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Justice

The media frenzy and general public outcry arising from the acquittal of Casey Anthony has raised a major ethical issue:- If "everybody believes" that Casey was the person who killed her her child, was the jury wrong in concerning itself with the legal technicalities, such as the absence of any substantial evidence linking Casey to the murder. She claimed that her father was implicated in the child's death, and the jury considered him as a completely unsatisfactory witness, and that seemed to have given rise to the "reasonable doubt" that the jury had, and which ultimately caused them to opt for acquittal.

I think that the issue raised by the Anthony case is more directly bound up with the philosophy of law than with ethics more generally. Indeed, the justification for the verdict seems to reflect the nature of American law in particular, which holds that in a criminal case, guilt must be established "beyond a reasonable doubt." In the Anthony case, the inability of the prosecution to establish the cause of death was an especially important factor in the jury's verdict. What's crucial in this context, is the standard of evidence required for a guilty verdict, which is set quite high in order to try to give the accused the 'benefit of the doubt'. Regardless of whether all the evidence seems to point towards Anthony's guilt, the jury was quite right strictly to insist that guilt be established "beyond a reasonable doubt": this insistence does not reflect a misplaced concern with legal technicalities, but rather a commitment to the letter of the standard of evidence in American criminal trials. Despite...
Justice

If the Nazi government can be called evil for committing the Holocaust then shouldn't the American government during the time of slavery be regarded as evil also?

The notion of evil is somewhat problematic in this context, since it is a very loaded term. Indeed, Hannah Arendt's influential Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil , argued that Adolf Eichmann's actions aren't straightforwardly seen as evil (hence the subtitle of her book). One might extend Arendt's doubts to other members of the Nazi government as well, and, even, to members of the American governments that presided over and perpetuated. I would, therefore, wish to reformulate the question as whether the Nazi and American governments are morally blameworthy for their actions, and to this question I would respond, unhesitatingly, that both are certainly morally blameworthy, and probably reprehensible, as well.
Justice
Religion

I am an atheist fully in favour of a secular society. However I have recently been alarmed by the burka ban recently put in place by the French government. This to me seems at best to be a draconian, knee jerk reaction to something that effects a very small number of people (apparently 1,900 women in France) and at worst thinly veiled racism. I am in no way in favour of the burka or any form of religious dress, but a carpet ban seems to me to be wrong. Surely it is better to live in a society in which such things are allowed, in the hope that one day the people wearing the burka feel they no longer need to. It is often cited as a reason for the ban that it stops oppression of muslim women, but it seems that taking away the option to wear something is a form of oppression also. As an atheist who wishes for as secular a society as possible, am I justified to be concerned about such a law and people lobbying for a similar ban in Britain?

It should be noted, first, that there is considerable disagreement even in the French Parliament regarding the ban on the wearing of the burqa; it has been suggested that the ban is a political ploy on the part of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. (For more on the internal disagreement regarding the law, see a recent article in The New York Times .) Despite the disagreement in the French Parliament, as noted in the Times article, it is likely that the bill will be passed by the French Senate in September and then become law. Does France thus risk, as Daniel Garrigue, the legislator who cast the sole vote against the law, said, slipping into totalitarianism? I think not; indeed, I think that the law is very much in keeping with France's secularism. The basic rationale for the law, which I think is untouched by the considerations advanced by Nussbaum and differs greatly from those considered by Andy in his response--although, to be sure, issues about security and the public space have been...