scholarly journals Zuhd and Pleasure : A Comparative Account between Imam Ali’s Nahj Al-Balāgha and Moore’s Ethics

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 104
Author(s):  
Qusthan Firdaus
Keyword(s):  
Positive Duty ◽  
Right To Work ◽  
Positive Duties ◽  
Negative Duties ◽  
Negative Duty

<div><p><strong>Abstrak :</strong> Artikel ini mendiskusikan zuhd sebagai sebuah penanda etis (an ethical bon mot) sekaligus membandingkannya dengan argumen Moore mengenai kesenangan. Memaksimalkan output dan meminimalkan input merupakan dua premis dasar yang menyusun zuhd. Keduanya membawa kepada kewajiban positif dan negatif. Kewajiban positif berakar pada hak untuk berekspresi secara bebas sementara kewajiban negatif berakar pada hak untuk bekerja pada lingkungan yang adil dan disukai. Di samping itu, argumen Moore mengenai kesenangan tidak memadai untuk menjadi sebuah penanda etis karena bersifat  subjektif. Dengan demikian, zuhd memiliki kualitas yang lebih baik daripada kesenangan untuk menjadi sebuah penanda etis.</p><p><em>Kata Kunci : Zuhud,  pleasure (Kesenangan), Penanda etis, Kewajiban posistif, Kewajiban negatif</em></p><p><em><br /></em><strong>Abstract :</strong> This article discusses about Zuhd as an ethical sign (an ethical bon mot), all at once to compare it with Moor’s argument on pleasure. Maximizing output and minimizing input  constitute two basic premises which composed zuhd. Both of  them lead to positive and negative duties. Positive duty is rooted  on right to express freely, while negative duty is rooted on right  to work in just and prefer domain. Moreover, Moor’s argument  of pleasure is unsufficient to be an ethical sigh, for it is very subjective argument. By this, Zuhd has a better quality than  pleasure to be an ethical sign or marker.</p><p><em>Keywords : Zuhud, Pleasure, Ethical bon mot, Positive duties, Negative duties</em></p></div>

Positive Duties and Gender Equality

2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 91-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colm O'cinneide
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Fourth Generation ◽  
Positive Duty ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
Substantive Equality ◽  
Promote Gender Equality ◽  
Positive Duties ◽  
And Gender ◽  
First Time

The imposition since 1998 of a variety of positive equality duties upon public authorities has attracted comparatively little academic attention. However, these duties are a central part of current government equality initiatives, increasingly constitute a major part of the work of the UK's equality commissions, and have been described as an essential part of a new ‘fourth generation’ of equality legislation. It now appears likely that a positive duty to promote gender equality will soon be imposed upon public authorities, which will complement similar race and disability duties. Will the introduction of this positive gender equality duty add to, detract or complement existing statutory provisions? Given the danger that ‘soft law’ initiatives may undermine existing anti-discrimination controls, will the duty provide a clear steer to public authorities, or will it lack teeth, substance and direction, and possibly even prove counter-productive? Such positive duties are designed to compensate for the limitations of existing anti-discrimination law, by requiring the taking of positive steps to promote equality and eliminate discrimination, rather than just compelling a reactive compliance with the letter of the (equality) law. The justifications in principle for the introduction of such duties are strong: for the first time, the introduction of a positive gender duty will impose a clear legislative obligation upon public authorities to adopt a substantive equality approach and to take proactive action to redress patterns of disadvantage linked to gender discrimination. Serious concerns do however exist as to the extent to which such duties can be enforced, and the danger that they will simply encourage greater bureaucratic activity at the expense of real change. The proposed gender duty, as with the other duties that have been introduced, is no panacea. Nevertheless, it does constitute a good start, can serve a useful function by empowering public authorities to take positive action, and if effectively used will be a very valuable point of pressure to push for better things.

Human Rights and Positive Duties

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowan Cruft
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Significant Risk ◽  
Reverse Order ◽  
Global Society ◽  
Thomas Pogge ◽  
World Poverty ◽  
Positive Duties ◽  
Negative Duties ◽  
Just Society ◽  
Policy Proposals

In World Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge presents a range of attractive policy proposals—limiting the international resource and borrowing privileges, decentralizing sovereignty, and introducing a “global resources dividend”—aimed at remedying the poverty and suffering generated by the global economic order. These proposals could be motivated as a response to positive duties to assist the global poor, or they could be justified on consequentialist grounds as likely to promote collective welfare. Perhaps they could even be justified on virtue-theoretic grounds as proposals that a just or benevolent person would endorse. But Pogge presents them as a response to the violation of negative duties; this makes the need for such remedial policies especially morally urgent—on a par with the obligations of killers to take measures to stop killing.In this essay, I focus on the claim that responsibility for world poverty should be conceived in terms of a violation of negative duties. I follow Pogge in distinguishing two questions (p. 134): What kind of duties (positive or purely negative?) would we be subject to in a just global society where everyone fulfilled their duty and there was no significant risk of injustice? And what kind of duties (positive or purely negative?) do we face given that our global society falls short of the just society?I tackle these questions in reverse order below. I argue, in contrast to Pogge, that positive duties are relevant to our answers to both questions.

For Better or For Worse: Corporate Responsibility Beyond “Do No Harm”

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florian Wettstein
Keyword(s):  
Multinational Corporations ◽  
Corporate Responsibility ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
Political Responsibility ◽  
Positive Duty ◽  
Recent Contribution ◽  
Do No Harm ◽  
Negative Duty

ABSTRACT:Do corporations have a duty to promote just institutions? Agreeing with Hsieh’s recent contribution, this article argues that they do. However, contrary to Hsieh, it holds that such a claim cannot be advanced convincingly only by reference to the negative duty to do no harm. Instead, such a duty necessarily must be grounded in positive obligation. In the search of a foundation for a positive duty for corporations to further just institutions, Stephen Kobrin’s notion of “private political authority” offers a promising connecting point. Political authority implies political responsibility; Political obligation, however, includes more than merely not doing any harm—it is essentially positive obligation. The implications of the new political responsibilities of multinational corporations may even go far beyond the particular duty to promote just institutions; they may be symptomatic for a much more profound shift from an individual to a collective age.

Human Dignity and Human Rights

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Gilabert
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
National Origin ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Labor Conditions ◽  
Positive Duties ◽  
Negative Duties ◽  
The Difference ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Normative Status

Human dignity: social movements invoke it, several national constitutions enshrine it, and it features prominently in international human rights documents. But what is it, and why is it important? This book offers a sophisticated and comprehensive defence of the view that human dignity is the moral heart of human rights. First, it develops the network of concepts associated with dignity, highlighting the notion of human dignity as an inherent, non-instrumental, egalitarian, and high-priority normative status of human persons. People have this status in virtue of their valuable human capacities rather than as a result of their national origin and other conventional features. Second, it shows how human dignity gives rise to an inspiring ideal of solidaristic empowerment, generating both negative duties not to undermine, and positive duties to facilitate, people’s pursuit of a flourishing life in which they develop and exercise their valuable capacities. The most urgent of these duties are correlative to human rights. Third, the book illustrates how the proposed dignitarian approach allows us to articulate the content, justification, and feasible implementation of specific and contested human rights, such as the rights to democratic political participation and decent labor conditions. Finally, the book’s dignitarian framework illuminates the arc of humanist justice, identifying both the difference and the continuity between basic human rights and more expansive requirements of social justice such as those defended by liberal egalitarians and democratic socialists. Human dignity is indeed the moral heart of human rights. Understanding it enables us to defend human rights as the urgent ethical and political project that puts humanity first.

Contributing and Benefiting: Two Grounds for Duties to the Victims of Injustice

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norbert Anwander
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Global Poverty ◽  
Positive Duty ◽  
Thomas Pogge ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Negative Duty ◽  
Harmful Effects ◽  
Do So

Contrasting his own position with that of those who conceive the moral challenge of global poverty in terms of a positive duty to help, Thomas Pogge suggests that “we may be failing to fulfill our stringent negative duty not to uphold injustice, not to contribute to or profit from [emphasis added] the unjust impoverishment of others” (p. 197). We should conceive of our individual donations and of possible institutionalized initiatives to eradicate poverty not as helping the poor but “as protecting them from the effects of global rules whose injustice benefits us and is our responsibility” (p. 23, emphasis added). Pogge also claims that such activities should be understood in terms of compensation: “The word ‘compensate’ is meant to indicate that how much one should be willing to contribute toward reforming unjust institutions and toward mitigating the harms they cause depends on how much one is contributing to, and benefiting from, their maintenance” (p. 50, emphasis added).In characterizing wrongful involvement in an unjust social order and the compensatory duties that arise from it, Pogge refers to the terms contribution/responsibility as well as to benefit/profit (the latter are used interchangeably). The first of these factors is unobjectionable: we can take it for granted that there is a negative duty not to contribute to injustice and that those who are responsible for harmful institutions should compensate their victims. I want to raise doubts, however, about the role that Pogge assigns to benefiting from injustice in the determination of our duties toward the victims of injustice. I shall do so by challenging his claim that there is a negative duty not to benefit from injustice, and that the role that benefiting from injustice plays in determining our duties to work toward reforming unjust practices and mitigating their harmful effects is best understood in terms of compensation.

Autonomy and Free Speech

2021 ◽  
pp. 60-81
Author(s):  
Catriona Mackenzie ◽  
Denise Meyerson
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Negative Liberty ◽  
The Social ◽  
Positive Duties ◽  
Negative Duty ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter evaluates the relationship between autonomy and freedom of speech, examining a variety of autonomy-based justifications for the importance of speech and especially of freedom of speech. The differences between these justifications relate not only to the different conceptions of autonomy that underpin them, but also to their different responses to the problem of competing autonomy interests. It is plausible to think that the state should respect, protect, and promote the autonomy of everyone—speakers, listeners, thinkers, bystanders, and members of the public at large. Enhancing the autonomy of some might, however, require restricting the speech of others. The liberty-based conceptions of autonomy prioritize the interests of speakers and listeners and hold that the primary obligation of the state is the negative duty not to interfere with the autonomy of individual speakers and listeners. By contrast, the relational conceptions of autonomy hold that the negative liberty interests of individual speakers and hearers should be balanced against the positive duties of the state to promote the social conditions necessary for the development and exercise of autonomy by all citizens.

scholarly journals Pogge, poverty, and war

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 446-469
Author(s):  
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Poor People ◽  
Positive Duty ◽  
Ceteris Paribus ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Thomas Pogge ◽  
Rich People ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Negative Duty ◽  
Economic Injustice ◽  
Do So

According to Thomas Pogge, rich people do not simply violate a positive duty of assistance to help the global poor; rather, they violate a negative duty not to harm them. They do so by imposing an unjust global economic structure on poor people. Assuming that these claims are correct, it follows that, ceteris paribus, wars waged by the poor against the rich to resist this imposition are morally equivalent to wars waged in self-defense against military aggression. Hence, if self-defense against military aggression is just, then, ceteris paribus, so are defensive wars against the imposition of economic injustice. While I do not think Pogge’s analysis of the causes of global poverty is correct, I defend these inferences against various challenges.

Splitting the Difference: Killing and Letting Die

Dialogue ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-78
Author(s):  
Douglas N. Walton
Keyword(s):  
Intensive Care ◽  
Hospital Staff ◽  
Positive Duty ◽  
Intrinsic Difference ◽  
Discontinuation Of Treatment ◽  
Anselm Of Canterbury ◽  
Killing And Letting Die ◽  
Letting Die ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Negative Duty

Routinely, in Arriving at decisions on what treatments to recommend in intensive care wards, the moral presumption is that there is an intrinsic difference between the positive duty to save lives and the negative duty not to take lives. The discontinuation of treatment – say stopping chemotherapy or removing a ventilator – is thought of as a “negative” action, an allowing to die, not “positively”, say as an act of suicide by the patient, or a killing by the hospital staff. But the distinction between “positive” and “negative” here, despite its grave ethical import, is elusive and difficult to grasp firmly. St. Anselm of Canterbury was fond of citing the trickiness of the distinction between “to do” (facere) and “not to do” (non-facere). In answer to the question “What's he doing?” we say “He's just sitting there.” (positive), really meaning something negative: “He's not doing anything at all.” Sometimes the “negative” action is described in “positive” terms, or vice versa, and that makes one wonder if the distinction might be somehow trivial, a bit of jesuitry too insubstantial to bear much serious ethical weight.

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