This paper discusses the thought of the medieval Maghrebin thinker Ibn Khaldun through the prism of the philosophy and sociology of law and politics. I will first try to illustrate how, even if Ibn Khaldun wrote in the fourteenth century, he anticipated many core concepts that are characteristic of modern Western sociological and philosophical thought. The argument is thus made that his thought can, and indeed must, be rescued from the wide neglect that, outside the specialized field of Khaldunian studies, (...) it has so far suffered in our treatment and teaching of the history of politico-legal sociological thought. I will then claim that the scheme he devised to explain the rise and fall of civilizations can also, with due care, be used to frame and understand the political and cultural landscape in which the West and the Islamic world are presently engaged in a difficult dialogue. The discussion is in this sense offered in the hope of making a contribution to the current politico-legal philosophical and sociological debate on multiculturalism, and on the limits of its scope. (shrink)

Governments around the world collect huge amounts of personal data from their citizens for counterterrorist purposes. While mining this data has arguably increased the security of populations, the practices through which these data are currently collected in many countries have been criticised for violating individuals’ rights to privacy. Yet it is not clear what a permissible data collection regime would look like and thus also how we could reform existing regimes to make them morally acceptable. This article explores a number (...) of ways in which we might justify a data collection regime to those affected in spite of the setbacks to their privacy. In contrast to existing justifications, I argue that individuals can be asked to surrender their personal data as a requirement of reciprocity in a cooperative system in which they gain security from others doing likewise. Relying on this justification, though, has significant implications for how we should reform existing data collection regimes. In particular, more stringent limits will need to be placed on the forms which these regimes can legitimately take. (shrink)

Raz holds that necessarily all legal authorities, even de facto authorities, make a claim to legitimate authority. He does not say that legitimacy is a necessary property of law. This view, which I call the claim view, constitutes my focal point in this paper. Many commentators have criticized this view. I discuss and dismiss three critiques of the claim view: the verification critique (the claim view is not empirically confirmed), the legalistic critique (law claims legal authority, not moral authority), and (...) the semantic critique (legal obligations are semantically distinct from moral obligations). I submit that Raz equates the meaning of legal duties with that of moral duties and yet denies that legal statements entail moral propositions. In other words, I distinguish the semantic identity thesis from the semantic entailment thesis. Instead of a semantic interpretation of the claim view, I defend a presuppositional ascription of a general claim to moral authority to authoritative duty‐imposing and normatively committed uses of legal language by official spokesmen. I show that law’s claim to authority does not prove the truth of the sources thesis, because conceptual confusion or insincerity can affect the epistemic reliability of the propositions embodied in the claim, and because blatant immorality can altogether cancel law’s pragmatically presupposed claim to moral authority. I also argue that the claim view can only warrant two qualified versions of exclusive legal positivism, one of which is almost tautological, the other self‐contradictory. Finally, I suggest that exclusive legal positivism cannot be defended on conceptual grounds. (shrink)

Abstract Two features of human?rights discourse are often targeted for criticism: its universalism and its individualism. Both features, it is usually claimed, illegitimately overlook the significance of cultural diversity. In this essay I argue that individualism is incompatible with universalism and compatible with cultural diversity. Thus I defend the view that human rights are individualistically justified, and I argue that it follows from this that human rights are in an important sense non?universal. I go on to show how my non?universalist (...) conclusion can provide the basis for a retort to those who appeal to facts about cultural diversity in order to criticise human rights discourse. (shrink)

One of the central debates in legal philosophy is the debate over legal positivism. Roughly, positivists say that law is ultimately grounded in social facts alone, whereas antipositivists say it is ultimately grounded in both social facts and moral facts. In this paper, I argue that philosophers involved in the dispute over legal positivism sometimes employ distinct concepts when they use the term “law” and pick out different things in the world using these concepts. Because of this, what positivists say (...) might well then be true of one thing (e.g., law1) but false of another (e.g., law2). Accepting this thesis does not mean that the philosophers engaged in this dispute are “talking past each other” or engaged in a “merely verbal dispute” that lacks substance. I argue that participants in this dispute are sometimes arguing about what they should mean by the word “law” in the context at hand. This involves putting forward competing proposals about which concept the word “law” should be used to express. This is an issue in what I call “conceptual ethics.” This argument in conceptual ethics can be well worth having, given the connotations that the term “law” plays in many contexts, ranging from legal argument to political philosophy to social-scientific inquiry. Sometimes, I claim, philosophers (and ordinary speakers) engage in such argument tacitly by competing “metalinguistic” usages of the term “law”—usages of the term that express a view (in this case, a normative view) about the meaning of the word itself. In such cases, speakers on different sides of the positivism debate might in fact both speak truly, in terms of the literal (semantic) content of what they both say. Nonetheless, they may disagree in virtue of views in conceptual ethics about “law” that they express through the nonliteral content of what they say. These views in conceptual ethics often reflect further disagreements about issues that are not ultimately about words or concepts. These include foundational ones in ethics and politics about how we should live and what kind of institutions should govern our lives. My metalinguistic account of the dispute over legal positivism better equips us to identify what such issues are and to engage them more fruitfully. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin famously argued that legal positivism is a defective account of law because it has no account of Theoretical Disagreement. In this article I argue that legal positivism—as advanced by H.L.A. Hart—does not need an account of Theoretical Disagreement. Legal positivism does, however, need a plausible account of interpretation in law. I provide such an account in this article.

This paper challenges a pervasive, if not always explicit assumption of the present state of theorising in business ethics. This is the idea that a workable theory of organizational ethics must provide a unified perspective on its subject matter. In this paper we will sketch the broad outlines of an alternative understanding of business ethics, which focuses on constraints on corporate conduct that cannot reasonably be rejected. These constraints stem from at least three different levels or spheres of social reality, (...) i.e. the preconditions of a well-ordered society, the internal morality of economic activity and the preconditions of autonomous agency. (shrink)

In this article I investigate the extent to which Bhikhu Parekh believes that a person's cultural/religious background must be preserved and whether, by implication, religious schooling is justified by his theory. My discussion will explore—by inference and implication—whether Parekh's carefully crafted multiculturalism, enriched and illuminated by numerous practical insights, is socially tenable. I will also consider whether, by extension, it is justifiable, on his line of reasoning, to cultivate cultural and religious understandings among one's own children. Finally, I will contend (...) that Parekh, notwithstanding his cautious, even‐handed approach, commits several important errors, including conflating the culture of the parents with that of the children and insisting that cultural and religious persons ought to be allowed to defend their views in the public square on religious grounds. (shrink)

This article presents moral jurisprudence theory as a systematic approach to business ethics that analogizes core problems of the field to related problems in law. Adapting theoretical approaches from contemporary philosophy of law, the article develops a decision-making method for business ethics.

At the heart of any theoretical problem of justice lies the problem of motivation: Even if we could conceive of a way to develop a comprehensive system of just laws, and even if we could rationally believe in the justice of these laws, how could we ever ensure that we—or anyone else—would be motivated to abide by them? By unearthing how the problem of motivation sways canonical discussions of justice, the article brings forth intrinsic similarities and differences in these discussions (...) that are often overlooked in the literature. In particular, the article highlights intrinsic similarities in the analysis of the concept of justice in two central works that belong to the continental and the analytic tradition respectively and are otherwise rarely discussed together: Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right and Rawls’s Theory of Justice. (shrink)

This paper seeks to elucidate the role played by the common good in John Finnis's arguments for a generic and presumptive moral obligation to obey the law.1 Finnis's appeal to the common good constitutes a direct challenge to liberal and philosophical anarchist denials of a generic and presumptive obligation to obey the law.2 It is questionable, however, whether Finnis has presented the strongest possible case for his position. In the first section I outline Finnis's account of the relationship between basic (...) goods, the common good, and the authority of law. Section II demonstrates how Finnis's emphasis upon the instrumental nature of the common good leaves his position vulnerable to Joseph Raz's objections3 that not all cases of law make a moral difference and that governmental authority is often unnecessary to resolve coordination problems. I argue that Raz's critique nonetheless fails adequately to address an alternative defense of the existence of a generic and presumptive obligation to obey the law, suggested by some passages in Finnis's work, according to which the common good is integral, rather than merely instrumental, to the good of individuals. In the final section I consider whether Finnis could strengthen his case for a generic and presumptive obligation to obey the law by adopting a more consistently robustaccount of the common good. (shrink)

ABSTRACTViolating a person's rights is disrespectful to that person. This is because it is disrespectful to someone to violate duties owed to that person. I call these ‘directed duties’; they are the flipside of rights. The aim of this paper is to consider why directed duties and respect are linked, and to highlight a puzzle about this linkage, a puzzle arising from the fact that many directed duties are justified independently of whether they do anything for those to whom they (...) are owed. (shrink)

In the paper, I argue that the existing model of cultural-legal transplantation predicates on a binarism of overseas/local culture. Seeing the limitation of such a binary model, I aim to develop a transplantation/osmosis mechanism by elaborating the model of ‘cultural simularity’. I will also use the proposed model to examine how the Euro-American discourses of justice infiltrates/interacts with the Han-Chinese culture.

For Frank Knight, the fact that we are free to engage in economic pursuits brings out what is both best and worst in human nature. The same competitive economy that liberates individuals to choose their own desired ends also provides them with socially undesirable wants and fosters habits potentially at odds with the demands of liberal democracy. Given Knight’s desire both to defend human liberty and his concession that liberty is likely to be abused, his version of liberalism must of (...) necessity be anticonsequentialist. Paradoxically, Knight’s philosophical pluralism?his insistence that there are any number of incommensurable perspectives on the good or just society?underlies both his criticism of the ?ethical? possibilities of the competitive order and his defense of human liberty against the dangers of social planning. (shrink)