Online research in philosophy

Organ trafficking and trafficking in persons for the purpose of organ transplantation are recognized as significant international problems. Yet these forms of trafficking are largely left out of international criminal law regimes and to some extent of domestic criminal law regimes as well. Trafficking of organs or persons for their organs does not come within the jurisdiction of the ICC, except in very special cases such as when conducted in a manner that conforms to the definitions of genocide or crimes (...) against humanity. Although the United States Code characterizes trafficking as a transnational crime with national implications, (22 U.S.C. § 7101(b)(24) (2010)), trafficking is rarely prosecuted in domestic courts. It has thus functioned in practice largely as what might be judged a stateless offense, out of the purview of both international and national courts. Yet these forms of organ trafficking remain widespread—and devastating to those who are its victims. In this article, we begin by describing what is known about the extent of organ trafficking and trafficking in persons for the purpose of removal of organs. We then critically evaluate how and why such trafficking has remained largely unaddressed by both international and domestic criminal law regimes. This state of affairs, we argue, presents a missed chance for developing the legitimacy of international criminal law and an illustration of how far current international legal institutions remain from ideal justice. (shrink)

Various members of the academic community have attempted to attack Murray R¤thbard’s political and economic theories. One attempt made by H. E. Frech Ill in "The Public Choice Theory of Murray N. Rothbard, A Modern Anarchist" is quite disappointing in that it deals very superficially with many important areas of Rothbard’s work. This paper, however, will examine only one of Frech’s perfunctory crit· icisms — his charge that R0thbard’s theory of the stateless society is self-contradictory. The reasonableness of Frech’s (...) arguments will be determined. (shrink)

Transnational integration and other challenges to the nation-state have deprived it of its mystique and broken the automatic link between state and nation. This has encouraged the revival of stateless nationalisms, but also provided new means for their accommodation. The author argues that these changes call for a radical rethinking of the nature of sovereignty and of the state itself to meet the twin challenges of recognition of nationality and of democracy. Drawing on the experience of four plurinational states (...) - United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, and Canada - and of the European Union, he analyses the challenges of plurinationalism and its recognition. -/- Keating argues that we are not moving to a world without states, but to a complex political order with multiple sites of sovereign authority, and asymmetrical constitutional arrangements. This political order is new but at the same time old, as traditions of diffused authority and shared sovereignty, from before the rise of the nation-state, are rediscovered and rehabilitated. Democracy can no longer be confined to the framework of the nation-state but must extend to the new political spaces which are emerging above and below the state. Political movements and public opinion in the stateless nations are increasingly embracing these ideas and are the harbingers of a post-sovereign political order. (shrink)

The present article is devoted to the problem which is debated actively to-day, namely whether Greek poleis and the Roman Republic were early states or they represented a specific type of stateless societies. In particular, Moshe Berent examines this problem by the example of Athens in his contribution to this volume. He arrives at the conclusion that Athens was a stateless society. However, I am of the opinion that this conclusion is wrong: and I believe that Athens and (...) Rome were early states. Therefore the present article is in many respects a direct discussion with Berent (as well as with other supporters of this idea). (shrink)

Laying foundations -- Rejecting aggression -- Safeguarding cooperation -- Enforcing law -- Rectifying injury -- Liberating society -- Situating liberation.

An ethic of self-ownership combined with Lockean homesteading of external resources provides a plausible grounding both for anarchist opposition to the state and for a..

The non-citizen is the new ?other?. From popular discourse to political pronouncements and academic research, the non-citizen has become one of the subjects du jour. Among the ranks of the non-citizen, one finds a lesser-known category of people which has yet to be considered seriously by liberal political theory ? the stateless. Thus far, liberal political theory has either ignored this category of persons or subsumed them under the subjects of immigration or refugeehood. The present article challenges this theoretical (...) exclusion in two ways. First, it analyses the treatment of statelessness within the works of three prominent theorists on just membership ? Michael Walzer, Seyla Benhabib and William Barbieri, Jr ? and contends that these authors ignore the stateless as a unique category of non-citizen. Secondly, it explains why statelessness demands a distinct theoretical framework than is currently provided for within liberal political theory. The article contends that just membership questions necessitate not simply looking at who is let in and what naturalization procedures should be extended to them, but also entails examining who has always been on the inside and to whom we need to justify their continued exclusion. (shrink)

This article considers the ongoing difficulties for mainstream political theory of actualizing human rights, with particular reference to Rorty’s attempt to transcend their liberal foundations. It argues that there is a problematic disjuncture between his articulation of exclusion and his hope for inclusion via the expansion of the liberal human rights culture. More specifically, it shows that Rorty’s description of victimhood is based on premises unavailable to him, with the consequence that stateless persons are rendered inhuman, and, further, that (...) his accounts of sentimentality and solidarity have limited potential for the inclusion of such victims within the liberal ‘community of justification’. In the final analysis, the article argues that there is a substantial mismatch between Rorty’s dependence on both liberal norms and international political practice, and his hopes for the human rights culture to include those stripped of human dignity. (shrink)

This article considers concrete manifestations of the politogenesis multilinearity and the variation of its forms; it analyzes the main causes that determined the politogenetic pathway of a given society. The respective factors include the polity's size, its ecological and social environment. The politogenesis should be never reduced to the only one evolutionary pathway leading to the statehood. The early state formation was only one of many versions of development of complex late archaic social systems. The author designates various complex non-state (...) political systems as early state analogues. The early state analogue posed a real alternative to the state for a rather long period of time, whereas in many ecologically marginal regions they could compete quite seriously with the state sometimes until recently. Thus, it was only in the final count that the state became the leading form of political organization of complex societies. The very pathways to statehood had a few versions. One may group them into two main types: ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’. Within the ‘vertical’ model the state formation took place in a direct way, i.e. directly from small pre-state polities to primitive statehood. Within the ‘horizontal’ model we first ob-serve the formation of early state analogues that were quite com-parable to the state as regards their complexity, whereas later those analogues were transformed into states . (shrink)

This article focuses on the account of disrespect found in Honneth’s theory of recognition. In it, I am particularly interested in the form of misrecognition or disrespect which is the negation of respect , and which is clearly represented by statelessness. Respect, for Honneth, is closely connected to legal recognition. Guided by Honneth’s view of critical theory as ‘not entirely without a foundation in social reality’, the article puts together an analysis of the political dynamics of his model of disrespect. (...) This analysis is used to challenge certain aspects of Honneth’s political theory and in particular the implications of his conception of the state. The article argues that the way in which the state is used has the effect of obscuring significant political obstacles to recognition, and in particular, the way in which the state limits respect. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is how to reconcile a central tension in Hannah Arendt’s thinking, one that – if left unresolved – may make us reluctant to endorse her political theory. Arendt was profoundly and painfully aware of the horrors of political evil; in fact, she is almost unparalleled in 20 th century thought in her concern for the consequences of mass political violence, the victims of political atrocities, and the most vulnerable in political society – the stateless, (...) the pariahs, the outcasts. At least, this is the case in her discussions of concrete, historical political situations. Yet in her philosophical writings, she continues to argue that the political realm ultimately redeems human existence, and furthermore, that politics should remain distinct and autonomous from moral evaluation. Political action must be evaluated according to “greatness,” not goodness or any other explicitly moral or even ethical standard. She goes so far as to suggest that politics and morality may be deeply hostile to one another, and can only be reconciled in situations of extreme emergency. This can leave many feeling both perplexed and deeply uncomfortable with the theory of human action that Arendt proposes. Drawing on her notions of political conscience, judgment and - in particular - her account of forgiveness, in this paper I argue that Arendt offers an ethics of plurality, in which what is good is developed from what is most politically important: amor mundi, or love of our shared political world. (shrink)

JEL Classification: B41, B53, B31, B2, P48, A12 Abstract: Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox has important implications for two aspects of Austrian theory. First, it makes it possible to reconcile the Misesian, Rothbardian, and hermeneutical approaches to methodology; second, it provides a way of defending a stateless legal order against the charge that such an order lacks, yet needs, a final arbiter.

My objective in this paper is to address a handful of issues that typically get raised in discussions of philosophical anarchism. Some of these issues arise in discussions among partisans of anarchism, and some are more likely to be raised in efforts to defend the state against its opponents. My hope is to focus the argument in such a way as to make clearer the main issues that are at stake from the point of view of at least one version (...) of philosophical anarchism. (shrink)

Disputes over territory are among the most contentious in human affairs. Throughout the world, societies view control over land and resources as necessary to ensure their survival and to further their particular life-style, and the very passion with which claims over a region are asserted and defended suggests that difficult normative issues lurk nearby. Questions about rights to territory vary. It is one thing to ask who owns a particular parcel of land, another who has the right to reside within (...) its boundaries and yet another to determine which individuals or groups have political rights of citizenship, sovereignty, and self-determination within it. It must also be asked how these rights—if ‘rights’ is the correct term—are acquired. When attention turns to the territorial rights of communities, national groups or states, sovereignty is the principal concern. Within international law, de facto power over a territory, say, of occupying forces or trustees, is insufficient to possess or acquire sovereignty (Brownlie, 1990, p. 111). The central conceptions underlying modern democratic thought are that sovereignty over a politically demarcated territory is vested in the resident population, and that governmental authority is derived from the consent of that population. It is simple enough to identify the latter with the citizenry of a state, but demographic and political flux makes this a loose criterion. States come and go, and sometimes a territory is stateless. Also, large-scale demographic shifts during upheavals and peacetime immigrations change the assessments of who belongs where. Does everyone residing in a place at a particular time have a right to share in its governance then? What about illegal immigrants? Presumably, sovereignty rests with the established population or.. (shrink)

Many anarchists believe that a stateless society could and should feature laws. It might appear that, in so believing, they are caught in a contradiction. The anarchist objects to the state because its authority does not rest on actual consent, and using force to secure compliance with law in a stateless society seems objectionable for the same reason. Some people in a stateless society will have consented to some laws or law-generating mechanisms and some to others – (...) while some will have consented to none. Someone’s obedience to a legal requirement could be justly enforceable absent the state, nonetheless, given either her actual consent to the requirement or to a mechanism responsible for generating it or the coextensiveness of the legal requirement with a moral requirement. And it could thus be just on the anarchist’s own terms to enforce a narrow range of positive legal requirements even against outlaws who had declined to consent to them. (shrink)

To resume, then, the need for a written Law specifically prohibiting Genocide. (1) It should by now be evident that “the pleasure principle” needs its ethical mandate, beyond the “reality principle” of a social field that can no longer be considered homeostatic and nonconflictual. The fantasmatic character of human pleasure must not only be accounted for in any ethic today, it must take primacy. Fantasy formations grow ever central in our lives; fantasy is the support of our “reality.” (2) The (...) writing of such a Law would permit the enunciation of positively negative content, thereby reframing the Other as lacking; and it would also provide a way for the increasingly stateless “citizens” of the postmodern, “global” community, to be asked to decide on the necessarily paired alternatives (Good and Evil, to kill or to love) which have once again become the starkest of possibilities for them. Only this kind of decision — which is not that of the vel — suffers resistance to the will of the people when it is a malignant will-to- jouissance. (shrink)

The notion of face, referring to the other's manifestation in Levinas's philosophy, does not imply any visibility, but rather signifies a proximity affecting me before any representation. In Levinas's text one can read a great number of statements about the face as not being in the world but as coming from outside to disturb it, to intrude on it. The experience of face is nevertheless made concrete in a phenomenological sense, thanks to somefigures as the stateless' or the refugee's (...) for instance, which are also to be found in Arendt. However, interpreting such a kind at the center of politics, whereas Levinas wants to go through the world in order to thrill the forgotten experience of proximity which is the source of hospitality. This paper argues that Levinas questions a notion of world which is not Arendt's and that, from Arendt's point of view, the disclosure of the Who, necessarily implying the world, is not exactly a visibility. (shrink)

The practical superiority of markets over governments has become readily apparent. Only the most dogmatic of state apologists continue to deny this obvious fact—at least with respect to the production of many goods and services. Free-market economists and libertarians go much further, of course. They affirm the market’s superiority in nearly all realms. Yet only a handful of anarchocapitalists, most notably Murray Rothbard, have dared claim that a free market could also do a better job of providing protection from foreign (...) states.1 National defense is generally considered the most essential of all government services. This widely conceded exception to the efficacy of markets seems to have irrefutable empirical confirmation. If private defense is better than government defense, why has government kept winning over the centuries? Indeed, the state’s military prowess has more than seemingly precluded the modern emergence of any anarchocapitalist society. At one time, as far as we know, all humankind lived in stateless bands of hunter-gatherers and had done so since the emergence of modern man some fifty thousand years ago. But beginning around 11,000 B.C., a gradual transition to.. (shrink)

Violating the human status : the evil of genocide and crimes against humanity -- Superfluous humanity : the evil of global poverty -- Citizens of nowhere : the evil of statelessness -- Effacing the political : the evil of neoliberal globalization.

Many people believe that Somalia’s economy has been in chaos since the collapse of its national government in 1991. We take a comparative institutional approach to examine Somalia’s performance relative to other African countries both when Somalia had a government and during its extended period of anarchy. We find that although Somalia is poor, its relative economic performance has improved during its period of statelessness. We also describe how Somalia has provided basic law and order and a currency, which have (...) enabled the country to achieve the coordination that has led to improvements in its standard of living. (shrink)