The Introduction to Morality as Legislation: Rules and Consequences explains the difference between a situated perspective where a person asks which act should be performed in a particular instance and a legislative perspective where one asks what rule should apply to a whole class of people in given circumstances. The legislative perspective seems to have advantages in terms of coming to more plausible moral conclusions but does not fit neatly into either consequentialist or Kantian categories as it uses consequentialist considerations to select among possible rules while being unable to explain why the question “which rule?” is the relevant question on purely consequentialist grounds. The Introduction describes four different dimensions along which conceptions of the legislative perspective can vary and two contextual dimensions as to where it is employed: political and nonpolitical contexts and legislative and nonlegislative contexts. The Introduction clarifies the goals of the book and provides summaries of the following chapters.

The Lactation at Work Law not only provided more leverage and legitimacy to lactating employees and their allies, but it also created opportunities for critical educational conversations between employees and their managers that shifted how certain managers approached workplace lactation. These managers moralized the law by framing compliance through a morality of child health. This framing shifted to include a morality focus because their lactating employees not only taught them about the health benefits of breastfeeding but also modeled their ideological commitment to workplace lactation. Compliance motivated by morality rather than managerial goals might better establish lactation accommodations within the cultural of the organization over time. Yet, these crucial educational conversations were most likely to happen where lactating employees had enough-but-not-too-much power. Where time and space accommodations were adequate or workers had autonomy and private space so they did not need accommodations, no discussion between worker and manager was needed. And where workers had insufficient power within the organization that they could not approach managers with problems, no discussion could happen. Thus, the lactation accommodations might become best established in those organizations in which lactating workers experienced some problems, but not too many difficulties.

Morality rests upon impersonal reflection, and our moral judgments aim to capture moral reasons for action, which like all reasons are essentially normative in character

an overview of the main themes of the book: metaphysics, morality, reason, freedom, and the self.

In eighteenth-century Britain, philosophy was a broader subject than it is today and included many subjects covered elsewhere in this book, such as science, political theory, and theology. This chapter focuses chiefly on those eighteenth-century topics in philosophy that have most shaped present-day philosophical discussion. The first of these is epistemology or the theory of knowledge: the study of what we know and how we know. John Locke, David Hume, and Thomas Reid called this the study of the human mind or understanding. We will also consider another area where the contributions of eighteenth-century British philosophers are widely recognized today: the work in moral and ethical philosophy of a group of thinkers commonly called the ‘British moralists’. From the ancient Greeks and Romans, eighteenth-century thinkers inherited an understanding of philosophy as a way of life and a guide to living well. On what basis do we arrive at moral principles of right and wrong, and what motivates us to follow those principles in our actions: our reason or our feelings? These questions concerned such thinkers as Samuel Clarke, the earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith.

This chapter explores the interconnections between sociopragmatics and morality. Notions of morality and the moral order have been recently incorporated into research on im/politeness and could potentially be of interest to other sub-fields of sociopragmatics. We review extant conceptualizations of the moral order and insights from moral psychology and propose ways of bringing the two traditions together by seeing morality as instantiated in the moral order and the latter as part and parcel of situated practice. Furthermore, we examine and elaborate on what we believe to be the fundamental links between im/politeness and moral evaluations and discuss how insights gained from research on in/civility and morality can be useful to im/politeness scholarship. In our case study, we briefly illustrate the application of moral psychology models to the analysis of im/politeness by drawing from Rai and Fiske’s Relationship Regulation Theory and conclude the chapter offering suggestions for new avenues of research that could be explored not only by im/politeness scholars but also by researchers working in other sub-fields of sociopragmatics.

This chapter traces how the material conditions and themes of Ibsen’s oeuvre reveal his interest in the culture of capitalism. The transformation of literary markets, the spread of economic ideas, and Ibsen’s financial struggles early in his career influenced both the content and form of his drama, which pays close attention to such prevalent features of nineteenth-century economic life as debt, credit, financialization and the invisible hand of the market. Although Ibsen never studied economics in depth, his own investment activities, coupled with his talent for observation, allowed him to capture European modernity in its transition from Christian ethos to the secular values of capitalism.

This chapter reveals the elaboration of a set of critical priorities, transition prime among them, crystallised by Aaron Hill in the 1730s. Offering what he claimed to be a purified version of pantomime’s techniques for arresting attention, Hill wrote of how actors could become a ‘true FAUSTUS’ for the theatres through transition, creating iconic and dynamic moments of suspension during which they could shift mind and body from one passion to another. Hill’s emphases continue into the time of David Garrick, whose transitions into ‘pensively preparatory attitudes’ were praised as intellectual achievements and blamed as pantomimical tricks. Ultimately, pauses and the transitions that occurred upon them became moments when an actor could be described as asserting their artistic autonomy and the focal point of critical attention. The realisation of Hill’s dreams — a theatre where sophisticated emotion replaced slapstick motion as the key source of spectacle — soon, however, risked becoming a Faustian pact, for an insight into the transitions of a play seemed to demand as much private attention to the page as public engagement with the stage.

In his Foundations of Natural Right, J. G. Fichte advances the innovative thesis that the theory of right is independent of, or separate from, moral theory. Although Fichte is concerned to stress the originality of his approach, he refers approvingly to some “excellent hints” in the writings of J. B. Erhard. Given the recent scholarly interest in Fichte’s account of the relationship between right and morality, it is surprising that Erhard’s position is seldom discussed. Where it is discussed, it is often presented as merely a hesitant precursor of Fichte’s position. This paper argues that Erhard’s account of the relationship between right and morality constitutes a distinctive and philosophically compelling position. I reconstruct Erhard’s account of the relationship between right and morality. I argue that Erhard’s position is best characterized as focusing on the dynamic interplay between the theory of right and the requirements of morality as articulated by Kantian moral theory. I demonstrate the coherence and significance of Erhard’s position by considering it in relation to a central debate in the philosophy of law—the debate between legal positivism and natural law theory.

Diderot and Rousseau were friends and then enemies, and they were also both major writers of the Enlightenment. They argued that human nature should be understood and valued, and they argued against anything that constrained it, as they considered that all suffering was destructive. Fiction was part of their argumentative arsenal, and perhaps even the tool they felt was most effective, as it works through the imagination on the emotions. 'Natural' reactions of dismay or distress at injustice or cruelty could 'enlighten' the reader at an emotional and therefore natural level, and create new ways of seeing that rejected harsh convention and promoted natural morality. This chapter tracks these aspects through their fictional and non-fictional works, showing how central they are to all their writing. We also look at the friendship of these two writers, and at the publication history of their fictional work.

This chapter sets out the idea of the moral economy of elections in more theoretical detail, locating it in the context of a particular theoretical approach to the state that draws inspiration from the work of Timothy Mitchell and others, as well as elaborating the description of the patrimonial and civic registers. The chapter also sets out the relationship of this moral economy approach to analytical models that foregound the idea of the norm, arguing that the affective power of the behaviours and language on political subjectivity is better captured by the language of virtue and morality. The chapter concludes with a brief description of three moments that help reveal the tensions between registers of virtue that shape the moral economy of elections.

As Lobban explains, Austin thought of jurisprudence as the study of concepts, principles and distinctions that are common to various, possibly only mature, legal systems. He considers Austin’s command theory and concept of a sovereign and Austin’s thoughts on the relation between law and morality and on legal reasoning and judge-made law. On Austin’s analysis, laws properly so-called, as distinguished from rules of positive morality, are commands issued by the sovereign to the subjects, and that something is a command only if there is a sanction behind it. Lobban considers the objection that the idea of a habit of obedience cannot account for the legal authority of the lawmaker, for the idea of a succession of lawmakers or for the idea of a legally limited lawmaker. Austin argued that there is no necessary connection between law and morality, defended a version of rule-utilitarianism and held that the principle of utility is a good index to divine law. He advocated a textual approach to the interpretation of statutes, holding that the law in a precedent is to be found in its ratio decidendi and that customary rules do not become legal rules until they are recognised by courts.

Borowski argues that Radbruch’s very important criticism against legal positivism is to be found not in his writings on legal positivism but in his own legal philosophy, especially the so-called Radbruch formula; that the Radbruch formula entails a rejection of the separation thesis on both the level of the criteria for the identification of valid legal norms and the level of the nature of law; and that Radbruch’s explicit claim that legal positivism was to blame for the situation in Germany is unconvincing because the Nazis did not, as a matter of fact, hold that law is law and should be applied according to its plain meaning in all circumstances, but were actually willing to apply a statute contrary to its wording if this suited their purposes.

The second chapter examines how public portrayals of local courtrooms continued to change in tandem with the widening reach of summary justice in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this period, magistrates’ courtrooms became among the most common and public sites of personal, concrete contact between ordinary citizens and the state in its various guises. As the advertisements that crowded the pages of the new popular press broadcast the expanding availability of products and services, columns of “Police Intelligence” broadcast the expanding roles of courtrooms and the authority of magistrates, police, and municipal agents. In doing so, they served to delineate that authority in the public eye and to either condone or condemn – largely the former – its expression and to assess the morality of individual responses to it. By portraying these daily encounters between the state and the people, police-court columns offered readers a common standard for defining morality, for determining victims and villains, and for measuring justice and injustice in the courtroom.