IMMIGRATION, NATIONALISM, AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Abstract: Michael Walzer and David Miller defend the authority of democratic states to determine who will be allowed entry and membership. In support of this view they have claimed that the domestic solidarity necessary for social justice is threatened by the unregulated influx of outsiders. This empirical thesis proves to be false when applied to the United States, where heavy Latino and Latina immigration is more likely to increase civic solidarity than to diminish it. Seen in this light, the positions of Jürgen Habermas and Carol Gould, giving human rights priority over democratic sovereignty in decisions about membership, cannot be criticized as utopian. Liberal philosophers can also defend open borders as a way to give oppressed peoples representation inside powerful countries where state decisions often threaten access to essential resources and basic freedoms in their home countries.     

A three-factor scale of attitudes toward guns

Guns figure prominently in American culture. There is, however, considerable variability in attitudes toward guns. The beliefs and feelings that comprise attitudes toward guns may well be important moderators of numerous social behaviors. For this reason, a three-dimensional attitudes scale was constructed. The first factor consists of an abstract set of beliefs concerning the right of the American public to own or not own guns. The second and third factors tap more concrete beliefs about the consequences of gun ownership. Specifically, the second factor assesses the degree to which people believe gun ownership affords protection against crime. The third factor measures the degree to which people believe guns stimulate crime. Discriminant validity of the subscales is shown by the pattern of correlations obtained with the three dimensions and various other social and personality measures. Regression analyses indicate that the subscales are uniquely predicted by different social variables. Discussion centers on the usefulness of such a measure for future research on aggression, social policy, and attitude change.     

国际关系的伦理审视

探讨国际关系伦理,明确战争的正义性和非正义性,以避免战争,尽量减少战争带来的伤亡,维护世界和平;各国要相互尊重,平等地开展国际合作,共同发展,实现世界的共同繁荣;南北国家要加强交流与合作,寻求最佳的结合点,共同致力于全球的可持续发展;最后,各国必须以伦理道德为依托来解决国际人权问题,必须承认人权的普遍性和多样性,确立一个同纷繁复杂的文化多样性相协调的普遍的最低道德标准。     

Leave No Poor Behind:

Globalization is being celebrated in many circles as a distinctive achievement of our age, drawing peoples and societies more closely together and creating far greater wealth than any previous generations ever knew. While the first of these assertions is correct in the sense that societies and cultures are colliding, hitherto relatively closed horizons are opening up, and spaces and time are compressing, the second deserves critical interrogations. Using Africa's experience with globalization as a case study, this article argues that globalization be understood as an emerging preference for certain institutional and policy practices that are creating and coercively imposing pervasive but avoidable conditions of material deprivations on many societies. The article defends a motivational rationale anchored in the normative vision of socio‐economic and development rights as a way to mitigate the deleterious effects of unguarded globalization.     

Moral Outrage: Territoriality in Human Guise

Moral outrage is a response to the behavior of others, never one's own. It is a response to infringements or transgressions on what people perceive to be the immunities they, or others with whom they identify, can expect on the basis of their rights and privileges and what they understand to be their reasonable expectations regarding the behavior of others. A person's culturally defined social identities and the rights and privileges that go with them in relationships to which those identities can be party make up the contents of that person's social persona and also constitute that person's social territory. Infringements of rights and privileges in the social and symbolic worlds in which humans live are the equivalent of encroachments on territory among animals, and moral outrage can be understood as the human expression of what we perceive as territorial behavior in animals. As emotion, outrage is affected by such clinical processes as displacement, rationalization, projection, and reaction formation. Outrage has an essential role in the maintenance of viable social groups, but it also exacerbates conflict among people who perceive one another as "others."     

Exploitation via labour power in Marx

Marx's account of capitalist exploitation is undermined by inter-related confusions surrounding the notion of labour power. These confusions relate to [i] what labour power is, [ii] what happens to labour power in the labour market, and [iii] what the epistemic status of labour power is (the issue of appearance and reality). The central theses of the paper are [a] that property ownership is the wrong model for understanding the exploitation of labour, and [b] that the concept of exploitation is linked more fruitfully to a conception of distributive injustice than to Marx's theory of surplus value.     

Experimentation on humans and nonhumans

In this article, I argue that it is wrong to conduct any experiment on a nonhuman which we would regard as immoral were it to be conducted on a human, because such experimentation violates the basic moral rights of sentient beings. After distinguishing the rights approach from the utilitarian approach, I delineate basic concepts. I then raise the classic “argument from marginal cases” against those who support experimentation on nonhumans but not on humans. After next replying to six important objections against that argument, I contend that moral agents are logically required to accord basic moral rights to every sentient being. I conclude by providing criteria for distinguishing ethical from unethical experimentation.     

Real World Justice

Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to lifelong severe poverty with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. We citizens of the rich countries are conditioned to think of this problem as an occasion for assistance. Thanks in part to the rationalizations dispensed by our economists, most of us do not realize how deeply we are implicated, through the new global economic order our states have imposed, in this ongoing catastrophe. My sketch of how we are so implicated follows the argument of my book, World Poverty and Human Rights, but takes the form of a response to the books critics.     

The Cosmopolitan Imperative: Global Justice Through Accountable Integration

Cosmopolitan political theorists hold that our obligations to distribute resources to others do not halt at state borders, but most do not advocate a restructuring of the global system to achieve their distributive aims. This article argues that promoting democratically accountable economic and political integration between states would be the most effective way to enable cosmopolitan, or routine, tax-financed, trans-state distributions. Movement toward a more integrated global system should encourage the view that larger sets of persons have interests in common that should be protected and promoted in common. Democratically accountable integration also should enable those within less-affluent states to more vigorously press trans-state distributive claims. The still-evolving E.U. is examined as a partial model for the integrated alternative in other geographic regions, as well as, in the much longer term, for some form of democratic global government capable of ensuring that any person born anywhere would have access to adequate resources and life opportunities.A version of this paper was presented at the global justice mini-conference at the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) annual meeting, Pasadena, California, 26–29 March 2004. Some of the arguments in this article were introduced in Luis Cabrera, Political Theory of Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State (London: Routledge, 2004), Chapter 4. They have been revised and further developed for this article. I would like to thank for their generous comments Jamie Mayerfeld, James A. Caporaso and Mika LaVaque-Manty.