Download or read book Human Dignity Education and Political Society written by James Greenaway and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A life of liberty and responsibility does not just happen, but requires a particular kind of education, one that aims at both a growth of the human soul and an enrichment of political society in justice and the common good. This we call a liberal education. Forgetfulness of liberty is also a forgetfulness of the multi-dimensional nature of the human person, and a diminution of political life. Keeping in mind what can be lost when liberal education is lost, this volume makes the case for recovering what is perennially noble and good in the liberal arts, and why the liberal arts always have a role to play in human flourishing. Each of the authors herein focuses on the connection of three primary themes: human dignity, liberal education, and political society. Intentionally rooted in the hub that joins the three themes, each author seeks to unfold the contemporary significance of that hub. As a whole, the volume explores how the three themes are crucial to each other: how they illuminate each other, how they need each other, and how the loss of one jeopardizes the wellbeing of the others. In individual chapters, the authors engage various relevant aspects of liberal education. As a result, the volume is organized into three parts: Liberal Education and a Life Well Lived; Thinkers on Dignity and Education in History; Contemporary Topics in Dignity and Education. As education is increasingly channeled into an ever more narrow focus on technical specialization, and measured against professional success, students themselves face a maelstrom of campus politics and competing political orthodoxies. These are among the issues that tend to militate against the operative liberty of the student to think and to speak as a person. This edited collection is offered as an invitation to think again about the liberal arts in order to recover the meaning of education as the authentic pursuit of the good life or eudemonia.

Download or read book Human Dignity and Liberal Politics written by Patrick Riordan and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book pursues two goals in the context of resurgence of interest in "the common good" as a topic in political philosophy and Christian ethics. The first goal is the clarification of the notion of common good, elaborating it through the three lenses of Aristotelian practical philosophy, twentieth century Catholic Social Thought, and political liberalism. The second goal is to make the case that the espousal of the common good does not entail a rejection of liberalism, but that a commitment to liberal politics is compatible with faithful adherence to the Catholic tradition. The first goal is warranted by the fact that many authors such as Michael Sandel who invoke "the common good" do not explain the concept. The second is necessitated by the tendency among many contemporary Catholic authors to polarize liberalism and the common good, presenting readers with a stark choice. Instead of exacerbating divisions this book explores what is common, even where there is difference and division. The Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et spes invites all to a dialogue about the common good as the set of economic, political, legal, and cultural conditions for the flourishing of human beings, whether as individuals or as communities. The challenge of dialogue is taken up through the three lenses, identifying a heuristic concept of the common good, along with two criteria for its application. First, no systematic exclusion of any person or group, and second, no systematic exclusion of any genuine dimension of the human good. These criteria have their counterparts in the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. They prove their usefulness in discussion of democracy, human rights, and religious liberty, accepting a political liberalism that can facilitate the collaboration in political life by exponents of many different worldviews and religious doctrines"--

Download or read book Human Dignity and Political Criticism written by Colin Bird and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: That human dignity matters politically is widely affirmed, yet how it matters remains unresolved. This book aims to settle that question.

Download or read book Identity written by Francis Fukuyama and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics: its origins, its effects, and what it means for domestic and international affairs of state In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole. Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy. Identity is an urgent and necessary book—a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.

Download or read book Human Dignity and Contemporary Liberalism written by Brad Stetson and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1998-01-21 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Human Dignity and Contemporary Liberalism argues that the nature and application of contemporary liberalism is significantly dissonant with the deepest inclinations and most persistent moral sentiments of human beings, and it therefore distorts human self-understanding and defaces human dignity. This mismatch between human nature and the essence of contemporary liberalism hobbles our public life, and—the author suggests—is the Gordian knot that must be loosed if the new millennium is to manifest a more humane and satisfying American civitas. This wide-ranging book begins with a discussion of certain consequences and implications of contemporary liberalism's heavy emphasis on individual rights, moving into a reflection on two general categories of human dignity, suggesting that there is in contemporary liberal thought a lack of clarity concerning the meaning and gravity of this concept. The focus then shifts to the idea of desert or deservingness. The viability of desert, rightly understood, is advanced as a useful general concept for understanding American public life, and as an important tool for restoring a measure of common sense to our politics. The second section of the book concentrates on the actual application of contemporary liberalism's values as it has occurred since the 1960s, particularly in the culturally contentious areas of race and abortion. Emerging from this survey is an unflattering image of a political paradigm which, according to the author, must be abandoned, or at least radically revised, if America is to strike a posture of moral intensity and genuine social understanding.

Download or read book Human Dignity and Political Criticism written by Colin Bird and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many, including Marx, Rawls, and the contemporary 'Black Lives Matter' movement, embrace the ambition to secure terms of co-existence in which the worth of people's lives becomes a lived reality rather than an empty boast. This book asks whether, as some believe, the philosophical idea of human dignity can help achieve that ambition. Offering a new fourfold typology of dignity concepts, Colin Bird argues that human dignity can perform this role only if certain traditional ways of conceiving it are abandoned. Accordingly, Bird rejects the idea that human dignity refers to the inherent worth or status of individuals, and instead reinterprets it as a social relation, constituted by affects of respect and the modes of mutual attention which they generate. What emerges is a new vision of human dignity as a vital political value, and an arresting vindication of its role as an agent of critical reflection on politics.

Download or read book Political Agape written by Timothy P. Jackson and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-29 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the place of Christian love in a pluralistic society dedicated to liberty and justice for all ? What would it mean to take both Jesus Christ and Abraham Lincoln seriously and attempt to translate love of God and neighbor into every quarter of life, including law and politics? Timothy Jackson addresses such questions in Political Agape: Prophetic Christianity and Liberal Democracy. Jackson argues that love of God and neighbor is the perilously neglected civil virtue of our time and that it must be considered even before justice in structuring political principles and policies. To indicate the specific implications of civic agapism, he looks at such issues as the death penalty, Christian complicity in the Holocaust, the case for same-sex marriage, and the morality of adoption. The book concludes with Jackson s reflections on Martin Luther King Jr. as a Christian hero.

Download or read book The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy written by Michael J. Perry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important new work elaborates and defends an account of the political morality of liberal democracy.

Download or read book Human Dignity and Liberal Politics written by Patrick Riordan, SJ and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-02 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deeply considered examination of the “common good” reconciling Catholic Social Thought with secular politics and philosophy The Second Vatican Council invites dialogue about the common good as the set of economic, political, legal, and cultural conditions for human flourishing, whether as individuals or as communities. However, some contemporary Catholic authors jeopardize this dialogue by polarizing liberalism and the common good, interpreting the commitment to individual liberty as incompatible with commitment to the common good. Human Dignity and Liberal Politics clarifies the meaning of the common good through the three lenses of Aristotelian practical philosophy, twentieth-century Catholic Social Thought, and political liberalism. It makes the case that embracing the common good does not entail a rejection of liberalism, but that a commitment to liberal politics is compatible with faithful adherence to the Catholic tradition. The book argues that liberal political philosophy is not only compatible with Catholic Social Teaching but may also be the most appropriate framework for communicating the richness of the Church’s tradition today. Furthermore, accepting political liberalism can facilitate collaboration in political life between those who hold different worldviews and foster an enriched discussion of democracy, human rights, and religious liberty. Students and scholars of Christian ethics and political philosophy will benefit from this response to the challenges of dialogue about the “common good” in the context of the resurgence of this topic.

Download or read book Human Dignity and Human Rights written by Pablo Gilabert and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human dignity: social movements invoke it, several national constitutions enshrine it, and it features prominently in international human rights documents. But what is human dignity, why is it important, and what is its relationship to human rights? This book offers a sophisticated and comprehensive defence of the view that human dignity is the moral heart of human rights. First, it clarifies the network of concepts associated with dignity. Paramount within this network is a core notion of human dignity as an inherent, non-instrumental, egalitarian, and high-priority normative status of human persons. People have this status in virtue of their valuable human capacities rather than as a result of their national origin and other conventional features. Second, it shows how human dignity gives rise to an inspiring ideal of solidaristic empowerment, which calls us to support people's pursuit of a flourishing life by affirming both negative duties not to block or destroy, and positive duties to protect and facilitate, the development and exercise of the valuable capacities at the basis of their dignity. The most urgent of these duties are correlative to human rights. Third, this book illustrates how the proposed dignitarian approach allows us to articulate the content, justification, and feasible implementation of specific human rights, including contested ones, such as the rights to democratic political participation and to decent labour conditions. Finally, this book's dignitarian approach helps illuminate the arc of humanist justice, identifying both the difference and the continuity between the basic requirements of human rights and more expansive requirements of social justice such as those defended by liberal egalitarians and democratic socialists. Human dignity is indeed the moral heart of human rights. Understanding it enables us to defend human rights as the urgent ethical and political project that puts humanity first.

Download or read book Christian Human Rights written by Samuel Moyn and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-09-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Christian Human Rights, Samuel Moyn asserts that the rise of human rights after World War II was prefigured and inspired by a defense of the dignity of the human person that first arose in Christian churches and religious thought in the years just prior to the outbreak of the war. The Roman Catholic Church and transatlantic Protestant circles dominated the public discussion of the new principles in what became the last European golden age for the Christian faith. At the same time, West European governments after World War II, particularly in the ascendant Christian Democratic parties, became more tolerant of public expressions of religious piety. Human rights rose to public prominence in the space opened up by these dual developments of the early Cold War. Moyn argues that human dignity became central to Christian political discourse as early as 1937. Pius XII's wartime Christmas addresses announced the basic idea of universal human rights as a principle of world, and not merely state, order. By focusing on the 1930s and 1940s, Moyn demonstrates how the language of human rights was separated from the secular heritage of the French Revolution and put to use by postwar democracies governed by Christian parties, which reinvented them to impose moral constraints on individuals, support conservative family structures, and preserve existing social hierarchies. The book ends with a provocative chapter that traces contemporary European struggles to assimilate Muslim immigrants to the continent's legacy of Christian human rights.

Download or read book The Theology of Liberalism written by Eric Nelson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of our most important political theorists pulls the philosophical rug out from under modern liberalism, then tries to place it on a more secure footing. We think of modern liberalism as the novel product of a world reinvented on a secular basis after 1945. In The Theology of Liberalism, one of the country’s most important political theorists argues that we could hardly be more wrong. Eric Nelson contends that the tradition of liberal political philosophy founded by John Rawls is, however unwittingly, the product of ancient theological debates about justice and evil. Once we understand this, he suggests, we can recognize the deep incoherence of various forms of liberal political philosophy that have emerged in Rawls’s wake. Nelson starts by noting that today’s liberal political philosophers treat the unequal distribution of social and natural advantages as morally arbitrary. This arbitrariness, they claim, diminishes our moral responsibility for our actions. Some even argue that we are not morally responsible when our own choices and efforts produce inequalities. In defending such views, Nelson writes, modern liberals have implicitly taken up positions in an age-old debate about whether the nature of the created world is consistent with the justice of God. Strikingly, their commitments diverge sharply from those of their proto-liberal predecessors, who rejected the notion of moral arbitrariness in favor of what was called Pelagianism—the view that beings created and judged by a just God must be capable of freedom and merit. Nelson reconstructs this earlier “liberal” position and shows that Rawls’s philosophy derived from his self-conscious repudiation of Pelagianism. In closing, Nelson sketches a way out of the argumentative maze for liberals who wish to emerge with commitments to freedom and equality intact.

Download or read book Human Rights Human Dignity and Cosmopolitan Ideals written by Matthias Lutz-Bachmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes a significant contribution to the on-going international dialogue on the meaning of concepts such as human rights, humanity, and cosmopolitanism. The authors propose a new agenda for research into a Critical Theory of Human Rights. Each chapter pursues three goals: to reconstruct modern philosophical theories that have contributed to our views on human rights; to highlight the importance of humanity and human dignity as a complementary dimension to liberal rights; and, finally, to integrate these issues more directly in contemporary discussions about cosmopolitanism. The authors not only present multicultural perspectives on how to rethink political and international theory in terms of the normativity of human rights, but also promote an international dialogue on the prospects for a critical theory of human rights discourses in the 21st century.

Download or read book A Critical Legal Examination of Liberalism and Liberal Rights written by Matthew McManus and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book has two aims. First, to provide a critical legal examination of the liberal state and liberal rights in the law, and secondly, to present a systematic alternative to liberal approaches to both the law and rights, grounded in a left wing conception of human dignity. At the opening of the 21st century a remarkable thing happened. Liberalism, once considered the only doctrine left standing at the end of history, began to face renewed competition from both the political left and the post-modern conservative right. This book argues that the way forward is not to abandon, but to radicalize, the potential of the liberal project. Analysing major theoretical positions in order to build a critical genealogy of liberal rights, McManus lucidly develops a left wing alternative to the classic liberal approach to rights drawing on the traditions of liberal egalitarians and deliberative democracy theory. Societies, he argues, should be committed to advancing the human dignity of all through the enshrinement of certain rights into positive state law, the expansion of democracy and a resolute commitment to economic equality.

Download or read book The Demon in Democracy written by Ryszard Legutko and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ryszard Legutko lived and suffered under communism for decades—and he fought with the Polish anti-communist movement to abolish it. Having lived for two decades under a liberal democracy, however, he has discovered that these two political systems have a lot more in common than one might think. They both stem from the same historical roots in early modernity, and accept similar presuppositions about history, society, religion, politics, culture, and human nature. In The Demon in Democracy, Legutko explores the shared objectives between these two political systems, and explains how liberal democracy has over time lurched towards the same goals as communism, albeit without Soviet style brutality. Both systems, says Legutko, reduce human nature to that of the common man, who is led to believe himself liberated from the obligations of the past. Both the communist man and the liberal democratic man refuse to admit that there exists anything of value outside the political systems to which they pledged their loyalty. And both systems refuse to undertake any critical examination of their ideological prejudices.

Download or read book The Politics of Virtue written by John Milbank and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two expert authors combine a compelling critique of contemporary liberalism with post-liberal alternatives in politics, the economy, culture and international affairs, to provide the fullest account so far of the post-liberal alternative in Western politics.

Download or read book Dignity written by Michael Rosen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dignity plays a central role in current thinking about law and human rights, but there is sharp disagreement about its meaning. Combining conceptual precision with a broad historical background, Michael Rosen puts these controversies in context and offers a novel, constructive proposal. “Penetrating and sprightly...Rosen rightly emphasizes the centrality of Catholicism in the modern history of human dignity. His command of the history is impressive...Rosen is a wonderful guide to the recent German constitutional thinking about human dignity...[Rosen] is in general an urbane and witty companion, achieving his aim of accessibly written philosophy.” —Samuel Moyn, The Nation “[An] elegant, interesting and lucid exploration of the concept of dignity...Drawing on classical, liberal and Catholic traditions, Rosen hopes to rehabilitate dignity to its rightful place near the centre of moral thought...Rosen's admirable book deserves wide attention from political theorists, jurisprudes and political philosophers.” —Simon Blackburn, Times Higher Education “Dignity deserves to be widely read, not only for its intrinsic interest, but also as a corrective to the habit of discussing such topics in abstraction from their social context. Whether or not one agrees with Rosen's arguments, there can be no doubt he has widened our horizons.” —Rae Langton, Times Literary Supplement