Law, Freedom, and Slavery

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Joshua Neoh
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Legal Subjectivity

Abstract This paper argues that the wrong of slavery lies in the denial of the good of law to the slave. Defending this proposition will require the positing of three related claims: (i) that law is good, (ii) that the good of law is denied to the slave, and (iii) that the denial is wrong. This paper will defend the main proposition by defending its three constituent claims. On claim (i), the paper will relate the form of law to the formation of freedom. On claim (ii), the paper will relate law’s objectivity to legal subjectivity. On claim (iii), the paper will relate the state of nature to the state of civil society.

scholarly journals The Early Literary Evolution of the Notorious Pirate Henry Avery

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
Richard Frohock
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The State ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Literary Evolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civil Order

Henry Avery (alternately spelled Every) was one of the most notorious pirates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and scholars have written much about Avery in an effort to establish the historical details of his mutiny and acts of piracy. Other scholars have focused on the substantial literary production that his life occasioned; the early literary history of Avery’s exploits evolves quickly away from the known facts of his life, offering instead a literary trajectory of accumulated tropes about Avery’s motivations, actions, and transformations. This literary invention of Avery is a compelling subject in itself, particularly as writers used his story to explore pressing philosophical and political concerns of the period. In this essay, I consider how early fictions about Avery look well beyond the history of a particular pirate to ruminate on topical ideas about the state of nature, the origins of civil society, and human tendencies toward self-interest and corruption that seem—inevitably—to accompany power and threaten civil order, however newly formed or ostensibly principled.

Kant's Non-Voluntarist Conception of Political Obligations: Why Justice is Impossible in the State of Nature

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helga Varden
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Liberal Ideal ◽  
Moral Response ◽  
Political Obligations ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Necessary Evil ◽  
The Ideal

In this paper, I present and defend Kant's non-voluntarist conception of political obligations. I argue that civil society is not primarily a prudential requirement for justice; it is not merely a necessary evil or a moral response to combat our corrupting nature or our tendency to act viciously, thoughtlessly or in a biased manner. Rather, civil society is constitutive of rightful relations among persons because only in civil society can we interact in ways reconcilable with each person's innate right to freedom. Civil society is the means through which we can rightfully interact even on the ideal assumption that no one ever succumbs to immoral temptation. Kant's account, therefore, provides ideal reasons to support the claim that voluntarism cannot be the liberal ideal of political obligations.

What we own Before Property: Hugo Grotius and the Suum

Grotiana ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandra Mancilla
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Current Discussion ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Scholarly Attention

At the basis of modern natural law theories, the concept of the suum, i.e. what belongs to the person (in Latin, his, her, its, their own), has received little scholarly attention despite its importance both in explaining and justifying not only the genealogy of property, but also that of morality and war. In this essay I focus on Grotius’s account of the suum and examine what it is, what things it includes, what rights it gives rise to, and how it is extended in the transition from the state of nature to civil society. I then briefly suggest that reviving this concept could help to illuminate the current discussion on the foundations of basic human rights, and to re-evaluate cases where these seem to clash with property rights.

Rousseau on Equality

1984 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurice Cranston
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Distributive Justice ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Nature

Rousseau has the reputation of being a radical egalitarian. I shall suggest that a more careful reading of his work shows him to have been hardly more egalitarian than Plato. He was undoubtedly disturbed by existing inequalities, especially as he observed them in France. He had an original and interesting theory about how inequality among men came into being; he also set out what he considered to be the connections between equality and freedom. As a champion of a certain idea of freedom, he wrote in favor of specific sorts of equality; even as Plato, as the champion of a certain idea of justice, wrote in favor of putting every man in his place. The great difference is that Plato believed that men were never equal, whereas Rousseau believed they had once been equal but no longer were.To the proposition that all men are born equal he could be said to subscribe only in the sense that “all men were originally equal”. Rousseau argued that equality prevailed in the state of nature; but he also said it would be wrong to expect, even to desire such equality in civil society. In the final footnote to his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (hereinafter called the Second Discourse) he wrote (in 1753): “Distributive justice would still be opposed to that rigorous equality of the state of nature, even if it were practicable in civil society.”1Commentators eager to claim Rousseau as an egalitarian, or proto-Marx, ignore this footnote; as for the opinions expressed in the Dedication to the Second Discourse, opinions no less at variance with egalitarian ideology, they tend to be dismissed as empty hyperbole, designed to ingratiate the philosopher with the authorities of Geneva at a time when he wanted to recover his rights as a citizen and burgess.

scholarly journals The Emergence of Civil Society in Hobbesian Philosophy

Jurnal Office ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
Edor John Edor
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern State ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Social

The origin of the modern state has left many scholars intellectually engaged. Sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, jurists, anthropologists, and philosophers have variously grappled with the issue of the origin of the state. Thomas Hobbes is one of the great thinkers who has contributed to the discussion on the origin of the state. Thomas Hobbes is of the view that naturally, that is, man in the state of nature, is a-social, atavistically thinking about himself alone. Because of this atomistic and solitary disposition of man in the state of nature, the society was accentuated by an unprecedented degree of rancor, acrimony and obfuscation. Given this picture of man and the pre-civil-society depicted by Hobbes, one would feel that justifying the emergence of the civil society would become difficult. This paper examines how Hobbes migrated man from the state of nature to the civil society in spite of the gory picture of him he had painted. Thomas Hobbes’ theory of the origin of the state is categorized in the class of the social contract theories. 

Some Thoughts on Civil Society in Eastern Europe and the Lockean Contractarian Approach

1987 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 573-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Rau
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Special Form ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Character ◽  
Totalitarian State

Neither the concept of the totalitarian system nor the newly worked-out notion of ‘socialist civil society’ can express the social and political phenomenon of the rise and growth of independent groups and movements in Eastern Europe. Rather, it is suggested here that the Lockean contractarian approach should be used. This embraces mutually interacting ethical, empirical and analytic arguments which would take into consideration the state, the independent groups organized outside it, and the relationships between them. The utility of the model of the totalitarian state in understanding the origin of independent groups is discussed here. Lockean multidimensional individualism is suggested as a category expressing the political character of these groups, and Lockean teaching on absolute monarchy—a special form of the state of nature—is advanced as the means for analysing the relationship between these groups and the state of the Soviet type.

Thomas Hobbes: Power in the State of Nature, Power in Civil Society

Polity ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 505-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Read
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Nature

scholarly journals Violence, Wars, and the Possibility of Ethical Life in an Apocalypse: A Kantian Reading of The Walking Dead

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-66
Author(s):  
Selda Salman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
New World ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Walking Dead ◽  
Ethics And Politics

Abstract The Walking Dead is a popular TV series depicting a catastrophic and violent world. After a pandemic that turns humans into zombies, we witness the collapse of civilization with all its institutions, the depletion of the resources, and the struggle to build a new world in the middle of the wars between surviving groups. It illustrates a world of literal and metaphorical homo homini lupus. Some people choose sheer survival, and others try to build a moral, civil world. In this article, I propose a reading of this series from a Kantian perspective by employing his interrelated ideas on history, ethics, and politics. I claim that The Walking Dead represents the state of nature and the violence it contains, and illustrates the course of history toward a civil society as defined by Kant.

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