Ronald Dworkin’s theory of equality has exerted a strong gravitational force over Canadian equality rights doctrine for more than two decades. And although Dworkin is never cited in the Supreme Court of Canada’s equality rights cases, his shadow is plainly visible in the reception of the right to ‘equal concern and respect’ in Andrews (1989), and the ‘right to moral independence’ in Law v Canada (1999).Although this paper assesses the extent to which Dworkin’s theory of equality has been received in (...) Canadian law, it also engages in debates between Dworkin and his critics that developed as Dworkin defended and modified his theory of rights and equality over the years. The debates between Dworkin and his critics are invaluable for interpreting Canadian constitutional jurisprudence, I will argue, because the Supreme Court does not always adequately justify the conceptions of equality, dignity, etc. that it incorporates into constitutional law. Indeed, it is not always evident that the Court is aware that it is choosing among alternative conceptions, rather than straightforwardly interpreting a determinate constitutional text. The payoff from a parallel study of Dworkin and the equality rights doctrine of the Supreme Court is the identification of resources from the academic debate that can be commended for the development of a more sound and stable constitutional doctrine. (shrink)

To speak of human rights in the twenty-first century is to speak of proportionality. Proportionality has been received into the constitutional doctrine of courts in continental Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Israel, South Africa, and the United States, as well as the jurisprudence of treaty-based legal systems such as the European Convention on Human Rights. Proportionality provides a common analytical framework for resolving the great moral and political questions confronting political communities. But behind the singular appeal to proportionality (...) lurks a range of different understandings. This volume brings together many of the world's leading constitutional theorists - proponents and critics of proportionality - to debate the merits of proportionality, the nature of rights, the practice of judicial review, and moral and legal reasoning. Their essays provide important new perspectives on this leading doctrine in human rights law. (shrink)

Originalism is a force to be reckoned with in constitutional interpretation. At one time a monolithic theory of constitutional interpretation, contemporary originalism has developed into a sophisticated family of theories about how to interpret and reason with a constitution. Contemporary originalists harness the resources of linguistic, moral, and political philosophy to propose methodologies for the interpretation of constitutional texts and provide reasons for fidelity to those texts. The essays in this volume, which includes contributions from the flag bearers of several (...) competing schools of constitutional interpretation, provides an introduction to the development of originalist thought, showcases the great range of contemporary originalist constitutional scholarship, and situates competing schools of thought in dialogue with each other. They also make new contributions to the methodological and normative disputes between originalists and non-originalists, and among originalists themselves. (shrink)

Originalism is a force to be reckoned with in constitutional interpretation. At one time a monolithic theory of constitutional interpretation, contemporary originalism has developed into a sophisticated family of theories about how to interpret and reason with a constitution. Contemporary originalists harness the resources of linguistic, moral, and political philosophy to propose methodologies for the interpretation of constitutional texts and provide reasons for fidelity to those texts. The essays in this volume, which includes contributions from the flag bearers of several (...) competing schools of constitutional interpretation, provides an introduction to the development of originalist thought, showcases the great range of contemporary originalist constitutional scholarship, and situates competing schools of thought in dialogue with each other. They also make new contributions to the methodological and normative disputes between originalists and non-originalists, and among originalists themselves. (shrink)

Hegel is an immensely important yet difficult philosopher. His Philosophy of Mind is one of the main pillars of his thought. Michael Inwood, highly respected for his previous work on Hegel, presents this central work to the modern reader in an accurate new translation supported by a philosophically sophisticated editorial introduction and elucidating scholarly commentary.

This essay examines several recent philosophical attempts to define ‘disease’. Two prominent ones are considered in detail, an objective approach by Christopher Boorse and a normative approach by Caroline Whitbeck. Both are found to be inadequate for a variety of reasons, though Whitbeck's is superior because of her careful preliminary distinctions and because of its normative approach which is more nearly in accord with medical and lay usage. The paper concludes with a discussion of the nature of such efforts at (...) definition and suggests that their limitations are due both to the nature of our language and concepts in general, and to the nature of medicine in particular. It is the practical and changing character of medicine and its language that frustrates the efforts of philosophers to formulate such definitions. Keywords: disease, definition CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Richard Miller presents a bold new program for international justice. He argues for new standards of responsible conduct by governments, firms, and individuals in developed countries, to govern trade, investment, environmental policy, and the use of force. He offers an urgently needed strategy for moving humanity toward genuine global co-operation.

We investigate the dynamics of sensory integration for perceiving musical performance, a complex natural behavior. Thirty musically trained participants saw, heard, or both saw and heard, performances by two clarinetists. All participants used a sliding potentiometer to make continuous judgments of tension (a measure correlated with emotional response) and continuous judgments of phrasing (a measure correlated with perceived musical structure) as performances were presented. The data analysis sought to reveal relations between the sensory modalities (vision and audition) and to quantify (...) the effect of seeing the performances on participants' overall subjective experience of the music. In addition to traditional statistics, functional data analysis techniques were employed to analyze time-varying aspects of the data. The auditory and visual channels were found to convey similar experiences of phrasing but different experiences of tension through much of the performances. We found that visual information served both to augment and to reduce the experience of tension at different points in the musical piece (as revealed by functional linear modeling and functional significance testing). In addition, the musicians' movements served to extend the sense of phrasing, to cue the beginning of new phrases, to indicate musical interpretation, and to anticipate changes in emotional content. Evidence for an interaction effect suggests that there may exist an emergent quality when musical performances are both seen and heard. The investigation augments knowledge of human communicative processes spanning language and music, and involving multiple modalities of emotion and information transfer. (shrink)

Glial cells play a central role in the development and function of complex nervous systems. Drosophila is an excellent model organism for the study of mechanisms underlying neural development, and recent attention has been focused on the differentiation and function of glial cells. We now have a nearly complete description of glial cell organization in the embryo, which enables a systematic genetic analysis of glial cell development. Most glia arise from neural stem cells that originate in the neurogenic ectoderm. The (...) bifurcation of glial and neuronal fates is under the control of the glial promoting factor glial cells missing. Differentiation is propagated through the regulation of several transcription factors. Genes have been discovered affecting the terminal differentiation of glia, including the promotion glial–neuronal interactions and the formation of the blood–nerve barrier. Other roles of glia are being explored, including their requirement for axon guidance, neuronal survival, and signaling. BioEssays 23:877–887, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Historians of the eugenics movement have long been ambivalent in their examination of the links between British hereditary researchers and Nazi Germany. While there is now a clear consensus that American eugenics provided significant material and ideological support for the Germans, the evidence remains less clear in the British case where comparatively few figures openly supported the Nazi regime and the left-wing critique of eugenics remained particularly strong. After the Second World War British eugenicists had to push back against the (...) accusation that their science was intrinsically dictatorial or totalitarian and, as a result, many of their early perceptions of the Nazis were ignored or rationalised away. Further, historians in recent years have focused more directly on the social reformist elements of eugenics, discussing the links between hereditary science and the birth control and feminist movements in addition to others. While undoubtedly making valuable contributions to the scholarly understanding of the eugenic milieu in the interwar years, these studies have neglected to recontextualize the sentiments of British eugenicists who did indeed view the Nazi government positively in the early years of the 1930s. This article argues that there was a significant, though not numerically sizable, faction in the British eugenics movement, though mostly outside the Eugenics Society itself, in the early 1930s that viewed the Nazi Germany as an admirable state for its implementation of eugenic principles. One of these figures was later interned by his own government for being too closely aligned with the German regime, though he argued that this affinity was driven by the quest for scientific truth rather than politics. Eugenics in Britain thus contained a greater diversity of views toward Germany than scholars have previously assumed, warranting more research into the individuals and organizations harbouring these views. (shrink)

The first seven chapters of Doing without Concepts offer a perfectly reasonable view of current research on concepts. The last chapter, on which the central thesis of the book rests, provides little actual evidence that using the term impedes scientific progress. It thus fails to demonstrate that this term should be eliminated from the scientific vernacular.

John Maynard Keynes was the most important economist of the twentieth century. He was also a philosopher who wrote on ethics and the theory of probability and was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists. In this volume contributors from a wide range of disciplines offer new interpretations of Keynes's thought, explain the links between Keynes's philosophy and his economics, and place his work and Keynesianism - the economic theory, the principles of economic policy, and the (...) political philosophy - in their historical context. Chapter topics include Keynes's philosophical engagement with G. E. Moore and Franz Brentano, his correspondence, the role of his General Theory in the creation of modern macroeconomics, and the many meanings of Keynesianism. New readers will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Keynes currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Keynes. (shrink)

John Maynard Keynes was the most important economist of the twentieth century. He was also a philosopher who wrote on ethics and the theory of probability and was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists. In this volume contributors from a wide range of disciplines offer new interpretations of Keynes's thought, explain the links between Keynes's philosophy and his economics, and place his work and Keynesianism - the economic theory, the principles of economic policy, and the (...) political philosophy - in their historical context. Chapter topics include Keynes's philosophical engagement with G. E. Moore and Franz Brentano, his correspondence, the role of his General Theory in the creation of modern macroeconomics, and the many meanings of Keynesianism. New readers will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Keynes currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Keynes. (shrink)

In their important paper “Autonomous Agents”, Floridi and Sanders use “levels of abstraction” to argue that computers are or may soon be moral agents. In this paper we use the same levels of abstraction to illuminate differences between human moral agents and computers. In their paper, Floridi and Sanders contributed definitions of autonomy, moral accountability and responsibility, but they have not explored deeply some essential questions that need to be answered by computer scientists who design artificial agents. One such question (...) is, “Can an artificial agent that changes its own programming become so autonomous that the original designer is no longer responsible for the behavior of the artificial agent?” To explore this question, we distinguish between LoA1 (the user view) and LoA2 (the designer view) by exploring the concepts of unmodifiable, modifiable and fully modifiable tables that control artificial agents. We demonstrate that an agent with an unmodifiable table, when viewed at LoA2, distinguishes an artificial agent from a human one. This distinction supports our first counter-claim to Floridi and Sanders, namely, that such an agent is not a moral agent, and the designer bears full responsibility for its behavior. We also demonstrate that even if there is an artificial agent with a fully modifiable table capable of learning* and intentionality* that meets the conditions set by Floridi and Sanders for ascribing moral agency to an artificial agent, the designer retains strong moral responsibility. (shrink)

Purpose – This paper aims to explore similarities and differences between robots, invasive biological species, and genetically modified organisms. These comparisons are designed to better understand the potential effects of robots on human society. Design/methodology/approach – This paper applies established ideas in one discipline – biology – to issues that are less well understood, but actively being studied in another discipline – science and technology studies. Findings – Robots entering human society in large numbers share many of the characteristics of (...) an invasive species entering a new ecosystem. The authors also find that robots have several characteristics that are similar to a genetically modified organism. Taken together, these similarities suggest that society should be cautious about the introduction of large numbers of robots in a short period of time. Originality/value – The approach taken here to assess robots in society by these analogies to ecological processes is, to the authors' knowledge, novel. Applying ideas from a better-known area to a less well-known area is routine in philosophy, but these particular analogies have not yet been carefully articulated in the literature. (shrink)