Suchergebnisse

pt. 1. A framework for thinking the ethics of the real -- 1. Indicating the pathway -- 2. The journey to disenchantment -- 3. The rise of the particular -- 4. On speechlessness -- pt. 2. Some particular problems of the particular -- 5. International law : universal human rights and cultural diversity -- 6. Business : asking the right question in business ethics -- 7. Social science : senseless kindness and the politics of cost-benefit analysis -- 8. Postscript.

"The founding premise of this book is that the nimbus of prestige, which once surrounded the idea of justice, has now been dimmed to such a degree that it is no longer sufficient to secure the possibility of a good conscience for those who undertake, in good faith, to make the world a better place in the spheres of politics and law. The many decent human beings who have noticed and experienced this diminishment of justice's prestige find themselves in a thoroughly disenchanted existential situation. For them, the attempt to do justice without the illusion of being grounded in something beyond the sheer facticity of their own performances is a distinctly ethical theme, which cries out to be investigated in its own right. Heeding the cry, this book asks and attempts to answer the following fundamental ethical question: is a life in the law - even one spent in the pursuit of justice - worth living, and if so, how can a disenchanted person come to bear the living of it without constantly having to engage in self-deception? If Nietzsche is right that living without illusions is impossible for human beings, then the most important ethical implication of this essentially anthropological fact goes far beyond the question of what illusions we ought to choose. It must also include the question of whether we should succumb to that most seductive and pernicious of all illusions: namely, the belief that exercising great care and responsibility in choosing our illusions - which we might then call our 'principles of justice' - excuses us ethically for what we do to others in their name. The culmination of a 10 year legal-philosophical project, this book will appeal to graduate students, scholars and curious non-academic intellectuals interested in continental philosophy, critical legal theory, postmodern theology, the philosophy of human rights and the study of individual ethics in the context of law"--Unedited summary from book cover

So long as there is law there can be no universal human right to peace. This is because legalized violence, whether in threat or in deed, constitutes the very antithesis of peaceful relations from the point of view of those whom law represses. Law cannot define peace as the absence of all violence—and still less as the absence of all legalized suffering—without gainsaying justice, for as Pascal says, "Justice without might is helpless; might without justice is tyrannical." Although legal outcomes, like falling boulders and pouncing lions, can always be imputed to historical causes, experience teaches that legal actors generally seek to legitimate their deeds by grounding the law in some non-causal narrative of the right or the good. According to a tenet of political liberalism that can be traced to Descartes' discovery (or invention) of the irreducible "I" that thinks, the legitimacy of law's narrative is both given and taken by free and rational politico-legal subjects. In truth, however, the Western philosophical tradition gives us two separate grammars for discussing what it takes to be two different kinds of rational subjects: the causal subject and the grounding subject. The causal subject stands in a relation to the world. Acting strategically as the cause of effects, it uses the object world and other human beings as means to its ends. But the causal subject is also itself caused: its desires and actions are effects of history in the largest sense of the word. Such a one is fated by grammar and custom to become an object and a means in its own right: an object for scientific inquiry and knowledge, for example, and, more generally, a means to the ends of other causal subjects. From the standpoint of the causal subject, there can be no human right not to use or be used as a means. Unlike the causal subject, the grounding subject is supposed to be a genuine origin rather than a mere link in an infinite chain of causes and effects. In Greek terms, this subject is an archē as opposed to an aitia. It also ...

The title of my talk is "What is the Rule of Law?"—and its subtitle is "Perspectives from Central Europe and the American Academy." I represent the "American Academy" part, and as I will make clear in a little while, the other part comes from my sustained engagement, over the past ten years, with legal theorists and political philosophers in the Republic of Slovenia. Slovenia, by the way, is a nation that was created twelve years ago as the northernmost of those "breakaway" republics of the former Yugoslavia.