The spinal cord provides an alternative model for nerve tissue grafting experiments. Anatomo-functional correlations are easier to make here than in any other region of the CNS because of a direct implication of spinal cord neurons in sensorimotor activities. Lesions can be easily performed to isolate spinal cord neurons from descending inputs. The anatomy of descending monoaminergic systems is well defined and these systems offer a favourable paradigm for lesion-graft experiments.

Transnational corporations have become actors with significant political power and authority which should entail responsibility and liability, specifically direct liability for complicity in human rights violations. Holding TNCs liable for human rights violations is complicated by the discontinuity between the fragmented legal/political structure of the TNC and its integrated strategic reality and the international state system which privileges sovereignty and non-intervention over the protection of individual rights. However, the post-Westphalian transition—the emergence of multiple authorities, increasing ambiguity of borders and jurisdiction (...) and blurring of the line between the public and private spheres—should facilitate imposing direct responsibility on transnational firms. Mechanisms for imposing direct responsibility on TNCs are considered including voluntary agreements and international law. However, I conclude that a hybrid public-private regime which relies on non-hierarchical compliance mechanisms is likely to be both more effective and consistent with the structure of the emerging transnational order. (shrink)

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can’t see it One in four American workers says their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers’ speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, (...) recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom. (shrink)

In Aristotle's account of change, lacking a form is called privation (Physics I.7 191a14). For example, someone takes on the form of being musical only from previously having the privation of being unmusical. However, he also states that “shape and nature are spoken of in two ways, for the privation too is in a way form” (Physics II.1 193b19). I will demonstrate that these seemingly contradictory statements are not actually in tension. Since all perceptible matter must be enformed, we would (...) have trouble discussing things that have yet to undergo generation, like menstrual fluid, and things that have undergone corruption, like corpses, if we did not cite the privation as a sort of form. I will argue that, given his commitment to hylomorphism, Aristotle is committed to privation being a form in a qualified sense. It cannot be a form in an unqualified sense because privation often spoils the matter such that it can no longer be reformed. The fact of the matter is we cannot draw a bright line between privation and form because the two are contraries and can be said to hold to different degrees at different points on a spectrum. (shrink)

Privatization and the Social Value of Water in Africa The paper assesses the current clamor and actual privatization of water in Africa. Though this is said to be done in view of wastage and declining access of people to water, this paper submits that the transformation of the social value of water to economic, is rather a continuation of capitalist quest for profit making, which eventually is at the expense of the poor majority.

The cases of corruption reported by the media tend almost always to involve a private party (a citizen or a corporation) that pays, or promises to pay, money to a public party (a politician or a public official, for example) in order to obtain an advantage or avoid a disadvantage. Because of the harm it does to economic efficiency and growth, and because of its social, political and ethical consequences, private-to-public corruption has been widely studied. Private-to-private (...) corruption, by contrast, has been relatively neglected and only recently has started to receive the attention it deserves. The purpose of this paper is to offer some thoughts on the nature and importance of private-to-private corruption; the legal treatment it receives in some of the world''s leading countries; and the measures that companies can take to combat it, with special consideration of its ethical aspects. (shrink)

Simon Blackburn objects that Wittgenstein's private language argument overlooks the possibility that a private linguist can equip himself with a criterion of correctness by confirming generalizations about the patterns in which his private sensations occur. Crispin Wright responds that appropriate generalizations would be too few to be interesting. But I show that Wright's calculations are upset by his failure to appreciate both the richness of the data and the range of theories that would be available to the (...) private linguist. (shrink)

Abstract:We discuss the role that transnational corporations (TNCs) should play in developing global governance, creating a framework of rules and regulations for the global economy. The central issue is whether TNCs should provide global rules and guarantee individual citizenship rights, or instead focus on maximizing profits. First, we describe the problems arising from the globalization process that affect the relationship between public rules and private firms. Next we consider the position of economic and management theories in relation to the (...) social responsibility of the firm. We argue that instrumental stakeholder theory and business and society research can only partially solve the global governance issue, and that more recent concepts of corporate citizenship and republican business ethics deliver theoretically and practically helpful, fresh insights. However, even these need further development, especially with regard to the legitimacy of corporate political activity. (shrink)

Why government outsourcing of public powers is making us less free Many governmental functions today—from the management of prisons and welfare offices to warfare and financial regulation—are outsourced to private entities. Education and health care are funded in part through private philanthropy rather than taxation. Can a privatized government rule legitimately? The Privatized State argues that it cannot. In this boldly provocative book, Chiara Cordelli argues that privatization constitutes a regression to a precivil condition—what philosophers centuries ago called (...) "a state of nature." Developing a compelling case for the democratic state and its administrative apparatus, she shows how privatization reproduces the very same defects that Enlightenment thinkers attributed to the precivil condition, and which only properly constituted political institutions can overcome—defects such as provisional justice, undue dependence, and unfreedom. Cordelli advocates for constitutional limits on privatization and a more democratic system of public administration, and lays out the central responsibilities of private actors in contexts where governance is already extensively privatized. Charting a way forward, she presents a new conceptual account of political representation and novel philosophical theories of democratic authority and legitimate lawmaking. The Privatized State shows how privatization undermines the very reason political institutions exist in the first place, and advocates for a new way of administering public affairs that is more democratic and just. (shrink)

The emergence of private authority has become a feature of the post-Cold War world. The contributors to this volume examine the implications of this erosion of the power of the state for global governance. They analyse actors as diverse as financial institutions, multinational corporations, religious terrorists and organised criminals. The themes of the book relate directly to debates concerning globalization and the role of international law, and will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations, politics, sociology (...) and law. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Is a language necessarily shared with a community of speakers? Innate knowledge of a language Robinson Crusoe sails again Solitary cavemen and monologuists Private languages and ‘private languages’ Overview.

It has gone largely unnoticed that when Deleuze opposes the “private thinker” to the “public professor,” he is invoking the existential thought of Lev Shestov. The public professor defends established values and preaches submission to the demands of reason and the State; the private thinker opposes thought to reason, “idiocy” to common sense, a people to come to what exists. Private thinkers are solitary, singular and untimely, forced to think against consensus and “the crowd.” Deleuze takes from (...) Shestov and Kierkegaard the idea that genuine thinking manifests itself in a thinking which rebels against rational necessity, a theme central to Shestov’s leading French interpreter, Benjamin Fondane. Although Deleuze at first expresses doubts as to whether Shestov’s critique of reason can overcome the legislative reason of Kant, or whether it is entirely free of ressentiment, I argue that Shestov and Fondane’s anti-rationalism is more radical than Deleuze sometimes admits, and show how Deleuze’s attitude toward Shestov became more unreservedly positive over the years. On the other hand, against Shestov and Fondane, I agree with Deleuze that the private thinker is in solidarity with the “strange powers” which can remake the world, and thus with “the people to come.” Nonetheless, I argue that Deleuze’s philosophy cannot form the basis of a politics of egalitarian consensus, but that “the people to come” can only be a “broken chain” of untimely and singular exceptions. (shrink)

Codes of conduct are the main tools to privately regulate worker rights in global value chains. Scholars have shown that while codes may improve outcome standards (such as occupational health and safety), they have had limited impact on process rights (such as freedom of association and collective bargaining). Scholars have, though, only provided vague or general explanations for this empirical finding. We address this shortcoming by providing a holistic and detailed explanation, and argue that codes, in their current form, have (...) limited impact on trade union rights due to (i) buyers paying lip service to trade union rights, (ii) workers being treated as passive objects of regulation in codes of conduct, (iii) auditing being unable to detect and remediate violations of trade union rights, (iv) codes emphasizing parallel means of organizing, (v) suppliers having limited incentives for compliance, and (vi) codes being unable to open up space for union organizing when leveraged in grassroots struggles. Our arguments suggest that there is no quick fix for codes’ limited impact on trade union rights, and that codes, in their current form, have limited potential to improve trade union rights. We conclude by discussing ways in which codes of conduct, and private regulation of worker rights more generally, could be transformed to more effectively address trade union rights. (shrink)

The role of private food standards in agriculture is increasingly raising questions of legitimacy, particularly in light of the impacts such standards may have on food producers. While much work has been carried out at a macro policy level for developing countries, there have been relatively few empirical case studies that focus on particular food supply chains, and even fewer studies still of the impact of private standards on developed countries such as Australia. This study seeks to address (...) this imbalance, with a particular focus on examining the impact of private standards on an Australian vegetable supply food system in North Tasmania as well as tracing the impact of perceived and actual power relations among actors. Applying a governance framework and adopting a Foucauldian position we show that private standards are a “technology of power” that have risen out of a crisis discourse in the mid-1990s about on-farm food safety. Private standards have the effect of using knowledge from particular actors to establish truths about good agricultural practice (GAP), however we show that Tasmanian vegetable growers are not docile bodies and are employing alternative knowledge and technologies of power to challenge how GAP is implemented on-farm. (shrink)

The dominance of agency theory can reduce our collective scope to analyse private equity in all its diversity and depth. We contribute to theorisation of private equity by developing a contrasting perspective that draws on a rich tradition of virtue ethics. In doing so, we juxtapose 'private equity' with 'public good' to develop points of rhetorical and analytical contrast. We develop a typology differentiating various forms of private equity, and focus on the 'take private' form. (...) These takeovers are where private equity funds are used to buy all a firm's publicly listed shares. Take private deals reduce reporting requirements and lessen the amount of public scrutiny a firm comes under. They allow greater control of a firm's assets and resources but also have effects in terms of the wider social fabric. The 'public good' and virtue ethics offer an alternative basis for theorisation of these deals. This provides a needed contrast to accounts of private equity based on agency theory. (shrink)

It’s natural to think of acts of solidarity as being public acts that aim at good outcomes, particularly at social change. I argue that not all acts of solidarity fit this mold - acts of what I call ‘private solidarity’ are not public and do not aim at producing social change. After describing paradigmatic cases of private solidarity, I defend an account of why such acts are themselves morally virtuous and what role they can have in moral development.

This article is part of a symposium on property-owning democracy. In A Theory of Justice John Rawls argued that people in a just society would have rights to some forms of personal property, whatever the best way to organise the economy. Without being explicit about it, he also seems to have believed that protection for at least some forms of privacy are included in the Basic Liberties, to which all are entitled. Thus, Rawls assumes that people are entitled to form (...) families, as well as personal associations which reflect their tastes as well as their beliefs and interests. He seems also to have assumed that people are entitled to seclude themselves, as well as to associate with others, and to keep some of their beliefs, knowledge, feelings and ideas to themselves, rather than having to share them with others. So, thinking of privacy as an amalgam of claims to seclusion, solitude, anonymity and intimate association, we can say that Rawls appears to include at least some forms of privacy in his account of the liberties protected by the first principle of justice. -/- However, Rawls did not say very much about how he understands people’s claims to privacy, or how those claims relate to his ideas about property-ownership. This is unfortunate, because two familiar objections to privacy seem particularly pertinent to his conception of the basic liberties. The first was articulated with customary panache by Judith Thomson, in a famous article on the moral right to privacy, in which she argued that talk of a moral right to privacy is confused and confusing, because privacy rights are really just property rights in disguise. The second objection has long been a staple of leftist politics, and is that the association of privacy with private property means that privacy rights are just a mask for coercive and exploitative relationships, and therefore at odds with democratic freedom, equality and solidarity. If the first objection implies that Rawls is wrong to think that protection for privacy can be distinguished from protection of personal property, the second objection implies that Rawls cannot hope to protect privacy without thereby committing himself to the grossest forms of capitalist inequality. -/- In this paper I will not discuss Rawls’ views of property-owning democracy. However, by clarifying the relationship between claims to privacy and claims to property-ownership, I hope to illuminate some of the conceptual, moral and political issues raised by Rawls’ ideas, and by work on the concept of a property-owning democracy, which he inspired. As we will see, privacy-based justifications of private ownership are not always unappealing, and privacy is sometimes promoted, rather than threatened, by collective ownership. The conclusion draws out the significance of these claims for the idea of a property-owning democracy. (shrink)

cannot understand the language.”[1] This is not intended to cover (easily imaginable) cases of recording one's experiences in a personal code, for such a code, however obscure in fact, could in principle be deciphered. What Wittgenstein had in mind is a language conceived as necessarily comprehensible only to its single originator because the things which define its vocabulary are necessarily inaccessible to others.

The private provision of security services has attracted a great deal of recent attention, both professional and popular. Much of that attention suggests the questioned moral legitimacy of the private vs. public provision of security. Linking the literature on moral legitimacy and responsibility from new institutional and stakeholder theories, we examine the relationship between moral legitimacy and responsible behavior by both private security companies (PSCs) and their stakeholders. We ask what the moral-legitimacy-enhancing responsibilities of both might be, (...) and contribute to both literatures and their managerial implications by detailing the content of those responsibilities, emphasizing the reciprocal nature of moral obligations. We suggest that the moral legitimacy of the industry depends upon responsible behavior by both PSCsandtheir stakeholders. (shrink)

Near the end of 'Naming the Colours', Lewis (1997) makes an interesting claim about the relationship between linguistic and mental content; we are typically unable to read the content of a belief off the content of a sentence used to express that belief or vice versa. I call this view autonomism. I motivate and defend autonomism and discuss its importance in the philosophy of mind and language. In a nutshell, I argue that the different theoretical roles that mental and linguistic (...) content play suggest these kinds of content should be understood as sensitive to different things. (shrink)

This article deals with the issue of the abolition of both property and family for the Guardians in Plato's Republic. My aim is to show that such abolition answers to the problem of the art of ruling raised in Book I: how can the rulers rule not in their own interest, but rather in the interest of the ruled? The abolition of property and family changes the very economic and social framework of the city, leading to an identity of the (...) private interests of the rulers and of the common interests of the polis, by establishing a koinÜnia among the Guardians and a relationship of interdependence between them and the producers. Nevertheless, the exclusion of the lower class from the abolition of property and family creates a situation of fundamental asymmetry in the relationship between the classes and renders ambiguous the manner in which the producers belong to the city, creating in this way a 'differential inclusion into citizenship'. (shrink)

Over the past twenty years, Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) have become significant elements of national security arrangements, assuming many of the functions that have traditionally been undertaken by state armies. Given the centrality of control over the use of coercive force to the functioning and identity of the modern state, and to international order, these developments clearly are of great practical and conceptual interest. This edited volume provides an interdisciplinary overview of PMSCs: what they are, why they (...) have emerged in their current form, how they operate, their current and likely future military, political, social and economic impact, and the moral and legal constraints that do and should apply to their operation. The book focuses firstly upon normative issues raised by the development of PMSCs, and then upon state regulation and policy towards PMSCs, examining finally the impact of PMSCs on civil-military relations. It takes an innovative approach, bringing theory and empirical research into mutually illuminating contact. Includes contributions from experts in IR, political theory, international and corporate law, and economics, and also breaks important new ground by including philosophical discussions of PMSCs. (shrink)

John White (2016) defends the UK private school system from the accusation that it allows an unfair form of ‘queue jumping’ in university admissions. He offers two responses to this accusation, one based on considerations of harm, and one based on meritocratic distribution of university places. We will argue that neither response succeeds: the queue-jumping argument remains a powerful case against the private school system in the UK. We begin by briefly outlining the queue-jumping argument (§1), before evaluating (...) White’s no-harm (§2) and meritocracy (§3) arguments. (shrink)

Habermas dialogically recasts the Kantian conception of moral autonomy. In a legal-political context, his dialogical approach has the potential to redress certain troubling features of liberal and communitarian approaches to democratic politics. Liberal approaches attach greater normative weight to negatively construed individual freedoms, which they seek to protect against the interventions of political authority. Communitarian approaches prioritize the positively construed freedoms of communal political participation, viewing legal-political institutions as a means for collective ethical self-realization. Habermas’ discourse theory of law and (...) democracy seeks to overcome this competition between the negative and positive liberties. Doing so entails reconciling private and public autonomy at a fundamental conceptual level. This is his co-originality thesis, which seeks to show that private and public autonomy are internally connected and evenly balanced. I support his aim but argue that he fails to achieve it due to an unsatisfactory account of private autonomy. I suggest an alternative dialogical conception of autonomy as ethically self-determining agency that would enable him to establish his thesis. (shrink)

A private property right is a collection of particular rights that relate to the control of an object. The ground for such moral rights rests on the value of project pursuit. It does so because the individual ownership of particular objects is intimately related to the formation and application of a coherent set of projects that are the major parts of a self-shaped life. Problems arise in explaining how unowned property is appropriated. Unilateral acts with regard to an object, (...) e.g., mixing in one’s labor into it, probably don’t ground particular rights to private property. Nor do bilateral contracts since a stable pre-institutional contract with regard to appropriation is not likely to form. However, a conventional method of appropriation can allow for such appropriation while at the same time preserving the pre-institutional nature of such rights. This theory can also account for a person’s property rights in her own body. However, the value of project formation requires that persons have at least some private property that is to serve as the object of their projects. These positive rights to property undermine the libertarian claim that all non-commitment-based rights are negative. However, a further empirical argument is needed in order to justify protecting these positive moral rights to private property by positive legal rights. (shrink)

This paper responds to Love's Labor, Eva Feder Kittay's seminal contribution to feminist disability theory, arguing that Kittay's “nested obligations” approach creates a two-tiered system of justice in which care relationships built around private dependence and private obligation are figured as wholly prepolitical, to the detriment of both gender justice and disability justice. I suggest that centering the civic membership of the disabled person allows us to keep what is valuable in Kittay's contribution, namely her theorization of the (...) nature of care and its political significance, and her call for collective support of care relationships, while omitting the nesting of obligations and resituating care recipients and care workers as equal and interdependent. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's treatment of private language is the dissolution of some of the major problems in traditional philosophy. Philosophical problems, for Wittgenstein, are the conceptual confusion arising due to the abuse of language. They can be fully dispensed with by commanding a clear view of language. Language, for Wittgenstein, is on the one hand, the source of philosophical problems while, on the other hand, it is a means to dispense with them. Private language is one such issue which is (...) ultimately rooted I a mistaken conception of language and is the sources of various philosophical problems/ puzzles. (shrink)

Imprisonment calls into question the institutionalized violence of the state and its organs. It touches on the very core of the meaning of state sovereignty and concerns one of the most disempowered groups of society: indicted criminals. Therefore, privatization of prisons signals the willingness to apply privatization policies almost with no limitations. Private prisons have become a known phenomenon in many countries. After the debate on this issue seemed to lose its pragmatic value—in contrast to its importance on the (...) theoretical level—privatization of prisons reemerged as an issue of legal debate due to the Israeli Supreme Court decision that declared a law authorizing the establishment of a private prison unconstitutional. The following analysis evaluates this decision using it as a microcosm for studying the role of law in regulating privatization policies. The Article starts by studying the full range of privatization policies, in order to offer an analysis that would be relevant also to other cases along the privatization spectrum. It then challenges the traditional premise of public law that the move to privatization is merely a matter of policy and not of law. More concretely, the Article offers an analysis based upon distinguishing among three distinct spheres of discussion: the boundaries of privatization, the privatization process, and the regulation of privatized actions. This model of analysis is then applied to the case-study of prison privatization as decided by the Israeli Supreme Court. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive moral theory of privatization in war. It examines the kind of wars that private actors might wage separate from the state and the kind of wars that private actors might wage as functionaries of the state. The first type of war serves to probe the _ad bellum_ question of whether private actors can justifiably authorize war, while the second type of war serves to probe the _in bello_ question of whether private (...) actors can justifiably participate in war. The cases that drive the analysis are drawn from the rich and complicated history of private military action, stretching back centuries to the Italian city-states whose mercenaries were reviled by Machiavelli. The book also takes up the hypothetical examples conjured by philosophers—the private protective agencies of Robert Nozick’s _Anarchy, State, and Utopia_, for example, and the private armies of Thomas More’s _Utopia_. The aim of this book is to propose a theory of privatization that retains currency not only in assessing current military engagements, but past and future ones as well. In doing so, it also raises a set of important questions about the very enterprise of war. This book will be of much interest to students of ethics, political philosophy, military studies, international relations, war and conflict studies, and security studies. (shrink)

Surrogacy involves a private agreement whereby a woman who gestates a child attempts to surrender her (putative) moral right to become the parent of that child such that another person (or persons), of the woman’s choice, can acquire it. Since people lack the normative power to privately transfer custody, attempts to do so are illegitimate, and the law should reflect this fact.

With Gendering the Commonwealth, Anna Becker has given us one of the most stimulating discussions of the “language and concepts of Renaissance political thought” (1) in recent years. Over five chap...

Abstract The institution of war is the broad framework of rules, norms, and organizations dedicated to the prevention, prosecution, and resolution of violent conflict between political entities. Important parts of that institution consist of the accountability arrangements that hold between armed forces, the political leaders who oversee and direct the use of those forces, and the people in whose name the leaders act and from whose ranks the members of the armed forces are drawn. Like other parts of the institution, (...) these arrangements are responsive to changes in military technology and needs, to geopolitical facts, and to moral and political norms. In particular, they are sensitive to the forms that military organization takes. Since the emergence of modern states in Europe some 500 years ago, there have been three main such forms: private providers?in the form of mercenaries, in early modern Europe?then professional standing armies, which in turn developed into citizen armies. Although elements of the three organizations have coexisted in many armies, the citizen army model has dominated until recently. That model brought with it a particular conception of the accountability relations between the army, the state, and the people. The state had authority over and directed the army, which was accountable to it. In turn the state was accountable for its use of the army to the people, on whose behalf it acted. The dominance of state authority over the military is now under strain, with the professional and private elements?in the form of private military and security companies (PMSCs)?having increasing importance. As those elements increase in power and presence, so it becomes more difficult to make the state accountable to the people for its use of the military, and more difficult for the people to act as a restraining force on the way in which the military used. In this essay, I outline and assess these developments?with particular emphasis on the emergence of PMSCs?in the light of a liberal view of (political) violence. The essay focuses on the situation in the United States, which possesses by far the most important military force in the world today, and in which the use of PMSCs is most developed. The paper has three main sections and a brief conclusion: the first section sketches the liberal view of violence and its implications for organizations dedicated to its use; the second outlines the salient characteristics of the three historically dominant forms of armies; and the third looks at the current situation in which the three forms coexist uneasily. (shrink)

The privation account of moral evil holds that the badness of morally bad acts consists not in the positive act itself or in any positive feature of the act but rather in the act’s lack of conformity to the moral standard. Traditionally recognized for its theological usefulness, the account has been the target of at least five recent objections. In this paper I offer a positive philosophical argument for the account and then show that the objections fail.

Van oudsher proberen liberaal-democratische samenlevingen private en publieke sferen gescheiden te houden. Individuen en bedrijven kunnen privaat handelen op de markt, winst maken en daar de vruchten van plukken. De publieke macht moet daar onafhankelijk van uitgeoefend worden, op democratische basis. Maar die strikte scheiding tussen privaat en publiek staat onder druk. Oligarchen beïnvloeden in veel landen de politiek, door partijdonaties en lobbyactiviteiten. Bedrijven reguleren hun eigen activiteiten, en overheden slagen er in een geglobaliseerde economie lang niet altijd in (...) om daar effectieve controle over te hebben. In dit boek presenteert Rutger Claassen een filosofische analyse van de relatie tussen privaat en publiek. In het feodalisme waren beide met elkaar verweven, op een ongezonde manier. De moderne, open samenleving ontstond in de 18e eeuw als een reactie daarop. Maar vandaag de dag lijken we een terugval te beleven. Opnieuw vermengen economische en politieke belangen zich, ten koste van burgers. Zijn we aangeland in een ‘neo-feodaal’ tijdperk? En hoe daarop te reageren? Voor iedereen die wil begrijpen hoe politiek en economie elkaar beïnvloeden, en hoe een filosofische blik ons daarbij kan helpen. (shrink)

Can the right to private property be claimed as one of the `rights of mankind'? This is the central question of this comprehensive and critical examination of the subject of private property. Jeremy Waldron contrasts two types of arguments about rights: those based on historical entitlement, and those based on the importance of property to freedom. He provides a detailed discussion of the theories of property found in Locke's Second Treatise and Hegel's Philosophy of Right to illustrate this (...) contrast. The book contains original analyses of the concept of ownership, the ideas of rights, and the relation between property and equality. The author's overriding determination throughout is to follow through the arguments and values used to justify private ownership. He finds that the traditional arguments about property yield some surprisingly radical conclusions. (shrink)

Private copying exception is an exception to copyright which is present both in Lithuanian national law and law of the European Union. Recent jurisprudence of Court of Justice of the European Union interpreted legal regulation of private copying exception in the laws of the European Union. The mentioned jurisprudence raised concern whether Lithuanian copyright laws on private copying exception and their interpretation in case law of Supreme Court of Lithuania are compatible with the European Union law. This (...) paper analyses the nature and intention of private copying exception, its reflection in Lithuanian and European copyright law and evaluates Lithuanian laws and case law in the light of recent jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The authors conclude that recent jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union on private copying exception shall not lead to any dramatic or substantial changes of Lithuanian national copyright laws. (shrink)

Descartes’s very brief explanations of human responsibility for sin and divine innocence of sin include references to the idea that evil is a privation rather than a real thing. It is not obvious, though, that privation fits naturally in Descartes’s reductionistic metaphysics, nor is it clear precisely what role his privation doctrine plays in his theodicy. These issues are made clear by contrasting Descartes’s use of privations with that of Suarez, particularly in light of reoccurring objections to privation theory. These (...) objections have no weight against Suarez’s use of privations, but Descartes’s mentions of privation are so few that it is not clear how his account avoids their consequences. Descartes’s brevity seems to have motivated some of his followers to develop creative accounts of the way in which privation fits in a Cartesian system. Pierre-Sylvain Régis accomplishes this task by reintroducing material causation. Régis holds that moral evil has no efficient cause since an efficient cause can only produce something real. Because he holds that moral evil can have a material cause, he is able to affirm that the soul is morally responsible for sin. In Régis’s case, accommodating this theological issue meant reincorporating Aristotelian resources into his Cartesian system. (shrink)

In this book Saul Kripke brings his powerful philosophical intelligence to bear on Wittgenstein's analysis of the notion of following a rule.