Chris Bertram

It is often claimed that states enjoy, as a consequence of their sovereign status, the right to control the passage of outsiders through their territory and that they have a discretion to admit or to refuse to admit outsiders, whether those outsiders be tourists, business travelers, would-be economic migrants, or even refugees. Or, to be more exact, such limitations on that right to control are derived from the agreement of states to treaties and conventions, agreement which they could have withheld and could yet revoke. As a statement of the legal position this is not completely uncontroversial,1 but my aim in this paper is not to make a contribution to international law or law at all. Rather, my concern is with political philosophy and with the issue of whether..

This chapter demonstrates that Rousseau sets out no systematic moral theory of his own but rather a series of theories about other matters which contain remarks and opinions relevant to ethics, beginning with a discussion of his theory of psychological development. It then explores a number of possible answers to the questions: what, according to Rousseau is morality, and why should we be moral? Next, the chapter explains the meaning of Rousseau's natural goodness thesis. It presents two main accounts of how individuals can achieve a flourishing and satisfied life, the first of which is Rousseau's educational theory, as articulated in Emile; the second is the political philosophy he advances in the Social Contract.

Liberal egalitarian political philosophers have often argued that private property is a legal convention dependent on the state and that complaints about taxation from entitlement theorists are therefore based on a conceptual mistake. But our capacity to grasp and use property concepts seems too embedded in human nature for this to be correct. This essay argues that many standard arguments that property is constitutively a legal convention fail, but that the opposition between conventionalists and natural rights theorists is outmoded. In doing this, the essay draws on recent literature in evolutionary biology and psychology. Even though modern property in a complex society involves legal conventions, those conventions should be sensitive to our natural dispositions concerning ownership.