Thomas J. Donahue

A prominent conception of terrorism, held by Igor Primoratz, Stephen Nathanson, C. A. J. Coady, Uwe Steinhoff, and Jeff McMahan, claims that it (i) is gravely and distinctively wrong, compared to other forms of violence; and (ii) necessarily harms those who are not responsible for, or morally innocent of, the terrorists’ grievance. Moreover, the conception holds that these two views preserve and explain the conventional moral judgment that terrorism is almost always wrong. This paper challenges that against-moral-innocents (AMI) conception. I argue that AMI, unlike other terrorism-conceptions, incentivizes lay non-philosophers adhering to it to see all terrorists as radically evil agents who pose an existential threat. But if so, then those layfolk will have reasons, provided by the AMI conception, for engaging in morally regrettable deliberation about how to respond to terrorism. That, the paper argues, provides a reason for doubting such conceptions. In making that argument, the paper analyzes the nature of conventional-morality-capturing conceptions like AMI, distinguishes AMI from other terrorism-conceptions, examines four prima facie wrongs which AMI-viewed terrorism will be seen to do, compares these to the fewer prima facie wrongs which other terrorism-conceptions take terrorism to do, and considers how lay people’s seeing AMI-viewed terrorism as radically evil figured in the response to the recent Boston Marathon bombings and in the War on Terror.

A penultimate version is available for download. Please cite the published version, available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phil.12021/abstract

Anthropocentrism holds that the only things valuable in themselves are: human beings, their desires and needs, and the satisfaction of those. In turn, Gaia theory holds that the Earth and all creatures on it constitute something akin to a vast living being. Many layfolk maintain that Gaia theory implies the falsity of anthropocentrism, and thus puts the kibosh on that doctrine. But philosophical writers deny this implication. This paper therefore argues for what we may call “the Kibosh Thesis”—that Gaia theory, when correctly understood, does indeed put the kibosh on anthropocentrism. It defends this thesis by appealing to “the Part-Whole Thesis”—that no parts of a living being which do not constitute the whole being can have as much intrinsic value as the being itself has. Since the evidence supporting Gaia theory is mounting, this thesis appears to provide a fairly strong argument against anthropocentrism. In arguing for this position, I show why anthropocentrism is a plausible doctrine, specify Gaia theory’s main claims, meet the main philosophical objections to the Kibosh Thesis, and develop the argument from the Part-Whole Thesis.

In How Terrorism Is Wrong (Oxford UP, 2008), Virginia Held argues that terrorism is not necessarily morally unjustifiable (pp. 77-81, 88-89). Call this “the Non-necessity Thesis.” Held has a powerful and illuminating argument to this thesis. The argument asserts what we may call “the Violations Distribution Principle” (VDP): If we must have rights violations, then a more equitable distribution of such violations is better than a less equitable; from this principle, Held then argues that terrorism may sometimes be less unjustifiable than accepting continued rights violations. Among Held’s motivations for arguing the Non-necessity thesis is that terrorism may sometimes be the only means the weak and oppressed have to effectively combat the systematized violation of their rights.

In this critical response, I accept the VDP, as well as Held’s motivation for urging the Non-necessity thesis. But I shall nevertheless try to refute that thesis. Terrorism, I shall argue, is always wrong; but it sometimes should be excused and partly forgiven. Rather than ask whether terrorism is always wrong or sometimes justified, I shall argue that we do better to ask what kind of wrong a particular terrorist act or campaign is. Moral wrongs, I shall argue, can be divided into four types: delicts, offenses, iniquities, and enormities; a delict being the least grave, an enormity the most. Moreover, offenses, inquities, and enormities are injustices, while a delict is not. A terrorist act simpliciter is an offense, a terrorist campaign an iniquity. But terrorist acts can, if they aim to end a systematized and massive violation of human rights, and if they are the only feasible means of taking the society to a less inequitable distribution of rights-violations, be excused to the status of delicts, and, mutatis mutandis, terrorist campaigns to the status of offenses. Hence terrorism is always wrong, but need not be unjust.

It is often said that we live in global systems of injustice. But if so, what are they, and what are their moral consequences? This book offers a theory of global injustice—Unfreedom for All. The theory explores and defends the old adage that “No one is free while others are oppressed” by putting five hotly-debated questions about global injustice: Why and when ought we to relieve injustices done to distant others?  Do we in fact live under global systems of injustice? What counts as systematic injustice or oppression? Who if anyone is made unfree by systematic injustice or oppression, and how? What harms do such injustices do? Unfreedom for All shows that the “No one is free” creed either answers or results from each of the five questions. It defends that creed by considering how systematic injustices—like global severe poverty, the oppression of women, or racial oppression—are perpetuated. The mechanics of such injustices, the book argues, reveal a surprising fact. Where your society does such an injustice, that society systematically suppresses anyone’s resistance to the injustice—including yours. But that makes its rule authoritarian, so you too are subject to arbitrary power and lack of the rule of law. Hence you too are unfree. This holds just as true of global systematic injustices occurring in global society.

Thus does Unfreedom for All justify and explain the "No one is free" doctrine. That creed is one of the few things shared by the global left today. Yet, as the left’s opponents observe, the creed is hardly self-evident, and the best-known defenses of it rely on an exquisite and rarefied conception of freedom. For these defenses make the unfreedom in question that described by Hegel or Mikhail Bakunin, by which we are unfree until we are recognized as free and equal by everyone else, who must themselves be free and equal . But that is hardly the kind of unfreedom that most people deem a grave and urgent harm. It is the unfreedom of philosophers, not the unfreedom of common people. Unfreedom for All shows how systematic injustice imposes on everyone a harm that all people want to avoid: subjection to arbitrary power.

Unfreedom For All therefore challenges prominent theories of the grounds of our duties to distant victims of injustice.  Such theories say that our main reason for relieving injustice is a moral duty to aid or protect, or a duty not to uphold unjust institutions.  But this book argues that universal unfreedom should be our main reason for challenging systematic injustices. For we have only one real means of creating the robust, stable solidarity needed to eventually abolish systematic injustice: confronting Unfreedom for All.

It is often said that we live in global systems of injustice. But if so, what are they, and what are their moral consequences? This book offers a theory of global injustice—Unfreedom for All. The theory explores and defends the old adage that “No one is free while others are oppressed” by putting five hotly-debated questions about global injustice: Why and when ought we to relieve injustices done to distant others?  Do we in fact live under global systems of injustice? What counts as systematic injustice or oppression? Who if anyone is made unfree by systematic injustice or oppression, and how? What harms do such injustices do? Unfreedom for All shows that the “No one is free” creed either answers or results from each of the five questions. It defends that creed by considering how systematic injustices—like global severe poverty, the oppression of women, or racial oppression—are perpetuated. The mechanics of such injustices, the book argues, reveal a surprising fact. Where your society does such an injustice, that society systematically suppresses anyone’s resistance to the injustice—including yours. But that makes its rule authoritarian, so you too are subject to arbitrary power and lack of the rule of law. Hence you too are unfree. This holds just as true of global systematic injustices occurring in global society.

Thus does Unfreedom for All justify and explain the "No one is free" doctrine. That creed is one of the few things shared by the global left today. Yet, as the left’s opponents observe, the creed is hardly self-evident, and the best-known defenses of it rely on an exquisite and rarefied conception of freedom. For these defenses make the unfreedom in question that described by Hegel or Mikhail Bakunin, by which we are unfree until we are recognized as free and equal by everyone else, who must themselves be free and equal . But that is hardly the kind of unfreedom that most people deem a grave and urgent harm. It is the unfreedom of philosophers, not the unfreedom of common people. Unfreedom for All shows how systematic injustice imposes on everyone a harm that all people want to avoid: subjection to arbitrary power.

Unfreedom For All therefore challenges prominent theories of the grounds of our duties to distant victims of injustice.  Such theories say that our main reason for relieving injustice is a moral duty to aid or protect, or a duty not to uphold unjust institutions.  But this book argues that universal unfreedom should be our main reason for challenging systematic injustices. For we have only one real means of creating the robust, stable solidarity needed to eventually abolish systematic injustice: confronting Unfreedom for All.

Unfreedom for All recommends a perspective on justice and injustice that makes the careful diagnosis of injustices central to understanding what to do about them. Yet present-day political theory, and especially the Rawls-influenced tradition within it, treats the diagnosis of injustice as only a marginal task for political theory. In this it differs from past political theory, which thought the diagnosis of injustice one of its central tasks.

Hence one of the main aims of Unfreedom for All is to challenge the marginal status of diagnosis within present political theory. This chapter therefore aims to describe, explain, and undermine the marginal role that the diagnosis of oppression has come to play within political theory. As we shall see, things were not always thus: until the 1970s, such diagnostics were considered a central part of political theory. Part 1 therefore describes the marginal role that such diagnostics play within present political theory, compares it to the role played by such diagnostics in political theory prior to the 1970s, attributes political theory’s flight from diagnosis to the rise to paramount status in political theory of the Rawls-influenced tradition, explains why that tradition’s mainstream considers the diagnosis of injustice a marginal task of political theory, and then tries to show why, by its own lights, that tradition has good reason to make such diagnostics once again a central task of political theory. The reason is that the tradition itself declares that what it considers a central part of political theory, “non-ideal theory,” requires the careful diagnosis of injustice. And yet when the tradition’s mainstream members engage in non-ideal theory, they fail to offer such diagnoses.  Part 2 then further redresses the marginal status of such diagnostics by describing the leading theories of systematic injustice and the questions they put. These theories constitute the closest thing we have to a nosology and pathology of systematic injustice, nosology being the classification of diseases, and pathology being the study of disease in general. Given that careful diagnosis requires familiarity with nosology and pathology, placing the careful diagnosis of injustice back at the center of political theory requires that we make political theorists familiar with nosology and pathology.

This chapter evaluates the rival answers to the five questions put by this book: When do we have a responsibility to challenge injustices done to distant others?  What counts as systematic injustice or oppression? Do we live under global systems of injustice? Who if anyone is made unfree by systematic injustice or oppression, and how? What harm do such injustices do? It evaluates the answers given by the view received among the world’s liberal democratic elites, a view propounded by the New York Times and by John Rawls. That view was sketched in the Introduction to this book. The chapter also evaluates answers given by leading academic theories of these questions, and by the theory owing to G. W. F. Hegel and Frederick Douglass’s theory of recognition, which says that under oppression, both the oppressed and the oppressor are unfree.

The chapter therefore scrutinizes the received view’s conception of the nature of oppression, and its theory that there are no global social injustices. It finds both wanting. It then evaluates the received view’s theory of the grounds of our responsibilities for challenging injustice. It shows that the mainstream liberalism underlying the received view makes a bold and ingenious proposal about the responsibilities that individuals have as members of groups, a proposal that breaks fundamentally with the picture of groups offered by Hobbesian liberalism or the republican tradition. Ironically, mainstream liberalism offers a theory of the responsibilities of members that sets groups free—rather than Leviathans composed of atomistic individuals jealous of their liberties, they are Gullivers released from the Lilliputians’ bonds. The chapter argues that this underlying theory leads the received view to its multi-part account of the responsibilities to challenge injustice, and then argues against this account that it results in a shortfall of responsible agents. The chapter then considers rival theories of the responsibility to challenge injustice. It divides these into three families, altruistic theories like that proposed by Peter Singer or Martha Nussbaum, which ground the responsibility in an impartial duty owed equally to all human beings; potential-harm theories like that proposed by Thomas Pogge, Iris Marion Young, or Robert Goodin, which ground the responsibility in the harm that the agent might do to the victim of the injustice; and the Hegel-Douglass theory of freedom as recognition, which grounds the responsibility in the claim that neither the oppressed nor the oppressor can enjoy free personhood until the oppression is ended. The chapter challenges all these theories, because they do not identify a ground that could sufficiently motivate enough agents to truly remedy the injustice. The chapter then turns to the question, “Who, if anyone, is unfree under oppression?” It considers and challenges the answers given by the received view and the Hegel-Douglass theory. The chapter ends by considering the received view and four rival theories of the ultimate harm done by oppression. This is the final moral fallout of the oppression as a total system. It argues that none of the five theories—the received view, the theory that oppression’s ultimate harm is that it depersonizes its victims, the theory that it alienates the victims from themselves, the Hegel-Douglass theory that it depersonizes both oppressor and oppressed, and Marilyn Frye’s theory that it unjustly constrains the victims from living up to their abilities. The chapter challenges all of these theories, on the grounds that they mistake the ultimate harm of an oppression for the focal or severest harm that it does to individuals. This of course is the harm that it does to individual victims. But the severest harm done is not the ultimate harm—the ultimate harm is the overall aggregate harm done to all of society.

Having identified these defects in the rival theories, the stage is set for presenting and defending my theory: Unfreedom for All. Chapter 3 turns to beginning that task.

What counts as systematic injustice or oppression? That is one of the five main questions put by this book. This chapter answers that question by defending the Structural Injustice Conception of oppression, which runs as follows.

Systematic injustice and oppression comes in two major forms: political subjugation (which is captured by the received liberal view of oppression, sketched in the Introduction) and structural injustice, which can be described as an institutional harm unjustly suffered by a group in a society or system of rule, in which the members of that group (i) have their collective political voice systematically marginalized in the politics of that society, (ii) are systematically subject to high degrees of economic exploitation or economic marginalization by other groups in that society, (iii) are exposed to systematic violence or predation within that society, and (iv) suffer from cultural and psychological degradation by failing to meet the society’s dominant norms. The members of the group suffer these harms as members of the group, and because they are members of it. Moreover, such manifold harms—structural injustices—can be done by another group in society, by the government, or by society itself: no group need benefit from the total harm. It can be done by global society. As such, oppression constitutes a particularly grave type of social harm: it is either an enormity or an iniquity. Finally, it is true that an injustice is social just in case it implicates all of society. But society can be implicated in injustices done to groups over whom it has no relation of claimed political authority. To implicate all of society, an injustice need only be one from which all those members of society who are not victims of the injustice gain some benefit.

This conception, the chapter argues, gives a better set of criteria for deciding on a claim of oppression than does the received view’s conception of oppression. The criteria offered by Structural Injustice are founded on a more realistic picture of the place and propensities of groups in political life. Moreover, Structural Injustice gives us a standard for assessing the relative gravity of oppressions compared to other injustices: what I call “the scale of wrong-doing.” By so doing, Structural Injustice aims to contribute to the project of John Rawls’s non-ideal theory, which we discussed in Chapter 1. It does this by presenting and defending assessments of the type and gravity of injustices, and so contributes to the first, neglected part of non-ideal theory: the diagnosis and assessment of injustice. To achieve these aims, the chapter presents the picture of groups in political life presupposed by Structural Injustice, distinguishes the Conception from leading conceptions of oppression and domination, presents the idea of the scale of wrong-doing, shows how it allows Structural Injustice to contribute to the diagnostic part of non-ideal theory, and defends the account of social injustice presented by the Conception.

One of the most hotly debated questions in our world is whether women in general are oppressed. This question, when it is raised in the world’s rich countries, like France, New Zealand, or the United States, ignites furious controversy. On the one hand, some maintain that women everywhere are the victims of global patriarchy, the rule by men in general over women in general, in which men—but not women—are expected to hold the power, the wealth, the authority, and the glory in society; and in which women—but not men—are expected to do the dirty work, to feed their families, to care for the young and the infirm, to divert and entertain men, and to provide them with sexual services. They note that on almost any dimension of power or status, the incident of being a woman makes a person worse-off on that dimension. The severely poor worldwide, for example, are disproportionately women. People forced into labor—slaves—are disproportionately women and girls. This, say the holders of this view, is patriarchy.

On the other hand, many maintain that women in the world’s rich societies have achieved equality with men—they have the vote; equal rights to work, education, and inheritance; no-fault divorce; cheap birth control; the right to hold the highest offices in society; criminal prohibitions on marital rape; and, often, constitutional guarantees of equality with men. On their view, which is sympathetic to the claimed-authority conception of oppression, it is women in the world’s poor and unfortunate societies who are truly oppressed, for they are denied equal rights to inherit or divorce, are excluded from high office, are prevented from attaining education, are kept to inferior roles by religious laws, and are considered by their culture to be fair game for domestic violence or public harassment. Hence to claim that all women everywhere are oppressed, and that we should combat such oppression wherever we find it, is to unfairly advantage the privileged and relatively liberated women living in the world’s rich societies.

What, then, should we make of this controversy? Are women in general oppressed, or are they not? To ask this question is to embark on the task of Part Two of this book, which is to argue that there exist systematic injustices with a global scope. This chapter will begin this task by asking whether women worldwide are the victims of a global oppression. The chapter answers this question by pointing out that the above debate between the universal-patriarchy view and the no-oppression-in-liberal-societies view is too crude. The debate assumes that if women are not oppressed by their own society, then they are not really oppressed. But this overlooks the possibility that global society, the set of institutions, practices, and structures with a global scope that has emerged and congealed since the beginning of hyper-globalization in 1990, might oppress women worldwide, without implying that all national societies also oppress all of their own women. This chapter urges us to take this possibility—the possibility of oppression being done by global society, without the necessary oppression of all of a society’s women by its own institutions—seriously. 

To see how, let us use the term “societal patriarchy” to mean a system in which the men in a society dominate, oppress and exploit its human females. Societal patriarchy, this chapter will argue, has been smashed in a good number of the world’s richest and most powerful societies. Societies like Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, France, or Canada, I shall argue, are no longer patriarchal. For at least half of women in those societies are not dominated, oppressed, and exploited by the society’s men. These we may call “liberated women.” The rest of the women in those societies—half or a substantial minority—are indeed dominated, oppressed, and exploited by men. We may call them “subjugated women.” This chapter will argue that the experience of subjugated women in societies like these does not represent that of women in general in those societies. For societal patriarchy in these societies has been smashed. These societies, which we may call “fractionally patriarchal,” do indeed do their subjugated women a systematic injustice: but that is not the same as doing a systematic injustice to all women in the society.

Now to say this is not to say that liberated women in fractionally patriarchal societies have achieved equality with men. Indeed, I shall argue that in these societies, all women are the victims of male superordinacy, a form of social injustice in which men unjustly have more advantages than women, and in which maleness is taken as the standard and the norm. But male superordinacy is not an oppression or systematic injustice, for as we saw in Part One, not all social injustices amount to oppression.

In the rest of the world, I shall argue, the case is quite different. In many of the world’s societies, the patriarchal part of society is larger than the post-patriarchal part. Sometimes this split tracks a division in the population into a liberated, substantial minority and a subjugated majority. Contemporary Mexico or Russia might be examples. Sometimes it tracks a division in which a large fraction of the institutions of patriarchy have been defeated, while another large portion have not. Contemporary South Korea or Japan might be examples. Societies with substantial parts patriarchal and non-patriarchal we may call “semi-patriarchal societies.” In them, patriarchy still awaits a thorough smashing. In yet other societies, societal patriarchy is in full force. Here, the vast majority of females are indeed dominated, oppressed, and exploited by the men in society. India and Saudi Arabia are probable examples of such fully patriarchal societies.

Thus we may divide the world’s societies into three: fractionally patriarchal, semi-patriarchal, and patriarchal. This threefold division has an interesting consequence, once we consider that it has arisen since 1989, the same period in which hyper-globalization occurred. For with the advent of hyper-globalization came the advent of a truly global society, in which a majority of the world’s people increasingly came to know of and be immediately influenced by events occurring on the other side of the planet, in which there arose an ever-proliferating set of institutions and practices with a global scope and global presence, and in which a large fraction became able to travel around the globe and experience cultures on the other side of the world. With global society’s emergence, there arises the question of how that society itself treats women. This chapter will argue that the world’s women, as a class, live under a structural injustice or oppression imposed upon them by global society. But at the same time, this does not mean that the world’s women are also oppressed by their own societies. Indeed, a growing number of societies—admittedly only a small fraction of the 200 or so now extant—do not oppress their women in general. What we are seeing, then, is the emergence of the oppression of women as a single global class, and—thanks in good part to feminists’ efforts to smash patriarchy—a decline in the oppression of the women of each of the world’s national states. Call this “the theory of global rise and national decline.” It is for this theory that this chapter argues.

If you would like to read the chapter, please e-mail me at tjdonahueAThaverford.edu for a copy.

Race is widely acknowledged as one of the great tragedies of the modern world. In its name have been committed the most monstrous crimes and stupendous folly, crimes and folly that have fundamentally shaped the world we live in. So much is widely agreed. Yet there is fierce disagreement on whether we should use the concept of race to diagnose and describe the injustices of the world we live in, or whether the crime and folly that seem inevitably associated with the concept of race mean that we should eschew the concept altogether, and avoid diagnosing injustice in racial terms.

This chapter addresses this question by continuing the task of Part Two of this book, “Analyzing Global Injustices.” It asks whether the racial aspects of the worldwide injustices we live under should be diagnosed as a global systematic injustice with a racial basis—in other words, as a distinct global systematic injustice, on all fours with those allegedly done by the global order to women, or to the global poor. To answer that question, the chapter begins by critically examining two leading responses to it. The first is given by the philosopher of race Charles W. Mills, who argues that there is indeed a global racial oppression wrought by the present global order: it is global white supremacy. Sections 1 and 2 critically examine that theory and its central concept of global white supremacy. The second response is given by the philosopher of global injustice Thomas Pogge, who argues that there is not a distinct global racial injustice, but rather that race and the racial concentration of disadvantage worldwide intensify and heighten the injustice done by the global order to the world’s deprived and disadvantaged. Pogge thus argues for the unity of global injustice: he is against the idea that there is a distinct global racial injustice, on all fours with other alleged global oppressions, like global gender injustice or the oppression of global poverty. Section 3 examines this theory of the unity of global injustice. Sections 4 and 5 then turn to presenting and defending my own theory, which holds that global white supremacy no longer exists, but that there is a global racial oppression being inflicted by the present world order: it is a systematic injustice done to those that world society considers racially dark: racially black, brown, red, or mestizo. This injustice I call “global dark oppression.” On my theory, while global white supremacy is still a useful concept, and while such supremacy has been central to the creation of the current global order, our current global racial order is not a global white supremacy. Global white supremacy, I shall argue, is dead, and it died sometime in the 2000s. The white racial group are no longer dominant over all other racial groups in the world. In particular, those considered racially yellow by global society—East Asians and their descendants—have finally managed to escape from the structures of white racial domination. Yellow people worldwide, I shall argue, are no longer racially dominated by whites and whiteness. In 2015, then, we no longer have racial whites dominating and oppressing all other racial groups; instead, we have a more subtle system of structural oppression by which the world order, along with some whites, but not the whole white racial group—oppresses the world’s non-white, non-yellow racial groups—reds, browns, blacks, Latin American mestizos, etc. This is the system I call global dark oppression, and I argue that this racial system—and no other—is the contemporary social-structural root of global racial injustice. This, then, is my diagnosis of present racial injustice worldwide. I defend it against the competing diagnoses offered by Mills’s theory and Pogge’s theory, and so offer what Chapter 1 described as a differential diagnosis of the injustice.

If you would like to read the chapter, please e-mail me at tjdonahueAThaverford.edu for a copy..

One of the world’s great social evils is the number of people living in desperate circumstances. The World Bank estimates that some 2.2. billion people live on less than 2 US dollars a day. It is from the ranks of people living below that consumption line that almost all of the world’s 795 million chronically undernourished people come, as well as almost all of the world’s more than 860 million slum dwellers, almost all of the world’s 748 million people whose drinking water sources are contaminated with shit, and almost all of the world’s 1.1. billion people lacking access to electricity. These people, then, are the truly disadvantaged.

Political philosophy has recently devoted much attention to whether or not the global order does a systematic injustice to these people, whom I propose to call “the global poor.” Thomas Pogge, in particular, has influentially argued that the global political and economic order does do the global poor several harms which constitute systematic injustice or oppression. Against this, Mathias Risse has argued that the global order does harm the global poor, but that the harms are not severe enough to constitute global oppression or systematic injustice. In this chapter, I do not propose to enter this debate. Instead, I shall put a related question which might shed some new light on the debate, as it has paid little heed to the opinions of the global poor on this question.

The question I shall put is: What is the severest harm suffered by the victims of this injustice? Here we are not looking for a moral explanation of the wrong in the injustice. Such explanations, examples of which we discussed in Chapter 1, point to moral principles or rights that the injustice violates. Such violations, it is held, explain why the injustice is a moral wrong.  So, for example, some have claimed that what explains the moral wrongness of severe poverty is that it violates a human right or a principle that people not be in severe poverty, or that it constitutes the systemic violation of a human right to subsistence. But violations of a right or a principle, whether aggregative or systemic, are not the severest harm done by an injustice; an injustice’s severest harm is a harm it deals out to each and every one of its victims, a harm which, of all those done them by the injustice, is the one that constitutes the greatest setback to their interests, and which does the most to impede them from overcoming their victimization. Hence there is a difference in aim between moral explanations of wrongness and specifications of severest harm. The one focuses on the actions or omissions of the wrong-doing agent, the other on the consequences of the wrong for the victim. What interests me here is the latter, since it is a central part of what the Introduction called “the victim-centered perspective” on injustices. In examining the severest harm done by a systematic injustice like global poverty, we shed more light both on the workings of that injustice and on the condition of its victims. Moreover, inquiring into the severest harm of global poverty advances the aims of Part Two of this book, which is to examine several of the most prominent alleged systematic injustices with global scope, in order to give us a lively sense of what we are talking about when we say that global injustices make all people worldwide unfree.

This chapter argues that the severest harm of being a member of the global poor is that it entangles you in a web of crises. You are caught up in a spider’s web of pressing and agonizing decisions among options all of which are at least painful, distressing, and annoying, and many of which are humiliating, disgusting, physically dangerous, and unhealthy. Moreover, a great many of these will be moral dilemmas, in which, no matter what you do, you will do a moral wrong. These decisions constitute a web entangling you because, day in and day out, you must choose and act among sets of such options.  You must, in other words, live entangled in a web of crises.

The chapter argues for this entanglement thesis in two stages, appealing to evidence that is by turns conceptual, empirical, and taken from the opinions of the global poor themselves on these questions. For we are far more likely to be on the right track in specifying the severest harm of an injustice if we examine what the victims themselves have to say about it. Part 2 examines four leading alternative conceptions of the severest harm in global poverty. These conceptions are social policy researchers’ theory that global poverty implies social exclusion, Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit’s conception of poverty as being a corrosive disadvantage, a conception inspired by Avishai Margalit’s theory of humiliation, which says that to be a member of the global poor is to suffer humiliating failure theory, and Hegel’s theory that being a member of the global poor throws you into moral degradation. I try to show why each conception fails, generally on the ground that what it claims is a harm done to all of the global poor is in fact done only to some of them. In Part 3, I present and defend my entanglement-in-crises conception. I explain what it is to be entangled in a web of crises, and why we should think that the global poor are all entangled in such webs. I follow this by giving a positive reason for thinking that such entanglement is global poverty’s severest harm is the correct explanation. The reason lies in the web-like relation of the crises. Each crisis requires real attention and energy, and more are on the way, occasioned both by your poverty and by your previous crises. Thus the web presents a formidable obstacle to your escaping from poverty. Once choose poorly, and you may be trapped in it forever. The poor know that this is the case, and that they will always be entangled in the web for as long as they are poor. Moreover, the poor know that there are others who, because they are not poor, do not face such entanglement. Thus the web of crises presents them with agonizing daily reminders of their disadvantage. I also show that the opinions of the global poor on the harms of global poverty support this entanglement theory. Part 4 concludes and points the way to the third and final part of the book.

If you would like to read the chapter, please e-mail me at tjdonahueAThaverford.edu for a copy.

“No one is free while others are oppressed.” This is the famous lemma of the global left today. You hear it in marches and protests, in lecture halls and on soap boxes, at party conferences and in flash gatherings. It is used to urge solidarity with African women farmers, to demand better police protection for blacks or women in the United States, to summon people to protest against their government’s upholding foreign dictatorships, or to call for aid for the workers in the world’s sweatshops.  Evidently, it is a slogan with considerable motivating power. People of the global left rally and ready themselves when they hear it. It calls them to the struggle.

Yet for all the lemma’s power, the grounds for it—the axioms from which it is to be derived—are poorly understood. Why is no one free while others are oppressed? Why, for example, aren’t the oppressors themselves free? Or, if the Hegelian theory of lordship and bondage seems to easily answer that, then why aren’t the privileged third-party bystanders free? For they are neither victims nor oppressors. As we saw in the Introduction, the prevailing justifications for the left’s great lemma give poor answers to these questions. They either rely on a false empirical generalization: that oppressions metastasize until eventually everyone is a victim; or, in the alternative, they assume an exquisite and ethereal conception of freedom, such that no ordinary people are likely to care if they themselves lack it. Can we put the lemma on firmer ground? 

This chapter argues that we can. It does so by answering the fourth question put in this book: Who if anyone is made unfree by systematic injustice or oppression? In what way are they unfree? To this, my answer is the core thesis of Unfreedom for All: Those made unfree by a systematic injustice are all the members of the society which perpetrates it, as well as the injustice’s direct victims. All are unfree, because a systematic injustice means that all are under an authoritarian system of rule, and to be under authoritarian rule means that you are subject to arbitrary power, and hence are unfree in the negative sense. For your freedom is impeded by a definite obstacle: subjection to authoritarian rule. But to suffer from negative unfreedom is to be harmed: so this is how systematic injustices, including global injustices, harm you.

Here is a sketch of the argument for this thesis of Universal Unfreedom. In what follows, I will explain and defend each of these propositions. (1) Where a systematic injustice is done by your society, that society rules despotically over the victim group. (2) Systematic injustice endures as systematic only if it systematically suppresses anyone’s actual or potential resistance to it, including yours. It does this through ideological de-sensitizing, fear of reprisals, fear of disturbing the system, violence, unjust or arbitrary law enforcement, incentives, ignorance, and ghettoization of discussions of the injustice. (3) If a society systematically suppresses resistance by anyone to one of its institutional features, then that feature has established authority in that society. (4) Yet if a society does a systematic injustice to a group, like women or the severely poor, and the society is despotic over that group, and the injustice has established authority in that society, and the society systematically suppresses resistance by anyone to that injustice, then that injustice is central to the society’s institutional arrangements. The injustice is a central aspect of the society’s political system. It merges with the society’s total system of rule and becomes one of its central institutional features. (5) There is, however, a word for political systems that systematically suppress anyone’s actual or potential resistance to those of their central features that have established authority: authoritarian. (6) This implies that everyone in a society that commits an enduring systematic injustice is subject to authoritarian rule, including you. It also implies that everyone’s ability to resist such rule is suppressed by the system. (7) If so, then all members of such a system are subject to arbitrary power and coercion by others’ arbitrary will. (8) But to be subject to such arbitrary power means that, both on good republican grounds and good Hayekian grounds, you are not free in the negative sense of not impeded by obstacles. No one in a society deeply complicit in systematic injustice is negatively free. All are unfree, in the tough-minded, hard-nosed sense advocated by both the neo-republican and Hayekian traditions. (9) This means that everyone in a society that commits injustice is harmed: for to suffer affronts to your negative freedom is to suffer a real harm, a setback to one of your important interests. Hayek, the Black Radical Congress are now accepting members!

The world over, societies are wracked by oppression and systematic injustice. The poor, women, Dalits in India, gays, sweated laborers, sex slaves, indigenous peoples. All are alleged to be the victims of oppression, and some join in resistance against these injustices. But the resistance-movements are often fragile and fractious. In part, this is because of the suppression of resistance entailed by any oppression, which we examined in Chapter 7. But it is also because there is widespread disagreement on why we should resist injustice. What should be our main reason for challenging and resisting oppression? The question matters, because different answers to it lead to different visions of strategy and tactics for resisting oppression. If you say, for example, with Peter Singer, that you should resist an oppression because you have reasons of altruistic morality for helping those in dire need when you could do so at little cost to yourself, that will lead you to accept certain strategies and reject others. You will probably be open to the idea that a good way of resisting oppression is to give to charity. But if you say, with Iris Marion Young, that you should resist oppressions because and to the extent that you are helping to cause such injustices “in a system of interdependent processes of cooperation and competition,” then that will lead you to accept different strategies and tactics. You will think that the thing to do is to challenge the workings of the interdependent processes. So it matters why we should challenge and resist oppression. The reason we choose as the main one will shape all of our judgments about what strategies and tactics to adopt in challenging it.

In Chapter 2, we considered four leading theories of the main reason to challenge oppression. These were the theory held by the received view: dual agents, dual reasons; the altruistic-morality theories due to people like Singer; the potential-harm-to-the-agent theories of Young, Thomas Pogge, Robert Goodin, and others, which say that we should resist injustice when we are in a relationship with the victims whereby we could at least potentially do them harm; and finally the Hegel-Douglass theory, which  maintains that the duty to challenge injustice is grounded in oppression’s rendering unfree and depersonizing both the oppressor and the oppressed, which gives both a duty to challenge and abolish that oppression. Chapter 2 considered and challenged each of these theories, finding a serious problem in each. It is time now to see whether Unfreedom for All can do a better job. Can it give a better answer to this book’s first question: What should be our main reason for challenging and resisting injustice?

This chapter argues that Unfreedom for All should be our main reason for challenging and resisting injustice, because we should seek a reason that will have maximal appeal to the non-victims of oppression, inducing them to resist and challenge the injustice. Unfreedom for All, I argue, is the best such reason available. I have two arguments for this view. The first is that we have a basic and urgent interest in challenging serious obstacles to our negative freedom, and Unfreedom for All, as Chapter 7 showed, presents all of us with just such an obstacle. The second argument is that robust and mutual solidarity among a critical mass of the victims, the bystanders, and the perpetrators is necessary for successfully combating and ending systematic injustice, and so for ending Unfreedom for All. But because of the suspicion and mistrust that are likely to obtain in a resistance that includes perpetrators, bystanders, and victims, we need a reason for challenging injustice that describes a shared harm done to all of them by the injustice. For only a sense of such a shared harm could underwrite the robust and mutual solidarity necessary to abolish oppression. Unfreedom for All is just such a shared harm. To argue this claim, I present and defend an account of solidarity as the third ideal of modern political life, after liberty and equality. I explain why mainstream liberalism has trouble accommodating this ideal, and argue that the core value in solidarity is the commitment that no member in the group be left behind. I distinguish this account from an important new theory due to Avery Kolers, which argues that solidarity is a duty grounded in equity, according to which we must defer to the least well off’s judgments about how to resist the inequities done them.

It is often said that we live in global systems of injustice. But if so, what are they, and what are their moral consequences? This book offers a theory of global injustice—Unfreedom for All. The theory explores and defends the old adage that "No one is free while others are oppressed" by putting five hotly-debated questions about global injustice: Why and when ought we to relieve injustices done to distant others?  Do we in fact live under global systems of injustice? What counts as systematic injustice or oppression? Who if anyone is made unfree by systematic injustice or oppression, and how? What harm do such injustices do? Unfreedom for All shows that the "No one is free" creed either answers or results from each of the five questions. It defends that creed by considering how systematic injustices—like global severe poverty, the oppression of women, or racial oppression—are perpetuated. The mechanics of such injustices, the book argues, reveal a surprising fact. Where your society does such an injustice, that society systematically suppresses anyone's resistance to the injustice—including yours. But that makes its rule authoritarian, so you too are subject to arbitrary power and lack of the rule of law. Hence you too are unfree. This holds just as true of global systematic injustices occurring in global society.

Thus does Unfreedom for All justify and explain the "No one is free" doctrine. That creed is one of the few things shared by the global left today. Yet, as the left's opponents observe, the creed is hardly self-evident, and the best-known defenses of it rely on an exquisite and rarefied conception of freedom. For these defenses make the unfreedom in question that described by Hegel or Mikhail Bakunin, by which we are unfree until we are recognized as free and equal by everyone else, who must themselves be free and equal . But that is hardly the kind of unfreedom that most people deem a grave and urgent harm. It is the unfreedom of philosophers, not the unfreedom of common people. Unfreedom for All shows how systematic injustice imposes on everyone a harm that all people want to avoid: the unfreedom of systematic subjection to arbitrary power.

Unfreedom For All therefore challenges prominent theories of the grounds of our duties to distant victims of injustice.  Such theories say that our main reason for relieving injustice is a moral duty to aid or protect, or a duty not to uphold unjust institutions.  But this book argues that universal unfreedom should be our main reason for challenging systematic injustices. For we have only one real means of creating the robust, stable solidarity needed to eventually abolish systematic injustice: confronting Unfreedom for All.

Does the Trump movement have a coherent ideology? The prevailing view on the U. S. coasts, in the academy, and in the mainstream media seems to be "No." The ideology Trump campaigned on, we are told, is a mish-mash of conservative and liberal proposals; it aims only at playing on the shifting moods of a white blue-collar base. Or, it is said, the Trump ideology is populism, and thus it lacks a coherent system of political ideas. In these quarters, then, the established view holds that Trump's movement lacks a coherent ideology. Moreover, this view is held all over the political spectrum. These expressions of it were made by social liberals, libertarian Republicans, advocates of social democracy, and neo-conservatives.

I shall argue that this view is false.  The Trump movement does have a coherent system of political ideas. It is principled, and it has clear views of what the central political values are, what priority they should have over other values, which political institutions are the most important, which less important, and by how much. For Trump's ideology is a form of authoritarian nationalist populism, and hence it cleaves above all to a form of populism. Yet populism is not, as the prevailing view has it, an unprincipled ideology. On the contrary, as recent research in political science has shown, populism asserts three basic principles. First, that society is now divided between a corrupt elite and a virtuous common people. Second, that that elite illegitimately and undemocratically excludes the common people from ruling. Third, that democracy requires rule by the common people. From these core principles, as we shall see, can be derived the whole of the Trump ideology: its nationalism, its authoritarianism, its seemingly odd combinations of welfare-statism and free-market ideas, and its particular policy proposals, like "Build that wall!" and "Lock her up!" 

To understand Trumpism, we should treat the "Make America Great Again" slogan as its one-sentence summary, and then interpret that slogan in terms of these three principles of populism. We can then see that the ideology is a nationalist form of populism, for the slogan’s focus is on the American nation. We can then use that insight to examine the public statements and policy proposals made by Trump and his surrogates. Once we take the principles of nationalist populism to be Trumpism's foundation, we can see these statements as the façade that the ideology presents to the public. The question then is what counts as the ideology's frame. What are the middle-range ideas that hold up the façade, and yet are themselves based on the foundation of nationalist populism? To specify these ideas, we can survey the public statements and proposals, and then see what doctrines must be conjoined to nationalist populism to derive them. The doctrines we come up with can be seen as Trumpism's frame. Hence this paper is a survey drawing of Trump's most monumental building to date: the Trump ideology.

Do we live under global white supremacy? The recent death in police custody of Freddie Gray, as well as the 2014 killings  of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, make it incumbent upon us to put that question. This paper argues that we no longer do live under such supremacy, but this does not mean that global racial domination is abolished. Instead, I argue, a new form of such domination has replaced global white supremacy: what I call "global dark oppression." On the one hand, I argue that global white supremacy is now finally dead, because people classed by global society as racially yellow have recently thrown off the chains of white domination. But on the other hand, I argue, our present global racial order is one of global dark oppression, in which people classed as non-white and non-yellow are systematically oppressed by the world order, but not by white people as a collective, and certainly not by yellow people as a collective. To argue this thesis, I examine the most powerful theory of global white supremacy currently available, the theory developed by Charles W. Mills over the course of many works. I present and evaluate Mills’s theory that our global racial order is one of global white supremacy. I challenge his arguments for this by analyzing some ambiguities and silences in his theory, and by analyzing further the concept of global white supremacy. I then present my conception of global dark oppression, and give positive arguments for the claim that global white supremacy is at an end, and that the new global racial order is one of global dark oppression.

The link leads to a webpage that I have used with some success in teaching students how to learn and use theories. My experience is that most academics teach this by one of two methods. Either they take theories singly, and have students apply each theory to many different cases; or they have students consider the theory in comparison with rival theories, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each. The first method has the merit that students come away with a lively sense of the real-world purchase of the theory. Its demerit is that most of the students don't acquire a firm grasp of the theory's structure. The method does not do enough to train them in becoming articulate and discriminating users and evaluators of theories. The second method has the merit that students will acquire--at least temporarily--a firm grasp of the theory's question, its main claims, its explanatory concepts, and the leading theorems generated by the theory, since these will be the focus in evaluating the theory against its rivals. This method has the demerit that many students will (rightly) consider all this to be purely theoretical, and therefore will have difficulty remembering or quickly re-learning the structures of these theories once they have finished with them. (Of course, most academics opt for a mix of both methods. But it's pretty clear which teachers are primarily theory-appliers and which teachers primarily theory-comparers.)



What is needed, I think, is a method of teaching students how to learn theories that clearly connects theories with the facts and concrete images with which students are already familiar, while at the same time having them focus on the main elements of the theory. I have therefore been experimenting with a new approach to teaching students to learn and use theories. This approach agrees with the first method in putting the focus on one theory, but it agrees with the second method in focusing on that theory's internal structure, rather than its applications and theorems. On this approach, we see theories as composed of the following elements: a statement about the boundaries of the class of entities the theory seeks to illuminate (the theory's target entities); a statement of a question or questions about those entities; an answer or answers to those questions (the theory's main claims); the new concepts those main claims use to answer those questions; a diagram or model of the relationships described by the main claims; and the underlying metaphor or analogy in terms of which the theory invites us to see the target entities--the theory's model and its main claims can be seen as workings out of the details of this metaphor.



For more, see the linked webpage. I don't propose this approach as a rival to the theory-applying or the theory-comparing methods. I tend toward theory-comparing, myself. Rather, I see this as a useful technique for learning theories that can supplement either method.

The link leads to a webpage in which I set out some precepts for how to do political philosophy. Students are often puzzled by how to do political philosophy. They aren't as clear on what its tools, techniques, and problems are as they are for disciplines like historical sociology, ethnography, or development economics. The response that many philosophers give is that "You learn it by doing it!" This is no doubt true: there is no royal road to competence in philosophy. To learn it, you have to do it. But students would still like some precepts: nobody learns a craft without having some precepts about it. So the linked webpages tries to give some precepts by describing the tools and techniques of political philosophy.

The webpage also tries to describe the problems of political philosophy, and to address the question of what makes a problem in political philosophy an interesting one. It suggests that many of the interesting problems in political philosophy are interesting because they ask us to resolve a clash between three attractive but seemingly incompatible statements, like that in the famous problem of evil: (1) There is a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good; (2) There is evil in the world; (3) An all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good being cannot coexist with evil in the world; the being would never permit it. This is an example of what philosophers call an "inconsistent triad," and in the webpage I suggest that many of the interesting problems in political philosophy have just this structure. For example, take the problem of hard cases in legal philosophy: it can be formulated as the following triad of seemingly inconsistent but independently attractive statements. (1) In law, there are hard cases: ones where no settled legal rule resolves the case; (2) If there is no settled legal rule resolving a case, then there is no right legal answer to that case; (3) There are no gaps in the law: there is always a right legal answer to every legal case (even if nobody now knows what it is). H. L. A. Hart's theory of hard cases can be seen as rejecting (3); Ronald Dworkin's theory of hard cases rejects (2).

The link leads to the syllabus for a course that I taught at Haverford College in Spring 2018: "Does the West Exist? Comparative and Transnational Studies." The course asks whether the West--a civilization that sets the standards for all other civilizations and cultures--exists. To answer that, we consider comparative, transnational, and area-focused perspectives on the way we live now, and on the ideas, institutions, processes, and events that shaped it.

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In a globalizing world, we need to think across borders. But how to do that? This course seeks to answer this question by considering the strengths and weaknesses of transnational, comparative, and area-focused perspectives on the way we live now, and on the ideas, institutions, processes, and events that shaped it. Our guiding question is: Does the West--a civilization that sets the standards for all other civilizations and cultures--exist? To answer that question, we consider the difference it makes to see ideas, institutions, and processes in transnational or entangled perspective, looking at how these phenomena were shaped and re-shaped as they were passed around the globe and reinterpreted by various actors. So we will look at the impact the Haitian Revolution had on the Black Atlantic and on White Europe of the nineteenth century, at how various actors in the countries colonized by Europeans shaped and reshaped ideas held by their colonizers, and at whether Egypt and African civilizations had a much greater impact on the civilization of classical Greece and Rome than many of us now like to think. We will consider various comparisons across countries, cultures, and areas, taking note of how and when they show us similarities we had ignored, or differences we had missed. So we will look at comparisons of economic change in China and Europe, at the similarities and differences among secularisms in different areas of the world, and at the similarities among Western communitarian and Islamist critiques of modernity. We then consider the unique perspective gained by considering ideas, institutions, and processes in the context of the area or region in which they occur, attending to the similarities across that region. So we will consider what is common to Latin American constitutionalisms, as well as their similarities and differences with constitutionalism in the US. We will look at the power of unexpected models or analogies, and what insights can be gained by seeing Alexander Hamilton as a Creole revolutionary like Simon Bolivar, or seeing the founding ideas of Pakistan as remarkably like the Zionist ideas that founded the state of Israel.  And finally, we consider whether modernity is essentially Western, and whether the best response to European hegemony on the part of non-Europeans is to take the nativist road of playing up the differences between modernity and one’s own culture, or to reinterpret modernity by reworking it and adding one’s own ideas to it. 

The link leads to the syllabus for a course that I taught at Haverford College in Spring 2018: "Introduction to Political Theory: Ideologies and the Struggle to Control Authority." The course examines how major ideologies like liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and populism, on the one hand; and how major theoretical traditions like social contract theory, Utilitarianism, and Marxism, on the other hand, have interpreted central political concepts like FREEDOM, AUTHORITY, JUSTICE, OPPRESSION, ILLEGITIMACY, SOLIDARITY. Special focus on how these ideologies and theoretical traditions have struggled over how to define the grounds and limits of authority.

The link is to the syllabus for a course I am teaching at Haverford College in fall 2017, "What We Owe to the Groups: The Ethics and Politics of Collective Life." The course revolves around one question: what should we make of the enormous privileges and terrifying demands presented by membership in groups?

DESCRIPTION:  Where would we be without groups? Our lives are shaped and immeasurably enriched by the groups that call us members. Our nations, our families, our corporations, our political parties, our churches, our clubs, our polities, our social movements—all of these give us identities, resources, opportunities, comradeship, support, encouragement, recognition, and a sense of purpose. Some of these goods could perhaps be achieved in a world without social groups—a world of social atoms in which all goods are exchanged in one-off contracts. But it is hard to see how we could enjoy this whole embarrassment of riches without social groups. It is in large part thanks to social groups that the world enjoys such a diversity of goods. And yet it is notorious that our social groups make heavy demands on us. In the name of loyalty to a state, a church, a nation, a movement, or a corporation, countless millions of people have sacrificed their lives, their consciences, their freedom, their loved ones, their life plans, or their reputations. Moreover, every society seems to place disproportionately heavy burdens on some of its social groups. It is often argued that certain racial groups, religious groups, gender groups, economic classes, or sexuality groups are subjected to oppressive burdens not faced by other groups of that kind. From these claims of oppression and group harm, people often argue that those in the victim group have special responsibilities to be loyal to the group, to identify with it, and to make sacrifices for its uplift. People also argue that those in the beneficiary group have special responsibilities to make amends for the oppression, to make sacrifices to combat it, to feel guilt or shame for how it unjustly benefits them, and to not cry foul if they uphold the oppression and then are attacked for their complicity.   

So groups provide each of us with immeasurable benefits, and they also impose enormous burdens on us all. Collective life grants to each of us enormous privileges, while at the same time laying on us terrifying demands. What then should we make of this? How much value should we give to these privileges? How do we decide which of these demands is reasonable and which unreasonable? Here, we are not asking how the state or the government should channel and regulate these privileges and demands. Those are familiar questions asked by political science and legal theory. Instead, we are asking how we as individuals should weigh and evaluate these privileges and demands. What do we as individuals owe to groups? What value should we put on the privileges they grant us, and how far should we accede to their demands?

This course will ask these questions of some of the groups that loom largest in social and political life. We will examine peoples, nations, states, citizenries, corporations, political parties, crowds, social movements, racial groups, gender groups, economic classes, and cultural groups. For each of these types of groups, we will examine leading theories of the benefits provided by membership in these groups. We will also examine leading theories of the demands they impose on us. When may a group like a political party reasonably ask a person to put her identity as a member of that group ahead of all her other identities? When may a group like a corporation ask a person to put her loyalties to the corporation above her commitments to other groups? We will also examine theories of when and how far the members are responsible for what these groups do, or the harms these groups cause.

The link leads to the syllabus for a course I taught at Haverford College in Autumn 2015, "Injustices: Human & Animal."

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Almost everyone today pledges allegiance to justice. Politicians, pundits, and ordinary people declare their commitment to human rights, equal respect, fairness, and even-handedness. And yet the world is awash in accusations of injustice and oppression. We are frequently told that we live in a world marked by global gender injustice, global racial domination, the brutal exploitation of sweatshop labor, the social exclusion and humiliation of people of diverse sexualities, the mass murder and torture of animals, and the legacies of systematic subordination and brutalization of the Jews. What should we do about these accusations? Some people ignore them, some dismiss them, and some assert them as obviously true. This course is for those who want to think them through. What does it mean to say that a group is oppressed? What sorts of harms or rights-violations are central to social injustice? What role do human rights, liberal principles, socialist principles, national self-determination, and cultural recognition play in claims of social injustice? What, fundamentally, is wrong with oppression? What kind of responsibility do people have for such injustices? And, above all, who today is oppressed, and what should be done about it? We shall examine arguments aiming to show that today there are worldwide injustices done to refugees, women, non-white people, colonized people, indigenous people, the global poor, sweatshop workers, and the working class. In each case, we look at proposed remedies for the claimed injustice, and questions about who has what kind of responsibility for dealing with it. We pay special attention to the question of whether animals are currently victims of a worldwide injustice by those who eat them; kill them for their skins or furs; or use them to produce eggs, milk, wool, or the like. We examine proposals to remedy this alleged injustice by morally requiring people to recognize animals as moral equals, or by awarding them citizenship rights. By the end of the course, students should have a firm grasp of the arguments for and against the existence of these injustices, and of arguments for and against prominent proposals to remedy them. They should also have a command of the concepts of injustice, oppression, systematic harm, rights-violations, misrecognition, maldistribution, disrespect—and their contraries: justice, respect for rights, recognition, etc.

Syllabus: https://sites.google.com/site/tjdonahu/home/injustices-human-animal

The link leads to the syllabus for a course I taught at Haverford College in spring 2017, "Globalization: Ethics, Politics & Economics." The course revolves around one question: What are the clashing values and perspectives that underlie arguments for and against (neo-liberal) globalization?

DESCRIPTION. Life today seems to be incessantly globalizing. On the one hand, ideas, goods, services, money, and people flow across the globe at rates that seem perpetually to increase. In 2015, the real value of foreign trade worldwide was nearly twice what it was in 2005, and it seems likely that each coming year will see that proportion increase. In 2013, there were 70 million more international migrants worldwide than there had been in 2000, which itself saw 20 million more international migrants than there had been in 1990. From 2006 to 2015, the worldwide number of yearly international tourist arrivals increased in each year except 2009. From 1970 to 2005, the number of international NGOs quintupled, whereas world population did not even double during that time. Moreover, from 1990 to 2005, the number of transnational corporations more than tripled, whereas world population grew by only about 30%.

On the other hand, we seem to live in a world that has in many ways become truly globally integrated. Today, an important event in Kuala Lumpur can immediately have effects in Kansas City. Almost every country today has a city in which you can find the products of any culture on the planet—these are tellingly called “global cities.” Famously, technological goods are instances of global integration: If you have an iPhone, the chances are good that it has chips made in Texas and California, Gorilla Glass made in Kentucky, panels and batteries and memory drives made in South Korea and Taiwan, a Gyroscope made in California, and all of these made with rare minerals mined in Inner Mongolia. All of these parts are then assembled into a finished iPhone in mainland China. But it isn’t only high-technology goods that manifest global integration. So too can handmade, traditional goods. With only an internet connection, a credit card, and a stable delivery address, a person in Cochabamba, Bolivia can order from a dealer in Abu Dhabi an Oriental rug of New Zealand wool dyed with techniques developed in Turkey and then hand-knotted in Lahore, Pakistan by refugees from Afghanistan to a design developed in 17th century Mamluk Egypt. Moreover, if the buyer does a bit of homework and uses a reliable courier, she can be reasonably sure that the rug will be delivered from Abu Dhabi to her address in Cochabamba in a few days.   

So globalization in these two senses—a process of accelerating and expanding global flows, and the accomplished fact of global integration—seems to be a fundamental feature of our times. What should we make of it? On the one hand, it is frequently argued that the hyper-globalization of the last 30 years has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, that it has massively increased living standards around the world, that it has redressed some of the disparities created by European colonialism by raising the middle classes in East Asia to near parity with the middle classes in Europe and the Anglophone countries, that it leads people to expand their sympathies and show care and concern for everyone worldwide, that it encourages respect and comfort with difference, that it boosts innovation and presents people with new ideas and ways of life, that it gives those stuck at the bottom of their social orders a chance to pull themselves up and live the good life, that the mass migration it encourages allows individuals to more freely choose where and how they will spend their lives; that it encourages countries to genuinely adopt such good institutions as democracy, the rule of law, free exchange, freedom of thought and assembly; and tolerance of religious and ideological difference; and that it encourages peoples and governments to seek common ground and to share governance. These are widely considered chief benefits of globalization.

On the other hand, it is often argued that globalization is destroying democracy in the rich countries by shrinking their middle classes, leaving those countries divided between a globalized elite and an anti-globalist class of left-behinds; that it is destroying democracy in the poorer countries by forcing them to accept the “golden straitjacket” of neo-liberal institutions; that it creates a kind of tyranny of global corporations and global finance over the poorer countries, in which they, with the collusion of the rich countries, dictate to the poor countries many of the policies they must adopt; that its encouragement of mass migration to the rich countries destroys national solidarity in those countries, and thereby endangers their welfare states; that its mass migration crimps the chances for future success of the poorer countries, since those who migrate tend to display the grit, determination, and savvy needed for economic success;  that it destroys national solidarity in the poorer countries by welcoming into the global elite those who succeed in the globalizing order, while leading them to ignore the claims of their less fortunate co-nationals; that it encourages governments to think that global corporate and financial elites are the goose that lays the golden eggs, and hence that they should look the other way when those elites act irresponsibly in the pursuit of further riches, but that they should ensure that the little guy or gal is punished to the fullest extent of the law; and that globalization is a new form of Western imperialism, by which the Western countries and cultures seek to shore up their global hegemony by advocating a new global order in which the playing field is allegedly level, but in reality is heavily tilted in favor of the powerful. These are widely considered important evils of globalization.

What should we make of these arguments? For these are the great arguments that seek to demonstrate globalization’s good and bad points. This course seeks to give students the tools to arrive at well-reasoned evaluations of these arguments. It will do this by considering the ethical, political, and economic aspects of globalization, both as a process and as an accomplished fact. The course will therefore examine past versions of globalization; our current hyper-globalization; the Washington Consensus underlying hyper-globalization; the major political ideologies dealing specifically with globalization; market globalism, justice globalism, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism; the institutions of global production: offshoring, sweatshops, and the global corporation; the institutions of global finance; the institutions of global governance; global civil society and the global justice movement; the regime of free trade and sovereign debt; the moral and political problems involved in mass migration; whether globalization creates systems of global injustice along lines of poverty, race, and gender; and whether global citizenship is possible. In examining these issues, our focus will always be on diagnosing the clashes of values and of perspectives that give rise to them and that lead people to evaluate them differently. Our aim is to bring these clashing values and perspectives into relief, so that students will have the clear grasp of them that is needed for arriving at well-reasoned judgments about the merits of the great arguments for and against globalization. Hence the course will revolve around one question: What are the clashing values and perspectives that underlie arguments for and against globalization? By the end of the course, students should have honed their skills of diagnosing and describing these clashes, and should also have mastered the concepts hyper-globalization, Washington Consensus, market fundamentalism, global governance, cosmopolitanism, national solidarity, the golden straitjacket, sovereign debt, sweatshops, offshoring, the global elite, local masses, and bailout politics, among others.

The link leads to the syllabus for a course I taught at Haverford College in spring 2016, "The Power of Ideas: Political Ideologies."

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Modern politics is a contest of ideas. Sometimes the contest is violent: In the 20th and 21st century, tens of millions of people have been killed in the name of systems of political ideas. Sometimes the contest is verbal: Liberals debate socialists, conservatives quarrel with anarchists, nationalists denounce libertarianism. But what do these ideologies amount to? What is it that they offer to people? Why have so many died in their names?

This course examines many of the leading ideologies of our time: liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism, anarchism, republicanism, secularism, neo-liberalism, libertarianism, nationalism, populism, fascism, neo-conservatism, multiculturalism, feminism, and political Islam. We look at how ideologies explain to people their social world, give them a set of standards for evaluating politics, make them feel that they are part of a group with a purpose, and give them a set of instructions they can use to help further that purpose. For each of these major ideologies of our day, we examine its key concepts, questions, doctrines, principles, values, and underlying rationale. We examine the boundaries between these ideologies, and the varieties that many of them have created. By the end of the course, students should have a command of these basic features of each ideology, as well as some sense of their historical development and inter-relationships. The aim is to help each student see what each ideology says and why it says it, so that they can decide for themselves among the current set of ideologies, or build their own.

Syllabus:  https://sites.google.com/site/tjdonahu/home/political-ideologies

The links leads to the syllabus for a course I taught at Haverford College in autumn 2016.

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International law is a system of norms by which states regulate their treatment of each other and of each other’s citizens. Its underlying hope is that by setting a law for states, there will be more peace, order, and justice in world politics than if there were no such law. This course seeks to introduce students to the history, structure, and principles of international law. We begin by examining the history of international law as a system of norms accepted by states, from its origins in tacit conventions, treaties, and the law of nations to the highly complex system of norms that it is today. We look at the history of various conventions and practices that try to introduce a modicum of peace and order into international relations, giving special attention to international law as one such practice. We will look equally at histories that see international law as a force for good, and histories that see it as serving and entrenching the hegemony of powerful states over all others, or as a tool for colonial injustice and oppression. We then turn to examining the structure of international law: its scope, sources, content, interpreters, and enforcers. We will examine the relations between international law and domestic law, and how much authority either should have over the other. After that, we turn to scrutinizing the many sources of both public and private international law, and their varying degrees of legal authority: customary law, treaties, UN conventions, etc. We then move to examining the subjects of international law: states, insurgents, national liberation movements, international organizations, and individuals. We look at the rules for the recognition of such subjects, and their powers, immunities, and duties under international law. We look at the conditions under which states and individuals are responsible for violations of international law, and the means of settling disputes over what international law requires. After that, we survey some main fields of public international law, including international economic law, the laws of war, and human rights law. We conclude by examining the principles underlying international criminal law, and the collective responsibility attributed by international law to all citizens for actions taken by their state.

The course is a small, research-intensive seminar. Enrollment will be strictly capped at 15 students. “Research-intensive” means that we will intersperse the substantive readings and discussion with readings and discussion of problems about doing research, posing a research problem, solving the problem, and writing up the results, drawn from Wayne Booth et al.’s The Craft of Research.

Syllabus here:  https://sites.google.com/site/tjdonahu/home/international-law

The link leads to the syllabus for a seminar I regularly teach at Haverford College,  "Development, Human Rights, and Transnational Injustices."

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What are the worldwide obstacles to peace and justice? How can we surmount them? This course examines theories of some of the leading obstacles to peace and justice worldwide, and of what global citizens can do about them. The three problems we will consider are colonialism and its legacies, whether we live in a global racial order, and whether the global economic order harms the poor and does them a kind of violence. The two solutions we will consider are the project of economic and social development and the practice of human rights. The course has three main goals. First, to give students some of the knowledge they will need to address these problems and be effective global citizens. Second, to understand some of the major forces that shape the present world order. Third, to hone the skills in analysis, theory-building, and arguing that are highly valued in legal and political advocacy, in public life and the professions, and in graduate school.

All students are welcome. Special consideration will be given to returning interns of the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship at Haverford.

The course begins by examining the history of economic and social development since World War II, seen as a project for creating world order. We then turn to the nature and main features of colonialism. We examine the history of colonialism, how it went hand in hand with the spread of capitalism, whether there still exists an economic neo-colonialism founded on unequal exchange between poor and rich countries, what were the main justifications offered for colonialism, and whether the injustice of much colonialism means that contemporary states created by colonialism—including the United States, Canada, and Australia—are illegitimate. Next, we turn to whether Europeans and their descendants have created a global racial order, in which whites reign supreme. We examine the various ways in which the European colonial project may have been founded on racial domination, how there might have been a sort of contract or agreement to dominate the “inferior” races, and whether global racial domination is still a fact in our time. We then turn to asking whether the current global economic order systematically harms the poor. We examine arguments for “Yes” and “No,” and then consider whether unjust poverty amounts to a kind of violence done by institutions to the poor. Next, we turn to examining whether economic and social development can be reconfigured to solve these problems. We look at conflicting theories of the ends and the means of development--is it a strong and rich state? An end to widespread poverty? Or providing everyone with the capabilities for flourishing? We consider current skepticism about the development project, according to which it is either a First-world patriarchal imposition, or a neo-colonial project controlled by the rich countries. We end by examining whether human rights can solve these problems. We consider the nature of human rights and what they do, objections that they promote a false universalism that supports Western hegemony, and Confucian, West African, and Islamic perspectives on human rights.

A Note to Returning CPGC Interns: One goal of this course is specifically aimed at you: to help you get a better intellectual grasp on the experiences you had during your internship. The course will begin by asking you to reflect on some of the problems that arose for you during your internship, and especially puzzled you. The course will conclude by asking you to reflect on whether and how the theories and problems treated in this course have affected the way you now think about the problems that struck you during your internship.

Syllabus:  https://sites.google.com/site/tjdonahu/home/theories-of-peace-and-global-citizenship

The link leads to the syllabus for a course I taught at Haverford College in spring 2016: "Majority Rule, Minority Rights, and Social Choice: Ethics & Economics." The course seeks comprehensively to answer one question: How should we balance between following the will of the people, governing in the people's interests, and respecting minorities' rights? What are the advantages, disadvantages, and possibilities of majority rule, consensus, dictatorship, rule by experts, and other group decision rules, considering that they are attempts to strike that balance?

DESCRIPTION
We are all democrats now. From Moscow to Melbourne, from Beijing to Buenos Aires, from Havana to Harare, political elites and ordinary people everywhere proclaim their commitment to democracy. And democracy, as Lincoln famously said, is rule of, by, and for the people. Rule by the people requires majority rule or consensus, for those are the best ways of discovering the people’s will. Yet pure majority rule is also majority tyranny, and pure consensus slows government to a snail’s pace. Hence both in practice usually amount to a shifting compromise between (super-)majority rule and minority rights. Rule for the people requires ruling in the best interests of all the people. Yet majorities are often oblivious to the basic rights of minorities, or to their own best interests--Hitler was democratically elected. Rule of the people requires effective government. Yet effective government in the modern state requires a governing elite, and such elites may favor the special interests of themselves and those like them. But this creates a ruling class, which flouts majority rule. (U.S. or Japanese political elites are still almost all men, while their populations are majority female.)

This course asks what we should do about these tensions in the democratic form of social choice. Hence the course pivots around one basic problem: How should we balance among following the will of the people, governing in the people's interests, and respecting minorities' rights? What should we make of majority rule, consensus, rule by experts, elite rule, and other group decision rules, considered as attempts to strike that balance? What are the advantages, disadvantages, and possibilities of those decision rules?

The course aims to give students the tools to produce their own well-constructed solutions to that problem. To achieve this aim, we examine famous inquiries into some of the problem's component questions. What is so great about consensus or majority rule? Why shouldn’t we let a minority of experts rule? Or a minority of the highly informed? Or a minority of the highly interested? Is there any reasonable basis for claiming that a society chooses this over that? Should we aim for a democracy in which all citizens actively participate, or are we better off when the people only have a say during periodic elections? What decision rules should we use to organize our common life, and why? How do we balance the rights of minority groups against the rights of disadvantaged minorities within those minorities? Should consensus or majority rule be the default rule of political decision-making, or should some other rule--supermajority or elite rule or rule by experts or dictatorship--be preferred in certain circumstances? If so, which ones? Should all citizens' preferences carry equal weight in political decision-making? Are political organizations inevitably ruled in the special interests of a minority group? We also address, among other questions, whether consensus is inherently biased against activist government, the problem of protecting minority rights, the problem of permanent minorities, the problem of unreasoning majorities, whether majority rule is possible even in principle, whether there is a ruling class, whether there is any way to aggregate all citizens’ preferences into a genuine social choice, and what to do about immoral and unjust preferences entering political decision-making. These are the central questions of the political morality of social choice. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with the application of economic models of rational decision-making to questions of social choice. We shall examine answers given to these questions by leading political theorists like Lani Guinier, James Madison, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Gustave Le Bon, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Dahl, Ronald Dworkin, and Brian Barry; and by the Economics Nobelists Kenneth Arrow and James Buchanan.

The course aims to hone students’ skills in analysis and argument. Much attention will be given to structures of reasoning and the shape of models and theories. The goal is to strengthen skills of theory-building, reasoning, analysis, and synthesis that are highly valued in public life, in the professions, and in graduate school.

Syllabus: https://sites.google.com/site/tjdonahu/home/majority-rule-minority-rights-and-social-choice

The link leads to the syllabus for an undergraduate seminar that I taught at Yale in spring 2014. The course revolves around one question: what are capitalism's good and bad points?

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Capitalism is the leading economic system of our time. No corner of the globe has been untouched by it. Almost everything we do nowadays is done with capitalism’s products, or is shaped by markets and capitalist institutions. Cell phones, cars, airplanes, health care, education, food, clothing, political news and opinion, houses, child care, the arts, and even prisons are nowadays provided by capitalist institutions. The world’s largest business corporations have greater revenues and more employees than most national governments. Moreover, it is beyond question that the rise of capitalism has enormously benefited humankind. World GDP per capita has skyrocketed since the advent of industrial capitalism. All the rich countries today are more or less capitalist, and the affluence enjoyed today by most people in those countries surpasses that enjoyed by the wealthiest people living 1,000 years ago in China, France, the West African empires, or Britain. Capitalism, in a word, has enriched the middle ranks of society, and it has helped hundreds of millions climb out of poverty. Moreover, it has frequently been noticed that every lasting democratic regime since 1900 has had a capitalist economy.     

On the other hand, communism, the 20th century’s main alternative to capitalism, is today defunct as a political and social movement. Communism advocates community of property: now even Cuba has begun privatizing its state-owned economy. Worldwide, enthusiasm for strict community of property has probably never been lower. It is not required by many, perhaps most, of the extant communes and kibbutzim. And many religious monasteries that did require it have shut their doors and dissolved. Communism currently makes its last stand, oddly enough, in the very heart of current capitalism: the internal operations of business firms. For in most of these, the things used to produce goods are owned by the firm; and decision-making about what to make, buy, and sell is determined by the firm.* And even here, there is a growing movement to create internal markets within firms.

So capitalism rules the world, and its rule has unquestionably brought vast benefits to all levels of society. And yet there are persistent criticisms of capitalism. Suppose we define capitalism as that economic system in which: most of the means of production are privately owned, a free price system is used to distribute goods and services, producers compete against each other to sell their products, there is a good deal of private property, labor markets are relatively free and open, and many firms are organized in a bureaucratic hierarchy. Capitalism in that sense, it has been argued, exploits workers, alienates them from their labor, corrupts the morals of society, makes the workers collectively unfree, makes people in rich countries progressively more unhappy, commoditizes everything, encourages wasteful competition to create and market new products, swamps the culture with wasteful and manipulative advertising, sets up noxious markets in things like child labor, tends to lead to a few giant firms’ dominating an industry and keeping prices high, gives the leaders of business a privileged position in democratic politics, and progressively destroys the environment because of its obsession with growth. On the other hand, it has been argued that capitalism does better than any other economic system at distributing information efficiently, that it does better at producing and distributing goods efficiently, that it promotes peace and nonviolence better than any other economic system, that it is required by people's rights to self-ownership and self-determination, that it is required for the full development of people’s individuality, that it is a necessary condition for democratic government, that it uniquely responds effectively to meet people’s shifting wants and needs, and that it uniquely fosters the innovation and new products that allow further growth. 
     
This course will explore these arguments: the great arguments that seek to demonstrate capitalism’s good points and bad points. They are arguments due to some who have thought most deeply and carefully about capitalism’s good and bad points: Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, F. A. Hayek, Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Milton Friedman, G. A. Cohen, Robert Nozick,  Debra Satz, the 19th century utopian socialists, and Charles Lindblom. Whether you are a champion of the free market, a defender of big business, a market socialist, or a defender of centralized price-setting; if you take this course, you will never look at capitalism in the same way. For the course aims to explode some pieties and convenient but false simplifications preached by all sides in the debate over capitalism. 

These arguments would be relevant at any time, but they have particular poignancy in the wake of the Great Recession that began in 2008. For that catastrophe made undeniable what critics of capitalism had long been arguing: that income inequality around the world is soaring; that the middle class in all rich countries is shrinking and being replaced by a new divide between rich and poor; and that the Washington Consensus of free trade and no-welfare-state delivered 0 per cent median per capita income growth in poor countries between 1980 and 2000, while the protectionist and welfare state consensus of 1960 to 1980 delivered 2.5 per cent.**  These facts make pressing the question that this course aims to help you answer for yourself: do capitalism's undeniable good points outweigh its bad points? Or vice versa?

The arguments we’ll consider are pieces of reasoning which show that certain acceptable premises support or justify a particular conclusion about a good or bad point of capitalism. We will investigate the main pieces of these arguments, critically evaluating their truth or falsity, and how well their premises support their conclusions. We also focus on examining the theories that generate these arguments. We will critically examine the main claims of these theories, their presuppositions, and their implications for the real world. The course thus aims to hone the analytical and argumentative skills required in public life, graduate school, and the professions. But it also aims to improve your ability to use the key concepts and key claims of these theories about capitalism. These claims and concepts have all been highly influential in political and moral debate about capitalism, as well as in business decision-making.

This course's topic covers an immense span. Capitalism's merits and demerits have produced vast amounts of research in philosophy and the social sciences, much of it good. So we can only visit a few particularly attractive islands in a vast archipelago. That is why, for many sessions, the syllabus suggests further reading about the topic for those who wish to learn more. Understanding the archipelago requires visiting other islands.

Syllabus:  https://sites.google.com/site/tjdonahu/home/capitalism

The link gives the syllabus for a course that I taught at Haverford College in autumn 2014. The course seeks comprehensively to answer one question: What are the moral consequences of a growth-centered society and its inevitable environmental impacts?

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This course introduces students to questions about our duties concerning the environment. How, it asks, should we deal with clashes among environmental values, economic growth, and people's desires? Such clashes include the following: Should we invalidate contracts to dump waste made between corporations and poor and marginalized communities? Should we send all the waste to poor countries, if their standard of living is lower and therefore—some economists say--the economic costs to them of the waste are less than they would be to rich-country inhabitants? Should the US encourage Andean countries to spray pesticide on peasants’ coca farms in order to reduce the supply of cocaine? Why preserve species that nobody gives a hoot about? In deciding who should pay to fight the costs of climate change, how do we balance among the claims of currently rich countries that polluted in the past, and countries on the make that are polluting heavily now? We examine arguments for and against prominent answers to these questions, in order to help students come up with their own well-informed answer to the course’s central question: What are the moral consequences of a growth-centered society and its inevitable environmental impacts? The course aims to hone the skills in analysis, theory-building, and arguing that are highly valued in legal and environmental advocacy, in public life and the professions, and in graduate school.

The course begins by considering specific problems of environmental justice: whether trees should have legal standing to sue, is there anything wrong with US policy of poisoning the coca crop of Colombian peasants, whether we should preserve wilderness, what’s so great about sustainability, how we should allocate resources among different means of preserving biodiversity, what limits should we accept on consumption for the environment’s sake, how do we balance saving nature and preventing hunger. We then move to considering whether economics can help solve the environmental crisis, or instead worsens it. We next turn to examining three political ideologies that respond to the environmental crisis: green politics, deep ecology, and ecofeminism. The course concludes by critically examining a recent influential book: Stephen M. Gardiner’s A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (2011). This book, which has touched off a debate among scholars and policy wonks, tries to specify the problem at the root of the climate crisis. The book explains why it is so hard to deal with climate change: climate change is a perfect moral storm, involving deep moral failings by all people and all institutions, and a widespread failure to carefully consider the problem. By pressing us to carefully consider the problem, Gardiner gives us grounds for real hope. For, as John Dewey famously said, "A problem well posed is half solved."

It is in that spirit that this course will conduct its business. We shall focus on the problems of the ethics, politics and economics of the Earth: on clashes and trade-offs among conflicting values, on how to allocate scarce resources among alternative priorities, on disputes over the relevant facts, and on disagreements over how to understand the relevant concepts. For by understanding the shape and specifics of each of the problems, we will be halfway to solving them. And what we need in the environmental crisis are serious solutions. We do not need the simple-minded cure-alls purveyed by zealots and talking heads.

To better understand these problems, we will occasionally refer to personal narratives and film. So, for example, to better understand the ecofeminist critique of male-centered domination over nature, we will watch part of "Crocodile" Dundee (1986) and read Val Plumwood's memoir of being attacked by a crocodile. To better understand the moral corruption that many see as partly responsible for the climate crisis, we will watch part of Sense and Sensibility (1995).

Those problems, and proposed solutions to them, make up our agenda. The course might thus also be called, "Theoretical Foundations of Environmental Action," since it scrutinizes the presuppositions of current arguments in favor of this or that environmental policy or environmental attitude. Our questions concern the clashes of values, the differing interpretations of facts, and the clashing theories and attitudes that form the first level of presuppositions driving current political and policy debates about the environment. In particular, we will focus on how the ethical, political, and economic presuppositions at this level do and should inform each other.

Syllabus:  https://sites.google.com/site/tjdonahu/home/the-earth-ethics

The link leads to the syllabus for a course I taught at Haverford College in spring 2016. The course revolves around one question: How should we balance between the demands of morality and the demands of political responsibility? When--if ever--can good political ends justify bad means?

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Can politics be moral? Many people think not. They cite a litany of moral disasters produced by politics and government: civil wars, mass murder, systematic lying to the public, mass rape, dirty wars of mass torture and “disappearances,” white-supremacist government, cruel and unusual punishment, war for the sake of profits for a few, political corruption, class domination ratified by the state, show trials, political witch hunts, intentional punishment of the innocent, and on and on. Faced with such a record, many well-meaning people wash their hands of politics and government, preferring to cultivate their own garden or work toward anarchy. They refuse to participate in government. For them, politics is anathema, because it falsely thinks that the end justifies the means. 

They may be right in their anathema. But they pay a high price for their refusal. For politics will continue while they cultivate their garden. And while anarchy may be the right long-term goal, it is still a long way off. What should we do in the meantime?

This course is for those who wish to think about what we should do in the meantime: those who want to understand whether and how one can make moral choices in politics. Can the end justify the means? If it can’t, then is politics inherently morally wicked? To answer these questions, the course tries to pick out what the following have in common: Zionism, Palestinian nationalism, civil disobedience, rebellion, detaining suspected terrorists without trial, interrogational torture, accepting economic exploitation so as to pick the fruits of economic growth, Stalinism, the Bolshevik rejection of human rights, conservatism, and the debate between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Each of these, the course will argue, represents a response to one of the central problems of political life: the problem of dirty hands. In everyday life, we accept certain moral rules: don’t lie, don’t cheat, keep your promises, don’t steal, and don’t kill. If we are social and politically aware, we may add another rule: don’t support injustice. But, in politics, we often find ourselves face to face with grave injustices or—occasionally—impending moral disasters. In those circumstances, it sometimes seems that we could alleviate the injustice, or avert the disaster, if only we broke the ordinary moral rules. Indeed, many people in such circumstances have thought that breaking those rules is the only morally responsible thing to do. They profess contempt for those who refuse to dirty their own hands. “Don’t want to get your hands dirty, eh? You must not be too worried about (saving the republic/ending the oppression/avoiding the disaster).”

In such cases, what should we do? This is the dirty hands problem: How do we balance between the demands of morality and the demands of political responsibility? This course examines some of the leading practical responses to this problem, as well as theoretical treatments of it. The course aims to give students the tools to build a well-supported answer to the problem of what to do in such cases. Can the end ever justify the means? Was William Penn right when he said that, “A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it”? Or was Penn just obtusely refusing to acknowledge that, sometimes, all the actions open to us are evil?

To help students answer these questions for themselves, we begin with Machiavelli’s and Sartre’s famous analyses of the choice between saving the republic or ending oppression, on the one hand, and respecting ordinary morality, on the other. We then examine Zionism and Palestinian nationalism as responses to enduring injustices suffered by both sides; treatments by Albert Camus and others of whether to seek justice or peace after the overthrow of an oppressive regime; the debate between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X over whether nonviolent protest or violent self-defense is the best response to oppressive violence;  Henry David Thoreau’s argument that civil disobedience against unjust laws outweighs the value of being law-abiding; the controversy between Leon Trotsky and John Dewey over whether loyalty to the moral rules inevitably entrenches injustice and oppression; and whether or not conservatism in the strict sense is a dirty-hands proposal for how to avoid political and social evils. Our focus in the latter half of the course will be the ethics of war and peace, for the dirty hands problem arises with special urgency in decision-making about when to go to war, what to do once in it, and what to do when the fighting stops. We shall therefore examine the moral principles that should guide us in going to war; the principles that govern fighting wars and war crimes, including especially whether it can ever be acceptable or tolerable to target civilians and their property, or to commit other war crimes; and the ethics of post-war settlements and restoring peace.

The course aims to hone students’ skills in analysis and argument. Much attention will be given to structures of reasoning and the shape of models and theories. The goal is to strengthen skills of reasoning and analysis that will be useful in public life, in the professions, and in graduate school.

Syllabus: https://sites.google.com/site/tjdonahu/home/ends-and-means-moral-choices-in-politics

The link leads to the syllabus for a course I taught at Haverford College in Spring 2017. The course puts and explores one central question: What balance should we as individuals strike between craft and design, given that the world economy is increasingly elevating design over craft, while both have undoubted values? How much authority should we give to design, and how much to craft? How can we tell what is good quality and what isn’t, when people disagree so vehemently and in apparent good faith about what is good and why?

DESCRIPTION
Size matters in the world economy. The big fish, often aided by governments, eat up, buy out, or marginalize the little fish. And there is much to be said for this. Economies of scale and streamlined design processes let big makers produce ever niftier gadgets at ever lower prices. This benefits everybody: people living in mud huts today have smartphones. But something important is also lost. Dedication, handwork, good materials, adjusting the work to the environment in which it’s done, putting your soul into it, learning from tradition, respect for excellence—in short, craft—is being marginalized. Craft is forced aside by design and marketing, over which big corporations and designing persons have the decisive edge. This obviously harms small and scrupulous makers. But it harms others too. For in a world economy in which designers are the heroes and marketers the hatchet men, work and its products become ever more abstract and insubstantial. The design and how to spin it are what have authority nowadays; the process and the making are seen as dirty, unskilled jobs. All that was solid is, it seems, melting into bullshit. So-called knowledge workers with fancy degrees are consigned to cubicles where they spend their days entering data. Design and spin, not craft, have become the touchstone of quality.

Against this, a world economy in which Steve Jobs is the messiah, a diverse social movement is arising. Craftspeople, amateurs, DIYers, tinkerers, plain-speakers, hobbyists, connoisseurs, anarcho-syndicalists, labor advocates, dropouts from the cubicle force, and environmental activists are, despite their numerous disagreements, making common cause. Their aim is to smash the hegemony of design and spin over the world economy, and to put craft and small batches back in a place of honor and authority. And if that means challenging the collusion between governments and the big corporation, so be it. For them, craft, not design, is the key to quality.

This course seeks to help students understand the contending forces and values at play in this contest over quality. It centers on one main question: What balance should we as individuals strike between craft and design, given that both have undoubted values? How much authority should we give to design, and how much to craft? How can we tell what is good quality and what isn’t, when people disagree so vehemently and in apparent good faith about what is good and why? To answer this question, we will examine how the world economy and society have become ever more abstract, focused on images and unexamined ideas, rather than things and worked-out concepts. We will look at the exploitation involved in the making of industrial necessities and luxury goods, and the alienation inherent in both the manufacturing work of today and much so-called “knowledge work.” We examine how design and marketing triumphed over craft in their struggle for authority, thanks in good part to modernism’s attempts to achieve social justice and efficiency through large-scale industrial production. Next, we look at the value of good design and marketing: what they achieve and what they give to the world. We then examine the nature and value of craft, work(wo)manship, and design. We will look at arguments that only handwork and dedication reliably prevent alienation from one’s labor in the new hyper-capitalism, and at defenses of the budding handcrafts movement. We consider theories that craft is always on the side of those with time and money; is this true, or can craft be used to challenge unjust hierarchies? Finally, we turn to examining our own crafts as scholars and thinkers: inquiring, debating, researching, theorizing, etc. We will focus on examining and honing the craft of research.

Syllabus: https://sites.google.com/site/tjdonahu/home/in-search-of-quality