Natural law theory founds moral judgments on what, given the nature of human beings and ever-present circumstances, enables people to live together in thriving communities. The cognitive features of moral judgments--the claims of literal truth for these judgments about these matters and the readiness to have the judgments stand or fall with the evidence for those claims come front and centre with this characterization of natural law theory. Both what is good for human beings and what it is right and (...) wrong for them to do are matters of fact implied by what is required for their thriving; and so it is reasonable to hold that natural law theory is a variety of moral realism. So, if Hume is not a moral realist, he is not a natural law theorist. But I shall argue that Hume is not a moral realis; and this is what I shall undertake to do, in the course of establishing that he is a natural law theorist, indeed, a human nature natural law theorist. (shrink)

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The traditional problem of the social contract defies solution. Agents with the motivations traditionally assumed would not in the circumstances traditionally assumed voluntarily arrive at a contract or voluntarily keep it up, as we can now understand, more clearly than our illustrious predecessors, by treating the problem in terms not available to them: the terms of Prisoner's Dilemma and of the theory of public goods.

Authority does, of course, raise practical questions, and sometimes these have been so provocative as to amount to social crises. People in the awakening colonial countries have had to cope with a painful transition between old foreign authorities and new indigenous ones. In the metropolitan centers of colonial authority, especially in France, there has been profound agitation about received political forms, though fortunately this has not yet resulted in the catastrophic disintegration of civil authority which Italy and Germany experienced during (...) the rise of fascism. (shrink)

But there certainly can be such a thing. Either Cohen is wrong in conceiving of words as social institutions or this conception has led him to make a false inference.

Mr. Cohen's political geography is unexpectedly topical. His conception of political philosophy is not so advanced; however Cohen's disposition is all for forward movement. Insisting perhaps too strongly upon the etymology of "political," Cohen would even have us cease doing "political philosophy"; for, he says, there are no longer any truly sovereign and autonomous states left in the world. The era of the nation-state has vanished quite as definitely into the past as the era of the city-state. We live in (...) a "polycentric" world community, under a regime of law, though the world community is not itself a sovereign state, nor are there any sovereign states that are a part of it. The members of the world community are people, obliged to support whatever international laws and agencies of international collaboration there are, and there are many of them. To assert that there is a world community is to imply that there are no sovereign national states to impose obligations equally eminent or superior. (shrink)

The correlativity of rights and obligations is one of the few stock topics in the basic repertory of English-speaking philosophy th-t is considered suitable for assignment to philosophers specializing in political philosophy. It is a topic perennially discussed, chiefly for reasons that have little to do with its importance: namely, just because it is a recognized topic and because it appears to be a safely tidy one that lends itself readily to being tidied up further by formal or quasi-formal considerations. (...) For my part, I wish more effort went into discussing less tractable subjects like the individuation of rights and their delimitation vis-à-vis one another.What I have to contribute to the subject of correlativity, returning to the scene of my comments on David Lyons’ paper, “The Correlativity of Rights and Duties,” is mainly a stint of annual or biennial repair-work, designed to restore the obvious — the truth that rights do imply obligations and cannot be understood without accepting this implication. (shrink)

Models of culture and representations of changes in culture as changes between such models can be validated without making unreasonable departures from the validating conditions for basic narratives. Von Wright's logic of norms provides a useful analysis of the concept of rule and hence a basis for constructing models of cultures as systems of rules. As illustrations from historical work on the eighteenth-century origins of the British permanent civil service and on administrative developments in Tudor England show, the logic of (...) norms brings to light the logical issues that are of critical importance to changes in culture. These issues, like the models on which they depend, involve human expectations through involving human conventions; but one must also acknowledge parallel systems of description which can figure in covering-law explanations. (shrink)

Assorted fruit from forty years' writing, these essays by David Braybrooke discuss (in Part One of the book) a variety of concrete, practical topics that ethical concerns bring into politics: people's interests; their needs as well as their preferences; their work and their commitment to work; their participation in politics and in other group activities. Essays follow on the justice with which theme matters are arranged for and on the common good in which they are consolidated. Justice here (...) inspires a 'departures' approach, which moves from agreement on departures from commutative justice to agreement on measures of distributive justice needed to forestall such departures. Another essay (first published here) radically undermines the odd but entrenched belief that utilitarianism classically licenced, even prescribed, systematically sacrificing the happiness of some people to give others greater pleasure. Part II and Part III of the book concentrate upon the subject of settled social rules, which are devices for securing the objectives treated in Part I. Part II shows that rules are ubiquitous in ethics, since there are no virtues without rules, just as there are no (justified) rules; without virtues. Part Two also shows that rules are as ubiquitous in social phenomena as the causal regularities sought by one school of social science. Part III captures the dialectic of history at least in part by a logical analysis of changes in rules following the onset of quandaries. It then considers how political choices can be both prudent, by keeping within duly considered incremental limits, and yet imaginative enough to escape the recent embarrassments generated by social choice theory. Characteristically versatile in topic and style, Braybrooke offers original light on all theme subjects. One reader has commented, ' His] prose is elegant and always a pleasure to read. Some of the pieces are nothing short of brilliant.' Which did the reader have in mind? Readers may differ (they already have) on just which pieces they would rank highest. (shrink)

Substituting comparative censuses for the hedonistic calculus that figures in standard utilitarianism, Braybrooke excludes gratuitous sacrifices also of happiness short of life-sacrifices.