Concept Of Individual Rights Research Articles

Transformation of Anthropological Legal Values of Human Existence under Conditions of War

Purpose. The main purpose of the article is to study the anthropological and socio-philosophical dimensions of human existence in the context of hostilities by highlighting the aspects of transformation of anthropological legal values of human existence during the war. Theoretical basis. The methodological tools are presented in the interaction of axiological, synergetic, socio-legal and comparative methods. The survey method is used to obtain quantitative data on the self-assessment of Ukrainian citizens in relation to the war, changes in their internal intentions as a result of the crisis of social reality. Originality. Military actions can act both as a catalyst for the formation of new anthropological legal values, in accordance with the specifics of martial law and the need to adapt legal systems to the challenges arising in wartime, and as a destructor of certain value attributes of society. Conclusions. The nature of paradigmatic changes in wartime is represented by the metamorphosis of anthropological legal values, which manifests itself in profound changes in the philosophical understanding of man, the transformation of legal principles and the revision of moral norms in society. Reflections on the legal paradox appear in attempts to balance the need to keep within the law with the requirement to ensure security and defence in the first place. The article highlights the following aspects of changes: revision of the concept of individual rights and freedoms by recognising that individual rights may be subject to restrictions for the sake of the common good or national security; new legal values arise which are related to the protection of human rights in war conditions.

Locating rights in the afro-communitarian scheme: Testing the compatibilist argument

In this paper, I explore the relationship between individual rights and duties within the Afro-communitarian discourse in African political philosophy. The notion of individual rights is prominent in modern African political philosophy, which is usually used to refer to the tension between community and individual in Afro-communitarianism. In this paper, I specifically focus on this question: Can Afro-communitarianism ground a plausible conception of individual rights that will be of benefit to modern African societies? I will discuss two approaches within the Afro-communitarian discourse that have offered a response to this question. On the one hand, are the duty-based incompatibilists who defend the primacy of duties over individual rights and claim that Afro-communitarianism is incompatible with individual rights. On the other hand, are the rights-based compatibilists who claim that Afro-communitarianism is compatible with individual rights by according to rights and duties equal status in African political philosophy. In this paper, I will take issues with the latter. First, I argue that rights-based compatibilists have not been able to locate individual rights in Afro-communitarianism beyond selective rights granted to a few persons by the community. Second, I argue that some rights-based compatibilists ground their theory of rights on an idea of community that is not communitarian. With these arguments, I establish that rights-based compatibilism does not dislodge the claims of duty-based incompatibilism.

A Neo-Confucian Definition of the Relationship between Individuals and Community in the Song–Ming Period (960–1644): Start with the Discovery of Multifaceted Individuals

Alasdair MacIntyre doubts that Confucianism can discuss the relationship between individuals and community because he maintains that it is impossible to discuss the topic in depth without a Western conception of individual rights. In this article, I show that Neo-Confucianism pays extensive attention to the relationship between individuals and community by working through several Chinese thinkers’ theories from the 11th to the 17th centuries. Neo-Confucianism seems to be focused on the exploration of the common principles of a community, but its real intention is ensuring the fundamentality of individual selves and making up for limitations caused by an excess of individual limitations. Thus, a new relationship is formed between individuals and community; that is, all individuals are equal and the common principles of community are independent of any individual. In order to make each individual harmonize with common principles, some mainstream Neo-Confucian thinkers attached great importance to the effort (gongfu 工夫) of “eliminating personal desires” (qu renyu 去人欲) since they thought that personal desires represented a selfish appeal that contradicts common principles. Influenced by this line of thinking, Neo-Confucianism fell into the predicament where individuals were suppressed, but this shortcoming was corrected in its later stage by defending the right to satisfy individual desires for survival. This study shows that Neo-Confucian discourse has given much thought to the problem of the relationship between individuals and community.

Trajectories of Education Development: from 1960s to 2000s

The article is devoted to the analysis of the formal and substantive aspects of the development of education in the process of forming a single European educational space. The formal conditions for the integration of education (the development of common quality criteria, the choice of educational trajectories, the mobility of students and teachers) were considered by default as arising from the European concept of individual rights and freedoms. The content of education in the post-industrial era, when society refuses to impose strict value and behavioral imperatives on the individual, is aimed at ensuring a level of autonomy of the subject that would allow him not only to realize his creative potential, but also to determine his life goals and meanings. In this regard, an important task is to develop the theoretical and conceptual foundations of the leading trends in the transformation of the educational system - personalization, autonomization of the subject, the introduction of projective techniques, recognition of the leading role of creative activity. The conditions for Russia's entry into the Bologna process and the thesis about the alienness of the standards introduced in this regard for national education are analyzed. It is shown that the cognitive foundations of design and creative activity, as well as the ideas of intellectualization of education, developed in the 1960s in Russian philosophy, psychology and pedagogy, can be used as methodological foundations for reforming Russian education. The possibilities of using the activity paradigm as a conceptual framework for developing a teaching methodology, a methodology for the formation of critical thinking and project activity are shown. This allows us to conclude that there is still variability in the trajectories of the development of domestic education, which can be based both on methodological and technological advances, as well as cultural and anthropological perspectives.

Legal regulation of international adoption in Lithuania and Portugal

Research problem and degree of the research. Protecting the rights of the child is one of the most important issues today, both nationally and internationally. The situation is particularly complicated when it comes to international adoption. The adoption institute transcends all cultures and has long since existed, having played different functions over time. This institute has come to reflect social changes relating to how society faces a child’s needs, the way of exercising parental responsibilities and the needs of birth parents and adoptive parents. This is a subject increasingly relevant within the phenomenon of globalization and the urgency given to children and their rights in contemporary society. This is a subject for today and for the future.
 The adoptive child, due to his or her subjective characteristics, is unable to exercise his or her rights properly. This obligation must be exercised by the child’s parents or the State and its authorities. Although the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania guarantees that every child has the right to grow up in a family, many children do not have a family and are forced to grow up in foster care. In this situation, an adoption institute emerges, which, at least from dallies, gives the child a chance to live in a family. In Portugal, the strong connection between the principle of the child´s best interest, major principle of family law, deeply influences the entire legal institute and, specially, the matter of international adoption. The placing of children in a foreign family is a subsidiary option, in great deal due to the difficulties that they will find from the moment they exit their country of origin. Difficulties such as differences in culture, language, religion, habits, among others that may result in children´s cultural uprooting and affect their cultural identity, beyond the cut with their biological family, implied in any adoption.
 Subject of the article: protection of the rights of the child and problems in cross-border adoption.
 Aim of the work: to analyse whether the rights of the child in the case of international adoption are violated.
 Research methods: teleological, historical, comparative analysis of legislation, generalization, analysis, and synthesis of scientific literature, descriptive, comparative, analytical methods.
 The right of the child to grow up in a family is enshrined in the basic international instruments. It is in the family that the life and socialization of each child begins. It creates an atmosphere for the child to grow, develop and explore the world. The child should grow as much as possible to feel the love, care, and responsibility of his parents.
 Adoption is a significant process in many states. The main international instrument governing adoption is the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in respect of Intercountry Adoption. States, in accordance with both their national and international legislation on adoption, seek to enable the child to grow up in a new family, while ensuring that such adoption best protects the rights and interests of the child.
 In Portugal, the child’s best interest is a fundamental concept in this matter, for a true concept of individual rights is one in which the child is considered a subject of rights, and not object of them. This principle is the guiding principle for the exercise of private responsibilities in relation to children, as well as public ones, and should be considered both in state and judicial decisions and actions. The child’s best interest is an indeterminate legal concept, varying with the customs of each society, taking into evolutionary and dynamic nature, and depending on case-by-case evaluation.
 This continues to be a divisive issue in Portugal and Law No. 2/2016, of 29 February eliminates discrimination against persons of the same sex who live in a de facto union or are married, in access to adoption, civil sponsorship and other family legal relationships, making all the legal changes.
 Key words: child, adoption, child’s right to grow up in a family, international adoption.

The Primacy of Duty and Its Efficacy in Combating COVID-19

Nyansa nye sika na w'akyekyere asie. (‘Wisdom, unlike money, cannot be kept in a safe’) (Appiagyei-Atua 2000).One critical factor that has contributed to the spread of the virus COVID-19 and resulting illnesses and deaths is both the conceptual and the ethical confusion between the prioritization of individual rights over social duties. The adherence to the belief in the priority of rights over duties has motivated some individuals to refrain from social distancing and, as a result, has placed themselves and other individuals at serious risk to health and life. My argument is that the ethical enjoinder of social duty possesses priority over the ethical value of individual rights especially in times of global crisis. I demonstrate this point by arguing that the concept of individual right is derivative from the concept of social duty and through the argument that the concept of social duty is more efficacious in addressing global threats to human life than is the concept of individual rights. What is needed is an in-depth revision of the moral ordering of rights and duties and a vision of the human being as inherently other directed with duties toward others. I shall examine two specific ethical systems, that of Confucian and African, Akan moral philosophy that exemplify such a revision of the moral order.

SUBJEKTINIŲ TEISIŲ PRIGIMTIES PROBLEMA ŠIUOLAIKINĖSE TEISINIO POZITYVIZMO TEORIJOSE

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama šiuolaikinio teisinio pozityvizmo teorijose pateikiama subjektinių teisių samprata. Skiriamos dvi teisiniam pozityvizmui priskiriamos vyraujančios subjektinių teisių koncepcijos: valios teorijos ir interesų teorijos. Straipsnyje siekiama pagrįsti, jog remiantis pamatinėmis teisinio pozityvizmo prielaidomis – atskirties ir šaltinio tezėmis – subjektinės teisės terminas teisinio pozityvizmo teorijose tampa nebūtinas ir perteklinis. Dėl šios priežasties valios ir interesų teorijoms siekiant pagrįsti tam tikrą subjektinės teisės funkcijos apibrėžimą neišvengiamai susiduriama su prieštaravimais arba nukrypimais nuo pamatinių teisinio pozityvizmo prielaidų. Straipsnyje siekiama įrodyti, jog aktyviai vykstantį ginčą tarp valios ir interesų teorijų lemia prioriteto skirtingoms gėrio sampratoms teikimas. Tai reiškia, jog teisinis pozityvizmas analizuodamas subjektinių teisių prigimtį negali atsiriboti nuo vertinimų, priklausančių turinio sričiai.

Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire

One might reasonably ask if anything new can be written about Benjamin Franklin. Carla J. Mulford's Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire answers that question with a resounding “plenty.” Mulford begins this stimulating and engaging “literary biography” with her self-proclaimed “preoccupation” with Franklin's 1768 articulation of civil liberty—which he conceived as personal dignity, economic independence, and political freedom inextricably linked to form a “common right” for all British citizens, including most importantly those living in far flung colonies (pp. x, 2). Mulford takes on earlier historians' understandings of Franklin's political thought; she is never dismissive or critical of them but instead uses her skills as a literary critic to clarify and expand on what she understands as his ideology at key moments. She challenges those who believe that Franklin always articulated an ardent defense of American political rights in opposition to an overly powerful British Parliament as well as those who argue that Franklin became a passionate defender of American liberties only after Alexander Wedderburn's embarrassing denunciation of him before the British Privy Council (known as the “cockpit”) in 1774. Drawing upon Franklin's published and unpublished papers, Mulford adamantly and consistently maintains that Franklin's early modern liberal notion of sovereignty was “not a new line of argument” for him but rather was an evolving, even maturing, ideology dating from Franklin family tales of political oppression throughout the English Civil War, becoming more fully developed in his 1750 letters to William Shirley, and reaching maturity in 1771 when he toured Ireland and finally understood the permanent damage an overweening power could do to the concept of individual rights grounded in the freedom of labor. Mulford turns a fresh analytical lens on Franklin's often-complicated critique of “the inconsistencies in a system that yoked imperialism to the language of liberalism while denying that any inherent rights and liberties belonged to those most valuable to the commonwealth, the laboring people” (p. 17). For Mulford, nowhere was this more evident than the British support of its eastern empire to the detriment of its American empire. That and not the “cockpit” debacle may have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790–1837 by Katey Castellano

Katey Castellano. The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790-1837. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Pp. ix+220. $95. In her intriguing The Ecology of British Conservatism, 1790-1837, Katey Castellano reframes the politics of Romantic proto-environmentalism, questioning what she terms largely unchallenged assumption in both Romanticism and in environmental studies ... [that] environmental awareness and advocacy is tethered to liberal progressivism and its expanding concept of individual rights (2). Building on Terrance Ball's observation that Edmund Burke argued for an intergenerational symmetry in which the living have obligations both to the dead and to the unborn, Castellano argues that the conservative notion of humans as caretakers of property and tradition represents fundamental Romantic contribution to the concept of sustainability. Playing on the shared roots of conservation and conservatism, Castellano argues that writers ranging from William Wordsworth to William Cobbett affiliated themselves with this mode of Romantic conservatism in texts that opposed universalizing scientific, political, and financial systems' erosion of place and custom. The of the book's title may mislead some readers. Castellano is primarily concerned with the social ecology of second (represented mainly by the traditional practices of agricultural communities) rather than the environmental ecologies of wilderness. (Indeed, the old Romantic keyword nature is tellingly omitted from the book's index.) Rather than analyzing scientific or imperial representations of natural ecology, Castellano instead provides an ecocritical perspective on topics usually examined in strictly human contexts: enclosure, cultural loss, and the deterioration of the estate. At times I wish she had highlighted the environmental dimensions of her argument more, for there is much that feels familiar in her discussions of literary representations of rural community collapse. Nevertheless, in connecting elegies for vanishing rural past with the environmental consequences of rupturing traditions of land use, Castellano generates some fresh readings of familiar Romantic texts. For Romantic ecocritics, her book's greatest contribution lies in its valuable observation that the intergenerational represented in depictions of rural societies under siege by modernity may also be the imagination best equipped to perceive and articulate the slow violence of environmental degradation. Castellano's political frame (established in short introduction) has its strengths and weaknesses. It is refreshing to see Edmund Burke positioned as proto-environmental writer, and the connections Castellano illustrates certainly complicate any attempts to straightforwardly equate liberal philosophy with environmental thinking. However, her very particular definition of conservative lies uneasily atop the historical developments she is describing. At times, the argument that follows begs the question of how Romantics perceived the politics--Whig, Tory, or otherwise--of the representational trends she cites. Given Castellano's emphasis on social ecology, I would have liked to learn how she sees the agricultural philosophies of Whig and Tory landed interests intersecting with her chosen texts. That said, Castellano's claims are carefully scaffolded, and her terminology offers an alternative frame for configuring Romantic authors' responses to the social and physical deterioration of rural localities. The first chapter explores the environmental ethics implied in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Castellano argues that Burke's portrayal of citizens as custodians of national inheritance intersects with contemporary tensions over proper land management. In portraying individuals as temporary possessors of land inherited from the dead, which they are responsible for transmitting intact to the future, Burke promotes a cultural commons of lived relationships between people, history, and the environment (27) that lays important groundwork for an ethos of sustainability. …

Leave “Those Kids” Alone: On the Conflation of School Homophobia and Suffering Queers

In this article I make a conceptual intervention in the idea that queer children and youth have needs that differ from those of other children and youth on the basis of their gender or sexuality alone, and that doing well by them requires adults to act on the basis of this difference. Namely, I examine the conflation of “fighting school homophobia” and “helping young queers.” I argue that making space for queerness in education is not the same as making space for queers, and that queer young people ought to be left alone. I offer two explanations for the conflation’s persistence such that “leaving them alone” is generally unthinkable: one affective and one institutional. In the first instance, I read a short memoir through a recent queer theoretical account of childhood as queerness, and argue that the “queer child” is the vehicle of queer adult longing for origins. In the second instance, I show how in education the nebulous (queerness) tends to become concrete (homophobia) and therefore actionable (fight homophobia) because of the constraints of schooling as the singularity of education in the present. In the conclusion, I suggest that a twist on the liberal concept of individual rights may ironically provide a pragmatic means of moving beyond the flourishing of individual queers and toward the flourishing of queerness in schools, and offer some preliminary suggestions of what can be done if queerness was to become the beneficiary of anti‐homophobia interventions in education.

The rhetoric of women and children's rights in Indian psychiatry

Despite heavy patient caseloads and limited resources, psychiatric professionals of North Indian public teaching hospitals aspire to deliver psychosocial interventions along with pharmaceutical or biologic treatments. However, significant obstacles stand in the way of the success of these interventions. This paper discusses how the relative social and political status differences between elite professionals and their non-elite patients and patients’ families render problematic many of the psychosocial interventions employed. Data were collected in the form of observations of practitioner-patient-family attendant interactions at the Outpatient Department, and interviews with patients, patients’ family members, and psychiatric professionals at the Inpatient Department 2001–2004. Analysis found that many of the professionals’ verbal interventions attempted to promote egalitarian styles of communication and relating among patients’ family members. Psychiatrists perceived mental health problems as stemming from structural violence inherent in the North Indian institution of the family, which they described as organized hierarchically according to gender, age, and generation. One strategy evident in interventions deployed ‘traditional’ values, beliefs, and maxims irreverently in an attempt to re-order or level hierarchical differences. Another strategy invoked the concept of individual rights in an effort to empower weaker family members and enlighten powerful members regarding the destructive impact of relational styles predicated on inequality. Unfortunately, the professionals experienced their psychosocial interventions as unsuccessful. The paper suggests that rigid interactional norms across class statuses, an emphasis on liberal individual rights versus community rights, and a harsh exhortative style, contributed to the sense that the interventions alienated non-elite patients and family attendants.

Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice (review)

Reviewed by: Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice Jim Williams Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice. By David Wiles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; pp. 268. The notion of what constitutes "citizenship," especially within a socioeconomic and cultural realm, remains ambiguous. This is exemplified in the current debate in the United States and some European countries regarding immigration and citizenship, and indirectly, in the persistent questioning of Barack Obama's origin of [End Page 198] birth. "Citizenship" remains a contested term that straddles the concept of individual rights, collective democracy, and local, state, national, and global communities. In Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice, David Wiles uses the historicity of theatre to examine the political and social functions of "makers of theatre"—the contributions of artists and spectators to the prominent debate between individual rights and collective will, and their functions both in the public and private spheres. Through an extensive introduction and subsequent seven chapters, he makes the argument that theatre, manifested in the public sphere, functions historically as a political and social event that effectively promotes citizenship, albeit in different incarnations. Wiles supports his discussion by selecting prominent political/ cultural icons—Aristotle, Machiavelli, Thomas Heywood, Voltaire, and Rousseau—to address the thesis, "What is this thing 'art' that like food we have the right to consume? And is theatre primarily a mimetic representation, or is it a social event?" (2). Theatre and Citizenship builds on and further addresses issues touched on by Susan Bennett in her seminal text Theatre Audiences, and engages with the same context (although on a much larger scale) as S. E. Wilmer's Theatre, Society and the Nation. In the introduction to this intriguing text, Wiles first examines the concept of citizenship—often in the context of public performances—and then in following chapters demonstrates the mercurial manifestations of what it is to be a "citizen" throughout history. He starts out by tackling the plurality of definitions attributed to the concept of citizenship. He recounts the diversity of citizenship as a concept in its various incarnations throughout history, noting that national, cultural, and ethnic differences often lead—and still do to this day—to contradictory understandings. His initial proposition is to view citizenship through the lens of an "ideal republic" body politic as created by the Romans: "Citizenship is a function of the spatial unit to which the citizen belongs, and that unit can take different forms. . . . Of all these, it is the 'republic' that has been tied most strongly to the moral ideal of the 'citizen'" (7). According to Wiles, the republic "implies ownership of the res publica or 'public thing'" (8). He makes the argument that we are part of a social and cultural fabric via the language we use, the religion we practice, and the arts we engage in, and, as such, "it follows that our moral choices are rooted in cultural norms, and theatre must engage us not as individuals but as members of a community" (18). Wiles asserts that the citizen is indeterminate, which he bases on Étienne Balibar's contention that "the citizen is unthinkable as an 'isolated' individual, for it is his active participation in politics that makes him exist, but he cannot on that account be merged into a 'total' collectivity" (ibid.). Wiles proposes that it is this indeterminacy that warrants an examination of the public sphere, which is a "prerequisite of both theatre and citizenship" (208). In the proceeding chapters, Wiles explores the history of the public sphere and consequently the tension between the theatre spectator/practitioner as an individual citizen versus the citizen being part of and obligated to a collective citizenship. He discusses the contradicting perspectives of Aristophanes, Plato, and Aristotle regarding the function of the Chorus as representatives of a body politic, and observes that "fifth-century tragedy was a performance practice that built community, with shared pleasure in discussion comprising but one aspect of communal polis life" (47). In his discussion of the public sphere and citizenship in Renaissance London, Wiles identifies playwright Thomas Heywood, not Shakespeare, as actively engaging the working-class spectator. While "Shakespeare placed his spectators as citizens of a nation-state...

La Democracia en América Latina: la alternativa entre populismo y democracia deliberativa

In Politics VI 2, 1317b 1-17, Aristotle defines «democracy» as follows: «the aim of democracy is, ideally, freedom from any interference of government, and, failing that, such freedom as comes from alternation of ruling and being ruled. It contributes, in this way, to a general system of liberty based on equality ». Historically, this normative model shaped two possible political regimes, v. gr., popular or extreme democracy, based on direct participation of all citizens, as in Athens, and a «mixed constitution» containing oligarchic as well as democratic features, called «republican» in the roman tradition since Cicero. Modern democracy was the heir of both these Ancient regimes, tempered by the new conception of individual rights belonging to Modern thought from Hugo Grotius to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The representative constitution was, thus, the modern solution to the conflict between government of the majority and government of the laws. Since their Independence in the 19th century, Latin American democracies suffer from the unresolved tension between populism and the liberal constitutional regime. The neo-populism that grew in the last years of 20th century appears as a response and defiance to democracy’s unfulfilled promises. Against defenders of authoritarian populism, such as Ch. Mouffe and E. Laclau, I argue that deliberative democracy is a better response to them.

Estado-Nação e Direitos: Uma Relação Conflituosa

The modern State was constituted by the end of the Middle Age and the Nation-State, as we understand it today, appeared during the 19 th Century. The relationship between the Nation-State and rights was forged in the French Revolution, in the mark of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Therefore, from the said Declaration, the state of law is consolidated in modern Western tradition, balancing the individual rights and guarantees based on an abstract conception of individual rights to be safeguarded by the State and against the State, although sustained by a problematic and incomplete theoretical framework, the source of a discussion that extends to the present day. In face of this fact, the aim of this work is to test the following hypothesis: the human person is the bearer of rights only if he is under the protection of the State, otherwise he is reduced to nothing, invalidating the universalist view of the 1789 Declaration (and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights). To do so, we will expose the debate, dividing it according to the view of three groups of scholars: 1) the advocates of the universalism of rights; 2) the critics of such universalism; 3) the advocates of a conciliation between universalism and specific cultural demands. As a conclusion, we will present a balance of the debate and show its perspectives.

Free Software and non-exclusive individual rights

Free software introduces a challenge to the classical conception of individual rights. The model of software licensing given by the General Public License generates the question whether it constitutes an exercise or a wavering of copyright. It is argued in this paper that the later alternative is entrenched in the classical concept of freedom as autonomy, which, by its turn, is reflected in a classical conception of individual rights based on the model of propriety as a dominion over an exclusive object (res). We provide grounds for a concept of non-exclusive individual rights, based on the notion of freedom as reciprocity, in order to obtain more solid legal foundations for the free licensing of software. The concept of freedom as reciprocity and the corresponding reconstruction of non-exclusive subjective rights achieved in this paper is an exercise in general theory of law and thus may be applied to other legal fields where the classical notion of freedom and the property of exclusivity do not fit properly.

Is Modern Liberty Ancient? Roman Remedies and Natural Rights in Hugo Grotius' Early Works on Natural Law

This paper argues that Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), a major protagonist in the history of individual natural rights, developed his highly influential rights doctrine by reference to ancient Roman legal remedies and Cicero's moral philosophy. The paper thus puts forward a fresh account of the historical background of modern thinking on rights, one that runs counter to the traditional liberal historical account, epitomized by Benjamin Constant, according to which modern liberty is distinct from ancient liberty precisely on account of the alleged lack of a concept of individual rights in classical antiquity. It is argued that Grotius, a humanist steeped in Roman law, had substantive reasons for using his Roman sources. Roman law had already developed a doctrine of the freedom of the high seas, based on the idea of the sea as having remained in a natural state. Furthermore, Roman law and Cicero's ethics provided a fair amount of commerce driven remedies in contract law, which were part of the so-called law of peoples (ius gentium), a body of law initially created to accommodate foreigners, especially merchants, and give them standing in Roman courts. Although this paper's focus is not on the Roman texts themselves, but on the use Grotius made of them in some of his early works, the paper does entail the claim that those texts contain a concept of subjective rights. Moreover, it is suggested that the paper's historical account can contribute not only to a better doctrinal understanding of Grotius' rights doctrine, but also to a better understanding of modern liberal doctrines of rights.

Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity Douglas Langston Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen , editors. Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity. New Synthese Historical Library, 57. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005. Pp. vi + 340. Cloth, €139.10. This is a collection of fifteen essays from a 2001 workshop, "Late Medieval and Early Modern Ethics and Politics," funded by the European Science Foundation as part of a network of meetings on Early Modern Thought. The editors intend the volume to reflect current historical and philosophical scholarship about the moral thought of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is arranged into three sections, reflecting three different themes: 1. Scholastics and Neo-Scholasticism; 2. Theories of Human Rights and Dominion; 3. Reformers and Humanists. These themes demonstrate "the range and diversity of moral philosophy between 1400 and 1600" (5), and show "the continuity between late medieval and early modern thought" (2). The collection achieves these two aims. Essays treat such divergent schools of moral thought as Aristotelian scholasticism, casuistry, probabilism, post-Reformation Christian ethics, and neo-Stoicism. They discuss such figures as Suarez, Lessius, Gerson, Luther, Melanchthon, Daneau, Vives, and Muret. Each essay focuses on a figure or issue in the early modern period and connects the topic to relevant medieval material. So, for example, Risto Saarinen's "Ethics in Luther's Theology: The Three Orders" relates Luther's views of the three estates—church (ecclesia), household (œconomia), state (politia)—to the division medieval Aristotelian ethicists made between Aristotle's individual and social ethics. If one of the strengths of this collection is the range and diversity of material treated, it is also its principal weakness. It is difficult to imagine that most readers will be interested in the essays of all three sections. As the titles of the sections suggest, readers interested in the views of humanists or reformers will look to the essays of the third section primarily. Those who are interested in backgrounds to modern theories about human rights and property will look to the second section. And the first section will appeal to those interested in scholasticism, probabilism, and casuistry. This is not to suggest that the three sections [End Page 475] are unconnected. In fact, there are very strong connections between the first and second sections in showing how certain key notions of modern thought develop in the period from 1400 to 1600. And some of the essays of the third section present the views of certain reformers and humanists on related issues. In the second section, Roberto Lambertini's "Poverty and Power: Franciscans in Later Medieval Political Thought" and Virpi Mäkinen's "The Franciscan Background of Early Modern Rights Discussion: Rights of Property and Subsistence" argue that concepts of individual rights and property—hallmarks of modern thought—emerge in the controversies surrounding Franciscan poverty. Questions about whether property or only its use is natural are connected to issues about individual rights of subsistence, particularly whether Franciscan poverty is against the inalienable natural right of self-preservation everyone possesses. In "Conrad Summenhart on Natural Rights," Jussi Varkemaa shows how Summenhart used Jean Gerson's discussions of jus to argue that a person is dominus (lord) of his own person and can voluntarily enslave himself to another without violating his natural right of liberty. Issues about individual rights are also at play in several essays in the first section of the book. Sven K. Knebel's "Casuistry and the Early Modern Paradigm Shift in the Notion of Charity" discusses how an innocent person is to behave under torture. At issue is whether an innocent should suffer death by maintaining his innocence or preserve his life by sacrificing his reputation through lying. This conflict led to discussions about the status of one's reputation—is it the property of an individual?—as well as the nature of the right of self-preservation. Similarly, Rudolf Schüssler's "On the Anatomy of Probabilism" discusses how the "possidentis principle" became a cornerstone of probabilism at the end of the sixteenth century. According to this principle, "a bona fide possessor of a thing may not be deprived of it as long as the unlawfulness of his possession is not significantly established...

Russell Kirk and Territorial Democracy

Russell Kirk is one of the most important American conservative thinkers. This article traces the development of Kirk's understanding of federalism, which was neither nationalistic nor based in the usual arguments about states' rights. Specifically, Kirk adapted what the American thinker Orestes Brownson called “territorial democracy” to articulate a version of federalism that is based on premises that differ in part from those of the Founders and other conservatives. Further, Kirk believed that territorial democracy could reconcile the tension between treating the states as mere “provinces” of the central government and seeing them as autonomous political units independent of Washington. Finally, territorial democracy allowed Kirk to set out a theory of rights that was based in the particular historical circumstances of the United States while rejecting a universal conception of individual rights. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Protecting privacy in the cyber era

Issues related to privacy and technology go to the heart of concepts of individual rights, corporate power, the role of government, and law enforcement needs. The author considers various means to protect individual privacy and concludes that encryption may be the best solution.

Rousseau's Dance of Veils: The Confessions and the Imagined Woman Reader

Foucauldian accounts of the novel often emphasize how fiction induces readers to accept as natural ideological fictions whose effect is to constrain their ideas and actions. Nancy Armstrong argues, for example, that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the novel helped to create the middle-class fiction of separable public and private spheres of life.1 The novel constituted itself as a domain of feminine authority over matters of the heart and the household and helped create a new concept of identity, according to which individuals could define themselves in terms of their inner qualities rather than social status. Although this new sense of identity at first enfranchised people by helping to create concepts of individual rights and offering a rationale for modern social institutions, Armstrong asserts, it eventually became repressive.2 Social conflict was displaced onto sexual difference and thereby contained. Novels contributed to this trend by implying that love and marriage could and should resolve class tensions, thereby not only obfuscating social inequity but also enforcing a sexual contract.3 On women, especially, novels came to have an oppressive effect: the household became women's domain, but that domain was sequestered from the larger political world, which was the province of men.4