In this article we survey Ásta’s (2008, 2013) conferralist account of essence, which provides a broadly anti-realist picture of essence. We first offer some thoughts on the difference between realist and anti-realist accounts of essence in general. Then we present Ásta’s notion of a conferred property and sketch her conferralist account of essence. Finally, we examine some critical questions conferralism faces.

The conferralist account of social properties that Ásta develops and defends in Categories We Live By is persuasive in many ways. Conferralism could however do better, by its own lights, at handling the phenomenon of intersectionality. This paper first suggests a friendly amendment to the schema for conferrals that Asta offers. This helps to explain the difficulty concerning intersectionality. Finally, the paper suggests a way of developing the conferralist account that would resolve this difficulty.

Conferralism about race is a version of social constructivism about race, where the agents of construction seem to be individual agents. However, an important aspect of racism is systemic or structural, and seemingly not about the behavior of individual agents. Can conferralism account for that? In this paper, I begin to address that question by focusing on recent criticism of conferralism by Linda Martín Alcoff and Aaron Griffith.

Conferralism is the view that social properties are neither intrinsic to the things that have them nor possessed simply by virtue of their causal or spatiotemporal relations to other things, but are somehow bestowed (intentionally or not, explicitly or not) upon them by persons who have both the capacity and the standing to bestow them. We argue that conferralism faces a dilemma: either it is viciously circular, or it is limited in scope in a way that undercuts its (...) motivation. (shrink)

This paper will develop a set of concerns about a central feature of Ásta's account of social categories that she calls “conferralism.” I argue that generalist approaches to social categories such as Ásta provides are inadequate as a way of understanding the diverse formations of diverse categories, and that conferralism overemphasizes the power of top-down forces (what she calls “persons with standing”) to confer social identities. This approach then underplays the horizontal and bottom-up influences on category formation as (...) well as the historical formation of many social identities, especially ethnicity and race. Conferralism sets aside not only physical differences that play a role in some categories but also group-related historical experiences and practices that produce the “base properties” that justify the use of social identity categories. (shrink)

This essay concerns the causation involved in divine sustenance—the “pressure of the will of God” that continually upholds things in existence and supplies them with their properties and powers. My aim is to consolidate the theological doctrine of sustenance and a metaphysical theory of properties. Towards that end, I develop and motivate two consolidatory proposals, which together secure a more parsimonious theistic ontology and integrate the doctrine of sustenance and a theory of properties in a mutually enhancing way. The bulk (...) of the essay concerns the first proposal, which I explain and motivate in the first three sections. In the last two sections I explain and motivate the second proposal. (shrink)

Hospitality can be considered a key institution in the social relationships in the ancient Mediterranean. To identify the people involved in a hospitality agreement, in certain contexts small objects were used in a similar way to a password, which the Greeks called symbolon and the Romans tessera hospitalis. We know how the latter were used thanks to Plautus' Poenulus. At least 64 pieces are currently known which may be identified as tesserae hospitales. All come from the Western Mediterranean. The majority (...) contain brief inscriptions, written in Etruscan, Latin, Greek, or Celtiberian. They share a series of common features, which impart a clear family resemblance beyond geographic, cultural, or linguistic borders. (shrink)

Businesses often attempt to demonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) by showcasing women in their leadership ranks, most of whom are white. Yet research has shown that organizations confer status and power to women who engage in sexist behavior, which undermines DEI efforts. We sought to examine whether women who engage in racist behavior are also conferred relative status at work. Drawing on theory and research on organizational culture and intersectionality, we predicted that a white woman who (...) expresses anti-Black racism is conferred more status in the workplace than a white woman who does not. A pilot study (N = 30) confirmed that making an anti-Black racist comment at work was judged to be more offensive than making no comment, but only for a white man, not a white woman. Study 1 (N = 330) found that a white woman who made an anti-Black racist comment at work was conferred higher status than a white woman who did not, whereas the opposite held true for a white man, with perceived offensiveness mediating these effects. Study 2 (N = 235) revealed that a white woman who made an anti-racist/pro-Black Lives Matter comment was conferred lower status than a white woman who did not, whereas the opposite held true for a white man. Finally, Study 3 (N = 295) showed that people who endorse racist and sexist beliefs confer more status to a white man than to a white woman regardless of speech, but that people low in racism and sexism confer the highest status to a white woman who engages in anti-Black racist speech. These studies suggest that white women are rewarded for expressing support for beliefs that mirror systemic inequality in the corporate world. We discuss implications for business ethics and directions for future research. (shrink)

Social construction is involved in various forms of injustice that have been in focus in recent years, such as testimonial and discursive injustice. There is also injustice that is distinctly metaphysical and involves acting and being, and recent work has identified various forms of it, including categorical injustice, ontic injustice and ontological oppression. Less attention has been paid to cases that fall betwixt and between, to the unintelligible and interstitial. In this paper, I discuss how conferralism can account for (...) certain types of interstitial injustice. (shrink)

I argue that a central claim of Ásta’s conferralist framework – that it can account for all social properties of individuals – is false, by drawing attention to (opaque) class. I then discuss an implication of this objection; conferralism does not meet its own conditions of adequacy, such as providing a theory that helps to understand oppression. My diagnosis is that this objection points to a methodological problem: Ásta and other social ontologists have been fed on a “one-sided diet” (...) of types of examples, resulting in a limited view of the paradigmatic social phenomena, thus making conferralism too narrow to fulfill its intended role. (shrink)

According to the subset account of realization, a property, F, is realized by another property, G, whenever F is individuated by a non-empty proper subset of the causal powers by which G is individuated (and F is not a conjunctive property of which G is a conjunct). This account is especially attractive because it seems both to explain the way in which realized properties are nothing over and above their realizers, and to provide for the causal efficacy of realized properties. (...) It therefore seems to provide a way around the causal exclusion problem. There is reason to doubt, however, that the subset account can achieve both tasks. The problem arises when we look closely at the relation between properties and causal powers, specifically, at the idea that properties confer powers on the things that have them. If realizers are to be ontically prior to what they realize, then we must regard the conferral of powers by properties as a substantive relation of determination. This relation of conferral is at the heart of a kind of exclusion problem, analogous to the familiar causal exclusion problem. I argue that the subset account cannot adequately answer this new exclusion problem, and is for that reason ill-suited to be the backbone of a non-reductive physicalism. (shrink)

Realist essentialists face a prima facie challenge in accounting for our knowledge of the essences of things, and in particular, in justifying our engaging in thought experiments to gain such knowledge. In contrast, conferralist essentialism has an attractive story to tell about how we gain knowledge of the essences of things, and how thought experiments are a justified method for gaining such knowledge. The conferralist story is told in this essay.

This book articulates a cosmopolitan theory of the principles which ought to regulate belligerents' conduct in the aftermath of war. Throughout, it relies on the fundamental principle that all human beings, wherever they reside, have rights to the freedoms and resources which they need to lead a flourishing life, and that national and political borders are largely irrelevant to the conferral of those rights. With that principle in hand, the book provides a normative defence of restitutive and reparative justice, the (...) punishment of war criminals, the resort to transitional foreign administration as a means to govern war-torn territories, and the deployment of peacekeeping and occupation forces. It also outlines various reconciliatory and commemorative practices which might facilitate the emergence of trust amongst enemies and thereby improve prospects for peace. The book offers analytical arguments and normative conclusions, with many historical and/or contemporary examples. (shrink)

A concept of merit is used for spiritual accounting in many religious traditions, seemingly a substantial point of connection between religion and ordinary morality. Teachings of “merit transfer” (as in Buddhism and Roman Catholicism) might make us doubt this connection since they violate the principle that merit must be earned. If we examine the structure of ordinary schemes of desert, however, we find that personal worth is posited for a variety of reasons; the basic requirement in this realm is not (...) earning by individuals but rather a community’s program for cultivating desirable collaboration among its members. There are strong enough parallels between religiously envisioned merit transfer and socially normal conferrals and sharings of worth that we can conclude that the religious posits of transferred merit are indeed comprehensible as merit, whatever other problems of comprehensibility they pose. (shrink)

I aim to synthesize two issues within theistic metaphysics. The first concerns the metaphysics of creaturely properties and, more specifically, the nature of unshareable properties, or tropes. The second concerns the metaphysics of providence and, more specifically, the way in which God sustains creatures, or sustenance. I propose that creaturely properties, understood as what I call modifier tropes, are identical with divine acts of sustenance, understood as acts of property-conferral. I argue that this *theistic conferralism* is attractive because it (...) integrates trope theory and the doctrine of sustenance in a mutually enhancing way. Taking modifier tropes to be divine acts mitigates certain weaknesses of trope theory and safeguards divine sustenance from the threat of both deism and occasionalism. (shrink)

Can awarding migrants fewer legal rights than citizens ever be just? This paper explores this issue. I first outline an abstract argument in favor of rights differentiation. According to this argument, people’s rights ought to track their independent claims; since these claims may vary, some rights differentiation is permissible. I then suggest that this argument threatens to undermine the institution of citizenship because citizens’ claims on the state can differ in just the way migrants’ claims can, and the rights of (...) citizenship can be unbundled and awarded piecemeal. To resolve this tension, I offer a novel account of the normative functions of citizenship, which turns on the assertion that citizenship’s public conferral of equal rights promotes status equality and confers equal recognition. This account sets firm bounds on rights differentiation without ruling it out entirely. (shrink)

What counts as global ‘harm’? This article explores this question through critical engagement with Thomas Pogge’s conception of negative duties not to harm. My purpose here is to show that while Pogge is right to orient global moral claims around negative duties not to harm, he is mistaken in departing from the standard understanding of these duties. Pogge ties negative duties to global institutions, but I argue that truly negative duties cannot apply to such institutions. In order to retain the (...) global force of negative duties, we need to dissociate these duties from global institutions: each society’s negative duty to stop harming specific other societies ought to be seen as independent of global institutional change. In order to establish this thesis, I criticize both the features and the derivation of Pogge’s variant of negative duties. I conclude that one must see global negative duties as applying to the relations between specific sovereign societies as unitary agents rather than to global institutions. I then show how this view of negative duties can yield significant global reform, based on Pogge’s own accusations concerning democracies’ conferral of trading privileges upon dictators who embezzle state resources. After presenting the normative, empirical, and strategic advantages of such reform, I anticipate Poggean objections. (shrink)

This study illuminates how a cross-sector social partnership legitimizes itself toward multiple internal and external stakeholders. Within a single-case study design, we collected retrospective and real time data on the partnership between Deutsche Post DHL and The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Within this partnership, Deutsche Post DHL provides corporate volunteers that support disaster response after natural disasters on a pro bono basis. The main objects that needed legitimacy as well as the audiences from which legitimacy (...) was mainly sought changed over time. In addition, we identified legitimation work as occurring across objects, audiences, and time. Thus, we introduce legitimation work as the purposeful effort of the legitimacy seeker to avoid certain issues while ensuring other issues that are of importance to the conferrer of legitimacy. These findings contribute to micro-level considerations within institutional theory which view legitimacy as socially constructed between legitimacy seeker and conferrer. Hence, we add another perspective on legitimation to the previously existing conceptualizations of legitimacy as a deterministic consequence of institutionalization. (shrink)

Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the export-oriented (...) extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts. (shrink)

According to the cluster of theories in the metaphysics of properties known as ‘trope’ theories, properties are collections of particular qualitative instances. Though increasingly influential, the cluster is sufficiently diverse for there to be little agreement as to the prospects of its members. The present essay articulates and defends a conception of tropes as primitively qualitatively complex, somewhat in the vein of Quinean nominalist objects. After clarifying the relationships among tropes, properties, property exemplification, and property conferral, the essay discusses the (...) benefits of this new ‘ostrich’ trope theory. Specifically, the theory explains better than prior trope theories both the spatiotemporal status of tropes and the capacity tropes have to confer properties onto objects. Moreover, the theory is immune to many of the concerns that threaten more orthodox trope ontologies. (shrink)

One important thesis Ásta defends in Categories We Live By is that social properties and categories are somehow dependent on our thoughts, attitudes, or practices—that they are inventions of the mind, projected onto the world. Another important aspect of her view is that the social properties are related to certain base properties; an individual is placed in a category when the relevant base properties are thought to hold of them. I see the relationship between the social and the base as (...) connected to the problem of explaining how the social properties are sufficiently stable so as to be taken seriously, both in theoretical endeavors as well as in practical matters of how we relate to each other. In this light, I identify stability constraints for an adequate account of social categories. I argue that certain distinctive aspects of Ásta's conferralist view of social categories, such as the radical contextualism in her account of gender, undermine the stability of categories and are at odds with taking social categories seriously. I end with the suggestion that a distinctive “sheltered” form of normativity might help us do justice to Ásta's insights while avoiding some of the destabilizing elements of conferralism. (shrink)

This article discusses a Confucian notion of cosmological life and its eco-philosophical implication. In contrast to the Kantian notion of the man who has exclusive moral worth, existing as the ultimate value-conferrer among beings, Confucian cosmological man understands his/her selfness through the lens of sacred unity with other beings. The modern ecological disaster is arguably caused by the reluctance to recognize the inherent value of nature, which is due to the anthropocentrism partly introduced by the enlightenment notion of humanity. The (...) Confucian cosmological person worships the ultimate value of the cosmos as a unity of heaven, humans, and earth, and in so doing delivers genuine care for the environment, not for the sake of its instrumental but for its inherent value. (shrink)

The paper is an attempt to reflect on the valuing dimension of the category of the rationality of science, ontological and epistemological problems. Such problems should be solved should rationality be deemed a valuing category. Taking into consideration the discussions on the valuing character of the categories in ethics (good, evil) and the significance of moral judgements as the point of departure, I am posing a question about the importance of expressions with regard to the rationality of science, expressions treated (...) as valuing expressions. Since the beginning of the reflections on science until now it has contained valuing and normative elements. This was irrespective of whether it took the form of logic, epistemology, methodology or philosophy of science. Moreover, the above disciplines were treated as, of their nature, formulating the ideal of knowledge and providing rules of a valuing cognition. In the twentieth century the central concept on which the discussions focused was the category of rationality. The question was how to define a valuable scientific knowledge and how to pursue science. We find some problems when we want to interpret the category of rationality as a valuing category. These problems seem to be good examples of questions that should be answered, while interpreting other epistemic categories as valuing. Including the category of the rationality of science in the valuing categories is tantamount to the conferral of a valuing sense on the statements about the rationality of science, the predicator ,,rational\" and its antonyms. The standpoints in question, the interpretations of valuing statements are as follows: anti-naturalism, naturalism, cognitivism, and acognitivism. They answer such questions as: 1) what kind of feature is rationality? 2) what are its relationships with other features, in particular with the features examined by the natural, or broadly, empirical sciences? 3) does the feature of being rational or the relationship of being a good reason on behalf of something really exist? 4) what kind of predicator of the predicator ,,rational\" and its antonyms? 5) what are their relations to other predicators, in particular those predicators which the natural, or broadly, empirical sciences make use of? 6) what kind of propositions are the statements about the rationality of science? 7) what do the statements about the rationality of science denote, or do they denote anything really existing? 8) what are the relationships of the statements of the rationality of science to other statements, in particular the statements formulated by natural sciences, e.g. cognitive psychology? The review of various manners by which to use the category of rationality in the philosophy of science speaks on behalf of the rejection of extreme interpretations: both extremely cognitivist and acognitivist. In the statements about rationality there are now two components: descriptive (object-related) and valuing. The valuing component may be understood in at least three inseparable and often coexisting manners: approving/disapproving, perfectionist and normative. (shrink)

In this article I introduce a certain kind of anti-realist account of what makes a property essential to an object and defend it against likely objections. This account, which I call a ‘conferralist’ account, shares some of the attractive features of other anti-realist accounts, such as conventionalism and expressivism, but I believe, not their respective drawbacks.

Categorical Monism (that is, the view that all fundamental natural properties are purely categorical) has recently been challenged by a number of philosophers. In this paper, I examine a challenge which can be based on Gabriele Contessa’s [10] defence of the view that only powers can confer dispositions. In his paper Contessa argues against what he calls the Nomic Theory of Disposition Conferral (NTDC). According to NTDC, in each world in which they exist, (categorical) properties confer specific dispositions on their (...) bearers; yet, which disposition a (categorical) property confers on its bearers depends on what the (contingent) laws of nature happen to be. Contessa, inter alia, rests his case on an intuitive analogy between cases of mimicking (in which objects do not actually possess the dispositions associated with their displayed behaviour) and cases of disposition conferral through the action of laws. In this paper, I criticize various aspects of Contessa’s argumentation and show that the conclusion he arrives at (that is, only powers can confer dispositions) is controversial. (shrink)

The project of Categories We Live By is to offer a metaphysics of social categories. The strategy is to give a theory of social properties of individuals. The main components of the theory are a conferralist framework for properties; an account of social meaning; and an account of social construction; accompanying is also an account of social identity. This theory can be applies to offer concrete conferralist proposals of categories such as sex, gender, race, disability, religion, and LGBTQ categories. This (...) précis describes the main components (conferralist framework, social meaning, social construction, social identity) briefly, but leaves discussions of applications for another time. (shrink)

Richard Wollheim threatened George Dickie's institutional definition of art with a dilemma which entailed that the theory is either redundant or incomprehensible and useless. This article modifies the definition to avoid such criticism. First, it shows that the definition's concept of the artworld is not vague when understood as a conventional system of beliefs and practices. Then, based on Gaut's cluster theory, it provides an account of reasons artworld members have to confer the status of a candidate for appreciation. An (...) authorised member of an artworld has a good reason to confer the status on an object if it satisfies a subset of criteria respected as sufficient within this artworld. The first horn of the dilemma is averted because explaining the reasons behind conferral cannot eliminate references to the institution, and the second loses its sharpness, as accepting partial arbitrariness of the conferral does not deprive the theory of its explanatory power. (shrink)

Speaker authority can spring into existence via accommodation mechanisms: a speaker acts as if they had authority and they can end up obtaining it if nobody objects. Versions of this claim have been advanced by Rae Langton, Ishani Maitra, Maciej Witek, and others. In this paper, I shift the focus from speaker to hearer authority. I develop a three-staged argument, according to which (i) felicity conditions for illocution can be recast in presupposition terms; (ii) just as certain illocutions require speaker (...) authority, there are also illocutions requiring hearer authority; (iii) accommodation may provide a way to confer authority to one’s audience, rather than gain it for oneself. Speakers sometimes act as if their hearer had authority, and the hearer can end up obtaining it solely by playing along. In closing, I pause on the potentially problematic interplay between informal authority conferral and social norms of female deference to men. (shrink)

International policies often make the conferral of aid, debt relief, or additional trading opportunities to a country depend upon its having successfully implemented specific policies, achieved certain social or economic outcomes, or demonstrated a commitment to conducting itself in specified ways. Such policies are conditionality arrangements. My aim in this article is to explore whether conditionality arrangements that would make the conferral of debt relief depend on whether the debtor country achieves a certain status with respect to the human right (...) fulfilment of its population can be justified. I argue that many objections that are typically advanced against conditionality arrangements are unconvincing, and that the possible benefits of human rights conditionality are sufficient to warrant serious intellectual and practical exploration. Whether or not particular arrangements are justified cannot be determined in advance of such exploration. (shrink)

Contemporary ethical and political discourses frequently refer to the moral force of needs as justifying access to resources and rights to goods. Can needs make normative claims on anyone, and if so, how? What obligations do moral agents have to respond to the needs of other people? As finite creatures, humans inevitably experience need. Certain kinds of needs, namely fundamental needs, must be met if individuals are to avoid the harm of compromised agency. Fundamental needs involve agency-threatening events or circumstances (...) to which another must respond in order to cultivate, sustain or restore the agency of the one in need. I establish that fundamental needs have moral significance through an argument demonstrating the good of agency. I develop a robust account of agency, one that moves beyond the traditional identification of agency with rational capacities, to incorporate both emotional and relational abilities. Following the Kantian duty of beneficence, I then argue that our mutual and inevitable interdependence gives rise to a duty to care for the fundamental needs of others. Next, drawing upon care ethics, I suggest that moral agents are obligated not only to meet fundamental needs present in others, but also to do so in a manner indebted to forms of dignifying care. It is not enough that we meet the needs of others. How we do so carries with it the conferral or denial of dignity and inclusion in a moral community. Finally, I demonstrate the applied ethical import of the foregoing theoretical account by discussing practices of caring for the fundamental needs of elderly individuals, who are often relegated to the margins of agency. Specifically, I consider two cases: recommended rationing of healthcare resources for the elderly and filial obligation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionGerhold K. BeckerThe concept of personhood has been a prime focus in contemporary bioethics. Three areas of ethical decision making in particular have been addressed through explorations into the conditions and criteria of personhood: the beginning and the end of human life and the morally relevant boundaries that separate human beings from nonhuman animals. Blending theology with science fiction, the scope of the latter area has been expanded further (...) to include entities ranging from gods, angels, and extraterrestrials all the way down to machines. Although the recognition of personhood traditionally has been based on metaphysical and ontological considerations about sets of (psychological and cognitive) person-making properties, the emphasis is now squarely placed on moral concerns. Simply put, from a moral perspective a person is someone morally considerable who is the subject of moral rights and merits moral protection. The implications of the conferral of person status for moral decision making in medicine, health care, and research are, however, less clear. Problems arise from the fact that the traditional concept of personhood is constituted by three rather different ideas. As David Wiggins has pointed out, the concept of personhood combines in a single focus the ideas of the person as object of science (biological, neurophysiological, and so forth), as subject of consciousness and experience, and as locus of value and moral attributes. It is therefore extremely difficult to neatly separate metaphysical personhood from moral personhood, and vice versa, and to draw morally relevant conclusions without continuously moving back and forth between the different constitutive factors. Thus, moral rights seem to presuppose moral agency, and moral agency is contingent on personal identity, which in turn presupposes some form of physical (including psychological) existence. It is obvious, that differences in the analysis of any one of these constituents of personhood will result in different conceptions of personhood with different implications for ethical decision making. Bioethical disputes about the moral status of human fetuses or of irreversibly comatose patients, as well as of the great apes [End Page 289] and other animals, are notoriously complex because they involve fundamental disagreements about personhood and the most promising strategies for their resolution. Although this has led some to question the usefulness of the concept of personhood for bioethics altogether, others seek remedy through the analysis of moral agency within the context of particular bioethical issues.The essays in this volume clearly reflect the current state of the bioethical debate on personhood and are representative of its major strands. They evolved from discussions at an international symposium on Bioethics and the Concept of Personhood at the Centre for Applied Ethics, Hong Kong Baptist University, May 1998, that explored the bioethical implications of the concept of personhood in a historical and cross-cultural perspective.In the opening essay, John Harris gives Locke’s concept of person a new twist by reading his list of criteria of personhood as preconditions of a being’s capability to value his or her own existence. The status of person is contingent upon the possession of the capacity to value one’s own existence; whoever is capable of such valuation is a person (as long such capacity actually exists) and makes moral claims on other persons. On this account, personhood is not co-extensive with human life or the human species, and even transcends other forms of organic life. Harris allows for the possibility that some machines in effect might qualify for person status. Although human life develops gradually and with it the capacity to value existence, Harris rejects both the potentiality argument and gradualism on the grounds that personhood is a “threshold” concept. Accordingly, proximity to the threshold is morally insignificant, and everything depends on actually crossing the threshold.Tom Beauchamp takes issue with what he sees as the dominant trend in contemporary bioethics to derive moral conclusions from metaphysical accounts of personhood. On his reading, metaphysical theories of personhood are abused in normative analysis by employing certain sets of psychological or cognitive properties to identify persons as bearers of moral rights. He argues that by themselves, without the incorporation of independent moral principles, such properties have no moral implications and cannot confer moral standing. Thus, a being may... (shrink)

I assess the force of a justification for post-conflict amnesties that is aimed at overcoming the most common objection to their conferral: that they entail retributive injustice. According to this justification, retributivists ought to consider amnesties to be justified because they are analogous to plea bargains, and because retributivists need not consider plea bargains to be unacceptable. I argue with reference to the 2001 Timor-Leste immunity scheme that amnesties conditional upon perpetrators’ not only admitting guilt and confessing but also making (...) reparations may count as plea bargains. I show that plea bargains providing sentence discounts in return for guilty pleas, allowing offenders who accept these bargains to be punished in the absence of trials, and plea bargains offering leniency in punishment in exchange for offenders pleading guilty and providing testimony or other incriminating evidence against superiors or accomplices, may be consonant with versions of retributivism that allow less than the full measure of an offender’s deserved punishment to be exacted where necessary to maximise or expand deserved punishment overall. I argue that amnesties that are also plea bargains may be considered justified by plea bargain-defending retributivists. So too may amnesties conferred in exchange for perpetrators’ admitting guilt and providing incriminating testimony or other evidence against their superiors and accomplices, some of which count as plea bargains, since they too could in some cases maximise or expand deserved punishment. (shrink)

The Hobbesian social contract is effectively a repudiation of politics. And the story of humanity it tells is that of alienation. The multitude left politics behind in the state of nature, demarcating it as the power and domain of the Sovereign, as they surrendered their political capacities — their wills and judgments — to constitute the commonwealth. What they got in return is the guarantee to safely pursue the necessities of life. Thus, the politics of the modern state, as applied (...) to subjects, has always been the administration and care of mere life. This interpretation depends on a Hegelian and Arendtian reading of Hobbes. The only way to erect such a Common Power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of Foraigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby secure them in such sort, as that by their owne industrie, and by the fruites of the Earth, they may nourish themselves and live contentedly; is to conferre all their power and strength on one Man… and therein submit their Wills, every one to his Will, and their Judgements, to his Judgement.—Thomas Hobbes. (shrink)

The nomic view of dispositions holds that properties confer dispositions on their bearers with nomological necessity. The argument against nomic dispositions challenges the nomic view: if the nomic view is true, then objects don't have dispositions, but 'mimic' them. This paper presents an explication of disposition conferral which shows that the nomic view is not vulnerable to this objection.

ABSTRACT This article offers an account of cis sense in order to draw attention to the relation between meaning-making and cisnormativity. By drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of institution and phenomenological considerations of habit, it is argued that cis sense is a mode of perception that institutes and sediments an individual and social habit of the third-person conferral of gender that occludes gender variance and creates the social conditions necessary for transphobia. This consideration of cis sense challenges the mainstream conception of (...) cis as an identity category, highlighting instead that it is a habitual disposition, and gestures to the significance of trans sense as an alternative institution of gendered meaning. (shrink)

Some commentators argue that conception constitutes the onset of human personhood in a metaphysical sense. This threshold is usually invoked as the basis both for protecting zygotes and embryos from exposure to risks of death in clinical research and fertility medicine and for objecting to abortion, but it also has consequences for certain religious perspectives, including Catholicism whose doctrines directly engage questions of personhood and its meanings. Since more human zygotes and embryos are lost than survive to birth, conferral of (...) personhood on them would mean – for those believing in personal immortality – that these persons constitute the majority of people living immortally despite having had only the shortest of earthly lives. For those believing in resurrection, zygotes and embryos would also be restored to physical lives. These outcomes do not mean that conception cannot function as a metaphysical threshold of personhood, but this interpretation carries costs that others do not. For example, treating conception as a moral threshold of respect for human life in general, rather than as a metaphysical threshold of personhood, would obviate the prospect of the afterlife being populated in the main by persons who have never lived more than a few hours or days. (shrink)

This essay investigates Bonaventure’s account of the original state of human nature and his reasons for holding the theory that God created human beingswithout grace in an actual, historical moment. Bonaventure argues that positing a historical moment before grace is more congruent with the divine order, precisely because it emphasizes the distinction between nature and grace and delays the conferral of grace until man’s desire is elicited and his willingness to cooperate in the divine plan made clear. Bonaventure incorporates Aristotle’s (...) teleological view of nature into his thought while managing to avoid a view of nature as autonomous. He grounds nature’s heteronomy in the exigencies of natural desires, which dispose our nature to remain radically and intrinsically orderable to a good that transcends those natural powers (albeit not actually so ordered). Bonaventure’s theory thus affirms the integrity of nature, while also emphasizing the total gratuity of grace. He thinks human nature is suspended between its own finitude and a radical capacity for the transcendent that waits upon divine agency. (shrink)

The Byzantine rite of ordination to the presbyterate culminates in the conferral of a portion of the Eucharist upon the newly-ordained by the bishop. After reviewing the historical roots of this rite, this article examines the philological and biblical background of the term. Parakatathêkê coincides with the notion of paradosis but goes beyond it in personal and eschatological senses. Three simultaneous but distinct acts of personal transmission are highlighted: the personal participation of the newly-ordained in the apostolic ministry of the (...) bishop; the handing over of Christ personally present in the Eucharist to the newly-ordained; and the corresponding personal surrender of the new priest to Christ, to whom he will render an account of his own realization of Christ's priesthood in the service of His Mystical Body, the Church. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Maternal Megalomania: Julia Domna and the Imperial Politics of Motherhood by Julie LangfordLien FoubertJulie Langford. Maternal Megalomania: Julia Domna and the Imperial Politics of Motherhood. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. xiv + 203 pp. 20 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $55.It is now well-established that, through various media, imperial propaganda was aimed at different groups in Roman society. Ever since Jaś Elsner’s influential publication (Art and the Roman (...) Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity [Cambridge 1995]), scholars have also widely acknowledged that one should always reckon with the role of “the viewer” when studying processes of communication. Yet it remains difficult to find ways of measuring viewers’ responses to imperial messages, in particular when it concerns imperial [End Page 678] women, for whom we have far less evidence than for the male protagonists of Roman imperial history. Julie Langford’s study of the representation of Julia Domna and the way in which her image as a mother was perceived by the military, the Populus Romanus, and the Senate is, therefore, a much needed scholarly enterprise. By choosing this approach, the author builds on the model of the Principate as an “acceptance system,” first introduced by Egon Flaig in 1992 (Den Kaiser herausfordern: die Usurpation im römischen Reich [Frankfurt]), although this influence remains implicit as Flaig’s text is not mentioned in the introduction nor is it included in the bibliography. In this monograph, which is explicitly not intended as a biography in search of the “real” Julia Domna, Langford aims at examining the ideological negotiations that took place between image-makers.In chapter 1 (“Not Your Momma. Problematizing Julia Domna as the Mater Castrorum”), the author sets out to examine the relationship between the military and Julia Domna by means of a study of ideological discourses on the presence of women in a military context up to the time of Septimius Severus, the conferral of the title Mater Castrorum on Faustina Minor and Julia Domna, and the reactions to the latter by different groups within the army (one should also consult M.A. Speidel’s “Faustina—mater castrorum. Ein Beitrag zur Religionsgeschichte,” Tyche 27 [2012]: 127–52, which probably appeared too late for the author to take into account). She concludes that, contrary to what is often assumed, the title of “Mother of the Camps” was not granted to tighten or emphasize the connection between empresses and the army, but was instead aimed at the people of Rome and the provinces. For by creating the image of a familial connection between the soldiers and the imperial house, and thus implying that the military would support and protect their imperial “mother,” her husband, and her sons, the inhabitants of the Roman Empire would be discouraged from starting an uprising. The arguments that are put forward by the author are twofold. On the one hand, inscriptions, coins, and literary sources indicate that the military did not constitute a well-defined target of imperial propaganda with regard to Julia Domna’s military representations. For instance, less than 6 percent of the dedications to the empress studied by the author were set up by soldiers. In addition, although the Roman mint produced coins that advertised the empress’ title of Mater Castrorum from 196 onwards, this practice was not extended to the eastern traveling mints, which are often assumed to have been fundamental for the distribution of salaries or donations and, consequently, would have been a logical starting point for spreading ideological messages. On the other hand, the author pays attention to the poor reputation of Julia Domna within the army, focusing above all on the figures of Plautianus and Julius Crispus (38–44), and sees this as an indication of the initial reluctance of the soldiers to associate the empress with anything connected to the military sphere, including the acknowledgment of Julia Domna as “their mother.” The first argument in particular is convincing, since—even though the author admits that much remains unproven with regard to the role of eastern mints—the combination of epigraphic and numismatic source material shows that messages sent out by the imperial administration... (shrink)

Despite the urgency of this issue, AI still struggles to represent social life. This article presents a comprehensive agent-based model that investigates status-power dynamics in groups. Kemper’s sociological status–power theory of social relationships, and a literature review on school children in middle youth, is its basis. The model allows us to investigate causation of the near-ubiquitous phenomenon that females have lower social status on average than males. Possible causes included in the model are children’s dispositional traits (kindness, beauty, and physical (...) power), schoolyard culture (social acceptability of fighting), behavioural strategy (amount of rough-and-tumble play) and the balance between public and dyadic sources of status. An agent-based model of a virtual schoolyard was created in which the children assemble in changing groups and mutually confer status. The status conferred upon a child modifies the status it holds. Rough-and-tumble is modelled as ambiguous: it is intended as a status conferral, but may be perceived as a power move. Running many trials of the model we found that in time, depending on the parameter settings, a gender-based status gap emerged. Rough-and-tumble play had more impact on emergent status differences than did physical power differences. Social acceptability of fighting also strongly moderated the resulting status gap. Placing more weight on dyadic relationship could alleviate status loss. All these model behaviours are in line with empirical findings of child behaviour studies at schools. They have face validity for social status issues in the adult world. We conclude from this that this kind of agent-based model merits use in studying the status–power dynamics of other issues in child behaviour, or indeed in social behaviour in general. (shrink)

In many ways, we live in propitious times for gay and lesbian people. In 1996, the Supreme Court struck down Colorado law prohibiting any kind of protected status based on sexual orientation. In 2003, the Supreme Court held that states may not criminalize sexual conduct between consenting adults of the same sex in private, so long as no money changes hands. In 2010, the Congress repealed the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy that excluded openly gay men and lesbians from military (...) service. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down key elements of the Defense of Marriage Act that prohibited any federal recognition of same‐sex marriage. Most states do not allow same‐sex marriage, but more and more states are joining the fold. Likewise, most U.S. states do not forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation, but the number that does is increasing. Arguably, no other social minority has made as much legal progress in so short a time. Despite these advances, the story of gay and lesbian people and the law is not yet finished, and the meaning of homosexuality for bioethics is still being written too. Concerns about gay and lesbian people remain important to bioethics in key domains, especially in seeing to the conferral of optimal health care benefits and in sorting through the priorities and social effects of research. Progress in these domains still involves lifting certain burdens of medical and social misjudgments about same‐sex attraction. (shrink)

Visions and imaginaries have been longstanding research topics in Science and Technology Studies. Visions of sociotechnical change often ascribe responsibility for achieving the desired change to specific actors. However, there is little research on how visions create, change, and preserve responsibilities in the present. Drawing on Vision Assessment, we present a case-study on visions of neuromorphic computing in NeuroSys, a research and innovation cluster located in the Aachen region in Germany, which develops brain-inspired computing technology, also known as neuromorphic computing. (...) Based on interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, we identify a core vision, which imagines the region as a prominent center of neuromorphic computing, and three satellite visions, focusing on, respectively, entrepreneurship, science, and society. We analyze all visions through the lens of “responsibility boundary-work” operating in the dimensions of time, space, and actor constellation. This concept captures the selective conferral and deferral of responsibilities through visions, highlighting how normative boundaries are drawn in local practices. We further shed light on the larger institutional conditions shaping responsibility boundary-work by attending to the “politics of visions.” Power struggles are enacted through the ways in which visions confer and defer responsibilities. Tensions between these practices reflect conflicts over desirable social orders and power distributions within them, revealing the socio-political nature of visions. We discuss the implications of these findings for governance approaches that pursue responsible research and technology development, and we conclude that responsibility boundary-work may limit the potential of governance to conceive of and work toward responsible futures. (shrink)

Many philosophical discussions of the narrative self touch upon the end of life. End-related terms and concepts that occur in these discussions include finitude, completion, closure, telos, retroactive meaning-conferral, life shape, and a closed beginning-middle-and-end structure. Those who emphasise life’s end in non-philosophical narrative contexts are perhaps clearer on its significance. The end is thought to play a key role in the story of a life, securing or enhancing the life narrative’s meaning or value, and thereby warranting special treatment and (...) attention. Call this thought ‘the special-ends hypothesis’. In this paper, I test the applicability of the special-ends hypothesis within philosophical narrativist accounts of the self. I examine narrativist claims pertaining to the end of life, taking seriously the specific terms they deploy, and considering the contexts in which they occur. Superficially it seems that narrativists endorse the special-ends hypothesis, overtly or by implication. But as perspective is gained on the broader theoretical context in which the concepts are situated, this apparent support diminishes. Ultimately, for most narrativists, the end of life has no special role to play in securing or enhancing the meaning or value of life as a whole. (shrink)

In the penultimate chapter of his book, Art as Language, G. L. Hagberg presents an argument against Arthur Danto, George Dickie, and other advocates of the Institutional Theory (IT), arguing that a tension exists within the theory. Through conferral, a spokesperson declares what artifacts are accepted into the artworld. Hagberg finds this problematic because, while the criterion one uses is something that the later Wittgenstein would endorse, it points back to an essentialism that he clearly rejected. But Hagberg believes he (...) can avoid this problem by applying Wittgenstein’s notion of certainty to specific artifacts in aesthetics. By relying on Wittgenstein’s notion of certitude, however, he exposes himself to a tension that exists in On Certainty: is certainty natural, or is it social? Although the propositions Hagberg uses have the potential to become certain, he treats them as if they begin that way. In this paper I present two ways in which Wittgenstein classifies or understands certainty: a bottom-up approach, where certainty is part of our natural and instinctual predisposition, and a top-down approach, where certainty is acquired through positive reinforcement. I believe Hagberg fails to appreciate this distinction as well as the consequences for his claim. (shrink)

Criminalization is a form of social marginalization that is little appreciated as a determinant of poor health. Criminalization can be understood in at least two ways — in the narrow sense as the imposition of criminal penalties for a certain behavior, and more broadly as the conferral of a criminalized status on all individuals in the population, whether proven guilty of a specific offense or not. Both criminal penalties and criminalized status threaten the mental and physical health of these populations (...) in many ways. Incarceration, abandonment by families and communities, social disdain, physical abuse, discrimination, and relentless fear undermine their ability to enjoy their right to the highest attainable standard of health goods and services. Understanding the social determinants of health in these populations and formulating programs to address them have rarely been high priorities in national or international policy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Figuring Myself Out:Certainty, Injury, and the Poststructuralist Repositioning of Bodies of IdentityJames Haywood Rolling Jr. (bio)CertaintyI have been attempting to figure myself out. Out of chaos and incompletion, toward increased certainty. I have been at this task of construction for quite some time now. I have just proposed my dissertation and my intentions are once again uncertain. My dissertation is to be a self-study. It is also a story (...) about uncertainty and my attempts to redeem a clear definition, to be named a peer and a colleague among artists, writers, and teachers. I have been uncertain as a little boy; uncertain as a son; uncertain as a student of architecture; uncertain as an artist and writer; uncertain as a teacher; uncertain as a black man. To compensate, I have sought the conferral of certainty, a name among leaders in many fields of inquiry. Still, it is not easy to forget that certainty has also been the cause of great injury to my body, to my mind.On sunny afternoons after school all the kids came outside to play. The air would fill with echoes going back and forth between the red brick and stone buildings on both sides of our narrow street. Pounding rubber balls, the taps and scratches of shoe heels, and the slapping of sneakers on the cement and asphalt.Sometimes white chalk would appear and hopscotch boxes were quickly drawn on the neat squares of cement pavement in front of my Grandma's house. Grandma lived next door to us. Houses on our block were side by side, sharing each other's walls.On a particular day, similar to other days, I watched as a small flat stone was tossed to bounce across the cement into a numbered box. I watched the one foot, two feet, one foot hops from box to box to stop and balance on one small hopping foot, steadying itself, to drop a hand to pick up the stone. Some little girl came to sit beside me and asked me to look at her. We were sitting on one of Grandma's two wooden benches, just inside the front gate. [End Page 46] Two steps down was the sidewalk and other kids. I ignored the girl. I made sure my body had no contact with hers on the bench. Why was she talking to me anyway? Didn't she see I didn't have anything I wanted to say?"Look at me!" she said, tugging at my arm."Will you stop it!" I snapped back, jerking my arm away. Being touched was not natural to me. My family didn't touch. I tightened the skin of my eyebrows and the bridge of my nose into a frown."Smile!" the little girl said slyly, trying to tickle me."Leave me alone!" I yelled. I tried to move away from the touching.I must have grinned. Grinning relaxes the frowns on faces. The girl clapped a hand over her mouth, all giggles. I asked what she was laughing so loud for. The kids out in front of us now had our attention. I felt like I was now being watched. I can't remember the faces, just the noise and voices that seemed to stop. The little girl stood up, pointed at my face and declared, finger in my face, pointing, speaking out loud, "Look! He only has one dimple! See?! Look at his face!""No I don't," I said, dropping my face, my eyes, my voice. My head was down and I didn't want to see if anyone was looking. The attention made my face warm and I needed to move away fast. "No I don't," I repeated, stiffly. My whole head seemed to glow brightly, very hot, drawing lots of attention. I was beneath windows, very near, on both sides of the street, always with onlookers. I rushed through the painted iron gate, going quickly next door, upstairs to "our house," to the second floor apartment we lived in, down the hallway so dark after the bright outside, around a curve and a corner, into the bathroom, closing the door behind me. Locking the door... (shrink)

English summary: In this work, Alexander Schnell expounds the role played by the formation and conferral of sense in our understanding of reality and matters of fact. Starting from the phenomenological standpoint of consciousness analysis, he tries to show how the power of imagination in particular serves as a formative function for reality. Picking up on important phenomenological concepts--such as sense, the grounding of knowledge, the unconscious, reality, truth, time, space, the human, subjectivity, transcendence--the author deals with these anew. The (...) volume thereby also contributes to the reinvigorated realism-idealism debate of recent years in which phenomenology - more than a hundred years after its inception - has yet again been awarded a key role. German description: Alexander Schnell macht in diesem Band die Rolle der Sinnbildung und Sinnstiftung in unserem Verstandnis von Realitat und faktischem Geschehnis deutlich. Vom phanomenologischen Standpunkt der Bewusstseinsanalyse ausgehend, zeigt er auf, dass hierbei der Einbildungskraft eine wirklichkeitsbildende Funktion zukommt. Hierzu nimmt er einige bedeutsame Begriffe der Phanomenologie - Sinn, Erkenntnisbegrundung, Unbewusstes, Realitat, Wahrheit, Zeit, Raum, Mensch, Subjektivitat, Transzendenz - wieder auf und behandelt sie neu. Zugleich tragt dieser Band zur Realismus-Idealismus-Debatte bei, die in den letzten Jahren dank des Neuen Realismus neu entfacht und in welcher der Phanomenologie uber ein Jahrhundert nach ihrer Grundung wieder eine bedeutsame Rolle zugestanden wurde. (shrink)