According to Stephen Macedo, ‘[liberal], democratic politics is not only about individual rights and limited government, it is also about justification… political justification… understood politically.’ ‘Political justification,’ he asserts, ‘is a core liberal goal.’ Gerald Gaus, similarly, writes that the ‘idea of public justification is at the heart of a contractual liberalism.’ Very many other contemporary political philosophers believe that the politics of a liberal polity must be justifiable to its Citizens. In what follows I shall seek to understand the basis for such a belief and, in particular, to expose two possible sources in the views of Locke and Kant. Neither source, I shall argue, provides any warrant for the demand in question. First the bald claim — that the politics of a polity needs justifying — must be unpacked. By way of initial clarification I shall say something about, respectively, ‘justification’ and ‘politics.’

When the international Community recognizes political entities as states, it confers upon them the rights and powers of statehood. These include the right to territorial integrity, the right to noninterference in their internal affairs, the power to make treaties, and the right (subject to certain restrictions) to enforce legal rules on those within their territory. According to the justice-based account of recognition, political entities ought to be recognized as states if and only if they satisfy minimal requirements of internal and external justice. According to the pragmatic account, they ought to be recognized as states if and only if cooperating with them and giving them international support would be the best means of achieving peace and justice among and within them — that is, global peace and justice — whether or not they themselves currently satisfy minimal requirements of internal and external justice.

What place, if any, moral principles should or do have in moral life has been a longstanding question f or moral philosophy. For some, the proposition that moral philosophy should strive to articulate moral principles has been an article of faith. At least since Aristotle, however, there has been a rieh counter-tradition that questions the possibility or value of trying to capture morality in principled terms. In recent years, philosophers who question principled approaches to morality have argued under the banner of moral particularism. Particularists can be found in diverse areas of philosophical inquiry, and their positions and arguments are of broad interest. Despite its importance, a proper evaluation of particularism has been hindered both by the diversity of arguments employed to defend it, and, perhaps more significantly, by the diversity of positions that can fairly claim to be particularist.

1. 1) ‘“Be true to yourself!” and “Don't cave in!” express the value people place on [_]….’

2. 2) ‘… an important sense of [_] is being true to oneself.’

3. 3) ‘[_] encourages and protects people's general capacity to lead their lives out of a distinctive sense of their own character, a sense of what is important to and for them. ’

4. 4) ‘… to value [_] is to place value on an agent's acting from herreasons, whether they are good ones or not.’

Quiz: fill in the blanks. Here is a hint: two are autonomy and two are integrity. Can you sort out which ones are which? I suspect not, especially since the first two are nearly identical but have different answers. The third seems clearly to be integrity, at least given what philosophers such as Bernard Williams write about integrity: that it involves preserving one's own distinct character. However, the answer to 3) is autonomy. The fourth quotation brings to mind discussions about how autonomous agents can make bad choices, but we respect their autonomy by allowing them to do so. However, the answer to 4) is integrity.

Externalism is the thesis that some propositional attitudes depend for their individuation on features of the thinker's (social and/or physical) environment. The doctrine of self-knowledge of thoughts is the thesis that for all thinkers S and occurrent thoughts that p, S has authoritative and non-empirical knowledge of her thought that p. A much-discussed question in the literature is whether these two doctrines are compatible. In this paper I attempt to respond to one argument for an incompatibilist conclusion, Boghossian's 1989 ‘Memory Argument.’