Suchergebnisse

When we say we ''act for a reason'', what do we mean? And what do reasons have to do with being good or bad? Introducing readers to a foundational topic in ethics, Eric Wiland considers the reasons for which we act. You do things for reasons, and reasons in some sense justify what you do. Further, your reasons belong to you, and you know the reasons for which you act in a distinctively first-personal way. Wiland lays out and critically reviews some of the most popular contemporary accounts of how reasons can function in all these ways, accounts such as psychologism, factualism, hybrid theori

According to the democratic interpretation of public reason, political justification ought to appeal to the tacit dimension or common sense of society's actual historical moment. This article claims that a consequence of this interpretation is that religious reasons can be stable public reasons. More specifically, it claims that religious reasons can be public reasons in pervasively religious communities that are democratic, even in circumstances of ongoing social secularization. Three theoretical consequences are derived from this claim: first, democratic public reason assumes more social integration than other interpretations of public reason; second, religious reasons are not always inaccessible to non-believers; and third, religious reasons, when public reasons, can have normative force upon non-believers. Additionally, the following practical implication is made explicit: while justification of state power can appeal to religious reasons only, the law cannot be written in religious terms.

Many readers will have long known Professor Michael Walzer's remarkable book Just and Unjust Wars. The most interesting thing I can do is to discuss the way it has been received in some centres of the study of international relations in Britain. Professor Hedley Bull, Professor W. B. Gallic and Mr David Watt have reviewed it with Important differences but all to the same ultimate effect. Oxford, Cambridge and the Metropolis conclude that It Is a shallow book, lacking In philosophical depth.

Bucolic romanticism might seem harmless. But it leads, if enacted, to hunger, ecological destruction or both, on a vast scale.This is entirely true. George Monbiot is talking about:Farming in Transylvania looks (or did until recently) just as it "ought" to look: tiny villages where cows with their calves, ducks with their ducklings and cats with their kittens share the dirt road with ruddy-cheeked farmers driving horses and carts; alpine pastures where sheep graze and people scythe the grass and build conical haystacks. In other words, as the king remarked, it looks like a children's book.That other reason being that this bucolic romanticism is also the same thing as gross and abject poverty. Really, truly vile standards of living. Which is why absolutely every human society that has been able to abandons it as soon as possible. We are talking of lifestyles of £2,000, perhaps £3,000 a year instead of the £30,000 enjoyed (that is about the median in today's UK) here. A tenth and worse of today's living that is. And yes, obviously, that is already correcting for the costs of things over time and geography.The problem with peasant farming, as with peasantry as a whole, is that peasants are poor, really, really, poor.This, of course, being why the British peasantry flocked in their hundreds of thousands to the dark Satanic mills as soon as the option was available. The people who'd done that backbreaking work for small reward weren't going to do it for a moment longer than absolutely necessary.