Liberal Self-Determination in a World of Migration

This book focuses on three key questions regarding the movement of persons across international borders: (1) What gives some residents of a liberal society a right to be considered citizens of that society such that they have a claim to make decisions with regard to its political future? (2) Do citizens of a liberal society have a prima facie right to exclude prospective immigrants despite their commitment to the values of freedom and equality? And (3) if citizens have this prima facie right to exclude prospective immigrants, are there moral requirements regarding how they may exercise it? The book therefore tackles the most pressing philosophical questions that arise for a theory that does not endorse a human right to immigrate: the questions of who exercises self-determination in the area of immigration, why they have such a right in the first place, and how they should go about exercising it.

Evangelical Women and Secular Society in New Zealand: An Investigation into Feminism as an Ideology of Empowerment

<p>This thesis examines the resurgence of evangelicalism in New Zealand and the conflicting nature of the lives that evangelical women in New Zealand live. Evangelicalism in New Zealand is growing and evolving and thus evangelical women are by necessity adapting to their secular setting whilst maintaining their faith. This study reveals many interesting findings, illustrating the often contradictory and challenging issues that evangelical women must face as they identify with feminism as a secular symbol while maintaining a conservative evangelical faith. Evangelical women in New Zealand today are living in two worlds. The women have a strong sense of identity and faith within evangelicalism however there are contradictions. Simultaneously there is a strong influence of secular liberal society which is evident through the women's identification with feminist values. What has been discovered is that evangelical women can successfully live in two separate worlds – one secular and one religious. They can be women of faith while at the same time living their lives in a secular society. Similarly there is a significant gap between rhetoric and reality in evangelical women's lives – what evangelical women articulate regarding gender roles in theory is not necessarily what occurs in practice. These challenges are defined by society and thus are a useful tool to assist in the understanding of the conflicts evangelical women have to negotiate on a daily basis.</p>

Evangelical Women and Secular Society in New Zealand: An Investigation into Feminism as an Ideology of Empowerment

<p>This thesis examines the resurgence of evangelicalism in New Zealand and the conflicting nature of the lives that evangelical women in New Zealand live. Evangelicalism in New Zealand is growing and evolving and thus evangelical women are by necessity adapting to their secular setting whilst maintaining their faith. This study reveals many interesting findings, illustrating the often contradictory and challenging issues that evangelical women must face as they identify with feminism as a secular symbol while maintaining a conservative evangelical faith. Evangelical women in New Zealand today are living in two worlds. The women have a strong sense of identity and faith within evangelicalism however there are contradictions. Simultaneously there is a strong influence of secular liberal society which is evident through the women's identification with feminist values. What has been discovered is that evangelical women can successfully live in two separate worlds – one secular and one religious. They can be women of faith while at the same time living their lives in a secular society. Similarly there is a significant gap between rhetoric and reality in evangelical women's lives – what evangelical women articulate regarding gender roles in theory is not necessarily what occurs in practice. These challenges are defined by society and thus are a useful tool to assist in the understanding of the conflicts evangelical women have to negotiate on a daily basis.</p>

Freiheit heißt Leben

Liberty means to live. That is what Christian Jasper is convinced about regarding the understanding of liberty in German law and Christian faith. The author introduces the reader in the letter Samaritanus bonus on the care of persons in the critical and terminal phases of life which the roman catholic Congregation for the doctrine of the faith published on 14th July 2020. Therefore, the author compares theological and legal understandings of the idea of liberty. Whereas the German Constitutional Court puts much emphasis on the defence of autonomy the author highlights that human dignity implies more than the individual right to act arbitrarily. Modern societies require individuals who behave moral. The challenge is to avoid misunderstandings between the different faculties and to find wise compromises between moral expectations and legal rules in a liberal society. The lecture of Samaritanus bonus may help to improve the public discussion.

Conceptualizing China’s spatial lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic: a neo-liberal society or a pre-liberal one?

Purpose The draconian measures to lock down communities and cities in China during the COVID-19 pandemic are unprecedented in human history. First the mega-city of Wuhan, then the province of Hubei, and eventually the whole nation of China, were shut down, surveilled and governed in a way that was identical to the 17th century plague-stricken European town re-portrayed and analyzed by Foucault. Instead of categorizing China’s COVID-19-triggered spatial and social governance as an ad hoc and hence abnormal disciplinary mechanism, this essay argues that the spatial lockdown and social control in China during the COVID-19 pandemic express the long existing and well-established governance model of China: that of a pre-liberal disciplinary society. Design/methodology/approach A disciplinary society using “the meticulous exercise of the right of the sword” with neither liberal values nor liberal practices, China’s swift re-configuration into a pre-liberal disciplined society during the COVID-19 pandemic invalidates a neo-liberal reading of the Chinese governance. Furthermore, the radical spatial and social control measures not only expose the fundamentally illiberal nature of the Chinese governance but also suggest its institutional dependence on its Leninist nomenklatura system. Findings With this institutional dependence, draconian spatial and social control measures are likely to be continuously carried on in China after the COVID-19 crisis, albeit in a less brutal manner. Originality/value It offers a conceptual and theoretical framework to understand China's socio-spatial governance.

KEEPING JUSTICE (LARGELY) OUT OF CHARITY: PLURALISM AND THE DIVISION OF LABOR BETWEEN CHARITABLE ORGANIZATIONS AND THE STATE

Justice can be pursued by the state, or through voluntary charity. This paper seeks to contribute to the debate about the appropriate division of labor between government and charitable agencies by developing a positive account of the charity sector's moral foundations. The account given here is grounded in a legal conception of charity, as a set of subsidies and privileges designed to cultivate a wide variety of activities aimed at enhancing civic virtue and autonomy. Among other things, this implies that a charity sector oriented largely around the pursuit of justice will come at a moral cost to a liberal society, at least when the state is in a position to take the greater share of the responsibility. So, a positive account of charity provides at least a pro tanto reason for preferring a division of labor in which the state takes a greater share of the responsibility for pursuing justice. As well as developing and defending this conception in its own right, we apply it in offering some criticisms and enhancements of existing views about the division of labor.

Enforcement may crowd out voluntary support for COVID-19 policies, especially where trust in government is weak and in a liberal society

Effective states govern by some combination of enforcement and voluntary compliance. To contain the COVID-19 pandemic, a critical decision is the extent to which policy makers rely on voluntary as opposed to enforced compliance, and nations vary along this dimension. While enforcement may secure higher compliance, there is experimental and other evidence that it may also crowd out voluntary motivation. How does enforcement affect citizens’ support for anti–COVID-19 policies? A survey conducted with 4,799 respondents toward the end of the first lockdown in Germany suggests that a substantial share of the population will support measures more under voluntary than under enforced implementation. Negative responses to enforcement—termed control aversion—vary across the nature of the policy intervention (e.g., they are rare for masks and frequent for vaccination and a cell-phone tracing app). Control aversion is less common among those with greater trust in the government and the information it provides, and among those who were brought up under the coercive regime of East Germany. Taking account of the likely effectiveness of enforcement and the extent to which near-universal compliance is crucial, the differing degrees of opposition to enforcement across policies suggest that for some anti–COVID-19 policies an enforced mandate would be unwise, while for others it would be essential. Similar reasoning may also be relevant for policies to address future pandemics and other societal challenges like climate change.

Role of Informal Education, and Human-Agent on Insurance Industry

This article discusses how the insured persons learn to be responsible for managing the risk via insurance and the role of agents in this process. So that, a dozen of purposively selected persons were interviewed with unstructured and open-ended questions. Interpretation of so generated qualitative information suggests that people rarely appreciate insurance, and agents are as dominant as the product in buying decisions. Employing informal education to make citizens responsible for their risk management is almost ineffective. The role of agents in enabling customers as prudent risk managers by raising their awareness about different insurance products is observed as a conflict of interests between the state and the agent. In a liberal society, persuading people by a profit-making company is dominant than the state-delivered awareness program. These findings not only question the role of the insurance agent, a human resource for facilitating people to learn about insurance, as commission-based workers instead of professional but also problematize the legitimacy of transferring the state's responsibility of educating citizens to the private companies.

Patron Saints: (1) The European Tradition of Aristocratic Liberalism

This chapter examines the key authors and texts that provided conservative liberalism and Ordo-liberalism with a distinctive aristocratic character: its paternalism, its scepticism about democracy, its discomfort with the commercial aspects of capitalism, and its belief in a hierarchy of ability. From their interwar origins, conservative liberalism and Ordo-liberalism were about more than the economic order. They were fundamentally about the kind of social and cultural order that was appropriate to a sustainable liberal society and that would stem the crisis of moral and intellectual values. Referencing of canonical texts with which the cultivated bourgeois intelligentsia was familiar had the additional value of endowing conservative liberals and Ordo-liberals with prestige. This chapter examines the most cited authors and texts in this literature: Lord John Acton, Julien Benda, Jacob Burckhardt, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gustave Le Bon, Frédéric Le Play, José Ortega y Gasset, Bertrand Russell, George Santayana, and Alexis de Tocqueville. It also looks at Friedrich Hayek’s attempt to establish the Acton-Tocqueville Society. These authors embodied a faith in an aristocracy of knowledge, a distrust of plebeian culture, and a belief in the quality of the inner life and in character as the foundation of a liberal society. Aristocratic liberalism rested on two fears: of unbridled democracy and of the despotic state; of anarchy and servitude. The chapter closes with reflections on the changing fortunes of aristocratic liberalism and their implication for conservative liberalism and Ordo-liberalism.