I. Principle of Sovereignty: every self-governing society has a moral right to be free from intervention by outsiders, even if intervention would make its members better off, or make its internal relations more just.

II. Is this too strong?

a. Beitz: a society has no right to be free of outside intervention unless and until its arrangements are just.

b. A duty to intervene?

III. Then why not imperialism?

a. Lowell: U.S. system of colonial rule is founded on belief that “all men are created equal” (HCCR, p. 165). It should governed “with a single eye to their own welfare,” by someone who “can do justice to all the races” (HCCR, p. 169).

b. Beitz rejects imperial rule on empirical grounds.

i. Lowell: rule by a small minority is “always liable to produce tyrannical abuse” (HCCR, p. 169).

ii. J. S. Mill: people are generally in the best position to determine their own interests (Beitz, p. 84).

iii. Beitz: “the heart of the case against colonialism” is that it tended to make local arrangements more unjust. The “European powers,” he says, created “new social problems, increased distributive inequalities, structural economic distortions… and absolute as well as relative deprivation in the lower classes” (Betiz, p. 101).

IV. Sovereignty rides again

a. “But who is to say what is just?” Lives are at stake. We make mistakes. So we need some general rules, at least to keep civil order.

b. The Principle of Respect: when there is reasonable disagreement about whether an action or policy is unjust, you cannot force or coerce others to do what you think is just, even if your belief happens to be correct.

c. The Principle of Conditional Sovereignty: A self-governing society has the right to be free from intervention by outsiders, so long as it is not unjust in ways that are beyond the bounds of reasonable disagreement about justice. In that case, outsiders cannot permissibly intervene, even if their view of justice happens to be the correct one.

V. Human rights

a. In contemporary international law and practice, to say that arrangements are not only unjust but that we can’t really reasonably disagree about their injustice, is to say that a society violates human rights.

i. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948); the Genocide Convention (1948); the European Convention of Human Rights (1950); the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966); and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966); the American Convention on Human Rights (1978); and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (1981).

b. The human rights are given as a list of articles. Examples from the Universal Declaration (at http://www.un.org/rights/50/decla.htm ).

i. Article 4: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”

ii. Article 16, part 1: “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family….”

iii. Article 24: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.”

c. Reasonable exceptions

d. Gross and systematic failure

e. The compromise

 

VI. Would Beitz compromise?

a. Respect for persons, not peoples

i. Beitz denies that “only the righteous, the virtuous, or the psychologically well integrated should be respected as autonomous sources of ends” (Beitz, p. 81).

ii. For Beitz, “it is because all persons should be respected as sources of ends that we should not allow all states to claim a right of autonomy” (Betiz, p. 81).

b. Why not consider groups too?

i. Unlike individuals, they are not “organic wholes with the capacity to realize their nature in the choice and pursue of ends.” (Beitz, p. 76)

ii. “Boundary crossings”

iii. Civil order versus individual liberty

c. Freedom of association?

i. Beitz: “…there are few, if any, governments to which all (or even some) of the governed have actually consented, and therefore…few, if any, governments that are in fact free associations” (Beitz, p. 78).

ii. Locke: not explicit, but “tacit” consent.

1. Beitz: “Political institutions have a deep and pervasive effect on the prospects of people living under them, on their preferences, and on their abilities…” (Beitz, p. 79).

iii. Not actual consent (explicit or tacit), but hypothetical consent (Beitz, p. 80)