Papers by Jan-Harm De Villiers
Prepared under the supervision of PROF K (Karin) VAN MARLE © © U Un ni iv ve er rs si it ty y o o... more Prepared under the supervision of PROF K (Karin) VAN MARLE © © U Un ni iv ve er rs si it ty y o of f P Pr re et to or ri ia a Jan-Harm de Villiers TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .
South African Journal on Human Rights, 2012
Southern African Public Law, 2012
Pretoria Student Law Review
This article examines the conflict between procedure and substance. Substance should be favoured ... more This article examines the conflict between procedure and substance. Substance should be favoured above procedure because where substance is at the heart of a legitimacy mechanism, collective decision-making can take place that makes a positive contribution and constructs an ethical society. Lawfulness and morality should be connected to give practical effect to such a model. Apartheid laws were collective decisions that were procedurally lawful, but were morally unsatisfactory. When a citizen faces a law that is immoral, and in terms of Aquinas irrational, it is not a law at all, and it should be resisted.
Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal
This article situates the texts in which Emmanuel Levinas directly addresses questions of animali... more This article situates the texts in which Emmanuel Levinas directly addresses questions of animality against the backdrop of his larger oeuvre and argues that, despite an explicit attempt to arrange a privileged ethical (dis)position for humans, Levinas' ethical logic opens onto a deeper conception of ethics without boundaries or a priori content. Juxtaposing Levinas' ethical subjectivity with the relational structure underlying the prominent models of animal rights, it proceeds to examine the implications of Levinas' ethics for a theory of animal rights. The article concludes that Levinas' theory is not logically consistent with a thematisation of the ethical claims of animals in the language of rights and that it is best utilised as a framework within which to deconstruct the inherent anthropocentric character of current models of animal rights.
Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal
This article undertakes a critical analysis of subjectivity and exposes the metaphysical and anth... more This article undertakes a critical analysis of subjectivity and exposes the metaphysical and anthropocentric quasi-transcendental conditions that give rise to the construct(ion) of the Subject. I locate a critical moment for the metaphysical Subject in the work of Martin Heidegger which, whilst sadly not sustained in his later writings, provides a point of departure for an examination of the significance that animality plays in the metaphysical tradition and its constitutive relation to the construct of subjectivity. I discern this relation to be violent and sacrificial and draw on Jacques Derrida's nonanthropocentric ethics against the background of Drucilla Cornell's ethical reading of deconstruction to construct a critique of approaches that assimilate animals to the traditional model of subjectivity in order to represent their identity and interests in the legal paradigm. The main argument that I seek to advance is that such an approach paradoxically re-constructs the cl...
Southern African Public Law
Adherents of the ‘new welfarist’ approach advocate welfare reforms as essential short-term steps ... more Adherents of the ‘new welfarist’ approach advocate welfare reforms as essential short-term steps en route to the ultimate ideal of animal rights. A critical engagement with the ideological underpinnings of animal welfare theory and animal rights theory illustrates the contrasting moral spaces that the animal occupies in these theories and that the ‘new welfarist’ approach is philosophically unsound in assuming that these approaches are ideologically compatible. Karin van Marle’s ‘jurisprudence of slowness’ and Jacques Derrida’s exposition of the sacrificial logic underlying Western culture’s exclusion of animals from the ‘thou shalt not kill’ proscription provides a framework within which to illustrate and engage with the ideological purlieu that separates these theories.
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Papers by Jan-Harm De Villiers