ethics

In recent years, I have been led to think that the juridical - understood in the guise of the judiciary, with its written laws, its tribunals, its judges, and the pronouncement of the sentence in which the law is said - offered the philosopher the opportunity to reflect on the specificity of law, in its proper place, halfway between morality and politics.

The vocabulary of “reasonableness” invokes a wide margin of discretion that is often needed to temper the excessive rigour of legal rules and to deal with the inevitable problems of over- and under-inclusion associated with application of formal law to individual cases. The acceptability of the use of discretion by a law-applying institution such as the Israeli High Court of Justice is based on the assumption that its preferences and moral sensibilities are broadly reflective of the preferences and sensibilities of the community in which it exercises its jurisdiction.

"In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to proceed otherwise. At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. As a consequence, commenting on survivors' testimony necessarily meant interrogating this lacuna or, more precisely, attempting to listen to it.

In the face of the world’s disorders, moral concerns have provided a powerful ground for developing international as well as local policies. Didier Fassin draws on case materials from France, South Africa, Venezuela, and Palestine to explore the meaning of humanitarianism in the contexts of immigration and asylum, disease and poverty, disaster and war. He traces and analyzes recent shifts in moral and political discourse and practices — what he terms “humanitarian reason”— and shows in vivid examples how humanitarianism is confronted by inequality and violence.

Has there always been an inalienable "right to have rights" as part of the human condition, as Hannah Arendt famously argued? The contributions to this volume examine how human rights came to define the bounds of universal morality in the course of the political crises and conflicts of the twentieth century. Although human rights are often viewed as a self-evident outcome of this history, the essays collected here make clear that human rights are a relatively recent invention that emerged in contingent and contradictory ways.

This is the story behind another story. Inspired by the anthropological practice of reflexivity, it traces some practical, epistemological, ethical, and existential questions behind a book based on empirical socio-legal research into international criminal law in situations of conflict. The challenges involved in such research are at times impossible to overcome. Indeed, the challenges may be such that the researcher will never be able to answer her original question fully and confidently. However, challenges can be findings in themselves.