In this paper, I argue that Louis Pojman fails to justify his conception of a moderate cosmopolitan world government. I illustrate this by highlighting the fact that Pojman fails to articulate adequate justifications for his Principle of Humanity (POH) and Principle of Equality (POE). This is problematic because the POH and POE ground his conception of human rights, which, in turn, grounds his conception of a moderate cosmopolitan world government. Hence, since he fails to justify the POH and the POE, I conclude that his conception of a cosmopolitan world government ultimately fails. But, before I launch this attack on Pojman, I offer substantial philosophical analyses of Hobbes's arguments for the state of nature, human rights, and the establishment of the commonwealth. I do so because Hobbes provides the philosophical basis for Pojman's philosophy of world government. I show that by understanding the philosophical problems inherent in Hobbes we gain better understanding of the philosophical problems at the basis of Pojman.

Justice is often viewed in terms of seeing to it that right-holders are provided with the goods that they are entitled to. Less attention is given to the other dimension of justice, namely, that of duty-holders. If persons are assigned more duties, or more burdensome duties, than fairness requires, then they are victims of injustice just as much as persons whose rights are left unfulfilled. In this essay, I will argue for certain limits to the duty to assist people in need. My argument does not intend to show that we have no positive duties, but rather that these duties, whether they are of an interpersonal or a global, institutional kind, should be guided by an idea of fairness that pertains to the relations between duty-holders as well as between them and right-holders. I will discuss structural differences between negative and positive duties, as well as formulate a Principle of Contributive Fairness.

Aesthetic judgment has often been characterized as a sensuous cognitively unmediated engagement in sensory items whether visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory or gustatory. However, new art forms challenge this assumption. At the very least, new art forms provide evidence of intention which triggers a search for meaning in the perceiver. Perceived order excites the ascription of intention. The ascription of intention employs background knowledge and experience, or in other words, implicates the perceiver’s conceptual framework. In our response to art of every description we witness the incorrigible tendency in humans to construct meaningful narratives to account for events. Such meaningful narratives always implicitly involve the ascription of intention, even when the agent of the intention is not explicitly acknowledged or even clearly conceived. This principle of intention-in-order may seem incompatible with another truism which is that art is a source of novel ideas and essentially a critique of prevailing values and norms including conceptual schemes. I argue on the contrary that the human impulse to read intention in order is a precondition of art’s critical edge. Creativity is possible even though there is no raw perceptual data to which we have conscious access. That is, there are no sensory items, unmediated by the concepts we have internalized through our interaction with our communities, to which we have conscious access.