In matters of rights, constitutions tend to avoid settling controversies. With few exceptions, rights are formulated in open-ended language, seeking consensus on an abstraction without purporting to resolve the many moral-political questions implicated by rights. The resulting view has been that rights extend everywhere but are everywhere infringed by legislation seeking to resolve the very moral-political questions the constitution seeks to avoid. The Negotiable Constitution challenges this view. Arguing that underspecified rights call for greater specification, Grégoire C. N. Webber (...) draws on limitation clauses common to most bills of rights to develop a new understanding of the relationship between rights and legislation. The legislature is situated as a key constitutional actor tasked with completing the specification of constitutional rights. In turn, because the constitutional project is incomplete with regards to rights, it is open to being re-negotiated by legislation struggling with the very moral-political questions left underdetermined at the constitutional level. (shrink)

The question—what is a political constitution?—might seem, at first blush, fairly innocuous. At one level, the idea of a political constitution seems fairly well settled, at least insofar as most political constitutionalists subscribe to a similar set of commitments, arguments and assumptions. At a second, more reflective level, however, there remains some doubt whether a political constitution purports to be a descriptive or normative account of a real world constitution, such as Britain’s. By exploring the idea of a political constitution (...) as differently articulated by J.A.G. Griffith, Adam Tomkins and Richard Bellamy, this essay explores why the normativity of a political constitution may be indistinct and ill-defined, and how compelling reasons for this indistinctness and ill-definition are to be found in the very idea of a political constitution itself. A political constitution is here conceived as a ‘model’ which supplies an explanatory framework within which to make sense of our constitutional self-understandings. The discipline of thinking in terms of a model opens up a critical space wherein there need not be some stark, all-encompassing choice between constitutional models, which, in turn, allows for more subtle understandings of Britain’s constitution as neither exclusively ‘political’ nor ‘legal’. (shrink)

Legislated Rights: Securing Human Rights through Legislation aims to correct certain imbalances in constitutional thought and scholarship that burden the legislature and rights with misconceptions...

This is a book review of Grégoire Webber, Paul Yowell, Richard Ekins, Maris Köpcke, Bradley W. Miller, and Francisco J. Urbina, "Legislated Rights" (Cambridge U. Pr., 2018).

Certain recent experiments are often taken to show that people are far more likely to classify a foreseen side-effect of an action as intentional when that side-effect has some negative normative valence. While there is some disagreement over the details, there is broad consensus among experimental philosophers that this is the finding. We challenge this consensus by presenting an alternative interpretation of the experiments, according to which they show that a side-effect is classified as intentional only if the agent considered (...) its relative importance when deciding on the action. We present two new experiments whose results can be explained by our hypothesis but not by any version of the consensus view. In the course of doing so, we develop a methodological critique of the previous literature on this topic and draw from it lessons for future experimental philosophy research. (shrink)

In the opening lines of ‘Black Orpheus’, written as a preface to an anthology of negritude poetry, Sartre challenges white readers ‘to feel, as I do, the shock of being seen’. Reading this poetry, he thinks, should undermine white people’s presumption of the objectivity of their perspective. Accordingly, the essay itself contradicts two prominent aspects of the philosophy he had so far developed: the idea that poetry could not be politically engaged; and the theory of radical freedom. These changes are (...) ultimately rooted in his realisation, upon reading this poetry, that his previous understanding of prose is mistaken. This has the consequence that his philosophical method, which derives ontological conclusions from prose descriptions of experience, has two important limitations: its premises cannot be drawn solely from his own experience; and French prose might be insufficient for formulating all relevant premises. He therefore revises his method to deploy this poetry as phenomenological grounds for ontological conclusions, which transforms his ontology of human existence to include cultural inheritance as a primary feature. We will see how this reading of negritude poetry exemplifies both the epistemic challenge involved in what he calls ‘the look’ and the use of listening in response to it. (shrink)

Clinical ethics consultation has become an important resource, but unlike other health care disciplines, it has no accreditation or accepted curriculum for training programs, no standards for practice, and no way to measure effectiveness. The Clinical Ethics Credentialing Project was launched to pilot‐test approaches to train, credential, privilege, and evaluate consultants.

The _Turba Philosophorum_ is at the confluence of many Greek traditions, and bears testimony both to the history of the transmission of Greek knowledge, and of its reception in Egypt in the ninth century.

How do people learn to talk about the causal and temporal relations between events, and the motivation behind why people do what they do? The narrative practice hypothesis of Hutto and Gallagher holds that children are exposed to narratives that provide training for understanding and expressing reasons for why people behave as they do. In this context, we have recently developed a model of narrative processing where a structured model of the developing situation is built up from experienced events, and (...) enriched by sentences in a narrative that describe event meanings. The main interest is to develop a proof of concept for how narrative can be used to structure, organize and describe experience. Narrative sentences describe events, and they also define temporal and causal relations between events. These relations are specified by a class of narrative function words, including “because, before, after, first, finally.” The current research develops a proof of concept that by observing how people describe social events, a developmental robotic system can begin to acquire early knowledge of how to explain the reasons for events. We collect data from naïve subjects who use narrative function words to describe simple scenes of human-robot interaction, and then employ algorithms for extracting the statistical structure of how narrative function words link events in the situation model. By using these statistical regularities, the robot can thus learn from human experience about how to properly employ in question-answering dialogues with the human, and in generating canonical narratives for new experiences. The behavior of the system is demonstrated over several behavioral interactions, and associated narrative interaction sessions, while a more formal extended evaluation and user study will be the subject of future research. Clearly this is far removed from the power of the full blown narrative practice capability, but it provides a first step in the development of an experimental infrastructure for the study of socially situated narrative practice in human-robot interaction. (shrink)

In this article, we first describe our general inhibitory-control theory and, then, we describe how we have tested its specific hypotheses on reasoning with brain imaging techniques in adults and children. The innovative part of this perspective lies in its attempt to come up with a brain-based synthesis of Jean Piaget’s theory on logical algorithms and Daniel Kahneman’s theory on intuitive heuristics.

This article illustrates instrumental variable (IV) estimation by examining an unexpected finding of the research on career adaptability and job satisfaction. Theoretical and empirical arguments suggest that in the general population, people’s abilities to adapt their careers are beneficial to their job satisfaction. However, a recent meta-analysis unexpectedly found no effect when personality traits are controlled for. We argue that a reverse effect of job satisfaction on career adaptability, originating from affective tendencies tied to personality, might explain this null effect. (...) Our argument implies that the estimates obtained with traditional ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions are biased by endogeneity, a correlation between an explanatory variable and the error term in a regression model. When experimental manipulations are impossible, IV estimations, such as two-stage least squares (2SLS) regressions, are one possible solution to the endogeneity problem. Analyzing three waves of data from a sample of 836 adults, the concurrent and time-lagged effect of job satisfaction on career adaptability was revealed to be more consistent than the reverse. Our results provide an explanation, rooted in affective dispositions, as to why recent meta-analytical estimates unexpectedly found that career adaptability does not predict job satisfaction at the interindividual level. We also discuss IV estimation in terms of its limits, weight the interpretation of its estimates against the temporality criterion for causal inference, and consider its possible extension to analyses of change. (shrink)

The text opening the 'Great Peace Part' ('Taiping bu') in the Ming Taoist Canon, the Great Peace Scripture Digest (Taiping jing chao) is widely confused with the famous Great Peace Scripture (Taiping jing) which follows it in the Canon. The first full analysis and reassessment of the Great Peace Scripture Digest, this paper reviews the textual morphology of its ancient and modern editions, discusses current hypotheses concerning its date and authorship, and investigates its literary structure and form, pointing to clusters (...) of prosodic patterns. Light is shed on strata of diachronic origin coexisting in the text, which should not be regarded as being the product of an inconstant solitary compiler, but rather as the conflation of shortened renditions of the Great Peace Scripture perhaps dating to the Tang and pre-Song or early Song eras. A full linear analysis of the text, including a concordance, completes the literary study. (shrink)

Background:Little is known about case managers’ ethical issues and professional values.Objectives:This article presents an overview of ethical issues in case managers’ current practice. Findings are examined in the light of nursing ethics, social work ethics and principle-based biomedical ethics.Research design:A systematic literature review was performed to identify and analyse empirical studies concerning ethical issues in case management programmes. It was completed by systematic content analysis of case managers’ national codes of ethics.Findings:Only nine empirical studies were identified, eight of them from (...) North America. The main dilemmas were how to balance system goals against the client’s interest and client protection against autonomy. Professional codes of ethics shared important similarities, but offered different responses to these two dilemmas.Discussion:We discuss the respective roles of professional and organizational ethics. Further lines of research are suggested. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently argued that traditional discussions of virtue and character presuppose an account of behaviour that experimental psychology has shown to be false. Behaviour does not issue from global traits such as prudence, temperance, courage or fairness, they claim, but from local traits such as sailing-in-rough-weather-with-friends-courage and office-party-temperance. The data employed provides evidence for this view only if we understand it in the light of a behaviourist construal of traits in terms of stimulus and response, rather than in the (...) light of the more traditional construal in terms of inner events such as inclinations. More recent experiments have shown this traditional conception to have greater explanatory and predictive power than its behaviourist rival. So we should retain the traditional conception, and hence reject the proposed alteration to our understanding of behaviour. This discussion has further implications for future philosophical investigations of character and virtue. Key Words: character traits • situationism • social psychology • virtue ethics. (shrink)

The scholars who defend or dispute moral relativism, the idea that a moral principle cannot be applied to people whose culture does not accept it, have concerned themselves with either the philosophical or anthropological aspects of relativism. This study, shows that in order to arrive at a definitive appraisal of moral relativism, it is necessary to understand and investigate both its anthropological and philosophical aspects. Carefully examining the arguments for and against moral relativism, Cook exposes not only that anthropologists have (...) failed in their attempt to support relativism with evidence of cultural differences, but that moral absolutists have been equally unsuccessful in their attempts to refute it. He argues that these conflicting positions are both guilty of an artificial and unrealistic view of morality and proposes a more subtle and complex account of morality. (shrink)

Marcel Mauss published his essay The Gift in the context of debates about the European sovereign debt crises and the economic growth experienced by the colonies. This article traces the discursive associations between Mauss’ anthropological concepts and the reformist program of French socialists who pushed for an “altruistic” colonial policy in the interwar period. This article demonstrates that the three obligations which Mauss identified as the basis of a customary law of international economic relations served as key references in the (...) French debate about the relationships between metropolises and colonies in the interwar period. Mauss made this relation between colonial policy and the ethnology of the gift explicit in his book, The Nation. Moving beyond Mauss’ interwar writings, the article traces the genealogy of his later reflections to his involvement in prewar debate... (shrink)

Résumé L’objet de cet article est d’analyser les récits de bestialité qui se multiplient dans la littérature des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, dans les écrits juridiques, médicaux, polémiques et surtout dans les relations de voyages. Ces anecdotes qui mettent en scène des accouplements, voire des enfantements, entre hommes et bêtes, amènent à questionner les rapports troubles entre l’épistémè de la Renaissance et les savoirs ethnographiques acquis durant cette première époque coloniale, savoirs qui s’imprègnent parfois des récits mythologiques locaux. Inspirées par (...) une perspective anthropomorphique comme par le modèle de la fable, ces anecdotes zoophiles témoignent de la diversité des réflexions sur un possible interrègne, sur les zones de partage instables entre l’homme et l’animal, mais aussi sur la projection de stéréotypes animaliers sur des populations étrangères. (shrink)

Breast cancer is a major public health challenge. Organized mammography screening (OS) is considered one way to reduce breast cancer mortality. EU recommendations prone mass deployment of OS, and back in 2004, France introduced a national OS programme for women aged 50–74 years. However, in 2012, participation rate was still just 52.7%, well short of the targeted 70% objective. In an effort to re-address the (in) efficiency of the programme, the French National Cancer Institute has drafted an expert-group review of (...) the ethical issues surrounding breast cancer mammography screening. (shrink)

Auxiliaire de justice, indépendant et mandaté par son client, l’avocat occupe une place singulière dans le système judiciaire français et sa parole se caractérise a priori par une grande liberté. A l’examen cependant, on constate que son espace de parole est soumis aux règles rituelles du procès qui tendent progressivement à le restreindre, et que le contenu de cette parole est contraint par les exigences de sa mission même s’il bénéficie d’une protection dont l’effectivité est une garantie fondamentale du procès (...) équitable. Ainsi, si indéniablement l’avocat peut dans certaines situations, dire plus que le citoyen ordinaire, il doit surtout en toutes circonstances veiller à dire mieux que ce dernier. (shrink)

Interrogating the relationship of the sovereign power of the nation state to the scientist's expert knowledge as a legitimating--and sometimes challenging- ...

Clinical ethics consultation has become an important resource, but unlike other health care disciplines, it has no accreditation or accepted curriculum for training programs, no standards for practice, and no way to measure effectiveness. The Clinical Ethics Credentialing Project was launched to pilot‐test approaches to train, credential, privilege, and evaluate consultants.

Touching on issues of power, authority, and domination, Manhunts takes an in-depth look at the hunting of humans in the West, from ancient Sparta, through the Middle Ages, to the modern practices of chasing undocumented migrants.

Jonathan Webber articulates an original interpretation of existentialism as the ethical theory that human freedom is the foundation of all other values. Offering an original analysis of classic literary and philosophical works published by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon up until 1952, Webber's conception of existentialism is developed in critical contrast with central works by Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. -/- Presenting his arguments in an accessible and engaging style, Webber contends that (...) Beauvoir and Sartre initially disagreed over the structure of human freedom in 1943 but Sartre ultimately came to accept Beauvoir's view over the next decade. He develops the viewpoint that Beauvoir provides a more significant argument for authenticity than either Sartre or Fanon. He articulates in detail the existentialist theories of individual character and the social identities of gender and race, key concerns in current discourse. Webber concludes by sketching out the broader implications of his interpretation of existentialism for philosophy, psychology, and psychotherapy. (shrink)

This paper examines how digital technologies might be used to improve ethical attitudes towards nonhuman animals, by exploring the case study of nonhuman apes kept in modern zoos. The paper describes and employs a socio-ethical framework for undermining anti-ape prejudice advanced by philosopher Edouard Machery which draws on classic anti-racism strategies from the social sciences. We also discuss how digital technologies might be designed and deployed to enable and enhance rather than impede the three anti-prejudice strategies of contact and interaction, (...) enlightenment, and individualization. In doing so, the paper illuminates the broad potential and limitations of digital technology to both harm and benefit animals via its effects on human ethical attitudes. This examination provides guidance for future projects and empirical work on using digital technologies to promote moral respect for a range of nonhuman animals in different settings. (shrink)

This paper articulates a new understanding of Sartre’s philosophical methodology in his early publications up to and including Being and Nothingness. Through his critique of Husserl across these works, Sartre develops an original and sophisticated variety of transcendental phenomenology. He was attracted to Husserl’s philosophy for its promise to establish the foundations of empirical psychology but ultimately concluded that it could not fulfil this promise. Through the analyses that led him to this conclusion, Sartre formulated a new kind of phenomenological (...) reduction and a distinctive kind of transcendental argument to draw conclusions about mind-independent reality from phenomenological premises. His aims were to dissolve the traditional distinction between mind and world, to establish that the mind is accessible to empirical study, and to formulate the conceptual framework required to study the mind systematically. Sartre’s philosophy of psychology, therefore, drove the philosophical development of the methodological foundation of his philosophical project. (shrink)

Webber argues for a new interpretation of Sartrean existentialism. On this reading, Sartre is arguing that each person’s character consists in the projects they choose to pursue and that we are all already aware of this but prefer not to face it. Careful consideration of his existentialist writings shows this to be the unifying theme of his theories of consciousness, freedom, the self, bad faith, personal relationships, existential psychoanalysis, and the possibility of authenticity. Developing this account affords many insights (...) into various aspects of his philosophy, not least concerning the origins, structure, and effects of bad faith and the resulting ethic of authenticity. This discussion makes clear the contributions that Sartre’s work can make to current debates over the objectivity of ethics and the psychology of agency, character, and selfhood. Written in an accessible style and illustrated with reference to Sartre’s fiction, this book should appeal to general readers and students as well as to specialists. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how systematic Charles Taylor’s philosophy is. It rejects two opposite readings: one claiming that Taylor’s thought is too diverse to have real unity; the other, that it is the product of a “monomaniac” (Taylor’s own word). I claim that his thought has a very distinct structure, comprising two levels. On the first, “meta-hermeneutic” level, Taylor defends a thesis about hermeneutics (namely, that it cannot be dispensed with): this unifies his anthropology, epistemology, moral (...) philosophy, philosophy of language and political philosophy. On the second, “hermeneutic” level, Taylor builds an impressive historic construal of modern identity and its dilemmas. More importantly, while these two levels are irreducibly distinct, they relate to each other in interesting ways, giving Taylor’s philosophy its systematicity. I finally confront this view with other readings, and argue that it is the best way to understand Taylor’s work. (shrink)

When policymakers craft rules for use by the general public, they must take into account the ways in which their rules are likely to be misapplied. Should contractualists and rule consequentialists do the same when they search for rules whose general acceptance would be non-rejectable or ideal? I argue that these theorists face a dilemma. If they ignore the possibility of misapplication, they end up with an unrealistic view that rejects rules designed to protect us from others’ mistakes. On the (...) other hand, if they take misapplication into account, they end up rejecting rules that appeal to what really matters morally in favor of easier-to-apply proxies for these rules. This leaves them unable to say why certain wrong acts are wrong, which in turn may lead them to mistaken verdicts about moral worth and wronging. I show how this misapplication dilemma applies to standard contractualist and rule consequentialist theories, but also suggest how it might generalize to other two-level theories, including those designed to avoid the ideal world objection. (shrink)

Fichte's philosophy represented one of the first coherent attempts to provide a utopian philosophical foundation for preventative police power, one which anticipated in surprising ways the fundamental logical premises of modern dataveillance or "datapower." This article examines Fichte's proposals for a new system of police passports and the logic of control on which it rests, contextualizing it within the transformation of police practices during his lifetime. It concludes with a discussion of Hegel's criticism of the logical incoherence of securitarian policing, (...) and its relevance for our situation today. (shrink)

Cortical stimulation has been used for brain mapping for over a century, and a standard assumption is that stimulation interferes with task execution due to local effects at the stimulation site. Stimulation can however produce afterdischarges which interfere with functional localization and can lead to unwanted seizures. We previously showed that cognitive effort can terminate these afterdischarges, when termination thus occurs, there are electrocorticography changes throughout the cortex, not just at sites with afterdischarges or sites thought functionally important for the (...) cognitive task used, and thresholds for afterdischarges and functional responses can change among stimulation trials. We here show that afterdischarge termination can occur prior to overt performance of the cognitive tasks used to terminate them. These findings, taken together, demonstrate that task-related brain changes are not limited to one or a group of functional regions or a specific network, and not limited to the time directly surrounding overt task execution. Discrete locations, networks and times importantly underpin clinical behaviors. However, brain activity that is diffuse in location and extended in time also affect task execution and can affect brain mapping. This may in part reflect fluctuating levels of attention, engagement, or motivation during testing. (shrink)

Cet article prend pour point de départ une critique souvent adressée au minimalisme moral de Ruwen Ogien : il y a bien de la normativité dans le rapport à soi, nous avons des obligations vis-à-vis de nous-même. Après avoir rappelé cette objection (en la reformulant et en la renforçant), l’on se demande si une forme de minimalisme peut malgré tout lui survivre. Cet article répond par la positive, en proposant une reformulation radicale de la thèse minimaliste, qui parvienne à maintenir (...) le rejet du paternalisme tout en prenant en compte l’existence d’une normativité dans le rapport à soi. Il explique en quel sens une telle thèse peut encore être considérée comme minimaliste, puis entreprend d’examiner ses principales conséquences. (shrink)

Research clearly shows that increasing the number of women in leadership positions yields financial benefits for the organization. Despite this, there has been limited upward movement in the percentage of women in senior leadership positions. Few studies have examined the linkage between masculine culture and the implications for men. Using a mixed methods approach with two studies, this research focused on four aspects of masculine contest cultural norms and how they impact male identity and perceptions of career advancement. Study 1 (...) used a qualitative interview study of 10 male executives and found that masculine contest culture norms were evident but were being perpetuated and reinforced by organizational culture instead of individual masculine identities. In addition, Study 1 demonstrated a shift in masculine contest culture norms reducing the emphasis on the strong male archetype. Study 2 examines the relationship between masculine contest culture attributes impacting perceived opportunities for career development and promotion. We evaluated these relationships through a large‐scale survey study and found that at higher levels of masculine contest culture norms, men's perceptions of procedural justice for career development and promotion were lower compared with women. Broadly, the findings suggest that masculine archetypes of leadership negatively affect men and women. (shrink)

The coming to office of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has brought to the fore the need to understand the rise of the far right and to come to terms with the conflicted legacies of more than a decade of rule under the Workers’ Party. This forum brings together six leading intellectuals from different traditions on the left and introduces their reflections on the contradictions and complexities of the Workers’ Party, the 2008 crisis, the June 2013 protests, the weakness of the (...) Brazilian left, corruption, and on how to characterise Bolsonaro’s regime. Their interventions offer crucial insights that are relevant today not just to Brazil, or even Latin America, but to the politics of the left worldwide. (shrink)