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Armstrong on Self-Determination & Moral Arbitrariness

By Lawrence Solum

Chris Armstrong (University of Southampton - Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences) has posted National Self-Determination, Global Equality and Moral Arbitrariness (Journal of Political Philosophy, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Within the debate over global distributive justice, the most challenging proposals - those forwarded by global egalitarians - have attracted the objection that their ideals are incompatible with recognising the legitimate self-determination of national communities. In response, we might say that surely global egalitarians can accord some value to the ideal of self-determination, and still be global egalitarians. There must be a range of ways in which the two values could be traded off against each other. I pursue a stronger response in this paper by revealing the many ways in which global egalitarians can make space for self-determination without trading it off against equality.

Clearing room for national self-determination - assuming for the purposes of this paper that this is a worthy objective - will not be entirely straightforward for global egalitarians, though. I argue later on that global egalitarians need to be more circumspect about their argument that inequalities which track national membership should be condemned as ?morally arbitrary? in nature. Though this objection from moral arbitrariness supplies what can be considered the founding intuition of global egalitarianism, those who would advance it have not been clear about just when - and why - nationality-tracking inequalities should be rejected, and a lack of clarity about this stands in the way of the accommodation I am suggesting might be made.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on July 17, 2009 (boomark / email).