Introductory Remarks by Steven Ratner

2020 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 277-288
Author(s):  
Steven Ratner ◽  
James Stewart ◽  
Jiewuh Song ◽  
Carmen Pavel ◽  
David Luban
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
International Law ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
World Order ◽  
Just World ◽  
Legal Rules ◽  
Moral Content ◽  
Theories Of Justice ◽  
Interpretive Methods

International law (IL) and political philosophy represent two rich disciplines for exploring issues of global justice. At their core, each seeks to build a better world based on some universally agreed norms, rules, and practices, backed by effective institutions. International lawyers, even the most positivist of them, have some underlying assumptions about a just world order that predisposes their interpretive methods; legal scholars have incorporated concepts of justice in their work even as their overall pragmatic orientation has limited the nature of their inquiries. Many philosophers, for their part, have engaged with IL to some extent—at a minimum recognizing that legal rules may need to be the vehicles for their own theories of justice, or going a step further to appraise them for their underlying moral content.

scholarly journals Ethics and international law: integrating the global justice project(s)

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Ratner
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
World Order ◽  
The Other ◽  
Just World ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cost

Academic discourse on global justice is at an all-time high. Within ethics and international law, scholars are undertaking new inquiries into age-old questions of building a just world order. Ethics – within political and moral philosophy – poses fundamental questions about responsibilities at the global level and produces a tightly reasoned set of frameworks regarding world order. International law, with its focus on legal norms and institutional arrangements, provides a path, as well as illuminates the obstacles, to implementing theories of the right or of the good. Yet despite the complementarity of these two projects, neither is drawing what it should from the other. The result is ethical scholarship that often avoids, or even misinterprets, the law; and law that marginalizes ethics even as it recognizes the importance of justice. The cost of this avoidance is a set of missed opportunities for both fields. This article seeks to help transform the limited dialogue between philosophers and international lawyers into a meaningful collaboration. Through a critical stocktaking of the contributions of the two disciplines, examining where they do and do not engage with the other, it offers an appraisal of the causes and costs of separation and an argument for an interdisciplinary approach.

Global Justice in Lutheran Political Theology

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-58
Author(s):  
Carl-Henric Grenholm
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Equal Distribution ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Sharp Distinction ◽  
Main Thesis ◽  
Theories Of Justice ◽  
Influential Theory

The purpose of this article is to examine the contributions that might be given by Lutheran political theology to the discourse on global justice. The article offers a critical examination of three different theories of global justice within political philosophy. Contractarian theories are criticized, and a thesis is that it is plausible to argue that justice can be understood as liberation from oppression. From this perspective the article gives an analysis of an influential theory of justice within Lutheran ethics. According to this theory justice is not an equal distribution but an arrangement where the subordinate respect the authority of those in power. This theory is related to a sharp distinction between law and gospel. The main thesis of the article is that Lutheran political theology should take a different approach if it aims to give a constructive contribution to theories of justice. This means that Lutheran ethics should not be based on Creation and reason alone – it should also be based on Christology and Eschatology.

scholarly journals Cosmopolitism, Global Justice, and International Law

2005 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 679-684
Author(s):  
ROLAND PIERIK ◽  
WOUTER WERNER
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
International Law ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Moral Foundations ◽  
Global Poverty ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Global Inequality ◽  
Sovereign Equality ◽  
Central Elements

Along with the exploding attention to globalization, issues of global justice have become central elements in political philosophy. After decades in which debates were dominated by a state-centric paradigm, current debates in political philosophy also address issues of global inequality, global poverty, and the moral foundations of international law. As recent events have demonstrated, these issues also play an important role in the practice of international law. In fields such as peace and security, economic integration, environmental law, and human rights, international lawyers are constantly confronted with questions of global justice and international legitimacy. This special issue contains four papers which address an important element of this emerging debate on cosmopolitan global justice, with much relevance for international law: the principle of sovereign equality, global economic inequality, and environmental law.

Global Law

2018 ◽  
pp. 750-768
Author(s):  
Richard Falk
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
World Order ◽  
Just World ◽  
Global Inequality ◽  
Global Policy ◽  
Sustainable Solutions ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
Robust System ◽  
Global Law

An emphasis on “global law” is responsive to the emergence of problems of global scope. The entrenched statist character of Westphalian world order obstructs the development of a robust system of global law. Obstruction also arises from geopolitical factors. Geopolitical discretion thus fills the vacuum created by the inability of international law to respond to the agenda of global problems, and it does so in ways that contribute to widening gaps of global inequality and to the refusal to allow the growth of global law to provide more equitable and sustainable solutions to the material and human rights concerns of the peoples of the world. The future of a peaceful and just world depends on overcoming obstacles to the growth of global law dedicated to upholding global and human interests, which will only happen if international civil society becomes mobilized around the global policy and equity agenda.

scholarly journals Kant's Cosmopolitan Law: World Citizenship for a Global Order

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 72-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pauline Kleingeld
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
World Order ◽  
Public Law ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Just World ◽  
World Citizenship ◽  
The Status ◽  
Cosmopolitan Law ◽  
The Right

In debates over the conditions for a just world order, one hears frequent appeals to Kant's call for states to unite in a federation. Given the force of Kant's arguments and their influence on the shape of such institutions as the League of Nations and the United Nations, this is certainly justified. But an essential part of what Kant saw as necessary for a global legal order is usually neglected. What is overlooked is Kant's emphasis on the status of individuals under what he calls ‘cosmopolitan law’. Cosmopolitan law is concerned not with the interaction between states, but with the status of individuals in their dealings with states of which they are not citizens. Moreover, it is concerned with the status of individuals as human beings, rather than as citizens of states. In Kant's political theory, cosmopolitan law (Weltbürgerrecht) is the third category of public law, in addition to constitutional law and international law. Its core is what Kant calls a right to hospitality. He argues that states and individuals have the right to attempt to establish relations with other states and their citizens, but not a right to enter foreign territory. States have the right to refuse visitors, but not violently, and not if it leads to their destruction. This implies an obligation to refrain from imperialist intrusions and to provide safe haven for refugees.

Europe and the New World Order: Lessons from Alexandre Kojève's Engagement with Schmitt's ‘Nomos der Erde’

2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT HOWSE
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Alexandre Kojeve ◽  
Total War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Times

The received wisdom of the times is that a wide gulf has opened up between ‘Europe’ and ‘America’ – or at least has finally become visible. A commitment to a certain vision of international law is presented as a European trait that divides Europe from the United States. ‘European’ international law premises perpetual peace on rules that protect state sovereignty and sustain a world divided into territorial states, and it is at odds with the US preparedness to wage ‘total war’ in the name of some purportedly universal ideal, such as ‘human rights’ or ‘democracy’. This conception of ‘European’, territorially based international law versus US (or Anglo-Saxon) universalism is articulated most forcefully by the extreme-right legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt in his 1950 work, Der Nomos der Erde, and related essays; Schmitt, realizing that the state had met its demise with the fall of the Nazi project that he supported, now conceived of a world divided into Grossraume rather than states. Schmitt's conception was challenged by the Marxist-Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève, both in correspondence with Schmitt and in a public lecture that Kojève gave in Düsseldorf at Schmitt's invitation in the 1950s. Kojève articulated an alternative view of global order and Europe's place in it – a view that accepted global Anglo-American military supremacy while advocating a distinctive place for Latin or continental Europe in the building of global justice and prosperity through economic and legal integration and the construction of a just relationship in trade and finance with the developing world. This essay evaluates the debate between Schmitt and Kojève and draws lessons for contemporary discussion of the place of Europe in a one-superpower world.

International Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 361-392
Author(s):  
Steven R. Ratner
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Level ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Legal Rules ◽  
Moral Arguments ◽  
Key Participants

International law is central to both the discourse and practice of global justice. It offers a critical institutional site for transforming theories about global justice into binding rules with institutional enforcement; many of its rules have strong claims to morality; and it can offer insights into the nature of just arrangements at the international level. This chapter first introduces the key participants and fundamental norms of international law that respond to the various claims of those participants. Second, it elaborates on the range of engagement by international legal scholarship with questions of global justice. Legal scholars have incorporated concepts of justice in their work even as their overall pragmatic orientation has limited the nature of their inquiries. Third, the chapter synthesizes the different encounters of political and moral philosophical work on global justice with international law. While some philosophers have directly inquired into the morality of legal rules and others have relied on those rules as part of broader moral arguments, others exhibit skepticism about and distance from international law. Some of that distance stems from different missions of philosophy as compared to law, but some is based on an unjustified suspicion of legal rules. It concludes with some suggestions for future collaboration between philosophical and legal approaches to global justice.

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