Many philosophers and jurists believe that individuals should sometimes be granted religiouslygrounded exemptions from laws or rules. To determine whether an exemption is merited in a particular case, the religious claim must be weighed against the countervailing values that favour the uniform application of the law or rule. This paper develops and applies a framework for assessing the weight of religious claims to exemption, across two dimensions. First, the importance of the burdened religious practice, which is determined by its level (...) of obligatoriness and centrality, according to the beliefs of the individual claimant. Second, the extent of the burden on the practice, which depends on the cost the individual bears if she both undertakes the religious practice and obeys the law or rule, where costs are assessed using an impartial account of individual interests. Exemptions should be granted when claims are weighty on either of these dimensions and the countervailing value is relatively weak. The final section of the paper responds to an important objection to this approach, which concerns administrability. (shrink)

(2013). Reciprocity and Moral Syndromes: An Evolving Fractal View. World Futures: Vol. 69, Reclaiming Free Enterprise: The Scientific and Human Story, pp. 496-514.

Although we agree that ritualized behavior is a mystery that calls out for an explanation, we do not think that the proposed domain-specific two-component system offers an empirically well-justified and theoretically parsimonious description of the phenomena. Instead, we believe that the deployment of domain-general mechanisms based on choice of actions could also explain the essential features of ritualized behavior. (Published Online February 8 2007).

Although lie detection procedures have been fundamentally criticized since their inception at the beginning of the 20th century, they are still in use around the world. In addition, they have created some remarkable appeal in the context of counterterrorism policies. Thereby, the links between science and fiction in this topic are quite tight and by no means arbitrary: In the progressive narrative of the lie detection devices, there is a promise of changing society for the better, which is entangled in (...) a fictional narrative provided by many cinematic and literary examples. By drawing on the concept of “diegetic technologies” formulated by David Kirby, we want to highlight the role of science fictional narratives in the historical development and current application of lie detection procedures. We therefore aim to use this conceptual frame to analyze the role of prevention-oriented mind reading procedures, which are developed for or already used in the “war on terror” with reference to their fictional predecessors. One virulent factor has to be highlighted in this context: The fictional engagement with possible new lie detection practices is in itself creating a legitimating ground for future security technologies. (shrink)

Ellen Wood's study of the new imperialism represents the latest instance of her broader project of reconstituting a non-deterministic form of Marxism which is able both to explain the historical specificity of capitalism and to inform socialist political activity. This essay seeks to locate her analysis of imperialism both in the wider political context within which it was written and as an example of the fecundity of her re-interpretation of historical materialism. After outlining the main themes of Wood's 'political-Marxist' project, (...) I move on to overview the thesis of her book Empire of Capital before finally pointing to the main themes of the ensuing debate. (shrink)

More than half a century ago, the Supreme Court held that the free speech protection of the First Amendment is not limited to verbal communication, but also applies to such expressive conduct as saluting a flag or burning a flag. Even though the Supreme Court has decided a number of important cases involving expressive conduct, the Court has never announced any standards for distinguishing such conduct from conduct without communicative value. The aim of this paper is to examine which conceptions (...) of nonverbal expression underlie judicial decisions on expressive conduct, and to offer an account of expressive conduct grounded in contemporary semantic theory. The central hypothesis of this paper is that significance of expressive conduct can be explained by principles that explain important features of linguistic meaning. I propose an analysis of expressive conduct that takes the meaningfulness of conduct as a function of the action and its consequences in context. I develop a theory of expressive conduct whose underlying conception of expression is based on a number of ideas from speech act theory. These are Grice's account of nonnatural meaning, Austin's theory of illocutionary force, and Grice's work on conversational implicature. My analysis understands the meaningfulness of conduct in terms of its relational properties and relevant features of the context upon which illocutionary force, perlocutionary properties and implicature are predicated. The natural and conventional properties of types of conduct, features of the context, and underlying social and cultural presumptions and expectations about human conduct thus play a role in the constitution of symbolic speech. (shrink)