Mehmet Demiray

It is a mark of our age that the long-standing relations between politics and religion founded long ago along the axis of liberal-democratic principles have turned out to appear problematical. Recently raised religious demands and movements put on the agenda a common question: to what extent are such demands and movements compatible with the principle of the peaceful co-existence of diverse cultural forms, which is the essential reference point of any democratic imagination? It a cliché that fundamentalism understood as the opposite of temperateness in holding and practically following up religious convictions constitutes the limit for tolerating religious demands and movements within liberal-democratic regimes. Such a quantitative distinction between fundamentalism and “moderate” forms of religiosity paradoxically work out for the increase of tension between religiosity and democratic political life, because it implies that non-fundamentalist forms of religiosities are indeed “diluted” forms, while fundamentalist forms represent genuine and uncompromising loyalty to the religious creed. This paper investigates the possibility of making a qualitative distinction between fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist forms of religiosity by employing the categorical duality between zealotry and piety, which can then serve as the criterion for the acceptability of religious demands and movements within democratic political spheres.

Human rights are conceived moral response of humanity to the experiences of gross violations of human rights. Yet, almost in every case we come across with such violations, we also witness a common and disturbing tendency to overshadow the arguments from human rights. Hence, human rights are not able to fulfill the very function we expect of them in the most pertinent cases. In our view, this is because of the mindset of the “political” that competes with the mindset of human rights for guiding human practices. This paper evaluates these two mindsets so as to show how spoiling impacts the mindset of the “political” has against the standpoint of human rights. We will then conclude that, if we are to hold out on the triumph of “the political” over human rights in the very cases, whereby we need appealing to human rights at most, we should renounce the main vestige of “the political” within international and national legal-normative frameworks. This vestige is principally the idea of “sovereignty”, which is the arch and peak concept of the mainstream political imaginary.

This paper claims that a particular interpretation of Kant`s legal-political philosophy, as it is presented in his Doctrine of Right, provides us with the much needed resolution to the question of the normativity of law, precisely because it brings in a perspective that avoids both positivism and ethicism. This particular interpretation follows a strategy of argumentation that I call the “argument for the intrinsic normativity of law”, i.e., the argument that law is defined and justified on its own grounds, without any need to refer to ethics, or rational/enlightened self-interest. This argument highlights the concept of legal person with the innate right to freedom as the necessary presupposition of legal practices, and sets forth a fundamental sense of justice inherent to the concept of law that consists in the reciprocal recognition of legal personality. In the end, I come up with a distinctive conception of law that I formulate as a last resort of normativity in the face of a conflict wherein an ethical solution does not appeal to all parties.

This paper argues that Kant’s distinction between “civil union” and “ethical community” can be of great value in dealing with a problem that causes considerable trouble in contemporary political and social philosophy, namely the question of the normative significance and role of religion in political and social life. The first part dwells upon the third part of Kant`s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason with the intention of exposing the general features of ethical community. It highlights the fact that Kant considers publicity, and indeed public authority, to be constitutive of the ethical community. The second part discusses his argument that we have a unique ethical duty to enter into an ethical community. This discussion clarifies the constitutive purpose of ethical community and sets forth why Kant thought that the ethical community should have a religious form. The third part presents an account of the constitutive purpose of the state in light of the Doctrine of Right. Throughout these steps, as is concluded, the essentials of a model for the relations between law, ethics, and religion emerge, which shows the way in which both religious and secularist worries can be met on a principled basis.

This essay examines two dominant traditions in legal philosophy, the natural law theory and legal positivism, in terms of how they account for the normativity of law. I argue that, although these two traditions generally take the question of the normativity of law seriously and try to account for it, they are not successful in doing so. This failure in the prevailing literature on the philosophy of law, I suggest, nevertheless has an implicit reconstructive impact: the insights into the failure of natural law theory and legal positivism imply an alternative philosophical framework that may provide a positive answer to the question of the normativity of law