Abstract
In this essay, I continue Nicholas Wolterstorff’s work of developing a rights-based theory of ethics called eirenéism, which maintains the good life only occurs when justice—as a moral state of affairs where agents enjoy the goods to which they have a right—is achieved. As a result, justice is eirenē (the Greek word for peace). In the process of developing eirenéism I explain how eirenē differs from other conceptions of peace, and I offer several interpretive arguments for how best to understand eirenéism in relation to better-known competing ethical theories, like utilitarianism, virtue ethics, duty ethics, and care ethics.
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Notes
‘Inherent’ and ‘intrinsic’ worth will be assumed to mean the same thing throughout this essay.
The reader should not conflate ‘need’ with ‘want’. For eirenéism, individuals have rights to what one needs (i.e. what is necessary for one’s flourishing), not what one wants or desires, even if they might contribute to one’s flourishing. For a recent discussion on the philosophy of need, see: Soran Reader (ed.) The Philosophy of Need Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Some readers might find the use of ‘obligation’ jarring. Nevertheless, eirenéism maintains that certain acts of love are obligatory. I do not deal with such issues in this paper, but Wolterstorff’s book Justice in Love is dedicated to showing that there is nothing inconsistent between certain obligations and certain acts of love.
This natural preferables approach is similar to a philosophy of needs approach, where one’s needs determine what one has a right to. In fact, I would suggest they are different ways of discussing the same phenomenon. For an extended discussion of the philosophy of need, I would again point readers to Soran Reader’s The Philosophy of Need, cited in the second footnote.
I replaced Wolterstorff’s use of ‘evil’ with ‘diminish the person’s flourishing’ in this rule to avoid a lengthy explanation within the text of why he uses ‘evil’. Wolterstorff uses ‘evil’ to represent “life-evils,” as opposed to life-goods. In the text, he defines ‘evil’ as that which diminishes a person’s flourishing, which is why I replaced the term. To be clear, he does not use ‘evil’ in the stronger sense of willfully causing great harm to others.
Three of the most well-known are: Brad Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-consequentialist Theory of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring 1972): 229-24l; and Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
This does not include deontological approaches like Divine Command Theories that base moral worth on being human or in some relation to God.
Interestingly, in Justice in Love, Wolterstorff talks of eirenéism as a type of agapism, which would make it not only an ethics of peace but also and ethics of love, or more precisely, an ethics of peace achievable only through love.
Iris M. Young offers a strong argument for such an account in her book Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), and an account of global justice in her essay “Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model,” Social Philosophy and Public Policy Vol. 23, No. 1 (2006), which also appears in Responsibility for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
I argue elsewhere that Carol Gould’s procedural approach, detailed in Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (2004), performs such a task.
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Lewis, C. Understanding Peace within Contemporary Moral Theory. Philosophia 41, 1049–1068 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9450-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9450-5