This article focuses on the ethical implications of so-called ‘collateral damage’. It develops a moral typology of collateral harm to innocents, which occurs as a side effect of military or quasi-military action. Distinguishing between accidental and incidental collateral damage, it introduces four categories of such damage: negligent, oblivious, knowing and reckless collateral damage. Objecting mainstream versions of the doctrine of double effect, the article argues that in order for any collateral damage to be morally permissible, violent agents must comply with (...) high standards of care. In order for incidental harm to be permissible, an agent must take pains to avoid such harm even at higher cost to him- or herself. It is argued that accidentally but negligently caused collateral damage may be just as difficult to excuse as incidental harm. Only if high precautionary standards of care are met, can unintended harm to innocents – incidental or accidental – be permissible. In practice, such a strong commitment to avoiding harm to civilians may well lead us to question more generally and rethink more radically how violent conflicts ought to be fought, how military violence ought to be used and whether there are better ways of achieving those aims that we think are legitimate than those we are currently using. (shrink)

Collateral legal consequences attached to criminal convictions (CLCs) are often criticised because they expose criminal offenders to various forms of harmful and/or wrongful treatment. In this article, we argue that CLCs are problematic because they undermine the power to punish, a distinct normative power that allows the relevant powerholders to directly change the offender's normative situation. The article identifies important features of the power to punish construed as the normative ability that judges should hold in liberal polities. In particular, we (...) examine how CLCs undermine two of the features – viz., robustness and attributability – that are central to the non-deficient functioning of the normative power to punish. Acknowledging the implausibility of a forthcoming demise of CLCs, we conclude with an outline of non-ideal proposals that would marginally mitigate the unwarranted effects that CLCs have on the exercise of the normative power to punish. (shrink)

This paper concerns what if any obligations a “society of equals” has to criminal offenders after legal punishment ends. In the United States, when people leave prisons, they are confronted with a wide range of federal, state, and local laws that burden their ability to secure welfare benefits, public housing, employment opportunities, and student loans. Since the 1980s, these legal consequences of criminal convictions have steadily increased in their number, severity, and scope. The central question I want to ask is (...) whether the infliction of these burdensome legal consequences for those who have already been punished by the state is consistent with the ideal of equality. I argue that these collateral legal consequences violate relational egalitarian principles of justice and are thus objectionable. I conclude by examining possible objections to my argument. (shrink)

This article begins by comparing terror and death and then focuses on whether killing combatants and noncombatants as a mere means to create terror, that is in turn a means to winning a war, is ever permissible. The role of intentions and alternative acts one might have done is examined in this regard. The second part of the article begins by criticizing a standard justification for causing collateral (side effect) deaths in war and offers an alternative justification that makes use (...) of the idea of group liability. (shrink)

From schools advertising McDonald's, Nike, and Shell oil to military generals appointed as superintendents; from corporate CEOs hailed as education experts to students suspended for wearing Pepsi tee shirts on Coke day; Collateral Damage sifts through a wide range of incidents to reveal how the rising corporatization of public schools needs to be understood as a part of a broader attack on the public sector. Uniquely, Collateral Damage considers the privatization of public education in relation to both globalization and local (...) struggles over curriculum, schools, and culture. (shrink)

Kalevi Kull’s biosemiotic aesthetics has apparent potential for ecosemiotics. This potentiality will be elaborated through the concepts of collateral beauty and adjacent semiosis. If diverse organisms aim towards better fitting, perfection, and beauty, than aesthetics arises in ecosystems occasionally yet recurrently. Perceiving such collateral beauty becomes an effective means to create new semiotic connections and associations, thereby contributing to the integrity and coherence of the semiotic system. Collateral beauty may help humans become better connected with the broader ecosemiosphere, or to (...) perceive the meaning and the value of ecological systems. (shrink)

This chapter explores collateral sanctions' awkward straddling of punitive and regulatory aims. In showing that these restrictions do not fit clearly into either category, it demonstrates the real dangers of that ambiguity. The harmful consequences of the massive, murky, ill-defined collateral-sanctions regime extend well beyond those directly affected, rendering citizens unable to judge the efficacy of such restrictions and undermining core commitments of the American political order. While many such restrictions seem quite unlikely to fulfill their purported objectives, the confusion (...) over the character and purpose of collateral sanctions actually keeps us from knowing how to judge them in the first place. (shrink)

This article is a review of the 2010 book Collateral Damage by Dan Walter.

A criminal conviction can trigger numerous burdensome legal consequences beyond the formal sentence. Some charge that these “collateral” legal consequences (CLCs) constitute additional measures of punishment, which raises the further question of whether judges should consider these CLCs when making sentencing decisions, reducing the formal sentence in proportion to the severity of the CLCs the defendant will face. The idea that all CLCs constitute forms of punishment reflects a particular conception of punishment, which I call the “minimalist view.” In this (...) paper, I argue against the minimalist view. I contend that on a more adequate conception of punishment, some but not all CLCs constitute punishment. I also argue that whether judges should consider CLCs in sentencing decisions depends on whether the relevant CLCs constitute punishment. (shrink)

When most people think of legal punishment, they envision a judge or jury convicting a person for a crime, and then sentencing that person in accordance with clearly prescribed penalties, as specified in the criminal law. The person serves the sentence, is released (perhaps a bit early for A good behavior"), and then welcomed back into society as a full-functioning member, adorned with all the rights and responsibilities of ordinary citizens.

Pragmatic clinical trials offer important benefits, such as generating evidence that is suited to inform real-world health care decisions and increasing research efficiency. However, PCTs also present ethical challenges. One such challenge involves the management of information that emerges in a PCT that is unrelated to the primary research question, yet may have implications for the individual patients, clinicians, or health care systems from whom or within which research data were collected. We term these findings as?pragmatic clinical trial collateral findings,? (...) or?PCT-CFs?. In this article, we explore the ethical considerations associated with the identification, assessment, and management of PCT-CFs, and how these considerations may vary based upon the attributes of a specific PCT. Our purpose is to map the terrain of PCT-CFs to serve as a foundation for future scholarship as well as policy-making and to facilitate careful deliberation about actual cases as they occur in practice. (shrink)

Critical literatures, and public discourses, on public health policies and practices often present fixated concerns with paternalism. In this paper, rather than focus on the question of whether and why intended instances of paternalistic policy might be justified, we look to the wider, real-world socio-political contexts against which normative evaluations of public health must take place. We explain how evaluative critiques of public health policy and practice must be sensitive to the nuance and complexity of policy contexts. This includes sensitivity (...) to the ‘imperfect’ reach and application of policy, leading to collateral effects including collateral paternalism. We argue that theoretical critiques must temper their demandingness to real-world applicability, allowing for the detail of social and policy contexts, including harm reduction: apparent knock-down objections of paternalism cannot hold if they are limited to an abstract or artificially-isolated evaluation of the reach of a public health intervention. (shrink)

Drawing on their extensive research, Nichols and Berliner document and categorize the ways that high-stakes testing threatens the purposes and ideals of the American education system. For more than a decade, the debate over high-stakes testing has dominated the field of education. This passionate and provocative book provides a fresh perspective on the issue and powerful ammunition for opponents of high-stakes tests. Their analysis is grounded in the application of Campbell’s Law, which posits that the greater the social consequences associated (...) with a quantitative indicator, the more likely it is that the indicator itself will become corrupted—and the more likely it is that the use of the indicator will corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor. Nichols and Berliner illustrate both aspects of this “corruption,” showing how the pressures of high-stakes testing erode the validity of test scores and distort the integrity of the education system. Their analysis provides a coherent and comprehensive intellectual framework for the wide-ranging arguments against high-stakes testing, while putting a compelling human face on the data marshalled in support of those arguments. (shrink)

This essay attempts to identify the ethical principles appropriate to a second-order political agent—an agent, that is, whose primary responsibility lies not in the implementation of state power, but in the response to and evaluation of that state power. The specific agent I examine is the human rights non-governmental organization, and the specific context is that of humanitarian military intervention. I argue that the specific role of the human rights NGO gives rise to ethical permissions not available to government agents. (...) In particular, such NGOs may have permissions to ignore the motivation of government agents, and support even substantially unjust interventions, where such interventions would have substantial benefit for the defense and preservation of basic human rights. a Footnotesa Previous versions of this paper were presented at Brown University, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. I am grateful to all participants for their questions and comments. Thanks in particular go to the editors of this volume, whose help with this paper has been especially valuable. Responsibility for errors, of course, remains my own. (shrink)

The ongoing Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is disrupting most specialized healthcare services worldwide, including those for high-risk newborns and their families. Due to the risk of contagion, critically ill infants, relatives and professionals attending neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) are undergoing a profound remodeling of the organization and quality of care. In particular, mitigation strategies adopted to combat the COVID-19 pandemic may hinder the implementation of family-centered care within the NICU. This may put newborns at risk for several adverse (...) effects, e.g., less weight gain, more nosocomial infections, increased length of NICU stay as well as long-term worse cognitive, emotional, and social development. This article aims to contribute to deepening the knowledge on the psychological impact of COVID-19 on parents and NICU staff members based on empirical data from the literature. We also provided evidence-based indications on how to safely empower families and support NICU staff facing such a threatening emergency, while preserving the crucial role of family-centered developmental care practices. (shrink)

The well-known perception of war-hungry Muslims who had the Qur’an on the one hand and sword on the other offering a choice of either accepting Islam or losing one’s head has easily been created in the literature by the Orientalist scholars. Today the stress on the Jihad controversy by mass media in Europe and America is important and needs to be corrected. That jihad has usually been translated by the Western media as “holy war” is a greatly misunderstood principle in (...) Islam. There is no term in Arabic which means, “holy war”. War is not “holy” in Islam. I would like to divide this study into two parts: In the first part, the issue of conquest and its religious, ideological and theoretical references will be dealt with in reference to basic Islamic sources and the previous Islamic state’s practices. In particular, what are the limits of warfare and the position of civilians in the wars and wartimes according to the Islamic law will be looked for. In the second part, as a typical Islamic state, to what extend Ottoman conquests in the Balkans followed and practiced the legal way that opened up by Islamic law will be analyzed according to the available chronicles. (shrink)

People convicted of crimes are subject to a criminal sentence, but they also face a host of other restrictive legal measures: Some are denied access to jobs, housing, welfare, the vote, or other goods. Some may be deported, may be subjected to continued detention, or may have their criminal records made publicly accessible. These measures are often more burdensome than the formal sentence itself. -/- In Beyond Punishment?, Zachary Hoskins offers a philosophical examination of these burdensome legal measures, called collateral (...) legal consequences. Drawing on resources in moral, legal, and political philosophy, Hoskins analyzes the various kinds of collateral consequences imposed in different legal systems and the important moral challenges they raise. Can collateral legal consequences ever be justified as forms of criminal punishment or as civil measures? Hoskins contends that, considered as forms of punishment, such restrictions should be constrained by considerations of proportionality and offender reform. He also argues that they may in a limited range of cases be permissible as risk-reductive civil measures. Whether considered as criminal punishment or civil measures, however, collateral legal consequences are justifiable in a far narrower range of cases than we find in current legal practice. -/- Considering just how pervasive collateral legal consequences have become and their dramatic effects on offenders' lives, Beyond Punishment? sheds valuable light on whether these restrictive measures are ever morally justified. (shrink)

Convicted offenders face a host of so-called “collateral” consequences: formal measures such as legal restrictions on voting, employment, housing, or public assistance, as well as informal consequences such as stigma, family tensions, and financial insecurity. These consequences extend well beyond an offender’s criminal sentence itself and are frequently more burdensome than the sentence. This essay considers two respects in which collateral consequences may be relevant to the question of what the state should, or may, criminalize. First, they may be relevant (...) according to specific accounts of criminalization, including plausible versions of the harm principle and legal moralism. Second, they may be relevant to the legitimacy of state criminalization more generally. Thus for legal theorists concerned with the issue of legitimate criminalization, normative questions raised by collateral consequences are of central importance. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore have launched a powerful attack against Paul Churchland's connectionist theory of semantics—aka State Space Semantics. In one part of their overall attack, they exploit the potentially orthogonal histories of different individuals to introduce what they labeled ‘the collateral information problem’. Aarre Laakso and Gary Cottrell have recently put forward a mathematical technique for measuring conceptual similarity across neural networks. Churchland uses Laakso and Cottrell's tecnique to defend State Space Semantics. In this paper I shall highlight (...) a potential problem for Laakso and Cottrell's technique, and for Churchland's subsequent defence of connectionist semantics that has been ignored in the connectionist literature. I shall argue that a connectionist sympathiser of Churchland could not make use of Laakso and Cottrell's neurosimulations to address Fodor and Lepore's collateral information challenge. (shrink)

When people encounter potential hazards, their expectations and behaviours can be shaped by a variety of factors including other people's expressions of verbal likelihood. What is the impact of such expressions when a person also has numeric likelihood estimates from the same source? Two studies used a new task involving an abstract virtual environment in which people learned about and reacted to novel hazards. Verbal expressions attributed to peers influenced participants’ behaviour toward hazards even when numeric estimates were also available. (...) Namely, verbal expressions suggesting that the likelihood of harm from a hazard is low yielded more risk taking with respect to said hazard. There were also inverse collateral effects, whereby participants’ behaviour and estimates regarding another hazard in the same context were affected in the opposite direction. These effects may be based on directionality and relativity cues inferred from verbal likelihood expressions. (shrink)

What are termed the ‘collateral legal consequences’ (or CLCs) of criminal conviction have been defended in a variety of ways. The focus in this article is on efforts to justify the burdens and restrictions they involve as nonpenal measures designed to secure public safety. Zachary Hoskins' careful defense of such public‐safety CLCs is utilized as a point of departure. Although it is granted that such measures might be defensible, the many complications and problems of ensuring that they do not amount (...) to further legal punishment and are kept within reasonable bounds are explored. I argue that the state is unlikely to deploy such public safety measures wisely and with sufficient restraint. (shrink)

Ovaj clanak se bavi kritickom diskusijom shvatanja Kevina R. Dzonsona o americkoj imigrantskoj reformi, kao i njegovim predlogom o otvorenoj imigraciji koje je izneo u svojoj knjizi Otvaranje brana i u nekim drugim svojim clancima posvecenim istoj temi.

This investigation examines ‘teasing’ of non-combatant children by US military service personnel in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. The majority of existent investigations of teasing and related practices place significant conceptual importance on the intentions of the teaser – such that a target can understand that the tease is not true. However, in data examined here it appears that targets do not understand the language in which the teasing is undertaken. Drawing from publicly available video footage posted on the video sharing (...) website Liveleak, we provide an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic informed examination of how persons initiating teasing strategically exploit asymmetries in the sequential and preferential organization of interactions when tease recipients do not have sufficient English skills to redress the negative assessments being made of them. Three types of candidate teasing practices are identified: soldier initiated negative other-assessments; target parroting negative other-assessments; and offer-withdrawal games. Analysis examines how such interactions effectively fail as teases and explores how children can resist soldiers’ pursuit of degrading responses. (shrink)

The adoption of the Collateral Directive 2002/47/EC represents an important progress towards the implementation of a truly harmonized single financial market. The Lithuanian Financial Collateral Arrangements Act (the Law) has implemented the Directive 2002/47/EC in time. The Law establishes special regulation for financial securities given in transactions between „professional market participants“, between market participants and other companies, inclusive small and medium-sized enterprises. The Law applies to certain transactions on the financial markets and aims at stabilizing the financial markets. Essentially, the (...) Directive and the national implementing law ensure the enforceability of financial collateral arrangements and provide for rapid and non-formalistic enforcement of financial collateral procedures in insolvency cases. The realization of financial collaterals is made easier and cheaper. (shrink)

Traditionally, in deciding whether some strategy or action in war is proportionate and necessary and thus permissible both international law and just war theory focus exclusively on civilian deaths and the destruction of civilian infrastructure. I argue in this paper that any argument that can explain why we should care about collateral killing and damage to infrastructure can also explain why collateral displacement matters. I argue that displacement is a foreseeable near-proximate cause of lethal harm to civilians and is relevant (...) for proportionality and necessity calculi. Accepting my argument has significant consequences for what we are permitted to do in war and for what obligations we have towards refugees that result from our actions in war. (shrink)

In this article I attempt to show conclusively that the apparent intrinsic difference between causing collateral damage and directly attacking innocents is an illusion. I show how eleven morally irrelevant alterations can transform an apparently permissible case of harming as a side-effect into an apparently impermissible case of harming as a means. The alterations are as obviously irrelevant as the victims’ skin colour, and consistently treating them as relevant would have unacceptable implications for choices between more and less harmful ways (...) of securing greater goods. This shows not only how the principles philosophers have proposed for distinguishing between these cases cannot withstand scrutiny, but how we can be sure that there are no relevant differences yet to be discovered. I conclude by considering reasons to think that there are deontological constraints against harming, but that they apply just as forcefully against collateral harms as they do against intended harms. (shrink)

A sophisticated and intellectually powerful analysis of culpability and moral responsibility in war, This book focuses on the causes of many episodes of foreseeable collateral damage. Trenchant, original, and ranging across security studies, international law, ethics, and international relations, Accountability for Killing will reshape our understanding of the ethics of contemporary war.

Recent discussions in the just war literature suggest that soldiers have a duty to assume certain risks in order to protect the lives of all innocent civilians. I challenge this principle of risk by arguing that it is justified neither as a principle that guides the conduct of combat soldiers, nor as a principle that guides commanders in the US military. I demonstrate that the principle of risk fails on the first account because it requires soldiers both to violate their (...) strict duty of obedience and loyalty and to exceed their special obligations to protect their fellow comrades, the state, the state's constituents and other protected civilians. I then illustrate that the principle of risk fails on the second account since it conflicts with the commander's primary obligation to protect and promote the welfare and lives of his or her soldiers. I conclude by arguing that we cannot reasonably expect soldiers and commanders to adhere to the principle of risk until there is a radical, institutional-level transformation of militaristic goals, values, strategies, policies, warrior codes and expectations of service members in the US Armed Forces. (shrink)

Why do states who are committed to the principle of civilian immunity and the protection of non-combatants end up killing and injuring large numbers of civilians during their military operations? Bugsplat explains this paradox through an in-depth examination of five conflicts fought by Western powers since 1989.