Christine Korsgaard’sSelf-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrityis an impressive endeavour to synthesize the ethics of Plato and Kant in a comprehensive account of action and agency that locates the key to understanding both in self-constitution. A purportedly comprehensive account of action and agency will fail on its own terms if it cannot adequately account for some morally salient phenomenon. Korsgaard’s account fails to adequately account for the possibility of evil actions and evil people. If self-constitution is key to action and agency, (...) then we must abandon the Platonic and Kantian elements that Korsgaard endorses.L’ouvrage de Christine Korsgaard intituléSelf-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrityreprésente un remarquable travail de synthèse des éthiques platonicienne et kantienne qui, de manière exhaustive, rend compte de l’action et de l’agentivité sous le prisme de la constitution de soi. Toute tentative de saisie parfaite de l’action et de l’agentivité en termes propres ne saurait aboutir sans une prise en compte adéquate d’un quelconque phénomène moral saillant. L’approche de Korsgaard ne prend pas suffisamment en compte la possibilité du mal sous forme d’actions ou d’individus. Si la constitution de soi demeure centrale pour l’action et l’agentivité, alors il faudra mettre à l’écart les éléments platoniciens et kantiens que Korsgaard fait siens. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have been impressed with the thought that moral saints and moral monsters—or, evil people, to put it less sensationally—“mirror” one another, in a sense to be explained. Call this the mirror thesis. The project of this paper is to cash out the metaphorical suggestion that moral saints and evil persons mirror one other and to articulate the most plausible literal version of the mirror thesis. To anticipate, the most plausible version of the mirror thesis implies that (...) evil persons mirror moral saints insofar as the characters of each are marked by similar aretaic properties: suffering from extremely vicious character traits—in a sense to be explained—suffices for being evil whereas possessing extremely virtuous character traits similarly suffices for moral sainthood. (shrink)

This book examines what makes someone an evil person and how evil people are different from merely bad people. Rather than focusing on the "problem of evil" that occupies philosophers of religion, Barry looks instead to moral psychology—the intersection of ethics and psychology. He provides both a philosophical account of what evil people are like and considers the implications of that account for social, legal, and criminal institutions. He also engages in traditional philosophical reasoning strongly informed by psychological research, (...) especially abnormal and social psychology. In response to the popularity of phrases like "the axis of evil" and the ease with which politicians and others describe their opponents as "evil," Barry sets out to make clear just what it is to be an evil person. (shrink)

However liberalism is best understood, liberals typically seek to defend a wide range of liberty. Since same-sex marriage [henceforth: SSM] prohibitions limit the liberty of citizens, there is at least some reason to suppose that they are inconsistent with liberal commitments. But some have argued that it is the recognition of SSM—not its prohibition—that conflicts with liberalism’s commitments. I refer to the thesis that recognition of SSM is illiberal as “The Charge.” As a sympathetic liberal, I take The Charge seriously (...) enough to consider and ultimately reject it. Ultimately, I contend that The Charge is simply misguided and that arguments for it either fail to find support in some liberal principle or else find support from some illiberal principle. (shrink)

There is a decided consensus that Kantian ethics yields an absolutist case against torture – that torture is morally wrong and absolutely so. I argue that while thereisa Kantian case against torture, Kantian ethics does not clearly entail absolutism about torture. I consider several arguments for a Kantian absolutist position concerning torture and explain why none are sound. I close by clarifying just what the Kantian case against torture is. My contention is that while Kantian ethics does not support a (...) variety ofmoralabsolutism about torture, it does suggest a strong version oflegalabsolutism. (shrink)

Typically, philosophers interested in evil have typically been concerned with reconciling (or not) the apparent existence of gratuitous suffering with the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient and supremely loving and caring Deity. Undeniably, ‘evil’ functions as a mass noun: note the intelligibility of asking “Why is there so much evil in the world?” But ‘evil’ sometimes functions as an adjective and is used variously to describe persons, actions, desires, motives, and intentions; Joel Feinberg even speaks of “evil smells.” In (...) what follows, I shall consider the relationship between evil actions, evildoers—that is, persons disposed to perform evil actions—and evil people. Roughly, I defend the simple thesis that being an evil person just is being an evildoer. (shrink)

Experience clearly suggests that most legal philosophers and ethicists are not surprised to be told that liberal states cannot permissibly prohibit same-sex marriage (henceforth: SSM). It is somewhat less clear just what the appropriate liberal strategy is and should be in defense of this thesis. Rather than try to defend SSM directly, I shall proceed indirectly by arguing that SSM prohibitions are indefensible on liberal grounds. Initially, I shall consider what I take to be the most powerful liberal argument against (...) SSM prohibitions and account for my reservations about it. Then, I shall propose an alternative argument with roots in constitutional law that since SSM prohibitions do not survive liberal scrutiny, they must be rejected. (shrink)

It is plausible that being an evil person is a matter of having a particularly morally depraved character. I argue that suffering from extreme moral vices—and not consistently lacking moral vices, for example—suffices for being evil. Alternatively, I defend an extremity account concerning evil personhood against consistency accounts of evil personhood. After clarifying what it is for vices to be extreme, I note that the extremity thesis I defend allows that a person could suffer from both extremely vicious character traits (...) while possessing some modest virtue as well. By contrast, consistency theses rule out this possibility by definition. This result does not suggest that extremity accounts are flawed, however, since, as I argue, the thesis that evil people must lack moral virtue altogether effectively defines evil people out of existence and prematurely privileges skepticism about evil personhood. Ultimately, I contend that an extremity account is most consistent with common intuitions about putative evil persons as well as plausible assumptions about aretaic evaluations of character quite generally. (shrink)

It is reasonably well accepted that the explanation of intentional action is teleological explanation. Very roughly, an explanation of some event, E, is teleological only if it explains E by citing some goal or purpose or reason that produced E. Alternatively, teleological explanations of intentional action explain “by citing the state of affairs toward which the behavior was directed” thereby answering questions like “To what end was the agent’s behavior directed?” Causalism—advocated by causalists—is the thesis that explanations of intentional action (...) are both causal and teleological. By contrast, non-causalism—advocated by non-causalists—is the thesis that explanations of intentional action are teleological but not causal. Familiarly, the problem of causal deviance plagues causalism. But while some have supposed that the problem is grave enough that causalism is bound to suffer a global breakdown, the rumors of causalism’s demise are greatly exaggerated. In what follows, I note that every instance of causal deviance is also an instance of teleological deviance and that teleological deviance is a problem for causalist and non-causalist alike, a problem that causalists may be better able to deal with. Or so I argue. (shrink)

I contend that there are two dogmas that are still popular among philosophers of action: that agents can only desire what they think is good and that they can only intentionally pursue what they think is good. I also argue that both dogmas are false. Broadly, I argue that our best theories of action can explain the possibility of intentionally pursuing what one thinks is not at all good, that we need to allow for the possibility of intentionally pursuing what (...) one think is not at all good, and that if we can intentionally pursue what we think is not at all good then we can desire it on similar grounds. (shrink)

What makes someone an evil person? How are evil people different from merely bad people? Do evil people really exist? Can we make sense of evil people if we mythologize them? Do evil people take pleasure in the suffering of others? Can evil people be redeemed? Peter Brian Barry answers these questions by examining a wide range of works from renowned authors, including works of literature by Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Oscar (...) Wilde alongside classic works of philosophy by Nietzsche and Aristotle. By considering great texts from literature and philosophy, Barry examines whether evil is merely a fiction. _The Fiction of Evil_ explores how the study of literature can contribute to the study of metaphysics and ethics and it is essential reading for those studying the concept of evil or philosophy of literature at undergraduate level. (shrink)

Title from title page of source document.

Some philosophers have argued that the concepts of evil and wickedness cannot be well grasped by those inclined to a naturalist bent, perhaps because evil is so intimately tied to religious discourse or because it is ultimately not possible to understand evil, period. By contrast, I argue that evil—or, at least, what it is to be an evil person—can be understood by naturalist philosophers, and I articulate an independently plausible account of evil character.

It is plausible that being an evil person is a matter of having a particularly morally depraved character. I argue that suffering from extreme moral vices—and not consistently lacking moral vices, for example—suffices for being evil. Alternatively, I defend an extremity account concerning evil personhood against consistency accounts of evil personhood. After clarifying what it is for vices to be extreme, I note that the extremity thesis I defend allows that a person could suffer from both extremely vicious character traits (...) while possessing some modest virtue as well. By contrast, consistency theses rule out this possibility by definition. This result does not suggest that extremity accounts are flawed, however, since, as I argue, the thesis that evil people must lack moral virtue altogether effectively defines evil people out of existence and prematurely privileges skepticism about evil personhood. Ultimately, I contend that an extremity account is most consistent with common intuitions about putative evil persons as well as plausible assumptions about aretaic evaluations of character quite generally. (shrink)

The use of punitive torture was practiced historically and has hardly been purged from our current practices. Fairly little attention has been paid to its justification, perhaps because many theorists of punishment have thought it so obviously unjust. But there is a fairly straightforward retributivist argument that punitive torture is sometimes morally justified: roughly, punitive torture is proportionate to the wrongdoing of some malefactors, such that, in the absence of overriding reasons, torturing them as punishment for their wrongdoing is morally (...) justified. However, Barry contends that the retributivist should strongly suspect that there will always be overriding reasons that defeat retributivist reasons that would otherwise justify punitive torture. And if even retributivism cannot justify punitive torture, it is doubtful that any justification is forthcoming. (shrink)

Some jurisdictions acknowledge, as a matter of positive law, the relevance of evil to capital punishment. At one point, the state of Florida counted that the fact that a murderer’s crime was “especially wicked, evil, atrocious or cruel” as an aggravating factor for purposes of capital sentencing. I submit that Florida may be onto something. I consider a thesis about capital punishment that strikes me as plausible on its face: if capital punishment is ever morally permissible, it is permissible as (...) a response to evil. Call this the Punishment as a Response to Evil thesis, or PRE. If capital punishment is not morally permissible as a response to evil, then, according to PRE, it is not morally permissible, period. PRE admits of at least two different readings: on the first, if capital punishment is ever morally justified it is justified as a punishment for evil crimes; on the second, if capital punishment is ever morally justified it is justified as a punishment for evil people. While this first version of PRE has found advocates in both philosophy and forensic psychiatry, I argue against this first reading of PRE and for the second. To secure this conclusion I appeal to an account of evil and evil personhood that I have developed elsewhere. (shrink)

In this journal, Luke Russell defends a sophisticated dispositional account of evil personhood according to which a person is evil just in case she is strongly and highly fixedly disposed to perform evil actions in conditions that favour her autonomy. While I am generally sympathetic with this account, I argue that Russell wrongly dismisses the mirror thesis—roughly, the thesis that evil people are the mirror images of the morally best sort of persons—which I have defended elsewhere. Russell’s rejection of the (...) mirror thesis depends upon an independently implausible account of moral sainthood, one that is implausible for reasons that Russell himself suggests in another context. Indeed, an account of moral sainthood that parallels Russell’s account of evil personhood is plausible for the same reasons that his account of evil personhood is, and that suggests that Russell himself is actually committed to the mirror thesis. (shrink)

Almost everyone allows that conditions can obtain that exempt agents from moral responsibility—that someone is not a morally responsible agent if certain conditions obtain. In his seminal Freedom and Resentment, Peter Strawson denies that the truth of determinism globally exempts agents from moral responsibility. As has been noted elsewhere, Strawson appears committed to the surprising thesis that being an evil person is an exempting condition. Less often noted is the fact that various Strawsonians—philosophers sympathetic with Strawson’s account of moral (...) responsibility—at least appear to have difficulty incorporating evil persons into their accounts of moral responsibility. In what follows, I argue that Strawson is not committed to supposing that being evil is an exempting condition—at least, that he can allow that evil persons are morally responsible agents. (shrink)

The theoretical commitments of Rust Cohle, the philosopher detective of True Detective, tend toward nihilism. Cohle appears to be a tough‐minded naturalist. True Detective is a deep enough show that it offers some genuinely penetrating insights into evil and evil personhood. In True Detective evil is Errol William Childress: the "Lawnmower Man" of True Detective, with a yen for torturing, raping, murdering, and ritualistically posing young women. Childress is described as a "green‐eared spaghetti monster". Some philosophers suggest that there is (...) a link between evil people and monsters. Most philosophers agree that being an evil person is qualitatively worse than being a bad person or even a very, very bad person. Cohle does some bad stuff— and with impunity, by his own account— however he is not a pederast and he is not a child killer. That is a qualitative distinction. Childress seems to have killed more people than Cohle; that is a quantitative distinction. (shrink)

BackgroundThe Supreme Court of Canada removed the prohibition on physicians assisting in patients dying on 6 February 2015. Bill C-14, legalising medical assistance in dying in Canada, was subsequently passed by the House of Commons and the Senate on 17 June 2016. As this remains a divisive issue for physicians, the Canadian Neurosurgical Society has recently published a position statement on MAID.MethodsWe conducted a cross-sectional survey to understand the views and perceptions among CNSS members regarding MAID to inform its position (...) statement on the issue. Data was collected from May to June 2016.ResultsOf the 300 active membes of the CNSS who recevied the survey, 89 respondents completed the survey, 71% of whom were attending neurosurgeons and 29% were neurosurgery residents. Most respondents,74.2%, supported the right of physicians to participate in MAID with 7.8% opposing. 37% had current patients in their practice fitting the criteria for MAID. 23.6% had been asked by patients to assist with MAID, but only 11% would consider personally providing it. 84% of neurosurgeons surveyed supported the physicians’ right to conscientious objection to MAID while 21% thought attending surgeons should be removed from the inquiry and decision-making process. 43.8% agreed that the requirment to refer a patient to a MAID service should be mandatory. Glioblastoma multiforme, quadriplegia/quadriparesis secondary to spinal tumour/trauma and Parkinson’s disease were the most common suggested potential indications for MAID among the neurosurgical population.ConclusionsOur results demonstrate that most neurosurgeons in Canada are generally supportive of MAID in select patients. However, they also strongly support the physicians’ right to conscientious objection. (shrink)

A milestone in Wittgenstein scholarship, this collection of essays ranges over a wide area of the philosopher's thought, presenting divergent interpretations of his fundamental ideas. Different chapters raise many of the central controversies that surround current understanding of the Tractatus, providing an interplay that will be particularly useful to students. Taken together, the essays present a broader and more comprehensive view of Wittgenstein's intellectual interests and his impact on philosophy than may be found elsewhere.The thirteen chapters treat topics from both (...) periods of Wittgenstein's work: More than half are devoted to his early thought, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of 1921, reflecting a growing interest today among philosophers in reexamining this seminal book, while three chapters treat the Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953. The remaining chapters discuss such "nonstandard" topics as philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and anthropology.Contents: The Early Wittgenstein and the Middle Russell, Kenneth Blackwell; Frege and Wittgenstein, Michael Dummett; Wittgenstein and the Theory of Types, Hide Ishiguro; The So-called Realism of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Brian McGuinness; The Logical Independence of Elementary Propositions, David Pears; The Rise and Fall of the Picture Theory, Peter Hacker; The Picture Theory and Wittgenstein's Later Attitude to It, Erik Stenius; Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy of Mind, Anthony Kenny; A Theory of Language?, G. E. M. Anscombe; Im Anfang war die Tat, Peter Winch; Wittgenstein's Full Stop, D. Z. Phillips; Quote: Judgments from Our Brain, Paul Ziff; Wittgenstein and the Fire Festivals, Frank Cioffi, Index.Irving Block is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at The University of Western Ontario. (shrink)

Disputes over territory are a major contributing factor to the disruption of international relations. We believe that a cumulative, integrated, and continuously updated resource providing information about such disputes in an easily accessible form would be of benefit to intelligence analysts, military strategists, political scientists, and also to historians and others concerned with international disputes. We propose an ontology-based strategy for creating such a resource. The resource will contain information about territorial disputes, arguments for and against claims pertaining to sovereignty, (...) proffered evidence for such claims, political and military motives (overt or hidden), and associated conflicts. Our approach is designed to address several issues surrounding the representation of geopolitical conflict, including the tracking and individuation of disputes and the validation of disseminated information. (shrink)

First published in 1998, this volume argues that two conditions need to be met for any agreement between people with conflicting desires to count as an unforced one, namely, that the parties argue as if they had equal power and that their antipathy to being coerced exceeds their desire to coerce others. These conditions entail objective moral principles and a theory of justice, modifying and developing Rawls' contractarian theory, but without the veil of ignorance. They support Rawls on basic civil (...) liberties and constitutional liberal democratic government, including religious tolerance, anti-paternalism, anti-racism and anti-sexism, but dispute his Difference Principle, his circumstances of justice, Laws of Peoples, reflective equilibrium, and freedom of conscience as a basic liberty. The book also gives a contractarian account of epistemology, metaethics, education, the rationality of being moral, the rights of animals and other non-persons, and the rights of indigenous peoples. Writers such as Brian Barry, R.S. Peters, Isaiah Berlin, Vinit Haksar, Jurgen Habermas, R.M. Hare, Philip Pettit, Derek Parfit, Michael Smith, Peter Geach, Philippa Foot, Bronwyn Davies, Quentin Skinner and Will Kymlicka are also discussed. (shrink)

Discusses the philosophy of science and the process of scientific discovery, and looks at ethical issues such as genetic engineering, prolonging life through technology, and the role of the physician.

Sir Peter Medawar wasn't only a Nobel prize-winning immunologist but also a writer about science and scientists. This entertaining selection presents the best of his writing, with a new foreword by Stephen Jay Gould, one of his greatest admirers.

COVID-19 often manifests with different outcomes in different patients, highlighting the complexity of the host-pathogen interactions involved in manifestations of the disease at the molecular and cellular levels. In this paper, we propose a set of postulates and a framework for systematically understanding complex molecular host-pathogen interaction networks. Specifically, we first propose four host-pathogen interaction (HPI) postulates as the basis for understanding molecular and cellular host-pathogen interactions and their relations to disease outcomes. These four postulates cover the evolutionary dispositions involved (...) in HPIs, the dynamic nature of HPI outcomes, roles that HPI components may occupy leading to such outcomes, and HPI checkpoints that are critical for specific disease outcomes. Based on these postulates, an HPI Postulate and Ontology (HPIPO) framework is proposed to apply interoperable ontologies to systematically model and represent various granular details and knowledge within the scope of the HPI postulates, in a way that will support AI-ready data standardization, sharing, integration, and analysis. As a demonstration, the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework were applied to study COVID-19 with the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), leading to a novel approach to rational design of drug/vaccine cocktails aimed at interrupting processes occurring at critical host-coronavirus interaction checkpoints. Furthermore, the host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) relevant to COVID-19 were predicted and evaluated based on prior knowledge of curated PPIs and domain-domain interactions, and how such studies can be further explored with the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework is discussed. (shrink)

Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin were political theorists of the first rank whose impact on the study of political science in North America has been profound. A study of their writings is one of the most expeditious ways to explore the core of political science; comparing and contrasting the positions both theorists have taken in assessing that core provides a comprehensive appreciation of the main options of the Western tradition. In fifty-three recently discovered letters, Strauss and Voegelin explore the nature (...) of their similarities and differences, offering trenchant observations about one another's work, about the state of the discipline, and about the influences working on them. The correspondence fleshes out many assumptions made in their published writings, often with a frankness and directness that removes all vestiges of ambiguity. Included with the correspondence are four pivotal re-published essays—"Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections", "The Gospel and Culture", "Immortality: Experience and Symbol", and "The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy" —and commentaries by James L. Wiser, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Stanley Rosen, Thomas J. J. Altizer, Timothy Fuller, Ellis Sandoz, Thomas L. Pangle, and David Walsh. (shrink)

_Faith and Political Philosophy_ consists of fifty-three letters between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, two of the most important political theorists of the twentieth century. In this correspondence, Strauss and Voegelin explore the nature of their similarities and differences, offering insightful observations about one another's work, about the state of the discipline, and about the influences working on them. The letters shed light on many assumptions made in their published writings, often with an openness that removes all vestiges of uncertainty.

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

This collection uses Susan Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'" as a foundation from which to explore current topics related to camp. It recognizes Sontag's work as significant in spurring examination of the phenomenon but also limited in its descriptive rather than philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual nature.

DNA replication requires the unwinding of the parental duplex, which generates (+) supercoiling ahead of the replication fork. It has been thought that removal of these (+) supercoils was the only method of unlinking the parental strands. Recent evidence implies that supercoils can diffuse across the replication fork, resulting in interwound replicated strands called precatenanes. Topoisomerases can then act both in front of and behind the replication fork. A new study by Sogo et al. [J Mol Biol 1999;286:637–643 (Ref. 1)], (...) using a topological analysis, provides the best evidence that precatenanes exist in negatively supercoiled, partially replicated molecules in vivo. BioEssays 21:805–808, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Current COVID-19 pandemic and previous SARS/MERS outbreaks have caused a series of major crises to global public health. We must integrate the large and exponentially growing amount of heterogeneous coronavirus data to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechanisms, in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs. Ontologies have emerged to play an important role in standard knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. We have initiated the development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO). (...) As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is an open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. In this article, the general architecture and the design patterns of the CIDO are introduced, CIDO representation of coronaviruses, phenotypes, anti-coronavirus drugs and medical devices (e.g. ventilators) are illustrated, and an application of CIDO implemented to identify repurposable drug candidates for effective and safe COVID-19 treatment is presented. (shrink)

Foucault is often thought to have a great deal to say about the history of madness and sexuality, but little in terms of a general analysis of government and the state.; This volume draws on Foucault's own research to challenge this view, demonstrating the central importance of his work for the study of contemporary politics.; It focuses on liberalism and neo- liberalism, questioning the conceptual opposition of freedom/constraint, state/market and public/private that inform liberal thought.

Almost every country today contains adherents of different religions and different secular conceptions of the good life. Is there any alternative to a power struggle among them, leading most probably to either civil war or repression? The argument of this book is that justice as impartiality offers a solution. According to the theory of justice as impartiality, principles of justice are those principles that provide a reasonable basis for the unforced assent of those subject to them. The object of this (...) book is to set the theory out, explain its rationale, and respond to a variety of criticism that have been made of it. As the second volume of his work-in-progress, A Treatise on Social Justice, this work lies at the heart of a thriving academic debate which the author has played a key role in shaping. (shrink)