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The final chapter considers whether deliberative contractualism is capable of satisfying the explanatory adequacy criterion. Whereas the strategy in Chapter 6 was positive and direct, here the strategy is negative and indirect. It argues that we have good reason to believe that deliberative contractualism is explanatorily adequate because we lack good reason to believe that it is explanatorily inadequate in any of the ways that it would have to satisfy the moral accuracy criterion and yet still fail to ultimately ground morality. As argued in Chapter 1, there are five relevant kinds of explanatory inadequacy: explanatory backwardness; explanatory supersession; explanatory epiphenomenality; explanatory circularity; and explanatory non-fundamentality. The chapter considers each of these in turn and argues that the best arguments for thinking that deliberative contractualism exemplifies them fail.

This chapter describes the Beg Court of 1977–8. The next-in-line to follow Ray as CJI was H.R. Khanna but it was no surprise, just hours before Ray’s retirement on 28 January 1977, the government announced that M.H. Beg, the second most senior associate judge, was to be the fifteenth CJI. The supersession of Khanna was one of Indira Gandhi’s last major acts during her first regime. Beg had been a loyal soldier as an associate judge and had supported the government in Kesavananda and Habeas Corpus. In the second month of Beg’s stewardship, Mrs Gandhi’s government was routed and the Janata coalition took over. The most noteworthy change during the Janata regime concerning SCI appointments was the requirement that the CJI consult his two seniormost colleagues about nominees and apprise the government of their views. His new appointments include Vidyaranya Dattatraya Tulzapurkar, Dhirajlal Ambelal Desai, and Raghunandan Swarup Pathak.

Though Golaknath, which denied to Parliament the power to amend the Constitution so as to alter, abridge, or take away any of the fundamental rights guaranteed by Part III of the Indian Constitution was overruled by Kesavananda Bharati, the political executive found it immediately unacceptable as the Supreme Court reserved to itself the power to pronounce upon the question whether or not an amendment offended the basic structure. When the question of appointing a successor to Chief Justice Sikri arose in 1973, soon after the judgment was pronounced in Kesavananda, three senior judges, Justices Shelat, Grover, and Hegde were superseded and their junior, Justice A. N. Ray, was appointed Chief Justice. The year 1973 was indeed a watershed in the constitutional history of India. The road signposts clearly changed from democracy to authoritarianism. This chapter examines the constitutional amendments adopted in India, the declaration of emergency in the wake of protests against Indira Gandhi's election to Parliament, and the supersession of the three senior judges in relation to the Kesavananda case.

This chapter examines the unstable geography of Christian and Jew during the Anglo-Saxon period through an analysis of Bede's Latin exegetical work On the Temple (ca. 729–731) and in Cynewulf's Old English poem Elene. It takes as its starting point how Bede and Cynewulf tackle a material long associated with Jewish materialism, stone, in comparison with Christian materialism and descibes their accounts of the sepulchral Jew as well as the stony nature of Jews. It also considers how Bede and Cynewulf construct Christianity by asserting its alterity and opposition to an idea of Jewish carnality that draws on and modifies Pauline supersession. The chapter concludes with an assessment of how Bede's and Cynewulf's charged engagements with supersession and “Jewish” places contribute both to our understanding of Anglo-Saxon material culture and to the important role that ideas of the Jew played in such materialisms.

This essay is a critical analysis of the dynamics of executive-judiciary relations in judicial appointments from 1950 to 1973. It serves as a primer for the appointments made to the Supreme Court from 1950–73, the supersessions that were apprehended but did not come about, and generally, what weighed with the judges as well as the executive while making appointments in the years immediately after the Constitution came into force. The essay traverses the historical journey of appointments to the Supreme Court from the tenure of the first Chief Justice of India, Justice H.J. Kania, to the appointment of Justice R.S. Sarkaria in 1973. It provides insights, and in some cases, hitherto unknown facts about the factors that prompted the appointment of certain justices to the Court. The essay also documents the gradual incursion that the executive had begun to make in judicial appointments in the latter half of the 1960s.

This chapter addresses the ambiguity of Qur’ānic attitude to the question of salvation of other religious communities. While in a number of passages (i.e. Q.2:62: 5:48, 69) the Qur’ān seems to extends the salvific promise to other religions, at least three passages (3:19, 85; 5:3) give the impression that Islam is the only true path to salvation. These passages have often been regarded as having superseded the more positive attitude. This chapter demonstrates that Muslim reformers have not solved the ambivalence through the notion of supersession (naskh). Instead, they explicated the passages differently and understand “al-islām” in those passages in its generic meaning as an “obedience” and “submission” to God

This chapter traces the political developments that led to the present system of appointing judges to the Supreme Court of India, under which the five most senior judges of the court (including the Chief Justice) appoint Supreme Court judges. The chapter begins by analyzing the “seniority norm” on the Supreme Court– its historical origins on the High Courts, and two highly political derogations from the norm which precipitated the court’s subsequent usurpation of the power to appoint judges. This chapter discusses political attempts to tamper with the composition of the judiciary, and the Supreme Court’s responses to these attempts – the three Judges Cases. It is demonstrated that this development, that is, the court’s usurpation of the power to appoint judges, coincided in time with the weakening of political power at the center.

This chapter examines various genres of the historical Islamic discourse on religious difference—including the apologetic, polemical, exegetical, juridical, and Sufi—in an effort to highlight the complex and diverse processes of self-identification, boundary creation, and Othering that are woven throughout Islamic history. In these diverse genres, this chapter highlights a number of recurring themes, including the role of divine ontology (e.g., divine oneness and mercy) in assessing the human Other; the depiction of created anthropology (e.g., the status of humans without revelation and the purpose of humanity); the relationship between various revelations and prophets (e.g., issues of taḥrīf, supersession, completion, and the necessity of affirming Muḥammad); and the legal and soteriological explication of Qurʾānic categories (e.g., definition of threshold criteria and internal composition of categories such as īmān, islām, and kufr).

This chapter opens with an ethnographic vignette in which an ultra-Orthodox man explains the dangers of Zionism. He says the founding father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, “actually wanted to convert all the Jews to Christianity.” This opens a discussion about the character of the Jewish state, building on the previous chapter about assimilation. It focuses on government efforts to change the ultra-Orthodox and to integrate them into Israeli society. It deals with conflicts over “freedom,” which has often come to mean self-realization and individual autonomy, but should not be limited to this Western liberal definition. While anthropologists have long argued that such normative terms like freedom do not have a universal definition, in this case, we find that the secular state interprets freedom in a way that does not coincide with the understanding of at least some of those it intends to make free.

This chapter examines officer promotion and selection policies in India. It begins with a conceptual discussion of the role of civilians in this process, examining its practice in other democracies. Thereafter it describes the historical evolution in the Indian military’s officer promotion and selection policies. In doing so it makes three broad arguments. First, promotion policies are an almost exclusive military affair, and civilians have little to do with the processes. As in other established democracies, senior officer promotions are subject to the approval of political authorities; but, exceptions apart, there is little evidence that civilians have actively shaped these policies. Second, a lack of civilian guidance exacerbates parochial divisions within the military. Third, military promotion policies would be better served with greater (but informed) civilian oversight. There is a need therefore to create conditions for a dialogue on promotion, selection, and placement policies. Such a measure, however, also needs to create safeguards to prevent politicization of the military.

There are several ways in which rights may be lost: by renunciation or “alienation,” through wrongdoing or “forfeiture,” and through “prescription” or the expiration of rights or their expropriation by competing claimants. One form of prescription is “supersession,” where rights are alleged to “fade away” over time to be replaced by others’ claims of right. Chapter 7 is an in-depth examination of the idea of rights supersession. That idea is centrally employed, but inadequately analyzed, in virtually all theories of territorial rights. The chapter distinguishes from true supersession various related phenomena. It then examines and criticizes all of the familiar arguments in favor of supersession, with special reference to Waldron’s well-known approach. The arguments considered concern “fading bases,” shaky counterfactuals, changing circumstances, and the evolving demands of justice.

This Enlightenment’s concept of God was shaped by the legacy of the Reformation era. It was also shaped by certain medieval philosophical assumptions. Those assumptions have remained influential since the eighteenth century. They are particularly influential in common modern claims about the stadial supersession of revealed religion and about the disenchantment of the world born of modern science. The Enlightenment’s philosophical discourse about God is part of a longer historical trajectory, one that begins long before the seventeenth century and extends well beyond the eighteenth.

This chapter explores the possible moral justifications for states’ claimed rights to exclusive control over particular geographical territories. Concentrating primarily on claimed rights of territorial jurisdiction, it examines various functionalist, nationalist, and voluntarist justificatory strategies. The chapter argues that functionalist, nationalist, and majoritarian voluntarist approaches, along with hybrid theories based on them, all fall prey to powerful objections. These objections appeal to historical, rather than structural, features of states and concern primarily problems involving trapped minority populations and the implied rapid supersession of individual rights. The chapter defends as an alternative an individualist Lockean voluntarism, arguing that it both avoids objections based on clear historical wrongs and offers the most intuitively plausible account of states’ territorial rights.