Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-17T18:12:32.867Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Reasonable Pluralism and International Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2017

John Linarelli*
Affiliation:
Swansea University School of Law

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Harmony and Dissonance in International Legal Theory
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Hart, H.L.A., The Concept of Law 8283 (2d ed. 1994)Google Scholar.

2 I agree with John Morss on this point.

3 Gosepath, Stefan, Equality, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Zalta, Edward N. ed., 2011)Google Scholar, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/equality/.

4 Nagel, Thomas, Equality and Partiality 11 (1991)Google Scholar.

5 I am grateful for Dean Claudio Grossman’s comments during the discussion following the panel presentations, which encouraged the panelists to focus on the universalism of human rights.

6 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples 40 (1999). See also Nagel, supra note 4, at 169.

7 Griffin, James, On Human Rights 138 (2008)Google Scholar. For just such a recent writer, see Sloane, Robert D., Human Rights for Hedgehogs?: Global Value, Pluralism, International Law, and Some Reservations of the Fox, 90 B.U. L. Rev. 975, 976 (2010)Google Scholar. For a view similar to Griffin’s, see James W. Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights 168-84 (2d ed. 2007).

8 T.M. Scanlon, What weOwe to Each Other 333-34 (1998) (citing Hárman, Gilbert, What We Owe To Each Other 333-34 (1998) (citing Gilbert Harman, What is Moral Relativism!, in Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity? 364 (G. Hárman & Thompson, J.J. eds., 1996))Google Scholar. Scanlon calls this a benign moral relativism. A skeptical form of moral relativism challenges the basic idea of morality as authoritative. Some claim that value does not have truth conditionality but is simply a matter of taste or preference. We have all had students in class who say “We all have our own personal morality.” Finally, some claim that morality is simply a matter of social convention. These ways of “handling” morality can be described as skeptical. I will put them aside here. Those who accept these arguments likely reject my moral justification thesis for the force of international law, so I am not going to get anywhere in dealing with these arguments.

9 Scanlon, supra note 8, at 329. Scanlon calls the latter parametric universalism.

10 Griitin, supra note 7, at 130-31.

11 Rawls and Scanlon use the same language. See Rawls, supra note 6, at 11, 40; Scanlon, supra note 8, at 335-42.

12 Scanlon, supra note 8.

13 Stephen Darwall, the Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability 119-26 (2006).

14 Brian D. Lepard, Customary International Law: A New Theory with Practical Applications (2010).

15 Rawls, supra note 6, at 11, 15, 40, 54-57; John Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993); John Rawls, the Idea of Public Reason Revisited (1999). On Dworkin’s notion of ethical independence, see Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs 368-71 (2011).