The sense of duty is a virtue of caring, not directly about the good, or even about justice, but about doing one’s duty. Insofar as doing what one takes to be one’s duty is in fact to do what is good, the sense of duty functions as a backup for the more direct virtues of caring – generosity, compassion, and truthfulness, as well as justice. Being a virtue of caring, the sense of duty can be expressed in emotions: a feeling of satisfaction in having done one’s duties or feelings of guilt or shame at having neglected them. The sense of duty can vary, emotionally, according to how one conceives the authoritative source of duty, on a spectrum from reverence, through respect, to resentful acceptance. Example of the extremes beyond the spectrum are some Hebrew psalmists’ delight in the law of God and the contempt of the utter moral cynic.

Heidegger says very little about language in Being and Time, but he says quite a lot about “discourse” (Rede). What is discourse, according to Heidegger, and what is its relation to language? It is, he says, the “foundation” of language, so they cannot be identical. He also says that the “spoken expression” of discourse is language, but can discourse also be unspoken, or even nonlingustic? Remaining silent and the call of conscience, he also says, are kinds of discourse. In this chapter, I argue that what Heidegger means by “discourse” is communicative expression in a broad sense, which includes but is not limited to language. Expression and communication are, however, what discourse and language have in common. I show that competing accounts in the secondary literature either understate or overstate those features, which are essential to both linguistic and nonlinguistic cases of discourse

How should a constitutional state – one that respects subjects’ basic rights – treat civil disobedients? This chapter presents and critically engages with some of the most prominent answers legal scholars, political theorists, and philosophers have given to this question. On what I call punitive approaches, which I present in section 1, civil disobedience is first and foremost an act of resistance that threatens the constitutional order, and thus a public wrong worthy of punishment. Theorists of civil disobedience have challenged this approach since the 1960s, especially by conceiving of civil disobedience as a kind of dissent, which liberal democratic societies ought to and can ‘make room’ for. Sections 2 and 3 examine these ‘constitutionalizing’ approaches, with section 2 focusing on the case for leniency, and section 3 on the case for broad accommodation. Section 4 examines the costs of constitutionalizing approaches and reclaims the understanding of civil disobedience as a kind of resistance, alongside its uncivil counterparts, that is sometimes justified and even necessary in constitutional democracies.

Max Weber understood how democracy in the seventeenth century was tied to Calvinist individualism and the rejection of external forms. Thomas Hobbes hated the consequences of puritan rule and argued that politics needed to accept the principle of the mask in order to create social order. The lawyer William Prynne in his Histrio-mastix portrayed theatre as the root of all evils in the royalist regime, but he himself proved a masterly performer in working to undermine the regime. The most radical democratic thinking came from the ‘Levellers’ who harked back to the Garden of Eden and natural human innocence. Shakespeare interrogated the ambivalent myth of Eden in Henry VI Part Two, as did Milton in Paradise Lost. The Putney debates constitute the main focus of this chapter. Common soldiers with Leveller views argued with their generals about constitutional principles. Close analysis of the debate reveals the complications that followed from claims to sincerity, couched as insistence that because God had spoken to them speakers were following their consciences, avoiding rhetoric or hypocrisy. The religious context in fact allowed a high level of democratic exchange.

Christian August Crusius (1715–1775) was one of the most important German philosophers in the middle of the eighteenth century. His series of four German textbooks offered a systematic and sophisticated alternative to Wolffianism. Kant was at the beginning of his academic career when Crusius’ philosophical works were first published, so it is not surprising that Kant would come to be influenced by Crusius’ philosophy. This chapter contains a translation of selections from books 1 and 2 of Crusius’ Guide to Living Rationally (1744), capturing his theory of the will and desire, his theory of freedom, his voluntarist theory of ethics, his theory of the end of human life, and his moral proof of the immortality of the soul. The selections will help readers better understand Kant’s reference to Crusius’ moral philosophy as one based on the “will of God” (5:40), among many other things.

A multilevel conception of identity is proposed in this chapter, with individual, social, human, and ecological levels. Emphasis is placed on the nature of the relationships among the different identity positions, with a focus on dialogical flexibility and the distinction between consonant and dissonant dialogues. The risk of over-positioning is analyzed, indicating the one-sided exaggeration of one of the identities, and attention is devoted to the “level confusion” resulting from a lack of distinction between the different levels. An elaborate discussion of the concept of conscience is presented. From a neurological perspective, evidence shows that the natural inclination of bonding and caring puts limitations on our circle of moral regard. Finally, the worldviews of two historical icons, Jane Addams and Andrew Carnegie, are compared in order to demonstrate the value of promoter positions.

In the spring of 1593, a spate of viciously xenophobic libels appeared throughout London. The most notorious of these, the so-called Dutch Church libel, landed Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe in some trouble, possibly due to its prominent allusions to Marlowe’s plays. This chapter argues that the collaborative, censored playscript Sir Thomas More reprises the incendiary confluence of libel, xenophobia, and drama that took place in 1593. The play’s opening scenes dramatize the anti-immigrant Evil May Day riot of 1517 with an eye to the 1590s, showing the strangers’ crimes and the violent resistance of London’s citizens. The citizens take their grievances public once all legal avenues for redress have failed. Yet libel and riot are not the only extralegal recourses in the play. The latter two-thirds of Sir Thomas More track the rise and fall of its titular character, who himself repeatedly confronts the limits of the law. Thomas More’s career extends the initial dramatization of libel into an extended meditation on the remedies available to any subject afflicted by unjust law, from bills and libels to riot to the vexed administration of equity and the vagaries of conscience.

Evolutionary psychologists have long maintained that humans’ moral sense is essential to their success as a species and part of what makes humans unique among animals. Moral systems have functional roots, helping individual organisms survive, thrive, and pass on their genetic material. It is not despite anarchy but because of anarchy that humans have an ethical sense. Evolutionary theorists identify moral condemnation and binding morality as crucial for the emergence of other-regarding, altruistic behavior that makes liberal morality possible in the first place. When others harm us, or even third parties, we condemn, passing moral judgments and sometimes retaliating; we do not speak evil but speak of evil. Moral condemnation encouraged the development of moral conscience to avoid the outrage of, and often violent group punishment by, those who were wronged. This internalized sense of right and wrong in turn acted as a credible signal of cooperativeness that unwittingly and unconsciously paid material dividends. Group favoritism, also thought to have evolutionary origins, is moral in nature as well. Those early humans who felt obligated to contribute to the collective defense against common threats in an extremely dangerous environment could prosper enough to offset the competing incentives to free-ride within the group.

Chapter 1 covers the raising of consciousness and conscience and the interplay of authenticity and estrangement through a reading of Hannah Arendt, whose work we have found a profound inspiration throughout the book, notably her re-imagining of the ancient Greek city state of Athens and the polis as its political forum. The polis is an idealized space in whose relational confines an organized condition of authenticity can appear. It is a space to which those responsible for the administrative defence of the city, the strategoi, belong, but over which they have no authority. Separated from the household (oikos, the root term for economics), the polis is not primarily concerned with necessity, a condition Arendt calls labour, preoccupied with activity aimed at sustaining the metabolic persistence of life. Nor is it primarily a matter of work, of making and fabricating functional, symbolic and institutional things that last, such as temples, or laws, and that in return let the makers and fabricators ‘live on’ in reflection of the things they have produced. Drawing from the structure of the polis, we argue in this chapter for the intimacy between strategy and authenticity