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Punishment is notoriously difficult to justify because it involves visiting hard treatment upon those who are punished. The rights forfeiture theory of punishment contends that punishment is justified when and because the criminal has forfeited her right not to be subjected to this hard treatment. Because of a number of apparently devastating objections, this account has very few advocates. In this essay I aim to rehabilitate the rights forfeiture account by offering responses to the standard criticisms.

In this article I appeal to freedom of association to defend a state’s right to control immigration over its territorial borders. Without denying that those of us in wealthy societies may have extremely demanding duties of global distributive justice, I ultimately reach the stark conclusion that every legitimate state has the right to close its doors to all potential immigrants, even refugees desperately seeking asylum from incompetent or corrupt political regimes that are either unable or unwilling to protect their citizens’ basic moral rights. This article is divided into four sections. First, I argue for a presumptive case in favor of a state’s right to limit immigration as an instance of its more general right to freedom of association. In the second and third sections, I respond to egalitarian and libertarian cases for open borders. Finally, in the fourth section, I consider the permissibility of screening immigrants based upon their race, ethnicity or religion.

An international consensus has begun to take shape around that idea that the cross-border use of armed force by states is morally permissible if such force is required to stop or prevent human-rights abuses amounting to a supreme humanitarian emergency. At the same time, it is widely believed that political assassination is a form of murder and so morally impermissible in principle, regardless of the ends for which it is done. In this article, we reject these views. We argue that armed intervention is morally permissible when (1) the target state is illegitimate and (2) the risk to human rights is not disproportionate to the rights violations that one can reasonably expect to avert. Moreover, once one accepts that such intervention is sometimes permissible, it becomes untenable to hold that political assassination is impermissible in principle. The article is divided into six main sections. In the first two sections

In this article, we critically examine the prevailing justification of international criminal law and defend an alternative approach. We share the prevalent view that a system of such law is both possible and in the process of being created. However, we reject the conventional arguments offered in support of this system. Our alternative line of thinking has the consequence that a justifiable international criminal law can be much broader in scope than its conventional advocates presume. Our view is that it is permissible to prosecute and punish persons under international law when there are sufficiently widespread or systematic violations of basic human rights in a state. The rights violations need not constitute genocide, crimes against humanity, or any such “supercrime.” Instead, the violations may simply be ordinary criminal acts

In this article I advance a liberal account of political obligation. I divide my analysis into four sections. First, I briefly explain the liberal problem of political obligation and the inadequacy of existing attempts to solve this problem. In the second section, I propose a new solution. Next, I explain how my approach borrows from, but avoids the pitfalls of, earlier accounts. Finally, I respond to two potential objections.

Dans le cadre du debat sur la justification des obligations civiques opposant le communautarisme et le liberalisme, l'A. etudie l'alternative entre la these associative et la these reductionniste en matiere de politique redistributive. Evitant a la fois le patriotisme et le cosmopolitisme, l'A. defend l'importance des faits relationnels dans la conception des droits formels comme des devoirs entre citoyens et de l'egalite des relations.

IT IS not uncommon to find value judgments and judgments of obligation treated together as species of ethical judgments. This classification is probably correct, but it presents a difficulty and a danger. The difficulty is in specifying just what these two species of judgments have in common that makes them both ethical. The essence of ethical judgment, or the kind of meaning which ethical sentences have, is far from obvious. In fact, a good deal of the recent controversy in ethics has been centered on precisely this issue. My own view is that what they have in common is a relevance to decision or practice. But clearly there are many different sorts of judgment which can be relevant to choice in very different ways. Here lies the danger in lumping judgments of value and obligation together; one is tempted to overlook their differences. It seems to me that ethicists like C. L. Stevenson, R. M. Hare, and Paul Taylor emphasize their similarity to the point where any fundamental distinction is virtually denied. Those who do attempt some distinction are far from unanimous. For W. D. Ross the distinction between judgments of value and judgments of obligation is grounded in the distinctness of two simple non-natural properties, goodness and rightness. C. I. Lewis insists that we do not confuse the empirically valuable with the morally imperative; evaluations can be verified empirically, but judgments of obligation seem to rest on certain principles which are pragmatically a priori. Richard Brandt bases the distinction on differences in the qualified attitudes which correspond to the judgments. In Tke Language of Ethics I drew the distinction in terms of two kinds of meaning. Value judgments have evaluative meaning, which involves three factorsindication, partiality, and assertion-denial. Every value judgment indicates what is being evaluated. One says "this is good" as he takes another bite of steak or "all acts of stealing are wrong" as he lectures his son. Although such indication need not be concentrated in separate words in the utterance, every evaluation is about some object or objects and irrelevant to everything else. Moreover, a value judgment is about its object in a special way; it is pro or con, for or against. This partiality, which lies at the core of evaluation, reflects the attitudes we have toward things. In explaining what it is to be partial I can only point to pairs of attitudes like love and hate, desire and aversion, liking and disliking, admiration and contempt, approval and disapproval. This sort of polarity is reflected in our evaluative predicates "good" and "bad," "lovable" and "detestable," "virtuous" and "wicked." The third feature of evaluation is assertiondenial. Every evaluation involves a claim as to the appropriateness of the partiality expressed to the object indicated; this claim may be asserted, entertained, doubted, postulated, denied, etc. One can say "it is good," "that it be good," "is it good?" "let us grant that it is good," or "it is not good." Every judgment of value, then, has indication, partiality, and assertion-denial. Judgments of obligation, on the other hand, have critical meaning. Critical meaning involves indication, assertiondenial, and criticism. Each critical judgment is about one thing rather than another, and therefore it indicates which object or objects are being criticized. Moreover, each takes some stand ranging from assertion to denial on the appropriateness of the critical predicate to its object. It is in the predicate that the dif