Historically Wales has been regarded as a country with relatively low levels of school exclusion, particularly in comparison with England. This has been used as an indicator of Wales’ commitment to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which foregrounds a rights-based agenda that would argue school exclusion is a consequence of broader socio-economic structures than individual actions. However, simple analyses may mask a different picture of school exclusions in Wales. In this article, we study more detailed (...) information on formal school exclusions by looking at ‘instances’ of school exclusion, which considers the frequency and length of formal school exclusions in Wales, and alongside recorded school absence. The article also demonstrates that the pupils ‘at risk’ of formal school exclusion varies by when they experience school exclusion during their educational lifecourse. The article concludes by highlighting that patterns of school exclusion are complex, and that interpretation of these patterns depends on what kind of measure of school exclusion is used. By publishing these results, the article hopes to persuade policymakers and practitioners to re-examine their processes of exclusion to ensure they are commensurate with the law and to prevent unnecessary school exclusions. (shrink)

In the TTP Spinoza addresses in its full complexity the question of whether a republican theorist, committed to the view that the primary goal of political life is freedom conceived as the absence of slavery or dependence on arbitrary will, has any need for the notion of a right. His answer is designed to draw us away from many of the assumptions that run through the natural law tradition. Rather than accepting that our rights are stable, located in individuals, (...) and absolute, we should be prepared to accept that the only natural right we possess, our power to do what we can to maintain ourselves, is manifested in claims that are fluctuating, collective and come in degrees. The overriding advantage of this outlook is that it directs our attention to the practical business of politics – to the project of creating rights that will secure our freedom. (shrink)

Medieval discussions on rights. Bonaventure -- Godfrey of Fontaines -- Peter John Olivi -- Hervaeus Natalis -- William Ockham -- Richard Fitzralph -- Jean Gerson -- Antoninus of Florence -- The right of the individual. Right as power -- Right as dominion -- Right as a relation -- The species of dominion. The six-fold dominion -- Natural dominion -- Property rights. Justification of private property -- The rights of use (usus) and usufruct (usufructus) -- (...) Ownership (proprietas) and possession (possessio). (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the risk arising from technological devices, such as closed circuit television and nuclear power plants and the consequent effect on the rights to privacy and security of individuals.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents critical and conceptual analyses of CCTV, nuclear power plants and the rights of individuals. It also analyses how communitarianism and liberal individualism would respond to right‐infringements and risk‐imposition. It draws on W.D. Ross's prima facie and actual duties to explain (...) the pre‐eminence of duty when certain duties conflict in a bid to improve technology.FindingsThe paper discovers the importance of rights to individuals, particularly the rights to privacy and security. It shows that, in some situations, government's duty to respect the right to the privacy of individuals conflicts with the duty to provide public goods, such as CCTV. The paper, therefore, stresses that one duty has greater moral force than the other. In essence, the more incumbent duty can be employed by government in justifying right‐infringement and risk‐imposition, though this does not disvalue the rights of individuals.Originality/valueThe paper offers insight into ways of addressing questions such as: when is it morally acceptable or justifiable to expose others to risk? When is infringement on people's rights permissible? Also, the paper is relevant to those in the areas of ethics and technology because it offers an ethical analysis of risk‐imposition and right‐infringement by examining how ethical theories, such as communitarianism and liberal individualism, would assess risks resulting from CCTV and nuclear energy. It argues that consent is not enough to justify risk‐imposition and right‐infringement. It concludes by drawing on W.D. Ross's prima facie and actual duties as a means of justifying risk‐imposition and right‐infringement by government. (shrink)

In this article, I offer an outline of the papers comprising the special issue. I also provide a brief overview of its topic, namely, the friction between cyber security measures and individual rights. I consider such a friction to be a new and exacerbated version of what Mill called ‘the struggle between liberties and authorities,’ and I claim that the struggle arises because of the involvement of public authorities in the management of the cyber sphere, for technological and state (...) power can put individual rights, such as privacy, anonymity and freedom of speech, under sharp devaluating pressure. Finally, I conclude by stressing the need to reach an ethical balance to fine-tune cyber security measures and individual rights. (shrink)

In bioethics, discussions of justice have tended to focus on questions of fairness in access to health care: is there a right to medical treatment, and how should priorities be set when medical resources are scarce. But health care is only one of many factors that determine the extent to which people live healthy lives, and fairness is not the only consideration in determining whether a health policy is just. In this pathbreaking book, senior bioethicists Powers and Faden confront (...) foundational issues about health and justice. How much inequality in health can a just society tolerate. The audience for the book is scholars and students of bioethics and moral and political philosophy, as well as anyone interested in public health and health policy. (shrink)

In an article previously published in this Journal, Anthony Oyowe critically engages with my attempt to demonstrate how the human rights characteristic of South Africa’s Constitution can be grounded on a certain interpretation of Afro-communitarian values that are often associated with talk of ‘ubuntu’. Drawing on recurrent themes of human dignity and communal relationships in the sub-Saharan tradition, I have advanced a moral-philosophical principle that I argue entails and plausibly explains a wide array of individual rights to civil liberties, (...) political power, criminal procedures and economic resources. Oyowe’s most important criticism of my theory is in effect that it is caught in a dilemma: either the principle I articulate can account for human rights, in which case it does not count as communitarian, or it does count as the latter, but cannot account for the former. In this article, I reply to Oyowe, contending that he misinterprets key facets of my theory to the point of not yet engaging with its core strategy for deriving human rights from salient elements of ubuntu. I conclude that Oyowe is unjustified in claiming that there are ‘theoretical lapses’ that ‘cast enormous doubts’ on my project of deriving human rights from a basic moral principle with a recognizably sub-Saharan and communitarian pedigree. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Index to Volume Fifty-SixArticlesBernier, Bernard, National Communion: Watsuji Tetsurō's Conception of Ethics, Power, and the Japanese Imperial State, 1 : 84-105Between Principle and Situation: Contrasting Styles in the Japanese and Korean Traditions of Moral Culture, Chai-sik Chung, 2 : 253-280Buxton, Nicholas, The Crow and the Coconut: Accident, Coincidence, and Causation in the Yogavāiṣṭha, 3 : 392-408Chan, Sin Yee, The Confucian Notion of Jing (Respect), Sin Yee Chan, 2 (...) : 229-252Chong, Kim-chong, Zhuangzi and the Nature of Metaphor, 3 : 370-391Chung, Chai-sik, Between Principle and Situation: Contrasting Styles in the Japanese and Korean Traditions of Moral Culture, 2 : 253-280The Confucian Ideal of Harmony, Chenyang Li, 4 : 583-603The Confucian Notion of Jing.(Respect), Sin Yee Chan, 2 : 229-252The Conventional Status of Reflexive Awareness: What's at Stake in a Tibetan Debate? Jay L. Garfield, 2 : 201-228The Crisis of Knowledge in Islam (I): The Case of al-'āmirī, Paul L. Heck, 1 : 106-135The Crow and the Coconut: Accident, Coincidence, and Causation in the Yogavāiṣṭha, Nicholas Buxton, 3 : 392-408De Reu, Wim, Right Words Seem Wrong: Neglected Paradoxes in Early Chinese Philosophical Texts, 2 : 281-300The Desire You Are Required to Get Rid of: A Functionalist Analysis of Desire in the Bhaga-vadgītā, Christopher Framarin, 4 : 604-617Framarin, Christopher, The Desire You Are Required to Get Rid of: A Functionalist Analysis of Desire in the Bhagavadgītā, 4 : 604-617Garfield, Jay L., The Conventional Status of Reflexive Awareness: What's at Stake in a Tibetan Debate? 2 : 201-228Heck, Paul L., The Crisis of Knowledge in Islam (I): The Case of al-'ā mirī, 1 : 106-135Heidegger's Comportment toward East-West Dialogue, Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel, 4 : 519-566Ho, Chien-hsing, Saying the Unsayable, 3 : 409-427Kantor, Hans-Rudolf, Ontological Indeterminacy and Its Soteriological Relevance: An Assessment of Mou Zongsan's (1909-1995) Interpretation of Zhiyi's (538-597) Tiantai Buddhism, 1 : 16-68Lai, Karyn, Li in the Analects: Training in Moral Competence and the Question of Flexibility, 1 : 69-83Li, Chenyang, The Confucian Ideal of Harmony, 4 : 583-603Li in the Analects: Training in Moral Competence and the Question of Flexibility, Karyn Lai, 1 : 69-83Ma, Lin, and Jaap van Brakel, Heidegger's Comportment toward East-West Dialogue, 4 : 519-566National Communion: Watsuji Tetsurō's Conception of Ethics, Power, and the Japanese Imperial State, Bernard Bernier, 1 : 84-105Ontological Indeterminacy and Its Soteriological Relevance: An Assessment of Mou Zongsan's (1909-1995) Interpretation of Zhiyi's (538- 597) Tiantai Buddhism, Hans-Rudolf Kantor, 1 : 16-68Right Words Seem Wrong: Neglected Paradoxes in Early Chinese Philosophical Texts, Wim De Reu, 2 : 281-300The Role of Time in the Structure of Chinese Logic, Jinmei Yuan, 1 : 136-152Sakya Pandita and the Status of Concepts, Jonathan Stoltz, 4 : 567-582Saying the Unsayable, Chien-hsing Ho, 3 : 409-427Schiltz, Elizabeth, Two Chariots: The Justification of the Best Life in the Katha Upanishad and Plato's Phaedrus, 3 : 451-468Spackman, John, The Tiantai Roots of Dōgen's Philosophy of Language and Thought, 3 : 428-450Stevenson, Frank W., Zhuangzi's Dao as Background Noise, 2 : 301-331Stoltz, Jonathan, Sakya Pandita and the Status of Concepts, 4 : 567-582The Tiantai Roots of Dōgen's Philosophy of Language and Thought, John Spackman, 3 : 428-450 [End Page 709]Two Chariots: The Justification of the Best Life in the Katha Upanishad and Plato's Phaedrus, Elizabeth Schiltz, 3 : 451-468van Brakel, Jaap, and Lin Ma, Heidegger's Comportment toward East-West Dialogue, 4 : 519-566Yuan, Jinmei, The Role of Time in the Structure of Chinese Logic, 1 : 136-152Zhuangzi and the Nature of Metaphor, Kim-chong Chong, 3 : 370-391Zhuangzi's Dao as Background Noise, Frank W. Stevenson, 2 : 301-331Book NotesFenner, David E. W., Introducing Aesthetics (note by James McRae), 3 : 515-516Introducing Aesthetics, by David E. W. Fenner (note by James McRae), 3 : 515-516McRae, James, a book... (shrink)

: The increasing reliance upon, and perhaps the growing public and professional skepticism about, the special expertise of bioethicists suggests the need to consider the limits of moral expertise. For all the talk about method in bioethics, we, bioethicists, are still rather far off the mark in understanding what we are doing, even when we may be going about what we are doing fairly well. Quite often, what is most fundamentally at stake, but equally often insufficiently acknowledged, are inherently political, (...) essentially contested visions of the most compelling and attractive forms of life for individuals and social organization. The current situation in bioethics parallels similar debates in eighteenth-century jurisprudence, especially Jeremy Bentham's withering critique of the prevalent forms of judicial argument and his own, equally unsuccessful, attempt to develop a decision-making procedure in ethics that would operate on a plane above politics. The risk, both then and now, is that we will fail to appreciate the wide range of reasonable disagreement that will remain past the point of extended reflection and discussion. (shrink)

Modern life is full of examples of environmentally-mediated “group harms” – what Derek Parfit describes as harms produced by “what we all do together.” Typically, the harms are unintended and arise from the uncoordinated actions of many individuals. Their actions ordinarily are not inherently wrong, no one’s action causes harm to an identifiable individual, and prevention of the expected harm is unlikely unless all, or nearly everyone, reduce or cease to engage in activities that collectively and cumulatively result in (...) harm. Unless the individual’s action is likely to make a difference to the outcome, it is often argued that it is not clear what, if anything, makes it wrong or a breach of personal moral responsibility. Activities that result in climate change and agricultural practices commonly employed within the global system of food production are prominent examples. There are several well-known strategies for dealing with such cases, but often they rest on idealized assumptions regarding the impact that one individual can have, provide answers suitable only in counterfactual circumstances, or rely on the kinds of principles of justice that make it difficult to identify clearly and address directly many important moral problems. The task of this chapter is to examine these strategies and propose alternative freestanding practical principles that can guide our efforts to address the world as we find it and explain the sense of wrongness individuals often experience. (shrink)

This paper discusses a recent book of Maximiliane Kriechbaum, ‘Actio, ius, und dominium in den Rechtslehre des 13-14 Jahrhunderts.’ Kriechbaum maintains, contrary to the generally accepted opinion, that William of Ockham did not present any doctrine of individual subjective rights when he defined the word ius as potestas .She maintains that Ockham was rather arguing in terms of Aristotelian act and potency. The review-article criticizes this view and argues that Ockham often did use the word ius to mean a (...) rightful power, as the term is commonly used in discourse on rights. (shrink)

Two studies explored individual differences in appraisal of minor, potentially stressful events. Previous research on appraisal has focused on one or two appraisal dimensions within specific situations rather than on the full range of appraisals or on the stability of appraisal across situations. Goals of the present studies were: (1) to explore stability of individual differences in appraisal across situations; (2) to identify individual differences in general appraisal styles; and (3) to examine how appraisal styles are related (...) to personality constructs. Appraisal was moderately stable across situations and individual differences in appraisal style were related to relevant personality constructs. Primary threat appraisals and secondary appraisals of blame and manageability emerged as particularly important in distinguishing the appraisal styles. Implications of the results for the development of psychopathology are considered. (shrink)

Many of the contemporary disagreements regarding privacy are conceptual in nature. They concern the meaning or definition of privacy and the analytic basis of distinguishing privacy rights from other kinds of rights recognized within moral, political, or legal theories. The two main alternatives within this debate include reductionist views, which seek a narrow account of the kinds of invasions or intrusions distinctly involving privacy losses, and anti-reductionist theories, which treat a much broader array of interferences with a person as separate (...) and irreducible kinds of privacy invasions. Other theorists have expressed doubts about the prospects for achieving greater analytical precision even within a fairly expansive anti-reductionist approach. However, a reductionist privacy definition is defended in this article, and its primary theoretical virtues are its ability to unify and explain the insights of several competing definitions and its role in developing an account of privacy rights that is both internally coherent and consistent with a plausible understanding of the theoretical basis for a number of related rights. (shrink)

An important objection to many utilitarian theories is that their conceptions of utility may count as morally relevant contributions to individual well-being items which are morally or rationally suspect. For example, if the conception of utility is pleasure, or alternatively, the fulfilment of actual desire or satisfaction of preferences, then greater individual utility may be produced by whatever increases pleasure, fulfils desire, or satisfies someone's preferences. This is true no matter how disgusting or vile we may think such (...) pleasures are, or how irrational or distasteful we find the fulfilment of a desire or the satisfaction of some preference. (shrink)

Social evolution theory conventionally takes an externalist explanatory stance, treating observed cooperation as explanandum and the positive assortment of cooperative behaviour as explanans. We ask how the circumstances bringing about this positive assortment arose in the first place. Rather than merely push the explanatory problem back a step, we move from an externalist to an interactionist explanatory stance, in the spirit of Lewontin and the Niche Construction theorists. We develop a theory of ‘social niche construction’ in which we consider biological (...) entities to be both the subject and object of their own social evolution. Some important cases of the evolution of cooperation have the side-effect of causing changes in the hierarchical level at which the evolutionary process acts. This is because the traits that act to align the fitness interests of particles in a collective can also act to diminish the extent to which those particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance, while augmenting the extent to which collectives of such particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance. In this way, we can explain upward transitions in the hierarchical level at which the Darwinian machine operates in terms of particle-level selection, even though the outcome of the process is a collective-level selection regime. Our theory avoids the logical and metaphysical paradoxes faced by other attempts to explain evolutionary transitions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Their Father’s Library: Books Furnish Not Only a Room, But Also a Tradition ELIZABETH POWERS Although they shared close life dates and became famous in the same years for their epistolary novels, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Fanny Burney (1752–1840) would seem to have been worlds apart literarily. (Goethe had in his Weimar library a copy of Evelina, while Burney was probably not ignorant of the Europe-wide (...) sensation The Sorrows ofYoung Werther.) What might be called their literary apprenticeship, however, was remarkably similar, consisting not of schooling in a traditional institution in which students (and, importantly, most eighteenth-century writers) were drilled in the classical curriculum, but, instead, from wide reading within the confines of their fathers’ libraries. It is true that Goethe and his younger sister Cornelia were supplied at home with a number of tutors and that their progress was monitored by their father, but their acquaintance with literature was fostered within the confines of the family home. Burney had no formal education at all. Indeed, on the appearance of Evelina, her father (according to her diary) remarked : “[S]he has had very little Education but what she has given herself,—less than any of the others!” Burney, however, had the advantage of growing up in a milieu in which books mattered. While the Goethes were eminently respectable, on the mother’s side part of what was the patriciate of the city of Frankfurt, the Burney household in London was bursting with wits and with what can only be called celebrities. The Burneys knew God and the world: David Garrick, Dr. Johnarion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 116 in their father’s library son, Hester Thrale. As Virginia Woolf noted of the famous father, Dr. Charles Burney, he was a musician “who could talk of intellectual things and ask clever people to his house.” Goethe has given plenty of evidence of roaming freely among his father’s books, a collection of 1,700 calfskin-bound volumes. When Burney went to serve at the court of King George III, Queen Charlotte was disappointed at how few books the author of Evelina possessed. (Similarities accumulate: Goethe also served at court, as minister in the duchy of Weimar.) But why cart around a load of books? As Burney wrote in her diary: “[M]y Father’s most delightful Library, as I then told her [the Queen], with my free access to it, had made [owning my own books] a thing unnecessary... ” Libraries in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, whether private or public affairs, were not like contemporary public libraries, catering to a wide array of tastes, but were repositories of what Matthew Arnold termed “the best that is known and thought in the world.” Let’s call it the Western intellectual and cultural heritage. Most respectable homes would possess at a minimum a Bible, while the holdings in private homes, as evident in the library of Goethe’s father, could reach astounding proportions. According to Burney biographer Claire Harman, Fanny’s brother left at his death one of the finest private libraries of the age. Moreover, the antiquity of the works in the venerable libraries scattered across Europe from Dublin to Saint Petersburg, and especially their survival despite centuries of vicissitudes, was testimony to the authoritative nature of the transmission. Anyone who took the Bible in hand, who took lessons from it, adhering, for instance, to the injunctions of the Ten Commandments, was conscious of subscribing to values shared by preceding generations. Literary practitioners, also showing obeisance to authoritative predecessors, followed earlier models, in the process contributing to an evolving literary heritage. There was no purity in this transmission. It was truly promiscuous, but its quasi-biological character, like a mother’s left-handedness in a child, can be seen in the family Elizabeth Powers 117 resemblances among writers of different eras. Just as individuals perpetuate traits of their parents, so literature and the other arts recycled features of artistic predecessors. Writers as diverse in background and language and religion as Ariosto and Milton transmitted the dna, so to speak, of such epical forebears as Homer and Virgil. This sort of family legitimacy was... (shrink)

The prelims comprise: Introduction: Promise and Perils The History of Privacy as a Moral Concept Genetic Exceptionalism The Moral Basis of Medical Privacy Rights Genetic Paternalism Conclusion.

This paper focuses on the nature of cultural group rights in relation to individual rights. The recent liberal acceptance that minority cultures should have a collective power over their cultural matters has been challenged by other liberals on the grounds that cultural rights as group rights cannot be reconciled with the basic moral and political principles of liberalism which are derived from individual liberties and rights. Through tackling some liberal arguments against group rights, we reject the view (...) that regards group rights as normatively and practically incompatible with individual rights, and argue that group rights can be defended and justified on the ground that the interests and values protected through them are the shared interests and values of individuals. Thus, whether they are exercised individually or collectively, justifications of all group rights are derived from the interests and values that individuals have as members of the group. Like any other rights, cultural group rights also have some limitations. That is, the rights of a group to preserve its culture are limited by individual human rights, the rights of other relevant groups and the state. (shrink)

Christian ethics are usually based on a theology of love. In the case of Christian relationships to nature, Christian environmental writers have either suggested eros as a primary source for Christian love, without dealing with traditional Christian arguments against eros, or have assumed agape (spiritual love or sacrificial love) is the appropriate mode, without defining how agape should function in human relationships with the nonhuman portion of the universe. I demonstrate that God’s love for nature has the same form and (...) characteristics as God’s love for human beings, and that because agape is self-giving, it is preferable to eros in relationships with the environment. Agape concerning nature (I) is spontaneous and unmotivated, (2) is indifferent to value, (3) creates value, (4) initiates relationships with the divine, (5) recognizes individuality, (6) provides freedom, and (7) produces action and suffering. Agape might best be defined, not as Platonic ascent above the world, but as completely self-giving engagement with the world. Human love for nature is often limited by a human inability to accept love, including divine love, from nature. Flowing from God, agape cannot require reciprocity; yet agape understands what “the other has to give and can offer it complete valuation. Agape is the ideal form of human interaction with nature, because agape does not require equal status or ability, or common goals or needs. Love between humans and members of the land (or sea) community can be sacrificial, and should be distinguished by a loss of self-regard and a willingness to suffer. Further philosophical and theological discussion of the role of reciprocity and sacrifice in love for nature is highly desirable. (shrink)

Purpose This paper is concerned with the place of human rights in the process of technological development but specifically as this process is situated within the corporate-technological complex of modern digital communications and their derivatives. This paper aims to argue that expecting and institutionalizing the incorporation of human rights in the process of technological innovation and production, particularly in the context of global economic actors, constitutes a necessary act if we want to navigate the immediate future of artificial intelligence and (...) ubiquitous connectivity in ways that protect democracy and human dignity. Design/methodology/approach The discussion presents the case for defending human rights through a social control perspective, which assumes the conscious quest for impacting change and cartographing a path of actions and intentions. The authors approach the problem from James Ralph Beniger’s theory of the Control Revolution to explain the emergence of a new social order and to outline the main challenges brought particularly by media and information and communication technology corporations as global actors of power. Findings Ethics initiatives, considering human rights as an ethical framework for media and ICT businesses, can be based on social control perspectives to regard the more complex variables interacting in the formation of effective policy making. It is the right to participate in the construction of knowledge in society and, informed by this knowledge, help manage or control democratic issues, including influencing on the regulation of technology and other cultural formats of control. Knowing social control tools enable citizens to lead their destinies, plan their freedom and the change what they wish in the societies they live in. Originality/value Social control is often understood as a term taken for granted and many times faced as representing malignant and anti-democratic forms. Here, the authors try to build a theoretical ground where both sides – the benign and the malignant – can be taken in consideration to bring awareness to the need to discuss social control as a democratic endeavor, and consider human rights as part of this and not something apart and idealized. The practice of human rights is directly associated with social control forms and is from within these practices individuals must understand its role on social control and act. (shrink)

The focus of this article is the notion of alethic rights, the rights related to truth. The concept of truth grounds many norms and customary and official rules, but there is no clear and shared idea about its power to generate specific rights. The juridical and political archetype called ‘the right to truth’ is still subject of controversies, and there are doubts about its being a real ‘right,’ to be protected by positive (new) norms. In the article (...) the problem is explored in truth-theoretical perspective: can philosophy support the idea of truth as a source of rights? Can an updated and well-developed theory of truth be proposed, to help activists and theorists concerned with the need for truth of individuals and communities? I present six alethic rights, corresponding to six different aspects of the human need for truth, then I specifically focus on the truth theory that can justify the hypothesis. (shrink)

New biotechnologies have the potential to both dramatically improve human well-being and dramatically widen inequalities in well-being. This paper addresses a question that lies squarely on the fault line of these two claims: When as a matter of justice are societies obligated to include a new biotechnology in a national healthcare system? This question is approached from the standpoint of a twin aim theory of justice, in which social structures, including nation-states, have double-barreled theoretical objectives with regard to human well-being. (...) The first aim is to achieve a sufficient level of well-being in each of six core dimensions. In the special case of healthcare systems, this aim is focally but not exclusively attentive to achieving health sufficiency as one of the core dimensions. The second aim is to combat the emergence and persistence of densely woven patterns of systematic disadvantage that tend to undermine the achievement of a sufficient level of health and the other core elements of well-being of some persons and groups. Judgments about entitlements to health related resources, including new biotechnologies, are made in light of a threshold notion of health sufficiency. What is enough or sufficient health? The answer that is defended here is that sufficient health is enough health for a decent human life, understood as enough health to live a full life course without preventable, significant functional disability or decrement in health, or treatable pain or suffering. When a state must include a new biotechnology in its national healthcare system is also influenced by ancillary concerns about the connection between health and other core dimensions of well-being. What counts as a significant functional impairment or health decrement is thus explicated, in part, in relation to the theory’s sufficiency aim for the other essential dimensions of well-being, and thus for a decent life, overall. Those elements of health that play a critical role in the experience of sufficient reasoning, affiliation, security, respect and self determination are especially important; any loss of health function or capacity that threatens the individual’s prospects for sufficiency in these other dimensions, including the relational egalitiarian concerns they entail, constitutes a significant functional impairment. Within national borders, individuals are thus entitled to those health-related goods and services that are essential for a sufficiency of each of the dimensions of well-being; with regard to self determination and respect, what is sufficient by way of guaranteed access to specific goods and services is going to depend on the implications of such access for where an individual stands in relation to her co-nationals. The content of any entitlement to health-related goods and services is also necessarily dynamic. What can be done for health and the other core dimensions of well-being as a function of technological innovation and diffusion is in constant flux. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this analysis for the conditions under which states are obligated to include access in their healthcare systems to one biotechnology, deep brain stimulation. (shrink)

This paper develops a framework for establishing rigour for a discourse analysis of professional transition in midwifery, theorised as a ‘female professional project’. Discourse analysis has gained recognition as a useful approach in nursing and midwifery research. It provides an alternative to those qualitative approaches that propose to reveal a ‘reality’ from the perspective of the individual experience, and that this lived experience can be directly represented in language. There are multiple discourse analytic approaches, and often researchers are not (...) explicit about what type they are employing. Furthermore, to date there are few clear guidelines for what constitutes rigour in a discourse analytic study. Rigour in qualitative research broadly falls into two categories: the replication perspective that argues for the maintenance of criteria of validity and reliability, usually with an underpinning assumption (often unquestioned) that a ‘truth’ can be revealed. The second is the parallel perspective that questions the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the replication perspective and argues for the development of criteria that reflect the assumed questionable nature of truth and reality. Transferring these criteria to a discourse analytic study revealed some problems. A common challenge identified in achieving rigour in discourse analysis is the maintenance of congruity between the epistemological and ontological basis of a piece of research and the actual analysis conducted or reported. A framework is proposed to address these incongruities and includes six elements. As nurses and midwives increasingly employ discourse analysis in their research, attempts to clarify how rigour will be determined are important if the outcomes of such research are to be seriously considered for their implications for theory, policy and practice. (shrink)

There are three major reasons that ideas associated with ubuntu are often deemed to be an inappropriate basis for a public morality. One is that they are too vague, a second is that they fail to acknowledge the value of individual freedom, and a third is that they a fit traditional, small-scale culture more than a modern, industrial society. In this article, I provide a philosophical interpretation of ubuntu that is not vulnerable to these three objections. Specifically, I construct (...) a moral theory grounded on southern African worldviews, one that suggests a promising new conception of human dignity. According to this conception, typical human beings have a dignity in virtue of their capacity for community, understood as the combination of identifying with others and exhibiting solidarity with them, where human rights violations are egregious degradations of this capacity. I argue that this account of human rights violations straightforwardly entails and explains many different elements of South Africa’s Bill of Rights and naturally suggests certain ways of resolving contemporary moral dilemmas in South Africa and elsewhere relating to land reform, political power and deadly force. (shrink)

Although the literature has focused on individual differences in authenticity, recent findings suggest that authenticity is sensitive to context; that is, it is also a state. We extended this perspective by examining whether incidental affect influences authenticity. In three experiments, participants felt more authentic when in a relatively positive than negative mood. The causal role of affect in authenticity was consistent across a diverse set of mood inductions, including explicit (Experiments 1 and 3) and implicit (Experiment 2) methods. The (...) link between incidental affect and state authenticity was not moderated by ability to down-regulate negative affect (Experiments 1 and 3) nor was it explained by negative mood increasing private self-consciousness or decreasing access to the self system (Experiment 3). The results indicate that mood is used as information to assess one's sense of authenticity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Rights, China, and Cross-Cultural Inquiry:Philosophy, History, and Power PoliticsRandall PeerenboomStephen Angle's Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) is a wonderful book that combines philosophically sophisticated discussions of controversial human-rights issues with a detailed intellectual history of the evolution of human-rights discourse in China over the last several hundred years. I will use Angle's book as a platform for consideration of (...) a number of issues regarding the role of philosophy, history, and power politics in relation to human rights in China and elsewhere.Angle focuses his discussion on two claims: first, that countries have different concepts of human rights, and second, that we ought not demand that countries comply with human-rights concepts different from their own.1 These two claims (or something similar) are central to China's official position on rights and to humanrights debates more generally, including the debate about values in Asia.2Angle's response, in short, is that there are distinctive concepts of human rights in China, and that "there have been both continuities and changes in the ways that rights have been conceptualized over the course of China's rich and distinctive rights discourse" (p. 250). However, the only way a community can unilaterally declare its values and practices immune from the scrutiny of others is through "parochialism," which, according to Angle, cuts off that community from making legitimate demands on others. Rather, he suggests, we "should seek an accommodation of differences with one another in the spirit of toleration, and on that basis engage one another on as many levels as possible" (pp. 250-251).One of the many great strengths of this book is that Angle grounds his responses in an interesting and insightful discussion of contemporary philosophers, assessing along the way the contributions and limits of MacIntrye, Rawls, Dworkin, Raz, Walzer, and especially Brandom, among others, to this cross-cultural inquiry of human rights. It might seem, given this list of luminaries, Angle's own training in Western analytic philosophy, and his position in the philosophy department of an American university, that Western philosophy is driving the debate and dictating the fundamental terms and parameters of the inquiry.3 This, of course, is precisely one of the complaints of non-Westerners such as Liu Huaqiu, who argue that they are being measured by Western standards, that rights are concepts grounded in historically contingent modern Western philosophical traditions, and that the rights movement is biased in favor of secular liberalism, which is at odds with and may preclude states based on religious worldviews and communitarian or collectivist [End Page 283] points of view that do not privilege autonomy, choice, and individual interests to the extent that liberals do.Angle's response is twofold. First, he argues, sensibly enough, that we cannot and need not set aside or escape our traditions and value systems. Cross-cultural inquiry must begin from somewhere. But we must remain open-minded and willing to continue the conversation, at least for a considerable while and in most cases indefinitely, even if in some cases we simultaneously must rely on coercion and repression.4 As discussed below, Angle endorses a limited moral pluralism that tolerates some differences while not providing an excuse for appeasing dictators or turning a blind eye to genocide and other atrocities.Second, Angle is not out simply to measure China by the standards of contemporary Western philosophers. Rather, he wants to show that China has its own distinctive discourse on rights, and that this discourse is multifaceted and constantly evolving. According to Angle, "Chinese rights discourse should be seen as an ongoing creative achievement, rather than a reaction to or misunderstanding of Western ideas and institutions" (p. 2).5 He shows this by providing a detailed intellectual history of Chinese rights discourse, another great strength of the book. His primary focus is on several prominent Neo-Confucians and pre-1949 debates, although he also considers some contemporary debates.6 Angle is clearly successful at demonstrating that Chinese thinkers have advanced a number of different views and that rights discourse over the last century and a half has been... (shrink)

ABSTRACT In spite of vast global improvements in living standards, health, and well‐being, the persistence of absolute poverty and its attendant maladies remains an unsettling fact of life for billions around the world and constitutes the primary cause for the failure of developing states to improve the health of their peoples. While economic development in developing countries is necessary to provide for underlying determinants of health – most prominently, poverty reduction and the building of comprehensive primary health systems – inequalities (...) in power within the international economic order and the spread of neoliberal development policy limit the ability of developing states to develop economically and realize public goods for health. With neoliberal development policies impacting entire societies, the collective right to development, as compared with an individual rights‐based approach to development, offers a framework by which to restructure this system to realize social determinants of health. The right to development, working through a vector of rights, can address social determinants of health, obligating states and the international community to support public health systems while reducing inequities in health through poverty‐reducing economic growth. At an international level, where the ability of states to develop economically and to realize public goods through public health systems is constrained by international financial institutions, the implementation of the right to development enables a restructuring of international institutions and foreign‐aid programs, allowing states to enter development debates with a right to cooperation from other states, not simply a cry for charity. (shrink)

In spite of vast global improvements in living standards, health, and well-being, the persistence of absolute poverty and its attendant maladies remains an unsettling fact of life for billions around the world and constitutes the primary cause for the failure of developing states to improve the health of their peoples. While economic development in developing countries is necessary to provide for underlying determinants of health – most prominently, poverty reduction and the building of comprehensive primary health systems – inequalities in (...) power within the international economic order and the spread of neoliberal development policy limit the ability of developing states to develop economically and realize public goods for health. With neoliberal development policies impacting entire societies, the collective right to development, as compared with an individual rights-based approach to development, offers a framework by which to restructure this system to realize social determinants of health. The right to development, working through a vector of rights, can address social determinants of health, obligating states and the international community to support public health systems while reducing inequities in health through poverty-reducing economic growth. At an international level, where the ability of states to develop economically and to realize public goods through public health systems is constrained by international financial institutions, the implementation of the right to development enables a restructuring of international institutions and foreign-aid programs, allowing states to enter development debates with a right to cooperation from other states, not simply a cry for charity. (shrink)

Human rights are high priority norms that empower right holders to demand the benefits protected by their rights. This is no less true of socioeconomic human rights than civil and political human rights. I argue that realizing human socioeconomic rights requires that they be enacted into state law in such a way that individual right holders have the power to bring legal action in defense of their rights. Contrary to Thomas Pogge, it is not enough for (...) states simply to provide the benefits required by human rights. Unfortunately, limited resources mean that successful litigation by right holders threatens to disempower other right holders by distorting a fair distribution of limited resources, since those with the resources to litigate can command a disproportionate and unjust share of limited resources. Using the human right to health as an example, I argue that an important part of the solution requires specifying different aspects of the content of the right to health and adopting appropriately strong standards of judicial review. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Feminist Philosophy in a Historical Context Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy Feminist Methodologies: Key Issues New Orientations References Further Reading.

When the Supreme Court in 2003 struck down a Texas law prohibiting homosexual sodomy, it cited the right to privacy based on the guarantee of "substantive due process" embodied by the Constitution. But did the court act undemocratically by overriding the rights of the majority of voters in Texas? Scholars often point to such cases as exposing a fundamental tension between the democratic principle of majority rule and the liberal concern to protect individual rights. Democratic Rights challenges this (...) view by showing that, in fact, democracy demands many of these rights. Corey Brettschneider argues that ideal democracy is comprised of three core values--political autonomy, equality of interests, and reciprocity--with both procedural and substantive implications. These values entitle citizens not only to procedural rights of participation but also to substantive rights that a "pure procedural" democracy might not protect. What are often seen as distinctly liberal substantive rights to privacy, property, and welfare can, then, be understood within what Brettschneider terms a "value theory of democracy." Drawing on the work of John Rawls and deliberative democrats such as Jürgen Habermas, he demonstrates that such rights are essential components of--rather than constraints on--an ideal democracy. Thus, while defenders of the democratic ideal rightly seek the power of all to participate, they should also demand the rights that are the substance of self-government. (shrink)

This article addresses two questions related to the discrimination of homosexuals in the British Armed Forces as illuminated in the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in the casesSmith and Grady v. the United KingdomandBeck, Copp and Bazeley v. the United Kingdom. First, how does the military organization obtain knowledge about its subjects? Two works by Michel Foucault concerning the thematic of confession—The Will to KnowledgeandAbout the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth—provide a (...) foundation for answering this question. Second, what happens when this knowledge obtained by the military organization comes into contact with the legal system? In relation to this question, Foucauldian theories of law are discussed, namely the so-called ‘expulsion thesis’ and ‘polyvalence theory’. It is argued that the production of knowledge in the context of these cases is intertwined with the technique of confession. However, the confession does not only operate at the level of the military organization but also as an internal practice of the individual. When this knowledge then encounters the legal system, it appears that the law puts up a certain resistance towards other forms of power, e.g. disciplinary power. It is argued that this resistance is due to the law’s ‘strategic openness’, i.e. the possibility to harness the law to different strategic purposes, due to which law can never be fully subordinated by external powers. (shrink)

Background:Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1948, human rights as set out in government documents have gradually changed, with more and more power being transferred to individual.Objectives:The aim of this article is to analyze how the position of the patient in need of care is constructed in Norway’s renamed and revised Patients’ and Service Users’ Rights Act (originally Patients’ Rights Act, 1999) and published comments which accompanying this legislation from (...) the Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care Service.Research design:A constructivist design was used, and Fairclough’s critical discourse approach was adopted to analyze the text of the Patients’ and Service Users’ Rights Act and comments.Findings:The analysis identified three discourses: (a) political discourse, containing ethical discourses about priority and economy, in which patients are constructed as powerless individuals; (b) expert discourse, containing a theme about patients’ trust in the healthcare team and its knowledge, in which patients are constructed as helpless individuals lacking knowledge; and (c) patient participation and patient autonomy discourse, containing ethical discourses about decision-making, in which patients are constructed not only as individuals with needs and rights but also as “troublesome.”Conclusion:Dominant paternalistic discourses in the legal text validate the power of medicine, the healthcare system, and heath personnel over the needs, rights, participation, and autonomy of the patient. (shrink)

An important figure in the natural law tradition and in the Scottish Enlightenment, Gershom Carmichael defended a strong theory of rights and drew attention to Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke. Gershom Carmichael was a teacher and writer who played an important role in the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. His philosophy focused on the natural rights of individuals--the natural right to defend oneself, to own the property on which one has labored, and to services contracted for with others. Carmichael (...) argued that slavery is incompatible with the rights of men and citizens, and he believed that subjects have the right to resist rulers who exceed the limits of their powers. Although he appealed to the authority of Grotius and Locke, the grounds on which he defended natural rights were distinctively his own. He drew upon the Reformed or Presbyterian theology to propose that, in respecting the natural rights of individuals, one shows one’s reverence for God’s creation. Inasmuch as all of mankind longs for lasting happiness, which can be found only in worship of or reverence for God, such reverence is the natural law which obliges all to respect the rights of all. Natural Rights includes Supplements and Observations on Pufendorf (1724), Natural Theology (1729), Logic (1722), two theses, and a manuscript on teaching, all in English for the first time. Gershom Carmichael (1672-1729) was the first professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, preceding Hutcheson, Smith, and Reid. James Moore is Professor of Political Science at Concordia University in Montreal. Michael Silverthorne is Honorary University Fellow in the School of Classics at the University of Exeter. Knud Haakonssen is Professor of Intellectual History and Director of the Centre for Intellectual History at the University of Sussex, England. (shrink)

This paper examines the role and power of the state in modernity and its transformation throughout it and into the present. First, it recognizes the centrality of the role of information control for the modern state constitution, which allows sovereign power to extend to the national level. Secondly, it discusses the shift of state power from a purely informational power to an informational and bargaining power, as well as the gradual transformation of sovereignty into governmentality. (...) Finally, it analyzes the transformations that have led to a critical loss of both powers by the state and have enabled their acquisition by tech corporations. It examines the implications of this shift in power and the consequent disempowerment of the state, defining the mode of operation of the power embodied by tech corporations as a regime of performativity, rephrasing the Foucauldian regime of truth, which presided over the ways in which governmental power was performed. Such a regime bases its power not on the ability to order discourse and knowledge, but on the ability to automate it, and to predict and manipulate human behaviors. In this way, it has disintermediated not only the state in its role as the primary informational agent, but also, to some extent, the ability of individuals to assert rights through their actions. (shrink)

Covenantal Rights is a groundbreaking work of political theory: a comprehensive, philosophically sophisticated attempt to bring insights from the Jewish political tradition into current political and legal debates about rights and to bring rights discourse more fully into Jewish thought. David Novak pursues these aims by presenting a theory of rights founded on the covenant between God and the Jewish people as that covenant is constituted by Scripture and the rabbinic tradition. In doing so, he presents a powerful challenge to (...) prevailing liberal and conservative positions on rights and duties and opens a new chapter in contemporary Jewish political thinking.For Novak, "covenantal rights" are rooted in God's primary rights as creator of the universe and as the elector of a particular community whose members relate to this God as their sovereign. The subsequent rights of individuals and communities flow from God's covenantal promises, which function as irrevocable entitlements. This presents a sharp contrast to the liberal tradition, in which rights flow above all from individuals. It also challenges the conservative idea that duties can take precedence over rights, since Novak argues that there are no covenantal duties that are not backed by correlative rights. Novak explains carefully and clearly how this theory of covenantal rights fits into Jewish tradition and applies to the relationships among God, the covenanted community, and individuals. This work is a profound and provocative contribution to contemporary religious and political theory. (shrink)

I claim that the revisions John Rawls made to his theory of justice—as seen in his political conception of justice as fairness in the revised edition of Political Liberalism and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement—result in him being able to secure justice for all persons even in their private lives. Thus, I defend his theory against common communitarian and feminist criticisms, viz the lack of moral community and inability to secure justice for individuals in the private domain. I demonstrate that (...) justice is secured from the categorical requirement that all associational life and moral doctrines must adhere to the constraints of justice, by (what Rawls terms) the indirect application of the first principle of justice. The implications of and necessity for this indirect application are precisely what I interrogate in this thesis. I suggest that this indirect application requires unconditional acknowledgement and internalisation of the values of liberty and equality (political values of the first principle) into all aspects of civil society. I claim that Rawls realised this necessity for the congruence between the moral powers of persons, the spheres of society, and the right and the good and, as such, developed a complementary relation between these three features. Coherence between these three aspects is essential; without coherence, citizens would have a split moral personality, the public and the non-public spheres would be in conflict, and the political values and the moral doctrines of individuals would undermine one another. The significance of this strict coherence is that it can ensure the adequate development of individuals’ capacity for citizenship during the three stages of moral development. This results in citizens being able to form bonds of civic friendship necessary for justice as reciprocity to be realised. Thus, in this thesis, I position my argument against theorists such as Nancy Rosenblum, who argue for a more relaxed congruence between political institutions and civil society, as according to her illiberal forms of associational life can help form the necessary bonds of love and care needed for mutual cooperation in a liberal society. In opposition to this, I claim that strict congruence is necessary; without it, a stable liberal society is not possible as the citizens would not be able to able to respect one another on free, equal, and mutually beneficial terms. I rely on Hochschild’s sociological evidence to demonstrate that civic friendship has not been developed, due to a lack of reciprocity, impacting the negative development of one’s sense of justice. I then illustrate how this lack of reciprocity is amplified by digital and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The significance of this thesis is that I claim, firstly, Rawls’s last revisions and works before his death demonstrate that justice is a collective non-comprehensive good that results by constraining individuals’ associational life and their partial comprehensive doctrines to Rawlsian demands of justice. Thus, Rawls takes seriously the feminist and communitarian critiques he received. Secondly, I claim that this interpretation of Rawls’s theory of justice cannot be conceptualised in terms of a binary presentation of the priority of the right versus the good debate and, instead, I argue for a reconceptualisation of the priority of the right versus the good as ranges on a continuum of structural relations between the right and the good. (shrink)

Proposal Information: In this paper it is argued that although Spinoza, unlike other great philosophers of the Enlightenment era, never actually wrote a philosophy of education as such, he did – in his Ethics – write a philosophy of self-improvement that is deeply educational at heart. When looked at against the background of his overall metaphysical system, the educational account that emerges is one that is highly curious and may even, to some extent at least, come across as counter-intuitive in (...) a contemporary setting. This is so because it grounds the greater social and political endeavors of humanity in the individual’s striving for an ever-increasing power of acting. Hence, education, for Spinoza, is a decidedly individualistic affair, but then again, so is the making of society. Since, for Spinoza, every instance of knowledge bears the unique mark of the individual body that expresses it, one might conclude that at the foundation of every social structure is an encounter between concrete bodies; each expressing a particular perspective from where to grasp the world. I would argue, based on this, that one of Spinoza’s main contributions to educational theory is his grounding of larger social endeavors in the striving of the individual. Hinged on the striving to be more rational, as dictated by the doctrine of the conatus, education appears to offer a way of grounding the structure of the human social world in the same principles as those guiding the individual. Spinoza’s doctrine of the imitation of affects thereby offers a way of linking the egoistic striving for power on behalf of the individual with the educational goal of building a sustainable society. It does so as it conditions self-improvement by the human characteristic to imitate what others desire. By being surrounded with people who desire to be more rational, one can utilize this desire for the good and become strengthened in one’s own striving for increasing one’s degree of existence. Consequently, the teaching situation is geared for guiding students towards a more rational life, at the same time as it is geared for the self-improvement of the teacher. This aspect of self-improvement is, ultimately, what will motivate the teacher in striving to enhance the lives of his or her students in the first place. Being unable to self-improve in isolation, the doctrine of the imitation of affects dictates that the rational person will be moved toward a life of generosity, not primarily for altruistic reasons, but out of a desire to become more rational and thus to gain in his or her own power of acting. The question that follows from this, of course, is how does one go about when inculcating a desire to be more rational in one’s students?Education, from a Spinozistic point of view, is ultimately about the cultivation of the potential that lies dormant in each individual, so that a person may live a happier life as a result of understanding, more adequately, their place in the natural world. The challenge, then, becomes one of overcoming the many obstacles that prevent a person from developing their potential. Pedagogy, from this point of view, may be understood in terms of the art of offering the right amount of resistance. This notion is based on the assumption that if a student encounters no resistance – or too much resistance – his or her potential remains just that – a potential. In order to develop this potential the student needs to overcome certain barriers. With regards to this, the role of the teacher may be conceived in terms of the one balancing the amount of resistance so that the student is properly challenged but at the same time not overwhelmed. Methodology or Methods/ Research Instruments or Sources Used: The paper makes for an attempt to outline a Spinozistic philosophy of education based on readings of Spinoza’s texts – primarily the Ethics – and some of the relevant secondary literature such as Della Rocca’s influential reading of Spinoza. As such it is a philosophical inquiry seeking to interconnect some key aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy with some of the major issues of education. Methodologically, this paper argues, in line with Melamed, that rather than turning to the history of philosophy in order to identify ‘precursors to [our] own views’, so as to validate what we already believe we know, it is more fruitful to turn to past philosophers in order to ‘challenge our most basic beliefs and intuitions by studying texts that are both well-argued and strongly opposed to our commonsense’. Accordingly, turning to Spinoza marks an attempt to revisit and reconceptualize some key aspects of educational thought. Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings: A conclusion of this paper is that a Spinozistic philosophy of education would need to focus on resolving the tension between Spinoza’s egoism and education as a social project. To this end it identifies Spinoza’s doctrine of the imitation of affects as a possible link between the individual’s striving for power and the collective agenda of improving human well-being at large. It is also suggested that, in aspiring to inculcate a desire to be more rational in his or her students, the challenge for the Spinozistic teacher is to prompt the students to aspire to reach beyond the temporary satisfactions of the passions so as to acquire a more enduring sense of satisfaction and so that their well-being is more fully under their own command rather than under the command of various external influences. This, in turn, is connected with the notion of resistance in the sense that in experiencing the volatility of fortune – and thereby understanding the instability of relying on one’s passions – a person would appear to be more inclined to strive for a more enduring sense of happiness, even if this would mean giving up on some of the temporary pleasures that one has grown accustomed to. The resistance, then, may be conceived in terms of the overcoming of temporary pleasures that stand in the way of the developing of one’s potential. In this scenario the role of the teacher may be understood in terms of someone offering a well-balanced amount of resistance. This means that to accommodate one’s students – in the sense that one approaches them in terms of prospective customers, aspiring to satisfy their demands – is inimical to education insofar as the wants and desires of students are, generally speaking, caused by passive affects rather than their rational wills. References: Aloni, N.. Spinoza as Educator: From Eudaimonistic Ethics to an Empowering and Liberating Pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory 40, pp. 531–544.Della Rocca, M.. Spinoza. New York: Routledge.Della Rocca, M.. Rationalism, Idealism, Monism, and Beyond. In: E. Förster & Y. Y. Melamed Spinoza and German Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 7–26.Derry, J.. The Unity of Intellect and Will: Vygotsky and Spinoza. Educational Review, 56, pp. 113–120.Lloyd, G.. Spinoza and Educating the Imagination. In: A. O. Rorty Philosophers on Education: Historical Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 157–172.Melamed, Y. Y.. Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Nadler, S.. Eternity and Immortality in Spinoza’s Ethics. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26, pp. 224–244.Poulimatka, T.. Spinoza’s Theory of Teaching and Indoctrination. Educational Philosophy and Theory 33, pp. 397–410.Spinoza, B.. The Ethics. In: E. Curley A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works. Princeton: Princeton Unive. (shrink)

The present debate on constitutional rights aims to protect the individual against the intrusive power of the state. Analysing the precarious relationship between art and money, the authors argue that constitutional rights need to be extended into the regimes of private governance. This requires four fundamental changes. (1) Constitutional rights can no longer be limited to the protection of individual actors. Instead, they need to be extended to guarantees of freedom of discourses. (2) The new experience of (...) the twentieth century is that totalizing tendencies have their origin not only in politics, but also in other fields of action, especially in technology, science, and the economy. Thus, a discursive concept of constitutional rights should be directed against any social system with totalizing tendencies. (3) Instead of concentrating on centres of economic and social power, constitutional rights in the private sphere should focus on the specific communicative medium of the expansionist social system involved. (4) This excludes the direct analogy of a ‘right’ as a quasispatial exclusion zone. More significant guarantees of discursive autonomy could be found in a ‘proceduralization’ of constitutional rights. (shrink)

As dominant liberal conceptions of the relationship between rights and freedom maintain, freedom is a property of the individual human subject and rights are a mechanism for protecting that freedom—whether it be the freedom to speak, to associate, to practise a certain religion or cultural way of life, and so forth. Rights according to these kinds of accounts are protective of a certain zone of permitted or valorised conduct and they function either as, for example, a ‘side-constraint’ on the (...) actions of others or as a ‘trump’ over governmental or community goals. In such accounts, of course, the emphasis is placed upon the forms of power against which rights protect the individual, whether that be the trespasses of others or the overweening attentions of the state. Such accounts famously do not themselves take much account of the multiple ways in which rights also function as forms of power, often delimiting the courses of action that a putative rights-holder can take and affecting the manner of its exercise, indeed often in the very name of freedom itself. Of course, there is a sizeable critical literature which does address itself to these kinds of question, most notably from the radical traditions of Marxism and critical legal theory, which see rights in terms of the relations of production, consumption and exploitation that they establish between legal subjects. For various reasons, Foucault has not figured as prominently in critical discussions of rights. Here I do not propose to enter into debates surrounding Foucault’s engagement with, or failure to engage with, law as an object of study, nor with the emergent literature on Foucault’s deployments of rights, indeed even of human rights. Rather, what I want to do in this paper is to articulate and defend the view that through a reading of Foucault’s work, both on rights and on power relations more broadly, we can discern an understanding of the political ambivalence of rights. For Foucault (and for some of the post-Foucaultian scholars whose work I shall address, below), rights are both political tools for the contestation and alteration of mechanisms of power and simultaneously mechanisms of inscription, both disciplinary and governmental, which work to conduct those who rely upon them. Far from being an unproblematic tool for the protection of the subject’s freedom, rights emerge in this account as conflicted and ambivalent mechanisms. In the first part of this paper I develop a Foucaultian account of rights along these lines and then hope to illustrate it by reference to several examples, from the constitution of gender and cultural identity via rights to the figure of the refugee, whilst in the final part of the paper I make a return to the idea of freedom in Foucault’s work and link the view of rights developed herein to a certain conception of freedom in his work. (shrink)

Hegel's 1821 classic offers a comprehensive view of his influential system, in which he applies his most important concept--the dialectics--to law, rights, morality, the family, economics, and the state. The philosopher defines universal right as the synthesis between the thesis of an individual acting in accordance with the law and the occasional conflict of an antithetical desire to follow private convictions. The state, he declares, must permit individuals to satisfy both demands, thereby realizing social harmony and prosperity--the perfect (...) synthesis. Further, Hegel renounces the French Revolution and republican government in favor of an idealized form of a constitutional monarchy, in which ultimate power rests with the sovereign. (shrink)

While fundamental individual rights are unquestionably taken as subjective rights, the same does not happen with fundamental social rights (health, education, work and housing – all of them guided by the idea of human dignity). If they are subjective rights, they are justiciable. The main argument in favor of this understanding is based on liberty. The main argument against is the so called formal argument. In relation to the pro argument, liberty can be juridical or factual. Juridical liberty has (...) no value without factual liberty, because the right to liberty is only put into practice if one has the factual preconditions for its exercise. The argument against is that their justiciability displaces the competence of the elaboration of public politics from Legislative and Executive to Judiciary Power, what violates the principles of separation of powers and democracy. In fact, they are subjective rights, but special ones: they are prima facie subjective rights, so that their rules present exceeding content and the determination of the definitive right is only possible in the concrete case. There is only one subjective right that is a priori considered definitive: the right to Existenzminimum. Its content is not settled, but it is quite unequivocal that the rights to simple housing, fundamental education and minimum level of medical assistance are part of it. So Existenzminimum represents what is essential to assure human dignity. It is then related to the minimum necessary for factual liberty. Against the justiciability of fundamental social rights, besides the arguments referred above, the following ones have also arisen: (a) Juridification of politics; (b) Legal permission of administrative discretion; (c) Possible reserve clause. These are the counter-arguments: (a) Legislative and Executive Powers have the original competence, but Judiciary has the exceptional one; (b) It is not enough to state economical incapability of the State. It is necessary to prove it objectively; (c) Powers have discretion, but State’s will is not allowed; (d) Public administration is under the principles of legality and of non-obviation of Judiciary jurisdiction; (e) The Existenzminimun guarantee is untouchable, prevailing over any opposite allegation. (shrink)

This book critically investigates the notion of democracy without demos by unravelling the link that modern history has established between the concepts of democracy and the sovereignty of the people. This task is imposed on us by globalization. The individualization of the subject of rights is the result of the destruction of regimes of special rights of ancient societies by the centralizing action of a territorial power. This individualization, because it implies equality, has created a new form of political (...) subjectivity that has been the driving force of the democratization of democracies during the 19th and 20th centuries. Democracy and subjective rights discusses how asserting itself as the only guarantor of rights, the modern state has also nationalized citizenship. However, the author argues, the legal and judicial monopoly of the nation-state is weakened today by the multiplication and heterogeneity of the powers on which the rights of individuals depend. This situation forces us to denationalize citizenship without sacrificing, however, the specific form of political subjectivity that the individualization of rights has made possible. (shrink)