Peopling the donor world -- The meaning of family in a changing world -- Creating families -- Creating communities across families -- The laws of the donor world: parents and children -- Law, adoption, and family secrets: disclosure and incest -- Reasons to regulate -- Regulating for connection -- Regulating for health and safety: setting limits in the gamete world -- Why not to regulate -- Conclusion: challenging and creating kinship.

Nearly forty percent of the world’s financial assets are located in loosely defined British Empire city-state jurisdictions. This article seeks to provide an explanation for this odd development. My explanation of the rise of such a British Empire-centered economy links the development of the Euromarket, or the offshore financial market, to three sets of theories. The first is the hinterland theory that explains why small city-state types of jurisdictions are in an advantageous position when it comes to trading in Euromarket (...) financial assets in comparison to other states. Second is the dependent jurisdictions theory, which suggests that dependent jurisdictions are perceived as safer locations for investment than independent islands, in addition to which they are able to offer better treatment of nonresident capital because they are subsidized by the motherland. As the British Empire was the largest Empire the world has ever seen, it is perhaps not surprising that the British state has inherited the greatest number of such dependent jurisdictions, and that they, in turn, have taken advantage of their "Britishness" to develop their financial centers. Third, I advance a related argument that suggests that the hegemonic position of the British Empire in the world economy prior to the rise of the United States was an important factor as well. Here, I draw on the idea that city-states and, more generally, trading centers tend to be dominated by commercially outward-oriented elites. (shrink)

This chapter examines the reliability of using the tosefta for historical research. It explains that the tosefta is a compilation of early rabbinic legal traditions which date from the first to the early third century CE. It discusses the different manuscripts, editions and translations of the tosefta. It concludes that the narratives or case stories in the tosefta possess significance for historical research and their relevance ranges from an increased understanding of the daily life of the Jews in Palestine and (...) the activity of the rabbis in society to the more precise determination of their power and position within society. (shrink)

Adam and Eve have the same record yet receive different punishments. Adam receives the punishment that they both deserve, whereas Eve receives a more lenient punishment. In this article, we explore whether a deserved-but-unequal punishment, such as what Adam receives, can be just. We do this by explicating the conceptions of retributive justice that underlie both sides of the debate. We argue that inequality in punishment is disturbing mainly because of the disrespect it often expresses towards the offender receiving the (...) harsher treatment, and also because it casts doubt on whether Adam got what he deserved. We suggest that when no disrespect is involved and when it is clear that the criminal got what he deserved, inequality is not worrisome. (shrink)

Employing a time-lagged sample of 371 North American individuals working full time in a wide range of industries, occupations, and levels, we contribute to research on employee outcomes of corporate social responsibility attributions as substantive or symbolic. Utilizing a mediated moderation model, our study extends previous findings by explaining how and why CSR attributions are related with work-related attitudes and subsequent individual performance. In support of our hypotheses, our findings indicate that the relationships between CSR attributions and individual performance are (...) mediated through person–organization fit and work-related attitudes. Additionally, when CSR is perceived as important, substantive CSR is positively related to, and symbolic CSR is negatively related to, perception of fit with the organization. These findings contribute toward our understanding of the complex effect CSR has on employees’ work outcomes. Practical implications and future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. These scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers. -/- Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and (...) scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly-some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it. -/- Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era. (shrink)

This article addresses the question of what history an obstacle that stands in the way of our performing a certain action must have in order to render us socially unfree to x. The most promising view on this question is the moral responsibility view, according to which such an obstacle renders us socially unfree to x, if and only if another person is morally responsible for its existence. The main challenge of this view is to identify a serviceable test for (...) establishing when someone is morally responsible for the existence of an obstacle. Numerous attempts to do so have been made over the years, but none of them proved to be successful. In my discussion of the moral responsibility view I will expose the failure of the most recent and powerful attempt to identify such a test. Then I will suggest a more plausible test and defend it from a few possible objections. Before discussing the moral responsibility view I will discuss its main rivals and show why it is superior to them in the first place. (shrink)

Amid the highly industrialized, export-focused food system of the Canadian prairies, some farmers and consumers are turning to localized agriculture as an alternative—they are “going local”. Despite farmers’ obvious importance to the food system, surprisingly little research has examined their motivations and reasons for localization. To date, most local food scholarship in North America has focused on either consumers’ motivations to buy local or the systemic aspects of local food, such as regulations, infrastructure, and marketing arrangements. Existing research suggests that (...) local food systems are supported by consumers’ rejection of the industrial paradigm and desire to connect with their food and its source. But what drives farmers to localize, particularly when export-focused production is firmly entrenched as the status quo? Based on interviews and focus groups with 60 farmers, processors, policy experts, and retailers in the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan, this paper examines local food systems from the producer perspective in a rural context of high industrialization and geographical dispersion. We examine what motivates farmers to produce for local markets, and what forces they must resist to do so. The findings indicate that farmers’ main motivations for localization are political and social in nature, and stem from a critique of the dominant neoliberal agri-food system. We map farmers’ agential responses to this dominant system on a spectrum that ranges from acceptance of a neoliberal “feed the world” ideology to promotion of food sovereignty. Drawing on farmers’ perspectives, our findings question the straightforward equation of local food with environmental sustainability and also challenge neoliberal economic assumptions of “scaling up”. (shrink)

This paper questions the fairness of our current tort-law regime and the philosophical underpinnings advanced in its defense, a theory known as corrective justice. Fairness requires that the moral equality and responsibility of persons be respected in social interactions and institutions. The concept of luck has been used by many egalitarians as a way of giving content to fairness by differentiating between those benefits and burdens that result from informed choice and those that result from fate or fortune. We argue (...) that the theory of corrective justice, along with its institutional embodiment of tort law, is at odds with an egalitarian commitment to fairness because it allows luck an unjustifiable role in determining dissimilar liability for similar wrongs and dissimilar compensation for similar losses to bodily integrity. Many egalitarian political theorists have also recognized, if not defended, the notion of distinct forms of justice, namely corrective, retributive, and distributive. Although theorists of these different forms of justice have been concerned with negating unfair luck inside the operations of each form of justice, there has been little attention to the way in which luck operates to sort cases into each form of justice. We claim that there is a significant way in which luck operates to subject different people to principles of corrective, retributive, and distributive justicewhich flies in the face of the egalitarian value of fairness. After surveying the arguments put forward by theorists defending a categorical distinction between corrective justice and retributive and distributive principles, we argue that although analytical distinctions can be made between different forms of justice (although, we also suggest that the distinctions are not as sharp as some commentators suggest), there is no good reason to defend an acoustic separation between these forms of justice when doing so creates unfair outcomes. (shrink)

:We propose to strengthen Popper’s notion of falsifiability by adding the requirement that when an observation is inconsistent with a theory, there must be a ‘short proof’ of this inconsistency. We model the concept of a short proof using tools from computational complexity, and provide some examples of economic theories that are falsifiable in the usual sense but not with this additional requirement. We consider several variants of the definition of ‘short proof’ and several assumptions about the difficulty of computation, (...) and study their different implications on the falsifiability of theories. (shrink)

Buddhism and Jainism share the concepts of karma, rebirth, and the desirability of escaping from rebirth. The literature of both traditions contains many stories about past, and sometimes future, lives which reveal much about these foundational doctrines. Naomi Appleton carefully explores how multi-life stories served to construct, communicate, and challenge ideas about karma and rebirth within early South Asia, examining portrayals of the different realms of rebirth, the potential paths and goals of human beings, and the biographies of ideal (...) religious figures. Appleton also deftly surveys the ability of karma to bind individuals together over multiple lives, and the nature of the supernormal memory that makes multi-life stories available in the first place. This original study not only sheds light on the individual preoccupations of Buddhist and Jain tradition, but contributes to a more complete history of religious thought in South Asia, and brings to the foreground long-neglected narrative sources. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of metaphysical explanation according to which metaphysical explanations are answers to what-makes-it-the-case-that questions. On this view, metaphysical explanations are not to be considered entirely objective, but are subject to epistemic constraints imposed by the context in which a relevant question is asked. The resultant account of metaphysical explanation is developed independently of any particular views about grounding. Toward the end of the paper an application of the view is proposed that takes metaphysical explanations conceived in (...) this way to characterize reality's structure. According to this proposal, reality's structure is partly constituted by a projection of our explanatory practices onto reality. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that grounding relations are asymmetric. Here I develop and argue for a theory of metaphysical structure that takes grounding to be nonsymmetric rather than asymmetric. Even without infinite descending chains of dependence, it might be that every entity is grounded in some other entity. Having first addressed an immediate objection to the position under discussion, I introduce two examples of symmetric grounding. I give three arguments for the view that grounding is nonsymmetric (I call this view (...) ‘metaphysical interdependence’). These arguments are: (i) that metaphysical interdependence is the only theory able to reconcile competing intuitions about grounding; (ii) that it is the only theory consistent with both ‘gunk’ and ‘junk’; and (iii) that offers a satisfactory solution to the problem concerning whether or not grounding is itself grounded. (shrink)

This paper explores a middle way between realism and eliminativism about grounding. Grounding-talk is intelligible and useful, but it fails to pick out grounding relations that exist or obtain in reality. Instead, grounding-talk allows us to convey facts about what metaphysically explains what, and about the worldly dependence relations that give rise to those explanations.

Hillel Steiner’s left-libertarian theory of justice is the most serious recent attempt to reconcile the ideals of equality and freedom. This attempt consists in an argument that a universal right to equal freedom, which in Steiner’s view means also a universal right to maximal freedom, implies a universal right to self-ownership and to an egalitarian share of the world’s natural resources. In this article, I argue that this argument fails on Steiner’s own terms. I argue that, on Steiner’s conceptions of (...) freedom, self-ownership, and an egalitarian share of the world’s natural resources, insofar as the right to equal freedom implies the right to self-ownership and to an egalitarian share of the world’s natural resources, it is incompatible with equality. (shrink)

Grounding talk has become increasingly familiar in contemporary philosophical discussion. Most discussants of grounding think that grounding talk is useful, intelligible, and accurately describes metaphysical reality. Call themrealistsabout grounding. Some dissenters reject grounding talk on the grounds that it is unintelligible, or unmotivated. They would prefer to eliminate grounding talk from philosophy, so we can call themeliminitivistsabout grounding. This paper outlines a new position in the debate about grounding, defending the view that grounding talk is intelligible and useful. Grounding talk (...) does not, however, provide a literal and veridical description of mind-independent metaphysical reality. This irrealismabout grounding treads a path between realism and eliminativism. (shrink)

Attempts to elucidate grounding are often made by connecting grounding to metaphysical explanation, but the notion of metaphysical explanation is itself opaque, and has received little attention in the literature. We can appeal to theories of explanation in the philosophy of science to give us a characterization of metaphysical explanation, but this reveals a tension between three theses: that grounding relations are objective and mind-independent; that there are pragmatic elements to metaphysical explanation; and that grounding and metaphysical explanation share a (...) close connection. Holding fixed the mind-independence of grounding, I show that neither horn of the resultant dilemma can be blunted. Consequently, we should reject the assumption that grounding relations are mind-independent. (shrink)

This article argues that while Charles Taylor's commitment to anti-naturalism in the human sciences has been constant, the grounds for that commitment have changed significantly over time. What began as his critique of naturalism on empirical grounds was refashioned into a commitment on moral grounds, or more accurately, on the basis of there being no distinctly separable grounds between the scientific and the moral. Taylor shifted his descriptive phenomenological defence of anti-naturalism to cast a much broader critique against an empiricist (...) epistemology he saw underpinning all naturalist approaches in the human sciences. He calls attention to the speciousness of the ontological commitments of an empiricist epistemological outlook that tries to separate human agency from moral ontology, which he argues is itself a moral position. Whether we want to go along with Taylor's specific moral outlook or not, what his arguments about the human sciences teach us is twofold: (1) Taylor's descriptive phenomenology shows how the scientific language of the natural sciences often cannot explain human phenomena without contradiction; (2) Taylor's hermeneutic realism teaches us the extent to which defending an anti-naturalist philosophy of human sciences today necessitates moral argument. (shrink)

It’s widely accepted that we have most reason to accept theories that best fulfill the following naturalistically respectable criteria: (1) internal consistency, (2) consistency with the facts, and (3) exemplification of the theoretical virtues. It’s also widely accepted that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. I argue that if you accept the aforementioned criteria, you have most reason to reject that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. By applying the criteria to worlds that are all prima facie possible, I show that contingent (...) local matters of particular fact partly determine which theory of composition we should accept at a world. For instance, I argue that when we apply the criteria to our world, we should accept Mereological Nihilism. Furthermore, even if you think that the worlds I mention, such as gunky worlds, are impossible, you should still reject the brute principle that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. Instead, you should only accept that a theory of composition is necessarily true if contingent local matters of particular fact at possible worlds cannot tell in favor of one theory of composition over another. (shrink)

Der Aufsatz betrachtet die Geschichte und Praxis des Devising als ein Feld, um die Dynamik zwischen der Gewalt der Entscheidungsfindung und dem Potenzial für Kollektivität und Dissoziation zu untersuchen. Insbesondere beleuchtet dieser Artikel die Tradition des devised theatre, wie sie im Gefolge der Theater- und Performancegruppen der 1960er Jahre entstanden ist, die Kollektivität als politische Ideologie in den Vordergrund stellten. Ausgehend von den jüngsten partizipatorischen Performances des New Yorker Künstlerduos 600 HIGHWAYMEN im Rahmen des Tryptichons A Thousand Ways wird der (...) Begriff devised acts verwendet, um Facetten der Intervention und Entscheidungsfindung zu beschreiben. Der Aufsatz stellt dabei die Frage, wie die Kräfte der Gewalt durch devising transformiert werden können. Ausgehend von der Behauptung der US-amerikanischen Theaterregisseurin Anne Bogart, dass Entscheidungen eine generative Kraft der Gewalt hervorbringen können (2001, S. 45ff.), schaut dieser Beitrag auf Momente dieser „notwendigen Gewalt“ (ebd., S. 46), die sich nicht aus dem Prozess des Theatermachens und der Performance herauslösen lassen. (shrink)

The objective of this survey was to assess the extent to which nurses encounter and identify dilemma-generating situations in the light of the publication and circulation of the Israeli code of ethics for nurses in 1994. The results are being used as a basis for a programme aimed at promoting nurses' decision-making skills in coping with ethical dilemmas. In this era of major advances in medicine, the nurse's role as the protector of patient rights may bring about conflicts with physicians' (...) orders, with institutional policies, or with patients' families. Nurses will then become confronted with ethical and moral dilemmas. A nationwide survey was carried out to identify and describe the ethical conflicts with which nurses in Israel are confronted in the course of their work. A third of the enumerated dilemmas were encountered by more than 50% of the nurses. The major determinant influencing encounters with dilemmas, as perceived by the participating nurses, was their work setting, namely, the hospital versus the community. It was shown that nurses seek support mainly among their peers, they are barely familiar with the Israeli Code, and they consider their own families as the predominant factor in shaping their ethical attitudes. (shrink)

Currently, value sensitive design (VSD) does not commit to a particular ethical theory. Critiques contend that without such an explicit commitment, VSD lacks a methodology for distinguishing genuine moral values from mere stakeholders-preferences and runs the risk of attending to a set of values that is unprincipled or unbounded. We argue that VSD practitioners need to complement it with an ethical theory. We argue in favour of a mid-level ethical theory to fulfil this role.

In a celebrated article, published nearly a century ago, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld endeavored to elucidate the various types of jural relations. Hohfeld’s scheme has been justly regarded as a seminal contribution to analytical jurisprudence, and has stimulated lively debate since. This Essay aims to refute one of Hohfeld’s fundamental and most influential theses: the axiom of right–duty correlativity. To do so, it employs the simplest refutation strategy in first-order logic, namely providing a valid counterexample. Part I discusses earlier attempts to (...) do likewise, and explains why they failed. For the most part, previous illustrations of ostensibly standalone rights or standalone duties neglected relevant parties who could owe the correlative duties or hold the correlative rights, respectively. Part II puts forward a simple argument: There are abstract duties in private law that ban certain types of conduct without reference to specific victims. Those duties are not necessarily correlative with rights, although their breach may generate secondary duties with corresponding rights. In particular, tort law allows plaintiffs to recover for harm caused by breach of duty that occurred before they acquired legal personality. This is tantamount to recognizing duties that are not correlative with rights, and therefore invalidates the correlativity axiom. (shrink)

In this paper I explore irrealist alternatives to orthodox realism about grounding, and claim that at least some of these alternatives represent fertile areas for future discussion.

This article presents the framework Capability Sensitive Design (CSD), which consists of merging the design methodology Value Sensitive Design (VSD) with Martha Nussbaum's capability theory. CSD aims to normatively assess technology design in general, and technology design for health and wellbeing in particular. Unique to CSD is its ability to account for human diversity and to counter (structural) injustices that manifest in technology design. The basic framework of CSD is demonstrated by applying it to the hypothetical design case of a (...) therapy chatbot for mental health. By applying CSD to a design case, the merits of this new framework over the standard VSD approach become apparent. Also, the application demonstrates what a technology design would look like when attention is paid to capabilities right from the start of the design process. (shrink)