Psychology And The Natural Law Of Reparation

Are there universal values of right and wrong, good and bad, shared by virtually every human? The tradition of natural law argues that there is. Drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, whose analyses have touched upon issues related to original sin, trespass, guilt, and salvation through reparation, in this 2006 book C. Fred Alford adds an extra dimension to this argument: we know natural law to be true because we have hated before we have loved and have wished to destroy before we have wanted to create. Natural law is built upon the desire to make reparation for the goodness we have destroyed, or have longed to destroy. Through reparation, we earn salvation from the most hateful part of ourselves, that which would destroy what we know to be good.

Beginning with Saint Thomas Aquinas and ending with the latest developments in international human rights, 'Narrative, Nature, and the Natural Law: From Aquinas to International Human Rights,' brings a fairly traditional interpretation of the natural law to some rather untraditional problems and areas, including evolutionary natural law.

This title analyses the challenges citizens face obtaining remedies and reparation for harm suffered as a result of the actions of international organisations. It encourages reflection on additional measures to strengthen accountability.

'Did Melanie Klein ever think that 50 years after her death her ideas would be spreading world-wide in such a fruitful and productive way? In one sense she would be surprised, but in another, I think she might have regarded it as just to be expected. She had a very high regard for her own work, and enormous confidence that she was on to something new. At the same time she was fatefully resigned to being misunderstood and rejected - just as Freud had been, of course. But now, here is the evidence of her success: two thousand plus references, and climbing. Klein's ideas are truly international now, and perhaps wherever Freud is there Klein shall be, to adapt a well-known phrase. Of course this is in the context of other schools which also spread slipperily across the globe, thanks now to the web. But the author's bibliography is a proper published document, and is of immense potential use for clinicians, students, and researchers.

This book discusses the 2450 year-long journey of the evolution of human rights, beginning from their earliest manifestation through Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone (442 BCE). It then moves on to look at the relationship between human rights and the likes of Cicero and Jesus, Erasmus and the intellectuals of the Enlightenment, before considering the very roots of the idea of Europe, which goes back to the liberal and federalist thought of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book concludes with the Charter of the EU Fundamental Rights becoming legally binding for Member States in Lisbon in 2009. While inquiring into the origins of European shared values, it assesses their compatibility with a non-European culture and religion such as Islam.

The Real and the Reflected: Heroes and Villains in Existent and Imagined Worlds, unpacks many of the issues that surround heroes and villains. It explores the shadows that fall between the traditional black and white definitions of good and evil.

Exposes how ex-gay and postabortion ministries operate on a shared system of thought and analyzes their social implications. A staple of the culture wars, the struggle between Christian conservatives and progressives over sexuality and reproductive rights continues. Focusing on ex-gay ministries geared to helping same-sex attracted people resist their sexuality and postabortion ministries dedicated to leading women who have had an abortion to repent that decision, Cynthia Burack argues that both are motivated and characterized by a strain of compassion that is particular to Christian conservatism rather than a bias and hatred toward sexual minorities and sexually active women. This compassion reproduces the sexual ideology of the Christian right and absolves Christian conservatives from responsibility for stigma and other forms of harm to postabortive and same-sex attracted people. Using the democratic theory of Hannah Arendt, the popular fiction of Ayn Rand, and the psychoanalytic thought of Melanie Klein, Burack studies the social and political effects of Christian conservative compassion.

Packing his case with moral argument and relevant facts, Angelo Corlett offers the most comprehensive defense to date in favor of reparations for African Americans and American Indians. As Corlett see it, the heirs of oppression are both the descendants of the oppressors and the descendants of their victims. Corlett delves deeply into the philosophically related issues of collective responsibility, forgiveness and apology, and reparations as a human right in ways that no other book or article to date has done. He recommends specific policies and tests the basic arguments of this book with a lengthy chapter considering several objections to the line of reasoning grounding the project.