
This model seeks to negotiate the dichotomy between the
moral and the lived dimensions of transnational surro-
gacy. It does so by paying careful attention to the phe-
nomenology of oppression, agency, and power as lived in
the bodies of the surrogates, while working out the under-
lying moral dimensions. Listening to the voices of the
surrogates exposes the fact that surrogacy restructures or
can potentially restructure their worlds in important ways.
It might be the best available option available to some of
them and can facilitate a sense of worth and agency under
conditions of extreme oppression. However, the limited
power that surrogates may come to yield within the sur-
rogacy relation, is only made possible because they per-
petually live in a crisis zone of extreme alienation,
inequality, and injustice. Problematic gender, class, racial,
and other hierarchies threaten to undermine any sense of
agency. Therefore, even when individual women end up
with limited power within the context of transnational
surrogacy, it is problematic to read this as empowerment.
Transnational surrogacy embodies various quandaries
of globalization. Concerns about justice, ethics, legality,
economics, etc., that surround the practice, however, push
us to examine current epistemological, scientific, medical,
and ethical frameworks. National and international insti-
tutions and policies also need to be rethought in order to
adequately respond to these concerns. As more and more
women and children get caught up in the circuit of global
capital movement, one of the fundamental challenges ahead
is to work out effective liberatory and action-oriented pol-
itics from the analyses of global justice/injustice.
S
Related Topics
Borders
Capitalism
Feminist Ethics
Neoliberalism
Population Politics
References
Bailey A (2009) Reconceiving surrogacy: toward a reproductive justice
account of surrogacy work in India. 30 Nov 2009. Available at: http://
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1518026. Accessed on
7 Feb 2011
Banerjee A (2010) Reorienting the ethics of transnational surrogacy as
a feminist pragmatist. The Pluralist 5(3):107127
1048 S Sustainable Development
Dunbar P (2007) Wombs to rent: childless British couples pay Indian
women to carry their babies. The Daily Mail 8 Dec 2007.
Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-500601/Wombs-
rent-Childless-British-couples-pay-Indian-women-carry-babies.html.
Accessed on 1 Feb 2011
Dworkin A (1978) Right wing women. Perigree Books, New York
Eyal H (2010) Reproductive trafficking. GeneWatch 23(5) (Gene Patents)
OctDec 2010. Available at: http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.
org/GeneWatch/GeneWatchPage.aspx?pageId=313. Accessed on 7 Feb
2011
Fabre C (2006) Whose body is it anyway? Justice and the integrity of the
person. Clarendon, Oxford
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Available at: http://www.marieclaire.com/world-reports/news/inter-
national/surrogate-mothers-india. Accessed on 1 Feb 2011
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, Indian
Council of Medical Research (2010) The assisted reproductive
technologies (regulation) bill 2010 [Draft]. Available at:
http://www.icmr.nic.in/guide/ART%20REGULATION%20Draft%
20Bill1.pdf. Accessed on 7 Feb 2011
Pande A (2009) Not an angel, not a whore: surrogates as dirty workers
in India. Indian J Gend Stud 16(2):141173
Qadeer I (2010) The ART of marketing babies. Indian J Med Ethics vii
(4):209215, Available at: http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:
WfuZI6zNUvUJ:scholar.google.com/&hl=en&as_sdt=5,38&sciodt=0,38.
Accessed on 7 Feb 2011
Raymond JG (1993) Women as wombs: reproductive technologies and
the battle over womens freedom. Harper, San Francisco
Vora K (2009) Indian transnational surrogacy and the disaggregation of
mothering work. Anthropol News 50:912
Sustainable Development
RANDALL CURREN
Department of Philosophy, University of Rochester,
Rochester, NY, USA
Sustainable development is most often defined as it was in
1987 by the World Commission on Environment and
Development, also known as the Brundtland Commis-
sion: development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs or, somewhat more expansively,
development that meets the needs and aspirations of the
present without compromising the ability to meet those of
the future. Sustainable development is, in short,
development that satisfies some standard of sustainability
or compatibility with a comparable or better quality of life
in the future. The fundamental goal of development is to
improve the quality of life, and the fundamental goal of
sustainability is to do so within the carrying capacity
of ecosystems. Sustainable development is concerned with
the elimination of poverty in the face of growing ecological
risks caused disproportionately by the global North and
borne disproportionately by the global South. Environ-
mental considerations are foundational in the global
discourse of sustainability, but sustainability is generally
spoken of more expansively to include the long-term
health, survivability, and capacity of not just ecological
systems but also social and economic systems. Distributive
and participatory justice are often seen as instrumental to
achieving sustainable development and as independently
desirable, and they are sometimes stipulated as defining
conditions of sustainable development. The idea of
sustainable development is inherently normative and
permeated with considerations of global justice.
Environmental problems became a focus of interna-
tional attention at the UN Conference on the Human
Environment convened in Stockholm in 1972. The posi-
tion taken by developing countries both before and during
the Conference was that economic development to allevi-
ate poverty should not be subordinated to environmental
concerns a position articulated by the Indian Prime
Minister, Indira Gandhi, who argued that progress in
environmental protection requires progress in reducing
poverty. The outcome was a doctrine of environment
and development, now known as sustainable develop-
ment, and a Stockholm Declaration of 26 principles,
including a fundamental right to freedom, dignity and
adequate conditions of life, in an environment of quality
and a universal responsibility to protect and improve the
environment for present and future generations. Under
the doctrine of environment and development, govern-
ments agreed that development and environmental
protection are mutually reinforcing, and that countries
of the North would underwrite at least some of the cost
of environmental initiatives in the South through addi-
tional development assistance. It was thus at the very
advent of the global environmental movement that
asymmetries of NorthSouth interests subsumed environ-
mental initiatives under a larger, and in some ways
problematic, agenda of sustainable development. This
agenda was subsequently shaped by the 1987 Brundtland
Report, Our Common Future, the 1992 Rio Earth Summit
(United Nations Conference on Environment and
Development, or UNCED), and the 2002 Johannesburg
World Summit on Sustainable Development.
Problems of Definition
There are unresolved tensions in the idea of sustainable
development. As a form of development, sustainable
development is understood by some to be focused on
economic growth and by others to be focused on human

rights, the alleviation of poverty, and the survival and
well-being of diverse global cultures. Underneath this
divergence are related disagreements about the dynamics
of economic development whether investments in
human services and facilities retard or accelerate economic
development and the extent to which economic growth
as such can be counted on to alleviate poverty and
stimulate social development and democratic reform.
Agreement that development must be sustainable also
masks profound disagreements about the extent to
which environmental problems that threaten human
well-being can be solved through economic development,
and the extent to which any further economic growth can
be sustained. One assessment grounded in environmental
studies is that the idea of sustainable development is either
incoherent or ill-defined; another is that the terms of
development must be compatible with a flat or declining
aggregate human burden on natural systems. Some
theorists of sustainable development adopt a human
development or capability perspective on development,
and many defend the compatibility of improvements in
human well-being with dematerializing the global
economy, citing psychological research findings that
above some threshold of material adequacy there is little,
if any, positive correlation between happiness and rising
affluence.
There are identifiable ways in which targeted develop-
ment can reduce environmental burdens by introducing
cleaner technologies and reducing birth rates by providing
women with educational and economic opportunities, but
the size of the global economy remains a good predictor of
aggregate environmental impact. The Kuznets-curve
hypothesis holds that environmental damage declines at
higher per capita income levels, but this hypothesized
pattern is observable in only isolated cases. It is reasonable
to expect that if the global 5% per annum growth rate of
the first years of the twenty-first century continues, the
world economy will double in 14 years and environmental
damage will more or less double with it. The magnitude of
the threat to human well-being this entails is most easily
expressed in terms of the human ecological footprint, an
aggregate measure of human demands on ecosystems.
Those demands are estimated to have passed 100% of
the full capacity of the supporting systems in the mid-
1980s and to be growing so rapidly that they will be double
the capacity of natural systems by the mid-2030s. Running
ecological deficits amounts to depleting past ecological
savings and borrowing against the future productive global cooperation, states may leave their industries free to
capacity of ecosystems by overexploiting them. It is
predictable that continued overexploitation would cause
permanent damage and loss of capacity.
Sustainable Development S 1049
The Brundtland definition of sustainable develop-
ment, as development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs, has also been challenged on nor-
mative grounds. One may regard the (mere) meeting of
needs as falling short of what morality and justice require,
even if it is more than what is likely to be achieved in
practice. Appending an unqualified reference to
aspirations makes the opposite mistake of promising
too much. Controversy has also surrounded various
attempts to add requirements of equity and democratic
participation to the definition of sustainable develop-
ment. This might rest on the presumption that what is
unjust is socially unsustainable or the idea that equity and
participation are important ends or means of develop-
ment. An alternative to the Brundtland formulation
would be to define sustainability so as to require that
each generation live in a way that is compatible with future
generations enjoying a comparable quality of life, and to
formulate a quality of life index that could be used as
a measure of success. On this model, ways of life (broadly
construed) are the fundamental unit of interest and qual-
ity of life is the fundamental value at stake. Focus on
opportunities, resources, the health of ecosystems, and
the preservation of natural landscapes would be highly
salient, and quality of life considerations need not be
restricted (by definition or moral presumption) to the
lives of human beings.
Guiding Principles
What is important is perhaps not so much the definition
of sustainability, as the facts of environmental sustainabil-
ity and the principles that should guide national and
international responses to those facts. These principles
would include a proscription of cross-border environ-
mental harms and an associated requirement to provide
compensation for such harms. A related principle, owing S
to Immanuel Kant (German philosopher, 17241804), is
that parties whose actions affect each other are obligated
to cooperate in negotiating fair terms of engagement,
including what will and will not be recognized as wrongful
impairments of each others free enjoyment of their prop-
erty, health, and liberties. This is an important addendum,
inasmuch as environmental harms and threats to sustain-
ability impose increments of risk, and norms of action and
standards of liability must identify some threshold of
unacceptable risk. By refusing to negotiate fair terms of
impair globally vital ecosystems with impunity, but it
cannot be morally acceptable for them to do so. From
the perspective of global justice, the negotiation of fair
1050 S Sustainable Development
terms of cooperation would itself be subject to require-
ments of both procedural and substantive justice. The
substantive possibilities range from minimal human rights
provisions to requirements of global fair equality of
opportunity, applied both synchronically and with regard
to future generations. A primary philosophical alternative
to the principle that future generations should be able to
enjoy a comparable quality of life to what we have now, is
the view that intergenerational justice requires each gen-
eration act so as to preserve (equal) opportunity to live
good lives across generations. A necessary caveat is that we
dont yet have a workable conception or measure of the
equality of opportunities across temporally, geographi-
cally, or culturally distant contexts.
A range of more specific normative considerations
and arguments have been brought to bear on matters of
sustainability and sustainable development. Problems
of sustainability, in the form of climate-related drought,
desertification, rising sea levels, and destructiveness of
storms, are already evident in humanitarian crises,
migration, regional conflict, and political instability.
Principles of immigration, refugee status, mutual aid in
the prevention and mitigation of disaster, the equitable use
of global and regional commons, the ground rules of
shared sacrifice in reducing greenhouse gas emissions,
and assistance to the most vulnerable in adapting to
climate disruption are all relevant. Consideration of pop-
ulation growth and excessive consumption as underlying
drivers of unsustainability have given rise to arguments
about reproductive health and justice, the priority of
subsistence consumption over luxury consumption,
protection of ecological and resource assets fundamental
to the survival of endangered cultures, human rights and
the limits of commercialization of water and other public
utilities, educational rights, education for sustainable
development, and the educational prerequisites of
personal and collective agency and adaptation to the
demands of sustainability. Matters of sustainable develop-
ment are thus related not only to the conceptualization
of global justice generally, but also to a variety of specific
global justice debates.
The Prospects for Sustainable
Development
Sustainable development is, at least notionally, a major
focus of international concern, activity, and governance
facilitated by the United Nations, yet its attainment is
proving elusive. Neoliberal economic globalization
is identified by many observers as a fundamental obstacle,
because it entails an ongoing shift of power away from
governments, undermines the willingness of governments
to enter into binding environmental treaties, accelerates
damaging environmental trends, and remorselessly
commercializes water, schools, and other prerequisites of
human dignity and effective, collective response to
common problems. Global NorthSouth asymmetries of
interest, affluence, power, vulnerability, public opinion,
and political capacity undoubtedly present fundamental
challenges as well. It is plausible that the aggressive global
educational initiative called for by the United Nations in
its announcement of the Decade of Education for Sustain-
able Development (UNDESD, 20052014) could signifi-
cantly advance sustainable development by advancing
environmental understanding and global civic compe-
tence, building adaptive capacity, and strengthening
reproductive choice, social and economic opportunity,
and political capacity.
Related Topics
Brundtland Commission
Capabilities Approach
Consumerism
Development Assistance
Development Ethics
Environmental Justice
Environmental Protection
Intergenerational Justice
Obligation to Future Generations
Population Politics
Quality of Life
Stockholm Conference, 1972
United Nations: Right to Development
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