The Ethics of Treaties: A Humean Account

<p>This thesis concerns the reasons that states have to comply with their treaty commitments. It aims to answer two questions. Firstly, what reason does signing a treaty give to a state to act in accordance with the treaty? Secondly, assuming that there is such a reason, how does entering into a treaty generate that reason? One answer to these questions is to say that treaties are kinds of promises between states. To enter into a treaty is to make a promise and promises should be kept. But promises are a puzzling way of generating reasons for action. It is not clear how it is possible to create a reason to do something merely by communicating an intention to create a reason. So, to say that treaties are promises seems merely to transpose this puzzle from the relations between individual persons to international affairs and the relations between states. In this thesis I endorse a view of treaty making that understands treaties as promises as the philosopher David Hume understands them. I argue that this provides a plausible account of treaty making. I suggest that the resulting view, which I label ‘Treaty as Humean Promise,’ provides plausible and appealing answers to the two questions mentioned above. Treaty as Humean Promise claims that states entering treaties create self-interested reasons to comply with those treaties. They do this by invoking an independent social convention of treaty making one of the rules of which is that treaties must be kept. Continued access to this social convention is important to states. They jeopardise this continued access by violating their treaties and giving their treaty partners, and potential treaty partners, reason to withdraw future trust in them. I set this out in chapters 1 and 2. In chapter 3 I claim that Treaty as Humean Promise can make sense of the intuition that there are moral reasons to comply with treaties. In chapter 4 I look at what Treaty as Humean Promise has to say about different types of treaty. In chapters 5 and 6 I discuss Hume’s own views on treaty making. I offer a charitable reading of some puzzling remarks by Hume from a section of A Treatise of Human Nature called ‘Of the laws of nations’. In doing so, I defend Hume against a number of his critics. In the final two chapters I discuss a ‘political realist’ account of treaties. I distinguish between ‘act’ and ‘rule’ variants of political realism. Political realists, I suggest, should be rule realists at least about treaties. This means that they should endorse and follow the rule that treaties should be kept all else being equal.</p>

The Ethics of Treaties: A Humean Account

<p>This thesis concerns the reasons that states have to comply with their treaty commitments. It aims to answer two questions. Firstly, what reason does signing a treaty give to a state to act in accordance with the treaty? Secondly, assuming that there is such a reason, how does entering into a treaty generate that reason? One answer to these questions is to say that treaties are kinds of promises between states. To enter into a treaty is to make a promise and promises should be kept. But promises are a puzzling way of generating reasons for action. It is not clear how it is possible to create a reason to do something merely by communicating an intention to create a reason. So, to say that treaties are promises seems merely to transpose this puzzle from the relations between individual persons to international affairs and the relations between states. In this thesis I endorse a view of treaty making that understands treaties as promises as the philosopher David Hume understands them. I argue that this provides a plausible account of treaty making. I suggest that the resulting view, which I label ‘Treaty as Humean Promise,’ provides plausible and appealing answers to the two questions mentioned above. Treaty as Humean Promise claims that states entering treaties create self-interested reasons to comply with those treaties. They do this by invoking an independent social convention of treaty making one of the rules of which is that treaties must be kept. Continued access to this social convention is important to states. They jeopardise this continued access by violating their treaties and giving their treaty partners, and potential treaty partners, reason to withdraw future trust in them. I set this out in chapters 1 and 2. In chapter 3 I claim that Treaty as Humean Promise can make sense of the intuition that there are moral reasons to comply with treaties. In chapter 4 I look at what Treaty as Humean Promise has to say about different types of treaty. In chapters 5 and 6 I discuss Hume’s own views on treaty making. I offer a charitable reading of some puzzling remarks by Hume from a section of A Treatise of Human Nature called ‘Of the laws of nations’. In doing so, I defend Hume against a number of his critics. In the final two chapters I discuss a ‘political realist’ account of treaties. I distinguish between ‘act’ and ‘rule’ variants of political realism. Political realists, I suggest, should be rule realists at least about treaties. This means that they should endorse and follow the rule that treaties should be kept all else being equal.</p>

Genealogy, Ideology, and Critical Theory

This chapter examines the Genealogical-Ideological Method for interrogating the category of religion and unmasking its complicity with capitalist market interests, racial and gender inequities, colonializing practices, and power. With these ideas in hand, the chapter examines representative works by Russell McCutcheon, Timothy Fitzgerald, and Saba Mahmood. In their works, it is argued, the problem of failing to provide justificatory arguments looms large. McCutcheon and Fitzgerald fail to see how the problems they espy in the study of religion apply to their way of thinking. Mahmood conceives of human agency as an outcome of repetitive bodily practices rather than as relying on reasons for action, thus denying her ways to understand human motivation in Islamic pietism and concealing the justificatory dimensions of the practices she describes in Politics of Piety. The chapter shows how problems in these approaches are symptomatic of difficulties surrounding the justificatory status of the study of religion.

The Range of Reasons

This book contributes to two debates and it does so by bringing them together. The first is a debate in metaethics concerning normative reasons, the considerations that serve to justify a person’s actions and attitudes. The second is a debate in epistemology concerning the norms for belief, the standards that govern a person’s beliefs and by reference to which they are assessed. The book starts by developing and defending a new theory of reasons for action, that is, of practical reasons. The theory belongs to a family that analyses reasons by appeal to the normative notion of rightness (fittingness, correctness); it is distinctive in making central appeal to modal notions, specifically, that of a nearby possible world. The result is a comprehensive framework that captures what is common to and distinctive of reasons of various kinds: justifying and demanding; for and against, possessed and unpossessed; objective and subjective. The framework is then generalized to reasons for belief, that is, to epistemic reasons, and combined with a substantive, first-order commitment, namely, that truth is the sole right-maker for belief. The upshot is an account of the various norms governing belief, including knowledge and rationality, and the relations among them. According to it, the standards to which belief is subject are various, but they are unified by an underlying principle.

The State of Nature

The chapter assumes that the state of nature is the state of the world prior to the existence of social rules, and then goes on to argue for the following claims. (1) We have reasons for action in the state of nature. (2) In those state of nature worlds in which we all know what reasons for action we have and are motivated to act on them—for short, those worlds in which we are ideal—these reasons for action would support our exiting the state of nature, that is, our creating and maintaining certain social rules. (3) The social rules we have reasons to create would include social rules telling us what to do in both worlds in which we are ideal and nearby worlds in which we are non-ideal. (4) These need not be rules that we have any reason to abide by in the actual world in which we are non-ideal. (5) Thinking about the role of social rules in fixing what we have reason to do in those states of nature in which we are ideal and non-ideal suggests a complicated and novel story about what we have knowledge of, insofar as we have knowledge of what we have reason to do in the actual world in which social rules exist willy-nilly.

The Moral Status of Conscious Subjects

Any account of moral status faces three difficulties simultaneously. The first is the grounding difficulty—how to account for the grounds of moral status. The second is the mapping difficulty—how to map the grounds to the moral reasons for action associated with the possession of (some level of) moral status. The third is the cases difficulty—how to navigate the grounds and mapping difficulties without running afoul of strong intuitions about a wide range of problem cases. One cannot navigate these difficulties perfectly. But this chapter argues that a coherent and relatively compelling view can be had by grounding moral status in aspects of a subject’s conscious mental life, by mapping the grounds to moral reasons in terms of respect for conscious subjects, and by taking the problem cases one by one.

Discourses in Subjective Experience on Rehabilitation

In Finland, youth workshops support participants’ everyday management, social empowerment and employability skills, facilitating their access to education and work. In this study, we analysed conversations with ten participants about their experiences in non-formal learning workshops in Northern Finland. We explore how participants described personal transformation borne by workshop participation and how the prevalent discourses on youth (un)employment manifest in participants’ reasons for action. In the analysis, we identified (1) how participants assessed their situations; (2) their thoughts, feelings and actions in relation to their situations; and (3) their grounds for these thoughts, feelings and actions. The societal dimension of subjective experience is articulated by identifying the prevalent societal discourses featured in participants’ descriptions. The analysis showed that participants described themselves as vulnerable prior to the intervention and motivated after the intervention. Participants experienced tailored support as being significant in fostering the change. Individual descriptions of how the learning and training conditions were experienced constitute valuable knowledge about the possible ways of acting and experiencing in relation to common structures. With the help of these descriptions, it would be valuable for researchers and participants to continue the conversation about the discourses to enhance the participants’ conscious participation in maintaining and changing their living conditions.

Principles and Persons

This book is a collection of essays, most of which appear here for the first time, that were written in honour of the legendary moral philosopher, Derek Parfit. The essays are mainly concerned with issues that Parfit addressed in his book, Reasons and Persons. They include the relevance of personal identity to ethics, the rationality of different attitudes to time, the nature of well-being, the varieties of consequentialism, reasons for action, aggregation in ethics, causal overdetermination, egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and supererogation.