User:Mmcknight4

Ten years after my first birthday I could recall memories from nine years prior. My parents moved us from Florida to a secluded tribal village in Guyana to protect us from the constant threat of fish hawks. They were a beautiful animal, as I recall them, but had, within their three-toed feet, a vicious set of talons much accustomed to penetrating fish and mammals. Guyana was merely the name of the country we retreated to; we resided high in the mountains where the designation of countries and their boundaries were meaningless to the tribal population we joined. We roamed the mountainside catching sparrow monkeys and picking mountain pineapple, a bromeliad species I fear I ate the last of. Sparrow monkey and pineapple are quite a breakfast on a cold morning in Guyana. Our tribe leader 'Kinchusa' was fatally wounded by a chimp in a territorial dispute leading to a splintering of factions among our group. Thirty of us set off for the coast where we fashioned a quasi-democracy and sustained ourselves by netting fish and hunting small game. We had been told our father's fate was the vast prison labor system in Guyana but we later learned he had escaped and returned to Florida where he took up a law practice. We raised plane fare and joined him there where we have been happy citizens since. USA!

Favorite Food

pizza

• See Fernando Teson, "Humanitarian Rights and Cultural Relativism" 25 Virginia Journal of International Law (1985), 869)
• The only philosophically coherent (although counterintuitive) argument against humanitarian intervention is the pacifist position, one that opposes all violence. For a spirited defense of that position, see Robert Holmes On War and Morality (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989)
• See, for example, Bhiku Parekh, "Rethinking humanitarian Intervention," 18 International Political Science Review (1997), 49, 54-55.
• For the view that there is considerable overlap on humanitarian intervention among different religious traditions see Oliver Ramsbotham, "Islam Christianity, and Forcible Humanitarian Intervention," 12 Ethics and International Affairs (1998), 81.

"In this chapter I argue that intervention is morally justified in appropriate cases. The argument centrally rests on a standard assumption of liberal political philosophy: a major purpose of states and governments is to protect and secure human rights, that is, rights that all persons have by virtue of personhood alone. Governments and others in power who seriously violate those rights undermine the one reason that justifies their political power, and thus should not be protected by international law. A corollary of that argument is that, to the extent that state sovereignty is a value, it is an instrumental and not intrinsic value. Sovereignty serves valuable human ends, and those who grossly assault them should not be allowed to shield themselves behind the sovereignty principle. Tyranny and anarchy cause the moral collapse of sovereignty.

I supplement this argument with further moral assumptions. The fact that persons are right-holders has normative consequences for others. We all have (1) the obligation to respect those rights; (2) the obligation to promote such respect for all persons (3) depending on the circumstances, the right to rescue such victims - the right of humanitarian intervention. Because human rights are rights held by individuals through virtue of their personhood, they are independent of history, culture, or national borders.

I define permissible humanitarian intervention as the proportionate international use or threat of military force, undertaken in principle by a liberal government or alliance, aimed at ending tyranny or anarchy, welcomed by the victims, and consistent with the doctrine of double effect.

The argument for intervention has two components. The first is the quite obvious judgement that the exercise of governmental tyranny and the behavior that typically takes place in situations of extreme anarchy are serious forms of injustice towards persons. The second is the judgement that, subject to important constraints, external intervention is (at least) morally permissible to end that injustice. I suggest below that the first part of the argument is uncontroversial. For the most part, critics of humanitarian intervention do not disagree with the judgement that the situations that (according to interventionists) call for intervention are morally abhorrent. The situations that trigger intervention are acts such as crimes against humanity, serious war crimes, mass murder, genocide, widespread torture, and the Hobbesian state of nature (war of all against all) caused by the collapse of social order. Rather, the disagreement between supporters and opponents of humanitarian intervention concerns the second part of the argument: interventionists claim that foreigners may help to stop the injustice, non-interventionists claim they may not. The related claims from political and moral philosophy that I make (that sovereignty is dependent on justice, and that we have a right to assist victims of injustice) concern this second part of the argument. If a situation is morally abhorrent (as non-interventionists I suspect will concede) then neither the sanctity of national borders nor a general prohibition against war should by themselves preclude an intervention.

This discussion concerns forcible intervention to protect human rights. I address here the use and the threat of military force (what I have elsewhere called hard intervention) for humanitarian purposes. However, the justification for the international protection of human rights is best analyzed as part of a continuum of international behavior. Most of the reasons that justify humanitarian intervention are extensions of the general reason that justify interference with agents in order to help victims of their unjust behavior. Interference and intervention in other societies to protect human rights are special cases of our duty to assist victims of injustice. However, many people disagree that humanitarian intervention is part of a continuum; they treat war as a special case of violence, as a unique case, and not simply as a more violent and destructive form of human behavior that can nonetheless be sometimes justified. They do not agree with Clausewitz that war is the continuum of politics (politik) by other means. Intuitively, there is something particularly terrible, or awesome about war. It is the ultimate form of human violence. This is why many people who are committed to human rights nonetheless oppose intervention. To them, war is a crime, the most hideous form of destruction of human life, and so it cannot be right to support war, even for the benign purpose of saving people’s lives. Good liberals should not support war in any of its forms.

I am, of course, in sympathy with that view. Who would not be? If there is an obvious proposition in international ethics, it has to be that war is a terrible thing. Yet the deeply ingrained view that war is always immoral regardless of cause is mistaken. Sometimes it is morally permissible to fight; occasionally, fighting is even mandatory. The uncritical opposition to all wars begs the question about the justification of violence generally. Proponents of humanitarian intervention simply argue that humanitarian intervention in some instances (rare ones, to be sure) is morally justified, while agreeing of course that war is generally a bad thing. But it is worth emphasizing here that critics of humanitarian intervention are not pacifists. They support the use of force in self defense and (generally) in performance of actions duly authorized by the Security Council. So their hostility to humanitarian intervention cannot be grounded on a general rejection of war. Part of the task of this chapter is to examine those reasons.

The case for intervention relies on principles of political and moral philosophy. Political philosophy addresses the justification of political power, and hence the justification of the state. Most accounts of the state rely on social contract theory of some kind to explain and justify the existence of the state. Here I follow a Kantian account of the state. Governments are justified as institutions created by ethical agents, that is, by autonomous persons. The state centrally includes a constitution that defines the powers of governments in a manner consistent with respect for individual autonomy. This Kantian conception of the state is the liberal solution to the dilemmas of anarchy and tyranny. Anarchy and tyranny are the two extremes in a continuum of political coercion. Anarchy is the complete absence of social order which inevitably leads to a Hobbesian war of all against all. The exigencies of survival compel persons in the state of nature to lead a brutal existence marked by massive assaults on human dignity. The is a case of too little government, as it were. At the other extreme, the perpetration of tyranny is not simply an obvious assault on the dignity of persons: it is a betrayal of the very purpose for which government exists. It is a case of abuse of government - of too much government, as it were. Humanitarian intervention is one tool to help move the quantum of political freedom in the continuum of political coercion to the Kantian center of that continuum, away, on one hand, from the extreme lack of order (anarchy), and, on the other hand, from governmental suppression of individual freedom (tyranny). Anarchical conditions prevent persons, by reason of the total collapse of social order, from conducting meaningful life in common or from pursuing individual plans of life. Tyrannical conditions (the misuse of social coercion) prevents the victims, by the overuse of state coercion from pursuing their autonomous projects. If human beings are denied basic human rights and are, for that reason, deprived of their capacity to pursue their autonomous projects, then others have a prima facie duty to help them. The serious violation of fundamental civil and political rights generates obligations on others. Outsiders (foreign persons, governments, international organizations) have a duty not only to respect those rights themselves but also to help insure that governments respect them. Like justified revolutions, interventions are sometimes needed to secure a modicum of individual autonomy and dignity. Persons trapped in such situations deserved to be rescued, and sometimes the rescue can only be accomplished by force. We have a general duty to assist persons in grave danger if we can do it at reasonable cost to ourselves. If this is true, we have, by definition a right to do so. The right to intervene thus stems from a general duty to assist victims of grievous injustice. I do not think that critics of intervention necessarily disagrees with this in a general sense. Rather, their opposition to intervention relies on supposed moral significance of state sovereignty and/or national borders.

The issue of the justification of humanitarian intervention is narrower than the general issue of how liberal governments should treat abusive regimes. It is perfectly possible to say that a non-liberal government should not be treated as a member in good-standing with the international community while acknowledging that it would be wrong to intervene in those states to force liberal reforms. The situations that qualify for forcible intervention are best described as “beyond the pale” situations. Only outlaw regimes are morally vulnerable to acts of forcible and non-forcible humanitarian intervention. All regimes that are morally vulnerable to intervention are of course illegitimate, but the reverse is not rue. For many reasons it may be wrong to intervene in regimes which are nonetheless intolerable by general liberal tenets. Humanitarian intervention is reserved for the more serious cases - those that I have defined as tyranny and anarchy. Again, the illegitimacy of the regime is a necessary and not a sufficient condition for permissibility. I indicated that most critics of intervention are not pacifists. They object to this kind of war. They do not object to wars, say, in defense of territory. This position is somewhat anomalous because it requires separate justifications for different kinds of wars. In contrast, the liberal argument offers a unified justification for war. War is justified if, and only if, it is in defense of persons and complies with the requirements of proportionality and the doctrine of double effect. Take the use of force in self defense. What is the moral justification? That the aggressor is assaulting the rights of persons in the state attacked. The government of the attacked state then has the right to fight for its citizens’ lives and property. The defense of the state is justified qua defense of persons. There is no defense of the state as such that is not parasitic on the rights and interests of individuals. If this is correct, any moral distinction between self-defense and intervention, that is, any judgement that self-defense is justified while humanitarian intervention is not, has to rely on something above and beyond the general rationale of defense of persons." Tesòn, F.

Calamoideae

Calamoideae
Calamus gibbsianus, of the type genus.
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Plantae
(unranked):	Angiosperms
(unranked):	Monocots
(unranked):	Commelinids
Order:	Arecales
Family:	Arecaceae
Subfamily:	Calamoideae
Tribes
Calameae Lepidocaryeae

Calamoideae is a subfamily of flowering plant in the palm family found throughout Central America, South America, Africa, India, China, Southeast Asia and Australia. It is is represented by 21 genera - containing nearly a quarter of all species in the palm family - including the largest genus, Calamus, the type genus of the group. Only four are found in the New World while the rest are Old World denizens, usually found in equatorial swampland or along tropical coastlines.

While the many species show marked differences, the bracts of all orders are tubular, the flowers are almost always borne in dyads or dyad derivatives, but most marked as an identifier among these palms are the overlapping scales covering the fruit; occasionally small and irregular they are, in most cases, neatly aligned in vertical rows. Also common to the group are varying forms of armament: spines along leaf margins or on sheaths, root and stem spines, reflexed rachis cirri, or specialized hooks among the climbing species.

The long fossil record and the many unspecialized features imply the group diverged early, parallel perhaps, with the Coryphoideae from an ancient protopalm ancestor. While the simplest floral characteristics belong to those rattan genera endemic to Africa (Laccosperma, Eremospatha and Oncocalamus), they exhibit tremendous diversity suggesting a larger representation in the past. This subfamily has been noted in palm literature as the Lepidocaryoideae, however an 1844 (Griffith) designation of Calamoideae predates the use of the former at this rank and, as such, is correct in botanical nomenclature.

Description

The Calamoideae is a widely varied group. Many of the rattans in the subfamily are slender, high-climbing vines creeping from the jungle floor aided by evolved hooks and barbs, allowing them to cling onto competitive vegetation to reach the canopy top. Whether or not they climb, almost all genera in this subfamily tend to have clustering species with few solitary members among them, though some genre are mostly or strictly solitary producing acaulescent trees. Among the prostrate, clustered, or solitary and erect members, the Korthalsia genus is unique in that it produces off-shoots high above ground rather than near-ground as is seen in most other clustering species.

The leaves are consistently reduplicate of which palmate and pinnate variations exist. The armament on the leaves in many species mimics the armament found on other parts of plants in the group. Sharp prickles and spines line rachises, leaf margins and leaf sheaths. Other genera produce spines along the roots and stems. In climbing plants there are extended rachises formed into sharp spines while, as in the African rattans, the distal most leaflets are modified into reflexed spines, acanthophylls. While some Calamus species bear protective cirri others have evolved spines on false inflorescences as a means of protection.

Sexually they show hermaphroditic, monoecious, dioecious and polygamous characteristics of which some are hapaxanthic, dying after they flower and fruit, while the remainder follow the more common pleonanthic reproductive behavior. A bract is characteristic in this subfamily, protecting the dyads of flowers on maturing and where dyads are not present a dyadic origin of flowering is evident (with the exception of Oncocalamus). Triads of hermaphroditic flowers are occasionally discovered within Laccosperma and a sterile staminate flower winged by two pistillate flowers are found in the rare Calamus species though these are exceptions to the rule. Pollinated flowers produce a fruit with overlapping scales. Usually arranged in distinct, vertical rows, the scales in Eugeissona, Myrialepis and a handful of Salacca species are small and irregularly arranged.

Distribution

The lone outlier in the subfamily, R. taedigera, exists in tropical America though some speculation suggests it may have been introduced. In any case, it is joined by the strictly New World genera Mauritia, Mauritiella, and Lepidocaryum in Trinidad, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana and Surinam. Absent from the Andes, these plants are found in wet, predominantly lowland stands with some common to black-water rivers.

In Africa they are plentiful south of the Sahara, reaching from the West across humid rain forest and the Congo Basin, through the central part of the continent with southern bands hugging the coast down through Angola to the west and Mozambique to the east; one species in the Raphia genus occupies areas across the northern part of Madagascar, another possible introduction.

Onto Sri Lanka, India, China, the Fiji and Indonesian island chains and Australia

Tribes

Calameae

Calameae is an Old World tribe with the exception of the single species Raphia taedigera. Among the 18 genera there are plants with pinnate, entire, or bifid leaves with pinnate-ribs. Extremely varied, they are divided into subtribes based on the progressive modifications of flower arrangements from hermaphroditic dyads, dyads with hermaphrodites alongside staminate flowers, pistillate and sterile staminate pairs, onto solitary staminate or pistillate units. Oncocalamus possesses a flower structure unique not just to the tribe but to the family as a whole. It is vegetatively similar to another subtribe within Calameae but is distinguished by the pistillate and staminate flowers formed in groups up to 11. These flower clusters and isolated position of the genus argues for a long history of this subfamily in Africa with much extinction.

• Calamus
• Ceratolobus
• Daemonorops
• Eremospatha
• Eleiodoxa
• Eugeissona
• Korthalsia
• Laccosperma
• Metroxylon
• Oncocalamus
• Pigafetta
• Plectocomia
• Plectocomiopsis
• Raphia
• Retispatha
• Salacca
• Calamus

Lepidocaryeae

A monotypic tribe from North and Central America with moderately sized, erect trunks, with crownshafts. The flowers are solitary, spirally-arranged, hermaphroditic, and borne in the axils of small bracts.

• Mauritia
• Mauritiella
• Lepidocaryum

External links

• [1]
• [2]