Category
Society & Politics
Justice, rights, power and law; how we live together.
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Abusua dɔ funu, “the family loves the corpse”: who are our expensive funerals really for?
We buried my mother's cousin in September. The funeral cost more than our household makes from the farm in a good year, and the family will be paying it off past the next harvest. There were printed cloths with her face on…
Started by Akosua Mensah2 replies -
Dussel and Levinas on the stranger at the door: does “the Other comes first” tell a host country anything concrete?
Over the last decade millions of Venezuelans have crossed into Colombia. In 2021 the government offered most of those already here ten years of temporary protection. The decision was praised abroad and argued about at home, and still is. I have been…
Started by Andrés ZuluagaReply first (no replies yet) -
Is rest something you have to earn? Aristotle, the Gita and the Sabbath give three answers
I've had some months away from work, and the strangest part is not the free time. It's the feeling that I owe someone an explanation for it. Rest feels like a loan. Three texts I keep carrying around, which seem to disagree:…
Started by Rohan DesaiReply first (no replies yet) -
Protecting believers or protecting beliefs? Where offence to the sacred stops being the law’s business
Every few months the same argument breaks out somewhere: a cartoon, a novel, a burned book, a comedian. One side says nothing is sacred in law. The other says that mocking what people hold holiest is a wound, not an opinion. I…
Started by Hamza Qureshi3 replies -
Freire’s “banking” model, seen from inside a capoeira roda
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire describes "banking" education: the teacher deposits knowledge, the students receive, file and store it. Against it he sets problem-posing education, where teacher and students investigate together, and the teacher is also taught. In capoeira Angola…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Mill’s harm principle: where does it actually draw the line?
Mill's On Liberty (1859) proposes one simple principle: the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community, against their will, is to prevent harm to others. A person's own good is not a sufficient…
Started by Deepa KarthaReply first (no replies yet) -
Is human dignity a religious idea that secular law borrowed?
Article 1 of the German Basic Law (1949) declares human dignity inviolable. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) begins by recognising the inherent dignity of all members of the human family. Many constitutions since then have done the same. Kant gave…
Started by Hamza Qureshi1 reply -
Privacy as a virtue, not just a right
We usually talk about privacy as a right: something others shouldn't violate. But in my work I see people giving away their data voluntarily all the time, for convenience or a discount. The right isn't violated; it's waived, again and again. I've…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman1 reply -
Sartre’s “look” and Fanon on being fixed by another’s gaze
In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre describes the moment of being caught looking through a keyhole: suddenly I am an object for someone else, and I feel shame. The look of the other gives me an outside I can't control. Fanon's Black…
Started by Claire Dubois2 replies -
Legal realism is not a claim about what exists, and lawyers should stop treating it as one
A small irritation from evenings spent arguing with lawyer friends in Lahore. They say "I'm a legal realist" to mean one of three things: that judges decide on their prejudices and then find reasons; that law is ultimately power; or that there…
Started by Hamza QureshiReply first (no replies yet) -
The Gita’s karma yoga: acting without attachment to results
The Bhagavad Gītā's teaching on karma yoga, especially in chapters 2 and 3, says roughly: you have a right to your action, but never to its fruits; don't let the fruits be your motive, and don't be attached to inaction either. Gandhi…
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies -
Al-Farabi’s Virtuous City and Plato’s Republic
Al-Farabi (c. 870–950) is sometimes called the "Second Teacher", after Aristotle. His Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City combines Neoplatonic metaphysics with a political philosophy that owes a great deal to Plato's Republic. The virtuous city is…
Started by Layla Sfeir3 replies -
Epictetus was a slave and I drive the 413. What counts as ‘up to us’ at work?
I drive the 413 across Ankara. Eight hours, two breaks, roughly three hundred passengers a day. I listen to philosophy lectures between stops, and Epictetus is the one I keep coming back to. The Handbook opens by dividing things into what is…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies -
Gandhi’s satyagraha as philosophy, not just a tactic
Gandhi coined the word satyāgraha, "holding firmly to truth", in South Africa around 1906–08. He distinguished it from "passive resistance", which he saw as the weapon of the weak. Satyāgraha requires the resister to accept suffering without retaliating, aiming to convert the…
Started by Anand Kurup3 replies -
Hart’s “internal point of view”, seen from a courtroom in Lahore
Hart distinguishes being obliged to do something (as when a gunman demands your money) from having an obligation (as under a legal rule). The difference lies in the internal point of view: officials, especially judges, accept the rule of recognition as a…
Started by Hamza Qureshi3 replies -
Ibn Khaldun on taxation: a fourteenth-century Laffer curve?
In the Muqaddimah (1377) Ibn Khaldun observes that at the beginning of a dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments, while at the end of a dynasty it yields a small revenue from large assessments. Arthur Laffer himself credited Ibn…
Started by Javier Ferrandis3 replies -
My cooks are free to leave, in theory. What republican liberty sees in a kitchen
I came from Goa to cook in Dubai fifteen years ago, and I'm proud of how we treat people in my kitchen now. Nobody is shouted at. Overtime is paid. When someone's mother is ill, we find a way to send him…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Why does tax feel like theft to some of my clients and not to others?
Two of my tax clients run nearly identical businesses: same size, same bracket, similar families. Every April one of them tells me, only half joking, that the government is robbing him. The other says, with no irony, that tax is the membership…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal5 replies -
Han Feizi’s case for clear law, read in Lahore
I've been reading Han Feizi with more sympathy than I expected. His central insight about law is one I see confirmed every week in our courts. Where the rules are unclear, or applied differently depending on who you are, the powerful win…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyya and the rise and fall of states
The central concept of the Muqaddimah is asabiyya, usually translated "group feeling" or "solidarity". Ibn Khaldun argues that groups living hard lives on the margins of civilisation, often nomadic or tribal, develop strong solidarity. That solidarity lets them conquer settled states. Once…
Started by Youssef Berrada4 replies -
Kirat karni: is honest work a form of worship, or is that just a nice story about work?
This question follows me from the office to the langar. Guru Nanak's teaching is often summed up in three practices: naam japna, remembering the divine Name; kirat karni, earning by honest work; and vand chakna, sharing what you have. There's a story…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal5 replies -
Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste as political philosophy
In 1936 B. R. Ambedkar was invited to give the presidential address at the annual conference of the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal, an anti-caste Hindu reform group in Lahore. When the organisers saw the text, they asked him to remove parts, he refused, and…
Started by Deepa Kartha4 replies -
Marx’s alienation and the gig economy
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes four aspects of alienated labour: the worker is alienated from the product, from the activity of working, from their "species-being" (our nature as freely creative producers), and from other people. Delivery riders…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Writing an eligibility rule taught me that metaphysics doesn’t settle policy
For some years I served on the committee that wrote eligibility rules for our regional school competitions. I'm not going to argue here about any current controversy, and I'd ask others not to. I want to share something I learned that I…
Started by Gerrit Venter6 replies -
Teaching non-European philosophy as live positions, not museum pieces
I teach the terminale philosophy class at a lycée in Dakar, where Descartes and Senghor sit on the same exam paper. One of the clearest changes in philosophy since 1990 is that traditions outside Europe have begun entering curricula and journals as…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
Neither filling nor drawing out: what the Analects and Xunzi think a learner is
My students in Taipei memorise the Analects for exams, which means they experience Confucian learning as the most extreme form of filling-up imaginable. I keep trying to show them that the texts themselves say something else. The Analects opens with learning and…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Zakat is a claim on wealth, not a gift. What does that do to the charity versus justice debate?
Many debates about distributive justice I read, especially in English, assume a sharp line: justice is what can be demanded and enforced; charity is good but optional, a gift. Taxes for the first, donations for the second. Zakat doesn't sit comfortably on…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Before the Axial Age: the Nāsadīya hymn, Egyptian instructions and the gradualist objection
One of the first hymns my grandfather made me memorise was the Nāsadīya Sūkta of the Ṛgveda, the hymn of creation. It begins before being and non-being and ends with doubt: who truly knows how this arose? Perhaps the one who watches…
Started by Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya5 replies -
At my office “Confucian values” means obey the boss. Where did the reciprocity go?
I translate for a publishing house in Hanoi. When managers here want staff to stay late without complaint, they speak of Confucian values: respect for seniors, loyalty, harmony. We have a common saying about honouring teachers and respecting the Way. I grew…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo4 replies -
Adab, and the humanism that rarely gets the name
Much of my working time goes to books from a culture that, in the ninth to twelfth centuries, was organised around an ideal called adab. The word is hard to translate. It can mean manners and etiquette, and it can mean literature.…
Started by Mona Fathy5 replies