IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecl/harjfk/rwp05-066.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Forcing a People to Be Free

Author

Listed:
  • Applbaum, Arthur Isak

    (Harvard U)

Abstract

Is forcing a people to be free possible, and if so, is it ever morally permissible? The question in some form is very much on our minds, provoked by the war in Iraq and one of its stated justifications: freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny. An account of normative peoplehood is presented under which a people can fail to be a competent group agent, and so be a justified target of paternalism, even though the natural persons who make up the people are competent agents who are not justified targets of paternalism. Connections between a competent group agent, a free people, and a legitimate government are drawn. In response to the worry that this view permits limitless and never-ending regime change, an asymmetry between criteria for initiating intervention and criteria for ending intervention is shown to follow from the account of minimal legitimacy presented.

Suggested Citation

  • Applbaum, Arthur Isak, 2005. "Forcing a People to Be Free," Working Paper Series rwp05-066, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp05-066
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://research.hks.harvard.edu/publications/workingpapers/citation.aspx?PubId=3280&type=WPN
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp05-066. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ksharus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.