It is a commonly-held belief that ignorance excuses. But what of moral ignorance? Is a person blameless who acts from “false” moral principles? In this paper I shall try to show that such a person is blameworthy. I shall produce an argument that connects the acceptance of moral principles with character, character with moral responsibility, and moral responsibility with the justifiability of blame.

Although J. S. Mill′s essay On Liberty was intended by its author to be read as a self-contained work,1 and even though a careful reading would justify seeing it in this way, it has far too often been denied this right even by its defenders. There is a crucial distinction to be made between eliciting some point of substance from a particular work by an author and then turning to the rest of his work to throw further light on it, and employing other texts from the corpus of his writings to put the construction on certain things said in it which the work by itself cannot sustain, thus treating the former as essentially a fragment, albeit a most important fragment, of a whole.2 I would suggest that recourse to the latter course is justified only when the possibilities of treating it autarchically have already been explored. In this paper I propose to treat a celebrated text in the former way only because I believe that the results will show such an approach to be uniquely worthwhile, or at least fruitful enough to justify a paper conceived in this way. And, with a view to putting what I want to say about it in maximum focus I shall with one or two exceptions eschew giving supporting evidence from Mill′s other writings, even when this is permitted by the distinction I have made in this opening paragraph.

Here are three sets of circumstances: (i) On 27 July 1656, at the age of 23, Spinoza was thrown out of his religious community–the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam. During the remaining 21 years of his life it would have been easy enough for him to have returned, in practical if not in personal terms, but he chose not to do so. Despite close association with members of various Protestant sects, he chose to live without affiliation to any religious group. At that time, this was rare.

An old Arab proverb runs as follows:

He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool; shun him.

He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a child; teach him.

He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep; wake him.

But he who knows, and knows that he knows, is a sage; follow him.

Brian Calvert has offered us a clear and careful analysis of Locke′s views on punishment and capital punishment.1 The primary goal of his paper–that of correcting the misperception of Locke as a wholehearted proponent of capital punishment for a wide range of offences–must be allowed to be both laudable and largely achieved in his discussion. But Calvert′s analysis also encourages, I think, a number of serious misunderstandings of Locke′s true position.

There have been a number of attacks on the idea of human rights recently, both in the course of political and diplomatic encounters across the globe, as well as in the more systematic literature of political philosophy. These attacks do not always distinguish between the Lockean, negative and the more recent positive rights traditions. For example, at the 1993 summer conference on Human Rights in Vienna, Austria, many diplomats from different regions of the world raised such questions as 'When we speak of human rights, are these conditions that everyone everywhere ought to enjoy?’Is it perhaps the case that human rights are one thing for people in one part of the globe and another for those in another part?' These questions were raised in large part about the rights spelled out in the United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights, including both (so called) negative and positive rights–e.g., the rights to freedom of expression and to public education, respectively.