Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Democratic Rights And The Choice Of Economic Systems, Jeppe Von Platz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Holt argues that Rawls’s first principle of justice requires democratic control of the economy and that property owning democracy fails to satisfy this requirement; only liberal socialism is fully democratic. However, the notion of democratic control is ambiguous,and Holt has to choose between the weaker notion of democratic control that Rawls is committed to and the stronger notion that property owning democracy fails to satisfy. It may be that there is a tension between capitalism and democracy, so that only liberal socialism can be fully democratic, but if so, we should reject, rather than argue from, the theory of democracy …

Dialogues On Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Ladelle Mcwhorter, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

Shelley Tremain, of the blog Dialogues on Disability, interviews Ladelle McWhorter about her career, upbringing, and life experiences.

The Veil Of Ignorance In Rawlsian Theory, Jeppe Von Platz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

As part of his effort to answer the question "What is the best conception of justice for a democratic society?" philosopher John Rawls constructed a thought experience called the original position. In the original position, representativs of members of society choose principles of justice for society in light of limited interests and with limited information. Situated behind the veil of ignorance, the parties in the original position have no knowledge about particular facts that could lead them to prefer principles of justice partial to those they represent. The veil of ignorance is thus an important part of Rawls's argument …

Sources In Legal Positivist Theories, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The debate about positivism in general legal theory or in the international legal scholarship manifests so many different, if not conflicting, meanings of positivism—even among legal positivists themselves—that the debate about legal positivism has proved almost unfathomable and unintelligible.

No other approach to theorizing international law is more closely associated with and dependent upon the development of an account of its sources than is positivism. The explanation for this is a simple and familiar one: if there is any thesis regarding (p. 324) law that we can uncontroversially associate with the label ‘legal positivism’, it is the view that a …

From Scientific Racism To Neoliberal Biopolitics, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

Genealogy does not pose as political motivation, let alone moral imperative. It is a tool for those already engaged in resistance-not to dictate action but to enrich ongoing processes of analyzing and strategizing. With that understanding of genealogy's role, as I have argued (McWhorter 2009) and will argue here, Foucault's method can be extremely useful for confronting racism. In particular, his concepts of normalization and biopower are crucial for understanding how racism survived the demise of the nineteenth-century science that supported it and how it persisted throughout the twentieth century despite social, political, and economic change.

The Morality Of Corporate Persons, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

This essay provides a genealogy of corporate personhood as it exists currently in US law and places moral personhood in a similar genealogical context. This treatment demonstrates that the two are inextricably intertwined in both conception and institutionalized practices. We would do well to dismantle both; meanwhile, however, corporate personhood's implicit illiberal notion of collective mentality and responsibility may suggest possibilities for establishing collective counterforces to oppose activities of transnational for-profit corporations and mitigate their devastating political, economic, and environmental effects upon actual people and the ecosystems upon which we depend.

Beasts, Sovereigns, Pirates: Melville's "Enchanted Isles" Beyond The Picturesque, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Herman Melville's "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles," included in his signature set of shorter narratives The Piazza Tales, remains relatively unvisited by readers and critics. So too was the archipelago generally known as the Galapagos, before becoming a chic destination for natural history excursions and eco-tourism. These ten "sketches" relate a narrator's experiences on the Pacific islands, adding a number of travelers' stories, some extrapolated (more or less accurately) from known records, some creatively transformed. One informative, comprehensive handbook suggests that Melville's description of this volcanic archipelago as Encantadas or "enchanted" in the sense of bewitched-uncanny, weird, their very …

What Makes A Social Order Primitive? In Defense Of Hart’S Take On International Law, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The widespread antipathy to Hart's description of international law as a simple or primitive social order, one that lacks a rule of recognition and therefore does not qualify as a legal system, rests on two misunderstandings. First, the absence of a division of labor in identifying, altering, applying, and enforcing law is as much, if not more, central to Hart's understanding of what makes a society primitive as is the absence of any secondary rules at all. Second, it is primarily in terms of the presence of such a division of labor and the implications it has for the ontology …