Pandemic Capital or “The New Gravity”

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 579-596
Author(s):  
Agostino Cera
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Good Knowledge ◽  
Maximum Profit ◽  
The Social ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
Human Responsibility ◽  
The Right ◽  
Globalized World

This paper aims to highlight a latent evidence emerging from the pandemic phenomenon: Pandemic Capital. By this formula I mean a process of naturalization in regards to the equivalence between the right of a commercial enterprise to profit from its activity and the right of people to protect their own health, or, better, the right to maximize profit as new aspirant fundamental right. This naturalization becomes particularly clear in relation to the question of vaccine patents. The distinction between just (legitimate) profit and maximum profit equates to an updated version of the classic dilemma between nomos (law) and dike (justice), which in Sophocle’s Antigone takes the form of a clash between Kreon and Antigone. Faced with the risk of a legal nihilism, we need to (re)establish a hierarchy of rights that is up to par with our times, namely we must re-contractualize the social contract. To overcome the challenges of a globalized world/pandemic society, we need the neo-contractualism of a social contract that includes a “natural contract” as well. The latter is strictly related to the question of an Open Access Knowledge as new common good. Knowledge also means power, and as such demands responsibility, particularly from scientists and intellectuals. The idea of a human responsibility – or better, “fraternal responsibility” – could therefore represent the basis for a new alliance between nomos and dike for the sake of the polis.

The Right to Be Punished: Autonomy and Its Demise in Modern Penal Thought

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Dirk Dubber
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Rational Deliberation ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Life Plans ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Ordinary Person ◽  
The Right

The Enlightenment was the age of empathy and abstract identity. The common man no longer was to be pitied for his unfortunate plight. Instead, enlightened gentlemen and reformers strove to empathize with the ordinary person—identify with him—precisely because he was identical to them in some fundamental sense. That sense differed from Enlightenment theory to theory, but the identity remained central. So Bentham insisted that every member of the utility community was like any other because every member's pain and joy equally affected the utilitarian calculus and thus the common good. Contractarians like Beccaria or Fichte portrayed all citizens as identical insofar as they were all signatories to the social contract, a contract grounded in the shared rationality of its signatories who surrendered some of their external freedom to pursue their life plans protected from the chaos of the law of nature. And Kant and Hegel stressed the common capacity for rational deliberation shared by all humans as rational beings.

US Welfare Reform: Rewriting the Social Contract

2009 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
NEIL GILBERT
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Public Assistance ◽  
Welfare Policy ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Deficit Reduction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Right ◽  
Temporary Assistance ◽  
Welfare Reforms

AbstractThis paper analyses recent developments in US welfare policy and their implications for future reforms. The analysis begins by examining how the enactment of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programme in 1996 changed the essential character of public assistance and the major social forces that accounted for this fundamental shift in US welfare policy. It then shows how the most recent welfare reforms under the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 broadened and intensified the TANF requirements, leaving four avenues along which issues of conditionality and entitlement are likely to be played out in future welfare reforms. Finally, the discussion highlights how a new social contract is being forged through progressive and conservative proposals, which shift the focus of public assistance from the right to financial support to the right to work and earn a living wage.

scholarly journals Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction, A Love Story

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Kelly Oliver
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Love Story ◽  
The Social ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Voice

In The Right to Narcissism: A Case for Im-Possible Self-Love, Pleshette DeArmitt opens the space for an alternative to origin story so popular with political philosophers, namely, the social contract, which assumes a rational and self-identical subject.  She does this obliquely by deconstructing narcissism as love of the self-same, or, love of what Kristeva might call “the clean and proper self.”  Like Echo interrupting Narcissus’s soliloquy of deadly self-absorbed pleasure and his solitary auto-affection upon seeing his own reflection, Pleshette interrupts the seeming proximity of self-same, the closeness of near, and the propinquity of proper by deflecting the image of Narcissus onto the voice of Echo, who comes into her own by repeating his words.  How, asks Pleshette, can Echo’s reiteration of the words of another be anything more than mere repetition or reduplication?  Echoing Derrida, she answers that it is through a declaration of love.  Echo’s repetition of the words of Narcissus take on new meaning, and allow her to express herself, and her love, through the words of the other.  After all words are words of the other.  Language comes to us from the other.  Echo becomes a self, a “little narcissist,” through an address from and to the other, through the appropriation and ex-appropriation of the other’s words. 

The ‘Right of the Stronger’: Hobbes contra Spinoza

2020 ◽  
pp. 280-306
Author(s):  
Alexandre Matheron
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Short Discussion ◽  
Real Effects ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Power ◽  
The Right

Many agree that Rousseau’s The Social Contract takes Hobbes as its target. Does his critique of Hobbes also apply to Spinoza? In this essay, Matheron systematically compares Hobbes and Spinoza’s respective political philosophies with an eye to Rousseau’s criticism of the notion of the ‘right of the stronger’. As Matheron shows, Rousseau’s critique misses the mark in both cases, but for different reasons. The core of Spinoza’s innovation with respect to both Hobbes and Rousseau is his rejection of the idea of right as a moral power distinct from physical power and his identification of right with power. Power, for Spinoza, is not simply corporeal power, but rather the capacity to produce real effects in nature. But whereas Hobbes’s view appealed to the use of reason to determine what is best for preserving ourselves, Spinoza sees all human action as expressions of greater or lesser degrees of power governed instead by desire. Matheron concludes with a short discussion of the right to revolt in Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau.

The Gilets Jaunes and the New Social Contract

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Devellennes
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Fundamental Challenge ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Impact

This book provides a detailed account of the gilets jaunes, the yellow vest movement that has shaken France since 2018. The gilets jaunes are a group of French protesters named after their iconic yellow vests worn during their demonstrations, who have formed a new type of social movement. They have been variously interpreted since they began their occupation of French roundabouts: at first received with enthusiasm on the right of the French political establishment, and with caution on the left. They have provided a fundamental challenge to the social contract in France, the implicit pact between the governed and their political leaders. The book assesses what lessons can be drawn from their activities and the impact for the contemporary relationship between state and citizen. Informed by a dialogue with past political theorists — from Hobbes, Spinoza and Rousseau to Rawls, Nozick and Diderot — and reflecting on the challenges posed by the yellow vest movement, the book rethinks the concept of the social contract for contemporary societies around the world. It proposes a new relationship between the state and the individual, and establishes the necessity of rethinking the modern democratic nature of our representative polities in order to provide a genuine process for the healing of social ills.

The Right to Fish as an External Benefit of Open Access

1985 ◽  
Vol 42 (12) ◽  
pp. 2050-2053
Author(s):  
Ralph E. Townsend
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Social Benefits ◽  
Fishing Activity ◽  
Work Activity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Worker Satisfaction ◽  
The Right ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Occupational Communities

Work is more than a means to earn income. Work activity is intimately related to the values of a society. This is especially true for occupational communities. Fishing activity may have very profound effects upon the social system. Open access to the resource is one dimension that reinforces this connection. A worker satisfaction bonus is much too narrow a concept to capture the depth of the relationship of social benefits to the open-access institution. To understand the role that the birthright performs, the entire ecological system — biological, economic, political, and social — in which fishermen work and live must be understood.

scholarly journals A terra como bem-comum na memória do Direito brasileiro

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-31
Author(s):  
Sandra Regina Martini ◽  
Vanessa Chiari Gonçalves ◽  
Bárbara Bruna de Oliveira Simões
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right

 O artigo trata da terra,  memória e direito com o objetivo de reconsiderar a terra como bem comum da humanidade, as referências jurídico políticas e sociais utilizadas são as brasileiras até a década de 80, pois entendemos que a nova Constituição embora apresente avanços significativos, não é suficiente para enfrentar a complexidade do direito ao bem comum terra. O direito precisa retomar a memória para cumprir sua função de evitar e compor conflitos, ou seja, o direito tem uma função preventiva, deve operar prevenindo e compondo conflitos advindos das mais diversas instâncias, em especial, neste artigo, dos Movimentos Sociais, sem os quais não é possível pensar na terra como bem da comunidade, pois são os movimentos sociais que trazem para o cenário jurídico-político a conflitualidade da sociedade, por isso são sistemas autoreferenciais de comunicação, que se inserem nos sistemas jurídico e político como reação da própria sociedade diferenciada funcionalmente. Assim, constrói-se a ideia de terra como um bem comum da humanidade, passando pela cooperação entre o local e o global. Abstract The article deals with land, memory and law with the objective of reconsidering land as a common good of humanity, the legal and political references used are Brazilian until the 1980s, since we understand that the new Constitution does is sufficient to face the complexity of the right to the common good land. The law needs to retake the memory to fulfill its function of avoiding and composing conflicts, that is, the right has a preventive function, it must operate preventing and composing conflicts arising from the most diverse instances, especially in this article of the Social Movements, without which it is not possible to think of the land as a community good, because it is the social movements that bring to the juridical-political scenario the conflict of the society, for that reason they are self-referential systems of communication, that are inserted in the legal and political systems as a reaction of the own society functionally differentiated. Thus, the idea of land is constructed as a common good of humanity, through the cooperation between local and global.  

scholarly journals Permissibility of Death Penalty as a Hermeneutic Dilemma

Verbum Vitae ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-326
Author(s):  
Michał Kosche
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right

The notion of moral fairness of application of capital punishment is stretched between two poles of opposite interpretative meanings. On the one hand, there is an imperative related to maintaining the social order and good that justifies in some specific cases killing an individual for the good of the community; on the other hand, there is the message of the Gospel about holiness of each human life. In this regard, at the attempt to investigate the fairness of death penalty, a certain hermeneutic tension related to the overlapping of rights and obligations both with regard to the criminal and society that needs to be protected against him or her. The starting point of this article is an outlook on death penalty with due regard of a ‘hermeneutic charge’ contained both in the duty to protect common good and each individual’s life. Next, the ‘genuine paradox’ was analysed that emerges in a situation where the right to live and the right to protect overlap. All the considerations are concluded with a question whether the recent abolitionist interpretation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church should be classified as the continuity hermeneutic or rather the discontinuity hermeneutic.

Classical Natural Law, а Methodology for Justice

2021 ◽  
pp. 66
Author(s):  
STÉPHANE BAUZON
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Common Good ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Theory Of Law ◽  
The Right

Justice is the name for a human characteristic that everyone feels spontaneously: what is fair or unfair in a social relationship. Animals do not have justice. The human reason (logos – λόγος) acts in order to reveal what is included in justice. Thus, as a participation in justice, the human conscience (logos) finds the law. Away from modern (and current) theories of natural law that sets rules either to be applied directly to social reality or to be individual powers to be opposed to positive law, the classical theory of law is a social quest directed toward doing the right thing. In the wake of Aristotle, classical natural law is a methodology (based on dialectics) to find justice in society. The etymology of dialectics, dia-lektos, teaches us that it signifies the exchange of words between different interlocutors. In this sense, dialectics is practiced every day by those gathering together, who receive advice relating to a given situation. Dialectic does not solely aim to persuade; but also tries to look for the natural law. Legal conclusions, notwithstanding the authority submitting them, are ultimately questionable. Having been born in dialectic, these conclusions remain as such. Nonetheless, their very existence gives the natural law, a fragmented expression of justice. Unlike morality, or the precepts of divine law, natural law is not given at all: it must be established through dialectic. Morality retains a reduced role, broadly limited to the discovery of natural law’s essence, for example by prohibiting murder from being accepted in principle. Still, such a moral prescription does not solve the problem to know who is guilty of murder. As a methodology, classical natural law acknowledges the contingency of social norms with regard to the distribution of common goods. As a process that attends to the common good available and the merits of people understood in a broad fashion as encompassing the resources they possess, classical natural law cannot a priori determine what specific rights or goods particular specific people should have. Adapting to reality is necessary: a dialogue is always established to amend the contours of justice. For this purpose, classical natural law is the methodology for justice to achieve its new forms, to distinguish new data from the social distribution of goods and responsibilities. The protection of the worker, of the minor or of the foreigner is of indisputable moral value, though its implementation follows the oscillations of time. However, as a moral horizon, seeking justice involves a perennial effort to recognise other humans as human.

scholarly journals THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF THOMAS HOBBES

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-396
Author(s):  
Bachuki Tsanava ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Political Condition ◽  
Rational Deliberation ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Right

The article is devoted to the concept of the political in the philosophy of English thinker Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). The author points out the key concepts for understanding the concept of the political in Hobbes’s philosophy, such as the method of his philosophy, anthropological views, and the idea of the state of nature. The author describes the philosopher’s thought path toward the concept of the political, beginning from his attempt to overcome the shortcomings of contemporary philosophy and the desire to create a science of politics, based on rational deliberation. Hobbes contrasts elocution with his method of searching for political truth based on reason because there is more harm than good done to the state by elocution. In the hands of selfish and vain individuals, elocution turns into an instrument for achieving personal goals rather than the common good. Hobbes’s anthropological views allow him to describe all the horror and injustice in the state of nature, in which any selfish, but reasonable person, using the right method will come to the idea of the need to establish a state. The author notes that the concepts of vanity and fear occupied a particularly important place in Hobbes’s philosophy, since they are the reasons for the collapse and creation of states. Thus, the concept of the political in Hobbes’s philosophy is inseparable from deliberation based on reason, since without it selfish individuals cannot hear the voice of reason, establish the Leviathan, and proceed to the political condition. The social con- tract, obtained as a result of rational deliberation of egoistic individuals, represents the pinnacle of the political because neither the political condition nor citizens existed before it.

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