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LSE Political Theory Graduate Conference 2015 Venue: Graham Wallace Room, Old Building, 5th Floor (Friday, 20 March) Conference Program: Thursday, 19 March 13.30: Arrival and Welcome 14.00 Panel 1: Voting (Chair: Mollie Gerver) Udit Bhatia (Oxford), “Education as (Dis)Qualification: Democracy and the Illiterate” Matthew Baxendale (Budapest), “Citizenship and prisoner voting rights” 15.15 Break 15.30 Panel 2: Punishment (Chair: Fabio Wolkenstein) Gulzaar Barn (Oxford), “On the forced imposition of medical interventions on prisoners” Signy Gutnick Allen (Queen Mary, London), “‘Author of his Own Punishment’: The Hobbesian Citizenship of Punished Individuals” 17.00 Keynote David Armitage (Harvard), "Cosmopolitanism and Civil War" 18.30 Drinks and Dinner

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Friday, 20 March 09.30 Coffee 10.00 Panel 3: The People (Chair: Paola Romero) Attila Mráz (Budapest/NYU), “Does Vertical Political Equality Require Political Participation?” David Ragazzoni (UPenn), “Visions of the people. Schmitt and Kelsen on the democratic sovereign 11.15 Break 11.30 Panel 4: Exemption (Chair: Diana Popescu) Adam Kern (Oxford), “A simple theory of conscientious accommodation” Omri Ben-Zvi (Jerusalem), “The Unavailability of Religious Arguments” Paul Billingham (Oxford), “How Should Claims For Religious Exemptions Be Weighed?” 13.15 Lunch (Senior Dining Room) 14.30 Panel 5: Global (In-)Justice (Chair: Simon Beard) Siba Harb (Leuven), “Can global egalitarians defend egalitarian justice for the EU?” Pierre Cloarec (Sherbrooke/Paris), “Calamity and Injustice” Johannes Schulz (Frankfurt), “Global injustice and the enduring legacy of colonialism” 16.15 Break 16.30 Keynote Simon Caney (Oxford), “Justice in the Transition to a Better World: on the Relationship between Means and Ends” 18.00 Drinks

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Panel I Voting (Chair: Mollie Gerver)

Education as (Dis)Qualification: Democracy and the Illiterate (Udit Bhatia, Oxford)

In this paper, I critically examine the view that literacy is necessary for the exercise of democratic citizenship. I begin by examining John Stuart Mill’s endorsement of a literacy qualification for the franchise. In the first section, I demonstrate that, while Mill’s endorsement of plural voting for the educated is consistent with his dual commitment to participation and expertise, his endorsement of a literacy qualification poses a challenge to his thought on representative government. It urges us to question what drove Mill to deny participation to the illiterate. Before I turn to this task, I qualify the exclusionary thrust of Mill’s literacy qualification by suggesting that it, too, is inflected by his commitment to participation in certain important ways.

In the second section, I examine Mill’s justification for a literacy qualification, and argue that it rested on the necessity of literacy in developing one’s speculative faculties and being adequately informed.

He suggests, contrasting the British working class with its Scottish counterpart, that the former is more ‘brutal’, and less able to ‘think’ due to its lack of education. Firstly, it seems odd that Mill stipulates a much narrower ‘literacy’ requirement rather than a higher ‘educational’ qualification for the vote. One might respond that this was motivated by his skepticism towards the bureaucracy and view of literacy as more objectively verifiable. However, another problem emerges in the form of Mill’s skepticism of the current system of education to cultivate persons’ speculative faculties. If literacy is an imperfect marker of education, which, itself, is currently unable to fulfill its role of cultivating abilities necessary for citizenship, why would Mill still insist that persons be literate in order to vote? I suggest that the answer is found in his emphasis on the ability of reading, writing and arithmetic to cultivate habits, which are necessary for reasoning such as those of precision and understanding.

According to Mill’s second argument for the literacy qualification, citizens must be literate in order to read newspapers, through which they would be able to overcome information deficits posed by spatial difference, and thus, undertake coordinated political action. Once again, Mill’s argument suffers from an apparent inconsistency introduced by his pessimistic view of the ability of newspapers to enable citizens to fulfill the above role. As with the role of literacy in reasoning, I suggest that his argument can be made coherent by focusing on the emphasis he places in the development of a habit of being informed and coordinating political actions by reading newspapers.

In the third section, I examine critiques of Mill’s literacy qualification which suggest that it is incompatible with his support for the enfranchisement of women, and ignores the self-protective nature of the vote as well as the role of enfranchisement in political education. I respond to each of these criticisms, suggesting that they fail to adequately counter Mill’s position. A more thorough critique of his position must focus, I argue, on the incentives provided by the disenfranchisement of the illiterate for the literate class to resist the dissemination of education. Further, his position is also undermined by the role of popular support for democratization of education as an instrument of delivering greater literacy in many democratic societies.

In the final section, I briefly examine the implications of Mill’s defence of the literacy qualification for contemporary political theory. I point to the continuing vulnerability of illiterate citizens in the global South to exclusion from deliberation and political participation. I also suggest that his understanding of universal franchise as an ‘ideal’ which must be set aside on ‘practical’ grounds imposed by illiteracy has important lessons for the contemporary debate on ideal theory.

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Citizenship and prisoner voting rights (Matthew Baxendale, Budapest)

Advocates of prisoner enfranchisement have constructed arguments within frameworks of punishment. Such arguments attempt to resist the claim that disenfranchisement accords with the goals of punishment thus concluding that prisoner disenfranchisement lacks any theoretical justification. Whilst some policy changes in this area are being considered in the UK, full prisoner enfranchisement does not, for the time-being, appear to be on the policy agenda. In this paper I consider a novel approach to prisoner voting rights advanced by Peter Ramsay, a supporter of prisoner disenfranchisement. This approach concentrates on the connection between citizenship and voting rights. Ramsay argues that prisoners should not get the vote because they are not, in a specified sense, citizens of the state in which they are incarcerated. I welcome the introduction of this new framework within which to consider voting rights, however, against Ramsay, I argue that his account of citizenship fails to support his conclusion. Firstly because it does not afford the required move, from incarceration to loss of citizenship and secondly, because it fails to support the further more from loss of citizenship to loss of voting rights. I instead propose an account of differentiated citizenship which argues in favour of prisoner enfranchisement. I argue that taking differentiated citizenship seriously means that prisoners become a politically disadvantaged minority group within society and that their membership of such a group presses on us an obligation to afford them special political rights of representation. If, as I contend, the best way to ensure political representation for a minority group is to ensure the right to vote, then we have an obligation to ensure that prisoners are granted voting rights. I propose that differentiated citizenship not only avoids the difficulties faced by Ramsay’s account, but also opens up fruitful further questions about what it means to be a citizen of a state, as well as bringing the connection between citizenship and voting rights further into focus. Funding Application I wish to be considered for one of the five travel bursaries offered by the conference. I am currently a funded PhD student at CEU Budapest. Whilst my funding is adequate for living in Hungary, the large difference in currency value makes traveling to, and staying in, England for the purposes of conferences a particular stretch of financial resources. In addition, as a first year PhD candidate my institution’s travel policy makes me ineligible to apply for internal travel funding at the present time.

Panel II Punishment (Chair: Fabio Wolkenstein)

On the forced imposition of medical interventions on prisoners (Gulzaar Barn, Oxford)

Moral bioenhancement (MBE) has been heralded by certain theorists as a potential solution to anthropogenic climate change, nuclear warfare, and perhaps more modestly, as a way of preventing certain prisoners from re-offending, by way of altering their ‘moral motives.’ In this paper I focus on the latter use of MBE, wherein medical interventions would be used on criminals for the purpose of facilitating their rehabilitation. This view has most comprehensively been set out by Tom Douglas, who argues that current attempts to argue against the use of MBE on prisoners rest on a mistaken assumption about consent. In the paper, “Criminal Rehabilitation Through Medical Intervention,” Douglas seeks to cast doubt on the viability of The Consent Requirement, one particular route of attack used by opponents of medical interventions on prisoners. This requirement holds that, “medical correctives can only permissibly be provided with the valid consent of the offender who will undergo the intervention.” Such an assumption is implicitly operating in arguments made by those who oppose the use of MBE on prisoners on the grounds that it would be coercive, and so any consent obtained would be invalid. This is because prisoners are said to lack a fundamental sense of liberty and ‘ability to choose’, and so any such decision to undertake MBE would not be undertaken freely and voluntarily. Douglas seeks to sidestep this critique, laying out an alternative line of response: that the consent requirement may not be as defensible as such

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theorists require. He argues this on the grounds that we already incarcerate prisoners without regards to their consent, and there is no meaningful distinction between this existing practice and the use of medical interventions to rehabilitate prisoners. The upshot of this is that if non-consensual incarceration is permissible, as is non-consensual MBE. In this paper I critique this approach on two main grounds. As a general criticism, I argue that MBE may be a misguided solution to criminality in the way it views the individual as the source of, and ultimate solution to the problem of crime prevention. Viewing the individual as the appropriate focus of intervention to control risk factors of crime, such as aggression or an empathy deficit, is somewhat surface skimming and fails to address exactly why some people are more likely to commit crime, with such dispositions. The social conditions of crime, therefore, are problematically neglected from this narrative. Further, current arguments surrounding MBE do not pay sufficient attention to political concerns. Secondly, I argue that Douglas’ argument that non-consensual incarceration and non-consensual MBE are normatively aligned and so should be evaluated accordingly, inadvertently serves as a diatribe against the practice of incarceration. His argument could plausibly lead to the view that incarceration is similarly objectionable, in regards to the harm it inflicts and way that it threatens agency, and therefore does not do the work to show that non-consensual MBE is permissible, but rather sheds light on the problematic nature of both. Finally, I point to the idea that there does seem to be a fundamental distinction between the two practices; medical interventions on prisoners directly alter their minds; an invasive process, which plausibly extends beyond the appropriate remit of the state.

‘Author of his Own Punishment’: The Hobbesian Citizenship of Punished Individuals (Signy Gutnick Allen, Queen Mary)

The explanation provided in Leviathan of the origin of the sovereign’s right to punish citizens, that it is ‘not grounded on any concession, or gift of the Subjects’ (Chapter 28) but is rather a case of retained natural rights, is a necessary one for Hobbes to make, given his commitment to individuals’ right to self-defense. Nevertheless, it is one that has caused myriad difficulties for Hobbes scholars. Objections to this formulation have ranged from charges of inconsistency from Thomas Schrock to that of larger incoherence from David Gauthier. More recently, Alice Ristroph has pointed out that the question of the origin of the right has serious implications for how the act of punishing should be conceptualised at the moment of its occurrence, arguing that it forces us to reconsider Hobbesian categories of ‘state’ and ‘state of nature’ as regards their application to the punishing sovereign and the punished individual. This paper will argue that while recent interventions help us to understand the problem Hobbes creates for himself, they have not succeeded in precisely clarifying the relationship between state authorisation and the practice of punishment. It will focus on two major, and interrelated, questions: first, how can the statement that the criminal is the ‘author of his own punishment’ (Chapter 18) be reconciled with the above assertion that the origin of the state’s right to punish is precisely not this authorisation, and secondly, what are the implications of this puzzle for our understanding of the citizenship status of the punished individual during punishment itself? I will argue that the tempting solution to these problems, that punishment occurs in a total or quasi-state of nature, cannot be correct. I will suggest that the defining characteristics of punishment practice set out in Chapter 28 require a continued legal relationship between the sovereign and the punished citizen. This relationship is preserved by the recognition that while the state’s right to punish cannot come about through authorization by subjects, its power to engage in the practice does. Thus, punishment is not a case of the total ending of authorization and the resultant relegation of the punished subject to enemy status. As a result, both sovereign and subject retain both their natural and artificial aspects during punishment, a conclusion that helps us not only to understand Hobbes’s theory of punishment, but also his theory of citizenship.

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Panel III The People (Chair: Paola Romero)

Does Vertical Political Equality Require Political Participation? (Attila Mraz, Budapest/NYU)

This paper rebuts an argument for mandatory or incentivized voting. While these policies are sometimes supported as a means to ensure that elected representatives serve the interests of all citizens equally (e.g., Lijphart 1997, Engelen 2008, Hill 2011), I engage with a stronger case for participation-maximizing measures. This case argues for mandatory or incentivized voting based on the requirement of vertical political equality (VPE), i.e., the requirement that political office-holders and ordinary citizens exercise political authority as equals (Dworkin 2000).

First, I reconstruct what I call the Restriction Conception of VPE, and the argument for compulsory voting and incentivized political participation based on it. In representative democracies, public officeholders – as a consequence of their office-holding – have higher political impact and influence than ordinary citizens. This prima facie violation of VPE can only be justified, on the Restriction Conception, if political office-holders realize those and only those legislative aims that all or most citizens participate in choosing (cf. Christiano 1996, Brennan & Hill 2014). Otherwise, the differential political power of office-holders could not be justified to those who did not contribute to the choice of legislative aims but are still subject to political authority. Further, I show, pace López-Guerra 2011 and Brennan and Hill 2014, that representative polls cannot replace elections as an adequate means to collect information about citizens’ choices of legislative aims. Therefore, the Restriction Conception requires full participation, and hence, typically, compulsory or incentivized voting.

Second, however, I argue that the Restriction Conception of VPE is incoherent with popular sovereignty. The uptake of citizens’ choice of legislative aims through voting is guaranteed only if representative mandates are bound. So, the Restriction Conception requires bound mandates in addition to full participation. I argue, though, that representatives can pursue long term legislative aims chosen by citizens only if representative mandates are free. The enforcement of bound mandates creates perverse incentives that discourage politicians from the consistent pursuit of long term aims. Yet I argue that popular sovereignty requires citizens to be able to pursue long term legislative aims of their choice via their elected representatives. The freedom of representative mandates is thus justified not because representatives should be allowed to choose legislative aims (pace Guerrero 2010, Burke 1959), but because it is necessary to enable representatives to effectively pursue the long term legislative aims citizens choose. Thus the requirement of bound mandates is a reductio of the Restriction Conception.

Third, I argue for an alternative take on VPE: the Guiding Conception. This conception requires that voters have an adequate opportunity to control the legislative aims their representatives pursue, both in the electoral process and between elections. I show that the robustness of each citizen’s opportunity to contribute to the choice of legislative aims imposes restrictions of the choice between alternative electoral systems, and requires the anti-majoritarian protection of freedom of information, association, speech and the right to vote. Yet I also show that on the Guiding Conception, VPE does not require actual participation, and hence neither compulsory nor incentivized voting.

Visions of the people. Schmitt and Kelsen on the democratic sovereign (David Ragazzoni, UPenn)

The present paper draws on the work of two prominent theorists of the Weimar age – Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen – to bear on questions in contemporary democratic theory about democratic citizenship and popular sovereignty both at national and supranational levels. In

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the context of Weimar, debates on citizenship and sovereignty stemmed from a unique historical process – the abrupt transition from the Wilhelmine Empire to a parliamentary Republic. Accordingly, a whole generation of theorists – constitutional, legal and political – was forced to rethink the sphere of citizenship vis-à-vis representative institutions, mass parties and the whole new world of what I call “democratic indirectness”. Almost one century after their publication, the writings of Schmitt and Kelsen remain powerful, yet under-investigated, sources for rethinking the life and times of the democratic sovereign in contemporary political theory. The paper is structured as follows. Section 1 anchors the need to reconceptualise citizenship and sovereignty to the evolving landscape of democratic theory and practice, with specific regard to four levels: the differentiation of potentially competing forms of identity; the erosion of state sovereignty in light of supranational institutions and transnational forms of citizenship; the de-territorialization of political representation; the undoing of representative democracy along populist and plebiscitary lines. In light of such challenges, I argue that the competing visions of ‘the people’ Schmitt and Kelsen developed throughout the 1920s contribute to addressing questions of citizenship, sovereignty and constitution-making from a fresh perspective. Section 2 explores Schmitt’s critique of democratic indirectness, one that was rooted in a twofold dismissal of liberalism, both as a rationalistic world view and a set of institutions and procedures. Accordingly, his vision of the people (as opposed to the liberal primacy of the individual) was meant to reactivate a collective, unified and homogeneous Volk against the temporality of representative politics and the fictitious equality of mankind. I will pinpoint some flaws in Schmitt’s arguments to argue that his existential conception of citizenship is, on its own premises, normatively biased and logically self-contradictory. Section 3 casts light on Kelsen as a democratic theorist (thanks to the first, full English translation of Das Wesen und Wert der Demokratie, published in 2013). His inquiry into the philosophical and epistemological foundations of democratic politics induced him to reverse Schmitt’s arguments and to suggest a different vision of both democracy and citizenship. By doing so, he provided twentieth-century political theory with one of the most passionate defences of parliamentary democracy. Focusing on what I refer to as “the three P’s of democratic indirectness” – Parliament, parties and the people –, I will show that compromise, not acclamatio (à la Schmitt), is what makes Kelsenian democracy work. Finally, section 4 elaborates on the work of Schmitt and Kelsen to suggest a reconceptualization of ‘the people’ and its sovereignty beyond standard dichotomies in contemporary democratic theory: namely, those of identity (Schmitt)/representation (Kelsen), constituent (Schmitt)/constituted (Kelsen) power, substantial (Schmitt)/procedural (Kelsen) democracy, whose echo also resonates in recent debates on sovereignty, citizenship and constitution- making at national (democratic politics) and supranational (EU) levels.

Panel IV Exemption (Chair: Diana Popescu)

A simple theory of conscientious accommodation (Adam Kern, Oxford)

Conscientious accommodation is the practice of exempting someone from a legal requirement, or not imposing that requirement in the first place, because that person thinks it would be morally wrong to comply with that requirement. Conscientious accommodation is intuitive but baffling. First, where does it end? If pacifists are entitled to accommodation, why aren’t principled murderers as well? Call this the All-or-Nothing Problem. Second, what are its grounds? How could someone’s false belief that he must ϕ justify legally permitting him to ϕ? Call this the Foundational Problem. I develop a novel theory which addresses both these problems. My theory has striking practical implications. Probably, some non-moral commitments—such projects and aims—ought to be accommodated.

In barest outline, my theory makes three claims:

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(1) We burdened by being required to violate our commitments;

(2) Burden-shifting principles entitle us to disregard prima facie duties when compliance with those duties burdens us greatly, and non-compliance burdens others little.

(3) Our entitlements to conscientious accommodation are grounded in burden-shifting principles.

Each part of my paper argues for one of these claims.

In the first part, I show that the main reasons for and against accommodating someone are the burdens the conscientious objector will shoulder, if she complies with her duty; and the burdens which other people will shoulder, if the conscientious objector does not comply with her duty.

In the second part, I demonstrate that burden-shifting principles obtain in both personal and political morality. I argue in favor of two such principles in particular: the Extremity Principle and the Covering Principle. First, I show that these principles obtain in personal morality with two noncontroversial cases. I then extend them to political morality. I show that they are manifested in cases and just practices, and I show that they can be derived from theories of justice. Finally, I answer an objection to burden-shifting principles qua principles of justice. The objection is that the application of burden-shifting principles leads to manifestly unjust allocations of goods. My response is that burden-shifting principles are lexically inferior to principles of corrective and distributive justice.

In the third and final part, I show that burden-shifting principles explain our entitlements to conscientious accommodation. My purely positive argument is brief. In the first part, we saw that the major reasons for and against accommodating someone are burdens. Burden-shifting principles match those reasons neatly. The rest of my argument is both positive and negative. All of the cases from the first part contained background conditions:

1. The state requires conscientious objectors to act in a burdensome way.

2. The conscientious objectors have moral beliefs at stake.

I show that my theory describes the importance (or non-importance) of these conditions more accurately than its rivals. My theory unifies accommodation in personal and political life, and it explains why moral beliefs furnish especially strong reasons for accommodation.

The Unavailability of Religious Arguments (Omri Ben-Zvi, Jerusalem)

How should we treat religious justifications for state action? This question has received much scholarly attention in recent years, and yet no consensus has been reached. In this paper, I offer a novel rationale for excluding many (though not necessarily all) religious arguments from the public sphere. More specifically, while most philosophers address this issue as a question of political philosophy, I develop an account of religious arguments that draws on theories of practical reasoning. The paper argues that, appearances notwithstanding, religious arguments do not provide standard, run-of-the-mill reasons for action in the same way that (for example) utilitarian or deontological arguments do, and that they are in fact internally incoherent. The paper thus shifts attention away from liberal discourse, where both parties to the debate have found inconclusive support for their positions, and focuses on practical reasoning theories. Analyzing religious arguments in this way shows that there is a fundamental tension between religious argumentation and the way we conduct practical reasoning. This tension makes it hard to both take religious arguments seriously qua arguments and consider them in a practical reasoning scenario. The upshot is that the many

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religious arguments are revealed to be internally incoherent, and therefore unavailable to participants in public debates.

How Should Claims For Religious Exemptions Be Weighed? (Paul Billingham, Oxford)

Many philosophers endorse an approach to religious exemptions known as ‘reasonable accommodation’. On this view, religious individuals have a pro tanto claim to the accommodation of actions that they desire to undertake for religious reasons, through their being given an exemption from a rule or law imposed by an employer, place of education, or the state. This claim is weighed against the state’s or employer’s interest in the uniform application of the rule. Exemptions should be granted whenever the religious claim outweighs these countervailing considerations.

One vital question for this approach is how we judge the strength of a religious claim. Various accounts of the grounding of a right to accommodation have been offered, but less attention has been paid to what factors determine the weight of particular claims to an exemption. In this paper, I take the legitimacy of reasonable accommodation as given, and focus on that latter question, which is essential to determining when exemptions should be granted.

Following Greenawalt, we can weigh religious claims on two dimensions: the importance of the burdened religious practice, and the extent to which the relevant law or rule conflicts with that practice. I analyse these dimensions in turn.

With regard to the first dimension, I make two main arguments. First, the view endorsed by some theorists that exemptions should only be granted if the restricted practice is obligatory is too narrow. Some non-obligatory practices are nonetheless so central to an individual’s faith that they ground weighty religious claims. Second, to determine a practice’s obligatoriness or centrality we should focus on its place in the individual claimant’s belief-value set, rather than examining the views of religious leaders or theologians. However, the beliefs of the claimant’s religious community do provide evidence for the likely place of that practice within her life.

With regard to the second dimension, I argue that we can determine the extent to which the law conflicts with the religious practice by evaluating the cost the individual bears if she both follows her religious beliefs and fulfils her legal obligations. We should measure this cost using an objective theory of interests, rather than based on the claimant’s own understanding of cost. The individual’s own beliefs determine her claim’s weight on the first dimension, but an impartial understanding of interests should be used to measure costs on this second dimension.

My arguments establish a framework for judging the weight of a religious claim. To determine whether an exemption is merited, this claim must be weighed against the relevant ‘state interest’. Full consideration of this aspect of reasonable accommodation is beyond my paper’s scope. I do argue, however, that if the religious claim is weighty on either dimension and the competing value is relatively weak then an exemption should be granted, and I offer examples of such cases.

Finally, I consider a forceful objection to my approach: that it could not be fairly administered by courts. I acknowledge the importance of this objection, but offer three replies that I believe defuse it.

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Panel V - Global (In-)Justice (Chair: Simon Beard)

Can global egalitarians defend egalitarian justice for the EU? (Siba Harb, Leuven)

The aim of the paper is to explore the validity of global egalitarian positions on the question of social justice in the European Union (EU). In particular, it asks whether global egalitarians can consistently take the EU to be a domain to which egalitarian principles of justice apply while maintaining that the scope of egalitarian justice should be global. The paper consists of four parts. In the first part, I briefly discuss how the nascent theorizing on EU justice emerges from and ties to the global justice debate. I distinguish four positions on global justice according to their views on the scope, content and agents of justice: statists, internationalists, global egalitarians and global sufficientarians. In the second part, I explain why global egalitarians- theorists who take the scope of justice to be global, its agents to be individuals, and its content to be egalitarian-, but not the three other groups, might face the objection of consistency if they take the EU as a domain of justice and advocate an egalitarian conception of justice for it. The consistency objection says that by taking the EU as a domain of justice a global egalitarian is not taking her commitment to the global scope of justice seriously. Achieving global justice requires global institutions that guarantee an egalitarian distribution of global benefits and burdens among all persons. Strengthening EU institutions and EU egalitarian distributions is distributing internally what belongs globally- an objection which global egalitarians have themselves raised against statists. In the third part, I look more closely at the global egalitarian position on EU justice and specifically at accounts that have explicitly addressed the question of EU justice. I suggest three possible arguments for why global egalitarians might consider the EU as a domain of justice: the testing ground argument; the transitional argument, and the practical argument. I show that all three arguments as presented are exposed to the consistency objection. In the fourth part, I introduce distinctions from the ideal/non ideal theory debate and David Estlund’s recent Philosophy and Public Affairs article ‘Utopophobia’ to qualify the exercise of theorizing about the EU justice and that of theorizing about global justice. By differentiating the enterprises a theorist takes when theorizing about the EU from theorizing about the globe, and clarifying the different requirements of non-ideal and ideal theory I hope to argue that the transition and practical arguments can be salvaged against the consistency objection.

Calamity and Injustice (Pierre Cloarec, Sherbrooke/ Paris-Sorbonne)

Many natural events, such as earthquakes, floods or wildfires, are prone to cause terrible damage to human populations as well as to their built and natural environment, that is, to turn into catastrophes. It is, however, erroneous simply to call these catastrophes “natural events,” for their occurrence depends to a large extent on social, technological and institutional factors, including preparedness, risk mitigation, and engineering, and for the qualification of a natural as “catastrophic” depends on there being someone for whom it is a catastrophe (the Person-Affecting principle). Now it may and does happen that the best available risk mitigation techniques are not enough, or that they were not put into practice for acceptable reasons (such as the low probability of an event prone to turn into a catastrophe): in many cases, that is, no one can be said to have acted unjustly in the occurrence of a disaster. A catastrophic natural event, then, is not in itself an injustice. Call this the Social cause principle: for there to be an injustice, there must be an agent who has caused an injustice. If no agent can be said to have caused an injustice, it seems reasonable to affirm that there is no agent to whom a valid claim of justice can be addressed. Call this the Involvement principle: a valid claim of justice must be addressed to the agent that has caused an injustice in the first place. When combined, these two affirmations seemingly entail that there can be no duty of justice to provide the victims of a disaster with disaster relief, even if there can be, say, a duty of charity to do so. This is the conclusion I wish to challenge. I proceed by showing, first, that both parts of the

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argument are acceptable and can withstand serious objections leveled against them. These objections include the utilitarian view that justice requires the maximization of the amount of good in the world, and the luck egalitarian view that justice is concerned with neutralizing the effects of brute luck on the distribution of advantage. I show that neither objection is effective against the Social Cause principle, and thus that a catastrophic natural event is indeed not inherently unjust. I then defend the Involvement principle, but show that its conclusion is unwarranted, for there is indeed an injustice in the refusal to provide disaster relief. In support of this, I advance a common conceptual claim about justice, namely, that it is concerned with treating each other as equals, and that refusing to provide the victims of a disaster with disaster relief is a failure to treat them as equals. It follows that there is a duty of justice to provide the victims of a disaster with disaster relief, even if there were no injustice in the occurrence of the disaster itself. Finally, I stress some further difficulties raised by my argument that I cannot treat in the paper.

Global injustice and the enduring legacy of colonialism (Johannes Schulz, Frankfurt)

Colonialism has created the world as we know it, a world of inequality, with many former colonies still subordinated to their former colonizers and subjected to marginalization and, arguably, ongoing exploitation. Most of the poorest nations in the world are former colonies and development economists like Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robsinon make a strong empirical case for a causal connection between the current plight of many developing nations and their colonial history. Interestingly, the colonial and post-colonial history of present global injustice has received only sparse attention within the ongoing global justice debate. I seek to show that we have normative reasons to take the connection between present and past global injustice more seriously than has so far been the case but also that we should not think of it in the way that historical injustices are often or perhaps mostly thought of. Some argue that historical injustices should not concern us very much at all. We should devote our resources to tackling present injustices, a task that is more than difficult enough without addressing further obligations to rectify past injustice. Others argue that past injustices should be treated very much like present injustice, namely as moral wrongs that are adequately addressed through (re)-distributive duties. I argue that the former are right (our focus should be on present injustice), that the latter are wrong (claims towards redistributive compensation for past wrongs are implausible for a variety of reasons) without thereby giving up the claim that our unjust past has normative salience. Past injustice matters because and only if it reaches into the present, that is, when the unjust treatment of one social group by another has endured over generations and is ongoing. Such enduring injustices require different solutions to those typically provided by liberal theories of justice or at least to how they are standardly interpreted in liberal-democratic policy making. The formal recognition of equal liberty through (international) law or redistributive measures may not, while certainly necessary, be sufficient in overcoming enduring injustices. Relationships of enduring injustice are fraught with distrust, harmful collective narratives and implicit biases that will require non-redistributive measures to effectively address, including, perhaps most importantly, a long-term process of acknowledging the history of enduring injustice between certain social groups. In this paper I suggest that we may think of many or most colonial/post-colonial relationships as ones of enduring injustice and that overcoming many or most of these enduring international (and perhaps transnational) injustices will require measures that go beyond redistribution, importantly including acknowledgement understood as a long-term public deliberative process. Lastly, I want to make some tentative suggestions as to what such a process of acknowledgement might look like in the international realm.