The Problem of Paradox

The Good Kill ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 40-81
Author(s):  
Marc LiVecche
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
The Law

Chapter 2 helps uncover why so many warfighters hold the belief that killing is wrong. It does so by linking this belief to a particular kind of ethical paradox, commonplace in Western Christianity and the wider culture. This paradox is grounded in the twentieth-century American public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr. This chapter introduces the Niebuhrian tension placed between the Christian conceptions of love and justice, sometimes cast as contradictory obligations to a law of love and a law of responsibility. This chapter proceeds in two parts. The first part illustrates Niebuhr’s view of love, which, rooted in pacifism, illuminates his belief that killing is morally wrong. The second half, however, demonstrates how Niebuhr’s commitment, rooted in realism, to responsibility leads him to willingly suspend the law of love. After showing how the Niebuhrian paradox renders warfighting inherently morally injurious, this chapter concludes by challenging it.

Reinhold Niebuhr: The law of love and the omnipresence of power

2021 ◽  
pp. 175508822098588
Author(s):  
David Clinton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Heart ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Human History ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
Human Need ◽  
The Law ◽  
Realist View

The twentieth-century theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr frequently employed a formulation confounding to his readers, simultaneously appealing to the loftiest altruism as summed up in his identification of the “law of love” and compelling attention to the grittiest realism as encapsulated in his recognition of a universal struggle for power. This sharp contrast was no careless error on Niebuhr’s part, but rather an insistence on describing in the most sharply contrasting tones the paradoxical character of human nature. In his Christian Realist view fear and a consequent desire for power over others to protect oneself are inescapable components of human existence within history. The human need for community and refusal to be satisfied with anything less than devotion to the wellbeing of others unsullied by self-love are nevertheless also implanted in the human heart, which recognizes that reality extends beyond human history. Niebuhr demanded attention to both.

Studying Modern Arabic Literature

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Teaching And Research ◽  
The Face ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Modern Arabic

This book is devoted to the life and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi who transformed the study of modern Arabic literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1960s the study of Arabic literature, both classical and modern, had barely been emancipated from the academic approaches of orientalism. The appointment of Badawi as Oxford University's first lecturer in modern Arabic literature changed the face of this subject as Badawi showed, through his teaching and research, that Arabic literature was making vibrant contributions to global culture and thought. Part biography, part collection of critical essays, this book celebrates Badawi's immense contribution to the field and explores his role as a public intellectual in the Arab world and the west.

Guarding the Public Interest: England's Coroners and Organ Transplants, 1960–1975

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 926-946 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Spare Part ◽  
Organ Transplants ◽  
Legal Requirement ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Law ◽  
Do So

AbstractFrom the mid-twentieth century, England's coroners were crucial to the supply of organs to transplant, as much of this material was gleaned from the bodies of people who had been involved in accidents. In such situations the law required that a coroner's consent first be obtained lest removing the organs destroy evidence about the cause of the person's death. Surgeons challenged the legal requirement that they seek consent before taking organs, arguing that doing so hampered their quick access to bodies. Some coroners willingly cooperated with surgeons while others refused to do so, coming into conflict with particular transplanters whom they considered untrustworthy. This article examines how the phenomenon of “spare part” surgery challenged long-held conceptions of the coroner's role.

Abraham Heschel

2021 ◽  
pp. 198-216
Author(s):  
Susannah Heschel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
West Side ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
The Public ◽  
Prophetic Voice ◽  
The Public Sphere

The friendship between Abraham Joshua Heschel and Reinhold Niebuhr was both personal and intellectual. Neighbours on the Upper West Side of New York City, they walked together in Riverside park and shared personal concerns in private letters; Niebuhr asked Heschel to deliver the eulogy at his funeral. They were bound by shared religious sensibilities as well, including their love of the Hebrew Bible, the irony they saw in American history and in the writings of the Hebrew prophets, and in their commitment to social justice as a duty to God. Heschel arrived in the public sphere later, as a public intellectual with a prophetic voice, much as Niebuhr had been for many decades prior. Niebuhr’s affirmation of the affinities between his and Heschel’s theological scholarship pays tribute to an extraordinary friendship of Protestant and Jew.

Contract

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Gordley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
Legal Method ◽  
Legal Problems ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Law

‘Classical’ contract law was built on a substantive premise about contract law and two premises about legal method. The substantive premise was voluntaristic: the business of contract law is to enforce the will or choice of the parties. The first methodological premise was positivistic: the law is found, implicitly or explicitly, in the decisions of common law judges. The second methodological premise was conceptualistic: the law should be stated in general formulas which can be tested by their coherence. Finally, ‘classical’ contract law reflected an attitude about how best to steer a course — as every legal system must — between strict rules and equitable considerations. Since the early twentieth century, classical contract law has been breaking down. Allegiance to its premises has weakened as has the preference for rigor. At the same time, scholars have found classical law to be inconsistent even in its own terms. Nevertheless, much of it has remained in place faute de mieux while contemporary jurists have tried to see what is really at stake in particular legal problems. This article describes their work.

The New Law of Armed Conflict

1978 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 3-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. C. Green
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intermediate State ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
The Other ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Law Of Armed Conflict ◽  
The Law ◽  
Court Of Appeal

In HisDe Jure Belli ac Paris, Grotius, quoting Cicero, stated that “there is no Middle between War and Peace,” and this sentiment seems to have received general agreement well into the twentieth century. Thus, inJansonv.Driefontein Consolidated Mines, Lord Macnaghten stated: “I think the learned counsel for the respondent was right in saying that the law recognises a state of peace and a state of war, but that it knows nothing of an intermediate state which is neither one thing nor the other — neither peace nor war.” One might have thought that the English courts would have abandoned this view in the light of their own experience during the Manchukuo incident, for by 1939 inKawasaki Kisen Kabushiki Kaisha of Kobev.Bantham S.S. Co.the Court of Appeal was prepared to concede that “war” might exist for some commercial purposes but not in so far as other legal relationships were concerned.

The Monarchy

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Brazier
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law

This chapter examines the role of the monarchy in the history of the British constitution during the twentieth century, investigating how the constitutional power enjoyed by the sovereign gave way to constitutional influence and describing the changes the Parliament made to the law relevant to the Crown. It suggests that, for most of the twentieth century, sovereigns and their closest advisers recognised the continuing need to adapt the institution of monarchy so as to reflect changes in British society, and this involved further erosions in the sovereign's power.

Civil Liberties1

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Effective Protection ◽  
The Law ◽  
Parliamentary Supremacy

This chapter examines the changes in civil liberties in Great Britain during the twentieth century. It suggests that, for those 100 years, the law and practice of civil liberties have pulled in many directions at the same time. The doctrine of parliamentary supremacy gave Parliament the opportunity either to extend effective protection for rights or to interfere with them more extensively, and some rights, such as those derived from the idea of equality, have been advanced by Parliament.

The Origin of the Judges’ Rules

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-53
Author(s):  
Mike McConville ◽  
Luke Marsh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Issue ◽  
Home Office ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law ◽  
Police Forces

The point at which the liberty of the subject can be subject to interference by force of the law is a critical issue and one reliant on the integrity of judicial oversight. Focusing on the start of the twentieth century, this chapter addresses the discontinuities in the then existing rules relating to the interrogation of suspected persons (embodied by the Judges’ Rules of 1912, whose obscure origins are discussed) and the divergent responses of different police forces to the cautioning and questioning process. From this it explores how the need for closer formal regulation arose and the role of Home Office officials (the very same as those involved in the Adolph Beck case) in drafting the first revision of the Judges’ Rules in 1918 which were to remain in force for almost fifty years. These inapt and inexpertly drafted Rules thereafter laid the foundations for policing regulation in jurisdictions around the world.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Gregory J. Moore
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
Henry Kissinger ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Social Critic ◽  
Intractable Problems ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Hans Morgenthau

Reinhold Niebuhr was perhaps the preeminent American intellectual of the twentieth century. He was at once teacher, preacher, philosopher, social critic, public intellectual and ethicist, applying his brand of human nature Realism in both the secular and religious worlds. He was a highly influential thinker, especially at the height of the Cold War, addressing the economic, spiritual, social, and political issues of his day. He profoundly influenced the early classical Realists such as Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, and George F. Kennan. While Niebuhr has been forgotten by some, indeed there has been a marked resurgence of interest in Niebuhr’s work both in the United States and abroad in recent years, particularly in the wake of the 911 attacks and the invasion of Iraq. As we look forward, it is helpful to look backward to Niebuhr, for his views on international relations may well guide us as we attempt to deal with the many intractable problems of the present age.

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