The maqālāt of Abū Qāsim al-Balḫī contain several passages devoted to legal theory. The most important source found there is some extracts of K. al-futyā, a legal treatise by al-Ǧāḥiẓ of which until now only fragments remained, containing the criticisms addressed by al-Naẓẓām to the companions of the Prophet. This article provides a translation of these new extracts preceded by a study of the text and its place in the history of legal theory during this formative period of Islamic thought.

One of Averroes' earliest works is dedicated to law. The work comprises a summary of al-Ghazali's work on legal theory called al-Mustasfa min 'ilm al-usul. This volume presents a new edition of the Arabic text accompanied by a French translation and commentary. The edition is preceded by a study that draws attention to the main points of difference between the two philosophers.

Disparity in consumer ethics reflects cultural variations; these are differences in the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes one culture from another. This study explores the differences in consumer ethics across cultural dimensions using Hofstede's (in Culture's consequences: international differences in work-related values, Sage, Beverly Hills, 1980) model (collectivism, masculinity, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance) and Muncy and Vitell (in J Bus Res 24(4): 297-311, 1992) consumer ethics model (i.e., illegal, active, passive, and no harm). This is the first (...) study to empirically explore consumer ethics using these two major constructs. Seven hundred sixty one African American consumers were used to test the four major hypotheses developed in this study. Current research has revealed that there are significant differences in ethics between consumers who score high and consumers who score low on Hofstede's four cultural dimensions. In general, this research revealed that consumers who score high on collectivism, high on uncertainty avoidance, low on masculinity, and low on power distance scales reject questionable activities more than consumers who score low on collectivism, low on uncertainty avoidance, high on masculinity, and high on power distance. This study should prove valuable to international marketers because the Hofstede cultural model allows managers to identify differences in consumer ethics across different cultures and thus provides a theoretical base for designing effective marketing strategies. (shrink)

This study explores the ethical ideol-ogies and ethical beliefs of African American consumers using the Forsyth ethical position questionnaire (EPQ) and the Muncy-Vitell consumer ethics questionnaire (MVQ). The two dimensions of the EPQ (i.e., idealism and relativism) were the independent constructs and the four dimensions of the MVQ (i.e., illegal, active, passive and no harm) were the dependent variables. In addition, this paper explores the consumer ethics of African Americans across four demographic factors (i.e., age, education, gender, and marital status). (...) A sample of 315 African American consumers was used to explore these relationships. Results confirmed that consumers who score high on the idealism scale are more likely to reject questionable consumer activities, but there was no relationship between relativism and consumers' rejection of questionable activities. Older, more educated and married consumers rejected questionable activities more than younger, less educated and single consumers. Gender did not have any significant relationship to consumers' ethical orientation. (shrink)

This paper examines the moral case for a right to religious accommodation, which requires that religious conduct be free of any serious burdens placed on it by the state. Two different types of normative argument for this right are outlined and rejected. The first appeals to religion as a ‘basic good’, and the second to religion as an ‘intense preference’. In place of these, I suggest that a third type of argument has greater prospects of success. Religious accommodation is justified (...) on the grounds that religious conduct is a ‘derivative good’— that is, it derives its value from its being necessary for something else, namely, the integrity of the religious person. (shrink)

This article develops the argument that the state must provide parental subsidies if, and to the extent that, individuals would, under certain specified hypothetical conditions, purchase ‘insurance cover’ that would provide the funds they need for adequate childrearing. I argue that most citizens would sign up to an insurance scheme, in which they receive a guarantee of a means-tested parental subsidy in return for an obligation to pay a progressive income tax to fund the scheme. This argument from insurance bolsters (...) the weaker case that proponents of parental subsidies might offer were they to rely exclusively on arguments from fair play and efficiency. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical examination of the strongest defenses of the pure lifetime view, according to which justice requires taking only people's whole lives as relevant when assessing and establishing their distributive entitlements and obligations. The paper proposes that we reject a pure lifetime view and replace it with an alternative view, on which some time-specific considerations--that is to say, considerations about how people fare at specific points in time--have nonderivative weight in determining what our obligations are to them.

In this paper we ask whether liberal egalitarians can endorse workfare policies that require that welfare recipients should work in return for their welfare benefits. In particular, we focus on the fairness-based case for workfare, which holds that people should be responsible for their own welfare since they would otherwise impose unfair costs on others. Two versions of the fairness-based case are considered: The first defends workfare on the grounds that it would form part of an unemployment insurance scheme that (...) individuals would endorse under certain hypothetical conditions that are salient for the purposes of determining just public policy. The second appeals to the notion of reciprocity in order to justify the requirement that people work for their benefits. We cast doubt on both of these arguments for workfare. Neither argument shows that the unconditional provision of welfare benefits is unjust; hence, the fairness case for workfare is inconclusive. (shrink)

This study was designed to examine the determinants of and differences between the ethical beliefs of two groups of Japanese students in religious and secular universities. Multiple regression analysis revealed that students of the Japanese religious university perceived that young, male, relativistic, and opportunistic students tended to behave less ethically than did older, female, and idealistic students. Students of the Japanese secular university perceived that male, achievement-oriented, and opportunistic students tended to behave less ethically than did female and experience-oriented students. (...) Opportunism was found to be one of the most important determinants in explaining misconduct. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) revealed that students of the Japanese secular university tended to score higher on achievement and humanism, and lower on theism and positivism than did students of the Japanese religious university. In addition, students of the Japanese secular university were somewhat more sensitive to academic dishonesty practices than were students of the Japanese religious university. (shrink)

This study examines the role of acculturation in shaping consumers’ views of ethics. Specifically, it examines the relationships between the desire to keep one’s original culture, the desire to adopt the host culture, and the four dimensions of the Muncy and Vitell (Journal of Business Research Ethics 24(4), 297, 1992) consumer ethics scale. Using two separate immigrant populations – one of former Middle-Eastern residents now living in the U.S. and the other of Asian immigrants in the U.S. – results indicate (...) that those who want to keep their original culture are less tolerant of unethical consumer activities, while those who are more willing to adopt the host culture are more tolerant of these same consumer activities. Furthermore, the immigrants in both studies who are more tolerant of unethical consumer activities are those who are generally somewhat younger and with less formal education. The relationship between gender and consumer ethics was not significant. (shrink)

Racial profiling appears to be morally more troubling when the racial group that is the object of the profile suffers from background injustice. This article examines two accounts of this intuition. The responsibility-based account maintains that racial profiling is morally more problematic if the higher offender rate within the profiled group is the result of social injustices for which other groups in society are responsible. The expressive harm based account maintains that racial profiling is more problematic if it makes background (...) injustice vivid and thereby causes the profiled to feel resentment. I raise problems with both accounts and suggest a third account. On the humiliation-based account, individuals who are subjected to racial profiling in a context of background injustice are placed in a situation in which they cannot prevent appearing to onlookers in a demeaning way. (shrink)

The logic of (commutative integral bounded) residuated lattices is known under different names in the literature: monoidal logic [26], intuitionistic logic without contraction [1], H BCK [36] (nowadays called by Ono), etc. In this paper we study the -fragment and the -fragment of the logical systems associated with residuated lattices, both from the perspective of Gentzen systems and from that of deductive systems. We stress that our notion of fragment considers the full consequence relation admitting hypotheses. It results that this (...) notion of fragment is axiomatized by the rules of the sequent calculus for the connectives involved. We also prove that these deductive systems are non-protoalgebraic, while the Gentzen systems are algebraizable with equivalent algebraic semantics the varieties of pseudocomplemented (commutative integral bounded) semilatticed and latticed monoids, respectively. All the logical systems considered are decidable. (shrink)

This paper studies, with techniques ofAlgebraic Logic, the effects of putting a bound on the cardinality of the set of side formulas in the Deduction Theorem, viewed as a Gentzen-style rule, and of adding additional assumptions inside the formulas present in Modus Ponens, viewed as a Hilbert-style rule. As a result, a denumerable collection of new Gentzen systems and two new sentential logics have been isolated. These logics are weaker than the positive implicative logic. We have determined their algebraic models (...) and the relationships between them, and have classified them according to several standard criteria of Abstract Algebraic Logic. One of the logics is protoalgebraic but neither equivalential nor weakly algebraizable, a rare situation where very few natural examples were hitherto known. In passing we have found new, alternative presentations of positive implicative logic, both in Hilbert style and in Gentzen style, and have characterized it in terms of the restricted Deduction Theorem: it is the weakest logic satisfying Modus Ponens and the Deduction Theorem restricted to at most 2 side formulas. The algebraic part of the work has lead to the class of quasi-Hilbert algebras, a quasi-variety of implicative algebras introduced by Pla and Verdú in 1980, which is larger than the variety of Hilbert algebras. Its algebraic properties reflect those of the corresponding logics and Gentzen systems. (shrink)

This paper studies, with techniques ofAlgebraic Logic, the effects of putting a bound on the cardinality of the set of side formulas in the Deduction Theorem, viewed as a Gentzen-style rule, and of adding additional assumptions inside the formulas present in Modus Ponens, viewed as a Hilbert-style rule. As a result, a denumerable collection of new Gentzen systems and two new sentential logics have been isolated. These logics are weaker than the positive implicative logic. We have determined their algebraic models (...) and the relationships between them, and have classified them according to several standard criteria of Abstract Algebraic Logic. One of the logics is protoalgebraic but neither equivalential nor weakly algebraizable, a rare situation where very few natural examples were hitherto known. In passing we have found new, alternative presentations of positive implicative logic, both in Hilbert style and in Gentzen style, and have characterized it in terms of the restricted Deduction Theorem: it is the weakest logic satisfying Modus Ponens and the Deduction Theorem restricted to at most 2 side formulas. The algebraic part of the work has lead to the class of quasi-Hilbert algebras, a quasi-variety of implicative algebras introduced by Pla and Verdú in 1980, which is larger than the variety of Hilbert algebras. Its algebraic properties reflect those of the corresponding logics and Gentzen systems. (shrink)

This article examines how a just society must address the needs of its imprudent members. I defend compulsory insurance as an answer to this question. It has been assumed that compulsory insurance can only be justified on paternalistic grounds. I argue that this assumption is incorrect, and defend non-paternalistic compulsory insurance. To display the merits of NPCI, I identify a trilemma that arises for views about how to address the needs of the imprudent, including libertarian and so-called ‘ luck -egalitarian’ (...) views. I then suggest that NPCI enables us to escape the trilemma. (shrink)