The Moral Wrong of Colonialism: A Non-Instrumentalist Approach

Whether colonialism involves an intrinsic moral wrong or not happens to be an important question in contemporary political and legal philosophy. If colonialism is understood as a system that necessitates some form of intrinsic moral wrong then the process of epistemic decolonization can freely repeat the patterns of political relations prevailing in colonial regimes. However, understanding colonialism from a non-instrumentalist approach guides us to take a different path in the process of decolonization. This approach mandates for discontinuation of the wrongful political relation that was prevalent in colonial world. This article stands for a non-instrumentalist approach towards colonialism and regards the system of colonialism as intrinsic wrong. To that end, it challenges the predominant discourses that portray the wrong of colonialism from an instrumentalist approach. Moreover, it introduces new arguments to support Lea Ypi’s non-instrumentalist approach to the wrong of colonialism.

Losing Hope, Becoming Embittered

This chapter considers what happens to anger when people’s hopes for repair in the face of injustice are not realized. It argues that anger can evolve into the emotion of bitterness. Bitterness is a form of unresolved anger involving a loss of hope that an injustice or other moral wrong will be sufficiently acknowledged and addressed. And despite its unfortunate reputation as an inherently bad and destructive emotion, bitterness can be a prudentially rational, fitting, and morally appropriate response to injustice. Although it can lead to despair and inaction, some people who are bitter continue to be motivated to act against injustice even without hope that their efforts will be successful.

1. An introduction to the criminal law

It is neither easy to define crime nor identify the aims of criminal law but some characteristics may be universal to every crime, including that it involves public wrongs and moral wrongs. ‘Public wrongs’ reflect the important role of the public in punishing crimes. A crime incorporating a moral wrong implies that a ‘wrong’ is done or harm to others is involved but experience suggests that morality and criminal law are not coextensive. The chapter introduces students to thinking about criminalization and the need to guard against overcriminalization. It also examines the principal sources of criminal law: common law, statute, EU law, international law and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Problematically, important and serious offences and most defences in English law derive from common law rather than statute, and some offences—from public nuisance to gross negligence manslaughter—have been challenged recently on grounds of certainty and retrospectivity.

The role of template matching in the attribution of immorality

The sociology of culture provides tools to weigh in on key interdisciplinary debates that hinge around categorization and its underlying processes. For example, at present, there is widespread debate about how individuals come to perceive events as immoral. In this paper, I use sociological approaches to cultural meaning to test one of the leading theories of moral cognition: the idea that individuals attribute immorality through template matching. I use spatial measures of cultural meaning to define and locate a prototypical moral wrong. I then test the theory of template matching, and find evidence that distance from the typical moral transgression - in semantic space - is related to the time it takes to categorize an event as immoral or harmful. I then test these results on a corpus of naturally occurring text to assess their external validity. These studies provide empirical evidence supporting the notion that the attribution of immorality occurs through template matching. Furthermore, they also serve to illustrate that productive conversations can emerge when we take the insights that sociologists of culture and cognition have reached in the past few decades out of our disciplinary boundaries.

Ageism as a Hate Crime: The Case for Extending Aggravated Offences to Protect Age Groups

This article argues that hate crime laws in England and Wales should be extended to protect age groups by aggravating offences that are based on or motivated by hostility to age groups. I critically assess the following arguments for this: that age-related hate crime can impose greater psychological distress than equivalent non-hate crime and this justifies the increased punishments that aggravated offences offer; that hate crime laws can justifiably protect older people because older people are relatively vulnerable to crime; that extending aggravated offences to protect age groups can justifiably punish hate crime offenders for their increased culpability in contributing to marginalisation of age groups; and creating distinct aggravated offences for age-hostile crimes has symbolic value to reflect the grave moral wrong of these crimes and to communicate that the state is committed to eradicating discrimination against age groups.

What Is Exploitation?

Chapter 2 reviews academic accounts of exploitation. The dominant understanding of exploitation links it to a form of unfairness. Wertheimer argues that a transaction can have features that make it “specially” unfair, as when an employer has a monopoly on employment opportunities. Alternatively, an exchange can be unfair considering a structural injustice that systematically advantages the exploiter. In these cases, employers may have a political responsibility to address structural injustice to avoid exploitation. Contemporary accounts of exploitation also link it to a failure of respect for others. This failure of a duty of respect is linked to a specified duty of beneficence, where our entanglements with others serve to specify specific obligations to aid others in developing and maintaining their distinctive human capacities. The author argues that each of these accounts of exploitation picks out a different kind of moral wrong and is useful for understanding exploitation in different contexts.

Democratic legitimacy, political speech and viewpoint neutrality

The purpose of this article is to consider the question of whether democratic legitimacy requires viewpoint neutrality with regard to political speech – including extremist political speech, such as hate speech. The starting point of my discussion is Jeremy Waldron’s negative answer to this question. He argues that it is permissible for liberal democracies to ban certain extremist viewpoints – such as vituperative hate speech – because such viewpoint-based restrictions protect the dignity of persons and a social and moral environment of mutual respect. According to Waldron, well-drafted narrow hate speech bans are not democratically illegitimate, and they do not undermine systemic democratic legitimacy – that is, the legitimacy of a democratic political system. In contrast to Waldron, I will argue that democratic legitimacy requires viewpoint neutrality to respect persons as thinking agents. I will defend a civil libertarian doctrine of viewpoint neutrality, and this doctrine requires that citizens in liberal democracies ought to have a legal free speech right to do moral wrong – that is, a legal right to express and defend any political viewpoint or idea, even if it is morally wrong to express, or expose others to, such views. It will be argued that any viewpoint-based restriction on public discourse (including narrow hate speech bans) is democratically illegitimate, and that such restrictions undermine systemic democratic legitimacy.