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Online Public Shaming (OPS) is a form of norm enforcement that involves collectively imposing reputational costs on a person for having a certain kind of moral character. OPS actions aim to disqualify her from public discussion and certain normal human relations. We argue that this constitutes an informal collective punishment that it is presumptively wrong to impose (or seek to impose) on others. OPS functions as a form of ostracism that fails to show equal basic respect to its targets. Additionally, in seeking to mobilise unconstrained collective power with potentially serious punitive consequences, OPS is incompatible with due process values.

The agency objection to applying distributive justice globally is that principles of distributive justice need to apply to the behaviour of a special kind of institutional agent of distributive justice because of the special powers of that agent. No such agent exists capable of configuring cooperative arrangements between all persons globally, and so distributive justice does not apply globally. One response to institutional views of this kind is that they do not rule out Natural Duties of Justice that fall on all of us to bring about institutional agencies capable of global distributive justice. In this article I argue that this move presupposes a particular, teleological, conception of justice whilst institutional accounts most plausibly rest on a non-teleological one. I provide an argument for favouring the non-teleological conception. I also show why alternative ways of arguing for global Natural Duties of Justice do not get around this controversy. The debate is at the level of presuppositions about justice, and relying on a partisan conception is question begging.

This chapter presents a distinct account of neutrality in which the acceptability or justice of policies or public actions can only be established ‘holistically’, requiring an all-things-considered assessment in which the neutrality of those policies is never by itself definitive. Instead, neutrality is a definitive constraint only on the justification of principles/theories of justice. The chapter sets out a proper understanding of the value behind neutrality, defending this value from autonomy-based objections to neutrality. It then uses that account to show how the value engages with policies and public actions. The chapter also responds critically to views that see neutrality as a standard to be established separately to theories of justice. Finally, it argues that the value of neutrality with its proper scope and object in place can explain how to address cases of claimed exemption on the basis of burdens of conscience by people with ‘deeply’ held convictions.

There are two central theses to this article, the first is that a special kind of governance authority is needed for principles of distributive social justice (‘social justice’ from now on) to be applicable to any sphere of human action. The second is that international law does not and cannot represent that kind of governance authority. It is not ‘social justice-apt’, in my terminology. This is due to the limits inherent in the statist character of international law, a character that underlies the point and purpose of international law in the first place. Putting these together, one can conclude that international law cannot be used to govern the global order according to those principles of social justice that liberal theorists typically defend in the domestic context. This shows that if the cosmopolitan project of extending social justice to the global arena does not find an alternative form of governance for the international order (the problem of ‘cosmopolitan coordination’) it ceases to be a viable project.

Sue James recommends an ‘enforcement account’ of rights, where a right is to be understood simply as an enforceable claim. I show that adopting this analysis of rights implies giving up non-rhetorical, important, uses of the word ‘right’ which are possible on the best alternative theory of rights to James's position: the ability to deny a moral right's existence, even where claims are effectively enforced; the notion of a right's violation; and the idea that rights imply entitlement to make a demand, and not just enforcement of demands. Thus, adopting James's position implies giving up much more than mere rhetoric about rights.

A number of theorists have tried to resolve the tension between a western-oriented liberal scheme of human rights and an account that accommodates different political systems and constitutional ideals than the liberal one. One important way the tension has been addressed is through a “neutral” or tolerant, notion of human rights, as present in the work of Rawls, Scanlon and Buchanan. In this paper I argue that neutrality cannot by itself explain the difference between rights considered appropriate for liberal states and rights considered to be human rights proper. The central arguments used by neutralist theorists presuppose, rather than justify, this differential treatment. Instead, that difference can be understood only by reference to the purpose of human rights as distinct from the constitutional rights of a liberal state. This requires us to reassess the point and purpose of a theory of international justice, in contrast to justice for a domestic and politically separate society. In the case of a theorist like Rawls, human rights represent guides to the foreign policy of a liberal state, rather than to principles by which all states are expected to abide. That is because of Rawls’ acceptance that no common, authoritative, third-party, institutions capable of imposing duties on all agents uniformly exist or can exist. This also makes his theory inherently conservative about human rights, given that they are simply to act as a guide to which states can be treated as legitimate when it comes to liberal foreign policy: those that possess institutions that can be said to represent a peoples, rather than being imposed through violence. This standard is lower than the ideal set of rights extended to all in a liberal society.

The paper responds to Cohen's critical claim that for agents who sincerely accept Rawls's difference principle it is not consistent to seek material incentives towards productivity. The central argument of the paper is that productive agents in a market economy would not be as productive without material incentives unless held to be under a (controversial) duty to increase productivity. This duty is distinct from merely having a duty to contribute up to a reasonable minimum, and then equalise material benefits. The controversial duty is not derivable from the difference principle itself, nor from the background motivations for it. Therefore, if Cohen's critique is internal to Rawlsian distributive justice, it is based on a controversial version of that view of distributive justice when applied to a market system. It is the reach, and not the core insight of Cohen's critique that is attacked here. If in any way sound, that insight does not un-controversially apply to all material incentive-seeking in a market economy.

In this paper I challenge the idea that there can be rights the rationale and content of which is securing subsistence goods for people. I do not question whether sometimes one can be entitled to minimum provisions on a different basis. For example, social justice standards entitle us to a fair share of the social product; in certain circumstances this might imply the minimum necessary to enjoy one’s equal rights as a citizen. Yet the same standards can entitle us to more than this in other circumstances. By contrast human rights aim to articulate minimal entitlements that do not vary with social circumstances. I argue that the minimum they aim to articulate is not best understood as an entitlement to an amount of some goods, even a subsistence amount, but rather as a minimum treatment. I then show how this notion of minimum treatment does not challenge the idea that we have social and economic rights — it just makes their basis and content more nuanced.I pose the following dilemma. Either a person’s claim to subsistence goods is against social institutions equipped to distribute social benefits and burdens fairly and equitably or it is made regardless of such a social scheme. If the former, then one’s claim is best understood as based on principles the content of which is not a minimum goods entitlement, but rather an equitable social distribution — a fair share. However, if the claim is not against a social scheme, there will be no plausible principle defining what counts as a reasonable burden for any of the available agents to secure subsistence. That means there is no justified principle implying perfect duties any agent could clearly follow or clearly breach that secure subsistence conditions for others. At best we can justify perfect, but singular, rescue duties under very specific conditions, or general but imperfect duties (allowing a degree of personal discretion concerning what any of us must do). Neither of these obviously correlates with human rights standards, for reasons I shall give. For more than singular duties such as rescue duties and imperfect duties to apply an institutional social agent with special redistributive powers is needed. But this reintroduces the first horn of the dilemma above: for that kind of agent the relevant standard is a fair share, not a minimal right. Attempts in the literature to overcome the second horn of the dilemma through claims that basic rights can correlate with imperfect duties or that basic rights can generate duties to work towards institutions that ‘perfect’ our imperfect duties, are shown to be faulty.My conclusion is that our entitlement to specific goods distributions is a different kind of question from entitlements based in rescue or imperfect duties of assistance. They are more appropriately addressed in an institutional context and in those contexts it is the standards of social justice/fairness that apply. Human rights standards engage with distributive questions in a different way: they define impermissible reasons on which to base distributive policies, ones implying negligent disregard. They are better understood as standards of minimum treatment rather than entitlement to minimum goods provision.

A number of views about the scope of justice in this debate have come to be grouped together under the heading of 'practice-dependence' in the literature. This is because they have something special to say about the relationship of moral principles to a practice. There are three questions that I wish to consider here. The first (sections 3 and 4) is whether there is a distinctive approach, different from standard moral reasoning that can be described as 'practice-dependence.' I shall argue that there is, both in human rights theory and in justice theory. The second (section 5) is whether that view is plausible in the light of an important moral test. That is a test for justifiability of a methodological premise when using such a premise in an account of justice will have a significant substantive upshot (an upshot affecting the entitlements and obligations people can be said to have). I argue that the practice-dependence view fails this test quite dramatically. In fact the approach has very little going for it in terms of rational motivation. Thirdly (section 6), I will consider whether the practice-dependence approach has been rightly attributed, by endorsers and critics of the approach alike, to moral theorists who put forward principles of justice that have social, or institutional, triggering conditions. These include Dworkin and Rawls. In answer to this I show that a number of theorists that have been identified as having practice-dependent approaches, both by endorsers and by critics of the approach, do not share in the distinctive premises of the approach. They in fact hold views incompatible with those, practice-dependence premises. In the concluding section (section 7), I argue that not only is the practice-dependence approach lacking in rational motivation and wrongly attributed to a particular group of theorists, it also distracts attention away from what is at stake in the scope-of-justice debate. By focusing on apparently methodological premises, the account overlooks the value-based reasons a theory might have for restricting the scope of principles of justice. Plausible value-based approaches exist, yet these have been mistakenly described as practice-dependence views in the literature, which has generated confusion as to their methodological commitments. Once properly understood, I argue, these views have the merit of at least addressing the justifiability test, which practice-dependence views do not. For those reasons, I conclude that practice-dependence is a red herring, raising more questions than it answers, for the global justice debate.

Transnational effects are identified as those economic effects which cross state boundaries. Where these effects are negative, as illustrated by the ‘transnational case’, it is asked what the appropriate ethical analysis of such a case might be. If we leave aside a social distributive justice analysis, for reasons given, then a typical move is to claim that transnational economic effects are analysable as human rights violations. The paper examines this claim and identifies the specific view of human rights which motivates it: the ‘outcomes view of human rights’. It is then shown how the outcomes view of human rights ultimately collapses into social distributive justice-type standards and so suffers from the same problems raised against using those standards for transnational effects. An alternative approach to human rights is sketched, although a complete theory of human rights is not offered. Finally, a different type of justice analysis for transnational cases is offered in which a form of international justice proper is proposed.

The paper engages the conceptual question of the nature of rights. First, moral methodology for developing criteria to judge the adequacy of theories for the concept of rights is discussed. Standard methodologies for conceptual theory, such as analysis of language practices, appealing to intuitions to test and correct hypotheses, and mixtures of these with appeals to substantive moral values, are shown to fail in important ways to give us reasons to adopt one or another view of the concept. An alternative methodology is proposed which appeals to the distinct role of concepts in our value scheme (the added value of being able to employ such concepts in our moral judgments). This is then used to develop criteria for a successful theory of rights. Two existing theories are shown, as a matter of illustration, to fail to satisfy the criteria, and finally an alternative theory of rights which does satisfy these criteria is proposed and defended.

Toleration and neutrality have often featured as interchangeable terms in commentaries on liberal political morality.1 In this vein influential thinkers, such as John Rawls, speak of liberal neutrality as if it were an extension of the principle of toleration.2 In what follows I aim to show not only that these concepts are fundamentally different, but also that tolerant and neutralist principles are not even mutually supporting. The concepts clearly have many things in common, especially when we are talking about their relationship to political justification and action, and both appear to capture the aims of liberal political morality. In fact they seem to represent two aspects of one project, taking on different burdens in a moral division of labour: one a virtue of institutions and the other a virtue of citizens. However, the overlap is deceptive and misleading in terms of what liberals should consider themselves committed to. Separating them will clarify their values for liberal political morality. So, my second aim, after distinguishing the concepts, is to consider whether toleration is necessary in a neutralist society. I argue against this view. I then consider whether toleration might not be independently valuable, perhaps as a competitor, to neutrality, an approach which, I also argue, has decisive reasons against it.

La fausse piste de la dependance aux pratiques et de meilleures raisons de restreindre la portee de la justice Dans cet article, j’avance trois theses. La premiere est qu’il existe effectivement une approche specifique de methodologie morale, differente du raisonnement moral standard, qui peut etre decrite comme « dependance a la pratique ». Selon moi, sa specificite repose sur l’affirmation selon laquelle les principes moraux servant a reguler les pratiques sociales doivent etre les principes visant a remplir au mieux l’objet de ces pratiques, un objet qui peut etre mis au jour a partir des comprehensions partagees de la pratique. Les participants considerent que les societes politiques internes ont un objet different de la pratique des relations internationales. Selon cette approche, par consequent, differents principes moraux s’appliquent dans chacun des cas : des principes de justice distributive entre citoyens, d’une part, et des principes de cooperation equitable entre Etats, de l’autre. Ma seconde these est que cette approche echoue neanmoins a passer un test important : la contrainte de justifiabilite. Toute formulation d’un principe moral qui assigne aux individus des droits et des devoirs, des benefices et des charges, devrait etre justifiable visa- vis de ces personnes au regard d’une valeur morale. Pourtant, comme je le montre ici, l’approche par la dependance aux pratiques ne peut offrir aucune justification du caractere approprie des principes qui soit fondee sur des valeurs. Ma derniere these consiste a noter que les defenseurs comme les detracteurs de la dependance aux pratiques ont attribue cette approche a des theoriciens qui restreignent la portee de la justice sur la base d’une justification morale. Ces conceptions sont, en fait, incompatibles avec l’affirmation du caractere approprie des principes dans la mesure ou la restriction de la portee de la justice repose sur un fondement moral independant. Elles sont aussi compatibles avec la contrainte de justifiabilite. Pour toutes ces raisons, je conclus que la dependance aux pratiques est une fausse piste dans le debat sur la justice globale.