scholarly journals The Negligence Standard: Political Not Metaphysical

2019 ◽  
pp. 196-225
Author(s):  
John Gardner

This chapter considers the question of why the law might sometimes assign strict responsibilities and sometimes negligence-limited responsibilities. It argues that the explanation is political, not metaphysical. They relate to the desirability or appeal or merit or attractiveness of the arrangements whereby some people have responsibility for some things, and others have responsibility for others. They point to the fairness, the efficiency, or more generally the reasonableness, of responsibilities being carved up in that way, or in some other way. They do not relate to the tragedy of the human condition or the impossibility of our escape from our rational nature. They do not belong to the metaphysics of basic responsibility. They belong instead to the politics of assignable responsibility.

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 209-223
Author(s):  
Ruth Karin Lévai

Taking as its starting point the tension between the human condition as subject to the law of reason while belonging to the world of sense in establishing the categorical imperative as described by Kant, this article explores how belonging to the world of sense may be equated with randomness and the temporal as the presupposition for morality in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Borges's ‘The Garden of Forking Paths'. The article also discusses the two authors' views of time and eternity as expressed in their nonfiction.


2003 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles H. Talbert

Romans 5:12–8:39 goes over again the same basic train of thought covered earlier in 1:18–5:11. In both 1:18–5:11 and 5:12–8:39 the argument moves from the human condition to the divine remedy to the role of the law to ultimate salvation. This form of reasoning, repetition with variation, has roots in ancient Greco-Roman rhetoric.


2019 ◽  
pp. 133-172
Author(s):  
John Gardner

This chapter argues that reasons to succeed are indeed intelligible apart from the law—i.e. morally intelligible in the relevant sense—and that reasons to try are not morally intelligible, in the relevant sense, without them. From here it is but a relatively short step to conclude that at least the first half of this conjunction still holds true when the reasons in question are obligatory. There is no special problem with mandatory categorical reasons to succeed. But instead of making that short step here, it is left in the hands of others, including those who remain attached to Kant’s curious argument, to try and block it. That is the best way to honour the spirit of Honoré’s ground-breaking contrarian contribution to the philosophical study of the law of torts, and indeed the philosophical study of the human condition.


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.


Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.  


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Alexander Pschera

"Neben der Industrie hat die Digitalisierung auch die Natur ergriffen. Die Tatsache, dass Tausende von Tieren mit GPS-Sendern aus- gerüstet und überwacht werden, erlaubt, analog zur Industrie 4.0 auch von einer Natur 4.0 zu sprechen. Dieses Internet der Tiere verändert den Begriff, den der Mensch von der Natur hat. Er transformiert die Wahrnehmung vor allem der Natur als etwas fundamental An- deren. Neben den vielen kulturellen Problematisierungen, die das Internet der Tiere mit sich bringt, lassen sich aber auch die Umrisse einer neuen, ganz und gar nicht esoterischen planetarisch-post-digitalen Kultur aufzeigen, die die conditio humana verändert. In addition to industry, digitalization has also taken hold of nature. The fact that thousands of animals are provided and monitored with GPS transmitters allows to speak of nature 4.0 by way of analogy to industry 4.0. This internet of animals changes our idea of nature. Most of all, it transforms the perception of nature as something fundamentally other. Beside the many cultural problems that the internet of animals implies, it can also outline a new, not at all esoteric planetary post-digital culture that is about to change the human condition. "


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