Générations futures, animaux, rivières, espèces, écosystèmes, œuvres d’art, androïdes. La liste des entités non-humaines (ou non-individuelles) aspirant à la personnalité juridique s’allonge. Un nombre croissant d’État leur attribuent des droits dans le but de les protéger, avec plus ou moins de succès, en tant qu’entité à part entière. L’article 71 de la Constitution de l’Équateur figure parmi les exemples les plus marquants puisqu’il fait de la Nature ( Pacha Mama ) un sujet de droits au nom desquels (...) on compte le droit au respect de son existence et le droit à la régénération de ses cycles vitaux. La vulnérabilité de ces entités non-humaines appelle une protection dépassant les intérêts individuels. Souvent dépourvues de la personnalité juridique, ces entités ne peuvent pas agir en justice par elles-mêmes. Leurs intérêts, bien que de plus en plus protégés par les normes juridiques, demeurent partiellement défendus par l’appareil juridictionnel. Au-delà de la résistance de nos imaginaires politiques, cela s’explique par la difficulté théorique et pratique d’ouvrir l’accès au prétoire à des requérants agissant au nom d’autrui, en l’occurrence de ces entités. Ce sont les obstacles juridiques que nous tentons ici de lever. Le principe Nul ne plaide par procureur interdit à toute personne d’agir en défense d’un droit subjectif qui ne lui appartiendrait pas en propre, sans requérir un mandat de représentation du bénéficiaire du droit. L’intérêt pour agir que l’on présente comme la condition sine qua non de recevabilité de l’action se caractérise, en substance, par l’intérêt lésé du requérant. Les actions en justice dans l’intérêt d’autrui ne sont admises que par exception et sans que les concepts doctrinaux ne les embrassent pleinement. L’action en justice tout autant que la protection juridique des intérêts ont été pensées presque exclusivement par le prisme des intérêts et des besoins humains et individuels. La reconnaissance de droits aux non-humains rebat les cartes du droit processuel. Il faut repenser l’intérêt à agir comme condition de recevabilité susceptible d’être caractérisée par une motivation du requérant qui puisse être autre que la lésion de son propre droit. Il faut élargir la catégorie des bénéficiaires de droit aux entités, quelles qu’elles soient, dont les intérêts sont objectivement protégés par des normes juridiques. Il faut concevoir l’action en justice comme subordonnées non pas à un intérêt personnel du requérant mais à une norme d’habilitation dont le contenu est laissé à la décision des autorités normatives. Les voies processuelles peuvent accueillir une grande diversité de configurations. Il appartient à la sphère politique de pondérer la nécessité de garantir les droits sans encourager l’engorgement du prétoire. Toutefois, intégré au sein de ce que l’on appelle les « grandes causes », le contentieux des droits des non-humains participe à la transformation du rôle la justice dans nos systèmes. En dépassant le règlement des conflits individuels, elle doit aujourd’hui se prononcer sur des questions qui sont habituellement discutées au sein des arènes démocratiques ( cause lawyering ). JEL Codes : K380, K410. (shrink)

À lire le dernier essai de Pierre Kerzberg, ce que nous appelons la nature n’est plus que l’ombre d’elle-même. Avons-nous donc vraiment perdu la nature ? Ne sommes-nous pas en train de redécouvrir ce qu’elle est et ce qu’elle vaut ? Une certaine effervescence existe de fait aujourd’hui qui rend probable un intérêt nouveau pour une philosophie de la nature. Mais discerner ce qu’il en est exactement exige une certaine attention à une longue histoire. La (...) philosophie de la nature que l’on a perdue depuis longtemps et qui éveille toujours la nostalgie est celle des Anciens. Les philosophies modernes de la nature, elles, ne répondent plus au programme de ces cosmologies antiques et médiévales dont le propos est clairement ontologique.Au vu des possibilités qu’atteste l’histoire des philosophies de la nature, on ne peut envisager la situation actuelle à partir de la simple alternative du retour ou du non retour d’une philosophie de la nature que l’on situe en fait dans l’optique de la cosmologie ancienne. La situation est nettement plus complexe et les options plus nombreuses. According to Pierre Kerzberg’s latest essay, what we call nature is no longer but the shadow of itself. Have we really lost nature, then? Or, rather, are we not in the process of rediscovering what it is and what it is worth? There is a certain effervescence in the air today that makes a new interest in a philosophy of nature quite likely. However, discerning exactly where things stand requires we pay some attention to history over a longer time. The philosophy of nature that we lost long ago and that still awakens nostalgia is the Ancients’ philosophy of nature. Modern philosophies of nature, on the other hand, no longer correspond to the program set out by ancient and medieval cosmologies, the substance of which is clearly ontological.In view of the possibilities attested by the history of philosophies of nature, we can no longer envisage the present-day situation on the basis of a simple alternative between the return or non-return of a philosophy of nature which is in fact placed in the perspective of ancient cosmology. The situation is considerably more complex and the options far more numerous. (shrink)

Dans un cadre réglementaire de mise sur le marché des substances chimiques, l’information sur les risques chimiques pour la santé et l’environnement doit être généralement produite par les industriels, qui la soumettent aux agences sanitaires. L’accès du public à cette information est régulé par des dispositifs juridiques internationaux, européens et nationaux, et fondé sur les principes de transparence et de liberté d’accès et de réutilisation. Cependant, différents facteurs restreignent l’effectivité du droit à l’information et par conséquent le contrôle démocratique (...) et scientifique sur l’évaluation du risque. Les textes juridiques sont éclatés entre la législation environnementale et celle sur l’accès aux données publiques. Le droit d’accès peut être limité juridiquement pour des raisons de confidentialité et de secret industriel, des dispositions qui permettent aux entreprises de protéger leurs intérêts commerciaux mais qui peuvent être interprétés de manière arbitraire par les agences. Enfin sur le plan pratique, le manque de lisibilité du format, le langage employé et les interfaces peuvent constituer des obstacles à l’accès effectif et à la réutilisation des données.Under the regulations governing marketing authorisation for chemical substances, information on chemical risks to health and the environment generally has to be produced by the industries concerned for submission to the health agencies. Public access to this information is governed by international, European and national legal provisions, and based on the principles of transparency and the freedom to access and re-use the information. However, various factors are restricting the effectiveness of this right to information and, consequently, restricting democratic and scientific oversight of risk assessments. The relevant legal texts are split between environmental legislation and legislation on access to public data. The right of access can be legally limited on grounds of confidentiality and protection of trade secrets, under provisions that allow businesses to protect their commercial interests but which can be interpreted arbitrarily by the health agencies. Finally, on the practical level, the lack of clarity of the format, the language used and the interfaces can be an obstacle to effective access and re-use of the data. (shrink)

La production et la diffusion des résultats scientifiques soulèvent un certain nombre de questions juridiques. L’activité scientifique est en effet, en bonne part, une activité de création, donnant naissance à des œuvres au sens du Code de la propriété intellectuelle. Le chercheur est aussi et souvent un auteur dans l’accomplissement de sa tâche. En France, comme dans un certain nombre d’autres États, la recherche est pour l’essentiel du côté du secteur public, dont les personnels relèvent, en général, du statut (...) de la fonction publique, et la production dans ce cadre doit articuler liberté de créer du chercheur et intérêt public. La reconnaissance des droits des chercheurs sur la création scientifique se heurte à certaines difficultés, dont un bon nombre se concentrent sur les questions de paternité. Le mode collectif sur lequel se réalise la création scientifique rend encore plus ardue la détermination de la qualité d’auteur. Les nouveaux modes de production de la connaissance sur les réseaux Internet s’accommodent mal des différents schémas de création collective. Comment qualifier une œuvre initiée par une personne, volontairement versée dans l’espace public pour être discutée, poursuivie et transformée par d’autres ? La question du statut de la création rejoint ici celui de son mode de diffusion.The production and dissemination of scientific results raise a number of legal questions. Scientific activity is in fact, and largely, a creative activity that produces « works » as defined in the Intellectual Property Code. Researchers are often also authors in the performance of their tasks. In France, as in a number of other countries, research is essentially a public sector activity employing staff who are usually civil servants and whose output needs to reconcile the freedom to perform creative research with the public interest. The recognition of researchers’ rights in creative scientific work comes up against a number of difficulties, many of which have to do with paternity issues. The collective nature of creative scientific work makes authorship all the harder to determine. The new methods of knowledge production through the Internet do not fit easily into the various provisions covering collective creation. What description can be given to a work initiated by one person, deliberately handed over into the public sphere for discussion, then continued and transformed by other people? In this context, the question of creative authorship is closely tied to the issue of science dissemination. (shrink)

Resumen: Las dificultades para ser escuchado del menor extranjero en cualquier procedimiento que le afecte ponen de relieve las deficiencias generales existentes en nuestro ordenamiento jurídico para hacer efectivos los derechos de los que son titulares las personas menores de edad, sean extranjeras o no. Se analiza en primer lugar el artículo 12 de la Convención de los Derechos del niño, las condiciones imprescindibles para para hacer efectivo el derecho a ser escuchado y la conexión que existe entre ese derecho (...) y la consideración primordial de su interés superior. A continuación se hace un repaso de la regulación española de los procedimientos de repatriación de menores extranjeros no acompañados a la luz del interés superior del menor y su derecho a ser escuchado. Abstract: The current challenges that migrant children face to have their right to be heard fulfilled and respected, put in evidence the general deficiencies of our legal system ensuring the effective enjoyment of children rights, irrespective if the children in question are migrant or not. At the outset, article12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its content is analysed, including the essential requirements for an effective implementation and enjoyment of the right to be heard and its linkages with the best interest of the child as the primary consideration. An analysis of the Spanish regulations under the return procedures for unaccompanied foreignchildren is also provided in light of the respect of the best interests of the child and their right to be heard. (shrink)

Pierre Manent is one of France's leading political philosophers. This first English translation of his profound and strikingly original book La loi naturelle et les droits de l'homme is a reflection on the central question of the Western political tradition. In six chapters, developed from the prestigious Étienne Gilson lectures at the Institut Catholique de Paris, and in a related appendix, Manent contemplates the steady displacement of the natural law by the modern conception of human rights. He aims (...) to restore the grammar of moral and political action, and thus the possibility of an authentically political order that is fully compatible with liberty rightly understood. Manent boldly confronts the prejudices and dogmas of those who have repudiated the classical and (especially) Christian notion of "liberty under law" and in the process shows how groundless many contemporary appeals to human rights turn out to be. Manent denies that we can generate obligations from a condition of what Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau call the "state of nature," where human beings are absolutely free, with no obligations to others. In his view, our ever-more-imperial affirmation of human rights needs to be reintegrated into what he calls an "archic" understanding of human and political existence, where law and obligation are inherent in liberty and meaningful human action. Otherwise we are bound to act thoughtlessly and in an increasingly arbitrary or willful manner. Natural Law and Human Rights will engage students and scholars of politics, philosophy, and religion, and will captivate sophisticated readers who are interested in the question of how we might reconfigure our knowledge of, and talk with one another about, politics. (shrink)

En faisant du sujet de droit la prémisse anthropologique de la société, la modernité bouleverse la nature de l’intérêt général qui se mesure désormais à l’aune des aspirations individuelles. L’intérêt général est moins un principe qu’une notion relationnelle, qui articule, par le moyen du contrat, la composition des droits et des intérêts particuliers. Pourtant, la réciprocité initiale entre le droit et l’intérêt débouche sur une tension contrariant le projet de composer un intérêt général apte (...) à les satisfaire également. L’étude conjointe de deux auteurs, Thomas Hobbes et John Locke, permet de saisir que la priorité accordée à l’un des deux pôles, le droit et l’intérêt, aboutit à des pensées politiques radicalement divergentes, selon qu’elles portent l’accent sur l’exigence de la justice ou sur la poursuite de l’utilité sociale. Parce que la satisfaction des intérêts menace parfois de se retourner contre les droits, tandis que la protection des droits tend à discriminer les intérêts, la question se pose de savoir si l’univocité de la formule « intérêt général » ne masque pas une dualité dans sa nature, rendant problématique son statut d’idéal régulateur pour les sociétés modernes. (shrink)

By making the individual rights the anthropological premise of society, modernity subverted the essence of the common good which is now defined with regard to individual aspirations. The general interest can no longer be regarded as an end. Rather it is a means that reconciles individual rights and personal interests through the social contract. Therefore the project of a general interest complying with both individual rights and personal interests is compromised by their original reciprocity. Studying Hobbes and (...) Locke, who focus respectively on general utility of society and on justice, allows us to understand that two radically different political philosophies emerge whether the author prioritizes one or the other when aiming at defining the general interest. As on the one hand the satisfaction of personal interests may threaten individual rights while on the other hand the protection of those rights tends to organize personal interests into a hierarchy, this paper discusses the dichotomous nature of the general interest which might explain why this notion is so hard to comprehend today. (shrink)

Le thème de la nature revient dans la pensée contemporaine sous le signe de la menace. C’est parce que la nature est en péril que l’intérêt se porte à nouveau sur elle. Le souci d’éviter une possible catastrophe écologique doit-il nous faire revenir à une « théologie naturelle » où chaque composante du monde serait invitée à occuper son « lieu » sous la conduite du « Moteur immobile » ? Dans le monde catholique en particulier, cette (...) nostalgie n’est pas rare. Mais si l’on tient à un certain « anthropocentrisme chrétien », tout en restant conscient des risques qu’il comporte, comment redonner à la nature un statut théologique ? C’est ici le propos du présent article.Il commence par reprendre la composante anthropologique de l’héritage chrétien qui contraste avec le cosmocentrisme de la pensée antique. Il s’interroge ensuite sur la nouvelle vision de la nature. L’approche globale s’accompagne d’une perspective évolutive que l’on peut qualifier d’« historique », qui invite à s’interroger sur l’avenir du monde, plus ouvert et donc plus risqué, que dans les visions anciennes. Dans cette « dramatique » de l’histoire naturelle, la théologie peut apporter sa contribution.The subject of nature has come back into contemporary thought under a threatening cloud. It is because nature is endangered that so much interest is being taken in it. Should the concern with avoiding a potential ecological catastrophe make us come back to a “natural theology” in which every component of the world would be requested to occupy its “place” under the guidance of the “Immobile Mover”? This nostalgia is far from rare, especially in the Catholic world. However, if we prize a certain “Christian anthropocentrism,” while remaining quite aware of the risks it involves, how can we give a theological status back to nature? This is the subject of the present article.We thus begin by taking up the anthropological aspect of Christian heritage that stands in contrast to the cosmocentrism of Ancient thought, and then examine this new vision of nature. This global approach is accompanied by a progressive perspective that can be qualified as “historical” and that incites us to investigate the future of the world, which is thus more open and more hazardous than in the worldview of Antiquity. Within the framework of this “drama” of natural history, theology has a contribution to make. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: La notion de propriété de soi présuppose la définition des droits de propriété sur les ressources externes que le libertarisme de gauche limite habituellement aux ressources naturelles. Or, dans une économie spécialisée, la propriété de soi doitégalement être complétée par une définition des droits de propriété sur le surplus coopératif. S'il est cohérent, pour un libertarien de gauche, de considérer le surplus coopératif comme ressource externe et de le distribuer d'une manière égale, on doit en outre (...) observer qu'une théorie de la justice doit se prononcer sur les questions distributives dans plusieurs contextes. Articuler les différences entre ces contextes nous permet de préciser la relation que le libertarisme de gauche entretient avec d'autres théories de la justice.ABSTRACT: Any substantive notion of self-ownership presupposes well-defined property rights over external resources. Left-libertarians usually limit this category to natural resources. I argue that in a specialized economy, substantive self-ownership equally needs to be complemented by a definition of property rights to the cooperative surplus. The natural way for left-libertarianism to provide such a definition is to view the cooperative surplus as an external resource and to distribute it equally. The second part of the article makes the general point that a complete theory of justice needs to take a stance on distribution in various contexts. Articulating the differences between these contexts allows us to gain a better understanding of how left-libertarianism relates to other theories of justice. (shrink)

A partir d'une problématique qui fait droit à la distinction entre historique et historicité, l'article de J. Moingt pose la question : en quoi la théologie s'intéresse-t-elle au Jésus de l'histoire ? à quoi il répond d'emblée : le théologien, en tant que discours sur Dieu et ouverture à la révélation et au salut pris globalement, s'intéresse de façon inéluctable au Jésus de l'histoire en tant que l'identité du Dieu des chrétiens est déterminée par son rapport d'identification à un personnage (...) historique, Jésus de Nazareth. Proposant d'abord un parcours du symbole de foi pour vérifier cet intérêt de la foi pour l'histoire, il propose une approche théologique du Jésus de l'histoire par le retour à la question de Dieu aujourd'hui, rejoignant la question fondamentale qui est la question du sens.Starting from a problematical issue that admits the distinction between historical and historicity, the article of J. Moingt asks the question : in what way is theology interested in the Jesus of history ? to which he answers immediately : the theologian - as regards the discourse on God and openness to revelation and salvation taken globally - is interested ineluctably in the Jesus of history as the identity of the God of Christians and is determined by its relationship of identification to a historical personage, Jesus of Nazareth. Proposing, first of all, a run through the symbol of faith to verify the interest of the faith for history, he proposes a theological approach to the Jesus of history by returning to the question of God today, rejoining the fundamental question, which is the question of meaning. (shrink)

Cet article présente une approche étymologique des termes souvent confondus pour exprimer ce que sont la loi et les droits. Il tente de découvrir les situations archétypes et les relations qui paraissent avoir été les références originales des mots tels que “loi” et “droits”, “légal” et “juste”, aussi bien que d’autres mots qui sont indispensables lorsqu’on aborde le droit et la justice : “liberté”, “égalité”, “paix”, “autorité”, “société”, etc... Les concepts du juste et du légal peuvent être (...) clairement distingués ; ils semblent appartenir à des perspectives catégoriquement différentes sur l’aspect social de l’existence humaine.La distinction entre eux apporte un éclairage intéressant, non seulement sur la conception du droit par le juriste, mais également sur la vieille controverse concernant le droit naturel. A partir de cette analyse émerge une conception de l’ordre social distinctement libérale ainsi qu’une conception du droit naturel non-normative, dépourvue de toute connotation métaphysique ou théologique en référence à un “droit supérieur”. Les éléments dévoilés par l’analyse apportent un schéma cohérent du droit qui peut servir de base à une logique de la loi non déontique fondée sur les droits.This paper presents an etymological approach to the confusing language of law and rights. It attempts to uncover the archetypical situations and relationships that appear to have been the original referents of words such as ‘law’ and ‘rights’, ‘legal’ and ‘just’, as well as other words that are indispensable in discourses about law and justice: ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘peace’, ‘authority’, ‘society’ and others. The concepts of the lawful and the legal can be clearly distinguished; they appear to belong to categorically different perspectives on the social aspect of human existence. The distinction between them sheds an interesting light, not only on the lawyer’s conception of law, but also on the old controversy over natural law. From the analysis there emerges a distinctly liberal conception of social order as well as a naturalistic, nonnormative conception of natural law, with no metaphysical or theological connotations of a “higher law”. The elements uncovered by the analysis provide a coherent scheme of law that can serve as the basis for a nondeontic, rights-based logic of law. (shrink)

In the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, August 26, 1789, the possession of human rights is subject to the condition of birth and to a particular stipulation: only one who is born a man in entitled to human rights. Birth, that is, the manifestation of a body according to natural laws in a social world, is the condition by which a being comes to personhood. According to a long tradition in moral theology (...) and sacred embryology examined here, human identity is recognized at birth by the possession of a ‘human form.’ The difficulty lies in defining this ‘form,’ and in determining if it extends to beings formed or transformed by human industry. This article looks into the conditions necessary to recognize or grant human rights to trans/posthuman individuals. (shrink)

For a genealogical study of the value of human rights: an opposition to historicism and racism The purpose of this article is to focus on human rights as a value in itself that has to fight against other values. We would like to show that human rights have become an intrinsic value only by following a path in human history that distinguish them from historicism. Because human rights became a value through history, it is important to (...) be able to show the lay out of this history. We will illustrate it by means of diverse philosophical theories. We will begin with Leo Strauss' philosophy of natural rights which considers human rights in their opposition to historicism. Then, with the help of Michel Foucault's genealogy we will show how human rights develop themselves against the racist theory elaborated by a fraction of the French aristocracy in the 17th century. Consequently, a tension emerges inside those rights between their natural value and their historical one, which leads to the fundamental question: what is the essence of humankind involved in human rights? (shrink)

The shortcomings of existing legal tools to abate species extinctions and habitat losses raise the attractiveness of recognizing rights of nature (RoN), in effect granting legal standing directly to non-human entities and collectives. RoN have been recognized in several domestic legislations and attract increasing popularity and enthusiasm. Yet, from an analytical and general perspective RoN rely on a contentious relation between concepts such as intrinsic value and interests, respectively, as justifying RoN. Consequently, a general analytical defense (...) of RoN has not been provided and recognition hitherto has been constrained to the contingent factors of domestic legislations. Here, I will provide an examination of RoN by way of expressive theories of law where law expresses (some) ethical values. Expressive theories of law have not previously been related to RoN. I will examine whether such theories have the potential of defending RoN as rights that legislatures have strong general reasons to recognize. The examination of RoN through the lens of expressivist legal theories provide a better understanding of RoN, and the analytical and conceptual commitments they presuppose, including the relation between ethics and law and the values underpinning RoN to be expressed by law. (shrink)

Pablo Gilabert,Aude Bandini | : Cet article s’intéresse au lien entre deux perspectives qui concernent la nature des droits humains. Selon la perspective « politique » ou « pratique », les droits humains sont des revendications que les individus entretiennent face à un certain nombre de structures institutionnelles, dans certains États modernes, en vertu des intérêts qui sont les leurs selon les contextes qui les mettent en jeu. Selon la perspective « humaniste » ou « naturaliste », (...) plus traditionnelle, les droits humains sont des revendications pré-institutionnelles que les individus entretiennent face à tous les autres individus, en vertu d’intérêts propres à l’humanité qu’ils ont tous en partage. Cet article soutient qu’une fois qu’on identifie ces deux perspectives sous leur meilleur jour, on peut voir qu’elles sont complémentaires et qu’on a en réalité besoin de chacune d’elles pour donner sens, sur le plan normatif, à la pratique contemporaine des droits humains. J’y explique comment des considérations humanistes et politiques peuvent et même doivent travailler main dans la main si on veut rendre compte du concept, du contenu et de la justification des droits humains. | : This essay explores the relation between two perspectives on the nature of human rights. According to the « political » or « practical » perspective, human rights are claims that individuals have against certain institutional structures, in particular modern states, in virtue of interests they have in contexts that include them. According to the more traditional « humanist » or « naturalistic » perspective, human rights are pre-institutional claims that individuals have against all other individuals in virtue of interests characteristic of their com mon humanity. This essay argues that once we identify the two perspectives in their best light, we can see that they are complementary and that in fact we need both to make good normative sense of the contemporary practice of human rights. It explains how humanist and political considerations can and should work in tandem to account for the concept, content, and justification of human rights. (shrink)

Dominic LaRochelle | : Les religions ne constituent pas des monolithes immuables et inchangés dans le temps. Elles évoluent au fil de l’histoire humaine, changent au gré des transformations culturelles et sociales des communautés dans lesquelles elles s’implantent, négocient avec les instances séculières et religieuses leur pertinence et leur droit d’exister ; bref, elles innovent constamment pour s’assurer une place dans un monde lui aussi en constant changement. Cet article propose deux outils pour analyser les innovations au sein (...) des traditions religieuses : les théories de la réception, inspirées des travaux de Hans Robert Jauss, et l’invention des traditions, inspirée du célèbre ouvrage d’Eric J. Hobsbawm et Terence O. Ranger. L’intérêt de l’utilisation de ces outils en histoire est qu’ils permettent, entre autres choses, de dépasser les oppositions classiques tradition/modernité et authenticité/innovation en analysant les religions du point de vue des ruptures et des transformations à l’intérieur de celles-ci. Ces outils seront appliqués à un cas particulier, celui de la réception et de la réinvention du taoïsme dans les sociétés occidentales au XXe siècle. Cette tradition religieuse chinoise vieille de plusieurs siècles a en effet été réinventée en Occident et transformée en une tradition spirituelle universelle répondant aux attentes des Occidentaux en matière de spiritualité contemporaine. | : Religions are not immutable monoliths that remain unchanged over time. They evolve over the course of human history ; changing according to the cultural and social transformations of the communities in which they are established and negotiating with secular and religious authorities for their relevance and right to exist. In short, they continually innovate to secure a place in a constantly changing world. This article proposes two tools to analyze innovations within religious traditions : reception theories, inspired by the works of Hans Robert Jauss, and the invention of tradition, inspired by the celebrated work of Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger. The interest of using these tools in a historical approach is that they allow us, among other things, to overcome the traditional oppositions of tradition vs. modernity and authenticity vs. innovation by analyzing religions from a rupture and transformation point of view. These tools will be applied to a particular case, namely the reception and reinvention of Taoism in Western societies in the twentieth Century. This centuries-old Chinese religious tradition has been reinvented in the West and transformed into a universal spiritual tradition that meets the expectations of Westerners for contemporary spirituality. (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article(s): ‘Full Disclosure of the “Raw Data” of Research on Humans: Citizens’ Rights, Product Manufacturer’s Obligations and the Quality of the Scientific Database.’Philosophy Compass 6/2 (2011): 90–99. doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2010.00376.x Author’s Introduction Securing consent (and informed consent) from patients and research study participants is a key concern in patient care and research on humans. Yet, the legal doctrines of consent and informed consent differ in their applications. In patient care, the judicial doctrines of consent (...) and informed consent are disclosure doctrines based on the obligation of physicians to inform their patients of the following types of information: the nature of the procedure the physician is recommending in the patent’s care (P), the alternatives to the physician‐recommendation (A), and the risks of procedure and its alternatives (R). In addition, the physician must provide truthful answers to the patient’s questions (Q) to the best of the physician’s abilities. In research on humans, the onus of disclosure by study sponsors and principal investigators is much greater than in patient care precisely because the purpose of research is not patient care. The purpose of research is the identification and development of new generalizable knowledge. Thus, participation in a research study or trial may not benefit the study volunteer at all. In addition, the participant may carry a heavy risk burden in relationship to any testing of a newly designed drug or device as part of their experiences in the research study. Presently, despite the risks borne by the research study participant, the raw data collected from volunteers in research trials are treated by courts as if they were the private property of the study sponsor rather than generally owed to the public as would be expected by an effort like research participation aimed at contributing to the development of generalizable knowledge. This paper reviews the obligations that study sponsors owe to their study participants based on the very definition of research as a systematic activity whose purpose is to develop generalizable knowledge to help all humans. Author Recommends Court cases Canterbury v. Spence, United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit 464 F.2d 772 (1972). (Federal appellate decision heard in the District of Columbia, USA) Reibl v. Hughes, 2 S.C.R. 880 (1980). (Supreme Court of Canada) Rogers v. Whitaker, 175 C.L. R. 479 (1992). (High Court of Australia) Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985) (House of Lords) Canterbury v. Spence is the landmark Federal informed consent case in the United States heard in the District of Columbia. In this case, Judge Spottswood Robinson articulated the reasonable person standard of informed consent. This standard was subsequently adopted by the Supreme Court of Canada (Reibl v. Hughes, 2 S.C.R. 880 (1980)) and the High Court of Australia (Rogers v. Whitaker, 175 C.L. R. 479 (1992)). The House of Lords rejected the reasonable person standard in England in Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985). Book Mazur, Dennis J. The Science and Ethics of Research on Humans. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. This book is a detailed guide for the review of scientific and ethical aspects of research on humans contained in the research study protocols and research informed consent forms which need to be submitted by study sponsors and principal investigators to institutional review boards (IRBs) for IRB review before a research study can receive approval to be conducted within a human study population in those institutions over which the IRB has authority. It also presents basic definitions in the area of research on humans and basic approaches to help conduct a deep review of the underlying scientific and ethical issues that are present within a research study protocol and its accompanying research informed consent form. Report National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The Belmont Report: Ethical Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research. Washington, DC: DHEW Publications, 1978 (78‐0012). This U.S. National Commission in the Belmont Report argued for the necessity of a reasonable volunteer standard in research on humans in the United States. Arguing that the professional standard and the reasonable person standard of consent and informed consent were insufficient to base a disclosure standard in research on humans, this National Commission developed the reasonable volunteer standard where a study participant is to be approached in research informed consent with that information that a reasonable volunteer would want to know. Online Materials Belmont Report: Syllabus Topics for Lecture and Discussion Week I: Introduction and Overview Readings: Rogers v. Whitaker, 175 C.L.R. 479 (1992). (High Court of Australia) Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985) (House of Lords) Week II: The Different Standards of Consent and Informed Consent Readings: Canterbury v. Spence, 464 F.2d 772 (1972). (Federal appellate opinion heard in the District of Columbia) Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985) (House of Lords) Week III: Definition of Research Reading: Mazur, Dennis J. The Science and Ethics of Research on Humans. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. (Especially Chapters 2 and 3) Week IV: How to Review a Research Study Protocol and Research Informed Consent Form Reading: Mazur, Dennis J. The Science and Ethics of Research on Humans. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. (Especially Chapters 4–6, 10, and 12–14) Week V: Obligations in Research of Humans Versus Patient Care Reading: National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The Belmont Report: Ethical Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research. Washington, DC: DHEW Publications, 1978 (78‐0012). Focus Questions • How do the judicial doctrines of consent in England and Australia compare to the judicial doctrines of informed consent in the United States and Canada? • How does a professional standard of disclosure differ from a reasonable person standard of disclosure? • What is the definition of research? • How is a research study (study proposal and research informed consent form) reviewed from scientific and ethical bases for considerations of approval by an IRB? • How do the obligations of a study sponsor, a principal investigator, and a research team conducting a research trial on human study participants differ from the obligations of a physician caring for a patient? • Should all raw data of research derived from humans be made available to the public for use in developing generalizable knowledge to help others, or should raw data be considered the private property of the study sponsors (for example, prescription drug manufacturers), who fund the research trials? Seminar/project Idea Draw a timeline of the development of the basic concepts of consent and informed consent in patient care and in patient research. On this timeline, first place the dates of the key court cases in England, the United States, Canada, and Australia on consent and informed consent. Then place the date of the development of the Belmont Report. Why do differences exist between these four countries in terms of the legal requirements of informedness of a patient (in medical care) and a study participant (in medical research)? What roles if any do the concepts of self‐determination and self‐decision have in consent and informed consent in patient care and in informed consent in research on humans among the four countries of interest? What are the realities of research on human participants that require a new standard of informed consent, the reasonable volunteer standard, to be developed beyond the two standards in patient care, the professional standard, and the reasonable person standard? Counterpoint Arguments The following are counterpoint arguments that need to be appreciated to more fully understand the concepts that impact the thesis that ‘raw data’ should be open to the public to allow the opportunity of checking of the results of its associated scientific paper and for further analysis. De‐Identified (Anonymized) Raw Data A current approach to identifying (anonymizinig) raw data is based on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 (P.L.104‐191). HIPAA was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1996 to keep a person’s medical information private. In a research study, a person’s private medical information can become research data. HIPAA’s Privacy Rule allows a covered entity to de‐identify data by removing all 18 elements that could be used to identify the individual or the individual’s relatives, employers, or household members; these elements are enumerated in the Privacy Rule. The covered entity must also have no actual knowledge that the remaining information could be used alone or in combination with other information to identify the individual who is the subject of the information. Under this method, the identifiers that must be removed are the following: 1 Names. 2 All geographic subdivisions smaller than a state, including street address, city, county, precinct, ZIP Code, and their equivalent geographical codes, except for the initial three digits of a ZIP Code if, according to the current publicly available data from the Bureau of the Census: 2a. The geographic unit formed by combining all ZIP Codes with the same three initial digits contains more than 20,000 people. 2b. The initial three digits of a ZIP Code for all such geographic units containing 20,000 or fewer people are changed to 000. 3 All elements of dates (except year) for dates directly related to an individual, including birth date, admission date, discharge date, and date of death, and all ages over 89 and all elements of dates (including year) indicative of such age, except that such ages and elements may be aggregated into a single category of age 90 or older. 4 Telephone numbers. 5 Facsimile numbers. 6 Electronic mail addresses. 7 Social security numbers. 8 Medical record numbers. 9 Health plan beneficiary numbers. 10 Account numbers. 11 Certificate/license numbers. 12 Vehicle identifiers and serial numbers, including license plate numbers. 13 Device identifiers and serial numbers. 14 Web universal resource locators (URLs). 15 Internet protocol (IP) address numbers. 16 Biometric identifiers, including fingerprints and voiceprints. 17 Full‐face photographic images and any comparable images. 18 Any other unique identifying number, characteristic, or code, unless otherwise permitted by the Privacy Rule for re‐identification. Even though ‘raw data’ can be de‐identified (anonymized) so that there is no way to trace back the data to the study participant from which it was drawn, there are still questions whether the ‘de‐identified raw data’ can be given to other researchers or made public without the original study participant’s approval. It may be the case that this approval could be done at the start of any research study where the individual considering study participation would be counseled on what the process of de‐identification consists of and would be asked whether the participant would allow use of the data by other researchers or made available to the public in a de‐identified state. However, there may be questions of the study participants as to whether the data are truly de‐identified and untraceable back to the study participant since the participant would not be able to see the process actually being carried out in detail in all relevant circumstances. Using Raw Data in Context Simply being in possession of raw data is never enough to build on that data from a research perspective. Researchers need to understand the context of the scientific research study in which the data were collected. This research context includes (but is not limited to): (i) the scientific hypothesis of the research study, (ii) the inclusion and exclusion criteria selected by the research designers of the study to determine which study participants were included and which were excluded from the study, (iii) the methods used to collect the data and possibilities of errors in the data collection processes, and (iv) answers to questions regarding whether any data were excluded from the study data and why these data were excluded. Ownership Rights Over Data There are ownership rights over data. Ownership rights include court decision making related to the question which parties are to be considered as the owners of the data. Possible owners here include (but are not limited to) (i) the study sponsor whose only role was to fund that study, (ii) the principal investigator(s) who developed the scientific hypothesis, and (iii) individual study participants through special contracts made by individual participants who negotiate such contracts with study sponsors and principal investigators to share in the ownership of data. Examples of such data are participant sources of unique gene lines or unique cell lines to be used in future research. Objections to Data Sharing Finally, individual researchers may simply object to sharing data. A researcher’s arguments here may be simply stating that he or she has a right to fully analyze the data since the collection of the data was the researchers’ idea in the first place. These researchers may argue that they have the right to mine the data as fully as they can before deciding to make the data open to the public for others to analyze. Works Cited 1 Kaiser, J. ‘Making Clinical Data Widely Available.’Science 322.5899 (10 Oct. 2008): 217–8. 2 de Lusignan, S., J.F. Metsemakers, P. Houwink, V. Gunnarsdottir, and J. van der Lei. ‘Routinely Collected General Practice Data: Goldmines for Research? A Report of the European Federation for Medical Informatics Primary Care Informatics Working Group (EFMI PCIWG) from MIE2006, Maastricht, The Netherlands.’Informatics in Primary Care 14.3 (2006): 203–9. 3 Sim, I. ‘Human Studies Database Project’, CTSA Data Repositories Symposium (17 Oct. 2008). 23 Nov. 2010. 4 Sim, I., C.G. Chute, H. Lehmann, R. Nagarajan, M. Nahm, and R.H. Scheuermann. ‘Keeping Raw Data in Context.’Science 323.5915 (6 Feb. 2009): 713. 5 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, HIPAA Privacy Rule, Information for Researchers. 13 Nov. 2010. 6 Wilczynski, N.L., R.B. Haynes, and Hedges Team. ‘EMBASE Search Strategies for Identifying Methodologically Sound Diagnostic Studies for Use by Clinicians and Researchers.’BMC Medicine 29.3 (March 2005): 7. (shrink)

Dans cette communication, je me propose de mettre en avant que si la guerre est, il est vrai, le moyen licite qu'utilise les Etats pour acquerir et conserver leur droit ä l'etat de nature, eile est egalement et fondamentalement le ressort du passage de l'etat de nature ä l'etat civique, condition d'une pacification possible. De meme que la propension ä philosopher, ä batailler en faveur de sa philosophie et finalement en se rassemblant dans des camps qui s'opposent (...) ä mener une guerre ouverte, doit etre consideree comme "une des dispositions bienfaisantes et sages de la Nature, par laquelle eile cherche ä ecarter des hommes le grand malheur d'un corps vivant voue ä se corrompre", la guerre est, nous allons le voir, l'un des arrangements preparatoires que prend la Nature pour rendre la paix necessaire et l'un des moyens auquel eile recourt pour contraindre les Etats ä se donner une constitution et ä nouer des relations exterieures legales propres ä conduire ä la paix permanente, bref, une ruse de Tingenieuse et grande ouvriere" pour realiser son but: "faire naitre parmi les hommes, contre leur intention, l'harmonie du sein meme de leurs discordes.". (shrink)

Les personnes appelées à faire partie d'un comité national d'éthique sont choisies à raison de leurs connaissances pratiques d'un domaine de la recherche biomédicale, ou d'un secteur particulier de la vie sociale, ou d'une tradition philosophique ou spirituelle, – le théologien entrant évidemment dans cette troisième catégorie sans être pour autant le représentant attitré d'une Église. Le bon fonctionnement du comité requiert, comme première base éthique, un apprentissage de la communication entre ces différents experts et une grande attention aux (...) données techniques des questions à élucider. Chaque groupe d'experts aborde, en effet, les enjeux éthiques de ces questions du point de vue propre à leurs disciplines professionnelles ; cependant, à défaut d'intérêts ou de convergences idéologiques, des références communes à la dignité de la personne, aux droits de l'homme, au devoir moral, à la responsabilité, permettent de négocier des compromis prudentiels entre des valeurs opposées. Le théologien intervient dans ces débats, souvent de concert avec le philosophe, pour approfondir l'approche rationnelle des problèmes, soutenir l'irréductibilité de la personne, élargir le regard aux dimensions de l'humanité entière.Those called to participate in a national committee on ethics are cbosen on the basis of their practical knowledge in a field of biomedical researcb, or of a particular sector of social life, or of a philosophical or spiritual tradition. The theologian, wbo obviously belongs to this third category, is not necessarily a qualified representative of a Church. The smooth functioning of the committee requires, as its first ethical basis, an apprenticeship in communication between these different experts and witb great attention given to the technical aspects of the questions to be clarified. Each group of experts tackles the ethical stakes of these questions from their own professional disciplines point of view. However, in the absence of common interests or ideological convergencies, the references they share as regards human dignity, human rights, moral duty, and responsibility, permit the negociation of prudent compromises concerning contradictory values. It is at this point that theologians enter into the debate. They often work with philosophers in order to deepen a rational approach to the problems, to support the integrity of the person, and to broaden their perpective to encompass all of humanity. (shrink)

The development of collective beliefs via informational and reputational cascades represents a way of shortcircuiting the difficulties related to the collective action of ‘latent groups’ to ensure the promotion of their particular interests. This essay focuses on the protection of consumers, whose quality of the life has never been so high, despite the prevalence of hazardous products.Rationally ignorant individuals form their opinions by conforming to those of others; this can take two forms, either by consolidating their personal judgement or their (...) private information, or by pure conformist behaviour. It may even be that such individuals rarely hesitate, if necessary, to admit beliefs that they do not actually hold in order to avoid being ostracised by others. ‘Latent groups’ activists manipulate the process of formation of beliefs in order to bring about a predominant opinion on any given issue. Armed with the asset of the prevailing opinion, pressure can be exerted upon politicians in view of obtaining regulations and subsidies which would protect the ‘latent group’ of which they claim to be the representatives.This is the new face of collective action where the “politically correct” replaces physical violence or the strike. This way of shaping public opinion could have a beneficial outcome if it were not founded on erroneous information or led to a violation of individual rights due to regulation. However, this not the case. The very leitmotif of this method is, in fact, to bring about regulation which, by definition, violates private lives. In any case, it is dangerous because the manipulation of public opinion by these activists implies an intensive use of rhetoric, distorting the perception of risk, which in turn involves the circulation of misleading information in order to create a cascade modifying public opinion in favor of the proposed regulation, rather than informing the public on the potential risks and letting them insure freely against it if they judge to do so. But for the activist the end justifies the means. Thus, this manipulation of public opinion is a danger to the notion of modern democracy, already so sensitive to the pertaining to the majority.La formation des croyances par le biais des cascades d’information et de réputation est un moyen de courtcircuiter les difficultés liées à l’action collective des groupes latents pour assurer la promotion de leurs intérêts particuliers. Dans le cadre de cet essai est analysée la protection des consommateurs, dont la valeur de la vie est élevée, contre les produits à risque.Les individus rationnellement ignorants forment leurs opinions en se conformant aux croyances des autres, soit pour conforter leur jugement personnel ou leurs informations privées, soit par conformisme pur. Il se peut même que les individus n’hésitent pas, s’il le faut, à afficher de fausses croyances, pour ne pas être frappés d’ostracisme par les autres.Les activistes des “groupes latents” manipulent le processus de formation des croyances pour faire émerger une opinion majoritaire sur un problème spécifique. Grâce à cette opinion majoritaire ils vont pouvoir faire pression auprès des hommes politiques pour obtenir une réglementation et des subventions à leur propre profit dans le but de protéger le “groupe latent” dont ils prétendent être les représentants. Ce sont les nouvelles formes d’action collective où le politiquement correct remplace la violence physique ou le piquet de grève.Cette façon de former l’opinion publique pourrait avoir des conséquences bénéfiques si elle n’était pas fondée sur des informations erronées et si elle n’aboutissait pas à une violation des droits individuels par la réglementation. Or ce n’est pas le cas. Elle est faite justement pour faire émerger une réglementation qui par définition viole la vie privée des gens. Par ailleurs, elle est dangereuse parce que la manipulation de l’opinion publique par ces activistes implique un usage intensif de figures de rhétorique, de biais dans la perception des risques, de diffusion de fausses informations dans le but d’enclencher une cascade qui va modifier l’opinion publique en faveur de la réglementation et non pas dans le but d’éclairer le public sur les véritables risques encourus, la fin justifiant les moyens.Cette manipulation des croyances est alors un danger pour la démocratie politique contemporaine déjà si sensible à l’opinion majoritaire. (shrink)

ANGIE PEPPER | : This paper attempts to bring some clarity to the debate among sentientists, biocentrists, and ecocentrists on the issue of who or what can count as a candidate recipient of justice. I begin by examining the concept of justice and argue that the character of duties and entitlements of justice sets constraints on the types of entities that can be recipients of justice. Specifically, I contend that in order to be a recipient of justice, one must be (...) the bearer of enforceable moral claim rights. I then suggest that this has important implications for the dispute among sentientists, biocentrists, and ecocentrists. In brief, I show that sentientists cannot exclude nonsentient entities from the domain of justice merely by denying that they have “the right kind of interests,” and biocentrists and ecocentrists cannot move seamlessly from some feature of living things or ecosystems to entitlements of justice. I further argue that ultimately this disagreement on the bounds of justice bottoms out in a normative disagreement about which entities possess moral claim rights, and that the case for biotic or ecosystem rights has yet to be convincingly established. | : Le présent article vise à clarifier le débat parmi sentientistes, biocentristes et écocentristes autour de la question de qui ou de ce qui peut valoir comme un récipiendaire légitime de justice. Pour débuter, j’examine le concept de justice et soutiens que la nature des obligations et droits de la justice impose des contraintes sur les types d’entités pouvant être récipiendaires de justice. Plus particulièrement, je prétends que tout récipiendaire de justice doit être titulaire de droits de revendication morale applicables. Je propose ensuite que cette thèse a des conséquences importantes pour la querelle parmi les sentientistes, les biocentristes et les écocentristes. En bref, je démontre que les sentientistes ne peuvent exclure les êtres nonsentients du domaine de la justice simplement en niant qu’ils ont des « intérêts de la bonne sorte », alors que les biocentristes et écocentristes ne peuvent passer sans difficultés d’un aspect quelconque des êtres vivants ou des écosystèmes à des droits de justice. Enfin, je soutiens que ce désaccord sur les limites de la justice repose, en fin de compte, sur un désaccord d’ordre normatif à propos des entités possédant des droits de revendication morale, et que l’argument pour des droits propres aux êtres vivants ou aux écosystèmes n’a toujours pas été prouvé de manière convaincante. (shrink)

"Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) est l’un des principaux représentants de la première génération de l’École de Francfort. Il est reconnu comme l’un des plus grands philosophes du XXe siècle. En France, en particulier, son œuvre fait actuellement l’objet d’un regain d’intérêt indéniable. L’ouvrage Theodor W. Adorno. La domination de la nature propose à la fois une introduction à sa pensée et une actualisation de celle-ci au prisme des débats contemporains en écologie politique. Le thème de la domination de (...) la nature permet de tracer une transversale dans l’ensemble de la philosophie adornienne, des textes de jeunesse aux écrits de la maturité, tout en l’ouvrant aux enjeux de la crise écologique. La thèse principale du livre est que le motif de la domination de la nature permet de penser dans un cadre commun l’exploitation du travail, le patriarcat, le racisme, le spécisme et les diverses formes de destruction environnementale. La philosophie d’Adorno peut alors être lue comme une critique systématique des sociétés capitalistes. Elle nous aide à réinventer pour notre époque un sujet politique qui articule ensemble luttes sociales et luttes écologiques. Là où les modèles théoriques des deuxième et troisième générations de l’École de Francfort (la théorie de l’agir communicationnelle de Habermas et la théorie de la reconnaissance de Honneth) restent anthropocentrés et peu ouverts à la question écologique, le modèle adornien de critique sociale manifeste ainsi toute son actualité."--Résumé de l'éditeur. (shrink)

The notion of entrepreneurship developed by Israel Kirzner has applications far beyond the market process. Legal entrepreneurs are lawyers, activists, and other participants in the legal process who are alert to opportunities to alter legal rules, thereby benefiting themselves or their clients. Legal entrepreneurship creates a dynamic that can generate virtually continuous change in the structure of legal rights and duties. On the one hand, the notion of legal entrepreneurship is a testament to (...) the value of Kirzner’s project. But on the other, it creates a serious problem for Kirzner’s conception of welfare economics, which depends on the existence of a stable background of property rights. If the notion of entrepreneurship implies continual change in property rights, then the power of Kirznerian welfare economics is substantially curtailed.La notion d’esprit d’entreprise développée par Israel Kirzner a des applications qui vont bien au-delà du processus de marché. Les entrepreneurs juridiques sont les avocats, les activistes et autres participants au processus juridique qui ont conscience des opportunités de transformer les règles de droit, que ce soit pour leur propre bénéfice ou pour celui de leurs clients. L’entrepreneuriat juridique crée une dynamique qui peut générer des changements presque continus dans la structure des droits légaux et des devoirs. D’une part, la notion d’entrepreneuriat juridique est un témoignage de la valeur du projet de Kirzner. Mais d’autre part, il crée un sérieux problème quant à sa conception de l’économie du bien-être de Kirzner qui repose sur l’existence d’une structure stable de droits de propriété. Si la notion d’esprit d’entreprise implique un changement continuel dans les droits de propriété, alors la portée de l’économie du bienêtre de Kirzner est substantiellement réduite. (shrink)

Cet article propose une synthèse théorique pour mieux appréhender la problématique du présent numéro de la Revue de Philosophie Économique qui, axé sur « Justice, intérêt et judiciarisation », donne une place de choix au droit. Le texte revisite quelques principes fondamentaux de l’utilitarisme, plusieurs théories de la justice et des libertés en vue d’examiner la « judiciarisation » comme processus exprimant justice et intérêt(s). En repartant de Jeremy Bentham, en passant par les options opposées de John (...) Rawls et de Friedrich Hayek notamment, des tensions sont mises au jour au sein de la triade de concepts. En abordant le « réalisme » juridique, notamment chez Richard Posner, il apparaît combien la perspective socio-économique nourrit la judiciarisation, qui influence en retour les interactions sociales. L’enjeu du cadre civilisationnel est souligné sur le cas japonais, qui montre la pertinence de ressaisir ces concepts en contexte. Toile de fond, ce texte sert à aborder les articles subséquents du numéro, focalisés sur des applications pratiques de la philosophie économique. (shrink)

Deux ques t ions impor tantes sont rarement posées à propos de l’introduction possible de Quotas Individuels Transférables dans les pêcheries : Pourquoi n’y a-t-il que deux pays dans le monde, l’Islande et la Nouvelle Zélande, qui ont introduit un système compréhensible de QIT dans leurs pêcheries? et : qui s’occupe de la privatisation des biens d’accès libre? L’expérience de l’Islande peut donner quelques réponses. Dans une première partie, l’évolution du système de QIT en Islande entre 1975 et 2000 est (...) décrite comme un processus difficile de marchandage. D’une part les coûts de marchandage furent abaissés par la crainte répandue de la disparition des stocks de poisson, et par la relative homogénéité dans les pêcheries pélagiques. D’autre part ces coûts furent augmentés, par l’hétérogénéité dans les pêcheries démersales, avec des différences immenses entre les propriétaires de petits bateaux et ceux de grands chalutiers, ainsi que des différences entre les régions. Dans la seconde partie, est décrite la nature du système de QIT: alors que ceux qui détiennent des QIT jouissent de droits d’extraction plutôt que de la propriété, l’introduction du système de QIT équivaut à clôturer partiellement les stocks de poisson dans les eaux d’Islande, résolvant ainsi la plupart des problèmes associés à la “tragédie des communs”. Le système a plutôt bien opéré mis à part quelques problèmes subsistants, en particulier le statut légal incertain des QIT et les prises de premier choix. La troisième partie décrit les controverses actuelles au sujet du système des QIT. Nous démontrons que le seul moyen de rendre l’introduction de ce système acceptable pour les propriétaires d’un capital de pêche était d’allouer des quotas sur la base de l’histoire des prises, et qu’une taxe spéciale sur la location des ressources serait injuste car elle frapperait ceux qui ont choisi de rester dans les pêcheries et non ceux qui ont été mis à l’écart.Two important questions are rarely asked about the possible introduction of ITQs in fisheries: Why are there only two countries in the world, Iceland and New Zealand, which have introduced a comprehensive ITQ system into their fisheries? and: Who cares whether the commons is privatized? The experience in Iceland may provide some answers. In Part 1, the evolution of the ITQ system in Iceland in 1975-2000 is described as a difficult process of bargaining. Costs of bargaining were lowered by the widespread fear of the collapse of the fish stocks, and by the relative homogeneity in the pelagic fisheries. Those costs were increased, on the other hand, by the heterogeneity in the demersal fisheries, with vast differences between owners of small boats and large trawlers, and also between regions. In Part II, the nature of the ITQ system is described: while those who hold ITQs enjoy rights of extraction rather than property, the introduction of the ITQ system amounts to the partial enclosure of the fish stocks in Icelandic waters, solving most of the problems associated with the “tragedy of the commons”. The system has performed quite well although some problems remain, in particular the uncertain legal status of the ITQs and high-grading. In Part III, current controversies about the ITQ system are described. It is argued that the only way to make the introduction of the system acceptable to owners of fishing capital was to allocate quotas on the basis of catch history, and that a special resource rent tax would be unjust, since it would hit those who chose to remain in the fisheries, not those who were bought out. (shrink)

The paper suggests that Bastiat’s theory of interests, harmony, and the State is rooted in a particular conception of Natural Right, in which the Lockeans and thomistic streams of thought meet. But it also suggests that Bastiat’s interpretation of the role that Providence plays in human events is not able to give a sustainable theory of liberal order. The paper also considers the criticisms to Bastiat’s economic and political theory coming from exponents of classical liberalism, from the Austrians, and from (...) Catholic thinkers of that time, such as L. Taparelli d’Azeglio and M. Liberatore.The conclusion is that although the economic theory of Bastiat is by now obsolete from the conceptual point of view, his political theory and his criticism of the state do remain extraordinarily topical.Cet article suggère que les théories des intérêts, de l’harmonie et de l’Etat de Bastiat sont ancrées dans une conception particulière du droit naturel au confluent des pensées lockéenne et thomiste. Cependant, il suggère aussi que l’interprétation que donne Bastiat du rôle de la Providence dans les affaires humaines ne débouche pas sur une théorie recevable de l’ordre libéral. L’article examine aussi les critiques qu’adressent les partisans du libéralisme classique-tels que les économistes autrichiens, les penseurs catholiques de l’époque comme L. Taparelli d’Azeglio et M. Liberatore-à l’égard des théories économiques et politiques de Bastiat. L’article conclut que le caractère obsolète des théories de Bastiat d’un point de vue conceptuel ne remet pas en cause la singulière actualité de sa théorie politique et de sa critique de l’Etat. (shrink)

L’objet de cet article est d’éclairer les rapports qu’entretiennent le droit naturel et l’économie dans la pensée de F. Bastiat. On montre que le statut de la raison humaine occupe une place centrale dans cette articulation. On met également en évidence les tensions entre le mécanisme de répartition des droits de propriété soumis à une procédure de concurrence et le respect de la loi naturelle. A cet égard, F. Bastiat définit la liberté comme la capacité à utiliser la (...) raison.The aim of this paper is to throw a new light on the close relations between natural rights and economics in F. Bastiat’s thought. We show that the human reason status holds a central place in this articulation. We also underscore the problematic compatibility between the natural rights allocation mechanism based on a competition process and the natural law. We explain how F. Bastiat comes to grips with this tension. He proposes to define the notion of liberty as the faculty of using human reason. (shrink)

Alors que la diversité culturelle était considérée comme un frein au développement, à la démocratie et aux droits de l'homme, elle est aujourd'hui comprise comme leur ressource indispensable. Mais la diversité culturelle n'est pas une valeur en soi, elle ne peut couvrir n'importe quelle pratique et autoriser n'importe quel relativisme. La diversité culturelle est l'oeuvre des hommes et doit rester à leur service, dans la recherche des multiples faces de la dignité humaine: il ya protection mutuelle entre la diversité (...) et les droits de l'homme. Les droits culturels sont au centre de cette protection, car ils garantissent à chacun les droits et libertés d'exercer toute activité culturelle et d'accéder aux ressources qui sont nécessaires pour vivre, tout au long de sa vie, son processus d'identification jamais achevé. Mais la légitimité, entre universalité et diversité, est délicate: comment assurer la liberté de critique et en même temps le respect des oeuvres, qu'il s'agisse de patrimoines, de traditions, de modes de vie?While cultural diversity was seen as an obstacle to development, democracy and human rights, it is now understood as their indispensable resource. But diversity is not a value in itself, it can not cover any practice and authorize any relativism. Cultural diversity is the work of men and must remain in their service, in the search for multifaceted human dignity: there is mutual protection between diversity and human rights. Cultural rights are at the center of this protection because they guarantee to everyone the rights and freedoms to engage in any cultural activity and access to resources that are necessary for life, throughout his life, never identification process completed. But legitimacy, between universality and diversity is tricky: how to ensure freedom of criticism and at the same time respect for the works, whether heritage, traditions, ways of life? (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

The phenomenon of Public Interest Litigation [PIL] is a judicially crafted one and primarily consists of the constitutional court’s expansion of fundamental rights on the one hand, and procedural innovations to create better opportunities for disadvantaged groups to gain access to the legal system on the other. It has created a renewed conception of justice, and has enabled the court to augment and validate its own authority as the “guardian” of the public welfare, and as the constitutionally (...) appointed branch of the state to enforce the rights of the “public”. PIL at one level appears to have enabled the justice system and laws to define and shape social and political interactions and to channelize democratic pressures for gaining a response from the state. But it has also been a process by which law and justice emerge from social and political interaction. This new interaction between the realm of judicial decision making and state governance has created adjustments and adaptations and the creation of new legal acts, as well as systemic tensions and conflicts. The paper concludes by looking at broader questions that PIL generates for processes of civic participation, representative democracy and democratic polity under the constitution. (shrink)

Cette section décrit comment le vouloir se porte sur un objet extérieur, c’est-à-dire s’intuitionne dans son produit tout en s’en distinguant. Comment s’effectue le passage du subjectif dans l’objectif si, conformément au principe du système, agir et intuitionner ne font qu’un ? Est-ce une limite de l’idéalisme que de ne concevoir l’action que comme une intuition ou ce point de vue nous offre-t-il de nouvelles ressources pour penser ensemble la liberté de la volonté et sa nécessaire phénoménalisation ? La (...) réflexion sur le droit et l’histoire montre que l’idéalisme transcendantal ne peut garantir l’efficacité de notre activité pratique qu’en faisant de la nature l’élément inconscient qui permet aux libertés de s’objectiver, c’est-à-dire de s’éduquer mutuellement.This section describes how the will goes to an external object, or intuits itself in its product while distinguishing itself from it. How is made the passage of the subjective in the objective if, according to the principle of the system, acting and having an intuition make one ? Is it a limit of the schellingian idealism to conceive action as an intuition or does this point of view offer us new resources to think together freedom of the will and its necessary phenomenalisation ? The reflection on right and history shows that the transcendental idealism can warrant the efficiency of our practical activity only by making nature the unconscious element which allows freedoms to objectify themselves, that is to educate themselves mutually. (shrink)

This paper brings about a conversation between Schumpeterian and Polanyian perspectives on markets and their central role in the capitalist economy. For Schumpeter, markets were critical to the process of selftransformation of economic activity, but in his vision, markets as such were largely taken for granted. Markets enabled the introduction of new processes and products equally as well as rendering economic activities obsolete, with the entrepreneur and firm as agents of change, generating new combinations of activities and driven by the (...) creative power of knowledge. Innovation and markets are jointly the engines of endogenous growth. For Karl Polanyi, by contrast, although markets were the central feature of the capitalist economy from the beginning of the nineteenth century, his main interest is the constant impulse for markets as institutions to expand into every aspect of social life and the countermovement of regulation to restrain what he sees as their essentially destructive nature. His focus is therefore on markets as instituted economic processes, driven by the double movement of regulation and de-regulation. He scarcely considers innovation in production or consumption, concentrating on institutions of exchange and distribution. The paper explores the two perspectives in order to ask the question that their confrontation raises: What is the relation between intra-market endogenous change and marketframework institutional change? To test out each perspective, a schematic “long-duration” empirical account of the United Kingdom food distribution markets is subjected to a Schumpeterian and Polanyian reading, and each is exposed for complementary deficits. A broader explanatory framework is sketched that proposes analysis of innovation in market institutions--especially processes exchange and distribution-- in combination with innovation in production and consumption. It is suggested that to explore the constant change of capitalist economies, these four economic domains each involve different orders of innovation and transformation that have complex feedbacks and interactions with each other. Rather than according primacy to one or other order of change, we require a complex causal account embracing multiple instituted economic processes.Cet article discute de la vision des marchés et de leur rôle central dans l’économie capitaliste selon Schumpeter et Polanyi. Pour Schumpeter, les marchés sont essentiels au processus d’auto transformation de l’activité économique, mais dans son approche il présuppose l’existence des marchés. Les marchés permettent l’introduction de nouveaux processus et produits et rendent en même temps les activités économiques obsolètes. Les marchés, avec l’entrepreneur et la firme comme agents du changement, créent de nouvelles combinaisons d’activités et sont dynamisés par le pouvoir créatif de la connaissance. L’innovation et les marchés sont conjointement les moteurs de la croissance endogène. Chez Karl Polanyi, en revanche, bien que les marchés soient un élément central de l’économie capitaliste dès le début du 19ème siècle, l’attention se porte sur le mouvement permament des marchés-institutions à s’étendre à tous les domaines de la vie sociale ainsi que sur le contre-mouvement de la régulation à limiter ce que Polanyi considère comme la nature destructrice des marchés. Son interêt se porte ainsi aux marchés comme des processus économiques établis, conduits par un double mouvement de régulation et de dérégulation. Il ne considère que rarement l’innovation de production ou de consommation, et se concentre sur les institutions de l’échange et de la distribution.L’article explore les deux visions afin de sinterroger sur ce que la confrontation des approches soulève comme question: Quelle est la relation entre les changements endogènes intra marché et les changements institutionnels de la structure de marché? Pour tester chacune des visions, un compte-rendu empirique sur longue période de la distribution alimentaire au Royaume-Uni est soumis à une lecture Schumpeterienne et Polanyienne.Un cadre explicatif plus large est esquissé et suggère une analyse de l’innovation des institutions de marché - particulièrement des processus d’échange et de distribution - conjointement à l’innovation de production et de consommation. Il est suggéré que pour analyser le changement permanent des économies capitalistes, il faut considérer les ordres d’innovation et de transformation de ces quatres domaines économiques qui connaissent des “effets de retour” ainsi des interactions. Au lieu d’accorder la primauté à un des ordres de changement, il est nécessaire de rendre compte d’une causalité complexe qui prend en compte des processus économiques multiples. (shrink)

Olympe de Gouges (Montauban 1748 - Paris 1793) is best known as the author of the Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne of 1791. De Gouges' intellectual contribution and political commitment, however, encompassed a broader field than just gender relations and the assertion of women's civil and political rights. De Gouges in fact publicly intervened on many of the central issues of the political and social context of the French Revolution, including public health, social (...) policies, voting by head or by order, the execution of the king, divorce and, as we shall see in detail in the following pages, slavery and the slave trade. In the paper, I first reconstruct the context of de Gouges' production, with a focus on the institution of slavery in revolutionary France (§ 1). I then dwell on the political function of theatre at the time of the Revolution and trace the controversial events that marked the staging of L'esclavage des noirs (§ 2). I intend to show, more specifically, how de Gouges' reflection on the theme of slavery makes her an extraordinary interpreter of the spirit of the Enlightenment. Indeed, in it, she demystifies the supposed naturalness of existing inequalities and shows how, on the contrary, they are the result of historical injustices aimed at protecting specific interests and maintaining privileges. I then highlight de Gouges' originality within the philosophical paradigm of natural law. Compared to thinkers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, de Gouges is distinguished by the consistency of purpose with which she makes use of natural law. Indeed, de Gouges' reference to natural law always has emancipatory intentions and is never aimed at justifying existing inequalities (§ 4). Finally, I propose an interpretation according to which de Gouges is an advocate of a particular type of universalism, an anti-essentialist universalism that takes its starting point from concrete situations of injustice and inequality rather than from general and abstract principles, and which I will suggest we call ‘universalism of differences’ (§ 5). (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of rights, and their implications for the ethics of nursing. A right is seen as an entitlement which is justified on moral and/or legal grounds, and which may take the form of a right of action or a right of recipience, or both; in either case, correlative duties are generally imposed on others. Some of the conflicts which can occur among two or more conflicting rights are examined through three hypothetical scenarios, (...) and approaches to their resolution are suggested. The question of whether nurses, as nurses, possess rights is then considered, and it is suggested that they do not. In conclusion, it is argued that, if rights are to be a helpful concept, they must be carefully defined and analysed, and their relationship to one another, and to duties, must be clarified. Cet article étudie la nature des droits et leur implications pour l'éthique des soins infirmiers. Un droit reste sur des bases morales et légales et peut prendre la forme d'un droit d'action ou d'un droit de récipience ou des deux formes ensembles. En chaque instant, des devoirs corrélatifs sont normalement imposés à d'autres personnes. Quelques uns des conflits qui peuvent arriver entre deux (ou plusieurs) droits opposés sont considérés ici par trois possibilités hypothétiques et des possibilités de résoudre les problèmes sont proposées. Enfin, la question est considérée si les infirmiers/ères possèdent des droits en tels qu'infirmiers/ères, et il est proposé qu'ils/elles ne les possèdent pas. En conclusion, il est proposé que pour les droits d'être utiles, ils doivent être bien définis et analysés et les relations entre eux et envers les devoirs doivent être bien claires. Dieser Artikel erforscht des Wesen der Rechte und deren Auswirkungen in der Krankenpflegeethik. Ein Recht hat moralische oder legale Gründe und nimmt die Form entweder eines Rechtes der Aktion oder eines Rechtes des Empfanges, oder beider Arten. In allen Fällen sind entsprechende Pflichten anderen aufgelegt. Einige Konflikte, die unter zwei (oder mehreren) Rechten entstehen können, sind hier untersucht an Hilfe von drei hypothetischen Szenarien. Möglichkeiten für die Lösung der Probleme sind vorgeschlagen. Anschliessend wird die Frage, ob das Krankenpflegepersonal Rechte hat - als Personal - betrachtet, und es ist vorgeschlagen, dass solche Rechte nicht bestehen. Zum Abschluss wird vorgeschlagen dass Rechte hilfreich sind wenn sie sorgfältig analysiert und festgelegt sind und wenn deren Beziehung zu einander und zu Pflechten klar ist. (shrink)

« L’anarchie », comme en témoigne l’omniprésence du qualificatif « anarchique » dans De l’absurdité sur des échasses, est essentielle pour comprendre le chemin argumentatif développé dans la critique benthamienne des droits de l’homme. C’est seulement à partir d’elle qu’apparaissent clairement les différents pans de cette critique, mais surtout son ordre et son sens déterminés par ce qui vaut comme le fondement de toute la critique, la théorie des fictions. Une fois reconnue l’importance de ce fondement, alors la (...) continuité et la systématicité de la critique comme la propension dévastatrice de cette argumentation se déploient entièrement, et devient cette « machine de guerre » contre les droits de l’homme. « L’anarchie » est bien le fil directeur de la critique, en tant qu’elle est le moyen et la fin même de la Déclaration des droits de l’homme pour Bentham. (shrink)

L’intérêt général se présente comme une position de surplomb prenant le point de vue de la société et des exigences de rationalisation supposées la structurer. Nous nous proposons d’examiner trois options différentes concernant la nature et la détermination de cet intérêt en suivant, par facilité, une démarche chronologique qui, en réalité, se rapporte à des distinctions conceptuelles et thétiques de premier plan. L’approche du physiocrate, Lemercier de La Rivière dégage un intérêt général comme simple épiphénomène de (...) l’intérêt des membres de la société qui cherchent tous à voir leurs gains individuels maximisés. L’approche de Saint-Simon, étudiée ensuite, renverse celle-ci car, pour ce dernier, les droits des individus dépendent entièrement de leur fonction sociale dans le système industriel de telle sorte que le seul intérêt commun des individus est leur intérêt d’industriel qui converge dans une coopération universelle, de telle sorte que l’intérêt général assumé par l’État exprime les exigences générales de l’industrie, c.-à-d. de la production et de la distribution optimale des ressources dans tout le corps de la société. Enfin, l’approche de Léon Bourgeois permet d’articuler une thèse basée sur les droits et la protection des individus avec une thèse fondée sur la promotion d’intérêts sociaux irréductibles aux intérêts individuels. L’intérêt général incarné par l’État vise alors à réinscrire l’individu dans les exigences et les obligations civiques notamment par des devoirs comme celui de payer l’impôt. (shrink)

Le présent article propose de faire le point sur la façon dont le législateur français appréhende le conflit d’intérêts dans le milieu sanitaire, partagé entre droit commun et déontologie, au moment même où des scandales médiatiques l’obligent à encadrer la profession médicale. Le problème du débat juridique français est de se concentrer sur la définition essentialiste du conflit d’intérêts, alors qu’une approche pragmatique semblerait plus appropriée pour le qualifier pénalement. L’expérience française que nous relatons ici est riche d’enseignement (...) class='Hi'>pour d’autres États. Entre déontologie et droit normatif, ce débat montre les limites du langage juridique et nous éclaire sur la bonne méthode à appliquer pour traiter les conflits d’intérêts. (shrink)

PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN RIGHTS: HUMAN RIGHTS IN LIGHT OF THEIR INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION Summary The book consists of two main parts: in the first, on the basis of an analysis of international law, elements of the contemporary conception of human rights and its positive legal protection are identified; in the second - in light of the first part -a philosophical theory of law based on the tradition leading from Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas is constructed. The (...) conclusion contains an application of the results of the analysis conducted in the second part. The first part comprises four chapters. The first aims at revealing characteristics of human rights on the basis of an analysis of historical conditioning of the inter-national law of human rights and its development. The historical context displays the practical, vindicative, and critical character of the positive legal protection of human rights. Moreover, the process of change of positive human rights law is distinguished from the process of change of human rights as such. In the second chapter the content of human rights - a topic which is only auxiliary to the conducted analysis - is discussed. Basic typology and catalogues of rights proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and protected in the International Covenants of Human Rights are presented. The review of the content of rights aims at a more precise limitation of the field of research. The examination shows a diversity of rights which poses a serious challenge to the coherence of every philosophical theory of human rights. In the third chapter, central in the first part, international law is analyzed with regard to the characteristics of rights and the foundations of them. The analysis of documents shows a number of solutions referring to the anthropological foundations of rights. The inherent dignity of the human person is the source of all human rights. Each human being is recognized as free, and endowed with both reason and conscience. In the propounded conception of man individuals are not rivals but create a community which is a condition for their development. International law characterizes the rights as universal, inherent, inalienable and inviolable. The reconstructed conception also comprises the following basic elements: on the level of the structure of rights, a recognition of their equality, interdependence, and comprehensiveness; in the grounding of these rights, a recognition of the anthropological foundations of law; in the conception of positive law, a recognition of the secondariness of the positive law of human rights to human rights themselves, and a recognition of human rights and justice as the basis for legal order; in the conception of state, a recognition of the well-being of the individual as the fundamental aim of actions undertaken by political institutions, and recogni¬tion of rights which form an impassable boundary to the power of the state, includ¬ing its legislative actions. The characterization of the international legal paradigm serving for the under¬standing of human rights is supplemented by analyses of the structure of their posi¬tive legal protection. Various meanings of the terms "right" and "freedom" are distinguished. Subjective right, as basic structure of the positive legal protection of human rights, is understood as a complex relation formed by various legal situations of the subject of a right which create a functional whole in respect of the subordi-nation of human person to its good. Subordinating person to a good proper for it, expressed usually in a proclamatory norm, is the central element of particular rights around which further elements aiming at the realization of this good are built. In the second part of the book a philosophical theory is developed which allows for the location of a coherent foundation for the presented characterization of human rights and their positive legal protection. This part consists of two chapters. The first includes a review of some - not entirely satisfactory - means of founding of human rights; the second presents philosophical conceptions of law and man which may form a basis for the constructed theory. The review of arguments contained in the first chapter does not aim at a detailed analysis of various specific ways of argumentation encountered in works on this subject but rather at a concise presentation of the main possible lines of argumentation. These analyses also serve to emphasize the positive solutions which are pro¬posed later and to underscore the explanatory power of the elaborated theory. This theory, retaining accurate intuitions contained in the presented types of argumenta¬tion, helps in avoiding their consequences which are difficult to reconcile with the reconstructed paradigm of human rights. Efforts to base human rights on the norms of international law rightly take into account the necessity of determining the content of the rights and their positive legal protection as a means for the realization of man's good. These attempts, how¬ever, do not properly take into account the inherent character of human rights, which are independent of positive law and provide grounds for applying specific legislative measures and not others. Founding human rights on freedom accurately points at the freedom of an indi¬vidual as a constitutive element of some rights; however, absolutization of freedom leads, to a loss of an important element of the contemporary paradigm of under¬standing human rights. This foundation undermines recognition of the fact that human rights may set limits to both the freedom of others and the freedom of the subject of rights itself. Additionally, attempts at the so-called axiological justification of human rights are discussed. This type of justification has a few variants depending on the as¬sumed conception of value. Subjectivistic conceptions have similar advantages and disadvantages to the conceptions basing human rights on freedom; objectivistic conceptions while providing for the universality of human rights place, the fundamental aim of human rights protection beyond the individual human being - in the idealistically existing world of values; finally, conceptions rooting values and human rights in culture, while accurately noting that human rights are learned through the medium of culture, place the source of human rights beyond a concrete individual - in culture and processes which take place in it - which leads to difficulties in finding a basis for the universality of rights. Furthermore, attempts to ground human rights in specific characteristics of the human being are presented. This type of approach points to an important problem of dependence of the content of rights on what man is. However, recognition of specific characteristics of a human being as an ontic foundation of the existence of rights poses a danger to their universality since one has to accept that it is not enough to be a man to be a subject of rights, but a man possessing specific charac¬teristics. The second chapter aims at outlining solutions worked out by Saint Thomas Aquinas. For a fuller understanding of his propositions selected elements of Plato's and Aristotle's philosophy are presented. It was them who formulated the founda¬tions for reflection on law and justice in the ontological context. A qualification is made that Stoicism is not be analysed in depth. Although Thomas' concept of law was undoubtedly developed under the influence of the Stoic doctrine as well, it is not in this that one should look for the tools to understand the ontic foundations of human rights and law in general since the Stoic moral philosophy and philosophy of law were developed in the context of a theory of being which assumed monistic and pantheistic premises as foundations, leading to the recognition of a total subor¬dination of the human individual to a larger unity of which man is only a part. The analysis of Plato's and Aristotle's texts concentrates on problems of justice. Plato seems to be the first philosopher who reflected on the formula basic in the history of European thought: to render to each his due. It appears that justice as both a characteristic of man and his acts is understood in the perspective of that which is just, that which is a good for another man - the recipient of the act. The basis for determining what is just is the relation of correspondence between some¬one and something. While in the case of Plato this relation is based on something beyond its terms, namely on ideas, in the case of Aristotle the relation occurs on account of the elements of the relation itself. Something is just when it contributes to the develop¬ment of the recipient of an act realizing that which is just. At the same time, the realization of that which is just is a good for the agent. In the analysis of the just two types of relation are revealed: the relation of due-to-recipient occurring on account of the compatibility of that which is due, with the recipient of the act; and - a "superstructure" - a relation of obligation-of-subject occurring on account of the compatibility of the acting subject with the thing which should be done. The basis for being that which is due is formed by various potentialities of development of man - the recipient of agency; the basis of being that which is an obligation is the possibility of development of the subject of action. Aristotle distinguishes various types of freedom and points to the necessity of taking them into account in the discussion of justice. Among other things, as the core of man's freedom, he considers life for its own sake, which can be seen as his expression of the basic indices of the autotelic character of man - which is funda¬mental for later conceptions of dignity. The freedom which is described by him is not, however, inherent and inalienable; being free is conditioned by a factual possi¬bility of undertaking actions, which are not solely means to the realization of aims set by others. Thomas Aquinas takes over the Aristotelian research perspective both in his conception of man and of law. At the same time, however, he significantly enriches it. In anthropology he develops a conception of personal being. Drawing upon his distinction between existence ("that something is") and essence ("what something is"), he sees the basis for being a person in the dignity of personal being which is a certain way of existence of a rational being more perfect than that of non-personal beings. The person is a being which, by virtue of its act of existence, is individual¬ized in a specific way. It is an aim in itself. Expressing it in a negative way, one may say that it does not exist as a means for the realization of the aims of others and, in this sense, that it is free. As distinct from Aristotelian conclusions, being a person is not conditioned by the specific actions of a being. Dignity is inherent, based on that which is the foundation of the factual existence of every rational being. Although freedom requires that a being is rational, dignity still encompasses all being, all its properties and potentialities. Thus an act conforming with dignity has to take into account a whole human being. Among different types of that which is just, ius, the first place, from the point of view of understanding law, falls to "the just thing itself ("ipsa res justa"), which is right in the full meaning of the word. On the one hand, it is that which is due; on the other hand, it determines the way of acting in the utmost degree, since the course of every act is determined in the fullest extent by its aim. The content of ius may be determined both by elements independent of free decisions - ius naturale - and by free decisions taking into account the state of things - ius positivum. Recognition of the objective structure of being as the basis of law does not entail that it is possible or desirable to determine unequivocally "the only right" patterns of conduct. This concept is very well justified within the system proposed by Saint Thomas. Individualization of being is a significant element of the develop¬ment of a person as a person. It is attained by the realization of individual aims which are not unequivocally determined by circumstances and the nature common to all people. By virtue of free choices made in the sphere of that which is not by its nature unjust, the object of action becomes ius. Since in the realization of the person the individualization of human being is central, Aquinas clearly sees the need for the protection of the sphere of "dominion of will". This sphere itself constitutes ius naturale, something which is due to man independently of the acts of will. Therefore "law should forbid nothing which is not unjust" ("nihil debet lege prohiberi quod licite fieri potest", In 3 Sent., dist. 40, q. I, a. 1, 3). Besides the relation of due-to-recipient, ius also includes the relation of obligation-of-subject which is superimposed on the relation of due-to-recipient. As far as the ontic foundations of obligation are concerned, in explaining why man is subordinated to realization of the good of others, Aquinas generally follows Aristotle in accepting that this basis is the subordination to moral good - to actions conforming with the learned truth about reality. Aquinas' systemic solutions allow, however, to reach deeper and understand why moral development is also a development of the whole human being. This was difficult within Aristotle's system, since he was reluc¬tant to decide whether precedence should be given to intellectual or moral develop¬ment. The inclination to realise good of another appears to be a transcendental characteristic of being, based on its very existence. Morality understood as rational and free subordination to realize the good of another is a specifically personal way of the realization of this inclination. Thus just actions contribute to the actualization of being in the aspect of its existence and therefore to the actualization of being as a whole. Thomas' conception of natural law (lex naturalis) as participation in eternal law (lex aeterna), offers possibilities for grasping that which is just as something which is basically accessible cognition, independently of Revelation and independently of faith in God, and at the same time as something based in eternal law, understood as a design of God's wisdom. Eternal law, embracing all particular actions, is not, from the human perspective, accessible cognition directly. It is enacted in the struc-ture of the created being and - in case of human beings - in free choices taking this structure into account. In the concluding remarks, the results obtained earlier are applied directly to the contemporary conception of human rights. Human rights are understood in the first place as "just things" - concrete goods of man; as that which is due because of subordination, based on dignity, to the personal development of man. That which is just is understood as a relational - actual or potential - state of things, which exists by virtue of existing relations. Evaluations referring to that which is right are true when respective relations of due-to-recipient take place; norms of conduct are true when respective relations of obligation-of-subject take place. Examples of the application of the sketched theory outside the field of human rights are also presented. Procedural consequences of the developed theory are shown, such as the discrimination of two types of legislative procedures which differ significantly in the structure of argumentation: the first aims at recognition of that which is just independently of the will of the legislator, and the second, at making individual or collective "projects" of development compatible. Finally the possibilities of applying the theory to the increasingly important problems of the protection of the environment and the "rights" of animals are mentioned. The central issue is a philosophical conception of man and his freedom and a conception of law. It is also indispensable to turn to a general theory of being. The search for a comprehensive theory of human rights requires attention to the Abso¬lute Being - God - as well. This is important for at least two reasons. First, a conception of the Absolute Being is integral to philosophy of the systemic type -of which the present book is a piece. A conception of the Absolute Being is signifi¬cant for understanding all being, including, first of all, man as a personal being. Second, every theory of human rights which does not comprise the problem of the Absolute may be questioned as to whether solutions adopted in it do not lead, in consequence, to eliminating God from the perspective of the understanding of law. It is desirable that a philosophical theory should deal with this problem directly. A theory which eliminates God from the perspective of the understanding of rights will be unacceptable for all those who, for philosophical reasons or relying on faith, consider God as the author of inherent rights. Nevertheless, a theoretical approach to rights from the perspective of the Absolute Being should only be a possible extension of a philosophical approach which bases rights on something which is cognizable independently of the acceptance of the existence of God so that the theory is also acceptable for those who reject the existence of God or suspend their judgment on this subject. The pursued theory should therefore contain, on the one hand, reference to natural, faith-independent foundations of human rights, but on the other hand, point to a possible extension accounting for the Absolute Being. The analyses contained in this chapter have undoubtedly some historical value since they are based on source texts. Nevertheless, the use of these texts and not critical works was dictated, first of all, by a conviction that analyses embrace a given theory in the aspect selected by the interests of the researcher. Therefore to find out what past thinkers say on the subject characterized in the first part it is simpler to reach to the sources than to adopt the existing critical works. The pre¬sented reconstruction of Aquinas' views on philosophy of law incorporates proposi¬tions of supplementing and developing some of the ideas undertaken by him. Obligation to act in this and not an other way arises because human actions are subordinated to the conformity, on the one hand, of aims realized by these actions and, on the one hand, the order of being determining that which is favourable to man or destroys him. The content of the order of being is, on the one hand, determined by the structure of being independent from man's will and, on the other, by free decisions of man. (shrink)

Les formes et enjeux d’une patrimonialisation post-industrielle débordent la traduction littérale d’un patrimoine entendu comme héritage. Elle nous invite à considérer les traces de l’industrie – en l’occurrence de la mine – comme inscrites dans un processus toujours inachevé de protection, d’interprétation et de création, dont les enjeux ne sont assurément pas réductibles à la passion du collectionneur, ni même à la mise en tourisme d’un patrimoine envisagé comme vitrine culturelle d’une région. À partir d’un travail de recherche-accompagnement réalisé en (...) 2002-2003 pour la région Nord – Pas-de-Calais, nous interrogeons les formes de communication et de patrimonialisation du bassin minier visant, notamment, à le faire reconnaître au titre d’un patrimoine mondial de l’UNESCO. La problématique d’une reconversion prend ici son sens dans des formes actives d’interprétation culturelle, notamment artistique et environnementale, qui participent d’une relecture de l’activité économique et sociale passée et présente.The questions raised by post-industrial museums and their different forms challenge the idea of “heritage” taken as meaning an “inheritance”. They are an invitation to consider the traces of an industry – mining in this case – as part of an unfinished process of conservation, interpretation and creation, which is driven by more than a passion for collection or even the need to attract the interest of tourists in a heritage collection intended as a showcase for a region. A research and accompaniment project in 2002-2003 for the Nord – Pas-de-Calais region was our starting point for this investigation into the forms of communication and the treatment of heritage in this mining area, which was aiming, in particular, to achieve recognition as a UNESCO world heritage. Here, the economic conversion issue takes on particular significance in the active forms of cultural – and especially artistic and environmental - interpretation that stem from new ways of envisaging economic and social activities past and present. (shrink)

Les rituels sont les synapses dans le tissu culturel d'où sont issus les éléments qui gouvernent la vie en commun et la communication des êtres humains. Il en est ainsi depuis le commencement de toute société humaine. Mais ce n'est qu'au XX siècle que se manifeste un véritable intérêt pour le fonctionnement et l'importance culturelle des rituels. Il s'agit d'un tournant inspiré par les théories des ethnologues, et placé sous le signe du cultural turn et du performative turn (...) du XX siècle. On se détourne alors des pratiques jusque-là en vigueur de l'abstraction et de la représentation. Or, depuis le «Banquet» de Platon et l'instauration de la «Cène» chrétienne, l'un des rituels les plus importants est l'acte socialement codé de l'ingestion de nourriture, le repas. Avec l'Eat art dont il est le concepteur, Daniel Spoerri a repris ce thème et contribué, par le truchement du rituel piège, à poser un regard neuf sur l'acte de manger au XXe siècle. Tel que Spoerri le met en scène, le «rituel piège» attire l'attention sur le rôle de fondation de sens que joue le rituel dans la culture. Mais il fait apparaître également que les rituels se transforment en pièges idéologiques où tombe quiconque les prend « à la lettre » ou comme des évidences. Spoerri est un des artistes du XX et de ce début du XXI siècle qui, par le biais de leur art, rendent compte de la double fonction du rituel dans la culture: d'une part, le rituel maintient en vie le processus culturel; d'autre part, il est producteur d'idéologies qui font passer des mythes politiques pour naturels, prenant au piège consommateur de nourriture et consommateur d'art tout à la fois.Rituals are the synapses in the cultural fabric which has produced the elements that govern the coexistence and communication of human beings. This is so since the beginning of human society. But it is only 20th century that demonstrates a genuine interest in the operation and cultural importance of rituals. It is a milestone inspired by the theories of ethnologists, and placed under the sign of the cultural turn and performative turn of the twentieth century. It then turns practices far into force of abstraction and representation. However, since the "Banquet" of Plato and the establishment of the "Last Supper" Christian, one of the most important rituals is the act socially coded ingestion of food, meal. Eat with the art of which he is the designer, Daniel Spoerri took up this theme and contributed through the ritual trap, put a new perspective on the act of eating in the twentieth century. Spoerri as the stages, the "ritual trap" draws attention to the role of Foundation meaningful ritual plays in the culture. But it also shows that the rituals are transformed into ideological traps which falls whoever takes "the letter" or as evidence. Spoerri is one of the artists of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, through their art, reflect the dual role of ritual in culture: on the one hand, the ritual keeps life the cultural process, on the other hand, it is a producer of ideologies that pass for political myths natural trapping consumer food and consumer of art at the same time. (shrink)

Christopher Hamel | : Dans cet article, je tente de montrer que la vertu civique repose sur le souci du bien commun, sans être exclusive des intérêts personnels. À cette fin, j’examine les travaux que Shelley Burtt a consacrés à l’élaboration d’une conception privée de la vertu civique. Burtt juge cette conception privée compatible avec les prémisses réalistes de la citoyenneté contemporaine, car contrairement à la conception publique de la vertu civique héritée des Anciens, la conception privée fonde la vertu (...) civique dans la poursuite des intérêts personnels. Je montre que les reproches que Burtt adresse à la conception publique sont équivoques et que leur clarification ne permet pas de défendre la conception privée de la vertu. Je soutiens ensuite qu’en voulant faire l’économie du souci du bien commun, la conception privée échoue à assurer ce pour quoi elle est conçue : la stabilité des institutions libres. Je montre enfin que dans son explicitation de la conception d’esprit privé, Burtt présuppose en fait l’esprit public qu’elle cherche à écarter. Je conclus que la vertu civique est nécessairement enracinée dans l’esprit public, et propose des éléments définitionnels de la vertu civique dans ses rapports au bien commun et à la satisfaction des intérêts personnels. | : I argue that while civic virtue relies on the concern for the common good, it is not exclusive from self-interests. To do so, I scrutinize Shelley Burtt’s works that elaborate a private conception of civic virtue. She takes it to be compatible with the premises of contemporary citizenship, because unlike the public conception of civic virtue, the private conception grounds civic virtue in the pursuit of self-interest. I show that Burtt’s criticisms to the public conception are equivocal and that their clarification does not stand up for the private conception of civic virtue. I then claim that by trying to do without the concern of the common good, the private conception fails to provide what it is conceived for: the stability of free institutions. Finally, I show that in her own exposition of the case for the private conception, Burtt presupposes indeed the public spirit that she wanted to dismiss. I conclude that civic virtue is necessarily grounded in public spirit and I propose some definitional elements of civic virtue in its connexion with the common good and the satisfaction of self-interests. (shrink)

À l'université de Paris au XIV e siècle, Jean de Jandun est un commentateur érudit des œuvres d'Averroès et a marqué un intérêt particulier à sa doctrine sur la quantification de la matière présente au livre I de son De substantia orbis. S'il reprend à la lettre les enseignements du commentateur sur les dimensions indéterminées, il tente de définir aussi de façon originale les principes ontologiques de ces dimensions en les intégrant à deux théories très discutées à l'époque: la (...) génération et l'individuation. Le commentaire de Jean de Jandun souligne une tendance à utiliser de plus en plus cette doctrine dans les domaines de la métaphysique et de la philosophie naturelle, mais révèle aussi un statut ontologique insoluble pour ces dimensions qui confirment la nature indéfinissable de la materia prima. At the University of Paris in the XIV th century, Jean de Jandun is an erudite commentator of the works of Averroès and marked a particular interest in his doctrine on the quantification of matter in book I of De substantia orbis. If he takes back literally the teachings of the commentator on the indefinite dimensions, he tries to define also in an original way the ontological principles of these dimensions by joining them into two very controversial theories: the generation and the individuation. The comment of Jean de Jandun underlines a tendency to use more and more this doctrine in the domains of the metaphysics and the natural philosophy but also reveals an insoluble ontological status for these dimensions which confirm the undefinable nature of materia prima. (shrink)

This article examines the process for the eviction of tenants, which offers landlords a swift path for obtaining an eviction order against their tenants, as a case study exposing the politics of procedure. It shows that the PET is but one stage in a longstanding battle waged between two interest groups—landlords and tenants—involving both substantive law and procedural law. But while the story of their conflict over substantive law, fought in the parliament through the regular legislative process, is well-known, the (...) story of the procedural amendments, despite their immense impact, remains shrouded in mystery and is told here for the first time. The reason for that, we argue, is that despite the vast impact of procedure on substantive right, many in the Israeli legal system mistakenly view civil procedure rules as highly technical and neutral directives for the day-to-day operation of the litigation process. The conclusion from such a view is that rulemaking should be left to expert legal technicians and court administrators and that transparency mechanisms or public participation are to be avoided as unnecessary due to the costs and burdens they impose on the rulemaking process. The article concludes with a call for overhauling the rulemaking process in Israel. We argue that the secretive and opaque process is anathema to democracy. Bearing in mind that procedural rules are inevitably imbued with substantive values and have an enormous effect on the substantive rights of the citizenry, the rulemaking process should be radically altered to enable all interested parties to take part in the process, making it far more transparent and subject to public scrutiny in all its stages. (shrink)

Rights of nature is an idea that has come of age. In recent years, a diverse range of countries and jurisdictions have adopted these norms, which involve granting legal rights to nature or natural objects, such as rivers, forests, or ecosystems. This book critically examines the idea of natural objects as right-holders, and analyses legal cases, policies, and philosophical issues relating to this development. -/- Drawing on contributions from a range of experts in the (...) field, Rights of Nature: A Re-examination investigates the potential for this innovative idea to revolutionize the concepts of rights, standing, and recognition as traditionally understood in many legal systems. Taking as its starting point Stone’s influential 1972 article ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’, the book examines the progress rights of nature have made since that time, by identifying central themes, unifying principles, and key distinctions in how rights of nature discourse has been operationalized in the disciplines of law, philosophy, and the social sciences. These themes and principles are illustrated through a wide variety of examples, including ecosystem services, indigenous thinking, and ecological restoration, demonstrating how the relationship between humanity and the natural world may be transforming. -/- Taking a philosophical, political, and legal perspective, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental law and policy, environmental ethics, and philosophy. (shrink)

What does it Mean to be Entitled? Philosophical Considerations and Ethical Scope of Law. It seems justified to affirm, on the basis of the spirit of the first article of the universal declaration of human rights of 1789, that man is, by nature, a being of law, that is- that is to say that he naturally enjoys different rights apart from all racial, political, ethnic, religious considerations, and among others. These include, for example, the rights to (...) life, health, security, expression, leisure, property, freedom of choice, debt, etc. They are called subjective rights. Therefore, the notion of “having rights” appears to be clear, clear and understandable without any ambiguity. It is obvious that man, thanks to his nature, has rights, which are inalienable, and capable of being easily mobilized by him. However, in society, the mobilization of all rights by individuals, regardless of their legitimacy, is not automatic or de facto guaranteed. In practice, it happens that the individual is not able to easily mobilize and enjoy all the different rights. For example, of course, the right to smoke is recognized for all adults, but smoking is not permitted in all public spaces, except those designed for this purpose. In fact, smoking in all public spaces is not a de facto recognized right. The individual therefore does not have the possibility of enjoying it without limit. Hence the following legitimate question: what does “being entitled” mean? In other words, what does it mean that man, by living in society, has rights? What then can be the philosophical considerations of the notion “to have a right”? Can the law have an ethical impact on society? If yes, what is its meaning? To answer these different questions, let it be permitted to affirm that “having any rights” presupposes that individuals are able to mobilize, fully enjoy and be able to claim or even claim these rights without hindrance. However, they can, in reality, only enjoy, claim or claim rights that are effectively recognized by society. It amounts to considering, in fact, that they can only mobilize and really enjoy those defined by society, that is to say objective rights. These then, it seems to us, are the different philosophical considerations of the notion of “having the right”. Here, the task will be to further develop the thesis thus presented from a perspective of the contextual approach. RÉSUMÉ. Il parait fondé d’affirmer, sur la base de l’esprit de l’article premier de la déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme de 1789, que l’homme est, par nature, un être de droit, c’est-à-dire qu’il jouit naturellement de différents droits en dehors de toutes considérations raciale, politique, ethnique, religieuse, et entre autres. Il s’agit par exemple des droits à la vie, à la santé, à la sécurité, à l’expression, aux loisirs, à la propriété, à la liberté de choix, à la créance, etc. Ils sont dits des droits subjectifs. Dès lors, la notion « avoir droits »[1] paraît être claire, nette et compréhensible sans aucune ambiguïté. Il est évident que l’homme, grâce à sa nature, possède des droits, qui sont inaliénables, et susceptibles d’être mobilisés aisément par celui-ci. Cependant, en société, la mobilisation de tous les droits par les individus, légitimes qu’ils soient, n’est pas automatique ou de facto garantie. En pratique, il arrive que l’individu ne soit pas en mesure de mobiliser et de jouir aisément de tous les différents droits. Par exemple[2], certes, le droit de fumer est reconnu à tout individu majeur, mais il n’est pas permis de fumer dans tous les espaces publics, sauf ceux aménagés à cet effet. En fait, fumer dans tous les espaces publics n’est pas de facto un droit reconnu. L’individu n’a donc pas la possibilité de jouir sans limite de celui-ci. D’où l’interrogation légitime suivante : qu’est-ce qu’« avoir droit »? En d’autres termes, que signifie que l’homme, en vivant en société, ait des droits? Quelle peuvent-être alors les considérations philosophiques de la notion « avoir droit »? Le droit peut-il avoir une portée éthique sur la société? Si oui, quel est son sens? Pour répondre à ces différentes questions, qu’il soit permis d’affirmer qu’« avoir droits » quelconques suppose que les individus soient en mesure de mobiliser, de jouir pleinement et de pouvoir réclamer voire revendiquer ces droits sans entrave. Or, ceux-ci ne peuvent, en réalité, jouir, réclamer ou revendiquer que des droits reconnus, de manière effective, par la société. Il revient à considérer, en fait, qu’ils ne peuvent mobiliser et jouir réellement que ceux définis par la société, c’est-à-dire les droits objectifs. Telles sont alors, nous semble-t-il, les différentes considérations philosophiques de la notion « avoir droit ». Ici, la tâche consistera à développer davantage la thèse ainsi présentée dans une perspective de l’approche contextuelle. Mots clés : Droit, avoir droit, considérations philosophiques, portée éthique. [1] Le choix arbitraire de mettre la notion « avoir droit » en guillemets se justifie par le fait que celle-ci constitue la base fondamentale sur laquelle sera bâtie la présente réflexion. Ainsi, sera-t-elle employée lorsque nous aurons recours à elle dans toutes les lignes qui vont suivre. [2] Cet exemple peut présenter, à notre avis, deux intérêts : l’un est qu’il permet de savoir que la validité et la légitimité d’un droit dépendent de la vision de la société, et l’autre, la reconnaissance d’un droit par la société n’implique pas automatiquement la reconnaissance d’un autre droit ou d’autres droits. Le droit de fumer n’est pas, en fait, celui de fumer dans tous les espaces publics. (shrink)

The general interest (by opposition to the common interest) presents itself as a position of overhang, taking the point of view of society and the requirements of rationalization supposed to structure it. We propose to examine three different options concerning the nature and the determination of this interest. We follow a chronological approach which, in fact, refers to essential conceptual distinctions. Lemercier de La Rivière’s approach shows general interest as a mere epiphenomenon of the interest of the members of (...) society who are all seeking to see their individual gains maximized. The approach of Saint-Simon overturned it because, for him, the rights of individuals depend entirely on their social function in the industrial system in such a way that the only common interest of individuals is their interest as member of the industrial society. The general interest assumed by the State expresses the general requirements of industry, i.e. the production and optimum distribution of resources throughout the whole body of society. Finally, Leon Bourgeois' approach allows to articulate a thesis based on the rights and protection of individuals with a thesis based on the promotion of social interests irreducible to individual interests. The general interest incarnated by the State aims to reinstate the individual in the requirements and the civic obligations in particular by duties like that of paying the tax. (shrink)

L’admiration de Paul Ricoeur pour Merleau-Ponty est connue, lui qui entendait donner à la Phénoménologie de la perception sa « contrepartie pratique » avec le premier tome de la Philosophie de la volonté, Le Volontaire et l’involontaire. Il faut d’emblée s’étonner que celui-ci n’ait pas reconnu la teneur pratique de la philosophie de son aîné, dont les diverses analyses au Collège de France, et en particulier l’intérêt marqué de Merleau-Ponty pour la pensée marxiste comme philosophie de l’homme (...) charnel, et le motif naturaliste de l’être agissant et souffrant à partir de 1956, font état. Car c’est bien depuis ce motif que Ricoeur, en 2004, expose le parcours de la reconnaissance : de l’homme agissant et souffrant, à l’homme capable. L’enjeu, nous semble-t-il alors, de ces deux philosophies en leur dimension pratique se résume aisément par les exigences formulées par Paul Ricoeur dans l’ouvrage Soi-même comme un autre, en particulier lorsque celui-ci se donne pour but de « déterminer les traits nouveaux de l’ipséité correspondant à la pratique politique » – détermination du Soi agent qui se dessine, au dire même de l’auteur, à la croisée d’une phénoménologie de l’agir et d’une ontologie du Soi. En effet, comme le souligne Ricoeur, l’effacement paradoxal de la question de l’ipséité dans la philosophie morale kantienne, entre autres, s’explique par l’absence d’une telle théorie de l’action. En bref, le « Je veux » analysé en 1950 par Ricoeur s’ancre dans un « Je peux », qui ne se limite jamais au seul plan spatial chez Merleau-Ponty. Ainsi, à la figure phénoménologique de nos expériences de la passivité correspond la catégorie ontologique de l’altérité, mentionnée par l’expression du Visible et de l’invisible reprise en titre de cet article et dont l’attribution à Ricoeur ne choquerait pas.Paul Ricoeur’s admiration for Merleau-Ponty is well-known given that he presented his “practical counterpart” to the Phenomenology of Perception in the form of his Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. One is immediately surprised that this is not recognized as the practical content of his predecessor’s philosophy given the diverse analyses at the Collège de France of which, in particular, the marked interest Merleau-Ponty had in Marxist thought as the philosophy of the fleshly human being, as well as the naturalist motif of the active and suffering being beginning in 1956, are part. For, it is due to this motif that Ricoeur, in 2004, presents the trajectory of recognition: from the active and suffering human being to the capable human being. As we see them, the stakes in these two philosophies, as far as their practical dimensions are concerned, are easily summarized by the requirements Paul Ricoeur formulated in his work, Oneself as Another. This is particularly the case given that this text has for its aim, “determining the new traits of individual identity which correspond to practical politics” – the determination of Self as a self-designing agent, which, according to the author, lies at the intersection of a phenomenology of action and an ontology of the Self. In fact, as Ricoeur himself underlines, the paradoxical effacement of the question of ipseity in Kantian moral philosophy, among others, is explained by the absence of just such a theory of action. Briefly, the “I want” analysis by Ricoeur in 1950 is anchored in the “I can,” which is never limited to the single spatial outline we find in Merleau-Ponty. Thus, to the phenomenological figure of our experiences of passivity correspond the ontological category of alterity, as mentioned in the phrase from The Visible and the Invisible taken up in the title of this article and which it would not be shocking to attribute to Ricoeur.È ben nota l’ammirazione di Paul Ricoeur per Merleau-Ponty: col primo tomo della Philosophie de la volonté, intitolato Le Volontaire et l’involontaire, Paul Ricoeur intendeva offrire alla Fenomenologia della percezione una vera e propria “contropartita pratica”. Ma è singolare il fatto che Ricoeur non abbia riconosciuto il risvolto pratico presente nella filosofia del suo predecessore, risvolto ampiamente attestato nei corsi merleau-pontyani al Collège de France e in particolare nelle lezioni che pongono al centro delle loro analisi il pensiero marxista come filosofia dell’uomo carnale e il motivo naturalistico dell’uomo agente e dell’uomo sofferente almeno a partire dal 1956. È proprio prendendo le mosse da questo motivo che Ricoeur nel 2004 espone quanto definisce come il percorso del riconoscimento: dall’uomo agente e dall’uomo sofferente all’uomo “capace”. La posta in gioco, ci sembra, di queste due filosofie, considerate nella loro dimensione pratica, si riassume facilmente nelle esigenze che Ricoeur formula nel suo libro Sé come un altro, in particolare quando si assegna il compito di “determinare i tratti peculiari dell’ipseità corrispondente alla pratica politica” – cioè di determinare i tratti di quel Sé agente che si delinea, a dire dell’autore stesso, al crocevia tra una fenomenologia dell’agire e un’ontologia del Sé. In effetti, come sottolinea Ricoeur, la paradossale cancellazione dell’ipseità operata dalla filosofia morale kantiana si spiega tra l’altro con l’assenza di una adeguata teoria dell’azione. In breve, l’“Io voglio” analizzato da Ricoeur nel 1950 si àncora in un “Io posso” che non si limita mai, in Merleau-Ponty, al solo piano spaziale. Così, alla figura fenomenologica delle nostre esperienze di passività, corrisponde la categoria ontologica dell’alterità, che proprio Il visibile e l’invisibile menziona con l’espressione che noi riprendiamo nel titolo di questo articolo e che ci si aspetterebbe essere anzitutto ricoeuriana. (shrink)

L'amour de la nature, l'intérêt pour la nature, la joie éprouvée en présence des paysages et des êtres de la nature font partie des présupposés courants jamais remis en question. Notre civilisation est bien plutôt marquée par la haine de la nature. De la construction des villes à l'édification des corps, le monde de la technique est une véritable entreprise d'anéantissement. Les difficultés auxquelles aujourd'hui se heurtent les politiques environnementales, les échecs récurrents des conférences (...) internationales ne peuvent être compris si ce fait est oublié. Les orientations "vertes" du capitalisme actuel ne sont que des ruses pour faire triompher l'artifice. Elles ne font que nous éloigner davantage du sens de la nature, désormais perdue. La catastrophe systémique qui a commencé a proprement valeur apocalyptique, de révélation. C'est la pulsion de mort qui travaille en silence, jusqu'à sa probable victoire finale. (shrink)

Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer | : À première vue, il s’agit d’une chose et son contraire : la guerre est tellement le lieu par excellence de la violation des droits humains que leur relation semble se résumer à cet antagonisme primaire — l’un serait la négation de l’autre. La guerre viole les droits et les droits ont la paix, donc l’absence de guerre, comme condition de possibilité. Puis l’on se souvient que, contrairement aux apparences, la guerre n’est pas (...) cet état de non-droit où tout est permis, mais un espace normé, codifié. Il est question des droits humains pendant la guerre — pour dénoncer leur violation, certes, mais la violation des règles n’est pas la preuve de leur absence — mais aussi avant la guerre, puisque certains conflits sont justifiés par la protection des droits des populations locales, ou en vertu d’un « droit de l’humanité » qui serait un intérêt à agir. Les relations entre droits humains et conflits armés sont résumées dans cet article en quatre parties : d’un point de vue historique, d’abord, où l’on montre leur réciprocité. En reprenant la trilogie de l’éthique de la guerre ensuite : la guerre au nom des droits humains, les droits humains dans la guerre et, en guise de conclusion, les droits humains après la guerre. | : At first glance these two terms may seem contradictory. War is the most extreme context of human rights violations, suggesting that they have a fundamentally antagonistic relationship and that one is the negation of the other. War violates rights, while rights require peace and hence the absence of war. Despite this appearance, however, war is not a state of lawlessness where all is permitted, but rather a regulated, codified space. There is a question of human rights in war and we obviously denounce their violation, but the violation of rules is not proof of their absence. There is another question of human rights before war, since certain conflicts are justified by the protection of the local population’s rights, or the “rights of humanity” as a cause for action. This article summarises the relations between human rights and armed conflicts in four sections : firstly from a historical perspective, focusing on their reciprocity. The next sections follow the trinity of the ethics of war : war in the name of human rights, human rights in war and, to conclude, post-war human rights. (shrink)