Freedom and the Rule of Law takes a critical look at the historical beginnings of law in the United States, and how that history has influenced current trends regarding law and freedom. Anthony Peacock has compiled articles that examine the relationship between freedom and the rule of law in America. The rule of law is fundamental to all liberal constitutional regimes whose political orders recognize the equal natural rights of all.

Daniel Robinson suggests that much of the civil and criminal law "serves as the institutionalized form of praise and blame". Indeed it does. Pulling at this thread of Robinson's tapestry leads the reader straightaway to a host of truths about how law and morality not only intersect, but work together in harmony. "[L]aw", Robinson says, is a "vivid expression of deeper and impenetrably complex moral theories". This essay explores several of these harmonies, but focuses on two. One is that political (...) society must be seen as the cooperation of free persons according to law, which persons hold common moral understandings. The second has to do with retribution as the moral justifying aim of punishing criminals. The author goes beyond Robinson's limited praise of retribution, and shows that some central features of our practice of punishment are understandable only within the retributive framework. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Eusebius of Caesarea drew heavily on pagan philosophy in developing the first Christian political theology. His quotations from Plato’s most political work, the Laws, are so extensive that they are treated as a manuscript authority by modern editors. Yet Eusebius’s actual use of the Laws is oddly detached from Plato’s own political intentions in that work, adapting it to a model of philosophical kingship closer to the Republic and applied to the emperor Constantine. For Eusebius the Laws mainly shows the (...) agreement of Christian and pagan morality, while his political theory centers on the establishment and maintenance of a Christian empire under a Christian emperor who is a philosopher-king. His view represents one of the fundamental political options in ancient Christianity, one that influenced later Byzantine political theology, but was largely rejected in the west. (shrink)

The first part of the paper discusses the origins and meaning of democracy relative to the development of Christian political thought through the modern period; it is important here that democracy means something different in the ancient world than it does in the modern. The second part discusses the view of democracy proposed in the formative period of modern Catholic social doctrine in especially from the pontificate of Leo XIII to the Second Vatican Council. The third part analyzes the political (...) thought of St. John Paul II which seems to be the apogee of Catholic thinking about democracy. The fourth part discusses some remaining tensions and problems related to democracy that are articulated partly also in John Paul II’s thought, but in a sharper way in the thought of Pope Benedict XVI and one quite prominent challenge to the Catholic view of democracy in the phenomenon of pluralism. One can see in this history that the Church has gradually come to appreciate democracy not simply as an acceptable form of government, one that is not intrinsically at odds with Christianity, but in a positive sense, as an opportunity for human beings to achieve a level of moral development not available in other regimes. But there remain challenges associated with democracy to government and social life consistent with the natural moral law and to Christian faith. (shrink)

The idea of the common good has been a signature feature of Catholic social teaching and so of modern Catholic engagement in public affairs. It has recently been suggested that the notion is now obsolete due to changes in the culture and politics of the West. In keeping with this suggestion, some argue that Catholics should abandon it in favor of an appeal based on lower intermediate goods in a manner more related to Augustine’s engagement with the largely pagan culture (...) of his time than to Aquinas’s categories tailored to an integrally Christian society. I argue that such a solution misreads aspects of the tradition and of the present political and cultural situation and I suggest some alternative grounds on which Catholic engagement with contemporary public life should proceed and that thinking again about the common good is a necessary part of such engagement. (shrink)

This paper suggests an alternative account of the political character of Plato’s political philosophy. After pointing toward some problems of the common developmental paradigm, which emphasizes discontinuities between Plato’s Socratic early writings, the mature utopianism of the Republic, and the late pessimism of the Laws, it proposes that Plato’s two large constructive works, the Republic and Laws, are related to two actual historical events in which Plato played a role, the trial of Socrates and Plato’s failed intervention in Sicilian politics. (...) On this view, the Republic is to the Apology of Socrates as the Laws is to the Seventh Letter. The Republic is an imaginative reconstruction of the sort of defense of philosophy under more favorable conditions than obtained in the actual trial; the Laws is an imaginative reconstruction of the sort of political reform that Plato advocated under more favorable conditions than obtained in Syracuse under Dionysius II. The paper suggests this as the basis of a unified interpretation of Plato’s political philosophy. (shrink)

Religious freedom is included among the basic liberties to which persons are entitled in John Rawls’s account of Justice as Fairness. Rawls’s revised presentation of this as a political conception of justice in Political Liberalism aims to show how it can be (along with the other parts of Justice as Fairness) the focus of an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. As an example, Rawls contends that his understanding of religious freedom is consistent with that of the Roman Catholic Church, (...) at least since the Second Vatican Council. I argue that he was mistaken in this in so far as other aspects of his political conception, especially its characterization of citizens as normatively having the power to form their own conceptions of the good, puts it at odds with the teaching of the Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis humanae. This suggests more generally that the limits of consensus in modern pluralist societies are greater than Rawls’s theory holds. (shrink)

The Thomistic revival initiated by Leo XIII was late in having an effect on political philosophy. Many have charged Thomism with being inapt to contribute to political philosophy, either because it is at odds with modern political institutions and practices or because it is inflexibly moralistic. I address the former issue by way of an examination of Jacques Maritain’s Thomistic personalism, which provides distinctive and valuable resources for understanding modern politics. This requires examining the development of Maritain’s political thought in (...) reaction to controversies over integralism in the 1920s and the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s and ’40s. Throughout this period, Maritain was clear about the theological aspects of his personalism, and so I conclude by discussing contemporary pluralism as a challenge to Maritain’s project. (shrink)

For each of the N-values 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, and 1,024, 50,000 samples of size N were drawn from an L-shaped population, and for each sample the Z and t statistics were calculated. The resulting distributions of 50,000 Z or t values at each sample size were then used to study the robustness of left-tailed, right-tailed, and two-tailed Z and t tests at α levels of.05,.01, and.001 (and, for Z only,.0001). The actually obtained proportion, ρ, (...) of Type I errors was often far greater or far smaller than the nominal proportion, α. Furthermore, although α is the expected value of ρ at infinite N, no N-value below 512 ever brought the deviation of p from α to within 10% of α for any t tests or one-tailed Z tests. (shrink)

The robustness of the classical tests on means (Z, t, and F) and variances (chi square and F) was investigated by obtaining 30,000 (or, sometimes, 10,000 or 150,000) values of the test statistic under assumption-violating conditions and comparing the actual proportion of Type I errors with the proportion expected when all assumptions are met. The sampling and testing conditions investigated were: population shape (L-shape or bell-shape), relative population variance (1 or 4), sample size (8, 16, or 24), nominal significance level (...) (.05,.01, or.001), and location of rejection region (left-tailed, right-tailed, or two-tailed). All tests on means were nonrobust under most of the investigated conditions, and one was nonrobust under all of them. Both tests on variances were extremely nonrobust under virtually all conditions. The worst nonrobustness of the one- and two-independent-sample Z and t tests rivaled or exceeded that of the notoriously nonrobust chi-square and F tests on variances. (shrink)

The alleged robustness of Z, t, and F tests against nonnormality and, when sample sizes are equal, of t and F tests against heterogeneity as well was investigated in a large-scale sampling study under conditions realistic to experimentation and testing in the behavioral sciences. Factors varied were: population shape (L or bell), σ1/σ2 (1/2, 1, or 2), size N of smallest sample (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, or 1,024), N1/N2 (1/3,1/2,1, 2, or 3), α (.05,.01, or.001), (...) and test tailedness (left, right, or two). In about 25% of the situations investigated, the test failed to meet a very lax criterion for robustness at every examined N value less than 100, and in 8% at every value less than 1,000; no test met the criterion in all of the situations studied before N=512. Robustness was strongly influenced by all of the factors investigated, and interactions among the influencing factors were often strong and complex. (shrink)

L-shaped distributions are not rare and are probably far more prevalent than is generally realized. They are highly conducive to nonrobustness of normality-assuming statistical tests, and they strongly resist transformation to normality. The thinner the tail of the distribution, the more unlikely it is that its L-shapedness will be detected by inspecting a sample drawn from it. Yet, as the tail of an L-shaped distribution becomes increasingly shallow, its skewness and kurtosis depart increasingly from their “normal-distribution” values, and the distribution (...) becomes increasingly conducive to drastic nonrobustness. Worse, a fairly common type of experimental situation in psychological research produces shallow-tailed L-shaped distributions. (shrink)

A quarter-century ago, during a period when belief in the robustness of classical tests on means was practically a professional shibboleth, a series of large, carefully controlled, and well-validated experiments and sampling studies (supplemented and supported by extensive mathematical derivations) dramatically showed that highly publicized claims of robustness were insufficiently qualified and that extreme nonrobustness could occur under perfectly reasonable experimental and testing conditions. When these findings were published in technical reports, they tended either to be ignored or to be (...) so misrepresented and distorted by those who cited them as to make them appear to support, rather than question, the very claims of robustness they tended to refute. Attempts to publish these iconoclastic results in many of the most renowned professional journals were met with rejection based upon reviewer comments so illogical or fatuous as to be interpreted only as an indication of either contrived obstructionism or pathetic professional incompetence. Eventual acceptance by a few refereed journals could, in every case, be interpreted as a political-type fluke. (shrink)

There is no more important question in thinking about life-and actually living-in political community than whether it is to be permeated by, and purposefully oriented around, the main truths about human flourishing. It is at least paradoxical that, precisely when the state and its law and political life are shaping people's lives more and more, the professed roots of all this influence are growing thinner, more shallow. Lawmakers who profess and in many cases even think they should be "neutral" about (...) values are more involved with how persons' lives go than, perhaps, ever before. Of course, any community which has lost faith in the truth about human wellbeing is going to be quite befuddled by the question. But the perennial centrality of the question about truth and politics can be obscured for understandable reasons. One is the immediate urgency of so many practical challenges, such as settling the defense or state budget, protecting against terrorist attack, or deciding what to do about a nuclear-armed North Korea. Attention to the fundamental question is attenuated, too, by focus upon diffuse problems which affect nearly everyone daily, such as getting good healthcare coverage or creating jobs. Significant public debates about moral issues affecting policy are still common. But they tend to be episodic, and wary of getting down to foundations. When Americans argue today about immigration policy and capital punishment, for instance, they rely upon profound ethical beliefs. All too often, however, they link these commitments not to the objective moral truth at the heart of the matter, but instead to past practices, or to communal identity as a matter of fact who we are!"). (shrink)

The optimal-pessimal paradox (Bradley, 1975) has been criticized on bizarre grounds by Childs (1980). Assumptions that it never made were attributed to it and attacked. Empirical evidence for its existence (which occupied a large portion of the criticized article) was totally ignored, and it was treated as a mere theoretically based conjecture. Originally proposed solutions to the problems it presents were dismissed and replaced by ineffectual alternatives. In spite of Childs’ claim that “the paradox, although theoretically sound, is grounded (...) upon assumptions that are empirically untenable,” the paradox makes no such assumptions and is an empirical fact. (shrink)

That abortion kills someone with a right-to-life has become easier to see since Roe v. Wade. Progress in scientific research and medical practice has made both birth and viability unrealistic criteria for demarcating between human life, which demands moral respect, and merely “potential life” which does not have moral or legal equivalency with maternal interest. The near ubiquity of sonograms has probably done more than intellectual arguments to convince the public that a real baby resides in the uterus by the (...) tenth week of pregnancy. Earlier and earlier prenatal medical interventions on behalf of the unborn patient confirm this impression, and DNA indubitably substantiates that a fertilized embryo is biologically identical to the individual who is born nine months later and who has an undeniable right not to be killed. (shrink)

In 1971, Judith Jarvis Thomson published what was then and still often is regarded as a trailblazing philosophical defense of a woman’s right to have a lawful abortion. It is time to revisit Thomson’s paper. The aim here is not to engage Thomson’s pro-choice conclusions, which are indeed mistaken, but to show that her question—to what extent can abortion be morally justified, assuming that it is the deliberate killing of one person by his or her mother—is the question today in (...) American law concerning abortion. Pro-life people and groups argue among themselves about the prudence of political efforts to roll back Roe v. Wade by personhood initiatives, that is, by seeking to enact laws expressly recognizing that a human being with an equal right not to killed comes to be at fertilization, thereafter to pursue abortion restrictions as a matter of equal protection for all against unjustified uses of lethal force. Many if not most pro-life activists and bodies oppose such efforts as precipitous and almost certainly politically counterproductive. This article argues that, on the contrary, the unborn are already recognized as persons with a right not to be killed, and that the constitutional question of equal protection of unborn persons is already in the courts. Thomson’s question is, in other words, ripe and urgent, and it has been brought to the fore not by direct attack upon abortion rights, but indirectly by and through the many feticide laws enacted across the country since around the year 2000. (shrink)

Argues that same-sex “marriage” is a logical and practical impossibility and has serious implications for both other aspects of family law and the respect for human life and children in our culture. Asserts that the movement for same-sex “marriage” is a logical outgrowth of our culture’s separation of sex and procreation. Argues that the basis for opposition to this movement may be the residual reservoir of traditional understanding about marriage in the American public.

This volume offers an extensive and illuminating inquiry into the philosophical justification of the modern state. The author’s main thesis is that the state can be justified but that its justification is not sufficient to vindicate many of its most characteristic claims. The author thus steers a course between libertarian and communitarian rejections of the state and the pretenses of states themselves.

The lead-off essay by Kenneth Minogue is an Oakeshottian reflection on the extent to which modern people have become passive spectators of action, detached from traditional loyalties and modes of identity and thus a kind of new Epicurean, shorn of the genuinely contemplative character of the originals. Eric Ormsby follows this with a judicious appraisal of the possibilities and perils for culture associated with the advent of the new information technology. Anthony Daniels provides a similarly sober account of the many (...) consequences and dilemmas of medical technology for the noble Hippocratic art. David Pryce-Jones’s essay recounts the antipolitical utopianism of the totalitarian ideologies that shadowed most of the twentieth century and worries about the potentially destructive utopian tendencies in the contemporary project of European integration. Keith Windschuttle surveys the range of ideologies currently deployed in the academy, most of which derive from vulgarizations of Nietzsche. Edward Said’s influential body of work comes in for particular scrutiny here. Mark Steyn contributes a discussion of the now all-too-familiar self-hatred of Western intellectuals with the blunt precision and wit so characteristic of his splendid newspaper columns. Martin Greenberg’s essay on Burke manages to educe in brief compass the understanding of freedom that is the animating heart of that exemplary statesman’s thought and practice. Diana Schaub makes a case for the importance of political philosophy to the practice of modern politics centered on the statesmanship of Lincoln. Robert Bork’s chapter on the “adversary judiciary” limns the extent to which judges have gone from being the guarantors of the rule of law to the most effective antagonists of traditional institutions and values. Finally, Roger Kimball fittingly recalls the original Ciceronian understanding of culture as the development of the mind analogous to the cultivation of the earth, and connects it with the celebrated program of criticism proposed by Matthew Arnold. (shrink)

This engrossing book explores the human experience of evil and locates its ground in “an experience of dread almost beyond words,” arguing that the evil we do is “an attempt to master the experience by inflicting it on others”. This conclusion is the fruit of Alford’s reflections on interviews and surveys with two groups of people, those who responded to newspaper advertisements and a group of state prison inmates. Alford finds that their account of evil is not unlike that of (...) St. Augustine: it is “no-thing”. The book, however, is not a theodicy. What the ultimate explanation of evil is Alford leaves the reader to ponder. Rather he offers an account of our experience of evil, one which covers both the evil we do and the evil we suffer. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Private Consciences and Public Reasons. By Kent Greenawalt.

The author's introduces this sequel to his Morality, Politics, and Law as an extended gloss on John Noonan's statement that the "central problem of the legal enterprise is the relation of love to power." The renown of its author ensures that Love and Power will become a focal point in legal academic discussion of its central concern: the proper relation between morality, particularly religious morality, political choice, and public deliberation "in a morally pluralistic society like the United States.".

As John Henry Newman reflected on 'The Idea of a University' more than a century and a half ago, Bradley C. S. Watson brings together some of the nation's most eminent thinkers on higher education to reflect on the nature and purposes of the American university today. Their mordant reflections paint a picture of the American university in crisis. This book is essential reading for thoughtful citizens, scholars, and educational policymakers.

The purpose of this valuable book is to consider recent cultural trends in bioethics from a Catholic perspective. Bioethics is intended for a lay audience interested in understanding bioethical issues from a Catholic perspective.

Philosophers are interested in a constellation of issues involving the concept of truth. A preliminary issue, although somewhat subsidiary, is to decide what sorts of things can be true. Is truth a property of sentences (which are linguistic entities in some language or other), or is truth a property of propositions (nonlinguistic, abstract and timeless entities)? The principal issue is: What is truth? It is the problem of being clear about what you are saying when you say some claim or (...) other is true. The most important theories of truth are the Correspondence Theory, the Semantic Theory, the Deflationary Theory, the Coherence Theory, and the Pragmatic Theory. They are explained and compared here. Whichever theory of truth is advanced to settle the principal issue, there are a number of additional issues to be addressed: i. Can claims about the future be true now? ii. Can there be some algorithm for finding truth – some recipe or procedure for deciding, for any claim in the system of, say, arithmetic, whether the claim is true? iii. Can the predicate “is true” be completely defined in other terms so that it can be eliminated, without loss of meaning, from any context in which it occurs? iv. To what extent do theories of truth avoid paradox? v. Is the goal of scientific research to achieve truth? Table of Contents.. (shrink)

In the case of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al., Judge Jones ruled that a pro-intelligent design disclaimer cannot be read to public school students. In his decision, he gave demarcation criteria for what counts as science, ruling that intelligent design fails these criteria. I argue that these criteria are flawed, with most of my focus on the criterion of methodological naturalism. The way to refute intelligent design is not by declaring it unscientific, but by showing (...) that the empirical evidence for design is not there. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin’s theory of equality has exerted a strong gravitational force over Canadian equality rights doctrine for more than two decades. And although Dworkin is never cited in the Supreme Court of Canada’s equality rights cases, his shadow is plainly visible in the reception of the right to ‘equal concern and respect’ in Andrews (1989), and the ‘right to moral independence’ in Law v Canada (1999).Although this paper assesses the extent to which Dworkin’s theory of equality has been received in (...) Canadian law, it also engages in debates between Dworkin and his critics that developed as Dworkin defended and modified his theory of rights and equality over the years. The debates between Dworkin and his critics are invaluable for interpreting Canadian constitutional jurisprudence, I will argue, because the Supreme Court does not always adequately justify the conceptions of equality, dignity, etc. that it incorporates into constitutional law. Indeed, it is not always evident that the Court is aware that it is choosing among alternative conceptions, rather than straightforwardly interpreting a determinate constitutional text. The payoff from a parallel study of Dworkin and the equality rights doctrine of the Supreme Court is the identification of resources from the academic debate that can be commended for the development of a more sound and stable constitutional doctrine. (shrink)

t. 1. Filosofii︠a︡ ; Izbrannye predislovii︠a︡ ; I︠A︡zykoznanie -- t. 2. Filologii︠a︡ ; Vospominanii︠a︡ i nabli︠u︡denii︠a︡ ; Pami︠a︡ti uchiteleĭ i kolleg ; Prilozhenie : A.N. Kolmogorov, semioticheskie poslanii︠a︡.

The second volume of Jaakko Hintikka’s selected papers brings together essays from the decade 1986–96 concerning an often tacit distinction between “two competing overall views concerning our relationship to our language”. The first of these Hintikka characterizes as the view of language as lingua universalis, a single universal medium of communication; the second view, of language as calculus ratiocinator, is not meant to indicate that language is a “mere play with symbols” but rather that language “can be re interpreted like (...) a calculus”. (shrink)

Originally published in 1955. The Madhyamika philosophy is, in the author's view, the philosophy which created a revolution in Buddhism and through that in the whole range of Indian philosophy. This volume is a study of the Madhyamika philosophy in all its important aspects and is divided into three parts: Historical: this traces the origin and development of the Madhyamika philosophy. The second part concentrates on a full and critical exposition of the Madhyamika philosophy, the structure of its dialectic, its (...) conception of the Absolute and its ethics and religion. The last part of the book compares the Madhyamika with some of the well-known dialectical systems of the West (Kant, Hegel and Bradley) and undertakes a short study of the different absolutisms (Madhyamika, Vijnanavada and the Vedanta). (shrink)

Unlike many books of its kind, this collection of essays is more than a mere aggregate of papers loosely ordered around a set of common themes. In fact, for a work sensitive to the values inherent in the analytical tradition, it is surprisingly systematic, and strikes a happy balance between the products of the system-builders and the deliverances of those who are content to give us merely isolated insights. It embodies a sound knowledge of the history of philosophy, a sensitivity (...) to the contributions of the British philosophers since Bradley, and a desire to take science seriously without succumbing to the reductionism which so often characterized the contributions of the positivists. Throughout the papers the influence of Carnap, Kant and Wittgenstein is especially evident; and perhaps most characteristic are the repeated attempts to tread carefully, with their help, the sometimes narrow lines dividing realist and phenomenalist, realist and idealist, and realist and nominalist. Sellars is at pains to incorporate in his system the partial truths which always characterize conflicting philosophical alternatives. This book is well worth careful, critical study by philosophers of all persuasions.--C. V. (shrink)