I think you are asking whether international law ought to be revised so as to avoid the two intuitive injustices you assert. With regard to your first intuitive injustice, international law already recognizes a right to asylum and a duty of non-refoulement . But many states implement this right in arbitrary and quite ungenerous ways, with the result that many desperate people are either returned to a situation where their life or health are at risk or else confined for long periods in inhumane detention centers. Here a modification of international law -- involving a consistent and efficient international process for determining refugee status as well as a fair allocation of recognized refugees among suitable asylum countries -- would indeed be a great improvement. As for your second intuitive injustice, it may not be an injustice at all. Imagine a million Europeans eager to move to the Solomon Islands. Their presence would not really harm the locals -- in fact, it might greatly boost...

This is a very important concern in the post-9/11 political world. Still, we need to be clear about the perspective from which we are looking at the problem. One important perspective is that of the government, which has the best available information about the threats to national security (or rather to the legitimate interests contained under this horribly vague and overly capacious label). Another important perspective is that of us citizens. Your use of the word "state" might indicate that you are interested in the former perspective. But your reference to "we" suggests the latter perspective, and so I will read "state" in the sense of "country" rather than "government". On this reading, the trade-off is really somewhat different from what you suggest. By giving the government exceptional authorities and moral support, we are losing both knowledge and control of whatever trade-offs it makes in our name. For the rights and liberties our government will curtail first and foremost are rights to...

Such hypothetical protest would indeed be hypocritical if the two cases were relevantly alike. But are they? You point out two respects in which the cases are alike: Agents A are blocking the path of agents B, some of whom do not agree with the reasons for A's actions. But the cases may be different in other morally relevant respects. One such further respect is the quality of A's reasons (with which some of the Bs disagree). It matters morally, I would think, whether the police are seeking to prevent the burning down of a church or abortion clinic, on the one hand, or whether they are seeking to prevent a peaceful demonstration against a morally dubious war, on the other hand. And it matters whether students are shutting down the universities in protest against a government policy that permits blacks to attend or in protest against a government policy that forbids blacks to attend. The students could then argue against your charge of hypocrisy that their own blockade is protesting an...

Extreme contrasts of privilege and poverty are often the result of unjust social institutions such as feudalism and serfdom, for example. In such a context, people in dire poverty may well be justified in violating their society's property laws, in practicing civil disobedience, and even in overthrowing the established order, because those laws and this order lack moral standing. But even in a context of severe social injustice, it is generally not morally permissible to violate any and all laws (e.g., by killing children or by stealing from people even poorer than oneself). Those administering and enforcing the laws in a seriously unjust society will rarely admit that these laws are seriously unjust and that some violations of them are justified. Still, they ought to reflect on the justice of the laws they apply and enforce and, if they find the justice of some of these laws to be dubious, may well conclude that they ought to punish leniently if at all. They ought also to reflect...

Yes, it makes sense to see these two cases as parallel. But in doing so I would disagree with your first and agree with your second suggestion. I would agree that freedom of the press and free speech are more important that the maintenance of the taboos in question: Our countries should outlaw neither cartoons that insult the prophet of Islam nor works that glorify the Nazis or deny the holocaust. But this claim is distinct from your first suggestion namely that citizens of our countries should break the relevant taboos. I do not think that people ought to glorify the Nazis, ought to deny the holocaust, or ought to publish cartoons that insult revered figures of other religions. In fact, I think they ought to refrain from doing such things (though, to repeat, doing them should be legally permissible). We might then distinguish four classes of expressions: (1) those that ought to be outlawed and are morally wrong; (2) those that ought to be legal and are morally wrong; (3) those that ought...

With respect to some aspects of sovereignty, there may be a good reason. The fact that a country is ruled undemocratically is not sufficient justification for conquering and annexing it. With respect to other aspects, there is no good reason. We recognize dictators as entitled to sell us their country's natural resources, because we benefit from being able to buy them. (Imagine what crude oil would cost if we could buy it only from democracies!) We pay the dictator; he conveniently uses it to buy from us the weapons he needs to stay in power and invests the rest in our economy (under his own name, of course, or that of his family members). This practice is a clear-cut injustice perpetrated by the dictator in conjunction with rich-country banks, corporations and governments, against the populations of the countries in question. Their resources are taken without their consent and the proceeds are used to keep them oppressed. This is part of the explanation of the so-called resource curse (or Dutch...

It makes sense to start with your more general question: What is a (basic) human right? Official documents and public pronouncements typically leave this nebulous by not making explicit who bears what correlative duties to the human rights postulated or invoked. They are typically clearer with regard to the object of any human right -- that which this human right is a right to. Toward making the correlative duties explicit: I think that any human right imposes at least two kinds of duties on other human agents (persons, corporations, organizations, governments, etc.). These are interactional duties: duties not to deprive human persons of the objects of this human right, and institutional duties: duties not to collaborate in imposing on human persons social rules under which some will foreseeably and avoidably lack secure access to the objects of their human rights (unless one also makes compensating efforts to reform the rules or to protect their victims). A specific human right might then be...

Affirmative action programs can be morally acceptable or even required when they benefit a group that is prevented from competing on fair terms. Consider a group that had much inferior access to schooling and therefore did not have a fair chance of attaining the educational achievements that would make them competitive in their candidacy for a college or job. By giving members of this group a break, we are in one sense lowering standards: Lower-scoring candidates are chosen over higher-scoring ones. But in terms of expected performance, we may not be lowering standards at all: A somewhat lower score achieved by a poorly educated person may indicate greater brightness and promise than a somewhat higher score achieved by someone who had the opportunity of attending top schools. Of course, taking educational background into account in this way may engender resentment. But insofar as such resentment derives from a perception of injustice, it may disappear once the rationale for such affirmative action is...

Freedom from torture would be among the basic liberties protected by Rawls's first principle of justice. This means that the government could restrict this freedom only for the sake of this or other basic liberties (Rawls's "first priority rule"). To justify such a restriction, the government would need to show that the basic liberties of the representative citizen would be more secure with (and despite) this restriction than without. A compelling argument to this effect could be made only in exceptional circumstances when the use of torture makes a necessary and substantial contribution to the security of citizens' basic liberties. I do not think that Rawls would have thought freedom from racial profiling to be among the basic liberties. But, even if it were, the government could justify it by showing that the basic liberties of the representative member of the profiled group are more secure with (and despite) racial profiling than without (for example, because racial profiling enables the police...