Issue 22.1
Briefly Noted
This section contains a round-up of recent notable books in the field of international affairs.
Development as a Human Right: Legal, Political, and Economic Dimensions edited by Bard A. Andreassen and Stephen P. Marks
This book sets out to address the concepts of the right to development as well as the human rights-based approach to development. It includes contributions of economists, legal scholars, and philosophers presented at the 2003 Nobel Symposium on the Right to Development and Human Rights in Development.
Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
The core of Mike Davis’s book “Planet of Slums” is that the contemporary Third World urban poor are doubly cursed in ways that echo the two major upheavals of the nineteenth century: industrialization and imperialism.
Inventing Human Rights: A History by Lynn Hunt
Lynn Hunt’s “Inventing Human Rights” develops an intriguing meditation on the relationships among art, morality, and political change. Hunt also raises questions of profound importance to the contemporary human rights movement.
The Clash Within: Religion, Violence, and India’s Future by Martha C. Nussbaum
Nussbaum argues that her contribution is as that of a loudspeaker, since she feels that Indian developments are wrongly ignored in the United States and Europe.
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Torture Can Be Self-Defense: A Critique of Whitley Kaufman
In this online response, Uwe Steinhoff argues that Whitley Kaufman’s denial that torturing the “ticking bomb terrorist” can be justifiable is incorrect.
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: The Distributive Justice Theory of Self-Defense (Response to Whitley Kaufman)
Segev argues for a theory of distributive justice and considers its implications. This theory includes a principle of responsibility that was endorsed by others within an account of defensive force (self-defense and defense of others). Kaufman criticizes this account, which he refers to as the “distributive justice theory of self-defense” (DJ theory). In this paper, Segev responds to this criticism.
Torture and the “Distributive Justice” Theory of Self-Defense: An Assessment
The goal of this feature is to demonstrate that distributive justice is a flawed theory of self-defense and must be rejected, thus undercutting the argument that torture can be justified as self-defense.
