Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Christian Realism And Augustinian (?) Liberalism, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Surely there is enough kindling lying about in the Bible and in subsequent moral theology to fire up love for neighbors and compassion for countless “friends” in foreign parts--and in crisis. And, surely, the momentum of love’s labor for the just redistribution of resources, fueled by activists’ appeals for solidarity, should be sustained by stressing that we are creatures made for affection, not for aggression. Yet experience, plus the history of the Christian traditions, taught Reinhold Niebuhr, who memorably reminded Christian realists, how often love was “defeated,” how a “strategy of brotherhood . . . degenerates from mutuality to a …

Moral Markets: The Critical Role Of Values In The Economy By Paul J. Zak (Book Review), Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

This volume contains the fruits of a two-year seminar on ethics and economics funded by the John Templeton Foundation and administered through the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research. Participants came from the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities, and included Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith and other figures such as Frans de Waal, Herbert Gintis, Robert Frank, and Robert Solomon (for whom the book is dedicated in memoriam). The book’s editor, Paul Zak, is a pioneer in the emerging field of neuroeconomics, which uses medical technology to discover the physiological manifestations of cooperative and altruistic behavior. A theme of …

Virtue, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

In political theory, the word virtue usually refers to the disposition or character traits appropriate to a citizen. Someone who takes the responsibilities of citizenship seriously, to the point of putting the common good ahead of his or her personal interests, is thus said to display civic virtue. Political theorists have frequently warned that such virtue cannot be taken for granted, however, and many of them have urged that steps be taken to promote or foster civic virtue. This concern for the fragility of civic virtue is a clear theme in ancient (or classical) political thought, but it has …

Racism And Biopower, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

While ignorance, or at least a lack of clear and distinct experience, does not seem to have stopped our predecessors from philosophizing about all manner of things from matter to immortal souls, in the latter half of the twentieth century North American philosophers became increasingly timid about advancing propositions based primarily not on logic informed by material evidence but on intuition, creative imagination, and passionate desire. By the 1960s our generation's teachers and mentors, perhaps battered by the McCarthy years or humbled by the dazzling successes of their colleagues in the "hard" sciences, had redrawn the disciplinary boundaries tightly enough …

The Sources Of International Law: Some Philosophical Reflections, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

It seems only natural to begin the study of international law with a description of its sources. After all, whether as practitioner or scholar a person cannot begin to ask or answer questions about international law until he or she has some sense of what the law is. This requires in turn a basic grasp of the processes whereby international legal norms and regimes come to exist. Thus students of international law must engage immediately with some of the most basic questions in the philosophy of law: what is law, and what is a legal order or system.

These questions …

Book Panel Response: Symposium On Ladelle Mcwhorter's Racism And Sexual Oppression In Anglo-America: A Genealogy, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Unfortunately I do not have space to address individually each issue these four papers raise. Instead, I will first situate my work in relation to identity politics and address fears that my approach is reductive. Then, building on comments from Professors Wilkerson and Al-Saji, I will offer some remarks about aims, methods, and shortcomings.