Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

Aristotle's Quarrel With Socrates: Friendship In Political Thought, John Boersma

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Friendship played an outsized role in ancient political thought in comparison to medieval and modern political philosophies. Most modern scholarship has paid relatively little attention to the role of friendship in ancient political philosophy. Recently, however, scholars are increasingly beginning to investigate classical conceptions of friendship. My dissertation joins this growing interest by examining the importance of friendship in the political thought of Socrates and Aristotle. Specifically, I analyze the divergent approaches that Socrates and Aristotle take to politics and trace these distinct approaches to their differing conceptions of friendship. Through an examination of two Platonic dialogues—the Lysis and the …

Slogans Appropriate To The Legacy Of Martin Luther King Jr., Theodore Walker

Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events

For printing signs, banners, posters, tee shirts, and bumper stickers (and for preaching sermons) that are appropriate to the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., please consider the following slogans: ABOLISH WAR, ABOLISH POVERTY, AMEND THE CONSTITUTION, SUPPORT AN ECONOMIC BILL OF RIGHTS, JOBS FOR ALL, GUARANTEED INCOME FOR ALL, SUPPORT UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME, and GOOD NEWS TO THE POOR - Luke 4:14-19.

Debunking Human Prejudice And Blindness, Peter J. Li

Animal Sentience

Human prejudice and blindness to animal suffering are shocking. Despite their differences in culture, politics, and religious beliefs, humans have one thing in common. They see nonhuman animals as inferior and have since time immemorial assumed a dominant position in an asymmetrical human-animal relationship. When it comes to human-animal relations, there is no “clash of civilizations.” Human prejudice and blindness are predicated on “common sense assumptions” about the natural world and nonhuman animals in particular. Marino & Merskin’s review is part of the growing effort to debunk the assumptions that have shaped human actions so as to end the injustice …

When Equality Matters, John Thrasher

Philosophy Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Equality is at the heart of liberal, democratic political theory. Despite this, there is considerable disagreement about how we should understand equality in the context of liberal politics. Several different conceptions of equality (e.g., equality of opportunity, equality of welfare outcomes, and equality of basic rights) will recommend different and often conflicting policies and institutions. Further, we can expect, in democratic societies, that citizens will disagree on the correct conception of equality. This leads to the diversity problem of equality— there is no one conception of equality that will be acceptable to all citizens. This is compounded by the complexity …

The Eventualization Of Political Thinking: From The Arab Revolutions To The Trump Era, Oscar Barroso

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "The Eventualization of Political Thinking: From the Arab Revolutions to the Trump Era", Óscar Barroso maps out some of the most important contemporary philosophies of the Event: those of Rancière, Badiou, Hardt and Negri and Žižek. These philosophies of the event are defined as post-humanist political proposals that entrust emancipation not to the realization of anthropological ideas but to the emergence of difference. Examining the pessimistic interpretation that these authors make of what has happened since the events of 2011, the author questions whether too much trust has been placed in the supposed virtue of difference and, …

“A New Way Of Thinking”: Frantz Fanon’S True Opinion On Violence, Caroline D. Renko

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

In an attempt to clear Frantz Fanon’s name, on account of his opinion on the role of violence in decolonizing a nation, this paper focuses on two important chapters in his last book, The Wretched of the Earth. By closely reading his articulation of the Algerian war and the wounds brought on by mental illness at such a time, Fanon’s true opinion concerning violence becomes clear. For too long, he has been seen and used as a proponent for inciting violence, but this is a misconception that has been perpetuated by devaluing the importance of his descriptions of the …

The Nature Of Legal Interpretation: What Jurists Can Learn About Legal Interpretation From Linguistics And Philosophy, Triantafyllos Gkouvas

International Dialogue

Brian G. Slocum’s The Nature of Legal Interpretation: What Jurists Can Learn about Legal Interpretation from Linguistics and Philosophy is a formidable addition to an evolving trend in analytical jurisprudence that invites insights from jurisprudentially “extraneous” domains such as linguistics, philosophy of language and mind, metaethics and philosophy of action. A praiseworthy feature of this trend is the importance it attaches to keeping these insights as free as possible of prior translation in the occasionally cryptic or unnecessarily insular language of analytical jurisprudence and legal doctrine. It is precisely thanks to this feature that recent discussions on the relevance of …

Is There A Crisis Of Sustainable Development?, Edward Sandowski, Betty J. Harris

International Dialogue

This article argues that there is a crisis of sustainable development. Sustainable development may mean a value system, but also may mean a set of societal development processes, manifested in political economy and culture. One crisis of sustainable development in either meaning arises from a combination of elements under neoliberalism. We stress three. (1) Sustainable development includes complex demands about justice. These involve conflicts among neoliberal justice and rival more philosophically plausible concepts of justice. (2) Care for the environment (basic to sustainable development) is complex, and generates multiple sometimes, conflicting demands on decision-making. (3)

The Roots Of Ethnic Cleansing In Europe, Andy Aydin-Aitchison

International Dialogue

H. Zeynep Bulutgil’s monograph, available now in paperback, has already received high praise and recognition, winning the American Political Science Association European Politics and Society Section book award in 2017. In this review, I set out what the book offers in terms of argument and evidence, and so outline its contribution to understanding ethnic conflict and ethnic cleansing. In the spirit of cross-disciplinary dialogue, I consider how Bulutgil’s approach and insights can contribute to developments in the criminology of atrocity. Taken together the political science approach exemplified by Bulutgil, and criminological approaches characterized by disciplinary openness, complement each other in …

Citizenship, Insurrection, And Recognition: European Critical Theory Before The Biopolitical Threshold: Citizenship; Violence And Civility: On The Limits Of Political Philosophy; Recognition Or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter On The Politics Of Freedom, Equality, And Identify, Miguel Vatter

International Dialogue

Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière and Axel Honneth are representative figures of a generation of political theorists who stand under the shooting star of May 1968, the high season of insurrectionary politics in the last half century. The books under review offer a welcome opportunity to consider the lessons they draw from this event and its aftermath at the twilight of their careers. However, taken as a whole these books also reveal the limits of this style of radical democratic theory that only in a very approximate way has registered the passing of the baton, which occurred roughly during the same …

The Iranian Metaphysicals, Elise K. Burton

International Dialogue

Anthropologist Alireza Doostdar’s first book, The Iranian Metaphysicals, is a well-written and theoretically sophisticated contribution to scholarship on modern Iranian history and society. Combining vividly portrayed ethnography with archival research and textual analysis, he offers an unprecedented account of Iranians’ experiences with and beliefs about the supernatural. The term ‘metaphysical’ emerges directly from his Iranian interlocutors, who use the Persian equivalents metafiziki or mavara’i to describe paranormal practices and phenomena ranging from sorcery and traditional occult sciences, to spirit possession and séances, to clairvoyance and teleportation. Although many elite Iranians, secularist and orthodox Shi‘i alike, have condemned interest in the …

Hate Speech Law: A Philosophical Examination, Eric A. Heinze

International Dialogue

Alexander Brown writes as an inter-disciplinary scholar at the intersections of law, ethics, philosophy, and politics. With Hate Speech Law: A Philosophical Examination he justly claims to have explored “numerous principled arguments for and against hate speech law by articulating a collection of key normative principles” (316). This ambitious book identifies and organizes conflicting values within the hate speech controversies. It aims to synthesize deeper questions about core concepts of liberalism, democracy, personhood, dignity, and tolerance with policy concerns about pragmatics and effectiveness. The most seasoned free speech scholars will find points and angles they had not previously considered.

Humanity Without Dignity: Moral Equality, Respect, And Human Rights, David Jason Karp

International Dialogue

This book aims to reject theoretical approaches that ground human rights in a notion of dignity, understood in terms of an equal rank, transcendental/spiritual quality and/or human capacity for rational agency. It argues instead that the idea of human rights should be grounded in a fundamental moral right of each person not to be treated as inferior. It defends this argument with reference to a substantive account of what it means to be treated as inferior in the relevant sense—dehumanization, instrumentalization, infantilization, objectification and stigmatization—combined with an account of when and why these are wrong. The book says that they …

Heat, Greed And Human Need: Climate Change, Capitalism And Sustainable Wellbeing, Gillian Brock

International Dialogue

In this wonderful book, Ian Gough shows how we can deal with climate change sensibly, by developing eco-social policy that promotes human wellbeing. The result is a tour de force. Demonstrating sophisticated knowledge of several relevant fields, Gough combines important multidisciplinary insights with his previous groundbreaking research on human needs. The result is a coherent, usable framework that has considerable value in guiding policy discussions. This impressive work is bound to become essential reading for anyone working on policy, climate change and sustainable human well-being.

Famine, Affluence And Morality, Owen G. Mordaunt

International Dialogue

The foreword of this text is significant because Bill and Melinda Gates, co-chairs of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, make reference to the fact that in more than forty years the world has seen much improvement in curbing poverty. Less than half the world’s population lives in poverty and the proportion of children who die before the age of five has dropped even more. By 1990, it was around 10%, and now it is closer to 5%, even though 5% is still too many when you consider 6.3 million child deaths per year. Most of the deaths, however, are …

The Color Of Modernity: São Paulo And The Making Of Race And Nation In Brazil, Maria S. Arbeláez

International Dialogue

This The Color of Modernity is an outstanding examination of the role of race, regional, and nationalistic ideologies in the creation of modern-day Brazil. Barbara Weinstein focuses on the rise of the mainly white elite of the State of São Paulo as the prominent economic, political, and intellectual leader of the region and the country. The analysis articulates methodical theoretical approaches of cultural studies, discourse analysis, and politics of identity. It investigates the intricacies of how the coffee barons and intellectual Paulistanos managed to construct an image of modernity, entrepreneurship, and success as the paradigm of a new Brazil.What appears …

Heidegger And Jewish Thought: Difficult Others, David A. White

International Dialogue

This work is an anthology of fourteen articles on various aspects of Heidegger’s relation to the Jews and, more abstractly, what it means to be Jewish. The essays are arranged under three headings—Heidegger Thinks the Jews, Heidegger and Jewish Thinkers, Heidegger and Jewish Thought. The work also includes an introduction by Elad Lapidot and, as an appendix, Thomas Sheehan’s bibliography of Heidegger’s works (including English translations as of 2017). Lapidot’s introduction highlights the stimulus for the anthology, the publication of Heidegger’s “so-called Black Notebooks,” notes for the years 1931 to 1948. For Lapidot, “about a dozen passages” contain “strong anti-Jewish …

Notes From The Editor, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Notes from International Dialogue's Editor-in-Chief, Rory J. Conces for Volume 8.

The Life Of The Law In Palestine: The Abc Of The Opt: A Legal Lexicon Of The Israeli Control Over The Occupied Palestinian Territory Orna Ben-Naftali,, John Reynolds

International Dialogue

Through an accumulation of laws rather than by military means, a particular misery is intensified and entrenched. This slow violence, this cold violence, no less than the other kind, ought to be looked at and understood. (Cole 2015: 19) In September 2018, Israel’s Supreme Court confirmed that the planned eviction and demolition of the small West Bank village of Khan al-Ahmar, originally authorized by the Court earlier in the year, should go ahead. The residents of that village are Palestinian Bedouin who had been expelled by the Israeli state in 1952 from their original lands in the

Naqab desert. Six …

Not Enough: Human Rights In An Unequal World, Andrew Fagan

International Dialogue

These are troubling times, in which we appear to be facing an ever-expanding litany of harms and injustices entirely of our own making. Our awareness of these pathological conditions is expressed through various critical perspectives and platforms, which together reinforce a pervasive sense of crisis. We all contribute to the making of our world in a variety of ways. Few of us can claim to possess entirely clean hands when it comes to accounting for how the world could have become so disenchanted and so unpleasant for so many. However, some may wish to claim that the very purity of …

Table Of Contents, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Table of Contents for Volume 8

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’T Talk About It), Uğur Aytaç

International Dialogue

The demise of organized labor, the internationalization of capital movements, and technological changes are often believed to contribute to the decline in the bargaining power of employees vis-à-vis their bosses in the age of globalization. According to many, these radical socio-economic transformations are one of the explanatory factors behind the expanding income and wealth inequalities across societies. The emergence of these vast economic inequalities led social scientists to study the nature of these trends and search for possible institutional solutions. Similarly, the normative-philosophical discussions on the contemporary labor-capital relations have predominantly focused on the inequalities of economic resources such as …

Evidence For Hope: Making Human Rights Work In The 21st Century, Brett J. Kyle

International Dialogue

In Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century, Kathryn Sikkink delivers a timely defense of the promise and progress of human rights movements, ideas, and institutions. Amid a seemingly ever-growing body of scholarship on the shortcomings of human rights, Sikkink contends that the human rights movement has helped to improve the human condition over the long term. As the title promises, there is much we should regard as progress in human rights and reason to be hopeful for the future. Sikkink was motivated to write this book for human rights activists “who say they have lost …

In Defense Of Openness, Bas Van Der Vossen, Jason Brennan

Philosophy Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"The topic of global justice has long been a central concern within political philosophy and political theory, and there is no doubt that it will remain significant given the persistence of poverty on a massive scale and soaring global inequality. Yet, virtually every analysis in the vast literature of the subject seems ignorant of what developmental economists, both left and right, have to say about the issue. In Defense of Openness illuminates the problem by stressing that that there is overwhelming evidence that economic rights and freedom are necessary for development, and that global redistribution tends to hurt more than …

The Presbyterian Enlightenment: The Confluence Of Evangelical And Enlightenment Thought In British America, Brandon S. Durbin

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Eighteenth-Century British American Presbyterian ministers incorporated covenantal theology, ideas from the Scottish Enlightenment, and resistance theory in their sermons. The sermons of Presbyterian ministers strongly indicate the intermixing of enlightenment and evangelical ideas. Congregants heard and read these sermons, spreading these ideas to the average colonist. This combination helps explain why American Presbyterians were so apt to resist British rule during the American Revolution. Protestant covenantal theology, derived from Protestant reformers like John Calvin and John Knox, emphasized virtue and duty. This covenant affected both the people and their rulers. When rulers failed to uphold their covenant with God, the …

Politics As Loot: Reflections On Theories Of Decline In Political Thought, Milo Ward

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis responds to the perennial theories of political decline in Western political thought by reimagining politics as a part of the loot plundered by the victors of history. It unpacks and critiques prognostications of the impending end of politics, specifically those of theorists Wendy Brown and Hannah Arendt, by dredging up the colonial and the capitalist logics that covertly underpin assumptions that politics is something that can be exclusively possessed. The forensic treatment of narratives of political decline reveals the unmistakable tracks of the rationality of property relations behind laments over the fate of political traditions that also withhold …

Deliberation Or Simulated Deliberation?, Peter Levine

Democracy & Education

The work of Crocco and her colleagues, "Deliberating Public Policy Issues with Adolescents," combines two important fields—deliberative democracy and discussion as a pedagogy—with a study of policy deliberations in three classrooms. Their article yields valuable insights. As the authors note, the results are disappointing. This may be because the students were not actually asked to deliberate, if "deliberation" means discussing in order to make a decision. After all, the students could not decide US policy on immigration. Their discussion was a kind of simulated deliberation. Evidence suggests that we may see better results from real deliberations that occur within student-led …

Rescinding Rancière: An Investigation Into The Conservative Tendencies Of A Leading Proponent Of Radical Democracy, And A Reconstruction Of The Participatory Democracy Of Ancient Athens, Tyler J. Olsen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis advances a critique of the political theory of Jacques Rancière, focusing on the problems that arise as a result of its rigid form combined with its narrow content. I argue that Rancière gets caught in a practice of immanent critique that merely presupposes bourgeois abstract right; and that his ontological and pragmatic commitments prohibit him from projecting a norm that would transcend the liberal order. I trace these ontological and pragmatic commitments in detail by examining the intellectual milieu from which Rancière’s project emerged, the post-foundational political philosophy of the 1980s, with particular attention given to Claude Lefort. …

Stasi Brainwashing In The Gdr 1957 - 1990, Jacob H. Solbrig, Jacob Hagen Solbrig

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the methods used by the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), more commonly known as the Stasi, or East German secret police, for extraction of information from citizens of the German Democratic Republic for the purpose of espionage and covert operations inside East Germany, as it pertains to the deliberate brainwashing of East German citizens. As one of the most efficient intelligence agencies to ever exist, the Stasi’s main purpose was to monitor the population, gather intelligence, and collect or turn informants. They used brainwashing techniques to control the people of the GDR, keeping the populace paralyzed with fear …

Libertarianism, Bas Van Der Vossen

Philosophy Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Libertarianism is a theory in political philosophy that strongly values individual freedom and is skeptical about the justified scope of government in our lives. Libertarians see individuals as sovereign, as people who have a right to control their bodies and work, who are free to decide how to interact with willing others, and who cannot be forced to do things against their will without very strong justification.

For some, the argument in support of this view hinges on the principle of self-ownership. To them, individual rights are morally foundational, the basic building blocks of their theory. Many others, however, take …