ON THE TENACITY OF CHRISTIAN ANTI‐JUDAISM1

Joachim of Fiore's three ages of Father, Son and Spirit demonstrated that the supersessionist gambit Christianity had introduced against Judaism is a logic any successor can employ. Modernity (cf. modo, “now”) is constituted by a relentless supersessionist logic; the modern issue is less supersessionism than a conflict of supersessionisms. Christianity has repeatedly overspiritualized God's “bodily covenant” with Israel (Wyschogrod). This distortive tendency is intensified in modernity by Christianity's anxiety that it too will appear old/“Jewish” vis‐à‐vis a new New Testament of infinite spiritual freedom (cf. Romanticism.) One corrective would be for Christianity to return to a more Jewish understanding of election.     

SUBJECTIVITY, JUDGMENT, AND THE BASING RELATIONSHIP

Moral and legal judgments sometimes depend on personal traits in this sense: the subject offers good reasons for her judgment, but if she had a different social or ideological background, her judgment would be different. If you would judge the constitutionality of restrictions on abortion differently if you were not a secular liberal, is your judgment really based on the arguments you find convincing, or do you find them so only because you are a secular liberal? I argue that a judgment can be based on the considerations the subject claims as justification even when it depends on personal traits.     

IS THERE A RIGHT TO PRIVACY?

It is widely held that there is a legal right to privacy that plays such a central role in a number of important US Supreme Court decisions. There is however a great deal of dispute about whether there is a moral right to privacy and if there is, what grounds the right. Before this can be determined, we must be clear about the nature of privacy, something that is not clearly understood and that, as we shall see, is often confused with the right to privacy. I shall begin with a critical discussion of various views about the nature of privacy. I shall then present my own account, and show how it meets the objections that have been raised against other views. Lastly, I shall close with a discussion about whether privacy is a moral right.