The Law of Homicide

2011 ◽  
pp. 97-112
Author(s):  
David Novak
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Image Of God ◽  
The Political ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Image Of God

This chapter argues that the law prohibiting murder is the Noahide commandment most immediately and rationally evident. The rabbis considered its prohibition from two distinct points of view, the theological and the political. In theological terms, murder is the intentional taking of another human life, a life created in the image of God. In political terms, murder wrecks social life. Regarding murder at the individual level, the rabbis differentiated criteria for the punishment of Jews and gentiles. For Jews who commit murder, the death penalty is employed only under the strict standard of “hatra'ah,” or forewarning. Such a dispensation was not available to non-Jews. The law of homicide also deals with the morally knotty issue of abortion. Rabbinic Judaism permitted abortion only when the mother's life was in danger, but for Noahides, abortion was proscribed in every case.

Persons Together

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Image Of God ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Market Relations ◽  
The Image Of God

This chapter moves into the political and economic aspects of human nature. Given scarcity and interdependence, what sense has Judaism made of the material well-being necessary for human flourishing? What are Jewish attitudes toward prosperity, market relations, labor, and leisure? What has Judaism had to say about the political dimensions of human nature? If all humans are made in the image of God, what does that original equality imply for political order, authority, and justice? In what kinds of systems can human beings best flourish? It argues that Jewish tradition shows that we act in conformity with our nature when we elevate, improve, and sanctify it. As co-creators of the world with God, we are not just the sport of our biochemistry. We are persons who can select and choose among the traits that comprise our very own natures, cultivating some and weeding out others.

The True Believers

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara J. Risman
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Gender Differentiation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Gendered Expectations

This is the first data chapter. In this chapter, respondents who are described as true believers in the gender structure, and essentialist gender differences are introduced and their interviews analyzed. They are true believers because, at the macro level, they believe in a gender ideology where women and men should be different and accept rules and requirements that enforce gender differentiation and even sex segregation in social life. In addition, at the interactional level, these Millennials report having been shaped by their parent’s traditional expectations and they similarly feel justified to impose gendered expectations on those in their own social networks. At the individual level, they have internalized masculinity or femininity, and embody it in how they present themselves to the world. They try hard to “do gender” traditionally.

The Sovereign’s Beatitude

2021 ◽  
pp. 009059172110420
Author(s):  
Zoltan Balazs
Keyword(s):  
Image Of God ◽  
The Political ◽  
Short Treatment ◽  
Divine Sovereignty ◽  
Conceptual Coherence ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
Human Happiness ◽  
Theological Perspective ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
The Image Of God

Though it may sound awkward to ask whether the political sovereign is happy or unhappy, the question is relevant to political theory, especially within a political theological perspective. Because man was created in the image of God, human happiness needs to be a reflection of divine beatitude, and as divine sovereignty is, at least analogically, related to political sovereignty, the conceptual coherence is secured. The main argument is, however, that the analogy does not hold. I shall show how St Thomas Aquinas’s short treatment of God’s beatitude may mislead us about power, fame, riches, and dignity being essential to happiness, based on an analysis of Franz Kafka’s major novel, The Castle, and a few other writings by him. I shall argue that our tradition of political thinking and behavior remains ambivalent on this issue. The political sovereign is born out of our unhappy condition, yet its power, fame, riches, and glory suggests to us that it has appropriated our happiness. But for this very reason it cannot be happy, and it therefore suggests a false analogy between the divine and the political sovereign. It is fundamentally at variance with our happiness, which incites us to abandon, reject, and eventually, kill it.

scholarly journals PROSES PENYELESAIAN SENGKETA PERDATA DI PENGADILAN NEGERI DALAM KAITANNYA DENGAN TRANSAKSI YANG MENGGUNAKAN INTERNET

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanyoto Sanyoto ◽  
Antonius Sidik Maryono ◽  
Rahadi Wasi Bintoro
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Internet Technology ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The People ◽  
Banking Activity ◽  
Private Rights ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

The growth of technological Progress make the change of pattern in  the socialize human life, and it can conduct the economic activity in the local scale, regional and also global. In the individual assocciation by using internet technology will take the relation pattern between individual which it is unlike what that happened in the real world. By the existence of internet, contractual terms between subject of law and each other without meeting (face to face), even it is enabled for subject of law not to recognizing each other. During the people conducting activity in the illusory world, especially in the private law, like commerce, agreement and also banking activity, it is enabled to take a problems such as performed in the conventional private relationship. If the consumer internet in the private activity feel their private rights are impinged and they are wish to claim their rights, so there is civil conflict.  The relationship between the individual in the transaction using internet not yet arrange peculiarly in law and regulation. But judge have to find the law and also create the law if he confronted with a dispute in the transaction using internet. Kata kunci : hakim, hukum, internet, perdagangan elektronik, tanda tangan digital

Economic Crisis, Incumbent Performance and Regime Support: A Comparison of Longitudinal Data from West Germany and Costa Rica

1989 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven E. Finkel ◽  
Edward N. Muller ◽  
Mitchell A. Seligson
Keyword(s):  
Costa Rica ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Democratic Systems ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Regime Support

While much is known about the effects of the economy on the popularity and electoral fortunes of political leaders, political scientists know very little about how economic decline and political performance influence support for the political regime and the stability of democratic systems. We use three cross-national longitudinal surveys to address this issue: two collected in Costa Rica in the midst of a severe economic crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and one in West Germany during the recession of the mid-1970s. We show that in both countries, overall support for the political regime remained extremely high during the economic decline, while satisfaction with incumbent performance fluctuated much more sharply. Moreover, at the individual level, changes in satisfaction with incumbent performance were only weakly related to changes in regime support. These results provide strong evidence suggesting that if democracies enter economic downturns with initially high levels of regime support, they will be able to withstand even severe, prolonged crises of economic performance.

From Liberties to Liberty

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-130
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Habeas Corpus ◽  
House Church ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Body

This chapter studies how liberty in the law evolved from being attached to a collective, metaphorical body—the medieval corporation—to being rooted instead in the individual body across a range of practices in seventeenth century Europe. It analyses the early modern forms of toleration that developed from the ground-up in Protestant Europe (Holland and Germany in particular), including the practices of ‘walking out’ (auslauf) to worship one’s God, and the house church (schuilkerk). These practices were key to delinking liberty from place, and thus to paving the way to attaching it instead to territory and the state. The chapter also considers the first common law of naturalisation, known as Calvin’s Case (1608), which wrote into the law the process of becoming an English subject—of subjection. This law decisively rooted the state-subject relation in the bodies of monarch and subject coextensively. Both of these bodies were deeply implicated in the process of territorialisation that begat the modern state in seventeenth-century England, and in shifting the political bond from local authorities to the sovereign. The chapter then examines the corporeal processes underwriting the centralisation of authority, and shows how the subject’s body also became—via an increasingly important habeas corpus—the centre point of the legal revolution that yielded the natural rights of the modern political subject. Edward Coke plays a central role in the chapter.

Citizens and Political Sophistication

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Oscarsson ◽  
Lauri Rapeli
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Sophistication ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Changes Over Time

Political sophistication refers to the role of expertise and the use of information in the forming of political judgments. Citizens in a democracy need a sufficient level of political sophistication to make sense of politics and to hold office holders accountable. Most people do not seem to be as sophisticated as theory would expect, and political sophistication also seems to be very unevenly spread among individuals. The consequences for democratic governance continue to be a matter of much scholarly debate. Although most researchers agree that sophistication among citizens tends to be low, many issues in the research field are deeply contested. First, several concepts such as awareness, sophistication, and knowledge are used more or less interchangeably in analyses of the political competence of citizens. It is, however, unclear whether the terminology conceals essential conceptual differences. Second, the empirical strategy of using surveys to measure sophistication has been heavily criticized. For some, the survey is an unsuitable method because it measures the respondents’ ability to produce correct answers under suboptimal conditions, rather than measuring what they actually know about politics. For others, the survey questions themselves are an inadequate measure of sophistication. Third, it is not clear what the effects of citizens’ political sophistication or lack thereof are on democratic governance. According to one group of scholars, the aggregated opinions and electoral choices of democratic publics would not look very different even if they were more sophisticated. The opponents of this low-information rationality theorem claim that increases in citizens’ sophistication would lead to substantial differences in democratic output. In other words, perceptions of the significance of sophistication for democracy deeply divide scholars working in the field. There is less disagreement concerning the individual-level determinants of sophistication. Although being male, well educated, and in a socially advantaged position still stand out as the strongest predictors of high sophistication, recent findings provide a more nuanced understanding of how sophistication is distributed among citizens. In addition to many enduring disputes, some questions remain largely unanswered. Without cross-nationally standardized survey items, scholars have struggled to conduct comparative studies of political sophistication. Therefore, role of political institutions as facilitators of political sophistication is to some extent uncertain. Whether and how sophistication changes over time are equally important, but mostly unexplored, questions.

Political Agenda Setting and the Mass Media

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefaan Walgrave ◽  
Peter Van Aelst
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Mass Media ◽  
The Individual

Recently, the number of studies examining whether media coverage has an effect on the political agenda has been growing strongly. Most studies found that preceding media coverage does exert an effect on the subsequent attention for issues by political actors. These effects are contingent, though, they depend on the type of issue and the type of political actor one is dealing with. Most extant work has drawn on aggregate time-series designs, and the field is as good as fully non-comparative. To further develop our knowledge about how and why the mass media exert influence on the political agenda, three ways forward are suggested. First, we need better theory about why political actors would adopt media issues and start devoting attention to them. The core of such a theory should be the notion of the applicability of information encapsulated in the media coverage to the goals and the task at hand of the political actors. Media information has a number of features that make it very attractive for political actors to use—it is often negative, for instance. Second, we plead for a disaggregation of the level of analysis from the institutional level (e.g., parliament) or the collective actor level (e.g., party) to the individual level (e.g., members of parliament). Since individuals process media information, and since the goals and tasks of individuals that trigger the applicability mechanism are diverse, the best way to move forward is to tackle the agenda setting puzzle at the individual level. This implies surveying individual elites or, even better, implementing experimental designs to individual elite actors. Third, the field is in dire need of comparative work comparing how political actors respond to media coverage across countries or political systems.

Law in Doctrine and Life According to Martin Luther

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Risto Saarinen ◽  
Derek R. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Golden Rule ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Unity In Diversity ◽  
The Law ◽  
The One

The law both is and functions in Martin Luther’s theology. To the extent that it simply is, the law is wholly good, just, and pure. It reveals God’s benevolent providence for creation by instantiating structures of human relationships, natural processes, and social arrangements within which human life and all of creation can flourish. Luther regards the essential character of the law in a way reminiscent of the haggadah tradition of Rabbinic Judaism, where the law is a narrative which reveals features of the lawgiver. Under the conditions of sin, however, the law can be experienced as wrath by humans who cannot fulfill what it requires, and who suffer as a result of their own transgression of the Word of God or as a result of the transgressions of others. It functions thus as a curb against wickedness and as a means of exposing sin to be sin. Its continued presence in the life of the believer is necessary, as Luther clarified in his various debates with Johann Agricola and the so-called “Antinomians.” When the law is understood only in its antinomy with the gospel, the life-affirming elements of the law are occluded, even as the gospel’s life-redeeming elements are thereby rendered clear. While numerous fine distinctions can be found in Luther’s theology of the law, it maintains a basic unity-in-diversity. God wills singly in dealing with human beings as his creatures. Therefore “civil law,” the Decalogue, and other manifestations of the law are facets of the one will of God for the flourishing of creation. Recent Pauline scholarship has criticized Luther for eisegesis on Paul’s view of the law; Luther needed to see his contemporary Roman partisans as Paul’s legalistic Jewish opponents, they say, and so he read Romans as a critique of 16th-century “works righteousness.” This view ignores the fact that Luther (and Augustine) viewed the post-conversion Paul as “continent” in doing the works of the law, neither weak-willed nor perfectly virtuous. Law is necessary for doctrine, but it is also important for the “Christian life” because it helps the believer to understand the reciprocity that underlies interpersonal relationships, seen especially in the “golden rule” that functions as the epitome of the Christian life. The radical receptivity (i.e., passivity) that characterizes the life of faith in believers enables the experience of God’s will, understood as law or command, in a constructive and beneficial way. While Christian life should employ a “faith approach” rather than a “law approach,” genuine faith in God does, in fact, reveal the true meaning of the law. This might be called the “second use of the gospel” in that God’s command (Gebot), viewed in light of the gospel, becomes a source of guidance for the Christian life, the ten commandments, the double love command, and the Sermon on the Mount chief among them.

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