Download or read book Political ethics in illiberal regimes written by Zoltán Gábor Szucs and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it like to live in an illiberal regime? Ethical life in totalitarian regimes is easy to critique because it deviates from everything we think morally acceptable. But illiberal regimes are similar enough to liberal democracies to make addressing the experience of living there strikingly difficult. Political ethics in illiberal regimes argues that the common language of normative political theory is simply not up to the task of capturing this experience. On the one hand, we do not really need political theory to know why illiberal regimes are dangerous and undesirable. On the other, we do need political theory – at least of a certain realist kind – to understand why millions of reasonable people come to terms with living in such regimes. The book presents a novel theoretical language – Williamsian, liberal and realist – to articulate this experience. Part I lays out the theoretical framework, while Part II examines how politicians, experts and citizens in illiberal regimes are confronted with role-specific, political-ethical challenges and how the various normative contexts of their roles shape their agency.
Download or read book The Politics and Ethics of Toleration written by Johannes Drerup and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toleration plays a key role in liberal thought. This book explores our current understanding of toleration in liberal theory and practice. Toleration has traditionally been characterized as the willingness to put up with others or their actions or practices despite the fact that one considers them as objectionable. Toleration has thus been regarded as one of the core aspects of liberalism: as an indispensable democratic virtue and as a constitutive part of liberal political practice. In modern liberal societies, where deep disagreements about social values and ways of life are widespread, toleration still seems to be of crucial importance. However, contemporary debates on toleration cover an immense variety of theoretical and political issues ranging from controversies over its exact understanding and conceptual scope as well as its practical boundaries, e.g., regarding freedom of expression or the legitimate role of religious symbols in educational institutions. The contributions to this volume take up a number of carefully selected key questions and problems emerging from these ongoing theoretical and political controversies in order to explore and shed new light on pivotal conflicts and tensions that pervade different conceptions of toleration. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
Download or read book Political Emotions written by Martha C. Nussbaum and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we achieve and sustain a "decent" liberal society, one that aspires to justice and equal opportunity for all and inspires individuals to sacrifice for the common good? In this book, a continuation of her explorations of emotions and the nature of social justice, Martha Nussbaum makes the case for love. Amid the fears, resentments, and competitive concerns that are endemic even to good societies, public emotions rooted in love—in intense attachments to things outside our control—can foster commitment to shared goals and keep at bay the forces of disgust and envy. Great democratic leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., have understood the importance of cultivating emotions. But people attached to liberalism sometimes assume that a theory of public sentiments would run afoul of commitments to freedom and autonomy. Calling into question this perspective, Nussbaum investigates historical proposals for a public "civil religion" or "religion of humanity" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Rabindranath Tagore. She offers an account of how a decent society can use resources inherent in human psychology, while limiting the damage done by the darker side of our personalities. And finally she explores the cultivation of emotions that support justice in examples drawn from literature, song, political rhetoric, festivals, memorials, and even the design of public parks. "Love is what gives respect for humanity its life," Nussbaum writes, "making it more than a shell." Political Emotionsis a challenging and ambitious contribution to political philosophy.
Download or read book Exile Statelessness and Migration written by Seyla Benhabib and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the intertwined lives and writings of a group of prominent twentieth-century Jewish thinkers who experienced exile and migration Exile, Statelessness, and Migration explores the intertwined lives, careers, and writings of a group of prominent Jewish intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century—in particular, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Hirschman, and Judith Shklar, as well as Hans Kelsen, Emmanuel Levinas, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss. Informed by their Jewish identity and experiences of being outsiders, these thinkers produced one of the most brilliant and effervescent intellectual movements of modernity. Political philosopher Seyla Benhabib’s starting point is that these thinkers faced migration, statelessness, and exile because of their Jewish origins, even if they did not take positions on specifically Jewish issues personally. The sense of belonging and not belonging, of being “eternally half-other,” led them to confront essential questions: What does it mean for the individual to be an equal citizen and to wish to retain one’s ethnic, cultural, and religious differences, or perhaps even to rid oneself of these differences altogether in modernity? Benhabib isolates four themes in their works: dilemmas of belonging and difference; exile, political voice, and loyalty; legality and legitimacy; and pluralism and the problem of judgment. Surveying the work of influential intellectuals, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration recovers the valuable plurality of their Jewish voices and develops their universal insights in the face of the crises of this new century.
Download or read book Political Obligations written by George Klosko and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-03-10 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Obligations provides a full defense of a theory of political obligation based on the principle of fairness (or fair play), which is widely viewed as the strongest theory of obligation currently available. The work responds to the most important objections to the principle of fairness, and extends a theory based on fairness into a developed 'multiple principle' theory of obligation. In order to establish the need for such a theory, Political Obligations criticizes alternative theories of obligation based on a natural duty of justice and 'reformist' consent, and critically examines the non-state theories of libertarian and philosophical anarchists. The work breaks new ground by providing the first in-depth study of popular attitudes towards political obligations and how the state itself views them. The attitudes of ordinary citizens are explored through small focus groups, while the 'self image of the state' in regard to the obligations of its citizens is studied through examination of judicial decisions in three different democratic countries.
Download or read book Illiberal Trends and Anti EU Politics in East Central Europe written by Astrid Lorenz and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book provides an in-depth look into the background of rule of law problems and the open defiance of EU law in East Central European countries. Current illiberal trends and anti-EU politics have the potential to undermine mutual trust between member states and fundamentally change the EU. It is therefore crucial to understand their domestic causes, context conditions, specific processes and consequences. This volume contributes to empirically informed theory-building and includes contributions from researchers from various disciplines and multiple perspectives on illiberal trends and anti-EU politics in the region. The qualitative case studies, comparative works and quantitative analyses provide a comprehensive picture of current societal, political and institutional developments in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Through studying similarities and differences between East Central European and other EU countries, the chapters also explore whether there are regional patterns of democracy- and EU-related problems.
Download or read book The Ethics and Politics of Asylum written by Matthew J. Gibney and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the ethical and political issues raised by the responses of Western states to refugees.
Download or read book Essays on Political Morality written by Richard Mervyn Hare and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays represent Hare's thinking on a range of contemporary issues in political morality, including political obligation, terrorism, morality and war, rights, quality, and the environment. Three of the essays are previously unpublished.
Download or read book The Law of Peoples written by John Rawls and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001-03-02 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book consists of two parts: “The Law of Peoples,” a major reworking of a much shorter article by the same name published in 1993, and the essay “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” first published in 1997. Taken together, they are the culmination of more than fifty years of reflection on liberalism and on some of the most pressing problems of our times by John Rawls. “The Law of Peoples” extends the idea of a social contract to the Society of Peoples and lays out the general principles that can and should be accepted by both liberal and non-liberal societies as the standard for regulating their behavior toward one another. In particular, it draws a crucial distinction between basic human rights and the rights of each citizen of a liberal constitutional democracy. It explores the terms under which such a society may appropriately wage war against an “outlaw society” and discusses the moral grounds for rendering assistance to non-liberal societies burdened by unfavorable political and economic conditions. “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” explains why the constraints of public reason, a concept first discussed in Political Liberalism (1993), are ones that holders of both religious and non-religious comprehensive views can reasonably endorse. It is Rawls’s most detailed account of how a modern constitutional democracy, based on a liberal political conception, could and would be viewed as legitimate by reasonable citizens who on religious, philosophical, or moral grounds do not themselves accept a liberal comprehensive doctrine—such as that of Kant, or Mill, or Rawls’s own “Justice as Fairness,” presented in A Theory of Justice (1971).
Download or read book The Liberal Archipelago written by Chandran Kukathas and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2003-06-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his major new work Chandran Kukathas offers, for the first time, a book-length treatment of this controversial and influential theory of minority rights. The work is a defence of a form of liberalism and multiculturalism. The general question it tries to answer is: what is the principled basis of a free society marked by cultural diversity and group loyalties? More particularly, it explains whether such a society requires political institutions which recognize minorities; how far it should tolerate such minorities when their ways differ from those of the mainstream community; to what extent political institutions should address injustices suffered by minorities at the hands of the wider society, and also at the hands of the powerful within their own communities; what role, if any, the state should play in the shaping of a society's (national) identity; and what fundamental values should guide our reflections on these matters. Its main contention is that a free society is an open society whose fundamental principle is the principle of freedom of association. A society is free to the extent that it is prepared to tolerate in its midst associations which differ or dissent from its standards or practices. An implication of these principles is that political society is also no more than one among other associations; its basis is the willingness of its members to continue to associate under the terms which define it. While it is an 'association of associations', it is not the only such association; it does not subsume all other associations. The principles of a free society describe not a hierarchy of superior and subordinate authorities but an archipelago of competing and overlapping jurisdictions. The idea of a liberal archipelago is defended as one which supplies us with a better metaphor of the free society than do older notions such as the body politic, or the ship of state. This work presents a challenge, and an alternative, to other contemporary liberal theories of multiculturalism.
Download or read book Montesquieu s Liberalism and the Problem of Universal Politics written by Keegan Callanan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Montesquieu's liberalism and critique of universalism in politics, often thought to stand in tension, comprise a coherent philosophical and political project.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics written by Daniel C. Russell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the history, future and contemporary application of virtue ethics.
Download or read book Politics and Ethics in Review written by Patrick Hayden and published by Nova Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Serving as a forum for a diverse array of views and issues, this book fosters the exploration of both theory and practice in the intersecting realms of politics and ethics. The essays presented here run the gamut of topics from global to state concerns; from the brutal conflict in East Timor to the impact of market forces in society. Scholarly research and viewpoints make this collection of papers an important resource for studying and solving of political and ethical dilemmas.
Download or read book Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries written by Valerie J. Bunce and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1998 to 2005, six elections took place in postcommunist Europe that had the surprising outcome of empowering the opposition and defeating authoritarian incumbents or their designated successors. Valerie J. Bunce and Sharon L. Wolchik compare these unexpected electoral breakthroughs. They draw three conclusions. First, the opposition was victorious because of the hard and creative work of a transnational network composed of local opposition and civil society groups, members of the international democracy assistance community and graduates of successful electoral challenges to authoritarian rule in other countries. Second, the remarkable run of these upset elections reflected the ability of this network to diffuse an ensemble of innovative electoral strategies across state boundaries. Finally, elections can serve as a powerful mechanism for democratic change. This is especially the case when civil society is strong, the transfer of political power is through constitutional means, and opposition leaders win with small mandates.
Download or read book Beyond Liberal Democracy written by Daniel A. Bell and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is liberal democracy appropriate for East Asia? In this provocative book, Daniel Bell argues for morally legitimate alternatives to Western-style liberal democracy in the region. Beyond Liberal Democracy, which continues the author's influential earlier work, is divided into three parts that correspond to the three main hallmarks of liberal democracy--human rights, democracy, and capitalism. These features have been modified substantially during their transmission to East Asian societies that have been shaped by nonliberal practices and values. Bell points to the dangers of implementing Western-style models and proposes alternative justifications and practices that may be more appropriate for East Asian societies. If human rights, democracy, and capitalism are to take root and produce beneficial outcomes in East Asia, Bell argues, they must be adjusted to contemporary East Asian political and economic realities and to the values of nonliberal East Asian political traditions such as Confucianism and Legalism. Local knowledge is therefore essential for realistic and morally informed contributions to debates on political reform in the region, as well as for mutual learning and enrichment of political theories. Beyond Liberal Democracy is indispensable reading for students and scholars of political theory, Asian studies, and human rights, as well as anyone concerned about China's political and economic future and how Western governments and organizations should engage with China.
Download or read book Globalization and Political Ethics written by Richard B. Day and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book measures the current institutional and political realities surrounding globalization against philosophical ideals. Though the contributors share no particular orthodoxy, they do share the conviction that human responsibility is possible in circumstances that often appear to deny human agency.
Download or read book The Political Theory of Modus Vivendi written by John Horton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the idea of a modus vivendi as a way of governing political life and addressing problems characterized by pluralism or deep-rooted diversity. The individual essays illustrate both the merits and the limitations of a political theory of modus vivendi; how it might be interpreted and developed; specific challenges entailed by articulating it in a convincing form; what its institutional implications might be; and how it relates to other seminal issues and concepts in political theory; such as legitimacy, toleration, the social contract, etc. The book makes a significant contribution to the discussion on the scope and limits of liberal political theory, and on how to deal politically with deep-rooted diversity.
