This book is the most systematic, comprehensive and philosophically sophisticated discussion of police ethics yet published. It offers an in-depth analysis of the ethical values that police, as servants of the community, should uphold as they go about their task. The book considers the foundations and purpose of police authority in broad terms but also tackles specific problems such as accountability, the use of force, deceptive stratagems used to gain information or trap the criminally intentioned, corruption, and the tension between personal values and communal concerns. Offering the fullest, most rigorous and up-to-date treatment of police ethics currently available, this book will be a perfect textbook in courses on applied ethics in philosophy departments or police and criminal justice ethics in departments of criminology and law schools.
This book is a philosophically sophisticated and scientifically well-informed discussion of the moral and social issues raised by genetically engineering animals, a powerful technology which has major implications for society. Unlike other books on this emotionally charged subject, the author attempts to inform, not inflame, the reader about the real problems society must address in order to manage this technology. Bernard Rollin is both a professor of philosophy, and physiology and biophysics, and writes from a uniquely well-informed perspective on this topic. The style is non-technical and anecdotal and will ensure that the book can be used on a wide range of courses on bioethics, biotechnology, veterinary medicine and public policy. The book could also appeal to a general, non-academic reader with a serious interest in genetic engineering.
A central idea in moral and political philosophy, 'autonomy' is generally understood as some form of self-governance or self-direction. Certain Stoics, modern philosophers such as Spinoza, and most importantly, Immanuel Kant, are among the great philosophers who have offered important insights on the concept. Some theorists analyze autonomy in terms of the self being moved by its higher-order desires. Others argue that autonomy must be understood in terms of acting from reason or from a sense of moral duty independent of the passions. Autonomy seems closely related to the notion of freedom, but in what sense: freedom from coercion, freedom from psychological constraints, or freedom from material necessity? Various approaches to these and similar questions yield different implications for public policy. Is capitalism, social democracy or socialism more favorable to autonomy? The essays in this volume address these important questions.
Pursuing equality is an important challenge for any modern democratic society but this challenge faces two sets of difficulties: the theoretical question of what sort of equality to pursue and for whom; and the practical question concerning which legal and political institutions are the most appropriate vehicles for implementing egalitarian social policy and thus realizing egalitarian justice. This book offers original and innovative contributions to the debate about equality of opportunity. The first part of the book sets out a theory of equality of opportunity that presents equal opportunities as a normative device for the regulation of competition for scarce resources. The second part shifts the focus to the consideration of the practical application by courts or legislatures or public policy makers of policies for addressing racial, class or gender injustices. The author examines standardized tests, affirmative action, workfare, universal health-care, comparable worth, and the econ
As globalization has deepened worldwide economic integration, moral and political philosophers have become increasingly concerned to assess duties to help needy people in foreign countries. The essays in this volume present ideas on this important topic by authors who are leading figures in these debates. At issue are both the political responsibility of governments of affluent countries to relieve poverty abroad and the personal responsibility of individuals to assist the distant needy. The wide-ranging arguments shed light on global distributive justice, human rights and their implementation, the varieties of community and the obligations they generate, and the moral relevance of distance. This provocative volume will interest scholars in ethics, political philosophy, political theory, international law and development economics, as well as policy makers, aid agencies, and general readers interested in the moral dimensions of poverty and affluence.
The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals addresses the many problems in defining the relationship of intellectuals to the society in which they live. In what respects are they responsible for, and to, that society? Should they seek to act as independent arbiters of the values explicitly or implicity espoused by those around them? Should they seek to advise those in public life about the way in which they should act, or should they withdraw from any form of political involvement? And how should their preoccupations with truth and language find practical expression? The contributors to this volume seek to provide tentative answers to these questions. They come from a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from economics to linguistics and sociology to philosophy, and are drawn from both America and Eastern and Western Europe. The volume is given a particular interest by recent political upheavals in Eastern Europe, where many intellectuals have been confronted with sharply practical,
This important collection of essays brings together the work of prominent philosophers, political scientists, policy analysts, and defence consultants. It takes as its point of departure two central tendencies in current nuclear strategy: mutual assured destruction (MAD) and nuclear utilization target selections (NUTS). The essays examine and assess the arguments for these and other positions on the spectrum of policy options, and elaborate the implications of this analysis for strategic policy and for the further pursuit of research into SDI, and other matters.
In this volume a group of distinguished legal and political theorists and experts on journalism discuss how to reconcile our values concerning freedom of the press with the enormous power of the media - especially television - to shape opinions and values. The policy issues treated concern primarily the extent of justifiable government regulation of the media and the justification for regulating television differently from newspapers. The volume contains some highly original and groundbreaking analyses of philosophical issues surrounding the First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights. This is a book for anyone seriously interested in the rights to free speech and expression in technologically advanced societies.
This important collection of essays brings together the work of prominent philosophers, political scientists, policy analysts, and defence consultants. It takes as its point of departure two central tendencies in current nuclear strategy: mutual assured destruction (MAD) and nuclear utilization target selections (NUTS). The essays examine and assess the arguments for these and other positions on the spectrum of policy options, and elaborate the implications of this analysis for strategic policy and for the further pursuit of research into SDI, and other matters.
Frames of Deceit is a philosophical investigation of the nature of trust in public and private life. It examines how trust originates, how it is challenged, and how it is recovered when moral and political imperfections collide. In politics, rulers may be called upon to act badly for the sake of a political good, and in private life intimate attachments are formed in which the costs of betrayal are high. This book asks how trust is tested by human goods, moral character and power relations. It explores whether an individual's experience of betrayal differs totally from that of a community when it loses and then seeks to recover a vital public trust. Although this is a work of political philosophy it is distinctive in examining three literary texts - Sophocles' Philoctetes, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and Zola's Thérése Raquin - in order to deepen our understanding of the place of trust in morality and politics.
This important book was the first serious work of philosophy to address the question: Do adults have a moral right to use drugs for recreational purposes? Many critics of the 'war on drugs' denounce law enforcement as counterproductive and ineffective. Douglas Husak argues that the 'war on drugs' violates the moral rights of adults who want to use drugs for pleasure, and that criminal laws against such use are incompatible with moral rights. This is not a polemical tract but a scrupulously argued work of philosophy that takes full account of all available data concerning drug use in the United States today. The author is careful to describe the properties a recreational drug would have to possess before the state would be justified in prohibiting it. Since criminal laws against the use of recreational drugs are justified neither by the harm users cause to themselves nor by the harm users cause to each other, Professor Husak concludes that such laws are, in almost all cases, unjustified
How should modern medicine's dramatic new powers to sustain life be employed? How should limited resources be used to extend and improve the quality of life? In this collection, Dan Brock, a distinguished philosopher and bioethicist and co-author of Deciding for Others (Cambridge, 1989), explores the moral issues raised by new ideals of shared decision making between physicians and patients. The book develops an ethical framework for decisions about life-sustaining treatment and euthanasia, and examines how these life and death decisions are transformed in health policy when the focus shifts from what is best for a patient to what is just for all patients. Professor Brock combines acute philosophical analysis with a deep understanding of the realities of clinical health policy. This is a volume for philosophers concerned with medical ethics, health policy professionals, physicians interested in bioethics, and undergraduate courses in biomedical ethics.
This book attacks the assumption found in moral philosophy that social control as such is an intellectually and morally destructive force. It replaces this view with a richer and deeper perspective on the nature of social character aimed at showing how social freedom cannot mean immunity from social pressure. The author demonstrates how our competence as rational and social agents depends on a constructive adaptation of social control mechanisms. Our facility at achieving our goals is enhanced, rather than undermined, by social control. The author then articulates sources, contracts, and degrees of legitimate social control in different social and historical settings. Drawing on a wide range of material in moral and political philosophy, law, cognitive and social psychology, anthropology and literature, Professor Schoeman shows how the aim of moral philosophy ought to be to understand our social character, not to establish fortifications against it in the name of rationality and autono
Institutional and political developments since the end of the Cold War have led to a revival of public interest in, and anxiety about, international law. Liberal international law is appealed to as offering a means of constraining power and as representing universal values. This book brings together scholars who draw on jurisprudence, philosophy, legal history and political theory to analyse the stakes of this turn towards international law. Contributors explore the history of relations between international law and those it defines as other - other traditions, other logics, other forces, and other groups. They explore the archive of international law as a record of attempts by scholars, bureaucrats, decision-makers and legal professionals to think about what happens to law at the limits of modern political organisation. The result is a rich array of responses to the question of what it means to speak and write about international law in our time.
Originally published in 1976, this book was written specifically to guide students of political theory who want to understand Hegel's political ideas as they appear in The Phenomenology of Mind. Professor Shklar's commentary uses plain language and English translations of references wherever possible. The core of Hegel's argument is that freedom is the identity of the personal goals of individual citizens and the public ends of the polity as a whole. This is a dynamic process, in which all laws are created by each and all, and in turn expressed and realised in the minds and actions of every member of society. The text emphasises Hegel's criticism of every type of subjectivity. The failure to recognise the cultural character of all experience is the core of Hegel's critical review of all past philosophy, and led him to develop his own theory of history and of knowledge as retrospective thinking.
Liberal political philosophy and natural law theory are not contradictory, but - properly understood - mutually reinforcing. Contemporary liberalism (as represented by Rawls, Guttman and Thompson, Dworkin, Raz, and Macedo) rejects natural law and seeks to diminish its historical contribution to the liberal political tradition, but it is only one, defective variant of liberalism. A careful analysis of the history of liberalism, identifying its core principles, and a similar examination of classical natural law theory (as represented by Thomas Aquinas and his intellectual descendants), show that a natural law liberalism is possible and desirable. Natural law theory embraces the key principles of liberalism, and it also provides balance in resisting some of its problematic tendencies. Natural law liberalism is the soundest basis for American public philosophy, and it is a potentially more attractive and persuasive form of liberalism for nations that have tended to resist it.
In public political deliberation, people will err and lie in accordance with definite patterns. Such discourse failure results from behavior that is both instrumentally and epistemically rational. The deliberative practices of a liberal democracy (let alone repressive or non-democratic societies) cannot be improved so as to overcome the tendency for rational citizens to believe and say things at odds with reliable propositions of social science. The theory has several corollaries. One is that much contemporary political philosophy can be seen as an unsuccessful attempt to vindicate, on symbolic and moral grounds, the forms that discourse failure take on in public political deliberation. Another is that deliberative practices cannot be rescued even on non-epistemic grounds, such as social peace, impartiality, participation, and equality. To alleviate discourse failure, this book proposes to reduce the scope of majoritarian politics and enlarge markets.
No date is noted for the first edition, but the eight original essays are said to have been written a decade ago. The second edition contains three new chapters, on liberal feminism, law and economics
This book presents fifteen essays, written over the past dozen years, on egalitarianism. The essays explore contemporary philosophical debates on this subject, using the tools of modern economic theory, general equilibrium theory, game theory, and the theory of mechanism design. Egalitarian Perspectives is divided into four parts: the theory of exploitation; equality of resources; bargaining theory and distributive justice; and market socialism and public ownership. The first part presents Roemer's influential reconceptualisation of the Marxian theory of exploitation as a theory of distributive justice. The second part offers a critique of Ronald Dworkin's equality-of-resources theory, and puts forward a new egalitarian proposal based upon a specific method of measuring individual responsibility. The third part introduces a novel application of the theory of mechanism design to the study of political philosophy, and raises new concerns about the limitations of that application. The fou
Quentin Skinner is one of the foremost historians in the world, and in Hobbes and Republican Liberty he offers a dazzling comparison of two rival theories about the nature of human liberty. The first originated in classical antiquity, and lay at the heart of the Roman republican tradition of public life. Thomas Hobbes was the most formidable enemy of this pattern of thought, and his successive attempts to discredit it constitute a truly epochal moment in the history of Anglophone political thought. Hobbes and Republican Liberty develops several of the themes announced by Quentin Skinner in his celebrated inaugural lecture on Liberty before Liberalism of 1997. Cogent, engaged, accessible, and indeed exhilarating, this new book will appeal to readers of history, politics, and philosophy at all levels from upper-undergraduate upwards, and provides an excellent introduction to the work of one of the most celebrated thinkers of our time.
