This chapter extends the implications of free will skepticism into the broader realm of social justice. While critics argue that justice requires belief in free will and basic desert, the author contends that many compelling theories of justice – such as those of John Rawls, David Hume, and Amartya Sen – do not rest on desert-based foundations. The chapter introduces and defends the capabilities approach, developed by Sen and Martha Nussbaum, as a promising framework for promoting justice without reliance on retributive or meritocratic notions. This approach emphasizes enhancing individuals’ real freedoms and opportunities – what they are actually able to do and be – while acknowledging the profound effects of luck, social structures, and unequal starting points. Free will skepticism reinforces the moral urgency of this view by highlighting the arbitrariness of birth and circumstance in shaping life outcomes. Rather than attributing success or failure to personal choice alone, this perspective demands attention to systemic barriers and privileges. By rejecting the myth of the self-made individual, the chapter makes a strong case for redistributive justice, inclusion, and structural reform. Ultimately, it argues that free will skepticism not only coheres with the pursuit of social justice but provides a compelling moral rationale for greater compassion, equity, and solidarity.

This chapter explores the significance of the interaction between desert and city for the emergent church and its theology in early Byzantium. First, it examines how the desert resisted the city, focusing on the iconic figure of Antony the Great and the early desert dwellers. In withdrawing from the city, the anchorites also withdrew from the spatial and temporal dimensions of earthly life, entering the depths of their consciousness and being. Second, it probes how the desert sought to transcend the city, focusing on Barsanuphius and John in the mid-sixth century. The ascetic ways of these two Old Men, dying unto themselves and the world, as well as the wisdom of their 850 letters, portray a desire for spiritual constructs that overcame city conventions. Third, it looks at the hagiographic portrait of Mary of Egypt and how her liturgical afterlife shaped and transformed the city.

This chapter explores the setting of Numbers (the desert) and its plot (the forty-year wandering), and how attention to these literary features connect to theological issues, such as God’s care and revelation.

This chapter examines actual but in particular imagined deserts of the Anthropocene as they have been portrayed in literature, while also making occasional forays into other cultural media like film, television, comics, and computer games. The chapter is divided into three sections titled Apocalyptic Desert, Toxic Desert, and Biospheric Desert, each section examining how Eurocentric ideologies, religious perspectives, financial models, as well as literary and cultural traditions have tended to paint the desert in the light of an existential struggle of “the human.” The chapter argues that when reading deserts from the perspective of the Anthropocene, it is important to undo any totalizing vision of the desert. The chapter points towards a wide range of desert texts like Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, J.G. Ballard’s The Drought, David Brin’s The Postman, and Edan Lepucki’s California, computer games like Spec Ops: The Line, and Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, films like The Mad Max franchise, as well as comics like Judge Dredd and Tank Girl. The chapter concludes with an extended reading of Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Water Knife and Frank Herbert’s Dune.

In this Chapter I argue, contrary to Aquinas and modern day defenders, that capital punishment is unjustified killing. Capital punishment is not required by retributivism, and Aqunas’s arguments defending the practice are unconvincing.

Theatrical presentation encompasses diverging perspectives on water ecologies, ecological divisions and extremes of wet and dry in tropical and desert climates. While twentieth-century drama points to how water sources in Australia have been divided up to restrict access through land proprietorship, polarising attitudes and racial injustice, innovative twenty-first century performance emphasises the interconnectedness of water flows, seepage and below ground storage. An appreciation of water flow is particularly evident in First Nations performance, which includes the influential work of Bangarra Dance Theatre. Performance explores values and practices that resist the way water is polluted and detrimentally reconfigured in binary divisions to restrict access and divert flows and highlights the need for water availability for all species in a climate change era. Australian theatrical performance points to emotional feelings and values that protect and preserve water and its river flows even as human impact on the climate means its patterns are no longer predictable.

The Mono Lake case reached court in the early 1980s, but the crisis that led to the case began almost a century earlier, when the city of Los Angeles first began to run out of water. Moving water to Los Angeles, California’s most populous and economically dynamic city, has been a state priority since the turn of the 20th century. This chapter explores the water struggles that led to the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and ultimately to the Mono Lake litigation. It reviews the history of water exports from the Owens Valley in the early 1900s and the devastating effects on the local community and ecology – prompting the decline of its once thriving agricultural economy (and an open rebellion by Owens Valley farmers). It then recounts the St. Francis Dam disaster of 1928, which terrified the population and tempered judgements about the safety risks of large-scale water projects near population centers, further prompting water speculation in more remote areas of the state. The sobering loss of life in that infamous disaster testifies to the high stakes involved in managing water scarcity dilemmas that continue to bedevil California and arid regions throughout the world.

In this chapter, a new Lockean argument for intellectual property rights is offered, emphasizing self-defense, self-preservation, and the moral significance of investment. It is argued that creators and inventors have defensible claims to the values and income streams derived from their intellectual efforts, akin to their rights to protect their physical capacities and powers. These claims are grounded in two arguments: (1) the right to defend created values against unjustified interference, supported by Lockean principles of self-preservation and respect for persons; and (2) the moral asymmetry between creators, who invest time, labor, and resources, and copiers, who do not. Addressing challenges such as the non-rivalrous nature of intellectual works and the balance of societal needs, it is argued that intellectual property rights are morally justified to protect the autonomy and livelihoods of creators.

Forgivingness is virtue, a specification of generosity, a disposition to give offenders, especially against oneself, more of good and less of evil than they deserve. It is an interconnected set of sensitivities to features of situations marked by wrongdoing. The forgiving person is responsive to these features in ways that tend to mitigate, eliminate, or forestall anger in the interest of wishing the wrongdoer well and/or of enjoying a positive and harmonious relationship with him or her. The chief considerations favoring forgiveness are (1) the offender’s repentance, (2) excuses for the offender, (3) the offender’s suffering, (4) moral commonality with the offender, and (5) relationship to the offender.

Critics of Rawls’s principles of justice complain that they ignore considerations of merit or desert. As meritocracy is the chief justification for the extremely wide inequalities between workers at the top and bottom today, we need to examine this complaint. I argue that ideas of desert or merit are inherently unsuited to informing principles of justice for the basic structure of society. Moreover, attempts to raise the principle of desert to the systemic level have historically formed the ideological grounds for irresolvable class warfare. Rawls’s principles of justice supply a normative perspective that wisely aims to transcend class warfare. Rawls’s conception of property-owning democracy, culturally shaped by public affirmation of the difference principle, offers a plausible vision of how society may achieve such transcendence.

Chapter 1 focuses on locusts and the Arabic-speaking Shammar nomadic group between 1858 and 1890. It explains how locusts foiled Ottoman attempts to transform the Jazira into a cotton-growing heartland in the midst of the American Civil War. As locusts challenged the designs of certain humans, they also ensured that the Jazira landscape remained productive depending on how one moved within it. It was in part the landscape created by locusts that undermined Ottoman attempts to forcibly settle the Shammar during the 1860s, and made far more difficult the settlement of Chechen refugees at Ras al-Ayn this same period. And it was this same landscape of locusts that incubated a revolt in 1871, as the Shammar protested the formation of the special administrative district of Zor, created in an effort to match the desert with administrative borders with the help of the empire’s foremost reformers, Cevdet Pasha and Midhat Pasha. The revolt was crushed and ended with different branches of the Shammar attached to separate districts of the Jazira. But it did not end the power of locusts and mobility, and so people continued to imagine how to close the gap between Ottoman provinces and the environment it divided up.