"The Tongues of the learned are insufficient": Phillis Wheatley, Publishing Objectives, and Personal Liberty

2018 ◽  
pp. 81-119
Author(s):  
Christopher Felker
Keyword(s):  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Personal Liberty

8 Personal Liberty in the Commonwealth

1958 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denys C. Holland
Keyword(s):  
Personal Liberty

scholarly journals The Fine Line: Rural Justice, Public Health and Safety, and the Coronavirus Pandemic

2021 ◽  
pp. 000276422110031
Author(s):  
Jennifer Sherman ◽  
Jennifer Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
Local Law Enforcement ◽  
Local Law ◽  
Sheriff's Department ◽  
Public Health And Safety

In this article, we provide an early glimpse into how the issues of public health and safety played out in the rural United States during the coronavirus pandemic, focusing on Washington State. We utilize a combination of news articles and press releases, sheriff’s department Facebook posts, publicly available jail data, courtroom observations, in-depth interviews with those who have been held in rural jails, and interviews with rural law enforcement staff to explore this theme. As elected officials, rural sheriffs are beholden to populations that include many who are suspicious of science, liberal agendas, and anything that might threaten what they see as individual freedom. At the same time, they expect local law enforcement to employ punitive measures to control perceived criminal activity in their communities. These communities are often tightly knit, cohesive, and isolated, with high levels of social support both for community members and local leaders, including sheriffs and law enforcement. This complex social context often puts rural sheriffs and law enforcement officers in difficult positions. Given the multiple cross-pressures that rural justice systems faced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we explore the circumstances in which they attempted to protect and advocate for the health and safety of both their incarcerated and their nonincarcerated populations. We find that certain characteristics of rural communities both help and hinder local law enforcement in efforts to combat the virus, but these characteristics typically favor informal norms of social control to govern community health. Thus, rural sheriff’s departments repeatedly chose strategies that limited their abilities to protect populations from the disease, in favor of appearing tough on crime and supportive of personal liberty.

Roe v. Wade and the History of Abortion Regulation

1989 ◽  
Vol 15 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 227-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Benjamin Linton
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Personal Privacy ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
Personal Rights ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Right Of Privacy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right Of Privacy ◽  
The Right ◽  
Roe V Wade

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court held that “[the] right of privacy … founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty … is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” The Court acknowledged that “[t]he Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy.” Nevertheless, the Court held that a “right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution.” However, “only personal rights that can be deemed ‘fundamental’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,’ … are included in this guarantee of personal privacy.”

The Matrix of Contractarian Justice

1984 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Buchanan ◽  
Loren E. Lomasky
Keyword(s):  
External Source ◽  
Economic Equality ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
Institutional Evaluation ◽  
External Standard ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Contracting Process ◽  
Point Of Departure

There are no first principles etched in stone from which all moral philosophers must take their bearings. We must deliberately choose our point of departure in any attempt to respond to the question: “Must any defensible theory of justice incorporate both a commitment to personal liberty and to economic equality?” Basic to our own approach is a suspicion of seers and visionaries who espy an external source of values independent from human choices. We presuppose, instead, that political philosophy commences with individual evaluation.1 A near-corollary of this presupposition is that each individual's preferences ought to be taken into account equally with those of others. That is, we suppose that there is no privileged evaluator, whose preferences are accorded decisive weight. Conceptual unanimity as a criterion for institutional evaluation follows naturally from the other two presuppositions. If there is neither an external standard of value nor a corps of resident value experts, only unanimity can ultimately be satisfactory as a test of social desirability. Our perspective then is subjectivist, individualist, and unanimitarian.These presuppositions inform our contractarian analysis. There are, however, two separate contractarian traditions that we shall find useful to distinguish, the “Hobbesian” and the “Rawlsian.” In the first, persons find themselves in the anarchistic war of each against all. They contract away their natural liberties in exchange for the order that civil society – through its sovereign – affords. In this contracting process, individuals are assumed to possess full self-knowledge; they know who they are, what conceptions of the good they hold, and what their endowments are.

Fundamental Rights in the Indian Constitution: Could it include ‘Right to Sanitation’?

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 291-296
Author(s):  
Anil Kumar Mohapatra
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Safe Drinking Water ◽  
Right To Life ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
Sanitation Facility ◽  
Supreme Court Of India ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The World ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Right

Long before India gained independence, M.K. Gandhi remarked that the availability of Sanitation facility is more important than gaining Independence for an Indian. Of late, it is now increasingly felt and realized in India that facilities like toilet, safe drinking water, accompanied by good hygienic conditions are fundamental necessities of a person. These are prerequisites of social and economic justice and genuine development. The Supreme Court of India in one judgement held that Right to life and personal liberty, should include right to privacy and human dignity etc. Despite that it has been an admitted shame that India still has the largest number of people defecating in open in the world. There are reported incidences of rape and murder of women in many places in India as women rely on open field for attending to the call of nature in morning and evening. The attempts like Community toi-let system, pay-and-use toilet system and schemes like ‘Mo Swabhiman -Mo Paikhana’ have been found to be less effective. In this connection the ‘Clean India Mission’ campaign launched by the Government of India in 2014 has been regarded as a right approach in that direction. Government of the day is actively considering the demand to convert the Right to Sanitation from a developmental right to a fundamental right. It would make the state more accountable and responsible. Against this background, the paper argues that spending huge money on that would yield good dividend in future for the country.

The Quest for a Global Age of Reason. Part II: Cultural Appropriation and Racism in the Name of Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-155
Author(s):  
Dag Herbjørnsrud ◽  
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Global Age ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment is more global and complex than the standard Eurocentric Colonial Canon narrative presents. For example, before the advent of unscientific racism and the systematic negligence of the contributions of Others outside of “White Europe,” Raphael centered Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in his Vatican fresco “Causarum Cognitio” (1511); the astronomer Edmund Halley taught himself Arabic to be more enlightened; The Royal Society of London acknowledged the scientific method developed by Ibn Al-Haytham (Alhazen). In addition, if we study the Transatlantic texts of the late 18th century, it is not Kant, but instead enlightened thinkers like Anton Wilhelm Amo (born in present-day’s Ghana), Phillis Wheatley (Senegal region), and Toussaint L’Ouverture (Haiti), who mostly live up to the ideals of reason, humanism, universalism, and human rights. One obstacle to developing a more balanced presentation of the Age of the Enlightenment is the influence of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and methodological nationalism. Consequently, this paper, part II of two, will also deal with the European Enlightenment’s unscientific heritage of scholarly racism from the 1750s. It will be demonstrated how Linnaeus, Hume, Kant, and Hegel were among the Founding Fathers of intellectual white supremacy within the Academy. Hence, the Age of Enlightenment is not what we are taught to believe. This paper will demonstrate how the lights from different “Global Enlightenments” can illuminate paths forward to more dialogue and universalism in the 21st century.

Freedom of Public Meeting in England Since 1914

1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 516-525
Author(s):  
Dell G. Hitchner
Keyword(s):  
Civil Liberties ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
English History ◽  
Total War ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
Public Meeting ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Personal Rights ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Government

To refute the maxim silent leges inter arma is one of the modern challenges to a democracy at war. It is usually recognized that when a state is at war many of the rights of personal liberty normally enjoyed by its citizens must be limited to prevent interference with the prosecution of hostilities. In international conflicts having an ideological basis, such limitations, if too severe, produce a somewhat embarrassing dilemma for a democratic state. The requirements of total war may necessitate at home some of the very objectionable features of government which are to be overthrown elsewhere; yet to be too lenient with dissident groups can well be disastrous. At all events, the government hesitates so to act as to invite its citizens to ask: “To what purpose is a war in defense of democracy if it begins by ending the very liberties which a people are asked to defend against external aggression?” Nevertheless, war conditions are not alone responsible for altered conceptions of personal rights. Internal developments in peace-time may also create a need for changes in such rules; the law cannot remain constant when the conditions upon which it is based are being transformed. Within a twenty-five-year period in English history, two major wars, as well as a series of domestic emergencies, have produced conditions sufficiently serious to arouse substantial sentiment favoring restrictions on civil liberties. At the same time, however, other equally determined groups, whose position is strengthened by the increased popularity of democratic ideals, have sought to combat such restrictions. The events of the period examined show the nature and the result of this conflict.

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