Empirical legal research is defined in many ways. These differences in definition are important when considering the place of empirical legal studies in the law school curriculum. In this regard, this article reflects on school curricula in law schools in the United States and the United Kingdom. Empirical legal studies are largely absent from law school curricula. One indispensable pre-condition for any law school curriculum is that it must reflect what those teaching it believe to be true. Empirical legal studies (...) can be properly incorporated into the law school curriculum if students not only use and understand such studies but also understand the methods used and the theories upon which they are based. Law schools throughout the world are in a state of flux. Empirical legal research has to compete for the attention of academics in law schools with a number of other areas of research that are becoming more popular. (shrink)

This collection of essays explore the long-standing,intricate relationship between law and faith. Faith in this context is to be read in the broadest sense, as extending beyond religion to embrace the knowledge, beliefs, understandings and practices which are at work alongside the familiar and seemingly more reliable, trusted and relatively certain content and conventionally accepted methods of law and legal reasoning. The essays deal with three broad themes. The first concerns the extent to which faith should be involved in legal (...) decision making. Ought decisions to aspire simply to right reason or ought faith-based models of decision-making to be incorporated into the legal system? If the latter, how is this best done? Ought faith to operate simply as a reason itself or ought it to help to structure the method by which legal decisions are reached? The second, and perhaps most familiar theme, stemming in part from rights discourse, is the extent to which law does, and ought to, respect the rights of those whose religious beliefs conflict with the dominant social norms and practices. Liberal democratic constitutions typically provide protection for religion and religious beliefs. Are these justified, and if so how? Can such protection as exists suffice from the perspective of the faithful, or does law's otherwise pervasive agnosticism make this impossible or illusory? Thirdly, questions of identity and difference arise. Assuming that most societies remain a mix of many faiths (religious and secular) and no faith, how should law and legal theory understand the varying and, it must be said, conflicting claims for recognition. Should we encourage conformity in the hope of reducing friction, or should we preserve and promote difference, seeking to understand others, whether groups or individuals, without removing that which makes them distinct? More radically and controversially, should we be more sceptical of individual and group claims to authenticity and see them rather as strategies in an ongoing power game? Faith after all, like reason and law, has never been far from politics and intrigue, especially in its institutional representation. Contributors: Zenon Bankowski, Anthony Bradney, Claire Davis, John Gardner, Adam Gearey, Tim Macklem, Maleiha Malik, Victor Tadros. (shrink)

This paper examines the concepts of desert and luck, familiar in political theory but neglected by sociologists. I argue that the idea of desert is composed of both personal performance and the degree of responsibility a person has over that performance. Distribution ought to be in accordance with the indebtedness created by the person's performance. This can be compromised by luck; that is, personal desert is undermined where lack of performance scuttles the applicability of the contributory model. This paper examines (...) recent work, focusing on establishing desert criteria for each person's ends and life‐plans, and a formula for distribution according to personal welfare. (shrink)

The Sustainable Development Goals are an opportunity to address major social and environmental challenges. As a widely agreed framework they offer a potential way to mobilise stakeholders on a global scale. The manner in which the goals, with time-based targets and specific metrics, are set out within a voluntary reporting process adopted by both governments and business, provides a fascinating and important case for organisational studies. It is both about advancing performance measurement and evidence-based policy-making for sustainable development, and also (...) participation and consultation at a wider, more global scale, than has ever been possible before. This paper contributes to the notion of SDGs as a wicked problem, answering calls for deeper theorisation, via synthesis with core ideas in the management field of decision theory. A case study on the wicked problem of deforestation and its links to supply chains, multi-stakeholder initiatives and SDG reporting, provides an illustration of the relevance of the application of decision theory to wicked problems, presented using a novel conceptual framework. This helps to illustrate new avenues for research and practical application regarding the balance of technocratic and participative approaches for sustainable development. (shrink)

Deriving ethical conclusions from arguments that rely heavily on metaphysical foundations, as Parfit (1984) does in generating his Nonidentity Problem, is an approach fraught with problems. Sparrow...

What I call the Just Distribution theory of punishment holds that the justification of punishment is that it rectifies the social distribution of benefits and burdens which has been upset by the offender. I argue that a recent version of this theory is no more viable than earlier versions. Like them, it fails in its avowed intention to deliver fundamental intuitions about crime and punishment. The root problem is its foundation in Hart's Principle of Fair Play, a foundation which, I (...) argue, is inappropriate for a theory of punishment. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to locate the precise moment in which reason becomes endowed with an ought. In stating the goal in this way, something has already been said about Kant and his project of grounding the metaphysics of morals. But in speaking of a moment (or an instant or an event or an occasion) in which reason becomes endowed with an ought, that is, a moment in which pure reason becomes practical, we have already headed off in (...) a direction beyond the metaphysics of morals. For by invoking the moment, we have invoked something concrete. This distinguishes the current project from the Kantian enterprise in that Kant sought the universal conditions of morality as they followed from a rationality already endowed with an ought. In so doing, he could identify that the ideas of morality and freedom were concomitantly related (along with reason itself), but he could not show that any of these ever materialized in concrete experience. Toward the end of the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, he writes, "we have finally traced the determinate concept of morality back to the idea of freedom, but we could not prove freedom to be something actual in ourselves and in human nature" (GMM 51). On the next page, he writes: ... we are not as yet able to have any insight into why it is that we should divorce ourselves from such interest, i.e., that we should consider ourselves as free in action and yet hold ourselves as subject to certain laws so as to find solely in our own person a worth that can compensate us for the loss of everything that gives worth to our condition. We do not see how this is possible and hence how the moral law can obligate us. One must frankly admit that there is here a sort of circle from which, so it seems, there is no way to escape. (GMM 52. Emphasis is mine.) Even though Kant can align the concepts of freedom, reason and the moral law, it would seem that the obligating force of morality has slipped beneath his grip, and he is left to analyze the idea of moral obligation in its place.1 The present study seeks to return this idea of obligation to its origin.. (shrink)

Medical ethicist, Guidry-Grimes has critically reviewed the concept of insight, voicing concerns that it lacks consensus as to its components and that it undermines patient perspectives. We respond by briefly summarising research over the last 30 years that she overlooks which has helped establish the clinical validity of the construct. This includes the adoption of standardised assessment tools—at least in research—and longitudinal and cross-sectional studies quantifying associations with psychopathological, clinical and cognitive measures. We also make the distinction between the current (...) standards for assessing decision-making capacity leading to, where appropriate, involuntary treatment in clinical and medico-legal settings which in most legislations do not include insight assessments, and anecdotal reports of the use and misuse of ‘lack of insight’ as a proxy for more comprehensive evaluation. We conclude by encouraging a broader view of insight akin to self-knowledge. (shrink)

In September 1981 the prestigious scientific journal Nature carried an unsigned editorial (subsequently acknowledged to be by the journal's senior editor, John Maddox) titled 'A book for burning?' (Maddox, 1981). It reviewed and damned Rupert Sheldrake's then recently published book A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Causative Formation (Sheldrake, 1981) and raised a storm of controversy whose fall-out is still very much with us. Up to this time Sheldrake was a well-respected up-and-coming plant physiologist and the recipient of (...) academic honours including a fellowship at his Cambridge college. The furore that grew out of the assault in Nature put an end to his academic career and made him persona non grata in the scientific community. Over twenty years later this journal still runs the risk of ostracism by publishing his work. What can explain this deep and lasting antagonism? (shrink)

In this recent history of British sociology, Andrew Halsey suggests an intriguing connection between political economic régimes in the twentieth century and the development of sociology as an academic discipline, dividing British sociology into four periods, 1900-1950, 1950-1967, 1968-1975, and 1975-2000. In this way, by connecting disciplinary developments with contemporaneous régimes of economic regulation, Halsey begins to outline a sociology of sociology. However, although much of Halsey's book is informative, especially his description of the period from 1950-1967 when he personally (...) entered the discipline, Halsey ultimately fails to develop his sociology of the discipline sufficiently, especially after 1967. Although it does not claim to be comprehensive, this essay attempts to develop Halsey's sociology of the discipline. Key Words: British sociology • social theory • twentieth century. (shrink)

Standard discussions of prudence treat it as requiring time-slice management. That this is the standard view of prudence can be seen by its presence in two seemingly opposed positions on prudence, those of Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit. I argue that this kind of view fails to properly appreciate the difficulty with being prudent, treating imprudence as a kind of theoretical mistake. I then offer a characterization of prudence as integrity, the holding together of disparate but temporally extended parts of (...) the self in a manner that makes the act of reasoning possible. (shrink)

This collection of germinal work in the field by Anthony Weston presents his pragmatic environmental philosophy, calling for reconstruction and imagination rather than deconstruction and analysis. It is a philosopher's invitation to environmental ethics in an unexpectedly inviting and down-to-earth key. On the pragmatic view advanced here, environmental values are thoroughly natural—what else could they be?—and are open-ended and in flux. Rather than passing judgment on the world as it is, we are called to rediscover and remake the world (...) as it might be. We require an environmental etiquette more than a formal ethic; an etiquette whose development must be an ongoing process; and a process in turn that is genuinely multicentric, challenging us to negotiate our place among the exuberant variety of living and other forms. (shrink)

Idealization is a central feature of human thought. We build ideal models in the sciences, our politics is guided by pictures of impossible utopias, and our thinking about the arts and moral life is guided by images of how things might have been. In all these cases we sometimes proceed with a representation of the world that we know is not true or aim at a world we accept we cannot realize. This is the world of the "as if," which (...) the philosopher Hans Vaihinger delineated at the turn of the century, in ways he traced back to Kant. In this book, I aim to explore idealization in aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics, as well as in the philosophy of mind, of language, of religion, and of the social and natural sciences. No one could be an expert on all of these things, but sometimes in philosophy it helps to stand back and take a broader view. On the way I hope to illuminate many issues, large and small, but there is one over-arching lesson: our best chance of understanding the world must be to have a plurality of ways of thinking about it. This book is about why we need a multitude of pictures of the world. It is a gentle jeremiad against theoretical monism. (shrink)

A. G. Greenwald and H. G. Shulman (1973) found that 2 tasks characterized by ideomotor (IM) compatibility could be perfectly timeshared (i.e., performed simultaneously without mutual interference). The 2 tasks were pronouncing “A” or “B” in response to hearing those letter names, and making a manual left or right response to seeing a left- or right-positioned arrow. M.-C. Lien, R. W. Proctor, and P. A. Allen (2002) did not replicate Greenwald and Shulman’s result, and concluded that their finding of perfect (...) timesharing of 2 IM-compatible tasks might not be replicable. In the present research, Experiment 1 replicated Greenwald and Shulman’s 1973 finding while also supporting the conclusion that Lien et al.’s nonreplication was due to their not instructing subjects to make 2 responses simultaneously in their timeshared task. Experiment 2 again replicated the perfect timesharing finding, using an alternative control procedure that mixed manual and vocal tasks in the same block. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

This book presents an accessible and carefully argued challenge to conventional approaches to thinking about free speech. Anthony Leaker provides a richer, more nuanced understanding of what free speech is and how it operates, explaining how free speech arguments are situated within a broader liberal humanist ideology.

In "The Self-Defeating Character of Skepticism," Douglas C. Long presents a transcendental argument against epistemological skepticism.' The argument has a distinctively Kantian flavor (though Long does not highlight this connection), in that it proceeds from the premise that I have self-knowledge and ends with the conclusion that I have perceptual knowledge of an objective, material subject of mental states. If the skeptic wishes to accept the transcendental argument's premise (as he seems to do), then he must reject his claim that (...) I lack knowledge of all propositions concerning my physical nature, history and environment. The falsity of this skeptical claim is a condition for the possibility of self-knowledge, according to Long's transcendental argument. In this paper, I would like to see whether the argument is really work-able. (shrink)