March 11, 2021 marked the first anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic. During this past year, a staggering 118,268,575 people contracted the virus, while 2,624,677 have died. As the world came to terms with the implications of this international public health crisis, governments the world over imposed restrictions on all…
Contemporary discussions of rights tend to be about where to place a caesura between acceptable and unacceptable kinds of rights. This caesura is primarily a matter of valuation, but it can also be one of historical narration: at a certain point in past time, a barrier between the acceptable and the unacceptable was crossed. For…
Nigel Biggar’s publications are predictable, but never uninteresting: predictable in that he is unashamedly a conservative moral philosopher who self-defines as a professional Christian ethicist, a description which seems to imply that mere amateurs, myself included, function with a less well-developed moral compass, or perhaps without one at all. His new book What’s Wrong With…
What’s Wrong with Rights is a superb book. If there is one subject that lends itself to interdisciplinary research, it is that of human rights. To the extent that lawyers have ever been able to claim a monopoly, those days are now well behind us. In this book, Nigel Biggar makes a fundamental contribution from…
Nigel Biggar is essentially right about rights. They are indeed paradigmatically legal. They are indeed conditional and limited. And it is indeed the case that they can neither be justly defined nor respected without attention to circumstances or without the virtues that enable agents properly to attend to the relevant circumstances. Biggar’s book What’s Wrong…
In his book What’s Wrong with Rights?, Nigel Biggar argues that “the task is actually not to jettison talk about subjective rights, but rather to save it by re-setting it in a larger framework of objective right” (142). In Biggar’s view, advocates, activists, scholars, and, most problematically, judges claim that rights are natural, meaning they…
Despite the title, Nigel Biggar’s main objective, in this stimulating but debatable book, is not to discredit rights language entirely. He is perfectly content to support the value of a subjective legal right, which depends on the existence of the institutions of government. It is “the property of a human subject or individual,” and is…
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced remote instruction, homeschooling was the fastest-growing educational choice in the United States over the past two decades. While many parents have kept their children enrolled in schools for online instruction, it appears that thousands of other families have chosen independent homeschooling this fall instead. These numbers will almost certainly…
Earlier this year, Harvard Magazine, the university’s alumni publication, interviewed Elizabeth Bartholet, professor at Harvard Law School and faculty director of its Child Advocacy Program, for an article titled “The Risks of Homeschooling.” In the article, Bartholet argued that unregulated homeschooling poses a danger to children, exposing them to risk of educational deprivation and even…
If you’re looking for a convenient signpost to mark the beginning of the homeschooling movement in the U.S. you might choose the publication of the first ever newsletter devoted to the practice, hand-typed and sent out to a few families by the famous education reformer John Holt in August of 1977. One of the major concerns…