Papers by Scott Boykin
Journal of Libertarian Studies, 2021
Herbert Spencer and F.A. Hayek developed bodies of liberal political thought that stress the impo... more Herbert Spencer and F.A. Hayek developed bodies of liberal political thought that stress the importance of evolutionary social adaptation as a type of spontaneous order. An evolutionary social theory, properly understood, can form part of a liberal theory of politics. Improperly understood, it has been employed to form defenses of the modern nation-state, and nation-states are not products of spontaneous social evolution but rather are destructive of it. Hayek and Spencer both regard social evolution as a process that is progressive in nature, producing large, complex industrial societies. Their emphasis on the importance of our lack of knowledge needed to design social norms and of the destructive nature of efforts to do so generally supports the classical liberal values of limited government and personal freedom for which they argued. On the other hand, their evolutionary arguments to explain the emergence and persistence of freedom and limited government in mass societies are deficient, because the evolutionary arguments on which they rely depend upon social rules being established and sustained in smaller societies than the mass societies they imagine as the end of social evolution. A consistent liberal evolutionist, therefore, would not also defend the nation-state.
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Washburn Law Journal, 2021
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Handbook of Research on Curriculum Internationalization and the Future of Global Education, 2018
What does it mean to internationalize a survey course in American government? After all, many ins... more What does it mean to internationalize a survey course in American government? After all, many instructors teach this course from a purely “American” perspective, as they rarely include comparisons with other governments and often leave topics such as United States foreign policy for the end of the semester. In contrast to that traditional approach, we argue that American government courses could benefit from utilizing an internationalized curriculum.
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Libertarian Papers: A Journal of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, 2018
The rights to liberty championed by classical liberal and libertarian theorists may be supported ... more The rights to liberty championed by classical liberal and libertarian theorists may be supported as products of practical reason. The foundations for these rights rest initially on the idea that the separateness of persons is embedded in the circumstances of life that make justice a meaningful concept. We can discover the duties justice imposes on us through a procedure for identifying principles of justice based on the concept of reasonableness that supports a method for testing proposed principles for human interaction. This procedure, which I present as a contractualist method of ethical justification, vindicates principles that establish duties to others that also constitute rights to liberty and rule out some kinds of purported rights that cannot be justified through the proffered contractualist method.
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The issue explores various approaches to transcending national and ethnic borders when studying t... more The issue explores various approaches to transcending national and ethnic borders when studying trauma and memory.
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Intersubjective recognition of human rights abuses affirms them and exerts pressure to acknowledg... more Intersubjective recognition of human rights abuses affirms them and exerts pressure to acknowledge them in international norms and institutions. It is in this way that the transnational memory of genocides, made part of the common lifeworld of humanity, can assert itself against the contrary interests of states and shape institutions and conduct in international affairs. Thus, human rights abuses do indeed foster the development of the international human rights regime. The Armenian Genocide, an unresolved and massive human rights abuse, contributed powerfully to the development of the current law on genocide and demonstrates how transnational memory, encapsulated in legal concepts, can transmit intersubjectively recognized norms of state conduct through time and institutions. In spite of the fact that there was no meaningful remedial action for the Armenian Genocide, and despite the fact that it is not been universally recognized and is to some extent the subject of dispute, the Armenian Genocide played a significant role in the development of the international law on genocide and, because it is still the subject of dispute, remains a focal point for discussion of the concept of genocide a century later. The Armenian Genocide offers evidence that memory of unresolved human rights abuses can drive the development of international norms, and the ways in which this historical case is remembered have played a constructive role in the development of the global human rights regime.
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Open Educational Resources (OER) by Scott Boykin
Classroom Activities for OpenStax American Government, 2019
This new set of classroom activities for OpenStax American Government was created under a Round E... more This new set of classroom activities for OpenStax American Government was created under a Round Eleven Mini-Grant for Ancillary Materials Creation and Revision (University System of Georgia). The materials created in order to support faculty implementing OpenStax American Government in the classroom include:
Icebreakers
Video Activities
Quiz Activities
Discussion Activities
Brainstorming Activities
Team Activities
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Papers by Scott Boykin
Open Educational Resources (OER) by Scott Boykin
Icebreakers
Video Activities
Quiz Activities
Discussion Activities
Brainstorming Activities
Team Activities
Icebreakers
Video Activities
Quiz Activities
Discussion Activities
Brainstorming Activities
Team Activities