This symposium issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics is devoted to the convening of the national public health law conference, Practical Approaches to Critical Challenges, on October 10-12, 2012, in Atlanta, Georgia. The conference was co-sponsored by the Network for Public Health Law and the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics with generous support provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, de Beaumont Foundation, California Endowment, and Healthcare Georgia Foundation.With the support of those organizations and (...) the dedicated efforts of the individuals mentioned below, the conference focused on building effective interactions between attorneys and public health practitioners in order to:•examine practical legal approaches to address priority public health issues;•learn about helpful public health law resources and evidence-based research;•discuss public health legal questions and answers; and•build partnerships to accomplish public health objectives and foster innovation. (shrink)

Michael Walzer’s use of John Stuart Mill’s A Few Words on Non-Intervention (1859) helped to inaugurate it as a canonical text of international theory. However, Walzer’s use of the text was highly selective because he viewed the first half as a historically parochial discussion of British foreign policy, and his interest in the second was restricted to the passages in which Mill proposes principles of international morality to govern foreign military interventions to protect third parties. As a result, theorists tend (...) to see those canonized passages as if through a glass darkly. Attention to the detail and context of Mill’s first-half critique of Lord Palmerston’s opposition to the Suez Canal project reveals that his discussion of purely protective intervention is embedded in a broader exploration of the limits of self-defence, including the moral permissibility of preventive military force and the use of protective interventions for defensive purposes. Moreover, reading the text holistically facilitates a refutation of some objections directed at it by Michael Doyle to the effect that Mill’s conception of self-defence incorporates elements of aggression which makes it extremely dangerous when adapted for application to the contemporary world. (shrink)

The passage of Mill’s Utilitarianism that sets out the condition in which one pleasure has a superior quality than another stokes interpretive controversy. According to the Lexical Interpretation, Mill takes one pleasure, P1, to be of a superior quality than another, P2, if, and only if, the smallest quantity of P1 is more valuable than any finite quantity of P2. This paper argues that, while the Lexical Interpretation may be supported with supplementary evidence, the passage itself does not rule out (...) qualitative superiority without lexical dominance, as it only requires P1 to be more valuable than any quantity of P2 that it is possible for someone to experience. Some will object that this concession to opponents of the Lexical Interpretation still renders Mill’s condition for qualitative superiority too demanding to be plausible. However, if Mill’s qualitative rankings apply to higher-order pleasures taken in modes of existence as such rather than to the pleasures of different activities chosen from within these modes, the objection loses much of its force. One upshot is that Mill may have more to contribute to debates in contemporary population axiology than is usually acknowledged. (shrink)

This book provides the first complete, literal English translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s and Gustave de Beaumont’s first edition of On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France. The work contains a critical comparison of two competing American penitentiary disciplines known as the Auburn and Philadelphia systems, an evaluation of whether American penitentiaries can successfully work in France, a detailed description of Houses of Refuge as the first juvenile detention centers, and an argument against (...) penal colonization. The work provides valuable insights into understanding Tocqueville as a statesman, as well as a comparative look at civic engagement in early American and French penal reform movements. The Translator’s Introduction provides historical context for understanding Tocqueville’s work in French penal reform and the major themes of the report. The book thus fills a void in Tocquevillian studies and extrapolates the roots of American and French criminal justice systems in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill claims that free institutions are next to impossible in a multinational state. According to Will Kymlicka, this leads him to embrace policies kindred to those of Friedrich Engels, aimed at promoting mononational states in Europe through coercive assimilation. Given Mill’s harm principle, such coercive assimilation would have to be justified either paternalistically, in terms of its civilizing effects upon the would-be assimilated, or non-paternalistically, with reference to the danger that their non-assimilation would pose to others. However, neither (...) possible interpretation is plausible; Mill takes Europe’s civilized status to shield Europeans from paternalistic coercion, and he opposes coercive assimilation where it could conceivably be justified in the name of defense. Although this much suggests that Kymlicka misinterprets Mill by ignoring his definition of nationality, it leaves scope for Kymlicka to argue that Mill favors policies that promote mononationality through neglecting the languages and cultures of national minorities. (shrink)

Many contemporary scholars defend the position that J. S. Mill was a ‘eudaimonist’, in a sense implying that he was not an ‘experiential’ hedonist. One ‘activist’ argument for this interpretation rests on the claim that Mill’s core axiological uses of ‘pleasure’ in Utilitarianism should be understood to refer to worthy or pleasurable activities rather than mental states. This paper offers a three-stage rebuttal of the activist interpretation. Firstly, in the Analysis, the Examination and the Logic, Mill explicitly identifies pleasures and (...) pains as mental states. Secondly, if we read Mill’s core axiological uses of ‘pleasure’ in Utilitarianism along activist lines, the text’s overall coherence and intelligibility becomes even more questionable than on the traditional experientialist reading. Finally, in his discussions of Plato, Mill seems to distance himself from the axiological view that non-hedonic features of mind or character have intrinsic value in their own right. In consequence, in the small number of cases in Utilitarianism in which Mill clearly speaks of ‘pleasures’ as activities, this is best construed as a derivative usage. (shrink)

Pettit endorses a ‘republican’ conception of social freedom of the person as consisting of a state of non-domination, and takes this to refute Mill’s ‘liberal’ claim that non-domineering but coercive interference can compromise social freedom of choice. This paper argues that Pettit’s interpretation is true to the extent that Mill believes that the legitimate, non-arbitrary and just coercion of would-be dominators, for the sake of preventing them from dominating others, can render them unfree to choose to do so without rendering (...) them socially unfree (qua dominated) persons in their own right. However, contra Pettit, Mill is correct to reject the ‘republican’ view for at least two reasons. Firstly, it enables him to avoid commitment to the implausible implication that would-be dominators who sincerely deny any interest in a shared system of basic liberties are automatically rendered unfree persons by the coercion necessary to uphold such a system. Secondly, it enables him to avoid begging the question against ‘immoralists’ like Nietzsche, whose opposition to systems of reciprocal non-domination is at least partly motivated by the losses of social freedom of choice they entail for those they deem to be worthy of dominating others. (shrink)

High on energy and imagination, this ode to self-esteem encourages kids to appreciate everything about themselves--inside and out. Messy hair? Beaver breath? So what! Here's a little girl who knows what really matters. At once silly and serious, Karen Beaumont's joyous rhyming text and David Catrow's wild illustrations unite in a book that is sassy, soulful--and straight from the heart.

Maximizing Hedonism maintains that the most pleasurable pleasures are the best. Francis Bradley argues that this is either incompatible with Mill’s Qualitative Hedonism, or renders the latter redundant. Some ‘sympathetic’ interpreters respond that Mill was either a Non-Maximizing Hedonist or a Non-Hedonist. However, Bradley’s argument is fallacious, and these ‘sympathetic’ interpretations cannot provide adequate accounts of: Mill’s identification with the Protagorean Socrates; his criticisms of the Gorgian Socrates; or his apparent belief that Callicles is misguided to attempt to show that (...) the pleasures of the intelligent can be more valuable than the pleasures of fools without also being more pleasurable. -/- L’hédonisme maximisateur maintient que les plaisirs les plus plaisants sont les meilleurs. Francis Bradley soutient que soit cela est incompatible avec l’hédonisme qualitatif de Mill, soit cela rend ce dernier redondant. Certains interprètes bien intentionnés répondent que Mill était soit un hédoniste non-maximisateur, soit un non-hédoniste. L’argument de Bradley est toutefois fallacieux et ces interprétations bien intentionnées ne peuvent rendre compte de manière adéquate de l’identification de Mill avec le Socrate protagorien, de ses critiques du Socrate gorgien, ni de sa conviction apparente que Calliclès a tort de tenter de montrer que les plaisirs de la personne intelligente peuvent être plus précieux que les plaisirs de l’idiot sans pour autant être plus plaisants. (shrink)

Mill's System of Logic (1843) indicates that the definition of ‘nationality’ he offered in Considerations on Representative Government (1861) is not a throwaway comment but a carefully considered causal hypothesis tailored to his politico-ethological research programme. This matters because Lord Acton's critique of Mill's claim that free institutions are almost impossible in multinational states ignored the definition, thereby obscuring subsequent scholars' vision of the conceptual dimension of this famous dispute. Although Mill struggled in his politico-ethological endeavour, he was sufficiently confident (...) to judge that, if nationalities seek self-determination through exclusive control of the state, liberal democratic institutions would be unlikely to emerge in multinational states, let alone survive and prosper. Since Acton's critique presupposed an undemocratic conception of free institutions and a far weaker notion of national self-determination, it failed to contradict that judgement. Indeed, once their conceptual disagreements are clarified, Acton's empirical analysis can be seen to support it. (shrink)

How does so much gender inequality endure in an era when many laws and policies endorse principles of gender equality? This essay examines this dilemma by considering Susan Moller Okin's criticism of “false gender neutrality,” research on implicit bias, and the shifting relation of gender bias to American law. I argue that these are crucial elements of the modern cycle of gender inequality, enabling it to operate through a perverse “invisible-hand” mechanism. This framework helps convey how underlying gender bias influences (...) individual behaviors that generate, legitimate, and mask broad patterns of inequality. Contemporary legal conflicts reflect many of these dynamics, which appear in controversies over gender-based violence, gender discrimination in pay and promotion, and women's reproductive health care benefits. This analysis advances our understanding of how the contemporary cycle of gender inequality operates, the complex links between individual behavior and structural bias, and the difficulty of pursuing gender justice through prevailing frameworks of law and liberalism. It also underscores the continued importance of feminists' collective work to address “invisible” as well as visible biases. (shrink)

It is possible to distinguish between empire, as a form of political order, and imperialism, as a process of aggressive expansion. Mill's liberalism allows for a legitimate empire, in which a civilized state rules a less civilized foreign people paternalistically to prepare them for liberal democratic self-rule. However, it rejects paternalistic imperialism, in the sense of aggression designed to establish such an empire. Apparent textual evidence to the contrary really demonstrates Mill's commitment to three distinct theses: that imperialism may benefit (...) those subject to it, and this can mitigate its evil; that it is easier to justify non-aggressive, empire-creating wars of conquest in response to aggression by barbarian powers; and finally, that civilized states are justified in engaging distant uncivilized peoples non-aggressively, even though the latter's aggressive tendencies mean that such engagement renders empire-justifying wars more likely. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers often purport to ‘borrow’ or ‘refute’ claims made by past philosophers. In doing so they contravene a contextualist methodological prohibition once defended by Quentin Skinner in his seminal paper “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”. Skinner's methodology has been much debated by theorists of textual meaning and interpretation, and yet the precise nature of the logical path from his premises to his prohibitory conclusion remains elusive. This paper seeks to refute two of the most promising variants (...) of an argument for his methodological prohibition on ‘refutation’, one of which draws on his appeal to Wittgenstein's conception of ‘meaning as use’, and the other of which draws on his appeal to speech act theory. (shrink)

Two Christian theologians writing in Arabic in the early ninth century argued that God had created humanity to freely choose good or evil actions, a belief shared universally by previous Christian writers in Greek and Syriac no matter the denomination they came from. They were debating with Muslim intellectuals who held that God created all human actions before they were acquired by humans, so that God had already decided which actions a particular human being would choose, whether good or evil. (...) Theodore Abū Qurra and ʿAmmār al-Baṣrī developed dialogues with determinist Muslims in the hope that they might influence these determinist Muslims to adopt earlier Muslim beliefs that the Qurʾan taught that God would judge humans for the choices that they freely made for good or evil. However, the trend towards determinism was so strong that by the end of the ninth century the mainstream Sunni view would be that God decreed all human actions before they were acquired by humans. (shrink)

Christian views of the Prophet Muhammad have in the past 30 years covered a wide spectrum from rejection of Muhammad’s prophetic status as a bringer of revelation from God to a warm embrace of the Qur’an as a third testament to revelation after the Old and New Testaments. The significance of the late Anglican Bishop Kenneth Cragg’s assessment of Muhammad, published in 1984, is addressed in this article by surveying the range of responses to the founder of Islam which followed. (...) Twenty-first century Christian–Muslim relations are likely to be deeply concerned with dialogue about Christian attitudes to the Prophet Muhammad. (shrink)

Focuses on the work of Frantz Fanon and the relationship between colonialism and the body. Each chapter has Fanon walking with another thinker.

The German painter Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea, a picture that has played an important role in accounts of the prehistory of twentieth-century abstract art, is significant among other reasons because it bravely refused painting’s narrative vocation and in so doing radicalized the optics characteristic of the contemporary aesthetics of the sublime. Friedrich’s contemporary, the novelist and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist, intuited precisely this in his scintillating comments on the painting at the time it appeared. Invoking the (...) shocking idea that looking at The Monk by the Sea is like seeing through eyes whose lids have been cut off, he recognized that Friedrich had transformed the canvas into the locus not so much of narration and signification as of sensation. This article leans on the terms devised by Gilles Deleuze to explain the paintings of Francis Bacon in order to explore the seminal shift in the relationship between spectator and composition that Friedrich’s canvas dramatizes with such compelling power. (shrink)

Bajo lo que se conoce como «música clásica» se esconden siglos de historias sobre búsquedas, hallazgos y revoluciones sonoras fascinantes. Acercarse a ellas desde una escucha despreocupada ofrece la posibilidad de pasear sin rumbo, dejarse llevar y disfrutar de caminos que conducen a lugares desconocidos y maravillosos. Sin embargo, desarrollar un tipo de escucha más concreta que busque responder a la pregunta de cómo funciona la música puede abrir una enorme puerta que permita disfrutarla de una manera completamente nueva. Los (...) compositores son arquitectos que proyectan, diseñan y construyen sus obras utilizando sonidos y silencios. Para ello, han tenido que concebir una técnica que les permita aprovechar al máximo las posibilidades expresivas de sus materiales y así poder crear su propio lenguaje. Para procesar completamente la información de ese mensaje sonoro y disfrutarla en su totalidad, los interlocutores, los oyentes, necesitan aguzar el oído: aprender a escuchar de forma activa y atenta para reconocer los elementos rítmicos, melódicos y armónicos de cada música y examinar los aspectos relacionados con su textura, color y forma. Así, la experiencia auditiva se ilumina y el corazón estalla"--Back cover. (shrink)

Newman was keenly aware of the challenge posed to Christians by the development of historical biblical criticism in the nineteenth century. In several of his Anglican writings—most notably in no. 85 of Tracts for the Times, in unpublished notes and drafts dating from 1861–1863, and in two essays published in 1884—he attempted to resolve questions regarding the nature of biblical “inspiration,” the respective roles of the divine and human “authors,” and the nature of biblical “truth.” This article, originally a paper (...) given at the 2012 conference of the Association française des Amis de Newman on Newman et la Bible, was first published in French in Études Newmaniennes no. 29 (2013). (shrink)

Newman’s constant preoccupation with “connectedness” leads him to explore and to insist upon the importance of the relationship between the “notional” and the “real,” and therefore of that between theology and philosophy, on the one hand, and spirituality and morality or ethics, on the other. This paper explores Newman’s expression of these ideas, firstly in his sermons and theological writings, and finally in the more philosophical context of the Grammar of Assent.

The arrival of Muslim rulers who were insistent on the unity of God among Christians who testified to the unity of God in His triune nature introduced a considerable challenge to those Christians who were in the ascendency throughout the Middle East. Now they were on the defensive, needing to stem the movement of members of their own community to Islam which would eventually lead to Muslims becoming the majority. In the period of gradual transfer from majority to minority status (...) Christian theologians attempted both to make their faith in the Trinity intelligible to Muslim intellectuals with whom they debated, and to give reasons to Christians for holding firm to their faith. These theologians are hardly known to the global church of the 21st century and it is the purpose of this paper to make them come alive for Christians who are witnessing to their faith before Muslims in our time in the hope that a contemporary testimony to the Triune God can be encouraged. (shrink)