Doctrine

About: Doctrine is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 21901 publications have been published within this topic receiving 204282 citations.

Endorsement Retires: From Religious Symbols to Anti-Sorting Principles

Abstract: As last Term's Ten Commandments cases illustrated, the Supreme Court sometimes polices government use of religious symbols. This is partly attributable to the preferences of Justice O'Connor; she authored the "endorsement test" for establishment clause violations. With her departure from the Court, there is a good chance that the test will retire along with her. In this article, I explain two overlapping principles that could underwrite continuing judicial concern about government-backed religious messages: anti-proselytism and anti-sorting. The first principle was inspired by the school prayer cases and it is the conventional grounding for the endorsement test. But it is often a weak basis for attacking public religious displays, as other commentators have noted. The second option - an anti-sorting principle - has not yet been explored. It is inspired by the Tiebout model of inter-local competition for citizen-voters. As applied to religious symbols, the principle would be attuned to their strategic use as signals to outsiders (and as reminders to insiders) regarding religion and political power within the community. More generally, the principle would target any state action that encourages citizens to sort themselves into religiously homogenous political jurisdictions. That principle obviously reaches beyond official use of religious messages. It can reorient thinking on an enormous range of questions. For example, attention to religious sorting deepens our understanding of founding era establishments, it might slant free exercise doctrine toward liberty norms and away from equality norms, and it even suggests a constitutional definition for religion. On the other hand, there are significant uncertainties in this field - normative, empirical, and sociological. Only a modest form of the anti-sorting principle should be enforced for now. In any event, religious sorting is a live social dynamic in America that deserves far more attention from the academy.

Research Note: Marketing ideology and criticism: Legitimacy and legitimization:

Abstract: The analysis of the dialectical relationships between marketing ideology and criticism is supported by the distinction between legitimacy and legitimization. Marketing ideology is defined as a relatively stable set of arguments that provide legitimacy to marketers and the market economy. However it does not preclude contradictions and the dissenting voice of criticism. Marketing doctrine also produces legitimization to lessen the tensions between the marketer’s claim to legitimacy and other people’s belief in this legitimacy. As marketing doctrine develops through incorporation of criticism, it follows that the critical process is a never-ending one.

Descartes's theory of modality

Abstract: Descartes propounded the allegedly strange, peculiar, curious, and incoherent doctrine that necessary truths are made true by God's voluntary act.' It seems to imply that God could have made necessary truths false, which entails that they are not necessary after all. Some of Descartes's interpreters have taken him in that way, as firmly implying that nothing is absolutely necessary or impossible.2 We all know, however, that if this doctrine runs free through Descartes's philosophical work it will do untold damage: many of his arguments have to be protected somehow from the thesis that socalled necessary truths are really contingent. Discussing an argument of Descartes's for the real distinction between body and mind, for example, Curley writes: "If we were to invoke the doctrine of the creation of eternal truths, we might say that a really omnipotent being could cause the mind and body to exist apart even if that were not logically possible. But in the Meditations Descartes is careful not to invoke that extravagant conception of omnipotence, and we would do him no service by bringing it in."3 That typifies the kind of thing Cartesian scholars have felt forced to say, charitably shielding Descartes from his own splatter. This "creation" or "voluntarism" doctrine does not appear in the Meditations, the Discourse on the Method, or the Principles of Philosophy. Descartes first declared it in three private letters to Marin Mersenne, most of a decade before his first published work ap-