From the late 1980s, scientists began concentrating their search for genes presumed responsible for inherited tendencies to get ovarian and breast cancers on chromosome 17. The Berkeley group and others around the world were closing in on the sequence when Mark Skolnick, a founder of Myriad Genetics, announced successfully isolating and cloning the BRCA1 mutation. In 1994, Myriad and other cooperating parties first filed a patent for the BRCA1 mutation they isolated and then in 1995 they also filed patents for (...) what is known as BRCA2, a related mutation. By 1996, Myriad developed and began marketing “BRCAnalysis™,” their predictive test for the presence of possibly cancer‐causing mutations. Shortly after the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) filed its case against Myriad, a series of cases went up to the US Supreme Court that set the stage for its eventual decision in Myriad, and revisited the subject of Section 101 patent‐eligibility. (shrink)

This is a timely book in its central theme, appearing as it does in the midst of the bicentennial celebration of the U. S. Constitution and also a time of spirited controversy over the substance of the Constitution in relation to the Supreme Court and the Executive. It is also a philosophical book of more permanent interest in its careful elucidation of meanings as it closely documents supporting grounds and arguments in a clear, pointed style without the preachy rhetoric of (...) politicians, ecclesiastics, and even Supreme Court decisions. In motivation and achievement the book reflects its author’s membership on the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union chairing its Church-State Committee, his work as Professor of Social Ethics at St. Paul School of Theology, and his previous publications on education and the politics of liberation. (shrink)

These are reflections on the Arkansas creationist trial by a witness for the American Civil Liberties Union. The following points are stressed: First, religion took the lead in defending science at the trial. Second, the appearance of creation science is a function not only of Protestant fudamentalism but also of the establishment of science in our wider culture. It represents a “deviant science” in such a culture. Third, our century has manifested many such bizarre unions of (...) ideological religion and modern science. This shows that science is dependent upon its humanistic, moral, and religious matrix for its social and historical health. Fourth, part of the cause of the rise of creation science has been the power, status, and self–assurance of science that it represents “the only form of truth.” Fifth, religion in turn tends both to increase and to become fanatical in advanced and precarious cultures; religion, therefore, needs rational and moral criticism if it would help in the creation of social health. (shrink)

arly in December of 1981, the federal courtroom in Little Rock, Arkansas, was packed. It was the first week of a trial brought on by the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge the constitutionality of a state law passed earlier that year. The law mandated "balanced treatment," in the publicly supported schools, between evolutionary ideas and so-called Creation Science, better known as the early chapters of Genesis taken absolutely literally (Ruse 1988). By the end of the (...) third day, the case for the plaintiffs was going well. Theologians had testified that Christianity had long interpreted the Bible metaphorically; a philosopher (me!) had argued that Creation Science fails every criterion of demarcation between science and pseudo-science; and the scientists were pointing to error after error in the claims of the literalists. (shrink)

Gene patenting has captured the headlines for the past four years, thanks in large part to the lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation brought against Myriad Genetics for the patents on the breast cancer genes, BRCA 1 and 2. Despite their recent celebrity, human gene patents have been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for over thirty years. The commodification of the human body is not all that recent: (...) one might be tempted to argue that gene patenting is the inevitable next step in the com-modification of natural processes and products. Edward Yoxen dates the origins of the technological capitalization of life back to the 1920s.. (shrink)

Mark Coeckelbergh starts his book with a very powerful picture based on a real incident: On the 9th of January 2020, Robert Williams was wrongfully arrested by Detroit police officers in front of his two young daughters, wife and neighbors. For 18 hours the police would not disclose the grounds for his arrest (American Civil Liberties Union 2020; Hill 2020). The decision to arrest him was primarily based on a facial detection algorithm which matched Mr. Williams’ (...) driving license photo with the picture of a man who was suspected of watch theft two years earlier. Not only did the computer ‘get it wrong’ as one of the detectives said, when Mr. Williams made them aware that the picture of the suspect obviously wasn’t resembling him, the probably unreliable algorithm very likely contributed to racial discrimination (Hill 2020). It is well documented that many available facial detection algorithms at this time had significant problems (e.g. a comparably high false positive rate) with respect to black persons, like Mr. Williams (NIST 2019). Multiple causes may exist, such as unbalanced training datasets and insufficient optimization. Coeckelbergh compares the disturbing case of Mr. Williams with a political interpretation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, where the protagonist, Josef K., is accused of an unspecified crime by an opaque, oppressive and absurd bureaucracy: “In the 21st-century United States, Josef K. is black and is falsely accused by an algorithm, without explanation” (p. 2). (shrink)

American liberals believe that both civil liberties and civil rights are harmonious aspects of a basic commitment to human rights. But recently these two clusters of values have seemed increasingly to conflict – as, for example, with the feminist claim that the legal toleration of pornography, long a goal sought by civil libertarians, actually violates civil rights as a form of sex discrimination.Here I propose an interpretation of the conflict of civil rights and (...) civil liberties in its latest manifestation: the controversy over how to treat discriminatory verbal harassment on American campuses. I was involved with the controversy in a practical way at Stanford, where I helped draft a harassment regulation that was recently adopted by the university.Like the pornography issue, the harassment problem illustrates the element of paradox in the conflict of civil-liberties and civil-rights perspectives or mentalities. This problem does not simply trigger familiar disagreements between liberals of a classical or libertarian orientation as against those of a welfare state or social democratic one – though it does sometimes do that. In my experience, the issue also has the power to appear to a single person in different shapes and suggest different solutions as it oscillates between being framed in civil-liberties and in civil-rights terms. At the same time, however, it remains recognizably the same problem. It is thus a very practical and political example of the kind of tension noted by Wittgenstein in the aphorism that heads this essay – a puzzle of interpretive framing, of “seeing-as.”. (shrink)

The civil rights movement has broken away from its religious roots which once provided it firm support and, indeed, it has become a threat to those roots. In fact, the past thirty years evidence two civil rights movements. The original civil rights movement promoted equal opportunity and presupposed a constrained vision of human possibilities compatible with Christianity, The revised civil rights agenda, which had replaced it by 1971, promoted preferential policies dubbed "affirmative action" based on an (...) unconstrained vision incompatible with both Christianity and the American founding. The most visible threat to religious liberty is the expansion of civil rights protections to include homosexuals despite the overwhelming rejection of homosexuality as a lifestyle by the majority of Americans, including Christians. (shrink)

When he gave his first political work the title The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, Hobbes signalled an agenda to revise and incorporate continental Roman and Natural Law traditions for use in Great Britain, and from first to last he remained faithful to this agenda, which it took his entire corpus to complete. The success of his project is registered in the impact Hobbes had upon the continental legal system in turn, specific aspects of his theory, as for instance (...) the right to punish, entering the European civil code through Pufendorf, and remaining to this day. This is a topic of considerable importance at a time at which the UK is considering scrapping the European Union, with all the attendant the legal ramifications. But strangely, despite some acknowledgement of Hobbes’s contribution to European civil law, and specifically the German civil code, the larger legal context for his thought has not thus far been systematically addressed. -/- Key words: Hobbes, civil law, common law, jurisprudence, ‘artificial reason’, natural law, sovereignty,. (shrink)

Conceived in Liberty is a cultural, sociological and geopolitical review of the uniquely American notion that the country and its people are "exceptional." While all nations have their own patriotic commitments, no other people have outwardly declared their power as vigorously as have Americans, especially since World War II. John J. Tierney, Jr. advances the idea that liberty is the singular source of the power of the American worldview and all other elements of this society--equality, patience, charity, justice, (...) etc.--are derived from liberty. He argues that this worldview comes from this one source and is responsible for the many movements that may engage the public's interest, such as women's rights, civil rights, and voting rights. Such movements are all positive, but they could not exist in a society devoid of liberty. Conceived in Liberty also traces other main components of the American worldview: geographic expanse, immigration, energy of the populace, diversity, public policies, and the elements that contribute to exceptionalism. Tierney is not blind to some of the deficiencies of the United States, but he posits that the liberty it manifests is truly the political globe's last, best hope. (shrink)

Is "natural law" actually the "Laws of Nature" as Thomas Jefferson explains in the Declaration of Independence, meaning the rights of Life, Liberty & the pursuit of Happiness, or the ecclesiastical view which holds that laws of the government must conform to "natural laws" in order to be binding? This text examines this conflict, yet leads the reader to draw his own conclusions.

Adam Ferguson’s imperial thought casts new light on the age-old republican dilemma of the tension between empire and liberty. Generations of republican writers had been haunted by this issue as the decline of Rome proved that imperial expansion would eventually ruin the liberty of a state. Many eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers regarded this as an insoluble conundrum and thus became critics of empire. Ferguson shared their basic views but, paradoxically, was still able to defend the British Empire in the debates over (...) the American Revolution. His argument effectively offered a viable solution to the republican dilemma, which distinguished him from his contemporaries. In light of this, I argue that political representation was the pivotal conception for Ferguson to make empire and liberty compatible. It was on this ground that he could advocate the union with Ireland, which he believed would lead to a lasting balance of power in Europe. -/- ; British Empire; liberty; balance of power; political representation; American Revolution; Anglo-Irish Union. (shrink)

Equality in Liberty and Justice is an integrated collection of essays in political philosophy, divided into two parts. The first examines (classically) liberal ideas-the ideas of the Founding Fathers of the American republic-and some of the applications and the rejections of such ideas in our contemporary world. Among other questions about liberty and responsibility it considers, in the context of the imprisonment and psychiatric treatment of dissidents in the psychiatric hospitals of the former Soviet Union, Plato's suggestion that (...) all delinquency is an expression of mental disease. The second part examines the relations and the lack of relations between old fashioned, without prefix or suffix, justice and what is called by its promoters social justice. It therefore presses such questions as "Equal outcomes or equal justice?" and "Enemies of poverty or of inequality?" Equality in Liberty and Justice was originally published before the winning of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Empire. This second edition updates the arguments of the previous editor and draws present day moral conclusions. This book will appeal to those for whom the classical liberal and conservative debates still have great meaning. Flew might well be the most significant sunthesizer of Tocqueville and Mill. (shrink)

Karl R. Popper: The open society and its enemies -- Ralf Dahrendorf: Liberty and civil society -- Raymond Plant: Social welfare without class warfare -- Gertrude Himmelfarb and Irving Kristol: The moral imagination -- Raymond Aron: The opium of the intellectuals -- Friedrich A. Hayek: The constitution of liberty -- Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and pluralism -- Michael J. Oakeshott: The conservative disposition -- Leo Strauss: Relativism and the crisis of modernity -- Edmund Burke: Liberty and duty -- James Madison (...) vs. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Two views of self-government -- Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America -- Winston S. Churchill: The English-Speaking Peoples and the Free World -- Limited and accountable Government -- Two kinds of rationalism -- Liberty as conversation. (shrink)

Mary-Elaine Swanson has done an invaluable service for this and subsequent generations by resurrecting awareness and presenting an accurate knowledge of John Locke and his reasoning through an uncensored view of his life, writings, and incalculable influence on America. This book will help Americans understand the importance of Locke's thinking for American constitutionalism today. You will learn the real meaning of the "law of nature" as it was embraced in Colonial America, and the separation of church and state embraced (...) in the Constitution. The Founding Fathers looked to Locke as the source of many of their ideas. Thomas Jefferson considered Locke as one of the three greatest men that ever lived. Locke's contributions to American Liberty can clearly be seen interwoven in our colonial Declarations of Rights, paraphrased in our Declaration of Independence, and incorporated into our Constitution and Bill of Rights. The Declaration is born of the extensively studied and widely taught Treatises On Civil Government by John Locke. There Locke reasoned the very purpose of forming civil government is the protection of property, and that "life, liberty, and property (pursuit of happiness)" are not three separate rights but intrinsically one great and inalienable right he called "property"--which begins with the life of the individual, then his liberty which is essential to his productivity, followed by the right to enjoy the fruits of his labors without fear that the government will confiscate his property. These inalienable rights are from God and legitimate government has no authority to take them away but is chartered in fact to preserve and protect liberty. (shrink)

The priority of liberty has always played a central role in John Rawls's political theory. This chapter reviews Rawls's three arguments for the priority of liberty in Theory and argues that two of them do indeed fail (either in whole or in part) because of two types of error. It presents a partial reconstruction of the hierarchy argument, and demonstrates that our highest‐order interest in the development and exercise of rationality follows naturally from the Kantian commitment to autonomy that Rawls (...) expresses in Theory. The chapter discusses an apparent problem with the scope of the hierarchy argument: it does not offer a particularly compelling defense of the priority of the basic political liberties, including the rights to vote and hold public office. The chapter also discusses the implications of the priority of liberty for the American practice of civil libertarianism. (shrink)

This study of the political philosophy of William Ernest Hocking be gan as a doctoral dissertation at Tulane University. Hocking (1873- 1966) was for many years Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity at Harvard University. Although he is relatively well-known among American philosophers, particularly by students of metaphysics and the philosophy of religion, very little atten tion has been given to his political philosophy. Some general studies of his thought summarize his political writings in (...) a very cursory fashion, but they do not discuss his contributions in detail or relate them to significant issues in political philosophy. Most important general works on modern political philosophy or American political thought do not even mention Hocking; a few note his name in passing. Because he is almost completely unknown in the social sciences, the original purpose of this study was to explore, systematize, and present his extensive writings in political philosophy. It then became apparent that his entire political philosophy is oriented around the concepts of liberty and community. When his thought is analyzed in terms of these themes, its unity and coherence are more obvious. Moreover, his writings become more significant when they are related to liberty and community, for these are focal concepts for important problems in modern political philosophy. This study of Hocking's political philosophy will, it is hoped, help us to see how liberty and community can be more understandable, attainable, and compatible with one another. (shrink)

Introduction -- Acton's life and mission -- Part I. The foundation of liberty -- Part II. Anglo-American liberty -- Part III. The liberty of revolutionary dreams -- Part IV. Civic versus civil liberty.

“It is the spirit of humanity, that which animates both so-called savages and civilized nations, working through a man, and not the man expressing himself, that interests us most,” writes Henry Dav...

In Towards the Light, A.C. Grayling tells the story of the long and difficult battle for freedom in the West, from the Reformation to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from the battle for the vote to the struggle for the right to freedom of conscience. As Grayling passionately affirms, it is a story - and a struggle - that continues to this day as those in power use the threat of terrorism in the 21st century to roll-back the (...) class='Hi'>liberties that so many have fought and died to win for us. Including an appendix of landmark documents, including the British and American Bills of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the Bloomsbury Revelations edition also includes a new preface by the author reflecting on developments since the book's original publication. (shrink)

It is only those who do not understand our people, who believe our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things we want much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists.

While unionization is usually evaluated as an aspect of freedom of association—the idea being that workers have the right to associate and form unions if they want and have an equal right not to do so if they don't, I argue that this is a mistake. Instead of merely allowing unions to form or not depending on the preferences of workers, I argue that unions are a basic and therefore necessary institution of a just society. After analyzing and criticizing the (...) schema developed by John Rawls for evaluating what constitutes a basic institution, I introduce a new principle that allows us to determine what should be considered a basic institution in the context of our existing social institutions and practices. I then apply this principle to unionization, and argue that while unions are subject to post-institutional regulation, just like firms are, their existence is demanded by pre-institutional principles of equality and liberty and therefore not optional. Not only are union shops consistent with our deepest moral principles, including our commitment to liberty, that commitment, when properly understood, actually requires that unionization be universal. (shrink)

Times of heightened risk to the physical safety of their citizens inevitably cause democracies to recalibrate their institutions and processes and to reinterpret existing legal norms, with greater emphasis on security, and less on individual liberty, than in "normal" times. This article explores the ways in which the American courts have responded to the tension between civil liberties and national security in times of crises. This history illustrates that courts have rejected both of the two polar positions (...) that characterize public discourse on these issues. Civil libertarians argue that political bodies are too easily gripped by passions, hysteria, and self-interest in these times and that courts therefore ought to play a central role in protecting liberty. Executive unilateralists argue that the qualities that uniquely characterize the executive branch, such as decisiveness, access to information, and efficiency, must become so dominant in these moments that few checks, if any, should constrain executive prerogatives. Oddly, civil libertarians and executive unilateralists find implicit consensus in the view that, in times of war, courts have tended not to play a significant role in overseeing executive power. We argue to the contrary: historically, a significant constitutional tradition of judicial scrutiny in the United States during times of war does exist. But this scrutiny does not take the form of courts making first-order substantive judgments about the content of liberty or other claimed constitutional rights. Nor does it take the form of judicial assessment of how significant or credible the national security claims of the executive branch might be. Instead, judicial oversight has been focused on preserving the institutional structures and processes through which decisionmaking on these issues takes place. The judicial role has centered on the second-order question of whether the right institutional processes have been used to make the decisions at issue, rather than on what the content of the underlying rights ought to be. This approach has historically rejected or resisted most claims of executive unilateralism. When courts have upheld the government's actions, they have done so only after a judgment that Congress, as well as the executive, has endorsed the action. This approach has also rejected the civil libertarian framework. When courts find bilateral institutional endorsement, they have typically accepted the joint political judgment of how liberty and security tradeoffs ought to be made. By focusing on congressional endorsement of emergency measures, the courts have created a broad-based political accountability for the actions taken in the name of national security. We suggest that even if congressional endorsement is more apparent than real in some of these contexts, the judicial maintenance of this structure of rhetorical justifications sustains desirable understandings of political structure. Because the President and Congress draw from different political constituencies in a presidential rather than a parliamentary system, we also raise questions about whether the American judicial approach to these questions should be limited to political systems with separated executive and legislative powers. (shrink)

: Forensic DNA testing threatens American civil liberties.

Cet article analyse le rôle des vêtements dans la métamorphose d’esclaves afro-américains en soldats de l’Union pendant la Guerre civile (1861-1865). Il explore la manière et la raison pour laquelle les uniformes militaires portent un tel poids narratif dans les portraits de ces hommes. Les textes, images, objets, gravures et photographies sont étudiés dans le contexte de la perception du corps au xixe siècle et des nouvelles théories de l’anthropologie physique et de la phrénologie. L’article souligne le rôle de (...) ces images dans la construction d’un discours cohérent sur la rédemption de l’esclavage et d’une catégorie « homme » plus inclusive, plus universelle, fondée sur le service militaire. (shrink)

I. Hardly any other mythical creature has enjoyed the ubiquity of the clown: “There are few other myths such as this one about which it can be affirmed without any doubt that they involve the most ancient modes of human expression,” wrote Paul Radin in his famous essay on the figure of the clown among primitive American Indians. “There are few myths which have retained their original characters with so few changes.” The character of the Fool, the Jester, the (...) Joker appears in a clearly identifiable fashion in the most primitive as well as the most highly cultivated groups: among the Greeks as well as the Chinese; in Japanese civilization as well as the Semite world. The medieval juggler is the embodiment of this figure of many aspects who perdures in the theater, especially puppet theater, and in the guise of the circus clown. (shrink)

In this original new study, Grant Havers critically interprets Leo Strauss’s political philosophy from a conservative perspective. Most mainstream readers of Strauss have either condemned him from the Left as an extreme right-wing opponent of liberal democracy or celebrated him from the Right as a traditional defender of Western civilization. Rejecting both of these portrayals, Havers shifts the debate beyond the conventional parameters of our age. He persuasively shows that Strauss was neither a man of the Far Right nor a (...) conservative. He was in fact a secular Cold War liberal who taught his followers to uphold Anglo-American democracy as the one true universal regime that does not need a specifically Christian foundation. Strauss firmly rejects the traditional conservative view held by Edmund Burke that Anglo-American democracy needs the leavening influence of Christian morality. Havers maintains that Strauss’s refusal to recognize the role of Christianity in shaping Western civilization, though historically unjustified, is crucial to Strauss and the Straussian portrayal of Anglo-American democracy. In the Straussian view, the Anglo-American ideals of liberty, equality, and constitutional government owe more to the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle than to the Christian tradition. In the process, Havers argues, Straussians end up rewriting history by falsely idealizing the ancient Greeks as the forerunners of modern liberal democracy, despite the Greek toleration of practices such as slavery and infanticide. Straussians also misrepresent statesmen of the Anglo-American political tradition such as Abraham Lincoln and Sir Winston Churchill as heirs to the ancient Greek tradition of statecraft, despite their indebtedness to Christianity. Havers contends that the most troubling implication of Straussianism is that it provides an ideological rationale for the aggressive spread of democratic values on a global basis while ignoring the preconditions that make these values possible. Concepts such as the rule of law, constitutional government, Christian morality, and the separation of church and state are not easily transplanted beyond the historic confines of Anglo-American civilization, as recent wars to spread democracy in the Middle East and Central Asia have demonstrated. This excellent study will be of interest not only to longtime readers of Strauss but also philosophers, political scientists, historians, religious studies scholars, and theologians. (shrink)

This article explores the ideological origins of the American free-speech tradition. It analyzes the two principal categorizations of free speech in classical antiquity: isegoria, the right to voice one’s opinion, and parrhesia, the license to say what one pleases often through provocative discourse, thus grounding modern free-speech epistemology and jurisprudential philosophy in a sociohistorical context. Part 1 reviews the First Amendment corpus juris. A progression of incrementally absolute judicial holdings promotes parrhesia, highlighting democratic utility over individual self-actualization; thus, Americans (...) no longer view freedom of speech as an end ipso facto. While Athenian democracy recognized the need for provocative speech, certain institutional and social constraints, such as dokimasia, established standards of truth and accountability. Part 2 frames the historical developments of isegoria and parrhesia for modern analysis. The author begins by discussing isegoria’s principal aims, namely, promoting individual self-actualization and effective democratic governance. The European free-speech tradition, which views the individual as the locus of power, favors the former. The American tradition, which ‘depersonizes’ civil liberties such that the collective becomes the locus of control, favors the latter. Part 3 identifies the colonial developments in Anglo-American history that account for present-day U.S. free-speech permissiveness. It shows that the American preference for parrhesia-based absolutism was born from British imperialism and censorship. Part 4 suggests a need to reexamine free speech-understandings in the context of new-media proliferation and digital content regulation. The dominance of U.S.-based social media companies injects the American speech tradition into cultures with disparate free-speech philosophies and practices. (shrink)

Détente or Destruction, 1955-57 continues publication of Routledge's multi-volume critical edition of Bertrand Russell's shorter writings. Between September 1955 and November 1957 Russell published some sixty-one articles, reviews, statements, contributions to books and letters to editors, over fifty of which are contained in this volume. The texts, several of them hitherto unpublished, reveal the deepening of Russell's commitment to the anti-nuclear struggle, upon which he embarked in the previous volume of Collected Papers ( Man's Peril, 1954-55 ). Continuing with the (...) theme of nuclear peril, this volume contains discussion of nuclear weapons, world peace, prospects for disarmament and British-Soviet friendship against the backdrop of the Cold War. One of the key papers in this volume is Russell's message to the inaugural conference of the Pugwash movement, which Russell was instrumental in launching and which became an influential, independent forum of East-West scientific cooperation and counsel on issues as an internationally agreed nuclear test-ban. In addition to the issues of war and peace, Russell, now in his eighties, continued to take an interest in a wide variety of themes. Russell not only addresses older controversies over nationalism and empire, religious belief and American civil liberties, he also confronts head-on the new and pressing matters of armed intervention in Hungary and Suez, and of the manufacture and testing of the British hydrogen bomb. This volume includes seven interviews ranging from East-West Relations after the Geneva conference to a Meeting with Russell. (shrink)

How does a country repair its harm to a vulnerable minority targeted during times of national fear because of race? How did the United States redress its then popular yet unconstitutional WWII incarceration of 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans in desolate barbed wire prisons without charges, hearings, or bona fide evidence of military necessity? In response to a Congressional inquiry, political lobbying, and lawsuits, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 directed the President to apologize and authorized over one billion (...) dollars in reparations. Congress also created a fund to educate the public about the government’s false assertion of “national security” to restrict civil liberties. Some considered redress a tremendous victory — rewriting history and personal healing. Others questioned reparations for one U.S. group but not others. Japanese American Redress served as a catalyst for reparations movements worldwide. This paper examines its genesis, legal implementation, and apparent effects. It also explores wide-ranging political mobilization and social meanings of redress and “unfinished business”. Reparations cannot be measured by laws alone. Diverse communities must engage contested questions of history, justice, and belonging. Reparations claims face often unforeseen benefits and limitations. The paper concludes with these “lessons learned” to date. (shrink)

_Détente or Destruction, 1955-57_ continues publication of Routledge's multi-volume critical edition of Bertrand Russell's shorter writings. Between September 1955 and November 1957 Russell published some sixty-one articles, reviews, statements, contributions to books and letters to editors, over fifty of which are contained in this volume. The texts, several of them hitherto unpublished, reveal the deepening of Russell's commitment to the anti-nuclear struggle, upon which he embarked in the previous volume of _Collected Papers_. Continuing with the theme of nuclear peril, this (...) volume contains discussion of nuclear weapons, world peace, prospects for disarmament and British-Soviet friendship against the backdrop of the Cold War. One of the key papers in this volume is Russell's message to the inaugural conference of the Pugwash movement, which Russell was instrumental in launching and which became an influential, independent forum of East-West scientific cooperation and counsel on issues as an internationally agreed nuclear test-ban. In addition to the issues of war and peace, Russell, now in his eighties, continued to take an interest in a wide variety of themes. Russell not only addresses older controversies over nationalism and empire, religious belief and American civil liberties, he also confronts head-on the new and pressing matters of armed intervention in Hungary and Suez, and of the manufacture and testing of the British hydrogen bomb. This volume includes seven interviews ranging from East-West Relations after the Geneva conference to a Meeting with Russell. (shrink)

This chapter argues that while we are polarized on narrowly defined issues, we agree on more basic principles, ideals, and goals‐which don't get as much attention in the media compared to arguments over how we should pursue them. Captain America not only defended justice, equality, and liberty to the Red Skull, but has represented them as the core ideals of the United States of America. Refocusing our attention on these ideals, remembering our common points while debating differences, is the first (...) step towards recovering a sense of national unity and restoring civility to our political life. All it takes is the determination to be better and the judgment to decide how to be excellent at what we want to do and who we want to be, and to work together to help create the society we want to live in. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In volume two of his work Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville argued that religion could guarantee individual liberties against the tyranny of the majority. However, in volume one of this work, Tocqueville presented a conventional ‘civil religion’ as a phenomenon that was identical to or subsumed by American social mores or opinions. Thus, the following questions are raised: How can such a religion represent a brake on potential tyranny? How can genuine religion be distinguished from (...) common opinion? Consequently, understanding Tocqueville’s approach to religion remains a major problem. This article demonstrates that in the second volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville suggested a different type of civil religion, one that has a transcendent authority that distinguishes it from public opinion but that, nevertheless, facilitates intellectual liberty. It also shows how Tocqueville resolved the dilemmas of authority and liberty in the civil religion, by focusing on, with his observations of American Christianity, his reading of Blaise Pascal’s works regarding religious authority and human reason, in which Pascal exhorted human beings to willingly recognise the limits of reason. (shrink)

Stephen's critique of Mill is best known in the form given to it in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873). Nevertheless, the two men's journalistic writings from the 1860s- - the decade of the American Civil War-- already reveal divergent views of human progressiveness. Both supported the North, but Mill's hope for a moral regeneration of the American people seemed to Stephen to endanger the legal case for Unionism and to threaten further violence. More broadly, Mill's progressivism reflected a (...) mistaken view of human nature. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill's best-known work is On Liberty. In it he declared that Western society was in danger of coming to a standstill. This was an extraordinarily pessimistic claim in view of Britain's global dominance at the time and one that has been insufficiently investigated in the secondary literature. The wanting model was that of China, a once advanced civilization that had apparently ossified. To understand how Mill came to this conclusion requires one to investigate his notion of the stages (...) from barbarism to civilization, and also his belief in imperialism as part of the civilizing process. Here India plays a central role, as both Mill and his father worked for the East India Company. This study, then, investigates the relationship between Mill's liberalism and his justification of imperialism. It takes us into the Utilitarianism of his family background, and such other influences as Romanticism, Scottish political economy and such key French thinkers as Saint- Simon, Guizot, Comte and Tocqueville. Mill, then, provides the focus of a debate on the origins, meaning, and consequences of Western civilization. It encompasses discourses on colonialism and orientalism, on Enlightenment optimism and conservative despair, on the need for leadership and the advance of democracy; in short, on the blessings, curses and dangers of modernization from approximately the time of the American and French revolutions to that of the so-called mid-Victorian calm in which On Liberty was written. Furthermore, current political issues concerning the West and Islamic countries have heightened interest in just the kind of question that this book discusses: that of how the West relates to, and assesses, the rest of the world. (shrink)

Contemporary civil libertarians claim that their works preserve a worthy American tradition of defending free-speech rights dating back to the framing of the First Amendment. _Transforming Free Speech_ challenges the worthiness, and indeed the very existence of one uninterrupted libertarian tradition. Mark A. Graber asserts that in the past, broader political visions inspired libertarian interpretations of the First Amendment. In reexamining the philosophical and jurisprudential foundations of the defense of expression rights from the Civil War to the (...) present, he exposes the monolithic free-speech tradition as a myth. Instead of one conception of the system of free expression, two emerge: the conservative libertarian tradition that dominated discourse from the Civil War until World War I, and the civil libertarian tradition that dominates later twentieth-century argument. The essence of the current perception of the American free-speech tradition derives from the writings of Zechariah Chafee, Jr., the progressive jurist most responsible for the modern interpretation of the First Amendment. His interpretation, however, deliberately obscured earlier libertarian arguments linking liberty of speech with liberty of property. Moreover, Chafee stunted the development of a more radical interpretation of expression rights that would give citizens the resources and independence necessary for the effective exercise of free speech. Instead, Chafee maintained that the right to political and social commentary could be protected independent of material inequalities that might restrict access to the marketplace of ideas. His influence enfeebled expression rights in a world where their exercise depends increasingly on economic power. Untangling the libertarian legacy, Graber points out the disjunction in the libertarian tradition to show that free-speech rights, having once been transformed, can be transformed again. Well-conceived and original in perspective, _Transforming Free Speech_ will interest political theorists, students of government, and anyone interested in the origins of the free-speech tradition in the United States. (shrink)

The article explores Alexis de Tocqueville’s explication of democracy as ‘civil religion’ or the new sacred of modern times. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville analyzed democracy as a political system as well as a moral value. The article begins with Tocqueville’s analysis of the religious roots of American democracy. Dissociated from the affairs of the state through the principle of ‘disestablishment’, religion became secure in civil society, whereas the concept of democracy became inviolable and ‘set apart’ as (...) sacred. He noted that the power of the majority acquires an inviolable character in democracy that had the potential to turn against the very principles that it upholds. In the Indian context, the debate around a uniform civil code (UCC) is one such issue that captures this predicament. Working out a roadmap for Indian pluralism signposted with a constitutional commitment to equality, liberty and fraternity has proved to be a task fraught with moral and political complexities, if not impasse. The article argues that Tocqueville’s discovery of the role of religion in civil society, his mistrust of democratic majoritarianism and his emphasis on understanding the ‘practice’ of democracy have something to offer to the polarized UCC debate in India. (shrink)

In response to the spread of COVID-19, governments across the world have, with very few exceptions, enacted sweeping restrictive lockdown policies that impede citizens’ freedom to move, work, and assemble. This paper critically responds to the central arguments for restrictive lockdown legislation. We build our critique on the following assumption: public policy that enjoys virtually unanimous support worldwide should be justified by uncontroversial moral principles. We argue that that the virtually unanimous support in favor of restrictive lockdowns is not adequately (...) justified by the arguments given in favor of them. Importantly, this is not to say that states ought not impose restrictive lockdown measures, but rather that the extent of the acceptance of these measures is not proportionate to the strength of the arguments for lockdowns. -/- We begin by exploring the case for restrictive lockdowns. We first argue that several of the principles that are used to justify the lockdowns yield unexpectedly revisionary implications for other political problems that many would be unwilling to accept. We then outline what we consider the strongest argument for a lockdown—namely, that its net welfare benefits are great enough to defeat the moral presumption against restricting citizens’ civil liberties to move, work, and assemble. However, we give a number of reasons for doubting that the lockdown’s net welfare benefits are, in fact, sufficiently high to defeat the presumption against it. (shrink)

La Cnil est confrontée à une évolution technologique incessante et considérable face à laquelle elle doit rester vigilante. La question des usages se pose au regard des menaces vis-à-vis de l'exercice des libertés. Un double traçage dans le temps et dans l'espace se produit, cristallisant les discours et la personnalité d'un individu de manière indélébile. La protection des données personnelles est appliquée de manière très inégale dans le monde tandis que le G29 fait respecter la législation de l'Union européenne (...) sur son territoire. Alors que la Cnil est amenée à assurer de plus en plus de contrôles, elle manque de moyens qu'il faudrait lui procurer en demandant des contributions aux collectivités territoriales et aux entreprises.To exercise the vigilance required of it, the CNIL - the French Data Protection Authority - has to deal with a continuous stream of technological development, which is often of major significance. The issue of data use needs to be addressed because it raises potential threats to civil liberties. Data leave traces both in space and time, generating indelible snapshots of individual discourses and personalities. Personal data protection is unevenly applied around the world, while the G29 enforces European data protection legislation within Europe. The CNIL is required to apply ever more controls, but lacks the financial resources do to so. These should be provided by contributions from territorial authorities and private companies. (shrink)

Richard Price is remembered mainly for his work in moral philosophy, A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals. He also wrote widely and effectively on the political and economic problems of his time; he contributed with rare distinction to the polemical pamphlet literature which surrounded the America revolution. He was devoted to the American cause, and he analyzed and attacked British policies not only on grounds of utility but also in consideration of rationally apprehended natural rights. (...) In this regard, his most famous pamphlets are his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Additional Observations on the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty, and Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution. The first two pamphlets were also bound together and, with a general introduction, published as Two Tracts. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Must Liberty and Equality Come Apart? Freedom of Conscience Self‐Ownership and Universal Suffrage Slavery Women's Rights The Cold War Thurgood Marshall Discussion Acknowledgments.

The European Union Data Protection Regulation will have profound implications for public health, health services research and statistics in Europe. The EU Commission's Proposal was a breakthrough in balancing privacy rights and rights to health and healthcare. The European Parliament, however, has proposed extensive amendments. This paper reviews the amendments proposed by the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs and their implications for health research and statistics. The amendments eliminate most innovations brought by (...) the Proposal. Notably, derogation to the general prohibition of processing sensitive data shall be allowed for public interests such as the management of healthcare services, but not health research, monitoring, surveillance and governance. The processing of personal health data for historical, statistical or scientific purposes shall be allowed only with the consent of the data subject or if the processing serves an exceptionally high public interest, cannot be performed otherwise and is legally authorised. Research, be it academic, government, corporate or market research, falls under the same rule. The proposed amendments will make difficult or render impossible research and statistics involving the linkage and analysis of the wealth of data from clinical, administrative, insurance and survey sources, which have contributed to improving health outcomes and health systems performance and governance; and may illegitimise efforts that have been made in some European countries to enable privacy-respectful data use for research and statistical purposes. If the amendments stand as written, the right to privacy is likely to override the right to health and healthcare in Europe. (shrink)

_Rawls: An Introduction_ is a uniquely comprehensive introduction to the work of the American philosopher John Rawls, who transformed contemporary political philosophy. In the 1950s and 1960s, political philosophy seemed to have reached a dead end characterized by a loose predominance of utilitarian theses. Rawls’s conception of liberalism placed civil liberties and social justice at its core, and his extraordinary influence has only been confirmed by the extent of the criticism he has provoked. The book is divided (...) into three parts which correspond to Rawls’s three major books. The first concentrates on _A Theory of Justice_ and examines the way in which Rawls’s general vision of social justice is presented. Maffettone also includes here a discussion of some of the most important critiques of Rawls. The second part of the book highlights _Political Liberalism_, with a chapter dedicated to the “passage” from _Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism_. Finally, the third part provides a discussion of _The Law of Peoples_. This work is acomprehensive examination of these three major texts by a renowned Rawls scholar and will appeal to all philosophers and social scientists for whom it is essential to understand the key theories of this most influential of political philosophers. (shrink)