RESUMO:O objeto de estudo deste artigo é a condição humana. Qual a possibilidade de existência da condição humana fundamentada na liberdade? O objetivo é relacionar esfera pública, política, liberdade e condição humana. A elaboração teórica considerou obras de Etienne de La Boétie, Hannah Arendt, Cornelius Castoriadis, entre outros. Na atualidade, ocorre a supressão da condição humana, pois a esfera pública tem a ingerência da esfera privada, predominando a razão instrumental e a lógica do mercado, e o homem é afastado da (...) vida política. Por isso, a nossa ação política pela liberdade é fundamental para a problematização do processo de banalização do mal e da servidão voluntária. A coragem é uma virtude indispensável à ação política, é necessária para nos libertarmos da dominação e do servilismo da vida privada e conquistarmos a vida política. A centralidade da ação política do homem é a sua condição de ser atuante para a reafirmação da esfera pública, do mundo da pluralidade, humano e comum. Todavia, a condição humana fundamentada na liberdade implica a superação da atividade e do pensamento pragmáticos e fragmentários da vida cotidiana e a constituição da praxis na dimensão humano-genérica consciente. ABSTRACT:The subject of this article is the human condition. What is the possibility of the existence of the human condition founded on freedom? The aim is to connect the public sphere, politics, freedom, and the human condition. The works of Etienne de La Boétie, Hannah Arendt, Cornelius Castoriadis, and others, are considered. At the present time there is occurring a suppression of the human condition, because the public sphere exists under the interference of a private sphere in which instrumental reason and market logic prevail. People are divorced from political life. For this reason, political action seeking freedom is essential for addressing the problems of the banalization of evil and voluntary servitude. Courage is an indispensable virtue to political action; it is necessary for liberating us from the domination and servitude of private life, as well as for attaining political life. The centrality of human beings’ political action is the condition for acting to reaffirm the public sphere and the world of plurality, both human and common. However, the human condition founded on freedom supposes the overcoming of the pragmatic and fragmented activity and thinking of daily life, and requires the constitution of praxis in the conscious human-generic dimension. (shrink)

Anorexia nervosa remains an enigma among Western cultures. Various causal explanations have been offered, encompassing biological, psychological, and sociocultural models. These explanations, however, focus on the immediate or proximal mechanisms of causation. A more thorough understanding of anorexia nervosa can be achieved by understanding the relationship between these factors and ultimate causation, the level of explanation which deals with individual reproductive fitness. This paper reviews the biological, psychological, sociocultural, and evolutionary models and indicates a necessary synthesis between proximate and ultimate (...) levels of causation in examining the anorexia nervosa puzzle. (shrink)

The U.S. Supreme Court’s approach to human rights is a global outlier. In conceiving of rights adjudication in categorical terms rather than embracing proportionality analysis, the Court limits its ability to make the kinds of qualitative judgments about rights application required to adjudicate claims of disparate impact, social and economic rights, and horizontal effects, among others. This approach, derivative of a private-law model of dispute resolution, sits in tension with the rights claims typical of a pluralistic jurisdiction with a (...) mature rights culture, in which litigants more often disagree, reasonably, about the scope of rights rather than deny that others have them at all. In order to overcome the mismatch between the nature of the rights claims the Court faces and its anachronistic technology of adjudication, it will need not only to adopt a form of proportionality analysis but it will also need to adjust the ways in which it receives and assesses empirical social facts and it will need to broaden its remedial toolkit to include, for example, suspensions of invalidity. While proportionality is far from perfect, its flaws are anticipated by the challenges of constitutional democracy itself under conditions of pluralism. (shrink)

In the face of documented difficulties in the public understanding of genetics, new metaphors have been suggested. The language of information coding and processing has become deeply entrenched in the public representation of genetics, and some critics have found fault in the blueprint metaphor, a variant of the dominant theme. They have offered the language of the recipe as a preferable metaphor. The metaphors of the blueprint and the recipe are compared in respect to their deterministic implications and other associations. (...) The likelihood of the recipe metaphor framing cognition in more useful ways is called into question. (shrink)

Law as Human Condition This paper concentrates on the dynamic tension between law as it is ‘made’ by legal professionals, functioning as homo faber, and law as it is experienced by citizens, functioning as homo agens. In between those two worlds, law develops as a human condition, a term borrowed from Hannah Arendt. It is argued that, in regard to law development and administration of justice, the function of homo agens should have priority over the function (...) of homo faber. The two basic faculties that connect the two worlds are judgment and speech. This leads to further thoughts on the character of judgment as ‘participatory judgment,’ the function of ‘middle terms’ in legal language and the concept of ‘shared responsibility.’. (shrink)

En la filosofía política latinoamericana predomina una concepción sobre la condición humana,- aunque no siempre se presentase en estos términos-, en lugar de una presunta naturaleza humana, biológicamente determinada o una esencia humana metafísicamente concebida. Los valores por sí mismos, lo mismo éticos que políticos, jurídicos, religiosos, estéticos, etc., no son capaces de realizar absolutamente nada si estos no van acompañados de profundas transformaciones socioeconómico políticas que trascienden su espiritualidad para tratar de convertirse en factor material de impulso al continuo (...) e infinito proceso de enriquecimiento de la condición humana. Este concepto se corresponde mucho mejor con el criterio histórico, holístico, complejo y dialéctico y por tanto contradictorio del perfeccionamiento del hombre en su lucha contra diversas formas de alienación, por lo que resulta más apropiado para concebir el desarrollo progresivo de la democracia y los derechos humanos. Latin American political philosophy is dominated by a conception of the human condition, - though not always he was appearing in these terms-, rather than an alleged human nature, biologically determined or a metaphysically conceived human essence. By themselves, the same ethical values, to political, legal, religious, aesthetic, etc., are not able to do absolutely nothing if they are not accompanied by profound socio-economic political transformations that transcend their spirituality to try to become a material factor of impulse to the infinite and continuous process of enrichment of the human condition. This concept corresponds better with the historical approach, holistic, complex and dialectic and therefore contradictory development of man in their struggle against various forms of alienation, which makes it more appropriate to conceive of the progressive development of democracy and human rights. (shrink)

The human propensity for casting our social worlds as "us against them" is perhaps the primary impediment to deep and broadly inclusive understandings of the workings of rhetoric. Many decades ago, Kenneth Burke assailed that barrier with regard to Adolf Hitler. Surrounded by the satisfactions of vituperation against the leader of one of the world's most heinous social movements, Burke begged his readers to make space for understanding how Hitler's rhetoric brought about what it did. Philippe-Joseph Salazar's Words Are (...) Weapons makes a similar contribution for our era. He asks us to resist the gratifications generated by dismissing as "Islamaphobic" any critical analysis of what he calls "caliphal"... (shrink)

Very little of the expanding debate over private policing has employed the language of human rights. This is notable not just because private policing is a distinctly global phenomenon, and human rights have become, as Michael Ignatieff puts it, “the lingua franca of global moral thought.” It is notable as well because a parallel development that seems in many ways related to the spread of private policing—the escalating importance of private military companies—has been debated as a matter of (...) human rights. This Article asks whether discussions of private policing have been impoverished by their failure to employ the language of human rights. It begins by discussing the dramatic rise, over the past several decades, in the size and significance of private policing. It then summarizes the academic and public policy debates about that development and considers what, if anything, the language of human rights could add to those debates, and whether the addition would be welcome. One strand of the Article compares the debate over private policing with the debate over private military companies. Another strand compares private policing with private prisons, in light of the recent ruling by the Supreme Court of Israel declaring private prisons unconstitutional. The Article concludes that the benefits of introducing the language of human rights into debates about private policing are far from clear—with one exception. Human rights, particularly as codified in international treaties, do seem a promising way to get traction on a particular aspect of police privatization that has received less attention than it deserves: the way in which widespread reliance on private security firms may weaken public commitment to providing everyone with a minimally acceptable degree of protection against private violence. (shrink)

Insights into the problem of our relation to language Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought: A Rhetoric in Transition reflects the present transitional nature of rhetoric and society. Its purpose is to relate the rhetorical theory of Burke to the theories of four major European philosophers--Jürgen Habermas, Ernesto Grassi, Foucault, and Jacques Derrida--as they discuss the nature of language and its central role in society. This book describes a rhetorical world in transition but not a world in chaos. It points (...) to the centrality of symbolism in theories of language and rhetoric and illustrates Burke's influence as a pivotal things and theorist in the communication arts and sciences, suggesting that the observations regarding shifting paradigms and perspectives made by other scholars are indeed emergent in the realm of rhetoric. It also regards the powerful impact of language and symbolic action in both the critique and construction of human knowledge and augurs a central role for rhetoric in the intellectual and social transformations of this and the next century. (shrink)

기계지능으로 작동하는 인공물이나 인공시스템이 인간을 대행하도록 허용할 수 있을 조건은 무엇인가? 이 논문은 자율주행자동차 같은 인공물이 인간의 대리자 역할을 하도록 합리적으로 승인할 수 있을 필요조건을 따진다. 이것은 그러한 인공물을 설계, 제작하고 활용하는 인간 행위의 합리성에 대한 철학적 반성이다. 논자는 여기서 논의된 조건들이 충족되지 않는 한 인공물로 인간을 대행하는 일은 불합리하며 따라서 받아들일 수 없는 것으로 권고되어야 한다고 주장한다. 이른바 5단계 자율주행자동차 같은 인공물을 인간을 대행하는 체계로 승인할 수 있을 필요조건은 그것이 주어진 환경을 지각함에 있어서 그것이 대행하는 인간이 상정하고 적용하는 것과 (...) 동일한 분류체계를 장착하고 적용해야 한다는 것이다. 그런데 논자가 보기에 이 조건을 만족시키는 것은 원칙적으로 불가능하지는 않더라도 매우 어렵다. 이 논문은 왜 그런지를 설명할 것이다. (shrink)

During the 20th century, the format of domestic life became an explicit object of functional reworking and rewriting. Thanks to the industrialisation processes that affected it, the home entered the era of its technical reproducibility, becoming a container aimed at optimising the functions it is called upon to perform. The meanings that were associated with it in the bourgeois tradition of the previous century, first and foremost that of being the place of intimacy and family affection, underwent a significant transformation. (...) The signs of this transformation are particularly evident in the experimental and futuristic projects on human domesticity by Richard Buckminster Fuller. Thanks to them, domesticity enters a new horizon of expression, even beyond the architectural imagination, anticipating elements and characteristics that define its contemporary condition. (shrink)

That every response is also a stimulus has important implications for how we characterize the private experiences of both people and non-human animals. Acting as stimuli, responses, whether covert or overt, change the probability of subsequent responses. Hence, all behavior, covert and overt, is necessarily associative in some sense, and thinking may be characterized as “covert autochaining.” According to this view, animals capable of responding to temporally remote stimuli and to characteristics of their own bodies necessarily engage in some (...) form of associative thinking. This characterization of thinking necessarily presumes that private behavioral events adhere to at least some processes that occur in — and have been extensively studied in — overt behavior. To assume otherwise, as do Daniel Dennett, Robert Nozick, and others, is to be unnecessarily pessimistic both about the robustness of evolutionary processes and about our ability to explain complex human phenomena in rigorous empirical terms. (shrink)

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can’t see it One in four American workers says their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers’ speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, (...) diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom. (shrink)

This essay argues that feminist ethics offers a model of moral philosophy that is enriched by empirical information and critical thought about actual social and moral forms of life and their distributions of authority, privilege and power. Feminist ethics is committed to revealing the ways that these social realities affect both moral philosophy and ethical thinking. Through analysis of a series of diverse examples of claims in contemporary moral philosophy, I illustrate the pitfalls of failing to test philosophical generalizations about (...) moral thinking and moral recognition in light of the realities of human social life and the pervasive presence of social hierarchies that shape moral attitudes as well as social interactions. In conclusion, I argue briefly for a non-ideal, nonfoundationalist, reflexively critical, and naturalized approach to philosophical theory in ethics and to everyday moral thinking. (shrink)

In this study, Knauff and Johnson-Laird's visual impedance hypothesis is applied to the domain of external representations and diagrammatic reasoning. We show that the use of real objects and augmented real objects can control human interpretation and reasoning about conditionals. As participants made inferences, they also moved objects corresponding to premises. Participants who moved real objects made more invalid inferences than those who moved AR objects and those who did not manipulate objects. Our results showed that real objects impeded (...) conditional reasoning, but AR objects did not. These findings are explained by the fact that real objects may over-specify a single state that exists, while AR objects suggest multiple possibilities. (shrink)

EVER SINCE PLOTINUS SOUGHT CLARITY in the notion of privation to dispel our human perplexity about evil, philosophers have debated whether this concept is adequate to the task. The intensity and scope of evil in the twentieth century—which has seen the horrors of world war and genocide—have added fuel to the debate. Can the idea of a falling away from the good, however refined, come anywhere close to capturing the calculation, the commitment, the energy, and the drive that underlie (...) the most virulent projects in malfeasance? While the privation account might appear a reasonable strategy for explaining passive wrongdoing—indifference to people in grave need, or cooperation with injustice—the more active and dynamic forms of evil would nevertheless seem to elude its conceptual net. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Conventions on human rights give priority to parents in education but modern states tend to make uniform provision, tending towards a monopoly position. Education itself is not incompatible with liberty but is a condition of it. A three-sided conflict exists, however, between the state, parents and professionals as to who should represent the interests of children. Liberty is best preserved if the conflict is resolved in favour of parents, for only parental decision-making guarantees educational variety and change. (...) In addition, the parental relationship itself generates rights, including one derived from the broader political right to cultural and religious freedom. (shrink)

It is still a popular philosophical position to call for a strict “separationism” concerning the private and the public sphere when it comes to religious convictions. Richard Rorty is one prominent supporter of this claim. The traditional critique against this division is mostly built on a particular characterization of religion that is at odds with Rortian assumptions. In this article, however, Rorty is criticized on his own terms turning pragmatically the objection to a fully internal one. What Rorty values most, (...) namely a tolerant and ironic liberalism as the capacity to describe oneself in new and interesting ways is precisely the role, I argue, that religious faith could play under “neo-liberal” conditions. (shrink)

The paper describes the modern morality as conditional morality, represented by theories of social contract and utilitarianism. They conditionally impose the moral duties on people, if the other people fulfil moral duties, too. As a result they justify the use of the political power to compel the citizens to public morality, leaving a certain margin of freedom to individual morality in the private domain which is fairly inconsequential for collective life. Public morality, on the other hand, is rigorously regulated and (...) precisely defined by statutory laws and political authority. An individual citizen thus becomes incapacitated in the public domain: reduced to accepting decisions adopted by the ruling group, perhaps also electing them once per several years. Unconditional morality, as represented by evangelical or Kant’s ethics, imposes rights, obligations and moral duties on individuals, requires compliance with them regardless of other individuals or groups. It may never constitute a foundation justifying violence, use of force, abuse of power, deception or restriction of liberty. Within this framework, such actions are considered immoral, irrespective of whether they occur in the institutionalized form or otherwise. (shrink)

Certification of banana plantations is widely used as a device for protecting and improving socio-economic conditions of wageworkers, including their incomes, working conditions and—increasingly—voice [related to labour relations and workplace representation]. However, to date, evidence about the effectiveness of certification in these domains is scarce. We collected detailed field data on (1) economic benefits for improving household income, (2) social benefits for labour practices, and (3) the voice of wageworkers focusing on identity and identification issues amongst wageworkers at Fairtrade certified (...) banana plantations and comparable, non-certified plantations in the Dominican Republic. We used different types of regression models to identify significant relationships. Econometrical analysis of survey results complemented by field observations and outcomes from in-depth stakeholder interviews indicate that the impact of Fairtrade certification on wageworkers’ economic benefits is rather limited. However, the impact on the voice of wageworkers (job satisfaction, sense of ownership, trust), is more evident. On Fairtrade certified plantations workers are more satisfied with the course of life and better represented. Thus while the additional value of Fairtrade certification on primary wages seems limited, Fairtrade has relevant positive effects on the labour force, particularly by delivering in-kind benefits, offering a sense of job-security, improving voice and enabling private savings. Benefits of (Fairtrade) certification, but also other interventions with a similar purpose, might therefore not be discerned in terms of economic benefits such as wages or basic labour conditions that are under direct control of (inter)national law, but they should be identified in terms of social benefits and improved norms of conduct for wageworker engagement. (shrink)

In this essay, author?educator?photographer A.D. Coleman considers a number of dilemmas inherent in photographing private persons in public places. ?Street photography?; is a genre whose ethical dimensions are often overlooked, despite the photographer's efforts to humanize and universalize a moment in time. According to the author, the dilemmas of street photography are imagistic, general, and philosophical, as well as pragmatic, specific, and legislative.

It can be assumed that if any part of our mental life is innate it could in principle be developed in private, i.e. is not of necessity a social product. According to the argument in de Sousa (1980), emotions can be subjected to rationality assessments, making them a part, albeit special (borderline), of our ‘rational life’. Contribution of emotions to the conduct of ‘rational life’ is important, as the characteristics of belief and action most commonly associated with rationality do not (...) provide sufficient grounds to guide an organism towards any particular course of action. By asking whether emotions (such that are still subjectable to minimal rationality assessments) can be developed in private (in a sense of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations) we are asking whether there can be any part of our ‘rational life’ that could be innate, and thus not a result of social conditioning. A brief survey of the related issue of interpretation of Wittgenstein’s arguments against private language and rule-following reveals that the issue is not whether socially non-conditioned emotions could be experienced (exist), but whether we would ever, given the absence of ‘investigation independent standards of correctness’, be able to know that they are or are not. (shrink)

Han Fei was a central figure in Chinese Legalism, which was a leading school of thought in the Warring States period of China, and which left a huge imprint on political culture in imperial China. This article examines the complex duality of public and private interests in Han Fei’s political thought, a crucial aspect of his thinking. I argue that Han Fei adopted a sophisticated statist approach to understanding public and private interests. For Han Fei, public interests are embodied in (...) the state while private ones have dual functions. On the one hand, private interests threaten public ones by inviting corrupt material interests, personal morality, and knowledge, as well as human relationships. On the other hand, self-centered human psychology plays a dialectic role in strengthening the state. (shrink)

Transnational corporations have become actors with significant political power and authority which should entail responsibility and liability, specifically direct liability for complicity in human rights violations. Holding TNCs liable for human rights violations is complicated by the discontinuity between the fragmented legal/political structure of the TNC and its integrated strategic reality and the international state system which privileges sovereignty and non-intervention over the protection of individual rights. However, the post-Westphalian transition—the emergence of multiple authorities, increasing ambiguity of borders (...) and jurisdiction and blurring of the line between the public and private spheres—should facilitate imposing direct responsibility on transnational firms. Mechanisms for imposing direct responsibility on TNCs are considered including voluntary agreements and international law. However, I conclude that a hybrid public-private regime which relies on non-hierarchical compliance mechanisms is likely to be both more effective and consistent with the structure of the emerging transnational order. (shrink)

Waging war for money has been frowned upon since the Peace of Westphalia and the rise of the modern nation-state. The stigma associated with private warfare translates, in legal terms, into a prohibition on mercenary activity and denying mercenaries the protection afforded to regular combatants . Noting the apparent similarities between mercenaries and private military contractors, some have sought to extend to the latter the restrictive regime applicable to the former. But the resemblance between these two types of actors should (...) not imply that private warfare, in its modern form, is condemnable outright. This Article argues that an inclusive approach to military outsourcing—drawing upon historical, legal and moral perspectives—is necessary to contend with the challenges raised by the growth of the private military industry. I examine the connection between history , morality , and law , to show that private warfare deserves a more nuanced and pragmatic treatment under international law. (shrink)

The recent ability to inactivate specific genes in mice has significantly accelerated our understanding of molecular, cellular, and even behavioral aspects of normal and disease processes. However, this ability has also demonstrated the extreme complexity of genetic determination in mammals, in particular, that genes in the same family or pathway can be functionally redundant and that a given gene often has multiple roles. Thus, inactivation of a gene often does not indicate its complete spectrum of functions. To circumvent this problem, (...) many new tools and novel applications of classic techniques have been developed to place spatial and temporal restrictions on the genomic alterations. These approaches include chimera and mosaic studies, organ transplantation, complementation assays, dominant negative mutants, conditional gene knockouts, and lineage-specific gene rescue. Not only has this opened up more sophisticated ways to make genomic alterations, but it has provided the opportunity to create animal models for sporadic human genetic diseases. BioEssays 20:200–208, 1998. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

When advocates of insurance‐privatization consider whether private insurance‐dominated systems achieve justice at all, they tend to rely on an incomplete set of criteria for a just healthcare system. They also mistakenly assume that it is enough to show that justice is in principle achievable within a private insurance‐dominated system. This essay offers a more complete set of criteria for a just healthcare system. It then argues that the motivational assumptions needed to make insurance‐privatization at all plausible are inconsistent with the (...) motivational assumptions needed to show that in practice a private insurance‐dominated system will achieve justice. A private insurance‐dominated system can be expected to satisfy the criteria for just healthcare only if there is extensive and effective regulation to constrain the normal competitive behavior of private insurers or if generous public funds are provided to fill the gaps in access left by the private insurance market. Yet the assumptions about the motivations and abilities of the public, regulators, and public officials needed to satisfy conditions or contradict the privatization advocate's explanations of how privatization will maximize efficiency, choice, and quality of care. (shrink)

This paper addresses recent calls to study the role of the state in private regulation. Integrating current scholarship on the state as a catalyst of private regulatory regimes with prior literature on regulatory failure and self-regulation, it identifies and problematizes unsettled assumptions used as a starting point by this growing body of research. The case study traces the evolution of public debates and the interaction of different regulatory initiatives dealing with corporate social responsibility issues in Canada’s mining industry. Findings reveal (...) the conditions under which the state is more likely to encourage firm-level, fragmented initiatives than facilitate and promote industry-wide regulatory strengthening and consolidation. I discuss the need for greater analytical precision regarding the variation in regulatory policy preferences across time and branches of government and the interaction between public and private regulatory initiatives. The conclusion outlines suggested areas for future research as well as the likely outcome of Canada’s current CSR policy framework. (shrink)

To such sanguine expectations, Pheng Cheah responds deftly with a sobering account of how the "inhuman" imperatives of capitalism and technology are ...

Despite an increasingly growth of professional guidelines, textbooks and research about ethics in health care, awareness about ethics in Danish physiotherapy private practice seen vague. This article explores how physiotherapists in Danish private practice, from an ethical perspective, perceive to practice physiotherapy. The empirical data consists of interviews with twenty-one physiotherapists. The interviews are analysed from a hermeneutic approach, inspired by Ricoeur’s textual interpretation of distanciation. The analysis follows three phases: naïve reading, structural analysis and comprehensive analysis. Four main themes (...) are constructed: Beneficence as the driving force; Disciplining the patient through the course of physiotherapy; Balancing between being a trustworthy professional and a businessperson; The dream of a code of practice. Private practice physiotherapy is embedded in a structural frame directed by both political and economical conditions that shape the conditions for practicing physiotherapy. It means that beneficence in practice is a balance between the patient, the physiotherapists themselves and the business. Beneficence towards the patient is expressed as an implicit demand. Physiotherapeutic practice is expressed as being an integration of professionalism and personality which implies that the physiotherapists also have to benefit themselves. Private practice seems to be driven by a paternalistic approach towards the patient, where disciplining the patient is a crucial element of practice, in order to optimise profit. Physiotherapists wish for a more beneficent practice in the future by aiming at bridging ‘to be’ and ‘ought to be’. (shrink)

The idea that private ownership implies that owners are free to do with their things whatever they want is shown to be mistaken. It is argued that private, public and common ownership are all based on the right to alienate a thing, regardless of the number of owners. Social or legal norms can make the ownership of a thing conditional on the participation in government or on group membership. In the former case, the norms establish public ownership, in the latter (...) case common ownership. If things are owned and these norms do not apply, they are privately owned. Local social circumstances determine to some extent what form of ownership generates the highest benefits to owners, social and legal norms provide incentives which encourage or discourage the choice of the efficient form of ownership. (shrink)

In this paper, we present three necessary conditions for morally responsible animal research that we believe people on both sides of this debate can accept. Specifically, we argue that, even if human beings have higher moral status than nonhuman animals, animal research is morally permissible only if it satisfies (a) an expectation of sufficient net benefit, (b) a worthwhile-life condition, and (c) a no unnecessary-harm/qualified-basic-needs condition. We then claim that, whether or not these necessary conditions are jointly (...) sufficient conditions of justified animal research, they are relatively demanding with the consequence that many animal experiments may fail to satisfy them. (shrink)

Hegel is often read as defending private property and property rights on the basis of the so-called “developmental thesis,” which holds that the institution of private property is a necessary condition for individuals to develop the basic capabilities required for free choice. In this paper, I challenge the developmental thesis, and present my own interpretation of Hegel's justification of private property and theory of property rights. Reconstructing Hegel's theory requires that we read the Philosophy of Right as a whole (...) and consider the role of property within the context of the political system that Hegel sketches there, rather than merely looking at the Property subsection of the work in isolation, as works that argue for the developmental thesis tend to do. (shrink)

This debate or “Critical Exchange” section from Contemporary Political Theory includes the following four articles discussing the book, the Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow: “We make our own history, but in circumstances of other people’s choosing: intercultural materialism in The Dawn of Everything” by Enzo Rossi, “Questions about The Dawn of Everything” by Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall, “Freedom and the bureaucratic state” by Annelien de Dijn, and “On historical materialism and The Dawn of Everything” by (...) David Wengrow. (shrink)

People respond to metaphors as much with regard to the emotions that they generate as to their referential, comparative contents. Interviews with non-geneticists about preferred metaphors for gene-environment interaction that illustrate this tendency are reported. These interviews also reveal the dynamic tendency of such emotional responses. A second set of interviews shows that lay people may preferentially use a metaphor of "virus" or "disease" for talking about genes, as opposed to the coding metaphors transmitted through the mass media and reportedly (...) preferred by geneticists. An explanation based on the differently situated emotions of these groups is proposed. It is proposed that the prominence of emotions in responding to genetics indicates the importance of incorporating analyses of emotions instead of simple principles into policy formulation about genetics. (shrink)

서비스 로봇이나 자율주행자동차처럼 현실의 공간에서 작동하는 기계가 임무를 성공적으로 수행하기 위하여 갖추어야 할 조건은 그것이 처한 환경의 상태를 파악하는 능력, 곧 지각의 능력이다. 이 논문은 이런 기계 지각, 특히 인간을 대행하도록 의도된 기계의 지각이 충족해야 할 조건들을 검토한다. 이러한 시도는 오늘의 사회가 집단적으로 추진하고 있는 공학 프로젝트에서 기술의 지향점을 환기시키면서 그것을 향한 실천을 구체화하는 논의라는 의미를 지닌다. 공학윤리의 원칙에 명시된 최우선의 가치를 고려할 때, 인간을 대행할 인공물은 우리가 아는 범위에서 가장 안전한 방식으로 구성되어야 하고, 이를 위하여 기계 시각을 비롯한 인공물의 (...) 지각은 일차적으로 그것이 대행할 인간의 지각을 닮은 결과를 산출하도록 설계, 제작되어야 한다. 인간의 지각은 자연의 역사가 부여한 여러 흥미로운 속성들을 가지고 있다. 특히 이 논문은 지각의 대상을 개념적 범주들을 적용해 판별하는 방식, 지각에 나타나는 다양한 항등성의 측면들, 인간의 지각에 나타나는 행지주의적 특성에 주목한다. 이 세 요소는 자율주행자동차를 비롯하여 이 논문이 고려한 적용의 영역들에서 모두 뚜렷한 유관성을 드러낸다. 이로부터, 이런 똑똑한 인공물을 설계, 제작하는 과정에서 인간 지각의 이러한 속성들이 실현되거나 아니면 적어도 실질적인 손실 없이 대체되는지를 살펴야 한다는 당위가 도출된다. (shrink)

Public law adjudication has grown dramatically in recent decades in many English-speaking countries. In the United States, and increasingly in other countries where it used to be rare for public questions to be decided in court, controversial questions of public policy are tried as constitutional or human rights issues and decided by court order. But in other areas of law - in everyday tort, contract, and property cases - court decisions are typically much less dramatic and seldom if ever (...) announce controversial innovations in public policy. Yet in private law cases too there are implicit questions of social justice.In common law countries, perhaps not surprisingly, tort, contract, and other private law cases are often decided on common law principles. Common law has a style and ethos of its own. It is based on precedent and, although precedent is open to modification, the common law style is anything but radical. With roots in the nineteenth century and earlier, common law often reflects classically liberal ideas, more or less consciously and more or less robustly.Instead of approaching private law cases with a common law mindset, should judges not treat these cases the way they might treat public law cases? Should courts not promote a vision of justice and human rights through private law adjudication, just as they sometimes - and in many countries increasingly - do in notable public law decisions?This article suggests several reasons why they should not. Turning private law more public in such a way would have considerable costs in legal stability, transparency, legitimacy, and judicial habits of neutrality and impartiality. Each of these considerations in turn is associated with what is generally thought of as the Rule of Law. The classically liberal ideas in the common law bloodstream themselves have at least some association with political freedom and the Rule of Law. And even if one is sceptical about classical liberalism and enthusiastic about today's public law, one might consider that public acceptance of ambitious public law adjudication may depend at least in part on the credit that courts build up through morally and politically unambitious day-to-day common law adjudication. (shrink)

The role of private food standards in agriculture is increasingly raising questions of legitimacy, particularly in light of the impacts such standards may have on food producers. While much work has been carried out at a macro policy level for developing countries, there have been relatively few empirical case studies that focus on particular food supply chains, and even fewer studies still of the impact of private standards on developed countries such as Australia. This study seeks to address this imbalance, (...) with a particular focus on examining the impact of private standards on an Australian vegetable supply food system in North Tasmania as well as tracing the impact of perceived and actual power relations among actors. Applying a governance framework and adopting a Foucauldian position we show that private standards are a “technology of power” that have risen out of a crisis discourse in the mid-1990s about on-farm food safety. Private standards have the effect of using knowledge from particular actors to establish truths about good agricultural practice (GAP), however we show that Tasmanian vegetable growers are not docile bodies and are employing alternative knowledge and technologies of power to challenge how GAP is implemented on-farm. (shrink)

Men often make riskier decisions than women across a wide range of real-life behaviors. Whether this sex difference is accentuated, diminished, or stable under stressful conditions is, however, contested in the scientific literature. A critical blind spot lies amid this contestation: Most studies use standardized, laboratory-based, cognitive measures of decision making rather than complex real-life social simulation tasks to assess risk-related behavior. To address this blind spot, we investigated the effects of acute psychosocial stress on risk decision making in men (...) and women using a standardized cognitive measure and a novel task that simulated a real-life social situation. Participants were exposed to either an acute psychosocial stressor or an equivalent control condition. Stressor-exposed participants were further characterized as high- or low-cortisol responders. Results confirmed that the experimental manipulation was effective. On the IGT, participants characterized as low-cortisol responders made significantly riskier decisions than those characterized as high-cortisol responders. Similarly, in the online chatroom, participants characterized as low-cortisol responders were, relative to those in the Non-Stress group, significantly more likely to make risky decisions. Together, these results suggest that at lower levels of cortisol both men and women tend to make riskier decisions in both economic and social spheres. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an increase in the turn to rights discourse within the context of access to health and specifically health care. Developments took place at both the national and global levels, with a significant increase in right to health litigation around the world1 and developments at the international level, such as the appointment of a Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health and the adoption of a “General Comment” on the topic by the UN Committee on Economic, Social (...) and Cultural Rights. (shrink)