Refine
Has Fulltext
- no (20)
Document Type
- Article (8)
- Part of a Book (6)
- Review (4)
- Other (2)
Language
- English (20) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (20)
Keywords
- Abendland (1)
- Catholicism (1)
- Cyberspace (1)
- De-territorialisation Process (1)
- Fatwas (1)
- Islam (1)
- Muslims (1)
- Orthodoxy (1)
- Protestantism (1)
- Shari'a (1)
Institute
This article focuses on the marginal extremities – the limits – of Shari’a practices in Australia, through the example of a criminal case in which four Sydney-based Muslim men whipped a Muslim convert to punish him for his excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol. The men claimed they acted in line with the doctrines of Shari’a practice to ‘purify’ or absolve the victim of his sins. While the case was tried before a magistrate in a lower court, it is argued in this article that its social and political significance was wider, reaching into contemporary debates around multiculturalism and immigration from non-western, non-liberal and mainly Muslim nations. Mainstream media and political narratives viewed the whipping as an example of the moral dangers of accommodating Shari’a norms, eliding the differences between peaceable Shari’a and its violent extremities, while situating the case at the limits of multicultural accommodation. This article interrogates the objectionable margins of some cultural practices through this limit case. At the same time it questions the limits or limitations of a multiculturalism that homogeneously views the practices of entire ethnic or religious groups as violent and incommensurable with dominant norms, while using these understandings as a justification for marginalising these groups.
Successful societies
(2020)
Combining moral philosophy with sociological theory to build on themes introduced in Hall and Lamont’s Successful Societies (2009), the paper outlines a distinctive perspective. It holds that a necessary condition of successful societies is that decision-makers base their decisions on a high level of attentiveness (concern and comprehension) towards subjectively valued and morally legitimate forms of life. Late modern societies consist of a plurality of forms of life, each providing grounds for what Alasdair MacIntyre has called internal goods—valued and morally valuable practices. The status of such goods is examined, and distinctions are drawn between their manifest and latent, and transposable and situationally specific, characteristics. We integrate this refined idea of internal goods into a developed conception of habitus that is both morally informed and situationally embedded. The sociological approach of strong structuration theory (SST) is employed to demonstrate how this conception of habitus can guide the critique of decision-making that damages internal goods. We identify the most pervasive and invidious forms of damaging decision-making in contemporary societies as those involving excessive forms of instrumental reasoning. We argue that our developed conception of habitus, anchored in the collectively valued practices of specific worlds, can be a powerful focus for resistance. Accounts of scholarship in higher education and of the white working class in America illustrate the specificities of singular, particular, social worlds and illuminate critical challenges raised by the perspective we advocate.
Introduction
(2019)
This book started as a conversation about successful societies and human development. It was originally based on a simple idea— it would be unusual if, in a society that might be reasonably deemed as successful, its citizens were deeply unhappy. This combination— successful societies and happy citizens— raised immediate and obvious problems. How might one define “success” when dealing, for example, with a society as large and as complex as the United States? We ran into equally major problems when trying to understand “happiness.” Yet one constantly hears political analysts talking about the success or failure of various democratic institutions. In ordinary conversations one constantly hears people talking about being happy or unhappy. In the everyday world, conversations about living in a successful society or about being happy do not appear to cause bewilderment or confusion. “Ordinary people” do not appear to find questions like— is your school successful or are you happily married?— meaningless or absurd. Yet, in the social sciences, both “successful societies” and “happy lives” are seen to be troublesome.
As our research into happiness and success unfolded, the conundrums we discussed were threefold: societal conditions, measurements and concepts. What are the key social factors that are indispensable for the social and political stability of any given society? Is it possible to develop precise measures of social success that would give us reliable data? There are a range of economic indicators that might be associated with success, such as labor productivity, economic growth rates, low inflation and a robust GDP. Are there equally reliable political and social measures of a successful society and human happiness? For example, rule of law and the absence of large- scale corruption might be relevant to the assessment of societal happiness. These questions about success led us inexorably to what seems to be a futile notion: happiness. Economic variables such as income or psychological measures of well- being in terms of mental health could be easily analyzed; however, happiness is a dimension that has been elusive to the social sciences.
In our unfolding conversation, there was also another stream of thought, namely that the social sciences appeared to be more open to the study of human unhappiness rather than happiness.