Like many governments in this COVID-19 pandemic, the Nigerian government imposed a lockdown on the country. As a consequence of the lockdown, many businesses shutdown and effectively had no source of revenue. Yet, without receiving any bailout or palliatives from the government, these businesses are required to meet their tax obligations to the government. Bearing in mind that this time (COVID-19 era) is different, one wonders what is required of businesses in view of the taxation problem and the social (...) contract between the businesspersons and the government. In view of social contract obligations, in this COVID-19 pandemic should businesses pay tax to a government that seems to have delegitimised itself by its exploitative actions in terms of taxation and delinquent omission in terms of the provision of public goods and social services? The Nigerian government at all tiers (federal, state and local) seldom respect the essence of taxation. Therefore, businesses often pay tax for nothing. For many businesses, as far as taxation is concerned, to pay or not to pay? that is the question. This article is aimed at teasing out this taxation problem that may or may not be a moral dilemma. In view of certain ethical considerations, this article shows why in spite of social contract obligations, there is no consensus or canonical agreement on whether, as law-abiding citizens and juridical persons (legal entities), businesspersons and businesses ought to or ought not to pay tax to the Nigerian government in this COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Debates concerning the taxation of prostitution have occurred in taxation law and in feminist literature. This article will integrate the case of Polok v. C.E.C. [2002] E.W.H.C, 156; [2002] S.T.C. 361, within the feminist legal canon. The case is discussed in the context of the argument of the European doctrine of fiscal neutrality, which dictates that, regardless of legality as amongst member states, if an activity is levied to V.A.T. in one member state, V.A.T. should be levied on (...) it in all member states. The doctrine of sovereignty accepts the possibility that the integrity of the V.A.T. system may be compromised by the levying of tax on illegal activities, in terms of the cooperation between tax and other aspects of the U.K.’s legal system. European law, feminist law, commodification and the marketplace are all considered within the context of these principles. The article also considers the place of Polok within standard feminist texts on prostitution. Different paradigms of prostitution define different aspects of prostitution as ‘problems’, and the article considers the implications within a feminist reconstruction of Polok of this. The article suggests that the challenge for a feminist analysis of Polok is to remain within the realm of European tax and competition law, and to render the perspective of the employees of the Polok taxpayers part of the substance of the deliberations of the case. (shrink)

Scholarship on international health law is currently pushing the boundaries while taking stock of achievements made over the past few decades. However despite the forward thinking approach of scholars working in the field of global health one area remains a stumbling block in the path to achieving the right to health universally: the financing of heath. This paper uses the book Global Health Law by Larry Gostin to reflect and take stock of the fiscal support provided to the right to (...) health from both a global and an African perspective. It then sets out the key fiscal challenges facing global and African health and proposes an innovative solution for consideration: use of the domestic principles of tax to design the global health financing system. (shrink)

Retraction note: Montoro López, A. (2022). Scope of taxation as a tool of the Environmental Policy of the European Union: “Environmental taxes and their effectiveness as an instrumental protection”. HUMAN REVIEW. International Humanities / Revista Internacional De Humanidades, 12(6), 2–15. https://doi.org/10.37467/revhuman.v11.4105 The Editorial Office of Eurasia Academic Publishing Group has retracted this article. An investigation carried out by our Research Integrity Department has found a group of articles, among which this one is found, that are not within the thematic (...) scope of the journal. We believe that the editorial process was manipulated and, furthermore, acceptance decisions were made under possibly inappropriate peer review. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political PhilosophyAlyssa R. BernsteinArthur Ripstein. Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy. Cambridge, MA-London: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 399. Cloth, $49.95.This superb, exemplary account of Immanuel Kant’s legal and political philosophy is essential reading not only for Kant scholars, but also for political philosophers and philosophers of law. Lucidly reasoned and written with crystalline clarity, the book is (...) both accessible to non-specialists and a pleasure to read. Ripstein reveals the coherent, systematic structure of thought in Kant’s obscurely written Doctrine of Right, and goes beyond illumination to defense and development of Kant’s conception of equal freedom. In the course of doing all of this, he not only presents Kant in historical context, but also brings to light important differences between Kant’s views and those of other political philosophers and philosophers of law, including John Locke, John Stuart Mill, H. L. A. Hart, and Ronald Dworkin, often enriching the discussion by referring to decisions or arguments made by courts in the U.S. or elsewhere. Ripstein shows that it is unjustifiable to exclude Kant from the primary canon of political philosophy, as is typical of current English-language teaching and scholarship.State governments both tell people what to do and force them to do as they are told; they also claim rights to do these things. Yet people claim the right to be free. Can these claims be consistent? Ripstein argues that Kant shows that they can. By working out the implications of the entitlement to be independent, one’s own master, and free from domination by others, Kant develops answers to the basic questions of political philosophy, addressing state legitimacy, the rule of law, political obligation, revolution, punishment, private property, taxation, and redistribution.The book begins with an overview chapter, followed by a chapter on what Kant calls the “innate right of humanity” in one’s own person, which is the right to be independent. Topics of private right are then addressed in three chapters, with topics of public right in five subsequent chapters, building on the previous ones. A central, bridging chapter explains Kant’s account of the transition from private right to public right, thus his account of political authority, which takes the form of arguments about the state of nature, its defects, and the need for the legal and political institutions of a state. The book ends with an appendix in which Ripstein explains the relation between the Universal Principle of Right and the Categorical Imperative.The right to independence is an original right in the sense that it does not require establishment by any affirmative act, Ripstein explains. Persons capable of acquiring rights through their actions must have the capacity to act in ways that have consequences for rights and thus for others’ conduct. Therefore, any system of rights must presuppose some basic moral capacities that do not depend on antecedent acts on the part of the person exercising them, and thus must presuppose the “innate right” to one’s own person. Each person’s entitlement to independence from another’s choice is the basis of all further rights. It sets restrictions on the capacity to acquire new rights and structures the rights [End Page 531] that each person can acquire. It also imposes duties on the state and restricts the means it can use for achieving its purposes. Equal freedom, understood in terms of restrictions on coercion, governs both private right and public right.In a system of equal freedom, each person is free to use his or her own powers, individually or cooperatively, in order to pursue his or her own purposes, and each person decides what ends to pursue with his or her own means. The right to such independence is an aspect of one’s status as a person in relation to other persons; within a system of reciprocal limits on freedom, it is an entitlement that restricts the conduct of others, consistent with everyone being subject to the same restrictions. It can be violated only by others’ conduct. The sole point of a system of equal freedom is... (shrink)

Regulation of gatekeepers of taxation has been so controversial and important that a review of ethical standards, professional responsibility and industry guidelines is examined. This paper explores whether gatekeepers of taxation need more ethics and enforcement to increase the compliance rate. In this paper we argue that an effective mixture of professional ethics and enforcement of gatekeepers can increase tax compliance. However, we question how much is optimal or reasonable? We theorize that ethics and enforcement should be proportionate (...) to the ecosystem because too much of it can lead to unintended consequences such as increase costs and higher noncompliance. A friendlier tax authority with less complex laws can enhance the compliance process. This strategy, in amalgamation with professional ethics, enforcement policies, and effective reporting systems, could increase the compliance rate. (shrink)

The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History. By Ahmed El Shamsy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 253. $90.

The consequences of taxation matter for the optimal design of the tax system. Those consequences depend on behavioral responses to taxation, as summarized by the elasticity of taxable income. Although this elasticity depends on characteristics of preferences, such as the elasticity of substitution between goods and leisure, it also depends on the avoidance technology, and on the response of government to avoidance behavior. It depends on the size of states, and the amount of tax coordination and harmonization. To (...) some degree the elasticity of response can be affected by government policies, and the government need not accept it passively, but rather should put in place policies that optimally determine it. (shrink)

After a brief review of the origins and the nature of the received canon of the history of political thought, this essay discusses the critiques that have been leveled at it over the past decades. Two major lines of critique are distinguished: 1. The democratic critique, focusing on the omission of "plebeian," non-Western, and female voices from the traditional canon, as well as the failure of the canon to discuss issues such as popular radicalism, patriarchal rule, and the politics of (...) empire. 2. The methodological critique in which the canon is deconstructed as an anachronistic, "Whiggish" enterprise, and its validity as history is questioned against the background of "history after the linguistic turn." The essay examines the consequences of both lines of criticism for some key concepts in the history of political thought, as well as for the coherence and the structure of the traditional canon. It calls attention to the paradox that, while virtually all elements of the canon have been subjected to incisive critique, the canon itself has so far survived relatively unscathed in the major textbooks and in the way the subject is taught in universities the world over. In the final section the question is raised what a new, reconstructed overall history of political thought might look like, and some preliminary suggestions are offered towards a revision of the canon that would satisfy both the democratic and the methodological critique. (shrink)

In its most general sense a canon of conceptualization is an authoritative principle of thought or discourse. It may exist in explicit formulation in a text or it may be implicit in a convention of speech or even of conduct in a community united by culture, persuation or some cognate criterion. When a canon appertains to those basic modes of conceptualization called categories it may exercise the profoundest influence on life and thought, which may be all the more decisive in (...) cases where that influence is less than fully conscious. And when canons of this sort conflict dialogue is apt to bog down in mutual incomprehension, providing fertile breeding grounds for relativistic meta-reflections. (shrink)

We show that for finite n⩾3n⩾3, every first-order axiomatisation of the varieties of representable n-dimensional cylindric algebras, diagonal-free cylindric algebras, polyadic algebras, and polyadic equality algebras contains an infinite number of non-canonical formulas. We also show that the class of structures for each of these varieties is non-elementary. The proofs employ algebras derived from random graphs.

In our feature presentation, “Mahatma Gandhi’s Philosophy of Nonviolence and Truth" Douglas Allen explicates central Gandhian values and concepts in a way that gives readers a kind of ‘one stop’ source for appreciating Gandhi’s nonviolence. In an author-meets-critics dialogue, Court Lewis, author of Repentance and the Right to Forgiveness, defends and clarifies his argument that wrongdoers have a right to forgiveness. Our reviews in this issue invite comparative analysis: Philip J. Rossi’s book on The Ethical Commonwealth in History; a collection (...) of essays on Tolstoy and Spirituality; the third volume of The Selected Papers of Jane Addams; George Monbiot's Out of the Wreckage; and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. (shrink)

We propose a canonization scheme for smooth equivalence relations on Rω modulo restriction to E0-large infinite products. It shows that, given a pair of Borel smooth equivalence relations E, F on Rω, there is an infinite E0-large perfect product P⊆Rω such that either F⊆E on P, or, for some ℓ<ω, the following is true for all x,y∈P: xEy implies x(ℓ)=y(ℓ), and x↾(ω∖{ℓ})=y↾(ω∖{ℓ}) implies xFy.

The aim of the article is to propose new answers to four fundamental questions concerning those rulings of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 that aim to regulate the functioning of monastic communities: 1. Why did the authors of the canons in question propose legal regulations for the key organizational aspects of the life of monastic communities? 2. Which monastic groups were to be subject to these regulations? 3. What were the chances of the regulations being implemented? 4. What (...) role did the canons have in relations between monks and the Church after Chalcedon? In her conclusions, the author emphasizes the Constantinopolitan context of the canons. She sees them as an example of “declarative law”, important in the sphere of ideology but hardly usable in practice. She explains her disagreement with those scholars who hold that the canons’ impact on the life of the Churches in the Empire was significant. (shrink)

The view of Homer which I have attempted to expound in articles recently contributed to this and other journals may be stated as follows: an individual, father of the children, first natural then spiritual, who bore his name and worshipped him, lived in Chios, of which island he was so much the glory that ‘ Chian ’ in the mouth of Simonides, himself a professional and an islander, means ‘ Homer.’ He was not blind, like his disciple the Chian Cynaethus, (...) but seeing: he selected, arranged, adorned and expanded two episodes in the stock of saga which the colonists brought with them from Europe. (shrink)

The church in Africa, like its counterparts elsewhere in the world, is called to fulfil the mission of God as expressed in the call ‘Missio Dei’ and influentially remains with the integrity of the mission of Christ, which is liberative and practical. For Christ was not only concerned with the spiritual needs of the people, but also with their material well-being. The following question therefore arises: how can the church in Africa, in general, and in Zimbabwe, in particular, actively do (...) God’s mission and remain with integrity in the midst of the reality of suffering. Furthermore, how can the church for mission and reconstruction be understood in a post-colonial Zimbabwe given the contextual realities of political crises, corruption, poverty, moral decadence, defined or censored truth, leadership crises and no freedom of expression? This article argues that, although the church is faced with these arduous realities, it remains called by God to do God’s mission. While in post-colonial Zimbabwe the socio-political, socio-economic and socio-religious situation might seem hopeless, the church has remained vibrant and alive for reconstruction theology. The transformation of society is possible given the authority and mission mandate of the church. This article argues that the church is a key player in reconstruction theology and in the transformation of society. For transformation to be possible, the church should witness to the gospel of Christ without fear of being labelled, castrated and persecuted. The article asserts that the spirit of the Bible should be revived in a time of reconstruction in Zimbabwe. The assumption in this article is that Zimbabwe is ready for reconstruction discourse. For this to happen, the researchers argue that the church as a critical relevant player in reconstruction needs to ‘be church’ in its missional mandates. Integrity is essential if a church wants to be relevantly missional and reconstructive. Integrity means that the church has to embrace the risks and opportunities associated with mission. (shrink)

Some time ago I had a shock. I was reading, in the Mathematical Gazette for March 1931, Sir A. S. Eddington's presidential address to the Mathematical Association in 1930. And quite suddenly I came on the statement that the number of protons in the universe is either 7 or 14 with 78 noughts after it. My breath was taken away. Readers of R. L. Stevenson's story, Providence and the Guitar, will remember the maiden lady who, after hearing what the Commissary (...) said when he was woken up in the night, felt her maiden modesty so outraged that she doubted if she ranked any longer as a maiden lady. I felt just like that. I felt that my philosophic modesty had been so outraged that I doubted if I ranked any longer as a humble student of philosophy. Sir Arthur has certainly not counted them. Then how in the world does he know that they are what he says they are? (shrink)

We give a simple proof of the canonicity of Sahlqvist identities, using methods that were introduced in a paper by Jónsson and Tarski in 1951.

It is now rather over a century since the marble statue of a youth in Naples was recognised as a copy of the Doryphoros of Polykleitos, and the first attempt made to extract from it the mathematical principles of the Polykleitan canon. Periodic warnings uttered on the subject by such scholars as Gardner and Furtwängler failed to deter further speculation, which culminated in Anti's monumental publication of 1921. Understandably enough, this seems effectively to have checked research in the field, with (...) only one or two exceptions, for a number of years. In the past decade or so, however, the pendulum, apparently never stable for long, has swung back again: a spate of books and articles on Polykleitos and his school has appeared, including no fewer than four major attempts to recover the principles of the canon from the surviving copies of his works. Again, murmurings to the contrary have passed unheeded, the gulf between believers and unbelievers now, it seems, having become virtually unbridgeable. With this in mind, and considering that Polykleitan studies have undergone a quiet revolution in the last year or two through the identification of fragments of casts of the Doryphoros and an Amazon among those recently discovered at Baiae, it seems an opportune moment to try to restate a few principles, basic but all too often ignored, and to indicate a number of directions that further research might take. (shrink)

“Towards a Theory of Taxation” is a proper theme for an Englishman to take when giving a paper in America. After all it was from the absence of such a theory that the United States derived its existence. The Colonists felt strongly that there should be no taxation without representation, and George III was unable to explain to them convincingly why they should contribute to the cost of their defense. Since that time, understanding has not advanced much. In (...) Britain we still maintain the fiction that taxes are a voluntary gift to the Crown, and taxing statutes are given the Royal Assent with the special formula, “La Reine remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur benevolence, et ainsi le veult” instead of the simple “La Reine le veult,” and in the United States taxes have regularly been levied on residents of the District of Columbia who until recently had no representation in Congress, and by the State of New York on those who worked but did not reside in the State, and so did not have a vote. Taxes are regularly levied, in America as elsewhere, on those who have no say on whether they should be levied or how they should be spent. I am taxed by the Federal Government on my American earnings and by state governments on my American spending, but I should be hard put to it to make out that it was unjust. Florida is wondering whether to follow California in taxing multinational corporations on their world-wide earnings. (shrink)

It is startling to realize that Canadian literature was canonized in fewer than twenty years. Here is how it happened.At the end of World War II, Canadian literature was not taught as an independent subject in Canadian schools. There was no canon. In 1957, the publishing firm McClelland and Stewart introduced its mass-market paperback reprint series entitled the New Canadian Library. It allowed teachers to discuss the work of many Canadian authors who had never been the subject of formal academic (...) study. This New Canadian Library was truly “new”: prior to its conception, there was no “library” in use. There were no Canadian classics. Northrop Frye recalls that at that time the notion of finding a classic Canadian writer remained but “a gleam in a paternal critic’s eye.”1Frye’s comment must be placed in context: he was remembering the efforts that produced the first Literary History of Canada in 1965. In T. D. MacLulich’s words, its publication “gave a definitive imprimatur of respectability to the academic study of Canadian writing.”2 It made a Canadian canon seem possible; to many, it made the canon seem real. With the advent of this history, the institution called Canadian literature was born.3 1. Northrop Frye, “Conclusion,” in Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, 2d ed., ed. Carl F. Klinck et al., 3 vols. , 3:319.2. T. D. MacLulich, “What Was Canadian Literature? Taking Stock of the Canlit Industry,” Essays on Canadian Writing 30 : 19; hereafter abbreviated “WWCL.”3. My use of the term “Canadian literature” applies to English-Canadian literature; the canonization of French-Canadian, or Québecois literature, invokes another story and another set of political imperatives that cannot be adequately treated within the scope of this discussion.4. John Guillory, “Canonical and Non-Canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate,” ELH 54 : 483. Robert Lecker is professor of English at McGill University. He is the author of several critical studies, including On the Line , Robert Kroetsch , and An Other I , and coeditor of Essays on Canadian Writing, the multi-volume Canadian Writers and Their Works , and the eight-volume Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors . Lecker is currently preparing a collection of essays on the Canadian canon. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show the unity and consistency of Kant’s reflections throughout all three sections of the Canon of Pure Reason. More specifically, I argue that Section 3, which is devoted to the issue of Fürwahrhalten, or taking-to-be-true, is crucial to achieving the methodological goal of the Canon, which is to justify the legitimacy of the speculative assumptions of pure reason. After examining the historical roots of Kant’s notion of a transcendental doctrine of method, I focus (...) on the methodological role that the practical element plays in the first two sections of the Canon. I then show how the limitations of Kant’s argument necessitate the introduction of a third crucial section, which serves both an analytic and an orientative function. (shrink)

In this essay, my aim is twofold: to clarify how the late Mill conceived of the certainty of inductive generalizations and to offer a systematic clarification of the limited domain of application of the Mill’s Canons of Induction. I shall argue that Mill’s views on the certainty of knowledge changed overtime and that this change was accompanied by a new view on the certainty of the inductive results yielded by the Canons of Induction. The key message of the (...) later editions of The System of Logic as conceived by the late Mill was no longer that by the Canons of Induction we can establish scientific certainty and true causes, but rather that the Canons are useful in establishing causal laws in a provisional way. (shrink)

This paper considers the cause for canonization of Gianna Beretta Molla, a pediatrician who died in 1962 because during her pregnancy she refused medical treatment that would have caused her to abort. The acts of Gianna’s cause contribute to the creation of a specific example mirroring and sustaining the position adopted by the Church in the 1960s and 1970s in matters of abortion, motherhood, family, and right to life. These issues were particularly delicate in those years, when the Catholic Church (...) was facing the rise of liberal and radical positions that contrasted with its doctrine; in particular, law n. 194 of 22 May 1978 constituted the first act of abortion legalization in Italy. In this context, the sanctification of Gianna had strategic importance for the Church as a way of presenting the faithful with the Catholic ideal of motherhood through a concrete example to follow. In this paper, I argue that the way in which the figure of Gianna is represented in the acts of her cause for canonization can be read as the figurativization of the axiology laid out in more abstract terms in Church texts with a normative value, such as the constitutions it issued during the Second Vatican Council and other official documents expressing the pontifical magisterium. (shrink)

Lady Mary Shepherd argued for distinctive accounts of causation, perception, and knowledge of an external world and God. However, her work, engaging with Berkeley and Hume but written after Kant, does not fit the standard periodisation of early modern philosophy presupposed by many philosophy courses, textbooks, and conferences. This paper argues that Shepherd should be added to the canon as a Scottish philosopher. The practical reason for doing so is that it would give Shepherd a disciplinary home, opening up additional (...) possibilities for research and teaching. The philosophical reason is that her views share certain features characteristic of canonical Scottish philosophers. (shrink)

We provide a survey of significant libertarian contributions to the discussion surrounding ethics and taxation. By significant contributions, we mean those which have exerted a strong influence both on libertarianism, popular and academic, and on political and ethical discourse more broadly. Our discussion centers on the work of three prominent libertarians: Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard. For each, we present his or her position concerning some ethical aspect of taxation and evaluate objections to it. Section 4.2 (...) discusses Nozick’s analogy between taxation of labor from earnings and forced labor and applies his argument against the fairness principle to fairness-based justifications of such taxation. Section 4.3 focuses on Rand’s view that compulsory taxation as such is unjust and considers her proposed scheme of voluntarily-funded minimal government. We argue that she failed to convincingly argue for either the feasibility or desirability of the latter. Section 4.4 addresses Rothbard’s similar position concerning the injustice of taxation per se and defends his view against possible justifications of that institution. (shrink)

The philosophical and exegetical oeuvre, biography and legacy of the Jewish-Italian Renaissance Rabbi Obadiah Sforno (c. 1475–1550) are revisited for the first time by international scholars presenting in-depth studies on the thoughts of a man “between two worlds”.