Hennie Lötter

Awareness of, and respect for differences of gender, race, religion, language, and culture have liberated many oppressed groups from the hegemony of white, Western males. However, respect for previously denigrated collective identities should not be allowed to confine individuals to identities constructed around one main component used for political mobilisation, or to identities that depend on a priority of properties that are not optional, like race, gender, and language. In this article I want to sketch an approach for accommodating different kinds of identity within a multicultural constitutional democracy. From a vantage point provided by a definition and explanation of personal identity, I want to show how people define, construct and change their personal identities to make themselves into unique individuals. Next I show how democratic political institutions and the personal identities of individuals reciprocally influence one another. In the final section I sketch ways in which diverse personal identities ought to be accommodated in multicultural constitutional democracies. The conclusion is that a society which gives its members the liberty, space, and opportunity to freely construct their own identities might avoid the formation of closed groups committed exclusively to their own sectional interests.

The fate of the half a million or so free-ranging elephants in Africa depends on the choices people will make. What ‘moral standing’ do elephants deserve, and thus what constraints should we impose on our behaviour towards them? To assess the state of our knowledge about ethics and elephants is no easy affair. Different views on the moral standing of elephants and thus the obligations humans owe elephants, are not really a matter of scientific knowledge, although such knowledge might deeply influence our chosen ethics. At stake are human value choices that are developed through argument and discussion into ethical positions that suggest, prescribe, or legislate acceptable behaviour, and proscribe or discourage unacceptable treatment of elephants. The point of this assessment is thus to determine which ethical positions have been developed on various matters concerning the management of elephants and have been justified through reasoning. This chapter portrays the different ethical views relevant to the management of elephants that are present in some or other form in the public domain. The aim is to make readers aware of the multiplicity of ethical issues involved in elephant management, as seen from a variety of ethical viewpoints. The complexity of the benefits and harm that accompany different management options will be clarified. The chapter is divided into five sections: (1) our human responsibility towards elephants, (2) the accountability of elephant custodians, (3) the moral standing of elephants, (4) ethical theories, and (5) ethics and management options.

In the introductory chapter of this book I firstly argue that the contemporary debate on justice focuses exclusively on matters of justice pertinent to nearly just societies; in the second place, I suggest that radically unjust societies generate problems of justice that cannot be solved by the naive application of current theories of justice. It follows that these problems of justice for unjust societies demand to be discussed in their own right. -/- In what follows, just such an attempt will be made to extend the scope of the contemporary debate on justice by developing a theory of justice for a radically unjust society. The chapters seek to remedy the several deficiencies of the contemporary debate on justice. -/- Thus, in Chapter Two suggestions will be made on how to identify injustice so that people can learn to see their experiences of suffering, degradation, humiliation, and oppression in terms of justice and injustice. In Chapter Three a standpoint will be developed on the relation between universal and particular elements in a theory of justice. Chapter Four serves two functions that are intertwined and cannot be easily separated. It functions first as a guide for making the second transition involved in the identification of injustice: to articulate theoretically the experiences of injustice. The second function is to provide a method for the design, construction, and justification of a theory of justice for a specific society. -/- In Chapter Five the relation between considerations of justice and forms of political action for the transformation of injustice into justice will be explored. Chapter Six then investigates the possible role that cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and religious pluralism has to play in theorizing about justice, and it asks how justice can be secured for every person in such a society. In the concluding section of Chapter Six the need for an ongoing dialogue between members of a political community is emphasized as the best way for settling disputes on matters of justice.