Aleksandar Jokic

Having followed the literature on genocide since the beginning of 1990s I have been often struck that academic writing on genocide is very much like non-professional pursuits in youth sports: anything is considered 'a good try'. The French have a good phrase for what I mean here: n'importe quoi. Works exhibiting no sound methodology, replete with irrational claims without factual basis and beliefs about foreigners adopted on faith limited only by a 'the worse the better' criterion of plausibility dominate the literature on genocide. My only consolation in confronting this literature has been that philosophers, for the most part, had not been the ones taking part in this orgy of nonsense. The book Genocide and Human Rights takes even that solace away as it purports to be 'a philosophical guide' to genocide.

In the debate between those who hold the tensed theory and those who hold the tenseless theory of time, Arthur Prior’s famous “Thank Goodness Argument” has had a special place. Initially designed to help tensers, it has seen its fortune change many times. In this paper the focus is on a methodological aspect of the argument. The purpose is to defend the “new reading” of the argument, which is intended to resolve an ontological issue by focusing on an epistemic fact, against a recent charge by Nathan Oaklander that such an argument can be valid only if it is trivial, i.e., if “ceases to exist” contained in one of the premises had been already understood in the tensed sense. However, whether the argument is trivial or not depends also on whether the tensed reading is directly invoked or obtained only through the substitution of an extensional equivalent whose truth is not based on the presupposed truth of the tensed account. A possible extensional equivalent needed for the intended substitution is offered. It is based on the concept of in-the-world-inherent-modalities.

A step towards constructing an ethics of international activism is proposed by formulating a series of constraints on what would constitute morally permissible agency in the context that involves delivering services abroad, directly or indirectly. Perhaps surprisingly, in this effort the author makes use of the concept of ‘force multiplier’. This idea and its official applications have explanatory importance in considering the correlation between the post-Cold War phenomenal growth in the number of international non-governmental organizations and the emergence of the US as the sole, unchallenged superpower. Four moral constraints useful for morally assessing international activism are formulated and defended. The final outcome is an argument in favor of an overarching duty for any activist-minded Westerner to go local, while developing nations are urged to closely regulate, even criminalize, activities by international activists and ‘human rights organizations’ on their territory when not in solidarity or in support of local movements. The position defended, urging the normative primacy of local over international activism, also finds support in Immanuel Kant’s Third Definitive Article for A Perpetual Peace.