1. Globalization and Violence: The Challenge to Ethics

Despite its many benefits, globalization has proven to harbor a good deal of violence. This is not only a matter of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction inaugurated by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, but includes many forms of indirect or “structural violence” resulting from the routine of economic and political institutions on the global scale. In this essay, the multifaceted phenomena of violence are approached from the standpoint of ethics. The prevailing political thinking associated with “realism” fails to address the problems of militarism and of hegemonic unilateralism. In contrast, many philosophers are critically rethinking the problem of global violence from different ethical perspectives. Despite sharing similar concerns, philosophers nevertheless differ over the role of philosophical reflection and the potentials of reason. These differences appear in two contrasting approaches associated with postmodern philosophy and discourse ethics. In the analysis of discourse ethics, attention is paid to Karl‐Otto Apel's attempt of philosophically grounding a macroethics of planetary co‐responsibility. At the heart of the essay is the analysis of the problem of violence, including terrorism, by Jürgen Habermas, who explains the phenomenon of violence in terms of the theory of communicative action as the breakdown of communication. Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of the notion of “terrorism” also is analyzed. According to the principle of discourse ethics, all conflicts between human beings ought to be settled in a way free of violence, through discourses and negotiations. These philosophers conclude that the reliance on force does not solve social and global problems, including those that are the source of violence. The only viable alternative is the “dialogical” multilateral relations of peaceful coexistence and cooperation among the nations for solving social and global problems. They emphasize the necessity of strengthening the international rule of law and institutions, such as a reformed United Nations.     

9. Human Rights: Historical Learning in the Shadow of Violence

This paper emphasizes the historical dimension of human rights understood as a social ethic. Rather than timeless principles, human rights and the universality proper to them emerge in a process of suffering, conflict, political assertion, and institutional change. We can understand them as historical yet also universal by seeing that human rights arise in processes of social learning that take place in an increasingly globalized world. Such learning often has advanced in the face of dramatic violence, for example, the bombing of Hiroshima. But the demands on a global social ethic today are not only a matter of responding to threats and acts of dramatic violence in isolation. Attention to the example of Hiroshima suggests that the problem of violence is bound up with other questions about the regulation of emerging technical powers in a context of inequality and social conflict. To what extent can an ethic centered on human rights provide an ethics that can inform effective responses to these problems? To consider the promise of human rights, we look more closely at the kind of social learning they involve and explore in particular the role of social movements in forging new identities and reciprocities along with normative claims proper to a global public sphere (the anti‐apartheid movement provides an example). We go on to see that these political experiences can inform interpretations of historical experience that can inform a widened sense of historical possibilities, both those missed in the past and those that confront us today. While this argument may thicken our sense of the promise of a human rights ethic, it remains speculative, not least because of the limited effectiveness of these norms in practice today. We close with the suggestion that nonetheless a coherent ethical response is possible, one that in the wealthy parts of the globe might take the form of an ethic of democratic responsibility. This would both represent a distinctive kind of learning and perhaps contribute to a wider advance of human rights.     

10 The Subject of Freedom at the End of History: Socialism Beyond Humanism

A bstract .   The postmodernist turn in theory left the status of humanism in some doubt. This chapter argues that a recuperation of a specifically socialist humanism is both possible and desirable, but only by overcoming the anthropocentrism of radical humanism. Renaissance and Enlightenment conceptions of the subject were rooted in an untenable dichotomy between the human and the animal, in ways that vitiated the idea and ideal of universal freedom. By conflating subjectivity as such with human subjectivity, humanism created a diremption in the world that placed the knower (human consciousness) on one side, and the merely known (objectified Nature) on the other. Marxism and socialist humanism reproduced this error in ways that have undermined the socialist vision of universal emancipation, misconstrued the nature of the subject, and overlooked the significance of human domination of other animals. The author advocates a new approach, what he calls metahumanism , to affirm a "two-sided" freedom in which the liberation of other animals from human oppression, and the emancipation of ourselves as animals—that is, the restoration of the sensual dimension of existence, free sexual expression, and valorization of the labor and love of the body—would become central features of a new movement for civil and cultural reform.     

2 Discourse Ethics, Democracy, and International Law: Toward a Globalization of Practical Reason

A bstract .   This paper deals with the foundational "architectonics" (Kantian) at the ground of the internal relation between the three concepts raised in the title. First, I provide a short introduction into the ultimate foundation of practical philosophy by the transcendental-pragmatic conception of discourse ethics . Then, I discuss the foundational relation between discourse ethics , positive law , and democracy as a constitutional state of law . Finally, I explore the foundational relation between human rights as part of universal law, the democratic state of law, and international law or jus gentium . By taking issue with Kant, Habermas, and Rawls, I try to show that a rational foundation of ethics, as well as a rational approach to the traditional problems of international law, is only possible through a critical transformation of Kant's approach via a transcendental-pragmatic conception of discourse ethics.     

4 Human Rights, Global Justice, and Disaggregated States: John Rawls, Onora O'Neill, and Anne-Marie Slaughter

A bstract .   Human rights are urgently important rights that all individual persons may validly claim and that all governments are obligated to respect. According to some philosophers, no government can plausibly claim legitimate authority unless its legal and political system ascribes such rights, and no society can plausibly claim to be just unless it has a legitimate government. John Rawls presents his own version of this conception in the context of his account of the moral basis of a just global system of public law, which he calls the Law of Peoples. According to some of his critics, including Onora O'Neill, not only is the Law of Peoples statist, but also it relies on a false view of the state. O'Neill has developed a new conception of an ideally just global order in which states have fewer, and corporations more, powers and obligations to secure human rights, in contrast to Rawls's conception. Her conception is consistent with Anne-Marie Slaughter's account of the transformation of state sovereignty due to globalization. However, contrary to initial appearances, it is not the case that O'Neill's and Slaughter's views taken together require significant modification of Rawls's conception of human rights. There is no fundamental conflict between Rawls's conception of human rights and Slaughter's account of state transformation. And O'Neill's criticisms of Rawls's view are unwarranted.     

3 Rethinking Global Justice from the Perspective of All Living Nature and What Difference it Makes

A bstract .   I begin this chapter with an account of what is deserved in human ethics, an ethics that assumes without argument that only humans, or rational agents, count morally. I then take up the question of whether nonhuman living beings are also deserving, and I answer it in the affirmative. Having established that all individual living beings, as well as ecosystems, are deserving, I go on to establish what it is that they deserve and then compare the requirements of global justice when only humans are taken into account with the requirements of global justice when all living beings are taken into account. I argue that the more adequate global justice that takes into account all living beings imposes some additional obligations on us that are absent from a less defensible human-centered global justice, but not as many as one might initially think.     

8. The Grounding of Forgiveness: Martha Nussbaum on Compassion and Mercy

Violence came to define the twentieth century. We live in fear that an even more extreme violence will characterize the twenty‐first century. The city of Hiroshima was the victim of the greatest single stroke of violence in the history of humanity. Yet it managed to arise, Phoenix‐like, as a city devoted to peace in the aftermath of nuclear horror. How was this extraordinary forgiveness possible? Is it possible that it was born out of a compassion for the victims of nuclear holocaust that extended beyond its immediate borders? In several works, but most notably in Upheavals of Thought, Martha Nussbaum has analyzed the conditions for the occurrence of compassion. She has also subjected her largely Aristotelian analysis of compassion to a Stoic‐inspired critique. This paper will reconstruct Nussbaum's analysis, critique, and defense of compassion. I will then extend Nussbaum's analysis to argue how a forgiveness rooted in compassion, rather than mercy, might be possible. The city of Hiroshima's dedication to worldwide peace in the aftermath of nuclear horror is used to illustrate a compassion‐based forgiveness.     

11. Toward Lasting Peace: Kant on Law, Public Reason, and Culture

Kant helps us understand the conditions for peace by reminding us that lasting peace requires both cosmopolitan legal reform and individual moral improvement, including resistance to egoism and the cultivation of cosmopolitan attitudes. The duty to pursue peace includes the duty to promote the rule of domestic and international law and work against its unilateral subversion. The juridical cosmopolitanism of a worldwide league of free peoples enables resistance to the dangers posed by authoritarian regimes and their dangerous willingness to manipulate their subjects and ignore international law. Constraining egoism enables people to overcome the tyranny of their desires and cultivates a sense of affiliation with the larger community of humanity in general, providing the moral foundation needed to support a cosmopolitan legal order. Moral development to a great extent is fostered through the arts and humanities, and a robust cultural life therefore ought to play a central role in the pursuit of global peace.     

2. The Democratic Peace Myth: From Hiroshima to Baghdad

This paper examines the ideal of the democratic peace and the recent misuse of this ideal in the war on terrorism. It argues against the idea that aggressive military force can be employed to bring about the ideal of the democratic peace. By looking at John Stuart Mill's utilitarian justification of benevolent despotism for barbarians, it examines how idealism can lead to a defense of aggressive intervention. And it considers how idealistic zeal can lead to violations of just war principles, as in the case of Hiroshima. It concludes by arguing that Kant's deontological approach is better. Kant provides us with a reason to hope that as democracy spreads, peace will spread as well. But Kant also prohibits us from using force to actualize this ideal.     

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5. The Project of Reconciliation and the Road to Redemption: Hegel's Social Philosophy and Nietzsche's Critique

Arthur Schopenhauer once observed: A Philosophy in between the pages of which one does not hear the tears, the weeping and gnashing of teeth and the terrible din of mutual universal murder is no [genuine] philosophy. ¹ Certainly, the unforgettable events of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, which bear the names Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Rwanda, and Darfur, pose a challenge for philosophical thinking to prove itself equal to what emerges from these horrific events. To that end, my paper looks back to the philosophies of G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche—in particular to their vision of a social reconciliation and cultural redemption—as a source of inspiration in our efforts to meet the challenges posed for a philosophy of the future by the global scale of violence, human suffering, and alienation. In what follows, I first offer a comparative analysis of Hegel's project of reconciliation with Nietzsche's project of redemption. I then consider whether or not either philosopher can provide us with a coherent and attractive ethical/sociopolitical alternative for our postmodern world—a world still characterized by global violence, injustice, genocide, ecological degradation, and the prospect of nuclear annihilation.