Jeff Noonan

Citizenship, Human Rights, and Social Justice

Despite continuous struggles on the part of disenfranchised and marginalized peoples throughout the world, and various initiatives undertaken by national states and international organizations, social justice remains an unattainable goal for many diverse groups and populations. By “social justice” we mean an equitable distribution of fundamental resources and respect for human dignity and diversity, such that no minority group’s life interests and struggles are undermined and that forms of political interaction enable all groups to voice their concerns for change. In light of this definition, we have been witnessing growing injustice in the past few decades, as access to resources is increasingly becoming more inequitable and new groups of people have become targets of racism and amplified vigilance due to their identity. These trends prompt us to interrogate the ways in which notions of citizenship and human rights (the two philosophical traditions rooted in principles of equality) have been employed by national and international agencies and organizations to either promote social justice or deny it. It is likewise important to explore how the use of certain concepts of citizenship brings about respect or disregard for human rights and, conversely, how human rights principles shape notions of citizenship. Human rights are distinct from citizenship rights. The notion of citizenship has three inter-related dimensions: political participation, rights and obligations, and membership in a political community (Cohen, 1999). The modern concept of citizenship links rights and political participation membership to a nation-state. The human rights tradition, institutionalized through the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, disassociates rights from membership in a bounded community by making rights universal (Teeple, 2005). Thus, the cross-border movements of peoples, such as labour migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, are subject to an international human rights regime (see Benhabib, 2004, p. 7). In this regard, human rights can be presented as conceptually distinct from citizenship, and some researchers (for example, Kiwan, 2005) believe they should not be conflated.

Human Needs: A Realist Perspective

Abstract This article argues for a realist conception of human needs. By ‘realist’ we mean that certain fundamental needs are categorically distinct from consumer wants, holding independently of peoples subjective beliefs as objective life requirements. These basic needs, we contend, are baseline measures of social justice in the sense that no society that does not prioritise their satisfaction can be legitimate. The paper concludes with a comprehensive response to seven core objections to our position.

Thought-time, money-time, and the temporal conditions of academic freedom

The paper argues that free academic work depends upon a unique structure of time which universities have historically preserved. This unique structure of time (“thought-time”) is essential to both the research and teaching vocations of academic work. Both are threatened by the growing trend away from public funding toward private funding of universities. Changes in funding models are leading to the imposition on academic work of the time-structure typical of capitalist industry (“money-time”). Money-time is fatal to free work activity, and especially free academic work activity. The social life-value of academic work is threatened in consequence of loss of thought-time.

Ecological Economics and the Life-Value of Labour

To the extent that classical, neoclassical, and Marxist political economy have traditionally ignored the problem of economic scale and valorized economic growth, all three have much to learn from ecological economics. Its most important contribution is the argument that the human economy is a subsystem of the finite earth’s natural life-support system. Implied in this argument is a new metric of economic health, the life-value rather than the money-value of that which economies produce and distribute.

Can There be Applied Philosophy Without Philosophy

The paper is a critique of the dominant model of applied philosophy. As currently structured, courses in applied philosophy are a response of philosophy departments to administrative demands to increase enrollment units. In order to achieve this goal, the properly philosophical approach to matters of concrete social concern is dropped in favour of decontextualized, ahistorical, and uncritical applications of philosophical theories to immediate practical problems. Using the example of applied ethics, I argue that the key problem besetting current trends in applied philosophy is that they all fail to uncover the contradiction between given social regimes of value and the universal concepts which must be employed to legitimate those regimes. While it is an essential duty of philosophy to be relevant to the practical issues of the day, it must be relevant on philosophical terms. That is, the real application of philosophy to social problems is not the unthinking mapping of a particular philosophical theory onto a problem, but bringing to light the hidden value assumptions definitive of different societies, and shaking to the foundation their claims to legitimacy. I spell out this alternative approach to applied philosophy through an example drawn from my own teaching practice.

Between egoism and altruism: Outlines for a materialist conception of the good

The essay argues that the most influential liberal accounts of moral theory (utilitarianism and deontology) assume that human material nature is the seat of desire, and that desire is essentially unsociable. Moral systems are then interpreted as a means of counteracting the essentially self-interested desires that are assumed to ordinarily drive human beings. The essay challenges the normative presuppositions of these arguments. It maintains that liberal moral philosophy must be interpreted in the historical context of the rise of a competitive market society. It then contends that contra liberal moral theory, human beings are neither essentially egoistic nor altruistic, but interdependent. Moral theory is better seen as following from a recognitions of this material interdependence than as an ideal limit on ‘naturally’ self-interested and competitive behaviour.

Thought-time, money-time and the conditions of free academic labour

My aim in this paper is to extend the general critique of academic capitalism to the changes in the nature of academic work time it is bringing about. I will argue that university teaching and research requires an open-ended structure of time free from externally imposed routines and deadlines. I call this structure of time ‘thought-time’ to emphasise its intrinsic connection to the way in which ideas develop in the mind and objectified in social life. Thought-time is incompatible with the structure of what I will call ‘money-time’. Money time is the structure of time required by capitalist markets. Its structure is determined by the generic goal of productivity – maximum output for minimum input of resources, labour, and time. Hence money-time structures human activity by forces without regard to the content and goal of the activity considered in itself – the precisely measured sequences, routines, and deadlines are calibrated to ensure the production of as much money-value profit as possible, and not the free development and elaboration of ideas in the open-ended processes characteristic of thought-time. This temporal restructuring of academic labour has especially pernicious effects in those areas of academic research, especially the humanities and social sciences, which are not amenable to the creation of commodifiable research. Hence, the progressive subordination of thought-time to money-time is a serious challenge to the future health of these disciplines.

The contradictions of Nussbaum's liberalism

The paper argues that there is a fundamental tension in the work of Martha Nussbaum between its implicit materialist foundations in what John McMurtry calls life-value, and her political liberalism. The genuinely universal values of life-requirement satisfaction and human capability development that form the core of Nussbaums ethics cannot be fully and coherently realized, I will argue, within the framework of liberal-capitalist society, whose surface problems she criticizes but whose depth social dynamics and normative justifications her work leaves intact. The problems particular to Nussbaums position are of general importance in so far as they expose the structural limitations of liberalism as a critical social theory.

Human Rights as Hinge Principles

ABSTRACT The standard interpretation of human rights models them on the constitutional rights of citizenship familiar from the history of liberalism. Human rights are, in this view, universalizations of nationally particular liberal rights of citizenship. This interpretation invites a Marxist critique. Like the rights of citizenship, human rights fail to address the deep causes on inequality, domination, and social violence: market forces that drive states into conflict over scarce resources and capitalists to intensify the exploitation of labour. I agree with this critique, but argue that it does not necessarily apply to human rights as such, but only to the standard interpretation. I conclude by excavating from major human rights documents a different interpretation. This counter-reading focuses on the life-value of human rights: their potential to expose the life-destructive forces that drive capitalism. Read in this way, human rights can serve as hinge principles that legitimate mass democratic struggle against capitalist oppression and violence. On their own human rights under any reading cannot solve the problems supporters think they can solve. But as hinge principles they can help legitimate the mass struggles that can solve those problems.

Paul Virilio and the temporal conditions of philosophical thinking

Unlike the memes of popular digital culture, philosophical understanding accumulates through the patience of reflection on the long-term implications of human action. The paper will draw upon the recent work of Paul Virilio to explain the threat that the speeds of digital culture pose to philosophy, both as an institutionalised discipline of human inquiry with a just claim to public support, and as an intellectual practice with a just claim to public relevance. If Virilio is correct, the trajectory of technological development is towards the displacement of human decision making from all spheres of social life (political, economic, military, cultural, and technical-scientific) because human thought is too slow. Hence, there are moves towards eliminating the deliberative function of human thought in favour of pre-programmed algorithms that can trade a stock or fire a missile in immediate response to a pre-determined set of objective circumstances. Philosophy cannot keep pace. Since it is committed to an open-ended dialectic of interpretation, reason giving, critique, and rejoinder, its time frames are incompatible with immediate response, and would, if allowed to operate in politics or economics, impede the ‘efficient’ execution of routines. However, the ‘efficient’ execution of the dominant political and economic routines is undermining the conditions of life on the planet. Hence, the defence of slow philosophical thinking is at the same time the affirmation of a different temporality of life, politics, economics, and cultural interaction. Philosophy is not a luxury that humanity can no longer afford, but the vital necessity of historically informed intelligence the solution of our most pressing environmental and social problems requires more than ever.