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What should political actors and state institutions be permitted, encouraged, required, or forbidden to do in the attempt to shape people’s national identities? This is the central question in the ethics of nation-building, and has been vastly understudied in recent normative political theories of nationalism. This chapter answers this question by discussing more than a dozen components of an individual’s national identity. It considers the many legitimate and illegitimate ways in which political actors and the state can shape or alter these components, and the content of the identity itself. It also considers the soundness and relevance of the seemly age-old distinction between so-called ethnic and civic national identities.

This chapter incorporates arguments and observations from earlier chapters into a case for a version of the equal shares approach of equal per capita national emissions allowances, contrasting this approach with the equal burdens model in which costs of mitigation and adaptation are equally assigned. A case is made against several versions of the equal burdens approach (including the Kyoto Protocol and the Bush administration's emissions intensity proposal) as being unjust, and a modified equal shares approach is defended against several anticipated objections. The case is made for instantiating the equal basic access to the earth's atmospheric services as a moral and legal environmental right, drawing upon Shue's distinction between basic and non-basic rights, and comparing this right with the claimed right to develop. Finally, it makes the case for procedural fairness in global climate policy development, urging recognition of this democratic norm for both principled and practical reasons.

This chapter examines the global minimum that people everywhere can claim as a matter of justice, and proposes that this should be understood as respect and protection for their basic human rights. When basic rights are threatened or violated, this triggers a responsibility on the part of outsiders to come to the aid of those whose rights are imperilled. The problem is to find a way of specifying the rights in question. There are two main desiderata. On the one hand, the grounding we give for basic human rights must explain their moral urgency, in particular why rights-violations can impose relatively demanding obligations on third parties who are not themselves responsible for the violations. On the other hand, the justification we present should have universal reach — it should appeal to reasons that everyone has reason to accept, regardless of their personal religious commitments or cultural values. It is argued that human rights can meet these desiderata, but only if the list of rights is kept fairly short and basic. More ambitious lists run the risk both of losing their moral urgency and of becoming unjustifiable except on partisan grounds.

Employs historical analysis and philosophical reasoning to argue that sovereignty is inherently limited. The writings of classical theorists such as Grotius and Vattel indicate that aspirations to sovereignty and non-intervention have always been tempered by considerations above and beyond the state. Philosophically, it must be remembered that sovereignty is a right, and the concept of a right makes no sense in the absence of a corresponding duty. The duties that are constitutive of the rights of sovereignty constrain the behaviour of every sovereign belonging to international society. Two conclusions follow. First, there are limits on how states may treat their own citizens within their own territory. Second, other states face specific limits concerning the ill-treatment of residents within the territory of other states that they are free to ignore. In particular, genocide and massive violations of human rights are a matter of concern for all states in contemporary international society.

This chapter considers the importance of an intervener's effectiveness. It outlines and defends the ‘Moderate Instrumentalist Approach’. This holds that an intervener's effectiveness is the primary determinant of its legitimacy. More specifically, it distinguishes between three types of effectiveness—internal effectiveness, global external effectiveness, and local external effectiveness—and goes on to argue that effectiveness is a necessary condition of an intervener's legitimacy. The second part of this chapter fleshes out the Moderate Instrumentalist Approach in more detail. It considers what sort of timescale and comparison should be used to measure an agent's effectiveness (and, consequently, considers the importance of intervention being the last resort), and delineates the qualities that an intervener needs to possess in order to be effective. The end of the chapter considers two alternative approaches. The first, the ‘Non‐instrumentalist Approach’, holds that an intervener's effectiveness is of little moral concern. The second approach gives exclusive weight to an intervener's effectiveness—the ‘Extreme Instrumentalist Approach’.

Describes the process of adopting a new constitution in post‐communist Lithuania. The reasoning behind the quick adoption of a constitution was the urgent need to create links to Western constitutional traditions, to legitimize the country's independence from the USSR, and to distinguish Lithuania from other Soviet satellite states. The Constitution was intended to contribute to the perception of Lithuania as an independent state in the international community, in the hope of securing itself from possible re‐annexation to the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the chapter points out that despite its quick adoption, the constitution includes important safeguards for democracy, such as the balance of powers and basic rights.

This chapter examines the jurisprudential and doctrinal developments in support of the existence of a general principle of international law to respect and observe human rights in the main. It then advances the premise that the basic rights of the human person of which this principle consists, today, must include socio-economic rights. It argues that the status of a universal principle to respect and observe human rights has been elevated to a level where it legally binds all states. Since the adoption of the UN Charter and the subsequent strengthening of a common commitment to human rights, an appreciation that there are fundamental rules regarding respect of the human person, and thus the protection of human rights has entered into the body of customary international law.

This chapter discusses how to move from a general concern with the justification of coercion to particular substantive principles of justice. It argues that a social system is just only so long as it respects the right to freedom of those subject to it, namely their right to the social conditions necessary to lead autonomous lives. For this to be the case, the distribution of freedom engendered by the system has to be justifiable in the eyes of all those who are subject to it. Focusing on domestic societies in particular, the chapter concludes that a multiplicity of principles of economic justice might instantiate mutually justifiable distributions of freedom, not all of which are egalitarian in form. In other words, contrary to most contemporary liberal theorists’ arguments on the view defended in this chapter, economic equality is not a fundamental, non-negotiable demand of justice.

Hohfeld's analysis of legal relations shows that any protection of freedom by means of liberties and claims is also the restriction of freedom by means of no-rights and duties. Every legal vindication of freedom is at the same time a restriction of freedom. Freedom cannot, thus, be maximised by means of any combination of legal relations. The very idea of maximum freedom is therefore self-defeating. A more nuanced analysis must distinguish between the value of certain freedoms and the qualities and burdens of restrictions. We need to look at the qualities of actions involved. Rawls' argument for the basic rights as derivative of the ‘two moral powers’ offers a solid basis for a will theory that respects the constraints of public reason. Equal liberty means a coherent scheme of rights that is equally secured to all.

This chapter discusses the general structure of a moral right, as well as basic rights. It considers why people have a basic right to physical security—a right that is basic not to be subjected to murder, torture, mayhem, rape, or assault. The main reason for discussing security rights was to make explicit the basic assumptions that support the usual judgment that security rights are basic rights. The chapter then assesses whether matters other than physical security should also be basic rights. It will emerge that subsistence, or minimal economic security, can also be shown to be as well justified for treatment as a basic right as physical security is. Minimal economic security, or subsistence, refer to unpolluted air, unpolluted water, adequate food, adequate clothing, adequate shelter, and minimal preventive public health care.

Alongside the increasingly difficult and complex task of proving cartel activity and involvement for legal purposes there developed a responsive practice on the part of companies, seeking to the challenge the exercise of powers, decision-making, and the imposition of sanctions on the part of the European Commission. Large and well-resourced companies mounted appeals, invoking the basic rights protection accorded to individuals under the criminal law process at the national level. This chapter explores the development of judicial review of Commission cartel decisions carried out by the European Court of Justice and later the Court of First Instance (now the General Court), and the judicial response to basic rights argumentation in this context, as companies challenged the legality of investigations, formal decision-making, and the imposition of fines. The discussion touches upon underlying constitutional issues, such as the separation of powers in the context of EU institutions, and the level of basic rights protection appropriate for corporate actors.

This chapter evaluates the right conventionally most emphatically endorsed in North Atlantic theory: rights to liberties. Some liberties merit attention for many reasons, not the least of which is a strange convergence between supposed “friends” of liberty in the North Atlantic and rulers in the poorer countries who would share the emphasis on the priority of subsistence rights. Both groups have converged upon the “trade-off” thesis: subsistence can probably be enjoyed in poor countries only by means of “trade-offs” with liberties. This thesis might also be called the theory of reluctantly repressive development. The chapter shows that although the advocates of repressive development profess a strong commitment to the provision of subsistence, those theories of repressive development must be sharply distinguished from the theory of basic rights presented in this book. One of the several major differences is the place assigned here to at least some liberties, and the chapter indicates how fundamentally the same argument that establishes security rights and subsistence rights as basic rights also justifies the acknowledgement of at least certain political liberties and certain freedom of movement as equally basic. The basic liberties will turn out to include the liberty of participation.

This chapter examines some of the reasons why it sometimes appears that although people have basic security rights, the right, if any, to even the physical necessities of existence like minimal health care, food, clothing, shelter, unpolluted water, and unpolluted air is somehow less urgent or less basic. Frequently it is asserted or assumed that a highly significant difference between rights to physical security and rights to subsistence is that they are respectively “negative” rights and “positive” rights. The chapter offers some examples that clearly illustrate that the honoring of subsistence rights sometimes involves action no more positive than the honoring of security rights does. It also presents two theses about economic deprivation. The chapter then suggests that with every basic right, there are three types of correlative duties: duties to avoid depriving; duties to protect from deprivation; and duties to aid the deprived.

This chapter details how the allocation of duties among bearers depends upon the specification of which duties need to be performed, and hence allocated. Unfortunately, which duties can reasonable be specified also depends upon which allocations of duties among bearers are generally reasonable and, most specifically, fair. The depth of the difficulty here emerges from the contrast between the institutional and the interactional perspectives. This difficulty has two elements. First, one can reason, as it were, from either end of the problem. On the one hand, one can take an institutional perspective on the honoring of rights by asking: what institutions would need to be functioning effectively in order for people generally to have secure access to what they have rights to? On the other hand, one can ask: which allocations of right-grounded duties would be fair to individual duty-bearers? The second element of the difficulty, however, is that while these reciprocal requirements are not contradictory, there unfortunately is also no guarantee that they can both be satisfied simultaneously in fact. The chapter then recommends an institutional turn in thinking about human rights.

This brief chapter recapitulates some important points and suggests that the book’s overall argument should not be regarded as inimical to democratic values and practices. Although the book contends that the franchise is not a basic right, it also claims that a number of electoral exclusions that are normally considered to be acceptable under universal suffrage are actually hard to justify: those involving felons, minors, the mentally impaired, and noncitizen residents. Failing to examine our ordinary ideas about the right to vote comes at the price, not only of holding unjustified beliefs, but also of ignoring not-so-obvious instances of unjustified exclusions.

This chapter addresses the idea that the fulfillment of subsistence rights would probably place inordinate, if not unlimited, burdens on everyone except the poorest. It would not be possible, and it is not necessary in order to fulfill subsistence rights, to transfer so much wealth and income from the currently affluent to the currently deprived that today's affluent will be reduced to a level only marginally better than subsistence. Nevertheless, since no calculation of the costs of fulfilling subsistence rights universally can be precise, one cannot rule out the possibility that those with the duties to aid the deprived will suffer some decline in the quality of their lives as a result of making the required transfers. In general, there is no reason why the performance of duties, especially duties correlative to basic rights, should cost the bearers of the duties nothing. But, as the broader population objection complains, it is possible for the costs to be unreasonably high.

This chapter addresses the greatest threat to basic rights in the twenty-first century: uncontrolled climate change. Climate change is a threat not only to widely acknowledged basic rights but also to all other rights, the protection of which depends on fulfillment of basic rights. The basic right to subsistence is obviously threatened by the global energy regime of fossil fuels. The most dangerous effects for humans of the combustion of fossil fuels come indirectly by way of the dynamics of rapid climate change and the effects of climate change on the fundamental interests that basic rights are intended to safeguard—on none more than on the food at the heart of subsistence. The chapter then highlights the danger that economic and political agreements made by others will make it impossible for ordinary people to provide such elements of subsistence for themselves by trapping them inside social structures that conflict with their fundamental interests. One might say that climate change is a threat that humanity is imposing upon itself.