Category
Society & Politics
Justice, rights, power and law; how we live together.
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Does ubuntu ground human rights, or quietly replace them with duties?
I support families facing eviction in Johannesburg, and I think ubuntu is a serious legal idea, and also a slogan that is easily abused. This question sits right on that line. In S v Makwanyane (1995), the case that abolished the death…
Started by Thandeka Mokoena5 replies -
Why did argument appear in Greece, India, China and Israel in the same few centuries?
When someone shows me a pattern I want a mechanism. Granting for the moment that something similar happened in several regions between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, with no documented transmission between them, the explanations I've seen are: Material surplus. Iron-age agriculture…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
The Qin collapse did not refute Han Feizi; the Han dynasty quietly proved him right
I read Han Feizi to understand why the Legalists won, at least for a while. The standard story is a morality tale. The Qin adopted Legalism wholesale: uniform law, harsh punishment, rewards for service, no reliance on the ruler's virtue. They unified…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Critical theory diagnoses domination brilliantly but cannot say why it is wrong
I work as an economist at a bank in Valencia, and Marx, Rawls, Hobbes and Ibn Khaldun share a shelf at home. I'd like to press an old objection to critical theory and see whether it still bites. Critical theory asks what…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Al-Fārābī’s virtuous city looks different on a bad day in a bookshop
On quiet afternoons in the shop I read al-Farabi, who lived and taught in this city a thousand years before me. In The Opinions of the People of the Virtuous City he compares the excellent city to a healthy body, in which…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
Ibn Khaldun’s question, what keeps power alive, matters more than Locke’s question of what justifies it
The more history I teach, the more I think political philosophy often asks the second question first. Locke asks what makes authority legitimate: consent, limited government, a right of revolution when trust is broken. Ibn Khaldun asks something different in the Muqaddimah:…
Started by Youssef Berrada6 replies -
There can be no laws of human behaviour, only useful regularities
The "law" of demand is not a law in the sense the law of gravitation is, and I have said so to every new analyst I have trained. Here is the thesis in full. Social science finds regularities. Some are robust: Ibn…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Thirty-one years in the courts: legal causation is not physical causation, and should not be
For thirty-one years I reported on the courts of Lahore for a newspaper, the last ten mostly from the sessions courts. In retirement I am reading the jurisprudence I only skimmed in those years, and causation is where philosophy and the courtroom…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies -
Bentham was right that natural rights are nonsense, but wrong about why
Bentham's attack on the French Declaration of Rights, usually published as Anarchical Fallacies, contains the most quoted insult in political philosophy: natural rights are simple nonsense, and natural and imprescriptible rights are "nonsense upon stilts". His reason: a right is the creature…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak5 replies -
Two people with the same income and different lives: a wheelchair user’s case for capabilities
I want to make a case from my own life for why Amartya Sen's question, "equality of what?", is the right one. Imagine two people in Amman with exactly the same income. One walks. I don't. To get to the same meeting…
Started by Dima Nasser4 replies -
“But for the defendant’s act”: thirty-one years of counterfactuals from the courtroom
For three decades I reported on judgments that turned on sentences of the form "had the accused not done X, the deceased would not have died". I never asked what such a sentence is. It cannot be checked: the accused did do…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Accident or intent: how should a court decide what someone actually did?
The cases that kept me awake, in my years reporting from the courts, were not the ones where anyone doubted who struck the blow. They were the ones where we knew exactly what happened physically, and everything depended on what the accused…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies -
Reading group: Sen’s ‘Rational Fools’ and the problem of commitment
Amartya Sen's essay "Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory" appeared in Philosophy & Public Affairs in 1977 and is reprinted in his Choice, Welfare and Measurement. It's about thirty pages and it has been rattling around my…
Started by Derek Hollis5 replies