In this chapter I focus on two problems facing immigration systems around the world, and Australia in particular. The topics addressed are chosen because each one involves important fundamental rights and because significant improvement in these areas is possible even if each state acts alone, without significant coordination with others. First, I examine refugee programmes, focussing specifically on the ‘two- tier’ refugee programmes pioneered by Australia with the introduction of Temporary Protection Visas by the Howard Government in 1999. Next, I (...) look at recent declines in refugee resettlement schemes from already stingy levels and, in relation to Australia in particular, I show how the tying of resettlement numbers to the number of affirmative asylum claims granted is both wrong- headed and counterproductive. The second area of immigration policy explored is family migration, another area where immigration systems around the world have been moving in the wrong direction, often via less than transparent administrative processes. Australia is no exception. While Australia’s family migration system is reasonably good on its face, in practice there are several factors which make the programme significantly less than satisfactory from the perspective of protecting the basic rights of migrants and, arguably more importantly, citizens. These problems can and should be fixed in straightforward ways, and since doing so would be more just, would have few— if any— significant negative consequences, and in fact would have a number of clear benefits, those changes should be made. (shrink)

Family ties play a particular and distinctive role in immigration policy. Essentially every country allows ‘family-based immigration’ of some sorts, and family ties may have significant importance in many other areas of immigration policy as well, grounding ‘derivative’ rights to asylum, providing access to citizenship and other benefits at accelerated rates, and serving as a shield from the danger of removal or deportation. Furthermore, status as a child may provide certain benefits to irregular migrants or others without proper immigration standing (...) that is not available to adults. Despite the fact that these benefits are extremely widespread, the justification for them remains less than fully clear, and the extent of the benefits required by considerations of justice (as opposed to expediency or other policy considerations) is debated. While essentially all states recognize at least some of these rights, a significant number of them wish to reduce, rescind, or place significant conditions on them. The role of the family in immigration policy, then, stands in need of further clarification. In this paper I attempt to provide the needed clarification and justification. I discuss first questions about family unification or formation, focusing in particular on how broad a right must be provided by states wishing to have a just immigration policy, and on whether this right violates norms of liberal neutrality. I then discuss the family in relation to refugee and asylum policy, considering both when family ties should be given weight in refugee protection decision and when harm to a family member should, on its own, be able to be grounds for applying for refugee protection. I turn next to the question of when, and to what extent, family ties should be able to serve as a “shield” to removal or deportation, and finish with a discussion of the special rights of and obligations to children in immigration settings. (shrink)

A Significant percentage of the people outside their country of citizenship or residence who are unable to meet their basic needs on their own, and need international protection, do not fall under the definition set out in the UN Refugee Convention. This has led many - both academic commentators and activists - to call for a new, expanded refugee definition, preferably backed up by a new, binding, international convention. In earlier work I have resisted this call, arguing that there is (...) good reason to pick out a sub-stet of those in need of international aid - a set that largely, if not completely, corresponds to those picked out by the Refugee Convention - for special benefit and protection. However, even if Convention refugees are in some ways special, we are left with the question of what, if anything, is owed to those in need of aid who are not Convention refugees. In this chapter, I set out philosophical foundations for so-called complementary protection, and show how this may and should apply to people in need of international aid who are not Convention refugees. (shrink)

This chapter examines three approaches to applied political and legal philosophy: Standard activism is primarily addressed to other philosophers, adopts an indirect and coincidental role in creating change, and counts articulating sound arguments as success. Extreme activism, in contrast, is a form of applied philosophy directly addressed to policy-makers, with the goal of bringing about a particular outcome, and measures success in terms of whether it makes a direct causal contribution to that goal. Finally, conceptual activism (like standard activism), primarily (...) targets an audience of fellow philosophers, bears a distant, non-direct, relation to a desired outcome, and counts success in terms of whether it encourages a particular understanding and adoption of the concepts under examination. (shrink)

The border is an area where the rule of law has often found difficulty taking root, existing as law-free zones characterized by largely unbounded legal and administrative discretion. In his important new book, The Rule of Law in the Real World, Paul Gowder deftly combines historical examples, formal models, legal analysis, and philosophical theory to provide a novel and compelling account of the rule of law. In this paper I consider whether the account Gowder offers can provide the tools needed (...) to bring the border under the rule of law. I argue that on Gowder’s account, there are two ways in which we might try to extend the rule of law to the border.The first is to look at concrete connections that current citizens or members of the political community have with non-citizens. Just as the interests of current citizens give them strong reasons to coordinate to establish the rule of law in their own community, so may the interests of current members in connections with nonmembers give them reason to work to extend the rule of law to the border. These interests can include family ties, other forms of personal relationships, offers of employment, intellectual connections, and others. Some of these connections already serve to give greater legal protections, including protections from arbitrary decision-making, to some non-citizens, and the general trend, I argue, can and should be further strengthened The second method for extending the rule of law to the border involves appealing to certain universal norms so as to build a sense of community that stretches beyond borders. While these norms are not as robust or well established as domestic law, and therefore are unlikely to extend all of the protections of the rule of law to all people at the border, they can, I argues, be a basis for working against the worst arbitrary actions by border officials. I conclude by considering the vexed dispute about providing “amnesty” for unauthorized immigrants in the United States and other countries. I argues that Gowder’s account of the amnesty provided to supporters of the oligarchic coups in ancient Athens provides a model for thinking about when and how amnesties for unauthorized migrants can be done without offending the rule of law, thereby making them more palatable to current citizens. (Please download this paper for free from SSRN on the link provided on this page). (shrink)

This is a short introduction to a book symposium on Paul Gowder's recent book, _The Rule of Law in thee Real World_ (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The book symposium will appear in the St. Luis University Law Journal, 62 St. Louis U. L.J., -- (2018), with commentaries on Gowder's book by colleen Murphy, Robin West, Chad Flanders, and Matthew Lister, along with replies by Paul Gowder.

In this short paper I hope to use some ideas drawn from the theory and practice of civil disobedience to address one of the most difficult questions in immigration theory, one rarely addressed by philosophers or other theorists working on the topic: How should we respond to people who violate immigration law? I will start with what I take to be the easiest case for my approach—that of so-called “Dreamers”—unauthorized immigrants in the US who were brought to this country while (...) still children (often as infants) and who have spent the majority of their lives in the US. Members of this group have engaged in wide-scale protests, making the civil disobedience paradigm all the more plausible. I will then move on to the case of unauthorized immigrants who have engaged in protests, but who do not fall into the “Dreamer” category. Finally, I will consider whether thinking about immigration law violations from the perspective of civil disobedience—and the proper response to that—can help us think about immigration enforcement more generally. (shrink)

In his _Natural Law and the Nature of Law_, Jonathan Crowe has written an important and interesting book, one that should be read by people interested in jurisprudence, ethics, and political philosophy. Its distinctive strength is in the way Crowe shows how much can be done within a natural law framework that does not assume a theological background. A distinctive feature of Crowe's approach to natural law, one that distinguishes it from other well-known approaches, is its argument that only a (...) minimal state, if any state at all, is required by or even compatible with natural law. It is this claim that I focus on in this paper. I show that these anti-state arguments do not work, and that a much more robust, largely state-like, type of political society is necessary if the requirements of natural law that Crowe accepts are to be met. In doing this, I also draw some related conclusions about the proper understanding and reach of the common good. In arguing for this conclusion I do not attack Crowe's general approach, but rather make what I hope to be an internal critique of the argument. If I am successful in this, then there will be reason for people who are sympathetic to the overall project to reject some of Crowe’s sub-conclusions, even if they wish to remain working in the natural law tradition overall. And, there will be reason to accept that something like the modern state will be necessary - at least for some time and for people like us - if we are to live good lives. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that anyone who accepts a Rawlsian account of justice should favor granting family-based immigration benefit to same-sex couples. I first provide a brief over-view of the most relevant aspects of Rawls's position, Justice as Fairness. I then explain why family-based immigration benefits are an important topic and one that everyone interested in immigration and justice must consider. I then show how same-sex couples are currently systematically excluded from the benefits that flow from family-based immigration rights. (...) Next I argue that people in the constitutional and legislative stages of Rawls's original position would act to protect family-based immigration rights for themselves and show how these rights are rights of the current citizens of a state to bring in certain outsiders and not rights of outsiders seeking to enter. Importantly, this argument takes place entirely within the bounds of Rawls's domestic theory of justice and does not make reference to his more controversial views found in his account of international justice. I then show that there is no acceptable reason to restrict these rights to opposite-sex couples and good reason to extend them to same-sex couples. Finally I consider two objections to my account and show why they do not threaten my conclusion. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel use of tax policy to address one of the most pressing issues arising from economic globalization and international migration, that of “brain drain” – in particular, the migration of certain skilled and highly trained or educated professionals from less and least developed countries to wealthy “western” countries. This problem is perhaps most pressing in relation to doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals, but exists also for teachers, lawyers, economists, engineers, and other highly skilled or trained (...) professionals. While there have been other proposals in the past to use tax policy to address brain drain (most famously versions of the so-called “Bhagwati Tax”, a form of exit tax), in this paper I provide an account of and justification for using tax credits, modeled loosely on the foreign tax credits U.S. citizens receive in certain situations for taxes paid in other countries. My proposal avoids several of the pitfalls of other methods of using tax policy to ameliorate the harms of brain drain, as it does not subject people from the developing world to potentially onerous double taxation, and does not depend on sophisticated tax collection capabilities within developing countries, capabilities which are often lacking. Additionally, my proposal also leads to fewer morally problematic restrictions on the liberty of citizens of less and least developed countries than do non-taxed based alternative proposals, such as temporary bans on migration. While the proposal cannot hope to completely solve the problems that arise in relation to brain drain – no approach can do this – it does provide a straightforward way to ameliorate the problems that arise from it without placing significant financial or liberty burdens on already less advantaged people from the developing world. -/- (This paper may be downloaded for free from the link to my SSRN page below). (shrink)

It is a common charge that treaties, perhaps especially recent treaties relating to economic activity, provide unreasonable restrictions on the sovereignty of the state parties. While this charge has been made most forcefully by smaller states, it is sometimes raised with justification by larger states or state-like bodies such as the E.U. as well. When a tribunal judging a dispute on an economic treaty tells a state that it may no longer make decisions such as to accept or reject genetically (...) modified foods, allow internet gambling, or produce generic drugs for domestic consumption, the citizens of the state may rightfully think they have lost important aspects of sovereignty to bodies that do not have legitimate authority to govern. This, in turn, makes negotiating treaties, despite their obvious value, much harder than it otherwise would be, leading to decreased cooperation and the forgoing of potentially significant gain. In this paper, I argue that by importing certain ideas from contract theory to the interpretation of treaties, these worries may be significantly reduced. Contracts have the seemingly paradoxical ability to increase the autonomy of the signers by allowing them to bind themselves to perform certain future actions. But, the ability of contracts to perform this function would be greatly reduced if the only possible remedy for breach were specific performance. Yet, an analogous approach to treaties is common among many important theorists of international law, who demand the equivalence of specific performance in the case of treaties. I will show how importing ideas from contract law can help ensure that treaties, especially economic treaties, are sovereignty-enhancing for states in a way that is similar to the way that contracts may be autonomy-enhancing for individuals, and will show that importing these elements from contract law will strengthen, not undermine, the legitimacy and fairness of international law. (Please download the full paper from SSRN at the link on this page). (shrink)

Over the last several years asylum cases relating to activities of criminal gangs have greatly increased in frequency. Cases involving Central American gangs, the so-called maras, have attracted the most attention but similar cases have arisen out of South Eastern and Eastern Europe as well. Applicants in such cases face a number of difficulties as their cases do not fit into paradigm categories for asylum claims. These cases almost always involve non-state actors, for example, acting for reasons that are not, (...) at least at first glance, clearly political. Additionally, the reasons why gangs target particular individuals often do not obviously fit into one of the traditional protected grounds. If applicants fleeing gang activity are to successfully apply for asylum they will have to overcome these apparent difficulties. In this paper, a contribution to the University of Memphis Law Review Spring Symposium on immigration reform, I break down gang-related asylum claims into three main categories and show how at least some cases in each category fit within the area set out for protection by asylum and refugee law. I briefly discuss a conceptual framework which explains how some gang-related cases should be seen as falling in the area that asylum law seeks to protect (thereby providing a concrete example of the sort of protection that I claim in my dissertation refugee law is meant to provide) and give advice to practitioners about how to formulate meritorious claims. (shrink)

Temporary labor migration programs have been among the most controversial topics in discussions of immigration reform. They have been opposed by many, perhaps most, academics writing on immigration, by immigration reform activists, and by organized labor. This opposition has not been without some good reasons, as many historical temporary labor migration programs have led to significant injustice and abuse. However, in this paper I argue that a well-crafted temporary labor migration program is both compatible with liberal principles of justice and (...) likely to be an important part of a sensible immigration policy for the near future, at least. I show how the many injustices and high potential for abuse of earlier programs may be avoided. I also show good reason to favor a well-crafted temporary labor migration program over either the more likely alternative outcome of officially tight borders (which would almost certainly maintain our current dependence on large-scale unauthorized immigration) and the much less likely option of nearly open borders. As increased labor migration of all sorts is an intrinsic part of increased economic globalization, it is especially important to craft guidelines for just temporary labor migration programs if we are to both gain the advantages of globalization and protect the rights of workers. (shrink)

Legal philosophers have given relatively little attention to international law in comparison to other topics, and philosophers working on international or global justice have not taken international law as a primary focus, either. Allen Buchanan's recent work is arguably the most important exception to these trends. For over a decade he has devoted significant time and philosophical skill to questions central to international law, and has tied these concerns to related issues of global justice more generally. In what follows I (...) review Buchanan's new collection of essays, Human Rights, Legitimacy, and the Use of Force, paying special attention to Buchanan's argument that the philosophy of international law must be more empirically informed than it has been so far, and also to his claim that greater emphasis must be placed on the role of institutions. While these are important claims, I show that Buchanan often does not take the first far enough, and that appealing to institutions cannot do as much as Buchanan hopes or needs if his substantive conclusions are to be correct. (shrink)

A number of articles and empirical studies over the past decade, most by Paul Robinson and co-authors, have suggested a relationship between the extent of the criminal law's reputation for being just in its distribution of criminal liability and punishment in the eyes of the community – its "moral credibility" – and its ability to gain that community's deference and compliance through a variety of mechanisms that enhance its crime-control effectiveness. This has led to proposals to have criminal liability and (...) punishment rules reflect lay intuitions of justice – "empirical desert" – as a means of enhancing the system's moral credibility. In a recent article, Christopher Slobogin and Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein (SBR) report seven sets of studies that they argue undermine these claims of empirical desert and moral credibility and instead support SBR's proposed distributive principle of "individual prevention," a view that focuses on an offender's future dangerousness rather than on his perceived desert. -/- The idea that there is a relationship between the criminal law's reputation for justness and its crime-control effectiveness did not originate with Robinson and his co-authors. Rather, it has been a common theme among a wide range of punishment theory scholars for many decades. A particularly important conclusion of recent Robinson studies, however, is their confirmation that this relationship is a continuous one: even small nudges in moral credibility can produce corresponding changes in the community's deference to the criminal law. This is important because it shows that even piecemeal changes or changes at the margin – as in reforming even one unjust doctrine or procedure – can have real implications for crime-control. SBR's studies, rather than contradicting the crime-control power of empirical desert, in fact confirm it. Further, SBR's studies do not provide support for their proposed "individual prevention" distributive principle, contrary to what they claim. -/- While SBR try to associate their principle with the popular "limiting retributivism" adopted by the American Law Institute in its 2007 amendment of the Model Penal Code, in fact it is, in many respects, just the reverse of that principle. With limiting retributivism, the Model Code's new provision sets desert as dominant, never allowing punishment to conflict with it. SBR would have "punishment" essentially always set according to future dangerousness; it is to be constrained by desert only when the extent of the resulting injustices or failures of justice is so egregious as to significantly delegitimize the government and its law. This ignores the fact that even minor departures from justice may have an important cumulative effect on the system as a whole. What SBR propose – essentially substituting preventive detention for criminal justice – promotes the worst of the failed policies of the 1960s, where detention decisions were made at the back-end by "experts," and conflicts with the trend of the past several decades of encouraging more community involvement in criminal punishment, not less. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Future of the Book: Images of Reading in the American Utopian Novel by Kevin J. HayesMatthew LeggattKevin J. Hayes. The Future of the Book: Images of Reading in the American Utopian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. E-book, 192 pp. ISBN 9780192670960.Kevin J. Hayes is a writer of high regard, having published many books over his distinguished career, including biographical studies such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, (...) George Washington: A Life in Books, and several on Edgar Allen Poe. Works like the 2020 monograph Shakespeare and the Making of America showcase his intersecting interests in biography, literature, and American political history. It is these interests that are very much on display in his 2022 monograph The Future of the Book: Images of Reading in the American Utopian Novel, and we should be thankful that Hayes has turned his attention to the subject of utopian fiction as he certainly has much to add to the discussion. The book is clearly a labor of love and Hayes writes with a great degree of detail and authority suggesting he has always held a deep interest in the utopian novel. In fact, from the preface, it is clear the research supporting this book has spanned many years.The preface sets it all up very neatly. Immediately, the reader is invited into the research story of the book. Hayes has an evocative and methodical style that carries that research throughout. The author is also careful in this preface to assert his expertise in the field. Having read “virtually every utopian novel in American literature published before 1910” on microfilm gives Hayes the opportunity to explore many of the obscure and lesser-known works of the period (ix), which he notes in his introduction is primarily between 1880 and 1915. Since many of these novels are yet to be digitized, his insight is notably rare.Aside from an introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into five chapters. The first is titled “The Residential Library” and is centrally about [End Page 601] books in home-spaces, from personal libraries to books on shelves in someone’s living room. Chapter 2, “The Public Library,” explores depictions of public libraries and ways that collected knowledge might be organized and made accessible in utopian visions. “The Idea of Authorship,” chapter 3, is about the professional/amateur status of authors in utopian societies. In this section, Hayes also explores ideas about literary quality and attempts to answer concerns that a utopian age would necessarily be incapable of producing great literature. Chapter 4, titled “The Newspaper,” details the struggles utopian authors have had with the newspaper format. Finally, “The Printed Page and the Written Word” examines ways in which utopian authors sought to refine the printed and written word and their innovative suggestions in this area. Each of these chapters opens by considering Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward in relation to the subject at hand and Bellamy’s 1888 novel is referred to extensively throughout The Future of the Book, offering a frame for Hayes’s exploration of utopian literature’s inner dialogue with the printed word.In his introduction, Hayes highlights that much of the scholarly work in this area has focused on dystopias. Indeed, when I think about the representation of literature in speculative fiction I tend, first, to think of the great dystopias like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which history is erased and rewritten by The Party, or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, in which books are considered dangerous and thus are rigorously hunted and burned by the ironically named Firemen of the future. Alternatively, postapocalyptic movies spring to mind. Taking shelter in the New York Public Library, Sam Hall (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) frantically burns books for warmth despite the protests of several other characters in Roland Emmerich’s 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow. Likewise, in “Marooned” (1989), an episode of the British SF sitcom Red Dwarf (1988–), of which I was particularly fond during my formative years, a copy of the collected works of Shakespeare is burned to keep the last remaining human, David Lister (played by Craig Charles), alive. In the opposite direction, some postapocalyptic... (shrink)

During his more than fifty-year writing and teaching career, Horace M. Kallen (1882-1974), the American Jewish philosopher who coined the term "cultural pluralism," incorporated into his pragmatism-infused philosophy of life a number of different sciences, from racial science to psychology and physics. Part biography, part cultural history, "Horace Kallen Confronts America" offers fresh insight into the larger question of how social discourses shape modern American Jewish identity.

What does it mean to consider the world of AI through a Christian lens? Rapid developments in AI continue to reshape society, raising new ethical questions and challenging our understanding of the human person. Encountering Artificial Intelligence draws on Pope Francis’ discussion of a culture of encounter and broader themes in Catholic social thought in order to examine how current AI applications affect human relationships in various social spheres and offers concrete recommendations for better implementation. The document also explores questions (...) regarding personhood, consciousness, and the kinds of relationships humans might have with even the most advanced AI. Through these discussions, this book investigates the theoretical and practical challenges to interpersonal encounter raised by the age of AI. (AI Research Group for the Centre for Digital Culture of the Dicastery of Culture and Education of the Holy See). (shrink)

A recovery of Georg Lukács's later thought on aesthetics, politics, and ontology and the first articulation of its unity, through the lens of the philosopher's writing on totality and reification.

Global lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic have offered many people first-hand experience of how their daily online activities threaten their digital well-being. This article begins by critically evaluating the current approaches to digital well-being offered by ethicists of technology, NGOs, and social media corporations. My aim is to explain why digital well-being needs to be reimagined within a new conceptual paradigm. After this, I lay the foundations for such an alternative approach, one that shows how current digital well-being initiatives can (...) be designed in more insightful ways. This new conceptual framework aims to transform how philosophers of technology think about this topic, as well as offering social media corporations practical ways to design their technologies in ways that will improve the digital well-being of users. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has catalysed what may soon become a permanent digital transition in the domains of work, education, medicine, and leisure. This transition has also precipitated a spike in concern regarding our digital well-being. Prominent lobbying groups, such as the Center for Humane Technology, have responded to this concern. In April 2020, the CHT has offered a set of ‘Digital Well-Being Guidelines during the COVID-19 Pandemic.’ These guidelines offer a rule-based approach to digital well-being, one which aims to mitigate (...) the effects of moving much of our lives online. The CHT’s guidelines follow much recent interest in digital well-being in the last decade. Ethicists of technology have recently argued that character-based strategies and redesigning of online architecture have the potential to promote the digital well-being of online technology users. In this article, I evaluate the CHT’s rule-based approach, comparing it with character-based strategies and approaches to redesigning online architecture. I argue that all these approaches have some merit, but that each needs to contribute to an integrated approach to digital well-being in order to surmount the challenges of a post-COVID world in which we may well spend much of our lives online. (shrink)

Value-sensitive design theorists propose that a range of values that should inform how future social robots are engineered. This article explores a new value: digital well-being, and proposes that the next generation of social robots should be designed to facilitate this value in those who use or come into contact with these machines. To do this, I explore how the morphology of social robots is closely connected to digital well-being. I argue that a key decision is whether social robots are (...) designed as embodied or disembodied. After exploring the merits of both approaches, I conclude that, on balance, there are persuasive reasons why disembodied social robots may well fare better with respect to the value of digital well-being. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that ethical leadership is beneficial for the organization, the leader, and followers. Yet, little has been said about potential limitations of ethical leadership, particularly boundary conditions involving the same person perceived to display ethical leadership. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, we argue that supervisor-induced hindrance stress and job hindrance stress are factors linked to the supervisor and work environment that may limit the positive impact of ethical leadership on employee deviance and turnover intentions. Specifically, we (...) expect that high levels of hindrance stress drain resources, specifically perceptions of social support, by inhibiting the completion of work, particularly in combination with the high expectations of ethical leaders. We test our model across two time-lagged field studies. Our results demonstrate that supervisor-induced hindrance stress mitigates some of the beneficial impact of ethical leadership and that job hindrance stress further strains these relationships. Overall, our results suggest that both forms of hindrance stress jointly impact the effectiveness of ethical leadership on important outcomes, and do so partly because of their influence on perceived social support. We discuss theoretical contributions to the ethical leadership and stress bodies of literature, as well as practical implications for managers and organizations wishing to develop ethical leaders. (shrink)

Asylum has become a highly charged political issue across developed countries, raising a host of difficult ethical and political questions. What responsibilities do the world's richest countries have to refugees arriving at their borders? Are states justified in implementing measures to prevent the arrival of economic migrants if they also block entry for refugees? Is it legitimate to curtail the rights of asylum seekers to maximize the number of refugees receiving protection overall? This book draws upon political and ethical theory (...) and an examination of the experiences of the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia to consider how to respond to the challenges of asylum. In addition to explaining why asylum has emerged as such a key political issue in recent years, it provides a compelling account of how states could move towards implementing morally defensible responses to refugees. (shrink)

The costs of the COVID-19 pandemic are yet to be calculated, but they include the loss of millions of lives and the destruction of countless livelihoods. What is certain is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has changed the way we live for the foreseeable future. It has forced many to live in ways they would have previously thought impossible. As well as challenging scientists and medical professionals to address urgent value conflicts in the short term, COVID-19 has raised slower-burning value questions (...) for corporations, public institutions, governments, and policymakers. In simple terms, the pandemic has brought what we care about into sharp relief, both collectively and individually. Whether this revaluation of our values will last beyond the current pandemic is unknown. Once COVID-19 has been tamed, will the desire to return to our previous lives be irresistible? Or will living under pandemic conditions have taught us something that will be incorporated into how we design our future lives and technologies? These are hard questions for the ethics of technology, which this volume aims to explore and address. (shrink)

Drawing on social comparison theory, we investigate employees’ ethical and performance comparisons relative to a similar coworker and subsequent emotional and behavioral responses. We test our theoretically driven hypotheses across two studies. Study 1, a cross-sectional field study, reveals that employees who perceive they are more ethical than their coworkers experience negative emotions toward the comparison coworkers and those feelings are even stronger when the employees perceive they are lower performers than their coworkers. Results also reveal that negative emotions mediate (...) the indirect relationship between being more ethical than a coworker, but also being a lower performer than that coworker onto social undermining and ostracism. Study 2, a 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design, provides further support for our moderated mediation model. Results reveal that participants experience negative emotions when they receive information that they are more ethical than a comparison participant. Negative emotions are amplified if the participant is told they were a lower performer than the comparison participant. Those participants indicate their desire to mistreat and ignore the comparison participant if given the opportunity. Thus, we find support for our hypotheses using a multi-method design. (shrink)

Spinoza was one of the most influential figures of the Enlightenment, but his often obscure metaphysics makes it difficult to understand the ultimate message of his philosophy. Although he regarded freedom as the fundamental goal of his ethics and politics, his theory of freedom has not received sustained, comprehensive treatment. Spinoza holds that we attain freedom by governing ourselves according to practical principles, which express many of our deepest moral commitments. Matthew J. Kisner focuses on this theory and presents (...) an alternative picture of the ethical project driving Spinoza's philosophical system. His study of the neglected practical philosophy provides an accessible and concrete picture of what it means to live as Spinoza's ethics envisioned. (shrink)

The idea that science is or should be value-free, and that values are or should be formed independently of science, has been under fire by philosophers of science for decades. Science and Moral Imagination directly challenges the idea that science and values cannot and should not influence each other. Matthew J. Brown argues that science and values mutually influence and implicate one another, that the influence of values on science is pervasive and must be responsibly managed, and that science (...) can and should have an influence on our values. This interplay, he explains, must be guided by accounts of scientific inquiry and value judgment that are sensitive to the complexities of their interactions. Brown presents scientific inquiry and value judgment as types of problem-solving practices and provides a new framework for thinking about how we might ethically evaluate episodes and decisions in science, while offering guidance for scientific practitioners and institutions about how they can incorporate value judgments into their work. His framework, dubbed "the ideal of moral imagination," emphasizes the role of imagination in value judgment and the positive role that value judgment plays in science. (shrink)

Proponents of the value ladenness of science rely primarily on arguments from underdetermination or inductive risk, which share the premise that we should only consider values where the evidence runs out or leaves uncertainty; they adopt a criterion of lexical priority of evidence over values. The motivation behind lexical priority is to avoid reaching conclusions on the basis of wishful thinking rather than good evidence. This is a real concern, however, that giving lexical priority to evidential considerations over values is (...) a mistake and unnecessary for avoiding the wishful thinking. Values have a deeper role to play in science. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the neglected question of justice between states in the distribution of responsibility for refugees. I argue that a just distribution of refugees across states is an important normative goal and, accordingly, I attempt to rethink the normative foundations of the global refugee regime. I show that because dismantling the restrictive measures currently used by states in the global South to prevent the arrival of refugees will not suffice to ensure a just distribution of refugees between (...) states, a more detailed account of how responsibilities should be shared between states is required. To this end, I make three claims. First, I argue that the definition of ‘refugee’ must be broadened beyond those subjected to persecution to include harms of action or omission by states that seriously jeopardise personal security or subsistence needs. Second, I argue that allocating a fair share of refugees to states should be based on state’s integrative capacities. Finally, I argue that distributive justice between states must be balanced against the legitimate interests of refugees in their destination country and the duty of states to ensure they are settled in places where they are likely to flourish. (shrink)

Digital technologies are changing our understanding of ethical emulation. In this article, Matthew Dennis proposes that some social media technologies have given rise to a strikingly new set of ethical ideals, often concerned with the ideal of self-cultivation. While there is relatively little philosophical discussion of these kinds of ideals, Dennis suggests that scrutiny of Friedrich Nietzsche's ethical philosophy offers a guiding account of why the ideal of self-directed character change is important. He concludes by speculating on how the (...) digital affordances of social media technologies will change the way in which ethical exemplars influence future generations. (shrink)

The view that it is better for life to be created free of disability is pervasive in both common sense and philosophy. We cast doubt on this view by focusing on an influential line of thinking that manifests it. That thinking begins with a widely-discussed principle, Procreative Beneficence, and draws conclusions about parental choice and disability. After reconstructing two versions of this argument, we critique the first by exploring the relationship between different understandings of well-being and disability, and the second (...) by more briefly focusing on the idea of a significant reason. By placing these results against the broader historical and ongoing contexts in which the lives of those with disabilities have been deemed of inferior quality, we conclude with a call for greater humility about disability and well-being in thought and practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article reevaluates Hölderlin’s social and political thought in the 1790s. Against Georg Lukács, it argues that Hölderlin’s politics of the new mythology, while utopian, are not mystical. In the Fragment of Philosophical Letters and the Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism, Hölderlin instead articulates two fundamental claims. Socially, the new mythical collectivity must elevate (erheben) the social relations produced by bourgeois society, exalting them in aesthetic-religious form, rather than sublating (aufheben) them, modifying both their form and their content. Politically, (...) realizing this new collectivity requires transcending the state, and so is essentially revolutionary. Hölderlin’s prosaic writings thus supplement Hyperion’s romantic critique of modernity. They take as their point of departure a sober exposition of the social relations of the market emerging in Hölderlin’s time and, from within these relations, excavate a new mythical collectivity capable of suturing the fragmentary divisions of modern life. (shrink)

Based on the French notion of terroir or ‘the taste of place,’ a certified geographical indication (GI) identifies an agro-food product as originating in a particular territory and suggests that its quality, reputation, or other characteristics are essentially or exclusively attributable to its geographical origin. Previous scholarship exploring the social construction of terroir has focused on how disparities in political, economic, and cultural power shape GI regulations, certification procedures, and territorial boundaries. While these works have considered knowledge as a resource (...) deployed through relations of authority, studies of GI implementation have not adequately considered an important aspect of power in contemporary politics: the epistemic authority to assert the legitimacy of knowledge and its relevance to policymaking. In contrast, in this article, I take the accomplishment of epistemic authority – to determine the ‘essential’ and ‘exclusive’ physical and/or cultural attributes of place that shape product character – as key to the social construction of terroir and the institutionalization of GI regulations. This process is explored through a case study of Ecuador’s 2013-2019 implementation of a GI for Galápagos Islands coffee. I draw on analysis of relevant policy and regulatory documents and semi-structured interviews with 21 key stakeholders to argue that analytical attention to the legitimacy and relevance of terroir knowledge explains how coffee producers were able to deploy authoritative knowledge to disrupt and reinforce relations of authority and challenge the terms and mechanisms of GI qualification. (shrink)

In the face of the desperate plight of refugees, virtually all moral and political philosophers, regardless of their general position on immigration controls, argue that states have a duty to grant asylum: people must not be turned back to countries where they would face persecution or severe human rights violations. Yet this consensus obscures a number of thorny ethical issues raised by the plight of the displaced. In this piece, I want to draw from recent writing in political and ethical (...) theory to bring some of these issues into view. I start by considering what a refugee is, before turning to the question how the obligations of political communities to the displaced are grounded. I then move to consider what societies owe to refugees and the question of international justice in the allocation of asylum. I conclude with a discussion of the moral responsibilities of refugees themselves. (shrink)

Virtue ethical interpretations of Nietzsche are increasingly viewed as a promising way to explain his moral philosophy, although current interpretations disagree on which character traits he regards as virtues. Of the first-, second-, and third-wave attempts addressing this question, only the latter can explain why Nietzsche denies that the same character traits are virtues for all individuals. Instead of positing the same set of character traits as Nietzschean virtues, third-wave theorists propose that Nietzsche only endorses criteria determining whether a specific (...) character trait is a virtue or vice for a specific individual. The article examines the criteria-based approaches of third-wave theorists Lester Hunt and Christine Swanton, showing how they urgently need revising to explain Nietzsche’s endorsement of non-acquisitive character traits. To do this I explore Nietzsche’s unpublished remarks on Spinoza, which I contend better explains why he understands non-acquisitive character traits as virtues. (shrink)

A far-reaching and influential view in evolutionary biology claims that species are cohesive units held together by gene flow. Biologists have recognized empirical problems facing this view; after sharpening the expression of the view, we present novel conceptual problems for it. At the heart of these problems is a distinction between two importantly different concepts of cohesion, what we call integrative and response cohesion. Acknowledging the distinction problematizes both the explanandum of species cohesion and the explanans of gene flow that (...) are central to the view we discuss. We conclude by tracing four broader implications for the study and conceptualization of species. (shrink)

The processes mediating dynamic and flexible responding to rapidly changing task-environments are not well understood. In the present research we employ a Stroop procedure to clarify the contribution of context-sensitive control processes to online performance. In prior work Stroop interference varied as a function of probe location context, with larger Stroop interference occurring for contexts associated with a high proportion of congruent items [Crump, M. J., Gong, Z., & Milliken, B. . The context-specific proportion congruent stroop effect: location as a (...) contextual cue. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13, 316–321.] Here, we demonstrate that this effect does not depend on awareness of the context manipulation, but that it can depend on attention to the predictive context dimension, and on the relative salience of the target and predictive context dimensions. We discuss the implications of our results for current theories of cognitive control. (shrink)

Pluralisms of various sorts are popular in philosophy of science, including those that imply some scientific concept x should be eliminated from science in favour of a plurality of concepts x1, x2, … xn. This article focuses on influential and representative arguments for such eliminative pluralism about the concept species. The main conclusions are that these arguments fail, that all other extant arguments also fail, and that this reveals a quite general dilemma, one that poses a defeasible presumption against many (...) eliminative pluralisms about various scientific concepts. The article ends by outlining a novel integrative alternative in defence of species. 1) Introduction 2) The species Concept, the Category ‘Species’, and the ‘Species’ Category Problem 3) What Are Eliminative Pluralism about species, and the Arguments for It? 4) Evaluation of Arguments 4.1 Splitting? 4.2 Lumping? 4.3 The eliminative pluralist’s dilemma 5) More General Lessons6Species Cohesion: An Integrative Alternative7Conclusion. (shrink)

Technological advancements in information systems over the past few decades have enabled firms to work with the major suppliers and customers in their supply chain in order to improve the performance of the entire channel. Tremendous benefits for all parties can be realized by sharing information and coordinating operations to reduce inventory requirements, improve quality, and increase customer satisfaction; but the companies must collaborate effectively to bring these gains to fruition. We consider two alternative methods of managing these interfirm supply (...) chain relationships in this article. The first, which we have named “dictatorial collaboration,” occurs when a dominant supply chain entity assumes control of the channel and forces the other firms to follow its edicts. We compare and contrast this method with “sustainable collaboration,” in which the parties share resources and engage in joint problem solving to improve the performance of the system as a whole. We use a virtue ethics lens to describe these methods of relationship management to suggest that sustainable collaboration is preferable to dictatorial collaboration both operationally and ethically in the long run. (shrink)

We argue for a new conventionalism about many kinds of evolutionary groups, including clades, cohesive units, and populations. This rejects a consensus, which says that given any one of the many legitimate grouping concepts, only objective biological facts determine whether a collection is such a group. Surprisingly, being any one kind of evolutionary group typically depends on which of many incompatible values are taken by suppressed variables. This is a novel pluralism underlying most any one group concept, rather than a (...) familiar pluralism claiming many concepts are legitimate. Consequently, we must help biological facts determine grouphood, even when given a single grouping concept. (shrink)

Thirteen original essays by leading scholars explore aspects of Spinoza's ethical theory and, in doing so, deepen our understanding of it as the richly rewarding core of his system. They resolve interpretive difficulties, advance longstanding debates, and point the direction for future research.