The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 7, Page 21-23, July 2012.

This investigation explores how contemporary motherhood is constituted in postindustrial consumer culture through a content and textual analysis of Shape Fit Pregnancy. Using all available issues of the magazine from its inception in 1997 to 2003, the authors first underscore a key tension surrounding pregnant women’s bodies within health and fitness discourse: That the pregnant form is presented as maternally successful yet aesthetically problematic. Second, the authors reveal how contemporary mothers are defined as newly responsible for a second shift of (...) household labor and child care and a new third shift of bodily labor and fitness practices. The analysis examines the way in which the second and third shift are constituted as mutually dependent and reinforcing. Last, the discussion analyzes how this particular fitness text draws on empowerment discourse derived from feminist gains of access to the public sphere while paradoxically inscribing women to the privatized realm of bodily practices, domesticity, and family values. (shrink)

Emerging out of increased attention to gender equality within violence and HIV prevention efforts in South African society has been an intensified focus on masculinities. Garnering a deeper understanding of how men respond to shifting gender relations and rights on the ground is of urgent importance, particularly since social constructions of gender are implicated in the HIV/aids epidemic. As social scientists collaborating on a rights-based HIV and antiviolence program, we sought to understand masculinities, rights, and gender norms across six high (...) HIV/aids seroprevalence provinces in South Africa. Drawing on focus group research, we explore the ways that men who are engaged in HIV and antiviolence programming can often be simultaneously resistant to and embracing of changes in masculinities, women’s rights, and gender relations. We use our findings on men’s responses to changing gender relations to make suggestions for how to better engage men in HIV and antiviolence programs. (shrink)

The tendency for individuals to interpret ambiguous information in a threatening way is theorised to maintain anxiety disorders. Recent findings suggest that positive and negative interpretation bi...

This study examines the communication strategies employed by MeritCare's public relations staff during the fen-phen case. The ethic of significant choice was the primary lens for the study. The study revealed that MeritCare's public relations staff members believed they did, in fact, follow the ethic of significant choice. Specifically, they perceived that the biases held by staff helped maintain the public's safety as the primary issue during the fen-phen events. They also believed that their communication strategies allowed them to avoid (...) ambiguity and emotionalized language. Finally, the staff members felt that teaming with Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota enabled them to influence the marketplace of ideas by capitalizing on the credible standing of Mayo Clinic. (shrink)

Early life stress precedes alterations to neuro-immune activation, which may mediate an increased risk for stress-related psychiatric disorders, potentially through alterations of central kynurenine pathway metabolites, the latter being relatively unexplored. We hypothesized that ELS in a non-human primate model would lead to a reduction of neuroprotective and increases of neurotoxic KP metabolites. Twelve adult female bonnet macaques reared under conditions of maternal variable foraging demand were compared to 27 age- and weight-matched non-VFD-exposed female controls. Baseline behavioral observations of social (...) affiliation were taken over a 12-week period followed by the first cerebrospinal fluid sample. Subjects were then either exposed to a 12-week repeated separation paradigm or assigned to a “no-RSP” condition followed by a second CSF. We used high-performance liquid chromatography for kynurenine, tryptophan, 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid, kynurenic acid, and anthranilic acid as a proxy for quinolinic acid determination. At baseline, social affiliation scores were reduced in VFD-reared versus control subjects. CSF log KYNA and log KYNA/KYN ratio were lower in VFD-reared versus control subjects. CSF log KYNA/KYN was positively correlated with CSF log ANTH in VFD only. Controlling for log KYNA/KYN, log ANTH was elevated in VFD-reared subjects versus controls. CSF log KYNA/KYN obtained post-RSP was positively correlated with mean social affiliation scores during RSP, specifically in VFD. ELS is associated with a reduced neuroprotective and increased neurotoxic pathway products. That the two contrasting processes are paradoxically correlated following ELS suggests a cross-talk between two opposing KP enzymatic systems. (shrink)

L'empire du droit est le maître ouvrage de Ronald Dworkin, étudié et discuté par les professeurs et les théoriciens, par les juristes et les juges, par les étudiants et les acteurs de la vie politique aux Etats-Unis et ailleurs. Comment les juges établissent-ils le droit (et comment devraient-ils le faire)? Il montre que les juges doivent se prononcer sur les cas difficiles en interprétant, au lieu de se contenter d'appliquer, les jugements rendus antérieurement, et il énonce une théorie générale (...) de l'interprétation, en littérature comme en droit, et des cas où une interprétation doit l'emporter sur les autres. Toute interprétation juridique est le reflet d'une théorie sous-jacente sur la nature d'ensemble du droit : Ronald Dworkin évalue les mérites de trois de ces théories. L'une, le conventionnalisme, considère que le droit qui gouverne une collectivité se borne à la définition qu'en donnent les conventions en usage dans cette collectivité. Selon une autre théorie, le pragmatisme, très estimé aujourd'hui, la meilleure définition de la pratique juridique est celle d'un instrument devant aider une société à atteindre ses objectifs. Dworkin s'élève avec vigueur et avec persuasion contre ces deux points de vue et défend une troisième théorie du droit, celle du droit-intégrité. Il souligne que l'intérêt fondamental du droit n'est pas de faire état d'un consensus, ni de fournir des moyens efficaces pour parvenir aux objectifs que s'est fixés une société donnée, mais de répondre à l'exigence d'une collectivité politique agissant envers chacun de ses membres sur la base cohérente de principes définis. A la lumière de cette conception, il étudie certains cas dans le cadre de la Common Law, d'autres entrés en fonction du droit écrit, et les grands cas de droit constitutionnel soumis à la Cour suprême. Il démontre systématiquement que le concept d'intégrité politique et juridique est la clef de la théorie comme de la pratique juridiques dans le système anglo-américain. (shrink)

Echoing the debate about the nature of law that has dominated legal philosophy for several decades, this volume includes essays on the nature of law and on law not as it is but as it should be. Wherever possible, essays have been chosen that have provoked direct responses from other legal philosophers, and in two cases these responses are included. Contributors include H.L.A. Hart, R.M. Dworkin, Lord Patrick Devlin, John Rawls, J.J. Thomson, J. Finnis, and T.M. Scanlon.

Iqbal, Muhammad, Sir,1877-1938 ; Islamic philosophy; criticism.

This study examines the communication strategies employed by MeritCare’s public relations staff during the fen–phen case. The ethic of significant choice was the primary lens for the study. The study revealed that MeritCare’s public relations staff members believed they did, in fact, follow the ethic of significant choice. Specifically, they perceived that the biases held by staff helped maintain the public’s safety as the primary issue during the fen–phen events. They also believed that their communication strategies allowed them to avoid (...) ambiguity and emotionalized language. Finally, the staff members felt that teaming with Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota enabled them to influence the marketplace of ideas by capitalizing on the credible standing of Mayo Clinic. (shrink)

Of liberty and necessity, by D. Hume.--The doctrine of necessity examined, by C. S. Peirce.--Determinism in history, by E. Nagel.--Some arguments for free will, by T. Reid.--Has the self free will? by C. A. Campbell.--Dialogue on free will, by L. de Valla.--Can the will be caused? by C. Ginet.--Free will, by G. E. Moore.--A modal muddle, by S. N. Thomas.--Determinism, indeterminism, and libertarianism, by C. D. Broad.--An empirical disproof of determinism? by K. Lehrer.--Free will, praise and blame, by J. J. (...) C. Smart.--Bibliographical essay. (shrink)

The philosophy of metaReality and, in particular, ideas of transcendence can ‘underlabour’ for the re-enchantment of Islamic praxis, ethics and law by helping to uncover in a systematic, non-arbitrary way the spiritual objectives inherent in the basic beliefs, practices and obligations of Islam. The commonly accepted elements of the Islamic legal pathway, such as the obligation of marriage, far from being inhibiting, can help humans access the dialectical pulse of freedom and the emancipatory meaning inherent tendentially in human relationships. Thus, (...) the Islamic Shari'a, underlaboured by the philosophy of metaReality, rather than a symbol of legal backwardness and inflexibility, can be conducive once again to greater personal ontological wholeness and collective human flourishing. (shrink)

Jules Coleman, one of the world's most influential philosophers of law, here expounds his recent views on a range of important issues in legal theory. Coleman offers for the first time an explicit account of the pragmatist method that has long informed his work, and takes on the views of highly respected contemporaries such as Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz.

Jules Coleman, one of the world's leading philosophers of law, here presents his most mature work so far on substantive issues in legal theory and the appropriate methodology for legal theorizing. In doing so, he takes on the views of highly respected contemporaries such as Brian Leiter, Stephen Perry, and Ronald Dworkin.

This is a collection of essays on themes of legal philosophy which have all been generated or affected by Hart's work. The topics covered include legal theory, responsibility, and enforcement of morals, with contributions from Ronald Dworkin, Rolf Sartorius, Neil MacCormach, David Lyons, Kent Greenawalt, Michael Moore, Joseph Raz, and C.L. Ten, among others.

"Human beings are a part of nature and apart from it." The argument of Natural Law and Justice is that the philosophy of natural law and contemporary theories about the nature of justice are both efforts to make sense of the fundamental paradox of human experience: individual freedom and responsibility in a causally determined universe. Professor Weinreb restores the original understanding of natural law as a philosophy about the place of humankind in nature. He traces the natural law tradition from (...) its origins in Greek speculation through its classic Christian statement by Thomas Aquinas. He goes on to show how the social contract theorists adapted the idea of natural law to provide for political obligation in civil society and how the idea was transformed in Kant's account of human freedom. He brings the historical narrative down to the present with a discussion of the contemporary debate between natural law and legal positivism, including particularly the natural law theories of Finnis, Richards, and Dworkin. Professor Weinreb then adopts the approach of modern political philosophy to develop the idea of justice as a union of the distinct ideas of desert and entitlement. He shows liberty and equality to be the political analogues of desert and entitlement and both pairs to be the normative equivalents of freedom and cause. In this part of the book, Weinreb considers the theories of justice of Rawls and Nozick as well as the communitarian theory of Maclntyre and Sandel. The conclusion brings the debates about natural law and justice together, as parallel efforts to understand the human condition. This original contribution to legal philosophy will be especially appreciated by scholars, teachers, and students in the fields of political philosophy, legal philosophy, and the law generally. (shrink)

H.L.A. Hart'sThe Concept of Lawis the most important and influential book in the legal positivist tradition. Though its importance is undisputed, there is a good deal less consensus regarding its core commitments, both methodological and substantive. With the exception of an occasional essay, Hart neither further developed nor revised his position beyond the argument of the book. The burden of shaping the prevailing understanding of his views, therefore, has fallen to others: notably, Joseph Raz among positivists, and Ronald Dworkin (...) among positivism's critics. Dworkin, in particular, has framed, then reframed, the conventional understanding, not only of Hart's positivism, but of the terms of the debate between positivists and him. While standing on the sidelines, Hart witnessed the unfolding of not only a lively debate between positivists and Dworkin, but an equally intense one among positivists as to positivism's (and his) core claims. The most important debate has been between so-called inclusive and exclusive positivists: a debate as much about Hart's legacy as about the proper interpretation of legal positivism. (shrink)

The Postscript to The Concept of Law contains Herbert Hart's only sustained and considered response to the objections pressed against his views by his distinguished critic, Ronald Dworkin. In this extraordinary collection, many of the leading legal philosophers in the world evaluate the success of Hart's responses to Dworkin on several of these counts. Notable contributors include Joseph Raz of Oxford University and Jules L. Coleman of the Yale Law School.

We explore the relationship between jurisprudential theories pertaining to the nature of law and semantic and metasemantic theories pertaining to the meaning of ‘law’ in the wake of Dworkin’s notorious Semantic Sting argument in Law’s Empire (HUP 1986). Along the way we delineate various aspects of the semantic and metasemantic underpinnings of ‘law’ as an artifact term and advance the general methodological point that jurisprudential inquiry is only negligibly constrained by the findings of semantic and metasemantic inquiry.

Even though tacit legal norms are deeply important to our past, present, and future, the very idea of unwritten law has been difficult to pin down, and problematic in a range of ways. Existing discussions of the phenomenon fall short of adequacy on one of several fronts: either they have focused on describing the normative features of one kind of unwritten law, or completely conflated the study of unwritten law with natural law, or else offered examinations of unwritten social rules, (...) focussing on (mere) custom, ethics, and/or etiquette. A particular defect is the fact that unwritten law has not been given a treatment by those working in the tradition of analytical jurisprudence. My thesis introduces a novel means of analyzing and explicating the elusive concept of unwritten legal rules, striving thereby to advance the state-of-the-art. In what follows I argue that unwritten laws are informally publicized rules held on the threat of formal sanction by an appropriate political authority. I argue that a law is informally disseminated just in case the appropriate governing theory of law, known to subjects, provides those subjects with a set of instructions about who to defer to concerning the contents of the law, absent dissemination in official venues. I propose that there are at least five potential kinds of unwritten law routinely recognized in legal studies: operations, implicit constitutions, justice norms, fiat rules, and secret laws. Through careful examination of extant theories of law (Aquinas, Hobbes, Foucault, Marx, Austin, Fuller, Hart, and Dworkin), I argue that there are identifiable structural features of the contents of these theories that make them more or less likely to endorse the legal validity of each kind of unwritten law. Throughout the course of the dissertation, I show how we are able to diagnose the ways in which these structural features of our theories of law differentially support the validity of—and shed important, additional light upon—each potential variety of unwritten law. (shrink)

No one denies that moral principles figure in legal argument and practice. However, the kind of role morality can or must play in law has been a topic of debate not only between positivists and their critics, but also within the positivist camp. The topic was brought into contemporary prominence by Ronald Dworkin, who in TheModelofRulesI made the provocative observation that the legality of norms appears to depend sometimes on their substantive (moral) merits, and not just on their pedigree (...) or social source. 1 The observation was intended by Dworkin as a challenge to the positivism of H.L.A. Hart. (shrink)

The papers in this volume focus on two central issues in the philosophy of law, the relationship between law and morality, and crime and punishment. In the essay that gives the title to this volume, it is argued that, although in many legal systems there are in fact significant connections between law and morality, these connections are not conceptually or logically necessary. They depend on various social practices. Ronald Dworkin's famous attempt to undermine the legal positivist's separation of law (...) from morality is rejected, and it is argued that Dworkin's own positive theory of law may indeed be quite compatible with certain versions of legal positivism. Other essays explore the notion of a wicked legal system, the rule of law, and various perspectives on the nature of law. The essays on crime and punishment discuss the theory and practice of punishment. They extend the work done in the author's earlier book, "Crime, Guilt and Punishment". They reject a purely retributive justification of punishment, in spite of the increasing sophistication in its recent formulations. (shrink)

Vinit Haksar has written a fairly lengthy book in order to establish a rather simple point : that it is impossible to arrive at an adequate account of justice without judging the objective merit of alternative ways of life. The main target of his argument is John Rawls, whose influential A Theory of Justice purports to sever considerations of justice from those of the human good in precisely this way. Haksar’s argument is also intended, however, as a criticism of the (...) views of such other contemporary liberal theorists as Ronald Dworkin and Robert Nozick. (shrink)