Why Is Voting Special?

2019 ◽  
pp. 130-168
Author(s):  
Julia Maskivker
Keyword(s):  
Moral Duty ◽  
Social Goods ◽  
Moral Attention

This chapter concentrates on the argument that voting is a moral duty even if it is true that other ways of helping society exist, many of which are discharged in non-political ways. The chapter shows that voting is morally special in its own right regardless of the fact that citizens may also be bound to discharge other duties of aid. Because governments are powerful entities that distribute and shape access to basic social goods as no other organization does, the mechanism to install them is unique and deserves moral attention separately. Other political, non-electoral ways of influencing government matter, but they lose all relevance if elections are absent.

Our universities away from partisan Altsarat

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
أ.د.عبد الجبار احمد عبد الله
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Moral Duty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Office ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Public ◽  
The University

In order to codify the political and partisan activity in Iraq, after a difficult labor, the Political Parties Law No. (36) for the year 2015 started and this is positive because it is not normal for the political parties and forces in Iraq to continue without a legal framework. Article (24) / paragraph (5) of the law requires that the party and its members commit themselves to the following: (To preserve the neutrality of the public office and public institutions and not to exploit it for the gains of a party or political organization). This is considered because it is illegal to exploit State institutions for partisan purposes . It is a moral duty before the politician not to exploit the political parties or some of its members or those who try to speak on their behalf directly or indirectly to achieve partisan gains. Or personality against other personalities and parties at the expense of the university entity.

Exclusive Public Reason

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christie Hartley
Keyword(s):  
Public Reason ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Moral Duty ◽  
Public Justification ◽  
Moral Foundation ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Public Reasoning ◽  
Comprehensive Doctrines

This chapter develops the idea of public reason based on the shared reasons account of public justification. It is argued that the moral foundation for political liberalism delimits a narrow scope for the idea of public reason, such that public reasons are required only for matters of constitutional essentials and basic justice. It is also argued that where public reason applies, persons as citizens have a moral duty to never appeal to their comprehensive doctrines when engaging in public reasoning. Hence, an exclusive account of public reason is vindicated. Finally, we respond to various potential objections to our view, such as the claim that the shared reasons view requires identical reasoning and the claim that public reason is interderminate or inconclusive.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fanie du Toit
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
The State ◽  
African History ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Social Goods ◽  
Forward Looking

Reading South African history through the lens of interdependence helps explain the disappointment that many South Africans feel in relation to reconciliation. While they are justified in feeling let down, owing to rising inequality and social exclusion, it is wrong to blame Mandela’s strategy of just interdependence because it was abandoned too early. In seeking to overcome oppression, reconciliation is forward-looking and predicated on rebuilding relationships in divided societies. Dealing with a violent past is valuable when striving for a more just future. Reconciliation fosters just, inclusive, and fair societies and is locally owned and driven. A progressive approach to reconciliation is also needed. Reconciliation recognizes the inherent interdependence between citizens themselves, and between citizens and the state. These relationships are progressively re-established in more just ways. In so doing, it helps to create conditions in which social goods such as forgiveness, the rule of law, or democracy become possible.

Overdoing Democracy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Talisse
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
Good Thing ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Crowding Out ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
Democratic Ideal ◽  
Empirical Results ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Social Goods

Democracy is an extremely important social political good. Nonetheless, there is such a thing as having too much of a good thing. When we overdo democracy, we allow the categories, allegiances, and struggles of politics to overwhelm our social lives. This has the effect of undermining and crowding out many of the most important correlated social goods that democracy is meant to deliver. What’s more, in overdoing democracy, we spoil certain social goods that democracy needs in order to flourish. Thus overdoing democracy is democracy’s undoing. A thriving democracy needs citizens to reserve space in their shared social lives for collective activities and cooperative projects that are not structured by political allegiances; they must work together in social contexts where political affiliations and party loyalties are not merely suppressed, but utterly beside the point. Combining conceptual analyses of democratic legitimacy and responsible citizenship with empirical results regarding the political infiltration of social spaces and citizens’ vulnerabilities to polarization, this book provides a diagnosis of current democratic ills and a novel prescription for addressing them. Arguing that overdoing democracy is the result of certain tendencies internal to the democratic ideal itself, the book demonstrates that even in a democracy, politics must be put in its place.

Suffering, Communication, and Social Virtue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael S. Brady
Keyword(s):  
Social Groups ◽  
Building Trust ◽  
Proper Functioning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Goods

In this chapter Brady argues that suffering is vital for the proper functioning and flourishing of social groups, because it is essential for the social virtues of justice, love, and faith. He makes this case by first focusing on Biblical and Qur’anic ideas—in particular that suffering is punishment for sin, and a test of faith—but argues that religious teachings have secular parallels. On this view suffering is essential for the legitimate punishment of criminal acts, and for building trust and solidarity in many groups. Central to suffering’s role in bringing about these social goods is its communicative value.

Group Duties

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Collins
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Systemic Reform ◽  
Moral Duty ◽  
Tripartite Model ◽  
Group Level ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Moral Duties ◽  
Fundamental Categories ◽  
Group Pattern

Moral duties are regularly attributed to groups. We might think that the United Kingdom has a moral duty to defend human rights, that environmentalists have a moral duty to push for global systemic reform, or that the affluent have a moral duty to alleviate poverty. This book asks (i) whether such groups are apt to bear duties and (ii) what this implies for their members. It defends a ‘Tripartite Model’ of group duties, which divides groups into three fundamental categories. First, combinations are collections of agents that do not have any goals or decision-making procedures in common. Combinations cannot bear moral duties. Instead, we should re-cast their purported duties as a series of duties—one held by each agent in the combination. Each duty demands its bearer to ‘I-reason’: to do the best they can, given whatever they happen to believe the others will do. Second, coalitions are groups whose members share goals but lack decision-making procedures. Coalitions also cannot bear duties, but their alleged duties should be replaced with members’ several duties to ‘we-reason’: to do one’s part in a particular group pattern of actions, on the presumption that others will do likewise. Third, collectives have group-level procedures for making decisions. They can bear duties. Collectives’ duties imply duties for collectives’ members to use their role in the collective with a view to the collective doing its duty.

Premchand, nationalism and civil resistance in colonial North India

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-194
Author(s):  
Shailendra Kumar Singh
Keyword(s):  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Duty ◽  
North India ◽  
Politics Of Representation ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Apparent Lack ◽  
Civil Resistance ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

The theme of nationalism in the works of Premchand, the pre-eminent Urdu–Hindi writer of the 1920s and 1930s, not only serves as an organising principle but also constitutes a protean and contentious field of study, which has resulted in conflicting interpretations. On the one hand, his nationalist narratives are categorically denounced for their apparent lack of radicalism, while on the other hand, they are unequivocally valorised for their so-called subversive content. Both these diametrically opposed schools of criticism, however, share a common lacuna, that is, both of them tend to conflate the writer’s nationalist narratives with his peasant discourse, thereby precluding the possibility of different themes yielding different interpretations. This article examines the theme of nationalism in Premchand’s works, in general, and the question of civil resistance in particular, in order to demonstrate how the writer’s politics of representation in his nationalist writings differs from the one that we find in his peasant narratives. It argues that as opposed to the authorial valorisation of the fictive peasant’s conformity to the exploitative status quo, civil resistance in Premchand’s nationalist narratives is not only necessary and desirable but also synonymous with dharma (moral duty) itself.

scholarly journals Why There Are No Epistemic Duties

Dialogue ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chase B. Wrenn
Keyword(s):  
Moral Duty

ABSTRACTEpistemic duties would be duties to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgement from propositions, and they would be grounded in purely evidential considerations. I offer a new argument for the claim that there are no epistemic duties. Though people may have duties to believe, disbelieve, or withhold judgement from propositions, those duties are never grounded in purely epistemic considerations. Rather, allegedly epistemic duties are a species of moral duty.

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