We study ranges of algebraic functions in lattices and in algebras, such as Łukasiewicz-Moisil algebras which are obtained by extending standard lattice signatures with unary operations.We characterize algebraic functions in such lattices having intervals as their ranges and we show that in Artinian or Noetherian lattices the requirement that every algebraic function has an interval as its range implies the distributivity of the lattice.

We study ranges of algebraic functions in lattices and in algebras, such as Łukasiewicz-Moisil algebras which are obtained by extending standard lattice signatures with unary operations.We characterize algebraic functions in such lattices having intervals as their ranges and we show that in Artinian or Noetherian lattices the requirement that every algebraic function has an interval as its range implies the distributivity of the lattice.

The concept of 'liturgical year' indicates a reference to the meaning of the measuring units of civil time, and especially to the cosmic entities that determine the general rhythm of time - the sun and the moon. Interestingly, the liturgical time depends both on the structure of civil time, and, on the two discrete systems of the solar and lunar cycles, which have always been underpinnings of time measuring. The special importance and influence that the cosmical rhythms exert on the (...) entire human life are also felt in the structure and theology of the liturgical time, where it signals the attempt to merge and reconcile the cosmical solar and lunar cycles within the liturgical year. This leads to a unique theology, expressing the powerful synthesis of the variability of the lunar cycle compared to the structure of the solar year's fixed dates. CONTRIBUTION: This research reveals the unique orthodox perspective on both civil and liturgical time, expressing their profound theological meaning, as a conscious, permanent reflection upon the mysterious, yet real, presence of Christ in the divine services of the Church. (shrink)

In this chapter we focus on the debate over publicly-maintained racist monuments as it manifests in the mid-2010s Anglosphere, primarily in the US (chiefly regarding the over 700 monuments devoted to the Confederacy), but to some degree also in Britain and Commonwealth countries, especially South Africa (chiefly regarding monuments devoted to figures and events associated with colonialism and apartheid). After pointing to some representative examples of racist monuments, we discuss ways a monument can be thought racist, and neutrally categorize removalist (...) and preservationist arguments heard in the monument debate. We suggest that both extremist and moderate removalist goals are likely to be self-defeating, and that when concerns of civic sustainability are put on moral par with those of fairness and justice, something like a Mandela-era preservationist policy is best: one which removes the most offensive of the minor racist monuments, but which focuses on closing the monumentary gap between peoples and reframing existing racist monuments. (shrink)

This article references the following linked citations. If you are trying to access articles from an off-campus location, you may be required to first logon via your library web site to access JSTOR. Please visit your library's website or contact a librarian to learn about options for remote access to JSTOR.

The dominant language of politics in the United States has been political individualism, with minimal restrictions on property and personal, voluntary conduct. But there are second languages of community that stress cooperation and group action. These second languages include the constitutional tradition for public health. Public health offers a community justification for paternalistic measures that, for example, discourage smoking or require seatbelts.

Over the last thirty years there have been a number of attempts to analyse the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties in terms of the facts about naturalness. This article discusses the three most influential of these attempts, each of which involve David Lewis. These are Lewis's 1983 analysis, his 1986 analysis, and his joint 1998 analysis with Rae Langton.

The leading account of intrinsicality over the last thirty years has arguably been David Lewis's account in terms of perfect naturalness. Lewis's account, however, has three serious problems: i) it cannot allow necessarily coextensive properties to differ in whether they are intrinsic; ii) it falsely classifies non-qualitative properties like being Obama as non-intrinsic; and iii) it is incompatible with a number of metaphysical theories that posit irreducibly non-categorical properties. I argue that, as a result of these problems, Lewis's account should (...) be rejected and replaced with an alternative account, which also analyses intrinsicality in terms of perfect naturalness, but which avoids these problems. (shrink)

Over the last thirty years there have been a number of attempts to analyse the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties. This article discusses three leading attempts to analyse this distinction that don’t appeal to the notion of nat-uralness: the duplication analysis endorsed by G. E. Moore and David Lewis, Peter Vallentyne’s analysis in terms of contractions of possible worlds, and the analysis of Gene Witmer, William Butchard and Kelly Trogdon in terms of grounding.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ideal of Shared Decision Making Between Physicians and PatientsDan W. Brock (bio)IntroductionShared treatment decision making, with its division of labor between physician and patient, is a common ideal in medical ethics for the physician-patient relationship.1 Most simply put, the physician's role is to use his or her training, knowledge, and experience to provide the patient with facts about the diagnosis and about the prognoses without treatment and with (...) alternative treatments. The patient's role in this division of labor is to provide the values—his or her own conception of the good—with which to evaluate these alternatives, and to select the one that is best for himself or herself. As a rough guide to practice, this is a reasonable conception; most of the time it is likely to produce sound treatment decisions. However, as an ideal it is too simplistic, and is subject to several challenges that I will explore in this paper.Some challenges relate to the physician's role. This facts/values division of labor seems to assume that the physician can and should provide the facts about treatment alternatives in a value-neutral form. But some have questioned whether the sciences on which medicine is based are, or can be, value free. Moreover, the concepts of health and disease, and of the normal and pathological, are held by many to be value laden. And even if it is possible for physicians to provide only value-neutral facts to the patient, should the physicians' role be restricted in this way?Other challenges that I will present in the paper are to the patient's role [End Page 28] as provider of the values for the evaluation of the different treatment alternatives. One defense of this role is based on the claim that physicians are not in a position to know reliably what is in a patient's best interests (Buchanan, forthcoming). I believe at least as influential—even if often not explicitly stated—is an extreme subjectivism about values that assumes that the patient's own ultimate values, which define his or her own conception of the good, are incorrigible. By incorrigible, I mean they cannot be mistaken. In the standard case in which treatment is pursued for the patient's benefit, this extreme subjectivism is thought to support the patient's values guiding treatment decision making and treatment. I will explore this incorrigibility claim and will argue that on each of the main philosophical conceptions of the good for persons it is indefensible and should not be the basis for shared treatment decision making.Underlying this view of the physician-patient division of labor are assumptions and beliefs about the nature and relation of facts and values, and science and ethics, that are largely the legacy of a logical positivism that has long since been rejected by most philosophers. It is time that these unstable foundations for our normative ideal of the physician-patient relation were finally removed and replaced with more defensible underpinnings.Two Models of the Physician-Patient RelationshipPositivists insisted on a relatively sharp distinction between descriptive or empirical claims and science, on the one hand, and evaluative claims and ethics, on the other.2 Descriptive statements and the claims of science were to be true or false according to whether they in fact correctly described and explained the world. By remaining properly descriptive or empirical, science could, at least in principle, be entirely value neutral or value free.In its more extreme versions, positivism held that ethical judgments lacked cognitive content, but were instead expressions of emotions or attitudes, and as such could be neither true nor false, correct or mistaken. Because no evaluative statements were held to be logically entailed by any descriptive or empirical statements, moral reasoning was thought to be properly understood not as reasoning but as attempts at nonrational persuasion.3 Many drew from this an extreme subjectivism in ethics along the lines of what I have called above the incorrigibility thesis—there is no meaningful sense in which an individual's ultimate values defining his or her own conception of the good life could be mistaken, false, or unfounded.These... (shrink)

An intrinsic property is roughly a property things have in virtue of how they are, as opposed to how they are related to things outside of them. This paper argues that it is not possible to give a definition of 'intrinsic' that involves only logical, modal and mereological notions, and does not depend on any special assumptions about either properties or possible worlds.

Interest in the political relevance of the emotions is growing rapidly. In light of this, Hannah Arendt’s claim that the emotions are apolitical has come under renewed fire. But many critics have misunderstood her views on the relationship between individuals, emotions and the political. This paper addresses this issue by reconstructing the conceptual framework through which Arendt understands the emotions. Arendt often describes the heart – where the emotions reside – as a place of darkness. I begin by tracing this (...) metaphor through her work to demonstrate that it is meant to convey the inherently uncertain nature of emotions rather than a devaluation of them. I proceed to challenge the notion that Arendt adopts the Enlightenment dichotomy between reason and emotion. In fact, she rejects both as a basis for politics. However, she does identify some constructive roles for the emotions. I argue that fear is intrinsically connected to courage – the principal political virtue – in Arendt’s philosophy. In light of my discussion, I then reinterpret the role of compassion and pity in On Revolution, concluding that Arendt’s insights can help us avoid the potential pitfalls of the contemporary project to recuperate the emotions in politics. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis has served not just to instil fear in the populace but to highlight the importance of fear as a motivating dynamic in politics. The gradual emergence of political-philosophical approaches calling for concern for ‘positive’ emotions may have made sense under non-pandemic conditions. Now, however, describing fear in the face of a deadly pandemic as ‘irrational’ or born of ‘ignorance’ seems ‘irrational’ and ‘ignorant’. In this article, we draw upon the work of John Gray and behavioural science to (...) present a defence of fear. We show how the pandemic has highlighted deficits in the work of four thinkers highly critical of fear: Martha Nussbaum, Zygmunt Bauman, Hannah Arendt and Sara Ahmed. We argue that, if such approaches are to be of value in anything other than optimal conditions, then they have to acknowledge the fundamental role of fear in helping human beings to pursue fundamental interests. (shrink)

Faced with the choice between supporting industrial plant agriculture and hunting, Tom Regan’s rights view can be plausibly developed in a way that permits a form of hunting we call “dignitarian.” To motivate this claim, we begin by showing how the empirical literature on animal deaths in plant agriculture suggests that a non-trivial amount of hunting would not add to animal harm. We discuss how Tom Regan’s miniride principle appears to morally permit hunting in that case, and we address recent (...) objections by Jason Hanna to environmentally-based culling that may be seen to speak against this conclusion. We then turn to dignity, which is especially salient in scenarios where harm is necessary or justifiable. We situate “dignitarian” hunting within a larger framework of adversarial ethics, and argue that dignitarian hunting gives animals a more dignified death than the alternatives endemic to large-scale plant agriculture, and so is permissible based on the kinds of principles that Regan endorses. Indeed, dignitarian hunting may actually fit better with Regan’s widely endorsed animal rights framework than the practice of many vegans, and should only be rejected if we’re just as willing to condemn supporting conventional plant agriculture. (shrink)

Interest in the political relevance of the emotions is growing rapidly. In light of this, Hannah Arendt’s claim that the emotions are apolitical has come under renewed fire. But many critics have misunderstood her views on the relationship between individuals, emotions and the political. This paper addresses this issue by reconstructing the conceptual framework through which Arendt understands the emotions. Arendt often describes the heart – where the emotions reside – as a place of darkness. I begin by tracing this (...) metaphor through her work to demonstrate that it is meant to convey the inherently uncertain nature of emotions rather than a devaluation of them. I proceed to challenge the notion that Arendt adopts the Enlightenment dichotomy between reason and emotion. In fact, she rejects both as a basis for politics. However, she does identify some constructive roles for the emotions. I argue that fear is intrinsically connected to courage – the principal political virtue – in Arendt’s philosophy. In ligh... (shrink)

The article examines some of the main theses about self-awareness developed in recent analytic philosophy of mind (especially the work of Bermúdez), and points to a number of striking overlaps between these accounts and the ones to be found in phenomenology. Given the real risk of unintended repetitions, it is argued that it would be counterproductive for philosophy of mind to ignore already existing resources, and that both analytical philosophy and phenomenology would profit from a more open exchange.

This piece is written as a public service to ethics professors and students interested in learning more about honor ethics. To facilitate its use in classrooms, it’s written in the style of many contemporary textbooks: it focuses on ideas, principles, and intuitions and ignores scholarly figures and intellectual history. Readers should note this is an “opinionated” introduction, as it focuses on the agonistic conception of honor. It also takes for granted that the agonistic ethos described counts as a “moral” theory. (...) Arguments for these assumptions are in print elsewhere. Any comments or recommendations for improvement are much appreciated. (shrink)

In this paper I address the relation between just claims to health care and severe cognitive impairment from dementia. Two general approaches to justice in allocation of health care are distinguished – prudential allocation and interpersonal distribution. First, I analyze why a patient who has died has no further claims to health care. Second, I show why prudential allocators would not provide for health care treatment should they be in a persistent vegetative state. Third, I argue that the destruction of (...) personal identity from severe dementia implies that only claims to palliative, but not life-sustaining, health care remain. Finally, I argue that the prudential allocator approach is indeterminate regarding life-sustaining care for the moderately demented and that social policy should not deny that care to patients. Keywords: elderly, health care, the severely-demented, justice CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

It is sometimes said that a society should be judged ethically by how it treats its least-fortunate or worst-off members. In one interpretation this is not a point about justice, but instead about moral virtues such as compassion and charity. In our response to the least fortunate among us, we display, or show that we lack, fundamental moral virtues of fellow feeling and concern for others in need. In a different interpretation, however, this point is about justice and a just (...) society—the justice of a society is shown especially in how it treats its least-fortunate members. (shrink)

Given its psychological and sociological importance, especially in non-liberal societies, honor may be the most undertheorized normative phenomenon. Philosophical neglect of honor is due partly to the doubtful moral bona fides of honor: honor-typical motives have been usually viewed by philosophers in both the Christian and liberal West as either non-moral or immoral but replaced by morally sounder ones. More practically, honor (and what is usually translated into the English “honor”) connotes a number of apparently contradictory meanings, further bedeviling analyses. (...) Four particularly salient conceptions of honor emerge in the anthropological, literary, and philosophical literature on honor: honor as prestige, honor as the ethos characteristic of “cultures of honor,” honor as honestas, and honor as agonism. (shrink)

In the United States, public opinions about climate change have become polarized, with a stark difference in the belief in climate change. Climate change denialism is pervasive among Republicans, especially conservatives, contrasting the high recognition of human-induced climate change issues among Democrats. As the water crisis is closely linked to climate change, the current study aims to examine how the belief in climate change’s impacts on future water supply uncertainty affects water conservation behaviors and whether the effect is conditional on (...) being a Republican. The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics was performed on a dataset of 1831 water users in an arid region (Albuquerque, New Mexico). The analysis shows that water users’ belief in climate change’s impacts on future water supply uncertainty positively affects the number of water conservation behaviors they adopt, regardless of whether they are Republicans. Although being a Republican does not significantly negatively moderate the association between climate change belief and water conservation behaviors, the result still underscores the importance of fighting climate change denialism. Otherwise, it will not only hinder the climate change alleviation efforts but also exacerbate the water crisis. Several strategies to reduce climate change denialism are also recommended. (shrink)

In this paper I will address whether the restriction on the creation of human embryos solely for the purpose of research in which they will be used and destroyed in the creation of human stem cell lines is ethically justified. Of course, a cynical but perhaps accurate reading of the new Obama policy is that leaving this restriction in place was done for political, not ethical, reasons, in light of the apparent public opposition to creating embryos for use in this (...) research. But the issue of whether the restriction is ethically justified remains important, even if only for another day in the policy arena. (shrink)

The paper argues that members of future generations have an entitlement to natural resources equal to ours. Therefore, if a currently living individual destroys or degrades natural resources then he must pay compensation to members of future generations. This compensation takes the form of “primary goods” which will be valued by members of future generations as equally useful for promoting the good life as the natural resources they have been deprived of. As a result of this policy, each generation inherits (...) a “Commonwealth” of natural resources plus compensation. It is this inherited “Commonwealth” which members of that generation must then pass on to members of the next generation. Once this picture is accepted, the standard bundle of property rights is problematic, for it takes the owner of a constituent of the Commonwealth to have the right to “waste, destroy or modify” that item at will. This paper therefore presents a revised set of property rights which takes seriously the idea that each generation has an equal claim on the resources that nature has bequeathed us, whilst allowing certain effects on those natural resources by each generation, and a degree of exclusive use of those natural resources owned by an individual. (shrink)

[Requested essay for George Washington Leadership Institute curriculum, Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, Mt. Vernon.] Honor is often equated with integrity, dignity, courage, and unimpeachable reputation. But what is the underlying essence of honor that explains those associations? This essay provides a framework for thinking about honor, and explores a theory of honor that understands it in terms of agonism---that is, as an ethic regulating our pursuit of prestige according to principles of fair and (...) respectful contest. We begin by distinguishing between honor-as-prestige and honor as an ethical system. We then canvass honor’s commitment to fair competition, noblesse oblige, integrity, independence, and martial valor. After forwarding the agonistic theory of honor, we conclude with some suggestions for leaders interested in fostering honor-mindedness in their organizations. (shrink)

Our understanding of language, its origins and subsequent evolution, is shaped not only by data and theories from the language sciences, but also fundamentally by the biological sciences. Recent developments in genetics and evolutionary theory offer both very strong constraints on what scenarios of language evolution are possible and probable, but also offer exciting opportunities for understanding otherwise puzzling phenomena. Due to the intrinsic breathtaking rate of advancement in these fields, and the complexity, subtlety, and sometimes apparent non-intuitiveness of the (...) phenomena discovered, some of these recent developments have either being completely missed by language scientists or misperceived and misrepresented. In this short paper, we offer an update on some of these findings and theoretical developments through a selection of illustrative examples and discussions that cast new light on current debates in the language sciences. The main message of our paper is that life is much more complex and nuanced than anybody could have predicted even a few decades ago, and that we need to be flexible in our theorizing instead of embracing a priori dogmas and trying to patch paradigms that are no longer satisfactory. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper examines two recent trends relative to boards of directors’ compensation, and their potential incompatibility. There has been some progress in increasing board diversity, specifically the inclusion of women and minorities on boards. The increasing trend requiring directors to hold/purchase equity as a requirement of board membership may seriously compromise further improvements in diversifying boards. Also, an increasing number of companies compensate directors partially or fully in stock grants and options. These compensation policies may be exclusionary, especially for women (...) and minorities, impacting the quality of boardroom discussions and decisions. This study systematically examines whether corporations requiring director equity are exclusionary toward women and minority directors. Contrary to being exclusionary, companies with director stock requirements and annual stock awards have greater representation by women and minorities on their board. Moreover, larger companies are both more likely to have such policies and have higher proportions of women and minorities on the board. (shrink)

Accountants preparing information are in a position to manipulate the view of economic reality presented in such information to interested parties. These manipulations can be regarded as morally reprehensible because they are not fair to users, they involve in an unjust exercise of power, and they tend to weaken the authority of accounting regulators. This paper develops a model for detecting earnings manipulators using financial statements’ ratios in a sample of Spanish listed companies. Our results provide evidence that accounting data (...) can be extremely useful in detecting manipulators. This approach can be used by a large category of users of accounting information among which we can cite stock exchange supervisors or investing professionals. (shrink)

What are things like the Supreme Court? Gabriel Uzquiano has defended that they are groups, entities which are somehow composed of members (at certain times) but which, unlike sets (or pluralities), allow for fluctuation in membership. The main alternative holds that 'the Supreme Court' refers (at any time) to the set (or plurality) of their members (at the time). Uzquiano motivates his view by posing a metaphysical puzzle for this reductive alternative. I argue that a parallel reasoning would also find (...) a corresponding 'puzzle' in the case of singular terms like 'The Chief Supreme Court Justice'. (shrink)

This article proposes a model for conceptualizing advertising ethics theory based on a distinction between philosophical and occupational ethical systems and the assumption that the fundamental goal of occupational ethics is to address the imbalance of power between the practitioner group and the community or communities they serve through practices that cultivate a relationship of trust. An analytical model is proposed as the basis for future empirical research to test and clarify the suggested relationships. It is suggested that a more (...) refined theoretical meta-model could provide a common framework within which research in specific advertising ethics issues might be revisited. (shrink)

Could God have created a better universe? Well, the fundamental scientific laws and parameters of the universe have to be within a certain miniscule range, for a life-sustaining universe to develop: the universe must be ‘Fine Tuned’. Therefore the ‘embryonic universe’ that came into existence with the ‘big bang’ had to be either exactly as it was or within a certain tiny range, for there to develop a life-sustaining universe. If it is better that there exist a life-sustaining universe than (...) not, then it was better that the embryonic universe was one of this small set of very similar embryonic universes than that it was not. Furthermore, there are no firm grounds for claiming that of this small set of very similar embryonic universes, there is one which would have developed into a universe better than ours. Therefore there are no firm grounds for claiming that God could have created a better universe than ours. (shrink)

Legal Judgment Summarization (LJS) can highly summarize legal judgment documents, improving judicial work efficiency in case retrieval and other occasions. Legal judgment documents are usually lengthy; however, most existing LJS methods are directly based on general text summarization models, which cannot handle long texts effectively. Additionally, due to the complex structural characteristics of legal judgment documents, some information may be lost by applying only one single kind of summarization model. To address these issues, we propose an integrated summarization method which (...) leverages both semantic and structural information to improve the quality of LJS. Specifically, legal judgment documents are firstly segmented into three relatively short parts according to their specific structure. We propose an extractive summarization model named BSLT and an abstractive summarization model named LPGN by adopting Lawformer as the encoder. Lawformer is a new pre-trained language model for long legal documents, which specializes in capturing long-distance dependency and modeling legal semantic features. Then, we adopt different models to summarize the corresponding part regarding its structural characteristics. Finally, the obtained summaries are integrated to generate a high-quality summary involving semantic and structural information. We conduct comparative experiments to evaluate the performance of our model. The results show that our model outperforms the baseline model LEAD-3 by 14.78% on the mean ROUGE score, which demonstrates our method is effective in LJS and is prospected to be applied to assist other tasks in legal artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Perhaps the biggest disconnect between philosophers and non-philosophers on the question of gun rights is over the relevance of arms to our dignitary interests. This essay attempts to address this gap by arguing that we have a strong prima facie moral right to resist with dignity and that violence is sometimes our most or only dignified method of resistance. Thus, we have a strong prima facie right to guns when they are necessary often enough for effective dignified resistance. This approach (...) is distinctively non-libertarian: it doesn’t justify gun rights on the basis of (mere) liberty or security. Nonetheless it is compatible with libertarian defenses of gun rights based on a liberty right to guns, and, if sound, in fact lowers the bar for gun rights in some ways, as it justifies access to guns even when nonviolent means would better achieve the liberty or security aims of potential victims. And although this defense of gun rights is most readily categorized as “conservative” or rightist, it relies upon principles and intuitions about dignity popular among progressives in other domains, such as in disability, women’s, or LGBT rights debates. (shrink)

In the nearly 800 pages that comprise the three volumes of his Graphology Poems 1995–2015, John Kinsella demonstrates an exemplary moral anger registering iterations of colonial “omni-speak” as unethical. This paper reads Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer by way of apprehending the rhetorical substrata underpinning discourses of Australia as not just determining a sovereign colonial space; in a place where “history is absurdity […] history is overlay”, Kinsella shows how indigenous and non-colonial others are consistently cast as extra-juridical and merely sub-human. (...) These Graphology Poems not only anathemise and hex historical falsehoods of nation: Kinsella dares sound out the bullshit, and his iconoclastic language games refuse outright to acquiesce to the epistemically violent nullifications of antipodean identity. (shrink)

From Thomas Hobbes to Steven Pinker, it is often remarked that cultures of honor are destabilizing and especially dangerous to liberal institutions. This essay sharpens that criticism into two objections: one saying honor cultures encourage tyranny, and another accusing them of undermining rule of law. Since these concerns manifest differently in established as opposed to fledgling liberal democracies, I appeal to Western and African examples both to motivate and allay these worries. I contend that a culture of civic honor is (...) perfectly capable of offering those with soaring ambitions all the civic distinction they could hope for—including civic immortality—without tempting them to seize undemocratic levels of power. And as for rule of law and public order, an “irrationally” defiant response to the indignity of state-sanctioned oppression has often animated citizens to resist illiberal regimes despite great peril. Thus, cultures of civic honor are not only compatible with, but sometimes necessary to, founding and maintaining liberal institutions. (shrink)

The following thoughts grew through a year of seminars with Dr. Michael Herzfeld (Indiana University). Readers of his forthcoming book entitled Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge 1987) may note some ideas strikingly similar to those expressed in these pages. I am indebted to him for much of the stimulus and inspiration, as well as for concrete suggestions for revision, and to him I offer this sincere dedication.

This article uses an economic narrative to examine the theoretical adequacy of applying humanitarian law to the regulation of the war on international terror. I will argue that problems inherent in collective action hinder the ability of this law to generate an optimal level of global security, and that the absence of the element of reciprocity lowers states’ compliance with it. The paper discusses factors such as audience costs, negative externalities of public conscience, NGOs’ activities, and the promotion of the (...) humanitarian approach toward humanitarian law in international bodies and courts as helping to mitigate these phenomena. A controversy between states concerning the application of humanitarian law to the war on international terror, however, might prevent these factors from offsetting the decline in the status of humanitarian law. Humanitarian law is therefore at risk of lapsing into irrelevance in this war. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Strangers at the Bedside: A History of How Law and Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision Making. By David J. Rothman.

This study utilizes hierarchical regression analysis to explore how environmental management systems influence financial performance through customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, and the moderating effects of switching cost. The originality of the present research is to unpack the “black box” through which a firm can profit from EMSs. The empirical results indicate that EMSs have positive and significant impacts on customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and financial performance. In addition, switching cost negatively and significantly moderates the relationship between EMSs and customer (...) satisfaction, but does not significantly moderates the relationship between EMSs and customer loyalty. The results also demonstrate that customer satisfaction and customer loyalty partially mediate the relationship between EMSs and financial performance. Our findings highlight that customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and switching cost play important roles for a firm to profit from EMSs. (shrink)

In The Problem of Punishment, David Boonin offers an analysis of punishment and an account of what he sees as ethically problematic about it. In this essay I make three points. First, pace Boonin's analysis, everyday examples of punishment show that it sometimes isn't harmful, but merely "discomforting." Second, intentionally discomforting offenders isn't uniquely problematic, given that we have cases of non-punitive intentional discomforture---and perhaps even harmful discomforture---that seem unobjectionable. Third, a notable fact about both non-harmful punishment and non-punitive intentional (...) discomforture is that they aim at improving the subject. This suggests that, if the prima facie wrongness of intentionally harming another person is the fundamental challenge for punishment, the "educative defense" is the royal road to justifying the practice. I conclude by outlining one version of the educative defense that exploits this advantage while avoiding some traditional objections to the approach. (shrink)

To understand private property, it is generally assumed, we must recognize the contribution objects make to human life. On the prevailing view, ownership is valuable only insofar as its subject matter is of value. In the order of valuation, objects come first, owning them comes second. But despite its air of obviousness, the assumption does not suit our ordinary concept of ownership. Ownership can be valuable quite apart from the value of the owned object, and it can be the source (...) of an object’s value as well as derive from the latter its own value. At its core, our ordinary concept of ownership does not describe a normative but an ontological relationship to objects, analogous to our relationship to our bodies, and best revealed by attending to our self-referential use of first person pronouns, personal and possessive. The result is a non-reductive and non-consequentialist account of property, or, more accurately, of the idea of ownership. (shrink)

The Holocaust was a rupture in civilisation – a Zivilisationsbruch –, a shattering of ontological certainty. The perception of the event enshrined in the notion of “rupture in civilisation” is the result of both the historical and the conceptual engagement with the event. Its manifest content seeks to combine two ways of discerning which are in fact opposed to one another: a particular one and a universal one. The particular perspective reflects the experience undergone by Jews as Jews of having (...) been destroyed everywhere and solely because of their belonging, i.e. because of their alleged origin. It was hence the experience of being exposed to total extermination without any reason. Never before had anything of this kind taken place: a rupture in civilisation, carried out upon the Jews. The significance of the concept is further-reaching, however. The concept of rupture in civilisation seeks to denote the indeed singular circumstance of the extermination of human persons by human persons as the transgression of all the ethical and instrumental limits of comportment which had hitherto been considered as certain and secure. Transgression of this kind marks a rupture in civilisation that is carried out upon all humankind. The phenomenon of the crime against humanity experienced by the Jews can, however, be split and regarded from those two opposing perspectives: one that argues historically and that is above all adopted by the victims, while the other is an anthropologically inclined perception of the events which rather reaches further into a universal domain. The latter focuses on the significance of the events for the species as such. These perspectives are necessarily unequal. They may even work against other. (shrink)

For humans, Westworld is a fun, Old West Disneyland; for theartificial humans, it is a “living hell”, as robot Android Bernard describes it in “Bicameral Mind”. Ruled by a despot and controlled through programmed indoctrination, omniscient surveillance, and secret police, Westworld resembles a concentration camp as described by philosopher Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. This chapter explores the parallels between Westworld and historical instances of totalitarian oppression and colonialization as well as the justified use of violence as a (...) revolutionary weapon, drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon. Fanon viewed colonialism and occupation as violence personified and systematic enslavement. His most influential work The Wretched of the Earth analyzed the effects of occupation and provided a handbook to combat those effects. This book achieves significance as an essay on the nature and morality of violent liberation from the perspective of the persecuted victim. (shrink)

Essays on the ethics of monuments tend to focus on their morality in relation to domestic populations. In this article we turn our attention to how the principles we favor for the ‘ingroup’ apply to various ‘outgroups’, including foreigners and foreign governments, guest workers, visiting scholars, forcibly annexed or colonized peoples, and migrant communities. It argues that nations have a prima facie moral right to erect and maintain monuments offensive to foreigners and foreign governments or (in the case of institutions) (...) rivals. Furthermore, we hold that whereas prospective immigrants have little standing to advocate for the removal of monuments they find offensive in their receiving countries, those who have been forcibly annexed have a much greater claim to inoffensive memorialization, contingent on their willingness to be countrymen with the descendants of their former oppressors and principles of reasonably charitable interpretation. Lastly, the article advocates for the protection of heritage landscapes from foreign influence and highlights the responsibilities of migrant populations to avoid memorializing their old grievances in ways that undermine the interests of their adopted nations. (shrink)

This article develops a theory of simulation as a nation building mechanism by exploring the production of national belonging in Massad, a Jewish-American summer camp that operated in the Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania, between 1941 and 1981. Trying to inspire campers to Zionism, the camp organizers shaped Massad as a “mini Israel.” This simulation engendered national attachments by lending credence to the belief that others, in Israel, experience more authentic national belonging. Rather than tempting campers to imagine the nation as a (...) “horizontal camaraderie” (Anderson 1991), national simulations allow members to account for their distinct and often ambivalent position from within the nation. From this perspective, nation building is not simply a matter of relativizing internal differences and dramatizing differences between the groups that make up the nation and “outsiders.” Instead, nation building also is centrally a matter of creating institutional routines and practices that allow members to account for their differential position from within the nation. (shrink)

The general theory of perception proposed by Roderick Chisholm in his book Perceiving: A Philosophical Study1 has gained considerable acceptance among contemporary philosophers of perception. In this paper, I will review and evaluate one part of this theory and show where I believe an important modification is necessary. Chisholm distinguishes what he thinks are two importantly different senses of “perceive,” a propositional and a nonpropositional sense, and then proposes a definition of each. The propositional sense of “perceive” is expressed in (...) contexts in which what is perceived is referred to by a propositional clause, as in 1. George perceives that this is a door. The nonpropositional sense is expressed in contexts in which the perceptual object is referred to by a noun or noun phrase, as in 2. George perceives the door. The problem areas I will deal with are, first and foremost, the adequacy of the definitions Chisholm gives of these two senses, and second, the ways in which these senses are related to one another. In the first section, dealing with the propositional sense, I will not be concerned with propositional perceivings in their entirety. Specifically, I will not be concerned with them as instances of knowing that something is such and such, which is a central feature of Chisholm’s definition. Rather, I will be concerned mainly with the mental state, qua mental, which is involved in these perceptions, that is, the mental state considered apart from any relation it may have to the object it is about. I will assume that the mental state involved in a propositional perceiving is a conceptual state, i.e., one which involves the exercise of concepts or thoughts, together with an accompanying propositional attitude. The key locution Chisholm uses to describe this conceptual mental state is “S takes something to have some property.” I will argue that Chisholm’s definition of taking will not do the job it is intended to do in these perceptual contexts. In the second section, I will explore what Chisholm calls the “simplest” nonpropositional sense of “perceive,” which he defines wholly in terms of a causal relation existing between the object perceived and the subject’s sensory state. Significantly, this definition does not make any reference to a taking or to any propositional state on the part of the subject, but only to the subject’s sensory state. Consequently, if one accepts the idea, as I believe Chisholm would, that sensing is a nonconceptual state, then Chisholm’s nonpropositional sense of “perceive” would not refer to any conceptual fact at all. I will consider Chisholm’s definition, and raise the question of whether nonpropositional perceptual contexts should ever be construed as having a propositional meaning, that is, as including the idea that the subject exhibits some thought. As we shall see, Chisholm makes allowance for such a possibility. (shrink)

This paper develops and defends an internalist account of having authority for one’s claim. It begins with Robert Brandom’s pragmatist account of thinking which locates the root notion of reasoning in a primitive language game of asking for and giving reasons. The idea is that the authority of a claim can be spelled out pragmatically in terms of the social practice of undertaking commitments and attributing entitlements. It is argued that this account fails to acknowledge the role of the subject’s (...) grasp of the higher-order concept of the evidence on which I base my claim. (shrink)