Globalization versus the nation state has emerged as one of the central areas of controversy and debate in the field of international political economy in the context of the 1990s. The pace of technological change, the speeding up of communications and the extent of international economic integration have brought into question the effectiveness of many traditional national economic instruments. A number of investigators point towards the erosion of economic sovereignty and question the nation state as the main building block of governance. It is undoubtedly the case that the nation state is under pressure; yet it is also the case that the process of globalization is much more in evidence in some areas than others. Whilst we observe significant increases in the volume of trade and foreign direct investment over the past decade, the process of globalization has arguably proceeded further than anywhere else in the sphere of financial capital. Computerization, advanced telecommunications, and associated pressures for financial deregulation have resulted in a major increase in both the scale and mobility of financial capital across national boundaries. Capital is now so mobile that markets will ensure that holders of financial assets receive broadly the same risk adjusted real return anywhere. Any country that offers significantly lower returns will experience capital outflows and a rapidly depreciating exchange rate. It is now virtually impossible for countries to return to exchange controls as an instrument of economic regulation.

This essay seeks to analyze the daily reproduction of inequalities in and around a contemporary İstanbul civil courthouse. Based on an ethnographic study in three poor urban neighborhoods and their civil courthouse, I examine the mode of conduct in the latter and the ways in which this mode is perceived. This study shows that routinized divergences from formalistic premises in the courthouse are not perceived as flaws, but placed within informal relations. This enmeshing of formal and informal practices is considered normal by both the legal professionals and lay low-income litigants. These constituencies, however, perceive this conduct rather differently in relation to their own and others' attributes. Lay low-income litigants locate it within a broader idiom of “doing administration,” a series of tactics to engage within a horizon of perpetual injustice. For legal professionals, on the other hand, the daily mixing of formal and informal practices has to do with their mission of “educating” and transforming those in need to participate in the culture of the state. I discuss the particular relation of these two perceptions in normalizing the view of the law as a site, not of formal egalitarianism, but of hierarchical social engagements.

In Turkey there is currently a widespread public desire to narrow the extent to which parliamentarians are immune from the law. That desire is largely motivated by the perception that political corruption is widespread and that parliamentary immunity only serves to obstruct the fight against it. As a result, a number of political parties have based their electoral platforms on the promise to limit the scope of parliamentary immunity once in office. As of yet, none have carried through their promise and this has only served to reinforce the public view that parliamentarians see their immunity as a personal privilege. Irrespective of the merits of that charge, there is a genuine concern that confronts Turkish deputies, which means that they will be less likely to limit the immunity once elected. Their concern is that current law does not adequately protect civil and political liberties and that the judiciary is not yet sufficiently evenhanded in its treatment of political cases. In effect, the fight against political corruption has been frustrated in part because of the risk to free speech that exposure to the law might entail.

This article focuses on a scandal surrounding the airing of an episode of Germany's most famous TV crime series, in which there occurred a murder in an Alevi immigrant family originally attributed to a Sunni Muslim who had just arrived from Turkey. The Alevi father and head of the family was then found out to have murdered his own daughter after she had threatened to reveal that he was sexually abusing her sister. The episode was met with an enormous outcry from Alevis based in Germany as well as in Turkey. This essay analyzes the protests for what they reveal about the trans-nationalization of stereotypes and immigrant demands for fair media representation in Germany. It is argued that it marks a new stage in the development of border-crossing public spheres in which the politics of cultural struggle in relation to ethnic and religious hierarchies lose some of their national moorings.

The Distribution View provides a model that integrates four distributional concerns in the evaluation of risky prospects. Starting from these concerns, we can generate an ordering over a set of risky prospects, or, starting from an ordering, we can extract a characterization of the underlying distributional concerns. Separability of States and/or Persons for multiple-person risky prospects, for single-person risky prospects and for multiple-person certain prospects are discussed within the model. The Distribution View sheds light on public health policies and provides a framework for the discussion of Parfit's Priority View for risky prospects.

In The Second Person Standpoint, Stephen Darwall makes a new argument against consequentialism, appealing to: (a) the conceptual tie between obligation and accountability, and (b) the ‘right kind of reasons’ for holding others accountable. I argue that Darwall's argument, as it stands, fails against indirect consequentialism, because it relies on a confusion between our being right to establish practices, and our having a right to do so. I also explore two ways of augmenting Darwall's argument. However, while the second of these ways is more promising than the first, neither provides a convincing argument against indirect consequentialism.

In this article I argue for a particular analysis of paternalism. I start by examining Dworkin's conditions for the paternalist act and make a case for alternative conditions. I argue that the paternalist actor acts irrespective of what she believes the wishes of the target of her action are and the paternalist actor acts because she has a positive epistemic standing that the act may or will improve the welfare of the target of her action. I also argue that it is consistent with my analysis that there are paternalist acts that don't interfere with the autonomy of the object of the paternalist act. I describe some such acts and make the case that such acts, when they are paternalist acts, may be morally permissible and outline the factors that bear on their permissibility. Finally I locate my analysis in the literature by comparing it to a number of other accounts.

I argue that, since the legal order is a public good, an act of legal punishment may be viewed as the imposition of a kind of tax, which I label ‘a quasi-tax’. Once punishment is viewed as a quasi-tax, the traditionally opposed approaches to punishment may be reconciled, as both utility and retribution jointly justify an act of legal punishment. I discuss objections to my argument and I reply to them.

I argue that a liberal commitment to value neutrality is best honoured by maintaining a pure cardinality component in our rankings of opportunity sets. Two challenges to this claim are considered. The first holds that cardinality rankings are unnecessary for neutrality, since what matters from this perspective is the variety (and not the mere size) of opportunity sets. The second holds that pure cardinality metrics are insufficient for neutrality, because opportunities cannot be individuated into countable entities without presupposing some relevantly partisan evaluative perspective. In each case, a clear understanding of the liberal basis for valuing liberty yields a satisfying response.

The most basic question one can ask of a model is ‘What is the effect on variable y2 of variable y1?’ Causation is ‘implementation neutral’ when all interventions on external variables that lead to a given change in y1 have the same effect on y2, so that the effect of y1 on y2 is defined unambiguously. Familiar ideas of causal analysis do not apply when causation is implementation neutral. For example, a cause variable cannot be linked to an effect variable by both a direct path and a distinct indirect path. Discussion of empirical aspects of implementation neutrality leads to further unexpected results, such as that if one variable causes another the coefficient representing that causal link is always identified.

The paper seeks to defend Telic Egalitarianism (TE) by distinguishing two distinct categories into which typical objections to it fall. According to one category of objections (for example, levelling down) TE is groundless. That is, there is simply no good reason to think that inequality as such is bad. The other type of objections to TE focuses on its counterintuitive implications: it is forced to condemn inequalities between ourselves and long-dead Inca peasants, or between us and worse-off aliens from other planets. The paper shows that once we unpack these two types of objections to TE they become much less persuasive.

G.A. Cohen has criticized the capability approach for focusing on individuals’ freedom – their capability to control their lives – and ignoring benefits achieved passively. He argues that this view of well-being is excessively ‘athletic’. However, if the capability approach is employed to guide egalitarian public policy, capabilities are the appropriate goal of just distributive policies, not just components of individual well-being. When understood as a policy-guide, I argue that the capability approach's focus on ‘athletic’ individual freedom and control is justified: in the public domain, it is important not just that individuals receive benefits, but that they participate in their achievement.

Suppose that Depletion will reduce the well-being of future people. Many of us would like to say that Depletion is wrong because of the harm to future people. However, it can easily be made to seem that Depletion is actually harmless – this is the non-identity problem. I discuss a particularly ingenious attempt by Melinda Roberts to attribute a harm to Depletion. I will argue that the magnitude of Roberts's harm is off target by many orders of magnitude: it is just too tiny to explain the intuitive wrong of Depletion.