When
Location
Social Sciences 224
1145 E South Campus Drive
Tucson, AZ 85721
Title
Against Justice Fetishism
Bio
Allen Buchanan is Laureate Professor of Philosophy and Research Professor, University of Arizona Center for the Philosophy of Freedom. His B.A. is from Columbia University (1970) and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (1975).
His main research is in Philosophy of International Law, Bioethics, and Political Philosophy. He recently was chosen for the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. In addition to scholarly work and teaching, Allen has participated in policy-making processes at the highest levels, including serving on the Advisory Council for the Human Genome Project, as a Staff Philosopher or consultant for all the Presidential Bioethics Commissions, as a consultant to the Transitional Government of Ethiopia on the writing of the secession clause, and as a consultant on self-determination issues to the Government of Canada, the President of Catalonia, the European High Commissioner on National Minorities, and the U.S. State Department. His current research is on the role of ideologies in large-scale social change. His hobbies include fly fishing, hiking, sporting clays and skeet, and 100 yd rimfire benchrest competition.
Abstract
I and my co-author, Simone Sepe, make a case against justice fetishism, the tendency to treat justice as an absolute value, having lexical priority over all else, or to assume that considerations of justice, framed in terms of rights, have such extraordinary moral weight that coercion, as in the enforcement of laws, is only justified if it is needed to make rights effective. We distinguish four fallacies encouraged by justice fetishism. One implication of the rejection of justice fetishism is that from the fact that capitalism is inherently and irredeemably unjust, it does not follow that it is unjustifiable or ought to be abolished.