Katrin Flikschuh

Elusive unity: the general will in Hobbes and Kant

According to one interpretation of Leviathan, Hobbes sinks the democratic argument in favour of government by representation into his own argument in favour of absolute rule. This paper argues that Kant in turn sinks Hobbes’ argument for coercive political authority into Rousseau’s construction of the volonte generale. Why does Kant reject Rousseau’s argument in favour of popular sovereignty; why does he revert to Hobbes’ endorsement of a coercively unifying political authority? The paper examines the different responses given by Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant to the problem of political unity and unified political decision-taking. While for Hobbes and Rousseau political unity must be empirically real – there must be an actual unifying authority – in Kant the idea of the general united will is a rational criterion of just lawmaking. For Kant, it is not the form of government that matters, but the manner of governing.

The Limits of Liberal Cosmopolitanism

The essay critically reviews two recent contributions to the debate on global justice made by Darrel Moellendorf and Thomas Pogge respectively. Given both authors’ acknowledgement of the substantial contributions which liberal economic practice currently makes to ever-increasing levels of global deprivation and injustice, can we continue to assume with confidence that liberal morality is capable of providing the solution? It is a central claim of the essay that both authors are able to sustain this optimistic assumption only because of their abstraction of liberal morality from its statist political and competitive economic settings. Were these settings to be taken into account, some liberal values might be shown to be less universalisable than they are routinely assumed to be. In that case, we should not argue, implausibly, for the extension of these values to the global context, but should focus on their critical revision in the context of mature liberal societies’ domestic politics.

Innate Right and Acquired Right in Arthur Ripstein's Force and Freedom

Since the publication of Arthur Ripstein’s book I have occasionally been asked whether, as a Kantian, I do not find it unduly libertarian. The first time I was asked this I assumed inattentive reading on the part of my interlocutor. The second time I worried that perhaps the inattentiveness was my own. The third time I was sufficiently concerned to re-read substantial portions of the book. Having re-read them, I still do not think Ripstein’s interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy libertarian (though this is not to judge the intrinsic merits of libertarianism one way or the other). There is, of course, the early emphasis on property rights as the ground of political obligation; there is also the reading throughout of external freedom in terms of ‘independence’ or ‘being one’s own master’. But the book equally emphasises entrance into the civil condition as a necessary condition of conclusive property rights; the two chapters on state functions—on so-called ‘police powers’ and redistributive policies respectively—go well beyond the idea of a minimal state usually associated with libertarianism; the concluding chapter essentially endorses, moreover, Kant’s position of a no-right to revolution even against despotic (though not against barbaric) regimes. Indeed, while the first five chapters seemingly champion individual freedom, the last six make a sustained case for a conception of public authority that views it (2010) 1(2) Jurisprudence 295–304

Metaphysics and the Boundaries of Justice

(2000). Metaphysics and the Boundaries of Justice. Global Society: Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 487-505.

Should African thinkers engage in the global justice debate

Abstract This article asks under what conditions and on what terms current African thinkers can and should engage in the global justice debate. Following summary overviews of the Western-led global justice debate and post-independence African philosophy as two essentially separate, non-intersecting philosophical discourses, I go on to argue that the current generation of African thinkers can fruitfully intervene in the global justice debate if it succeeds in building on philosophical insights of the first-generation of African thinkers. In particular, current African thinkers might fruitfully engage the notion of ‘false universals’ developed by first generation African thinkers to challenge Western philosophical conceptions in general in order to re-invigorate recently neglected critical inquiry into the status of many of this more particular debate’s unreflective universality claims. Re-invigorating these more distinctively philosophical aspects of the global justice debate is particularly important against the background of an international research climate that increasingly favours ‘impact-oriented’ approaches to philosophy and to the humanities more generally.

How Far Human Rights

This short introductory paper explains the broader research setting from which the idea for this symposium arose. I then summarise the arguments mounted by Simon Hope and Kofi Quashigah respectively. Taking a philosophical perspective, Hope asks whether insisting on the language of human rights when broaching issues of historical injustice may not risk misunderstanding the nature of the original wrong. Quashigah analyses the legal conundrums facing modern African states when in seeking to comply with international human rights requirements they risk further alienating members of traditional societies whose own sense of justice is often violated by fulfilment of those requirements. Both papers explore, from different disciplinary perspectives, the limits of morally defensible human rights reasoning. I briefly consider possible responses to each set of reflections from proponents of ‘orthodox’ and ‘political’ human rights reasoning respectively.