Carmen Pavel

One of the hallmarks of human civilization is the extent to which societies take care of their most vulnerable members, especially the sick and disabled. Many countries have outlined public policies committed to providing healthcare for those who cannot provide for themselves. Such policies have various rationales, such as reducing suffering, providing for the least well-off, improving health to create fair opportunity in life, and so on. One of the most prevalent rationales for public healthcare policies is a human right to healthcare. Understanding healthcare as a universal human right demands recognizing individuals' entitlements to claim healthcare resources that prevent and cure disease, ameliorate disability, and enhance wellbeing, regardless of their political membership or social and economic status.

The rule of law is a moral ideal that protects distinctive legal values such as generality, equality before the law, the independence of courts, and due process rights. I argue that one of the main goals of an international rule of the law is the protection of individual and state autonomy from the arbitrary interference of international institutions, and that the best way to codify this protection is through constitutional rules restraining the reach of international law into the internal affairs of a state. State autonomy does not have any intrinsic value or moral status of its own. Its value is derivative, resulting from the role it plays as the most efficient means of protecting autonomy for individuals and groups. Therefore, the goal of protecting state autonomy form the encroachment of international law will have to be constrained by, and balanced against the more fundamental goal of an international rule of law, the protection of the autonomy of individual persons, best realized through the entrenchment of basic human rights.

H. L. A. Hart proposed one of the most influential accounts of law, according to which law is a union of primary rules, which guide the behavior of the law's subjects, and secondary rules, which guide officials in recognizing, changing, and interpreting primary rules. Writing at the end of the 1950s, Hart had serious doubts about whether international law meets the necessary criteria for a legal system. But there are several reasons to reconsider his position. One is that international law has grown significantly since then, but a more important reason is that Hart provided an oversimplified description of the necessary and sufficient conditions for law provided by his account, and therefore of the nature of the international legal order. A proper understanding of Hart's view gives us a richer and more accurate understanding of the essential features of law, but also a less precise yardstick by which to measure and characterize the various systems of rules, including international law. According to this new yardstick, international law fails to meet the criteria for a Hartian legal system, but for reasons other than those identified by Hart.

International and domestic law offer a study in contrasts: States' legal obligations often depend on their consent to specific international legal norms, whereas domestic law applies to individuals with or without their consent; enforcement in international law is weak and, for many international treaties, non‐existent, whereas states spend
considerable resources to create centralized coercive enforcement mechanisms; and international law is characterized by much less institutional differentiation and specialization of functions than domestic legal systems are. These differences have invited a number of skeptical challenges to international law, 3 of which we explore in this essay. The first points to 1 or more of the deviations of international law's institutional structure from that of a modern state's legal system as a basis for denying that international law is really “law.” Central to the debates over
international law's status as law are concerns about whether and why the concepts of law inherited from domestic legal systems should serve as the blueprint for
theorizing law in general and international law in particular. The second skeptical challenge targets international law's legitimacy. It claims that we lack reasons to treat international legal norms or the exercise of political power by international
institutions, as anything other than an attempt by states to advance their national interests. If this challenge succeeds, states and other subjects of international law
have merely prudential reasons to comply with it rather than a moral duty to obey it. Following a brief description of recent debates over how we ought to understand the concept of legitimacy when used to assess international political practices or global governance, we survey several possible bases for a moral duty to obey or respect international law. These include state consent, instrumental accounts of legitimate authority, and global democracy. The third set of challenges focuses on the relationship between state sovereignty and international law. International rules and institutions often make demands for reform affecting the domestic law of a state in order to elicit compliance with international law. Skeptics argue that the rule of international law is incompatible with states' political self‐determination. Regardless of whether their defense of this claim ultimately succeeds, thoughtful engagement with it may well require us to rethink some of the fundamental concepts and normative ideals in political philosophy, including state sovereignty, democracy, individual rights, political authority, and political obligation.

In most functioning democracies, special interests are an intrinsic part of the democratic process: they provide information about how particular industries are affected by legislation, translate technical knowledge to policy makers, and assist them in formulating policy objectives. Special interest groups can also derail the process by inducing public officials to cater exclusively to them, and to ignore other compelling interests of the voting public. International agreements are not immune from this type of influence. As the negotiations leading up to the agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) at the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT—now the WTO) show, interest groups can easily skew the negotiation process in their favor. Efforts to extend patent and copyright protections internationally were spearheaded by powerful industry groups from the U.S., Europe, and Japan, to the detriment of consumers from developed and developing countries, whose interests were equally neglected in the negotiation process. One way for the WTO to make the process of treaty negotiating more legitimate, that is, to make it more responsive to the interests of different groups who will be subject to the treaty, is not to close the door to special interests, but rather to open it wider. International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), international institutions, professional associations and industry groups with competing interests can play a critical role during the negotiation of WTO policy. These third parties can serve three key functions: an information function , a monitoring function, and an accountability function. However, the only way interest groups can play such roles is if their rights of access are articulated and recognized by the WTO decision and dispute resolution bodies.

The use of private security companies by national governments is met with widespread skepticism. Less understood is the role these companies can play in international humanitarian interventions in the service of international organizations. I argue here that despite valid concerns about the use of such private entities, we should nonetheless see them as legitimate participants in efforts to secure human rights protection around the globe. In order to assess their legitimacy, we need to ensure, among other things, that they can adhere to ethical standards when serving in humanitarian missions, that they can be held accountable when they fail to uphold the standard of justice enshrined in international law, and that their for-profit status does not have implications detrimental to humanitarian concerns.

Cosmopolitanism and nationalism are at war, if the criticism they relentlessly direct at each other is any guide. The current debates between defenders of these two views tend to solve their disagreements by showing that one view is incoherent and assigning victory to the other. I argue instead that cosmopolitanism and nationalism do not fail on their own, but are rather incomplete facets of the truth, because each reflects demands of morality that are in permanent tension with one another. Moreover, there may be no way in principle to establish a binding order of priority between nationalistic and cosmopolitan claims, even if in practice we will find various ways to negotiate between them. Carmen E. Pavel is a postdoctoral fellow in the program in Political Philosophy, Policy and Law at University of Virginia. She specializes in liberal theory, international justice and the morality of international institutions. She can be reached at pavel@virginia.edu. Cosmopolitans and nationalists display distinctive attitudes about international justice. On the one hand, cosmopolitans say that national boundaries cannot mark the limits of our moral obligation toward our fellow humans. One's substantive duties also extend beyond the borders of one's political community, to include equally all human beings. On the other hand, defenders of the primacy of patriotic duties claim that one's compatriots are entitled to special *I am indebted to John Tomasi, Sharon Krause, Charles Larmore, and William Galston, for kindly reading several drafts. In addition, I would like to acknowledge Jason Brennan, Adam Tebble, and the participants at the Political Philosophy Workshop at Brown University for constructive feedback. I am grateful for suggestions from Loren Lomasky, Thom Brooks, Andrew Polsky, and two anonymous referees for Polity during the final stages of writing this paper.

There are no moral entitlements with respect to pollution prior to legal conventions that establish them, or so I will argue. While some moral entitlements precede legal conventions, pollution is part of a category of harms against interests that stands apart in this regard. More specifically, pollution is a problematic type of harm that creates liability only under certain conditions. Human interactions lead to harm and to the invasion of others' space regularly, and therefore we need an account of undue harm as a basis of assigning legal protections (rights) and obligations (duties) to different agents, which creates standards for holding those agents responsible for harm. Absent such positive standards with respect to pollution at the domestic or international level, it does not make sense to hold agents responsible. This fact has two fundamental implications. First, contrary to what some defenders of environmental justice argue, we cannot hold people responsible for polluting without a system of legal rights in place that assigns entitlements, protections, and obligations, and second, contrary to what opponents of environmental regulation claim, the lack of moral entitlements to pollute creates room for quite extensive legal restrictions on people's ability to pollute for the sake of the environment and human health. Indeed the scope of those restrictions is wide and open-ended.

Citizens in rich countries should shoulder the burden of alleviating global poverty because they are harming the poor, or so many argue. But the baseline for assessing harm is often unclear.This paper recommends a baseline for harm as rights violations.This baseline makes it clear that many of the attributions of harm made by proponents of the harm argument, instead of representing cases of harms caused, are rather instances of benefits withheld from the poor. A moral case can be made that benefits should be extended by the rich countries toward poor ones, but this case will look very different from a case for responsibility for harm.