At the Amax of Delhi

I’m hardly a travel advisor but still I would like to commend the Amax Inn in New Delhi. It’s a bit out of the way but still only a 35 minute walk or a Rs 50 auto-taxi fare from Connaught Place. Prepaid taxi from and to DEL was Rs 350. The ride from the airport was not much more than half an hour.

My room and attached bath were newly refurbished and both the staff and amenities had Westerners in mind. My price was reasonable, Rs 935 including taxes, but even the less expensive room looked very nice. The rooftop terrace was only adequate as a place to eat but the food was very good and decently priced. (In other words, you could get the same food for less elsewhere if you were willing to poke around but the hotel menu was in English and had many examples of Western fare.)

Many of the staff spoke English very well. Folks at the front desk were very helpful on places to see, how to get there, and what it should cost to do so. The Pahar Ganj part of town may be a bit off-putting to India newbies, and you would be well advised to keep your valuables close, but for the price I think the value of the Amax Inn beats mid-range places that cost five times as much.

Human Rights Redux

Über-blogger Peter Leithart posts here about Douglas Farrow's recently published Ascension Theology. I don't plan to read the book but Leithart's summary sent me to amazon.com where I read what Farrow had to say about the current problem of human rights. His observation is apt: today the Christian church is assaulted for evils that it did more than any other institution to correct – for being misogynist when it “has produced a civilization in which women have enjoyed unprecedented freedom” and for slavery when “for two millennia it has been the primary force of resistance to slavery.”

Like many others, however, Farrow mistakenly traces part of the contemporary problem of human rights to an alleged turn from objective to subjective rights. Readers from 2009 might remember my blogs on Nick Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs, who, along with other, puts paid to this canard.

I urge those who want to know more to wait a few more weeks until the current issue of the Campbell Law Review publishes my piece "Looking for Bedrock: Accounting for Human Rights in Classical Liberalism, Modern Secularism, and the Christian Tradition." A quick survey of the history of human rights in the West, a critique of a leading contemporary theory, and what I believe is a robust exegetical/theological account for human rights.

Child Marriage Today

The current (June) issue of National Geographic features an article on child brides. Of particular interest to me was the first of the two locations the writer addressed: Rajasthan. As long-time followers of this blog know, I had the opportunity to live and teach for nearly five months in Rajasthan as a Fulbright Scholar (this was back in the pryorpostsindia.blogspot.com days). Cynthia Gorney does a reasonable job of  describing the social setting in which child marriage takes place. Note that I said child marriage; it is not only brides who are married as children although Gorney focuses on girls in her piece.

By flipping from Rajasthan to Yemen, casual readers of Gorney's article may miss that there are two matters at issue: child marriage and plural marriages. From my limited observations and conversations, monogamous child marriages are less problematic for women than plural marriages. In other words, the graphic "elephant and rat" metaphor mentioned in the article happens when men have more than one wife, not when the husband has only one wife. There are, I imagine, exceptions both ways but the status of women in places dominated by a religion that advocates multiple wives will generally be more precarious than in places where monogamous child marriages are the cultural norm.

One might be interested to know that prohibition of child marriages and requirement of consent from both parties is not the product of Enlightenment autonomy but of the leavening effect of Christianity. For an excellent discussion of the long-standing efforts of the Church to place mutual party consent at the center of marriage take a look at John Witte's article Honor Thy Father (and Thy Mother): Child Marriage and Parental Consent in Calvin's Geneva.

North to Alaska

Entering Tar Inlet before heading into Glacier Bay has a sobering effect. Earlier days on our cruise of the Alaskan waters had been sunny but it was cold and spitting rain as we awoke the morning of May 18.

We were struck by the grandeur of the 200+' face of the Margerie Glacier. But for the sounds of calving, the silence was deafening.





The next day we visited Ketchikan, which  has a monument to the persons and professions that made it what it is today (a pleasant tourist trap with some fishing on the side):

While the occupation of the Victorian-garbed gal on the right gazing upward might not be apparent from this picture (schoolmarm, perhaps?), the small print near the top of the sign at the beginning of nearby Creek Street should give it away:

Apparently the working girls provided hard cash to an otherwise credit-based economy in the days before the military influx during World War II. Important enough to convince the city fathers they deserved a representation on the monument. Which is more than can be said about the late 19th-century Presbyterian missionaries brought in at government expense.

Corporations and Rights (and Duties)

Last week I started a brief discussion here of the moral obligation to keep one's promise, even to a non-human entity like a corporation. The immediate context was a contemporary debate about the morality of strategic defaults by borrowers who owe more to their lender than their property, typically a home purchased in the last half-decade, is worth. My argument drew on something I had written earlier here about the purpose or, in Aristotelian terms, final cause of a corporation.

But is there any connection between my earlier series of posts about Nicholas Wolterstorff's book Justice and the moral nature of the corporate form? Indeed there is. Wolterstorff employs his analytic approach to conclude that corporations too have rights. But how can it be the case that corporation, which are not alive, can have a "worth" that can be disrespected?


Even though corporations are not capable of causal agency, i.e., apart from human agents they can do nothing, corporations nonetheless are capable of rational agency. In other words, a human's acts on behalf of a corporation are those of the corporation and in turn the corporation's agent's acts are counted as that of the corporation, which Wolterstorff calls double agency (p. 364). Quoting from the following page:

Human persons are living organisms capable of rational agency. Social entities [like corporations] confront us with the curious phenomenon of entities capable of rational agency that are not living organisms. Shall we say that such entities do not have lives, on the ground that they are no living organisms? Or shall we say that they do have lives, on the ground that they are capable of rational agency?

Wolterstorff opts for the later. In the case of corporations, it is the power of the state that confers this sufficient simulacrum of living organisms to enable them to acquire rights. Thus, indirectly, and certainly not without human agency, corporate entities have sufficient non-instrumental worth to ground rights. If rights, then duties of others to respect such rights and, equally importantly, the duty to properly regard the rights of others.

The Morality of Promise-Receiving Part 2

The moral obligation of promisors to keep promises is well-established. There are competing accounts for the obligation and a wide variety of limitations on it but most people find the notion fundamentally sound. In contrast, the obligation of promisees to forgive has not received much attention in moral philosophy. It has garnered even less consideration at the intersection of morality and contract law. It is thus helpful that Jean Braucher recently published a piece that begins with the observation that “a forgiveness principle is [a] conventional but under-articulated [aspect of] promissory morality.” Braucher bridges the gap between law and morality as she follows in the Wisconsin tradition of “law in action” made famous as the relational theory of contracts by Stewart Macaulay and Ian Macneil. Braucher criticizes both Charles Fried (“Contract As Promise”) and O.W. Holmes, Jr. (“The Path of the Law”) for their focus on what (appellate) courts say about law while ignoring what contract parties actually do.

Well, what usually actually happens when one party to a contract fails to perform?  As any practicing lawyer and most people who have had contract disputes know, seeking legal redress is a distant last resort. As Braucher observes, “the expectation interest is decidedly not protected by contract law or the shadow of contract law in any robust sort of way in most types of contracts.”  Yet private ordering--the market dominated by contractual exchanges--goes on. Why? According to Braucher, because of the strong moral sense of obligation.

Braucher is an intuitionist when it comes to accounting for this moral sense. From the same source, she identifies altruism, the virtue of voluntary sharing out of concern for our fellows. If, Braucher reasons, the State will on occasion deploy its coercive powers to remedy the vice of promise-breaching, why should those same powers not be used (or at least withheld) to vindicate the virtue of altruism? Which is exactly what bankruptcy is--a legal remedy that implements (or at least reflects) a moral principle. And while Braucher omits them from her analysis, we can at least in part account for many ordinary legal defenses to contract obligations (such as voidability on grounds of fraud, misrepresentation, undue influence, duress, mistake, and unconscionability as well as the implication of conditions) from the same resource.

I find moral intuitionism a very weak reed on which to base any moral conclusions. Nonetheless, we see in Braucher’s argument the basis of a principled response to Bridgeman’s monolithic focus on one side of morality, the obligation to keep one’s promise. The response need not--indeed should not--be to deny that a promise to pay even a corporation carries a moral obligation but to articulate and apply moral standards of promise-receiving to the same corporate entities.

The Morality of Promise-Receiving Part 1

A day ago I argued here that corporations incur moral obligations when they make promises and that human beings incur a moral obligation when they make promises, even to corporations. I was writing in part in response to Adam Levitin’s piece that had claimed to the contrary. What in part motivated Levitin were the bad or at least grossly negligent actions of banks and other mortgage lenders who made mortgage loans to people who had parlous prospects of repayment. Of course, the attribution of bad motives to corporate actions belies the non-morality principle, which is how I characterized Levitin’s claim about the incoherence of the notion of corporate moral obligations. Yet the outrage of Levitin and those who commented on his blog are typical of many who believe that underwater mortgagors have no moral obligation to repay their loans. Bob Maxey, one of my commenters on that piece, describes a specific example of the sort of lender practices that generate such outrage.

On the one hand, Curtis Bridgeman, to whose article Levitin was responding, seems largely unconcerned about lender (im)morality. On the other, Levitin takes lender immorality, inconsistently it seems to me, as a universal solvent of any lingering notion of borrower moral obligation. But surely this does not follow: an individual wrongdoer does not thereby lose her human dignity. My upcoming piece in the Campbell Law Review symposium issue grounds human dignity, upon which the contemporary notion of human rights depends, in the theological concept of humanity’s creation in the image of God. Regardless of whether one is persuaded by my theological foundation for dignity, something accounts for it and, if human rights are inalienable, dignity cannot be lost by committing a wrongful act. Without belaboring yesterday’s arguments, I believe the same holds for corporate entities.

Levitin also points to the existence of the discharge of an individual’s obligations in bankruptcy as another reason for concluding there is no underlying moral obligation to pay one’s contractual debts. This too does not follow. Since modern times legal obligations have been creatures of the State. So too the State can withdraw its legal remedies for failure to carry out one’s legal obligations. But the Bankruptcy Code nowhere addresses the moral obligations of the debtor; it is a work of secular legislation. And we should remember that bankruptcy discharges debts owing both to individuals and corporations indiscriminately. Thus, to argue that the availability of the discharge proves there is no moral obligation to corporations proves too much, or at least more than I think Levitin wants to claim.

But what of the bankruptcy discharge? Are we to understand its effect, limited as it is to legal obligations, reflects nothing of morality? In other words, is there a moral justification for the discharge? Here I can do no better to point to another entry on my blog that linked to a wonderful piece by the late Bill Stutz called Law and the Christian Story. The bankruptcy discharge reflects forgiveness, another moral obligation. Not only are promisors morally obligation to perform, promisees may be morally obligated to forgive. More about this next time.