Clark Wade Butler

This book manuscript, entitled United Nations Human Rights Ethics: For The Greatest Success of the Greatest Number, critically examines most all major normative ethical theories since Socrates and finds Roman Stoic ethics to be the least deficient. It divides ethical theories into popular ones with little academic support, other popular ones that have had such support, and Kantian ethics standing alone as a philosopher's academic ethical philosophy with limited popular support. It criticizes the appropriation of human rights by the international law profession to the exclusion of moral philosophy, despite the origin of "human rights" in the moral philosopher Rousseau. It blames the inability of moral philosophers to reach a professional consensus on the elements of normative ethics, not the legal profession. It laments both the failure of human rights education to human beings everywhere as requested by the Universal Declaration and the decline in popular support for human rights in favor of nationalism in current history since 2015. It advocates a way of redirecting human right education to people on the ground rather than mainly to law students. Such education has been overtaken by the Rule of Law movement fighting high crimes crimes against humanity unanticipated by the Universal Declaration. It argues for a way for ethicists to get on the same page in teaching elements in ethics and argues forcefully for a positive method for popular human rights education as well as for human rights-based elementary ethical theory.

This article is the preface to a completed book manuscript, United Nations Human Rights Ethics. Based on the indivisibility of human rights, the Four Freedoms Speech, and the Preamble of the Universal Declaration, the book takes freedom of expression as the one human right. Other rights are modes of this one. For example, one exercises freedom of expression (speech) by exercising the right to life, access to courts, etc.. The book argues that human rights are primarily an ethical concept (introduced by Rousseau) rather than a concept of international law.

Human rights have increasingly come to the center of political and social philosophy since 1945. The have been widely discussed in publications on topical human rights issues, in the work of some of the most notable philosophers of the time like Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, and in volumes on global justice. But, despite Habermas work in Diskurs Ethik, discussion ethics has never clearly been presented as a normative ethical theory in competition with the classical rivals such as utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. This paper makes a clear, concise case recognition of human rights ethics as a contemporary normative ethical theory, and for its inclusion in future elementary textbooks. Universal legal human rights protect the central ethical human right to freedom of expression. Human Rights Ethics supersedes classical theories based on evident first principles because these principles are either merely asserted without justification or are justified by being superseded by the final self-justifying standard of definable ethical discussion. The very refutation of human rights ethics could be sound only through ethical discussion, with all parties exercising the ethical, but not yet universally legal, right to freedom of expression. Hence the refutation of the ethical right to freedom of expression cannot be sound.

In Jena Hegel began his philosophical career under the auspices of Schelling’s Spinozism. His declaration of philosophical independence from Schelling, dating from publication of the Phenomenology, was a repudiation of the Spinozistic definition of the absolute as merely substance. Substance without the flux of accidents, he came to see, is nothing at all. Yet in the judgment of history Hegel’s break with Schellingian Spinozism, though clearly embarked upon, was not so clearly consummated. The struggle of monism and pluralism is no longer a burning issue in philosophy, and that is perhaps why Hegel’s monism is rarely mentioned by today’s Hegel scholars. But the belief that Hegel was a one-substance monist — affirming the existence of spirit as an all-encompassing and indivisible substance — was never far from the minds of earlier interpreters. Such interpreters range from K. F. Göschel to C.E.M. Joad in “Outline of Hegel’s Philosophy: Monistic Idealism,” Chapter 15 of his Guide to Philosophy,. By failing to distinguish the absolute idealism of Hegel from that of the British idealists, Whitehead himself lent support to the monistic interpretation of Hegel when he wrote

The usual version of the genetic argument for panpsychism is not difficult to refute. The version is based on the principle of biological continuity according to which the various species differ in degree rather than in kind. It is then asserted that if there is some point in the evolution of life out of inanimate matter, or of higher out of lower life, such that before this point minds did not exist while thereafter they do exist, then the principle of continuity is violated. The argument, as Paul Edwards points out, is based on the Scholastic principle that a cause must contain its effect in actuality, since otherwise it could not communicate the effect and thus could not operate as its cause. Just as what causes a body to heat up must itself be hot, so what causes human minds to come into existence must already possess mentality. Ultimately, the inanimate world of, say, six billion years ago caused human minds to come into existence. Therefore, the constituents of even the so-called “inanimate world” are psychic. Yet Edwards’ refutation of this particular argument is unassailable. The argument fails, first, because the Scholastic principle on which it is based is highly dubious. But it fails even granting this principle. The emergence of high-level minds from low-level minds would create just as great a problem as an original emergence of the mental from the nonmental. There would still be the problem of how an entity with given capacities and characteristics could be caused by entities without those capacities and characteristics. And, finally, if we grant the emergence of high-level from low-level minds, it is not clear why the mental itself may not emerge from the nonmental.

This article defends linguistic descent in contrast to the possibility of linguistic ascent or the formal mode in metaphysics. We can go both ways, but metaphysics metaphysically defined presupposes metaphysics conceptualstically defined, which presupposes metaphysicas ontologially defined. Predicates implie abstract concepts (categories in metaphysics), and abstract oncepts presuppose the concrete qualities from which they are abstracted. A distinction is made between any quality and that which has the quality. This article contains a refutation of Kant on the ontological argument. Being, conceived as instantiation, is a predicate once we posit universal properties instantiated by whatever is. The article, in the author's subequent work, leads to an explicit nominalism which asserts universals only as practical postulates of theoretical reason, i.e., logical discourse. Qualities are unique, not open to multiple instantiation.

The purpose of this book is to advance responsible rehabilitation of the speculative philosophy of history. It challenges the idea popularized by thinkers such as and Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-François Lyotard that historical meta-mythology and meta-narrative are philosophically obsolete. As long as humanity, viewed anthropologically, lives by over-arching narrative, the quest for a version that survives rational criticism remains vital. Here human rights serve as the key to unlock such a version. Despite the fact that the Hegelian philosophy of history has often been derided, something very similar currently functions as the official ideology of the world community: the idea of history as the story of freedom. This book does not retell the world-historical story of freedom. Rather, it uncovers it, beginning with the current age of human rights and working backward through the great role-model civilizations of history. Its conclusion is that a forward retelling of the story of freedom as the story of human rights can be justified by dewesternizing the story. The book contains critical responses from specialized scholars and re-presentative of selected world cultures. The volume includes illustrations, and a guest Afterword by Donald Phillip Verene. It is a companion-volume to the author's _Hegel's Logic: Between History and Dialectic_ (North-western University Press, 1996).

World history has been consigned by professional historians to textbooks for the public schools. But people will obtain ideological or mytihcal notions of the meaning of history unless philosophers ofhistory step in to rationally regulate accounts of world history. Despite its dependenc in most cases on secondary sources, world history not an impossible academic research disclipline due to the countless cultures and ethnic groups in history--much as astronomy is not impossible due the countless celestial objects. To understand world history it is enough to distinguish a finite number of role model nations as distinct from nations that follow in their wake. The paper seeks to legitimate the sort of philosophical world history research pursued by Hegel.

The usual version of the genetic argument for panpsychism is not difficult to refute. The version is based on the principle of biological continuity according to which the various species differ in degree rather than in kind. It is then asserted that if there is some point in the evolution of life out of inanimate matter, or of higher out of lower life, such that before this point minds did not exist while thereafter they do exist, then the principle of continuity is violated. The argument, as Paul Edwards points out, is based on the Scholastic principle that a cause must contain its effect in actuality, since otherwise it could not communicate the effect and thus could not operate as its cause. Just as what causes a body to heat up must itself be hot, so what causes human minds to come into existence must already possess mentality. Ultimately, the inanimate world of, say, six billion years ago caused human minds to come into existence. Therefore, the constituents of even the so-called “inanimate world” are psychic. Yet Edwards’ refutation of this particular argument is unassailable. The argument fails, first, because the Scholastic principle on which it is based is highly dubious. But it fails even granting this principle. The emergence of high-level minds from low-level minds would create just as great a problem as an original emergence of the mental from the nonmental. There would still be the problem of how an entity with given capacities and characteristics could be caused by entities without those capacities and characteristics. And, finally, if we grant the emergence of high-level from low-level minds, it is not clear why the mental itself may not emerge from the nonmental.

The paper analyzes the American counterculture of the 1960s and early '70s, from the New Left through the hippies, revolutionaries and Jesus people, to the counterculture's collapse in artistry and the cynicism of Watergate; this evolution is viewed as a re-enactment of Hegel's dialectic of 'active reason' in the Phenomenology of Spirit , from the critique of 'observation' to 'society as a community of animals'. Secondly, an attempt is made to account for this re-enactment in the twentieth century. The tentative conclusion is that the counterculture was America's discovery of the Hegelian idea of the state, but that, in an age of world economic interdependence and universal (if sometimes unacknowledged) military insecurity, this discovery came too late. The economic and military basis of the only world-history which Hegel knew, the history of nation-states all the way from oriental despotisms to modern 'Germanic' states is, it seems, in the process of disappearance. Section on the dialectic of Observation to Active Reason revised and updated in The Dialectical Method: A Treatise Hegel Never Wrote. Prometheus Books, 2012.

In Jena Hegel began his philosophical career under the auspices of Schelling’s Spinozism. His declaration of philosophical independence from Schelling, dating from publication of the Phenomenology, was a repudiation of the Spinozistic definition of the absolute as merely substance. Substance without the flux of accidents, he came to see, is nothing at all. Yet in the judgment of history Hegel’s break with Schellingian Spinozism, though clearly embarked upon, was not so clearly consummated. The struggle of monism and pluralism is no longer a burning issue in philosophy, and that is perhaps why Hegel’s monism is rarely mentioned by today’s Hegel scholars. But the belief that Hegel was a one-substance monist — affirming the existence of spirit as an all-encompassing and indivisible substance — was never far from the minds of earlier interpreters. Such interpreters range from K. F. Göschel to C.E.M. Joad in “Outline of Hegel’s Philosophy: Monistic Idealism,” Chapter 15 of his Guide to Philosophy,. By failing to distinguish the absolute idealism of Hegel from that of the British idealists, Whitehead himself lent support to the monistic interpretation of Hegel when he wrote

This volume argues that the Hegel system is not closed, but open to the future. The conclusion is convincing, although it may not have required as arduous an exposition as Hoffmeyer gives it. His prose as well as the usually solid substance of what he says is reminiscent of Hegel’s Logic, whose sections bearing on his conclusion he analyzes closely. One of the interesting aspects of his book is that Hoffmeyer argues against Hegel’s own explicit exposition to establish his conclusion. Hegel, we know, asserts the Logic to be God’s eternal essence before the creation of nature and history as deployed in time. The essence of the absolute is what has been, but precisely for that reason it is a temporal process withdrawn into itself. But this essence is also the power or potential for such process unfurling itself anew and in unforeseen ways. I take this to be the apparent meaning of Hegel, not a revision of him as Hoffmeyer suggests. Newly appearing self-determined attainments manifest ever more fully an essence that has always been. Yet if we reject determinism, there are countless possible past essences of countless possibly different presents. If the absolute essence which has been expresses itself in World War II, it acquires posthumously the property of always having been capable of doing so. The indetermination of the present results in a change of the essential past into the potential for this rather than that.

Hegel’s defense of the welfare state retains appeal when grounded in dialogical human rights ethics defended as true normative ethical theory. His dialectic of trade passes through budding consumer desires in the once sovereign family and trade between households risking market-induced poverty, ending in market regulation by an external welfare state. The dialectic recurs on a higher level as we in domestic civil society turn to foreign products. Market-induced poverty generates an external global welfare state gradually visible in today’s international financial institutions Hegel did not see. The US has fallen subject to the dialectic of trade, with relative economic decline and a more dialogical relation with the outside world. Yet a welfare state does not replace the market, but protects it against from itself. Entrepreneurship remains key to fighting world poverty. Beside mini-loans, “mini competitive economic colonialism”—neither classical political colonialism nor monopolistic economic neocolonialism—creates new consumer markets in the poorest nations for the products of developed nations, and vice versa: developing nations are not made dependent on a single foreign power or international financial organization, nor forced to generate investment capital domestically by an authoritarian suppression of consumption and democracy, nor forced to sacrifice economic development.