Without Jurisdiction: Reconceptualising the Universal in our Response to Injustice (original) (raw)

This thesis proposes asymmetric legality as an alternative response to injustice to the expansion of jurisdictional competencies that renders 'subjects' of those it seeks to protect. Against those who posit universalism as firstly consistency in moral reasoning and secondly as a universal source of objective obligation it is argued that the second form of universalism does not derive from the first. In reconceptualising 'the universal' as the way in which meaning extends outwards in (subjective) moral judgment, the notion of obligation is also reconfigured as an (immanent) expression of our moral commitments and rejected as a source of authorization for action. (Although there is no particular fidelity in this work to sustaining the significance of the term 'obligation'.)