Szifris on Socrates and Aristotle: The Role of Ancient Philosophers in the Self-Understanding of Desisting Prisoners @KirstineSzifris @LoaderIan

Kirstine Szifris, University of Cambridge, has published Socrates and Aristotle: The Role of Ancient Philosophers in the Self‐Understanding of Desisting Prisoners at 56 Howard Journal of Crime and Justice 419 (2017). Here is the abstract.

This article argues that providing a forum for philosophical conversation within prison education is relevant to the self‐understanding and desistance of prisoners. Semi‐structured interviews with 20 participants of an in‐prison philosophy class in Scotland investigated the personal relevance of engaging in philosophical dialogue. Findings demonstrated that philosophical dialogue develops participants' self‐understanding, providing vocabulary for alternative self‐definition. The philosophy class achieved this by encouraging self‐reflection, developing communication skills, and providing a forum for positive prosocial interaction with peers. These skills are essential in reframing self‐understanding which is, in turn, essential to desistance. 

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Rodriguez-Blanco, Law and Authority Under the Guise of the Good (Hart) Now Available in Paperback

Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco's book Law and Authority Under the Guise of the Good (Hart Publishing, 2016) is now also available in paperback. Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

The received view on the nature of legal authority contains the idea that a sound account of legitimate authority will explain how a legal authority has a right to command and the addressee a duty to obey. The received view fails to explain, however, how legal authority truly operates upon human beings as rational creatures with specific psychological makeups. This book takes a bottom-up approach, beginning at the microscopic level of agency and practical reason and leading to the justificatory framework of authority. The book argues that an understanding of the nature of legal normativity involves an understanding of the nature and structure of practical reason in the context of the law, and advances the idea that legal authority and normativity are intertwined. This point can be summarised thus: if we are able to understand both how the agent exercises his or her practical reason under legal directives and commands and how the agent engages his or her practical reason by following legal rules grounded on reasons for actions as good-making characteristics, then we can fully grasp the nature of legal authority and legal normativity. Using the philosophies of action enshrined in the works of Elisabeth Anscombe, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, the study explains practical reason as diachronic future-directed intention in action and argues that this conception illuminates the structure of practical reason of the legal rules' addressees. The account is comprehensive and enables us to distinguish authoritative and normative legal rules in just and good legal systems from 'apparent' authoritative and normative legal rules of evil legal systems. At the heart of the book is the methodological view of a 'practical turn' to elucidate the nature of legal normativity and authority.

 

Justness In Aristotle and Cicero

Dmitry Dozhdev, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences; Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of State and Law, has published 'Aequitas' as Real Law: Sources of the European Legal Tradition, in "The Best In the West": Educator, Jurist, Arbitrator: Liber Amicorum in Honour of Professor William Butler (Natalya Iu. Erpyleva and Maryann E. Gashi-Butler, Wildy, Simmonds, and Hill, 2014). Here is the abstract.

Concepts of Justness in Aristotle and Cicero are analysed. Both follow formal approach to Justness, proper to legal science. Looking for model of moral perfection and dignity Cicero appeals to the findings of Quintus Mucius Scaevola (II-I BC), founder of european legal science, who revealed the nature of just in proper application of formal equality (bonum et aequum). For Roman lawyers just person was a person that was following a model of a 'vir bonus' (good man). Abstract qualities of a good man were products of law and at the same time elemenst of legal system. The very conformity to the principles of law makes a participant of legal interaction 'good man'. Abstract notion of 'aequity' (justness) was seen as a source of law. In Byzantine times 'aequity' became a quality of the Emperor, while the just nature of law was substituted by 'justness' of the ruler. Some scholars connect the abstraction of 'aequity' with this new approach and deem Roman law texts corrupted in later times. However, the autenticity of the traditional texts can be proved.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

A New Book On Justice and Injustice

New from Routledge



The Concept of Injustice
By Eric Heinze
Published October 24th 2012 by Routledge--218 pages

The Concept of Injustice challenges traditional Western justice theory. Thinkers from Plato and Aristotle through to Kant, Hegel, Marx and Rawls have subordinated the idea of injustice to the idea of justice. Misled by the word’s etymology, political theorists have assumed injustice to be the sheer, logical opposite of justice. Heinze summons ancient and early modern texts, philosophical and literary, with special attention to Shakespeare, to argue that injustice is not primarily the negation, failure or absence of justice. It is the constant product of regimes and norms of justice. Justice is not always the cure for injustice, and is often its cause.

Pretty Little Philosophers?

Timothy Lukes has published The Politics of Beauty: Locke, Shaftesbury, and Burke as an APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper. Here is the abstract.

I argue that liberalism adulterates beauty, that Shaftesbury cannot resist the survival agenda of Locke, and that Burke's concept of the sublime is the result.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

The State of Nature: Whence Politics?

William A. Edmundson, Georgia State University College of Law, has published Politics in a State of Nature. Here is the abstract.

Aristotle thought we are, by nature, political animals. Political philosophy in the tradition of Hobbes and Locke sees political society not as natural but as an artifice. For this tradition, political society emerged from a pre-political state of nature by the exercise of innate normative powers. Those powers, together with the rest of our native normative endowment, both make possible the construction of the state, and place sharp limits on the state’s just powers and prerogatives.

Thus described, a state-of-nature theory has three components. One is an account of the native normative endowment, or “NNE.” Two is an account of how the state is constructed using the tools included in the NNE. Three is an account of the state’s resulting normative endowment, which includes a (purported) moral power to impose duties of obedience.

State-of-nature theories disagree about the NNE. For Hobbes, it consists of a moral permission to do whatever seems to one to be necessary to survival, and a moral power to covenant. Locke specified a more constraining NNE, which also included a “natural executive right” to punish wrongdoing. Rawls excluded personal desert from the “original position,” his refurbishing of the state of nature. In each case, the NNE is not treated as though it were a matter of empirical investigation and discovery, but rather were one of reflective adjustment to the other two components of the theory.

The work of social psychologist Stanley Milgram and his students suggests a quite different NNE, one far more constrained than what state-of-nature theories have allowed. Norms that constrain moral reproof are of particular interest here. Contrary to Locke, people do not behave in experimental settings as one would predict if they possessed a “natural executive right” to punish wrongdoing. Moral reproof is subject to standing norms. These norms limit the range of eligible reprovers.

This paper draws on this work to support two claims. One, is that the native normative endowment is (as Aristotle held) already political. The other is that political authority should be re-conceived as a matter of standing - that is, as the state’s unique possession of a moral permission to enforce moral norms, rather than as a moral power to impose freestanding duties of obedience.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.