This comment on Brian Langille's article agrees with Langille's claim that inter-state competition should not be viewed as the main challenge to the global efforts to regulate labor rights. The comment suggests, however, that there is another type of competition that poses a challenge, namely a transnational competition which takes place among sub-state actors. Focusing on this "transnational conflict paradigm," the ILO has the tools to engage domestic constituencies in an effort to promote labor rights within the respective member states.

This Article examines the authority of states to settle individual private property claims in post–conflict negotiations towards settlement. We analyze this question by exploring the limits of states’ authority to take or limit private property rights for the public good. We argue that this authority rests on two cumulative justifications: the inclusion of the property owners among the public that stands to benefit from the public good, and their representation by the government that decides on the taking of the property. (...) In post–conflict settlement, the negotiating states may redistribute both private property and the public good between and within their respective communities. Their authority to redistribute continues to rests on the same justifications of inclusion and representation. Hence, their authority extends only to the redistribution of property of owners who are members of the respective communities that negotiate the agreement, and who are represented by a negotiating government. (shrink)

In 1992, Israel underwent a major constitutional reform, which provided Israel, for the first time in its history, with an effective system of separation of powers between the political branches of government. This reform was not intentional but, rather, a byproduct of the voluntary adoption by the two major political parties of open primaries as the method for choosing candidates on their lists for election to parliament. The adoption of the primaries system produced two major changes in the Israeli constitutional (...) and political order. First, it transformed the Knesset into an independent body and, hence, for the first time in Israel’s history, provided for a functioning system of checks and balances between the legislature and the executive. Second, it shifted power from the Jewish religious minority to the secular majority and even contributed to the increase in the relative power of the Arab parties. On a more general level, the Article demonstrates the impact different modalities of pre-selection of party candidates can have not only on the outcome of the elections and on the relative power relations among the parties, but, more importantly, on the structure and the functioning of the political system. Once proven, this impact requires public attention: legislative regulation of the pre-selection process may be required, indeed even constitutionally mandated, to ensure political checks and balances. (shrink)

The debate whether property is a limit on or the product of sovereignty envisages a tension between “the individual owner” and “the state.” But “the state” is not more than the aggregate of individuals who define theirs and others’ property rights through the state’s political process. The underlying tension between property and sovereignty is thus the tension between the economic market and the political market. Owners and others compete simultaneously at both levels to define, protect or improve the value of (...) property. There are two ways to compete in the political marketplace: by engaging in either “high visibility politics” or “low visibility politics.” Diffuse owners rely on high visibility politics promoted by agents such as political parties or trade unions and on elections, referenda and the like, whereas smaller groups of owners prefer the low politics of capturing lawmakers and state executives. When economic markets became global at the end of the Cold War, so did the political markets: property rights increasingly became defined by international agreements, by decisions of international organizations, and by the exercise of “low politics” in foreign, weaker states. The global political markets were dominated by the executive branches of a handful of relatively strong states that, in turn, were responsive to the “low politics” of special interests. The high transaction costs of cooperation among diffuse owners inhibited the parallel rise of “high politics” at the global level. The skewed global political market for property continues to favor special interests, but there are budding attempts to reclaim the space for “high politics” by national regulators and courts. Current negotiations over the so-called “Mega Regional” agreements between the United States and its trading partners will, if successful, nip these buds as they render certain property rights almost immune to the subsequent challenges of high politics. (shrink)

In 1861 John Stuart Mill published Considerations on Representative Government to discuss the justifications for democracy. In the third chapter of this book he explores why a government run by a Good Despot is unacceptable. In this Article we revisit Mill’s critique of the Good Despot to problematize the contemporary exercise of authority and influence by multinational companies, especially in foreign countries. Inspired by Mill, we redefine the problem of privatization. The challenges of privatization are mostly defined by essentialist concerns (...) or a consequentialist critique of the problematic outcomes of privatization. In this Article we shift the attention to the democracy losses associated with the privatized decision-making process. We identify the growing influence of private, particularly foreign, actors as a democratic problem of exclusion of persons from decision-making processes on issues with constitutive influence on their lives, and explore the different aspects of what we regard as an acute problem of democratic deficit. The redefining of the problem as one of process and democratic deficit allows us toconclude with a critical assessment of the potentials and limitations of contemporary attempts to solve it. (shrink)

Lawmakers regularly delegate authority to agents. Such delegation is accompanied by mechanisms that attempt to ensure that the agents adhere to the will of the lawmakers. But these mechanisms are often ineffective or inefficient. Moreover, at times the very imposition of constraints distorts the agents’ incentives and impels them to adopt skewed policies. We suggest that it is possible to reduce such wasteful enforcement costs by delegating authority to certain types of agents who will pursue the lawmaker’s policies without constraints (...) imposed by the lawmaker. In this Article we focus on agents who are impartial — but not indifferent! — and skillful enough to identify the proper course of action. The Article encompasses two main arguments. The normative argument is that when skillful and impartial agents can be identified, it makes sense to delegate to them decision-making powers with only limited constraints. Moreover, in such instances it may be more cost-effective to provide agents with incentives to act impartially rather than develop enforcement mechanisms to impose impartiality. The positive argument is that the law — sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly — is compatible with our normative argument in various fields. Although our argument is general in scope and applies to many areas of law, in this Article we begin by focusing on tort law and on international law. We distinguish five categories of cases where the law relies on agents and detect in some of them impartial and skillful agents. This analysis demonstrates that, in some of these categories, the law in fact relies on agents with only minimal constraints and that, in other situations, the constraints imposed by the law are counterproductive. Our normative argument thus serves an explanatory role in understanding many legal doctrines and principles, but, at the same time, offers a critical view on other doctrines and principles, which are not compatible with that argument. (shrink)

We examine whether the "evidence of evidence is evidence" principle is true. We distinguish several different versions of the principle and evaluate recent attacks on some of those versions. We argue that, whatever the merits of those attacks, they leave the more important rendition of the principle untouched. That version is, however, also subject to new kinds of counterexamples. We end by suggesting how to formulate a better version of the principle that takes into account those new counterexamples.

Law, Economics, and Morality examines the possibility of combining economic methodology and deontological morality through explicit and direct incorporation of moral constraints into economic models. Economic analysis of law is a powerful analytical methodology. However, as a purely consequentialist approach, which determines the desirability of acts and rules solely by assessing the goodness of their outcomes, standard cost-benefit analysis is normatively objectionable. Moderate deontology prioritizes such values as autonomy, basic liberties, truth-telling, and promise-keeping over the promotion of good outcomes. It (...) holds that there are constraints on promoting the good. Such constraints may be overridden only if enough good is at stake. While moderate deontology conforms to prevailing moral intuitions and legal doctrines, it is arguably lacking in methodological rigor and precision. Eyal Zamir and Barak Medina argue that the normative flaws of economic analysis can be rectified without relinquishing its methodological advantages and that moral constraints can be formalized so as to make their analysis more rigorous. They discuss various substantive and methodological choices involved in modeling deontological constraints. Zamir and Medina propose to determine the permissibility of any act or rule infringing a deontological constraint by means of mathematical threshold functions. Law, Economics, and Morality presents the general structure of threshold functions, analyzes their elements and addresses possible objections to this proposal. It then illustrates the implementation of constrained CBA in several legal fields, including contract law, freedom of speech, antidiscrimination law, the fight against terrorism, and legal paternalism. (shrink)

Despite their clearly demonstrated safety and effectiveness, approved vaccines against COVID-19 are commonly mistrusted. Nations should find and implement effective ways to boost vaccine confidence. But the implications for ethical vaccine development are less straightforward than some have assumed. Opponents of COVID-19 vaccine challenge trials, in particular, made speculative or empirically implausible warnings on this matter, some of which, if applied consistently, would have ruled out most COVID-19 vaccine trials and many non-pharmaceutical responses.

We revisit the analogy suggested by Madelung between a non-relativistic time-dependent quantum particle, to a fluid system which is pseudo-barotropic, irrotational and inviscid. We first discuss the hydrodynamical properties of the Madelung description in general, and extract a pressure like term from the Bohm potential. We show that the existence of a pressure gradient force in the fluid description, does not violate Ehrenfest’s theorem since its expectation value is zero. We also point out that incompressibility of the fluid implies conservation (...) of density along a fluid parcel trajectory and in 1D this immediately results in the non-spreading property of wave packets, as the sum of Bohm potential and an exterior potential must be either constant or linear in space. Next we relate to the hydrodynamic description a thermodynamic counterpart, taking the classical behavior of an adiabatic barotopric flow as a reference. We show that while the Bohm potential is not a positive definite quantity, as is expected from internal energy, its expectation value is proportional to the Fisher information whose integrand is positive definite. Moreover, this integrand is exactly equal to half of the square of the imaginary part of the momentum, as the integrand of the kinetic energy is equal to half of the square of the real part of the momentum. This suggests a relation between the Fisher information and the thermodynamic like internal energy of the Madelung fluid. Furthermore, it provides a physical linkage between the inverse of the Fisher information and the measure of disorder in quantum systems—in spontaneous adiabatic gas expansion the amount of disorder increases while the internal energy decreases. (shrink)

This volume offers a holistic, empirically grounded examination of the factors which influence educational leaders' ethical judgments in their day-to-day work in schools. Drawing on a range of quantitative studies, the text utilizes organizational psychology to explore multiple ethical paradigms. It considers social aspects including ethnicity, gender, hegemony-minority relations, and leadership styles which influence and drive ethical judgment patterns employed by educators and principals. The book ultimately demonstrates the Ethical Perspectives Instrument (EPI) as an effective tool for the assessment of (...) various ethical viewpoints and their interactions, suitable for application to diverse cultures and socio-educational circumstances. An important study of the leaders' ethics and preparation in handling marginalized populations, this book will be valuable for academics, researchers, and graduate students working in the fields of educational leadership, organizational psychology, and the sociology of education. (shrink)

On the origin of film and the resurrection of the people : D.W. Griffith's Intolerance -- The actor of the crowd : The great dictator -- Howard Hawks' idea of genre -- What is a cinema of Jewish vengeance? : Tarantino's Inglourious basterds.

Suppose we learn that we have a poor track record in forming beliefs rationally, or that a brilliant colleague thinks that we believe P irrationally. Does such input require us to revise those beliefs whose rationality is in question? When we gain information suggesting that our beliefs are irrational, we are in one of two general cases. In the first case we made no error, and our beliefs are rational. In that case the input to the contrary is misleading. In (...) the second case we indeed believe irrationally, and our original evidence already requires us to fix our mistake. In that case the input to that effect is normatively superfluous. Thus, we know that information suggesting that our beliefs are irrational is either misleading or superfluous. This, I submit, renders the input incapable of justifying belief revision, despite our not knowing which of the two kinds it is. (shrink)

The Madelung equations map the non-relativistic time-dependent Schrödinger equation into hydrodynamic equations of a virtual fluid. While the von Neumann entropy remains constant, we demonstrate that an increase of the Shannon entropy, associated with this Madelung fluid, is proportional to the expectation value of its velocity divergence. Hence, the Shannon entropy may grow due to an expansion of the Madelung fluid. These effects result from the interference between solutions of the Schrödinger equation. Growth of the Shannon entropy due to expansion (...) is common in diffusive processes. However, in the latter the process is irreversible while the processes in the Madelung fluid are always reversible. The relations between interference, compressibility and variation of the Shannon entropy are then examined in several simple examples. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for classical diffusive processes, the “force” accelerating diffusion has the form of the positive gradient of the quantum Bohm potential. Expressing then the diffusion coefficient in terms of the Planck constant reveals the lower bound given by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in terms of the product between the gas mean free path and the Brownian momentum. (shrink)

When a belief is self-fulfilling, having it guarantees its truth. When a belief is self-defeating, having it guarantees its falsity. These are the cases of “self-impacting” beliefs to be examined below. Scenarios of self-defeating beliefs can yield apparently dilemmatic situations in which we seem to lack sufficient reason to have any belief whatsoever. Scenarios of self-fulfilling beliefs can yield apparently dilemmatic situations in which we seem to lack reason to have any one belief over another. Both scenarios have been used (...) independently to challenge Evidentialism, on which what we may rationally believe is all and only what fits our current evidence. Here we tie the two scenarios together and explore what a knowledge-sensitive evidentialist approach to one implies for the other. (shrink)

The Self-Intimation thesis has it that whatever justificatory status a proposition has, i.e., whether or not we are justified in believing it, we are justified in believing that it has that status. The Infallibility thesis has it that whatever justificatory status we are justified in believing that a proposition has, the proposition in fact has that status. Jointly, Self-Intimation and Infallibility imply that the justificatory status of a proposition closely aligns with the justification we have about that justificatory status. Self-Intimation (...) has two noteworthy implications. First, assuming that we never have sufficient justification for a proposition and for its negation, we can derive Infallibility from Self-Intimation. Interestingly, there seems to be no equivalently simple way to derive Self-Intimation from Infallibility. This asymmetry provides reason for thinking that bottom-level justification rather than top-level justification drives the explanation for why the levels of justification align. Second, Self-Intimation suggests a counterintuitive treatment of information concerning what justificatory status a proposition has. It follows from Self-Intimation that we always have justification for the truth about whether a proposition is justified for us, and therefore, that higher-order evidence could change what we should believe on this matter only by misleading us. This permits forming beliefs about whether a proposition is justified for us without regard to higher-order evidence, and thus reveals a reason for thinking that top-level justification is evidentially inert. (shrink)

We present a new theoretical construct labeled motivational readiness. It is defined as the inclination, whether or not ultimately implemented, to satisfy a desire. A general model of readiness is described which builds on the work of prior theories, including animal learning models and personality approaches, and which aims to integrate a variety of research findings across different domains of motivational research. Components of this model include the Want state, and the Expectancy of being able to satisfy that Want. We (...) maintain that the Want concept is the critical ingredient in motivational readiness: without it, readiness cannot exist. In contrast, some motivational readiness can exist without Expectancy. We also discuss the role of incentive in motivational readiness. Incentive is presently conceived of in terms of a Match between a Want and a Perceived Situational Affordance. Whereas in classic models incentive was portrayed as a first order determinant of motivational readiness, here we describe it as a second order factor which affects readiness by influencing Want, Expectancy, or both. The new model’s relation to its theoretical predecessors, and its implications for future research, also are discussed. (shrink)

Civilian casualties contribute to the perpetuation of intergroup conflicts through increased radicalization and hostilities, but little is known on the psychological processes that affect responses to outgroup civilian casualties. The goal of the present research was to explore two factors expected to lead group members to act more cautiously, thereby reducing civilian casualties: perceived accountability and forecast group-based moral emotions. In two studies, Jewish–Israeli civilians (Study 1) and soldiers (Study 2) were asked to forecast their group-based moral emotions in case (...) of Palestinian (i.e., outgroup) civilian casualties, then exposed to accountability manipulations. Participants who expected to feel low levels of shame and were primed with accountability made more cautious decisions than those in the control condition. Participants who expected to feel high levels of shame were unaffected by accountability primes. Theoretical and practical implications regarding forecast moral emotions and accountability as an intervention in intergroup conflicts are discussed. (shrink)

Detecting that two images are different is faster for highly dissimilar images than for highly similar images. Paradoxically, we showed that the reverse occurs when people are asked to describe how two images differ—that is, to state a difference between two images. Following structure-mapping theory, we propose that this disassociation arises from the multistage nature of the comparison process. Detecting that two images are different can be done in the initial (local-matching) stage, but only for pairs with low overlap; thus, (...) “different” responses are faster for low-similarity than for high-similarity pairs. In contrast, identifying a specific difference generally requires a full structural alignment of the two images, and this alignment process is faster for high-similarity pairs. We described four experiments that demonstrate this dissociation and show that the results can be simulated using the Structure-Mapping Engine. These results pose a significant challenge for nonstructural accounts of similarity comparison and suggest that structural alignment processes play a significant role in visual comparison. (shrink)

ABSTRACTShould conciliating with disagreeing peers be considered sufficient for reaching rational beliefs? Thomas Kelly argues that when taken this way, Conciliationism lets those who enter into a disagreement with an irrational belief reach a rational belief all too easily. Three kinds of responses defending Conciliationism are found in the literature. One response has it that conciliation is required only of agents who have a rational belief as they enter into a disagreement. This response yields a requirement that no one should (...) follow. If the need to conciliate applies only to already rational agents, then an agent must conciliate only when her peer is the one irrational. A second response views conciliation as merely necessary for having a rational belief. This alone does little to address the central question of what is rational to believe when facing a disagreeing peer. Attempts to develop the response either reduce to the first response, or deem necessary an unnecessary doxastic revision, or imply that rational dilemmas obtain in cases where intuitively there are none. A third response tells us to weigh what our pre-disagreement evidence supports against the evidence from the disagreement itself. This invites epistemic akrasia. (shrink)

In an attempt to explore further the Madelung fluid-like representation of quantum mechanics, we derive the small perturbation equations of the fluid with respect to its basic states. The latter are obtained from the Madelung transform of the Schrödinger equation eigenstates. The fundamental eigenstates of de Broglie monochromatic matter waves are then shown to be mapped into the simple basic states of a fluid with constant density and velocity, where the latter is the de Broglie group velocity. The normal modes (...) with respect to these basic states are derived and found to also satisfy the de Broglie dispersion relation. Despite being dispersive waves, their propagation mechanism is equivalent to that of sound waves in a classical ideal adiabatic gas. We discuss the physical interpretation of these results. (shrink)

This article looks at the way people determine the antecedent of a pronoun in sentence pairs, such as: Albert invited Ron to dinner. He spent hours cleaning the house. The experiment reported here is motivated by the idea that such judgments depend on reasoning about identity . Because the identity of an individual over time depends on the causal-historical path connecting the stages of the individual, the correct antecedent will also depend on causal connections. The experiment varied how likely it (...) is that the event of the first sentence would cause the event of the second for each of the two individuals . Decisions about the antecedent followed causal likelihood. A mathematical model of causal identity accounted for most of the key aspects of the data from the individual sentence pairs. (shrink)

Epistemically akratic agents believe both p and that believing p is irrational for them. Some of the costs of thinking that epistemic akrasia can be rational are clear. It is hypocritical, and outright weird, to have beliefs that we consider irrational, let alone to reason with or act on those beliefs. However, as Maria Lasonen-Aarnio (2020) and Brian Weatherson (2019) have argued, the weirdness of akrasia does not obviously tell against its rationality. Here I argue that views permitting epistemic akrasia (...) fare worse than previously thought. These views imply that we should sometimes have beliefs that we know for certain are either irrational or false. And while having a belief that we know to be irrational is straightforwardly irrational, the additional possibility that the belief may be false cannot make having it any more rational. (shrink)

_A major new interpretation of the philosophical significance of the oeuvre of Denis Diderot._.

_A major new interpretation of the philosophical significance of the oeuvre of Denis Diderot._.

The case study aims to reveal the praxis that serves the media during ethnic-violence conflicts. The article closely reads reports of the Israeli media covering the clashes between Israeli Arabs and the police, in the first days of the second Intifada. We analyze how mainstream Hebrew media covered the unfolding events, and also refer to reports in Arab-language newspapers. Two prominent trends shaped the frame through which events were reported: Inclusion and exclusion. Israel's Hebrew-language media excluded the Arab citizens from (...) the general Israeli public, while, at the same time, equating them with the residents of the Palestinian Authority. That is, the media framed the Arab Israeli citizens as Palestinians, blurring the line between the riots within Israel and the armed violence in the West Bank and Gaza. This coverage changed after the first and most intense days of riots; Israeli journalists then switched to a more civil framing after establishing an inner as well as an outer discourse. (shrink)

What it means for an action to have moral worth, and what is required for this to be the case, is the subject of continued controversy. Some argue that an agent performs a morally worthy action if and only if they do it because the action is morally right. Others argue that a morally worthy action is that which an agent performs because of features that make the action right. These theorists, though they oppose one another, share something important in (...) common. They focus almost exclusively on the moral worth of right actions. But there is a negatively valenced counterpart that attaches to wrong actions, which we will call moral counterworth. In this paper, we explore the moral counterworth of wrong actions in order to shed new light on the nature of moral worth. Contrary to theorists in both camps, we argue that more than one kind of motivation can affect the moral worth of actions. (shrink)

The alignment of bargaining positions is crucial to a successful negotiation. Prior research has shown that similarity in language use is indicative of the conceptual alignment of interlocutors. We use latent semantic analysis to explore how the similarity of language use between negotiating parties develops over the course of a three-party negotiation. Results show that parties that reach an agreement show a gradual increase in language similarity over the course of the negotiation. Furthermore, reaching the most financially efficient outcome is (...) dependent on similarity in language use between the parties that have the most to gain from such an outcome. (shrink)

Is it ever rational to suspend judgment about whether a particular doxastic attitude of ours is rational? An agent who suspends about whether her attitude is rational has serious doubts that it is. These doubts place a special burden on the agent, namely, to justify maintaining her chosen attitude over others. A dilemma arises. Providing justification for maintaining the chosen attitude would commit the agent to considering the attitude rational—contrary to her suspension on the matter. Alternatively, in the absence of (...) such justification, the attitude would be arbitrary by the agent's own lights, and therefore irrational from the agent's own perspective. So, suspending about whether an attitude of ours is rational does not cohere with considering it rationally preferable to other attitudes, and leads to a more familiar form of epistemic akrasia otherwise. (shrink)

This article brings a historical perspective to explain the recent dissemination of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as the new “gold standard” method to assess international development projects. Although the buzz around RCT evaluations dates from the 2000s, we show that what we are witnessing now is a second wave of RCTs, while a first wave began in the 1960s and ended by the early 1980s. Drawing on content analysis of 123 RCTs, participant observation, and secondary sources, we compare the two (...) waves in terms of the participants in the network of expertise required to carry out field experiments and the characteristics of the projects evaluated. The comparison demonstrates that researchers in the second wave were better positioned to navigate the political difficulties caused by randomization. We explain the differences in the expertise network and in the type of projects as the result of concurrent transformations in the fields of development aid and the economics profession. We draw on Andrew Abbott’s concept of “hinges,” as well as on Bourdieu’s concept of “homology” between fields, to argue that the similar positions and parallel struggles conducted by two groups of actors in the two fields served as the basis for a cross-field alliance, in which RCTs could function as a “hinge” linking together the two fields. (shrink)

Phenotypic divergence among animal species may be due in part to species‐specific (SS) regulation of gene expression by small, non‐coding regulatory RNAs termed “microRNAs”. This phenomenon can be modulated by several variables. First, microRNA genes vary by their level of conservation, many of them being SS, or unique to a particular evolutionary lineage. Second, microRNA expression levels vary spatially and temporally in different species. Lastly, while microRNAs bind the 3′UTR of target genes in order to silence their expression, the binding (...) sites themselves are often non‐conserved. The variability of the miRNA‐target paradigm between different species is thus multifactorial, and this paradigm has only just started to gain attention from researchers in various fields. Here we present and discuss recent findings regarding the characteristics and implications of SS microRNA regulation. (shrink)

To counter the pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, some have proposed accelerating SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development through controlled human infection trials. These trials would involve the deliberate exposure of relatively few young, healthy volunteers to SARS-CoV-2. We defend this proposal against the charge that there is still too much uncertainty surrounding the risks of COVID-19 to responsibly run such a trial.