Inaugural Conference of the Research Group on Global Justice
September 8 and 9, 2016 (Thurs-Fri)
McGill University
The conference program is provided in English below. Pour la version française, cliquez ici.
Thursday, September 8 (9:00 am to 4:00 pm)
Introduction and Welcome (9:00-9:30)
Location: Leacock Building, Room 429
Panel 1 (9:30-11:30)
Location: Leacock Building, Room 429
Chair: Yves Winter (McGill)
Paper presenters:
- Briana McGinnis (McGill), ‘Conflicts of Affect and Reason: Loss of Nation and the Obligation to Love’
Abstract: This paper explores the (often conflicting) normative reasoning underlying historical and contemporary policies for removing existing members from their home nations. Focusing primarily on the denaturalization and denationalization policies of liberal nations such as the U.S. and the U.K., this paper examines the problems that blending contractual and affective citizenship requirements present for nations that prize consent, fairness, and the rule of law. - Catherine Lu (McGill), ‘Reconciliation and the Conditions for Genuine Communication’
Abstract: The political project of reconciliation is a response to the alienation produced by or constitutive of social/political injustices and harms. Agents can be alienated from other agents, but also from the institutions and structures that produce or contribute to injustice. Under what conditions may those who have experienced major social/political injustice come to affirm the social/political order that mediates and organizes their activities? I examine in particular barriers in the case of indigenous peoples’ reconciliation with settler colonial states and the international order of sovereign states, consisting in the problems of structural indignity and inauthentic agency.
Lunch Break (12:00-1:00) Arts Council Room 160
Panel 2 (1:00-2:30)
Location: Arts Council Room, Arts Building, Room 160
Chair: Catherine Lu (McGill)
Paper presenter:
- Robert E. Goodin (ANU), ‘Structures of Complicity: Consumers, Producers, Suppliers’
Abstract: Businesses or customers are often accused of complicity with the bad behaviour of suppliers of products that they use or consume. But complicity is a relatively precise notion, involving one agent making a potentially necessary causal contribution to the wrongdoing of some other agent. Often one or another of those key elements is missing in the corporate or consumer case. Sometimes what businesses do amounts to more than mere complicity with wrongdoings of upstream suppliers; sometimes they are virtually ‘partners in crime’. Other times what businesses or customers do amount to less than complicity, because there was no realistic chance that what they did could have made a causal difference to the other’s wrongdoing. In the latter cases, however, they can still commit the moral wrong of being part of a bad practice. - Discussant: Amandine Catala (UQAM)
Afternoon Tea (2:30-4:00 pm) Arts Council Room
Friday, September 9 (11:30 am to 5:15 pm)
Panel 3 (11:30-1:30) – Light lunch with tea/coffee and dessert will be provided at the start
Location: Leacock Building, Room 429 (co-sponsored by the Centre for International Peace and Security Studies)
Chair: Fernando Nuñez-Mietz (McGill)
Paper presenters:
- Caesar Atuire (University of Ghana), ‘Power and responsibility: a contemporary African reading of Romano Guardini’
- Yann Allard-Tremblay (McGill), ‘The Global Geryon: Pluralism, Self-Government, and Subsidiarity’
Abstract: I argue for three principles that should guide political theory in its apprehension of the global order: (1) fundamental pluralism regarding significant political entities; (2) self-government, understood as the joint determination of terms of governance and interactions, of this multiplicity of political entities; (3) subsidiarity as the standard by which these entities should be guided in their interactions. This leads to a normatively desirable complex and irregular representation of the global political order, one that is neither statist nor cosmopolitan.
Short Break (1:30-2:00)
Panel 4 (2:00-4:00)
Location: Arts Council Room 160 (co-sponsored by the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Philosophie Politique - GRIPP)
Chair: Pablo Gilabert (Concordia)
- Robert E. Goodin (ANU), ‘Enfranchising all subjected, worldwide’
Abstract: According to Robert Dahl’s all-subjected principle, ‘the citizen body in a democratically governed state must include all persons subject to the laws of that state except transients and persons proved to be incapable of caring for themselves.’ The all-subjected principle does not limit voting rights to conventional national boundaries, as its advocates have hoped in forwarding it as a more restrictive alternative to the all-affected principle. - Arash Abizadeh (McGill), ‘The Meaning and Scope of the All-Subjected Principle’
Abstract: Domestic laws that coercively seek to regulate activities within the state’s territory by threatening sanctions for violations may be given a wide-scope interpretation (implying that everyone is subject to the coercive threat) or a narrow-scope interpretation (implying that only those within the territory are subject to the coercive threat). I here argue for a narrow-scope interpretation.
4:00-5:15 Reception in Arts Council Room