This article offers a theoretical and doctrinal solution to a vexing question in public law: how to determine the justifiability of Charter rights-limiting administrative decisions. The jurisprudence suggests three approaches, or modes of reasoning: minimal impairment analysis, ‘interest balancing’, and ‘values-advancing reasoning’. Like Cerberus, the guard dog of Hades, Canadian public law has become three-headed. While scholars and courts argue about which mode of reasoning is categorically best, the culture of justification compels us to ask instead which provides the (...) most compelling explanation for each rights-limiting decision. Just as cutting off one of Cerberus’s heads would diminish his effectiveness as a guard dog, rejecting either of the modes of reasoning would limit decision makers’ capacity to explain their decisions and undermine a culture of justification. The article makes a theoretical case for retaining all three modes of reasoning and sets out a doctrinal approach to determining when each is applicable. (shrink)

_The face of American education is evolving—and the roadmap is clear_ _On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools are Pushing the Envelope_ examines the rise and expansion of leading charter school network Rocketship, revealing the "secret sauce" that makes a successful program. A strong narrative with a timely message, the book explores how Rocketship started and the difficulties encountered as it expands. Designing schools for children who have been failed by traditional schools is extremely challenging work. Setbacks are (...) inevitable. Later in the book the narrative shifts to the national picture, exploring how high performing charter schools are changing the education landscape in cities such as Denver, Memphis, and Houston. The book emerges just as charter schools are running into stiff political opposition in New York City and elsewhere. Even in San Jose, Rocketship's home base, the pushback against charter schools is gaining speed. _On the Rocketship_ becomes a valuable resource for explaining what's at stake in this battle. Lose these schools, in New York, San Jose and other cities, and low-income and minority students lose their best shot at a quality education. Written by a veteran journalist who followed Rocketship through a school year, the book explores some of the factors that make Rocketship and other charters successful, including the blended learning that was pioneered at charter schools, especially Rocketship. Many schools around the country are looking to Rocketship as a model for implementing blended learning. The interplay between charter schools and blended learning is setting a change in motion, and the American education system is ready to evolve. _On the Rocketship_ details this phenomenon, providing insights for educators across the nation. (shrink)

Part of a series exploring ethical issues relevant to the practising nurse. In terms of ethics, The Patient's Charter is about the rights of patients and clients. This book views the ethical issues of the charter from four different viewpoints - the nurse, the doctor, the manager and the patient.

Drawing upon hitherto-unused sources and written in a lively, accessible style, this book represents a shift in the historiography of British education. At the center of the investigation is Joseph Payne, born in humble circumstances in 1808, who in 1873 was appointed to the first professorship in Britain, established by a chartered body of schoolteachers. By that date Payne had acquired a considerable reputation-as the founder of two of the most successful of Victorian private schools; a classroom practitioner of rare (...) skill; the author of bestselling textbooks; a scholar, despite no formal education; and as a leading member of such bodies as the College of Preceptors, the Scholastic Registration Association, the Girls' Public Day School Trust, the Women's Education Union, and the Social Science Association. (shrink)

With the end of the Cold War the world approached the prospect of realizing what one might call the ‘Kantian moment’ in international relations. Auspiciously, 1995 marked both the 50th anniversary of the establishment of UN Charter, in which human rights guarantees prominently figured, as well as the 200th anniversary of Kant’s celebrated text on ‘Perpetual Peace.’ During the era of the EastWest political stalemate, the idea of effective world governance remained a chimera, as both political camps willfully exploited (...) international governmental organizations (IGOs), such as the UN and UNESCO, for the self-serving ends of Realpolitik. Human rights claims were brazenly politicized. The Soviets lambasted American racism and the inadequacy of social rights. The USA and its allies, conversely, pilloried their opponent’s failure to minimally respect basic, first-generation civil and political liberties. (Published: 26 May 2010) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2010, pp. 143-153. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v3i2.5213. (shrink)

This article examines the political challenges of the European Union. It explains that political theorists and scientists alike have viewed European integration as a laboratory for exploring how far the nation state, and the forms of domestic and international politics to which it gave rise, has been affected by the various processes associated with globalization. It discusses the Charter of Rights and Constitutional Treaty of the EU and suggests that the EU can be plausibly characterized as an intergovernmental organization (...) of an advanced kind, a nascent federation of states, and a new form of post-national and post-state entity. (shrink)

This paper is an ethical exegesis of the biblical story of Gibeah, which concludes the Book of Judges (19–21), to show the catastrophic failure of the anti-political politics of the “community of virtue”, i.e., the rejection of power for the sake of moral society, such as proposed by libertarians, neo-liberals, anarchists and utopians. I consider Kant’s statement of the political problem: given humanity’s unsocial sociality, where each person is tempted to act as an exception to universal law, humans need rulers, (...) but how to obtain rulers who are not themselves ruled by power, and become tyrannical, rather than being ruled by justice? The solution proposed by “the community of virtue” would reject power altogether and replace it with society regulated exclusively according to the moral virtue of its members. The Bible’s story of Gibeah shows graphically and conclusively the failure of any such attempt. Instead, as with normative political philosophy, the Bible endorses the rule of a king, i.e., the rule of the state, and a politics whereby power is disciplined to serve justice because it is rooted in Torah, i.e., a fundamental covenant, charter or constitution, aware and vigilant regarding the ambiguities and temptations of sovereignty, and therefore, ideally, always open to critique. As exemplified by biblical prophets, political protest against injustices perpetrated by the powerful against the least—widow, orphan, stranger—is at once religious obligation and true patriotism. (shrink)

ExcerptThe Ukraine war since February 2022 has exposed stark cleavages in international politics. The end of history long ago ended, and with it the conviction that Western civilization and its distinctive form of modernity would become universal.1 The clash of civilizations, in the model outlined by Samuel Huntington, has also been shown to be misdirected, although not entirely misguided.2 There is a struggle between civilizations, but the line is drawn not between the great religious blocs but along rather different lines. (...) It is the Atlantic West that has emerged as the leading contender, provoking a range of reactions from Eurasia and the Global South. The front line now runs within the Global North, between the Atlantic powers and an ill-defined Eurasian bloc, both of which are firmly part of European culture and civilization. The conflict can be viewed as a type of civil war, generated not by civilizational conflict per se but by geopolitics. The political West that took shape in Cold War I represented a distinctive combination of power and authority. Power was expressed above all by the military potential vested in the United States and formalized in a multilateral format with the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. Authority was generated by the principles underlying the political West, whose founding document is the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, which enunciated Wilsonian themes of democracy and security. (shrink)

Today the radical as well as the organizing pacifism have become compatible in the engagement for an universal legal system, which is based on the acknowledgement of human rights and a general prohibition of the use of force. The classical doctrines of just war have become obsolete, but their implicit elements concerning moral criticism of violence are indispensable. The author critisizes the misuse of the human rights argument for the justification of military interventionism. A legitimate policy of peace and security (...) has to depend on the development of a collective security system as proposed by the UN-Charter. It cannot be based on traditional military alliances of defence. To intervene in domestic conflicts, if any, peacekeeping operations are qualified, when and as far as they bind themselves to the principles of consensus of all parties concerned, of strict neutrality and of deescalation. There is a special obligation for Germany to restrain herself in military actions and toset an example in developing an international culture of nonviolence. (shrink)

Spiritual/religious coping has proven to be a fertile ground for investigating health-related spirituality in action. Ken Pargament and his colleagues have successfully demonstrated that spiritual/religious coping differs significantly from previously identified coping strategies. While much has been accomplished to date, there are undeveloped theoretical and methodological avenues that appear to provide important promise for understanding the complexities of this critical domain of coping. Some scholars have failed to conceptualize and research spiritual/religious coping as a contextual, temporally bounded process. This paper (...) explores the theoretical and methodological advantages of adopting a contextually embedded, process-oriented epistemology—contextual action theory. We propose that doing so will not only address some of the inadequacies of the extant literature but also aid researchers in exploring novel dimensions of spiritual/religious coping. From a contextual action-theory perspective, spiritual/religious coping is viewed as intentional, goal-directed behaviour that is embedded in a social and relational context. This teleonomic reconceptualization enables researchers to understand the constitution and development of intentions involved in the process of spiritual/religious coping over time. Further, a contextual action theory perspective transcends the narrow, individualistic lens of coping and explores joint and collective coping processes that emerge as people draw upon spiritual/religious practices to cope with distress. Thus, spiritual/religious coping is embedded in social and relational context and as part of personal, intentional goal-directed processes over time. The novel contributions of a contextual theoretical perspective to spiritual/religious coping research and theory are illustrated through a case example. (shrink)

We show that the partial order of Σ0 3-sets under inclusion is elementarily definable with parameters in the semilattice of r.e. wtt-degrees. Using a result of E. Herrmann, we can deduce that this semilattice has an undecidable theory, thereby solving an open problem of P. Odifreddi.

In a world in which everything is reduced "to the play of signs detached from what is signified," Levinas asks a deceptively simple question: Whence, then, comes the urge to question injustice? By seeing the demand for justice for the other—the homeless, the destitute—as a return to morality, Levinas escapes the suspect finality of any ideology.Levinas’s question is one starting point for In Proximity, a collection of seventeen essays by scholars in eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, history, and religion, and their readings (...) of Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Wordsworth, Behn, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, and Mendelssohn. The title In Proximity alone speaks volumes about Levinas’s philosophy and its relevance today. "If it is true that we are, through technology, moving closer and closer to one another," writes editor Melvyn New, then "the importance of proximity and our response to it cannot be overstated." For the contributors to this volume, the question of whether we may, ethically, appropriate the object of study for our own causes has become vital. Levinas asks us to see ourselves, our own reading, "in proximity" to what is not ourselves, not our understanding of the world.The dialogue created among the essays themselves establishes an enormous diversity of texts and ideologies to which Levinas can contribute something of significant value. At a time when the secondary literature on Levinas and his work is expanding explosively, the cross-disciplinary voices gathered together in In Proximity come at precisely the right time. (shrink)

Western media coverage of female genital modifications in Africa has been hyperbolic and one-sided, presenting them uniformly as mutilation and ignoring the cultural complexities that underlie these practices. Even if we ultimately decide that female genital modifications should be abandoned, the debate around them should be grounded in a better account of the facts.

The reliable covariation between numerosity and spatial extent is considered as a strong constraint for inferring the successor principle in numerical cognition. We suggest that children can derive a general number concept from the (experientially) infinite succession of spatial positions during object manipulation.

A dozen papers by internationally known scholars explore questions largely unthinkable without Richard Watson's classic Downfall of Cartesianism: Descartes in Holland, Descartes and Simon Foucher, and issues raised by Descartes for philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, translation and toleration.

The country's leading libertarian scholar sets forth the essential principles for a legal system that best balances individual liberty versus the common good.

With this book, Richard A. Epstein provides a spirited and systematic defense of classical liberalism against the critiques mounted against it over the past thirty years. One of the most distinguished and provocative legal scholars writing today, Epstein here explains his controversial ideas in what will quickly come to be considered one of his cornerstone works. He begins by laying out his own vision of the key principles of classical liberalism: respect for the autonomy of the individual, a strong (...) system of private property rights, the voluntary exchange of labor and possessions, and prohibitions against force or fraud. Nonetheless, he not only recognizes but insists that state coercion is crucial to safeguarding these principles of private ordering and supplying the social infrastructure on which they depend. Within this framework, Epstein then shows why limited government is much to be preferred over the modern interventionist welfare state. Many of the modern attacks on the classical liberal system seek to undermine the moral, conceptual, cognitive, and psychological foundations on which it rests. Epstein rises to this challenge by carefully rebutting each of these objections in turn. For instance, Epstein demonstrates how our inability to judge the preferences of others means we should respect their liberty of choice regarding their own lives. And he points out the flaws in behavioral economic arguments which, overlooking strong evolutionary pressures, claim that individual preferences are unstable and that people are unable to adopt rational means to achieve their own ends. Freedom, Epstein ultimately shows, depends upon a skepticism that rightly shuns making judgments about what is best for individuals, but that also avoids the relativistic trap that all judgments about our political institutions have equal worth. A brilliant defense of classical liberalism, Skepticism and Freedom will rightly be seen as an intellectual landmark. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Breakdown of C i M phy " artes an eta sacs RICHARD A. WATSON WITHIN CARTESIANISMthere arose many problems deriving from conflicts between Cartesian principles. Inadequate attempts to solve these problems were crucial reasons for the breakdown of Cartesian metaphysics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The major difficulties derived from the acceptance of a dualism of substances seated in a system which included epistemological (...) and causal likeness principles plus an ontological framework in which the categories of substance and modification were exhaustive. The major solutions involved either denying the likeness principles or altering the ontological framework. The first led to unintelligibility ; the second, culminating in Hume, opened the way to non-Cartesian metaphysics. The first section of this study contains a characterization of late seventeenth -century Cartesian metaphysics. The second is an exposition of Foucher 's four major criticisms of this system. In the third section, monistic solutions suggested in Descartes and by Spinoza, Foucher, Leibniz, and Locke are considered; in the fourth, the dualistic solutions of the orthodox Cartesians Rohault, R~gis, Desgabets, La Forge, Le Grand, and Arnauld; and in the fifth, the occasionalist solution of Malebranche. The sixth section is an analysis of these orthodox and occasionalist solutions, showing how each ultimately fails because of dependence upon the ontology of substance and modification. The seventh section is a consideration of Berkeley and Hume in the Cartesian context. A consideration of their systems as offering solutions to Cartesian problems illuminates in new light both the systems and the problems. In broad terms, this study moves from a consideration of problems arising from an ontology of two substances, to a consideration of problems arising from the ontological pattern of substance and modification. The Cartesians were concerned with relationships between two substances, but they saw no difficulties connected with the relationship between a substance and its modifications (or properties). Berkeley's treatment (deriving from Male- [177] 178 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY branche) of the relationships between mind and idea, and between mind and notion, is illuminated by a consideration of the extent to which he took these relationships for granted in the Cartesian way, and of the extent to which he saw difficulties in the relationship between substance and modification. The Berkeleian solution to Cartesian problems, like that of Malebranche before him, was not successful; Malebranche belittled, and Berkeley denied the dualism of substances, but neither philosopher could break entirely with the ontological pattern of substance and modification. The final breakdown of Cartesian metaphysics came with Hume, who, in providing the culmination of a most important trend in modern philosophy, opened the way to new metaphysics and became the father of contemporary philosophy. I A model late seventeenth-century Cartesian metaphysical system. The last grand expositor of the Cartesian philosophy was Antoine Le Grand who in 1694 published An Entire Body of Philosophy. The characterization of the late seventeenth-century Cartesian system given below follows Le Grand's exposition more closely than others, but it also incorporates elements from those of Rohault, R6gis, Desgabets, La Forge, Malebranche, and Arnauld.1 None of these philosophers professed a system of exactly the sort this characterization pictures, nor is it implied here that they do. The guide and rationale for drawing from them such a model Cartesianism is the polemical writing of Simon Foucher. Foucher's series of attacks upon Cartesianism (of which the second is his criticism of Malebranche of 1675, Critique de la Rdcherche de la veritd) give clearly the most important objections against Cartesian metaphysics.2The system outlined below, while more com1Le Grand, Antoine, An Entire Body of Philosophy According to the Principles of the Famous Renate des Cartes (London, 1694); Rohault, Jacques, Traitd de physique (Paris, 1671); R6gis, Pierre-Sylvain, Syst~me de philosophie, contenant la logique, la mdtaphysique, la physique et la morale (Lyon, 1690); Desgabets, Robert, Critique de la Critique de la Recherche de la veritd, oCt l'on decouvre le chemin qui conduit aux connoissances solides. Pour servir de rdsponse gtla Lettre d'un academicien (Paris, 1675); La Forge, Louis de, Traitd de l'dme humaine, de ses facultds et fonctions et de son union avec le corps, d'apr~s les principes de... (shrink)

The relationship between mind and matter, mental states and physical states, has occupied the attention of philosophers for thousands of years. Richard Fumerton's primary concern is the knowledge argument for dualism - an argument that proceeds from the idea that we can know truths about our existence and our mental states without knowing any truths about the physical world. This view has come under relentless criticism, but here Fumerton makes a powerful case for its rehabilitation, demonstrating clearly the importance (...) of its interconnections with a wide range of other controversies within philosophy. Fumerton analyzes philosophical views about the nature of thought and the relation of those views to arguments for dualism, and investigates the connection between a traditional form of foundationalism about knowledge, and a foundationalist view about thought that underlies traditional arguments for dualism. His book will be of great interest to those studying epistemology and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to extend prior research testing the premise that small deviations from ethical behavior lead to even larger deviations from ethical behavior. This study examines the association between a person’s willingness to bribe a police officer to avoid being issued a speeding ticket with their views on inappropriate behavior of corporate executives. Our sample of 528 participants comes from Colombia (90), Ecuador (70), South Africa (131) and the United States (237). As part of our data (...) gathering, we controlled for social desirability response bias in the responses of the students who participated in our study. Our data indicate significant differences between the views of the students from Colombia, Ecuador, and South Africa when compared to the views of the students from the United States. The analysis indicates that, for all four dilemmas, the most significant variable was the belief about how ethical it was to pay a bribe to avoid a traffic ticket. In addition, in three of our four dilemmas, Paulhus’ Impression Management Subscale, which measures social desirability response bias, was the second most significant variable. Finally, in three of the four dilemmas, the students from Colombia, Ecuador and South Africa thought the actions described in the dilemmas were less ethical than the students from the United States. (shrink)

In this engrossing double volume, the work and thought of Nicolas Malebranche is examined through the eyes of Simon Foucher and Dortous de Mairan. Part 1 consists of Richard A. Watson’s translation of the first published critique, by Simon Foucher, of Malebranche’s main philosophical work, _Of the Search for the Truth. _In the second part, Marjorie Grene presents a meticulous translation of the long correspondence between Malebranche and Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan that ended shortly before Malebranche’s death. Both Watson (...) and Grene provide insightful introductions to their translations. The influence of the works of Malebranche has been extensive, as has the influence of the lesser works of his first critic, Simon Foucher. Although Foucher was a minor philosopher of the seventeenth century, he provided arguments that led to a crucial turning point in modern philosophy. Listened to with care and treated with respect by Leibniz, Foucher’s arguments were utilized by Bayle, Berkeley, and Hume toward the destruction not only of Cartesian metaphysics but of substance philosophy as well. In this translation of Foucher’s work, it is now possible for readers of Malebranche’s _Of the Search for the Truth _to evaluate the immediate response of a young philosopher about town to one of the most important philosophical works of his day. The correspondence between Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan, an obscure provincial, and Nicolas Malebranche has usually been viewed as a small addendum to the works of Malebranche. Marjorie Grene, however, in her translation of this correspondence, considers it not only a contribution to the Malebranchian corpus but also an example of a reaction to Spinoza. Born at Béziers in the south of France in 1678, Mairan went to Paris in 1698, where he studied mathematics with Malebranche. Their correspondence began four years later when Mairan returned to Béziers to accept a position with the local bishop. In his letters to Malebranche, Mairan reveals himself to be one of no more than a handful of known readers of Spinoza who, in the early eighteenth century, admitted fascination with Spinoza’s presentation of his thoroughly unorthodox God and his equally unorthodox nature. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: How Brave a New World? Dilemmas in Bioethics. By Richard A. McCormick. Notes on Moral Theology, 1965 through 1980. By Richard A. McCormick.