Introduction -- "Every Legitimate Government is Republican": Rousseau's Debt to and Departure from Montesquieu on Republicanism -- What if There is no Legislator? Rousseau's History of the Government of Geneva -- Rousseau's Republican Citizenship: The Moral Psychology of The Social Contract -- Rousseau's negative liberty: Themes of domination and skepticism in The Social Contract -- Rousseau's Ancient Ends of Legislation: Liberty, Equality (& Fraternity) -- Property and Possession in Rousseau's Social Contract -- Political Equality Among Unequals -- On the Primacy (...) of Peoplehood: Nations and Nationalism in Rousseau's Social Contract -- Rousseau on Voting and Electoral Laws -- Rousseau and the puzzle of the Roman Republic -- Rousseau's Case against Democracy -- Rousseau's Dilemma or "Of Civil Religion" -- Entreating the Political: Politics and Theology in Rousseau's Social Contract -- Civil Religion and Political Unity: Social Contract 4.8. (shrink)

Very diverse societies pose real problems for Rawlsian models of public reason. This is for two reasons: first, public reason is unable accommodate diverse perspectives in determining a regulative ideal. Second, regulative ideals are unable to respond to social change. While models based on public reason focus on the justification of principles, this book suggests that we need to orient our normative theories more toward discovery and experimentation. The book develops a unique approach to social contract theory that focuses on (...) diverse perspectives. It offers a new moral stance that author Ryan Muldoon calls, "The View From Everywhere," which allows for substantive, fundamental moral disagreement. This stance is used to develop a bargaining model in which agents can cooperate despite seeing different perspectives. Rather than arguing for an ideal contract or particular principles of justice, Muldoon outlines a procedure for iterated revisions to the rules of a social contract. It expands Mill's conception of experiments in living to help form a foundational principle for social contract theory. By embracing this kind of experimentation, we move away from a conception of justice as an end state, and toward a conception of justice as a trajectory. (shrink)

‘Contract cheating’ has recently emerged as a form of academic dishonesty. It involves students contracting out their coursework to writers in order to submit the purchased assignments as their own work, usually via the internet. This form of cheating involves epistemic and ethical problems that are continuous with older forms of cheating, but which it also casts in a new form. It is a concern to educators because it is very difficult to detect, because it is arguably more fraudulent than (...) some other forms of plagiarism, and because it appears to be connected to a range of systemic problems within modern higher education. This paper provides an overview of the information and literature thus far available on the topic, including its definition, the problems it involves, its causal factors, and the ways in which educators might respond. We argue that while contract cheating is a concern, some of the suggested responses are themselves problematic, and that best practice responses to the issue should avoid moral panic and remain focussed on supporting honest students and good academic practice. (shrink)

Ulysses contracts are a method by which one person binds himself by agreeing to be bound by others. In medicine such contracts have primarily been discussed as ways of treating people with episodic mental illnesses, where the features of the illness are such that they now judge that they will refuse treatment at the time it is needed. Enforcing Ulysses contracts in these circumstances would require medical professionals to override the express refusal of the patient at the (...) time treatment is required, something that is generally problematic both ethically and legally. In this paper I will argue that despite appearances Ulysses contracts can make it the case that treating a patient in such circumstances is an instance of treating him with his consent, although safeguards are needed to ensure that this is the case. Given the potential benefits to patients I further argue that modified Ulysses contracts should be made legally enforceable. (shrink)

Social contract theory has been criticized as a “theory in search of application.” We argue that incorporating the nano, or individual, level of analysis into social contract inquiry will yield more descriptive theory. We draw upon the psychological contract perspective to address two critiques of social contract theory: its rigid macro-orientation and inattention to the process of contract formation. We demonstrate how a psychological contract approach offers practical insight into the impact of social contracting on day-to-day human interaction. We then (...) articulate several potentially testable propositions that emerge from this nano-level perspective. (shrink)

It is often argued that fully structural theories of truth and related notions are incapable of expressing a nonstratified notion of defectiveness. We argue that recently much-discussed non-contractive theories suffer from the same expressive limitation, provided they identify the defective sentences with the sentences that yield triviality if they are assumed to satisfy structural contraction.

A powerful work of moral and political philosophy.The idea which I shall present here came to me more or less out of the blue. I was on a train some five years ago, on my way to spend a day at Headingley and I was reading a book about the death camp at Sobibor... The particular, not very appropriate, conjunction involved for me in this train journey... had the effect of fixing my thoughts on one of the more dreadful features (...) of human coexistence, when in the shape of a simple five-word phrase the idea occurred to me. In The Contract of Mutual Indifference, Norman Geras discusses a central aspect of the experience of the Holocaust with a view to exploring its most important contemporary implications. In a bold and powerful synthesis of memorial, literary record, historical reflection and political theory, he focuses on the figure of the bystander -- the bystander to the destruction of the Jews of Europe and the bystander to more recent atrocities -- to consider the moral consequences of looking on without active response at persecution and great suffering. Geras argues that the tragedy of European Jewry, so widely pondered by historians, social scientists, psychologists, theologians and others, has not yet found its proper reflection within political philosophy. Attempting to fill the gap, he adapts an old idea from within that tradition of enquiry, the idea of the social contract, to the task of thinking about the triangular relation between perpetrators, victims and bystanders, and draws a somber conclusion from it. Geras goes on to ask how far this conclusion may be offset by the hypothesis of a universal duty to bring aid. The Contract of Mutual Indifference is an original and challenging work, aimed at the complacent abstraction of much contemporary theory. It is supplemented by three shorter essays on the implications of the Jewish catastrophe for conceptions of human nature and progress and for certain types of Marxist explanation. (shrink)

Blockage contraction is an operation of belief contraction that acts directly on the outcome set, i.e. the set of logically closed subsets of the original belief set K that are potential contraction outcomes. Blocking is represented by a binary relation on the outcome set. If a potential outcome X blocks another potential outcome Y, and X does not imply the sentence p to be contracted, then Y ≠ K ÷ p. The contraction outcome K ÷ p is equal to the (...) (unique) inclusion-maximal unblocked element of the outcome set that does not imply p. Conditions on the blocking relation are specified that ensure the existence of such a unique inclusion-maximal set for all sentences p. Blockage contraction is axiomatically characterized and its relations to AGM-style operations are investigated. In a finite-based framework, every transitively relational partial meet contraction is also a blockage contraction. (shrink)

How robust is a contraction-free approach to the semantic paradoxes? This paper aims to show some limitations with the approach based on multiplicative rules by presenting and discussing the significance of a revenge paradox using a predicate representing an alethic modality defined with infinitary rules.

Abstract:This article sets out two central theses. Both theses primarily involve a fundamental criticism of current contractarian business ethics (CBE), but if these can be sustained, they also constitute two boundary conditions for any future contractarian theory of business ethics. The first, which I label the self-discipline thesis, claims that current CBE would gain considerably in focus if more attention were paid to the logic of the social contract argument. By this I mean the aims set by the theorist and (...) method of reasoning by which normative conclusions are drawn in the contract model. The second, to which I refer as the domain-specificity thesis, argues that current CBE needs to be better adapted to its field of application and the specific goals which it aims to establish. I will substantiate these two theses on the basis of a comparative analysis of CBE with two earlier families of social contract theories. (shrink)

Some theorists have developed formal approaches to truth that depend on counterexamples to the structural rules of contraction. Here, we study such approaches, with an eye to helping them respond to a certain kind of objection. We define a contractive relative of each noncontractive relation, for use in responding to the objection in question, and we explore one example: the contractive relative of multiplicative-additive affine logic with transparent truth, or MAALT. -/- .

Isaac Levi's new book develops further his pioneering work in formal epistemology, focusing on the problem of belief contraction, or how rationally to relinquish old beliefs. Levi offers the most penetrating analysis to date of this key question in epistemology, offering a completely new solution and explaining its relation to his earlier proposals. He mounts an argument in favor of the thesis that contracting a state of belief by giving up specific beliefs is to be evaluated in terms of the (...) value of the information lost by doing so. The rationale aims to be thoroughly decision theoretic. Levi spells out his goals and shows that certain types of recommendations are obtained if one seeks to promote these goals. He compares his approach to his earlier account of inductive expansion. The recommendations are for "mild contractions." These are formally the same as the "severe withdrawals" considered by Pagnucco and Rott. The rationale, however, is different. A critical part of the book concerns the elaboration of these differences. The results are relevant to accounts of the conditions under which it is legitimate to cease believing and to accounts of conditionals. Mild Contraction will be of great interest to all specialists in belief revision theory and to many students of formal epistemology, philosophy of science, and pragmatism. (shrink)

An important question for proponents of non-contractive approaches to paradox is why contraction fails. Zardini offers an answer, namely that paradoxical sentences exhibit a kind of instability. I elaborate this idea using revision theory, and I argue that while instability does motivate failures of contraction, it equally motivates failure of many principles that non-contractive theorists want to maintain.

Contract as Promise is a study of the philosophical foundations of contract law in which Professor Fried effectively answers some of the most common assumptions about contract law and strongly proposes a moral basis for it while defending the classical theory of contract. This book provides two purposes regarding the complex legal institution of the contract. The first is the theoretical purpose to demonstrate how contract law can be traced to and is determined by a small number of basic moral (...) principles. At the theory level the author shows that contract law does have an underlying, and unifying structure. The second is a pedagogic purpose to provide for students the underlying structure of contract law. At this level of doctrinal exposition the author shows that structure can be referred to moral principles. Together the two purposes support each other in an effective and comprehensive study of contract law. This second edition retains the original text, and includes a new Preface. It also includes a substantial new essay entitled Contract as Promise in the Light of Subsequent Scholarship--Especially Law and Economics which serves as a retrospective of the work accomplished in the last thirty years, while responding to present and future work in the field. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Background: mapping the field of business ethics The evolution of social contract approaches to business ethics Integrative social contracts theory (ISCT) Remaining issues and promising research directions for contractarian business ethics.

This paper reorganizes and further develops the theory of partial meet contraction which was introduced in a classic paper by Alchourron, Gardenfors, and Makinson. Our purpose is threefold. First, we put the theory in a broader perspective by decomposing it into two layers which can respectively be treated by the general theory of choice and preference and elementary model theory. Second, we reprove the two main representation theorems of AGM and present two more representation results for the finite case that (...) "lie between" the former, thereby partially answering an open question of AGM. Our method of proof is uniform insofar as it uses only one form of "revealed preference", and it explains where and why the finiteness assumption is needed. Third, as an application, we explore the logic characterizing theory contractions in the finite case which are governed by the structure of simple and prioritized belief bases. (shrink)

Kernel contraction is a natural nonrelational generalization of safe contraction. All partial meet contractions are kernel contractions, but the converse relationship does not hold. Kernel contraction is axiomatically characterized. It is shown to be better suited than partial meet contraction for formal treatments of iterated belief change.

As the contract cheating market has become more sophisticated and competition has intensified, the contract cheating industry has had to redevelop its approach to gain custom. The industry has developed new models of internal operation and providers are using more sophisticated techniques to reach potential customers. This paper discusses contract cheating industry workflows and introduces terminology to allow complexities of the industry to be more consistently discussed. Examples are provided throughout to indicate the scale and challenge of the contract cheating (...) industry operations.An analysis of contract cheating operations on the micro-outsourcing website Fiverr.com is presented, using comparative data collected in June 2016 and October 2018. The analysis of the data demonstrates how the contract cheating industry is seeing continual change. Specifically, on Fiverr.com, this includes an increase in the number of providers offering essay writing services, particularly those from Kenya and Pakistan. The increase in service availability is accompanied by an associated reduction in essay pricing. The advertised pricing per 1000 words has dropped substantially, from $31.73 USD to $5.73 USD. The accounts used by contract cheating providers are also being replaced at an increased rate.Based on the data, contract cheating providers on Fiverr.com are currently estimated to be taking a minimum of $92,001 USD per year in revenue. This is an example calculated from only one search term on which contract cheating providers advertise on only one micro-outsourcing site used for contract cheating. The actual industry income from micro-outsourcing web sites is likely to be substantially higher. (shrink)

Students are using file sharing sites to breach academic integrity in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper analyses the use of one such site, Chegg, which offers “homework help” and other academic services to students. Chegg is often presented as a file sharing site in the academic literature, but that is just one of many ways in which it can be used. As this paper demonstrates, Chegg can and is used for contract cheating This is despite the apparent existence (...) of an Honour Code on Chegg which asks students not to breach academic integrity. With pandemic led safety considerations leading to increased online teaching and assessment, the paper analyses data relating to how Chegg is used by students in five STEM subjects, namely Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics and Chemistry. The results show that students are using Chegg to request exam style questions. They demonstrate that contract cheating requests can be put live and answered within the short duration of an examination. The number of student requests posted for these five subjects increased by 196.25% comparing the time period April 2019 to August 2019 with the period April 2020 to August 2020. This increase corresponds with the time when many courses moved to be delivered and assessed online. The growing number of requests indicates that students are using Chegg for assessment and exam help frequently and in a way that is not considered permissible by universities. The paper concludes by recommending that academic institutions put interventions in place to minimise the risk to educational standards posed by sites such as Chegg, particularly since increased online teaching and assessment may continue after the pandemic. (shrink)

Detecting contract cheating in written submissions can be difficult beyond direct plagiarism detectable via technology. Successfully identifying potential cases of contract cheating in written work such as essays and reports is largely dependent on the experience of assessors and knowledge of student. It is further dependent on their familiarity with the patterns and clues evident in sections of body text and reference materials to identify irregularities. Consequently, some knowledge of what the patterns and clues look like is required. This paper (...) documents how to identify some of the patterns and clues observed in essay and report submissions. Effective assessment design with specific contextual requirements make irregularities easier to detect and interpret. The irregularities identified were confirmed as instances of contract cheating through conversations held with postgraduate students. An essential element of the conversations was the evidence presented for discussion. Irregularities were noted on a pro-forma specifically developed for this purpose. Patterns identified include misrepresented bibliographic data, inappropriate references, irrelevant material and generalised text that did not address the assessment question or grading criteria. The validated patterns formed the basis of identifying potential instances of contract cheating in later submissions. Timely conversations with students before the end of semester are essential to determining whether the patterns and clues link to poor knowledge of academic writing conventions or classified as contract cheating necessitating the application of appropriate penalties under institutional policies and procedures. (shrink)

The postulate of recovery is commonly regarded to be the intuitively least compelling of the six basic Gärdenfors postulates for belief contraction. We replace recovery by the seemingly much weaker postulate of core-retainment, which ensures that if x is excluded from K when p is contracted, then x plays some role for the fact that K implies p. Surprisingly enough, core-retainment together with four of the other Gärdenfors postulates implies recovery for logically closed belief sets. Reasonable contraction operators without recovery (...) do not seem to be possible for such sets. Instead, however, they can be obtained for non-closed belief bases. Some results on partial meet contractions on belief bases are given, including an axiomatic characterization and a non-vacuous extension of the AGM closure condition. (shrink)

In this pithy and highly readable book, Brian Skyrms, a recognised authority on game and decision theory, investigates traditional problems of the social contract in terms of evolutionary dynamics. Game theory is skilfully employed to offer new interpretations of a wide variety of social phenomena, including justice, mutual aid, commitment, convention and meaning. The author eschews any grand, unified theory. Rather, he presents the reader with tools drawn from evolutionary game theory for the purpose of analysing and coming to understand (...) the social contract. The book is not technical and requires no special background knowledge. As such, it could be enjoyed by students and professionals in a wide range of disciplines: political science, philosophy, decision theory, economics and biology. (shrink)

The first part of the paper presents three little arguments from theism to idealism. The second part employs these arguments to make sense of a puzzling doctrine of Jewish mysticism: the doctrine of divine contraction (heb. tzimtzum).

_Contract and Domination_ offers a bold challenge to contemporary contract theory, arguing that it should either be fundamentally rethought or abandoned altogether. Since the publication of John Rawls's _A Theory of Justice_, contract theory has once again become central to the Western political tradition. But gender justice is neglected and racial justice almost completely ignored. Carole Pateman and Charles Mills's earlier books, _The Sexual Contract_ and _The Racial Contract_, offered devastating critiques of gender and racial domination and the contemporary contract (...) tradition's silence on them. Both books have become classics of revisionist radical democratic political theory. Now Pateman and Mills are collaborating for the first time in an interdisciplinary volume, drawing on their insights from political science and philosophy. They are building on but going beyond their earlier work to bring the sexual and racial contracts together. In _Contract and Domination_, Pateman and Mills discuss their differences about contract theory and whether it has a useful future, excavate the settler contract that created new civil societies in North America and Australia, argue via a non-ideal contract for reparations to black Americans, confront the evasions of contemporary contract theorists, explore the intersections of gender and race and the global sexual-racial contract, and reply to their critics. This iconoclastic book throws the gauntlet down to mainstream white male contract theory. It is vital reading for anyone with an interest in political theory and political philosophy, and the systems of male and racial domination. (shrink)

Abstract:Social contracting has a long and important place in the history of political philosophy (Hardin, 1991; Waldron, 1989) and as a theory of justice (Baynes, 1989; Rawls, 1971). More recently, it has been developed into an individual rights-based theory of organizations (Keeley, 1980, 1988), and as a way to integrate ethics and moral legitimacy into corporate strategy and action (Donaldson, 1982; Freeman&Gilbert, 1988). Currently, it is being proposed as an integrative theory of economic ethics (Donaldson&Dunfee, forthcoming). This paper will extend (...) the Donaldson and Dunfee approach by arguing thatsocial contracting can best be understood and applied in organizational settings if it is perceived and treated as a network governance process. This insight can benefit management scholars and practitioners alike, since it calls attention to the processes by which trust is created and sustained in on-going contractual relationships. It also strongly suggests that a new approach to applying managerial discretion, asmoral agency, is needed to realize the full competitive and ethical potential of emerging network forms. (shrink)

We can often specify how we would contract by a certain sentence by saying that this contraction would coincide with some other contraction that we know how to perform. We can for instance clarify that our contraction by p&q would coincide with our contraction by p, or by q, or by {p, q}. In a framework where the set of potential outcomes is known, some contractions are “self-evident” in the sense that there is only one serious candidate that can be (...) the outcome of such a contraction. Contraction by a specific contractee (sentence or set of sentences to be contracted) is bootstrapped if it is specified by saying that it coincides with some such self-evident contraction. For a wide range of (multiple) contraction operators, contractions by any contractee can be bootstrapped. This means that the selection mechanism (selection function, incision function, etc.) can be replaced by a function called a bootstrapping selector that assigns to each contractee some “self-evident” contractee that yields the same outcome. With bootstrapping we can eliminate traditional extralogical components in contraction (e.g., selection functions) and replace them by bootstrapping selectors that reflect more closely the ways in which we actually reason and argue about belief contraction. (shrink)

Pateman challenges the way contemporary society functions by questioning the standard interpretation of an idea that is deeply embedded in American and British political thought: that our rights and freedoms derive from the social contract explicated by Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau and interpreted in the United States by the Founding Fathers. The author shows how we are told only half the story of the original contract that establishes modern patriarchy. The sexual contract is ignored and thus men's patriarchal right over (...) women is also glossed over. No attention is paid to the problems that arise when women are excluded from the original contract but incorporated into the new contractual order. One of the main targets of the book is those who try to turn contractarian theory to progressive use, and a major thesis of the book is that this is not possible. Thus those feminists who have looked to a more "proper" contract- one between genuinely equal partners, or one entered into without any coercion- are misleading themselves. In the author's words, "In contract theory universal freedom is always a hypothesis, a story, a political fiction. Contract always generates political right in the forms of domination and subordination." Thus the book is also aimed at mainstream political theorists, and socialist and other critics of contract theory. The author offers a sweeping challenge to conventional understandings- of both left and right- of actual contracts in everyday life: the marriage contract, the employment contract, the prostitution contract, and the new surrogate mother contract. By bringing a feminist perspective to bear on the contradictions and paradoxes surrounding women and contract, and the relation between the sexes, she is able to shed new light on fundamental political problems of freedom and subordination. (shrink)

The pervasive use of contracts in healthcare is a source of unease for many healthcare ethicists and patient advocates. This commentary examines the use of such contracts with individuals in rehabilitation settings who have complex medical and behavioural issues. The goals of this paper are to examine the many factors that can lead to contract use, to discuss some legal and ethical implications of contract use, and to assess contract use in light of concerns about health equity. The (...) paper concludes with some practical alternatives to the use of such contracts, and refers specifically to tools that might be borrowed from the field of behavioural therapy. (shrink)

Geometric theories are presented as contraction- and cut-free systems of sequent calculi with mathematical rules following a prescribed rule-scheme that extends the scheme given in Negri and von Plato. Examples include cut-free calculi for Robinson arithmetic and real closed fields. As an immediate consequence of cut elimination, it is shown that if a geometric implication is classically derivable from a geometric theory then it is intuitionistically derivable.

In the present paper we argue that the theory of contracts embraced by many libertarian scholars and relied upon by them in sundry important debates (e.g. over morality of the fractional reserve banking or loan maturity mismatching etc.), that is, the title transfer theory of contracts (TTT) should be rejected as not being able to account for the binding force of future-oriented contracts, including contracts deemed enforceable by those scholars themselves. The TTT claims that the only (...) contracts that should be legally binding are these where the debtor’s failure to abide by them constitutes a violation of the creditor’s private property rights. However, as we argue, no default of the debtor in a future-oriented contract can in itself amount to such a violation. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Challenge to the Distinctiveness and the Coherence of Contract Four Autonomy‐Based Theories Three Teleological Theories Concluding Remarks References.

_Contract Theory_ examines the logical and conceptual structures that arise in the process of making, honoring, and enforcing contracts. The touchstone of Anglo-American contract law is the determination of contractual intent. Two theories have competed for center stage: the subjective theory of the "meeting of the minds" and the objective theory in which the parties' manifestations and the transaction's contextual factors became the means for contract interpretation and enforcement. The implementation of the objective theory of contract is the "reasonable (...) person standard." Larry DiMatteo focuses on the development, construction, and application of the reasonable person standard. He undertakes a study of the origins of the reasonable person in the disciplines of philosophy, theology, and psychology and concludes with an examination of the interplay between this objective standard and the subjectivity of judgment. The importance of the synthesis of the objective and subjective elements of contracts is crucial for a complete understanding of contract law. (shrink)

Our main goal is to investigate whether the infinitary rules for the quantifiers endorsed by Elia Zardini in a recent paper are plausible. First, we will argue that they are problematic in several ways, especially due to their infinitary features. Secondly, we will show that even if these worries are somehow dealt with, there is another serious issue with them. They produce a truth-theoretic paradox that does not involve the structural rules of contraction.

The basic assumption of repertoire contraction is that only some of the logically closed subsets of the original belief set are viable as contraction outcomes. Contraction takes the form of choosing directly among these viable outcomes, rather than among cognitively more far-fetched objects such as possible worlds or maximal consistent subsets of the original belief set. In this first investigation of repertoire contraction, postulates for various variants of the operation are introduced. Necessary and sufficient conditions are given for when repertoire (...) contraction coincides with AGM contraction or with operations generated by AGM-style contraction on a belief base. A close connection is shown to hold between repertoire contraction and specified meet contraction. (shrink)

One way to construct a contraction operator for a theory (belief set) is to assign to it a base (belief base) and an operator of partial meet contraction for that base. Axiomatic characterizations are given of the theory contractions that are generated in this way by (various types of) partial meet base contractions.

A contract theory is an attempt both to make normative sense of contract law as an institutional type and to come up with criteria for the evaluation of the law of any particular place. There is no precise rule telling us how far the prescriptions of a theory can deviate from actually existing contract law and still be a theory of contract — rather than a political proposal to replace contract law with something else. But we can say roughly that (...) contract theory aims to provide normative foundations for the type of legal institution that enforces (some) agreements and unilateral commitments. Having provided an account of the point of having an institution of that general kind, the theory can then be used to evaluate existing examples. (shrink)

We present a decision-theoretically motivated notion of contraction which, we claim, encodes the principles of minimal change and entrenchment. Contraction is seen as an operation whose goal is to minimize loses of informational value. The operation is also compatible with the principle that in contracting A one should preserve the sentences better entrenched than A (when the belief set contains A). Even when the principle of minimal change and the latter motivation for entrenchment figure prominently among the basic intuitions in (...) the works of, among others, Quine and Ullian (1978), Levi (1980, 1991), Harman (1988) and Gärdenfors (1988), formal accounts of belief change (AGM, KM – see Gärdenfors (1988); Katsuno and Mendelzon (1991)) have abandoned both principles (see Rott (2000)). We argue for the principles and we show how to construct a contraction operation, which obeys both. An axiom system is proposed. We also prove that the decision-theoretic notion of contraction can be completely characterized in terms of the given axioms. Proving this type of completeness result is a well-known open problem in the field, whose solution requires employing both decision-theoretical techniques and logical methods recently used in belief change. (shrink)

Contractions on belief sets that have no finite representation cannot be finite in the sense that only a finite number of sentences is removed. However, such contractions can be delimited so that the actual change takes place in a logically isolated, finite-based part of the belief set. A construction that answers to this principle is introduced, and is axiomatically characterized. It turns out to coincide with specified meet contraction.

Modern belief revision theory is based to a large extent on partial meet contraction that was introduced in the seminal article by Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson that appeared in 1985. In the same year, Alchourrón and Makinson published a significantly different approach to the same problem, called safe contraction. Since then, safe contraction has received much less attention than partial meet contraction. The present paper summarizes the current state of knowledge on safe contraction, provides some new results (...) and offers a list of unsolved problems that are in need of investigation. (shrink)

This paper seeks to define and delimit the scope of the social responsibilities of health professionals in reference to the concept of a social contract. While drawing on both historical data and current empirical information, this paper will primarily proceed analytically and examine the theoretical feasibility of deriving social responsibilities from the phenomenon of professionalism via the concept of a social contract.

Semi-contraction is a withdrawal operation defined by Fermé in "On the logic of theory change: Contraction without recovery." In this paper we propose: (1) an axiomatic characterization of semi-contraction; (2) an alternative construction for semi-contraction based on semi-saturatable sets, inspired by Levi's saturatable sets; (3) a special kind of semi-contraction that satisfies the Lindström and Rabinowicz interpolation thesis.

This paper applies Wempe’s (2005, Business Ethics Quarterly 15(1), 113–135) boundary conditions that define the external and internal logics for contractarian business ethics theory, as a system of argumentation for evaluating current or prospective institutional arrangements for arriving at the “good life,” based on the principles and practices of social justice. It does so by showing that a more dynamic, process-oriented, and pluralist ‘dialogic twist’ to Donaldson and Dunfee’s (2003, ‘Social Contracts: sic et non’, in P. Heugens, H. van (...) Oosterhout and J. Vromen (eds.), The Social Institutions of Capitalism: Evolution and Design of Social Contracts (Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar Publishing, Ltd.) pp. 109–126; 1999, Ties that Bind: A Social Contracts Approach to Business Ethics (Boston, MA, Harvard Business School Press); 1995, Economics and Philosophy 11(1), 85–112; 1994, Academy of Management Review 19(2), 252–284.) integrated social contracting theory (ISCT) of economic ethics will further develop this promising and influential approach to moral reasoning, ethical decision-making, and stakeholder governance. This evolutionary, interactive learning-based model of ethical norm generation via dialogic stakeholder engagement is particularly appropriate within economic communities that are experiencing value conflict and pressures for institutional change. (shrink)

Contract theories may be a useful analytical tool for understanding and explaining contract, as well as for facilitating orientation in a complex and often fragmented legal regulation. The article presents main understandings of contract in various European jurisdictions: contract as free assumption of obligation, contract as a bargain based on the idea of consideration, contract as free assumption of obligation based on sufficient causa. The article inquires as to how universal those theories are, what are the recent trends in the (...) development of European contract law, what philosophy of contract underlies the soft law instruments, such as UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts or Principles of European Contract Law (PECL), what is the stance of the Draft Common Frame of Reference (DCFR) in regard to the concept of contract. Under the law of Lithuania the definition of contract comprises elements found in several European countries, but it is argued that the new Lithuanian Civil Code has not received any model in its pure form. However it seems that the prevailing view understands contract as juridical act, as freely assumed obligation and meeting of parties’ intentions with the aim to create legal effects. Following the position of soft law instruments in regard to the elements of the contract, Lithuanian law (at least in its statutory form) does not have any explicit additional requirements, such as consideration or causa. (shrink)

With increasing market competition and rapid development of service economy, more and more enterprises are shifting from providing products or services to providing product-service systems that integrate products and services, in order to improve competitiveness and profitability. Meanwhile, consumers have strategic delayed purchasing behavior when purchasing the PSS and high requirements for service quality. This paper investigates the two-period pricing and service quality decisions of product-service supply chain considering consumers’ strategic behavior under decentralized and centralized scenarios. The equilibrium results are (...) compared in two scenarios. In order to eliminate performance loss under the decentralized scenario, we design two-period dynamic contracts to coordinate the PSSC. Furthermore, numerical simulation is provided to verify the feasibility of the contracts. The following conclusions can be drawn: the higher the service input-efficiency, the more beneficial for alleviating consumers’ strategic purchase behavior under two scenarios, but this mitigation effect is more obvious under the centralized scenario. Compared with the centralized scenario, the service quality is lower, the two-period PSS sales prices are higher, and the two-period profit is lower under the decentralized scenario. The proportion of service valuation will promote the widening of the service quality gap under two scenarios, but in some cases, the service input-efficiency will weaken the promotion effect of the proportion of service valuation. The design of the two-period combined contracts depends on the proportion of service valuation. When the proportion of service valuation is high, the “two-period revenue sharing + service-cost sharing” combined dynamic contract can achieve PSSC perfect coordination. However, when the proportion of service valuation is low, it is necessary to design complexity combined dynamic contract which can achieve PSSC perfect coordination. (shrink)

This paper relates Donaldson and Dunfee’s Integrative Social Contracts Theory to the problem of gender discrimination. We make the assumption that multinational managers might seek some guidance from ISCT to resolve ethical issues of gender discrimination in countries indifferent or hostile to gender equaIity. The role of Donaldson and Dunfee’s “hypernorms” seems especially cruciaI, and we find that, under their writings thus far, no “hypernorms” exist to make unethical the most blatant acts of sex discrimination in a host country (...) whose local norms tolerate such discrimination. The genesis of “hypernorms” as “global moral minimums” is recounted, and specific application of ISCT to a familiar ethics case (“A Foreign Assignment”) is provided. (shrink)

Contract theories – such as contractarianism and contractualism - seek to justify (and sometimes to explain) moral and political ideals and principles through the notion of “mutually agreeable reciprocity or cooperation between equals” (Darwall 2002). This chapter argues that such theories face fundamental difficulties in the intergenerational setting. Most prominently, the standard understanding of cooperation appears not to apply, and the intergenerational setting brings on a more severe collective action problem than the traditional prisoner’s dilemma. Mainstream contract theorists (such as (...) Gauthier and Rawls) have tried to overcome such difficulties by postulating some kind of chain of connection between generations. However, the chapter maintains that thus far such attempts have proven inadequate. Given this, it seems either that mainstream contract theory needs to be rethought, or that a new, specifically intergenerational, contract theory is needed. (shrink)

I. Introduction Two kinds of remedies have traditionally been employed for breach of contract: legal relief and equitable relief. Legal relief normally takes the form of money damages. Equitable relief normally consists either of specific performance or an injunction – that is, the party in breach may be ordered to perform an act or to refrain from performing an act. In this article I will use a “consent theory of contract” to assess the choice between money damages and specific performance. (...) According to such a theory, contractual obligation is dependent on more fundamental entitlements of the parties and arises as a result of the parties' consent to transfer alienable rights. My thesis will be that the normal rule favoring money damages should be replaced with one that presumptively favors specific performance unless the parties have consented to money damages instead. The principal obstacle to such an approach is the reluctance of courts to specifically enforce contracts for personal services. The philosophical distinction between alienable and inalienable rights bolsters this historical reticence, since a right to personal services may be seen as inalienable. I will then explain why, if the subject matter of a contract for personal services is properly confined to an alienable right to money damages for failure to perform, specific enforcement of such contracts is no longer problematic. Finally, I shall consider whether the subject matter of contracts for corporate services is properly confined to money damages like contracts for personal services, or whether performance of corporate services can be made the subject of a valid rights transfer and judicially compelled in the same manner as contracts for external resources. (shrink)

Since the ancient Greeks, philosophers have often mounted arguments for political or moral conclusions by invoking the idea of a ‘social contract’, either between the people and the ruler, or among the people themselves, or both. The contractarian form of argument became popular in the seventeenth century, and its popularity continues to this day. Advocates of this approach tell us to resolve answers to moral and political issues by asking what a group of rational persons could all agree to, or, (...) alternatively, what such people would be unreasonable to reject. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider multiplicative-additive fragments of affine propositional classical linear logic extended with n-contraction. To be specific, n-contraction (n 2) is a version of the contraction rule where (n+ 1) occurrences of a formula may be contracted to n occurrences. We show that expansions of the linear models for (n + 1)- valued ukasiewicz logic are models for the multiplicative-additive classical linear logic, its affine version and their extensions with n-contraction. We prove the finite axiomatizability for the classes (...) of finite models, as well as for the class of infinite linear models based on the set of rational numbers in the interval [0, 1]. The axiomatizations obtained in a Gentzen-style formulation are equivalent to finite and infinite-valued ukasiewicz logics. (shrink)