CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Kulkarni, Neil Atul |
|---|---|
| Title | The Limits of International Toleration: A Communitarian Case for Pluralism and Non-Intervention |
| Summary | On the one hand, there are fundamental moral principles that apply to all people, regardless of the nation-states they are born into. On the other hand, it is desirable to prevent cultural homogenisation and enable each group to preserve its own customs and traditions. This thesis is an attempt to reconcile these two intuitions. It attempts to do so by defending a broadly communitarian position, with significant concessions to liberalism. The first chapter introduces the different theories at issue in this universe of discourse, before situating the argument of the thesis in some detail. The second deals with the debate between John Rawls’s position as expressed in his Law of Peoples, and its critics, who argue for the irrelevance of borders on either institutional or moral grounds. The next two chapters pertain to relativism and communitarianism respectively. I deal especially with normative relativism, the idea that there are no universal, true moral principles. I show that relativism, although an intuitively appealing response to Rawls’s critics, must be rejected because it is self-defeating. I deal with communitarianism in Chapter 4, and offer some arguments in its favour. The thesis concludes with some suggestions of a possible reconciliation of the liberal and the communitarian positions. |
| Supervisor | Kis, Janos |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/kulkarni_neil.pdf |
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