Elisabeth H. Ellis

The prospect of an east–west conversation on good governanceGood governance, facilitated by the device of assigning representative roles to those less familiar with the represented material, was an intriguing one to me. As a political theorist passionate about KantKant, Immanuel’s cosmopolitanism and steeped in Rawlsian thought experiments, I loved the idea that we would have to draw a more-literal-than-usual veil of ignorance around ourselves in discussion. Preparing to introduce sessions on Confucian valuesValues brought an intensity to my study that reminded me of graduate school, in a good way. It was a pleasure to immerse myself in the work of Sungmoon KimKim, Sungmoon and other modernModernConfucianConfucian political theorists in the run up to our meeting. Following my other main scholarly interest, in environmental decision-making, I discovered the work of Confucian scholars of energy policy and other environmental questions. I was reading about ConfucianConfucian thought in my study in Dunedin, known as the “wildlife capital” of Aotearoa New Zealand, and arguably the most remote center of learning anywhere. It seemed natural to me that an east–west conversation on good governance would focus on finding common ground and perhaps even sources of hope about the climate and sustainabilitySustainability crises already affecting daily life in Dunedin and everywhere else.

The topic for this session is ritual, civilityCivility, and harmony for good governance. Arguably, one of the most distinctive features of Confucianism as a cultural, philosophical, and political tradition is that it takes ritual really seriously. And in the Confucian tradition, ritual is important, especially in relation to civility and harmonyHarmony. Moreover, ritual as we understand it is one of the key valuesValues that define and undergird the ideas and practicesPractice not only of the Chinese society but also of Indian and Japanese societies.

In this paper, I explain why people seeking to flourish together fairly in the im- perfect world we share today ought to support a universal carbon tax with no exception for international aviation. The argument proceeds in four steps. First, I provide a free-standing analysis of emissions behavior at the individual moral level. Second, I offer a picture of ideal and non-ideal coordination based mostly on Kantian social contract theory. Third, I argue that in a non-ideal context, moral signals about right relation offer a coordinating fulcrum around which meaningful if only partly coordinated action is possible. Fourth, I apply these conclusions to the case of aviation exceptionalism, focusing especially on instances of incomplete, overlapping, partly coordinated climate actions. I conclude that these arguments together amount to a case for reversing the Chicago Convention and applying a universal carbon tax that does not exclude international flights, ending aviation exceptionalism.

Kant's best contribution to modern political theory is his dynamic account of the transition from the imperfect, provisional state toward political perfection. Scholarly attention to Kant's political philosophy has focused on his theory of the ideal state, at the expense of the far more interesting account of transition. Kant is rightly honored for his defense of human rights, of the rule of law, and of the cause of international peace; in short, for his attempt to devise a political system that would protect human freedom at every level of interaction. Nevertheless, Kant's original contribution comes not from his doctrine of the ideal state, which exemplifies moderate enlightened political thought of his time, but from his theory of the conditions of the gradual approximation of that state in practice. This dissertation traces the development of this line of reasoning from the Critique of Pure Reason through the Conflict of Faculties, setting Kant's arguments in the contexts of his predecessors in social contract theory and of his contemporaries in the Berlin Enlightenment. ;Over the course of his writing, Kant proposes a number of different accounts of the political progress that would result from the application of ideal judgment to political practice: the public sphere in "What is Enlightenment?" teleological history in Critique of Judgment, formal principles of publicity in "Perpetual Peace," provisional right in the Rechtslehre, and the judging public in Conflict of Faculties . Though the specific elements of these solutions vary, the main lines of Kant's argument remain the same throughout his work: progress toward the just state results from comparisons made by some human agents between rational ideals and empirical reality. However Kant arranges his various proposed institutions, the human judges of right need to be isolated from all but the interests of reason, not only to ensure their freedom to reason from a possibly punishing government, but also to prevent the corruption of this reason by the temptations of power itself. Over the long run, the interplay of public judgments should lead to the advent of more enlightened political institutions and practices