Taking God Seriously, but Not Too Seriously: The Divine Command Theory and William James' 'The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’

While some scholars neglect the theological component to William James’s ethical views in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” Michael Cantrell reads it as promoting a divine command theory (DCT) of the foundations of moral obligation. While Cantrell’s interpretation is to be commended for taking God seriously, he goes a little too far in the right direction. Although James’s view amounts to what could be called (and what Cantrell does call) a DCT because on it God’s demands are necessary and sufficient for the highest obligations, this is a view with characteristics unusual for a DCT. It only holds for some obligations; on it moral obligation does not derive from God’s authority; it is not obvious that James believes the God required by it even exists; we do not know what God’s demands are; and, finally, since we do not know them, we cannot act on them. (Lest there be any confusion, the titular phrase "taking God seriously, but not too seriously" describes William James' view of God and morality, not my own view.

Natural Law Ambiguities

I share with Fred Schauer the relatively unpopular belief that the positivist insistence that we keep separate the legal is from the legal ought is a logical prerequisite to meaningful legal criticism, and therefore, in the constitutional context, is a logical prerequisite to meaningful criticism of the Constitution. As Schauer argues, despite the modern inclination to associate positivism with conservatism, the positivist separation thesis, properly understood, facilitates legal criticism and legal reform, not reactionary acquiescence. If we want to improve law, we must resist the urge to see it through the proverbial rose-colored glasses; we must be clear that a norm\u27s legality implies nothing about its morality. To reverse the classical natural lawyer\u27s formulation of the issue, if we wish to make our laws just, we must first see that many of our laws are unjust, and if we are to understand that simple truth, we must understand that the legality of those norms implies nothing about their justice. Surely the lessons of positivism are more compelling, not less compelling, in the constitutional context where the capacity for self-delusion is so great, given the moralistic content and peculiar history of the Constitution, and where the stakes are highest: the consequences of merging constitutional fact with constitutional virtue are that we preclude even the logical possibility of fundamental criticism of our most foundational legal document. As I have argued at some length elsewhere, by merging in our own minds and in the public mind constitutional morality and critical morality, we have closed the door to meaningful criticism of the Constitution. The positivist\u27s classic and even enlightened insistence on the separation of law and morality, if it would free up criticism of constitutional norms, could bring a welcome breath of fresh air. Today, legal positivism is widely taken to imply not just a conservative stance against legal change, but much worse: a refusal even to engage the issue, a denial of the coherence of legal criticism, and a denial of the relevance, in some sense, of legal reform. Given the historical grounding of positivism in an insistence on the need for legal criticism and legal reform, this modern belief about the reactionary consequences of legal positivism is strikingly peculiar: how did black become white? Where did this belief, so widely shared yet so wildly at odds with both the clear history and the apparent logic of legal positivism, come from? In these comments I want to supplement Fred Schauer\u27s discussion and general defense of positivism with a brief response, in a sense, to Cover\u27s quite chilling indictment. I will ultimately argue that whatever the (limited) force of Cover\u27s indictment of the positivism of the abolitionist judges, that argument has no force against the positivism of the nonjudge constitutional critic. The critic, unlike the judge, is interested in competing theories of the relationship between law and morality, not as a guide to legal interpretation, but rather as a guide to clear-headed legal criticism. The constitutional critic, almost by definition, will rarely if ever be a judge. For such a critic, contrary to contemporary opinion and for the reasons stressed by the classical positivists, positivism does indeed facilitate the kind of constitutional criticism that natural law thinking obscures

Implementing Privacy Policy: Who Should Do What?

Academic scholarship on privacy has focused on the substantive rules and policies governing the protection of personal data. An extensive literature has debated alternative approaches for defining how private and public institutions can collect and use information about individuals. But, the attention given to the what of U.S. privacy regulation has overshadowed consideration of how and by whom privacy policy should be formulated and implemented. U.S. privacy policy is an amalgam of activity by a myriad of federal, state, and local government agencies. But, the quality of substantive privacy law depends greatly on which agency or agencies are running the show. Unfortunately, such implementation-related matters have been discounted or ignored— with the clear implication that they only need to be addressed after the “real” work of developing substantive privacy rules is completed. As things stand, the development and implementation of U.S. privacy policy is compromised by the murky allocation of responsibilities and authority among federal, state, and local governmental entities—compounded by the inevitable tensions associated with the large number of entities that are active in this regulatory space. These deficiencies have had major adverse consequences, both domestically and internationally. Without substantial upgrades of institutions and infrastructure, privacy law and policy will continue to fall short of what it could (and should) achieve

"Acquired wit" and Hobbesian education

This thesis analyzes and evaluates the scheme for civil education discussed in Thomas Hobbes’ political works. Hobbes argues in The Elements of Law, De Cive, and Leviathan that the preservation of political order requires that all subjects learn the rationally grounded principles of political theory. Some contemporary scholarship on this aspect of Hobbes’ political philosophy has confined its understanding of “Hobbesian education” to this: the sovereign’s system of true civil doctrines and the means for their dissemination. I argue that for the system of Hobbesian civil doctrines to function as it is intended, a public must also receive instruction in formal argumentation, a skill Hobbes calls “acquired wit” (L viii.13). I will show that the subjects’ cultivation of their individual reasoning abilities is required so the subjects are able to (1) understand the philosophical foundations of the sovereign’s power, (2) sufficiently resist the allure of obfuscating eloquence and other falsehoods, and (3) conduct themselves in accordance with Hobbes’ natural laws. Civil peace in a Hobbesian system requires that the public be able to tell the difference between sound and unsound inferences. If Hobbes did intend for the sovereign to instruct the public in “acquired wit,” contemporary scholars who have offered sympathetic appraisals of Hobbesian education are further vindicated

Civil War and Revolution

The vast majority of work on the ethics of war focuses on traditional wars between states. In this chapter, I aim to show that this is an oversight worth rectifying. My strategy will be largely comparative, assessing whether certain claims often defended in discussions of interstate wars stand up in the context of civil conflicts, and whether there are principled moral differences between the two types of case. Firstly, I argue that thinking about intrastate wars can help us make progress on important theoretical debates in recent just war theory. Secondly, I consider whether certain kinds of civil wars are subject to a more demanding standard of just cause, compared to interstate wars of national-defence. Finally, I assess the extent to which having popular support is an independent requirement of permissible war, and whether this renders insurgencies harder to justify than wars fought by functioning states

PrIC3: Property Directed Reachability for MDPs

IC3 has been a leap forward in symbolic model checking. This paper proposes PrIC3 (pronounced pricy-three), a conservative extension of IC3 to symbolic model checking of MDPs. Our main focus is to develop the theory underlying PrIC3. Alongside, we present a first implementation of PrIC3 including the key ingredients from IC3 such as generalization, repushing, and propagation

Kant, the Practical Postulates, and Clifford’s Principle

In this paper I argue that Kant would have endorsed Clifford’s principle. The paper is divided into four sections. In the first, I review Kant’s argument for the practical postulates. In the second, I discuss a traditional objection to the style of argument Kant employs. In the third, I explain how Kant would respond to this objection and how this renders the practical postulates consistent with Clifford’s principle. In the fourth, I introduce positive grounds for thinking that Kant would have endorsed this principle

A renaissance of the doctrine of Rebus Sic Stantibus?

Once the “popular plaything of Realpolitiker” the doctrine of rebus sic stantibus post the 1969 VCLT is often described as an objective rule by which, on grounds of equity and justice, a fundamental change of circumstances may be invoked as a ground for termination. Yet recent practice from States such as Ecuador, Russia, Denmark and the United Kingdom suggests that it is returning with a new livery. They point to an understanding based on vital States’ interests––a view popular among scholars such as Erich Kaufmann at the beginning of the last century

Imperative change and obligation to do

The ambition of the paper is to provide a solution to the problem posed by Von Wright (1999): how is it possible that the two actions, one of producing P and the other of preventing P can have different deontic status, the former being obligatory and the latter being forbidden. The solution for the problem is sought for by an investigation into connections between imperative and deontic logic. First, it is asked whether a solution could be found in Lemmon's (1965) system of "change logic", using his idea on connection between logic of orders being in force and deontic logic. The answer is the negative one. Next, the connection between Lemmon's imperative logic and deontic logic given in Aqvist's paper - "Next" and "Ought" (1965) - is analyzed. Than, the Lemmon's treatment of imperatives is restricted to the natural language imperatives and Aqvist's way of connecting imperative and deontic logic is modified accordingly. Some principles for the natural language imperatives are established (the negation rule ; the law of contraposition for imperative conditionals) and a simple "global" semantics is developed. The notion of "opposite action" is introduced and it is given an important role in semantics. Finally, a solution for von Wright's problem is given. In the closing sections some further topics for investigation are hinted: one of them being the connection between Aqvist's epistemic- imperative conception of interrogatives and "epistemic obligations", the other being formalization of the idea that imperatives create and re-create obligation patterns that can be described in deontic terms