Human rights discourse has been likened to a global lingua franca, and in more ways than one, the analogy seems apt. Human rights discourse is a language that is used by all yet belongs uniquely to no particular place. It crosses not only the borders between nation-states, but also the divide between national law and international law: it appears in national constitutions and international treaties alike. But is it possible to conceive of human rights as a global language or lingua (...) franca not just in a figurative or metaphorical sense, but in a literal or linguistic sense as a legal dialect defined by distinctive patterns of word choice and usage? Does there exist a global language of human rights that transcends not only national borders, but also the divide between domestic and international law? Empirical analysis suggests that the answer is yes, but this global language comes in at least two variants or dialects. New techniques for performing automated content analysis enable us to analyze the bulk of all national constitutions over the last two centuries, together with the world’s leading regional and international human rights instruments, for patterns of linguistic similarity and to evaluate how much language, if any, they share in common. Specifically, we employ a technique known as topic modeling that disassembles texts into recurring verbal patterns. The results highlight the existence of two species or dialects of rights talk—the universalist dialect and the positive-rights dialect—both of which are global in reach and rising in popularity. The universalist dialect is generic in content and draws heavily on the type of language found in international and regional human rights instruments. It appears in particularly large doses in the constitutions of transitional states, developing states, and states that have been heavily exposed to the influence of the international community. The positive-rights dialect, by contrast, is characterized by its substantive emphasis on positive rights of a social or economic variety, and by its prevalence in lengthier constitutions and constitutions from outside the common law world, especially those of the Spanish-speaking world. Both dialects of rights talk are truly transnational, in the sense that they appear simultaneously in national, regional, and international legal instruments and transcend the distinction between domestic and international law. Their existence attests to the blurring of the boundary between constitutional law and international law. (shrink)

This is a short paper covering my own views on the methods and reasons behind the teaching of medical ethics. All the whys and wherefores are discussed and some conclusions reached. This paper is given from a junior doctor's viewpoint but could equally apply to many others.

This article deals with the housing framework of laws, that is, constitutions. It distinguishes between constitution referring to the de jure, formal, written book of laws and codes that assume supreme authority within any structure, and constitution which defines a body of informal, conditional rules and laws that do not have supreme authority but are abided by, owing to various objective, subjective factors. Constitution reflects the gap between aspiration and actuality, and constitution attracts a higher degree of compliance and implementation. (...) Studies have indeed found a negative relationship between formal rights protection and actual rights observance. The article reveals that rights guarantees are more prone to failure than success as they depend substantially on environmental and institutional conditions. This article emphasizes a symbiosis between judicialization and constitutionalization while a policy question needs to be judicial in nature if the judiciary has to decide on it. (shrink)

In France, John Baptist Say has the merit of producing a very superior work on the subject of Political Economy. His arrangement is luminous, ideas clear, style perspicuous, and the whole subject brought within half the volume of [Adam] Smith's work. Add to this considerable advances in correctness and extension of principles.

This is a first attempt at consolidating and extending the lists of biographies of historians of science compiled by George Sarton, Aldo Mieli and François Russo. In doing so, a systematic examination has been made of the Dictionary of scientific biography, and of the relevant parts of the Isis cumulative bibliography and Kenneth May's Bibliography and research manual of the history of mathematics. Material for a supplement is being collected. Readers are invited to send additional material along with their comments.

The integration of digital phenotyping in psychiatry promises unprecedented insights into mental health, particularly in college settings where mental well-being is a growing concern. The COVID-19...

Many computational tools for the simulation and design of emergency evacuation and egress are now available. However, due to the scarcity of human and social behavioral data, these computational tools rely on assumptions that have been found inconsistent or unrealistic. This paper presents a multi-agent based framework for simulating human and social behavior during emergency evacuation. A prototype system has been developed, which is able to demonstrate some emergent behaviors, such as competitive, queuing, and herding behaviors. For illustration, an example (...) application of the system for safe egress design is provided. (shrink)

Capital punishment—the legally authorized killing of a criminal offender by an agent of the state for the commission of a crime—stands in special need of moral justification. This is because execution is a particularly severe punishment. Execution is different in kind from monetary and custodial penalties in an obvious way: execution causes the death of an offender. While fines and incarceration set back some of one’s interests, death eliminates the possibility of setting and pursuing ends. While fines and incarceration narrow (...) one’s routes to happiness, death eliminates its possibility. Not surprisingly, there is much debate about the moral permissibility of capital punishment. This entry maps the terrain of this debate. The first section discusses justifications of the death penalty as they appear in major theories of punishment. The second section surveys moral objections to execution that apply to most justifications. The third addresses procedural criticisms, which do not target the morality of execution so much as the justice of its implementation. (shrink)

Skeptical theism is a leading response to the evidential argument from evil against the existence of God. Skeptical theists attempt to block the inference from the existence of inscrutable evils to gratuitous evils by insisting that given our cognitive limitations, it wouldn’t be surprising if there were God-justifying reasons we can’t think of. A well-known objection to skeptical theism is that it opens up a skeptical Pandora’s box, generating implausibly wide-ranging forms of skepticism, including skepticism about the external world and (...) past. This paper looks at several responses to this Pandora’s box objection, including a popular response devised by Beaudoin and Bergmann. I find that all of the examined responses fail. It appears the Pandora’s box objection to skeptical theism still stands. (shrink)

There is an old and powerful argument for the claim that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. A recent response to this argument, sometimes called the “dependence response,” centers around the claim that God’s relevant past beliefs depend on the relevant agent’s current or future behavior in a certain way. This paper offers a new argument for the dependence response, one that revolves around different cases of time travel. Somewhat serendipitously, the argument also paves the way (...) for a new reply to a compelling objection to the dependence response, the challenge from prepunishment. But perhaps not so serendipitously, the argument also renders the dependence response incompatible with certain views of providence. (shrink)

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously. Here we get to grips with an everyday reasoning error: the gambler's fallacy.

An in-depth study of Kierkegaard's thinking on Christology, emphasising the radical nature of his approach to the incarnation, with an emphasis on the call of the Christian believer to a life of 'kenotic' (self-emptying) discipleship in imitation of Christ.

Women are drastically underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and this underrepresentation has been linked to gender stereotypes and ability related beliefs. One way to remedy this may be to challenge male bias gender stereotypes around STEM by cultivating equitable beliefs that both female and male can excel in STEM. The present study implemented a growth mindset intervention to promote children’s incremental ability beliefs and investigate the relation between the intervention and children’s gender stereotypes in an informal science learning (...) site. Participants were visitors to a science museum who took part in an interactive space science show. Participants who were exposed to a growth mindset intervention, compared to the participants in the control condition, reported significantly less gender stereotyping around STEM by reporting equitably in the stereotype awareness measure. Relatedly, participants in the control condition reported male bias gender stereotype in the stereotype awareness measure. Further, children between 5 and 8-years-old reported greater male bias stereotypes awareness and stereotype flexibility in space science compared to children between 9 and 12-years-old. Lastly, children demonstrated in-group bias in STEM ability. Male participants reported gender bias favoring males’ ability in stereotype flexibility and awareness measures, while female participants reported bias toward females’ ability in stereotype flexibility and awareness measures. These findings document the importance of a growth mindset intervention in buffering against STEM gender stereotyping amongst children, as well as the significant role a growth mindset intervention can play within an informal science learning site. (shrink)

First Published in 2007. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Assume that, even with a time machine, Tim does not have the ability to travel to the past and kill Grandfather. Why would that be? And what are the implications for traditional debates about freedom? We argue that there are at least two satisfactory explanations for why Tim cannot kill Grandfather. First, if an agent’s behavior at time _t_ is causally dependent on fact _F_, then the agent cannot perform an action (at _t_) that would require _F_ to have not (...) obtained. Second, if an agent’s behavior at time _t_ is causally dependent on fact _F_, then the agent cannot perform an action (at _t_) that would prevent _F_ from obtaining. These two explanations have distinct upshots for more traditional debates over freedom. The first implies that causal determinism is incompatible with the ability to do otherwise and also raises questions about the traditional arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and the ability to do otherwise; the second does neither. However, both explanations imply that the Molinist account of divine providence renders agents unable to do otherwise, at least in certain circumstances. (shrink)

We all know that we have and are our bodies. But might it be possible to leave this common place? In the present article we try to do this by attending to the way we do our bodies. The site where we look for such action is that of handling the hypoglycaemias that sometimes happen to people with diabetes. In this site it appears that the body, active in measuring, feeling and countering hypoglycaemias is not a bounded whole: its boundaries (...) leak. Bits and pieces of the outside get incorporated within the active body; while the centre of some bodily activities is beyond the skin. The body thus enacted is not self-evidently coherent either. There are tensions between the body’s organs; between the control under which we put our bodies and the erratic character of their behaviour; and between the various needs and desires single bodies somehow try to combine. Thus to say that a body is a whole, or so we conclude, skips over a lot of work. One does not hang together as a matter of course: keeping oneself together is something the embodied person needs to do. The person who fails to do so dies. (shrink)

Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism aims to show that naturalism is, as he puts it, ‘incoherent or self defeating’. Plantinga supposes that, in the absence of any God-like being to guide the process, natural selection is unlikely to favour true belief. Plantinga overlooks the fact that adherents of naturalism may plausibly hold that there exist certain conceptual links between belief content and behaviour. Given such links, natural selection will favour true belief. A further rather surprising consequence of the existence of (...) such links is this: even if semantic properties are epiphenomenal, unguided evolution will still favour true belief. (shrink)

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces tips and pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously. Here we get to grips with two everyday reasoning errors.

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously. Here we get to grips with two everyday reasoning errors.

Is the virtue of the good citizen the same as the virtue of the good man? Aristotle addresses this in Politics 3.4. His answer is twofold. On the one hand, (the account for Difference) they are not the same both because what the citizen’s virtue is depends on the constitution, on what preserves it, and on the role the citizen plays in it, and because the good citizens in the best constitution cannot all be good men, whereas the good man’s (...) virtue is uniform. On the other hand, (the account for Identity) the two virtues are identical in the good men in the best constitution, in which all are good citizens, each possessing the ability for ruling and for being ruled. This nuanced answer can be seen as Aristotle’s synthesis of a Periclean view (contribution to state blots out personal wrongs) and a Socratic view (no good citizen is without justice). Its nuances reflect the extent to which Aristotle’s conceptions of good citizenship and the best constitution accommodate deviations of what is probable from the human ideal set out in his ethical writings. In the present chapter, I will first address three puzzles regarding the nuances of Aristotle’s answer. Second, I will consider one question about its implication: Does Aristotle’s account for Difference turn out to entail something ultra-Periclean: that no one can simultaneously be a good man and a good citizen in any constitution other than the best? I shall argue the negative. (shrink)

Brian Loar believes he has refuted all those antiphysicalist arguments that take as their point of departure observations about what is or isn't conceivable. I argue that there remains an important, popular and plausible-looking form of conceivability argument that Loar has entirely overlooked. Though he may not have realized it, Saul Kripke presents, or comes close to presenting, two fundamentally different forms of conceivability argument. I distinguish the two arguments and point out that while Loar has succeeded in refuting one (...) of Kripke's arguments he has not refuted the other. Loar is mistaken: physicalism still faces an apparently insurmountable conceptual obstacle. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Police Philosophize about the Armed and Dangerous The Interview.

Law's article begins by restating the classical ANT position that objects do not exist `in themselves' but are the effect of a performative stabilization of relational networks. In addition, these material enactments inevitably have a spatial dimension; they simultaneously establish spatial conditions for objectual identity, continuity, and difference. Space must not be reified as a natural, pre-existing container of the social and the material, but is itself a performance. Moreover, there are multiple forms of spatiality beyond the Euclidean space of (...) regions, and objects may exist and achieve homeomorphism within several different spatial systems. Technologies such as the Zimbabwe Bush Pump present a fluid object which is able to exist and cohere without the presence of fixed boundaries or the permanence of a particular functional definition. The network logic, however, which gravitates towards stability and functionality, tends to exclude and silence this spatial Other. An alternative political ontology is needed which goes beyond the reification of network space in order to give voice to the fluid objects which escape its unidimensional functionality. (shrink)

Let (leeway) incompatibilism be the thesis that causal determinism is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. Several prominent authors have claimed that incompatibilism alone can capture, or at least best captures, the intuitive appeal behind Jorge Luis Borges's famous “Garden of Forking Paths” metaphor. The thought, briefly, is this: the “single path” leading up to one's present decision represents the past; the forking paths that one must decide between represent those possible futures consistent with the past and the laws (...) of nature. But if determinism is true, there is only one possible future consistent with the past and the laws and, hence, only one path to choose from. That is, if determinism is true, then we are not free to do otherwise. In this paper, I argue that this understanding of the Garden of Forking Paths faces a number of problems and ought to be rejected even by incompatibilists. I then present an alternative understanding that not only avoids these problems but still supports incompatibilism. Finally, I consider how various versions of (leeway) compatibilism fit with the Garden of Forking Paths as well as the broader question of whether metaphors, however intuitive, have any dialectical force in the debates over freedom. (shrink)

This paper examines recent attempts to defend Rule-Consequentialism against a traditional objection. That objection takes the form of a dilemma, that either Rule-Consequentialism collapses into Act-Consequentialism or it is incoherent. Attempts to avoid this dilemma based on the idea that using RC has better results than using AC are rejected on the grounds that they conflate the ideas of a criterion of rightness and a decision procedure. Other strategies, Brad Hooker's prominent amongst them, involving the thought that RC need contain (...) no overarching concern to maximize the good are acknowledged to avoid the original dilemma, but lead to further problems of motivating and justifying RC in the absence of such a concern. The paper argues that Hooker's attempt to deal with these problems by using a 'Reflective Equilibrium plus method is unsuccessful. (shrink)

The year is 2100. Geena is the proud new owner of Emit, a state-of-the-art robot. She has just unwrapped him, the packaging strewn across the dining room floor. Emit is designed to replicate the outward behaviour of a human being down to the last detail . Emit responds to questions in much the same way humans do. Ask him how he feels and he will say he has had a tough day, has a slight headache, is sorry he broke that (...) vase, and so on. Geena flips the switch at the back of Emit's neck to ‘on’. Emit springs to life. (shrink)

In Mengzi 6A4, Gaozi states that “yì 義 (propriety, rightness) is external, not internal.” In 6A5, Meng Jizi says of yì that “...it is on the external, not from the internal.” Their defenses are met with Mengzi’s resistance. What does he perceive and resist in these statements? Focusing on several key passages, I compare six promising interpretations. 6A4 and a relevant part of 2A2 can be rendered comparably sensible under each of the six. However, what Gaozi says in 6A1 clearly (...) is evidence to Mengzi that, of the six views, Gaozi holds three although he does not convey them in his statement. As for Meng Jiz’s defense of his statement, Meng Jizi cites a special occasion where one is required to act one way even though one would feel a different way. Mengzi’s response has been traditionally interpreted as boiling down to a dissenting opinion about empirical psychology, that the agent on that special occasion would in fact feel the same way as they ought to act. But on a more charitable reading, the point Mengzi makes is conceptual: Though the satisfaction of yì may not require that the feeling and the act align perfectly in this case, cases where the alignment obtains are conceptually prior. This not only refutes Meng Jizi’s statement but also enables a more elegant explanation of why the Mengzi rightly has no record of Mengzi affirming that yì is internal. I conclude that 6A5 itself uniquely favors one interpretation, as far as Meng Jizi’s position is concerned: How one feels is irrelevant to whether one satisfies yì. (shrink)

In Warrant and Proper Function, Alvin Plantinga develops an argument designed to show that naturalism is self-defeating. One component of this larger argument is what I call Plantinga's belief-cum-desire argument, which is intended to establish something more specific: that if the content of our beliefs does causally effect behaviour (that is to say, semantic content is not epiphenomenal), and if naturalism and current evolutionary doctrine are correct, then the probability that we possess reliable cognitive mechanisms must be either inscrutable or (...) low. This paper aims to refute Plantinga's belief-cum-desire argument. (shrink)

This article is currently available as a free download on ingentaconnect.

The theological energies released by Martin Luther in 1517 created a set of theological insights and problems that eventually led to the development of kenotic Christology. This article traces how kenotic Christology originated in the Eucharistic Controversy between Luther and Zwingli, before receiving its first extensive treatment in the debate between the Lutheran theologians of Tübingen and Giessen in,the early seventeenth century. Attention then turns to the nine-teenth century, when doctrinal tensions resulting from the enforced union of the Prussian Lutheran (...) and Reformed churches created the conditions for a new flowering of kenotic Christology in the theologies of Ernst Sartorius and, subsequently, Gottfried Thomasius. Kenotic Christology ultimately originates with Luther, however, for it owes its existence to the creative theological energies he unleashed and which remain his lasting legacy. (shrink)