This paper examines the relationship between justice and colonialism. It defines colonialism; examines the kind of injustice that colonialism involved; and the possibility of corrective justice.

In our commonplace understanding of property, the “right to exclude” is seen as its central and defining feature: to own is to exclude. This paper examines the cost, to conceptual and normative clarity, of this understanding. First, I argue that the right not to be excluded is a crucial if overlooked element not simply of liberal understandings of ownership, but even of the right to exclude itself. Second, I argue that our neglect of the right not to be excluded severely (...) undermines the clarity and precision with which matters of ownership are debated within both contemporary politics and political philosophy. (shrink)

The article takes up and challenges the Lockean conception of common sense and common right to property in two ways: first, through a critical investigation of Locke's historical connection to colonialism, and second, by turning to contemporary indigenous conceptions of common sense. Locke's practical experiences in the founding of Carolina, I argue, serve not simply to explain the problematical colonial impulses of the Second Treatise, but indeed to help undo the credibility of that text's ideological claim to acquire and assimilate. (...) Next, I turn from an internal historicized critique of the Second Treatise to a contemporary external challenge, examining current indigenous perspectives de-legitimized by the Second Treatise. I contend that traditionalized conceptions of indigenous knowledge and understanding provide a strategic revitalization of common sense in ways that re-define and re-characterize the word's roots not only in the common but also in the senses themselves. The article concludes by questioning whether these revitalized 'traditionalisms' — as much as they challenge exclusionary Lockean conceptions of the 'common' and common sense — also carry the risk of denying aspects of indigenous modernity and excluding alternative indigenous conceptions of land and resource use. (shrink)

The article takes up and challenges the Lockean conception of common sense and common right to property in two ways: first, through a critical investigation of Locke's historical connection to colonialism, and second, by turning to contemporary indigenous conceptions of common sense. Locke's practical experiences in the founding of Carolina, I argue, serve not simply to explain the problematical colonial impulses of the Second Treatise, but indeed to help undo the credibility of that text's ideological claim to acquire and assimilate. (...) Next, I turn from an internal historicized critique of the Second Treatise to a contemporary external challenge, examining current indigenous perspectives de-legitimized by the Second Treatise. I contend that traditionalized conceptions of indigenous knowledge and understanding provide a strategic revitalization of common sense in ways that re-define and re-characterize the word's roots not only in the common but also in the senses themselves. The article concludes by questioning whether these revitalized ‘traditionalisms’ — as much as they challenge exclusionary Lockean conceptions of the ‘common’ and common sense — also carry the risk of denying aspects of indigenous modernity and excluding alternative indigenous conceptions of land and resource use. (shrink)

This article offers an account and defence of constructionism, both as a metaphilosophical approach and as a philosophical methodology, with references to the so-called maker's knowledge tradition. Its main thesis is that Plato's “user's knowledge” tradition should be complemented, if not replaced, by a constructionist approach to philosophical problems in general and to knowledge in particular. Epistemic agents know something when they are able to build (reproduce, simulate, model, construct, etc.) that something and plug the obtained information into the correct (...) network of relations that account for it. Their epistemic expertise increases with the scope and depth of the questions that they are able to ask and answer. Thus, constructionism deprioritises mimetic, passive, and declarative knowledge that something is the case, in favour of poietic, interactive, and practical knowledge of something being the case. Metaphilosophically, constructionism suggests adding conceptual engineering to conceptual analysis as a fundamental method. (shrink)