Heroic Action and Its Discontents: Safe Horizon’s Response to 9/11

Based on first-hand qualitative research, this article describes and analyzes the significant role that a local, New York City-based social service agency played in responding to 9/11; the sources of its notable ability to provide assistance to individuals and families affected by this terrorist attack; and the structural strains and unanticipated divisions within the agency that the heroism of its fervid engagement nevertheless engendered.

The Yardstick of Manners

The interdependence of etiquette consumers and producers makes the contemporary etiquette guide a book of rules informed by realism rather than one etched from the behavior of the comfortable. While the acquisition of good manners facilitates comfort and mobility, the yardstick of behavior, like the measure of standard language, evolves with the times and thus is never a mere instrument of conformity.

On the Rights of Undocumented Children

Changes in immigration laws over the last three to four decades have given rise to unprecedented numbers of undocumented children. However, as others have argued, policies regarding the control of undocumented migration have had deleterious effects on undocumented children and their basic access to social rights. Undocumented youth in the United States can legally attend K-12 education, but cannot legally work, vote, receive financial aid, or drive in most states. Their situation calls for a reexamination of immigration laws and a recasting of the frame that has been used to promote their inclusion.

What Body Parts Do We Owe Each Other?

The American experience in organ transplantation illuminates the attitudes and practices that underlie the ongoing failure to establish a national health insurance system. In both spheres, the public makes a sharp divide between the well-being of intimates and the well-being of strangers. Private and public duties remain distinct; obligations recognized on a personal level do not expand public commitments. As a result, individuals must shift for themselves, whether they require an organ donor or a doctor. In the world of transplantation as in the world of health care more generally, we are all on our own.

Creating Chaos at the Borders

The morbidity and mortality issues likely to arise for geriatric superstars are not unlike those already realized for so-called miracle babies. The therapeutic imperative and other social pressures, the technological imperative, financial interests, and media hyping have driven the overzealous medical-science pursuits of very old individuals and very young fetal infants. This article discusses lessons learned and lessons expected.

Five Challenges to Legalizing Economic and Social Rights

In recent years, dozens of human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) across the globe have begun to advocate for economic and social rights, which represents a significant expansion of the human rights movement. This article investigates a central strategy that NGOs have pursued to realize these rights: legalization. Legalization involves specifying rights as valid legal rules and enforcing them through judicial or quasi-judicial processes. After documenting some of the progress made toward legalization, the article analyzes five unique challenges involved in legalizing economic and social rights. It is important to identify these challenges because they must be overcome if the human rights movement wishes to refute the notion that economic and social rights are inherently non-justiciable (and therefore, to some, invalid as rights). These challenges also point to the possibility that legalization is not the only, or even the best, strategic pathway to realize economic and social rights effectively.

Lost in Translation

Conservative, and particularly religious opponents of enhancement technologies and of prolonging life indefinitely face formidable challenges from policymakers who are largely liberated from any forms of Christian moral consensus. This is the predicament of Daniel Callahan and others who are unable to translate their inescapably religious objections in secular terms.

Justice: Plain Old and Distributive: Rejoinder to Charles Taylor

This paper argues that the views of Charles Taylor on justice in income and wealth distribution are fallacious, especially in regard to issues such as private property rights, justice, human rights, and theft. As to this last point, Taylor maintains it is possible, under certain circumstances, to “legitimately steal.” We regard this as a philosophical howler of the first order. We also demur from his contention that equity and equality can be used as synonyms.

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Getting to Peace? Negotiating with the LRA in Northern Uganda

Getting to peace is not a straightforward process. In Uganda, internal conflict has raged for more than 20 years between the Government and the Lord’s Resistance Army. The construction of a comprehensive negotiated settlement is at the mercy of conflicting ideologies and influences at the international, national and grassroots levels. This paper examines the Juba peace talks, the major actors in the negotiation process, and tension between prosecution and amnesty.

Faith and Development

A consensus now exists that secularization theory can no longer explain the worldwide persistence and spread of modern religious movements, with the exception of western and central Europe as well as intellectuals in general. This essay examines how these new religious forces have taken root in economic development and how that development has been shaped by those same forces. An assessment is made of Max Weber’s famous thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The article concludes with five major observations about religion and development in the modern world.

Cohabitation,Marriage, and Child Wellbeing: A Cross-National Perspective

Non-marital cohabitation has become widespread in modern, Western nations. It has led to dramatic declines in marriage rates and contributed to high levels of unwed births and lone-parent families, thus negatively affecting child wellbeing.

Secularism,American-Style

The American approach to secularism is distinctive, differing from the laicite of the French or the Turks in its greater friendliness to the public expression of religious beliefs and sentiments. Such arrangements are challenging to sustain, requiring constant renegotiation of acceptable boundaries, but may also provide a more fruitful way of drawing on the moral energies and insights of religion while keeping them contained within appropriate limits.

Socialist Heroes in East German Schoolbooks

Based on examples of socialist heroes from East German schoolbooks and teaching guides designed for elementary school, this essay examines the role of state ideology in primary education. It assesses the German curriculum of the now-defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR) and illuminates distinctions between civic education and political propaganda. It also shows how the curricular emphasis on socialist virtue helped to form “the socialist personality.”

Can We Have a Public Bioethic?

This essay examines the viability of a publically held, articulated, and enacted bioethic in America's democratic regime. The essay takes the writings of several thinkers associated with the President's Council on Bioethics as its point of departure. The essay draws attention to some of the enduring moral, political, religious, and intellectual currents inherent in American civil society that will continue to provide both resources for and obstacles to any publicly held bioethic in America.

Biotechnology and the Modern Liberal Project

Biotechnological enhancement of human capabilities reveals a characteristically modern stance toward nature: Human nature, as given, is an impediment to be overcome on the way to full human freedom. As a form of metaphysical partisanship, the biotech enterprise seems to further the political intention of Thomas Hobbes to nullify human diversity. Commerce in biotech enhancements, and the individual liberty such commerce instantiates, is likely to have the ironic effect of psychic homogenization.

Elements of Negativity: Volume and Proportion in Exposure to Negative Advertising

Recent studies contend that negative advertising benefits voters. However, these studies only measure the volume of negativity in campaigns, often relying on survey data on voter behavior coupled with estimates of negative ad exposure. Theories of information processing indicate that the proportion of negativity may yield influences spanning a range of judgments related to candidate construction and voting behavior, yielding effects that are different from the influence of sheer volume. Thus, I argue that the proportion of negativity also has an influence, and that it is likely more often to be detrimental. I examine this claim using survey data and conclude that prevailing accounts of the effects of negative advertising campaigns are underspecified and, as a result, potentially overly optimistic. Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Patience as a Political Virtue: Delayed Gratification and Turnout

A number of scholars have demonstrated that voter turnout is influenced by the costs of processing information and going to the polls, and the policy benefits associated with the outcome of the election. However, no one has yet noted that the costs of voting are paid on or before Election Day, while policy benefits may not materialize until several days, months, or even years later. Since the costs of voting must be borne before the benefits are realized, people who are more patient should be more willing to vote. We use a “choice game” from experimental economics to estimate individual discount factors which are used to measure patience. We then show that patience significantly increases voter turnout.

Public Intellectuals as Media Critics

In the 1940s, leading public intellectuals established a commission to reform the American press. Many of them initially favored heavy regulation of newspapers and other media. Though the men failed to change the press, their report lives on in schools of journalism.

Reformation in Islam?

Large segments of the Muslim world are experiencing a radical return to ancient doctrine, not a reformation. Unlike Christianity with a separation of legal structures from religious dogma, many groups within the Islamic world are moving toward the imposition of severe Islamic law (Sharia) while theology as understood in the West is blocked. Simultaneously the issuance of Islamic religious injunctions (fatwas) is becoming more arbitary and unregulated.

The Freedom of Expression in Global Perspective

This paper presents recent events including the Danish cartoon crisis occasion—a re-examination of John Stuart Mill’s argument for freedom of expression. Despite the appeal of liberalism, Mill’s philosophy had from the start been subject to intense criticism. The rise of political Islam opens a new phase in the debate; the difficulties pointed out by Mill’s critics are indicative of the obstacles that liberalism still faces.