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.

scholarly journals Macintyre on identity of ethics and politics

2006 ◽  
pp. 29-56
Author(s):  
Michal Sládecek
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Ethics And Politics

In first chapters of this article MacIntyre?s view of ethics is analyzed, together with his critics of liberalism as philosophical and political theory, as well as dominant ideological conception. In last chapters MacIntyre?s view of the relation between politics and ethics is considered, along with the critical review of his theoretical positions. Macintyre?s conception is regarded on the one hand as very broad, because the entire morality is identified with ethical life, while on the other hand it is regarded as too narrow since it excludes certain essential aspects of deliberation which refers to the sphere of individual rights, the relations between communities, as well as distribution of goods within the state.

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.

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.

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.

Hegel's Views on War, the State, and International Relations

1983 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 624-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven B. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Perpetual Peace ◽  
The One ◽  
Kantian Morality

In this article I argue a thesis about Hegel's views on war different from most previous interpreters, e.g., Popper and Hook on the one side and Avineri and Pelczynski on the other. In particular I argue that his reflections on war are an attempt to answer the problem of political obligation or the question of why should anyone willingly die for the state. Accordingly, I examine briefly Hegel's critique of Kantian morality for its inability to account for political obligation proper and although ultimately I conclude that Hegel never completely extricated himself from Kant's belief in a providentialist historicism leading to a condition of “perpetual peace,” I still want to suggest that war remains for Hegel an essential moment in the “ethical” life of the state and perhaps the chief means whereby the dignity and autonomy of the state can be exerted over the network of private interests that constitutes civil society.

scholarly journals Community in Hegel’s Social Philosophy

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-201
Author(s):  
Simon Lumsden
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
The Family ◽  
Philosophy Of Right

AbstractIn the Philosophy of Right Hegel argues that modern life has produced an individualized freedom that conflicts with the communal forms of life constitutive of Greek ethical life. This individualized freedom is fundamentally unsatisfactory, but it is in modernity seemingly resolved into a more adequate form of social freedom in the family, aspects of civil society, and ultimately the state. This article examines whether Hegel’s state can function as a community and by so doing satisfy the need for a substantial ethical life that runs through Hegel’s social thought. The article also examines why Hegel does not provide a detailed analysis of community, as a distinct sphere between the private and the public political sphere in the Philosophy of Right, and why it is not a key platform of his social freedom.

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. 

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