It is well documented that the effects of legal punishment tend to drift to the family members, friends, and larger communities of convicted offenders. Instead of conceiving of punishment drift as incidental to legal punishment, or as merely foreseen but not intended by state authorities and thus permissible, I argue that efforts ought to be undertaken to limit or ameliorate it. Failure to confine punishment drift comes perilously close to punishment of the innocent and is at odds with other legal (...) doctrines and broader penal practices that hold offenders, and offenders alone, responsible for their crimes. Numerous arguments urging tolerance of punishment drift, or more assertively defending it, are examined and found wanting. (shrink)

More than just a jail, Rikers has become a site of shifting discourse on punishment and justice in the United States. In the book Life and Death in Rikers Island, Homer Venters argues that the systematic failures of jails to provide appropriate safety and care constitute human rights violations and public health risks. The former chief medical officer and commissioner of correctional health services for the NYC Health and Hospitals system, Venters offers critical insight on the Rikers jail system. “Because (...) jails are chaotic and concealed from outside view,” he asserts, “we only become aware of them when very bad outcomes occur, such as deaths.” Life and Death's success lies in how it blends Venters's experiences on the ground as a health care professional with the empirical data he's been able to collect and analyze over the tenure of his career. According to Venters, all suicides, homicides, and accidental deaths in jail are jail attributable, as they reflect system‐wide failures in safety. (shrink)

Can parents who choose not to vaccinate their children be held legally liable for any harm that results? The state of laboratory and epidemiological understanding of a disease such as measles makes it likely that a persuasive causal link can be established between a decision to not vaccinate, a failure to take appropriate precautions to isolate a non-vaccinated child who may have been exposed to measles from highly vulnerable persons, and a death. This paper argues that, even if a (...) parent chooses to not vaccinate a child under a state law permitting exemptions, that decision does not create complete protection against liability for the adverse consequences of that choice. (shrink)

Consider this hypothetical scenario involving a choice not to vaccinate a child. Ms. S has a niece who is autistic. The girl's parents are suspicious that there is some relationship between her autism and her Measles Mumps and Rubella vaccination. They have shared their concerns with Ms. S. She then declines to have her own daughter, Jinny S., vaccinated with the MMR vaccine. To bypass the state's mandatory vaccination requirement, Ms. S claims a state-legislated philosophical exemption, whereby she simply attests (...) to the fact that she is opposed to vaccinating her daughter due to a conscientiously held belief. At the age of four, Jinny goes on a trip by airplane to Germany with her mother. After returning to the United States, she attends daycare despite having some mild cold symptoms. Subsequently, she develops a classic measles rash, at which point her mother brings her to a pediatrician and keeps her home from daycare. (shrink)

Professor William Lane Craig argues that a particular set of concerns about the Christian doctrine of penal substitution (namely, that Jesus of Nazareth was sacrificed for the sins of humanity) can be satisfied. This article provides rebuttals to said replies in an attempt to render plausible the claim that God exists to the extent that God is perfectly just, and that divine justice requires, among other things, that God never engage in the harming of innocents, consistent with any doctrine (...) of retributivism worthy of the name. The doctrine of God, then, must remain consistent with unqualified negative retributivism. Any theism which might suggest otherwise violates such vital considerations of justice and fairness and must be rejected. (shrink)

Punishment -- Culpable mind -- Culpable action -- Responsibility for harm -- Liability for public welfare offences -- Justification -- Excuse -- Detention after acquittal -- The unity of the penal law.

Several liberal philosophers and penal theorists have argued that the state has a reason to prohibit acts that harm individuals. But what is harm? According to one specification of harm, a person P is harmed by an act (or an event) a iff, as a result of a, P is made worse off in terms of well-being. One central question here involves the baseline against which we assess whether someone is ‘worse off’. In other words, when (...) a person is harmed he is worse off, certainly—but what is worse off a variation from? A central part of the paper critically discusses different answers to this question based on versions of what we can call: the temporal baseline, the baseline from mankind and the counterfactual baseline. Essentially, it will be argued that the counterfactual baseline leaves us with a better understanding of harming than the other baselines discussed. The final part of the paper will describe some of the implications of our investigation for the application and evaluation of the view that harm matters in the justification of which type of acts should be criminalized by the state. The overall conclusion of the paper is that adherents of a view like the harm principle face a dilemma. Either they can accept the counterfactual baseline but then, they can do without the harm principle. Or they can reject the counterfactual baseline—but then they will have to formulate an alternative baseline which, as will be shown in the paper, is no easy task. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a constitutionalized Harm Principle could ensure that people are not jailed unless they deserve it. I do not aim to outline every possible type of bad consequence beyond harm that might be sufficiently serious to justify criminalization. Instead, I focus on criminalization that is backed up with jail terms and I argue that wrongful harm to others provides the only moral and constitutional justification for sending people to jail. Imprisonment harms the (...) prisoner, so she should not be imprisoned unless she has caused proportionate harm to others. I argue that the sufficient conditions for sending an offender to jail are: (1) that the offender's actions have (or risk) bad consequences that are sufficiently harmful to make her commensurately deserving of penal detention; and (2) that the offender culpably (that is, with a state of mind somewhere along the intentional/reckless/gross negligence continuum) chose (aimed or attempted) to bring about those bad consequences or did so with reckless indifference. The lawmaker would need to demonstrate from the ex ante perspective that proposed offenses carrying jail sentences are a proportionate and fair way of dealing with the wrongs involved. Because jail (including short sentences of a few days) involves hard treatment (seriously harmful consequences for the prisoner) harm to others would be the only bad consequence of sufficient weight to justify a jail sentence. Jailing people for wrongful behavior that has harmless consequences would be an unjust and disproportionate response. In terms of understanding imprisonment (a physical deprivation of liberty) in the United States, it is better to refer to the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution than to the Due Process Clause. The Eighth Amendment, if read morally, could be invoked to strike down laws that carry prison sentences for wrongs that do not result in harm to others. This is because harming a person by subjecting her to the hard treatment that is involved in serving a jail term would be a disproportionate response unless the wrongdoer inflicted equivalent harm on others. I argue, that the Eighth Amendment should be interpreted in a way that accords with its overall moral aim or purpose. The Amendment's overall moral aim is to ensure that the state does not inflict unjust, oppressive, or disproportional punishments on its citizens. (shrink)

Criminal law theory concerns itself with the justification of punishment. Conflicting moral theories of punishment will be held in liberal democracies. The positive law therefore neither will nor should reflect exclusively a single moral theory of punishment. Like the institutions for making law, the institutions for enforcing it will cause punishments imposed to deviate from what pure moral theory might prescribe. These claims are illustrated by the debate over blackmail prohibition. The best rationale for prohibition is not the moral argument (...) that blackmailers culpably cause harm, but the political argument that blackmailers threaten the state’s claimed monopoly on punishing crime. (shrink)

This article analyses the definitional reforms and re-categorisation of sexual offences under the Thai Penal Code in the period of 13 years, namely, the 2007 and 2019 amendments. The incidents are of uniqueness as the 2007 amendment shared much resemblance with jurisdictions that have departed the original meaning of rape and attempted to re-conceptualise sexual offences, whereas the 2019 amendment shared much similarities with jurisdictions that decided to retain the original meaning of rape and categorise other serious sexual offences (...) in other names. The article argues that, apart from accounts based on criminal law principles, the two definitional revisions had been carried out in the environments of different legal culture and social values in the Thai legislative bodies. It appears that the 2007 amendment followed a feminist perspective that emphasises the harm of sexual offences to bodily/sexual integrity as a state for individuals to realise their personhood, while the re-categorisation of sexual offences in the 2019 amendment suggests a greater role of the feminist perspective in another camp that views penile-penetration inherently differs from non-penile penetration and implies that the law continues, to a certain extent, regulating sexuality since the 2019 amendment used the reason of “naturalness” of sexual intercourse to distinguish between penile penetration and non-penile penetration. (shrink)

Ten years ago, researchers using event-related brain potentials to study language comprehension were puzzled by what looked like a Semantic Illusion: Semantically anomalous, but structurally well-formed sentences did not affect the N400 component—traditionally taken to reflect semantic integration—but instead produced a P600 effect, which is generally linked to syntactic processing. This finding led to a considerable amount of debate, and a number of complex processing models have been proposed as an explanation. What these models have in common is that they (...) postulate two or more separate processing streams, in order to reconcile the Semantic Illusion and other semantically induced P600 effects with the traditional interpretations of the N400 and the P600. Recently, however, these multi-stream models have been called into question, and a simpler single-stream model has been proposed. According to this alternative model, the N400 component reflects the retrieval of word meaning from semantic memory, and the P600 component indexes the integration of this meaning into the unfolding utterance interpretation. In the present paper, we provide support for this “Retrieval–Integration ” account by instantiating it as a neurocomputational model. This neurocomputational model is the first to successfully simulate the N400 and P600 amplitude in language comprehension, and simulations with this model provide a proof of concept of the single-stream RI account of semantically induced patterns of N400 and P600 modulations. (shrink)

Expectation-based theories of language comprehension, in particular Surprisal Theory, go a long way in accounting for the behavioral correlates of word-by-word processing difficulty, such as reading times. An open question, however, is in which component of the Event-Related brain Potential signal Surprisal is reflected, and how these electrophysiological correlates relate to behavioral processing indices. Here, we address this question by instantiating an explicit neurocomputational model of incremental, word-by-word language comprehension that produces estimates of the N400 and the P600—the two most (...) salient ERP components for language processing—as well as estimates of “comprehension-centric” Surprisal for each word in a sentence. We derive model predictions for a recent experimental design that directly investigates “world-knowledge”-induced Surprisal. By relating these predictions to both empirical electrophysiological and behavioral results, we establish a close link between Surprisal, as indexed by reading times, and the P600 component of the ERP signal. The resultant model thus offers an integrated neurobehavioral account of processing difficulty in language comprehension. (shrink)

This book is intended to help transform epistemology - the traditional study of knowledge - into a rigorous discipline by removing conceptual roadblocks and developing formal tools required for a fully naturalized epistemology. The evolutionary approach which Harms favours begins with the common observation that if our senses and reasoning were not reliable, then natural selection would have eliminated them long ago. The challenge for some time has been how to transform these informal musings about evolutionary epistemology into a rigorous (...) theoretical discipline capable of complementing current scientific studies of the evolution of cognition with a philosophically defensible account of meaning and justification. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom has it that evolution makes a sham of morality, even if morality is an adaptation. I disagree. I argue that our best current adaptationist theory of meaning offers objective truth conditionsfor signaling systems of all sorts. The objectivity is, however, relative to species – specifically to the adaptive history of the signaling system in question. While evolution may not provide the kind of species independent objective standards that (e.g.) Kantians desire, this should be enough for the practical work (...) of justifying our confidence in the objectivity of moral standards. If you believe morality is an adaptation, you should be a moral realist. (shrink)

Empirical research in the field of legal interpretation shows that, in many cases, analogy argumentation is complex rather than simple. Traditional analytical approaches to analogy argumentation do not explore that complexity. In most cases analogy argumentation is reconstructed as a simple form of argumentation that consists of two premises and a conclusion. This article focuses on the question of how to analyze and evaluate complex analogy argumentation. It is shown how the pragma-dialectical approach provides clues for analyzing complex analogy argumentation (...) and how the criteria for evaluating analogy argumentation can be used to reconstruct these types of complex analogy argumentation in Dutch case law. The critical questions in the argumentation scheme do not only serve as a tool for analyzing arguments justifying analogy argumentation, but are also helpful in analyzing arguments against a specific analogy argumentation. (shrink)

The concept of information tempts us as a theoretical primitive, partly because of the respectability lent to it by highly successful applications of Shannon’s information theory, partly because of its broad range of applicability in various domains, partly because of its neutrality with respect to what basic sorts of things there are. This versatility, however, is the very reason why information cannot be the theoretical primitive we might like it to be. “Information,” as it is variously used, is systematically ambiguous (...) between whether it involves continuous or discrete quantities, causal or noncausal relationships, and intrinsic or relational properties. Many uses can be firmly grounded in existing theory, however. Continuous quantities of information involving probabilities can be related to information theory proper. Information defined relative to systems of rules or conventions can be understood relative to the theory of meaning . A number of causal notions may possibly be located relative to standard notions in physics. Precise specification of these distinct properties involved in the common notion of information can allow us to map the relationships between them. Consequently, while information is not in itself the kind of single thing that can play a significant unifying role, analyzing its ambiguities may facilitate headway toward that goal. (shrink)

Moral norms are the rules of morality, those that people actually follow, and those that we feel people ought to follow, even when they don’t. Historically, the social sciences have been primarily concerned with describing the many forms that moral norms take in various cultures, with the emerging implication that moral norms are mere arbitrary products of culture. Philosophers, on the other hand, have been more concerned with trying to understand the nature and source of rules that all cultures ought (...) to follow, with relatively little regard for what people actually do. The tension between the two approaches has to do with whether there are any standards higher than the whims of culture in determining right and wrong. Typically, the social sciences say “no”, pointing at the diversity of moral beliefs. Most philosophers (along with people of moral conviction) feel that there must be some deeper source of morality than the trends and fads of culture. Unfortunately, the nature and source of such standards has remained something of a mystery. Recent work on the evolution of norms has changed this picture dramatically. (shrink)

Using a new method, we examined whether incidental perception of need-rewarding (positive) objects unintentionally prepares motor action. Participants who varied in their level of need for water were presented with glasses of water (and control objects) that were accompanied by go and no-go cues that required a response (key-press) or withholding a response. Importantly, if need-rewarding objects unintentionally prepare action, presentation of no-go cues should lead to motor inhibition of these prepared motor impulses. Consistent with this hypothesis, results showed that (...) participants relatively high in need for water (and hence, who perceive water as a rewarding, positive object) were slower to react to a successive action probe after withholding a response during perception of water than during perception of the control object, suggesting motor inhibition of unintentionally prepared motor impulses. We propose that incidental perception of need-rewarding objects unintentionally potentiates preparation of motor action to these objects. (shrink)

Information theory offers a measure of "mutual information" which provides an appropriate measure of tracking efficiency for the naturalistic epistemologist. The statistical entropy on which it is based is arguably the best way of characterizing the uncertainty associated with the behavior of a system, and it is ontologically neutral. Though not appropriate for the naturalization of meaning, mutual information can serve as a measure of epistemic success independent of semantic maps and payoff structures. While not containing payoffs as terms, mutual (...) information places both upper and lower bounds on payoffs. This constitutes a non-trivial relationship to utility. (shrink)

It is common in attempts to extend the theory of evolution to culture to generalize from the causal basis of biological evolution, so that evolutionary theory becomes the theory of copying processes. Generalizing from the formal dynamics of evolution allows greater leeway in what kinds of things cultural entities can be, if they are to evolve. By understanding the phenomenon of cultural transmission in terms of coordinated phenotypic variability, we can have a theory of cultural evolution which allows us to (...) avoid the various difficulties with the elaboration of informational entities such as the cultural replicator, or meme. Such an account is a boon to the project of evolutionary epistemology since it confirms the presumption in favor of the general adaptiveness of culture, illuminating rather than obscuring the inherent intimacy of our relationship to (e.g.) our ideas. (shrink)

Existing research demonstrates a positive connection between psychedelics and increased nature relatedness. Enhanced affective ties toward nature are widely framed as being built into the pharmakon itself, and the relevance of experiences remains little understood. This paper turns to neoshamanic ayahuasca ceremonies in Europe, exploring the way specialists and attendants refer to nature in speech and performance. I argue that ritual framings performed during these ceremonies provide fertile ground for affective ties to emerge through substance‐induced experiences. I trace such framings (...) by exploring how medicine and healers are being coded; how specific materialities are rendered meaningful; and how individual experiences are discussed at such retreats. I argue that even while participants prioritize individual healing, personal development, or the satisfaction of psychonautical curiosity, environmentalism appears to be anchored by the proceedings themselves. Thus, this paper opens up for analysis ceremonial substance use as a contact zone where coherence is produced intersubjectively. (shrink)

Skyrms describes how evolutionary models are helping us understand unselfish or cooperative behaviour in humans and animals. Mechanisms which can stabilize cooperative behaviour are sensitive to population densities, however. This creates the need for agent-based evolutionary models which depict individual interactions, spatial locations, and stochastic effects. One such model suggests that hostile environments may provide conditions conducive to the emergence and stabilization of cooperative behaviour. In particular, simulations show that random extinctions can keep population densities low, provide ongoing colonization opportunities, (...) and insulate cooperative communities from invasion. Agent-based and population models play complementary roles in furthering our understanding evolutionary processes. (shrink)

BackgroundIn about one in 10,000 cases, a published article is retracted. This very often means that the results it reports are flawed. Several authors have voiced concerns about the presence of retracted research in the memory of science. In particular, a retracted result is propagated by citing it. In the published literature, many instances are given of retracted articles that are cited both before and after their retraction. Even worse is the possibility that these articles in turn are cited in (...) such a way that the retracted result is propagated further.MethodsWe have conducted a case study to find out how a retracted article is cited and whether retracted results are propagated through indirect citations. We have constructed the entire citation network for this case.ResultsWe show that directly citing articles is an important source of propagation of retracted research results. In contrast, in our case study, indirect citations do not contribute to the propagation of the retracted result.ConclusionsWhile admitting the limitations of a study involving a single case, we think there are reasons for the non-contribution of indirect citations that hold beyond our case study. (shrink)

Empirical research has discovered that experimental subjects in ultimatum bargaining situations generally fail to play the decision-theoretic optimum strategy, and instead play something between that strategy and a fair split. In evolutionary dynamics, fair division and nearly fair division strategies often go to fixation and weakly dominated strategies can do quite well. Computer simulations were done using three different ultimatum bargaining games as determinates of fitness. (1) No tendency toward the elimination of weakly dominated strategies was observed, with or without (...) mutation. (2) Strategies making fair demands had sizable basins of attraction. (3) In a system where five different demands can be made, demands closest to (approximately) 91% had the largest basins of attraction. (4) If the strategies have thresholds for acceptable demands, rather than individuated responses to each demand, the apparent optimum demand may be quite low: 64% for one set of trials. (shrink)

In August 2019, the fifth international congress of the 'International Association for the Study of the Philosophy of Edith Stein' (IASPES) took place at the University of Cologne. Of the 57 papers presented at this prominent conference prepared and chaired by the historian and theologian Harm Klueting, 54 were accepted for publication in revised versions. Professor Klueting was able to add three other contributions -- among them by the director of the Research Institute of the German Province of the (...) Carmelites at Bamberg, the historian and theologian Edeltraud Klueting, who acts as co-editor. The congress volume, published only a little more than a year after the congress despite significant constraints due to the Corona pandemic, contains 29 contributions in English, 21 in German, and seven in Spanish or French on the subjects 'Biographical questions', 'Edith Stein and thinkers of the past', 'Edith Stein and other contemporary thinkers', 'Anthropology -- Women and men', 'Philosophy -- phenomenology and Christian philosophy', 'Society and politics', 'Theology and spirituality', and 'Experiences with Edith Stein'. (shrink)

This richly illustrated book discusses the ways in which astronomy expanded after 1945 from a modest discipline to a robust and modern science. It begins with an introduction to the state of astronomy in 1945 before recounting how in the following years, initial observations were made in hitherto unexplored ranges of wavelengths, such as X-radiation, infrared radiation and radio waves. These led to the serendipitous discovery of more than a dozen new phenomena, including quasars and neutron stars, that each triggered (...) a new area of research. The book goes on to discuss how after 1985, the further, systematic exploration of the earlier discoveries led to long-term planning and the construction of new, large telescopes on Earth and in Space. Key scientific highlights described in the text are the detection of exoplanets, the unexpected discovery of the accelerated expansion of the Universe, a generally accepted model for the large-scale properties of the Universe and the ΛCDM theory that explains how the galaxies and stars of the present Universe were formed from minute irregularities in the homogenous gas that filled the early Universe. All these major scientific achievements came at a price, namely the need to introduce two new phenomena that are as yet unexplained by physics: inflation and dark energy. Probably the deepest unsolved question has to be: Why did all of this start with a Big Bang? (shrink)

According to his own account, Russell was “led to” the Theory of Descriptions by “the desire to avoid Meinong’s unduly populous realm of being”. This “official view” has been subjected to severe criticism. However stimulating this criticism may be, it is too extreme and therefore not critical enough. It fails to fully acknowledge both the way it is itself opposed to Russell and the way Russell and Meinong were opposed to _their_ opponents. In order to avoid these failures, a more (...) “dialectical” kind of analysis will be applied. It leads to unravelling two confusions shared by the official and the unofficial views: the confusion between _conception_ and _adoption_ of the theory of descriptions and the confusion between _three varieties of Meinongianism_. By means of these distinctions both a significant kernel of truth contained in Russell’s account and the underlying motive for his distortion of the historical facts can be laid bare. (shrink)

In legal decisions standpoints can be supported by formal and also by substantive interpretative arguments. Formal arguments consist of reasons the weight or force of which is essentially dependent on the authoritativeness that the reasons may also have: In this connection one may think of linguistic and systemic arguments. On the other hand, substantive arguments are not backed up by authority, but consist of a direct invocation of moral, political, economic, or other social considerations. Formal arguments can be analyzed as (...) exclusionary reasons: The authoritative character excludes—in principle—substantial counterarguments. Formal arguments are sometimes used to conceal value judgements based on substantial arguments. This paper deals with reconstructing problems regarding this strategic use of formal arguments in legal decisions, with a focus on linguistic argumentation. (shrink)