Debate Matter Research

Raden Aryo Febrian Moedanton

(2009 – 2013)
Vol I
 Disclaimer

This material is NOT my works, rather I collect them from all over the place and
included paid journal. I would be happy if you want to share it, just give credit to the
original owner and (if u want) me, lol
 War

First published Fri Feb 4, 2000; substantive revision Thu Jul 28, 2005

War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between
political communities. Thus, fisticuffs between individual persons do not count as a war, nor
does a gang fight, nor does a feud on the order of the Hatfields versus the McCoys. War is a
phenomenon which occurs only between political communities, defined as those entities
which either are states or intend to become states (in order to allow for civil war). Classical
war is international war, a war between different states, like the two World Wars. But just as
frequent is war within a state between rival groups or communities, like the American Civil
War. Certain political pressure groups, like terrorist organizations, might also be considered
―political communities,‖ in that they are associations of people with a political purpose and,
indeed, many of them aspire to statehood or to influence the development of statehood in
certain lands.

What's statehood? Most people follow Max Weber's distinction between nation and state. A
nation is a group which thinks of itself as ―a people,‖ usually because they share many things
in common, such as ethnicity, language, culture, historical experience, a set of ideals and
values, habitat, cuisine, fashion and so on. The state, by contrast, refers much more narrowly
to the machinery of government which organizes life in a given territory.

1. Ethics of War and Peace

 2. Just War Theory

o 2.1 Jus ad bellum
o 2.2 Jus in bello
o 2.3 Jus post bellum
 3. Realism
 4. Pacifism
 5. Conclusion
 6. Guide to the Literature
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. The Ethics of War and Peace

Three traditions of thought dominate the ethics of war and peace: Realism; Pacifism; and Just
War Theory (and, through just war theory, International Law). Perhaps there are other
possible perspectives but it seems that very few theories on the ethics of war succeed in
resisting ultimate classification into one of these traditions. They are clearly hegemonic in
this regard.
Before discussing the central elements of each tradition, let's declare the basic conceptual
differences between ―the big three‖ perspectives. The core, and controversial, proposition of
just war theory is that, sometimes, states can have moral justification for resorting to armed
force. War is sometimes, but of course not all the time, morally right. The idea here is not that
the war in question is merely politically shrewd, or prudent, or bold and daring, but fully
moral, just. It is an ethically appropriate use of mass political violence. World War II, on the
Allied side, is always trotted out as the definitive example of a just and good war. Realism,
by contrast, sports a profound skepticism about the application of moral concepts, such as
justice, to the key problems of foreign policy. Power and national security, realists claim,
motivate states during wartime and thus moral appeals are strictly wishful thinking. Talk of
the morality of warfare is pure bunk: ethics has got nothing to do with the rough-and-tumble
world of global politics, where only the strong and cunning survive. A country should tend to
its vital interests in security, influence over others, and economic growth—and not to moral
ideals. Pacifism does not share realism's moral skepticism. For the pacifist, moral concepts
can indeed be applied fruitfully to international affairs. It does make sense to ask whether a
war is just: that is an important and meaningful issue. But the result of such normative
application, in the case of war, is always that war should not be undertaken. Where just war
theory is sometimes permissive with regard to war, pacifism is always prohibitive. For the
pacifist, war is always wrong; there's always some better resolution to the problem than
fighting. Now let's turn to the elements of each of these three traditions.

2. Just War Theory

Just war theory can be meaningfully divided into three parts, which in the literature are
referred to, for the sake of convenience, in Latin. These parts are: 1) jus ad bellum, which
concerns the justice of resorting to war in the first place; 2) jus in bello, which concerns the
justice of conduct within war, after it has begun; and 3) jus post bellum, which concerns the
justice of peace agreements and the termination phase of war.

2.1 Jus ad bellum

The rules of jus ad bellum are addressed, first and foremost, to heads of state. Since political
leaders are the ones who inaugurate wars, setting their armed forces in motion, they are to be
held accountable to jus ad bellum principles. If they fail in that responsibility, then they
commit war crimes. In the language of the Nuremberg prosecutors, aggressive leaders who
launch unjust wars commit ―crimes against peace.‖ What constitutes a just or unjust resort to
armed force is disclosed to us by the rules of jus ad bellum. Just war theory contends that, for
any resort to war to be justified, a political community, or state, must fulfil each and every
one of the following six requirements:

1. Just cause. This is clearly the most important rule; it sets the tone for everything which
follows. A state may launch a war only for the right reason. The just causes most frequently
mentioned include: self-defence from external attack; the defence of others from such; the
protection of innocents from brutal, aggressive regimes; and punishment for a grievous
wrongdoing which remains uncorrected. Vitoria suggested that all the just causes be
subsumed under the one category of ―a wrong received.‖ Walzer, and most modern just war
theorists, speak of the one just cause for resorting to war being the resistance of aggression.
Aggression is the use of armed force in violation of someone else's basic rights.
The basic rights of two kinds of entity are involved here: those of states; and those of their
individual citizens. International law affirms that states have many rights, notably those to
political sovereignty and territorial integrity.

2. Right intention. A state must intend to fight the war only for the sake of its just cause.
Having the right reason for launching a war is not enough: the actual motivation behind the
resort to war must also be morally appropriate. Ulterior motives, such as a power or land
grab, or irrational motives, such as revenge or ethnic hatred, are ruled out. The only right
intention allowed is to see the just cause for resorting to war secured and consolidated. If
another intention crowds in, moral corruption sets in. International law does not include this
rule, probably because of the evidentiary difficulties involved in determining a state's intent.

3. Proper authority and public declaration. A state may go to war only if the decision has
been made by the appropriate authorities, according to the proper process, and made public,
notably to its own citizens and to the enemy state(s). The ―appropriate authority‖ is usually
specified in that country's constitution. States failing the requirements of minimal justice lack
the legitimacy to go to war.

4. Last Resort. A state may resort to war only if it has exhausted all plausible, peaceful
alternatives to resolving the conflict in question, in particular diplomatic negotiation. One
wants to make sure something as momentous and serious as war is declared only when it
seems the last practical and reasonable shot at effectively resisting aggression.

5. Probability of Success. A state may not resort to war if it can foresee that doing so will
have no measurable impact on the situation. The aim here is to block mass violence which is
going to be futile. International law does not include this requirement, as it is seen as biased
against small, weaker states.

6. Proportionality. A state must, prior to initiating a war, weigh the universal goods
expected to result from it, such as securing the just cause, against the universal evils expected
to result, notably casualties. Only if the benefits are proportional to, or ―worth‖, the costs may
the war action proceed. (The universal must be stressed, since often in war states only tally
their own expected benefits and costs, radically discounting those accruing to the enemy and
to any innocent third parties.)

2.2 Jus in bello

Jus in bello refers to justice in war, to right conduct in the midst of battle. Responsibility for
state adherence to jus in bello norms falls primarily on the shoulders of those military
commanders, officers and soldiers who formulate and execute the war policy of a particular
state. They are to be held responsible for any breach of the principles which follow below.
Such accountability may involve being put on trial for war crimes, whether by one's own
national military justice system or perhaps by the newly-formed International Criminal Court
(created by the 1998 Treaty of Rome).

There are several rules of external jus in bello:

1. Obey all international laws on weapons prohibition. Chemical and biological weapons,
in particular, are forbidden by many treaties. Nuclear weapons aren't so clearly prohibited but
it seems fair to say a huge taboo attaches to such weapons and any use of them would be
greeted with incredible hostility by the international community.

2. Discrimination and Non-Combatant Immunity. Soldiers are only entitled to use their
(non-prohibited) weapons to target those who are, in Walzer's words, ―engaged in harm.‖
Thus, when they take aim, soldiers must discriminate between the civilian population, which
is morally immune from direct and intentional attack, and those legitimate military, political
and industrial targets involved in rights-violating harm. While some collateral civilian
casualties are excusable, it is wrong to take deliberate aim at civilian targets. An example
would be saturation bombing of residential areas. (It is worth noting that almost all wars since
1900 have featured larger civilian, than military, casualties. Perhaps this is one reason why
this rule is the most frequently and stridently codified rule in all the laws of armed conflict, as
international law seeks to protect unarmed civilians as best it can.)

3. Proportionality. Soldiers may only use force proportional to the end they seek. They must
restrain their force to that amount appropriate to achieving their aim or target. Weapons of
mass destruction, for example, are usually seen as being out of proportion to legitimate
military ends.

4. Benevolent quarantine for prisoners of war (POWs). If enemy soldiers surrender and
become captives, they cease being lethal threats to basic rights. They are no longer ―engaged
in harm.‖ Thus it is wrong to target them with death, starvation, rape, torture, medical
experimentation, and so on. They are to be provided, as The Geneva Conventions spell out,
with benevolent—not malevolent—quarantine away from battle zones and until the war ends,
when they should be exchanged for one's own POWs. Do terrorists deserve such protection,
too? Great controversy surrounds the detainment and aggressive questioning of terrorist
suspects held by the U.S. at jails in Cuba, Iraq and Pakistan in the name of the war on terror.

5. No Means Mala in Se. Soldiers may not use weapons or methods which are ―evil in
themselves.‖ These include: mass rape campaigns; genocide or ethnic cleansing; using poison
or treachery (like disguising soldiers to look like the Red Cross); forcing captured soldiers to
fight against their own side; and using weapons whose effects cannot be controlled, like
biological agents.

6. No reprisals. A reprisal is when country A violates jus in bello in war with country B.
Country B then retaliates with its own violation of jus in bello, seeking to chasten A into
obeying the rules. There are strong moral and evidentiary reasons to believe that reprisals
don't work, and they instead serve to escalate death and make the destruction of war
increasingly indiscriminate. Winning well is the best revenge.

Internal jus in bello essentially boils down to the need for a state, even though it's involved in
a war, nevertheless to still respect the human rights of its own citizens as best it can during
the crisis.

2.3 Jus post bellum

Jus post bellum refers to justice during the third and final stage of war: that of war
termination. It seeks to regulate the ending of wars, and to ease the transition from war back
to peace. There is little international law here—save occupation law and perhaps the human
rights treaties—and so we must turn to the moral resources of just war theory. But even here
the theory has not dealt with jus post bellum to the degree it should. There is a newness,
unsettledness and controversy attaching to this important topic. To focus our thoughts,
consider the following proposed principles for jus post bellum:

1. Proportionality and Publicity. The peace settlement should be measured and reasonable,
as well as publicly proclaimed. To make a settlement serve as an instrument of revenge is to
make a volatile bed one may be forced to sleep in later. In general, this rules out insistence on
unconditional surrender.

2. Rights Vindication. The settlement should secure those basic rights whose violation
triggered the justified war. The relevant rights include human rights to life and liberty and
community entitlements to territory and sovereignty. This is the main substantive goal of any
decent settlement, ensuring that the war will actually have an improving affect. Respect for
rights, after all, is a foundation of civilization, whether national or international. Vindicating
rights, not vindictive revenge, is the order of the day.

3. Discrimination. Distinction needs to be made between the leaders, the soldiers, and the
civilians in the defeated country one is negotiating with. Civilians are entitled to reasonable
immunity from punitive post-war measures. This rules out sweeping socio-economic
sanctions as part of post-war punishment.

4. Punishment #1. When the defeated country has been a blatant, rights-violating aggressor,
proportionate punishment must be meted out. The leaders of the regime, in particular, should
face fair and public international trials for war crimes.

5. Punishment #2. Soldiers also commit war crimes. Justice after war requires that such
soldiers, from all sides to the conflict, likewise be held accountable to investigation and
possible trial.

6. Compensation. Financial restitution may be mandated, subject to both proportionality and

discrimination. A post-war poll tax on civilians is generally impermissible, and there needs to
be enough resources left so that the defeated country can begin its own reconstruction. To
beggar thy neighbor is to pick future fights.

7. Rehabilitation. The post-war environment provides a promising opportunity to reform

decrepit institutions in an aggressor regime. Such reforms are permissible but they must be
proportional to the degree of depravity in the regime. They may involve: demilitarization and
disarmament; police and judicial re-training; human rights education; and even deep
structural transformation towards a minimally just society governed by a legitimate regime.
This is, obviously, the most controversial aspect of jus post bellum.

The terms of a just peace should satisfy all these requirements. There needs, in short, to be an
ethical ―exit strategy‖ from war, and it deserves at least as much thought and effort as the
purely military exit strategy so much on the minds of policy planners and commanding
officers.

3. Realism

Realism is most influential amongst political scientists, as well as scholars and practitioners
of international relations. While realism is a complex and often sophisticated doctrine, its
core propositions express a strong suspicion about applying moral concepts, like justice, to
the conduct of international affairs. Realists believe that moral concepts should be employed
neither as descriptions of, nor as prescriptions for, state behaviour on the international plane.
Realists emphasize power and security issues, the need for a state to maximize its expected
self-interest and, above all, their view of the international arena as a kind of anarchy, in
which the will to power enjoys primacy.

4. Pacifism

It seems best to rely on Jenny Teichman's definition of pacifism as ―anti-war-ism.‖ Literally

and straightforwardly, a pacifist rejects war in favour of peace. It is not violence in all its
forms that the most challenging kind of pacifist objects to; rather, it is the specific kind and
degree of violence that war involves which the pacifist objects to. A pacifist objects to killing
(not just violence) in general and, in particular, she objects to the mass killing, for political
reasons, which is part and parcel of the wartime experience. So, a pacifist rejects war; she
believes that there are no moral grounds which can justify resorting to war. War, for the
pacifist, is always wrong.

5. Conclusion

This entry provides a sample of the rich and controversial argumentation surrounding
philosophical discourse on war. This discourse is dominated by three major traditions of
thought: just war theory (and its international law subsidiary); realism; and pacifism. The
interaction between these three traditions structures the contemporary discussion of wartime
issues, at the same time as it fuels fascinating debate about them. While just war theory
occupies an especially large and influential space within the discourse, its realist and pacifist
alternatives endure as provocative challenges to the philosophical mainstream which it
represents.
 Torture

First published Tue Feb 7, 2006; substantive revision Sat Jan 5, 2008

This entry is in four parts. The first part addresses the question what is torture?; the second
part, what is wrong with torture?; the third part, is torture ever morally justifiable?; and the
last part, should torture ever be legalised or otherwise institutionalised?[1]

In relation to the definition of torture, two of the most sustained contemporary philosophical
accounts on offer are those of Michael Davis (2005) and David Sussman (2005). Sussman
also offers the most up to date and detailed account of what is wrong with torture. This
contemporary debate concerning the justifiability of torture tends to conflate the issue of
justifying torture in possibly one-off emergencies, and justifying the legalisation of torture in
states confronting an ongoing terrorist threat. The debate principally concerns the torture of
terrorists and is dominated by two groups. There are those who argue in the affirmative and
point to so-called ticking bomb scenarios to support their case. These include Fritz Alhoff
(2003). Then there are those who argue in the negative and point to the depravities, injustices,
and damage to liberal institutions consequent upon the legalisation and institutionalisation of
torture.

1. Definition of Torture

 2. What is Wrong with Torture?

 3. The Moral Justification for One-off Acts of Torture in Emergencies
o 3.1 Case Study — The Beating
o 3.2 Case Study — The Terrorist and the Ticking Bomb
 4. The Moral Justification for Legalised and Institutionalised Torture
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Definition of Torture

Torture includes such practices as searing with hot irons, burning at the stake, electric shock
treatment to the genitals, cutting out parts of the body, e.g. tongue, entrails or genitals, severe
beatings, suspending by the legs with arms tied behind back, applying thumbscrews, inserting
a needle under the fingernails, drilling through an unanesthetized tooth, making a person
crouch for hours in the ‗Z‘ position, waterboarding (submersion in water or dousing to
produce the sensation of drowning), and denying food, water or sleep for days or weeks on
end.[3]

2. What is Wrong with Torture?

In terms of the above definition of torture there are at least two things that are manifestly
morally wrong with torture. Firstly, torture consists in part in the intentional infliction of
severe physical suffering — typically, severe pain; that is, torture hurts very badly. For this
reason alone, torture is an evil thing.

Secondly, torture of human beings consists in part in the intentional, substantial curtailment
of individual autonomy. Given the moral importance of autonomy, torture is an evil thing —
even considered independently of the physical suffering it involves. (And if torture involves
the breaking of someone's will, especially in the maximalist sense, then it is an even greater
evil than otherwise would be the case.)

Given that torture involves both the infliction of extreme physical suffering and the
substantial curtailment of the victim's autonomy, torture is a very great evil indeed.
Nevertheless, there is some dispute about how great an evil torture is relative to other great
evils, specifically killing and murder.

3. The Moral Justification for One-off Acts of Torture in Emergencies

In this section one-off, non-institutionalised acts of torture performed by state actors in

emergency situations are considered. The argument is that there are, or could well be, one-off
acts of torture in extreme emergencies that are, all things considered, morally justifiable.
Accordingly, the assumption is that the routine use of torture is not morally justified; so if it
turned out that the routine use of torture was necessary to, say, win the war on terrorism, then
some of what is said here would not be to the point. However, liberal democratic
governments and security agencies have not even begun to exhaust the political strategies,
and the military/police tactics short of the routine use of torture, available to them to combat
terrorism.

Let us consider some putative examples of the justified use of torture. The first is a policing
example, the second a terrorist example. Arguably, both examples are realistic.

3.1 Case Study — The Beating

Height of the antipodean summer, Mercury at the century-mark; the noonday sun softened the
bitumen beneath the tyres of her little Hyundai sedan to the consistency of putty. Her three
year old son, quiet at last, snuffled in his sleep on the back seat. He had a summer cold and
wailed like a banshee in the supermarket, forcing her to cut short her shopping. Her car
needed petrol. Her tot was asleep on the back seat. She poured twenty litres into the tank;
thumbing notes from her purse, harried and distracted, her keys dangled from the ignition.

3.2 Case Study — The Terrorist and the Ticking Bomb

A terrorist group has planted a small nuclear device with a timing mechanism in London and
it is about to go off. If it does it will kill thousands and make a large part of the city
uninhabitable for decades. One of the terrorists has been captured by the police, and if he can
be made to disclose the location of the device then the police can probably disarm it and
thereby save the lives of thousands. The police know the terrorist in question. They know he
has orchestrated terrorist attacks, albeit non-nuclear ones, in the past. Moreover, on the basis
of intercepted mobile phone calls and e-mails the police know that this attack is under way in
some location in London and that he is the leader of the group. Unfortunately, the terrorist is
refusing to talk and time is slipping away. However, the police know that there is a
reasonable chance that he will talk, if tortured. Moreover, all their other sources of
information have dried up. Furthermore, there is no other way to avoid catastrophe;
evacuation of the city, for example, cannot be undertaken in the limited time available.
Torture is not normally used by the police, and indeed it is unlawful to use it.

4. The Moral Justification for Legalised and Institutionalised Torture

We have seen that there are likely to exist, in the real world, one-off emergency situations in
which torture is, all things considered, the morally best action to perform. It may seem to
follow that institutional arrangements should be in place to facilitate torture in such
situations. However, it is perfectly consistent to oppose any legalization or institutionalization
of torture, as Jeremy Waldron and David Luban have argued. They have drawn attention to
the moral inconsistency and inherent danger in liberal democratic states legalising and
institutionalising torture, a practice that strikes at the very heart of the fundamental liberal
value of individual autonomy.
 Political Representation

First published Mon Jan 2, 2006

The concept of political representation is misleadingly simple: everyone seems to know what
it is, yet few can agree on any particular definition. In fact, there is an extensive literature that
offers many different definitions of this elusive concept. [Classic treatments of the concept of
political representations within this literature include Pennock and Chapman 1968; Pitkin,
1967 and Schwartz, 1988.] Hanna Pitkin (1967) provides, perhaps, one of the most
straightforward definitions: to represent is simply to ―make present again.‖ On this definition,
political representation is the activity of making citizens' voices, opinions, and perspectives
―present‖ in the public policy making processes. Political representation occurs when
political actors speak, advocate, symbolize, and act on the behalf of others in the political
arena.

 1. Key Components of Political Representation

o 1.1 Delegate vs. Trustee
o 1.2 Pitkin's Four Views of Representation
 2. Changing Political Realities and Changing Concepts of Political Representation
 3. Contemporary Advances
 4. Future Areas of Study
 Bibliography
o A. General Discussions of Representation
o B. Arguments Against Representation
o C. Non-Electoral Forms of Representation
o D. Representation and Electoral Design
o E. Representation and Accountability
o F. Descriptive Representation
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Key Components of Political Representation

Political representation, on any account, will exhibit the following four components:

1. some party that is representing (the representative, an organization, movement,

state agency, etc.);
2. some party that is being represented (the constituents, the clients, etc.);
3. something that is being represented (opinions, perspectives, interests etc.); and
4. a setting within which the activity of representation is taking place (the political
context).

1.1 Delegate vs. Trustee

Historically, the theoretical literature on political representation has focused on whether

representatives should act as delegates or as trustees. Representatives who are delegates
simply follow the expressed preferences of their constituents. James Madison (1987) is one of
the leading historical figures who articulated a delegate conception of representation.
Trustees are representatives who follow their own understanding of the best action to pursue.
Edmund Burke (1967) is famous for arguing that

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which
interest each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but
Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole…
You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him he is not a member of Bristol,
but he is a member of Parliament (115).

1.2 Pitkin's Four Views of Representation

Pitkin offers one of the most comprehensive discussions of the concept of political
representation, attending to its contradictory character in her The Concept of Representation.
This classic discussion of the concept of representation is one of the most influential and oft-
cited works in the literature on political representation. Adopting a Wittgensteinian approach
to language, Pitkin maintains that in order to understand the concept of political
representation, one must consider the different ways in which the term is used. Each of these
different uses of the term provides a different view of the concept. Pitkin compares the
concept of representation to ― a rather complicated, convoluted, three–dimensional structure
in the middle of a dark enclosure.‖

Main Research Implicit Standards

Four Views Brief Description Question within for Evaluating
each View Representatives
1. Formalistic The institutional What is the None
Representation arrangements that precede institutional position
and initiate representation. of a representative?
Formal representation has
two dimensions:
authorization and
accountability
(Authorization) The means by which a What is the process No standards for
representative obtains his by which a assessing how well a
or her standing, status, representative gains representative behaves.
position or office. power (e.g. elections) One can merely assess
and what are the whether a
ways in which a representative
representative can legitimately holds his
enforce his or her or her position.
decisions?
(Accountability) The ability of constituents What are the No standards for
to punish their sanctioning assessing how well a
representative for failing mechanisms available representative behaves.
to act in accordance with to constituents? Is the One can merely
their wishes (e.g. voting representative determine whether a
an elected official out of responsive towards representative can be
 office) or the
responsiveness of the
representative to the
constituents.
2. Symbolic The ways that a
Representation representative ―stands for‖
the represented — that is,
the meaning that a
representative has for
those being represented.
3. Descriptive The extent to which a
Representation representative resembles
those being represented.
4. Substantive The activity of
Representation representatives—that is,
the actions taken on the
behalf of, in the interest
of, as an agent of, and as a
substitute for the
represented.
his or her sanctioned or has been
constituents' responsive.
preferences?
What kind of Representatives are
response is invoked assessed by the degree
by the representative of acceptance that the
in those being representative has
represented? among the represented.
Does the Assess the
representative look representative by the
like, have common accuracy of the
interests with, or resemblance between
share certain the representative and
experiences with the the represented.
represented?
Does the Assess a representative
representative by the extent to which
advance the policy policy Outcomes
preferences that serve advanced by a
the interests of the representative serve
represented? ―the best interests‖ of
their constituents.

One cannot overestimate the extent to which Pitkin has shaped contemporary understandings
of political representation, especially among political scientists. For example, her claim that
descriptive representation opposes accountability is often the starting point for contemporary
discussions about whether marginalized groups need representatives from their groups.

2. Changing Political Realities and Changing Concepts of Political Representation

As mentioned earlier, theoretical discussions of political representation have focused mainly

on the formal procedures of authorization and accountability within nation states, that is, on
what Pitkin called formalistic representation. However, such a focus is no longer satisfactory
due to international and domestic political transformations. [For an extensive discussion of
international and domestic transformations, see Mark Warren and Dario Castioglione (2004).]
Increasingly international, transnational and non-governmental actors play an important role
in advancing public policies on behalf of democratic citizens—that is, acting as
representatives for those citizens. Such actors ―speak for,‖ ―act for‖ and can even ―stand for‖
individuals within a nation-state. It is no longer desirable to limit one's understanding of
political representation to elected officials within the nation-state.

3. Contemporary Advances

There have been a number of important advances to the concept of political representation. In
particular, these advances call to question the traditional way of thinking of political
representation as a principal-agent relationship. Most notably, Melissa Williams' recent work
has recommended reenvisioning the activity of representation in light of the experiences of
historically disadvantaged groups. In particular, she recommends understanding
representation as ―mediation.‖ In particular, Williams (1998, 8) identifies three different
dimensions of political life that representatives must ―mediate:‖ the dynamics of legislative
decision-making, the nature of legislator-constituent relations, and the basis for aggregating
citizens into representable constituencies. She explains each aspect by using a corresponding
theme (voice, trust, and memory) and by drawing on the experiences of marginalized groups
in the United States. For example, drawing on the experiences of American women trying to
gain equal citizenship, Williams argues that historically disadvantaged groups need a ―voice‖
in legislative decision-making. The ―heavily deliberative‖ quality of legislative institutions
requires the presence of individuals who have direct access to historically excluded
perspectives.
 Toleration

First published Fri Feb 23, 2007

The term ―toleration‖ — from the Latin tolerare: to put up with, countenance or suffer —
generally refers to the conditional acceptance of or non-interference with beliefs, actions or
practices that one considers to be wrong but still ―tolerable,‖ such that they should not be
prohibited or constrained. There are many contexts in which we speak of a person or an
institution as being tolerant: parents tolerate certain behavior of their children, a friend
tolerates the weaknesses of another, a monarch tolerates dissent, a church tolerates
homosexuality, a state tolerates a minority religion, a society tolerates deviant behavior. Thus
for any analysis of the motives and reasons for toleration, the relevant contexts need to be
taken into account.

 1. The Concept of Toleration and its Paradoxes

 2. Four Conceptions of Toleration
 3. The History of Toleration
 4. Justifying Toleration
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. The Concept of Toleration and its Paradoxes

It is necessary to differentiate between a general concept and more specific conceptions of

toleration (see also Forst 2003a, 2003b). The former is marked by the following
characteristics. First, it is essential for the concept of toleration that the tolerated beliefs or
practices are considered to be objectionable and in an important sense wrong or bad. If this
objection component (cf. King 1976, 44-54) is missing, we do not speak of ―toleration‖ but of
―indifference‖ or ―affirmation.‖ Second, the objection component needs to be balanced by an
acceptance component, which does not remove the negative judgment but gives certain
positive reasons that trump the negative ones in the relevant context. In light of these reasons,
it would be wrong not to tolerate what is wrong, to mention a well-known paradox of
toleration (discussed below).

2. Four Conceptions of Toleration

The following discussion of four conceptions of toleration is not to be understood as the

reconstruction of a linear historical succession. Rather, these are different, historically
developed understandings of what toleration consists in that can all be present in society at
the same time, so that conflicts about the meaning of toleration may also be understood as
conflicts between these conceptions.

1. The first one I call the permission conception. According to it, toleration is a relation
between an authority or a majority and a dissenting, ―different‖ minority (or various
minorities). Toleration then means that the authority gives qualified permission to the
 minority to live according to their beliefs on condition that the minority accepts the
dominant position of the authority or majority.

2. The second conception, the coexistence conception, is similar to the first one in
regarding toleration as the best means toward ending or avoiding conflict and toward
pursuing one's own goals. What is different, however, is the relationship between the
subjects and the objects of toleration. For now the situation is not one of an authority
or majority in relation to a minority, but one of groups that are roughly equal in
power, and who see that for the sake of social peace and the pursuit of their own
interests mutual toleration is the best of all possible alternatives (the Augsburg Peace
Treaty of 1555 is a historical example). They prefer peaceful coexistence to conflict
and agree to a reciprocal compromise, to a certain modus vivendi. The relation of
tolerance is no longer vertical but horizontal: the subjects are at the same time the
objects of toleration. This may not lead to a stable social situation in which trust can
develop, for once the constellation of power changes, the more powerful group may
no longer see any reasons for being tolerant (cf. Rawls 1987, 11, Fletcher 1996).

3. Different from this, the third conception of toleration — the respect conception — is
one in which the tolerating parties respect one another in a more reciprocal sense (cf.
Weale 1985, Scanlon 1996). Even though they differ fundamentally in their ethical
beliefs about the good and true way of life and in their cultural practices, citizens
recognize one another as moral-political equals in the sense that their common
framework of social life should — as far as fundamental questions of rights and
liberties and the distribution of resources are concerned — be guided by norms that all
parties can equally accept and that do not favor one specific ethical or cultural
community (cf. Forst 2002, ch. 2).

3. Justifying Toleration

Many of the systematic arguments for toleration — be they religious, pragmatic, moral or
epistemological — can be used as a justification for more than one of the conceptions of
toleration mentioned above (section 2). The classic argument for freedom of conscience, for
example, has been used to justify arrangements according to the ―permission conception‖ as
well as the more reciprocal ―respect conception.‖ Generally speaking, relations of toleration
are hierarchically ordered according to the first conception, quite unstable according to the
conception of ―coexistence,‖ while the ―esteem conception‖ is the most demanding in terms
of the kind of mutual appreciation between the tolerating parties. In each case, the limits of
toleration seem either arbitrary or too narrow, as in the esteem conception, which only allows
toleration of those beliefs and practices that can be ethically valued.
 Terrorism

First published Mon Oct 22, 2007

Before the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001, the subject of
terrorism did not loom large in philosophical discussion. Philosophical literature in English
amounted to a few monographs and a single collection of papers devoted solely, or largely, to
questions to do with terrorism. Articles on the subject in philosophy journals were few and
far between; neither of the two major philosophy encyclopedias had an entry. The attacks of
September 11 and their aftermath put terrorism on the philosophical agenda: it is now the
topic of numerous books, journal articles, special journal issues, and conferences.

 1. The conceptual issue

o 1.1 ―Terrorism‖ from the French Revolution to the early 21st century
 1.1.1 The reign of terror
 1.1.2 Propaganda by the deed
 1.1.3 The state as terrorist
 1.1.4 Terrorists and freedom fighters
o 1.2 Two core traits of terrorism and two types of definition
 1.2.1 Violence and terror
 1.2.2 Wide and narrow definitions
 1.2.3 Some idiosyncratic definitions
 2. The moral issue
o 2.1 Complicity of the victims
o 2.2 Consequentialism
 2.2.1 Terrorism justified
 2.2.2 Terrorism unjustified
o 2.3 Nonconsequentialism
 2.3.1 Basic human rights and distributive justice
 2.3.2 Supreme emergency and moral disaster
 2.3.3 Terrorism absolutely wrong
 Bibliography
o Books
o Special journal issues
o Articles and book chapters
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. The conceptual issue

The history of terrorism is probably coextensive with the history of political violence. The
term ―terrorism‖, however, is relatively recent: it has been in use since late 18th century. Its
use has repeatedly shifted in some significant respects. Moreover, in contemporary political
discourse the word is often employed as a polemical term whose strong emotional charge
occludes its somewhat vague descriptive meaning. All this tends to get in the way of
sustained rational discussion of the nature and moral standing of terrorism and the best ways
of coping with it.

1.1 ―Terrorism‖ from the French Revolution to the early 21st century

1.1.1 The reign of terror

When it first entered public discourse in the West, the word ―terrorism‖ meant the reign of
terror the Jacobins imposed in France from the fall of 1793 to the summer of 1794. Its
ultimate aim was the reshaping of both society and human nature. That was to be achieved by
destroying the old regime, suppressing all enemies of the revolutionary government, and
inculcating and enforcing civic virtue.

1.1.2 Propaganda by the deed

Yet the term ―terrorism‖ and its cognates soon took on very strong negative connotations.
Critics of the excesses of the French Revolution had watched its reign with horror from the
start. Terrorism came to be associated with drastic abuse of power and related to the notion of
tyranny as rule based on fear, a recurring theme in political philosophy.

1.1.3 The state as terrorist

The terrorism employed by both sides in the Russian Revolution and Civil War was in
important respects a throwback to that of the Jacobins. The government set up in Russia by
the victorious Bolsheviks was totalitarian. So was the Nazi rule in Germany. Both sought to
impose total political control on society. Such a radical aim could only be pursued by a
similarly radical method: by terrorism directed by an extremely powerful political police at
an atomized and defenseless population.

1.1.4 Terrorists and freedom fighters

After the heyday of totalitarian terrorism in the 1930s and 1940s, internal state terrorism
continued to be practiced by military dictatorships in many parts of the world, albeit in a less
sustained and pervasive way. But the type of terrorism that came to the fore in the second half
of the 20th century and in early 21st century is that employed by insurgent organizations.
Many movements for national liberation from colonial rule resorted to it, either as the main
method of struggle or as a tactic complementing guerrilla warfare. So did some separatist
movements. Some organizations driven by extreme ideologies, in particular on the left, took
to terrorism as the way of trying to destroy what they considered an unjust, oppressive
economic, social and political system.

1.2 Two core traits of terrorism and two types of definition

1.2.1 Violence and terror

The evaluative meaning of ―terrorism‖ has shifted considerably more than once. So has its
descriptive meaning, but to a lesser degree. Whatever else the word may have meant, its
ordinary use over more than two centuries has typically indicated two things: violence and
intimidation (the causing of great fear or terror, terrorizing). The dominant approach to the
conceptual question in philosophical literature reflects this. Terrorism is usually understood
as a type of violence. This violence is not blind or sadistic, but rather aims at intimidation and
at some further political, social, or religious goal or, more broadly, at coercion.

1.2.2 Wide and narrow definitions

Should we adopt a wide or a narrow definition? A wide definition encompasses the entire
history of ―terrorism‖ from the Jacobins to the present, and is more in accord with current
ordinary use. A narrow definition departs from much ordinary use by restricting terrorist
violence to that directed at non-combatants or innocent persons. Thus it leaves out most of
19th century ―propaganda by the deed‖ and political violence perpetrated by Russian
revolutionaries which they themselves and the public called terrorist.

1.2.3 Some idiosyncratic definitions

The vast majority of cases almost anyone without an ax to grind would want to classify as
―terrorism‖ exhibit the two traits implied in ordinary use and highlighted by mainstream
philosophical definitions such as those quoted above: violence and intimidation. But
philosophical literature also offers definitions that leave out one or the other core component.

2. The moral issue

Can terrorism be morally justified? There is no single answer to this question, as there is no
single conception of what terrorism is. If we put aside definitions that depart too much, and
for no compelling reason, from the core meaning of ―terrorism‖ (such as those cited in 1.2.3),
we still need to decide whether the question assumes a wide or a narrow understanding of
terrorism. A narrow conception of terrorism seems to be better suited to ethical investigation
(1.2.2).

2.1 Complicity of the victims

If the former line of argument is successful, will it prove too much? In showing that an
instance of violence was justified because those targeted were not really innocent, we will
have shown that the act or campaign of violence at issue was actually not a case of terrorism.
This may be merely a matter of semantics. There is a much more damaging objection. A
terrorist act is characteristically the killing or injuring of a random collection of people who
happen to be in a certain place at a certain time. Arguments to the effect that those people are
not innocent of the wrongs the terrorist fights against will therefore have a very wide reach,
and accordingly will be based on some crude conception of collective responsibility.

2.2 Consequentialism

Adherents of consequentialism judge terrorism, like every other practice, solely by its
consequences. Terrorism is not considered wrong in itself, but only if it has bad consequences
on balance. The innocence of the victims does not change that. This is an instance of a
general trait of consequentialism often highlighted by its critics, for example in the debate
about the moral justification of legal punishment. A standard objection to the consequentialist
approach to punishment has been that it implies that punishment of the innocent is justified,
when its consequences are good on balance. This objection can only get off the ground
because consequentialism denies that in such matters a person's innocence is morally
significant in itself.
2.2.1 Terrorism justified

Kai Nielsen approaches questions to do with political violence in general and terrorism in
particular as a consequentialist in ethics and a socialist in politics. The use of neither can be
ruled out categorically; it all depends on their utility as a method for attaining morally and
politically worthwhile objectives such as ―a truly socialist society‖ or liberation from colonial
rule. ―When and where [either] should be employed is a tactical question that must be
decided … on a case-by-case basis … like the choice of weapon in a war‖ (Nielsen 1981:
435).

2.2.2 Terrorism unjustified

Nicholas Fotion also uses a wide definition of terrorism. He, too, is a consequentialist
(although some of his remarks concerning the innocence of many victims of terrorism might
be more at home in nonconsequentialist ethics). But he finds standard consequentialist
assessments of terrorism such as Nielsen's too permissive. If some types of terrorism are
justifiable under certain circumstances, such circumstances will be extremely rare. Terrorists
and their apologists do not perform the requisite calculations properly. One problem is the
―higher good‖ to be promoted by terrorism: more often than not, it is defined in ideological
terms, rather than derived from settled preferences or interests of actual people. But for the
most part Fotion discusses the issue of means. If a terrorist act or campaign is to be justified
instrumentally, it must be shown (1) that the end sought is good enough to justify the means,
(2) that the end will indeed be achieved by means of terrorism, and (3) that the end cannot be
achieved in any other way that is morally and otherwise less costly. Terrorists not only, as a
matter of fact, fail to discharge this burden; Fotion argues that, with regard to terrorism that
victimizes innocent people, it cannot be discharged.

2.3 Nonconsequentialism

Within a nonconsequentialist approach to morality, terrorism is considered wrong in itself,

because of what it is, rather than only because (and insofar as) its consequences are bad on
balance. But this is not to say that this approach leaves no room whatever for morally
justifying certain acts or campaigns of terrorism. Indeed, nonconsequentialist discussions of
terrorism also present a range of positions and arguments.

A nonconsequentialist might try to justify an act or campaign of terrorism in one of two

ways. One might invoke some deontological considerations, such as justice or rights, in favor
of resorting to terrorism under certain circumstances. Alternatively, one might argue that the
obvious, and obviously very weighty, considerations of rights (of the victims of terrorism)
and justice (which demands respect for those rights) may sometimes be overridden by
extremely weighty considerations of consequences — an extremely high price that would be
paid for not resorting to terrorism. For the rejection of consequentialism is of course not
tantamount to denying that consequences of our actions, policies, and practices matter in their
moral assessment; what is denied is the consequentialists' claim that only consequences
matter.

2.3.1 Basic human rights and distributive justice

Virginia Held operates with a broad notion of terrorism, but her justification of terrorism is
meant to apply to terrorism that targets common citizens. Her discussion of the subject
focuses on the issue of rights. When rights of a person or group are not respected, what may
we do in order to ensure that they are? On one view, known as consequentialism of rights, if
the only way to ensure respect of a certain right of A and B is to infringe the same right of C,
we shall be justified in doing so. Held does not hold that such trade-offs in rights with the aim
of maximizing their respect in a society are appropriate. Yet rights sometimes come into
conflict, whether directly or indirectly (as in the above example). When that happens, there is
no way we can avoid comparing the rights involved as more or less stringent and making
certain choices between them. That applies to the case of terrorism too. Terrorism obviously
violates some human rights of its victims. But its advocates claim that in some circumstances
a limited use of terrorism is the only way of bringing about a society where human rights of
all will be respected.

2.3.2 Supreme emergency and moral disaster

In Held's justification of terrorism, it is justice that requires that inescapable violations of

human rights be more evenly distributed. There is a different way of allowing for the use of
terrorism under certain circumstances within a nonconsequentialist approach to the ethics of
violence. It could be argued that, as far as justice and rights are concerned, terrorism (or, in
Held's terminology, the kind of terrorism that targets the innocent) is never justified.
Furthermore, considerations of justice and rights carry much greater weight than
considerations of good and bad consequences, and therefore normally trump the latter in
cases of conflict. However, in exceptional circumstances considerations concerning
consequences — the price of not resorting to terrorism — may be so extremely weighty as to
override those of justice and rights.

2.3.3 Terrorism absolutely wrong

Some hold that terrorism is absolutely wrong. This position, too, comes in different versions.
One philosopher begins his contribution to a collection on the ethics of terrorism by stating
that there is no such thing: ―… There is nothing worth asking here. It is wrong, and obviously
wrong … to kill innocent people, for political aims without political authority. […] Terrorism
… is a matter as clear as can be‖ (Bittner 2005: 207). This indicates a confusion of
―intrinsically wrong‖ with ―absolutely wrong‖. Some philosophers work with a wide
definition of terrorism, and argue that under certain circumstances ―selective‖ terrorism that
targets only those seriously implicated in the wrongs at issue may be justified (Corlett 2003,
Young 2004). This seems to suggest that terrorism which is not selective in this way — that
is, terrorism in the narrow sense — is never justified. Yet this does not follow: there is still
room for arguing that terrorism of the latter type can be justified by further considerations,
such as those of ―supreme emergency‖ or ―moral disaster‖.
 Philosophy of Technology

First published Fri Feb 20, 2009; substantive revision Mon Jun 22, 2009

If philosophy is the attempt ―to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the
term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term‖, as Sellars (1962) put it,
philosophy should not ignore technology. It is largely by technology that contemporary
society hangs together. It is hugely important not only as an economic force but also as a
cultural force. During the last two centuries, much philosophy of technology has been
concerned with the impact of technology on society. Mitcham (1994) calls this type of
philosophy of technology ‗humanities philosophy of technology‘ because it is continuous
with social science and the humanities.

1. Historical Developments

o 1.1. The Greeks

o 1.2. Later developments
o 1.3. Recent developments
 2. Analytic Philosophy of Technology
o 2.1. Introduction: Philosophy of technology and philosophy of science
o 2.2. The relationship between technology and science
o 2.3. The centrality of design to technology
o 2.4. Methodological issues: design as decision making
o 2.5. Metaphysical issues: The status and characteristics of artifacts
o 2.6. Other topics
 3. Ethical and Social Aspects of Technology
o 3.1. The development of the ethics of technology
o 3.2. Approaches in the ethics of technology
o 3.3. Some recurrent themes in the ethics of technology
 Bibliography
o Journals
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Historical Developments

1.1. The Greeks

Philosophical reflection on technology is about as old as philosophy itself. It started in

ancient Greece. There are four prominent themes.

One early theme is the thesis that technology learns from or imitates nature (Plato, Laws X
899a ff.). According to Democritus, for example, house-building and weaving were first
invented by imitating swallows and spiders building their nests and nets, respectively (fr
D154; perhaps the oldest extant source for the exemplary role of nature is Herakleitos fr
D112). Aristotle referred to this tradition by repeating Democritus' examples, but he did not
maintain that technology can only imitate nature: ―generally art in some cases completes
what nature cannot bring to a finish, and in others imitates nature‖ (Physics II.8, 199a15; see
also Physics II.2, and see Schummer 2001 for discussion).

1.2. Later developments

Although there was much technological progress in the Roman empire and during the Middle
Ages, philosophical reflection on technology did not grow at a corresponding rate.
Comprehensive works such as Vitruvius' De Architectura (first century BC) and Agricola's
De re metallica (1556) paid much attention to practical aspects of technology but little to
philosophy.

1.3. Recent developments

Since the 1960s, a form of the philosophy of technology has been developing that can be
regarded as an alternative to the humanities philosophy of technology. It has gained
momentum in the past 10 or 15 years, and it is now becoming the dominant form of
philosophy of technology. This form of the philosophy of technology may be called
‗analytic‘. It is not so much concerned with the relations between technology and society as
with technology itself. It does not see technology as a ‗black box‘, but as a phenomenon that
deserves study. It regards technology as a practice, basically the practice of engineering. It
analyzes this practice, its goals, its concepts and its methods, and it relates these issues to
various themes from philosophy. The following discussion will be concerned with this form
of the philosophy of technology.

2. Analytic Philosophy of Technology

2.1. Introduction: Philosophy of technology and philosophy of science

Few practices in our society are as closely related as science and technology. Experimental
science is nowadays crucially dependent on technology for the realization of its research
settings and for the creation of circumstances in which a phenomenon will become
observable. Theoretical research within technology has come to be often indistinguishable
from theoretical research in science, making engineering science largely continuous with
‗ordinary‘ science. This is a relatively recent development, not more than a century old, and
is responsible for great differences between modern technology and traditional, craft-like
techniques.

2.2. The relationship between technology and science

The close relationship between the practices of science and technology may easily keep the
important differences between the two from view. The predominant position of science in the
philosophical perspective did not easily lead to a recognition that technology merited special
attention for involving issues that did not emerge in science. This situation is often presented,
perhaps somewhat dramatized, as coming down to a claim that technology is ‗merely‘ applied
science.

2.3. The centrality of design to technology

To claim, with Skolimowski and Simon, that technology is about what is to be or what ought
to be rather than what is may serve to distinguish it from science but will hardly make it
understandable why so much philosophical reflection has taken the form of socio-cultural
criticism. Technology is a continuous attempt to bring the world closer to the way it is to be.
Whereas science aims to understand the world as it is, technology aims to change the world.
These are abstractions, of course. Unlike scientists, however, who are considered personally
motivated in their attempts at describing and understanding the world, engineers are
considered, not in the least by engineers themselves, as undertaking their attempts to change
the world as a service to the public.

This scientific knowledge is therefore often generated within technology, by the engineering
sciences. The sort of knowledge involved in engineering design is of a broader character,
however. In his book What engineers know and how they know it (Vincenti 1990), the
aeronautical engineer Walter Vincenti gave a six-fold categorization of engineering design
knowledge (leaving aside production and operation as the other two basic constituents of
engineering practice). Vincenti distinguishes

1. Fundamental design concepts, including primarily the operational principle and the
normal configuration of a particular device;
2. Criteria and specifications;
3. Theoretical tools;
4. Quantitative data;
5. Practical considerations;
6. Design instrumentalities.

2.4. Methodological issues: design as decision making

Design is an activity that is subject to rational scrutiny but in which creativity is considered to
play an important role as well. Since design is a form of action, a structured series of
decisions to proceed in one way rather than another, the form of rationality that is relevant to
it is practical rationality, the rationality incorporating the criteria on how to act, given
particular circumstances. This suggests a clear division of labor between the part to be played
by rational scrutiny and the part to be played by creativity.

2.5. Metaphysical issues: The status and characteristics of artifacts

Another issue of central concern to internal philosophy of technology is the status and the
character of artifacts. Artifacts are man-made objects: they have an author (see Hilpinen,
article ‗artifact‘). The artifacts that are of relevance to technology are, in particular, made to
serve a purpose. This excludes, within the set of all man-made objects, on the one hand
byproducts and waste products and on the other hand works of art. Byproducts and waste
products result from an intentional act to make something but just not precisely, although the
author at work may be well aware of their creation.

2.6. Other topics

There is at least one additional technology-related topic that ought to be mentioned because it
has created a good deal of analytic philosophical literature, namely Artificial Intelligence and
related areas. A full discussion of this vast field is beyond the scope of this entry, however.
Information is to be found in the entries on Turing machines, the Church-Turing thesis,
computability and complexity, the Turing test, the Chinese room argument, the computational
theory of mind, functionalism, multiple realizability, and the philosophy of computer science.

3. Ethical and Social Aspects of Technology

3.1. The development of the ethics of technology

It was not until the twentieth century that the development of the ethics of technology as a
systematic and more or less independent subdiscipline of philosophy started. This late
development may seem surprising given the large impact that technology has had on society,
especially since the industrial revolution.

A plausible reason for this late development of ethics of technology is the instrumental
perspective on technology that was mentioned in Section 2.2. This perspective implies,
basically, a positive ethical assessment of technology: technology increases the possibilities
and capabilities of humans, which seems in general desirable.

3.2. Approaches in the ethics of technology

Not only is the ethics of technology characterized by a diversity of approaches, it might even
be doubted whether something like a subdiscipline of ethics of technology, in the sense of a
community of scholars working on a common set of problems, exists. The scholars studying
ethical issues in technology have diverse backgrounds (e.g., philosophy, STS, TA, law,
political science) and they do not always consider themselves (primarily) ethicists of
technology.

3.2.1. Cultural and political approaches

Both cultural and political approaches build on the traditional philosophy and ethics of
technology of the first half of the twentieth century. Whereas cultural approaches conceive of
technology as a cultural phenomenon that influences our perception of the world, political
approaches conceive of technology as a political phenomenon, i.e. as a phenomenon that is
ruled by and embodies institutional power relations between people.

3.2.2. Engineering ethics

Engineering ethics is a relatively new field of education and research. It started off in the
1980s in the United States, merely as an educational effort. Engineering ethics is concerned
with ‗the actions and decisions made by persons, individually or collectively, who belong to
the profession of engineering‘ (Baum 1980: 1). According to this approach, engineering is a
profession, in the same way as medicine is a profession.

Although there is no agreement on how a profession exactly should be defined, the following
characteristics are often mentioned:

 The use of specialized knowledge and skills that require a long period of study.
 The occupational group has a monopoly on the carrying out of the occupation.
 The assessment of whether the professional work is carried out in a competent way is
done, and can only be done, by colleague professionals.
3.2.3. Ethics of specific technologies

The last decades have witnessed an increase in ethical inquiries into specific technologies.
One of the most visible new fields is probably computer ethics (e.g., Johnson 2001; Weckert
2007; Van den Hoven and Weckert 2008), but biotechnology has spurred dedicated ethical
investigations as well (e.g., Morris 2006; Thompson 2007). Also more traditional fields like
architecture and urban planning have attracted specific ethical attention (Fox 2000). More
recently, nanotechnology and so-called converging technologies have led to the establishment
of what is called nanoethics (Allhoff et al. 2007). Apart from this, there has been a debate
over the ethics of nuclear deterrence (Finnis et al. 1988).

3.3. Some recurrent themes in the ethics of technology

We now turn to the description of some themes in the ethics of technology. We focus on a
number of general themes that provide an illustration of general issues in the ethics of
technology and the way these are treated.

3.3.1. Neutrality versus moral agency

One important general theme in the ethics of technology is the question whether technology
is value-laden. Some authors have maintained that technology is value-neutral, in the sense
that technology is just a neutral means to an end, and accordingly can be put to good or bad
use (e.g., Pitt 2000). This view might have some plausibility in as far as technology is
considered to be just a bare physical structure. Most philosophers of technology, however,
agree that technological development is a goal-oriented process and that technological
artifacts by definition have certain functions, so that they can be used for certain goals but
not, or far more difficulty or less effectively, for other goals.

3.3.2. Responsibility

Responsibility has always been a central theme in the ethics of technology. The traditional
philosophy and ethics of technology, however, tended to discuss responsibility in rather
general terms and were rather pessimistic about the possibility of engineers to assume
responsibility for the technologies they developed. Ellul, for example, has characterized
engineers as the high priests of technology, who cherish technology but cannot steer it.

A third explanation is that the codes of ethics as such are not morally binding but that they
express moral responsibilities that are grounded otherwise. One may, for example, ground the
responsibility of engineers by applying general philosophical notions of responsibility.
Typical conditions for responsibility mentioned in the literature on responsibility include
(e.g., Fischer and Ravizza 1993):

 The responsible actor is an intentional agent concerning the action;

 The action, resulting in the outcome, was voluntary;
 The actor knew, or could have known, the outcome;
 The action of the actor contributed causally to the outcome; and
 The causally contributory action was in some way faulty, i.e. the actor can be blamed
for the contributory action.
3.3.3. Design

In the last decades, increasingly attention is paid not only to ethical issues that arise during
the use of a technology, but also during the design phase. An important consideration behind
this development is the thought that during the design phase technologies, and their social
consequences, are still malleable while during the use phase technologies are more or less
given and negative social consequences may be harder to avoid or positive effects harder to
achieve.

3.3.4. Technological risks

The risks of technology are one of the traditional ethical concerns in the ethics of technology.
Risk is usually defined as the product of the probability of an undesired event and the effect
of that event, although there are also other definitions around (Hansson 2004b). In general it
seems desirable to keep technological risks as small as possible. The larger the risk, the larger
either the likeliness or the impact of an undesirable event is. Risk reduction therefore is an
important goal in technological development and engineering codes of ethics often attribute a
responsibility to engineers in reducing risks and designing safe products.
 Suicide

First published Tue May 18, 2004; substantive revision Tue Jul 29, 2008

Suicide is an enigmatic and disconcerting phenomenon. Because of others' inability to

directly occupy the mental world of the suicidal, suicide appears to elude easy explanation.
This inexplicability is stunningly captured by Jeffrey Eugenides in his novel The Virgin
Suicides. In the novel, the narrator describes the reactions of several teenaged boys to the
suicides of five sisters. The boys keep a collection of the dead girls' belongings, repeatedly
sifting through them in a vain attempt to understand their deaths.

 1. Characterizing Suicide
 2. Highlights of Historical Thought
o 2.1 Ancient and Classical Views of Suicide
o 2.2 The Christian Prohibition
o 2.3 The Enlightenment and Modern Developments
 3. The Morality and Rationality of Suicide
o 3.1 Moral Permissibility
o 3.2 The Deontological Argument from the Sanctity of Life
o 3.3 Religious Arguments
o 3.4 Libertarian Views and the Right to Suicide
o 3.5 Social, Utilitarian, and Role-Based Arguments
o 3.6 Suicide as a Moral Duty?
o 3.6 Autonomy, Rationality, and Responsibility
o 3.7 Duties Toward the Suicidal
 4. Conclusion
 Bibliography
o A. Historical (pre-1900) Works Cited
o B. Works Cited, 1900-Present
o C. Further Reading
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Characterizing Suicide

Surprisingly, philosophical difficulties emerge when we even attempt to characterize suicide

precisely, and attempts to do so introduce intricate issues about how to describe and explain
human action. In particular, identifying a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for
suicide that fits well with our typical usage of the term is especially challenging. A further
challenge is that because suicide is strongly colored by negative emotional or moral
connotations, efforts to distinguish suicidal behavior from other behavior often clandestinely
import moral judgments about the aims or moral worth of such behavior.

2. Highlights of Historical Thought

2.1 Ancient and Classical Views of Suicide

Philosophical discourse about suicide stretches back at least to the time of Plato. Still, prior to
the Stoics at least, suicide tended to get sporadic rather than systematic attention from
philosophers in the ancient Mediterranean world. As John Cooper has noted (Cooper 1989,
10), neither ancient Greek nor Latin had a single word that aptly translates our ‗suicide,‘ even
though most of the ancient city-states criminalized self-killing.

2.2 The Christian Prohibition

The advent of institutional Christianity was perhaps the most important event in the
philosophical history of suicide, for Christian doctrine has by and large held that suicide is
morally wrong, despite the fact that no passage in Scripture unequivocally condemns suicide.
Although the early church fathers opposed suicide, St. Augustine is generally credited with
offering the first thoroughgoing justification of the Christian prohibition on suicide
(Amundsen 1989). He saw the prohibition as a natural extension of the fifth commandment:

The law, rightly interpreted, even prohibits suicide, where it says ‗Thou shalt not kill.‘ This is
proved especially by the omission of the word ‗thy neighbor‘, which are inserted when false
witness is forbidden in the commandment there is no limitation added nor exception made in
favor of any one, and least of all in favor of him on whom the command is laid! (Augustine,
book I, chapter 20)

2.3 The Enlightenment and Modern Developments

Hume's argument against this thesis is intricate, as he tends to juxtapose distinguishable but
closely related considerations, but in essence Hume attacks the seemingly arbitrary and
contradictory notions of natural law used to condemn suicide. Hume's argument is more or
less as follows:

1. If by the ‗divine order‘ is meant the causal laws created by God, then it would always
be wrong to contravene these laws for the sake of our own happiness. But clearly it is
not wrong, since God frequently permits us to contravene these laws, for he does not
expect us not to respond to disease or other calamities. Therefore, there is not
apparent justification, as Hume put it, for God's permitting us to disturb nature in
some circumstances but not in others. Just as God permits us to divert rivers for
irrigation, so too ought he permit us to divert blood from our veins.
2. If by ‗divine order‘ is meant the natural laws God has willed for us, which are (a)
discerned by reason, (b) such that adherence to them will produce our happiness, then
why should not suicide conform to such laws when it appears rational to us that the
balance of our happiness is best served by suicide?
3. Finally if by ‗divine order‘ is meant simply that which occurs according to God's
consent, then God appears to consent to all our actions (since an omnipotent God can
presumably intervene in our acts at any point) and no distinction exists between those
of our actions to which God consents and those to which He does not. If God has
placed us upon the Earth like a ―sentinel,‖ then our choosing to leave this post and
take our lives occurs as much with his cooperation as with any other act we perform.

3. The Morality and Rationality of Suicide

3.1 Moral Permissibility

The principal moral issue surrounding suicide has been

1. Are there conditions under which suicide is morally justified, and if so, which
conditions?

Several important historical answers to (1) have already been mentioned.

Note that this question should be distinguished from three others:

1. Should other individuals attempt to prevent suicide?

2. Should the state criminalize suicide or attempt to prevent it?
3. Is suicide ever rational or prudent?

3.2 The Deontological Argument from the Sanctity of Life

The simplest moral outlook on suicide holds that it is necessarily wrong because human life
is sacred. Though this position is often associated with religious thinkers, especially
Catholics, we find similar positions in Kant and in Ronald Dworkin (Dworkin 1993).
According to this ‗sanctity of life‘ view, human life is inherently valuable and precious,
demanding respect from others and reverence for oneself. Hence, suicide is wrong because it
violates our moral duty to honor the inherent value of human life, regardless of the value of
that life to others or to the person whose life it is. The sanctity of life view is thus a
deontological position on suicide.

3.4 Libertarian Views and the Right to Suicide

For libertarians, suicide is morally permissible because individuals enjoy a right to suicide.
(It does not of course follow that suicide is necessarily rational or prudent.) Libertarianism,
which has historical precedent in the Stoics and in Schopenhauer, is strongly associated with
the ‗anti-psychiatry‘ movement of the last half century. According to that movement's critics,
attempts by the state or by the medical profession to interfere with suicidal behavior are
essentially coercive attempts to pathologize morally permissible exercises of individual
freedom (Szasz 2002).

3.5 Social, Utilitarian, and Role-Based Arguments

A fourth approach to the question of suicide's permissibility asks not whether others may
interfere with suicidal behavior but whether we have a liberty right to suicide, whether, that
is, suicide violates any moral duties to others. Those who argue that suicide can violate our
duties to others generally claim that suicide can harm either specific others (family, friends,
etc.) or is a harm to the community as a whole.

No doubt the suicide of a family member or loved one produces a number of harmful
psychological and economic effects. In addition to the usual grief, suicide ―survivors‖
confront a complex array of feelings. Various forms of guilt are quite common, such as that
arising from (a) the belief that one contributed to the suicidal person's anguish, or (b) the
failure to recognize that anguish, or (c) the inability to prevent the suicidal act itself. Suicide
also leads to rage, loneliness, and awareness of vulnerability in those left behind. Indeed, the
sense that suicide is an essentially selfish act dominates many popular perceptions of suicide
(Fedden 1938, 209).
3.6 Suicide as a Moral Duty?

To this point, we have addressed arguments that concern whether a moral permission to
engage in suicidal behavior exists, and indeed, it is this question that has dominated ethical
discussion of suicide. Yet the social arguments against suicide are fundamentally
consequentialist, and some act-utilitarians have discussed the correlative possibility that the
good consequences of suicide might so outweigh its bad consequences as to render suicide
admirable or even morally obligatory (Cosculluela 1995, 76–81). In fact, in some cases,
suicide may be honorable.

3.6 Autonomy, Rationality, and Responsibility

A more restricted version of the claim that we have a right to noninterference regarding
suicide holds that suicide is permitted so long as—leaving aside questions of duties to
others—it is rationally chosen, or to put it in a Kantian vernacular, if it is undertaken
autonomously. This position is narrower than the libertarian view, in that it permits suicide
only when performed on a rational basis and permits others to interfere when it is not
performed on that basis.

3.7 Duties Toward the Suicidal

With the exception of the libertarian position that each person has a right against others that
they not interfere with her suicidal intentions, each of the moral positions on suicide we have
addressed so far would appear to justify others intervening in suicidal plans, at least on some
occasions. Little justification is necessary for actions that aim to prevent another's suicide but
are non-coercive. Pleading with a suicidal individual, trying to convince her of the value of
continued life, recommending counseling, etc. are morally unproblematic, since they do not
interfere with the individual's conduct or plans except by engaging her rational capacities
(Cosculluela 1994, 35; Cholbi 2002, 252). The more challenging moral question is whether
more coercive measures such as physical restraint, medication, deception, or
institutionalization are ever justified to prevent suicide and when. In short, the question of
suicide intervention is a question of how to justify paternalistic interference.
 Sovereignty

First published Sat May 31, 2003; substantive revision Tue Jun 8, 2010

Sovereignty, though its meanings have varied across history, also has a core meaning,
supreme authority within a territory. It is a modern notion of political authority. Historical
variants can be understood along three dimensions — the holder of sovereignty, the
absoluteness of sovereignty, and the internal and external dimensions of sovereignty. The
state is the political institution in which sovereignty is embodied. An assemblage of states
forms a sovereign states system.

 1. A Definition of Sovereignty
 2. The Rise of the Sovereign State: Theory and Practice
 3. The Circumscription of the Sovereign State: Theory and Practice
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. A Definition of Sovereignty

In his classic, The King's Two Bodies (1957), medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz describes a
profound transformation in the concept of political authority over the course of the Middle
Ages. The change began when the concept of the body of Christ evolved into a notion of two
bodies — one, the corpus naturale, the consecrated host on the altar, the other, the corpus
mysticum, the social body of the church with its attendant administrative structure. This latter
notion — of a collective social organization having an enduring, mystical essence — would
come to be transferred to political entities, the body politic.

2. The Rise of the Sovereign State: Theory and Practice

Supreme authority with a territory — within this definition, sovereignty can then be
understood more precisely only through its history. This history can be told as one of two
broad movements — the first, a centuries long evolution towards a European continent, then
a globe, of sovereign states, the second, a circumscription of absolute sovereign prerogatives
in the second half of the twentieth century.

3. The Circumscription of the Sovereign State: Theory and Practice

The rise and global expansion of sovereignty, described and even lauded by political
philosophers, amounts to one of the most formidable and successful political trends in
modern times. But from its earliest days, sovereignty has also met with both doubters and
qualified supporters, many of whom have regarded any body of law's claim to sovereign
status as a form of idolatry, sometimes as a carapace behind which rulers carry out cruelties
and injustices free from legitimate outside scrutiny. It was indeed after the Holocaust that
meaningful legal and institutional circumscriptions of sovereignty in fact arose, many of
which have come to abridge the rights of sovereign states quite significantly. The two most
prominent curtailments are conventions on human rights and European integration.

Social Minimum

First published Tue Nov 16, 2004

‗People should not be allowed to starve in the streets.‘ ‗No one should be denied access to a
decent minimum of health-care.‘ ‗Every citizen should be able to meet his or her basic
needs.‘ These statements all express a widespread view that a political community should
seek to ensure that its members are all able to enjoy at least a minimally decent standard of
living. They assert the importance of what is often called the social minimum. However, the
exact nature of the social minimum, the considerations that support it, and, indeed, its basic
justifiability, are all matters of intense philosophical controversy. The aim here is to provide a
guide through the terrain of these controversies. This is done in three stages.

 1. What is a social minimum?

o 1.1 Welfare, capabilities, and resources
o 1.2 An ecumenical-capabilities conception of the social minimum?
o 1.3 Is the social minimum higher in richer societies?
o 1.4 Reasonable access to the social minimum
 2. Why a social minimum?
o 2.1 Utilitarianism
o 2.2 Libertarianism
o 2.3 Left-libertarianism
o 2.4 Egalitarian liberal perspectives
o 2.5 Democratic perspectives
 3. What can be said against the enactment of a social minimum?
o 3.1 The freedom objection
o 3.2 The fairness objection
o 3.3 The legitimacy objection
 4. Conclusion
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. What is a social minimum?

Our first task, then, is to clarify what a social minimum is. When we speak of a ‗social
minimum‘ we mean to refer to the bundle of resources that a person needs in order to lead a
minimally decent life in their society. Now the members of a given society might decide to
introduce a set of institutions and policies that secures every member reasonable access to a
social minimum in this sense. We shall refer to this set of institutions and policies as a ‗social
minimum policy regime‘. In the discussion that follows we shall often speak of ‗enacting a
social minimum‘. Enactment is a somewhat legalistic word, but we intend the term to be
understood broadly here; ‗enacting a social minimum‘ means putting in place a social
minimum policy regime. (Strictly speaking, we should perhaps speak of ‗enacting a social
minimum policy regime‘; but ‗enacting a social minimum‘ is a less clumsy phrase, and these
comments should suffice to make clear what we mean by it.) These concepts — of the social
minimum and of a social minimum policy regime — are intended to be quite abstract, and
they clearly raise further questions.

1.1 Welfare, capabilities, and resources

In contemporary political philosophy there is a lot of discussion surrounding what has come
to known as the ‗Equality of what?‘ debate: If we assume that it is desirable for there to be
equality between individuals, what should we be fundamentally concerned to equalize? Since
the positions taken up in this debate have direct relevance to our concern with the nature of
the social minimum, in this section we shall briefly review these positions before returning
explicitly to the question of how we might define and specify the resources a person needs to
lead ‗a minimally decent life in their society‘.

The first position is known as welfarism. ‗Welfare‘ here is understood in one of two ways. In
classical utilitarian thinking, pioneered by Jeremy Bentham, welfare refers to happiness
which, in turn, is understood as the net balance of pleasure over pain that the individual
experiences (Bentham, 1789).

1.2 An ecumenical-capabilities conception of the social minimum?

Nussbaum believes we can identify a set of vitally important capabilities by posing the
question: ‗What activities characteristically performed by human beings are so central that
they seem constitutive of a life that is truly human?‘ (Nussbaum, 1999, p. 39). More
concretely: What activities and related capabilities seem important to us when we consider
whether someone who has undergone a major change in their capacities is still capable of a
human life? What activities and related capabilities are important to people when they
differentiate between the human and the non-human (sub-human or superhuman) in, say,
constructing stories? Proceeding inductively through reflection on these questions, Nussbaum
claims to identify a range of ‗central human functional capabilities‘, capabilities people must
have if they are to be able to live a truly human life. These include (for more details, see
Nussbaum, 1999, pp. 40-41):

1. the capability for physical survival;

2. the capability for bodily health;
3. the capability for bodily integrity;
4. the capability for the exercise of imagination;
5. the capability for emotional response and exploration;
6. the capability for practical reason;
7. the capability for love and friendship;
8. the capability for connection with nature and other species;
9. the capability for play;
10. the capability for the exercise of control over environment, including political control.

1.3 Is the social minimum higher in richer societies?

We have said that a social minimum is the bundle of resources necessary for someone to live
a minimally decent life in their society. This raises the question of how far the resources we
need to live a minimally decent life are affected by the general level of opulence of the
society in which we live. Is the social minimum higher in societies that are wealthier on
average than others? This question is closely related to a question that has long exercised
students of income and wealth distribution: Is poverty a matter of absolute income/wealth, or
of relative income/wealth? Many studies of poverty assume that poverty has a relative
dimension (for example, Townsend, 1979).

1.4 Reasonable access to the social minimum

Let us imagine that we have settled on an acceptable definition of what is necessary for a
person to enjoy a ‗minimally decent life in their society‘. We now wish to enact a social
minimum to ensure that all members of our society have reasonable access to the resources
necessary to lead such a life. A key term here is ‗reasonable access‘. What is meant by this
term? Why not say simply that society should ensure that its members have the resources
they need to lead a minimally decent life? Why take this apparently roundabout way of
expressing things by saying that they ought to have reasonable access to such resources,
rather than the resources themselves?

2. Why a social minimum?

Hopefully, we have now clarified what a social minimum is and what it means to enact a
social minimum. These clarificatory concerns met, we can now consider why we might want
to enact a social minimum. As noted in the introduction, we shall review a number of
influential theories of social justice asking, with respect to each theory, what support (if any)
it can give to the case for enactment. The five theories to be reviewed are: utilitarianism;
libertarianism; left-libertarianism; egalitarian liberalism; and democratic theories of social
justice.

2.1 Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is the view that actions and institutions should be judged on how far they
produce welfare (or ‗utility‘) for people (or for all beings capable of experiencing welfare). In
its classical form, utilitarianism demands that social institutions be arranged so as to
maximize the sum total of happiness, understood as pleasure net of pain, while in its more
contemporary version it calls for these institutions to maximize the sum total of desire-
satisfaction. In calculating this total, utilitarianism insists on a principle of equality: each
person's utility counts equally with that of every other person (Mill, 1861).

2.2 Libertarianism

If utilitarianism's criterion of justice is aggregate welfare, libertarianism's is individual rights.

Individuals are ‗inviolable‘: they have rights, and these rights may not be violated even for
the sake of increasing aggregate welfare — indeed, even for the sake of preventing the wider
violation of rights (Nozick, 1974, pp. 28-35).

2.3 Left-libertarianism

However, not all libertarians — those who endorse the principle of self-ownership — agree
with the theory of acquisition that we find in writers like Nozick. According to some
philosophers, sometimes referred to as left-libertarians, the principle of self-ownership should
be combined with a principle of equal division of initially unowned external resources. Thus,
if we imagine a group of people who find themselves transported to a previously uninhabited
planet, the left-libertarian holds that each of these people has the rights of self-ownership plus
a right to an equal, per capita share of this planet's initially unowned external resources (see,
for example, Steiner, 1994, and Vallentyne and Steiner, 2000a, 2000b).

2.4 Egalitarian liberal perspectives

Within contemporary political philosophy, egalitarian liberalism seeks to present an

alternative both to utilitarianism and to the two versions of libertarianism discussed above.
Egalitarian liberals agree with libertarians that utilitarianism fails to take seriously the
inviolability of the person. Unlike libertarians, however, egalitarian liberals do not think that
respect for the inviolability of the person commits us to the principle of self-ownership (for
more on this issue, see section 3.1.2 below). Consequently, they feel much less compunction
in advocating tax-transfer schemes, which the libertarian would find objectionable, so as to
secure a full social minimum. Indeed, they argue that justice demands that we do introduce
such schemes. Let us take a brief look at two particularly influential egalitarian liberal
theories of justice, and their implications for the justifiability of enacting a social minimum.

2.4.1 Rawls, the veil of ignorance, and the strains of commitment

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, first published in 1971 (with a revised edition in 1999)
poses an intriguing question: What principles would you accept to govern your society if you
did not know your actual or likely position in this society? In practice, we are all aware of the
religion we have, we have some sense of the natural abilities we have been born with, and the
advantages or disadvantages we have gained from our social background. But, for a moment,
envisage that we did not know such things and possessed only very general information about
the kind of society we are going to live in. Behind this ‗veil of ignorance‘, not knowing our
religion, natural ability, or social background, what principles would we choose to govern the
institutions that affect the distribution of ‗primary goods‘ like income and wealth?

2.4.2 Dworkin and the hypothetical insurance market

Ronald Dworkin's theory of ‗equality of resources‘ (see especially Dworkin, 1985, 2000)
starts from a simple intuition: ideally, no person should have a smaller share of resources than
another except as a result of the life-style choices that he or she makes.

As a first step in elaborating this conception of justice, Dworkin asks us to imagine a group of
people who find themselves shipwrecked on a previously uninhabited island. The island
contains various external resources — trees, streams, land, and so on. How should these
external resources be divided up amongst the newly arrived islanders? Here Dworkin
introduces the idea of an initial auction (Dworkin, 2000, pp. 65-71). We imagine that each
islander is given an equal share of money (‗clamshells‘ serve as currency) and is then allowed
to bid for the island's resources in an auction.

2.5 Democratic perspectives

We use the term democratic here to refer to perspectives in social philosophy that give self-
conscious priority to the promotion of equality in power relations (understood, let us assume,
as a demand of justice). One focus of concern is with ensuring the fair value and
effectiveness of citizens‘ political liberties. In a political democracy, all citizens have rights
to vote, to campaign, and to stand for political office in competitive elections (Dahl, 1998). It
seems fairly clear that poverty can significantly diminish the effectiveness with which
individuals can exercise these rights.

3. What can be said against the enactment of a social minimum?

Having reviewed the main arguments for the enactment of a social minimum, let us now
consider some of the more important objections to enactment. We shall here consider three
objections appealing respectively to the values of freedom, fairness, and legitimacy.

3.1 The freedom objection

One important objection to enactment of a social minimum is that such enactment conflicts
with respect for individual freedom. To enact a social minimum, a government must
coercively tax and transfer income and, in the view of some thinkers, this coercion is
inherently objectionable. We shall consider two versions of this objection here. The first
appeals to freedom understood as the absence of intentional coercion. The second appeals to
the libertarian principle of self-ownership that we discussed above (see sections 2.2 and 2.3).

3.1.1 The crude freedom objection

According to writers in the so-called ‗classical liberal‘ tradition such as Friedrich Hayek,
freedom consists in the absence of intentional coercion (see Hayek, 1960). If the government
requires one citizen, Betty, to pay taxes that will in turn be used to assist a less fortunate
citizen, Alf, as part of the process of enacting a social minimum, then the government
intentionally coerces Betty and, therefore, reduces her freedom. This is regrettable and, if we
regard freedom as the most important political value, we should perhaps refrain from using
governmental power to assist unfortunates like Alf in this way. The welfare of people like Alf
might suffer; but freedom will be preserved.

3.1.2 The self-ownership objection

A second, subtler version of the freedom objection comes from libertarian philosophers
committed to the principle of self-ownership. As we have seen, libertarians do not object to
transfers of income and wealth which aim to make sure that each person receives his/her fair
share of external resources (or fair compensation for others‘ appropriation of their share).
However, these transfers might not be enough to ensure that all enjoy a full social minimum.
This insight has led some political philosophers to conclude that commitment to the
enactment of a social minimum is ultimately incompatible with the libertarian commitment to
respect the self-ownership of persons: we must be prepared to override certain claims of self-
ownership, and forcibly transfer a portion of labor incomes from higher earners to the
disadvantaged, if a social minimum is to be enacted. But is this justifiable? After all, on the
face of it, self-ownership seems like an attractive value, capturing some basic commitments
we have to the freedom and inviolability of the individual (see Cohen, 1995, chapter 3).

3.2 The fairness objection

Some critics might agree that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with harnessing the
talented so that if they choose to work they must help those who are less talented. But what
about harnessing the hard-working so that they are required, in choosing to work hard, to
help the lazy? Surely this cannot be just? Here we touch on another objection to the
enactment of a social minimum. A commonplace objection to welfare policies is that they
allow people to get ‗something for nothing‘. People take their benefits, it is argued, and make
no contribution to society in return. People who use the welfare system in this way allegedly
take unfair advantage of their fellow citizens.

3.2.1 The balance of considerations argument against conditionality

The first argument against work-conditionality appeals to perceived problems of vulnerability

and equity in the application of work conditions in a social minimum policy regime.

One alleged problem concerns vulnerability in the labor market. As we saw above in section
2.5, one rationale for having a welfare state to enact a social minimum is that, by providing
access to urgently needed goods independently of the sale of labor-power, it can reduce the
pressure on disadvantaged workers to scramble into poor quality (exploitative or abusive)
jobs. There is a danger that work-conditionality rules could undermine this desirable effect.
If, to take the most extreme case, the government tells an unemployed person that she must
look for a job and take any job offered by an employer on whatever terms this employer
states, or else lose all welfare benefits, then this person will be under severe pressure to find
and take a job.

3.2.2 The inheritance argument against conditionality

A further objection to making the social minimum work-conditional comes from

philosophers influenced by the left-libertarian tradition reviewed above (see section 2.3). As
we saw above, left-libertarians believe that, ideally speaking, individuals have a right to an
equal share of resources that are an inheritance from nature or from past generations. Thus,
imagine that ten people arrive on an island and find that it contains a factory containing ten
machines. The machines can be used to produce the food, clothing and shelter that the
islanders need to survive. The left-libertarian will argue that in principle each islander should
receive one machine — that is, an equal share of the machines in the inherited factory.

3.3 The legitimacy objection

A third objection to the enactment of a social minimum appeals to the value of legitimacy. A
law or policy lacks legitimacy when the law or policy is arbitrary in the eyes of those bound
by the law or policy — that is, they are unable to identify a sufficiently good reason to justify
their subjection to this law or policy. The absence of legitimacy signals a kind of alienation
from the law or policy, so that people are quite unable to identify with it as an expression of
what they value and believe. Critics might argue that the establishment of a social minimum
policy regime creates distinctive problems of legitimacy for a society; and they might further
argue that these problems make it undesirable, all things considered, to enact a social
minimum. How might enactment of a social minimum generate problems of legitimacy? How
can these problems be tackled? Do the problems really discredit the case for enactment?
 Social Institutions

First published Thu Jan 4, 2007

The term, ―social institution‖ is somewhat unclear both in ordinary language and in the
philosophical literature (see below). However, contemporary sociology is somewhat more
consistent in its use of the term. Typically, contemporary sociologists use the term to refer to
complex social forms that reproduce themselves such as governments, the family, human
languages, universities, hospitals, business corporations, and legal systems. A typical
definition is that proferred by Jonathan Turner (Turner 1997: 6): ―a complex of positions,
roles, norms and values lodged in particular types of social structures and organising
relatively stable patterns of human activity with respect to fundamental problems in
producing life-sustaining resources, in reproducing individuals, and in sustaining viable
societal structures within a given environment.‖

1. Accounts of Social Institutions

 2. A Teleological Account of Institutions

 3. Agency and Structure
 4. Normative Character of Institutions
 5. Social Institutions and Distributive Justice
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Accounts of Social Institutions

Any account of social institutions must begin by informally marking off social institutions
from other social forms. Unfortunately, as noted above, in ordinary language the terms
―institutions‖ and ―social institutions‖ are used to refer to a miscellany of social forms,
including conventions, rituals, organisations, and systems of organisations. Moreover, there
are a variety of theoretical accounts of institutions, including sociological as well as
philosophical ones. Indeed, many of these accounts of what are referred to as institutions are
not accounts of the same phenomena; they are at best accounts of overlapping fields of social
phenomena. Nevertheless, it is possible, firstly, to mark off a range of related social forms
that would be regarded by most theorists as being properly describable as social institutions;
and, secondly, to compare and contrast some of the competing theoretical accounts of the
―social institutions‖ in question.

Social institutions[1] need to be distinguished from less complex social forms such as
conventions, social norms, roles and rituals. The latter are among the constitutive elements of
institutions.

2. A Teleological Account of Institutions

Teleological accounts of social action in general, and of social institutions in particular, fall
well within the rationalist, individualist, philosophy of action tradition that has its roots in
Aristotle, Hume and Kant and is associated with contemporary analytic philosophers of social
action such as Michael Bratman (Bratman 1987), John Searle (Searle 1995) and Raimo
Tuomela (Tuomela 2002). However, this way of proceeding also has a place outside
philosophy, in sociological theory. Broadly speaking, it is the starting point for the
voluntaristic theory of social action associated with the likes of Max Weber (Weber 1949)
and (the early) Talcott Parsons (Parsons 1968).

3. Agency and Structure

It is convenient to conceive of social institutions as possessed of three dimensions, namely,

structure, function and culture. However, it needs to be kept in mind that this is potentially
misleading since, as we saw above, there are conceptual differences between functions and
ends. On some accounts, function is a quasi-causal notion (Cohen 1978 Chapter IX), on
others it is a teleological notion, albeit one that does not necessarily involve the existence of
any mental states (Ryan 1970 Chapter 8).

4. Normative Character of Institutions

Social institutions have a multi-faceted normative dimension.[11] Moral categories that are
deeply implicated in various social institutions include human rights and duties, contract
based rights and obligations and rights and duties derived from the production and
consumption of collective goods. Take police institutions. Police are typically engaged in
protecting someone from being deprived of their human right to life or liberty, or their
institutional right to property. Moreover, a distinctive feature of policing is the use, or
threatened use, of coercive force. Here the institution of the police is different from other
institutions that are either not principally concerned with protecting moral rights, or that do
not necessarily rely on coercion in the service of moral rights. Take welfare institutions.
There is a human right to a subsistence living, and aiding the deprived is a fundamental
purpose of welfare institutions. However, aiding the deprived does not necessarily or
routinely involve the use, or threat of the use, of coercive force. Thus welfare institutions are
different in kind from policing institutions, but both centrally involve human rights.

5. Social Institutions and Distributive Justice

Justice is an important aspect of many, if not all, social institutions. Market economies, salary
and wage structures, tax systems, judicial systems, prisons, and so on are all in part to be
evaluated in terms of their compliance with principles of justice.

Here it is important to distinguish the concept of justice from, on the one hand, the related
concept of a right—especially a human right—and from goods, such as well-being and
utility, on the other hand. Self-evidently, well-being is not the same thing as justice.
However, there is a tendency to conflate justice and rights. Nevertheless, arguably the
concepts are distinct; or at least justice in a narrow relational sense should be distinguished
from the concept of a right. Genocide, for example, is a violation of human rights—
specifically, the right to life—but it is not necessarily, or at least principally, an act of
injustice in a relational sense. A person's rights can be violated, irrespective of whether or not
another - or indeed everyone - has suffered a rights violation. However, injustice in the
relational sense entails an unfairness as between persons or groups; injustice in this sense
consists in the fact that someone has suffered or benefited but others have not (and there is no
adequate justification for this state of affairs).

Contemporary Approaches to the Social Contract

First published Sun Mar 3, 1996; substantive revision Fri Sep 5, 2008

The idea of the social contract goes back, in a recognizably modern form, to Thomas Hobbes;
it was developed in different ways by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel
Kant. After Kant the idea largely fell into disrepute until it was resurrected by John Rawls. It
is now at the heart of the work of a number of moral and political philosophers. The basic
idea seems simple: in some way, the agreement (or consent) of all individuals subject to
collectively enforced social arrangements shows that those arrangements have some
normative property (they are legitimate, just, obligating, etc.). Even this vague basic idea,
though, is anything but simple, and even this abstract rendering is objectionable in many
ways. To explicate the idea of the social contract we analyze contractual approaches into five
variables: (1) the nature of the contractual act; (2) the parties to the act; (3) what the parties
are agreeing to; (4) the reasoning that leads to the agreement; (5) what the agreement is
supposed to show.

 1. The Contractual Act

o 1.1 Consent and Agreement
o 1.2 Hypothetical Agreements
o 1.3 The Importance of Actuality
 2. The Description of the Parties
o 2.1 Non-moralized v. Moralized Parties
o 2.2 The Level of Idealization and Abstraction
 3. The Object of Agreement
 4. The Reasoning that Leads to a Solution
 5. What Does the Contract Show?
 6. Conclusion: The Social Contract and Public Justification
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. The Contractual Act

1.1 Consent and Agreement

The traditional social contract views of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau crucially relied on the
idea of consent. For Locke only ―consent of Free-men‖ could make them members of
government (Locke 1689, §117). Now in the hands of these theorists—and in much ordinary
discourse—the idea of ―consent‖ implies a normative power to bind oneself. When one
reaches ―the age of consent‖ one is empowered to make certain sorts of binding
agreements—contracts. By putting consent at the center of their contracts these early modern
contract theorists (1) were clearly supposing that individuals had basic normative powers
over themselves before they entered into the social contract (a point that Hume [1741]
stressed), and (2) brought the question of political obligation to the fore. If the parties have
the power to bind themselves by exercising this normative power, then the upshot of the
social contract was obligation. As Hobbes (1651, 81 [chap xiv,¶7) insisted, covenants bind;
that is why they are ―artificial chains‖ (1651, 138 [chap. xxi, ¶5).

1.2 Hypothetical Agreements

Given that the problem of justification has taken center stage, the second aspect of
contemporary social contract thinking appears to fall into place: its reliance on models of
hypothetical agreement. The aim is to model the reasons of citizens, and so we ask what they
would agree to under conditions in which their agreements would be expected to track their
reasons. Contemporary contract theory is, characteristically, doubly hypothetical. Certainly,
no prominent theorist thinks that questions of justification are settled by an actual survey of
attitudes towards existing social arrangements, and are not settled until such a survey has
been carried out. The question, then, is not ―Are these arrangements presently the object of an
actual agreement among citizens?‖ (If this were the question, the answer would typically be
―No‖.) The question, rather, is ―Would these arrangements be the object of an agreement if
citizens were surveyed?‖ Although both of the questions are, in some sense, susceptible to an
empirical reading, only the latter is in play in present-day theorizing. The contract nowadays
is always hypothetical in at least this first sense.

1.3 The Importance of Actuality

It is almost a commonplace today that contemporary social contract theory relies on

hypothetical, not actual, agreement. And, as we have seen, in one sense this is certainly the
case. However, in many ways the ―hypothetical/actual‖ divide is artificial: the hypothetical
agreement is meant to model, and provide the basis for, actual agreement. Understanding
contemporary social contract theory is best achieved, not through insisting on the distinction
between actual and hypothetical contracts, but by grasping the interplay of the hypothetical
and the actual.

The key here is Rawls's (1996, 28) distinction among the perspectives of: (1) you and me, (2)
the parties to the deliberative model, and (3) persons in a well-ordered society. The
agreement of the parties in the deliberative model is certainly hypothetical in the two-fold
sense we have analyzed: a hypothetical agreement among hypothetical parties.

2. The Description of the Parties

2.1 Non-moralized v. Moralized Parties

The description of the parties to the hypothetical agreement, then, is determined by our
(actual) justificatory problem, and what is relevant to solving it. A major divide among
contemporary social contract theories is just what is our justificatory problem. Among those
who—very roughly—can be called followers of Hobbes, the crucial justificatory task is, as
David Gauthier puts it, to resolve the ―foundational crisis‖ of morality:

2.2 The Level of Idealization and Abstraction

The core idea of social contract theories, we have been stressing, is that the deliberation of
the parties is supposed to model the justificatory problem of ―you and me.‖ Now this pulls
social contract theories in two opposing directions. One the one hand, if the deliberations of
the hypothetical parties are to model our problem and their conclusions are to be of relevance
to us, they must be similar to us. The closer the parties are to ―you and me‖ the better their
deliberations will model you and me, and be of relevance to us. On the other hand, the point
of contract theories is to make headway on our justificatory problem by constructing parties
that are idealizations of you and me.

3. The Object of Agreement

Social contract theories differ about the object of the contract. In the traditional contract
theories of Hobbes and Locke the contract was about the terms of political association. In
particular, the problem was the grounds and limits of citizen's obligation to obey the state. In
his early formulation, Rawls's parties deliberated about ―common practices‖ (1958). In his
later statement of his view Rawls took the object of agreement to be principles of justice to
regulate ―the basic structure:‖

4. The Reasoning that Leads to a Solution

Suppose we have identified the object of the parties' deliberations: practice, norms, basic
institutions, moral codes, etc. Now social contract theories fundamentally differ in whether
the parties reason differently or the same. As we have seen (§2.2) in Rawls's contract
everyone reasons the same: the collective choice problem is reduced to the choice of one
individual. Any one person's decision is a proxy for everyone else. In social contracts of this
sort, the description of the parties (their motivation, the conditions under which they choose)
does all the work: once we have fully specified the reasoning of one party, the contract has
been identified.

(i) Bargaining Solutions. As Rawls recognized in his 1958 essay on ―Justice as Fairness‖
one way for parties to resolve their disagreements is to employ bargaining solutions,
such as that proposed by R.B. Braithwaite (1955). Rawls himself rejected bargaining
solutions to the social contract since, in his opinion, such solutions rely on threat
advantage and ―to each according to his threat advantage is hardly a principle of
fairness‖ (Rawls 1958, 58n). However, Gauthier famously pursued this approach,
building his Morals by Agreement on the Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solution (see
also Gaus 1990, Ch. IX).
(ii) (ii) Aggregation. We might distinguish bargaining from aggregation solutions. Rather
than seeking an outcome that (as, roughly, the Kalai-Smorodinsky solution does)
splits the difference between various claims, we might seek to aggregate the
individual rankings into an overall social choice. Arrow's theorem and related
problems with social choice rules casts doubt on any claim that one specific way of
aggregating is uniquely rational: all have their shortcomings (Gaus 2008, ch. 5).
Harsanyi (1977, Chs. 1 and 2; 1982) develops a contractual theory much like Rawls's.
(iii) Equilibrium. Brian Skyrms (1996, 2004) suggests a different approach. Suppose that
we have a contractual negotiation in which there are two parties, ordering four
possible ―social contracts‖: (a) both Alf and Betty hunt stag, (b) both hunt hare; (c)
Alf hunts stag, Betty hunts hare; (d) Alf hunts hare, Betty hunts stag. Let 3= best
outcome, and 1= worst in each person's ranking (Alf's ranking is first in each pair).

5. What Does the Contract Show?

Suppose, then, we have arrived at some social contract. Depending on the initial justificatory
problem it will specify principles (P) that have some normative property (N)— such as
justice, morality, authority, obligation, legitimacy, mutual benefit, and so on. But, supposing
that the contract has generated principle P with the relevant normative property N, precisely
what is shown by the fact that P was generated through the contractual device?

6. Conclusion: The Social Contract and Public Justification

The social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all stressed that the justification
of the state depended on showing that everyone would, in some way, consent to it. By relying
on consent, social contract theory seemed to suppose a voluntarist conception of political
justice and obligation: what is just depends on what people choose to agree to—what they
will. Only in Kant (1797) does it become clear that consent is not fundamental to a social
contract view: we have a duty to agree to act according to the idea of the ―original contract.‖
Rawls's revival of social contract theory in A Theory of Justice did not base obligations on
consent, though the apparatus of an ―original agreement‖ persisted as a way to help solve the
problem of justification. As the question of public justification takes center stage (we might
say as contractualist liberalism becomes justificatory liberalism), it becomes clear that posing
the problem of justification in terms of a deliberative or a bargaining problem is a heuristic:
the real issue is ―the problem of justification‖—what principles can be justified to all
reasonable citizens or persons.
 Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction

First published Mon Nov 10, 2008

Social ―construction,‖ ―constructionism‖ and ―constructivism‖ are terms in wide use in the
humanities and social sciences, and are applied to a diverse range of objects including the
emotions, gender, race, sex, homo- and hetero-sexuality, mental illness, technology, quarks,
facts, reality, and truth. This sort of terminology plays a number of different roles in different
discourses, only some of which are philosophically interesting, and fewer of which admit of a
―naturalistic‖ approach—an approach that treats science as a central and successful (if
sometimes fallible) source of knowledge about the world. If there is any core idea of social
constructionism, it is that some object or objects are caused or controlled by social or cultural
factors rather than natural factors, and if there is any core motivation of such research, it is
the aim of showing that such objects are or were under our control: they could be, or might
have been, otherwise.

 1. What is Social Construction?

o 1.1 What Constructs?
o 1.2 What is constructed?
o 1.3 What is it to Construct?
 2. Naturalism and Social Construction
 3. Naturalizing Social Construction
o 3.1 The Social Construction of Representations
o 3.2 Construction, Human Kinds and Human Traits
 4. New Directions for Social Construction
o 4.1 Constructionist Explanation and Integrative Models
o 4.2 Social Construction as Ultimate Explanation
 5. Conclusion
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. What is Social Construction?

While constructionist claims often take the passive form of a declaration that ―Y is socially
constructed,‖ it is more useful to think of social constructionist claims as having the form of a
two-part relation:

X socially constructs Y.

We can then think of different accounts of social construction as differing in their accounts
either of the relation itself, or of one or both relata.

1.1 What Constructs?

While philosophers have carefully engaged various constructionist claims over the last
several decades, much of the attention has been paid to various objects of construction (e.g.,
ideas? knowledge? facts? human nature?). In contrast, comparatively little attention has been
paid to distinguishing different sorts of agents of construction. Many of the agents in social
constructionist claims can be neatly divided into two groups: those that view the agents as
primarily impersonal agents, and those that view the agents as personal agents (i.e., persons
or groups).

1.2 What is constructed?

Social constructionist claims are made about so many different objects that it is perhaps not
surprising to find that such claims have different implications depending upon the different
objects at which they are directed. Most uses of ―construction‖-talk (and related talk to the
effect that that objects are, surprisingly, ―invented‖ or ―made up‖) are directed at three very
different sorts of entities: representations (e.g. ideas, theories, concepts, accounts,
taxonomies, and so forth), (non-representational) facts quite generally, and a special sort of
non-representational fact: facts about human traits.

1.3 What is it to Construct?

We have already suggested that the core idea of constructionism is that some social agent
produces or controls some object. Of course, ―construction‖ talk is meant to evoke a variety
of connotations that attend more paradigmatic construction: intentional activity, engaged in
step-by step fashion, producing a designed, artifactual product. While different objects lead
constructionist talk to be interpreted in different ways, we can distinguish two importantly
different sorts of relationship: causal or constitutive.[7] On the first, X constructs Y if Y is
caused to come to exist, to continue to exist, or to have the properties that it does by X. On
the second, Y is constructed if it is constituted by X's conceptual or social activity (perhaps
even independently of X's causal influence on Y).

2. Naturalism and Social Construction

Any discussion of naturalistic approaches to social construction is complicated by the fact

that ―naturalism‖ itself has no very widespread and uniform understanding (see Naturalism).
Still, the prospect seems provocative, in part, because social construction has come to be
associated with a critical anti-realist attitude towards science.

Above, we identified naturalism with a certain attitude towards science, and for present
purposes, we develop this idea by identifying three naturalistic attitudes toward science that
have been picked up by naturalists addressing social constructionist themes.

1. Epistemological Fundamentalism
a. Accommodating Science: Most contemporary naturalists take science to be an
enormously successful enterprise, and so other knowledge claims must either
cohere with the findings of our best science or explain those findings away.
b. Empiricism: Knowledge comes from careful study of the world, not a priori
theorizing.
c. Causal Modeling: The world is a set of entities related by natural laws. In
attempting to understand it, we produce causal models that idealize these
relationships to varying degrees.
2. Metaphysical Fundamentalism
a. Supervenience: There are more and less fundamental entities, and the less
fundamental depend on the more fundamental. Naturalists understand (at least)
 these fundamental entities to be natural (as opposed to supernatural).
Naturalists typically hold these fundamental entities to be physical entities.
b. Reduction: The regularities in which less fundamental entities participate are
explained by natural laws governing the more fundamental entities upon
which they supervene.
3. Human Naturalism:
a. Nonanomalism: Human beings and their products (e.g. culture or society) are
natural objects within the world that science explains. They are not
metaphysically anomalous.
b. Methodological Naturalism: In studying human nature, human culture, and
social life, the methods of the natural sciences are to be employed.

3. Naturalizing Social Construction

As we noted above, the production of facts by social agents poses no special problem for the
naturalist where that production is understood causally, though naturalists of many stripes
may want to produce causal models to show how the macro-level social phenomena of
interest to many social theorists and social scientists are causally realized given what we
know about, e.g. human nature or the causal structure of the universe. In contrast, constitutive
claims of construction seem difficult to make sense of (except on an account of construction
on which social activity involving a representation comes to produce and causally sustain an
object that is referred to by that representation).

3.1 The Social Construction of Representations

In talking about the construction of representations, we address the range of mental states,
group beliefs, scientific theories, and other representations that express concepts or
propositions. Such representations are, among other things, the vehicles of our thought as
well as the means by which we store, organize, and further our knowledge of the world, and
we do this in virtue of their role as bearers of meaning. A number of commentators have
noted that many provocative constructionist claims are, in the first instance, claims that some
sort of representation is constructed (e.g. Andreasen 1998, Hacking 1999, Mallon 2004).

3.2 Construction, Human Kinds and Human Traits

Any sort of human trait could be an object of social construction, but many of the most
interesting and contested cases are ones in which clusters of traits—traits that comprise
human kinds—are purported to co-occur and to correlate with mental states, including
dispositions to think and behave in particular ways.[13]

Because discussion of kinds of persons with dispositions to think and behave quickly gives
rise to other questions about freedom of the will and social regulation, debates over
constructionism about kinds are central to social and political debates regarding human
categorization, including debates over sex and gender, race, emotions, hetero-and homo-
sexuality, and mental illness. Since the constructionist strategy explains a trait by appeal to
highly contingent factors (including culture), partisans of these debates often come inquire
whether a trait or cluster of traits is culturally specific, or can be found across cultures.
3.2.1 The Conceptual Project

These issues can quickly come to generate more heat than light, and so one role that
philosophers in general, and naturalists in particular, have played is to carefully analyze
constructionist positions and their alternatives. For example, in reflecting on debates over
cultural specificity or universality, a number of commentators have noted that constructionist
claims of cultural specificity often hinge not on genuine empirical disagreement about what is
or is not found through history and across cultures, but also on a strategy of individuating the
phenomena in question in ways that do or do not involve contextual features that vary across
cultures (Mallon and Stich 2000; Boghossian 2006, 28; Pinker 2003, 38).

3.2.2 The Social Role Project

Naturalist interpretations of constructionism have also taken up the distinct project of

suggesting causal models for substantive constructionist claims about human traits via the
suggestions that human socio-linguistic behaviors produce social roles (e.g. Hacking 1995b,
1998; Appiah 1996; Griffiths 1997; Mallon 2003; Murphy 2006) that in turn shape human
traits (including behavior) via a number of different avenues, both developmental and
situational.

4. New Directions for Social Construction

4.1 Constructionist Explanation and Integrative Models

Fitting the social construction of human traits or kinds together with an account of
representations, we see that one can be more or less thoroughgoingly constructionist. Social
role accounts of traits or kinds may be paired with constructionist accounts of the
representations that structure the social roles, and indeed, this is the natural way to read much
constructionist work: work that is committed to explaining both theories of human kinds and
the traits those theories purport to explain by appeal to social agents. One might hold, for
example, that both our theories about gender and the differential behavior those theories
structure are products of social construction.

4.2 Social Construction as Ultimate Explanation

The canonical way to understand social constructionism about human traits is as suggesting
that human traits emerge from experience of the world and as emphasizing the role of culture
in structuring the world so experienced. Such constructionism thus contrasts with nativist
accounts of those traits.

5. Conclusion

The metaphor of ―social construction‖ has proven remarkably supple in labeling and
prompting a range of research across the social sciences and humanities, and the themes of
cultural causation taken up in this research are themselves of central concern. While most
philosophical effort has gone towards the interpretation and refutation of provocative
accounts of social construction arising especially out of studies in the history and sociology
of science, social constructionist themes emerge across a host of other contexts, offering
philosophical naturalists a range of alternate ways of engaging constructionist themes.
 Human Rights

First published Fri Feb 7, 2003; substantive revision Sat Jul 29, 2006

Human rights are international norms that help to protect all people everywhere from severe
political, legal, and social abuses. Examples of human rights are the right to freedom of
religion, the right to a fair trial when charged with a crime, the right not to be tortured, and
the right to engage in political activity.

The philosophy of human rights addresses questions about the existence, content, nature,
universality, justification, and legal status of human rights. The strong claims made on behalf
of human rights (for example, that they are universal, or that they exist independently of legal
enactment as justified moral norms) frequently provoke skeptical doubts and countering
philosophical defences. Reflection on these doubts and the responses that can be made to
them has become a sub-field of political and legal philosophy with a substantial literature.

This entry includes a lengthy final section, International Human Rights Law and
Organizations, that offers a comprehensive survey of the international system for the
promotion and protection of human rights.

 1. The General Idea of Human Rights

 2. The Existence of Human Rights
 3. Which Rights are Human Rights?
o 3.1 Civil and Political Rights
o 3.2 Social Rights
o 3.3 Minority and Group Rights
o 3.4 Environmental Rights
 4. Are Social Rights Genuine Human Rights?
 5. International Human Rights Law and Organizations
o 5.1 Historical Overview
o 5.2 United Nations Human Rights Treaties
o 5.3 Other Human Rights Agencies within the United Nations
o 5.4 Regional Arrangements
o 5.5 The International Criminal Court
o 5.6 Promotion of Human Rights by States
o 5.7 Nongovernmental Human Rights Organizations
o 5.8 The Future of Human Rights Law
 Bibliography
o References Cited
o Other Important Works
 Other Internet Resources
o Documents and Treaties
o Organizations (Governmental and Nongovernmental)
o Websites Devoted to Human Rights
 Related Entries
1. The General Idea of Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) sets out a list of over two dozen specific
human rights that countries should respect and protect. These specific rights can be divided
into six or more families: security rights that protect people against crimes such as murder,
massacre, torture, and rape; due process rights that protect against abuses of the legal system
such as imprisonment without trial, secret trials, and excessive punishments; liberty rights
that protect freedoms in areas such as belief, expression, association, assembly, and
movement; political rights that protect the liberty to participate in politics through actions
such as communicating, assembling, protesting, voting, and serving in public office; equality
rights that guarantee equal citizenship, equality before the law, and nondiscrimination; and
social (or "welfare") rights that require provision of education to all children and protections
against severe poverty and starvation. Another family that might be included is group rights.
The Universal Declaration does not include group rights, but subsequent treaties do. Group
rights include protections of ethnic groups against genocide and the ownership by countries
of their national territories and resources (see Anaya 2004, Baker 2004, Henrard 2000, and
Kymlicka 1989).

2. The Existence of Human Rights

The most obvious way in which human rights exist is as norms of national and international
law created by enactment and judicial decisions. At the international level, human rights
norms exist because of treaties that have turned them into international law. For example, the
human right not to be held in slavery or servitude in article 4 of the European Convention and
in article 8 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights exists because these
treaties establish it. At the national level, human rights norms exist because they have through
legislative enactment, judicial decision, or custom become part of a country's law. For
example, the right against slavery exists in the United States because the 13th Amendment to
the U.S. Constitution prohibits slavery and servitude. When rights are embedded in
international law we speak of them as human rights; but when they are enacted in national
law we more frequently describe them as civil or constitutional rights. As this illustrates, it is
possible for a right to exist within more than one normative system at the same time.

3. Which Rights are Human Rights?

This section discusses the question of which rights belong on lists of human rights. Not every
question of social justice or wise governance is a human rights issue. For example, a country
could have too much income inequality, inadequate provision for higher education, or no
national parks without violating any human rights. Deciding which norms should be counted
as human rights is a matter of some difficulty. And there is continuing pressure to expand
lists of human rights to include new areas. Many political movements would like to see their
main concerns categorized as matters of human rights, since this would publicize, promote,
and legitimate their concerns at the international level. A possible result of this is "human
rights inflation," the devaluation of human rights caused by producing too much bad human
rights currency (Cranston 1973, Orend 2002, Wellman 1999, Griffin 2001b).

Human rights are specific and problem-oriented (Dershowitz 2004, Donnelly 2003, Shue
1996, Talbott 2005). Historic bills of rights often begin with a list of complaints about the
abuses of previous regimes or eras. Bills of rights may have preambles that speak grandly and
abstractly of life, liberty, and the inherent dignity of persons, but their lists of rights contain
specific norms addressed to familiar political, legal, or economic problems.

3.1 Civil and Political Rights

These rights are familiar from historic bills of rights such as the French Declaration of the
Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) and the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791, with subsequent
amendments). Contemporary sources include the first 21 articles of the Universal
Declaration, and such treaties as the European Convention, the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights, the American Convention on Human Rights, and the African
Charter on Human and People's Rights. Some representative formulations follow:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought and expression. This right includes freedom to
seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either
orally, in writing, in print, in the form of art, or through any other medium of one's choice.
(American Convention on Human Rights, article 13.1)
Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with
others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests
(European Convention, article 11).
Every citizen shall have the right to participate freely in the government of his country, either
directly or through freely chosen representatives in accordance with the provisions of the law.
2. Every citizen shall have the right of equal access to the public service of his country. 3.
Every individual shall have the right of access to public property and services in strict
equality of all persons before the law (African Charter, article 13).

Most civil and political rights are not absolute—they are in some cases overridden by other
considerations and rightly set aside in those cases. For example, some civil and political
rights can be restricted by public and private property rights, by restraining orders related to
domestic violence, and by legal punishments. Further, after a disaster such as a hurricane or
earthquake free movement is often appropriately suspended to keep out the curious, to permit
access of emergency vehicles and equipment, and to prevent looting. The International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights permits rights to be suspended during times "of public
emergency which threatens the life of the nation" (article 4). But it excludes some rights from
suspension including the right to life, the prohibition of torture, the prohibition of slavery, the
prohibition of ex post facto criminal laws, and freedom of thought and religion.

3.2 Social Rights

Besides the civil and political rights just discussed, the Universal Declaration includes social
(or welfare) rights. These include equality and nondiscrimination for women and minorities,
access to employment opportunities, fair pay, safe and healthy working conditions, the right
to form trade unions and bargain collectively, social security, an adequate standard of living
(covering adequate food, clothing, and housing), health care, and education. These rights
were made part of international law by treaties such as the International Covenant on
Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, European Social Charter, and the Protocol of San
Salvador (1988), which amended the American Convention on Human Rights. Whether
social rights are genuine human rights is discussed below: (4. Are Social Rights Genuine
Human Rights?).
3.3 Minority and Group Rights

Concern for the equal rights of women and minorities is a longstanding concern of the human
rights movement. Human rights documents emphasize that all people, including women and
members of minority ethnic and religious groups, have the same basic rights and should be
able to enjoy them without discrimination. The right to freedom from discrimination figures
prominently in the Universal Declaration and subsequent treaties. The Civil and Political
Covenant, for example, commits its participating states to respecting and protecting their
people's rights "without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, political or
other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or social status" (see Nickel 2006, ch.
10).

Some standard individual rights are especially important to ethnic and religious minorities,
including rights to freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and
freedom from discrimination. Human rights documents also include rights that refer to
minorities explicitly and give them special protections. For example, the Civil and Political
Covenant in article 27 says that persons belonging to ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities
"shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of their group, to enjoy their
own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language."

3.4 Environmental Rights

In spite of the danger of rights inflation, there are doubtless norms that should be counted as
human rights but are not generally so treated. After all, there are lots of areas in which
people's dignity and fundamental interests are threatened by governmental actions and
omissions. Consider environmental rights, which are often defined as rights of animals or of
nature itself. Conceived in this way they do not fit our general idea of human rights because
the rightholders are not humans or human groups. But more modest formulations are
possible; environmental rights can be understood as rights to an environment that is healthy
and safe. Such a right is human-oriented: it does not cover directly issues such as the claims
of animals, biodiversity, or sustainable development (Nickel 1993. See also Hayward 2005).

4. Are Social Rights Genuine Human Rights?

The Universal Declaration included social (or "welfare") rights) that addressed matters such
as education, food, and employment. Their inclusion has been the source of much
controversy (Beetham 1995). Social rights are often alleged to be statements of desirable
goals but not really rights. The European Convention did not include them (although it was
later amended to include the right to education). Instead they were put into a separate treaty,
the European Social Charter. When the United Nations began the process of putting the rights
of the Universal Declaration into international law, it followed the model of the European
system by treating economic and social standards in a treaty separate from the one dealing
with civil and political rights. This treaty, the International Covenant on Economic, Social,
and Cultural Rights (the "Social Covenant," 1966), treated these standards as rights — albeit
rights to be progressively realized.

A human rights treaty usually contains three parts: (1) a list of rights; (2) a specification of
what the parties are agreeing to do in regard to this list; and (3) a system to monitor and
promote compliance with the agreement. The Social Covenant's list of rights includes
nondiscrimination and equality for women in the economic and social area (articles 2 and 3),
freedom to work and opportunities to work (article 4), fair pay and decent conditions of work
(article 7), the right to form trade unions and to strike (article 8), social security (article 9),
special protections for mothers and children (article 10), the right to adequate food, clothing,
and housing (article 11), the right to basic health services (article 12), the right to education
(article 13), and the right to participate in cultural life and scientific progress (article 15).

5. International Human Rights Law and Organizations

International law now contains many functioning human rights treaties. A number of them
have been ratified by more than three-quarters of the world's countries. This section sketches
the development of international measures to promote and protect human rights. The efforts
to protect human rights through international treaties began in 1919 in the League of Nations
and expanded after World War II in international organizations such as the United Nations,
the Council of Europe, the Organization of American States, and the African Union. The
international promotion and protection of human rights complements the legal protection of
human rights at the national level.

 5.1 Historical Overview

 5.2 United Nations Human Rights Treaties
 5.3 Other Human Rights Agencies within the United Nations
 5.4 Regional Systems
 5.5 The International Criminal Court
 5.6 Promotion of Human Rights by States
 5.7 Nongovernmental Human Rights Organizations
 5.8 The Future of Human Rights Law

5.1 Historical Overview

When a government violates the human rights of its residents they may be able to appeal to
the country's laws or bill of rights and get a court to order that the violations stop and that the
government provide remedies. If suitable national laws and bills of rights are unavailable,
however, victims of human rights violations may seek help from international law and
organizations. Traditionally, international law did not confer rights and protections on
individual persons; its concern was exclusively the rights and duties of countries or states.
Victims of human rights violations could appeal to heaven, and invoke standards of natural
justice, but there were no international organizations working to formulate and enforce legal
rights of individuals. After World War I the League of Nations had some success in using
minority rights treaties to protect national minorities in Europe, but the effort ended with the
rise of Nazi Germany and the beginning of World War II.

5.2 United Nations Human Rights Treaties

International human rights treaties transform lists of human rights into legally binding state
obligations. The first such United Nations treaty was the Genocide Convention, approved in
1948 — just one day before the Universal Declaration. The Convention defines genocide and
makes it a crime under international law. The Convention requires states to enact national
legislation prohibiting genocide, to try to punish persons or officials who commit genocide,
and to allow persons accused of genocide to be transported to countries capable of trying the
charge. It also calls for action by UN bodies to prevent and suppress acts of genocide
(Genocide Convention, articles 5, 7, 9). Currently the Genocide Convention has more than
130 parties (1948). The International Criminal Court, created by the Rome Treaty of 1998, is
authorized to prosecute genocide at the international level, along with crimes against
humanity and war crimes.

5.3 Other United Nations Human Rights Agencies

Human Rights treaties are only one part of the UN's human rights program. In fact, the UN
has several agencies and courts, independent of its human rights treaties, to address
continuing human rights abuses. Three notable agencies are the High Commissioner for
Human Rights (OHCHR), which serves as a full-time advocate for human rights within the
UN; Human Rights Council, which took over the main functions of the now defunct Human
Rights Commission in addressing gross human rights violations; and the Security Council,
which has the authority to impose diplomatic and economic sanctions, sponsor peacekeeping
missions, and authorize military interventions in cases of human rights emergencies.

5.3.1 The High Commissioner for Human Rights

In 1993, following recommendations included in the World Conference on Human Rights in

Vienna, the United Nations General Assembly established the office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights as part of the UN Secretariat. The OHCHR coordinates the
many human rights activities within the UN, working closely with treaty bodies, such as the
Human Rights Committee, and other UN agencies such as the Human Rights Council. The
High-Commissioner assists in the development of new treaties and procedures, sets the
agenda for human rights agencies within the UN, and provides advisory services to
governments. Most importantly, the High Commissioner serves as a full-time advocate for
human rights within the United Nations (Korey 1998). The OHCHR also has field offices
throughout the world, including offices in Central Asia, East and Southern Africa, the Pacific,
Latin America, and the Middle East.

5.3.2 The Human Rights Council

In 2006 the longstanding UN Human Rights Commission was replaced by a new Human
Rights Council. The Human Rights Commission was a 56 member committee, authorized by
the UN Charter, consisting of state representatives. The stated goals of the replacement were
to eliminate "double standards and politicization." The new Council's responsibilities include
"promoting universal respect for the protection of all human rights," addressing gross human
rights violations, making recommendations to the General Assembly, and "responding
promptly to human rights emergencies." The Council's other responsibilities include
providing direct assistance to UN member states to help them meet their human rights
responsibilities through communication, technical assistance, and capacity building.

5.3.3 The Security Council

The Security Council's mandate under article 24 of the UN Charter is the maintenance of
international peace and security. The fifteen-member body consists of 5 permanent and 10
elected members. Nine votes are needed to approve any measures. Any of the five permanent
members (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) can exercise
their veto power to prevent a given action from succeeding. The permanent membership of
five countries, with their veto power, is a clear concession to economic and military power
within the Security Council. The Security Council can issue binding decisions regarding
international security or peace, authorize military interventions and impose diplomatic and
economic sanctions (Bailey 1994, Ramcharan 2002).

5.4 Regional Human Rights Systems

Regional arrangements supplement the UN system by promoting and protecting human rights
in particular parts of the world. Three regions — Europe, the Americas, and Africa — have
formulated their own declarations and conventions for the protection and enforcement of
human rights. Because of their locations, regional agencies and courts have better chances of
effectively investigating alleged violations promptly and securing relief for victims. Regional
agencies are also likely to be more attuned to the culture and identity of the region and may
accordingly have a deeper understanding of problems, circumstances, and possible reforms.

5.4.1 The European System

The European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights (1950) demonstrated to the
world the possibility of enforcing internationally human rights norms. Article 3 of the Statute
of the Council of Europe requires member states to accept the principles of human rights and
fundamental freedoms within their jurisdictions. The Council even defines its post-1989 role
as that of a "human rights watchdog" for post-communist European countries (see About the
Council of Europe). During its 57 year history, membership in the Council of Europe has
more than doubled-currently the Council has over 45 member states, 21 of which are Central
or Eastern European states.

5.4.2 The Inter-American System

The Organization of American States (OAS) is the oldest regional organization of states. In
1948, 21 states signed the OAS Charter, establishing the regional organization and affirming
their commitment to democracy, liberty, and equality before the law. One OAS principle, set
forth in article 3 of the charter, is the "fundamental rights of the individual without distinction
as to race, nationality, creed, or sex." The Inter-American system consists of two main
documents, the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the American
Convention on Human Rights ; and two main treaty bodies, the Inter-American Commission
on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights . All 35 of the independent
countries in the Americas currently comprise the Organization of American States.

5.4.3 The African System

The newest regional human rights system covers the countries of the African continent. In
2000 the Organization of African Unity tranformed itself into the African Union. The
Constitutive Act whereby this was accomplished reaffirmed Africa's determination "to
promote and protect human and peoples' rights." The African Union's objectives include the
promotion and protection of human rights in accordance with the African Charter of Human
and Peoples' Rights and "other relevant human rights instruments." As of 2006 the African
Union consists of 53 state parties.
5.4.4 Other regions

Other regions of the world have yet to establish transnational human rights systems. No
regional system exists in Asia, and the members of the League of Arab States have yet to
ratify their Arab Charter of Human Rights despite its adoption more than a decade ago.

5.5 The International Criminal Court

Once human rights norms are established internationally, the question arises about what
should be done by way of punishment and accountability for political, military, and ethnic
leaders who have organized and carried out severe human rights violations. The International
Criminal Court (ICC) is designed to prevent impunity for human rights crimes, genocide, war
crimes, and crimes against humanity. The ICC was based on the models and experience of
the Nuremberg Tribunal, the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

The ICC was created in 1998 when 120 States adopted the Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court setting forth the jurisdiction and functions of the Court. By April 11, 2002 the
Rome Statute obtained the requisite number of ratifications, and entered into force on July 1,
2002 (Broomhall 2003). Within fifteen months the state parties to the Rome Statute adopted
the Rules of Procedure and Evidence, Elements of Crimes, and Agreement on Privileges and
Immunities, and elected the Court's 18 judges (McGoldrick et al. 2004).

5.6 Promotion of Human Rights by States

Perhaps the most important role that states play in international human rights law is in
defining and establishing that law by creating and ratifying human rights treaties. Treaties are
generally authored by committees of state representatives, and they are ratified by executive
and legislative consent at the national level. Once a treaty is established, states help give it
life by creating domestic legislation to implement it, conforming their conduct to its norms,
and using it has a standard for domestic and international evaluation and criticism.

5.7 Nongovernmental Organizations

Nongovernmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Doctors without Borders
are extremely active at the international level in the areas of human rights, war crimes, and
humanitarian aid. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) allow for collaborations between
local and global efforts for human rights by "translating complex international issues into
activities to be undertaken by concerned citizens in their own community" (Durham 2004).
The functions of international NGOs include investigating complaints, advocacy with
governments and international governmental organizations, and policy making. Local
activities including fundraising, lobbying, and general education (Durham 2004).

5.8 The Future of Human Rights Law

A person who has read the foregoing account of human rights law may wonder whether it has
made any difference. If so much international human rights law exists, why is the world such
a mess?
A simple answer with much truth in it is that the world's human rights problems are large and
deeply entrenched, and that human rights law and organizations are, by comparison, not very
strong — particularly within the United Nations. Countries with the worst human rights
records often do not much participate in the UN system (for example, one forth of the world's
countries have not ratified the Civil and Political Covenant), and many others participate in a
formal and hypocritical way.

Group Rights

First published Mon Sep 22, 2008

A group right is a right held by a group as a group rather than by its members severally. The
―group‖ in ―group right‖ describes the nature of the right-holder; it does not describe the
mere fact that the right is confined to the members of a group rather than possessed by all
members of a society or by humanity at large. Much of the controversy that surrounds group
rights focuses on whether groups can hold rights and, if they can, on the conditions that a
group must satisfy if it is to be a right-holder. Some proponents of group rights conceive
right-holding groups as moral entities in their own right, so that, as a right-holder, a group has
a being and status analogous to those of an individual person. Others give groups no such
independent standing, but conceive group rights as rights that are shared in and held jointly
by the group's members. Some opponents of group rights challenge the very proposition that
groups can bear rights. Others do not, but worry about the threats that such rights pose for
individuals and their rights. They, in turn, are met by claims that individual rights and group
rights, suitably formulated, are complementary rather than conflicting and that some group
rights might even be human rights.

 1. Identifying group rights

 2. Moral and legal group rights
 3. Groups as right-holders
 4. Group rights: corporate and collective
 5. Group rights and collective goods
 6. Scepticism about group rights
 7. Fears of the implications or consequences of group rights
 8. Group rights and individual rights: co-existence and complementarity?
 9. Group rights and human rights
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Identifying group rights

A group right is a right possessed by a group qua group rather than by its members severally.
It contrasts with a right held by an individual person as an individual. An example of a
commonly asserted group right is the right of a nation or a people to be self-determining. If
there is such a right, it is a right possessed and exercised by a nation or a people as a group. It
is logically possible that a single individual could have a right that an entire people should be
self-determining, so that an invader would violate that individual's right rather than a right
held by the people themselves; but nowadays it would be difficult to find anyone who would
accept the political morality needed to turn that logical possibility into a serious claim of
right.

2. Moral and legal group rights

Group rights can be legal or moral or both. If a legal system accords rights to a group, or
recognises it as an entity possessing rights, it will simply be the case for that legal system that
the group has rights. Those legal rights might then spawn moral rights. A law may create a
wrong that would not otherwise be a wrong but, if the legal system is generally just and if the
law serves a useful purpose, its breach may be considered a moral, as well as a legal, wrong.
For example, you may have no right to a particular good in the absence of a law giving you
legal title to it but, once you have legal title, my theft of that good can wrong you morally as
well as legally. Similarly, once a group has been accorded legal rights, we might think that, in
at least some cases, violations of its legal rights wrong it morally as well as legally. A group
may therefore be credited with legally-dependent moral rights.

3. Groups as right-holders

No-one ascribes rights promiscuously to every kind of group, so what is it that marks out a
group as the kind of group that might bear rights? An essential condition for many theorists is
the integrity manifested by a group: a group must surmount a threshold of unity and identity
if it is to be potentially capable of bearing rights.

The phenomenon of a group's having an identity and existence that is separate from its
members is most readily apparent in the case of formally organised groups. So, for example,
we can think of a football club or a university department or a trade union as remaining the
same football club, university department or trade union, even though the individuals who
constitute its members change over time. When you or I join or leave a formally constituted
organisation, there is something independent of ourselves that we join or leave. Thus, if we
ascribe rights to a formally constituted group, the right-bearing group will be something other
than the set of individuals who happen to belong to it at any moment.

4. Group rights: corporate and collective

The various approaches to group rights described in the previous section share a common
feature. Each supposes that ascribing a right to a group entails conceiving the group as moral
entity in its own right: the group must possess a moral standing that is not reducible to the
standing of its members. That is why arguments about group rights frequently assume the
same character as arguments about the ascription of rights to foetuses or the dead or future
generations or non-human animals. In each of these cases, the central issue is whether we
should allow that the relevant entity has the moral standing necessary for it to bear rights.

. A group, as a single integral entity, can possess duties just as it can possess rights, and those
duties may derive from group rights. For example, each nation's right of self-determination is
most obviously directed at other nations who, as nations, have corresponding duties to respect
one another's rights. (It remains logically possible, of course, that duties stemming from
group rights will fall upon individual persons, just as it is possible that the rights of individual
persons will generate duties for groups.)
5. Group rights and collective goods

The distinction between corporate and collective rights concerns the way in which we might
conceive the subject of a group right. But the issue of whether there is reason to ascribe rights
to groups is sometimes approached through their possible objects—through what group rights
might be rights to. If there are goods that have a necessarily group character and if there are
rights to those goods, it would seem that those must be group rights. So are there such goods?

6. Scepticism about group rights

Criticism of group rights can take a case-by-case form. The critic might argue that close
inspection of particular rights that are commonly claimed as group rights reveals either that
they are not rights at all or that they dissolve into individual rights (e.g. Griffin 2003;
Lagerspetz 1998). However, much criticism is directed at the very idea of group rights. That
criticism is generally of two sorts: either it is sceptical of the claim that groups can hold rights
or it is fearful of the implications or consequences of ascribing rights to groups.

7. Fears of the implications or consequences of group rights

Worries about the moral implications or consequences of ascribing rights to groups, relate not
only to whether we should accept that groups have rights but also to how ready we should be
to vest rights in groups. The common thread running through these worries is the threat that
group rights may pose to individuals and their rights. Sometimes the concern is for those
inside, and sometimes for those outside, the right-holding group.

8. Group rights and individual rights: co-existence and complementarity?

A number of things might be said in response to these worries. First, very much depends
upon the content that we give group rights. It is possible to invest individual rights with a
content that would make them unsavoury, but that would not discredit the very idea of
individual rights; similarly, the possibility that we might find some group rights objectionable
is no reason to dismiss group rights altogether. Secondly, it would seem strangely arbitrary,
given the moral significance that we give to rights, to insist that the objects of rights can be
only goods that individuals can enjoy as independent individuals and never goods they can
enjoy only in association with others. Some theorists of rights seem to think just that. But we
cannot take for granted that no good, whose shared nature was such that it could be the
possible object only of a group right, could ever have the significance that would justify its
actually being the object of a right.

Thirdly, there is no reason why individual rights and group rights should not both figure in
our moral thinking. Indeed, they commonly do. For example, it would be entirely
commonplace to hold that a people, as a political unit, has a collective right to be self-
determining but only within the limits set by individuals' human rights. Group rights do not
have to clash with individual rights and a complete moral theory would articulate individual
rights and group rights so that they formed a coherent set (cf. Buchanan 1994; Holder and
Corntassel 2002).

9. Group rights and human rights

Can we go still further and incorporate group rights within human rights? The preambles to
the UN's Covenants on Civil and Political Rights (1966) and on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights (1966) characterise the rights set out in each Covenant as human rights. The
first articles of both Covenants ascribe to all ―peoples‖ the right of self-determination, the
right freely to dispose of their natural wealth and resources, and the right not to be deprived
of their means of subsistence. Rights of peoples would seem to be group rights and yet they
also figure in the UN Covenants as human rights.

Children's Rights

First published Wed Oct 16, 2002; substantive revision Fri Oct 13, 2006

Children are young human beings. Some children are very young human beings. As human
beings children evidently have a certain moral status. There are things that should not be done
to them for the simple reason that they are human. At the same time children are different
from adult human beings and it seems reasonable to think that there are things children may
not do that adults are permitted to do. In the majority of jurisdictions, for instance, children
are not allowed to vote, to marry, to buy alcohol, to have sex, or to engage in paid
employment. What makes children a special case for philosophical consideration is this
combination of their humanity and their youth, or, more exactly, what is thought to be
associated with their youth.

1. Children and Rights

 2. Critics of Children's Rights

 3. Liberationism
 4. Arbitrariness
 5. Children's Rights and Adult Rights
 6. The Child's Right to Grow Up
 7. Best Interests
 8. The Right to be Heard
 Summary
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Children and Rights

Article 1 of the United Nations Convention defines a child as any human being below the age
of eighteen years ‗unless,‘ it adds, ‗under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained
earlier‘ (United Nations 1989). In what follows this definition will be assumed. Some think it
obvious that children do have rights and believe that the only interesting question is whether
children possess all and only those rights which adults possess. Others are sceptical believing
that given the nature both of rights and of children it is wrong to think of children as right-
holders.
Obviously different claims are being made and the same claims are playing distinct roles in
different arguments. The claims in question can be set out as follows:

1. Rights are protected choices

2. Only those capable of exercising choices can be right-holders
3. Children are incapable of exercising choice
4. Children are not right-holders
5. Adults have duties to protect the important interests of children
6. Rights and duties are correlative
7. Children are right-holders

2. Critics of Children's Rights

Grant that on either account of what it is to have a right children could, in principle, be the
holders of rights. We may now address the further questions Ought children to have rights?
And, if so, what rights should they have? Note that the rights can be moral or legal. Children
do have rights in law (under the UN Convention most notably). These need not be accepted
as moral rights. Conversely, if children do have moral rights these need not be enshrined in
law, although there would evidently be a strong presumption that they should. In the first
instance the question is whether children should have moral rights. If they should then there
would be a good case for thinking that these should be legally protected rights.

Should children have rights? There are those who claim that children should have all the
rights that adults presently have. These are called ‗liberationists‘ and include Holt, Farson
and Cohen (Farson 1974; Holt 1975; Cohen 1980).

4. Arbitrariness

Liberationists might move in the other direction and argue that the capacity which qualifies
adults to have rights is in fact not a capacity that most, or perhaps any, adults actually
possess. Thus it will be said that no adult fully understands the nature of the choices she
faces, nor is she consistent in her beliefs and desires, nor is she really independent of the
influences of her environment and peers. Whether the liberationist urges a ‗thin‘ definition of
capacity—which the child satisfies as much as the adult—or argues that on a ‗thick‘
definition of capacity neither adult nor child qualifies as capable, the point is the same. The
point is that the alleged differences between children and adults in respect of a qualifying
capacity are not sufficient to warrant the ascription of rights to the latter and their denial to
the former.

5. Children's Rights and Adult Rights

If children can have at least some rights, what rights should they have? One important reason
for asking, and for giving a satisfactory answer to, this question is a concern that the child's
moral status should be adequately secured and protected. Some, like Onora O'Neill, believe
that this is assured by discharging our obligations as adults to children. It can also be
maintained that there are things we ought not to do to children, just as there are things we
ought not to do to animals, without believing that animals or children have rights. But
children are not animals. They are human beings. Ought they not then to have the basic rights
that humans have?
6. The Child's Right to Grow Up

The second sub-class of C-rights are those which Feinberg characterises as ‗rights-in-trust‘
and which he thinks can be resumed under the single title of a ‗right to an open future‘. These
are the rights given to the child in the person of the adult she will become. They are the rights
whose protection ensures that, as an adult, she will be in a position to exercise her A- and A-
C-rights to the maximal or at least to a very significant degree. They keep her future open.
Such rights impose limits on the rights of parents, and also impose duties on the part of the
state to protect these rights.

7. Best Interests

If children are not thought to have the A-rights, and, chiefly, do not have the liberty rights to
choose for themselves how to conduct their lives, nevertheless they are not morally
abandoned to their own devices. In the first place it is a standard principle of child welfare
law and policy that the ‗best interests‘ of a child should be promoted. Article 3.1 of the
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states that ‗In all actions concerning
children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law,
administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a
primary consideration‘ (United Nations 1989).

8. The Right to be Heard

The right to be heard is a valuable right. What makes it valuable is both that there is a point to
making one's views known and, further, that making one's views known makes a difference.
It matters to me that I can speak out on political questions. It matters also, and probably more,
if what I say leads to the changes I favour. Correlatively it is true both that I do not want to be
silenced and that I do not want the statement of my views to be ineffectual. As a further
general point it is clear that there will always be some issues on which it is more important
that I be allowed to speak and that what I say about these issues carries weight in determining
outcomes. Those are the issues that matter to me, and the more they matter the more
important it is that I have the freedom to speak about them and be heard.

Collective Responsibility

First published Mon Aug 8, 2005; substantive revision Mon Jun 14, 2010

The notion of collective responsibility, like that of personal responsibility and shared
responsibility, refers to both the causal responsibility of moral agents for harm in the world
and the blameworthiness that we ascribe to them for having caused such harm. Hence, it is,
like its two more purely individualistic counterparts, almost always a notion of moral, rather
than purely causal, responsibility. But, unlike its two more purely individualistic
counterparts, it does not associate either causal responsibility or blameworthiness with
discrete individuals or locate the source of moral responsibility in the free will of individual
moral agents. Instead, it associates both causal responsibility and blameworthiness with
groups and locates the source of moral responsibility in the collective actions taken by these
groups understood as collectives.
  1. Collective Responsibility: the Philosophical Controversies
 2. Making Sense of Collective Responsibility: Actions, Intentions and Group
Solidarity
 3. Collective Responsibility and the Structure of Groups
 4. Can Collective Responsibility Be Distributed?
 5. Alternative Approaches to Collective Responsibility
 6. Collective Responsibility and the Question of Consequences
 7. Selected Readings on Collective Responsibility
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Collective Responsibility: the Controversies

The first of these controversies concerns whether or not collective responsibility makes sense
as a form of moral responsibility. Not surprisingly, the primary focus of attention here has
been with both the moral agency of groups in general and the possibility of group intentions
in particular. How, participants in this controversy have asked, can we understand the notion
of collective responsibility as a matter of moral—and not just causal—responsibility? Is it
possible for groups, as distinct from their members, to cause harm in the sense required by
moral responsibility? to act as collectives? to have intentions? Is it possible for groups, as
distinct from their members, to be morally blameworthy for bringing about harm? to be guilty
as moral agents?

The second controversy, interestingly enough, is not really about the moral responsibility of
groups at all, even though it is couched in the language of collective moral responsibility.
Instead, it is about the moral responsibility of individuals who belong to groups that are
themselves thought to be morally responsible for particular cases of harm. How, participants
in this controversy have asked, can we distribute collective responsibility across individual
members of such a group? Does it makes sense to distribute collective responsibility in
general? Is it appropriate to hold individual group members morally responsible for harm that
other group members caused? that the group itself caused? that the group as a whole failed to
prevent? If so, under what conditions and with respect to what particular kinds of groups?
Random collections of individuals? Interest-based groups? Corporate entities?

The third controversy is primarily normative and concerns the value of ascribing collective
responsibility in practice. In some cases, the concern is with the general practice of collective
responsibility and its consequences for our ability to sustain the values of individualism,
freedom, and justice. In other cases, the concern is with the ascriptions of collective
responsibility in particular contexts, e.g., in the contexts of war tribunals, reparations for
slavery, terrorism, and rape, and with whether such ascriptions are productive and/or fair to
those being blamed.

2. Making Sense of Collective Responsibility: Actions, Intentions, and Group Solidarity

Almost all of those now writing about collective responsibility agree that collective
responsibility would make sense if it were merely an aggregative phenomenon. But they
disagree markedly about whether collective responsibility makes sense as a non-distributive
phenomenon, i.e., as a phenomenon that transcends the contributions of particular group
members. In this context, as in many others, skeptics set the agenda. Two claims become
crucial. The first is that groups, unlike individuals, cannot form intentions and hence cannot
be understood to act or to cause harm qua groups. The second is that groups, as distinct from
their individual members, cannot be understood as morally blameworthy in the sense required
by moral responsibility.

3. Collective Responsibility and the Structure of Groups

While French, Gilbert, May, and others who concentrate on redeeming collective
responsibility as an intellectual construct do so by defending the coherence of collective
actions and group intentions, they do not go as far as to assert that all kinds of groups are
capable of acting and intending collectively. Nor do they go as far as to assert that all kinds of
groups can be understood as collectively responsible for bringing about harm. Instead, they
assert that only particular kinds of groups are capable of acting and intending collectively and
that only particular kinds of groups are capable of being collectively responsible for harm.
What kinds of groups are these?

4. Can Collective Responsibility be Distributed?

Contemporary moral and political philosophers are generally careful to distinguish between
collective responsibility, on the one hand, and individual or shared responsibility, on the
other. But they do not leave individual moral agents behind altogether. Indeed, after
analyzing collective responsibility as part of group morality, they frequently place individual
moral agents back at the center of their attention in an effort to discern what collective
responsibility means on the level of individual moral actors. Is it possible, they ask, for
individual members of a group to be collectively responsible for group-based harms in cases
where they did not directly cause it? In cases where they did not do anything to stop it? If so,
under what conditions?

5. Alternative Approaches to Collective Responsibility

Moral Responsibility has traditionally been understood to entail moral—and not just social or
legal—blameworthiness and moral blameworthiness has traditionally been understood to be
an aspect of an individual's own moral agency rather than a judgment that we ourselves make
on the basis of our own social and legal standards. Hence, those who search for the conditions
of moral responsibility generally insist that an individual has herself caused—freely willed—
that for which she is being held morally responsible.

6. Collective Responsibility and the Question of Consequences

When is it appropriate to hold a group responsible for harm? When is it appropriate to refrain
from holding a group responsible? As things now stand, we generally assume that to hold a
group—or, for that matter, an individual—responsible for harm is simply to establish that he,
she, or it is responsible for the harm. Hence, we do not generally find the above question
especially challenging. Indeed, we often assume that we can answer it by simply reiterating
the conditions of collective responsibility itself.
 Religion and Political Theory

First published Thu Oct 2, 2008

When the well-known political theorist Leo Strauss introduced the topic of politics and
religion in his reflections, he presented it as a problem—the ―theologico-political problem‖
he called it (Strauss 1997).[1] The problem, says Strauss, is primarily one about authority: Is
political authority to be grounded in the claims of revelation or reason, Jerusalem or Athens?
In so characterizing the problem, Strauss was tapping into currents of thought deep in the
history of political reflection in the west, ones about the nature, extent, and justification of
political authority. Do monarchies owe their authority to divine right? Has God delegated to
secular rulers such as kings and emperors the authority to wage war in order to achieve
religious aims? Do secular rulers have the authority to suppress heretics? What authority does
the state retain when its principles conflict with God's? Is the authority of the natural law
ultimately grounded in divine law? These and other questions animated much of the
discussion among medieval and modern philosophers alike.

 1. The Standard View

 2. The Doctrine of Religious Restraint
o 2.1 Core Components of the Doctrine of Religious Restraint
 3. Three Arguments for the Doctrine of Religious Restraint
o 3.1 The Argument from Religious Warfare
o 3.2 The Argument from Divisiveness
o 3.3 The Argument from Respect
 4. Liberal Critics of the Doctrine of Religious Restraint
 5. The Primary Concern Regarding the Doctrine of Religious Restraint
 6. Rawls
 7. The New Traditionalism
o 7.1 The Declinist Narrative of the New Traditionalism
o 7.2 Two concerns about the narrative
 8. Summary
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. The Standard View

The standard view among political theorists, such as Robert Audi, Jürgen Habermas, Charles
Larmore, Steven Macedo, Martha Nussbaum, and John Rawls is that religious reasons can
play only a limited role in justifying coercive laws, as coercive laws that require a religious
rationale lack moral legitimacy.[2] If the standard view is correct, there is an important
asymmetry between religious and secular reasons in the following respect: some secular
reasons can themselves justify state coercion but no religious reason can. This asymmetry
between the justificatory potential of religious and secular reasons, it is further claimed,
should shape the political practice of religious believers. According to advocates of the
standard view, citizens should not support coercive laws for which they believe there is no
plausible secular rationale, although they may support coercive laws for which they believe
there is only a secular rationale. We can refer to this injunction to exercise restraint as The
Doctrine of Religious Restraint (or the DRR, for short).[3] This abstract characteization of the
DRR will require some refinements, which we'll provide in sections 2 and 3. For the time
being, however, we can get a better feel for the character of the DRR by considering the
following case.

2. The Doctrine of Religious Restraint

Rick is a politically engaged citizen who intends to vote in a referendum on a measure that
would criminalize homosexual relations. As he evaluates the relevant considerations, he
concludes that the only persuasive rationale for that measure includes as a crucial premise the
claim that homosexual relations are contrary to a God-established natural order. Although he
finds that rationale compelling, he realizes that many others do not. But because he takes
himself to have a general moral obligation to make those political decisions that, as best he
can tell, are both just and good, he decides to vote in favor of criminalization.

2.1 Core Components of the Doctrine of Religious Restraint

The standard view has often been misunderstood, typically by associating the DRR with
claims its advocates are free to deny. It will therefore be helpful to dissociate the DRR from
various common misunderstandings.

First, the DRR is a moral constraint, one that applies to people in virtue of the fact that they
are citizens of a liberal democracy. As such, it need not be encoded into law, enforced by
state coercion or social stigma, promoted in state educational institutions, or in any other way
policed by the powers that be.

Second, the DRR does not require a thorough-going privatization of religious commitment.
Indeed, the DRR permits religious considerations to play a rather prominent role in a citizen's
political practice: citizens are permitted to vote for their favored coercive policies on
exclusively religious grounds as well as to advocate publicly for those policies on religious
grounds.

Third, the DRR places few restrictions on the content of the secular reasons to which citizens
can appeal when supporting coercive laws. Although the required secular reasons must be
―plausible‖ (more on this in a moment), they may make essential reference to what Rawls
calls ―comprehensive conceptions of the good,‖ such as Platonism, Kantianism, or
utilitarianism.[7]

Fourth, the DRR itself has no determinate policy implications; it is a constraint not on
legislation itself, but on the configuration of reasons to which agents may appeal when
supporting coercive legislation. So, for example, it forbids Rick to support the criminalization
of homosexuality when he believes that there are no plausible secular reasons to criminalize
it. The DRR, then, is a norm that is supposed to provide guidance for how citizens of a liberal
democracy should conduct themselves when deliberating about the implementation of
coercive laws. For our purposes, it will be helpful to work with a canonical formulation of it.
Let us, then, formulate the DRR as follows:
The DRR: a citizen of a liberal democracy may support the implementation of a coercive law
L just in case he reasonably believes himself to have a plausible secular justification for L,
which he is prepared to offer in political discussion.

3. Three Arguments for the Doctrine of Religious Restraint

3.1 The Argument from Religious Warfare

Advocates of the standard view sometimes commend the DRR on the grounds that
conforming to it will help prevent religious warfare and civil strife. According to Robert
Audi, for example, ―if religious considerations are not appropriately balanced with secular
ones in matters of coercion, there is a special problem: a clash of Gods vying for social
control. Such uncompromising absolutes easily lead to destruction and death‖ (Audi 2000,
103).

3.2 The Argument from Divisiveness

If the liberal critics are correct, one of the problems with the argument from warfare is that
there is no realistic prospect of religious warfare breaking out in a stable liberal democracy
such as the United States. Still, there may be other evils that are more likely to occur under
current conditions, which compliance with the DRR might help to prevent. For example, it is
plausible to suppose that the enactment of a coercive law that cannot be justified except on
religious grounds would engender much anger and frustration on the part of those coerced:
―when legislation is expressly based on religious arguments, the legislation takes on a
religious character, to the frustration of those who don't share the relevant faith and who
therefore lack access to the normative predicate behind the law‖ (Greene 1993, 1060).

3.3 The Argument from Respect

The third and most prominent argument for the DRR is the argument from respect. Here we
focus on only one formulation of the argument, which has affinities with versions of the
argument offered by Gerald Gaus and Charles Larmore (see Gaus [forthcoming] and Larmore
1987).[10]

The argument from respect runs as such:

1. Each citizen deserves to be respected as a person.

2. If each citizen deserves to be respected as a person, then there is a powerful prima
facie presumption against the permissibility of state coercion.
3. So, there is a powerful prima facie presumption against the permissibility of state
coercion.
4. If the presumption against state coercion is to be overcome (as it sometimes must be),
then state coercion must be justified to those who are coerced.
5. If state coercion must be justified to those who are coerced, then any coercive law that
lacks a plausible secular rationale is morally illegitimate (as there will be many to
whom such coercion cannot be justified).
6. If any coercive law that lacks a plausible secular rationale is morally illegitimate, then
a citizen ought not to support any law that he believes to have only a religious
rationale.
However, on the assumption that the antecedent to premise (4) is true—that there are cases in
which the state must coerce—it follows (given a few other assumptions) that:

7. The DRR is true.

4. Liberal Critics of the Doctrine of Religious Restraint

In the last section, we considered three arguments for the DRR and responses to them offered
by the liberal critics. In the course of our discussion, we began to see elements of the view
that liberal critics of the standard view—critics such as Michael Perry, Philip Quinn, Jeffrey
Stout, and Nicholas Wolterstorff—endorse. To get a better feel for why liberal critics of the
standard view reject the DRR, it will be helpful to step back for a moment to consider some
important features of their view.

5. The Primary Concern Regarding the Doctrine of Religious Restraint

Assume that, in religiously pluralistic conditions, religious citizens have good moral reason—
perhaps even a moral obligation—to pursue secular reasons for their favored coercive laws.
Assume as well that secular citizens have good reason to pursue religious reasons for their
favored coercive policies (if only because, with respect to some coercive laws, some of their
fellow citizens find only religious reasons to support them). What should citizens do,
religious or secular, when they cannot identify these reasons?

6. Rawls

The portrait that we have offered of the standard view (and that of its liberal critics) is a
composite, one which blends together various claims that its advocates make about the
relation between coercive law and religious reasons. Because of this approach we have made
relatively little explicit mention of particular advocates of the standard view, such as that
towering figure of contemporary political philosophy, John Rawls. Of all the contemporary
figures who have shaped the debate we are considering, however, none has exercised more
influence than Rawls. It is natural to wonder, then, whether we've presented the standard
view in its most powerful form and, thus, whether we've omitted a crucial dimension of the
debate between the standard view and its liberal critics.

7. The New Traditionalism

To this point, we have been primarily concerned to articulate the standard view and lay out
the response offered to it by its liberal critics. We have emphasized that there are important
differences between these two views. While not trivial, these differences should not be
exaggerated, however. Both views are deeply committed to the core components of liberal
democracy, including the protection of basic freedoms such as the freedom to practice
religion as one sees fit. Furthermore, both views recognize the legitimacy of religious reasons
in political deliberation, noting the role of such reasons in important social movements such
as the civil rights movement.

7.1 The Declinist Narrative of the New Traditionalism

Those familiar with the work of Alasdair MacIntyre will immediately recognize the New
Traditionalists' narrative. For in its broad structure, it bears a close resemblance to the one
that MacIntyre tells in his three books After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and
Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (MacIntyre 1984, 1988, and 1990, respectively).[16]
The MacIntyrean narrative is broadly declinist in character, depicting the degeneration of
Western moral and political thought in the following four stages.

7.2 Two concerns about the narrative

The MacIntyrean narrative is intriguing but highly controversial. Liberal critics have raised
the following two objections to it.

The first feature of the narrative to which liberal critics have drawn attention is its highly
intellectualized character. If John Milbank and MacIntyre are correct, for example, the fall
into secularist liberalism is driven by the influence of some fairly abstract philosophical
claims about the nature of reason and existence, which were defended by the medieval
philosopher Duns Scotus. By rejecting the broadly Augustinian/Thomistic picture of reason
and existence, the New Traditionalists claim, Scotus paved the way for the rise of secularism,
which is endemic to contemporary liberal democracies (see Milbank 1990 and MacIntyre
1990, Ch. 7).

8. Summary

The theologico-political problem is one that concerns the problem of political authority. In its
contemporary form, it primarily concerns the justification of authoritative political acts, such
as the implementation of coercive laws. Can religious reasons justify the implementation of
such laws? This is the central question with which political philosophers have been
concerned. The standard view tells us that religious reasons are never sufficient to justify
coercive law. It therefore champions the DRR, or the claim that, if a citizen is trying to
determine whether or not she should support some coercive law, and if she believes that there
is no plausible secular rationale for it, then it is impermissible for her to support that law. The
main responses to the standard view divides into two types. Liberal critics of the view hold
fast to the principles of liberal democracy but reject the DRR—in part for the reason that the
DRR is illiberal. New Traditionalists, by contrast, reject both liberal democracy itself and the
DRR, viewing the latter as more or less a component of the former. (On this latter point, they
agree with advocates of the standard view.)
 Legal Punishment

First published Tue Jan 2, 2001; substantive revision Mon Apr 14, 2008

The question of whether, and how, legal punishment can be justified is central to both legal
and political philosophy: what could justify a state in using the apparatus of the law to inflict
burdensome sanctions on its citizens? Radically different answers to this question are offered
by consequentialist and by retributivist theorists—and by those who seek to combine
consequentialist with retributivist considerations in ‗mixed‘ theories of punishment; an
important strand in recent theorising has been the idea of punishment as a communicative
enterprise. Meanwhile, abolitionist theorists argue that we should aim to replace legal
punishment rather than to justify it.

 1. Legal Punishment and its Justification

 2. Punishment, Crime and the State
 3. Pure Consequentialism and Punishment
 4. Side-Constrained Consequentialism and Punishment
 5. ‗Positive‘ Retributivism and the Meaning of Desert
 6. Punishment as Communication
 7. ‗Restorative Justice‘
 8. Further Issues
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Legal Punishment and its Justification

The central question asked by philosophers of punishment is: What can justify punishment?
More precisely, since they do not usually talk much about punishment in such contexts as the
family or the workplace, their question is: What can justify formal, legal punishment imposed
by the state on criminals? We will also focus on legal punishment here: not because the other
species of punishment do not raise important normative questions (they do), nor because such
questions can be answered in terms of an initial justification of legal punishment as being the
paradigm case (since it's not clear that they can be), but because legal punishment, apart from
being more dramatically coercive and burdensome than other species of punishment usually
are, raises distinctive issues about the role of the state and its relationship to its citizens, and
about the role of the criminal law. Future references to ‗punishment‘ should therefore be read,
unless otherwise specified, as references to legal or criminal punishment.

2. Punishment, Crime and the State

Legal punishment presupposes crime as that for which punishment is imposed, and a criminal
law as that which defines crimes as crimes; a system of criminal law presupposes a state,
which has the political authority to make and enforce the law and to impose punishments. A
normative account of legal punishment and its justification must thus at least presuppose, and
should perhaps make explicit, a normative account of the criminal law (why should we have a
criminal law at all?) and of the proper powers and functions of the state (by what authority or
right does the state make and declare law, and impose punishments on those who break it?).

Crimes are, at least, socially proscribed wrongs—kinds of conduct which are condemned as
wrong by some purportedly authoritative social norm. That is to say that they are wrongs
which are not merely ‗private‘ affairs, which properly concern only those directly involved in
them: the community as a whole—in this case the political community speaking through the
law—claims the right to declare them to be wrongs. But crimes are ‗public‘ wrongs in a sense
that goes beyond this. Civil law deals in part with wrongs which are non-private in that they
are legally and socially declared as wrongs—with the wrong constituted by libel, for instance:
but they are still treated as ‗private‘ wrongs in the sense that it is up to the person who was
wronged to seek legal redress.

3. Pure Consequentialism and Punishment

Many people, including those who do not take a consequentialist view of other matters, think
that any adequate justification of punishment must be basically consequentialist. For we have
here a practice which inflicts, indeed seeks to inflict, significant hardship or pain: how else
could we hope to justify it than by showing that it brings consequential benefits sufficiently
large to outweigh, and thus to justify, that hardship and pain? However, when we try to flesh
out that simple consequentialist thought into something closer to a full normative account of
punishment, problems begin to appear.

A consequentialist must justify punishment (if she is to justify it at all) as a cost-effective

means to certain independently identifiable goods. Whatever account she gives of the final
good or goods at which all action ultimately aims, the most plausible immediate good that a
system of punishment can bring is the prevention of crime: a rational consequentialist system
of law will define as criminal only conduct that is in some way harmful; in preventing crime
we will thus be preventing the harms that crime causes; and punishment can prevent crime by
incapacitating, or deterring, or reforming potential offenders. (There are of course other
goods that a system of punishment can bring: it can reassure those who fear crime that the
state is taking steps to protect them—though this is a good that, in a well-informed society,
will be achieved only insofar as the more immediate preventive goods are achieved; it can
also bring satisfaction to those who want to see wrongdoers suffer—though to show that to be
a genuine good we would need to show that it involves something more than mere revenge,
which would be to make sense of some version of retributivism.)

The most familiar objections to consequentialist penal theories are objections to purely
consequentialist theories which hold that only the consequences are relevant to question of
justification (for two simple examples of such theories, see Wilson 1983; Walker 1991). For,
critics argue, it could turn out that manifestly unjust punishments (the punishment of those
known to be innocent, for instance, or excessively harsh punishment of the guilty) would
efficiently serve the aim of crime prevention, and consequentialists must then regard such
punishments as in principle justified: but such punishments would be wrong, just because
they would be unjust (see e.g. Hart 1968, chs. 1-2; Ten 1987; Primoratz 1999, chs. 2-3).

4. Side-Constrained Consequentialism and Punishment

One question about such accounts concerns the grounding of these side-constraints. If they
are derived from a ‗negative‘ retributivism which insists that punishment is justified only if it
is deserved (see Dolinko 1991: 539-43), they face the problem of explaining this retributivist
notion of desert (see s. 5 below): but it is not clear whether they can be justified without such
an appeal to retributivist desert (see Hart 1968: 44-48; Walker 1991, ch. 11; Feinberg 1988:
144-55).

5. ‗Positive‘ Retributivism and the Meaning of Desert

‗Positive‘ retributivism holds not merely that we must not punish the innocent, or punish the
guilty more than they deserve, but that we should punish the guilty, to the extent that they
deserve: penal desert constitutes not just a necessary, but an in principle sufficient reason for
punishment (only in principle, however, since there are very good reasons—to do with the
costs, both material and moral, of punishment—why we should not even try to punish all the
guilty).

Retributivism comes in very different forms (Cottingham 1979). All can be understood,
however, as attempting to answer the two central questions faced by any retributivist theory
of punishment. First, what is the justificatory relationship between crime and punishment that
the idea of desert is supposed to capture: why do the guilty ‗deserve to suffer‘ (see L. Davis
1972)—and what do they deserve to suffer (see Ardal 1984; Honderich 2005, ch. 2)? Second,
even if they deserve to suffer, why should it be for the state to inflict that suffering on them
through a system of criminal punishment (Murphy 1985; Husak 1992; Shafer-Landau 1996)?

A different retributivist account appeals not to the abstract notion of unfair advantage, but to
our (normal, appropriate) emotional responses to crime: to, for instance, the resentment of
‗retributive hatred‘, involving a desire to make the wrongdoer suffer, that crime may arouse
(see Murphy & Hampton 1988, chs. 1, 3); or to the guilt, involving the judgement that I ought
to be punished, that my own wrongdoing would arouse in me (see Moore 1997, ch. 4).

6. Punishment as Communication

The central meaning and purpose of punishment, on such accounts, is to communicate to

offenders the censure or condemnation that they deserve for their crimes. Once we recognise,
as we should, that punishment can serve this communicative purpose, we can see how such
accounts begin to answer the two questions that retributivists face. First, there is an obviously
intelligible justificatory relationship between wrongdoing and censure—as a response which
is intended to bring pain (the pain of condemnation by one's fellows) to an offender for his
offence: whatever puzzles there might be about other attempts to explain the idea of penal
desert, the idea that wrongdoers deserve to suffer censure is surely unpuzzling. Second, it is
appropriate for the state to ensure that such censure is formally administered through the
criminal justice system: for crimes are public wrongs, breaches of the political community's
authoritative code; as such, they merit public censure by the community.

7. ‗Restorative Justice‘

The ‗restorative justice‘ movement has been growing in strength: although there are different
and conflicting conceptions of what ‗restorative justice‘ means or involves, the central theme
is that what crime makes necessary is a process of reparation or restoration between offender,
victim and other interested parties; and that this is achieved not through a criminal process of
trial and punishment, but through mediation or reconciliation programmes that bring together
the victim, offender and other interested parties to discuss what was done and how to deal
with it .
 Punishment

First published Fri Jun 13, 2003; substantive revision Fri Feb 19, 2010

The concept of punishment — its definition — and its practical application and justification
during the past half-century have shown a marked drift away from efforts to reform and
rehabilitate offenders in favor of retribution and incarceration. Punishment in its very
conception is now acknowledged to be an inherently retributive practice, whatever may be
the further role of retribution as a (or the) justification or goal of punishment. A liberal
justification of punishment would proceed by showing that society needs the threat and the
practice of punishment, because the goal of social order cannot be achieved otherwise and
because it is unfair to expect victims of criminal aggression to bear the cost of their
victimization.

 1. Background
 2. Theory of Punishment
 3. Consequentialist or Deontological Justification
 4. Liberal Justification
 5. Conclusion
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Background

Philosophical reflection on punishment has helped cause, and is itself partially an effect of,
developments in the understanding of punishment that have taken place outside the academy
in the real world of political life. A generation ago sociologists, criminologists, and
penologists became disenchanted with the rehabilitative effects (as measured by reductions in
offender recidivism) of programs conducted in prisons aimed at this end (Martinson 1974).
This disenchantment led to skepticism about the feasibility of the very aim of rehabilitation
within the framework of existing penal philosophy.

2. Theory of Punishment

The prevailing features in the modern theory of punishment were developed by analytic
philosophers half a century ago. The theory in the Anglo-American philosophical world was
and still is governed by a small handful of basic conceptual distinctions, self-consciously
deployed by virtually all theorists no matter what substantive views they also hold about
punishment. The terminus a quo of these ideas are the influential writings of H.L.A. Hart
(1959) in England and John Rawls (1955) in the United States. Though both Hart and Rawls
pass muster as centrist liberals, they believed these analytic distinctions to be ideologically
neutral.

 Defining the concept of punishment must be kept distinct from justifying punishment.
A definition of punishment is, or ought to be, value-neutral, at least to the extent of
not incorporating any norms or principles that surreptitiously tend to justify whatever
falls under the definition itself. To put this another way, punishment is not supposed
 to be justified, or even partly justified, by packing its definition in a manner that
virtually guarantees that whatever counts as punishment is automatically justified.
(Conversely, its definition ought not to preclude its justification.)
 Justifying the practice or institution of punishment must be kept distinct from
justifying any given act of punishment. For one thing, it is possible to have a practice
of punishment — an authorized and legitimate threat system — ready and waiting
without having any occasion to inflict its threatened punishment on anyone (because,
for example, there are no crimes or no convicted and sentenced criminals). For
another, allowance must be made for the possibility that the practice of punishment
might be justified even though a given act of punishment — an application of the
practice — is not.
 Justification of any act of punishment is to be done by reference to the norms (rules,
standards, principles) defining the institutional practice — such as the classic norms
of Roman law, nulla poena sine leges and nulla poena sine crimen (no punishments
outside the law, no punishments except for a crime). Justification of the practice itself,
however, necessarily has reference to very different considerations — social purposes,
values, or goals of the community in which the practice is rooted. The values and
considerations appropriate to justifying acts are often assimilated to those that define
judicial responsibility, whereas the values that bear on justifying the punitive
institution are akin to those that govern statutory enactments by a legislature.
 The practice of punishment must be justified by reference either to forward-looking or
to backward-looking considerations. If the former prevail, then the theory is
consequentialist and probably some version of utilitarianism, according to which the
point of the practice of punishment is to increase overall net social welfare by
reducing (ideally, preventing) crime. If the latter prevail, the theory is deontological;
on this approach, punishment is seen either as a good in itself or as a practice required
by justice, thus making a direct claim on our allegiance. A deontological justification
of punishment is likely to be a retributive justification. Or, as a third alternative, the
justification of the practice may be found in some hybrid combination of these two
independent alternatives. Recent attempts to avoid this duality in favor of a
completely different approach have yet to meet with much success (Goldman 1982,
Hoekema 1986, Hampton 1984, Ten 1987, von Hirsch 1993).

Justifications of Punishment As a first step we need a definition of punishment in light of

the considerations mentioned above. Can a definition be proposed that meets the test of
neutrality (that is, does not prejudge any policy question)? Consider this: Punishment under
law (punishment of children in the home, of students in schools, etc., being marginal rather
than paradigmatic) is the authorized imposition of deprivations — of freedom or privacy or
other goods to which the person otherwise has a right, or the imposition of special burdens
— because the person has been found guilty of some criminal violation, typically (though not
invariably) involving harm to the innocent. (The classical formulation, conspicuous in
Hobbes, for example, defines punishment by reference to imposing pain rather than to
deprivations.)

It is helpful in assessing various candidate justifications of punishment to keep in mind the

reasons why punishment needs to be justified.

 Punishment — especially punishment under law, by officers of the government — is

(as noted above) a human institution, not a natural fact. It is deliberately and
intentionally organized and practiced. Yet it is not a basic social institution that every
 conceivable society must have. It is a testimony to human frailty, not to the conditions
necessary to implement human social cooperation. It also has no more than an
historical or biological affinity with retaliatory harm or other aggressive acts to be
found among nonhuman animals or (despite thinkers from Bishop Joseph Butler
(1723) to Sir Peter Strawson (1962) to the contrary) with the natural resentment that
unprovoked aggression characteristically elicits.
 The practice or institution of punishment is not necessary, conceptually or
empirically, to human society. It is conceivable even if impracticable that society
should not have the practice of punishment, and it is possible — given the pains of
punishment — that we might even rationally decide to do without it. Not surprisingly,
some radical social thinkers from time to time (and even today) have advocated its
abolition (Skinner 1948, Bedau 1991, A. Davis, 2003).
 Punishment under law, and especially in a liberal constitutional democracy, incurs
considerable costs for everyone involved in carrying it out, whatever the benefits may
be. Some rationale must be provided by any society that deliberately chooses to
continue to incur these costs. The matter is aggravated to the extent that society
prefers to incur these costs rather than those of alternative social interventions with
personal liberty that might result in preventing crime in the first place and healing the
wounds of its victims (Currie 1985).

3. Consequentialist or Deontological Justification

For several decades philosophers have (over-) simplified the picture of possible forms of
normative justification in ethics, policy formation, and law into two alternatives:
consequentialist and deontological. They have also undertaken to apply this distinction to the
justification of punishment. By a purely consequentialist theory, I mean a theory that imposes
no constraints on what counts as my fourth step in justification (see above). The pure
consequentialist views punishment as justified to the extent that its practice achieves (or is
reasonably believed to achieve) whatever end-state the theorist specifies (such as the public
interest, the general welfare, the common good). Most philosophers would reject this view in
favor of introducing various constraints, whether or not they can in turn be justified by their
consequences. Thus, a most important part of the theory of punishment is the careful
articulation of the norms that provide these constraints on the practice and their rationale.

The best justification of punishment is also not purely retributivist. The retributive
justification of punishment is founded on two a priori norms (the guilty deserve to be
punished, and no moral consideration relevant to punishment outweighs the offender's
criminal desert) and an epistemological claim (we know with reasonable certainty what
punishment the guilty deserve) (Primoratz 1989, M. Moore 1987). It is arguable, however,
whether the guilty always do deserve to be punished; it is also arguable whether, even when
they do they ought always to get what they deserve; and it is further arguable whether when
they ought to be punished as they deserve, the punisher always knows what it is they deserve
(except in the purely procedural sense alluded to above; see also below) (Bedau 1978).

4. Liberal Justification

We can begin with an empirical generalization of unimpeachable reliability: Some kinds of

intentional human conduct are harmful to others, and it is inappropriate to expect (teach,
require) people who have been victimized by such harm either to forgive those who harmed
them or to suffer the harm in silence. (Private retaliation must also be pre-empted by general
confidence that offenders will be arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced by the authorities.)
In a just society, undeserved victimization is understood to violate individual rights and is
therefore prohibited by law and is punishable. Thus the color and texture of any possible
justification for punishment will depend upon more general political and moral theory,
consistent with the responsibilities for legal protection afforded by a just society. Justification
for punishment under law thus emerges as a contingent matter, inescapably dependent on
other and deeper normative considerations that only a theory of social justice can provide.[3]

There are, however, constraints in the use of penal threats and coercion even to preserve a
just social system. Four are particularly important for a liberal theory of punishment.

1. Punishments must not be so severe as to be inhumane or (in the familiar language of

the Bill of Rights) ―cruel and unusual.‖
2. Punishments may not be imposed in ways that violate the rights of accused and
convicted offenders (―due process of law‖ and ―equal protection of the laws‖).
3. Punitive severity must accord with the relative severity of the crime: The graver the
crime, the more severe the deserved punishment. The severity of the crime is a
function of the relative importance of the reasons we have to dissuade people from
committing it, reasons that will make reference to harms done to victims, to social
relationships, and to the security of our rights.
4. Punitive severity is also subject to the principle of minimalism (less is better), that is,
given any two punishments not ruled out by any of the prior principles and roughly
equal in retributive and preventive effects for a given offense and class of offenders,
the less severe punishment is to be preferred to the more severe.
 Public Health Ethics

First published Mon Apr 12, 2010

At its core, public health is concerned with promoting and protecting the health of
populations, broadly understood. For example, the Institute of Medicine defines public health
as ―what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be
healthy‖ (IOM 1988). Often, but not exclusively, collective interventions in service of
population health involve or require government action. In the United States, for example, the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the
Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Protection Agency are in part or in
whole public health agencies. All states and most municipalities or counties have health
departments whose various functions include everything from the inspection of commercial
food service to the collection and use of epidemiological data for population surveillance of
disease. Collective action to promote and protect population health also occurs at the global
level, as exemplified by the activities of the World Health Organization.

One view of public health ethics regards the moral foundation of public health as an
injunction to maximize welfare, and therefore health as a component of welfare (Powers &
Faden 2006).

1. Distinctive Challenges of Public Health Ethics

 2. Justifying Public Health Programs and Policies

o 2.1 Overall Benefit
o 2.2 Collective Action/Efficiency
o 2.3 Communitarianism
o 2.4 Fairness in the Distribution of Burdens
o 2.5 The Harm Principle
o 2.6 Paternalism
o 2.7 Liberty-limiting Continua and A Central Task of Public Health Ethics
 3. Justice and Fairness in Public Health
 4. Global Justice
o 4.1 Research In but not For the Developing World
o 4.2 Uneven Research Focus
o 4.3 Undue (Health-Related) Burdens Imposed by a Shared World Order
o 4.4 Compensatory Claims
o 4.5 Positive Duties Across Borders
o 4.6 Mutual Benefit
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Distinctive Challenges of Public Health Ethics

There is no standard way of organizing the ethics of clinical practice, public health and
biomedical science. Although these distinctive concerns are often captured under the
umbrella term of bioethics, sometimes bioethics is presented as the equivalent of medical
ethics or in contrast to public health or population-level bioethics. Whichever approach is
preferred, a key question remains: what distinguishes public health ethics from medical
ethics? The answer lies in the distinctive nature of public health. Public health has four
characteristics that provide much of the subject matter for public health ethics: (1) it is a
public or collective good; (2) its promotion involves a particular focus on prevention; (3) its
promotion often entails government action; and (4) it involves an intrinsic outcome-
orientation.

2. Justifying Public Health Programs and Policies

Public health draws its foundational legitimacy from the essential and direct role that health
plays in human flourishing, whether that role is understood ultimately in terms of maximizing
health or promoting health in the context of advancing social justice. This general
justification is sometimes too broad, however, to provide sufficient moral warrant for specific
public health policies and institutions, especially when, as is so often the case, these policies
and institutions are implemented by the state and affect the liberty or privacy of corporate or
individual persons. This section puts forward six justifications or reasons that can be put
forward to defend a particular public health institution or policy.

2.1 Overall Benefit

Ultimately, we all benefit from having public health interventions, and from having trusted
regulatory agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) make decisions about such interventions and their
reach. All things considered, having public health regulation is better than not having it.
Having public health decisions made on the basis of overall statistics and demographic trends
is ultimately better for each one of us, even if particular interventions may not directly benefit
some of us. Thus, the task of public health ethics is not necessarily to justify each particular
intervention directly.

2.2 Collective Action/Efficiency

A related justification views health as a public good the pursuit of which is not possible
without ground rules for coordinated action and near-universal participation. Thus, public
health is viewed as having the structure of a coordination or collective efficiency problem. If
one person (or at least, a sufficient number of such persons) decides to go when the traffic
light is red and stop when the traffic light is green, it does not matter that everyone else is
following the rules: this person will disrupt the smooth functioning of the system, with
potentially dangerous results. Similarly, if one person (or a sufficient critical mass of such
persons) decides not to abide by a public health regulation because the regulation does not
directly benefit her or she otherwise objects, the ramifications will likely be felt by others in
her environment and beyond.[4] Everybody has to participate because, failing their
involvement, neither they nor anyone else can reap the benefit of a healthy society.

2.3 Communitarianism
The communitarian argument relies on the idea that what is good for the whole is necessarily
good for its parts (Beauchamp & Steinbock 1999, p. 57). Communitarians view individuals'
identities and the meaningfulness of their lives as indelibly tied to the well-being of their
community. Thus, on this view, public health interventions are good for individuals simply
because they benefit the community as a whole.

2.4 Fairness in the Distribution of Burdens

Yet another appeal that can be used to defend certain public health interventions that impose
unequal burdens on different members of a population relies on considerations of fairness.
The basic premise of this line or argument would be that burdens have to be roughly
equivalent for everyone. This justifies taxing different income brackets at different rates. The
same could be said for certain public health ―burdens,‖ understood as both the burdens of
disease and disability and the burdens of public health interventions. Based on considerations
such as a particular group's likelihood to contract a certain disease, and their overall health
status, other parts of the population can legitimately be asked to ―contribute,‖ as it were, in
order to make the distribution of disease burdens more equitable.

2.5 The Harm Principle

It is likely that no classic philosophical work is cited more often in the public health ethics
literature than John Stuart Mill's essay ―On Liberty‖ (Mill 1869). In that essay, Mill defends
what has come to be called the harm principle, in which the only justification for interfering
with the liberty of an individual, against her will, is to prevent harm to others. The harm
principle is relied upon to justify various infectious disease control interventions including
quarantine, isolation, and compulsory treatment. In liberal democracies, the harm principle is
often viewed as the most compelling justification for public health policies that interfere with
individual liberty.

2.6 Paternalism

Not surprisingly, paternalism—understood classically as interfering with the liberty of action

of a person, against her will, to protect or promote her welfare—is as controversial as the
harm principle is uncontroversial (Dworkin 2005; Feinberg 1986). Few public health
interventions are justified exclusively or even primarily on unmediated, classic paternalistic
grounds, although many more public health programs may have paternalistic effects. By
contrast, other classes of arguments that are sometimes described as paternalistic, including
soft paternalism, weak paternalism, and libertarian paternalism, are evoked more frequently.

2.7 Liberty-limiting Continua and A Central Task of Public Health Ethics

Part of the appeal of libertarian paternalism in public health policy is that, at least in certain
contexts, it appears to sidestep or in some cases resolve the tension between liberty and
health. This tension takes center stage in some analyses of the ethics of public health, as when
public health policies are placed on autonomy-limiting continua and justifications #5 and #6
dominate the analysis. A recent and influential such continuum is the Nuffield Council's
―intervention ladder‖ (Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2007), which is presented as a way of
thinking about the acceptability and justification of public health policies.

3. Justice and Fairness in Public Health

Whether social justice is viewed as a side constraint on the beneficence-based foundation of
public health, or as foundational in its own right, there is broad agreement that a commitment
to improving the health of those who are systematically disadvantaged is as constitutive of
public health as is the commitment to promote health generally (Powers and Faden 2006,
Institute of Medicine's Committee for the Study of the Future of Public Health 1988; Thomas
2002; Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2007)

4. Global Justice

Thus far, no sharp distinctions have been drawn between the national and the global context.
Just as in the economic, environmental and security arenas, it has become increasingly
difficult to discuss the demands of justice without metaphorically crossing national
boundaries, so too from a public health point of view. In this section, we survey six broad
areas of global justice concern that deserve further attention from a public health ethics point
of view.

4.1 Research In but not For the Developing World

Medical research is sometimes undertaken in the developing world in order to further the
understanding and treatment of diseases, not primarily for the benefit of those in the
developing world, but rather for the benefit of citizens of the developed world. In such cases,
participants and their communities might well claim that they are entitled to share in the
benefits of the research. However, compensation to participants and their communities is
often non-existent or not nearly in line with the potential benefits their participation will bring
to those fortunate enough to have been born in a different geographical location (Benatar
2002).

4.2 Uneven Research Focus

Much medical research is focused on diseases that affect less than 10% of the world's
population, while millions die every year from diseases that potentially could be prevented or
more easily treated if only enough research and other medical resources were devoted to
them. (Hunt & UN Economic and Social Council 2004) Given the sheer numbers of people
who needlessly die every day from such neglected but widespread diseases, and given that
the developed world clearly has the resources to change that state of affairs, justice claims
arguably also arise in this context.

4.3 Undue (Health-Related) Burdens Imposed by a Shared World Order

Discussions within countries, for example in the UK or in the US, about uneven distribution
of government or federal resources in different localities or states are not uncommon, and
claims of justice arise when some citizens are being treated differently from other citizens
with regards to access to (in this instance) health and medical resources.

4.4 Compensatory Claims

Many poor, underdeveloped countries that are massively underserved when it comes to
public health resources continue to suffer from the direct and indirect effects of historical,
unjust harms perpetrated by many of the world's wealthiest countries such as colonialism,
war, occupation, and other forms of violent economic exploitation. In many cases, harms are
more recent or are continuing, for example the diamond wars in Sierra Leone and other
African countries as well as the more general on-going exploitation of local natural resources.
Both the historical effects and the persistent effects of such violence and exploitation on
public health in those countries ground additional justice-based claims against the wealthy
nations to reduce the profound inequalities in health that exist between the world's poor and
advantaged people.

4.5 Positive Duties Across Borders

In addition to compensatory or remedial justice claims that arise out of global interactions,
there is arguably a strong positive duty to provide resources to those whose access to such
resources is limited by a mere luck of the draw. Where one happens to be born in large part
determines one's ability to access medical and other public health resources. In today's global
world, we all live in close enough proximity to each other's misfortunes that we cannot
without disingenuousness claim not to see it on our doorstep. This generates a particularly
strong obligation to attend to the public health needs of those who are particularly vulnerable
to illness and disease and lack access to medical care and other critical resources.

4.6 Mutual Benefit

Finally, there is a more pragmatic reason to attend to public health in the developing world.
Beyond claims of justice, morality, and common decency, we live in a world where mobility
and interaction within and across countries is very high. Diseases such as SARS, H1N1, and
drug-resistant TB, as well as less headline-grabbing ailments such as cholera and malaria, are
not neatly contained within one national boundary. Citizens of all countries would benefit
from improving public health in the developing world. Contributing to the availability and
improvement of medical, sanitary, and other health-related resources for those who live in
poverty and deprivation is ultimately good for us all, whether we are in the habit of traveling
around the world or not.
 Property

First published Mon Sep 6, 2004

Property is a general term for rules governing access to and control of land and other material
resources. Because these rules are disputed, both in regard to their general shape and in
regard to their particular application, there are interesting philosophical issues about the
justification of property. Modern philosophical discussions focus mostly on the issue of the
justification of private property rights (as opposed to common or collective property).
‗Private property‘ refers to a kind of system that allocates particular objects like pieces of
land to particular individuals to use and manage as they please, to the exclusion of others
(even others who have a greater need for the resources) and to the exclusion also of any
detailed control by society. Though these exclusions make the idea of private property seem
problematic, philosophers have often argued that it is necessary for the ethical development
of the individual, or for the creation of a social environment in which people can prosper as
free and responsible agents.

 1. Issues of Analysis and Definition

 2. Historical Overview
 3. Is Property Really a Philosophical Issue?
 4. Genealogies of Property
 5. Justification: Liberty and Consequences.
 Bibliogrpahy
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Issues of Analysis and Definition

More than most policy areas dealt with by political philosophers, the discussion of property is
beset with definitional difficulties. The first issue is to distinguish between property and
private property.

Strictly speaking, ‗property‘ is a general term for the rules that govern people's access to and
control of things like land, natural resources, the means of production, manufactured goods,
and also (on some accounts) texts, ideas, inventions, and other intellectual products.
Disagreements about their use are likely to be serious because resource-use matters to people.

2. Historical Overview

There are extensive discussions of property in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas,
Hegel, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Marx, and Mill. The range of justificatory themes they
consider is very broad, and I shall begin with a summary.

The ancient authors speculated about the relation between property and virtue, a natural
subject for discussion since justifying private property raises serious questions about the
legitimacy of self-interested activity. Plato (1993 [c. 370 BCE], 462b-c) argued that
collective ownership was necessary to promote common pursuit of the common interest, and
to avoid the social divisiveness that would occur ‗when some grieve exceedingly and others
rejoice at the same happenings.‘

3. Is Property a Philosophical Issue?

What is it about property that engages the interest of philosophers? Why should philosophers
be interested in property?

Some have suggested that they need not be. John Rawls argued that questions about the
system of ownership are secondary or derivative questions, to be dealt with pragmatically
rather than as issues in political philosophy (Rawls 1971, p. 274). Although every society has
to decide whether the economy will be organized on the basis of markets and private
ownership or on the basis of central collective control, there was little that philosophers could
contribute to these debates. Philosophers, Rawls said, are better off discussing the abstract
principles of justice that should constrain the establishment of any social institutions, than
trying to settle a priori questions of social and economic strategy.

4. Genealogies of Property

In our philosophical tradition, arguments about the justification of property have often been
presented as genealogies: as stories about the way in which private property might have
emerged in a world that was hitherto unacquainted with the institution.

The best known are Lockean stories (Locke 1988 [1689] and Nozick 1974). One begins with
a description of a state of nature and an initial premise about land belonging to nobody in
particular. And then one tells a story about why it would be sensible for individuals to
appropriate land and other resources for their personal use and about the conditions under
which such appropriations would be justified. Individuals have needs and they find
themselves surrounded with objects capable of satisfying those needs.

5. Justification: Liberty and Consequences

The justificatory issue might therefore be confronted directly, without invoking any sort of
history or genealogical narrative.

In dealing with the pros and cons of private property as an institution, it has sometimes been
suggested that the general justification of private property and the distribution of particular
property rights can be treated as separate issues, rather in the way that some philosophers
suggested that the general justification of punishment can be separated from the principles
governing its distribution (Hart 1968, p. 4; see also Ryan 1984, p. 82 and Waldron 1988, p.
330.
 Pornography and Censorship

First published Wed May 5, 2004

Can a government legitimately prohibit citizens from publishing or viewing pornography, or

would this be an unjustified violation of basic freedoms?

This question lies at the heart of a debate that raises fundamental issues about just when, and
on what grounds, the state is justified in using its coercive powers to limit the freedom of
individuals.

Traditionally, liberals defended the freedom of consenting adults to publish and consume
pornography in private from moral and religious conservatives who wanted pornography
banned for its obscenity, its corrupting impact on consumers and its corrosive effect on
traditional family and religious values. But, in more recent times, the pornography debate has
taken on a somewhat new and surprising shape. Some feminists have found themselves allied
with their traditional conservative foes in calling on the state to regulate or prohibit
pornography-although the primary focus of feminist concern is on the harm that pornography
may cause to women (and children), rather than the obscenity or immorality of its sexually
explicit content.

1. What is pornography?

 2. The shape of the traditional pornography debate

o 2.1 Conservative arguments for censorship
o 2.2. The traditional liberal defence of a right to pornography
 2.2.1 The harm principle
 2.2.2 Pornography and offence
 2.2.3 The dangers of censorship
 3. Recent liberal dissent
 4. Feminist approaches
o 4.1 Feminist arguments against pornography
o 4.2 Feminist arguments against legal regulation
 5. Recent debate: liberals and feminists
o 5.1 Does pornography cause harm to others?: The empirical evidence
o 5.2 Liberals and feminists
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. What is Pornography?

"I can't define pornography," one judge once famously said, "but I know it when I see it."
(Justice Stewart in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 US 184 (1964).) Can we do better?

The word "pornography" comes from the Greek for writing about prostitutes. However, the
etymology of the term is not much of a guide to its current use, since many of the things
commonly called "pornography" nowadays are neither literally written nor literally about
prostitutes.

Here is a first, simple definition. Pornography is any material (either pictures or words) that is
sexually explicit. This definition of pornography may pick out different types of material in
different contexts, since what is viewed as sexually explicit can vary from culture to culture
and over time. "Sexually explicit" functions as a kind of indexical term, picking out different
features depending on what has certain effects or breaks certain taboos in different contexts
and cultures. Displays of women's uncovered ankles count as sexually explicit in some
cultures, but not in most western cultures nowadays (although they once did: the display of a
female ankle in Victorian times was regarded as most risqué). There may be borderline cases
too: do displays of bared breasts still count as sexually explicit in various contemporary
western cultures? However, some material seems clearly to count as sexually explicit in many
contexts today: in particular, audio, written or visual representations of sexual acts (e.g.,
sexual intercourse, oral sex) and exposed body parts (e.g., the vagina, anus and penis-
especially the erect penis).

2. The shape of the traditional pornography debate

2.1 Conservative arguments for censorship

Until comparatively recently, the main opposition to pornography came from moral and
religious conservatives, who argue that pornography should be banned because its sexually
explicit content is obscene and morally corrupting. By "pornography", conservatives usually
mean simply sexually explicit material (either pictures or words), since conservatives
typically view all such material as obscene.

According to conservatives, the sexually explicit content of pornography is an affront to

decent family and religious values and deeply offensive to a significant portion of citizens
who hold these values. The consumption of pornography is bad for society. It undermines and
destabilizes the moral fabric of a decent and stable society, by encouraging sexual
promiscuity, deviant sexual practices and other attitudes and behaviour that threaten
traditional family and religious institutions, and which conservatives regard as intrinsically
morally wrong. Furthermore, pornography is bad for those who consume it, corrupting their
character and preventing them from leading a good and worthwhile life in accordance with
family and religious values.

2.2 The traditional liberal defence of a right to pornography

Traditional liberal defenders of pornography famously disagree, rejecting both the principle
of legal moralism and the principle of legal paternalism, at least where consenting adults are
concerned. This is not to say that liberal defenders of pornography necessarily approve of it.
Indeed, they frequently personally find pornography-especially violent and degrading
pornography-mindless and offensive. Many concede that pornography-by which they usually
mean sexually explicit material whose primary function is to produce sexual arousal in
viewers-is "low value" speech: speech that contributes little, if anything, of intellectual,
artistic, literary or political merit to the moral and social environment. But this does not mean
that it should not be protected-quite the opposite. A vital principle is at stake for liberals in
the debate over pornography and censorship. The principle is that mentally competent adults
must not be prevented from expressing their own convictions, or from indulging their own
private tastes, simply on the grounds that, in the opinion of others, those convictions or tastes
are mistaken, offensive or unworthy. Moral majorities must not be allowed to use the law to
suppress dissenting minority opinions or to force their own moral convictions on others. The
underlying liberal sentiment here is nicely captured in the famous adage (often attributed to
the French philosopher, Voltaire):"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the
death your right to say it."[1]

2.2.1. The ‗harm principle‘: when is the state justified in restricting individual liberty?

These three central ingredients in the liberal defence of pornography find their classic
expression in a famous and influential passage from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859). In
this passage, Mill sets out the principle that underpins the prevailing liberal view about when
it is justified for the state to coercively interfere with the liberty of its citizens. It is a principle
that continues to provide the dominant liberal framework for the debate over pornography
and censorship. Mill writes:

The only principle for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a
civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either
physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or
forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because,
in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for
remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not
for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the
conduct from which it is desired to deter him, must be calculated to produce evil to someone
else. The only part of the conduct of any one for which he is amenable to society, is that
which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of
right, absolute. (Mill 1975: 15)

2.2.2 Pornography and Offense: Justifying restrictions on the public display of

pornography

However, Dworkin thinks, considerations of offence may provide some justification for
preventing or restricting the public display of pornography so as to avoid its causing offense
to non-consenting adults who might otherwise involuntarily or unwittingly be exposed to it.
Joel Feinberg, another well-known liberal defender of pornography, agrees. But Feinberg
thinks that such restrictions must be justified by a separate principle to the harm principle, for
he thinks that certain sorts of unpleasant psychological states are not in themselves harms.
Feinberg calls this additional principle the offense principle. The offense principle says that
"It is always a good reason in support of a proposed criminal prohibition that it would
probably be an effective way of preventing serious offense (as opposed to injury or harm) to
persons other than the actor, and that it is probably a necessary means to that end (i.e., there is
probably no other means that is equally effective at no greater cost to the other values)."
(Feinberg 1999:78. For a more detailed discussion see Feinberg 1985.)

2.2.3 The dangers of censorship

Liberals also have technical concerns about how censorship laws might work in practice.
Many liberal (and feminist) objections to censorship of pornography point to the practical
costs and dangers of censorship, arguing that even if pornography does cause some harm to
others, the risks involved in censoring it are too great. They point to the difficulties involved
in formulating a legal definition of ‗pornography‘ that will be sufficiently precise to minimize
the danger that censorship laws targeting pornography will be used (intentionally or
unintentionally) to censor other unpopular material, including valuable literary, artistic and
political works. Censoring pornography may thus place us on a dangerous "slippery slope" to
further censorship of other material; and may have a general "chilling effect" on expression,
making people reluctant to say or publish things that might be construed as pornography and
for which they could be prosecuted. (For further discussion see Williams 1981, Schauer 1982,
Easton, 1994.)

3. Recent liberal dissent

Although traditional defenders of a right to pornography have been liberals, it is important to

note that not all contemporary liberals defend such a right. Indeed, the question of whether
there might be good liberal grounds for prohibiting or otherwise regulating the voluntary
private consumption of pornography has become the subject of increasing and lively debate.
Inspired by more recent feminist arguments against pornography, some have begun to argue
that the liberal commitment to protecting individual autonomy, equality, freedom of
expression and other liberal values may in fact support a policy that prohibits certain kinds of
pornography, rather than the permissive policy liberals have traditionally favoured. (See e.g.,
Dyzenhaus 1992, Easton 1994: 42-51, Langton 1990, Okin 1987, West 2003.)

4. Feminist approaches

4.1 Feminist arguments against pornography

According to anti-pornography feminists, pornography is not harmless entertainment or

cathartic, therapeutic fantasy. Nor is the harm it causes merely that of ‗offence‘. Unlike moral
conservatives, who object to pornography on the grounds of the obscenity of its sexual
explicit content and its corrosive effect on the conservative way of life, the primary focus of
the feminist objection to pornography is on the central role that pornography is thought to
play in the exploitation and oppression of women. (See e.g., Lederer 1980, Itzin 1992,
MacKinnon 1984, 1987, 1995.)

4.2 Feminist arguments against legal regulation

Of course, not all feminists object to pornography, even in MacKinnon's sense (see e.g.,
Burstyn 1985, Chester and Dickey 1988, Cornell 2000, Hunter and Law 1985, Gruen and
Panichas 1997). The question of pornography and censorship has divided feminists, just as it
has begun to divide liberals. Some feminists argue that pornography is an important form of
sexual expression that does not harm women, and may even benefit them by liberating
women and women's sexuality from the oppressive shackles of tradition and sexual
conservatism. Pornography, on this view, is an important tool for exploring and expressing
new or minority forms of female sexuality. Far from making downtrodden victims of women,
pornography may have a vital role to play in challenging traditional views about femininity
and female sexuality and in empowering women, both homosexual and heterosexual, to shape
their own identities as sexual beings.
5. Recent debate: liberals and feminists

Despite the efforts of anti-pornography feminists, many traditional liberal defenders of

pornography remain unconvinced. They typically continue to maintain either that
pornography does not cause harm to women (in the relevant, usually narrow, sense of
‗harm‘), or they admit that pornography probably does cause some harm to women's
interests, but deny that this harm is sufficiently great to offset the dangers inherent in
censorship and to justify the violation of the rights of pornographers and would-be
consumers.

5.1 Does pornography cause harm to others? The empirical evidence

Liberal defenders of pornography readily admit that, if there were reliable evidence to show
that consumption of pornography significantly increases the incidence of violence sexual
crime, there would be a very strong liberal case for prohibiting it. However, liberal defenders
of pornography remain unconvinced that there is reliable evidence to show that pornography
is a cause of rape or other sexual crime. Ronald Dworkin, for example, writes "…in spite of
MacKinnon's fervent declarations, no reputable study has concluded that pornography is a
significant cause of sexual crime: many of them conclude, on the contrary, that the causes of
violent personality lie mainly in childhood, before exposure to pornography can have had any
effect, and that desire for pornography is a symptom rather than a cause of deviance"
(Dworkin 1993: 38).

5.2 Liberals and feminists

The empirical evidence remains the subject of ongoing debate and investigation. But in the
absence of sufficiently conclusive evidence that pornography causes crimes of sexual
violence, many liberal defenders of pornography continue to view censorship as unjustified.

However, the rights-based feminist arguments against pornography do not rest entirely on the
claim that consumption of pornography is a significant cause of violent sexual crime. The
claim that pornography contributes to women's inequality, and the claim that it violates
women's right to freedom of speech, can rest on more moderate empirical claims about which
there is likely to be more agreement: for example, that pornography helps to form and
reinforce the view that women are sex objects, which manifests itself in how women are
perceived and treated in society and so perpetuates women's inequality. Among other things,
it may increase the likelihood of sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination against
women, undermine women's credibility in certain contexts, encourage a general expectation
that women who say ‗no‘ in sexual contexts often do not intend to refuse, and so on.
 Political Obligation

First published Tue Apr 17, 2007; substantive revision Fri Apr 30, 2010

To have a political obligation is to have a moral duty to obey the laws of one's country or
state. On that point there is almost complete agreement among political philosophers. But
how does one acquire such an obligation, and how many people have really done what is
necessary to acquire it? Or is political obligation more a matter of being than of doing — that
is, of simply being a member of the country or state in question? To those questions many
answers have been given, and none now commands widespread assent. Indeed, a number of
contemporary political philosophers deny that a satisfactory theory of political obligation
either has been or can be devised. Others, however, continue to believe that there is a solution
to what is commonly called ―the problem of political obligation,‖ and they are presently
engaged in lively debate not only with the skeptics but also with one another on the question
of which theory, if any, provides the solution to the problem.

 1. Political Obligation in Historical Perspective

o 1.1 Socrates on Obeying the Law
o 1.2 Divine Command
o 1.3 The Social Contract
o 1.4 Utility and Obligation
 2. Conceptual Matters
o 2.1 Obligation and Duty
o 2.2 Obligation and Morality
o 2.3 Obligation, Political and Legal
 3. Anarchist Challenges to Political Obligation
o 3.1 Philosophical Anarchism
o 3.2 Against Philosophical Anarchism
 4. Contemporary Theories of Political Obligation
o 4.1 Consent
o 4.2 Gratitude
o 4.3 Fair Play
o 4.4 Membership or Association
o 4.5 Natural Duty
 5. Conclusion: A Plurality of Principles?
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Political Obligation in Historical Perspective

The phrase ―political obligation‖ is apparently no older than T. H. Green's Lectures on the
Principles of Political Obligation, delivered at Oxford University in 1879–80 (D'Entrèves, p.
3). The two words from which Green formed the phrase are much older, of course, and he
apparently thought that combining them required no elaborate explanation or defense. In any
case, there was nothing novel about the problem Green addressed in his lectures: ―to discover
the true ground or justification for obedience to law‖ (Green 1986, p. 13). Sophocles raised
this problem in his play Antigone, first performed around 440 BCE, and Plato's Crito
recounts Socrates' philosophical response to the problem, in the face of his own death, some
forty years later.

1.1 Socrates on Obeying the Law

In 399 BCE an Athenian jury found Socrates guilty of impiety and corrupting the morals of
the youth, for which crimes the jury condemned him to death. According to Plato's account,
Socrates' friends arranged his escape, but he chose to stay and drink the fatal hemlock,
arguing that to defy the judgment against him would be to break his ―agreements and
commitments‖ and to ―mistreat‖ his friends, his country, and the laws of Athens (Crito, 54c;
Trial and Death, p. 54). Socrates' arguments are sketchy, and Crito, his interlocutor, does
little to challenge them, but they are nevertheless suggestive of the theories of political
obligation that have emerged in the two and a half millennia since his death.

1.2 Divine Command

Throughout history, the belief that political society and its rules are divinely ordained has
been so strong as to keep many people, and probably most, from considering the possibility
that disobeying those rules might ever be justified. With the advent of Christianity, however,
that possibility had to be taken seriously. For the Christian, the distinction Jesus draws
(Matthew 22:15–22) between the tribute owed to Caesar and that owed to God makes it clear
that what the rulers command may be at odds with what God wants done. That point became
even clearer when the rulers tried to suppress Christianity. Nevertheless, Christian doctrine
held that there is an obligation to obey the law grounded in divine command, with the most
important text being Paul's Epistle to the Romans (13:1–2): ―For there is no authority except
from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the
authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.‖

1.3 The Social Contract

Although the idea of the social contract long antedates the modern era (Gough 1967), its full
development occurred in the seventeenth century, when Thomas Hobbes and John Locke
used the theory to rather different ends. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and other
philosophers have also relied on social contract theory, but the classic expressions of the
contract theory of political obligation remain Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) and Locke's Second
Treatise of Government (1690).

For Hobbes, social contract theory established the authority of anyone who was able to wield
and hold power. If we imagine ourselves in a state of nature, he argued, with no government
and no law to guide us but the law of nature, we will recognize that everyone is naturally
equal and independent. But we should also recognize that this state of nature will also be a
state of war, for the ―restlesse desire for Power after power‖ that drives all of us will lead to
―a warre of every man against every man‖ (Hobbes, chaps. 11, 13). To escape so dreadful a
condition, people surrender their independence by entering into a covenant to obey a
sovereign power that will have the authority to make, enforce, and interpret laws. This form
of the social contract Hobbes called ―sovereignty by institution.‖ But he also insisted that
conquerors acquire authority over those they subject to their rule — ―sovereignty by
acquisition‖ — when they allow those subjects to go about their business. In either case,
Hobbes said, the subjects consent to obey those who have effective power over them, whether
the subject has a choice in who holds power or not. Because they consent, they therefore have
an obligation to obey the sovereign, whether sovereignty be instituted or acquired.

1.4 Utility and Obligation

For all its influence in other areas of legal, moral, and political philosophy, utilitarianism has
found few adherents among those who believe that there is a general obligation to obey the
laws of one's country. Part of the reason for this situation may be the fact that Jeremy
Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and others who followed Hume's path had little to say about
political obligation. A more powerful reason, though, is that utilitarians have trouble
accounting for obligations of any kind. If one's guiding principle is always to act to maximize
expected utility, or promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, then obligations
seem to have little or no binding force. After all, if I can do more good by giving the money
in my possession to charity than by paying my debts, then that is what I should do,
notwithstanding my obligations to my creditors. By the same reasoning, whether I should
obey or disobey the law is a matter to be settled by considering which will do more good, not
by determining whether I have an obligation to obey.

2. Conceptual Matters

In the twentieth century political philosophers devoted themselves at least as much to the
analysis of the problem of political obligation, and to the concepts it involves, as to full-scale
attempts to devise theories of the obligation to obey the law. As in the four historically
significant theories surveyed in the previous section, however, the presumption has continued
to be that the answer to the problem of political obligation must be stated in moral terms.
When T. H. Green set out in 1879 ―to discover the true ground or justification for obedience
to law,‖ for example, he was looking for more than prudence alone can provide. ―You ought
to obey the law because you will suffer if you do not‖ may be a powerful reason for
obedience, but it is not a reason that speaks to Green's concern with ―the moral function or
object served by law …‖ (Green 1986, p. 13).

2.1 Obligation and Duty

As the previous sentence suggests, obligations are also duties. That is true, at any rate, when
the obligation in question is political obligation. To be sure, some philosophers have
uncovered differences between obligations and duties, the most important of which is that
obligations must be voluntarily undertaken or incurred, but duties need not be (e.g., Brandt
1964; Hart 1958). The obligation to keep a promise or fulfill a contract, for example, arises
only when one has done something that generates the obligation — made a promise or signed
a contract — but the duties of charity and truth telling supposedly fall on us regardless of
what, if anything, we voluntarily commit to do. John Rawls relies on this distinction when he
argues that most citizens of a reasonably just political society have no general obligation to
obey its laws, even though they do have a ―natural duty‖ to support just institutions — a duty
that has the general effect of requiring them to obey (Rawls 1999, p. 97).

2.2 Obligation and Morality

In the case of the first question, the problem is to determine whether the obligation to obey
the law outweighs, overrides, or excludes competing moral consideration. If there is an
obligation or duty to obey the law as such, simply because it is the law, then it is an
obligation to obey no matter what the content of a particular law may be. Yet few people will
say that someone who breaks the speed limit while driving a desperately ill person to the
hospital is acting immorally; and many will say that some laws, such as those prohibiting
consensual homosexual acts, are themselves immoral. We may grant that the law carries
moral force, in other words, but we cannot grant that it holds a monopoly on that kind of
force. Whether one ought to obey the law in a particular case is something that must be
decided all things considered — that is, in light of other moral considerations that may arise.
But what kind of an obligation is it that may be overridden or outweighed in this manner?

2.3 Obligation, Political and Legal

What does this prima facie or defeasible nature of political obligation imply by way of an
answer to the second question, which concerns the distinction between political and legal
obligation? If those who have a political obligation have a duty to obey the law, ceteris
paribus, then why not call it a legal obligation? Or why not conclude, with Bhiku Parekh
(1993, p. 240), that the question of whether we have a duty to obey the law is really a matter
of civil obligation — that is, ―the obligation to respect and uphold the legitimately constituted
civil authority‖ — that entails legal obligations ―to obey the laws enacted by the civil
authority‖ rather than political obligation? ―Political‖ is the broader term, according to
Parekh, and someone who has a truly political obligation will owe her polity more than mere
obedience to its laws. Such a person will have a positive duty to take steps to secure the
safety and advance the interests of her country. Following Parekh's distinction, then, we may
say that someone who pays taxes discharges a legal obligation, no matter how grudgingly she
pays them, but someone who pays taxes and contributes voluntarily to public projects fulfills
a truly political obligation.

3. Anarchist Challenges to Political Obligation

According to the foregoing analysis, a political obligation, if it exists at all, is a systemic,

prima-facie moral duty to obey the laws of one's polity. But does such an obligation exist or
obtain in any general or widespread sense? Most political philosophers have assumed that the
answer is yes, and they have devoted their efforts to discovering what Green called ―the true
ground or justification for obedience to law.‖ Some philosophers in the middle years of the
twentieth century even asserted, on conceptual grounds, that political obligation needs no
justification. As one of them said, ―to ask why I should obey any laws is to ask whether there
might be a political society without political obligations, which is absurd. For we mean by
political society, groups of people organized according to rules enforced by some of their
number‖ (Macdonald, p. 192; also McPherson, p. 64, and, more subtly, Pitkin 1966; but cf.
Pateman 1973, and Horton 1992, pp. 137–45). This view did not long prevail, but it testifies
to the strength of the tendency to believe that citizens surely have an obligation to obey the
laws of their country, at least if it is reasonably just.

3.1 Philosophical Anarchism

The arguments of these philosophical anarchists take either an ―a priori‖ or an ―a posteriori‖

form (Simmons 2001, pp. 104–106). Arguments of the first kind maintain that it is impossible
to provide a satisfactory account of a general obligation to obey the law. According to Robert
Paul Wolff, the principal advocate of this view, there can be no general obligation to obey the
law because any such obligation would violate the ―primary obligation‖ of autonomy, which
is ―the refusal to be ruled‖ (1998 [1970], p. 18). As Wolff defines it, autonomy combines
freedom with responsibility. To be autonomous, someone must have the capacity for choice,
and therefore for freedom; but the person who has this capacity also has the responsibility to
exercise it — to act autonomously. Failing to do so is to fail to fulfill this ―primary
obligation‖ of autonomy.

3.2 Against Philosophical Anarchism

Whether a priori or a posteriori, the arguments of the philosophical anarchists pose a serious
challenge to those who continue to believe in a general obligation to obey the law. This
challenge is made especially difficult by the powerful objections that Simmons and other a
posteriori anarchists have brought against the existing theories of political obligation. The
most effective response, of course, would be to demonstrate that one's favored theory does
not succumb to these objections, and we shall briefly consider attempts to respond in this
fashion in the following section. Some general attempts to refute philosophical anarchism
ought to be noted first, however.

4. Contemporary Theories of Political Obligation

Although the lines that separate one theory from another are not always distinct,
philosophical justifications of political obligation nowadays usually take the form of
arguments from consent, gratitude, fair play, membership, or natural duty. Some philosophers
advance a hybrid of two or more of these approaches, and others hold, as the concluding
section shows, that a pluralistic theory is necessary. For the most part, though, those who
believe that it is possible to justify a general obligation to obey the law will rely on one of
these five lines of argument.

4.1 Consent

Most people who believe they have an obligation to obey the law probably think that this
putative obligation is grounded in their consent. Political philosophers are less inclined to
think this way, however, in light of the withering criticism to which Hume and more recent
writers — notably A. John Simmons (1979, chaps. 3 and 4) — have subjected consent theory.
The critics' claim is not that consent cannot be a source of obligations, for they typically
believe it can. The claim, instead, is that too few people have given the kind of express or
actual consent that can ground a general obligation to obey the law, and neither hypothetical
nor tacit consent will supply the defect, for reasons already canvassed.

4.2 Gratitude

To move from consent to gratitude is to move from the most to the least popular foundation
for a theory of political obligation. That is not to say that those who believe in political
obligations seldom appeal to gratitude. To the contrary, the appeal is both long-standing —
appearing some 2500 years ago in Plato's Crito, as we have seen — and widespread. The
point is that it is rarely the sole or even primary basis for an attempt to justify the obligation
to obey the law. Plato's account of Socrates' reasoning is typical in this regard, with gratitude
but one of at least four considerations that Socrates relies on in explaining why he will not
disobey the ruling of the jury that sentenced him to death. (For more recent examples, see
Simmons 1979, pp. 162–63.) When Simmons included a chapter on the weakness of gratitude
as a foundation for political obligation in his influential Moral Principles and Political
Obligations (1979), in fact, there was no gratitude theory on which to concentrate his
criticism.

That situation changed within a decade when A. D. M. Walker sketched such a theory in
―Political Obligation and the Argument from Gratitude.‖ Walker's argument takes the
following form (1988, p. 205):

1. The person who benefits from X has an obligation of gratitude not to act contrary to
X's interests.
2. Every citizen has received benefits from the state.
3. Every citizen has an obligation of gratitude not to act in ways that are contrary to the
state's interests.
4. Noncompliance with the law is contrary to the state's interests.
5. Every citizen has an obligation of gratitude to comply with the law.

4.3 Fair Play

Although earlier philosophers, including Socrates, appealed to something resembling the

principle of fairness (or fair play), the classic formulation of the principle is the one H. L. A.
Hart gave it in ―Are There Any Natural Rights?‖ As Hart there says, ―when a number of
persons conduct any joint enterprise according to rules and thus restrict their liberty, those
who have submitted to these restrictions when required have a right to a similar submission
from those who have benefited by their submission‖ (1955, p. 185). John Rawls subsequently
adopted this principle in an influential essay of his own, referring to the duty derived from the
principle as the ―duty of fair play‖ (1964).

The principle of fair play applies to a political society only if that society can reasonably be
regarded as a cooperative enterprise. If it can, the members of the polity have an obligation of
fair play to do their part in maintaining the enterprise. Because the rule of law is necessary to
the maintenance of such a polity — and perhaps even constitutive of it — the principal form
of cooperation is abiding by the law. In the absence of overriding considerations, then, the
members of the polity qua cooperative practice must honor their obligation to one another to
obey the laws. In this way the principle of fair play provides the grounding for a general
obligation to obey the law, at least on the part of those whose polity is reasonably regarded as
a cooperative enterprise.

4.4 Membership or Association

A fourth attempt to ground a general obligation to obey the law has emerged in the last
twenty years or so in the form of the ―membership‖ or ―associative‖ theory. According to the
proponents of this theory, political obligation is best understood as an associative obligation
grounded in membership. If we are members of a group, then we are under an obligation,
ceteris paribus, to comply with the norms that govern it. Nor does this obligation follow from
our consenting to become members, for it holds even in the case of groups or associations,
such as families and polities, that people typically do not consent to join. Voluntary or not,
membership entails obligation. Anyone who acknowledges membership in a particular polity
must therefore acknowledge that he or she has a general obligation to obey its laws.
4.5 Natural Duty

The final contender in the political obligation debates is an approach that follows John Rawls
in distinguishing obligations from natural duties. As noted earlier, Rawls believes that a
person must do something to acquire an obligation, such as make a promise or sign a
contract, whereas natural duties ―apply to us without regard to our voluntary acts‖ (1999, p.
98). One implication of this distinction is that most people have no general obligation to obey
the laws of their polity, for they have not done what is necessary to incur such an obligation.
Everyone, however, is subject to the natural duty of justice, which ―requires us to support and
to comply with just institutions that exist and apply to us‖ (1999, p. 99), and this duty takes
the place, for Rawls, of political obligation. As he says, ―there are several ways in which one
may be bound to political institutions. For the most part the natural duty of justice is the more
fundamental, since it binds citizens generally and requires no voluntary acts in order to
apply‖ (1999, p. 100).

5. Conclusion: A Plurality of Principles?

One response to this question might be to say that both concepts are at work, and a good
thing that they are, for no one concept or principle by itself can ground a satisfactory theory
of political obligation. In fact, that is a response that a number of philosophers have made,
either implicitly or explicitly, in recent years. Gilbert (2006) and Steinberger (2004), for
example, seem to have developed hybrid theories without ever advertising them as such.
Gilbert's theory fuses the consent and associative approaches through her reliance on joint
commitments to a plural subject, or group. For his part, Steinberger combines the consent and
natural-duty approaches, arguing that any ―generalized attempt to divorce obligations from
natural duties, to find justifications for the former that are entirely independent of the latter, is
… doomed to fail‖ (2004, p. 211).
 Action

First published Mon Mar 18, 2002; substantive revision Thu Nov 1, 2007

If a person's head moves, she may or may not have moved her head, and, if she did move it,
she may have actively performed the movement of her head or merely, by doing something
else, caused a passive movement. And, if she performed the movement, she might have done
so intentionally or not. This short array of contrasts (and others like them) has motivated
questions about the nature, variety, and identity of action. Beyond the matter of her moving,
when the person moves her head, she may be indicating agreement or shaking an insect off
her ear. Should we think of the consequences, conventional or causal, of physical behavior as
constituents of an action distinct from but ‗generated by‘ the movement? Or should we think
that there is a single action describable in a host of ways? Also, actions, in even the most
minimal sense, seem to be essentially ‗active‘. But, how can we explain what this property
amounts to and defend our wavering intuitions about which events fall in the category of the
‗active‘ and which do not?

 1. The Nature of Action and Agency

 2. Intentional Action and Intention
 3. The Explanation of Action
 4. Reasons
 Bibliography
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. The Nature of Action and Agency

It has been common to motivate a central question about the nature of action by invoking an
intuitive distinction between the things that merely happen to people — the events they
undergo — and the various things they genuinely do. The latter events, the doings, are the
acts or actions of the agent, and the problem about the nature of action is supposed to be:
what distinguishes an action from a mere happening or occurrence? For some time now,
however, there has been a better appreciation of the vagaries of the verb ‗to do‘ and a livelier
sense that the question is not well framed. For instance, a person may cough, sneeze, blink,
blush, and thrash about in a seizure, and these are all things the person has, in some minimal
sense, ‗done,‘ although in the usual cases, the agent will have been altogether passive
throughout these ‗doings.‘

1.1 Knowledge of one's own actions.

It is frequently noted that the agent has some sort of immediate awareness of his physical
activity and of the goals that the activity is aimed at realizing. In this connection, Elizabeth
Anscombe [1963] spoke of ‗knowledge without observation.‘ The agent knows ‗without
observation‘ that he is performing certain bodily movements (perhaps under some rough but
non-negligible description), and he knows ‗without observation‘ what purpose(s) the
behavior is meant to serve [see also Falvey 2000].
1.2 Governance of one's own actions.

It is also important to the concept of ‗goal directed action‘ that agents normally implement a
kind of direct control or guidance over their own behavior. An agent may guide her paralyzed
left arm along a certain path by using her active right arm to shove it through the relevant
trajectory. The moving of her right arm, activated as it is by the normal exercise of her
system of motor control, is a genuine action, but the movement of her left arm is not. That
movement is merely the causal upshot of her guiding action, just as the onset of illumination
in the light bulb is the mere effect of her action when she turned on the light. The agent has
direct control over the movement of the right arm, but not over the movement of the left. And
yet it is hardly clear what ‗direct control of behavior‘ can amount to here.

2. Intentional Action and Intention

Anscombe opened her monograph Intention by noting that the concept of ‗intention‘ figures
in each of the constructions:

(5) The agent intends to G;

(6) The agent G'd intentionally; and

(7) The agent F'd with the intention of Ging,

For that matter, one could add

(7′) In Fing (by Fing), the agent intended to G.

Although (7) and (7′) are closely related, they seem not to say quite the same thing. For
example, although it may be true that

(8) Veronica mopped the kitchen then with the intention of feeding her flamingo afterwards,

it normally won't be true that

(8′) In (by) mopping the kitchen, Veronica intended to feed her flamingo afterwards.

3. The Explanation of Action

For many years, the most intensely debated topic in the philosophy of action concerned the
explanation of intentional actions in terms of the agent's reasons for acting. As stated
previously, Davidson and other action theorists defended the position that reason
explanations are causal explanations — explanations that cite the agent's desires, intentions,
and means-end beliefs as causes of the action [see Goldman 1970]. These causalists about the
explanation of action were reacting against a neo-Wittgensteinian outlook that claimed
otherwise. In retrospect, the very terms in which the debate was conducted were flawed.

4. Reasons

In the foregoing, reference has been made to explanations of actions in terms of reasons, but
recent work on agency has questioned whether contemporary frameworks for the philosophy
of action have really articulated the way in which an agent's desires and other pro-attitudes
have the distinctive force of reasons in the setting of these ordinary explanations [see
Frankfurt 1988, 1999, Smith 1994]. Of course, it is widely recognized that reason
explanations both tell us what motivated the agent's action and elucidate the justification that
the action had, at least from the agent's own standpoint. However, the motivating role of
‗reasons‘ can come to be separated from their role in providing an apparent justification.