Justice and Arbitrary Boundaries

This chapter deals with three problems of discrimination, arising from our membership of certain communities. The first of these concerns the debate between cosmopolitans and non-cosmopolitans about international justice. It is just a lucky accident that we were born where we were, but these arbitrary facts can make a huge difference to life chances. Rawlsian non-cosmopolitans thus risk a charge of incoherence if they combine an acceptance of these sources of arbitrariness with a commitment to anti-arbitrariness principles of justice. The Irrelevance Interpretation of Rawls’s justice as fairness advanced in Chapter 7 is used to defuse this charge of incoherence. The second problem concerns the ‘basic equality’ project of establishing robust foundations for human moral equality by locating a morally significant property that every human possesses, and possesses equally. It is contended that the basic equality project is wrongheaded, and that we need not worry about descriptive inequalities among human beings. The third problem concerns interspecies relations and the charge of ‘speciesism’. It is maintained that much anti-speciesist literature rests upon the doctrine of ‘moral individualism’, and that this doctrine is severely flawed. To come to a satisfactory view of what we owe to each other, we need to pay attention to both the properties individuals possess, and also the properties they lack. To do that, in turn, requires that these individuals be situated in certain communities, including species-specific communities.

Introduction: Citizens, Markets, and Turkey

The concept of citizenship is typically divided into distinct components. Following the pioneering work of T.H. Marshall, we focus on social and economic citizenship. We ask in particular whether the “basic equality of membership” at the heart of Marshall’s definition of citizenship can be advanced by market-centered policies such as social cash transfer, even in cases such as that of forced migrants in which political or civil elements of citizenship are not present. Contemporary Turkey provides an ideal setting in which to investigate this question.

Illusion in Equality of Opportunity in Education

This article focuses on the portion of the confusion that has been addressed by the different sociological and philosophical perspectives on equality of opportunity. For this study, I have used the document review approach where books, reports and research articles are reviewed for the purpose. Basically qualitative information is used and adopted for the thematic information analysis process. This article attempts to settle the illusion of equality of opportunity through binary thinking like the egalitarian that believes on how well people’s lives go not just the formally as a support by Marxist view as the protection should have on the basis of socioeconomic position rather than their personal needs. Basic equality and the social democracy theory are concerned on, no one should be discriminated against their sex or gender, race or ethnicity, and socioeconomic background or to be given equal value as a human worth. This article concludes that the illusion of equality of opportunity still remains on which one standard of measurement is best to achieve equal opportunity that one is unanswerable within single pint and events.

The Human Right to Health and Access to Essential Medicines

Living with untreated AIDS is devastating. Patients often suffer from terrible lesions, pneumonia, and nausea; become emaciated; have seizures; and eventually die. The first chapter argues that there should be an enforceable legal human right to health that includes a right to access essential medicines to treat diseases like AIDS. The chapter does not provide a complete account of the right’s basis; the right may also have to protect our basic equality and dignity, for instance. Nevertheless, it argues that health is necessary for, and partly constitutive of, a minimally good life. Lack of access to essential medicines characteristically undermines individuals’ ability to live such lives. So people should have a human right to health that grounds rights to access essential medicines.

The Buddhist Just Society

Buddhism posits a basic equality of sentient beings as faced with suffering and in need of liberation. It also regards humans in particular as having a precious kind of rebirth with great potential for liberation in spite of their different karmic backgrounds. Respect for others is seen in the reflection, ‘For a state that is not pleasing or delightful to me, how could I inflict that on another?’ (SN V.353–354; Harvey 2000: 33–34). This is given as a reason for not inflicting wrong action or wrong speech on others. This chapter discusses Buddhist ideals on good social relationships and the good governance of society, in which a government should seek to prevent poverty, punish crime in a way that is reform-orientated and compassionate yet effective, and sets an ethical example. It includes a discussion of attitudes to capital punishment, democracy, and the extent to which the law should encode ethics.

Discriminant as a product of local discriminants

Let [Formula: see text] be a discrete valuation ring with maximal ideal [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] be the integral closure of [Formula: see text] in a finite separable extension [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text]. For a maximal ideal [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text], let [Formula: see text] denote respectively the valuation rings of the completions of [Formula: see text] with respect to [Formula: see text]. The discriminant satisfies a basic equality which says that [Formula: see text]. In this paper, we extend the above equality on replacing [Formula: see text] by the valuation ring of a Krull valuation of arbitrary rank and completion by henselization. In the course of proof, we prove a generalization of the well-known weak Approximation Theorem which is of independent interest as well.

PRIVATIZATION AND NATIONALIZATION CYCLES

This paper studies cycles of nationalization and privatization in resource-rich economies. It starts with a synthesis of available evidence on the drivers and consequences of privatization and nationalization. Then it develops a dynamic model of the choice between private and national regimes for the ownership of natural resources. The choice is driven by a basic equality-efficiency trade-off: national ownership results in more redistribution of income and more equality but undermines incentives for effort. We discuss how the resolution of the trade-off depends on external variables—such as the commodity price—and domestic ones—such as the tax system. The model thus identifies the determinants of the observed cycles of privatization and nationalization and is consistent with key stylized facts.

Unrelenting Racial Progress

Beyond the usual coordinates of racism, conventionally defined, and socioeconomic class lies a form of racial inequality that has not been fully studied or developed in scholarly circles or public discussions about the problems African Americans, or blacks, face in our post–Jim Crow society. This form of racial inequality subordinates racial advancement to competing nonracist interests. It disadvantages all blacks, including the rich and famous—Oprah and President Obama—by making it more difficult than it otherwise has to be for blacks to climb out of the abyss of racial degradation wrought by slavery and Jim Crow. Racial degradation strikes at the heart of basic equality; that is, human dignity, equal worth. I call this form of racial inequality racial subordination....