They must apply overlapping normative structures to complex concrete scenarios and act as dictated by their role, by ethical, legal and regulatory frameworks, and according to conscience. In a liberal democracy, law-enforcement agents and other agents of the state must operate under principles for the protection of citizens’ basic rights and liberties. Also pertinent within liberal democracies are normative principles about how social goods like income, wealth, and education should be distributed and principles of neutrality across differing conceptions of the good (such as are contained in different religious creeds).
The members of this group address such questions as:
- What is the proper role of desert in the just distribution of social goods?
- How are the basic rights and liberties of citizens to be demarcated?
- Do the basic rights and liberties of citizens give rise to a civic duty not to infringe on other citizens’ basic rights and liberties? How, if at all, do duties of respect for other citizens’ basic rights and liberties affect the exercise of rights like the right to strike and the right to protest? Are the rights to engage in strikes and other forms of direct action themselves among the basic rights and liberties?
- How do basic rights and liberties bear upon business and the world of work?
- How is the liberal polity to accommodate and manage differences of worldview between subpopulations, balancing individuals’ rights and the demands of their consciences with the avoidance of conflict?
- What are appropriate bases and limits for the criminalization, or for the punishment through legal or social sanction, of conduct?
- What differences are there between the rights and responsibilities of public officials as against those of private citizens? For example, are private citizens properly to be debarred from vigilante activity?
- How should public standards, for example requiring public officials to act honestly and with integrity, be formulated? What are the ethical limits on measures for regulating, or for enforcing, public standards?
Members
Sorin Baiasu, Daniel Hill, Stephen McLeod, Simon Hailwood, Tarek Yusari
Affiliated members
PhD researchers
Miles Cheshire
Associated research centre
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