Jonathan Kwan

I argue that a people as an intergenerational group has a self-directed duty of ecological sustainability that is a precondition, and even a correlate, of its own right to self-determination. Conceptualizing ecological sustainability as a self-directed duty of self-determination offers several advantages. First, it avoids the nonidentity problem, since the identity conditions of intergenerational peoples do not depend on which specific individuals will become members. Second, it better captures the normatively valuable relationships knitting different generations into a single political community than theories that ascribe rights to self-determination or sovereignty to discrete generations. Third, grounding a duty of ecological sustainability in self-determination not only responds to a distinct demand of legitimacy but also sidesteps problems that arise when appealing instead to justice, especially egalitarian distributive principles. Lastly, I reply to the worry that a duty grounded in the right to self-determination cannot be a genuinely binding duty insofar as a people can simply waive its right to self-determination. I contend that a people cannot permanently waive its right to self-determination while continuing to exist, and even when a people chooses to dissolve, it is still bound by its self-directed duty of ecological sustainability until it ceases to exist.

The main accounts of the wrongs of colonialism in political philosophy and political theory conceptualize colonialist wrongs in purely political terms and fail to consider their environmental or ecological dimensions. Building off the insights of Indigenous scholars and communities, I develop an eco-political principle of self-determination to explain many central wrongs of colonialism as at once political and environmental. I argue that a people’s right to self-determination over a given territory is normatively linked to a duty of ecological sustainability and a right to ecological integrity. A people has a duty to ecologically sustain the material prerequisites for human life, political society, and its capacities to exercise self-determination, as otherwise it would undercut the very preconditions of its self-determination and territorial rights. However, ecological sustainability is not simply an internal constraint on a people’s self-determination but rather how exactly ecological sustainability is conceptualized and realized in each geographical location should be determined by a people for itself. Likewise, the external dimension of self-determination (the right to be free from illegitimate outside interference) and the right to territorial integrity should be understood not simply in political terms, as protecting against border changes for instance, but environmentally as encompassing a right to ecological integrity. This eco-political principle of self-determination unifies and explains many central wrongs of colonialism, which include but are not limited to the taking of territory: such as forced displacement, the spread of infectious diseases, extractive industries, settler containment strategies, and climate change. I end by responding to the objection that my view could license a kind of green colonialism on the basis that new settlers could ecologically sustain a territory better than Indigenous peoples.

Confucius endorses a balance between generalism and particularism in ethics and aesthetics. Rather than standards, his rules are defeasible guides for perception, thought, and action balanced by particularizing capacities of judgment. These rules have opaque and open-ended hedges that strengthen a generalization by restricting its application. A similar architecture for ethical and aesthetic rules reflects a broad view of ethics and aesthetics as intertwined and continuous. Hence, whether one chooses a generalist or particularist ethics depends on one's corresponding choices in aesthetics, and vice versa. This fundamental finding about value theory invites philosophers everywhere to investigate the teachings of Confucius.

In this article, I show how the principle of democratic self-determination can answer the boundary problem by both grounding and constraining a people’s right to exclude potential immigrants. I argue that a people has the qualified right to exclude insofar as it respects the self-determination claims of outsiders. I analyze the concrete implications of the requirement to respect the self-determination claims of outsiders in the cases of long-term residents, refugees, and brain drain. Sometimes the only way for a people to respect the self-determination claims of outsiders will be by including, rather than excluding, them as members.

I argue that principles need to be appealed to in criticism especially when critics deliberate and determine the consistency between their verdicts on individual artworks. Following Frank Sibley, we can take principles as identifying properties with inherently positive or negative polarities that can be reversed in interactions with other properties. I contend that we should understand the character of such principles as having ceteris paribus hedges that restrict the scopes of the principles to artworks in which the inherent polarities of cited qualities are not undermined or reversed. This is to adopt Michael Strevens’ ‘narrowing’ approach to interpreting ceteris paribus clauses. A consequence of such hedges is that the conditions of application of critical principles—when certain polarities are not undermined or reversed—may be partly opaque and unknown. Unpacking the opaque truth conditions of such principles, then, helps to make sense of how critics go about working out the consistency between their verdicts. This view of critical principles is consistent with and even predicts Arnold Isenberg’s particularist intuition that verdicts can be directly perceived without the need to infer them from principles. After all, opaque truth conditions mean that sometimes critics may not know whether an inference from a principle to verdict is valid. Ultimately, this view of hedged principles helps to make sense of critical aesthetic practice and accords with both the generalist intuition that critical reasons, to be reasons, require principles and the particularist intuition that inferences to verdicts can be short-circuited by direct acts of perception.