This article provides an overview of the contributions to this special issue. It organizes the contributions through three conceptual lenses: the person, the state, and the church.

Bain's short but insightful monograph contrasts the idea of trusteeship with liberty, both of individuals and of communities. This sets his work apart, for most other analyses of trusteeship consider it in terms of civilization and barbarism.

A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of literary criticism. Critical Inquiry’s contribution to this shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues, ”Writing and Sexual Difference,” and “‘Race,’ Writing and Difference.” In the 1990s, however, “race,” “class,” and “gender” threaten to become the regnant clichés of our critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of (...) identity by exploring the formation of identities and the problem of subjectivity.Scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to address what we might call the politics of identity. Their work expands on the evolving, anti-essentialist critiques of ethnic, sexual, national, and racial identities, particularly the work of those post-structuralist theorists who have articulated concepts of difference. The calls for a “post-essentialist” reconception of notions of identity have become increasingly common. The powerful resurgence of nationalisms in Eastern Europe provides just one example of the catalysts for such theorizing.Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Assertion and Conditionals, Truth in Semantics, and Necessary Questions, has also published a novel, Avenging Angel, and a collection of essays, In My Father’s House. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black, The Signifying Monkey, and Loose Canons. His latest contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Critical Fanonism”. (shrink)

Should states be held responsible and punished for violations of international law? This article argues that they can and should be.

Lang writes: "Read together, [these books] make a fairly convincing case that the UN was indeed responsible for failing to stop the genocide in Rwanda.".

Some passages throughout Spinoza’s body of works suggest that an attribute in its absolute nature provides a sufficient condition for all of its modes, including the finite ones. Other passages suggest that an attribute in its absolute nature fails to provide a sufficient condition for its finite modes. My aim is to dispel this apparent tension. I argue that all finite modes are ultimately entailed by the absolute nature of their attribute. Furthermore, I explain how the Spinozistic positions that appear (...) incompatible with this view are in fact compatible. As I see it, we should read those passages where Spinoza says that no finite mode ultimately follows from the absolute nature of its attribute as saying merely that no finite mode ultimately follows in one-by-one fashion, independent of an infinite series of other modes, from the absolute nature of its attribute. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's approach to politics focuses on action and conduct, rather than institutions, constitutions, and states. In light of Arendtian conceptions of politics, essays in this book challenge conventional IR theories. The contributions on agency explore concepts and categories of political action that enable individuals to act politically and to re-make the world in new, unpredictable ways. The contributions on structure explore how Arendt provides new critical purchase upon often reified structures and categories.

Against its prominent compatiblist and libertarian opponents, I defend Galen Strawson's Basic Argument for the impossibility of moral responsibility. Against John Martin Fischer, I argue that the Basic Argument does not rely on the premise that an agent can be responsible for an action only if he is responsible for every factor contributing to that action. Against Alfred Mele and Randolph Clarke, I argue that it is absurd to believe that an agent can be responsible for an action when no (...) factor contributing to that action is up to that agent. Against Derk Pereboom and Clarke, I argue that the versions of agent-causal libertarianism they claim can immunize the agent to the Basic Argument actually fail to do so. Against Robert Kane, I argue that the Basic Argument does not rely on the premise that simply the presence of indeterministic factors in the process of bringing an action about is itself what rules out the agent's chance for being responsible for that action. (shrink)

Under what conditions does the existence of risk and uncertainty about possible threats license the use of military force? What consultative procedures should be required in order to legitimate the preventive or preemptive use of force?

Debates about trying and punishing terrorists reveal how the failure to construct a shared normative consensus in international criminal justice continues to bedevil the international community. The only way to achieve this consensus is to engage in the messy business of politics.

Medical populism, as a political style of handling the challenges of a public health crisis, has primarily been analyzed in terms of its influence on the efficacy of governmental efforts to meet the challenges of the current pandemic (such as those related to testing, vaccination, and community restrictions). As these efforts have moral consequences (they, for instance, will affect people’s wellbeing and may lead to suffering, loss of opportunities, and unfair distributions), an analysis of the ethics of medical populism is (...) much needed. In this essay, we address the need to analyze the moral dimension of medical populism by relating it to issues in healthcare ethics. Specifically, we identify the moral significance of medical populism by demonstrating how it contributes to the failure of governments to discharge their moral duty to provide for the healthcare needs of their people, and, correlatively, to the violation of the people’s moral right to healthcare. We argue that with medical populism, governments tend to mishandle the constraints that would morally justify their shortcomings in fulfilling such duty. We identify such constraints as mainly referring to the governments’ given (economic and institutional) capacities and the relative degree of incumbency of their competing duties. (shrink)

Fichte’s The Way towards the Blessed Life is a genuinely mystical work that contains several themes characteristic of mystical writing: the opposition of a non-spatio-temporal, non-manifold being to the world as it appears; the ineffability of the Divine; the centrality of union with God and of detachment; and the individual as a conduit for Divine life and love. It must, however, be granted that Fichte conjoins his affirmations of union with denials that the ontological identity of human beings and God (...) is a matter of experience. This is nevertheless an insufficient reason for denying that Fichte’s text is correctly characterized as mystical, for experience of God’s presence is a more adequate criterion of the mystical than the experience of ontological identity or even of union with God, and the experiences that The Way towards the Blessed Life does acknowledge are properly interpreted in terms of Divine presence. (shrink)

Theories of global justice range from the utilitarian philosophy of Peter Singer to the institutional design arguments of Thomas Pogge. These works have grappled with a wide range of issues, but almost all of them have been driven by the recognition of two core problems: the huge numbers of people mired in poverty and the increasing levels of inequality. Much of this literature begins with these two problems and then proposes schemes to resolve them. This problem-solving approach to the issue (...) of global poverty and inequality has tended to avoid engagements with figures in the history of political thought. One thinker who has certainly inspired much of this literature, either explicitly or implicitly, is Immanuel Kant. With his rigorous method, systemic structure of metaphysics and morality, and celebration of Enlightenment reason over staid authority structures, Kant presents a model for how to undertake rational arguments in response to moral dilemmas. (shrink)

Regulating war has long been a concern of the international community. From the Hague Conventions to the Geneva Conventions and the multiple treaties and related institutions that have emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, efforts to mitigate the horrors of war have focused on regulating weapons, defining combatants, and ensuring access to the battlefield for humanitarians. But regulation and legal codes alone cannot be the end point of an engaged ethical response to new weapons developments. This short essay reviews (...) some of the existing ethical works on lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), highlighting how rule- and consequence-based accounts fail to provide adequate guidance for how to deal with them. I propose a virtue-based account, which I link up with an Aristotelian framework, for how the international community might better address these weapons systems. (shrink)

This edited volume focuses on what Hannah Arendt famously called “the raison d’être of politics”: freedom. The unique collection of essays clarifies her flagship idea of political freedom in relation to other key Arendtian themes such as liberation, revolution, civil disobedience, and the right to have rights. -/- In addressing these, contributors to this volume juxtapose Arendt with a number of thinkers from Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls and Philip Pettit to Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon and Geoffroy de Lagasnerie. They also (...) consider the continuing relevance of Arendt’s work to some of the most dramatic events in recent years, including the current global refugee crisis, the Arab uprisings of the 2010s, and the ongoing crisis of liberal democracy in the West and beyond. -/- Contributors include Keith Breen, Joan Cocks, Tal Correm, Christian J. Emden, Patrick Hayden, Kei Hiruta, Anthony F. Lang Jr., Shmuel Lederman, Miriam Leonard, Natasha Saunders, William Smith, and Shiyu Zhang. (shrink)

This essay explores the possibility of universal values. Universal values do not exist as Platonic ideals nor do they exist in clearly defined lists of rules or laws. Rather, universal ethical claims are constructed through the actions of individual political leaders, scholars, and activists. This essay explores how such normative constructions take place. It uses an initiative undertaken by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime to further education around corruption as an example of how such universal values come into (...) existence. The initiative focused on developing teaching materials for higher education. The essay focuses on two particular modules, both their content and the process by which they were written. (shrink)

A brief introduction to the roundtable on William Bain, Political Theology of International Order.

This book assesses the impact of the work of Chris Brown in the field of International Political Theory. The volume engages with general issues of IPT as well as basic issues such as the use and role of practical reasoning and presents a nuanced understanding about issues regarding the legitimacy of war and violence. It explores questions that pertain to human rights, morality, and ethics, and generally an outlook for devising a ‘better’ world. The project is ideal for audiences with (...) interest in International Relations, Ethics and Morality Studies and International Political Theory. (shrink)

This book discusses topics normally excluded from the current educational conversation such as soul, authority, irony, memory, style, luck, privacy, power, and hospitality.