Download or read book Thoughtfulness and the Rule of Law written by Jeremy Waldron and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential study of the rule of law by one of the world’s leading liberal political and legal philosophers. The meaning and value of the rule of law have been debated since antiquity. For many, the rule of law has become the essence of good government. But Jeremy Waldron takes a different view, arguing that it is but one star in a constellation of ideals that define our political morality, ranking alongside democracy, human rights, economic freedom, and social justice. This timely essay collection, from one of the most respected political philosophers of his generation, is a brief on behalf of thoughtfulness: the intervention of human intelligence in the application of law. Waldron defends thoughtfulness against the claim that it threatens to replace the rule of law with the arbitrary rule of people. To the contrary, he argues, the rule of law requires thoughtfulness: it is impossible to apply a standard such as “reasonableness” on the basis of rules alone, and common legal activities like arguing in court and reasoning from precedents are poorly served by algorithmic logics. This rich compilation also addresses the place of law in protecting human dignity, the relation between rule of law and legislation, and whether vagueness in the law is at odds with law’s role in guiding action. Thoughtfulness and the Rule of Law emphasizes the value of procedures rather than the substance or outcome of legal decisions. Challenging the view that predictability and clarity are cardinal virtues, Waldron shows that real-world controversies often are best approached using a relatively thin concept of the rule of law, together with the thoughtfulness that a legal system frames and enables.

Download or read book Political Political Theory written by Jeremy Waldron and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political theorists focus on the nature of justice, liberty, and equality while ignoring the institutions through which these ideals are achieved. Political scientists keep institutions in view but deploy a meager set of value-conceptions in analyzing them. A more political political theory is needed to address this gap, Jeremy Waldron argues.

Download or read book Thoughtfulness and the Rule of Law written by Jeremy Waldron and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Political theorist Jeremy Waldron makes a bracing case against identifying rule of law with predictability. Seeing the rule of law as just one value to which democracies aspire, he embraces thoughtfulness rather than rote rule-following, flexibility even at the cost of vagueness, and emphasizing procedure and argument over predictable outcomes"--

Download or read book One Another s Equals written by Jeremy Waldron and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-19 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enduring theme of Western philosophy is that we are all one another’s equals. Yet the principle of basic equality is woefully under-explored in modern moral and political philosophy. What does it mean to say we are all one another’s equals? Jeremy Waldron confronts this question fully and unflinchingly in a major new multifaceted account.

Download or read book The Harm in Hate Speech written by Jeremy Waldron and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-08 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every liberal democracy has laws or codes against hate speech—except the United States. For constitutionalists, regulation of hate speech violates the First Amendment and damages a free society. Against this absolutist view, Jeremy Waldron argues powerfully that hate speech should be regulated as part of our commitment to human dignity and to inclusion and respect for members of vulnerable minorities. Causing offense—by depicting a religious leader as a terrorist in a newspaper cartoon, for example—is not the same as launching a libelous attack on a group’s dignity, according to Waldron, and it lies outside the reach of law. But defamation of a minority group, through hate speech, undermines a public good that can and should be protected: the basic assurance of inclusion in society for all members. A social environment polluted by anti-gay leaflets, Nazi banners, and burning crosses sends an implicit message to the targets of such hatred: your security is uncertain and you can expect to face humiliation and discrimination when you leave your home. Free-speech advocates boast of despising what racists say but defending to the death their right to say it. Waldron finds this emphasis on intellectual resilience misguided and points instead to the threat hate speech poses to the lives, dignity, and reputations of minority members. Finding support for his view among philosophers of the Enlightenment, Waldron asks us to move beyond knee-jerk American exceptionalism in our debates over the serious consequences of hateful speech.

Download or read book The Idea of Justice written by Amartya Sen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an analysis of what justice is, the transcendental theory of justice and its drawbacks, and a persuasive argument for a comparative perspective on justice that can guide us in the choice between alternatives.

Download or read book The Second Person Standpoint written by Stephen Darwall and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-30 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why should we avoid doing moral wrong? The inability of philosophy to answer this question in a compelling manner—along with the moral skepticism and ethical confusion that ensue—result, Stephen Darwall argues, from our failure to appreciate the essentially interpersonal character of moral obligation. After showing how attempts to vindicate morality have tended to change the subject—falling back on non-moral values or practical, first-person considerations—Darwall elaborates the interpersonal nature of moral obligations: their inherent link to our responsibilities to one another as members of the moral community. As Darwall defines it, the concept of moral obligation has an irreducibly second-person aspect; it presupposes our authority to make claims and demands on one another. And so too do many other central notions, including those of rights, the dignity of and respect for persons, and the very concept of person itself. The result is nothing less than a fundamental reorientation of moral theory that enables it at last to account for morality’s supreme authority—an account that Darwall carries from the realm of theory to the practical world of second-person attitudes, emotions, and actions.

Download or read book Force and Freedom written by Arthur Ripstein and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this masterful work, both an illumination of Kant’s thought and an important contribution to contemporary legal and political theory, Arthur Ripstein gives a comprehensive yet accessible account of Kant’s political philosophy. Ripstein shows that Kant’s thought is organized around two central claims: first, that legal institutions are not simply responses to human limitations or circumstances; indeed the requirements of justice can be articulated without recourse to views about human inclinations and vulnerabilities. Second, Kant argues for a distinctive moral principle, which restricts the legitimate use of force to the creation of a system of equal freedom. Ripstein’s description of the unity and philosophical plausibility of this dimension of Kant’s thought will be a revelation to political and legal scholars. In addition to providing a clear and coherent statement of the most misunderstood of Kant’s ideas, Ripstein also shows that Kant’s views remain conceptually powerful and morally appealing today. Ripstein defends the idea of equal freedom by examining several substantive areas of law—private rights, constitutional law, police powers, and punishment—and by demonstrating the compelling advantages of the Kantian framework over competing approaches.

Download or read book The Force of Law written by Frederick Schauer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bentham's law -- The possibility and probability of noncoercive law -- In search of the puzzled man -- Do people obey the law? -- Are officials above the law? -- Coercing obedience -- Of carrots and sticks -- Coercion's arsenal -- Awash in a sea of norms -- The differentiation of law

Download or read book Justice for Hedgehogs written by Ronald Dworkin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fox knows many things, the Greeks said, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In his most comprehensive work, Ronald Dworkin argues that value in all its forms is one big thing: that what truth is, life means, morality requires, and justice demands are different aspects of the same large question. He develops original theories on a great variety of issues very rarely considered in the same book: moral skepticism, literary, artistic, and historical interpretation, free will, ancient moral theory, being good and living well, liberty, equality, and law among many other topics. What we think about any one of these must stand up, eventually, to any argument we find compelling about the rest. Skepticism in all its forms—philosophical, cynical, or post-modern—threatens that unity. The Galilean revolution once made the theological world of value safe for science. But the new republic gradually became a new empire: the modern philosophers inflated the methods of physics into a totalitarian theory of everything. They invaded and occupied all the honorifics—reality, truth, fact, ground, meaning, knowledge, and being—and dictated the terms on which other bodies of thought might aspire to them, and skepticism has been the inevitable result. We need a new revolution. We must make the world of science safe for value.

Download or read book The Ordinary Virtues written by Michael Ignatieff and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During a 3-year, 8-nation journey, Michael Ignatieff found that while human rights is the language of states and liberal elites, the moral language that resonates with most people is that of everyday virtues: tolerance, forgiveness, trust, and resilience. These ordinary virtues are the moral system of global cities and obscure shantytowns alike.

Download or read book The Rule of Law in the Real World written by Paul Gowder and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Rule of Law in the Real World, Paul Gowder defends a new conception of the rule of law as the coordinated control of power and demonstrates that the rule of law, thus understood, creates and preserves social equality in a state. In a highly engaging, interdisciplinary text that moves seamlessly from theory to reality, using examples ranging from Ancient Greece through the present, Gowder sheds light on how societies have achieved the rule of law, how they have sustained it in the face of political upheaval, and how it may be measured and developed in the future. The Rule of Law in the Real World is an essential work for scholars, students, policymakers, and anyone else who believes the rule of law is critical to the proper functioning of society.

Download or read book Moral Dimensions written by T. M. Scanlon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a clear and elegant style, T. M. Scanlon reframes current philosophical debates as he explores the moral permissibility of an action. Permissibility may seem to depend on the agentÕs reasons for performing an action. For example, there seems to be an important moral difference between tactical bombing and a campaign by terroristsÑeven if the same number of non-combatants are killedÑand this difference may seem to lie in the agentsÕ respective aims. However, Scanlon argues that the apparent dependence of permissibility on the agentÕs reasons in such cases is merely a failure to distinguish between two kinds of moral assessment: assessment of the permissibility of an action and assessment of the way an agent decided what to do. Distinguishing between these two forms of assessment leads Scanlon to an important distinction between the permissibility of an action and its meaning: the significance for others of the agentÕs willingness to act in this way. An actionÕs meaning depends on the agentÕs reasons for performing it in a way that its permissibility does not. Blame, he argues, is a response to the meaning of an action rather than its permissibility. This analysis leads to a novel account of the conditions of moral responsibility and to important conclusions about the ethics of blame.

Download or read book What We Owe to Each Other written by T. M. Scanlon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2000-11-15 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we judge whether an action is morally right or wrong? If an action is wrong, what reason does that give us not to do it? Why should we give such reasons priority over our other concerns and values? In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other. According to his contractualist view, thinking about right and wrong is thinking about what we do in terms that could be justified to others and that they could not reasonably reject. He shows how the special authority of conclusions about right and wrong arises from the value of being related to others in this way, and he shows how familiar moral ideas such as fairness and responsibility can be understood through their role in this process of mutual justification and criticism. Scanlon bases his contractualism on a broader account of reasons, value, and individual well-being that challenges standard views about these crucial notions. He argues that desires do not provide us with reasons, that states of affairs are not the primary bearers of value, and that well-being is not as important for rational decision-making as it is commonly held to be. Scanlon is a pluralist about both moral and non-moral values. He argues that, taking this plurality of values into account, contractualism allows for most of the variability in moral requirements that relativists have claimed, while still accounting for the full force of our judgments of right and wrong.

Download or read book On Betrayal written by Avishai Margalit and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-06 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Seamlessly combines analytic rigor with personal memoir . . . its arguments are drawn from political history . . . Biblical commentary . . . novels and biographies.” (Amélie Rorty, Tufts University) Adultery, treason, and apostasy no longer carry the weight they once did. Yet we constantly see and hear stories of betrayal. Avishai Margalit argues that the tension between the ubiquity of betrayal and the loosening of its hold is a sign of the strain between ethics and morality, between thick and thin human relations. On Betrayal offers a philosophical account of thick human relations?relationships with friends, family, and core communities?through their pathology, betrayal. Judgments of betrayal often shift unreliably. A traitor to one side is a hero to the other. Yet the notion of what it means to betray is remarkably consistent across cultures and eras. Betrayal undermines thick trust, dissolving the glue that holds our most meaningful relationships together. On Betrayal is about ethics: what we owe to the people and groups that give us our sense of belonging. Drawing on literary, historical, and personal sources, Maraglit examines what our thick relationships are and should be and revives the long-discarded notion of fraternity. “Provocative and illuminating.” —Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study “Witty and wise, precise and profound, On Betrayal is an easy but deep read: it sees life as it really is with all its turmoil.” —The Christian Century “The range of Margalit’s examples is astonishing. . . . He is much more knowledgeable about and comfortable with communities (and in communities) than most philosophers are, and so he is very good at recognizing when they go wrong.” —New York Review of Books

Download or read book Rationality and Freedom written by Amartya Sen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-30 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rationality and freedom are among the most profound and contentious concepts in philosophy and the social sciences. In this, the first of two volumes, Amartya Sen brings clarity and insight to these difficult issues.

Download or read book The Practice of Moral Judgment written by Barbara Herman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbara Herman argues for a radical shift in the way we perceive Kant's ethics. She convincingly reinterprets the key texts, at once allowing Kant to mean what he says while showing that what Kant says makes good moral sense. She urges us to abandon the tradition that describes Kantian ethics as a deontology, a moral system of rules of duty. She finds the central idea of Kantian ethics not in duty but in practical rationality as a norm of unconditioned goodness. This book both clarifies Kant's own theory and adds programmatic vitality to modern moral philosophy.