Abstract
Valuable though the insights contained in the transcommunal approaches that we have examined may be, they represent only the beginnings of full-scale theories of constitutive justice. The interdependence model, the eudaemonist-recognition model, the pragmatic-democratic model, and the deconstructionist model all present promising trajectories for developing constructive, systematic frameworks for evaluating prospective rationales for moral and political boundaries around communities of justice, even as they identify problems and lacunae that such frameworks need to address.
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Notes
I discuss the notion of reflective equilibrium below in Chapter 7. On the notion of an overlapping consensus, see John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 32–38.
On “fit” as an interpretive concept and on the relation between law and the politics of integrity, see Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
Although they do not quite effectively thematize the problem of constitutive justice as I have developed it, two valuable recent studies in the comparative ethics of boundaries do give a sense of the range that such theories might take. See David Miller and Sohail H. Hashmi, eds, Boundaries and Justice: Diverse Ethical Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001);
Allen Buchanan and Margaret Moore, eds, States, Nations, and Borders: The Ethics of Making Boundaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
William A. Barbieri Jr., Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration and Group Rights in Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
I recognize that this statement might be countered by perspectives, internal to some religious communities, that peoples are shaped by divine fiat or other nonhuman forms of action, such that one might argue, for example, that the answer to the question “Who is a Jew?” can be resolved only with respect to sacred sources of authority. But even such a question admits of hermeneutical dimensions: scripture must be interpreted and applied, with an ineliminable component of human practical reasoning involved. Historically and sociologically, religions are subject to many of the same power-political, structural, and discursive processes of formation as other large-scale social groups: see, for example, Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003);
Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005). In the case of Judaism, an additional legal-political dimension of agency is introduced through the link binding Israeli citizenship to the Jewish people.
Cf. Marion Smiley, Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community: Power and Accountability from a Pragmatic Point of View (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), esp. pp. 179–224.
See Christopher List and Philip Pettit, Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
See Hannah Arendt, “Collective Responsibility,” in James Bernhauer, ed., Amor Mundi (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 43–50.
A useful overview is Larry May, The Morality of Groups: Collective Responsibility, Group-Based Harms, and Corporate Rights (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987).
See also Carol Rovane, The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Durkheim developed this conception in several works, beginning with The Division of Labor in Society (1893). See also John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995);
Margaret Gilbert, On Social Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
R.G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan: Or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1942), pp. 148–60.
Raimo Tuomela, The Philosophy of Sociality: The Shared Point of View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, Raymond Mayer, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), is an excellent introduction into this field.
Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987). Her conclusion is that “[f]or better or worse, individuals really do share their thoughts and they do to some extent harmonize their preferences, and they have no other way to make the big decisions except within the scope of institutions they build” (p. 128).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith, trans. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), esp. pp. 387–407.
On this point, see Larry May, Genocide: A Normative Account (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
See Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
See Timothy Longman, “Identity Cards, Ethnic Self-Perception, and Genocide in Rwanda,” in Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds, Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 345–58.
On the latter connection, see James Jay Carney, Rwanda Before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Robin Lovin and Frank Reynolds, Cosmogony and Ethical Order: New Studies in Comparative Ethics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985);
Nancey Murphy and George Ellis, On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1996);
Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18.1 (August 1991): 1–21.
See, e.g., Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992);
Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990);
Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988).
See Stanley Hauerwas, “The Self as Story: Religion and Morality from the Agent’s Perspective,” Journal of Religious Ethics 1.1 (1973): 73–85; and Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).
Margaret R. Somers, “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach,” Theory and Society 23 (1994): 605–49.
Ricoeur describes the “historiographical operation” as the means by which historians participate in a “circle of interpretation” through which they reassess and narrate the story embodied in the “collective memory” of a group. See his Memory, History, Forgetting, Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, trans. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004). On the manner in which historical sciences are complemented by literary narratives and other modes such as film and architecture, see Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990);
Stefan Berger et al., Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media, and the Arts (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 19.
Charles Tilly, Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties (London: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), p. 134.
See also Sarah Green, “A Sense of Border: The Story So Far,” in The Blackwell Companion to Border Studies, Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, eds (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 573–92.
See, e.g., Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, The Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Citizenship in Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
Linda Bosniak, The Alien and the Citizen: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
On the latter, see Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 416.
On the relation between nation and people in modern politics, see Bernard Yack, “Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism,” Political Theory 29.4 (2001): 517–36.
Charles Tilly, “Social Boundary Mechanisms,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34.2 (2004): 211–36.
On the latter history, see, e.g., Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
For a quite nuanced overview, see Harrison C. White, Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Miller and Hashmi, Boundaries and Justice, pp. 95, 103, 106, 210. Religions’ self-definitions can clash with those of the state. On the impact of government policies on religious boundaries in multicultural societies such as Canada and Israel, see Rene Provost, ed., Mapping the Legal Boundaries of Belonging: Religion and Multiculturalism from Israel to Canada (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978);
Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
See Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 195–226.
See, for example, Florin Curta, ed., Borders, Boundaries and Ethnogenesis: Frontiers in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Brepols Publishers, 2006).
Jan and Aleida Assmann, Schrift und Gedächtnis: Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation. (München: Fink, 1987);
Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt, eds, Memory and Political Change (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
For a study that analyzes how the global state system and international relations interact with nation-building, see Harris Mylonas, The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Nancy Fraser, “Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World,” New Left Review 36 (2005): 1–19;
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 147–77.
On this point, see R.E. Ewin, “On Justice and Injustice,” Mind 79. 314 (1970): 200–216;
Eric Heinze, The Concept of Injustice (London: Routledge, 2013).
claine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Philip Alston, “Conjuring Up New Human Rights: A Proposal for Quality Control,” American Journal of International Law 78 (1984): 607–621.
Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, trans. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Iris Marion Young, “Five Faces of Oppression,” in Lisa Heldke and Peg O’Connor, eds, Oppression, Privilege, and Resistance (Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 2004).
D.D. Raphael, Concepts of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 243.
Elizabeth Wolgast, The Grammar of Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). For an argument that “the concept of injustice wears the trousers, so that any satisfactory account of justice must be a negative account,” see Ewin, “On Justice and Injustice,” p. 202.
Cf. Deborah Fitzmaurice, “Justice, Practical Reason and Boundaries,” in Percy B. Lehning and Albert Weale, eds, Citizens, Democracy, and Justice in the New Europe (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 15–33.
See also the proposal from Bas Schotel, On the Right of Exclusion: Law, Ethics, and Immigration Policy (London: Routledge, 2011).
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Barbieri, W.A. (2015). Constituents of a Theory. In: Constitutive Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263254_7
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