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Things one may not do in offence one may do in defence—and not thereby acquiesce in offence. And one could reason similarly in the case of racial segregation. In response to white segregation laws, the black community could conceivably have imposed its own segregation laws. And in Senegal and Martinique the poets and statesmen Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aime Cesaire gave the theory powerful expression in the philosophy of Negritude, which favorably contrasted the communality and closeness to nature of African culture with the soullessness and materialism of European culture. A person who lacks due pride in his race will probably lack self-esteem, self-respect, and autonomy, and racism has, of course, done all it can to undermine that pride in black people. But these are generalities. To be authentic, and true to oneself, one must first know oneself. Dubois evidently thought that this was a special problem for black Americans.

Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave, an abolitionist, an orator, an agitator for black civil and political rights, an editor, an ambassador, a lecturer, a feminist, a journalist, a confidant of John Brown and also of William Lloyd Garrison, and a self-educated intellectual and philosopher who never had a single day of formal schooling in his life. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, published in 1845 when he was 27 years old and only seven years out of slavery, is a literary classic, and sold more than 4,500 copies in the first six months after it appeared. His My Bondage and My Freedom, published ten years later, is the best philosophical analysis of human nature in slavery ever written.

This chapter chronicles Frederick Douglass’s change from staunch pacifism to a support of violent resistance for slaves against their masters as a result of his fight with the slave breaker Edward Covey. Douglass started as a Garrisonian abolitionist and pacifist who warned other blacks not to fight their masters, thinking that violent revolt would only delay the progress of slavery’s abolition. However, as he became more of an educated man, his hatred of slavery grew, and so he encouraged slaves to rise up against their masters as an act of self-defense. This drastic change in belief—which marked a departure from the Garrisonian position—shows itself in Douglass’s fight against Covey. The consequences of this fight were not only Douglass’s victory and Covey never whipping Douglass again, but also Douglass’s rethinking the meaning of freedom.

Bernard Boxill is a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Blacks and Social Justice (1984) and editor of Race and Racism (2001) and has two forthcoming books: A History of African American Political Thought: From Martin Delany to the Present, and Boundaries and Justice: On International Ethics and Distributive Justice.

Appalled by Kant’s views on race, some Kantians suggest that these views are unrelated to his central moral teaching that every human being “exists as an end in itself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will.” But Kant developed his racial views because of his teleological view that we regard the history of the human species as the completion of a hidden plan of nature to establish an externally perfect state constitution as the necessary means to the end of developing all human predispositions. To evade the difficulty, Kantians may claim that Kant’s teleology and moral theory are not essentially related, but Kant thought that they were and close textual analysis supports their connection.

Kant claimed that we have a duty to seek peace, and encouraged a hope for peace to support that duty. To encourage that hope he argued that peace was reasonably likely. He thought that peace was reasonably likely because he believed that historical trends would create opportunities to implement his plan for peace. But authorities claim that globalization is undermining such opportunities. Consequently Kant's arguments can no longer sustain our hope for peace. We can sustain that hope by devising a new plan for peace that globalization will give us opportunities to implement. But in order to devise such a plan we need to sustain our hope for peace. We can sustain such a hope by reflecting on the value of peace because hope is sustained not only by the belief that the object of hope is likely, but also by the conviction that it is valuable. In this way we can perhaps sustain a hope for peace that will support our duty to seek peace. But the fear of war and compassion for the victims of war may also support the duty to seek peace. Kant ignored these opportunities to support the duty to seek peace because they could support only the duty to avoid war. But Kant never showed that the duty to seek peace—as he saw it—outweighed the duty to avoid war. I conclude that Kant's arguments lead us to endless war rather than to peace.

Although Frederick Douglass disclaimed any patriotism or love of the United States in the years when he considered its constitution to be pro-slavery, I argue that he was in fact always a patriot and always a lover of his country. This conclusion leads me to argue further that patriotism is not as expressly political as many philosophers suppose. Patriots love their country despite its politics and often unreasonably, although in loving their country they are concerned with its politics. The greatest among them freely dedicate themselves selflessly to the improvement of their country, partly because they love it, and partly because they are moved to take on great projects.

This is a defense of blackreparations using the theory of reparations setout in John Locke's The Second Treatise ofGovernment. I develop two mainarguments, what I call the ``inheritanceargument'' and the ``counterfactual argument,''both of which have been thought to fail. In nocase do I appeal to the false ideas that presentday United States citizens are guilty ofslavery or must pay reparation simply becausethe U.S. Government was once complicit in thecrime.

Rejetant l'explication raciste et politique de R. Roberts concernant la non-reparation des injustices subies par les Noirs aux Etats-Unis, l'A. retrace l'histoire du debat sur l'action affirmative et met en evidence l'inegalite du pouvoir entre les groupes ethniques.

African-American political thought finds its premises in European philosophical traditions. But these traditions often challenge African-American humanity which African-American political thought defends. African-American political thought is therefore an extended commentary on the consistency of European philosophical traditions.

A society is culturally plural when it contains a variety of cultural groups. A common view is that just societies are likely to be culturally plural. This view assumes that human beings have rights to remain in the cultures in which they were born, or even to adopt whatever culture they choose. It is also widely believed that cultural pluralism tends to have good consequences. For example, many people suppose that the variety of cultures in a culturally plural society adds savor and interest to the lives of its inhabitants. This view evidently assumes that culture is a consumer good. Another view that cultural pluralism tends to have good consequences rests on the premise that each culture has claims to moral knowledge.

In what way, and by how much, is the working man better off than the slave? Frederick Douglass argued that the difference might not be great. The slaveholders, he claimed, had succeeded in making the laboring white man “almost” as much a slave as the “black slave himself.” But some contemporary philosophical discussions go much further, suggesting that essentially the laboring white man and the black slave were both enslaved. For example, this is the clear implication of Philip Pettit's discussion of domination, freedom, and slavery in his book Republicanism (1997). Pettit calls a person's freedom “republican freedom,” marking it off from negative and positive liberty. As if to confirm that the republican tradition was right to equate domination and slavery, Pettit describes them as both characteristically condemning their victims to lives of fear, deference, flattery, and slyness. Since the most important and reliable of the strategies to deaden the slaves' imagination is to compel them to live in constant fear, there would be no difference between slavery and mere domination if domination per se made people fearful.

Tentative de demontration qu'aucun probleme conceptuel n'est obstacle a la realite d'un gouvernement de consentement.

This article examines philosophical theories applicable to discrimination, affirmative action, and diversity in business. It argues that utilitarianism supports many forward-looking arguments for affirmative action based on good consequences and that natural rights theory can be used to support both forward-looking and backward-looking arguments for affirmative action. It also argues in defense of the view that diversity in the workplace is an important grounding for affirmative action.

Although the black ghetto neighborhoods of the mid-twentieth century were typically very poor, they did not have the high rates of joblessness, welfare dependence, teenage pregnancies, out of wedlock births, femaleheaded households, drug abuse, and violent crime which now characterize so many black ghettos today. To date the best explanation of this alarming social and economic retrogression is William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged. 1 Wilson compares the inhabitants of today's black ghettos to the lumpenproletariat in Karl Marx's description of life in the slums of nineteenth-century England. But Wilson's name for them is the "underclass" (pp. 6, 7). Wilson locates the main cause of the underclass in deep changes in the economy which caused prolonged joblessness in certain segments of the black population. Prominent among these changes are a slack labor market, the contraction of the manufacturing sector, and the shift of employment opportunities from the inner cities to the suburbs. Because of past racial discrimination in residence and employment, many blacks lived in the inner cities of the great cities and were confined to unskilled, blue-collar work in the manufacturing sector. Thus they lost their jobs disproportionately when the manufacturing sector contracted and lived too far from the suburbs to compete for the jobs being created there. But, although Wilson is clear that joblessness was the main cause of the underclass, he argues that another development was also necessary. This was the departure of the black middle and working classes from black neighborhoods where they had previously been confined by de jure residential segregation. Wilson argues that this removed an important "social buffer" that could have prevented black joblessness from leading to the underclass. If these classes had not left the ghetto, important institutions like churches, schools, stores, and recreational facilities would

Some Afro‐American thinkers maintain that blacks will best serve their interests if they integrate with whites wherever they can. Others argue the case for separation, both as a means and as an end. This essay considers the arguments for integration and separation from the perspective of equality. Egalitarians tend to believe that their principles are capable of settling most social and political disputes. This is shown to be not true for the debate between integrationists and separatists.

When Homer Plessy brought suit against the state of Louisiana for its laws segregating the races on railways he was not complaining about the poor accommodations for black people on the state’s railways. Neither was he objecting to the economic injustice of forcing blacks to pay the same fare as whites, but for inferior accommodations. If the state required the railways to reserve separate accommodations for black people that were as good as the accommodations they reserved for white people this would have satisfied Booker T. Washington -he said so — but it would not have satisfied Plessy.1 Plessy would not be satisfied until he got the right to sit next to whites on railway carriages.