Civic Respect Research Articles

Davids, Nuraan, and Yusef Waghid. Teaching, Friendship and Humanity. Springer Briefs in Citizenship Education for the 21st Century. Springer, 2020.

The newest book of Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid Teaching, Friendship and Humanity has been a landmark of philosophy and theory in the higher education debate, focusing on the relationship among love, education, and democracy practices. Inspired by their “love for education” (p. vii), the authors address teachers’ and students’ roles and responsibilities in making education a path to social change. The authors depart from a democratic educational citizenship framework that values “civic engagement, communal living, mutual respect, and equalisation of voice” (p. ix) in their analysis. They present an innovative pedagogic approach that makes sense of emotional experiences of nurturing loving educational encounters through openness to empathy, wondering and the ability for inner change. For the authors: “when teachers and students love the world on the basis of their educational aspirations, they commit themselves to embark on encounters that can bring about significant and valuable changes in the world” (p. ix).

Accessibility, pluralism, and honesty: a defense of the accessibility requirement in public justification

ABSTRACT Political liberals assume an accessibility requirement, which means that, for ensuring civic respect and non-manipulation, public officials should offer accessible reasons during political advocacy. Recently, critics have offered two arguments to show that the accessibility requirement is unnecessary. The first is the pluralism argument: Given the pluralism in evaluative standards, when officials offer non-accessible reasons, they are not disrespectful because they may merely try to reveal their strongest reason. The second is the honesty argument: As long as officials honestly confess their beliefs after offering non-accessible reasons, disrespect and non-manipulation do not occur. This paper defends the accessibility requirement and asserts that these two arguments overlook a unique feature of the political domain. While all citizens collectively own political power as a corporate body, an official does not privately own her political power. Instead, she is a trustee who has a duty to act on behalf of the corporate body, that is, she has to make decisions on grounds that are accessible to others. This duty explains why, despite pluralism, the accessibility requirement is necessary. Moreover, given that political decisions are profoundly influential to each person, requiring people to be honest is ineffective in discouraging disrespectful and manipulative acts.

Law, Religion, and Conscience in a Pluralistic Society: The Case of the Little Sisters of the Poor

In their participation as plaintiffs in Zubik v. Burwell, the Little Sisters of the Poor have appealed to the moral teachings of the Catholic Church in order to argue that the Affordable Care Act requires the organization to act against its conscience and in complicity with evil. However, this Article argues that the exigencies of litigation have required the plaintiffs to distort Roman Catholic moral teaching on cooperation with evil and the respect due to the conscience of others. John Rawls’ concept of ‘civic respect’ and Mario Cuomo’s invocation of the Golden Rule provide a framework for understanding the moral requirement to respect the conscience of others. Examining the role of the Little Sisters of the Poor as an employer and institutional citizen clarifies the moral issues surrounding this case and demonstrates the ways in which the adversarial nature of the legal process has pressed them to understand both their own obligations and those of the government in a binary manner. This distortion has prevented them from helping to discern what sorts of conscience protection are appropriate for all of us in an interdependent and pluralistic constitutional democracy.

The European Court of Human Rights Grand Chamber: Scoppola v. Italy (No. 3)

In Scoppola v. Italy (No. 3), the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights clarified its position on prisoner disenfranchisement under Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The Grand Chamber upheld, by sixteen votes to one, the challenged Italian legislation as within the margin of appreciation granted to member states in determining the conditions under which the Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 right to vote is exercised. Following its precedent in Hirst v. United Kingdom (No. 2), the Grand Chamber ruled that the Italian law pursued the legitimate aim of preventing crime and enhancing civic responsibility and respect for the rule of law, and that the relevant measure was proportionate because it did not affect a group of people generally, automatically, and indiscriminately. Notably, the Grand Chamber differentiated Scopppola (No. 3) from Hirst (No. 2), stressing that the U.K. legislation challenged in the latter deprived all prisoners, regardless of the length of their sentences or the nature of their crimes, of their right to vote. Unlike Hirst (No. 2), the Grand Chamber noted, the Italian legislation adapted voting restrictions to the particular circumstances of each case.

Civic Education in an Emerging Democracy: Students’ Experiences in Malaysia’s Projek Warga

This article aims to look at the relevance of civic education in Malaysia—an illiberal democracy—by using data collected from students participating in Projek Warga throughout the year 2009. While civic education as advocated by the state is geared towards legitimizing the status quo and therefore does not necessarily converge with democratic norms and values, Projek Warga stresses the importance of active citizenship by exposing participants to the need for civic engagement at the local level. This is achieved by educating students on how public policies are formulated as well as its dynamics. It is hoped that after participating in the project, students will in turn internalize that democracy is not a spectator’s sport and consequently value active citizenship as an indispensable element in public life. The results suggest that participation in the project has succeeded in increasing students’ understanding of public policy and the democratic process in general. As most students entered the project without prior knowledge of public policy, their understanding of the different dimensions of public policy—its processes as well as parties involved—have significantly increased. Similarly, they are also able to see the importance of exercising their rights as citizens so as to make their community a better place. In light of these findings, it could be argued that civic education propagated by a non-governmental organization that is geared towards instilling social responsibility and citizenship is more likely to succeed in promoting “civic respect”.

Civic Respect, Civic Education, and the Family

We formulate a distinctly ‘political liberal’ conception of mutual respect, which we call ‘civic respect’, appropriate for governing the public political relations of citizens in pluralist democratic societies. A political liberal account of education should aim at ensuring that students, as future citizens, learn to interact with other citizens on the basis of civic respect. While children should be required to attend educational institutions that will inculcate in them the skills and concepts necessary for them to be free and equal citizens, parents should be granted as much freedom as is compatible with the requirements of civic respect to raise their children in accordance with their respective ‘comprehensive doctrines’ (systems of beliefs and values, including religious doctrines). We consider an objection to our position drawn from the account of upbringing recently advanced by Matthew Clayton, namely, that the conception of civic respect that we advance rests on an implausible view about the limited scope of the requirements of political justice. We develop an account of the ‘basic structure of society’ as the appropriate subject of political justice that can overcome this objection.

Beyond Judicial Minimalism

Many judges are minimalists. They favor rulings that are narrow, in the sense that they govern only the circumstances of the particular case, and also shallow, in the sense that they do not accept a deep theory of the legal provision at issue. In law, narrow and shallow decisions have real advantages insofar as they reduce both decision costs and error costs; make space for democratic engagement on fundamental questions; and reflect a norm of civic respect. In many cases, however, minimalism is hard to justify in these ways. Sometimes small steps increase the aggregate costs of decisions; sometimes they produce large errors, especially when they export decision-making burdens to fallible people. Predictability is an important variable, and minimalist decisions can compromise predictability. Sometimes large, nonminimalist steps serve democratic values and do not compromise the norm of civic respect. It follows that the justifications for minimalism are unconvincing in many contexts. The debate between minimalists and their adversaries is closely related to the debate between those who prefer standards and those who prefer rules, though there are some important differences.

Civic friendship and the third term

Mark Vernon contrasts the Aristotelean conception of civic respect and virtues with what contemporary politicians seem to have in mind.

Civic respect, political liberalism, and non-liberal societies

One prominent criticism of John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples is that it treats certain non-liberal societies, what Rawls calls ‘decent hierarchical societies’, as equal participants in a just international system. Rawls claims that these non-liberal societies should be respected as equals by liberal democratic societies, even though they do not grant their citizens the basic rights of democratic citizenship. This is presented by Rawls as a consequence of liberalism’s commitment to the principle of toleration. A number of critics have claimed that Rawls’s treatment of these non-liberal societies is symptomatic of a more general problem with political liberalism, namely, its reliance on toleration as its ‘fundamental principle’. Against this view, I argue that the principle of toleration should not be understood as political liberalism’s ‘fundamental principle’. This is revealed through a consideration of the normative basis of what Rawls calls the ‘Liberal Principle of Legitimacy’. A correct understanding of political liberalism’s ‘fundamental principle’, which I claim is a principle of equal ‘civic respect’ for citizens, shows that Rawls’s toleration of non-liberal societies is in fact a misapplication of political liberalism to the global domain. Moreover, I explain that political liberalism must assert that the principle of equal civic respect for citizens is the correct principle to govern the public political relations of citizens in all pluralist societies, and that most ‘decent hierarchical societies’ are pluralist in nature. Identifying political liberalism’s fundamental principle as that of equal civic respect for citizens helps to render political liberalism, in both the domestic and international domains, a more coherent and compelling approach to thinking about fundamental political issues.

Civic Theater for Civic Education

ABSTRACT This study illustrates the special value of theater for conducting civic education. It begins by identifying the features of good citizenship in the United States. Citizenship in America includes rights, interests, affections, duties, and virtues. We focus on one duty, civic respect, and the virtue most necessary to meet that duty—civic attention. Unless citizens pay respectful attention to one another, some will be left in civic bondage—voiceless in the political community or consigned to second-class citizenship. One remedy to the problem of civic bondage is civic education that teaches civic respect through civic attention. We argue that two basic pedagogical strategies are required to teach civic attention: (1) civic hermeneutics (interpreting other citizens with the aim of granting them civic respect) and (2) civic staging (organizing public space to allow citizens to better communicate). We then argue that theater—including classical and experimental varieties—is especially valuable for teaching civic attention. Theater is uniquely valuable for understanding, criticizing, problematizing, practicing, transforming and even for resisting politics. The quality of our political lives can be dramatically improved by careful attention learned through civic theater.

Context-sensitive monitoring and evaluation for the World Bank

This article sketches a preliminary design for a new system of monitoring and evaluation in support of a program on New Bank Practices in Civic Engagement, Empowerment, and Respect for Diversity (CEERD) in the World Bank. The new practices bring to the foreground uncertainties and ambiguities arising from the human factors in empowerment and development. Consequently, a system of monitoring and evaluation must be context-sensitive, taking into account differences and changes in context. Meaningful indicators of success or failure, and assumptions about responsibility for them, cannot be specified reliably in project agreements in advance of implementation. Specification in advance could inhibit the improvisations necessary to deal with unanticipated problems and opportunities in the implementation process on the ground.