Christopher D I Bertram

Teaching against the grain: multi‐disciplinary teamwork effectively delivers a successful undergraduate unit in sustainable development

A team‐taught interdisciplinary undergraduate unit in Sustainable Development has been developed and run over the past two years at the University of Bristol. This has been a unique initiative for this university to take. As in most other research‐intensive higher education institutions, teaching generally follows rather traditional disciplinary conventions, operating within departmental bounds. The initiative was unusual – and indeed ambitious – enough to gain the Higher Education Environmental Performance Improvement (HEEPI) Green Gown Award in teaching for 2007 (HEEPI is a project supported by the Higher Education Founding Council for England; http://www.heepi.org.uk/green_gown_awards.htm). There are both challenges and pleasures in designing and delivering a team‐taught unit in a traditional university setting. This experience is outlined and evaluated here, giving consideration to both the practical and the more fundamentally philosophical issues encountered in the process.

Rousseau's Legacy in Two Conceptions of the General Will: Democratic and Transcendent

This paper explores the contrast between two conceptions of the general will to be found in Rousseaus work, especially in the Social Contract . The first of these identifies the general will with the decisions of the sovereign people as they legislate together; the second conceives of the general will as a transcendent fact about the society which may or may not be reflected in actual legislative decisions. Though these conceptions may be capable of reconciliation in Rousseaus own work, the tension remains and is reflected both in Rousseaus own ambivalence towards democracy and in the different ways his thought has been received and adapted in philosophy and politics.

PROPERTY IN THE MORAL LIFE OF HUMAN BEINGS

Liberal egalitarian political philosophers have often argued that private property is a legal convention dependent on the state and that complaints about taxation from entitlement theorists are therefore based on a conceptual mistake. But our capacity to grasp and use property concepts seems too embedded in human nature for this to be correct. This essay argues that many standard arguments that property is constitutively a legal convention fail, but that the opposition between conventionalists and natural rights theorists is outmoded. In doing this, the essay draws on recent literature in evolutionary biology and psychology. Even though modern property in a complex society involves legal conventions, those conventions should be sensitive to our natural dispositions concerning ownership.

Competing methods of territorial control, migration and justice

Many accounts of justice and migration focus on the spatial exclusion of migrants. This article argues that two modes of exclusion, one spatial and the other social, are of normative interest. It explores the merits and demerits of territorial and social boundary exclusion from the point of view of justice. Territorial exclusion offends against freedoms of movement and association; social boundary exclusion undermines status equality among those subject to the same laws. Explicit awareness that modern states use both modes of exclusion is a prerequisite for clear thinking about migration justice.

Realism, Moralism, Models and Institutions

This article distinguishes between three methodologies for thinking about justice: principle-based, model-based and ‘realist’, concentrating mainly on the differences between the first two. Both model-based and realist approaches pride themselves on taking institutions seriously and argue that institutions make a fundamental difference to justice. This claim is at best not proven, and it may be possible to account for the difference that institutions make to what justice requires while retaining a non-institutional account of what justice is.

On Albert Weale's ‘Full Fruits’ Principle

In Democratic Justice and the Social Contract Albert Weale endorses the principle that producers should receive the full fruits of their labour (net of some deductions). This article argues that the fact that producers in some pre-capitalist societies would endorse the principle gives us little reason to do so and that operationalising such a principle for a complex modern society is impractical and undesirable.