We consider random choice rules that, by satisfying a weak form of Luce’s choice axiom, embody a form probabilistic rationality. We show that for this important class of stochastic choices, the law of demand for normal goods—arguably the main result of traditional consumer theory—continues to hold on average when strictly dominated alternatives are dismissed.

The paper applies confirmation theory to a famous statement of economics, the law of demand, which says that ceteris paribus, prices and quantities demanded change in opposite directions. Today's economists do not accept the law unless definite restrictions hold, and have shown little interest in deciding whether or not these restrictions were satisfied empirically. However, Hildenbrand (1994) has provided a new derivation of the law of aggregate demand and used this theoretical advance to devise a test that may (...) be the first rigorous one ever performed on the law. The paper accounts for Hildenbrand's and, in less detail, his predecessors' contributions within the philosophical framework of Hempel (1965) and Glymour (1980). Its salient result is that economists have accepted the "consequence condition", and rejected the "converse consequence condition", and thus implicitly adhered to a Hempelian- Glymourian view of confirmation and testability. (shrink)

A number of ecologists have put forward various proposals that ecology has laws, yet they have not explicated what role laws play in ecological explanations. Marcel Weber (1999), Lev Ginzburg and Mark Colyvan (2004) correct this deficiency and also make their case for laws of ecology: the principle of competitive exclusion and Malthus's law of exponential growth respectively. According to Weber, the principle of competitive exclusion explains phenomena (1) by direct application, or (2) by describing a default state from which (...) observed phenomena deviate and mechanisms are called to account for the discrepancy. Independently of Weber, Ginzburg and Colyvan articulate a role similar to (2) for Malthus's law. I argue that Weber's proposition of explanation by direct application is not consistent with Gause's account of ’bottle experiments’ that he uses to support it and does not do justice to ecologists' explanatory practice. To address these problems, I articulate an alternative account of explanation by direct application—the covering-law model—based on a proposal by Elgin and Sober (2002) and show that even in this proposal mechanisms play a key explanatory role. I also demonstrate how the covering-law model accounts for how Malthus's law can explain by direct application and for its role of descriptor of a default state. Finally, I argue that the views on laws as components in covering-law model explanations or as descriptors of default states do not give sufficient attention to the prominent explanatory role of mechanisms and to the demanding task of identifying and describing them, and ought to be corrected. (shrink)

The Great Divide in metaphysical debates about laws of nature is between Humeans, who think that laws merely describe the distribution of matter, and non-Humeans, who think that laws govern it. The metaphysics can place demands on the proper formulations of physical theories. It is sometimes assumed that the governing view requires a fundamental / intrinsic direction of time: to govern, laws must be dynamical, producing later states of the world from earlier ones, in accord with the fundamental direction of (...) time in the universe. In this paper, we propose a minimal primitivism about laws of nature (MinP) according to which there is no such requirement. On our view, laws govern by constraining the physical possibilities. Our view captures the essence of the governing view without taking on extraneous commitments about the direction of time or dynamic production. Moreover, as a version of primitivism, our view requires no reduction / analysis of laws in terms of universals, powers, or dispositions. Our view accommodates several potential candidates for fundamental laws, including the principle of least action, the Past Hypothesis, the Einstein equation of general relativity, and even controversial examples found in the Wheeler-Feynman theory of electrodynamics and retrocausal theories of quantum mechanics. By understanding governing as constraining, non-Humeans who accept MinP have the same freedom to contemplate a wide variety of candidate fundamental laws as Humeans do. (shrink)

We revisit Naturalized Epistemology and the Law of Evidence, published twenty years ago. The evolution of the relative plausibility theory of juridical proof is offered as evidence of the advantage of a naturalized approach to the study of the field and law evidence. Various alternative explanations of aspects of juridical proof from other disciplines are examined and their shortcomings described. These competing explanations are similar in their reductive, a priori approaches that are at odds with an empirically oriented naturalized approach. (...) The shortcomings of the various a priori approaches are driven by their common methodological commitments to employing weird hypotheticals to engage in intuition mining about the American legal systems that in turn ignore important aspects of the actual legal systems and consistently make impossible epistemological demands. As a result, both their descriptions of and prescriptions for American legal systems are implausible, unlike the relative plausibility theory. (shrink)

In this paper I reconstruct and defend John Rawls' The Law of Peoples, including the distinction between liberal and decent peoples. A “decent people” is defined as a people who possesses a comprehensive doctrine and uses that doctrine as the ground of political legitimacy, while liberal peoples do not possess a comprehensive doctrine. I argue that liberal and decent peoples are bound by the same normative requirements with the qualification that decent peoples accept the same normative demands when they are (...) reasonably interpreted and from their comprehensive doctrine, not from political liberalism. Normative standards for peoples appear in a law of peoples in two places: as internal constraints carried forward from political liberalism which regulate domestic affairs and as principles derived from a second original position that provide the normative ground for a society of peoples. This first source of normative standards was unfortunately obscured in Rawls' account. I use this model to defeat the claim that Rawls has accommodated decent peoples without sufficient warrant and to argue that all reasonable citizens of both liberal and decent peoples would accept the political authority of the state as legitimate. Although my reconstruction differs from Rawls on key points, such as modifying the idea of decency and rejecting a place for decent peoples within a second original position, overall I defend the theoretical completeness of political liberalism and show how a law of peoples provides reasonable principles of international justice. (shrink)

Drawing from a variety of Hegel’s writings, Shannon Hoff articulates a theory of justice that requires answering simultaneously to three irreducibly different demands: those of community, universality, and individuality. The domains of “ethicality,” “legality,” and “morality” correspond to these essential dimensions of human experience, and a political system that fails to give adequate recognition to any one of these will become oppressive. The commitment to legality emphasized in modern and contemporary political life, Hoff argues, systematically precludes adequate recognition of the (...) formative cultural contexts that Hegel identifies under the name of “ethical life” and of singular experiences of moral duty, or conscience. Countering the perception of Hegel as a conservative political thinker and engaging broadly with contemporary work in liberalism, critical theory, and feminism, Hoff focuses on these themes of ethicality and conscience to consider how modern liberal politics must be transformed if it is to accommodate these essential dimensions of human life. (shrink)

This paper gives a novel reading of the argument addressed by the Laws of Athens to Socrates in Plato's Crito. Many philosophers have suggested that the argument of the Laws is merely a weak 'rhetorical sop' to Crito. However, I offer an interpretation of that argument that brings out its plausibility, particularly in the context of the post-Oligarchic demos of early fourth-century Athens. For on Crito's plan, Socrates would have undermined a critical form of civic trust in Athens, not by (...) merely disobeying the sentence imposed on him by the jury, but by openly displaying the legal impunity of the rich. -/- We can call this 'legal trust.' By that coinage, I mean citizens' faith in their fellow citizens' willingness and ability to collectively defend the law---to enforce it against the powerful, and refrain from acting to undermine that capacity. When the members of a democratic political community recognize one another's commitment to their legal system, they are able to defend the laws that hold their democracy together; in such a state, the laws are both conceptually constitutive of democratic authority and practically necessary for democracy. -/- Taken in the context of the strategic structure of the Athenian legal system, in the appeal to the filial loyalty Socrates owed the Laws we can see just such an account of the interweaving of law, trust, and citizenship in the preservation of a democracy. The Laws demand that Socrates be trustworthy, and thereby refrain from undermining his fellow citizens' trust in them, where that trust is necessary for the citizens' collective defense of the democratic legal system; they make this demand on Socrates in virtue of the Laws' role in Socrates's identity as citizen. (shrink)

In the ‘Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic’ of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant contends that the idea of God has a positive regulative role in the systematization of empirical knowledge. But why is this regulative role assigned to this specific idea? Kant’s account is rather opaque and this question has also not received much attention in the literature. In this paper I argue that an adequate understanding of the regulative role of the idea of God depends on the specific (...) metaphysical content Kant attributes to it in the Critique and other writings. I show that neither a heuristic principle of conceptual systematicity, nor conceiving God as a hypothesis of an intelligent designer, can satisfy the demands of reason to make the unity and necessity of the laws of nature intelligible. Regarding the positive account about the metaphysical content of the idea of God, I support my argument by referring to Kant’s pre-critical discussion of the usefulness of the conception of God for the project of science, and by expounding Kant’s critical account of the necessity of the laws of nature. Thus my account sheds light on the continuity of Kant’s conception of God and his appropriation of his own rationalistic metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper argues that the demands of respect for autonomy in the context of biobanking are fewer and more limited than is often supposed. It discusses the difficulties of agreeing a concept of autonomy from which duties can easily be derived, and suggests an alternative way to determine what respect for autonomy in a biobanking context requires. These requirements, it argues, are limited to provision of adequate information and non-coercion. While neither of these is in itself negligible, this is a (...) smaller set of demands than is often suggested. In particular, it is argued here that securing ‘one time consent’ is consistent with respect for autonomy. Finally, the paper notes that while the demands of respect for autonomy may be less than some suppose, respecting autonomy is not the only way in which biobanks and their users may have moral duties to donors. (shrink)

On one view of ethical development, someone not yet virtuous can reliably progress by engaging in what meaningfully resembles virtuous conduct. However, if the well-intended conduct is psychologically demanding, one's character, precisely because one is not yet virtuous, may worsen rather than improve. This risk of degradation casts doubt on the developmental view. I counter the doubt through one interpretation and one application of the Mengzi. In passage 2A2, invoking the image of a farmer who “helped” the crop grow by (...) pulling the sprouts, MENG Ke cautions, “do not help it grow.” I defend a novel interpretation: do not advance with a naïve negligence about your psycho-physiological constitution. I also show how to advance with realistic care by pointing out an overlooked application of a much-discussed cultivation technique illustrated in Mengzi 1A7: ethical reflection can conciliate one with one’s ongoing or past advanced action, lowering the action’s risk of degradation. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilize and materialize social and other relations. In doing so, (...) our aim is to explore the implications of digital devices and data for reassembling social science methods or what we call the social science apparatuses that assemble digital devices and data to ‘know’ the social and other relations. Building on recent work at CRESC on the social life of methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by social worlds, and can in turn become agents that shape those worlds. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer the following nine propositions about the implications of digital data and devices and argue that these demand rethinking the theoretical assumptions of social science methods: transactional actors; heterogeneity; visualization; continuous time; whole populations; granularity; expertise; mobile and mobilizing; and non-coherence. (shrink)

Law and Morality at War offers a broadly instrumentalist defense of the authority of the laws of war: these laws serve combatants by helping them come closer to doing what they have independent moral reason to do. We argue that this form of justification sets too low a bar. An authority’s directives are not binding, on instrumental grounds, if the subject could, within certain limits, adopt an alternative, and superior, means of conforming to morality’s demands. It emerges that Haque’s argument (...) fails to vindicate the law’s authority over all combatants. (shrink)

It seems a generally acknowledged view that physics is confined to the investigation of events that can be reproduced. “The natural scientist — says Pauli1 — is concerned with a particular kind of phenomena … he has to confine himself to that which is reproducible… I do not claim that the reproducible by itself is more important than the unique. But I do claim that the unique exceeds the treatment by scientific method. Indeed it is the aim of this method (...) to find and to test natural laws…” Here for Pauli as for everybody else a natural law is a statement expressing a regularity more or less directly related to repeatable events. And one may add that it is not only the possibility of testing that is responsible for our demand of reproducibility. Rather it is the very fact of regularity expressed in it that gives a natural law its dignity and makes it a subject worth studying on its own account. (shrink)

Most philosophers of science hold that the laws of nature play an important role in determining which counterfactuals are true. Marc Lange reverses this dependence, arguing that it is the truth of certain counterfactuals that determines which statements are laws. I argue that the context sensitivity of counterfactual sentences makes it impossible for them to determine the laws. Next, I argue that Lange’s view cannot avoid additional counterexamples concerning nested counterfactuals. Finally, I argue that Lange’s counterfacts, posited as the ultimate (...) ontological ground for the laws of nature, are unsuited to the role he demands of them. (shrink)

Fire safety expertise was in great demand following the Grenfell Tower fire in London in June 2017. The government established a review of building regulations and an expert panel to inform its responses to Grenfell, and many other relevant organisations also formed their own expert panels. However, expert knowledge in fire safety is a highly contested domain, with knowledge claims based on differing sources. Fire fighters can claim expertise based on their experience of fighting fires, scientists and science-based engineers (...) can claim expertise from experimentation, and those who create and enact regulations can claim expertise in what can termed ’codespeak’—the language of regulation. Although distanced from fundamental empirical experience of fire, codespeak is powerful because of its relative clarity and certainty, and legal status. Building users also bring their own form of ‘local’ expertise—they have first-hand experience of the practicalities of the solutions wrought by the other experts. Policy-makers thus face many competing forms of expert advice on fire safety, and their ability to judge what is most relevant in any particular case rests on the existence of a sufficient range and depth of in-house government expertise. (shrink)

The golden rule -- The law of divine oneness -- The Law of Gratitude -- The Law of Love -- The Law of Frequency -- The Law of Intention -- The Law of Attraction -- The Law of Abundance -- The Law of Light -- The Law of Unity -- The Law of Purpose -- The Law of Harmony -- The Law of Action -- The Law of Affirmation -- The Law of Clarity -- The Law of Success -- The (...) Law of Relativity -- The Law of Correspondence -- The Law of Compensation -- The Law of Cooperation -- The Law of Perspective -- The Law of Thought -- The Law of Passivity -- The Law of Sacrifice -- The Law of Responsibility -- The Law of Attachment and Detachment -- The Law of Faith -- The Law of Attention -- The Law of Forgiveness -- The Law of Request -- The Law of Allowing -- The Law of Discipline -- The Law of Cycles -- The Law of Prosperity -- The Law of Patience -- The Law of Awakening -- The Law of Cause and Effect -- The Law of Balance and Polarity -- The Law of Supply and Demand --The Law of Potential. (shrink)

Cinema Derrida charts Jacques Derrida's collaborations and appearances in film, video, and television beginning with 1983's Ghost Dance (dir. Ken McMullen, West Germany/UK) and ending with 2002's biographical documentary Derrida (dir. Dick and Ziering, USA). In the last half of his working life, Derrida embraced popular art forms and media in more ways than one: not only did he start making more media appearances after years of refusing to have his photo taken in the 1960s and 1970s, but his philosophy (...) started to draw more explicitly from visual culture and artistic endeavours. While this book offers explanations of this transition, it contends the image of "Jacques Derrida" that emerges from film and TV appearances remains spectral, constantly deferring a complete grasp of him. Tyson Stewart draws out the main tenets of spectrality from Derrida's seminal texts Of Grammatology and Specters of Marx and other writings, like Echographies of Television, in order to fill a gap in studies of Derrida and film. Throughout the book, he explains how various techniques and spectral effects such as slow motion, stillness, repetition, mise-en-abîme, direct address, and focus on body parts/bodily presence bring about a structure of spectrality wherein the past other returns to make impressions and ethical demands on the viewer. Drawing on communication theory and film and media studies, Cinema Derrida makes a major intervention in classical communication thought. (shrink)

Abstract:Early modern efforts to justify warfare entailed serious reflection on the relationship between Christianity and nature or natural law. Those working in a Thomist tradition could draw on a concept of natural law as an ethical system distinct from Christianity; others rejected that concept, working instead to show that warfare could form part of the duties of Christians. All sides recognized the tension between the words of Christ and the demands of human political life, especially when it came to defending (...) military activity. That tension produced creative discussions of natural law, political thought, and theology, in the universities and beyond. (shrink)

Economic sanctions are envisaged as a sort of punishment, based on what should be an institutional decision not unlike a court ruling. Hence, the conditions for their lifting should be clearly stated and once those are met sanctions should be lifted. But this is generally not what happens, and perhaps is precluded by the very nature of international sanctioning. Sanctions clearly have political, economic, military and strategic consequences, but the question raised here is whether sanctions can also have moral justification. (...) Illustrated by the example of international sanctions against Yugoslavia, the authors show how the process of escalating demands on a target country, inherent to the very process of sanctioning, can lead ultimately even to overt aggression. As a result of this logic of escalation, economic sanctions cannot be articulated properly in any law-like system. Economic sanctions have much more in common with war than legal punishment, and in fact represent a form of siege. As such, they cannot be ended simply on the basis of their initial rationale, for the very process of sanctions implementation opens up possibilities for setting new goals and a continuous redefinition of the goal that sanctions are seen to have. (shrink)

Since the 1930’s, several attempts have been made to develop a general theory of technical systems or objects and their evolution: in France, Jacques Lafitte, André Leroi-Gourhan, Bertrand Gille, Yves Deforge, and Gilbert Simondon are the main representatives of this trend. In this paper, we focus on the work of Simondon: his analysis of technical progress is based on the hypothesis that technology has its own laws and that customer demand has no paramount influence upon the evolution of technical (...) systems. We first describe the process Simondon called “concretization” and compare it with the process of “idealization” as defined by Genrich Altshuller. We then explain how the progress of technical lineages can be characterized as following a specific rhythm of relaxation and how it thus obeys a “law” of evolution in the industrial context. Simondon’s theoretical approach, although similar to some aspects of methodologies of conception, emphasized a more accurate understanding of technical progress over possible operational applications. Simondon never intended to optimize the engineer’s tasks from an economic point of view and, in fact, his conception of technical progress can be considered as independent from the capitalistic trend of innovation. However, the philosophy of Simondon provides a better understanding of what is at stake theoretically in the modeling of laws of technical evolution. (shrink)

In their brilliant and thought-provoking book Recognizing Wrongs, John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky offer a vindicatory interpretation of the law of torts. As part of this, they offer a justification for what they call the “principle of civil recourse.” This is the principle that “a person who enjoys a certain kind of legal right, and whose right has been violated by another, is entitled to enlist the state’s aid in enforcing that right, or to make demands in response to its (...) violation, as against the person who has violated it.” To defend the principle of civil recourse, Goldberg and Zipursky appeal to three values: equality, fairness, and individual sovereignty. In this essay, we make two critical points. First, we argue that Goldberg’s and Zipursky’s defense errs by omitting a justificatory appeal to our moral rights and duties as part of the normative foundation of the tort law. Second, we argue that Goldberg’s and Zipursky’s arguments do not explain certain institutional features of the tort law, including the fact that legal duties of redress emerge only at the conclusion of court cases and the fact that lawsuits are opted int.o by tort victims who must initiate these actions themselves. To retain what is philosophically valuable in Goldberg’s and Zipursky’s impressive defense of the principle of civil recourse, we conclude with a strategic suggestion on their behalf: they should split their defense of the principle of civil recourse into two parts, with the first part justifying the existence of some institution of civil recourse or other and the second part justifying specific details that this institution should have. (shrink)

A new strategy in philosophy of law appeals to explanatory gap arguments to attack legal positivism. We argue that the strategy faces a dilemma, which derives from there being two available readings of the constraint it places on legal grounding. To this end, we elaborate the most promising ways of spelling out the epistemic constraints governing law-determination, and show that each of the arguments based on them has problems. Throughout the paper, we evaluate a number of explanatory requirements, ultimately with (...) a view to shedding light on the explanatory nature of both grounding in general, and legal grounding in particular. (shrink)

Humean interpretations claim that laws of nature merely summarize events. Non-Humean interpretations claim that laws force events to occur in certain patterns. First, I show that the Lewis/Ramsey account of lawhood, which claims that laws are axioms or theorems of the simplest strongest summary of events, provides the best Humean interpretation of laws. The strongest non-Humean account, the scientific essentialist position, grounds laws of nature in essential non-reducible dispositional properties held by natural kinds. The scientific essentialist account entails that laws (...) are a posteriori necessary truths. After showing that these are the best Humean and non-Humean accounts, I demonstrate that the Lewis/Ramsey account is better equipped for interpreting dispositions and counterfactuals. One distinction between the two accounts is whether counterfactuals, whose antecedents are physically possible, sometimes require closest worlds with different laws than the laws of the base world. On the Lewis/Ramsey account non-legal worlds will be necessary. If laws are merely summaries of events that occur then a world where the events are drastically different will often have different laws. The scientific essentialist, however, must demand that laws are the same in counterfactual reasoning because she grounds counterfactual reasoning in the essential dispositional properties of natural kinds. Recently, problems have developed for counterfactual analysis of dispositions due to finkish dispositions, mimicked dispositions, and masked dispositions. These difficulties have led some to abandon reductive accounts of dispositions. Doing so makes positions like scientific essentialism tenable. Yet, while scientific essentialism demands that dispositional properties cannot be reduced to categorical properties, the Humean has the opposite commitment. If dispositional properties are primitives in our ontology, then there is a stronger tie between events than Humeans admit. So, another major disagreement between these accounts is whether dispositions can be reduced. After examining why many attempts at reducing dispositions have failed, I offer one suggestion of how to reduce dispositions and demonstrate that keeping dispositional properties as primitives in our ontology is worse than the solution I offer. (shrink)

The law of the future faces fundamental challenges that it cannot overcome by means of ‘tried and trusted’ dogmatics alone. Nor can it, from a methodological standpoint, take refuge in a purportedly apolitical hermeneutics or a one-sided application of empirical methods. Its responsibilities are not exhausted in mere steering, innovation or stimulating operations, but also encompass critical-emancipatory functions. Methodological reflection and legal critique - understood as social theory in the ‘interior’ of law - enable legal doctrine to meet the particular (...) demands that arise from the simultaneous affiliation of jurisprudence to the systems of law and science. The future development of legal studies thus requires a foundational research approach that preserves the interdisciplinary connection to neighbouring disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and provides impetus for enlightened self-critique and self-reflection. Only in this way - through the emergence of jurisprudence from its self-incurred ignorance regarding its social function - might legal practice assert itself in everyday legal life and confront the injustices of the legal world with its own thinking. Such critical legal thinking demands more than just the perpetuation of traditions based on the history of ideas. Nor can it be satisfied through the mere cultivation of empirical approaches to reality. It must aim to develop and unfold a normative concept of law, and write this forward into the future. It derives its essential reflective potential from social-theoretical modelling and methodological development. In the process, the reciprocal confrontation and translation of rival theoretical models opens new learning possibilities not to solve legal conflicts, but to treat them more judiciously. Here, it is above all the foundational legal subjects that, through their discrete approaches and perspectives, open diverse and flexible entryways to the potentialities and actualities of law and, particularly in light of new cases, ensure the necessary variance of options for perception and action. The future of law resides in experimental testing and innovative discovery, in the creative quest for alternative possibilities and possible realities, in the critical and constructive struggle for the law of the future - as the ecological law of future life in the next bio-digital society. (shrink)

Declarations of law, of politics and of ethics have proliferated in contemporary discourses of public life. In this article, a terrain of research is unfurled that addresses the demand and repetition of declaration. Declarations are understood as relations of speech addressed between the masks of law, of sovereignty, of critic and of enemy. It is argued that what is instituted in the declarations of our time is a melancholic relation of speech which disavows the insistence of the remainder. The (...) remainder persists. How then to bear witness to the remainder? Mourning provides some headway in the effort. What remains undeclared here must be mourned. (shrink)

This paper suggests the adoption of a ‘capability approach’ to key concepts in healthcare. Recent developments in theoretical approaches to concepts such as ‘health’ and ‘disease’ are discussed, and a trend identified of thinking of health as a matter of having the capability to cope with life’s demands. This approach is contrasted with the WHO definition of health and Boorse’s biostatistical account. We outline the ‘capability approach’, which has become standard in development ethics and economics, and show how existing work (...) in those areas can profitably be adapted to healthcare. Cases are used to illustrate the value of adopting a capability approach. (shrink)

David Lyons is one of the pre-eminent philosophers of law active in the United States. This volume comprises essays written over a period of twenty years in which Professor Lyons outlines his fundamental views about the nature of law and its relation to morality and justice. The underlying theme of the book is that a system of law has only a tenuous connection with morality and justice. Contrary to those legal theorists who maintain that no matter how bad the law (...) of a community might be, strict conformity to existing law automatically dispenses 'formal' justice, Professor Lyons contends that the law must earn the respect that it demands. Moreover, we cannot, as some would suggest, interpret law in a value-neutral manner. Rather courts should interpret statutes, judicial precedents, and constitutional provisions in terms of values that would justify those laws. In this way officials can promote the justifiability of what they do to people in the name of law, and can help the law live up to its moral pretensions. (shrink)

Since the 1930’s, several attempts have been made to develop a general theory of technical systems or objects and their evolution: in France, Jacques Lafitte, André Leroi-Gourhan, Bertrand Gille, Yves Deforge, and Gilbert Simondon are the main representatives of this trend. In this paper, we focus on the work of Simondon: his analysis of technical progress is based on the hypothesis that technology has its own laws and that customer demand has no paramount influence upon the evolution of technical (...) systems. We first describe the process Simondon called “concretization” and compare it with the process of “idealization” as defined by Genrich Altshuller. We then explain how the progress of technical lineages can be characterized as following a specific rhythm of relaxation and how it thus obeys a “law” of evolution in the industrial context. Simondon’s theoretical approach, although similar to some aspects of methodologies of conception, emphasized a more accurate understanding of technical progress over possible operational applications. Simondon never intended to optimize the engineer’s tasks from an economic point of view and, in fact, his conception of technical progress can be considered as independent from the capitalistic trend of innovation. However, the philosophy of Simondon provides a better understanding of what is at stake theoretically in the modeling of laws of technical evolution. (shrink)

What makes identity politics a significant departure from earlier, pre-identitarian forms of the politics of recognition is its demand for recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has previously been denied: it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition.... The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of “universal humankind,” on the basis of shared human attributes; nor is it for respect “in spite of” one’s differences. Rather, what (...) is demanded is respect for oneself as different. And here we reach the crux of the matter: once we move from group claims to the individual struggle for recognition, to the continuous conversation with others and.. (shrink)

This paper examines Jacques Derrida's analysis of Walter Benjamin's ‘Critique of Violence’ in the context of their respective theories of the university. Whereas Derrida foregrounds the complex ways that the university and law are intertwined, Benjamin claims that the ‘educative power’ stands removed from the law by identifying the university with ‘divine violence’. ‘Force of Law’ not only questions the possibility of a neutral, pre-legal space that Benjamin's theory warrants, ‘Force of Law’ also draws attention to the laws structuring the (...) colloquia that gave rise to Derrida's text. This paper claims that Derrida's analysis of justice, law, violence, and justesse is thus informed by a theory of the university, and that the ways in which Derrida's theory of law stands opposed to Benjamin's parallels the ways in which Derrida's theory of the university questions Benjamin's understanding of the ‘educative power’. This paper concludes by drawing attention to the demand posed by the absence of justice in the academy. Although the laws of the academy produce justesse in the present, this negatively affirms justice in the future, which cannot wait. (shrink)

Law is an important part of Althusser’s thought. He profoundly criticized the mechanism of capitalist law from the perspective of ‘reproduction.’ First, the law cannot be separated from the relations of production. In order to maintain capitalist relations of production, the law covers up the exploitation in the process of capitalist production. The key methods are to determine the ownership of the means of production and products and confuse the technical division of labor and social division of labor in the (...) process of labor. It demands the submission of legal subjects, seducing and tempting subjects through the ideological function of law so that they will actively and willingly accept the restriction of law. Secondly, the law and the State are integrated. The ‘surplus-violence’ that the ruling class holds over the ruled class is transformed by law into legal State power, and the State power shapes individuals into subjects and endows subjects with rights through law, with the aim of the reproduction of capitalist relations of production. In addition, at the end of the article, I also mention Althusser’s preliminary conception of communist law. (shrink)

Ceteris-paribus clauses are nothing to worry about; aceteris-paribus qualifier is not poisonously indeterminate in meaning. Ceteris-paribus laws teach us that a law need not be associated straightforwardly with a regularity in the manner demanded by regularity analyses of law and analyses of laws as relations among universals. This lesson enables us to understand the sense in which the laws of nature would have been no different under various counterfactual suppositions — a feature even of those laws that involve no ceteris-paribus (...) qualification and are actually associated with exceptionless regularities. Ceteris-paribus generalizations of an‘inexact science’ qualify as laws of that science in virtue of their distinctive relation to counterfactuals: they form a set that is stable for the purposes of that field. (Though an accident may possess tremendous resilience under counterfactual suppositions, the laws are sharply distinguished from the accidents in that the laws are collectively as resilient as they could logically possibly be.) The stability of an inexact science's laws may involve their remaining reliable even under certain counterfactual suppositions violating fundamental laws of physics. The ceteris-paribus laws of an inexact science may thus possess a kind of necessity lacking in the fundamental laws of physics. A nomological explanation supplied by an inexact science would then be irreducible to an explanation of the same phenomenon at the level of fundamental physics. Island biogeography is used to illustrate how a special science could be autonomous in this manner. (shrink)

_Grounding_ is meant to be a metaphysically explanatory relation of non-causal constitutive determination. Recently there has been significant interest in the idea that there might be ‘laws of metaphysics’ for grounding, analogous to the laws of nature for causation. In this paper I argue that current accounts of the structure of law-based grounding (focusing on Jonathan Schaffer’s structural equation modeling account) do not capture grounding’s directionality—a central feature. The formal account must be supplemented to satisfy this demand and give (...) a successful general account of directed grounding relations. I thus propose two alternative supplements: Priority-Inextricable Grounding and Priority-Extricable Grounding (itself divided into two alternatives—Priority by Absolute Fundamentality and Priority by Relative Fundamentality). Each supplement offers a distinct image of grounding—most illustratively, modally: for each, the structure of grounding contrastingly constrains the metaphysical compossibility of worlds that share facts or grounding relations. As such, I conclude that the supplements offer incompatible strategies for sourcing grounding directionality and grounding theorists ought to decide between them. (shrink)

Scenes of violence and incisions into the flesh informeethe demand for law. The scene of little girls being held down in practices of female circumcision has been a defining and definitive image that demands the attention of human rights, and the intervention of law. But the investment in protecting women and little girls from such a cut is not all that it seems.eeLaw's Cuteeon theeeBody of Human Rights: Female Circumcision, TortureeeandeeSacred Flesheeconsiders how such imageseecome to inform laweeand the investment (...) of advocates of law in an imagination of this scene. Drawing on psychoanalytic andeepostcolonialeetheory, and accompanying ideas in political theology, Juliet Rogers examines the language, imagery and excitement that accompanies recenteeinitiatives to legislate against what is called 'female genital mutilation'. The author compliments this examination witheea consideration of the scene of torture exposed in images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.eeRogers argues that the modes ofeefascination and excitement that accompanyeesceneseeof torture and female circumcisioneebetray the fantasy of aeepolitical conditioneeagainst which the subject of liberal law is imagined; this is subjectivityeein aeestate of non-mutilation, non-prohibition or, in a psychoanalytic idiom, non-castration.eeTo support the fantasy of this subject,eethe mutilated subject, the authors suggests, is rendered as flesh cut from the democratic nation state, deserving of only selective human rights, or none at all. (shrink)

The author considers, first of all, recent and fairly recent interpretations of Plato’s dialogue the Crito, arguing that the character Socrates, whose expressed ideas probably correspond in major detail to the convictions of the historical Socrates, is not saying that the laws of Athens demand unquestioning obedience. The dialogue is rather an account of the debate that goes on in Socrates’s mind itself. A strong consideration in this debate is clearly the rule of law; but equally strong is Socrates’s (...) lifelong commitment to carry out what, in the end, he regards as the most reasonable course of action. The author then considers two contemporary ethical issues: our way of coming to know the natural law and the proper understanding of laws that allow of exceptions. Regarding the first, he argues—consistently with what we find not only in the Crito but also in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas—that we come to know the natural law through being immersed in the laws and customs of a particular society: the more just the society, the better access to the natural law it provides. Regarding the second, he argues that an article in Aquinas is sometimes interpreted as suggesting that the realm of concrete human experience is beyond the reach of law. He argues, in the spirit of the historical Socrates, that the rule of law is equivalent to the rule of reason and that this does reach into the realm of concrete human experience, where exceptions are sometimes recognized as contained in the law. (shrink)

Most contemporary legal philosophers tend to take force to be an accessory to the law. According to this prevalent view the law primarily consists of a series of demands made on us; force, conversely, comes into play only when these demands fail to be satisfied. This book claims that this model should be jettisoned in favour of a radically different one: according to the proposed view, force is not an accessory to the law but rather its attribute. The law is (...) not simply a set of rules incidentally guaranteed by force, but it should be understood as essentially rules about force. The book explores in detail the nature of this claim and develops its corollaries. It then provides an overview of the contemporary jurisprudential debates relating to force and violence, and defends its claims against well-known counter-arguments by Hart, Raz and others. This book offers an innovative insight into the concept of Pure Theory. In contrast to what was claimed by Hans Kelsen, the most eminent contributor to this theory, the author argues that the core insight of the Pure Theory is not to be found in the concept of a basic norm, or in the supposed absence of a conceptual relation between law and morality, but rather in the fundamental and comprehensive reformulation of how to model the functioning of the law intended as an ordering of force and violence. (shrink)

What is the nature of law and what is the best way to discover it? This book argues that law is best understood in terms of the social functions it performs wherever it is found in human society. In order to support this claim, law is explained as a kind of institution and as a kind of artefact. To say that it is an institution is to say that it is designed for creating and conferring special statuses to people so (...) as to alter their rights and responsibilities toward each other. To say that it is an artefact is to say that it is a tool of human creation that is designed to signal its usability to people who interact with it. This picture of law's nature is marshalled to critique theories of law that see it mainly as a product of reason or morality, understanding those theories via their conceptions of law's function. It is also used to argue against those legal positivists who see law's functions as relatively minor aspects of its nature. -/- This method of conceptualizing law's nature helps us to explain how the law, understood as social facts, can make normative demands upon us. It also recommends a methodology for understanding law that combines elements of conceptual analysis with empirical research for uncovering the purposes to which diverse peoples put their legal activities. (shrink)

How should the judge or jury in a just criminal court treat a civil disobedient, someone who performs a conscientiously motivated communicative breach of the criminal law? Kimberley Brownlee contends that all else equal a court of law should neither convict nor punish such offenders. Though I agree with this conclusion, I contend that Brownlee mischaracterizes the nature of the criminal defense to which civil disobedients are entitled. Whereas Brownlee maintains that such actors ought to be excused for their criminal (...) breach, I argue that they ought to enjoy a justification defense. Acts of civil disobedience are not wrongful violations of the law for which an actor ought not to be blamed; rather, they are violations of the law that are not wrong in virtue of their illegality. It is the absence of wrongdoing, and not merely the absence of fault, that renders the conviction and punishment of those who perform acts of civil disobedience inappropriate. (shrink)

Do our present circumstances allow us to defend a specific connection (that specific connection) between «legal rules», «moral claims» and «democratic principles» which we may say is granted by an unproblematic presupposition of universality or by an «acultural» experience of modernity? In order to discuss this question, this paper invokes the challenge-visée of a plausible reinvention of Law’s autonomous project (a reinvention which may be capable of critically re-thinking and re-experiencing Law’s constitutive cultural-civilizational originarium in a «limit-situation» such as our (...) own). The discussion is developed by recognising that the claim to universality is not only incompatible with a substantive conception of juridicalness as validity but also sustained with difficulty by a procedural representation of discourse and rationality (a representation which, against its own conclusion-claims, could also be said to be culturally and civilizationally bounded). Not forgetting some specific features of contemporary juridical pluralism—namely that which emerges from the counterpoint between semiotic groups or interpretative communities (and their differently assumed claims of intersemioticity concerning the signifier law)—this train of reflection diagnoses briefly a sequence of complementary main difficulties (as «obstacles» to recognising Law’s demand as an unmistakable cultural project), namely those arising from the formalistic normativistic inheritance (confounding legal autonomy with isolationism), from the challenges and seductions of practical holism (justifying a continuum in which Law’s project loses its sense and autonomy), and also from the familiar debate between exclusive and inclusive versions of positivism and non-positivism (a debate which establishes-consecrates an equivocal counterpoint between Law and Morality). (shrink)

The legal progression in China is portrayed negatively by western scholars who often argue that the state institutions in China are subordinate to the control of Chinese Communist Party’s leadership which makes these institutions politically insignificant. We consider that the legal progression in China has an instrumental role in achieving “Harmonious Socialist Society.” The purpose of this thesis is to provide an analytical literature review of scholastic work to explain the legality of rule of law in China and to elaborate (...) the outcomes of China’s recent legal developments. This paper has two main subjects. First, it examines the nature of law and rule of law in China through the prism of different legal theories. Secondly, by arguing from different political theories, it explains the necessity of customized legal system in China for establishing a Harmonious Socialist Society. By giving different examples from contemporary China, this thesis argues that the legality of the rule of law in China ought to be understood in the context of China’s economic and social progression rather than the western legal scholarship. China’s economic progress demands a customized legal system. In our thesis, we claim that the regular upgradation of laws and introduction of constitutional amendments in China, should be recognized as important achievement which is required for the institutional innovation. Legal progression in China during last decade perfectly fit into the framework of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” and is very crucial for building a harmonious socialist society. It is vivid from China’s economic growth and developed international relations. Finally, this paper suggests that the Chinese legal progression can be taken as successful example of legal experimentalism. (shrink)

Historians of science have long considered the very idea of a law-governed universe to be the relic of a bygone intellectual culture that took it largely for granted that a divine lawmaker existed. Similarly, many philosophers of science today insist that the notion of a law of nature is fraught with implausibly theological assumptions, preferring instead to treat them as theoretical axioms in an optimal description of nature's regularities, or else as robust patterns of causal connections or causal powers whose (...) status can be reconciled to the stringent demands of metaphysical naturalism. Yet the metaphor of lawhood has proven more difficult to dislodge than the theistic commitments it once presupposed, not least because it preserves the widespread intuition that the task of scientific inquiry is not to stipulate the difference between a lawful and an accidental regularity in nature, but to discover it. Taking its cue from the repeated failure to find naturalistic alternatives to divine lawmaking, this book undertakes a retrieval and reappraisal of a high-scholastic philosophy of nature that grounds lawlike regularities in the conceptual and causal powers of God and, having done so, concludes that the metaphysical framework of classical theism yields a more powerful and parsimonious explanation of the rhythms and patterns of the natural world than its secular rivals. (shrink)

Cognitive science has come down with a nasty cold, so Jerry Fodor has recently lamented, and the afflicting strain is something called concept pragmatism.1 Its chief symptom is the urge to identify the content of a concept with the inferences habitually drawn upon in its use (a ‘definition-in-use’), these serving also as its condition of possession, in knowing how to draw those inferences definitive of the concept.2 The affliction is quite fatal if Fodor is right, but the welfare of the (...) patient is of only indirect concern. What I want instead to ask here is whether the diagnosis has anything to do with the pragmatism that he says, breathlessly, has “bred monsters” down the last century—in particular, with the.. (shrink)

This article analyses the conflicting professional ethical demands imposed on judges to, on the one hand, faithfully apply the existing law of the land and, on the other hand, do justice in the face of urgent global challenges such as ensuring an equal access to life-saving medicines. After establishing the precise nature of the professional ethical duties of judges (as opposed to those of lawyers) and noting the tensions they face when the duty of applying the law prevents them from (...) complying with the duty of delivering material justice in the domain of access to medicines, the article then analyses the way this issue plays out in Latin America, a región where judicially-mandated access to medicines has been common. The article concludes by arguing that the Latin American experience suggests that judges around the world should take seriously the need to find a balance between their duty of deference towards public health authorities in this domain (when this is mandated by legislation), and the duty to do justice to individuals who cannot afford live-saving medicines. (shrink)

Constitutional law has been and remains an area of intense philosophical interest, and yet the debate has taken place in a variety of different fields with very little to connect them. In a collection of essays bringing together scholars from several constitutional systems and disciplines, Philosophical Foundations of Constitutional Law unites the debate in a study of the philosophical issues at the very foundations of the idea of a constitution: why one might be necessary; what problems it must address; what (...) problems constitutions usually address; and some of the issues raised by the administration of a constitutional regime. Although these issues of institutional design are of abiding importance, many of them have taken on new significance in the last few years as law-makers have been forced to return to first principles in order to justify novel practices and arrangements in their constitutional orders. Thus, questions of constitutional 'revolutions,' challenges to the demands of the rule of law, and the separation of powers have taken on new and pressing importance. The essays in this volume address these questions, filling the gap in the philosophical analysis of constitutional law. The volume will provoke specialists in philosophy, politics, and law to develop new philosophically grounded analyses of constitutional law, and will be a valuable resource for graduate students in law, politics and philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophers sometimes claim that economics, and the idealizing strategies it employs, is ultimately unable to provide genuine laws of nature. Therefore, unlike physics, it does not qualify as an actual science. Careful consideration of thermodynamics, a well-developed physical theory, reveals substantial parallels with economic methodology. The corrective account of scientific understanding I offer appreciates these parallels: understanding in terms of efficient performance.

Part of our folklore is that genuine laws of nature must be universal in space and time. The purpose of this note is to explicate and compare various senses of this requirement. I am not concerned to argue here that the requirement, in any one of its explicated forms, should or should not be adopted.If it is hard to state straight out exactly what is demanded by universality in space and time, Michael Tooley has provided an example of a hypothetical (...) law which fails the requirement in a significant sense:All fruit in Smith’s garden at any time are apples. When one attempts to take an orange into the garden, it turns into an elephant. Bananas so treated become apples as they cross the boundary, while pears are resisted by a force that cannot be overcome. (shrink)

The law serves functions that are not often taken seriously enough by ethicists, namely feasibility and practicability. A consequence of feasibility is that most laws do not meet the demands of ideal ethical theory. A consequence of practicability is that law requires elaborated and explicit methodologies that determine how to do things with norms. These two consequences form the core idea behind this book, which employs methods from legal theory to inform and examine debates on methodology in applied ethics, particularly (...) bioethics. It is argued that almost all legal methods have counterparts in applied ethics, which indicates that much can be gained from comparative study of the two. The author first outlines methods as used in legal, focusing on deductive reasoning with statutes as well as analogical reasoning with precedent cases. He then examines three representative kinds of contemporary ethical theories, Beauchamp and Childress’s principlism, Jonsen and Toulmin’s casuistry, and two versions of consequentialism—Singer’s preference utilitarianism and Hooker’s rule-consequentialism—with regards to their methods. These examinations lead to the Morisprudence Model for methods in applied ethics. (shrink)