Melina Duarte

“What purpose does your knowledge serve?” In her book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Martha Nussbaum states the difference between a democratic education for citizenship and an education for profit, and draws attention to the current education crisis caused by an overvaluation of the latter over the former. An education for democratic citizenship aims to develop three key abilities: critical thinking, the capacity to understand and to transcend parochial attachments, and empathy. An education for profit, however, requires the training of specific skills in order to produce the economic growth of a certain group, company or country. While the first, in accordance to a Socratic education, focuses on the foundation of perennial structures of thought related to human dignity, the latter, following the sophistic model, simplifies these structures according to economic priorities. In this paper, I critically explore Nussbaum’s manifesto by reformulating two key arguments to show that: education must always aim at creating knowledge, and education must always be focused on the development of humanism as the greater goal, regardless of the emphasis on arts and humanities or on exact science.

This introduction discusses some of the background assumptions and recent developments of the current refugee crisis. In this issue, the crisis is not viewed as a primarily European, Western or even Syrian, Afghan, or Iraqi crisis, but as a global crisis that raises complex ethical and political challenges for all humanity. The contributions to this thematic issue discuss a variety of questions relating to the rights and duties of different actors involved in the refugee crisis, and assess some of the suggested responses to handling the crisis.

The aftermath of the European refugee crisis can be said to have sparked a crisis of solidarity. Despite abundant demonstrations of solidarity with refugees and asylum seekers, what many saw as an exercise of their duty to help was made illegal. The critical term that emerged to refer to this conjuncture was “criminalization of solidarity”. In order to include this term in the academic debate, this article starts by disclosing the embedded claims present in its rhetorical usage. The article then scrutinizes the design of the politics of criminalizing solidarity and its consequences. It argues that at least three aspects of the politics of criminalizing solidarity plausibly indicate the possibility that regulating the aid in question will produce and reinforce consequences for the EU that are not only unintended, but also damaging. This is because, first, what I refer to as the blending aspect might spread the perception of illegality among several types of immigrants; second, the moral aspect can discharge people from their duty to help foreigners by conditioning this duty to group membership and belonging; and third, the polarizing aspect might exacerbate the existing divide between citizens and immigrants currently causing conflicts and social fragmentation.

This paper has a twofold aim in determining who should be granted electoral rights at the state level, one negative and another positive. The negative part deconstructs the link between state-level political membership and citizenship and contests naturalization procedures. This approach argues that naturalization procedures, when coercively used as a necessary condition for accessing electoral rights at the state level, are both inconsistent with liberal democratic ideals and an inexcusable practice in liberal democratic states. The positive part of the paper seeks to establish what – if not the acquisition of citizenship –could determine state-level political membership for non-citizens. In other words, it attempts to explain how and in what conditions non-citizens may become political members of a state without naturalizing. This approach considers the most prominent arguments that base state-level political membership on residency, i.e. residency as a legal status granted by the previous members of the community and residency as physical presence within a defined jurisdiction. It argues that, in a world of increasing human mobility across borders, while the former way of understanding residency might be too restrictive, the latter might be too banal to forge membership ties that form a political community. Domicile is the proposed alternative, introduced as a type of residency that is self-given and remains stable despite numerous changes of residency. Domicile is a legal term that indicates where a person officially registers her permanent home even when residing abroad. In sum, this is an argument against naturalization as the access door for electoral rights at the state level and in favor of defining membership in the political community based on domicile.

In the following interview, Pogge focuses his attention on the situation in Brazil, a country that he says can exert its increasing influence on the design of global institutions. He anticipates the challenges coming for Brazil in combating poverty and gender disparities. He discusses the positive and negative aspects of the Bolsa Família programme, and he suggests that the government should extend its benefits to a larger proportion of the population in order to gain more support from the public. He believes the Bolsa Família programme is well-designed and that its implementation is essential to mitigating the absurd inequalities that so strongly polarize society and jeopardize democracy in Brazil. To distribute resources to the poor is not a question of charity, as it was considered in the old days, he explains. He finds no justification for affluent Brazilians to control all the country’s resources while the poor are deprived of their fair share. Pogge is also concerned that, owing to increasing capital mobility, globalization will tend to benefit Brazil’s rich, who also find it much easier to evade taxes. Therefore, in addition to the intervention of social programmes, Pogge recommends that the Brazilian government ensure that the country’s wealth is properly taxed and distributed.

¿Deben tener derecho los estados democráticos liberales a excluir a los inmigrantes de su territorio? Este artículo cuestiona dos argumentos centrales a favor del control de las fronteras: (1) el derecho exclusivo del estado al asentamiento en un determinado territorio; y (2) el derecho exclusivo de los ciudadanos y residentes legales a la pertenencia a dicho estado. El artículo muestra que los estados contemporáneos no mantienen una vinculación inexorable a un trozo particular de tierra que les permita justificar el derecho exclusivo de asentamiento y que los habitantes no pueden defender coherentemente su restricción unilateral al acceso a la pertenencia. Para terminar, el artículo desarrolla una visión alternativa de los derechos territoriales estatales.

Recently, philosophers and political theorists who defend a more practical or realistic approach to the issue of global justice have challenged the purely theoretical approaches. Nevertheless, the debate can be regarded as excessively restricted to the discussion about policies and institutions neglecting the non-contingent dimensions of the problem. In principle, both positions, theoretical and practical, may be understood as diverging from each other. However, abstract and concrete demands of justice can also be complementary to each other. Thus, in this special issue of Etikk i Praksis we propose to explore the points of convergence and divergence between the theoretical and the practical approaches to global justice. We encourage submissions: arguing for or against the theoretical approach; arguing for or against the practical approach; exploring or rejecting the possibility of convergence between them.