Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Legitimacy, justice and public international law. Three perspectives on the debate
- 1 The legitimacy of global governance institutions
- 2 Institutionalising global demoi-cracy
- 3 The responsibilities and legitimacy of economic international institutions
- 4 Do international organisations play favourites? An impartialist account
- 5 ‘Victors’ justice'? Historic injustice and the legitimacy of international law
- 6 International law and global justice
- 7 Global justice: Problems of a cosmopolitan account
- 8 The responsibility to protect human rights
- 9 The threat of violence and of new military force as a challenge to international public law
- 10 Forcing a people to be free
- Index
- References
10 - Forcing a people to be free
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Legitimacy, justice and public international law. Three perspectives on the debate
- 1 The legitimacy of global governance institutions
- 2 Institutionalising global demoi-cracy
- 3 The responsibilities and legitimacy of economic international institutions
- 4 Do international organisations play favourites? An impartialist account
- 5 ‘Victors’ justice'? Historic injustice and the legitimacy of international law
- 6 International law and global justice
- 7 Global justice: Problems of a cosmopolitan account
- 8 The responsibility to protect human rights
- 9 The threat of violence and of new military force as a challenge to international public law
- 10 Forcing a people to be free
- Index
- References
HTML view is not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button.
Summary
Is forcing a people to be free possible, and if so, is it ever morally permissible? The question cries out for clarification: what is it to be a people? What is it for a people to be forced? And what is it for a people to be free? As with so many questions in political philosophy, the hardest task here is to ask the right one, so I will spend most of my time specifying and clarifying what I am asking. When the question is well posed, it will almost answer itself, or so I hope.
The question in some form is very much on our minds, provoked by the war in Iraq and one of its stated justifications: freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny. When ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, as the war was called, began, President George W. Bush announced, ‘Our mission is clear: to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people’.
Now that it has been established beyond doubt that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction at the time of the invasion, and now that the White House has acknowledged that there is no evidence at all of a connection between the 11 September terrorist attacks and Saddam Hussein's regime, the freedom argument must bear all the weight of justification for both the invasion and the extended occupation that has followed. The Bush administration's case for war initially had three legs.
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Legitimacy, Justice and Public International Law , pp. 270 - 310Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
References
1988. ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’ (1971), in , The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge University Press, 11–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1968. ‘Collaborationism in France during World War II’, Journal of Modern History 40: 375–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and 1979. ‘The Impossibility of Bayesian Group Decisionmaking with Separate Aggregation of Beliefs and Values’, Econometrica 47: 1321–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1991. ‘Doctrine of Right’ (1797), in (ed.), The Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
1996. ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’ (1795), in (ed.), Practical Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 311–52.Google Scholar
1996. ‘Two Distinctions in Goodness’, in , Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge University Press, 249–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and 2002. ‘Aggregating Sets of Judgments: An Impossibility Result’, Economics and Philosophy 18: 89–110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1958. ‘Of Husbanding your Will’ (1585–8), in (trans.), The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Stanford University Press, 766–84.Google Scholar
1963–1991. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. (ed.). 33 vols. University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
1984. ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’ (1859), in (ed.), Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: Essays on Equality, Law, and Education. Vol. XXI. University of Toronto Press, 109–24.Google Scholar
2004. ‘Groups with Minds of Their Own’, in (ed.), Socializing Metaphysics. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 167–93.Google Scholar
1978. ‘On the Social Contract’ (1762), in (ed.) and (trans.), On the Social Contract: with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy. New York: St Martin's Press.Google Scholar
Accessibility standard: Unknown
Why this information is here
This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.Accessibility Information
Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this chapter is currently unknown
and may be updated in the future.
You have
Access
- 1
- Cited by