How far can we apply the same moral principles to both public and private behaviour. In the interests of effective political action, are we right to accept acts of deceit, exploitation or force which we would regard as unacceptable in private relations with individuals? What means can be properly adopted in the promotion of great public causes? The problem of 'dirty hands' in politics was posed most strikingly by Machiavelli. It has re-emerged this century in a (...) pressing and, to some extent, a new form, in connection with the two World Wars and more recently the Vietnam War, where the political decisions and the destruction, and risks of destruction, have been of a scale and character not previously experienced. The contributors, including Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, T. M. Scanlon, and Ronald Dworkin, examine the background to this problem in moral and political theory. (shrink)

Conceptions of citizenship which rest on an abstract and universal notion of the individual founder on their inability to recognize the political relevance of gender. Such conceptions, because their ‘gender-neutrality’ has the effect of excluding women, are not helpful to the project of promoting the full citizenship of women. The question of citizenship is often reduced to either political citizenship, in terms of an instrumental notion of political participation, or social citizenship, in terms of an instrumental notion of economic (in)dependence. (...) The paper argues for the recognition of citizenship as gendered, and as an ethical, that is non-instrumental, social status which is distinct from both political participation and economic (in)dependence. What unites us as citizens, in our equal membership of the political community, need not rely on a conception of us as ‘neutral’ (abstract, universalized, genderless) individuals undertaking one specific activity located in the public realm, but can take account of the diverse ways in which we engage in ethically-grounded activities on the basis of our different genders, ethnic and cultural backgrounds and other differences, in both the public and private realms. A convincing feminist conception of citizenship necessarily involves a radical redefinition of the public/private distinction to accommodate the recognition of citizenship practices in the private realm. The paper builds on the observation that the concept of ‘citizenship’ is broader than the concept of ‘the political’ (or ‘the social/economic’), and contends that feminism provides us with the emancipatory potential of gendered subjectivity, which applies to both men and women. The recognition of gendered subjectivity opens the way to the recognition of the diversity of citizenship practices. It is not that women need to be liberated from the private realm, in order to take part in the public realm as equal citizens, but that women – and men – already undertake responsibilities of citizenship in both the public and the private realms. (shrink)

How far can we apply the same moral principles to both public and private behaviour. In the interests of effective political action, are we right to accept acts of deceit, exploitation or force which we would regard as unacceptable in private relations with individuals? What means can be properly adopted in the promotion of great public causes? The problem of 'dirty hands' in politics was posed most strikingly by Machiavelli. It has re-emerged this century in a (...) pressing and, to some extent, a new form, in connection with the two World Wars and more recently the Vietnam War, where the political decisions and the destruction, and risks of destruction, have been of a scale and character not previously experienced. The contributors, including Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, T. M. Scanlon, and Ronald Dworkin, examine the background to this problem in moral and political theory. (shrink)

Gordon's emphasizes that the process of prosecution is crucial to the idea of crime. One who commits a public wrong is properly called to public account for it, and the criminal trial constitutes such a public calling to account. The state is the proper prosecutor of crimes: since a crime is ‘our’ wrong, rather than only the victim's wrong, it is appropriate that we should prosecute it, collectively. The case is not simply V the victim, or P (...) the plaintiff, against D the defendant. It is brought, as the Americans properly have it, by ‘the People’, or by ‘the Commonwealth’, against the defendant. This is a useful way in which to think about crimes and criminalisation. This chapter tries to develop this conception of public wrongs a little further, which also involves complicating it more than a little. It works from a version of liberal communitarianism that rejects the metaphysical version of the individualist's ‘unencumbered self’; but the account sketched here should be compatible with all but the most radically individualist kinds of liberal theory. (shrink)

This essay draws on comparative ethnographic material from Albania and Italy. It addresses different forms of corruption, arguing that in order to understand the way in which phenomena such as corruption occur and are experienced in any given society, we should contextualize them in the historical and cultural traditions of that specific society. In doing so, however, we should be alert in avoiding falling into the trap of either moral relativism or cultural determinism. The essay suggests that an anthropological analysis (...) of corruption should distinguish between legal rules and social norms. In particular, the empirical study of such norms helps to understand the meanings—both individual and inter-subjective—that actors give to the social and political situation in which they operate. (shrink)

Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) is the study of how to reason about knowledge, belief, and communication. This paper studies the relative expressivity of certain fragments of the DEL language for public and private communication. It is shown that the language of public communication with common knowledge and the language of private communication with common knowledge are expressively incomparable for the class of all pointed Kripke models, which provides a formal proof that public and private (...) communication are fundamentally different in the presence of common knowledge. It is also shown that single-recipient private communication does not add expressive power to the language of modal logic with common knowledge for any class of transitive pointed Kripke models. The latter result provides a sense in which positive introspection—believing our own beliefs—induces a kind of self-dialog. (shrink)

A thoughtful addition to the growing debate over public and private morality. Looks at lying and deception in law, family, medicine, government.

The public and private distinction is essential to our moral and political vocabularies as it continues to structure our social and legal practices. Public and Private provides a multidisciplinary perspective on this distinction which has been at the centre of controversial debate in recent years. The focus of the debate has been on delineating acceptable boundaries between public and private in economic, social and cultural spheres. What is the nature and scope of citizenship? What (...) are the implications of new reproductive technologies? And what is the fate of state sovereignty in a globalised world economy? At first glance these questions may appear unrelated, yet they all raise underlying and serious concerns regarding the scope and proper boundaries between the public and the private. Public and Private will stimulate the current debate with its original approach and provide a valuable resource for all those interested in the role the public and private play in structuring our societies. (shrink)

The public and private distinction is essential to our moral and political vocabularies as it continues to structure our social and legal practices. _Public and Private_ provides a multidisciplinary perspective on this distinction which has been at the centre of controversial debate in recent years. The focus of the debate has been on delineating acceptable boundaries between public and private in economic, social and cultural spheres. What is the nature and scope of citizenship? What are the (...) implications of new reproductive technologies? And what is the fate of state sovereignty in a globalised world economy? At first glance these questions may appear unrelated, yet they all raise underlying and serious concerns regarding the scope and proper boundaries between the public and the private. _Public and Private_ will stimulate the current debate with its original approach and provide a valuable resource for all those interested in the role the public and private play in structuring our societies. (shrink)

This paper raises questions concerning Ted Morris’ interpretation of Hume’s notion of meaning and investigates the private and public aspects of Hume’s notion of meaning.

These essays, by widely respected scholars in fields ranging from social and political theory to historical sociology and cultural studies, illuminate the significance of the public/private distinction for an increasingly wide range of ...

Han Fei was a central figure in Chinese Legalism, which was a leading school of thought in the Warring States period of China, and which left a huge imprint on political culture in imperial China. This article examines the complex duality of public and private interests in Han Fei’s political thought, a crucial aspect of his thinking. I argue that Han Fei adopted a sophisticated statist approach to understanding public and private interests. For Han Fei, (...) class='Hi'>public interests are embodied in the state while private ones have dual functions. On the one hand, private interests threaten public ones by inviting corrupt material interests, personal morality, and knowledge, as well as human relationships. On the other hand, self-centered human psychology plays a dialectic role in strengthening the state. (shrink)

This collection provides a fresh and wide-ranging assessment on the changing nature of the public-private debate. For the first time, eight essays by scholars provide insight into this issue from a number of disciplinary perspectives. The focus of recent debates on this topic has been the delineation of acceptable boundaries between the public and the private in the economic, social and cultural spheres of modern societies. Tough questions are raised pertaining to the nature and scope of (...) citizenship, privacy rights, the implications of new reproductive technologies, and the fate of state sovereignty in the context of a globalized world economy. All of these issues discussed in this book bring serious concerns about the distinction between public and private to light. (shrink)

My paper will explore boundaries and rights, the public and the private, as to the enforcement of religious legal rules in societies self-consciously founded on Islamic law. I employ as my case-study legal and social controversies aroused by the Saudi Hay’at al-amr bi-al-ma`ruf wa-al-nahy `an al-munkar, the government agency charged with “ordering the good and forbidding the evil.” The paper will first lay out some of the laws fixing the powers of the Hay’at, including various statutes issued by (...) the king but, of equal or greater importance, the received medieval fiqh rules governing the muhtasib . Focus shall be on an issue much debated in the classical law and also a long-time bone of contention in Saudi society, namely the legal limits on the powers of the Hay’at to investigate and punish immoral acts occurring in private. Limits on such powers stem from two sources, both in the law and in social understandings of that law. One source, the more prominent in public debate, concerns revelatory and fiqh and related social norms against spying or prying into people’s behavior and against undue attempts to expose people’s sins. Notably, however, this restriction affects only enforcement. The pervasiveness of laws considered to arise from the relationship of the individual to God still stands. A solitary immoral act performed in privacy can still be a sin and a crime, and punishable if it is somehow legitimately known and proved . The second source of restrictions is more far-reaching, going beyond issues of investigation and proof. As held by the majority of scholars, the Hay’at may not compel or forbid any actions for which the religious-legal ruling is under classical law a matter of legitimate difference of scholarly opinion; or inversely, the Hay’at may compel or forbid only those actions as to which there is a divine command known to a certainty either from a revealed text or from the consensus of scholars. A commonly noted abuse by the Hay’at in Saudi Arabia has been to attempt to enforce rules lacking requisite certainty, such as requiring veiling of the face. Rules known to a certainty have a pervasive role in Islamic constitutional theory. In principle, such rules must be enforced, regardless of whether they concern matters other societies may consider individual or private, such as changing one’s religion. Rules lacking that high degree of certainty cannot – without separate justification on grounds other than religious text – define sins or crimes or be enforced as general rules by the state. Though seemingly scholastic and philosophical, this restriction is potentially crucial in defining a realm of individual autonomy in religious matters and shaping the boundary between public and private in societies self-consciously founded in Islamic law. It is important to examine to what extent the restriction is reflected in legal and social practice in such societies. (shrink)

The Tanner Lectures are a collection of educational and scientific discussions relating to human values. Conducted by leaders in their fields, the lectures are presented at prestigious educational facilities around the world.

Commentators on John Broome's Tanner Lecture. The Tanner Lectures are a collection of educational and scientific discussions relating to human values. Conducted by leaders in their fields, the lectures are presented at prestigious educational facilities around the world.

The arrival of Covid-19 in 2020 brought severe disruption to our public and our private lives, and also to ordinary normative boundaries we maintain between the two which we had previously taken fo...

Men are living in the midst of a world pervaded by ideas.* Ideas, which provide men with help in their will to act and to think according to rules, which offer them guidance in their lives, are mustered into systems which are called ideologies.Ideologies are issued by the inclusive society, by special, functional groups inside the society and, beginning with a given stage in the development of human society, by ideological movements which profess to provide men not only with guidance (...) for special tasks or functions, but for life as a whole. So, individual men are faced with various sets of ideologies, more or less in agreement between themselves, more 'or less authoritative for them. They must choose between the suggestions, the rules, the orders given to them. As men are always in search of some degree of consistency in their ways of thinking and acting, they fit together the ideas they choose, unconsciously, into systems, into personal, private, individual ideologies. (shrink)

One of the themes running through this issue of the Hastings Center Report is the complexity of how private moral commitments cash out in the public sphere. It's a theme I find both fascinating and important.The lead article is about how hospices in Oregon have dealt with the state's law permitting physician-assisted death. Most patients who have sought physician-assisted death in Oregon did so while in hospice, suggesting to some people that hospices are centrally involved in physician-assisted death—both (...) in patients' decision-making and in administering the medications. In fact, their involvement is much more limited and circumspect, as authors Courtney Campbell and Jessica Cox document.The focus of the article .. (shrink)

This article draws analogies between the making of norms by contract, often seen as typical of private law, and by subordinate law-making, often seen as a typically public function and for public bodies. These analogies are set in the context of those rules which govern the relations between universities and their students, as the same types of rule may find their source in a range of legal sources: prescription, royal charter, parliamentary legislation or contract. Of these different (...) sources, the common law courts long accepted that chartered corporations, created by exercise of royal prerogative, were entitled to make subordinate legislation (known as byelaws) for the furthering of their purposes for both members and non-members, despite this law-making being extra-parliamentary. This article suggests how this power to make byelaws in chartered corporations may apply to chartered universities, noting the difficulties arising from the allegedly eleemosynary nature of these bodies and from the possible coexistence of statutory powers. It then examines the way in which the contract between a student and a university arises, and how this contract may form the legal basis of student rules, whether these rules are conceived as terms of the contract itself or as expressions of a unilateral power in the university arising from the contract. A subsequent article will compare the review of student rules on the grounds of public law principle and of contractual regulation. (shrink)