Mark C. Murphy

__The Philosophy of Law_ is a broad-reaching text that guides readers through the basic analytical and normative issues in the field, highlighting key historical and contemporary thinkers and offering a unified treatment of the various issues in the philosophy of law._ Enlivened with numerous, everyday examples to illustrate various concepts of law. Employs the idea of three central commonplaces about law - that law is a social matter, that law is authoritative, and that law is for the common good - to organize seemingly disparate topics and to bring rival views into contention with each other. The first volume in the _Fundamentals of Philosophy_ series, in which leading philosophers explore the fundamental issues and core problems in the major sub-disciplines of philosophy.

One of John Hare’s central theses in Unity and the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit aims at unity. This article raises two questions about Hare’s thesis. The first is about its modality: on Hare’s view, is it a necessary truth that the Holy Spirit has that aim? The second is about the exclusiveness of the aim of unity: on Hare’s view, does the Holy Spirit ever aim at disunity? Resources within this bookand Hare’s prior work can be shown to give leave these questions open; Hare’s position is compatible with radically different stances on them.

In characterizations of the Anselmian God — that is, God as an absolutely perfect being — it is common to ascribe _perfect moral goodness_ to God. This moral goodness is, furthermore, of a familiar sort, such that God’s exhibiting moral goodness of that sort entails that God will be motivated to prevent setbacks to the well-being of humans and other sentient animals. But the ascription of this familiar welfare-oriented moral goodness to the Anselmian God is unjustified: we lack justification for the view that the moral norms that properly govern human conduct properly govern the conduct of the Anselmian God, and we have some justification for denying that view. That the Anselmian God’s ethics is not of the familiar welfare-oriented variety has important implications for our understanding of the problem of evil.

What is Justice? Classic and Contemporary Readings, 2/e, brings together many of the most prominent and influential writings on the topic of justice, providing an exceptionally comprehensive introduction to the subject. It places special emphasis on "social contract" theories of justice, both ancient and modern, culminating in the monumental work of John Rawls and various responses to his work. It also deals with questions of retributive justice and punishment, topics that are often excluded from other volumes on justice. This new edition features expanded and updated readings on justice and punishment and includes more recent responses to John Rawls's work. Part One of the book features selections from classical sources including Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Mencius, as well as excerpts from the Bible and the Koran. Part Two provides readings on the state of nature and the social contract, from Hobbes and Locke to Rawls, Nozick, Gauthier, and Baier. Part Three includes the Declaration of Independence and Amendments to the U.S. Constitution in addition to selections on property and social justice by Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Engels, Marx, Mill, and several contemporary authors. Part Four offers a wide variety of readings on punishment, several of which address the death penalty. Part Five begins with selections from Rawls's work and includes responses from Dworkin, Nagel, Nozick, MacIntyre, Sandel, Walzer, Okin, and Rawls himself. Each selection is preceded by a brief introduction and each of the five parts opens with an introduction. The volume is further enhanced by a general introduction and an updated and extensive bibliography. Ideal for a wide variety of courses including social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of law, and contemporary moral problems, What Is Justice?, 2/e, does not assume any philosophical or specialized background. It is also engaging reading for anyone interested in justice.

__The Philosophy of Law_ is a broad-reaching text that guides readers through the basic analytical and normative issues in the field, highlighting key historical and contemporary thinkers and offering a unified treatment of the various issues in the philosophy of law._ Enlivened with numerous, everyday examples to illustrate various concepts of law. Employs the idea of three central commonplaces about law - that law is a social matter, that law is authoritative, and that law is for the common good - to organize seemingly disparate topics and to bring rival views into contention with each other. The first volume in the _Fundamentals of Philosophy_ series, in which leading philosophers explore the fundamental issues and core problems in the major sub-disciplines of philosophy.

The aim of this paper is to take the first steps toward providing a refurbished consent theory of political authority, one that rests in part on a reconception of the relationship between the surrender of judgment and the authoritativeness of political institutions. On the standard view, whatever grounds political authority implies that one ought to surrender one's judgment to that of one's political institutions. On the refurbished view, it is the surrender of one's judgment – which can plausibly be considered a form of consent – that makes political institutions practically authoritative.

Both Thomas Hobbes and John Austin identify civil law with commands issued by a sovereign; thus it is common to think of Austin’s theory of law as closely continuous with Hobbes’s view. Yet this “command of the sovereign” formulation masks deep differences between Hobbes and Austin, not only in their understandings of command and sovereign but also in the commitments that gave rise to their offering theories of law formulated in these terms. Nor is it correct to think that innovations in Hobbes’s conception of law paved the way for Austin’s more full-blown legal positivism: Hobbes’s jurisprudence is, in fundamentals, closely akin to Thomas Aquinas’s natural law jurisprudence. The idea that Hobbes and Austin are jurisprudential allies ought to be abandoned.