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Political philosophy or political theory is the philosophical study of government, addressing questions about the nature, scope, and legitimacy of public agents and institutions and the relationships between them. Its topics include politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of laws by authority: what they are, if they are needed, what makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect, what form it should take, what the law is, and what duties citizens owe to a legitimate government, if any, and when it may be legitimately overthrown, if ever.
In ethics and the social sciences, value theory involves various approaches that examine how, why, and to what degree humans value things and whether the object or subject of valuing is a person, idea, object, or anything else. Within philosophy, it is also known as ethics or axiology.
In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is a theory or model that originated during the Age of Enlightenment and usually, although not always, concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual.
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In the 19th century, the philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment began to have a dramatic effect on subsequent developments in philosophy. In particular, the works of Immanuel Kant gave rise to a new generation of German philosophers and began to see wider recognition internationally. Also, in a reaction to the Enlightenment, a movement called Romanticism began to develop towards the end of the 18th century. Key ideas that sparked changes in philosophy were the fast progress of science, including evolution, most notably postulated by Charles Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and theories regarding what is today called emergent order, such as the free market of Adam Smith within nation states, or the Marxist approach concerning class warfare between the ruling class and the working class developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Pressures for egalitarianism, and more rapid change culminated in a period of revolution and turbulence that would see philosophy change as well.
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The Metaphysics of Morals is a 1797 work of political and moral philosophy by Immanuel Kant. It is divided into two sections: the Doctrine of Right, dealing with political rights, and the Doctrine of Virtue, dealing with ethical virtues.
Kantian ethics refers to a deontological ethical theory developed by German philosopher Immanuel Kant that is based on the notion that: "It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will." The theory was developed in the context of Enlightenment rationalism. It states that an action can only be moral if (i) it is motivated by a sense of duty and (ii) its maxim may be rationally willed a universal, objective law.
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice is a book about liberalism by the philosopher Michael Sandel. The work helped start the liberalism-communitarianism debate that dominated Anglo-American political philosophy in the 1980s.
Allen William Wood is an American philosopher specializing in the work of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism, with particular interests in ethics and social philosophy. One of the world’s foremost Kant scholars, he is the Ruth Norman Halls professor of philosophy at Indiana University, Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and has held professorships and visiting appointments at numerous universities in the United States and Europe. In addition to popularising and clarifying the ethical thought of Kant, Wood has also mounted arguments against the validity of trolley problems in moral philosophy.
References
- ↑ Quong, Jonathan. "Public Reason". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 24 October 2021.
- ↑ Van Schoelandt, Chad (2015). "Justification, coercion, and the place of public reason". Philosophical Studies. 172: 1032–1034. doi:10.1007/s11098-014-0336-6.
- ↑ Kant, Immanuel. "Kant's "What Is Enlightenment"". An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?. Archived from the original on 25 November 2011. Retrieved 9 December 2011.
- 1 2 Deligiorgi, Katerina (2005). Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment. New York: State University of New York Press. p. 8. ISBN 0791464695.
- ↑ Rawls, John (1997). "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited". The University of Chicago Law Review. 64 (3): 765–807. doi:10.2307/1600311. JSTOR 1600311.
- ↑ Rawls, John (2002). The Law of Peoples: With "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited". Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 55. ISBN 067400079X.
