Transgender legal protections have long been contentious issues, with courts often pathologizing or refusing recognition of transgender identities. Recently, however, courts adjudicating asylum claims have recognized “transgender” as a legitimate category of protection. I take this legal development as an opportunity to ask how courts determine if individuals are transgender. While previous work has shown how courts maintain the gender binary, asylum law offers the first chance to analyze how recognizing a distinct transgender category affects the legal gender order and (...) the classification of trans claimants. Drawing on court decisions, ethnographic observations, and interviews, I argue that the recognition of transgender as a category implicitly acknowledges the malleability of gender. Yet, the adjudication of transgender asylum cases continues to uphold a fixed and binary conception of gender by assuming a “born into the wrong body” narrative and that claimants should always already know their gender identities. Courts thus enforce a cis–trans binary wherein only certain claimants are found “trans enough.”. (shrink)

The globalization movement in recent decades has meant rapid growth in trade, financial transactions, and cross-country ownership of economic assets. In this article, we examine how the globalization of national business systems has influenced the framing of corporate social responsibility (CSR). This is done using text analysis of CEO letters appearing in the annual reports of 15 major corporations in Sweden during a period of transformational change. The results show that the discourse about CSR in the annual reports has changed (...) from a national and communitarian view of social responsibility (cf. a negotiated view of CSR) toward an international and individualistic view of social responsibility (cf. a self-regulating view of CSR). The article contributes theoretically (1) by adding a national–global dimension to previous conceptualizations of CSR and (2) by showing that the rise of CSR discourse and activities in the last 10 years does not have to imply an increased commitment and interest in corporate responsibility per se, only that there are increased societal expectations that corporations should develop the capability to act more independently as moral agents. (shrink)

Research on the base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) approach and the associated business case for deprived participants in informal markets now appears frequently in a range of business ethics and management-related journals. The present analysis of how supply chain management (SCM) and sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) concepts are habitually used in base-of-the-pyramid research serves to strengthen the theoretical foundation of BoP research by addressing the related business case. Based on a content analysis of BoP papers published in English-speaking peer-reviewed journals between 2000 (...) and 2014 from the Web of Science database, this literature review comprehends existing research in the context of established SCM and SSCM frameworks, using both frequency and contingency analyses. The frequency analysis indicates that supply chain management and sustainable supply chain management [(S)SCM] constructs regularly discussed in the BoP literature include supplier integration, strategic purchasing, decommoditization, long-term relationship and enhanced communication among supply chain actors. The identified contingencies reflect linkages between BoP research and (S)SCM constructs. The highest number of links was found between the SCM constructs of strategic purchasing and long-term relationship and the SSCM constructs of supplier integration and communication and coordination with suppliers. These can be regarded as the most crucial (S)SCM constructs in the BoP business environment. This analysis facilitates the development of future research propositions at this intersection, including the use of tools from (S)SCM theories to evaluate BoP propositions and projects. Granted the limited range of BoP-related papers analyzed, the findings provide a coherent understanding of (S)SCM practices crucial to the functioning of BoP markets and why they matter, so contributing to the related ethical rationale. These findings will be of use to researchers and practitioners alike for the formulation of business development strategies and their subsequent implementation in informal market economies. (shrink)

The analytical tension between legal norms, moral values, and national interests seems no uncharted territory in political science, but has found very little interest in legal academia. For lawyers, moral values and national interests are largely “unknowns,” dealt with by other disciplines. Looking a bit deeper, the picture becomes more nuanced, however. As part of a roundtable on “Balancing Legal Norms, Moral Values, and National Interests,” this essay argues that norms, values, and interests are not different universes of legal normativity, (...) morality, and specific interests, but are interrelated concepts. Values clearly influence norms and often underpin them, while seemingly concrete norms (rules) are themselves often fragile constructs trying to balance competing interests. Value systems are quite diverse within societies, and this is even truer for interests; each society is a dynamic system of social interaction where conflicting interests are constantly playing out. In a way, underlying conflicts of values and interests are constantly being renegotiated in the legal system, with the norms enshrined in the text of statutes and treaties serving to constitute transitory reference points. (shrink)

Within evolutionary biology, life-history theory is used to explain cross-species differences in allocation strategies regarding reproduction, maturation, and survival. Behavioral scientists have recently begun to conceptualize such strategies as a within-species individual characteristic that is predictive of behavior. Although life history theory provides an important framework for behavioral scientists, the psychometric approach to life-history strategy measurement—as operationalized by K-factors—involves conceptual entanglements. We argue that current psychometric approaches attempting to identify K-factors are based on an unwarranted conflation of functional descriptions and (...) proximate mechanisms—a conceptual mix-up that may generate unviable hypotheses and invites misinterpretation of empirical findings. The assumptions underlying generic psychometric methodology do not allow measurement of functionally defined variables; rather these methods are confined to Mayr’s proximate causal realm. We therefore conclude that K-factor scales lack validity, and that life history strategy cannot be identified with psychometrics as usual. To align theory with methodology, suggestions for alternative methods and new avenues are proposed. (shrink)

Much recent work in Cognitive Linguistics and neighbouring disciplines has adopted a so-called usage-based perspective in which generalizations are based on the analysis of authentic usage data provided by computerized corpora. However, the analysis of such data does not always utilize methodological findings from other disciplines to avoid analytical pitfalls and, at the same time, generate robust results. A case in point is the strategy of using corpus frequencies. In this paper, we take up a recently much debated issue from (...) construction grammar concerning the association between verbs and argument-structure constructions, and investigate a construction, the English as-predicative, in order to test the predictive power of different kinds of frequency data against that of a recent, more refined corpus-based approach, the so-called collexeme analysis. To that end, the results of the application of these corpus-based approaches to an analysis of the as predicative are compared with the results of a sentence-completion experiment. Concerning the topic under consideration, collexeme analysis is not only shown to be superior on a variety of theoretical and methodological grounds, it also significantly outperforms frequency as a predictor of subjects’ production preferences. We conclude by pointing out some implications for usage-based approaches. (shrink)

Construction grammar organizes its basic elements of description, its constructions, into networks that range from concrete, lexically-filled constructions to fully schematic ones, with several levels of partially schematic constructions in between. However, only few corpus studies with a constructionist background take this multi-level nature fully into account. In this paper, we argue that understanding language variation can be advanced considerably by systematically formulating and testing hypotheses at various levels in the constructional network. To illustrate the approach, we present a corpus (...) study of the Dutch naar-alternation. It is found that this alternation primarily functions at an intermediate level in the constructional network. (shrink)

Die klassische deutsche Philosophie zählt zu den bedeutendsten und wirkmächtigsten Diskursformationen. Die Beiträge bieten eine grundlegende Orientierung sowie systematische Analysen zu Schlüsselbegriffen und Grundproblemen der praktischen Philosophie dieser Epoche. Neben den Klassikern wie Kant, Fichte und Hegel werden auch Beziehungen zu aktuellen Debatten behandelt und analysiert.

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 63 Heft: 6 Seiten: 1022-1047.

During the last years the focus of sociological justice research has been on the measurement of justice attitudes of the people outside the laboratory via large scale and internationally comparative surveys. Within these surveys one attempt has been to identify the social determinants and the consequences of individual justice attitudes. However, the theoretical foundation of this research within exiting sociological theories and concepts has been neglected. Therefore, the sociological justice research is so far not able to provide theoretically sound answers (...) to at least two questions: (1) why do people think justice is important, and (2) what are the reasons for substantively different justice attitudes? By using the theory of social production functions and the goal-framing theory this contribution tries to overcome this shortcoming and suggests an explanation why justice is seen as a desirable goal and why norms of justice are in the very own interest of the individual. Assumptions are derived under which conditions individuals declare themselves in favor of a specific principle of justice to solve conflicts of allocation and distribution. The aim of this paper is to derive theoretically substantive and empirically testable predictions based on a general theory of action and thus to contribute to a stronger theoretical foundation of sociological justice research. (shrink)

Will the new Rome I Regulation meet its goals - to improve the predictability of the outcome of litigation? - to bring certainty as to the law applicable and the free movement of judgments? - to designate the same national law irrespective of the country of the court in which an action is brought? The most important features of this instrument were outlined and discussed by distinguished legal experts from all over Europe and beyond at the conference "The Rome I (...) Regulation", held in Verona on March 2009. This first book in English on the Rome I Regulation contains the papers submitted to that conference. (shrink)

In the article, the author presents attempts by Polish Marxist philosophers to enrich Marxism with ethical issues. The initial absence of ethics in Marxism is associated with the ignorance of tradition related to their own formation. In the author’s opinion, only polemics with the competitive Lviv-Warsaw school forced Polish Marxists to take the issue seriously. That is why Polish Marxist ethics in its mature form was only established in the 1960s, and did not enrich Marxism itself, but rather indirectly contributed (...) to the initiation of socio-political transformations in our country. (shrink)

This video-ethnographic study explores how professional actors and a director at the end of a theatrical rehearsal process coordinate transitions between rehearsed scenes. This is done through the development and use ofcues, that is, ‘signals for action’. The aim is to understand how cues are developed and how timing in transitions is achieved by using the designed cues. Work on three different scene transitions is analysed using multimodal Conversation Analysis. The results show that cueing is a central tool for developing (...) well-timed transitions, and how cues serve different purposes in the developing performance. There is no prior plan for how to achieve timely transitions. In all the analysed examples, it is an actor who must produce or act on the given cue who insists on its precise definition, followed by a negotiation on candidate cues, confirmation and specifying the cue. It is also actors who are primarily responsible for the timing of transitions, and the timing is solved through an interplay of clear-cut and embodied actions that allow for temporal variance. Cues are reflexively linked to actors’ observation and interpretation of other actors’ actions, which prevents a mechanical determination of timing in scene transition. (shrink)

Beginning from the texts of Colectivo Situaciones on the insurrectional movements of December 2001 in Argentina, this article raises the question of institutional critique on the basis of a reflection on destituent practices. Far from being reducible to the aim of a reinstitution – that is, the aim of accomplishing the classical functions of political power – these practices refer instead to a « positive no », to the self-transforming actualization of the potentials of social action before and beyond the (...) figures of institutional representation. Thus, what appears amidst destitution is not a « labor of negation », but rather the contours of an instituting activity that engenders new forms of coexistence and coaction, even if this activity is partially haunted by the staging of past conflicts. To better understand this instituent activity, we must consider a second meaning of the word « destitution », which is desubjectivation as the destruction of the faculty of subjectivation, as Agamben describes it in Remnants of Auschwitz. It is only on the basis of the double meaning of destitution that the complex co-involvement of institution and destitution can be brought to light and that the privilege long accorded to « constitution » can be questioned, on the level of the theory of subjectity as well as that of politics. (shrink)

The main thesis of the paper is that change and time depend existentially on a specific property of being, described by the author as the Heraclitean unstability (i.e. a kind ofsusceptibility to non-existence). Change and time are, in substance, quite different aspects of being; but they are mutually connected: time cannot exist without occurence of changes; and vice versa. All these intuitions are logically reconstructed by the author.

This is a short systematic introduction to Political Philosophy.

A collection of Classical Texts in Moral Philosophy from Antiquity to the Present.

Welche Theorie(n) bzw. Auffassungen eines Rechts auf Eigentum werden im gerechtigkeitstheoretischen Egalitarismus vertreten? Spezifischer stellt sich die Frage: Lässt der Egalitarismus als eine Theorie der Gleichverteilung Eigentumsrechte überhaupt zu oder schränkt er sie nur stark ein, um Umverteilung zu ermöglichen? Zur Beantwortung dieser Frage wird zuerst der Egalitarismus näher bestimmt. Sodann wird zweitens bestimmt, was Eigentum ausmacht, um dann auf die eigentumstheoretischen Aspekte im Egalitarismus eingehen zu können. Dazu wird drittens gezeigt, dass und warum es für die dominante Rawls’sche Version (...) des Egalitarismus keine moralischen Ansprüche auf Eigentum vor den Ergebnissen der Umsetzung (s)einer übergeordneten Gerechtigkeitstheorie gibt. Anschließend wird auf zwei egalitäre Alternativen zur Rawls’schen Verteilungsgerechtigkeit eingegangen, nämlich die linkslibertäre (im vierten Abschnitt) sowie die linksliberale Eigentumstheorie (im fünften Abschnitt). Die linkslibertäre Auffassung argumentiert mittels einer naturrechtlichen und die (links-)liberale Auffassung mittels einer moralischen Begründung für Freiheits- und Eigentumsrechte als grundlegend. So gelangen beide auf unterschiedlichen Wegen zu egalitaristischen Implikationen für ihre Eigentumsauffassungen. -/- What theory or conception of property rights does egalitarianism as a theory of justice advocate? More specifically, as a theory of equal distribution, does egalitarianism allow for property rights at all, or does it severely restrict them in order to allow for redistribution? To answer this question, we first need to define egalitarianism. Second, it is necessary to determine what constitutes property in order to be able to address the property-theoretical aspects of egalitarianism. Third, it will be shown for the dominant Rawlsian version of egalitarianism that and why there are no moral claims to property before the results of the implementation of a higher ranking theory of justice. Two egalitarian alternatives to Rawlsian distributive justice are then discussed, namely the left-libertarian (in the fourth section) and the left-liberal (in the fifth section) theories of property. The libertarian view argues for freedom and property rights on the basis of natural law, while the (left) liberal view does so on the basis of morality. In this way, both arrive at egalitarian implications for their concepts of property by different routes. (shrink)

In this paper I present an argument for a procedural principle of distribution, which is often called the presumption of equality.

This book studies Thomas Aquians' treatise on happiness (STh I-II 1-5) with his "Summa Theologiae from a Lutheran theological perspective.

This paper is an attempt to explain Wittgenstein’s remark that „It is always by favor of Nature that one knows something.“ In this regard, two positions are distinguished. The first one is the standard interpretation within analytic epistemology. Alternatively, I will suggest another possibility to interpret Wittgenstein’s remark, which is inspired by John McDowell’s epistemological disjunctivism. As I am going to show, the alternative is the better choice.