Signed into law in early 2011, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) marked the first major overhaul of the United States’ regulatory system for food safety since the 1930s. This presidential address explores how the social movement for local and regional food systems influenced the debates around the FSMA and, in particular, how issues of scale became pivotal in those debates. Specifically, a key question revolved around whether or not the proposed regulations should apply to small farms and processors who (...) sell directly to consumers in local markets. Advocates of the so-called “Tester amendment” aimed to create a scale-sensitive alternative to the requirements in the bill. This address lays out the three interrelated arguments that amendment advocates used. The first was the idea that food safety risks are different at different scales, and therefore the rules should reflect those differences. Their second argument revolved around the character of the local, direct markets of small producers and the social relationships embedded within them. The third argument used to support the Tester amendment is that the costs of complying with the detailed regulatory requirements of the new food safety law place a disproportionately large burden on small producers and that might thwart the emerging market for local food as an alternative to industrial agriculture. I conclude by suggesting some research and policy questions that could be explored more fully, both with respect to this case and with respect to alternative agri-food movements more generally. (shrink)

As the interest in corporate social responsibility within advertising industry is growing, this paper explores the discourse on CSR among employees in advertising agencies. Different sensemaking dimensions are taken into account to examine how employees, as one of the key stakeholders involved in the joint meaning construction, make sense of CSR. In addition, this paper studies the legitimation approaches that employees use to address CSR of advertising agencies. The empirical evidence of discursive examples also indicates that there is a linkage (...) between sensemaking and legitimation perspective in CSR discourse analysis and supports the idea that both may be a potential route toward institutionalization of CSR inside organizations or sectors. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the possibility that law is a functional kind by replying to objections from Leslie Green and Brian Tamanaha. I also show how Kenneth Ehrenberg’s approach to law’s functions in his latest book concedes too much to these objections. A functional kinds approach to law is possible and, for someone interested in showing the importance of law’s functions, preferable. I first explore Tamanaha’s objection and show that the possibility of functional equivalents does not pose a problem (...) for a functional kinds account of law. I then respond to Green by showing that law is more distinctively identified by its function than by the means by which it achieves this function. I quickly explore a lesser objection dealing with how law can pursue a variety of ends while having the same function the whole while. I then turn to an issue Ehrenberg raises regarding thinking of the law as having a plurality of functions like a Swiss Army knife. Finally, I show that Ehrenberg’s approach to the relationship between law and its functions is unnecessarily weak, as it avoids holding that law's nature or essence is its proper function for similar reasons to Green and Tamanaha. (shrink)

Hart’s account of law has long been acknowledged to be vulnerable to counterexamples which show that it is over-inclusive, since organisations such as private clubs, trade unions, and the mafia sat...

Many U.S. corporations and the goods they produce negatively impact our society without breaking any laws. We are all too familiar with the tobacco industry's effect on public health and health care costs for smokers and nonsmokers, as well as the role of profit in the pharmaceutical industry's research priorities. It's Legal but It Ain't Right tackles these issues, plus the ethical ambiguities of legalized gambling, the firearms trade, the fast food industry, the pesticide industry, private security companies, and more. (...) Aiming to identify industries and goods that undermine our societal values and to hold them accountable for their actions, this collection makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion of ethics in our time. This accessible exploration of corporate legitimacy and crime will be important reading for advocates, journalists, students, and anyone interested in the dichotomy between law and legitimacy. Nikos Passas is Professor in the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. Neva Goodwin is Co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. (shrink)

Some companions journey with us; others await our return home. The Cambridge Companion to Legal Positivism1 is, at 800 pages, one of the latter. It is a companion worth returning to, however, as it...

A review of The Cambridge Companion to Legal Positivism (CUP, 2021).

In agriculture, the principle of coexistence refers to a condition where different primary production systems can exist in the vicinity of each other, and can be managed in such a way that they affect each other as little as possible. Coexistence policies aim to ensure that farmers are able to freely grow the crops they choose—be they genetically engineered (GE), non-GE conventional, or organic. In the United States (US), the issue of coexistence has very recently come into sharp relief with (...) the introduction of Roundup Ready® (RR) alfalfa, a landmark court decision in 2007 (Geertson v. Johanns), and subsequent governmental actions, including the first Environmental Impact Statement on a GE crop. By contrast, in 2003 the European Union (EU) created a policy to manage coexistence and to address economic harms that may be caused by contamination. We briefly review the EU framework as an instructive resource. This policy analysis then looks at the US organic industry and its standards with respect to GE before turning to the case of RR alfalfa. With a focus on the field trial stage and on environmental assessments prior to market approval, the case reveals numerous problems in the existing regulatory framework as it pertains to coexistence and prevention of contamination of organic products with GE material. The paper concludes with specific policy recommendations for creating a more robust coexistence policy in the US. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Bazzocchi disposes the text of the Tractatus in a user-friendly manner, exactly as Wittgenstein's decimals advise. This discloses the logical form of the book by distinct reading units, linked into a fashioned hierarchical tree. The text becomes much clearer and every reader can enjoy, finally, its formal and literary qualities.

1. Sae sidae rŭl yŏrŏ gan saramdŭl -- 2. Ŏdum ŭi sidae.

A directory of archives and manuscript repositories, with links to web pages for the repositories and to online finding aids. Searchable by: collection name; city; state; National Inventory of Documentary Sources (NIDS) number; and National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) number.

Est-il possible de trouver une herméneutique œcuménique pour que toutes les confessions chrétiennes puissent lire les Saintes Ecritures ensemble ? C'est à cette question que tente de répondre l'A. dans cet article. Après avoir formulé précisément la nature de sa problématique théologique en introduction, l'A. axe sa première partie sur l'état actuel de la question posée. En seconde partie, il propose un modèle possible d'herméneutique transconfessionnelle. En dernière partie, il procède à une étude comparative entrre les diverses confessions sur la (...) réflexion scripturaire. (shrink)

The AGI alignment problem has a bimodal distribution of outcomes with most outcomes clustering around the poles of total success and existential, catastrophic failure. Consequently, attempts to solve AGI alignment should, all else equal, prefer false negatives (ignoring research programs that would have been successful) to false positives (pursuing research programs that will unexpectedly fail). Thus, we propose adopting a policy of responding to points of philosophical and practical uncertainty associated with the alignment problem by limiting and choosing necessary assumptions (...) to reduce the risk of false positives. Herein we explore in detail two relevant points of uncertainty that AGI alignment research hinges on---meta-ethical uncertainty and uncertainty about mental phenomena---and show how to reduce false positives in response to them. (shrink)

In a recent article Duncan Purves, Ryan Jenkins, and B. J. Strawser argue that in order for a decision in war to be just, or indeed the decision to resort to war to be just, it must be the case that the decision is made for the right reasons. Furthermore, they argue that this requirement holds regardless of how much good is produced by said action. In this essay I argue that their argument is flawed, in that it mistakes what (...) makes an agent morally good for what makes an act morally good. I argue that the main thrust of Purves et al.’s argument in fact undermines the conclusion they wish to draw, and that the reasons for one’s action do not make an in principle difference to the morality of actions in war. I further argue that this position undermines the traditional ad bellum just war constraint of right intention, and that the morality of actions in war is, at core, only concerned with outcomes. I conclude by clarifying that one’s reasons for action do in fact matter when deciding to enter war or kill in war, but only because one’s reasons significantly impact the way in which one acts. The purpose of this paper is to clear the theoretical space by showing why intentions/reasons do not in principle matter when assessing the morality of war (or killing), but this should not be taken as an argument that we should ignore intentions/reasons altogether. (shrink)