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Instructors: Dr. Stefan Rinner
Event type:
Advanced seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
Hours per week:
2
Credits:
4,0
Language of instruction:
German
Min. | Max. participants:
1 | 25
Allocation scheme: Phil_Standard_WS1415
Comments/contents:
While traditional liberal political theories have been historically wary of assigning an important role to emotions and attitudes with an emotional component, many are the ways in which these emotions and attitudes inform our political life and the action of state institutions as well as other political actors. The aim of this course is to discuss their nature and place in politics and law.
A good place to start this investigation is by looking at the criminal law, as this domain, unlike others, is one where reactive attitudes and emotions have been seeing as playing an important role. Many believe that moral censure and blame are essential to criminal punishment. This influential view has been recently criticised by theorists who argue that blame leads to the stigma of those who are punished. Others have even suggested that the state should abandon blame and punish instead with forgiveness. This course will explore this debate in criminal law theory.
In this seminar, we will also look at the ways in which shame informs the law as well as public discourse. We will reflect on the use of shame in criminal punishment and on public shaming more broadly, also in light of its role in some recent social movements, addressing the question of whether this way of treating our fellow citizens can be justified and on which grounds.
Moreover, we will look at the nature of mercy, attempting to answer the question of whether mercy should play a role in the relationship between individuals and the state or, in virtue of being an inherently inegalitarian attitude, it is unsuitable for egalitarian societies and political relationships. We will explore the role of mercy in criminal law as well as in politics, looking at a recent proposal on the role of mercy in migration ethics and policy.
Another emotion the role of which will be discussed in this course is anger. Anger is considered by some to be a potentially constructive emotion in politics, insofar as it is a form of righteous indignation for injustice and wrongdoing. In this seminar, we will discuss the question of whether anger can be a useful and appropriate emotion for political and social movements and individuals when faced with injustice.
Finally, we will look at the role of care in political theory. Over the last thirty years, care ethics has become one of the most influential moral theories and many of its proponents have argued that care should also play an important role in political life. In this course, we will look at the implications of care for politics and the relationship between care and other political values, first and foremost justice.
In examining the role of these emotions and attitudes with an emotional component in politics and law we will also reflect on their nature, comparing different accounts of what blame, forgiveness, shame, mercy, anger and care are.
Literature:
Bennett, Christopher. 2008. The Apology Ritual: A Philosophical Theory of Punishment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blake, Michael. 2020. Justice, Migration, and Mercy. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.
Card, Claudia. 1990. ‘Caring and Evil’. Edited by Nel Noddings. Hypatia 5 (1): 101–8.
Fricker, Miranda. Forthcoming. ‘Forgiveness: An Ordered Pluralism’. Australasian Philosophical Review.
Friedman, Marilyn, ed. 2005. Women and Citizenship. Studies in Feminist Philosophy. Oxford?; New York: Oxford University Press.
Hall, Cheryl. 2002. ‘“Passions and Constraint”: The Marginalization of Passion in Liberal Political Theory’. Philosophy & Social Criticism 28 (6): 727–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/019145370202800607.
Held, Virginia. 2006. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford?; New York: Oxford University Press.
Kelly, Erin. 2018. The Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Lacey, Nicola, and Hanna Pickard. 2015. ‘To Blame or to Forgive? Reconciling Punishment and Forgiveness in Criminal Justice’. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 35 (4): 665–96. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqv012.
Lepoutre, Maxime. 2018. ‘Rage inside the Machine: Defending the Place of Anger in Democratic Speech’. Politics, Philosophy & Economics 17 (4): 398–426. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594X18764613.
Lorde, Audre. 1981. 'The Uses of Anger' https://academicworks.cuny.edu/wsq/509/
Murphy, Jeffrie G, and Jean Hampton. 1989. Forgiveness and Mercy. Cambridge, GBR: Cambridge University Press. http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=4638583.
Noddings, Nel. 2003. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics & Moral Education. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nussbaum, Martha Craven. 2016. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. New York: Oxford University Press.
Scanlon, Thomas. 2008. Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Srinivasan, Amia. 2018. ‘The Aptness of Anger’. Journal of Political Philosophy 26 (2): 123–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12130.
Thomason, Krista K. 2018. Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Tronto, Joan C. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge.
Wolf, Susan. 2011. ‘Blame, Italian Style’. In Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon, edited by R. Jay Wallace, Rahul Kumar, and Samuel Richard Freeman, 332–47. New York: Oxford University Press.
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