Search results for ""author arthur ripstein""

Kant casts a long shadow over contemporary debates in political philosophy. The Kantian roots of ideas of dignity, autonomy, equality and freedom under law are widely acknowledged. Kant’s own developments of those ideas in his explicitly political writings are taken up less frequently. The aim of this volume is to help bring those contributions out of the shadows. The articles and essays explore various dimensions of Kant’s complex and powerful picture of the relation between morality and politics that Kant develops.

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A waiter spills hot coffee on a customer. A person walks on another person’s land. A moored boat damages a dock during a storm. A frustrated neighbor bangs on the wall. A reputation is ruined by a mistaken news report. Although the details vary, the law recognizes all of these as torts, different ways in which one person wrongs another. Tort law can seem puzzling: sometimes people are made to pay damages when they are barely or not at fault, while at other times serious losses go uncompensated. In this pioneering book, Arthur Ripstein brings coherence and unity to the baffling diversity of tort law in an original theory that is philosophically grounded and analytically powerful.Ripstein shows that all torts violate the basic moral idea that each individual is in charge of his or her own person and property, and never in charge of another individual’s person or property. Battery and trespass involve one person wrongly using another’s body or things, while negligence injures others by imposing risks to them in ways that are inconsistent with their independence. Tort remedies aim to provide a substitute for the right that was violated.As Private Wrongs makes clear, tort law not only protects our bodies and property but constitutes our entitlement to use them as we see fit, consistent with the entitlement of others to do the same.

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The past two decades have seen renewed scholarly and popular interest in the law and morality of war. Positions that originated in the late Middle Ages through the seventeenth century have received more sophisticated philosophical elaboration. Although many contemporary writers appeal to ideas drawn from Kant's moral philosophy, his explicit discussions of war have not yet been brought into their proper place in these debates. Ripstein argues that a special morality governs war because of its distinctive immorality: the wrongfulness of entering or remaining in a condition in which force decides everything provides the standards for evaluating the grounds of initiating war, the ways in which wars are fought, and the results of past wars. The book is a major intervention into just war theory from the most influential contemporary interpreter and exponent of Kant's political and legal theories. Beginning from the difference between governing human affairs through words and through force, Ripstein articulates a Kantian account of the state as a public legal order in which all uses of force are brought under law. Against this background, he provides innovative accounts of the right of national defence, the importance of conducting war in ways that preserve the possibility of a future peace, and the distinctive role of international institutions in bringing force under law.

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Arthur Ripstein's lectures focus on the two bodies of rules governing war: the jus ad bellum, which regulates resort to armed force, and the jus in bello, which sets forth rules governing the conduct of armed force and applies equally to all parties. Ripstein argues that recognizing both sets of rules as distinctive prohibitions, rather than as permissions, can reconcile the supposed tension between them. He contends that the law and morality of war are in fact aligned, because the central wrong of war is that war is the condition which force decides. In his first lecture, "Rules for Wrongdoers," he explains how moral principles governing an activity apply even to those who are not permitted to engage in them. In his second lecture, "Combatants and Civilians," he develops a parallel account of the distinction between combatants and civilians. The volume includes an introduction by editor Saira Mohamed and subsequent essays by commentators Oona A. Hathaway, Christopher Kutz, and Jeff McMahan. Rules for Wrongdoers represents a major statement on the ethics of war by one of the most distinguished thinkers in the field.

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Markets are thought of by some as liberating the individual. Rather than a feudal system in which each is assigned a role or tasks by an authority, each is free to make decisions concerning how to use their resources and direct their productive activities in light of market prices for goods and services. These prices are not dictated but reflect the preferences of individuals, aggregated by an invisible hand. In this posthumous work, political philosopher Waheed Hussain argues that this way of thinking about markets obscures their systemic nature. He shows that a better way to think about the invisible hand is as a mechanism that drops each of us into a maze whose design is opaque to us. It liberates us from the direct bondage of a feudal system; but leaves us subordinate to an arbitrary authority, one whose character is harder to discern. Hussain locates this authority in the way the market shapes the options available to us, exercising what he calls an impersonal authority over each of us. According to Hussain, the market system is objectionable when and because it is arbitrary, governing us without giving anyone a voice concerning how the authority is exercised. This is incompatible with what Hussain takes to be fundamental to human freedom, the freedom to make choices in the face of an option set that one can make sense of as being available for good reasons, to which one can assent as a free person.

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