Civil Liberties in the Era of Mass Terrorism

This paper discusses the impact of the so-called war on terrorism on civil liberties. The United States government in Madison’s plan was to be distrusted and hemmed in to protect citizens against it. The terrorist attacks of 2001 have seemingly licensed the US government to violate its Madisonian principles. While the current government asks for citizen trust, its actions justify distrust. The courts, which normally are the chief defenders of civil liberties, typically acquiesce in administration policies during emergencies, and it has been during wartimes that the worst infringements of civil liberties have occurred. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Tolerant (In)civility? A Longitudinal Analysis of White Conservative Protestants’ Willingness to Grant Civil Liberties

Past research has found conservative Protestants to be less willing than most Americans to grant civil liberties to unpopular groups. In light of evidence of high and growing civility by Smith (2000) and Hunter (1984), there is good reason to believe that conservative Protestants are becoming less distinctive with regard to granting civil freedoms. We update and expand previous research on conservative Protestants and civil liberties by examining the civil liberties measures in the General Social Survey over a 26-year period, with special attention to explaining conservative Protestantism's rejection of civil liberties. In comparison to mainline Protestants and Catholics, we find that conservative Protestants are still less willing to grant civil liberties to unpopular groups, though important qualifications apply. Various explanations are examined.     

The <Emphasis Type="Italic">Struggle Between Liberties and Authorities</Emphasis> in the Information Age

The “struggle between liberties and authorities”, as described by Mill, refers to the tension between individual rights and the rules restricting them that are imposed by public authorities exerting their power over civil society. In this paper I argue that contemporary information societies are experiencing a new form of such a struggle, which now involves liberties and authorities in the cyber-sphere and, more specifically, refers to the tension between cyber-security measures and individual liberties. Ethicists, political philosophers and political scientists have long debated how to strike an ethically sound balance between security measures and individual rights. I argue that such a balance can only be reached once individual rights are clearly defined, and that such a definition cannot prescind from an analysis of individual well-being in the information age. Hence, I propose an analysis of individual well-being which rests on the capability approach, and I then identify a set of rights that individuals should claim for themselves. Finally, I consider a criterion for balancing the proposed set of individual rights with cyber-security measures in the information age.     

Personifying the Radical

This study examines relationships among individual dispositions, news framing of civil liberties restrictions, security concerns, and political tolerance. We theorize that news frames condition the effects of individual dispositions on security and tolerance attitudes. To explore these relationships, an online‐survey experiment was conducted with 650 respondents. This experiment presented alternative versions of news stories about domestic security policies following September 11, and the policies' implications for a fringe activist group. One factor was whether the activists targeted by the government advocated for a cause supported or opposed by the respondent; another factor was whether the story framed government actions against the activists at the individual or group level. Findings show that individual framing—as opposed to group framing—made participants less tolerant of radicals they opposed and more tolerant of radicals they supported. Similar effects were observed for political ideology. Implications of personification as a framing device are discussed.     

Terrorism's Toll on Civil Liberties

Summary

The toll that terrorism takes on civil liberties has become clear in the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Horrendous as those attacks were, they were hardly unique in the fear that they spurred on the part of the politicians and the public, resulting in a counterattack on civil liberties in the name of preventing terrorism. The cost to civil liberties is thus imposed not directly by terrorism itself, but rather by unjustified policies that are labeled “counter-terrorist.” In that sense, this chapter would more aptly be entitled, “Counter-Terrorism's Toll on Civil Liberties.”     

Roles of fundamentalism and authoritarianism in relations between religiosity and civil liberties among Muslims

Two cross-sectional studies were conducted with undergraduate and graduate students (mean age = 22 years) in two university campuses in different regions of Turkey to investigate confrontations between conservative religious people and secular-liberal people and the roles of fundamentalism and authoritarianism for these groups. Study 1 investigated the connections between traditional religiosity and liberties and the impact of religious fundamentalism with a sample of 482 participants. Using hierarchical multiple linear regression and bootstrapping analysis, religiosity was seen as negatively connected to three components of liberties. It was shown that religious fundamentalism had an indirect effect on this connection. In Study 2, with a sample of 260 participants, the negative connection between traditional religiosity with liberties was confirmed. Further, it was found that particularly the conservatism dimension of right-wing authoritarianism played an explanatory role in this connection. In addition, as an extension of the two studies, it was observed that secular-liberal participants supported civil liberties in general, but they expressed opposition to freedom of religion in particular, indicating that the antagonism between religious and secular people may also stem from secular-liberal people. It was found that dimension of aggression of left-wing authoritarianism played an explanatory role in connection to this aspect.     

Secession: The Case of Quebec

ABSTRACT I argue that people have a right to self-determination when they are plainly predominant in a certain territory and do not violate the civil liberties of minorities. But there is no self-determination without the preservation of self-identity and the cultural preservation that goes with its secure existence. So to preserve autonomy and self-determination people must preserve their cultural identity and this cannot be securely sustained in modern conditions without a nation-state concerned to nourish that identity. Such considerations support a right to secession when certain conditions are met. The conditions are that the people in question have a cultural identity, live in a distinct territory which they have inhabited for a long time, form an extensive majority, and respect the civil liberties of the minorities living in that territory (as well as elsewhere). Where they are such a group they have a right to secede from a larger state to which they are historically attached. These conditions, I argue, are met in Quebec.     

Choice Shifts In Political Decisionmaking: Federal Judges and Civil Liberties Cases

The purpose of this article is to investigate whether group-induced attitudinal shifts in decisionmaking take place outside the experimental laboratory and whether choice shift theory can be applied to the understanding of political behavior of actors engaged in socially relevant decisionmaking. A random sample of civil liberties decisions in Federal District Courts for the years 1963–1968 were examined. The hypothesis that there are systematic differences between single-judge and collegial court decisions was confirmed. Parties claiming a violation of constitutional rights increase the probability of successfully convincing a district judge when they are able to have their litigation heard by a three-judge court. The finding that judges are more likely to shift to a libertarian position when moving from the individual to the collegial decisionmaking condition holds when the data are examined in aggregate form as well as when the behavior of individual judges is studied under both decisionmaking settings.     

The importance of values in predicting Turkish youth's opinions about the European Union in light of the Copenhagen Political Criteria

The enlargement process of the European Union may be regarded as one of the most important social projects of human history in that it is trying to unite several nation-states under a "European identity." As a historically and culturally "distant" candidate, Turkey has been asked to meet a set of expectations referred to as the "Copenhagen Criteria," requiring a series of large-scale reforms to the infrastructure and superstructure of the country. Taking advantage of the unique opportunity to relate Turkish people's opinions on the criteria to their values, hypotheses based on Schwartz's model of values were tested. Schwartz's Personal Values Questionnaire and a questionnaire measuring opinions on the criteria and the Union were completed by 368 Turkish university students. Factor analysis of the opinion items yielded five factors: reduction of military influence in civil life, scepticism towards Europe and the European Union, improvement of human rights and liberties, improvement of minority rights, and lack of transparency in public institutions. Regression analyses showed that values and nationalism were powerful predictors of opinions whereas the effect of religiosity was limited only to the prediction of a preference for the reduction of military influence in civil life. Preference for openness to change values were successful in predicting variance in three of the five criteria: The more the participants favoured these values, the more they supported the improvement of human rights and liberties, the improvement of minority rights, and regretted the lack of transparency. Self-transcendence values were also positively related to support for the same three criteria together with a preference for reduction of military influence. As for nationalism, the results showed that this variable was related negatively to reduction of the military influence, improvement of human rights and liberties, improvement of minority rights; and positively to scepticism.     

All Liberty is Basic

Recent arguments for the basic status of economic liberty can be deployed to show that all liberty is basic. The argument for the basic status of all liberty is as follows. First, John Tomasi’s defense of basic economic liberties is successful. Economic freedom can be further defended against powerful high liberal objections, which libertarians including Tomasi have so far overlooked. Yet arguments for basic economic freedom raise a puzzle about the distinction between basic and non-basic liberties. The same reasons that economic liberties and the traditionally defined list of basic liberties are basic can also be given for all other liberties. Therefore, high liberals and Rawlsian libertarians ought to accept almost all other liberties as basic, even liberties that may strike us as trivial, silly, or unimportant. This claim has revisionary implications for high liberalism. Namely, liberals should endorse strong institutional protections for almost all liberties, even at the expense of other social values.     

Belief, motivational, and ideological correlates of human rights attitudes

Many people believe that an informed and thoughtful citizenry is essential to the maintenance of democratic ideals within the United States and the spread of those ideals abroad. Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the evidence that Americans consider issues of human dignity and rights when making judgments about the U.S. government's war on terror has been mixed. In our study, we assessed the relative contributions of ideological, belief, and cognitive-motivational factors to the prediction of human rights and civil liberties attitudes. Individuals scoring high on measures of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and the belief that the structure of knowledge is simple were the most likely to support restrictions on human rights and civil liberties as part of the war on terror. In a subsequent regression analysis, individuals scoring higher on personal need for structure or exhibiting lower levels of epistemological belief complexity tended to score higher on RWA. Additionally, men were generally more likely to support restrictions on rights and liberties and to score higher on RWA than were women.     

The Irrationality of Choosing Egoism—A Reply to Eshelman

Despite the vast literature on Rawls's work, few have discussed his arguments for the value of democracy. When his arguments have been discussed, they have received staunch criticism. Some critics have charged that Rawls's arguments are not deeply democratic. Others have gone further, claiming that Rawls's arguments denigrate democracy. These criticisms are unsurprising, since Rawls's arguments, as arguments that the principle of equal basic liberty needs to include democratic liberties, are incomplete. In contrast to his trenchant remarks about core civil liberties, Rawls does not say much about the inclusion of political liberties of a democratic sort – such as the right to vote – among the basic liberties.

In this paper, I complete some of Rawls's arguments and show that he has grounds for including political liberties, particularly those of a democratic nature, in the principle of equal basic liberty. In doing so, I make some beginning steps toward illustrating the genuinely democratic nature of Rawls's arguments. Rawls believes that a few different arguments can be given for democratic institutions and that these arguments work together to support the value of democracy. In this paper, I focus on Rawls's arguments relating to self-respect. I focus on this set of arguments because they are among the strongest of Rawls's arguments for equal political liberty and its fair value.     

Effects of viewing 9/11 footage on distress and Islamophobia: a temporally expanded approach

We investigated whether viewing September 11 footage affected peoples’ perceived distress spanning past, present, and anticipated future. Participants (n = 174) were randomly assigned to a 9/11, fear, or neutral condition and completed measures of temporal perceived distress, distress of future terrorism, Islamophobia, and restriction of civil liberties attitudes. Participants in the neutral and fear conditions perceived their 9/11‐related distress as declining over time. Those in the 9/11 condition perceived their distress as higher at present and declining from present (vs. past ratings). Those viewing 9/11 (vs. neutral or fear) footage reported greater future terrorism distress, more prejudice, and greater restriction of civil liberties. These differences were explained by higher 9/11‐related distress ratings for past 5 years, present, and future.     

Facing the threat: Invading the body for national security

The purpose of this paper is to explore the increasing use of biometric technology implemented in the global fight against domestic and international terrorism. Particular attention will be paid to the surveillance society, as the internalization of the mere prospect of observation results in the self-policing of populations. This concept will demonstrate the amplification of behavior modification and the irony produced as the technologies are implemented simultaneously as an instrument of public protection and a form of social control. I will outline the technologies available before exploring the possible implications they could produce. This will emphasize the ever-increasing surveillance of the social world with the notion of escalating dissent that is implemented as justification for the erosion of civil liberties and mass social subjugation. Miss Lindsey Wade is a criminologist and a prison drug rehabilitation practitioner. Her special interests include surveillance studies, human rights, and international terrorism.     

A note on Attitude Patterning among Protagonists of War and Capital Punishment

Abstract

The psychometric properties and correlates of the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (RWA Scale; Altemeyer, 1981) were investigated using a sample of White South African students (N = 217). Traditional measures of authoritarianism have performed particularly badly in such settings. The RWA scale was factorially unidimensional and highly reliable, and correlated powerfully with validity criteria of authoritarianism, such as civil liberties stance, anti-Black prejudice and discrimination, liberalism/conservatism, and acceptance of parental religious beliefs. The particularly strong correlation with anti-Black prejudice contradicted influential previous findings suggesting that this correlation would be very weak in settings where racism was widespread or normative.     

Social Democracy and Economic Liberty

Tomasi’s view of social democracy is shown to mischaracterize it as hostile to private economic liberties, which all real-world social democracies guarantee. The supposed Manichean choice between social and market democracy, seen as requiring contrasting accounts of fairness, results from combining Rawls-style idealization of regime types, the Hayekian presumption that social democracies are advancing along the road to serfdom, and tendentious appeal to scant and unconvincing historical evidence. The proposed constitutional protection of ‘thick,’ market-based economic liberties, as favoring both individual self-authorship and fair equality of opportunity, is defended by Tomasi against high-liberal and social democratic views as compatible with what Rawls’s social justice demands, but as their scope expands in the course of the book this fails to convince. Finally it is argued that the ever-expanding reach of the market across all social life, with feedback effects on the formation of preferences, renders questionable Tomasi’s claims that his account of market fairness is neutral with respect to ways of life and that it specifies conditions under which individuals can live lives that are truly their own.     

Are DIT scores empirically distinct from measures of political identification and intellectual ability? A test using post‐9/11 data

Emler, Renwick, and Malone (1983) argued against a developmental interpretation of the Defining Issues Test (DIT), suggesting instead that it actually measures a social psychological phenomenon – political identification. On the other hand, Sanders, Lubinski, and Benbow (1995) have argued that DIT scores measure intellectual ability. In this study, we pitted the DIT against measures of political identification and intellectual ability in order to test its ability to incrementally predict variation in post‐9/11 attitudes. We found that both DIT‐2 scores and political identification were significant predictors of attitudes toward restricting human rights/civil liberties, while our index of intellectual ability (i.e. ACT scores) was not. DIT‐2 scores, political identification and intellectual ability each accounted for significant variation in attitudes toward President George W. Bush in our undergraduate college sample during the spring of 2004.     

John Stuart Mill and the Conflicts of Equality

John Stuart Mill commented on the relationship between equality and liberty in general terms, and he also discussed the relationships between equality and four more concrete social goals: equality vs. diversity and individual spontaneity, equality vs. freedom of trade and entrepreneurial activity, equality vs. economic incentives for workpeople, and equality vs. welfare. In his more general statements he wrote off potential conflicts between equality and liberty, claiming that only those liberties that can be enjoyed by all are real liberties—or at least they are the only ones worth defending. However, in several of his more concrete discussions he gave higher priority to various liberty-related goals than to equality. This seeming contradiction can be resolved if we assume that he distinguished between valuing a liberty per se and valuing it as a means to achieve something else.

     

Political identification and the defining issues test: reevaluating an old hypothesis

Research on the association between the development of moral judgment (as measured by the Defining Issues Test [DIT]; J. R. Rest, 1979) and political attitudes has demonstrated that these factors are often reliably related. N. Emler (1987, 1990) and colleagues have asserted that DIT scores actually measure test-takers' political identity rather than their developmental level. To test this claim, these researchers have designed "faking studies" in which respondents are asked to complete the DIT as if they were of a particular political orientation, regardless of their real political views. These faking studies have yielded contradictory conclusions, whereas tests of the incremental validity of the DIT have provided some evidence for its empirical distinctiveness. In the present study, the authors reexamined this issue by pitting scores on the DIT, Version 2 (DIT-2; J. R. Rest, D. Narvaez, S. J. Thoma, & M. J. Bebeau, 1999) against several more concrete measures of political identification in several predictive models of attitudes toward human rights and civil liberties. DIT-2 scores and political identification emerged as significant predictors in nearly all regression analyses.     

Downward mobility and Rawlsian justice

Technological and societal changes have made downward social and economic mobility a pressing issue in real-world politics. This article argues that a Rawlsian society would not provide any special protection against downward mobility, and would act rightly in declining to provide such protection. Special treatment for the downwardly mobile can be grounded neither in Rawls’s core principles—the basic liberties, fair equality of opportunity, and the difference principle—nor in other aspects of Rawls’s theory (the concept of legitimate expectations, the idea of a life plan, the distinction between allocative and distributive justice, or the distinction between ideal and nonideal theory). Instead, a Rawlsian society is willing to sacrifice particular individuals’ ambitions and plans for the achievement of justice, and offers those who lose out from justified change no special solicitude over and above the general solicitude extended to all. Rather than guaranteeing the maintenance of any particular individual or group’s economic position, it provides all of its members—the upwardly mobile, the downwardly mobile, and the immobile—a form of security that is at once more generous and more limited: that they will receive the liberties, opportunities, and resources promised by the principles of justice.