Aleksandar Fatic

The paper discusses three aspects of belonging to religious systems of belief within a modern liberal society, namely (1) the sincerity and consistency of belief, (2) the possibility of exteriorization of belief through broader social interactions or transactions, and (3) the relationship between religious belief and the modern concept of affirmative tolerance, or affirmation of differences, which has become a pronounced public policy in multicultural liberal societies. The author argues that, while negative tolerance allows sincere religious belief to flourish in the private sphere and for benevolence to be shown to those who are seen as mistaken in their beliefs, affirmative tolerance opens an array of logical issues. The demand to extend potential substantive validation to opposed beliefs produces the ricochet effect of de-validating one’s own beliefs. This creates difficulties for religious communities when issues at stake are beliefs that, in the respective belief-systems, are definitive of the moral goodness and moral badness. Upon a more careful examination of the logical relations between the soteriological promises characteristic of what is sometimes called the ‘substantive’ layer of religiousness, on the one hand, and the public expectation of a tolerant coexistence of religious communities on a social level, on the other hand, it becomes clear that the tolerance required can only be a negative tolerance. Any expectation of affirmative tolerance de-values the soteriological script of the respective system of religious belief, and is thus likely to lead to serious disturbances in a liberal context of multi-cultural coexistence. The author argues that the recent political announcements of a ‘failure of the multicultural experiment’ are caused by the aggressive pursuit of ‘affirmative tolerance’ rather than by any in-built intolerance of others in any of the large religious belief systems now prevalent in the liberal democratic world.

While most discussions of corruption focus on administration, institutions, the law and public policy, little attention in the debate about societal reform is paid to the “internalities” of anti-corruption efforts, specifically to character-formation and issues of personal and corporate integrity. While the word “integrity” is frequently mentioned as the goal to be achieved through institutional reforms, even in criminal prosecutions, the specifically philosophical aspects of character-formation and the development of corporate and individual virtues in a rational and systematic way tend to be neglected. This paper focuses on the “internalities” of anti-corruption work with special emphasis on the pre-requisites that need to be ensured on behalf of the social elites in order for proper individual and collective character- formation to take place throughout the society. The author argues that a systematic pursuit of socially recognised virtues, both those pertaining to society as a whole and those specific to particular professions and social groups, is the most comprehensive and strategically justified way of pursuing anti-corruption policy, while institutional and penal policies can only serve an auxiliary role. The pursuit of institutional and criminal justice policies against corruption in a society that is subject to increasing relativism with regard to values and morality is at best ineffective, and at worst socially destructive. Thus the paper suggests a re-examination of the social discourse on the level of what the author calls “value strategy” and the gradual building of a plan to create and solidify specifically designed features of “corporate character” for key sectors of the society. This approach can serve as the main long-term strategy to improve the public profile of integrity and reinforce morality in both the public and civil sectors.

The paper examines the potential of sympathy as defined by Max Scheler to found a normative ethics. Scheler perceives sympathy in predominantly instinctivist terms, and insists that, while it accounts for a comprehensive range of human interactions, it cannot be a basis for ethics. However, Scheler does not convincingly argue against an ethics of sympathy. A closer examination of his account of sympathy reveals that this account in fact suggests a strong possibility of an ethics of sympathy, which would also encompass other segments of Scheler's systematic view of sympathy, including seeing sympathy as a foundation for cognition, emotions, and a certain a priori collective knowledge.

The paper discusses the manner and extent to which Epicurean ethics can serve as a general philosophy of life, capable of supporting philosophical practice in the form of philosophical counseling. Unlike the modern age academic philosophy, the philosophical practice movement portrays the philosopher as a personal or corporate adviser, one who helps people make sense of their experiences and find optimum solutions within the context of their values and general preferences. Philosophical counseling may rest on almost any school of philosophy, ranging — in the Western tradition from Platonism to the philosophy of language or logic. While any specialist school of philosophy may serve valuable purposes by elucidating specific aspects of one’s experiences and directing future action, the more ‘generalist’ the philosophy used as the basis for counseling is, the broader and more far-reaching its potential impact on the person undergoing counseling. Epicurean ethics is a prime example of a philosophy of life that is suitable for philosophical counseling today. Its closer examination reveals that, contrary to superficial opinion, it is not opposed to Stoicism and may in fact incorporate Stoicism and its antecedent virtues (including many Christian virtues) in a simple yet comprehensive practical system of directions for modern counseling.

The general aim of this work is to examine the main features of some of the most influential contemporary theories of criminal justice, to look at their conceptual and methodological relative advantages and shortcomings, and to try to glean in them a direction for the devising of a more promising, more optim ising way of accounting for crime and deviance, as well as for prospects of successful social control. The general contention of the work is that the key question to be asked in this respect is what value ought to lie at the base of all such explanatory attempts. The general answer, with which the 'restorative theory of crime-handling', espoused herein, deals, is that this value ought to be trust. All those arrangements which can generally be characterised as trust-enhancing appear to be optimising as well, and to contribute in a constructive way to the resolution of conflicts. Punishment, on the other hand, does not appear to be trust-enhancing; on the contrary, it seems to play an essentially trust-degrading role in most contexts, and thus creates an atm osphere and consequences which do not suggest the possibility of both effective and humane social control mechanisms. It has been the aim of theories of social control for decades to avoid excessive punitiveness and maximise the consensus which is built around the particular policies to that effect. Yet, most such theories have ended up neglecting the role of trust, and em phasising justice instead. Another contention of the arguments contained herein is to the effect that justice ought not to play such a prom inent role in any theory of social control which aspires to be trust-enhancing. Following the unavoidable directions of argum ents advanced over decades, the argum ents herein deal with theories such as 'retributivism ' and 'utilitarianism ', 'communitarianism ' and 'republicanism ', thereby bordering on political, and even on sociological theory. Yet, they do not remain on the level of presenting argum ents for and against these theories - the value of what is argued here against such theories, if there is any value in it, lies in its contribution to the fuller illum ination of the real role of trust in a social theory of crime-control which would derive strongly from the popular 'conflict-resolution' theories, but which, at the same time, would seek to avoid some of their greatest calam ities. To w hat extent this work might have succeeded in accomplishing that end, however, is, of course, up to the reader to judge.