Is the principal concern of political philosophy the source of political authority? And, if so, can this source be located in individual consent? In this article I draw on Rousseau to answer the second question negatively; and in rejecting that answer, why we might answer the first question in the negative as well. We should be concerned with questions of legitimacy rather than with the source of authority and political obligation. Our principal concern, that is, should be with the question (...) how well political institutions meet the needs of individuals. I pursue these issues in the context of interpreting Rousseau's distinctive contribution to political thought. I start out by asking the question 'What problem is the General Will designed to solve?' I argue that Rousseau's challenge to Hobbes represents a crucial step in the move from the source of authority and political obligation to a focus on legitimacy. (shrink)

This paper will contend that we, in the first quarter of the 21st century, need an enhanced Age of Reason based on global epistemology. One reason to legitimize such a call for more intellectual enlightenment is the lack of required information on non-European philosophy in today’s reading lists at European and North American universities. Hence, the present-day Academy contributes to the scarcity of knowledge about the world’s global history of ideas outside one’s ethnocentric sphere. The question is whether we genuinely (...) want to rethink parts of the “Colonial Canon” and its main narratives of the past. This article argues that we, if we truly desire, might create “a better Enlightenment.” Firstly, by raising the general knowledge level concerning the philosophies of the Global South. Thus, this text includes examples from the global enlightenments in China, Mughal India, Arabic-writing countries, and Indigenous North America—all preceding and influencing the European Enlightenment. Secondly, we can rebuild by rediscovering the Enlightenment ideals within the historiography of the “hidden enlightenment” of Europe’s and North America’s past. In Part I, of two parts of this paper, a comparative methodology will be outlined. In addition, examples will be given from the history of ideas in India and China to argue that we need to study how these regions influenced the European history of ideas in the 16th and 17th centuries. Finally, towards the end of this text, a re-reading of the contributions from Egypt and Greece aspires to give a more global and complex context for Western Europe’s so-called Age of Reason. (shrink)

: This essay examines the reconfiguration of the racial and sexual contracts underpinning democratic theory and practice in the transition to independence in India. Drawing upon the work of Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, Keating argues that the racialized fraternal democratic order that they describe was importantly challenged by nationalist and feminist struggles against colonialism in India, but was reshaped into what she calls a postcolonial sexual contract by the framers of the Indian Constitution.

The main purpose of this article is to show that the essence of Mozi’s political theory, namely that a civil state is in its best or ideal condition when each citizen exercises universal care, is more defensible than it is usually thought to be. Doing this will require an exposition of the main features of his theory and occasionally reference arguments and considerations outside of Mozi’s text. We interpret the disagreement between Mozi and his alleged Confucian opponents as a disagreement (...) about the nature of political obligation: Confucians regard political service as a kind of noncontractual role obligation, while Mozi regards it as an obligation derivable from universal and impartial moral principles. (shrink)

Abstract. Revelations in the United States of secret legal opinions by the Department of Justice, dramatically altering the conventional interpretations of laws governing torture, interrogation, and surveillance, have made the issue of "secret law" newly prominent. The dangers of secret law from the perspective of democratic accountability are clear, and need no elaboration. But distaste for secret law goes beyond questions of democracy. Since Plato, and continuing through such non-democratic thinkers as Bodin and Hobbes, secret law has been seen as (...) a mark of tyranny, inconsistent with the notion of law itself. This raises both theoretical and practical questions. The theoretical questions involve the consistency of secret law with positivist legal theory. In principle, while a legal system as a whole could not be secret, publicity need not be part of the validity criteria for particular laws. The practical questions arise from the fact that secret laws, and secret governmental operations, are a common and often well-accepted aspect of governmental power. This paper argues that the flaw of secret law goes beyond accountability and beyond efficiency to the role that law plays, and can only play, in situating subjects' understanding of themselves in relation to the state. Secret law, as such, is inconsistent with this fundamental claim of the law to orient us in moral and political space, and undermines the claim to legitimacy of the state's rulers. (shrink)

What justifies political power? Most philosophers argue that consent or democracy are important, in other words, it matters how power is exercised. But this book argues that outcomes primarily matter to justifying power.

Munoz-Dardé (2009) argues that a social contract theory must meet Rousseau's 'liberty condition': that, after the social contract, each 'nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before'. She claims that Rousseau's social contract does not meet this condition, for reasons that suggest that no other social contract theory could. She concludes that political philosophy should turn away from social contract theory's preoccupation with authority and obedience, and focus instead on what she calls the 'legitimacy' of social arrangements. I (...) raise questions about each of these claims. (shrink)

Judith Shklar, David Runciman, and others argue against what they see as excessive criticism of political hypocrisy. Such arguments often assume that communicating in an authentic manner is an impossible political ideal. This article challenges the characterization of authenticity as an unrealistic ideal and makes the case that its value can be grounded in a certain political realism sensitive to the threats posed by representative democracy. First, by analyzing authenticity’s demands for political discourse, I show that authenticity has greater flexibility (...) than many assume in accommodating practices common to politics, such as deception, concealment, and persuasion through rhetoric. Second, I argue that a concern for authenticity in political discourse represents a virtue, not a distraction, for representative democracy. Authenticity takes on heightened importance when the public seeks information on how representatives will act in contexts where the public is absent and unable to influence decisions. Furthermore, given the psychological mechanisms behind hypocrisy, public criticism is a sensible response for trying to limit political hypocrisy. From the perspective of democratic theory and psychology, the public has compelling reasons to value authenticity in political discourse. (shrink)

The most contentious aspect of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) concerned its amnesty‐granting powers. In return for perpetrators providing full disclosure about their crimes, the TRC was authorized to release them from both criminal responsibility and civil liability. This essay takes up the thorny question of how such a commission might be morally justified. Part 1 discusses the political circumstances that led to the creation of the TRC. Part 2 provides a critical survey of some previous attempts to (...) justify the commission's work. Part 3 offers a new justification, grounded in Adam Smith's notion of sympathy; after outlining some of the benefits of sympathy for political reconciliation, I argue that the work of a South African–style truth commission can promote sympathy between former enemies. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to provide a characterisation of emotional disorder. I begin by criticising the thought that an agent can be judged to be experiencing an emotional disorder if his emotion causes him some type of harm. This then leads me to develop the claim that emotional disorder relates to sufficiently inappropriate emotion, where (sufficiently) inappropriate emotion relates to emotion that fails to be (sufficiently) responsive to the agent's beliefs and/or desires. Finally, I conclude the paper by suggesting (...) that if an essentially non‐cognitivist conception of emotion is accepted then – on the characterisation of emotional disorder that I defend – there may exist strong grounds for thinking that cognitive therapy will be an inappropriate form of treatment in cases of emotional disorder.1. (shrink)

Over the past 20 years, there has been a huge amount of work on which things you can kill in self‐defense and why. This paper surveys that work.

The primary aim of this paper is to accentuate those features that distinguish Levinasian ethics from the egoism that prevails in management thought. It focuses on differences in the constitution of the subject, how Levinas seeks an ethics that goes beyond the subjective point of view that structures the self as being self-present, self-interested, free and systematic and relates to others through this perspective. Levinas's concepts are critically discussed by reading these alongside Jacques Lacan and Adam Smith, which enable observations (...) to be made about Levinas's concept of the Same and about the difference he effects between human and the nonhuman. It is concluded that it can be easy to misread Levinas in key respects in ways that may act to assimilate his thought to egoism. (shrink)

Beginning from an analysis of moral obligation's form that I defend in The Second-Person Standpoint as what we are answerable for as beings with the necessary capacities to enter into relations of mutual accountability, I argue that this analysis has implications for moral obligation's substance. Given what it is to take responsibility for oneself and hold oneself answerable, I argue, it follows that if there are any moral obligations at all, then there must exist a basic pro tanto obligation not (...) to undermine one another's moral autonomy. (shrink)

One of the greatest woman intellectuals of eighteenth‐century Germany is Elise Reimarus, whose contribution to Enlightenment political theory is rarely acknowledged today. Unlike other social contract theorists, Reimarus rejects a people's right to violent resistance or revolution in her philosophical dialogue Freedom. Exploring the arguments in Freedom, this paper observes a number of similarities in the political thought of Elise Reimarus and Immanuel Kant. Both, I suggest, reject violence as an illegitimate response to perceived political injustice in a way that (...) opposes Locke's strong voluntarism and the absolutism of Hobbes. First, they emphasize the need to maintain the legal state as a precondition for the possibility of external right. Second, they share an optimistic view of the inherently “just” nature of the tripartite republican state. And finally, Reimarus and Kant both outline an alternative, nonviolent response to political injustice that consists in the freedom of public expression and a discourse on the moral enlightenment of man. (shrink)

This paper aims at specifying the complex links which two major and polemically related 18th-century linguistic theories James Harris' universal grammar in Hermes (1751) and John Horne Tooke's system of etymology in the Diversions of Purley (1786, 1804) bear to empiricism. It describes both the ideologicalethical determining factors of the theories and the epistemological consequences dependent upon their respective philosophical orientation (Harris using classical Greek philosophy against empiricism, Tooke criticizing Locke's semantics along Hobbesian lines). The effects within the linguistic theories (...) are examined through a comparison of the theories of determination which follow from divergent theses concerning abstraction. The analysis proposed in this paper exemplifies once more the historical question of the exact location of the compatibility/incompatibility between empiricist and non-empiricist linguistic theories. (shrink)

: In the Aristotelian tradition, politics is a matter of public deliberation over questions of justice and injustice. The Bush administration's response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has been uniformly hostile to this notion, and it has instead promoted a jingoistic politics of self‐assertion by an America largely identified with the executive branch of its government. This is doubly disturbing, as the executive branch has sought to free itself from international law, multinational commitments, and domestic judicial regulation, (...) even as it has sought to validate itself by demonizing its enemies. This essay draws out the disturbing echoes here of Carl Schmitt's work of the 1920s, in particular of Schmitt's conception of the sovereign as the ungrounded ground of the law and the political as the site of mortal conflict between friend and enemy. The essay argues that Schmitt's position in the twenties, for all of its evident problems, is superior to that of Bush, Wolfowitz, and Ashcroft in at least two senses: Schmitt condemns the idea of waging war for profit and recognizes that such wars will often be disguised as moral crusades waged against the “inhuman”; and he acknowledges that claiming to fight a war for humanity denies one's enemies their humanity, leaving them open to torture and even extermination. (shrink)

Theories of the liberal tradition have relied on independence as a norm of personhood. Feminist theorists such as Eva Kittay in Love's Labor have been instrumental in critiquing normative independence. I explore the role of corporeal vulnerability in Kittay's account of personhood, developing a comparison to the role it plays in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. Kittay's crucial contribution in Love's Labor is that once we acknowledge the facts of corporeal vulnerability, we must not only acknowledge but also affirm dependency in a (...) genuinely inclusive affirmation of personhood. While endorsing Kittay's “dependency critique,” I discover difficulties that beleaguer Kittay's development of new norms of personhood. I trace these to a dependency of Kittay's account on a crucial premise of the liberal model it resists. I argue that in order to affirm dependency in a manner that departs more thoroughly from the criticized aspects of liberal personhood, we must cease to position it in a dichotomy of power and vulnerability. I suggest that attending to the corporeality of vulnerability can aid us in developing the terms of a discourse affirming relational personhood while undermining that dichotomy. (shrink)

In order to present a hopefully comprehensive framework of what is the stake of the growing use of robot soldiers, the paper focuses on: the different impact of robots on legal systems, e.g., contractual obligations and tort liability; how robots affect crucial notions as causality, predictability and human culpability in criminal law and, finally, specific hypotheses of robots employed in “just wars.” By using the traditional distinction between causes that make wars just and conduct admissible on the battlefield, the aim (...) is to clarify how advancement of military robotics technology is transforming a 2,000-year-old legal debate on the concept of “just war.” For the first time, legal systems will hold political authorities and military commissioners responsible for what an artificial soldier autonomously decides to do. The paper examines how the new scenario affects both principles of military conduct and notions of justice in resorting to war. (shrink)

Psychological Altruism (PA) is the view that everyone, ultimately, acts altruistically all the time. I defend PA by showing strong prima facie support, and show how a reinterpretive strategy against supposed counterexamples is successful. I go on to show how PA can be argued for in ways which exactly mirror the arguments for an opposing view, Psychological Egoism. This shows that the case for PA is at least as plausible as PE. Since the case for PA is not plausible, neither (...) is that for PE. (shrink)

The fictionalist paradigm is introduced, and differentiated from other paradigms, using the Lincoln & Guba template. Following an initial overview, the axioms of fictionalism are delineated by reference to standard metaphysical categories: the nature of reality, the relationship between knower and known, the possibility of generalization, the possibility of causal linkages, and the role of values in inquiry. Although a paradigm's ‘basic beliefs’ are arbitrary and can be assumed for any reason, in this paper the fictionalist axioms are supported with (...) philosophical considerations, and the key differences between fictionalism, positivism, and constructivism are briefly explained. Paradigm characteristics are then derived, focusing particularly on the methodological consequences. Towards the end of the paper, various objections and misunderstandings are discussed. (shrink)

One of the central tenets of Christian theology is the denial of self for the benefit of another. However, many views on the evolution of altruism presume that natural selection inevitably leads to a self-seeking human nature and that altruism is merely a façade to cover underlying selfish motives. I argue that human altruism is an emergent characteristic that cannot be reduced to any one particular evolutionary explanation. The evolutionary processes at work in the formation of human nature are not (...) necessarily in conflict with the possibility of altruism; rather, aspects of human nature are uniquely directed toward the care and concern of others. The relationship between altruism, human nature, and evolution can be reimagined by adopting an emergent view of the hierarchy of science and a theological worldview that emphasizes self-renunciation. The investigation of altruism necessitates an approach that analyzes several aspects of altruistic behavior at different levels in the hierarchy of sciences. This research includes the study of evolutionary adaptations, neurological systems, cognitive functions, behavioral traits, and cultural influences. No one level is able to offer a full explanation, but each piece adds a unique dimension to a much larger puzzle. (shrink)

: Unity, commonality, and agreement are generally understood to be the basis, or the aim, of community. This paper argues instead that disagreement and fracture are inherent to, and provide the expression of difference within, community. Drawing on the experience of race relations in Australia, this paper proposes that ongoing resis-tance and disagreement by Aboriginal groups against non-Aboriginal law and culture has enabled an unworking of homogenizing and totalizing forces which destroy alterity within community.

The article tries to inquire a third way in normative ethics between consequentialism or utilitarianism and deontology or Kantianism. To find such a third way in normative ethics, one has to analyze the elements of these classical theories and to look if they are justified. In this article it is argued that an adequate normative ethics has to contain the following five elements: (1) normative individualism, i. e., the view that in the last instance moral norms and values can only (...) be justified by reference to the individuals concerned, as its basis; (2) consideration of the individuals’ concerns and interests—aims, desires, needs, strivings—insofar as they have a justificatory function; (3) a pluralism of references of these concerns and hence of moral norms and values to all possible elements of actions; (4) the necessity of a principle of aggregation and weighing with regard to these concerns; (5) finally, as a central principle of aggregation and weighing, the principle of relative reference to self and others, operating as a generalizing meta-principle that guides the application of concrete principles and decisions. (shrink)

This article presents a discussion of how postmodernist, poststructuralist and critical educational thinking relate to different theories of power. I argue that both Critical Theory and some poststructuralist ideas base themselves on a concept of power borrowed from a modernist tradition. I argue as well that we are better off combining a postmodern idea of education with a postmodern idea of power. To this end the concept of power presented by the works of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe is introduced. (...) This concept controverts a number of major educational concepts, i.e. concepts such as causality, autonomy, subjectivity and originality. In other words, it allows us to take a fresh look at old concepts. Finally, I relate the discussion to a number of recent theories of learning. (shrink)

The paper examines today’s debate on the new responsibilities of Internet service providers in connection with legal problems concerning jurisdiction, data processing, people’s privacy and education. The focus is foremost on the default rules and safe harbour clauses for ISPs liability, set up by the US and European legal systems. This framework is deepened in light of the different functions of the services provided on the Internet so as to highlight multiple levels of control over information and, correspondingly, different types (...) of liability. The new responsibilities of ISPs concern the original “end-to-end” architecture of the medium and policies on design rather than responsibility for user content and individual messages. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Terrorism is perhaps the greatest challenge of the contemporary age. Of all the canonical figures in political theory, Thomas Hobbes is the most likely candidate to offer genuine insight into this problem. Yet although his analysis of the state of nature is immediately relevant to the diagnosis of this problem, his metaphysics cannot sustain his politics. His aspiration to “immutable” natural laws grounded in the universal motivation of the fear of death crumble when this fear is no longer universal. (...) When terrorists are inspired by a religious ideology that makes them willing to die for their beliefs—and when they benefit from other asymmetries with the civilian populations against which they are arrayed—Hobbes the theorist of war and international relations becomes less relevant than Hobbes the prescriber of “rational” (fearfully pacific) human nature. (shrink)