Preface and acknowledgments

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2007 by Steven V. Hicks, Daniel E. Shannon

THE ESSAYS INCLUDED in this volume were originally presented at the Renvall Institute for Area and Cultural Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland, on the occasion of the Sixth World Congress of the International Society for Universal Dialogue (ISUD). Most were either keynote addresses or prize-winning papers at the Congress, and all are focused on a central theme: namely, the need to rethink our concepts of nature, culture, and freedom in an age of increased globalization.

In his introductory essay "Rethinking Nature, Culture, and Freedom," Steven V, Hicks sets the tone for the volume by arguing that humanity at the beginning of the 21st century faces some ominous challenges that call for a radical rethinking and repositioning of several basic ideas and relations that define modern society. In particular, he focuses on three broad areas of concern: the problem of the physical sustainability of the natural world, the problem of intercultural dialogue and coexistence, and the problem of promoting freedom and human rights in a world of economic and corporate globalization. He also discusses the need to find creative ways of breaking the current cycle of dominance and economic/ecological/cultural destruction in order to build a more peaceful and just world through universal dialogue and collaboration.

Part I of the volume is entitled "Global Justice, Democracy, and Universal Dialogue." In this section, four contemporary political philosophers--Edward Demenchonok, Karl-Otto Apel, James P. Sterba, and Alyssa R. Bernstein--discuss the important issues of global justice, peace, democracy, and international law. Demenchonok's essay "From a State of War to Perpetual Peace" establishes the groundwork for the discussion that follows in Part I by carefully examining the problems of war, peace, and the future of human rights protection in a global context. His essay also explores some competing contemporary approaches to these difficult problems, specifically highlighting the "democratic peace" theories and new "cosmopolitan democracy" theories of Doyle, Habermas, Apel, Rawls, and others. Demenchonok concludes his essay by arguing for the ongoing relevance of Immanuel Kant's political philosophy to current and future discussions concerning global peace, justice, and human rights. The German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel, in his essay ',Discourse Ethics, Democracy, and International Law," also argues for the contemporary relevance of Kant's philosophy for meeting the ethical challenges posed by globalization. Professor Apel explores the foundational relation between human rights, democracy, and international law (or jus gentium); he takes issue with both Jurgen Habermas's and John Rawls's approaches to implementing a just global system of law; and he argues that a rational solution to the current problems of international law and justice is only possible through a critical transformation of Kant's practical philosophy via a "transcendental-pragmatic" conception of "discourse ethics." By contrast, James P. Sterba, in his essay "Rethinking Global Justice from the Perspective of All Living Nature," considers traditional libertarian and utilitarian approaches to justice and argues, instead, for a more adequate conception of "global justice" that takes into account all living beings and that imposes some additional obligations on us that are absent from less defensible "human-centered" (e.g., Rawlsian) notions of global justice, although not as many as we might initially think. Finally, Alyssa R. Bernstein, in her essay "Human Rights, Global Justice, and Disaggregated States," concludes this section by defending a Rawlsian approach to a just global system of public law (a "law of peoples") against Apel, Sterba, and others. In particular, she is concerned with arguing against Onora O'Neill and Anne-Marie Slaughter and their recent claims that transformations in the concept of state sovereignty due to globalization require significant modifications in Rawls's conception of human rights. Bernstein concludes this section by arguing that globalization has not rendered obsolete Rawls's conception of human rights and the "law of peoples," and that we therefore have some reason to hope that a just world order is a realistic possibility.

Part II, entitled "Rethinking Nature: Globalization and the Challenges of Environmental Ethics," examines some of the ethical challenges posed by globalization to current environmental thinking. Charles S. Brown, in his essay "Beyond Intrinsic Value: Undermining the Justification of Ecoterrorism," takes issue with certain radical approaches to environmental ethics, in particular, Aldo Leopold's "land ethics" and Arne Naess's "deep ecology." Brown argues, instead, for an alternative pragmatic conception of value that, he thinks, can better guide environmental thinking on matters of law, policy, and activism, and that undercuts the intellectual, psychological, and ethical justification for either ecofascism or ecoterrorism. Marc Lucht also looks to an alternative, and often neglected, resource for creative environmental thinking in a global context, namely, Kant's aesthetics. Lucht, in his essay "Does Kant Have Anything to Teach Us about Environmental Ethics?," argues that Kant's aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the sublime, when rightly understood, help reorient investigations in environmental philosophy by providing a more realistic view of the relationship between human beings and nature than one finds in most traditional dualistic or monistic theories.