A Hobbesian Theory of Shame

On most accounts present in the literature, the complex experience of shame has the injury to self‐esteem as its main component. A major objection to this idea is that it fails to differentiate between shame and disappointment in oneself. I argue that previous attempts to respond to the objection are unsatisfactory. I argue further that the distinction should refer to the different ways the subject's self‐esteem is formed. A necessary requirement for shame is that the standards and values by which the subject judges himself are borrowed from a canon of values the subject accepts as a given. The proper focus of shame is the fact of conformity to that canon. Those agents who have a different conception of self‐esteem and who freely set and alter their own values are prone to self‐disappointment, but not to shame.     

A Hobbesian derivation of the principle of universalization

In this article, I derive a weak version of Kant’s categorical imperative within an informal game-theoretic framework. More specifically, I argue that Hobbesian agents would choose what I call the weak principle of universalization, if they had to decide on a rule of conflict resolution in an idealized but empirically defensible hypothetical decision situation. The discussion clarifies (i) the rationality requirements imposed on agents, (ii) the empirical conditions assumed to warrant the conclusion, and (iii) the political institutions that are necessary to implement the derived principle. The analysis demonstrates the moral significance of the weak principle of universalization and its epistemic advantage over the categorical imperative.     

Conscious inhibitions: Freud,anti-Semitism,and Hobbesian imagination

This work aims to portray the effects of Freud’s anxiety about anti-Semitic violence on his political theory and metapsychology. Taking as its entry point Freud’s reorientation of anti-Semitism as aggressive action, I argue that Freud’s fear of the violent mob can be located in three interconnected dimensions of his work, all deeply informed by Hobbesian imagination. First, Freud accepted a Hobbesian vision of social antagonism into his political theory; second, he formulated a deeper, more efficient defence mechanism against mob violence with his notion of psychical guilt; third, Freud’s fears penetrated his metapsychology. Suffering from anti-Semitism, Freud was not only quick to accept a Hobbesian perspective – he also reconstructed it to a degree that radically changed its meaning. Freud’s third and most pervasive manoeuvre destabilized one of Hobbes’s fundamental theoretical tenets by suggesting that the Hobbesian State of Nature is inherently a non-human reality.     

Catharine Macaulay on the Paradox of Paternal Authority in Hobbesian Politics

Catharine Macaulay's first political pamphlet, “Loose remarks on certain positions to be found in Mr. Hobbes's philosophical rudiments of government and society with a short sketch for a democratical form of government in a letter to Signor Paoli,” published in London in 1769, has received no significant scholarly attention in over two hundred years. It is of primary interest because of the light it sheds on Macaulay's critique of patriarchal politics, which helps to establish a new line of thinking about the historian as an early feminist writer. It appears she was working from an unauthorized edition of the Thomas Hobbes's De Cive (1647) entitled Philosophicall Rudiments of Government and Society, printed by a royalist bookseller in London 1651. Some errors in this translation may explain Macaulay's skewed understanding of Hobbess argument in support of the premises of monarchy. Her intriguing analysis of paternal authority in “Loose Remarks” anticipates recent feminist explorations of Hobbesian political thought.     

The Right to Strike and the Right to Work

ABSTRACT L. J. MacFarlane has contended that the right to strike is a keystone of democratic society. The right to strike is a right to free expression, association, assembly and power. And the right to strike is dependent upon the right to employment. MacFarlane denies that the right to employment is a universal right. I argue that unless the right to work is indeed universal MacFarlane's main contention is false. Forced unemployment is, amongst other things, the denial of full citizen status, for the range of liberties that constitutes the right to strike is essential to full participation in democracy. It is only when the traditional liberty-rights of free expression and striking are seen as being based upon such recipient rights as rights to media space and time and upon the right to work, that they can play their proper democratic role. This conception of those rights is missing from the work of Rawls and Nozick as well as from MacFarlane.     

The Theological Foundation of Hobbesian Physics: A Defence of Corporeal God

In 1668, the octogenarian Hobbes finally affirmed openly a doctrine that was unavoidable given his longstanding embrace of both theism and materialism: God is corporeal. However, this doctrine has generally been downplayed or dismissed by scholars, who have alleged that Hobbes's corporeal theism is irreconcilable with his more orthodox theological pronouncements or with his fundamental metaphysical principles. This paper defends the coherence of Hobbes's corporeal God against particularly vigorous criticisms of Douglas Jesseph and others. The aim of the paper is not, however, to situate Hobbes's deity safely within the boundaries of seventeenth century protestant theology, as defenders of Hobbesian theism have often wanted to do. Rather, the paper places the corporeal God at the metaphysical foundations of Hobbes's natural philosophy. Despite his early reticence about theological speculation, Hobbes eventually relied on God to provide a continuous, resistance-free source of motion or conatus to a material plenum whose parts would otherwise quickly slow to an infinitesimal crawl. Hobbes's late theology, while certainly heterodox in content, is not so different in function from that of contemporaries like René Descartes and Henry More, whose religious sincerity is rarely questioned. Hobbes' corporeal deity deserves a place in the seventeenth century pantheon.     

人权视野下的个人健康权与选择权

从人权的角度看,个人健康权也是一种个人选择权,因为健康本来就是属于个人的。个人健康选择权在属性上,属于一种消极性、否定性和自由性的权利。个人健康选择权主要包括健康生活方式、治疗方式、保健方式、健康状态（水平）、健康隐私以及医疗保障组织选择。农村新型合作医疗是带有合作组织的性质的一种组织,它的推行,应当充分尊重农民自愿参加的选择权,不宜按照某个计划目标推行。     

The Right to Health Care as a Right to Basic Human Functional Capabilities

A just social arrangement must guarantee a right to health care for all. This right should be understood as a positive right to basic human functional capabilities. The present article aims to delineate the right to health care as part of an account of distributive justice in health care in terms of the sufficiency of basic human functional capabilities. According to the proposed account, every individual currently living beneath the sufficiency threshold or in jeopardy of falling beneath the threshold has a legitimate claim to justice. People’s entitlements to health care should not be determined on the basis of brute luck and their efforts to maintain healthy lifestyles. The prioritization of competing claim-rights of individuals is guided by two allocation principles: number and benefit-size weighted sufficiency (among people beneath the threshold) and need-weighted utilitarianism (among people above the threshold).     

做错事的权利

做错事的权利这一概念初看似乎是一个悖论。本文在排除了各种似是而非的解决方案之后,立足于道德权利的一般性概念对做错事的权利给出了论证。作者认为,道德对行为的评价大体上可分为三类:正确且可被允许的行为、错误且应受批评的行为以及与道德无关的行为。如果排除错误的行为,最终将会使道德权利变得贫乏,从而丧失保护个人选择这一重要功能。而且,做错事的权利也不涉及任何逻辑上的不一致。