This article discusses three main orientations in recent works of legal and political theory about the family-contract-based, community-based, and rights-based-and argues that none of these takes adequate account of two paradoxical features of family life and of the family's relationship to the state. A coherent political and legal theory of the family in the contemporary United States requires recognition of the relational rights and responsibilities intrinsic to family life.

Il est constamment fait appel, dans le discours juridique et politique contemporains, à la notion de droits en France, aux Etats-Unis et en beaucoup d'autres lieux. Pourquoi? Comment faire sens de ces usages? Quel rôle exact cette notion joue-t-elle dans le fonctionnement réel du droit positif et comment aide-t-elle à l'analyser? Martha Minow et Robert M. Cover, dans les deux textes traduits dans cet ouvrage, invitent à reprendre la réflexion sur ces sujets.

ExcerptThe reasons why individual nations and even individual people subscribe to notions of human rights vary enormously. Rationales range from idealism to realpolitik and sound in competing registers of theology, social contract, nature, utility, and game theory.1 Pervasive in discussions of human rights is the dignity of each person as both a reality and a normative guide. Capacious and ambiguous, this notion of dignity may invite agreement precisely because different people project different meanings onto it. Its recognition, though, can inspire (...) attitudes of respect and civility even when we disagree. Dignity thus serves less as a foundation and more as a lodestar, an aspiration. Justice Thurgood Marshall once explained, “A child born to a [B]lack mother in a state like Mississippi… has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It’s not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.”2. (shrink)

Should people make demands for justice relating to events occurring in the past, even the distant past? What does and what should happen when they do? These questions frame the problems of historical justice that became especially palpable during the twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries and contributed to innovations in the design and use of tribunals, truth commissions and reparations initiatives. These responses to calls for historical justice deal with objections and difficulties in their own ways. Objections to such innovations (...) include charges that they depart too radically from established legal forms, that they reopen old wounds, that they inevitably rely on stale and partial evidence, that their costs are excessive or divert resources from more pressing needs, and that they do little to prevent future atrocities or to heal social rifts. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Justice, Gender, and the Family. By Susan Moller Okin. Making All the Difference. By Martha Minow.

In this timely, provocative volume, essayists including Susan Moller Okin, Catherine A. MacKinnon, Cass Sunstein, Martha Minow, William Galston, and Sara McLanahan argue positions on sexuality, on the family, and on the proper role of law in these areas.

My purpose in this paper is to enquire into whether law can forgive. This line of inquiry must be distinguished from other possible avenues of investigation into the relation between law and forgiv...

This book is a study of ancient views about 'moral luck'. It examines the fundamental ethical problem that many of the valued constituents of a well-lived life are vulnerable to factors outside a person's control, and asks how this affects our appraisal of persons and their lives. The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of them have received the attention they deserve. This book thus recovers a central dimension of Greek (...) thought and addresses major issues in contemporary ethical theory. One of its most original aspects is its interrelated treatment of both literary and philosophical texts. The Fragility of Goodness has proven to be important reading for philosophers and classicists, and its non-technical style makes it accessible to any educated person interested in the difficult problems it tackles. This new edition features an entirely new preface by Martha Nussbaum. (shrink)

Should laws about sex and pornography be based on social conventions about what is disgusting? Should felons be required to display bumper stickers or wear T-shirts that announce their crimes? This powerful and elegantly written book, by one of America's most influential philosophers, presents a critique of the role that shame and disgust play in our individual and social lives and, in particular, in the law.Martha Nussbaum argues that we should be wary of these emotions because they are associated (...) in troubling ways with a desire to hide from our humanity, embodying an unrealistic and sometimes pathological wish to be invulnerable. Nussbaum argues that the thought-content of disgust embodies "magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity that are just not in line with human life as we know it." She argues that disgust should never be the basis for criminalizing an act, or play either the aggravating or the mitigating role in criminal law it currently does. She writes that we should be similarly suspicious of what she calls "primitive shame," a shame "at the very fact of human imperfection," and she is harshly critical of the role that such shame plays in certain punishments.Drawing on an extraordinarily rich variety of philosophical, psychological, and historical references--from Aristotle and Freud to Nazi ideas about purity--and on legal examples as diverse as the trials of Oscar Wilde and the Martha Stewart insider trading case, this is a major work of legal and moral philosophy. (shrink)

This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. The papers, many of them previously inaccessible to non-specialist readers, explore such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical issues; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and styles; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. Nussbaum investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves (...) emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rules. She argues that this ethical conception cannot be completely and appropriately stated without turning to forms of writing usually considered literary rather than philosophical. It is consequently necessary to broaden our conception of moral philosophy in order to include these forms. Featuring two new essays and revised versions of several previously published essays, this collection attempts to articulate the relationship, within such a broader ethical inquiry, between literary and more abstractly theoretical elements. (shrink)

Theories of social justice are necessarily abstract, reaching beyond the particular and the immediate to the general and the timeless. Yet such theories, addressing the world and its problems, must respond to the real and changing dilemmas of the day. A brilliant work of practical philosophy, Frontiers of Justice is dedicated to this proposition. Taking up three urgent problems of social justice neglected by current theories and thus harder to tackle in practical terms and everyday life, Martha Nussbaum seeks (...) a theory of social justice that can guide us to a richer, more responsive approach to social cooperation. The idea of the social contract--especially as developed in the work of John Rawls--is one of the most powerful approaches to social justice in the Western tradition. But as Nussbaum demonstrates, even Rawls's theory, suggesting a contract for mutual advantage among approximate equals, cannot address questions of social justice posed by unequal parties. How, for instance, can we extend the equal rights of citizenship--education, health care, political rights and liberties--to those with physical and mental disabilities? How can we extend justice and dignified life conditions to all citizens of the world? And how, finally, can we bring our treatment of nonhuman animals into our notions of social justice? Exploring the limitations of the social contract in these three areas, Nussbaum devises an alternative theory based on the idea of capabilities. She helps us to think more clearly about the purposes of political cooperation and the nature of political principles--and to look to a future of greater justice for all. (shrink)

Shepherd propounds a theory of mind with a fair claim to be better than Hume’s at explaining the sources of commonly held human beliefs about causal necessity due largely to her relational theory of sense perception. In comparison with Hume’s account, it incorporates a more sophisticated treatment of mental representation, especially the role of relational structure and logical form. Most important, perhaps, Shepherd’s theory enforces the division, obscured by Hume, between the evidence of necessity and the metaphysical foundation of necessity.

A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum.

A pathbreaking new study of women and morality How do people decide what is "good" and what is "bad"? How does a society set moral guidelines -- and what happens when the behavior of various groups differs from these guidelines? Martha Saxton tackles these and other fascinating issues in Being Good , her history of the moral values prescribed for women in early America. Saxton begins by examining seventeenth-century Boston, then moves on to eighteenth-century Virginia and nineteenth-century St. Louis. (...) Studying women throughout the life cycle -- girls, young unmarried women, young wives and mothers, older widows -- through their diaries and personal papers, she also studies the variations due to different ethnicities and backgrounds. In all three cases, she is able to show how the values of one group conflicted with or developed in opposition to those of another. And, as the women's testimonies make clear, the emotional styles associated with different value systems varied. A history of American women's moral life thus gives us a history of women's emotional life as well. In lively and penetrating prose, Saxton argues that women's morals changed from the days of early colonization to the days of westward expansion, as women became at once less confined and less revered by their men -- and explores how these changes both reflected and affected trends in the nation at large. (shrink)

This study argues both that the proofs are ultimately unconvincing and that Plato was aware of the problems. The Phaedo is shown as a truly dialectical philosophical conversation about the immortality of the soul.

Using data collected from 280 full-time employees from a variety of organizations, this study examined the effects of employee perceptions of the behavioral integrity (BI) of their supervisors on job tension. The moderating effect of procedural justice (PJ) on this relationship also was examined. Substitutes for leadership theory (Kerr and Jermier, 1978) and psychological contract theory (Rousseau, Empl Responsib Rights J 2:121–139, 1989) were used as the theoretical foundations for the hypothesized relationships. Results indicated a negative relationship between BI and (...) job tension. PJ moderated this relationship such that it was weakened under conditions of high PJ. Implications for research and managers are discussed. (shrink)

The doctor patient relationship starts with a story. Doctors' notes, a patient's chart, the recommendations of ethics committees and insurance justifications all hinge on written and verbal narrative interaction. The "practice" of narrative profoundly affects decision making, patient health and treatment and the everyday practice of medicine. In this edited collection, the contributors provide conceptual foundations, practical guidelines and theoretical considerations central to the practice of narrative ethics.

Visual Agnosia is a comprehensive and up-to-date review of disorders of higher vision that relates these disorders to current conceptions of higher vision from cognitive science, illuminating both the neuropsychological disorders and the nature of normal visual object recognition.Brain damage can lead to selective problems with visual perception, including visual agnosia the inability to recognize objects even though elementary visual functions remain unimpaired. Such disorders are relatively rare, yet they provide a window onto how the normal brain might accomplish the (...) complex task of vision. Visual Agnosia reviews a century of case studies of higher-level visual deficits following brain damage, places them in the general context of current neuroscience, and draws relevant conclusions about the organization of normal visual processing. It is unique in drawing on research in cognitive psychology, computational vision, visual neurophysiology, and neuropsychology to interpret the agnosias and draw inferences from them about visual object recognition.Following a historical account of agnosia research, Visual Agnosia offers a taxonomy of a wide range of agnosia syndromes, describing and interpreting the syndromes in terms of the latest theoretical models of visual processing and ultimately bringing them to bear as evidence on a variety of questions in the study of higher vision.Martha J. Farah is Associate Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Visual Agnosia is included in the Issues in Biology of Language and Cognition series, edited by John Marshall. (shrink)

The ethics of Aristotle , and virtue ethics in general, have enjoyed a resurgence of interest over the past few decades. Aristotelian themes, with such issues as the importance of friendship and emotions in a good life, the role of moral perception in wise choice, the nature of happiness and its constitution, moral education and habituation, are finding an important place in contemporary moral debates. Taken together, the essays in this volume provide a close analysis of central arguments in Aristotle's (...) Nicomachean Ethics and show the enduring interest of the questions Aristotle raises. (shrink)

The biology of early life adversity explores how social experiences early in life affect physical and psychological health and well-being throughout the life course. In our previous work, we argued that narratives emerging from and about this research field tend to focus on harm and lasting damage with little discussion of reversibility and resilience. However, as the Science and Technology Studies literature has demonstrated, scientific research can be actively taken up and transformed as it moves through social worlds. Drawing on (...) fieldwork with actors in education and juvenile corrections in the US Pacific Northwest, we found that they employed the biology of early life adversity not only to promote prevention but also to argue for changes within their own institutions that would allow them to better serve children and youth who have experienced adversity and trauma. Our study shows that biosocial narratives are neither inherently liberatory nor inherently oppressive but that the situated narrative choreographies in which they are enrolled are essential for their political effects. In our case, we show how these biosocial narratives have been articulated with knowledge and practices from restorative justice and trauma-informed care to reimagine the social meaning of the biology of early life adversity. (shrink)

A primary problem in the area of natural language processing has been semantic analysis. This book looks at the semantics of natural languages in context. It presents an approach to the computational processing of English text that combines current theories of knowledge representation and reasoning in Artificial Intelligence with the latest linguistic views of lexical semantics. The book will interest postgraduates and researchers in computational linguistics as well as industrial research groups specializing in natural language processing.

This paper argues that Locke has a representative theory of sensitive knowledge. Perceivers are immediately aware of nothing but sensory ideas in the mind; yet perceivers think of real external substances that correspond to and cause those ideas, and they are warranted in believing that those substances exist (at that time). The theory poses two questions: what warrants the truth of such beliefs? What is it in virtue of which sensory ideas represent external objects and how do they make perceivers (...) think of those objects? Both the epistemic and semantic issues need to be addressed. This paper urges that Locke's basic account of warrant is roughly reliabilist. The causal origin of sensory ideas assures that, in general, sense based beliefs are true. Locke defines the limit of this warrant by the theoretical point that we cannot discuss skeptical doubt without assuming the truthfulness of our perceptual faculty. Turning to the semantic question, the paper argues that ideas are mental modifications or entities. They are not intrinsically representative (satisfiable), but rather represent only by virtue of their causal origin. They merely “track” the presence of substances and their qualities. Ideas nevertheless prompt perceivers to think of their causes. This is roughly because sensory ideas have a specific mental role, namely, to serve as marks for distinguishing substances and their respective qualities for purposes of action. The paper suggests that, for Locke, the challenge posed by the semantic veil of ideas is to explain this externally directed marking function within bounds of his anti‐innatism. But it concludes that his answers to the twin questions fit together reasonably well. (shrink)