Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Political authority grants members of a government the right to rule over citizens using coercion if necessary (i.e., political legitimacy), while imposing an obligation for the citizens to obey government orders (i.e., political obligation). [2] A central question in political philosophy is "To what extent is political authority legitimate?"
According to this doctrine, the power of the state is limited in order to protect citizens from the arbitrary exercise of authority. The Rechtsstaat is a concept in continental European legal thinking, originally borrowed from German jurisprudence , which can be translated as "the legal state" or "state of rights".
In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for the affected individuals. [1] [2] In other words, utilitarian ideas encourage actions that lead to the greatest good for the greatest number.
Caplan defines rationality mainly in terms of mainstream price theory, arguing that mainstream economists oppose protectionism and government regulation more than the general population, and that more educated people are closer to economists on this score, even after controlling for confounding factors such as income, wealth or political ...
In the period of the eighteenth century, usually called the Enlightenment, a new justification of the European state developed.Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract theory states that governments draw their power from the governed, its 'sovereign' people (usually a certain ethnic group, and the state's limits are legitimated theoretically as that people's lands, although that is often not ...
Political ethics (also known as political morality or public ethics) is the practice of making moral judgments about political action and political agents. [1] It covers two areas: the ethics of process (or the ethics of office), which covers public officials and their methods, [2] [3] and the ethics of policy (or ethics and public policy), which concerns judgments surrounding policies and laws.
Hobbes’s moral philosophy therefore provides justification for, and informs, the theories of sovereignty and the state of nature that underpin his political philosophy. [2] In utilising methods of deductive reasoning and motion science, Hobbes examines human emotion, reason and knowledge to construct his ideas of human nature (moral ...
"Consent of the governed" is a phrase found in the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson.. Using thinking similar to that of John Locke, the founders of the United States believed in a state built upon the consent of "free and equal" citizens; a state otherwise conceived would lack legitimacy and rational-legal authority.