Law & Society Blog

As much as I sympathize with Singer’s recommendations, I find them hard to justify.

Socrates was offside!

(HT: Brian Leiter)
Technorati Tags: philosophy, soccer

I would dispute the claim that law has been tacitly agreed to in anything like a social contract.
To see what I mean, picture in your mind the following scenario. A resident of a small, distant, isolated island of Tikopia is fishing off the coast as he does every year. Tikopia is ecologically self-sufficient, due to […]

It seems that we can’t get enough of this timeless problem.

It is common practice in university departments to evaluate texts by way of “the principle of charity”. Some formulations of this principle make for fantastic additions to our analytical toolkit(s). Other formulations are mere distractions, and they waste our time.
It is misleading in the first place to speak of one single principle of charity, as […]

Some people seem to believe in “textual revelation” as a truth criterion…. (How do I know what qualifies as bona fide revelation and what’s just a figment of my imagination?

In reply to a recent thread, Cosim had two pressing concerns over the ethics and legal philosophy behind free speech.

(1) “I’m not sure why the law should tolerate racist opinions; general propositions don’t decide concrete cases. For example, to take the Brandenburg case from American constitutional law, Klansmen spoke about sending “€˜the Black back to […]

Given Hanno’s post directly below, it is particularly appropriate to examine the question to what extent we ought to mourn the victims of the 9/11 attacks, relative to those who die from many of the causes mentioned in the chart in Hanno’s post.
In response to this post of mine on the anniversity of the 9/11 […]

In this post over at Philosophy, et cetera Richard Chappell suggets that in liberal democratic societies civil disobedience may never be morally acceptable. He says of radical activists (including those involved in the actions described here, whose tactics seem to have played a role in motivating his post):
These dogmatists feel so assured of the […]

There are a couple of different ways to look at power.
Sociology is supposedly divided into two camps: “conflict” theorists and “consensus” theorists. As far as I can tell, this means that some people enjoy describing society at large as an eternal struggle for egoistic benefits, and others enjoy describing it in terms of voluntary […]