For several decades, international law has recognized certain norms such as the prohibitions against genocide, slavery, and military aggression as "jus cogens"- peremptory law which supersedes conflicting international treaties and customs. Despite widespread acceptance of the jus cogens concept, legal theorists continue to debate whether peremptory norms derive their legal authority from state consent, natural law, or the demands of international public order. Anxiety over peremptory norms' legal basis has frustrated efforts to clarify the scope and content of jus cogens, (...) as well as placing peremptory norms on a collision course with inherited notions of state sovereignty. Drawing on Immanuel Kant 's conception of fiduciary relations, this Article develops a new theory of jus cogens based on the idea that states are fiduciaries of their people. According to the fiduciary theory, peremptory norms do not stand in opposition to state sovereignty; rather, they are constitutive of state sovereign authority because all states owe their subjects a fiduciary obligation to comply with such norms. The fiduciary model of the state resolves the longstanding tension in international legal theory between peremptory norms and state sovereignty and points to discrete formal and substantive criteria for identifying peremptory norms. (shrink)

In international law, the term "jus cogens" refers to norms that are considered peremptory in the sense that they are mandatory and do not admit derogation. Although the jus cogens concept has achieved widespread acceptance, international legal theory has yet to furnish a satisfying account of jus cogens's legal basis. We argue that peremptory norms are inextricably linked to the sovereign powers assumed by all states. The key to understanding international jus cogens lies in Immanuel Kant 's discussion of the (...) innate right of children to their parents' care. Drawing on Kant 's account, our theory of jus cogens posits that states exercise sovereign authority as fiduciaries of the people subject to their power. An immanent feature of this state-subject fiduciary relationship is that the state must comply with jus cogens. The fiduciary theory clarifies jus cogens's content by generating discrete criteria for identifying peremptory norms. (shrink)

This Article explores three theories of humanitarian intervention that appear in, or are inspired by, the writings of Hugo Grotius. One theory asserts that natural law authorizes all states to punish violations of the law of nations, irrespective of where or against whom the violations occur, to preserve the integrity of international law. A second theory, which also appears in Grotius’s writings, proposes that states may intervene as temporary legal guardians for peoples who have suffered intolerable cruelties at the hands (...) of their own state. Each of these theories has fallen out of fashion today based on skepticism about their natural law underpinnings and concerns about how they have facilitated Western colonialism. As an alternative, this Article outlines a third theory that builds upon Grotius’s account of humanitarian intervention as a fiduciary relationship, while updating Grotius’s account for the twenty-first century. According to this new fiduciary theory, when states intervene to protect human rights abroad they exercise an oppressed people’s right of self-defense on their behalf and may use force solely for the people’s benefit. As fiduciaries, intervening states bear obligations to consult with and honor the preferences of the people they seek to protect, and they must respect international human rights governing the use of force within the affected state. By clarifying the respective responsibilities of the Security Council and individual states for humanitarian intervention, the fiduciary theory also lends greater coherency to the international community’s “responsibility to protect” human rights. (shrink)

We argue that human rights are best conceived as norms arising from a fiduciary relationship that exists between states and the citizens and noncitizens subject to their power. These norms draw on a Kantian conception of moral personhood, protecting agents from instrumentalization and domination. They do not, however, exist in the abstract as timeless natural rights. Instead, they are correlates of the state's fiduciary duty to provide equal security under the rule of law, a duty that flows from the state's (...) institutional assumption of irresistible sovereign powers. (shrink)

I read Raanan Gillon’s piece on the defence of medical commitments ceremonies with interest.1 I was, however, disturbed to see that in the ….

We show that there is a limit lemma for enumeration reducibility to 0 e ', analogous to the Shoenfield Limit Lemma in the Turing degrees, which relativises for total enumeration degrees. Using this and `good approximations' we prove a jump inversion result: for any set W with a good approximation and any set X< e W such that W≤ e X' there is a set A such that X≤ e A< e W and A'=W'. (All jumps are enumeration degree jumps.) (...) The degrees of sets with good approximations include the Σ0 2 degrees and the n-CEA degrees. (shrink)

Throughout the history of philosophy there has been a sustained interest in the concepts of knowledge, truth and meaning; interest in the concepts of error, falsity and nonsense, on the other hand, has been intermittent and spasmodic. Error, for example, has suffered at the expense of knowledge to such an extent that sometimes its very existence has been denied, or it has been explained away as being merely the absence of or privation of knowledge; many theories of truth are so (...) constructed that no place can be found for falsity, and theories about what constitutes making sense pay, on the whole, little heed to what constitutes nonsense. In this paper I hope to do something to redress the balance so far as error is concerned. My remarks are prompted by the hope that, just as we may best understand health through the study of disease, so a consideration of error or failure may throw light on knowledge or success. It is clearly not very informative to say of error, falsity and nonsense that they are merely the absence of knowledge, truth and sense; indeed it is just as laconic as a proposed medical definition of disease as the absence of health. (shrink)

Against Mitchell et al.'s assertions, we argue that (1) the concordance between learning and awareness does not support any particular learning theory, (2) their propositional approach is at odds with examples of learned behaviours that contradict beliefs about causation, and (3) the relative virtues of the two approaches in terms of parsimony is more ambiguous than Mitchell et al. suggest.

A completely mitotic computably enumerable degree is a c.e. degree in which every c.e. set is mitotic, or equivalently in which every c.e. set is autoreducible. There are known to be low, low2, and high completely mitotic degrees, though the degrees containing non-mitotic sets are dense in the c.e. degrees. We show that there exists an upper cone of c.e. degrees each of which contains a non-mitotic set, and that the completely mitotic c.e. degrees are nowhere dense in the c.e. (...) degrees. We also show that there is a set computably enumerable in and above 0′ which is not the jump of any completely mitotic degree. (shrink)

Aron Gurwitsch (1900-73) was one of the most important figures in the phenomenological movement between the 1920s and the 1970s. Through his introduction of Gestalt theoretical concepts into phenomenology, he exerted a powerful influence on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. The contributions to this memorial volume, most written by friends and students of Gurwitsch, contain critical studies of the work of Aron Gurwitsch and attempts to extend his philosophical analyses to new problems and fields. Ranging from formal ontology through the philosophy (...) of the social sciences to the interpretation of Kant, the essays assembled here are both a tribute to and a continuation of the philosophical legacy of Aron Gurwitsch. The contributions will be of interest to advanced undergraduates and graduate students, and to specialists in a wide range of areas. (shrink)

Perhaps no word has received such varied treatment from philosophers as the word ‘good’. No doubt this is largely due to the fact that it is a word with an unusually wide range of use. Aristotle, for example, realised that it is a term that can be applied to substances, qualities, relations, actions, passivities, times and places, and we may notice that he was of the opinion that the term must have different meanings when applied in these different categories. Many (...) of the usages which are distinguishable in everyday speech have given rise to corresponding theories about the nature of goodness. Indeed if we survey the history of philosophical speculation about goodness, we find that there are just about as many theories about goodness as there are distinct uses of the word ‘good’. For example, goodness has been variously described as an unique quality, as a consequential property, as a relational property, etc., and the word ‘good’ has been described as a term of commendation or approval, and its attributive, predicative and instrumental senses, to name a few, have been distinguished. (shrink)

Two versions of the GRW “hitting” model for explicit wavefunction collapse, which are consistent with preserving the symmetry of the wavefunction, are considered. The predictions of the models for excitation of bound systems are calculated and compared with experiment and with the predictions of other similar models. It is shown that our preferred model strongly supports the idea that collapse, if it occurs, has gravitational origin.

David Earl Over is a leading cognitive scientist and, with his firm grounding in philosophical logic, he also exerts a powerful influence on the psychology of reasoning. He is responsible for not only a large body of empirical work and accompanying theory, but for advancing a major shift in thinking about reasoning, commonly known as the 'new paradigm' in the psychology of human reasoning. Over's signature mix of philosophical logic and experimental psychology has inspired generations of researchers, psychologists, and philosophers (...) alike over more than a quarter of a century. The chapters in this volume, written by a leading group of contributors including a number who helped shape the psychology of reasoning as we know it today, each take their starting point from the key themes of Over's ground-breaking work. The essays in this collection explore a wide range of central topics--such as rationality, bias, dual processes, and dual systems--as well as contemporary psychological and philosophical theories of conditionals. It concludes with an engaging new chapter, authored by David Over himself, which details and analyses the new paradigm psychology of reasoning. This book is therefore important reading for scholars, researchers, and advanced students in psychology, philosophy, and the cognitive sciences, including those who are not familiar with Over's thought already. (shrink)

IPCC SPECIAL REPORT ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND LAND (SRCCL) -/- Chapter 3: Climate Change and Land: An IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems.

Book reviewed in this article: The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America. by Thomas R. Cole.

Explores how humans can take the lives of animals and plants while maintaining a proper respect both for ecosystems and for those who live in them.

I understand Pluralism to be the doctrine that, either generally or with reference to some particular area of judgement, there is more than one basic principle. It endorses the possibility that some particular case may arise which will be adjudicated in one way if one principle is applied while another principle points otherwise and to an answer which, at least in practice, is incompatible. Thus in morality, according to pluralism there may be more than one correct answer to the question (...) of which of the decisions available in some particular situation is the best. (shrink)

Interdisciplinarity is a notoriously difficult concept to define, and even harder to achieve in practice. All too often social approaches reduce science to an object of study, or conversely physical science approaches are invoked as a source of 'higher' truth. Drawing upon our experiences as ESRC-NERC PhD students within geography, we outline a paratactical approach that links disciplines by adjacency rather than hierarchy. Toppling the disciplinary hierarchy creates the potential for non-reductionistic dialogue between science and social science, but it also (...) raises a series of practical difficulties. These are considered around the themes of polyvocality, breadth over depth and (im)permanence. We suggest that while this kind of approach is increasingly encouraged by research funding bodies, it is less easily sustained within the everyday mechanics of the academic world. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)