This volume presents human rights in action, focussing on their effectiveness as legal tools designed to benefit human beings. By combining conceptual analysis with an emphasis on procedures and mechanisms of implementation, it provides a multidimensional overview of human rights. Beginning with an analysis of the historical and conceptual foundations of human rights, the volume then focusses upon the different mechanisms which may be employed in translating human rights from a promise into a reality. Special emphasis is placed upon the (...) United Nations procedures available to achieve this end. (shrink)

The legal regime regulating cross-border investment gives key rights to foreign investors and places significant duties on states hosting that investment. It also raises distinctive moral questions due to its potential to constrain a state’s ability to manage its economy and protect its people. Yet international investment law remains virtually untouched as a subject of philosophical inquiry. The questions of international political morality surrounding investment rules can be mapped through the lens of two critiques of the law – that it (...) systemically takes advantage of the global South and that it constrains the policy choices of states hosting investment. Each critique contains certain moral and empirical assumptions that deserve further attention. The distributive justice implications of international investment rules are also relevant to scholars of global distributive justice. The aim of the analysis is to develop an interdisciplinary agenda – among law, philosophy, and social science – for inquiry into the justice of investment law and reform of its unjust elements. (shrink)

In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal.

If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture. In _American Nietzsche_, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into (...) Nietzsche's philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike. A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, _American Nietzsche_ dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life—and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart. (shrink)

Naturalistic experiments of color perception are critically evaluated. The review concludes that they fail to confirm a natural determination of color perception. Rather than demonstrating universal sensitivity to focal colors, the experiments actually yielded enormous cultural variation in response. This variation is interpreted as supporting a sociohistorical psychological explanation of color perception.

This target article presents a theory of human cultural learning. Cultural learning is identified with those instances of social learning in which intersubjectivity or perspective-taking plays a vital role, both in the original learning process and in the resulting cognitive product. Cultural learning manifests itself in three forms during human ontogeny: imitative learning, instructed learning, and collaborative learning – in that order. Evidence is provided that this progression arises from the developmental ordering of the underlying social-cognitive concepts and processes involved. (...) Imitative learning relies on a concept of intentional agent and involves simple perspective-taking. Instructed learning relies on a concept of mental agent and involves alternating/coordinated perspective-taking (intersubjectivity). Collaborative learning relies on a concept of reflective agent and involves integrated perspective-taking (reflective intersubjectivity). A comparison of normal children, autistic children and wild and enculturated chimpanzees provides further evidence for these correlations between social cognition and cultural learning. Cultural learning is a uniquely human form of social learning that allows for a fidelity of transmission of behaviors and information among conspecifics not possible in other forms of social learning, thereby providing the psychological basis for cultural evolution. (shrink)

We develop the concept of ‘aesthetic practices’ to capture the work needed for population data to be disseminated via government data portals. Specifically, we look at the Census Hub of the European Statistical System and the Danish Ministry of Education’s Data Warehouse. These portals form part of open government data initiatives, which we understand as governing technologies. We argue that to function as such, aesthetic practices are required so that data produced at dispersed sites can be brought into relation and (...) projected as populations in forms such as bar charts, heat maps and tables. Two examples of aesthetic practices are analysed based on ethnographic studies we have conducted on the production of data for the Hub and Warehouse: metadata and data cleaning. Metadata enables data to come into relation by containing and accounting for the differences between data. Data cleaning deals with the indeterminacies and absences of data and involves algorithms to determine what values data can obtain so they can be brought into relation. We attend to how both aesthetic practices involve normative decisions that make absent what exceeds them: embodied knowledge that cannot or has not been documented as well as data that cannot meet the forms required of data portals. While these aesthetic practices are necessary to sustain data portals as ‘sites of projection,’ we also bring critical attention to their performative effects for knowing, enacting and governing populations. (shrink)

Despite a common agenda of normative analysis of the international order, philosophical work on international political morality and international law and legal scholarship have, until recently, worked at a distance from one another.The mutual suspicion can be traced to different aims and methodologies, including a divide between work on matters of deep structure, on the one hand, and practical institutional analysis and prescription, on the other. Yet international law is a key part of the normative practices ofstates, has a direct (...) effect on state behavior, and, as a meth-odological matter, can contribute to good theorizing onmatters of international ethics. Recently, philosophical workhas demonstrated a greater engagement with the moral aspects of international law. One strand of scholarship has treated the rules of international law as a proper subject for philosophical inquiry. Another has used international legal rules to support moral arguments about aspects of the international order. Future dialogue and cooperation would benefit both fields, in particular on the challenges to global cooperation from nationalism and on strategies for allocating responsibilities among global actors for rectifying global harms. (shrink)

And his writing captures the best of his speaking. In this book we have: . Hippocrates and his Oath validated anew for modern times, . Luke the Physician, .

Public sector adoption of AI techniques in welfare systems recasts historic national data as resource for machine learning. In this paper, we examine how the use of register data for development of predictive models produces new ‘afterlives’ for citizen data. First, we document a Danish research project’s practical efforts to develop an algorithmic decision-support model for social workers to classify children’s risk of maltreatment. Second, we outline the tensions emerging from project members’ negotiations about which datasets to include. Third, we (...) identify three types of afterlives for citizen data in machine learning projects: (1) data afterlives for training and testing the algorithm, acting as ‘ground truth’ for inferring futures, (2) data afterlives for validating the algorithmic model, acting as markers of robustness, and (3) data afterlives for improving the model’s fairness, valuated for reasons of data ethics. We conclude by discussing how, on one hand, these afterlives engender new ethical relations between state and citizens; and how they, on the other hand, also articulate an alternative view on the value of datasets, posing interesting contrasts between machine learning projects developed within the context of the Danish welfare state and mainstream corporate AI discourses of the bigger, the better. (shrink)

This paper considers the implications of Chiara Lepora and Robert Goodin's On Complicity and Compromise (OUP, 2013) for our understanding of international law. That volume systematizes and evaluates individuals’ ethical choices in getting (too) close to evil acts. For the law of nations, these concepts are relevant in three critical ways. First, they capture the dilemmas of those charged with implementing international law, e.g., Red Cross delegates pledged to confidentiality learning of torture in a prison. Second, they offer a rubric (...) for understanding when a state may use coercion against certain actors, e.g., international law's rules for when one state may use force against another based on the latter's ties to terrorist acts. Third, they offer a moral grounding for many international obligations of states based on the need to avoid their own complicity in others' wrongs, e.g., by not expelling refugees to a state persecuting them or by preventing private actors from committing human rights abuses. In the case of the last two, the law reflects decisions by states about how much complicity they will tolerate – either complicity by others or complicity by the states themselves. (shrink)

Offering a new interdisciplinary approach to global justice and integrating the insights of international relations and contemporary ethics, this book asks whether the core norms of international law are just by appraising them according to a standard of global justice grounded in the advancement of peace and protection of human rights.

Cecile Fabre’s Through a Glass Darkly offers a compelling account of the ethics of espionage drawn from both interpersonal morality and democratic and cosmopolitan political theory. Yet the spying that her theory finds permissible or prohibited does not map onto the spying that states undertake and that international law either explicitly or implicitly authorizes. That law allows or tolerates significant spying to promote compliance with diverse international legal regimes as well as advance other important public order values — well beyond (...) that allowed under Fabre's theory. This disconnect represents a challenge for her theory and ideal theory generally. This essay identifies these gaps and considers alternative approaches to addressing them. It argues that the political morality of spying should be explored through institutional moral reasoning that takes account of the actual practices, expectations, and institutions that states have created; it then offers a set of criteria for the international political morality of espionage. The essay concludes with a discussion of a key feature of all espionage, namely the secrecy of the methods used — as opposed to their goal of find others’ secrets. International law is both pushing transparency in many areas yet still allowing secret conduct by states, and these practices should also inform a theory of espionage. (shrink)

The doctrine that emotions are products of natural mechanisms is critiqued from a social constructionist perspective. Evidence marshalled in support of the naturalistic theory is also subjected to critical analysis and found wanting. The social constructionist theory of emotion is proposed as more adequate than the naturalistic theory. Since emotion exemplifies psychological phenomena in general, the social constructionist theory that explains it is considered worthy of explaining the entire range of psychological phenomena.

Ten years ago the civilized world was shocked out of an unwarranted confidence in the victory of science over superstition by the news that Tennessee had outlawed the teaching of man's evolutionary origin. Within the next three years both Mississippi and Arkansas joined Tennessee in defense of Biblical truth against the scepticism of science. The furor raised by the dramatic clashes between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow at the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, has now become a faded memory. (...) The struggle between Fundamentalists and Modernists has died down, though the embers still smoulder; and few ever think of the issues then raised, now that war and fascism threaten civilization. (shrink)

Academic freedom re-visited, by T. V. Smith.--Human rights under the United Nations Charter, by B. V. Cohen.--The absolute, the experimental method, and Horace Kallen, by P. H. Douglas.--Some tame reflections on some wild facts, by J. Frank.--Some central themes in Horace Kallen's philosophy, by S. Ratner.--Cultural relativism and standards, by G. Boas.--The philosophy of democracy as a philosophy of history, by S. Hook.--The rational imperatives, by C. I. Lewis.--From Poe to Valéry, by T. S. Eliot.--Events and the future, by (...) J. Dewey.--Teleological explanation and teleological systems, by E. Nagel.--Chʻan (Zen) Buddhism in China: its history and method, by H. Shih.--Reconsideration of the origin and nature of perception, by A. Ames.--Horace M. Kallen: A bibliography (p. 275-277). (shrink)

Academic freedom re-visited, by T. V. Smith.--Human rights under the United Nations Charter, by B. V. Cohen.--The absolute, the experimental method, and Horace Kallen, by P. H. Douglas.--Some tame reflections on some wild facts, by J. Frank.--Some central themes in Horace Kallen's philosophy, by S. Ratner.--Cultural relativism and standards, by G. Boas.--The philosophy of democracy as a philosophy of history, by S. Hook.--The rational imperatives, by C. I. Lewis.--From Poe to Valéry, by T. S. Eliot.--Events and the future, by (...) J. Dewey.--Teleological explanation and teleological systems, by E. Nagel.--Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism in China, by Hu Shih.--Reconsideration of the origin and nature of perception, by A. Ames, Jr.--Horace M. Kallen: a bibliography (p. 275-277). (shrink)

Academic freedom re-visited, by T. V. Smith.--Human rights under the United Nations Charter, by B. V. Cohen.--The absolute, the experimental method, and Horace Kallen, by P. H. Douglas.--Some tame reflections on some wild facts, by J. Frank.--Some central themes in Horace Kallen's philosophy, by S. Ratner.--Cultural relativism and standards, by G. Boas.--The philosophy of democracy as a philosophy of history, by S. Hook.--The rational imperatives, by C. I. Lewis.--From Poe to Valéry, by T. S. Eliot.--Events and the future, by (...) J. Dewey.--Teleological explanation and teleological systems, by E. Nagel.--Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism in China, by Hu Shih.--Reconsideration of the origin and nature of perception, by A. Ames, Jr.--Horace M. Kallen: a bibliography (p. 275-277). (shrink)

Although cross-cultural psychology has advanced our understanding of cultural aspects of psychology, it is marred by theoretical and methodological flaws. These flaws include misunderstanding cultural issues and the manner in which they bear on psychology; obscuring the relation between biology, culture, and psychology; inadequately defining and measuring cultural factors and psychological phenomena; erroneously analysing data and drawing faulty conclusions about the cultural character of psychology. This article identifies fundamental theoretical and methodological errors that have appeared in prominent cross-cultural psychological research. (...) Suggestions for overcoming them are then outlined. (shrink)

This article extends concepts from Vygotsky's sociohistorical psychology to explain unconsciousness. Freud's conception of the unconscious is criticized for minimizing the importance of social and cognitive aspects of unconsciousness. In contrast, sociohistorical psychology explains unconsciousness as emanating from social values. These social values organize the manner in which we perceive people, and therefore account for oversights and distortions in our perception of self and others. Implications for overcoming unconsciousness are also discussed according to sociohistorical psychological principles.

International law informs, and is informed by, concerns for global justice. Yet the two fields that engage most with prescribing the normative structure of the world order – international law and the philosophy of global justice – have tended to work on parallel tracks. Many international lawyers, with their commitment to formal sources, regard considerations of substantive (and not merely procedural) justice as ultra vires for much of their work. Philosophers of global justice, in turn, tend to explore the moral (...) commitments of international actors without grappling with the international legal doctrine or institutions. In recent years, however, both disciplines have begun to engage with one another more. This discussion among international lawyers and philosophers addresses the promises of and challenges to interdisciplinary approaches to global justice. The contributors consider the added value of philosophical inquiry to issues facing international law practitioners or scholars, the salience of of international law for political philosophy, and the methodological distinctions between the two fields. The contributors also identify promising lines and examples of interdisciplinary scholarship. (shrink)

International law and ethics share a common goal of helping us understand the norms and institutions needed to promote a just world order. Yet each of the two fields has approached this shared task with little regard for the insights of other, and interdisciplinary collaboration is now imperative. This essay shows the complementary nature of inquiries in political and moral philosophy, on the one hand, and international law, on the other, by examining the so-called New Haven School (or policy-oriented jurisprudence), (...) an international law method that explicitly considers values as both inputs and outputs of the process of making law. It finds that the School’s sociological orientation does not adequately integrate ethical inquiries essential to prescribing law, in particular questions about the scope of duties that individuals and states owe those abroad. Using the current legal debate over the extraterritorial application of human rights as an example, the paper shows how approaches from moral and political philosophy can help provide a rigorous and principled basis for the prescription of law, as well as link seemingly unrelated questions of international law to each other. (shrink)

Two strands of the Vygotskian sociohistorical school of psychology are compared to better understand the nature of cultural variation in cognitive processes. The "relativist" strand maintains that cognitive processes are culturally variable. The "universalist" strand maintains that these processes manifest essential cultural uniformity despite apparent differences in performance. A review of the evidence concludes that the relativist position is more tenable.

Walter Kaufmann's monumental study of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, Nietzsche:Philosopher,Psychologist,Antichrist (1950) dramatically transformed Nietzsche interpretations in the postwar United States and rendered Kaufmann himself a dominant figure in transatlantic Nietzsche studies from 1950 until his death in 1980. While the longevity of Kaufmann's hegemony over postwar American Nietzsche interpretations in particular is remarkable, even more so is the fact that he revitalized the career of such a radical thinker in the conservative intellectual climate of the 1950s. Philosophers and historians typically credit (...) Kaufmann with rescuing Nietzsche from the Nazis, but argue that he did so by denaturing Nietzsche's philosophy of power and narrowly transforming him into an existentialist. By contrast, this essay argues that Kaufmann took a much more dramatic step by extending the scope of Nietzsche's philosophy, demonstrating how his ideas resonated with but also transcended the dominant philosophies of the day. Kaufmann presented Nietzsche as a philosopher uniquely poised to bridge the increasing mid-century rift between continental and analytic philosophies, as well as between the increasingly distinct moral worlds of academic philosophers and general readers. At a time when philosophical discourses within the university and beyond were pulling apart, Kaufmann put Nietzsche to work to bring them back together. By emphasizing Nietzsche's harmony with the range of scholarly and popular philosophical concerns of mid-century, he also established, for the first time in the United States, Nietzsche's role as a canonical thinker in the Western tradition. (shrink)