Biblical Tax Systems and the Case for Progressive Taxation

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam S. Chodorow
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Distributive Justice ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Values And Beliefs ◽  
Academic Debate

The political rise of the religious right has brought to the fore the question of whether and to what extent religious values and beliefs should be taken into account when developing public policy. Policymakers have increasingly, or perhaps only more overtly, turned to religion for guidance on important public policy matters, such as abortion, stem cell research, and punishment, including the death penalty. Given the decidedly moral flavor of the debate over distributive justice, it is not surprising that many Americans and a growing number of policymakers have begun to look to religion for guidance on the question of how best to allocate tax burdens.While tax scholars have long debated questions of equity and distributive justice, with one notable exception, they have largely ignored religious arguments. Given the large number of Americans who identify themselves as religious, to say nothing of most politicians, limiting the inquiry into tax equity to secular arguments runs the risk of relegating academic debate to the sidelines, as decision-makers look to the Bible and other religious texts for guidance and support.

Capital Punishment in Independent Ireland

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Doyle ◽  
Liam O'Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dual Function ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Administration Of Justice

This is a comprehensive and nuanced historical survey of the death penalty in Ireland from the immediate post-Civil War period through to its complete abolition. Using original archival material, this book sheds light on the various social, legal and political contexts in which the death penalty operated and was discussed. In Ireland the death penalty served a dual function: as an instrument of punishment in the civilian criminal justice system, and as a weapon to combat periodic threats to the security of the state posed by the IRA. In closely examining cases dealt with in the ordinary criminal courts, this book elucidates ideas of class, gender, community and sanity and how these factors had an impact the administration of justice. The application of the death penalty also had a strong political dimension, most evident in the enactment of emergency legislation and the setting up of military courts specifically targeted at the IRA. As this book demonstrates, the civilian and the political strands converged in the story of the abolition of the death penalty in Ireland. Long after decision-makers accepted that the death penalty was no longer an acceptable punishment for ‘ordinary’ cases of murder, lingering anxieties about the threat of subversives dictated the pace of abolition and the scope of the relevant legislation.

Compassion as a Political Virtue

2002 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Whitebrook
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Distributive Justice ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Principles Of Justice ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The place of compassion in political thought and practice is debatable. This debate can be clarified by stipulating ‘compassion’ as referring to the practice of acting on the feeling of ‘pity’; in addition, compassion might best be understood politically speaking as properly exercised towards vulnerability rather than suffering. Working with these understandings, I contrast Martha Nussbaum's account of the criteria for the exercise of compassion in modern democracies with the treatment of compassion in Toni Morrison's novels in order to suggest how compassion can be viewed politically. In respect of distributive justice and public policy, in both cases compassion might modify the strict application of principles in the light of knowledge of particulars, suggesting an enlarged role for discretion in the implementation of social justice. More generally, compassion's focus on particulars and the interpersonal draws attention to the importance of imagination and judgement. The latter returns a consideration of compassion to the question of the relationship of compassion to justice. In the political context, although strict criteria for compassion are inappropriate, principles of justice might work as modifying compassion (rather than vice-versa, as might be expected).

Policy, Politics and Political Science

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 751-772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael M. Atkinson
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
The Political ◽  
Politiques Publiques ◽  
Political Feasibility ◽  
Power Differentials ◽  
Cognitive Deficiencies ◽  
Mesures Incitatives

Abstract.Political scientists are increasingly studying public policy in interdisciplinary environments where they are challenged by the political and normative agenda of other disciplines. Political science has unique perspectives to offer, including a stress on the political feasibility of policy in an environment of power differentials. Our contributions should be informed by the insights of cognitive psychology and we should focus on improving governance, in particular the competence and integrity of decision makers. The discipline's stress on legitimacy and acceptability provides a normative anchor, but we should not over invest in the idea that incentives will achieve normative goals. Creating decision situations that overcome cognitive deficiencies is ultimately the most important strategy.Résumé.Les politologues étudient les politiques publiques dans des contextes de plus en plus interdisciplinaires, où ils sont remis en question par les préoccupations politique et normatives d'autres disciplines. La science politique a des perspectives uniques à offrir, y compris un accent sur la faisabilité politique des politiques publiques dans un contexte de relations de pouvoir asymétriques. Nos contributions doivent être informées par les idées associées à la psychologie cognitive et nous devrions nous concentrer sur l'amélioration de la gouvernance, et notamment la compétence et l'intégrité des décideurs. L'accent de notre discipline sur la légitimité et l'acceptabilité fournit un point d'ancrage normatif, mais il ne faut pas trop investir dans l'idée que des mesures incitatives permettront nécessairement d'atteindre des objectifs normatifs. Créer des situations de décision qui surmontent les lacunes cognitives des acteurs est finalement la stratégie la plus importante à adopter.

scholarly journals ‘A fair go’ in public policy

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Bromell
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Distributive Justice ◽  
Financial Literacy ◽  
Ideal Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Retirement Income ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Public Reasoning ◽  
Political Spectrum

In the context of the 2013 retirement income review (CFLRI, 2013), Kathryn Maloney and Malcolm Menzies from the Commission for Financial Literacy and Retirement Income put the question to me: what does ‘a fair go’ mean in public policy? I mentioned this in a chance conversation with Colin James, who suggested tackling the question in an active, verbal sense (‘a fair go’), rather than attempting to elaborate on ‘fairness’ as an abstract noun. Consequently, this paper does not propose ‘a theory of fairness’ as a proxy for, say, a theory of distributive justice, or a theory of social justice, even a non-ideal theory of justice (cf. Arvan, 2014; Simmons, 2010). My aim is more modest: to provide a framework for public reasoning in contexts where there is argument across the political spectrum about whether a public policy gives people who are affected by it ‘a fair go’.  

The argumentative turn in public policy inquiry: deliberative policy analysis for usable advice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Policy Analysis ◽  
Policy Science ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Relevance ◽  
Usable Knowledge ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Policy Inquiry ◽  
Policy Argumentation

The argumentation turn in policy analysis emerged in the late 1980s as a response to questions concerning social relevance and usable knowledge. Toward this end, it focused on an apparent gap between policy inquiry and real-world policymaking. Basic to the approach was a challenge to the ‘value free’ positivist orientation that has shaped the field of policy analysis, underscoring in particular the limits of the technocratic practices to which it gave rise. After tracing the political and academic debates that surrounded the uses of policy analysis, the chapter presents the alternative argumentative orientation and its post-positivist methodological perspective. The discussion emphasizes its language-based foundations and outlines the logic of a deliberative-analytic framework for the assessment of policy argumentation. It illustrates the ways that policy analysis needs to integrate empirical and normative inquiry. Policy findings and practical policy argumentation are interpreted by decision-makers and citizens in terms of their relations to the larger framework of norms and values that imbue them with social and political meanings. Moving beyond a narrow empirical assignment, the argumentative turn seeks to assist these actors by also drawing out these normative connections. It is, as such, an effort to make good on Harold Lasswell's call for a 'policy science' of democracy.

What Accounts for Southeast Asia’s Diverse Clemency Practice?

2019 ◽  
pp. 193-225
Author(s):  
Daniel Pascoe
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
The Political ◽  
Final Decision ◽  
Death Row ◽  
The Third ◽  
International Audience ◽  
Executive Clemency

Chapter 7 draws together the findings of each of the preceding four case studies to discuss common patterns and ultimately develop a three-part hypothesis to explain clemency frequency in Southeast Asian death penalty cases over the period of study. The first limb of the hypothesis suggests that jurisdictions whose police, prosecutors, and judiciary are initially able to exercise a great deal of lenient discretion in converting potential capital charges into non-capital sentences (or into acquittals) are not the kind of systems where executive clemency thrives as a remedy against unfair or excessive punishment. The second theoretically supported explanation deriving from the four jurisdictions under analysis is that unelected decision makers are more likely to grant clemency than the elected leaders of democratic or semi-democratic governments. Where unelected final decision-makers such as the king of Thailand, Indonesian presidents Suharto and Habibie, or the Malay hereditary rulers grant clemency, often to bolster their own power and legitimacy before domestic constituents and the international audience, their mass grants of commutation or pardon can greatly increase the historical clemency rate vis-à-vis executions. The third explanatory factor posits that the longer prisoners remain on death row without being executed or removed for other reasons (e.g. escape, or death by natural causes), the more likely they are to be granted clemency. Independent of the political elite’s preferences for or ambivalence over capital punishment, inefficient judicial appeal and clemency petition systems that do not resolve a prisoner’s fate for many years on death row may actually create the conditions for clemency success.

The Use and Misuse of Religious Language: Zionism and the Palestinians

2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wetherell
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Title Deed ◽  
History Of ◽  
Land Question

Every discipline which deals with the land question in Canaan-Palestine-Israel is afflicted by the problem of specialisation. The political scientist and historian usually discuss the issue of land in Israel purely in terms of interethnic and international relations, biblical scholars concentrate on the historical and archaeological question with virtually no reference to ethics, and scholars of human rights usually evade the question of God. What follows is an attempt, through theology and political history, to understand the history of the Israel-Palestine land question in a way which respects the complexity of the question. From a scrutiny of the language used in the Bible to the development of political Zionism from the late 19th century it is possible to see the way in which a secular movement mobilised the figurative language of religion into a literal ‘title deed’ to the land of Palestine signed by God.

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