Inbar and Lammers (2012, this issue) conducted two surveys of a sample of Society for Personality and Social Psychology listserv members to empirically examine two questions: How many social psychologists are politically liberal, and is there evidence that liberal social psychologists are biased against their conservative colleagues and/or research taking a conservative perspective? They conclu...

the ninth constitution of afghanistan (1382 /2003) was ratified according to the bone agreement and with a democratic orientation. this paper compares the principles of this constitution with principles of two models of liberal democracy. for this purpose, five indexes have been used for our analysis: the view on man, the notion of right, political system, democracy, and the process for the act...

Libertarian Paternalism (LP) purports to be a kind of paternalism that is “liberty-preserving” and hence compatible with liberal principles. In this paper, I argue against this compatibility claim. I show that LP violates core liberal principles, first because it limits freedom, and secondly because it fails to justify these limitations in ways acceptable to liberal positions. In particular, Li...

Astonishingly, almost 25 years after the publication of “A Nation at Risk,” the clarion call for a radical overhaul of America’s education system, our Nation continues to find its students performing poorly on international exams in mathematics and sciences. In the spring of 2007, the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21 Century published the mos...

Liberal egalitarian theories of justice share the egalitarian ideal that inequalities due to factors beyond individual control should be eliminated. This justifies that individuals sometimes receive more (or less) than their marginal productivity, which in turn implies that a change in one individual’s effort sometimes will affect the post-tax income of others. What restrictions should we place...

Philosophers and psychologists have been attracted to two differing accounts of addictive motivation. In this paper, we investigate these two accounts and challenge their mutual claim that addictions compromise a person's self-control. First, we identify some incompatibilities between this claim of reduced self-control and the available evidence from various disciplines. A critical assessment o...

The debate on television’s "public service"obligations can only make full sense if integrated in the broader context of the debate on the best political model for society. In fact, the classic "public service"rationale is based in a normative conception of good and in a suspicious view of the average citizen that is largely tributary of a Platonic or Elitist approach to the political organizati...

An undergraduate education in liberal arts is viewed by many, especially in North America, as a desirable preparation for medical school. In countries where such a pre-medicine curriculum is not available, an introduction of 'humanities in medicine' has recently been emphasized. Few, however, has entertained the idea that Medicine already possesses many elements of a liberal arts education. In ...