This chapter traces the history of religious property tax exemptions, particularly in the Anglo-American common law and equity law traditions. It analyzes the perennial controversy around religious tax exemption in the history of America, and the constitutional defense of these exemptions that emerged with arguments from history, federalism, separatism, and the social benefits that exempt properties provide at ample state savings. Religious exemptions, however, are under fresh attack today, particularly for religious groups who maintain traditional sexual morality. The chapter reconsiders the constitutionality of such exemptions in light of recent First Amendment cases, and judges these exemptions still to be constitutionally valid and socially valuable, even if subject to legislative repeal.

I shall, first, adumbrate the sceptical challenge that arises from those views which argue that inadvertent action involves voluntariness in some deep sense of the concept. In a second step, I will suggest that we should not regard inadvertence as a block to a unified picture of moral responsibility. For, responsibility does not require voluntariness in a wholesale manner. Then I will draw on the theory and practice of the law of torts to suggest the plausibility of the distinction between responsibility and standards of fault. Subsequently, I trace a more principled foundation for this distinction in the philosophical literature: Tim Scanlon, drawing on the distinction between blame and permissibility, has demonstrated convincingly that the mental states of agents, which are relevant for determining blame, should not (in principle) feature among the grounds of the permissibility of actions. The argument submits that permissibility is determined by (objective) reasons for action while blame depends on the meaning of actions, which requires reference to (subjective) mental states of agents. I conclude by siding with authors who argue that among the grounds of responsibility is a reason not to act negligently. Notably, this displacement of negligence from voluntariness to the realm of reasons suggests that responsibility entails capacity for rational agency.

Massachusetts was the last of the original thirteen American states to disestablish religion. Its 1780 constitution guaranteed freedom and equality to all peaceable private religions but also retained a “mild and equitable establishment” featuring (1) ceremonial public religious language, symbols, rituals, and oaths, (2) moral instruction in state schools, and 3) state collection of tithes and required religious worship. Lead draftsman John Adams crafted this approach as a political compromise between hardline establishmentarians and radical separationists in his day. But this view also reflected his belief that too little religious freedom is a recipe for hypocrisy and impiety, while too much religious freedom is an invitation to depravity and license. After 1780, this compromise fell apart as religious pluralism and political division over religion grew in the state. Amendments of 1821 and 1833 outlawed religious test oaths, mandatory worship, and state tithe collections, but the state retained its ceremonial and moral establishments.

The Introduction argues that religion has long been a critical foundation and dimension of human rights; that religion and human rights still need each other for each to thrive; and that robust promotion and protection of religious freedom is the best way to protect many other fundamental rights today, even though religious freedom and other fundamental rights sometimes clash and need judicious balancing. Human rights, however, are not a fundamental belief system. They are only middle axioms in our discourse, a means to the ends of achieving justice, order, and peace for all. Human rights ultimately depend upon the visions and values of human communities, including religious communities, for their content, coherence, and controlled application.

Harms brought about through negligence are typically morally blameworthy despite being unintended and often unforeseen. How is this best understood? A natural approach parallels a common approach to blameworthiness for unwitting wrongdoing, i.e., acts performed in ignorance of their wrongness: blameworthiness for the act or harm in question is taken to be derivative from more straightforward blameworthiness for relevant earlier failures. I have argued elsewhere for a derivative blameworthiness approach to unwitting wrongdoing that appeals to reasonable expectations about available steps the agent could have taken to avoid or remedy the ignorance in question; and contra Gideon Rosen and Neil Levy, such claims about reasonable expectations do not depend on there being episodes of clear-eyed akrasia in the agent’s past management of her beliefs, so that the account allows for blame in a much wider range of cases. My aim here is to extend this approach to a variety of forms of negligence, defending a similarly broad reasonable expectations version of a derivative blameworthiness view. In particular, I will distinguish and explore cases involving (i) self-conscious negligence, (ii) negligence involving false beliefs about relevant norms of due care, (iii) thoughtless negligence, and (iv) harms due to pure forgetting – though I will argue that the latter often turn out not to be cases of negligence at all, at least for purposes of moral blame.

This chapter defends three ideas. (1) That negligence is essentially a conative failure to exercise due care. The negligent agent doesn’t care enough about a relevant moral aim. (2) Resultantly, the potential cognitive failures of agents, whether they foresee or fail to foresee certain risks of harm, are only incidentally relevant to their negligence. In this way, (3) negligence is conceptually contiguous with recklessness. The hallmark of both reckless and negligence conduct is an insufficient regard for the legitimate interests of others, and what separates them is better understood in terms of conative differences in how each agent disregards those interests, rather than cognitive differences in advertence. I examine these claims in the context of a puzzle regarding negligence and foresight, and consider the implications of my conclusions for negligence culpability in morality and the traditional hierarchy of mens rea in the law.

The vast majority of the literature on responsibility tends to associate the idea of control with intentional action. This seems intuitive and natural. ‘Intentional action’ describes bodily movements executed because of and guided by reasons for action. How else, indeed, can a rational agent control their bodily movements? Disagreements among theorists arise, however, on the characterization of ‘reasons for actions’. On the standard account of action, reasons for action are a binomial of beliefs and desires construed as mental states.1 On a more sophisticated account of the standard view, reasons for actions involve plans that direct us and result in ways of self-governance.2 On the classical tradition of action, reasons for actions track good-making characteristics or values.

This chapter analyzes the gradual and escalating development of human rights and religious freedom protections over the past two millennia. The chapter surveys the discovery and accumulation of rights and liberties in biblical texts and their interpretations over the centuries; in classical Roman law and the medieval civil, canon, and common law sources that built on the Bible and Roman law; in the Protestant Reformation and the Protestant–Catholic conflicts and revolts that followed; in Enlightenment liberalism and modern constitutional reforms born of democratic revolution; and in twentieth-century international human rights documents beginning with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Setting up the more detailed studies that follow, the chapter identifies several essential and enduring questions about the intersections of religion, human rights and religious freedom that still confront states and churches today.

In the case of negligent action, it is less clear what it means to manifest ill will, since the agent’s conscious choices may assign the appropriate weight to reasons. The relevant notion of expression is a causal notion: your negligent act expresses an insufficiently good will when (a) you have an insufficiently good will and (b) this fact plays some causal role in your conduct. The challenge is to characterize the relevant causal role. The easy case is the case in which the current negligent act is the foreseeable upshot of prior culpable wrongdoing. The hard case is the case in which there is no such prior act. The chapter describes a number of such cases, focusing mainly on negligent actions done from “implicit bias” and other non-conscious motives. The main claim is that conduct of this sort does manifest "ill will": for the purposes of understanding the “quality of will” condition, (almost) any causal relation between ill will and act will do. If it is unclear whether such conduct is culpable, this is not to be explained by appeal to the quality of will condition, but rather by reference to another condition on moral blameworthiness, which the paper seeks to articulate.

Inadvertent actions in relation to legal and moral responsibility have been represented as puzzling on many occasions. In this chapter, I aim to show they are puzzling for different reasons than those usually proposed. Before I do this it is important to clarify some assumptions and presuppositions. First, the chapter presupposes that intentional action constitutes the paradigm of action . Second, it presupposes that intention and intentional actions run parallel to practical reason, and that the first-person perspective is the primary perspective to explain intentional action. Inadvertent actions seem to be an important challenge to this conception and this study aims to pave the way for thinking about negligence in the context of the first-person perspective. The aim of the chapter is modest in the sense that it neither offers an account of negligence, nor a criticism of the views that have been advanced in the literature, but identifies a puzzle that arises in the context of actions from the first-person perspective and gestures towards a possible methodology for thinking about negligent actions. I see this as a necessary and preliminary task before engaging with the nature of negligent acts and responsibility for negligence.

Massachusetts was the last of the original thirteen American states to disestablish religion. Its 1780 constitution guaranteed freedom and equality to all peaceable private religions but also retained a “mild and equitable establishment” featuring (1) ceremonial public religious language, symbols, rituals, and oaths, (2) moral instruction in state schools, and 3) state collection of tithes and required religious worship. Lead draftsman John Adams crafted this approach as a political compromise between hardline establishmentarians and radical separationists in his day. But this view also reflected his belief that too little religious freedom is a recipe for hypocrisy and impiety, while too much religious freedom is an invitation to depravity and license. After 1780, this compromise fell apart as religious pluralism and political division over religion grew in the state. Amendments of 1821 and 1833 outlawed religious test oaths, mandatory worship, and state tithe collections, but the state retained its ceremonial and moral establishments.

Consider the well-travelled question, ‘What is international law?’ Unlike its confident counterparts in fields like constitutional law, administrative law, criminal law, and the like, the field of international law is downright famous for not really being sure of what it is. In its search for some closure, this uncertainty tends to flow in one of three directions. First, we have the issue of whether international law is really law at all, and so, we want to know, well then what is ‘international law’ if we cannot take its name seriously? Relying upon philosophers like John Austin or H. L. A. Hart as a starting point, the interrogation builds a particular conception of what law requires to be law qua law: something about an enforceable command issued from a superior to an inferior, or something about primary and secondary rules.