CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2010
| Author | Mráz, Attila Gergely |
|---|---|
| Title | Coercion, Responsibility and the Scope of Justice: A critique of Nagel's anti-cosmopolitan account |
| Summary | This thesis offers a critique of the influential anti-cosmopolitan position put forward by Thomas Nagel. This position holds that duties of egalitarian justice exist if and only if there is a coercive political authority these duties can apply to, and the effects coercively imposed by this authority can be attributed to those coerced by it. As there is no global authority fulfilling these conditions, the scope of justice is not global on this account. After a brief contextualization of the scope-debate, I offer a twofold criticism of Nagel’s account. First, I argue that the existence of the required kind of political institutions cannot be a sufficient condition for the existence of robust egalitarian duties. Second, I show that even if egalitarian duties arose as Nagel suggests, the account given for their generation would not entail that their scope is restricted. Finally, I argue that even if the account of the generation and anti-cosmopolitan scope of these duties were right, the reasons Nagel accepts for leaving the state of nature also serve as reasons for establishing a global coercive authority to which egalitarian principles would apply on his account. Thus, it is shown that Nagel’s central normative premises are false, but their truth would not yield his desired conclusion either; and due to his assumptions concerning the state of nature, a consistent interpretation of his account should conclude that there is a duty to realize egalitarian justice globally. |
| Supervisor | Miklósi, Zoltán |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2010/mraz_attila.pdf |
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