A renewed focus on the role of interpersonal relationships in the cultivation of religious sensibilities is emerging in the study of religion. Matthew Ryan Robinson addresses this question in his study of Friedrich Schleiermacher's notion of "free sociability." In Schleiermacher's ethics, the human person is formed in and consists of intimate, tightly interconnecting relationships with others. Schleiermacher describes this sociability as a natural tendency prompted by experiences of physical and existential limitation that lead one to look to others to (...) complete one's experience. But this experience of incompleteness and orientation to "the completion of humanity" also constitute the fundamental structure of religion in Schleiermacher's theory of religion as orientation to "the universe and the relationship of humanity to it." Thus, Schleiermacher not only presents sociability as basic to human nature, but also as inherently religious - and, potentially, redemptive. What making such a claim means and the implications it raises are central considerations of this study of Schleiermacher's ethics, theory of religion and ecclesiology. (shrink)

Um dos grandes problemas postos pelo tema dos direitos humanos à filosofia é, entre outros, o de sua fundamentação filosófica. No pano de fundo deste debate, surgem questões específicas: como se pode fundamentar/justificar filosoficamente a exigência de reconhecimento aos direitos humanos? Neste estudo, procuro abordar, de modo direto, o núcleo argumentativo sobre o qual está estruturada da proposta de Höffe. Para ele, os direitos humanos têm uma profunda relação com a noção de justiça. O conceito de justiça, na sua concepção, (...) deve ser entendido fundamentalmente como troca. Embora o conceito pareça demasiado simples, ele oferece uma série de dificuldades no que se refere à sua fundamentação. (shrink)

Los nuevos roles de participación ciudadana, vienen de parte de otros sujetos y actores sociales que en nada se vinculan u originan con los protagonismos institucionales que caracterizaron hasta hacemuy poco la actividad política en los países latinoamericanos. Estos han sido desplazados por completo, en lamedida que su fracaso reveló el fracaso de la democracia representativa para legitimar los poderes gubernamentales, cuando en su efecto no logró los cambios que se prometían a través de las vías de la constitucionalidad y (...) el discurso ideológico. Las nuevas prácticas políticas que se insertan en el campo de la participación política son ahora mucho más directas con respecto a los sectores marginados, y la forma en la que éstos se han hecho presentes a través de las protestas y cualquier tipo de desobediencia civil en el espacio público, logrando enfrentar al Estado con los reclamos de quienes siendo la mayoría no han dejado de sufrir la explotación y alineación económica y política. (shrink)

Intellectual humility is an interesting but underexplored disposition. The claim “I am (intellectually) humble” seems paradoxical in that someone who has the disposition in question would not typically volunteer it. There is an explanatory gap between the meaning of the sentence and the meaning the speaker expresses by uttering it. We therefore suggest analyzing intellectual humility semantically, using a psycholexical approach that focuses on both synonyms and antonyms of ‘intellectual humility’. We present a thesaurus-based method to map the semantic space (...) of intellectual humility as a heuristic to support philosophical and psychological analysis of this disposition. We find three semantic clusters that compose intellectual humility: the sensible self, the discreet self, and the inquisitive self; likewise, we find three clusters that compose its contraries: the overrated self, the underrated other, and the underrated self. (shrink)

Philosophers employing Frankfurt-style cases to challenge the principle of alternative possibilities have mostly sought to construct scenarios that eliminate as many of an agent’s alternatives as possible—and all alternatives at the moment of action, within the agent’s control—without causally determining the agent’s actions. One of the chief difficulties for this traditional approach is that the closer one gets to ruling out absolutely all alternative possibilities the more it appears that agents’ actions in these cases are causally determined. “Limited-blockage” versions of (...) these cases are meant to sidestep this worry by blocking all and only those alternatives that are intrinsically relevant to moral responsibility (“robust alternatives”) while leaving open all other alternatives, including a significant range of alternatives that are within the agent’s voluntary control at the moment of action. I argue that, owing to the fact that omissions (and not just actions) are capable of constituting robust alternative possibilities, limited-blockage cases cannot avoid collapsing into the more traditional sort of Frankfurt-style case to which they are meant to be an alternative and so are vulnerable to the very same concerns they are meant to avoid. (shrink)

Charles Hermes argues that the Direct Argument for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility fails because one of the inference rules on which it relies, Rule A, is invalid. Rule A states that if a proposition p is broadly logically necessary, then p is true and no one is, or ever has been, even partly morally responsible for the fact that p. Hermes purports to offer a counterexample to Rule A which focuses on agents’ moral responsibility for disjunctions. Hermes’s (...) objection is motivated by the idea that the logic of moral responsibility ought to be based on the logic of truthmakers rather than the logic of propositions. I show that the logic of moral responsibility does not track the logic of truthmakers and defend the validity of Rule A against Hermes’s objection. (shrink)

This article defends an ethics of care approach to global justice, which begins with an empirically informed account of injustices resulting from the workings and effects of contemporary neo-liberalism and hegemonic masculinities. Dominant distributive approaches to global justice see the unequal distribution of resources or ?primary goods? as the basic source of injustice. Crucially, however, most of these liberal theories do not challenge the basic structural and ideational ?frames? that govern the global political economy. Instead, they seek to ?correct? unjust (...) patterns of distribution according to an ideal theory. Subjects in these theories are generally understood as abstract, autonomous and impartial; this is in contrast to an ethics of care, which starts with an ontology of the subject as embodied, vulnerable and relational. The first part of this article explores the role and nature of theory in relation to the task of considering injustice on a global scale and offers a critique of the narrow focus in traditional theories of justice on the distribution of ?primary goods?. The second part considers the effects of neo-liberal globalization and hegemonic masculinities on global working families in order to illustrate the relationship between care and global justice. The final section sketches out a care-ethics approach to global injustice, focusing on three features: first, care as a relational approach; second, the focus in care ethics on intersecting structures of injustice; and third, care as a multi-scalar approach to global injustice. (shrink)

"An American psychologist, Daniel N. Robinson, traces the development of the insanity plea...[He offers] an assured historical survey." Roy Porter, The Times [UK] "Wild Beasts and Idle Humours is truly unique. It synthesizes material that I do not believe has ever been considered in this context, and links up the historical past with contemporaneous values and politics. Robinson effortlessly weaves religious history, literary history, medical history, and political history, and demonstrates how the insanity defense cannot be fully understood (...) without consideration of all these sources." Michael L. Perlin, New York Law School "Daniel N. Robinson has written a graceful history of insanity and the law stretching from Homer to Hinckley. He attempts no final theory as to how the law should cope with the insane; he seeks, rather, to use the shifting notions of when madness exculpates criminal activity to illuminate the core self-perceptions of the cultures developing ever-evolving resolutions of the problem...[T]he grandeur of the theme...commands attention and respect." --Neal Johnston, The Nation . (shrink)

This paper explores a variety of kinds of apparent disagreement of which it may be held that they involve failure to disagree in that, at least in some broad sense, the disputants use the same words to express different meanings or concepts. It is argued that it is hard to rebut the claim that some apparent disagreements about personal identity fall into a particular sub-category of this broad type. I conclude both that a "constrained" relativism which I call "quasi-relativism" is (...) appropriate in regard to some central personal-identity debates, and also that, in order to avoid the lamentable conclusion that there is no real disagreement at all in these debates, we should embrace the idea that there is a non-cognitive element in personal identity claims, in virtue of the tight conceptual relations between personal identity claims and value claims of various kinds. (shrink)

Available for the first time in English, this is the definitive account of the practice of sexual slavery the Japanese military perpetrated during World War II by the researcher principally responsible for exposing the Japanese government's responsibility for these atrocities. The large scale imprisonment and rape of thousands of women, who were euphemistically called "comfort women" by the Japanese military, first seized public attention in 1991 when three Korean women filed suit in a Toyko District Court stating that they had (...) been forced into sexual servitude and demanding compensation. Since then the comfort stations and their significance have been the subject of ongoing debate and intense activism in Japan, much if it inspired by Yoshimi's investigations. How large a role did the military, and by extension the government, play in setting up and administering these camps? What type of compensation, if any, are the victimized women due? These issues figure prominently in the current Japanese focus on public memory and arguments about the teaching and writing of history and are central to efforts to transform Japanese ways of remembering the war. Yoshimi Yoshiaki provides a wealth of documentation and testimony to prove the existence of some 2,000 centers where as many as 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and some Japanese women were restrained for months and forced to engage in sexual activity with Japanese military personnel. Many of the women were teenagers, some as young as fourteen. To date, the Japanese government has neither admitted responsibility for creating the comfort station system nor given compensation directly to former comfort women. This English edition updates the Japanese edition originally published in 1995 and includes introductions by both the author and the translator placing the story in context for American readers. (shrink)

Back cover: How is God revealed through the life of a human community? Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theological ethics begins from the claim to 'Christ existing as community', which David Robinson presents as one of several critical and politically astute variations on G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy of religion.

In this paper we have two related aims. First, we aim to present an account of what it is to treat women as sex-objects.1 Like other philosophical writers in the field, we hold that the central idea in an account of such treatment is the failure to treat women with proper respect in sexual behavior. This idea has been cashed out in terms of using,2 and in terms of dehumanization or failure to accord equal rights to freedom and welfare.3 However, (...) we believe that there is a central deficiency in most such philosophical accounts of treating women as sex-objects, namely, a failure to outline in any detail a theory of interpersonal norms so that one can grasp in more concrete terms what it is to avoid treating a woman as a sex-object. We aim to rectify this deficiency by presenting a model of interpersonal norms based on the work of the social psychologist Chris Argyris. (shrink)

A number of articles and empirical studies over the past decade, most by Paul Robinson and co-authors, have suggested a relationship between the extent of the criminal law's reputation for being just in its distribution of criminal liability and punishment in the eyes of the community – its "moral credibility" – and its ability to gain that community's deference and compliance through a variety of mechanisms that enhance its crime-control effectiveness. This has led to proposals to have criminal liability (...) and punishment rules reflect lay intuitions of justice – "empirical desert" – as a means of enhancing the system's moral credibility. In a recent article, Christopher Slobogin and Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein (SBR) report seven sets of studies that they argue undermine these claims of empirical desert and moral credibility and instead support SBR's proposed distributive principle of "individual prevention," a view that focuses on an offender's future dangerousness rather than on his perceived desert. -/- The idea that there is a relationship between the criminal law's reputation for justness and its crime-control effectiveness did not originate with Robinson and his co-authors. Rather, it has been a common theme among a wide range of punishment theory scholars for many decades. A particularly important conclusion of recent Robinson studies, however, is their confirmation that this relationship is a continuous one: even small nudges in moral credibility can produce corresponding changes in the community's deference to the criminal law. This is important because it shows that even piecemeal changes or changes at the margin – as in reforming even one unjust doctrine or procedure – can have real implications for crime-control. SBR's studies, rather than contradicting the crime-control power of empirical desert, in fact confirm it. Further, SBR's studies do not provide support for their proposed "individual prevention" distributive principle, contrary to what they claim. -/- While SBR try to associate their principle with the popular "limiting retributivism" adopted by the American Law Institute in its 2007 amendment of the Model Penal Code, in fact it is, in many respects, just the reverse of that principle. With limiting retributivism, the Model Code's new provision sets desert as dominant, never allowing punishment to conflict with it. SBR would have "punishment" essentially always set according to future dangerousness; it is to be constrained by desert only when the extent of the resulting injustices or failures of justice is so egregious as to significantly delegitimize the government and its law. This ignores the fact that even minor departures from justice may have an important cumulative effect on the system as a whole. What SBR propose – essentially substituting preventive detention for criminal justice – promotes the worst of the failed policies of the 1960s, where detention decisions were made at the back-end by "experts," and conflicts with the trend of the past several decades of encouraging more community involvement in criminal punishment, not less. (shrink)

It has long been held that humans need government to impose social order on a chaotic, dangerous world. How, then, did early humans survive on the Serengeti Plain, surrounded by faster, stronger, and bigger predators in a harsh and forbidding environment? Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers examines an array of natural experiments and accidents of human history to explore the fundamental nature of how human beings act when beyond the scope of the law. Pirates of the 1700s, the leper colony on (...) Molokai Island, prisoners of the Nazis, hippie communes of the 1970s, shipwreck and plane crash survivors, and many more diverse groups--all existed in the absence of formal rules, punishments, and hierarchies. Paul and Sarah Robinson draw on these real-life stories to suggest that humans are predisposed to be cooperative within limits. What these "communities" did and how they managed have dramatic implications for shaping our modern institutions. Should today's criminal justice system build on people's shared intuitions about justice? Or are we better off acknowledging this aspect of human nature but using law to temper it? Knowing the true nature of our human character and our innate ideas about justice offers a roadmap to a better society. (shrink)

SUFFERING HUMAN AND DIVINE INTRODUCTION I KNEW when I asked Dr. H. Wheeler Robinson to write this volume on Suffering that I was giving him the most difficult ...

In what particular manner human beings are free moral agents and to what extent they can reasonably expect to attain a good life are two intertwined questions that rose to prominence in antiquity and have remained so to the present day. This book analyzes and compares the approaches of two significant authors from different schools at the turn of the third century CE, Alexander of Aphrodisias and Clement of Alexandria. These contemporaries utilize their respective Peripatetic and Christian commitments in their (...) employment of the shared Greek classics toward these shared ethical questions. (shrink)

Formation of a Religious Landscape: Shiʿi Higher Learning in Safavid Iran. By Maryam Moazzen. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 151. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xiii + 290, illus. $149, €129.

It is a commonplace of Platonic scholarship that for Plato a significant, if not the most significant feature of Heracliteanism was the so-called “doctrine of flux”. In this paper I wish to discuss another feature of what seems to me basic Heraclitean doctrine that is taken over by Plato, albeit without explicit recognition of the fact, as a central tenet of his cosmopsychology: the notion of the language of the real.

In this article, we explore the possibility of adding a new role to the clinical encounter: an illness doula. Even though research and education in medical humanities and narrative medicine have made improvements in humanizing healthcare, progress is slow and ongoing. There needs to be an intervention in the practice of healthcare now for people currently going through the system. An illness doula, like a birth doula, would facilitate and insure that attention is paid to the personal needs and desires (...) of the patient in the present system. We envision illness doulas having the ability and availability to accompany the patient throughout the healthcare process, to help communicate with clinicians, and to ensure that patient preferences are understood and respected along the way. We discuss how this idea emerged through the clinical encounters of two of our authors, the possibilities and limitations of creating a new role for illness doulas, and the logistics of how to put this new role into play. (shrink)

For decades, both economists and legal scholars have regularly used the metaphor of a ‘bundle of rights’ to describe property. In recent and growing literature, the bundle formulation has been the target of a number of critiques, some of which point to Adam Smith, among others, as a source for an alternative perspective on property. This paper examines Smith's work and argues that Smith is an appropriate authority and focal figure for a traditional, in-rem view of property. It illustrates how (...) Smith's usage of concepts in the civil-law tradition, his appreciation for Hume, and especially his unique theory of the impartial spectator, together make clear that Smith's understanding of property is irreconcilable with the modern bundle formulation. (shrink)

A review providing an overview and assessment of Jose Jorge Mendoza's The Moral and Political Philosophy of Immigration.

Abstract: I argue that the solution to the Red Hat Problem, a puzzle derived from interactive epistemic logic, requires S5. Interactive epis- temic logic is set out in formal terms, and an attempt to solve the red hat puzzle is made in K, K, and K, each of which fails, showing that a stronger system, K is required.