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Giving Up On Moral Truth Shall Set You Free: Walzer On Relativism, Criticism, And Toleration, David Lefkowitz
Giving Up On Moral Truth Shall Set You Free: Walzer On Relativism, Criticism, And Toleration, David Lefkowitz
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Morality, Michael Walzer contends, is plural, subjective, and concrete, a multitude of moralities or moral ways of life created over time by the members of distinct historically situated communities. This entails that we must abandon the familiar notion of moral truth, according to which at least some claims of the form ‘it is wrong to ϕ’ are true in virtue of their tracking or reflecting objective and universal moral principles binding on all moral agents as such. Many of Walzer’s critics take this implication to constitute a reductio ad absurdum refutation of Walzer’s relativist meta-ethics. But what precisely do we …
When Does Might Make Right? Using Force For Regime Change, John Linarelli
When Does Might Make Right? Using Force For Regime Change, John Linarelli
Scholarly Works
Should states use force to bring about regime change? International law recognizes no such grounds. This paper seeks to provide guidance from moral theory. The aim of this paper is to identify the moral grounds for the use of armed force by one state or a group of states, against another state, when the intention of the intervening states is to achieve a fundamental change in the character of the political and legal institutions of the other state. Lawyers tend to place the argument for regime change intervention within putative humanitarian intervention doctrines. The moral justification for humanitarian intervention is …