From the Bottom Up: Selected Essays (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780199756162)

Kent Greenawalt's From the Bottom Up constitutes a collection of articles and essays written over the last five decades of his career. They cover a wide range of topics, many of which address ties between political and moral philosophy and what the law does and should provide. A broad general theme is that in all these domains, what really is the wisest approach to difficult circumstances often depends on the particular issues involved and their context. Both judges and scholars too often rely on abstract general formulations to provide answers. A notable example in political philosophy was the suggestion of the great and careful scholar, John Rawls, that laws should be based exclusively on public reason. The essays explain that given uncertainty of what people perceive as the line between public reason and their religion convictions, the inability of public reason to resolve some difficulty questions, such as what we owe to higher animals, and the feeling of many that their religious understanding should count, urging exclusive reliance on public reason is not a viable approach. Other essays show similar problems with asserted bases for legal interpretations and the content of provisions such as the First Amendment.

Author: Kent Greenawalt
ISBN-10: 0199756163
ISBN-13: 9780199756162
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 05/31/2016
Pages: 538
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.81lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.10w x 1.90d