Absent mistake or misrepresentation, most scholars assume that parties who agree to contract do so voluntarily. Scholars tend further to regard that choice as an important exercise in moral agency. Hanoch Dagan and Michael Heller are right to question the quality of our choices. Where the fundamental contours of the transaction are legally determined, parties have little opportunity to exercise autonomous choice over the terms on which they deal with others. To the extent that our choices in contract do not (...) reflect our individual moral constitutions — our values, virtues, vices, the set of reasons we reject and the set of reasons we endorse — we are not justified in regulating contracts reluctantly. Contracts are entitled to the privilege of liberal regulatory deference only to the extent that they are the work product of individual autonomy. The assumption that contract is voluntary does enormous work in most normative theories of contract. This Article takes still more seriously the obstacles to autonomous choice that contracting parties face. The most important constraints are not in contract law itself but in the material and moral imperatives that dictate parties’ contracting preferences. Many contracts are driven by circumstantial considerations or actual background obligations. While these contracts are not wholly lacking in the element of voluntariness, we should distinguish them from those choices — and those contracts — which more fully realize our potential to self-consciously author our relations with others. Autonomous choice in contract requires more than Dagan and Heller imply, and it is likely beyond the power of contract law standing alone to deliver it. (shrink)

The premise of contract law is that the redistribution of entitlements that results from contract is justified by the process of agreement. But theories of contract differ importantly on how and when voluntary exchange justifies a resorting of entitlements. Pure theories regard the principles of contract as essentially derivative from some aspect of the principle of autonomy; contracting parties’ intent to assume legal obligation is in principle necessary and sufficient for its enforcement. Perfect theories do not view contract as self-justifying (...) but regard the process of agreement as reliable evidence that contracts are welfare-improving. This article demonstrates the limitations of pure and perfect views. It favours instead imperfect theories of contract, which would have judges self-consciously pursue the normative ends of contract law as they apply context-sensitive rules. (shrink)

In “The Choice Theory of Contracts,” we explain contractual freedom and celebrate the plurality of contract types. Here, we reply to critics by refining choice theory and showing how it fits and shapes what we term the “Contract Canon”. I. Freedom. Charles Fried challenges our account of Kantian autonomy, but his views, we show, largely converge with choice theory. Nathan Oman argues for a commerce-enhancing account of autonomy. We counter that he arbitrarily slights noncommercial spheres central to human interaction. Yitzhak (...) Benbaji suggests that choice theory’s commitment to autonomy is overly perfectionist. Happily, in response to Benbaji, we can cite with approval Charles Fried’s point that contract types are “enabling our liberties.” II. Choice. Aditi Bagchi criticizes our inattention to impediments to choice. We show how choice theory’s commitments to both multiplicity and relational justice ameliorate these impediments. Gregory Klass explores parol evidence to highlight the mechanisms of choice. We substantially concur with his position, and show how such mechanisms can ensure voluntariness, an essential element of choice. Oren Bar-Gill and Clayton Gillette question the institutional capacity of existing legal actors to implement choice theory. Working from the example of cohabitation, we offer a somewhat more optimistic view. III. Contracts. Peter Benson contends our focus on the rational slights the reasonable. Although we did not use this Rawlsian vocabulary, choice theory complies with its strictures — more so than transfer theory. Daniel Markovits and Alan Schwartz claim provocatively that contract theory must: capitulate before pluralism ; leverage it; or fall victim to a so-called “embracing” approach. We reject the charge that choice theory is foundationally value-pluralist. Instead, we cabin pluralism and put it to work. The Contract Canon starts on the next big step for choice theory by explaining existing doctrine and helping adjudicate contract practice. Each Article in this Issue advances the field; each prompts us to refine choice theory — all steps, we hope, toward a more just and justified law of contract. (shrink)

The classical theory of rational choice is built on several important internal consistency conditions. In recent years, the reasonableness of those internal consistency conditions has been questioned and criticized, and several responses to accommodate such criticisms have been proposed in the literature. This paper develops a general framework to accommodate the issues raised by the criticisms of classical rational choice theory, and examines the broad impact of these criticisms from both normative and positive points of view.

This paper considers the question of virtues appropriate to a corporate actor's moral character. A model of corporate appetites is developed by analogy with animal appetities; and the pursuit of initially virtuous corporate tendencies to an extreme degree is shown to be morally perilous. The author thus refutes a previous argument which suggested that (1) corporate virtues, unlike human virtues, need not be located on an Aristotelian mean between opposite undesirable extremes because (2) corporations do not have appetites; and (3) (...) corporate virtues must serve the end of sustainable profit. If these disanalogies between corporate and human virtue no longer hold, then the stage is set for us to formulate a more adequate model of good corporate character that would encompass other-regarding virtues. (shrink)

Kant's system of Transcendental Idealism may be regarded, in the contemporary philosophical perspective, as concerned with the problem whether any linguistic or conceptual system can be regarded as adequately explained in terms of the facts which the system organises. ‘ Transcendental ’ may be understood as what is ‘ non-reducible ’. Kant seems to hold that a linguistic scheme cannot be reduced to the facts which fall within the scheme, and thus it is transcendental to those facts. Formulated in such (...) terms, the Kantian doctrine does not, apparently , propound anything which is new; that facts are tailored to a linguistic scheme is pretty much a well-known doctrine these days. But then, as we shall see, it does say something new; and when we extract that novel element in it, we shall discover also the positive import in the Kantian term, ‘ Transcendental ’. (shrink)

This study develops and tests an integrated model that explains how Schwartz’s higher order personal values of Openness to Change, Conservation, Self-Transcendence and Self-Enhancement influence the ethical behavior of accountants. The study further explores the influence of ethics training, gender and religiosity on ethical behavior. A survey instrument was administered to 252 accounting students and the findings reveal that some of the higher order personal values are significant in explaining the ethical behavior of accounting students. The findings also reveal that (...) gender and ethical training influence ethical behavior, and that effect of the personal value Self-Transcendence differs depending on participant gender and also religiosity. The implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

This paper takes the position that interpretations of legal discourse are invariably taken in the context of socio-pragmatic realities to which a particular instance of discourse applies. What makes this process even more complicated is the fact that social realities themselves are often negotiated within the mould of one’s subjective conceptualisations of reality. Institutions and organisations, including people in power, often represent socio-political realities from an ideologically fuelled perspective, engendering many ‘illusory’ categories often a result of contested versions of reality. (...) To substantiate this view, we discuss interpretations of a number of interesting contemporary and controversial laws, including America’s Patriot Act and Hong Kong’s proposed Article 23 of the Basic Law. Both laws can be seen as illustrative of the definitional conflict that abstract concepts such as democracy and human rights are subjected to in their own specific socio-political contexts. While America crowns itself with democracy and Hong Kong struggles to achieve it in effective synthesis with its unique political arrangement, the laws produced by both contrasting political systems are unexpectedly similar, aiming for the moderation of basic rights. The actions of both governments set against their beliefs and discourses, and furthermore set against one another and other media voices, particularly those of non-governmental organisations, political activists, and other socio-political groups, demonstrate contestation of realities, giving rise to ‘discursive illusions’, which seem to be interpreted not so much on the basis of their linguistic construction but more on the basis of socio-pragmatic factors, such as trust, belief, transparency, control and power. (shrink)

Arguments for the expansion of formal schooling have long focused on individual outcomes from schooling, including increasing income, reducing poverty, delaying marriage, and improving health, particularly for girls and women. For nearly three decades now, global education agendas have supported girls’ education in an effort to achieve these outcomes. A large body of research analyzes girls’ individual empowerment from schooling, but less attention is given to how schooling is creating change in families and communities, particularly for lowered-caste girls in India. (...) This article places longitudinal data from a three-year qualitative interview study of schoolgirls in Rajasthan alongside qualitative life-history interviews of girls who completed secondary school in Uttarakhand to understand how schooling affects social changes for lower castes. The analysis, using an intersectional and relational approach, illustrates how girls’ schooling shifts kin and caste relations connected to marriage and work but in ways that do not transform the stickiness of caste and gender norms. We argue that educational policies and programs must attend to the ways in which caste is implicated in achieving outcomes of delayed marriage and formal employment for lowered-caste girls in Indian communities if schooling is to create positive social change. (shrink)

We develop and use an integrated individual-level model to explain the driving forces behind digital piracy practice in two nations. The proposed model combines the Norm Activation model and Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology models. This study also explores the effect of culture on intention to practice DP in two nations: US and India. A survey instrument was used to collect data from 231 US and 331 Indian participants. Use of the integrated model proves to be a (...) powerful and a viable approach to understanding DP across cultures. In each nation, all 10 path coefficients on the research model are statistically significant thereby establishing the fact that personal norm, together with other factors, influences INT to engage in DP, which in turn, may influence the actual practice. The results reveal a support for cross-cultural generalizability and applicability of the proposed model. Culture clearly plays a strong moderating role in two out of the three paths tested. The implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

This article suggests that criminality in leaders might best be understood by ethicists as a matter of degree. Leaders may take without legitimate claim a variety of tangible or intangible goods including ideas and personal health. The extent to which any such act should be disfavoured is subject to debate. Moreover, both theft and control may be understood as continuous phenomena. Kleptocratic regimes within workplace or family may foster in people a habit of accepting similar treatment from economic and political (...) leaders at all levels. Forms of governance may be arranged on a continuum from those that serve to those that exploit their subjects. Responses to kleptocratic regimes range from acceptance through unconscious and conscious resistance to violent revolt. (shrink)

Quantification, Negation, and Focus: Challenges at the Conceptual-Intentional Semantic Interface Tista Bagchi National Institute of Science, Technology, and Development Studies (NISTADS) and the University of Delhi Since the proposal of Logical Form (LF) was put forward by Robert May in his 1977 MIT doctoral dissertation and was subsequently adopted into the overall architecture of language as conceived under Government-Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981), there has been a steady research effort to determine the nature of LF in language in light of (...) structurally diverse languages around the world, which has ultimately contributed to the reinterpretation of LF as a Conceptual-Intentional (C-I) interface level between the computational syntactic component of the faculty of language and one or more interpretive faculties of the human mind. While this has opened up further possibilities of research in phenomena such as quantifier scope and scope interactions between negation, quantification, and focus, it has also given rise to a few real challenges to linguistic theory as well. Some of these are: (i) the split between lexical meaning – a matter supposedly belonging to the phase-wise selection of lexical arrays – and issues of semantic interpretation that arise purely from binding and scope phenomena (Mukherji 2010); (ii) partially relatedly, the level at which theta role assignment can be argued to take place, an issue that is taken up by me in Bagchi (2007); and (iii) how supposedly “pure” scopal phenomena relating to quantifiers, negation, and emphasizing expressions such as only and even (comparable to, e.g., Urdu/Hindi hii and bhii, Bangla –i and –o) also have dimensions of both focus and discourse reference. While recognizing all of these challenges, this talk aims to highlight particularly challenge (iii), both in terms of scholarship in the past and for the rich prospects for research on languages of south Asia with the semantics of quantification, negation, and focus in view. The scholarship of the past that I seek to relate this issue to is where, parallel to (and largely independently of) the research on LF that had been happening, Barwise and Cooper were developing their influential view of noun phrases as generalized quantifiers, culminating in their key 1981 article “Generalized Quantifiers and Natural Language” while, independently, McCawley, in his 1981 book Everything that Linguists have Always Wanted to Know about Logic, established through argumentation that all noun phrases semantically behave like generalized quantified expressions (further elaborated by him in the second – 1994 – revised edition of his book). I seek to demonstrate, based on limited data analysis from selected languages of south Asia, that our current understanding of quantification, negation, and focus under the Minimalist view owes something significant to the two major, but now largely marginalized, works of scholarship, and that for the way forward it is essential to adopt a more formal-semantic approach as adopted by them and also by later works such as Denis Bouchard’s (1995) The Semantics of Syntax, Mats Rooth’s work on focus (e.g., Rooth 1996, “Focus” in Shalom Lappin’s Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory), Heim and Kratzer’s Semantics in Generative Grammar (1998), and Yoad Winter’s (2002) Linguistic Inquiry article on semantic number, to cite just a few instances. (shrink)

The months preceding and following the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States have incited furious debate about the authenticity of media discourse in the shaping of reality, including in particular the reporting of refugees from predominantly Muslim regions and their resettlement in Western nations. Much of this debate is rooted in how opposing discourse clans, such as liberal and conservative ideologies, construct a narrative of nationhood around contested views of refugees. Examining mainstream and alternative (...) media from a critical discourse analytic perspective, the article uncovers how two key narratives about the Syrian refugee crisis emerge when the media attempt to orient their respective audiences to government policy through the discursive formation of the American Dream. Drawing on aspects of historicity, linguistic and semiotic action, and social impact, the analysis of the data reveals a discursive fracas between a humanistic perspective on the crisis that exploits a banal understanding of the American Dream and a more dichotomous narrative that homogenises refugees as a threat to the American way of life. These observations add to the growing body of literature that questions the ways in which the media discursively shapes, and is shaped by, political ideologies. (shrink)

The authors found correspondence of several significant traits of Jewish mysticism with traits of Buddhism and other systems of Indian religion and philosophy in the literature. Among the corresponding traits is the fundamental idea of emptiness or nothingness, shuunyataa in Sanskrit, ayin in Hebrew. Also corresponding are attempts to harmonise the idea and experience of emptiness with fullness, and with the experience of the secular world with its many things and concepts. They list eight significant traits of Jewish mysticism, which (...) are found to correspond with traits of Indian religion-philosophies. This is of course a study in comparative religion, but some important relations between these Indian and Jewish belief systems with modern science are also discussed. (shrink)

Retribution? Restitution? Reconciliation? “Justice” comes in many forms as witnessed by the spike in war crimes tribunals, Truth & Reconciliation Commissions, hybrid tribunals and genocide trials. Which, if any form is appropriate should be influenced by the culture of the people affected. It took Cambodia over three decades to finally address the ghosts of its Khmer Rouge past with the creation of a hybrid Khmer Rouge Tribunal. But how meaningful is justice to the majority of survivors of the Khmer Rouge (...) auto-genocide when only a handful of top officials are tried? Further, given the persistent abuse of political and economic rights in post-conflict Cambodia, we are skeptical that justice or reconciliation is presently possible. (shrink)

Presents a collection of essays on fiscal policies, economic policies, and tax reforms in the context of financial reforms as a separate discipline of economics. Edited by Ameresh Bagchi, these essays are authored by reputed academicians in this field, such as James Buchanan, Joseph Stiglitz, Raja Chelliah, and Richard Musgrave.

His second best-seller, Go Kiss the World, was the story of his life, a motivation to young people that anyone can achieve. But as Subroto Bagchi says: 'Go Kiss the World did not provide a tool kit.

The Sentence in Language and Cognition is about the significant role of the sentence in linguistic cognition and in the practical domains of human existence. Dr. Tista Bagchi has written a comprehensive assessment of the structure and cognitive function of the sentence and the clause in the context of real-world discourse and activities.The notions of sentencehood and clausehood with special reference to the semantic histories of the terms sentence and clause, including their ethical, legal, and administrative uses, are assessed. (...) This is followed by a concise historical survey of the treatment of the sentence in a few of the ancient linguistic traditions, notably the Greek, Roman(-Alexandrian), Arab, and Sanskrit scholastic traditions. A wide variety of sentence types, from a cross-section of languages spoken in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, are presented by way of factual evidence for sentences and clauses as linguistic units. Formally defined notions of the sentence and the clause as syntactic constituents in major theoretical frameworks are examined and assessed for their essential properties and points of convergence. The Sentence in Language and Cognition is an essential book for advanced students and researchers of linguistics. (shrink)

In the literature we have found correspondence of several significant traits of Jewish mysticism with traits of Buddhism and other systems of Indian religion-philosophy. Among the corresponding traits is the fundamental idea of emptiness or nothingness, shuunyataa in Sanskrit, ayin in Hebrew. Also corresponding are attempts to harmonize the idea and experience of emptiness with fullness, and with the experience of the secular world with its many things and concepts. We list eight significant traits of Jewish mysticism, which we find (...) correspond with traits of Indian religion-philosophies. We also discuss some important relations of these Indian and Jewish belief systems with modern science. We contend, that natural science is built on spontaneous sensory experiences; on this basis concepts and theories are constructed. Likewise we think, that spiritual experiences occur spontaneously and contribute to the basis of religious, mystic and some philosophical belief systems. We thus think, there are important parallels between scientific and spiritual cognition. Key words: Comparative religion; Emptiness/fullness; nothingness; God; compassion; reincarnation; cognition, scientific spiritual; spiritual experiences; Buddhism. (shrink)

Debraj Bhattacharya, Exploring Marxist Bengal c.1971–2011: Memory, History, and Irony, 2016, Kolkata: K.P. Bagchi & Company, pp. 285 + xii, ₹ 995, ISBN-13: 978-8170743668.

Perceptual and recursion-based faculties have long been recognized to be vital constituents of human (and, in general, animal) cognition. However, certain faculties such as the visual and the linguistic faculty have come to receive far more academic and experimental attention, in recent decades, than other recognized categories of faculties. This paper seeks to highlight the imbalance in these studies and bring into sharper focus the need for further in-depth philosophical treatments of faculties such as especially hearing, touch, and proprioception, besides (...) other faculties such as the olfactory and gustatory ones. It also seeks to bring to bear the debate on the role of qualia in perception and overall in cognition in its thesis of the significance of these other modular faculties for genuine insights into cognition as a (now) technologically expanded domain. (shrink)

This paper seeks to address the relationship between two key areas of contention figuring in the communicative realities in which language is used and the morality of action: the role of silence and the role of power and the lack thereof. It is proposed that action per se becomes problematic under practical manifestations of silence such as inarticulacy and ignorance, and that even when action is possible, deciding on what would constitute morally right action under such circumstances remains a question. (...) Furthermore, another key hindrance to action for greater justice and equality is constituted by lack of empowerment. This paper presents the view that a beginning towards answering such questions can be made on the basis of the recognition of the universality of human creativity, in the domains of both language and constructive action, and the fundamental universality of human morality with culture- and communityspecific modes of putting that morality into practice. (shrink)

This paper seeks to address the relationship between two key areas of contention figuring in the communicative realities in which language is used and the morality of action: the role of silence and the role of power and the lack thereof. It is proposed that action per se becomes problematic under practical manifestations of silence such as inarticulacy (which is aggravated by major asymmetries in the global politics of language) and ignorance, and that even when action is possible, deciding on (...) what would constitute morally right action under such circumstances remains a question. Furthermore, another key hindrance to action for greater justice and equality is constituted by lack of empowerment. This paper presents the view that a beginning towards answering such questions can be made on the basis of the recognition of the universality of human creativity, in the domains of both language and constructive action, and the fundamental universality of human morality with culture- and communityspecific modes of putting that morality into practice. (shrink)