James Bernard Murphy

AGAINST CIVIC SCHOOLING

A fierce debate about civic education in American public schools has erupted in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Many liberals and conservatives, though they disagree strongly about which civic virtues to teach, share the assumption that such education is an appropriate responsibility for public schools. They are wrong. Civic education aimed at civic virtue is at best ineffective; worse, it is often subversive of the moral purpose of schooling. Moreover, the attempt to impose these partisan conceptions of civic virtue on Americas students violates the civic trust that underpins vibrant public schools.

Rational choice theory as social physics

Donald Green and Ian Shapiro discover a curious gulf between the prestige of rational choice approaches and the dearth of solid empirical findings. But we can understand neither the prestige of rational choice theory nor its pathologies unless we see it as a variant of the equilibrium analysis found in physics, economics, and biology. Only such a global perspective on rational choice theory will reveal its core assumptions and the likely shape of its future in political science. In this light, the growing dominance of rational choice theory in political science is all but inevitable and its pathologies are all but inescapable.

Perspectives on power

There are many contrasting and seemingly incompatible concepts of power: the three dimensions of power, subjective and objective power, power‐to and power‐over, power as ability, power as influence, etc. I will argue that the best way to understand the unity of these notions of power is to consider power from the internal perspective of an agent deliberating about how to exercise power. But not all internal perspectives on power are equally illuminating: the conceptually richest perspective on power is the internal perspective of morally conscientious agents who seek to exercise power responsibly. Our analysis of power ought to track the distinctions and considerations of those who deliberate responsibly about the exercise of power. This internal and practical perspective on power will illuminate many theoretical puzzles about power.

The philosophy of positive law : foundations of jurisprudence

In this first book-length study of positive law, James Bernard Murphy rewrites central chapters in the history of jurisprudence by uncovering a fundamental continuity among four great legal philosophers: Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes and John Austin. In their theories of positive law, Murphy argues, these thinkers represent successive chapters in a single fascinating story. That story revolves around a fundamental ambiguity: is law positive because it is deliberately imposed (as opposed to customary law) or because it lacks moral necessity (as opposed to natural law)? These two senses of positive law are not coextensive yet the discourse of positive law oscillates unstably between them. What, then, is the relation between being deliberately imposed and lacking moral necessity? Murphy demonstrates how the discourse of positive law incorporates both normative and descriptive dimensions of law, and he discusses the relation of positive law not only to jurisprudence but also to the philosophy of language, ethics, theories of social order and biblical law.

Against Civic Education in Public Schools

Abstract Both liberals and conservatives agree that civic education must go beyond civic knowledge and civic skills to include proper civic motives and dispositions; that is, they all properly agree that civic education must aim at civic virtue, even if they disagree about which precise virtues ought to be learned. Unfortunately, both liberals and conservatives also agree that such an education in civic virtue is the responsibility of public schools. But just because civic virtues must be learned does not mean that they can be taught—let alone that they can be taught in school. By assessing the best empirical studies of the effectiveness of civic education in schools, I show that civic schooling aimed at civic virtue is at best ineffective and is, indeed, often counterproductive. Moreover, advocates of civic schooling argue that schools need a compelling moral purpose and that civic education is the most appropriate moral purpose in a diverse democratic society. These normative arguments fail to grasp that academic schooling already has a compelling moral purpose, namely, to impart the intellectual virtues, that is, those dispositions making us conscientious in the pursuit of truth. Civic schooling is either irrelevant to the intrinsic moral purpose of schooling or positively subversive of it. I show that the history of civic schooling is a history of the subordination of truth-seeking to some civic agenda, leading to the whitewashing and distortion of academic knowledge. Finally, I argue that civic schooling aimed at civic virtue is inherently partisan and thereby violates the civic trust that underpins vibrant public schools.

Nature, Custom, and Reason as the Explanatory and Practical Principles of Aristotelian Political Science

According to Aristotle, nature ( physis ), habit or custom ( ethos ), and reason ( logos ) are the first principles of social explanation as well as the first principles of moral excellence. Just as we explain the order found in a polity as the product of natural, customary, and rationally stipulated kinds of order, so we become excellent persons through our good natural potential, the development of that potential in right habits, and sound ethical reflection upon those habits. For Aristotle, nature and convention are not mutually exclusive; rather, nature, custom, and reason form a hierarchy such that custom presupposes nature, but cannot be reduced to it, while reason presupposes custom, but cannot be reduced to custom. It is argued that Aristotles account of social order is superior both to the prior Sophistic accounts and to the account in Aquinas. Because Aristotle roots the order of deliberate human action in the order of nature and the order of custom, he focuses his ethical analysis not on the abstract freedom of choice but on the concrete freedom of the person who must act.

The philosophy of customary law

Acknowledgments Preface Chapter One: Habit and Convention at the Foundation of Custom Chapter Two: Customary Law in Suarez Chapter Three: Jeremy Bentham on Custom Chapter Four: James C. Carters Natural Law Theory of Custom Epilogue: Custom and Law Index

Free Market Morals

ABSTRACT John Tomasi argues that a theory of justice should include economic liberty since it provides people with a way of living self-authored lives. However, as Aristotelians have pointed out, even seemingly neutral theories of justice rely on non-neutral conceptions of the good. In Tomasis case, the ideal of self-authorship assumes that it is good to exert economic agency and in so doing, exercise ones economic liberty. Thus, Tomasi equates self-authorship with participation in market activities, tacitly universalizing what is, in fact, a narrow and objectionable conception of the good.

Aristotle, Feminism, and Biology

In his ambitious article, &dquo;A Sociobiological Defense of Aristotle’s Sexual Politics,&dquo; Larry Arnhart succeeds in creating a lively three-way conversation between Aristotle, feminism, and contemporary biology-no mean feat! Arnhart shows with copious textual evidence that one may construct an Aristotelian sexual politics that comports both with contemporary feminism and with contemporary biology. Indeed, I would entitle his article: &dquo;Aristotelian Feminism in the Light of Modern Biology.&dquo; Arnhart persuasively shows that one can construct a feminist sexual politics on the basis of Aristotle’s writings that is consistent with modern biology. I propose to contribute to this conversation by adding to the number of voices; I hope to show that there is more than one feminism, more than one Aristotelianism, and more than one sociobiology. Moreover, I will argue that a more radical critique and reconstruction of Aristotle’s biology is necessary if it is to speak effectively to contemporary social science. Finally, I will try to clarify the relation between

Religious Violence: Myth or Reality? A Symposium on William T. Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence

The appearance of William Cavanaugh’s important new book offers a strikingly new take on the familiar debate about religion and violence. According to Cavanaugh, it has become a very widespread article of faith that there is something especially dangerous about religion. Ever since the Enlightenment, many liberal statesmen and intellectuals have argued that religious conflict is a profound threat to civil peace and that the only way to secure civil order is to separate church from state. Only by denying religious institutions the coercive powers of government and making religion a purely private affair will we be safe from the threat of religious violence. John Rawls, in his influential book Political Liberalism, argues that the ‘‘wars of religion’’ in early modern Europe demonstrate the dangers that religious belief poses to political order and the necessity of building a secular foundation for political life. Virtually all major theorists of modern liberalism, including Judith Shklar, Ronald Dworkin, and Charles Larmore, cite the ‘‘wars of religion’’ to prove the necessity of the modern secular state. Modern liberalism is partly founded upon the view that religion is the chief threat to political harmony and freedom. With the end of the Cold War and the rise of ‘‘religious’’ conflict in Bosnia and throughout the Islamic world, the belief that religion is the key source of violence has spread dramatically. Now many conservatives, such as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis, argue that religion, especially Islam, poses a unique threat to world peace. They see a fundamental conflict between Judeo-Christian and Islamic civilizations, and they expect that the frontier between these religions will be a locus for violent conflict for many years to come. Eliza Griswold’s new book The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam describes this emerging worldwide conflict in explicitly religious terms. Rather than attempt to answer the question of why religion is so prone to violence, Cavanaugh asks a different question: why are we so prone to believe that religion is violent? What is the ideological function of the belief that religion is uniquely violent? What is it about religion that causes so many people to associate it with violence? William Cavanaugh in his recent book The Myth of Religious Violence political theology, Vol. 15 No. 6, November, 2014, 479–485