Peter J. McCormick Knihy

By the Court is the first major study of unanimous and anonymous legal decisions: the unique By the Court format used by the Supreme Court of Canada.

This is the first of two volumes dedicated to a sympathetic yet critical articulation of eco-ethics, the project of the distinguished contemporary Japanese philosopher, Tomonobu Imamichi. The basic idea of an eco-ethics is that the now global technological transformation of the human milieu requires radical ethical innovation. In the first of two books published simultaneously, Peter McCormick sets out the major lines of the eco-ethical project in comparison and contrast with outstanding work in contemporary philosophical reflection. He elucidates eco-ethics sympathetically but critically under four headings - moral and ethical realisms, correspondence and coherence accounts of truth, rationalities and aesthetics, interpretation theories and relativisms

Does everyone have a moral obligation to aid famine victims? Or do all persons have more basic ethical responsibility continually to assist such victims substantially, even „beyond the call of moral duty?“ If so, then why? And how? Making use of detailed case studies from the Great Bengal Famines of the 1940s to the recurring Ethiopian famines of the 1970s and 1980s and the Sudanese famines of today, Peter McCormick argues that famine is in part a philosophical issue. In the personal and tentative style of the short, classic reflective essay rather than in the impersonal style of the contemporary extended philosophical monograph, he proposes that „the problem of famine“ cannot be understood as exclusively an economic or political problem. Rather, comprehending famine properly raises at least one quite fundamental ethical issue. For the basic ethical significance of famine is that seriously considering whether and just how one ought continually to assist the numberless victims of famine challenges our previous understandings of what it is both to be a person and to live fully, and rightly, the life of a person.

How is the ethically unacceptable persistence of the unnecessary suffering of extraordinarily poor street children in extraordinarily rich European Union capital cities to be durably remedied? Perhaps centrally, this philosophical essay argues, by re-articulating current inadequate understandings in the European Union of social injustice not as an absence of solidarity but as the failure to imagine and to act on -mutualities.- First presented in 2011 as invited lectures for the Institute of European Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, this extended reflection explores four central elements of the empirical situations of such extreme child poverty amid great affluence in the contexts of a progressively developed case study of destitute street children in Paris. The essay focuses successively on such utterly destitute children's poor health, poor housing, poor food, and poor education. In each case, outstanding contemporary philosophical reflections on violations of social justice - those of J. Rawls, A. Sen, R. Dworkin, and J. Habermas - are found to be deeply suggestive but finally insufficient for understanding such legally and morally intolerable situations. Yet each may be interpreted as contributing substantively to a progressive re-articulation of at least four critical elements of what a renewed idea of social justice in the European Union tomorrow must involve - -mutualizations- of fairness, understanding, respect, and articulacy.

In a world increasingly beset by climate change, pollution, epidemics, extinctions, and ever more generalized violence, more thoughtful and effective collective responses are needed. Were some persons, institutions, and communities, to change their most basic priorities from mainly preserving individual and social privileges to serve the communal and fundamental relational values of all, both history and experience show that emergent, innovative solutions to global problems would become more probable. The issue of understanding and then changing basic priorities is framed here by two crucial contemporary debates centred around the relationship between language and personhood. The first is largely the preserve of archeologists and paleontologists and concerns specifying the moment when a person emerges as distinct from a human being, an event marked and guided by the appearance of human language. The second debate engages linguists and philosophers and concerns determining a person’s distinctive capacities for full and not just partial human language uses. This is something more than the kind of full combinatorial language use enjoyed by the later Neanderthals of Lascaux, for example, since it insists on including not just linguistic reflection on the perfomance of impressiove symbolic actions to fully embrace linguistic and philosophic reflection on the nature of symbolic discourse itself. My hope is that this brief empirical and philosophical essay will provide further insights into the significance of these two debates and help bring about some fundamental changes in our understanding of the true nature of persons as essentially relational beings rather than as exclusively individual or social entities. Peter McCormick is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Ottawa) and Permanent Member of the Institut International de Philosophie (Paris). Formerly Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa, he is Fürst Franz Josef and Fürstin Gina Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy of the Internationale Akademie für Philosophie im Fürstentum Liechtenstein.