Untangling the relationship of law and liberty is among the core problems of political theory. One prominent position is that there is no freedom without law. This article challenges the argument that, because law is constitutive of freedom, there is no freedom without law. I suggest that, once properly understood, the argument that law is constitutive of freedom does not uniquely apply to law. It also applies to social norms. What law does for freedom, social norms can do too. Thus, (...) I claim the question facing us is not the easy one of either law or social norms. Respecting this draws attention to the unique risks to our freedom introduced by both sets of norms. (shrink)

I argue social and political freedom is not primarily about the absence of constraints, whether those constraints be in the form of interference or domination. Instead, social freedom is centrally about what makes us free. That is, the question of social freedom is first and foremost about determining the positive preconditions of being a free person within society. Social freedom is about what I call the social bases of freedom, or those features of our social world that we have a (...) reason to rely on in making plans or going about our business. (shrink)

This article uses behavioral theories to develop an ethical decision-making model that describes how psychological factors affect the development of unethical intentions to commit fraud. We evaluate the effects of the dark triad of personality traits on fraud intentions and behaviors. We use a combination of survey results, an experiment, and structural equation modeling to empirically test our model. The theoretical insights demonstrate that psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism affect different parts of the unethical decision-making process. Narcissism motivates individuals to act (...) unethically for their personal benefit and changes their perceptions of their abilities to successfully commit fraud. Machiavellianism motivates individuals not only to act unethically, but also alters perceptions about the opportunities that exist to deceive others. Psychopathy has a prominent effect on how individuals rationalize their fraudulent behaviors. Accordingly, we find that the dark triad elements act in concert as powerful psychological antecedents to fraud behaviors. (shrink)

It seems impossible to foresee man's future. However, we do see clearly that the past determines our present in many realms : language, concept of the world, religion, science, law. Moreover, certain biological and physiological conditions appear to be so characteristic of the human species that we would not really be concerned with humanity if men managed to free themselves of these conditions.

A principal source of interest in behavioral economics has been its advertised contributions to policies aimed at ‘nudging’ people away from allegedly natural but self-defeating behavior toward patterns of response thought more likely to improve their welfare. This has occasioned controversies among economists and philosophers around the normative limits of paternalism, especially by technical policy advisors. One recent suggestion has been that ‘boosting,’ in which interventions aim to enhance people’s general cognitive skills and representational repertoires instead of manipulating their choice (...) environments behind their backs, avoids the main normative challenges. A limitation in most of this literature is that it has focused on relatively sweeping policy recommendations and consequently on strong polar alternatives of general paternalism and strict laissez faire. We review a real instance, drawn from a consulting project we conducted for an investment bank, of a proposed intervention that is more typical of the kind that economists are more often actually called upon to offer. In this example, the sophistication of current tools for preference attribution, combined with philosophical externalism about the semantics of preferences that makes it less plausible to attribute their literal self-conscious representation to people as propositional attitude content becomes more tightly refined, blocks applicability of the distinction between nudging and boosting. This seems to call for irreducible, context-specific ethical judgment in assessing the appropriateness of the forms of paternalism that economists must actually wrestle with in going about their everyday business. (shrink)

Urban street trees (USTs) have a range of values – some of which are easier to quantify than others. Focusing specifically on the UK context and using the Sheffield Tree Protests (2012–) as a case study, whilst confirming existing research as to the variety of values associated with their specifically ‘cultural’ services, the article argues that USTs have an additional potential form – what I call ‘civic-transformative value’. This form of value has at least three key characteristics. Firstly, it is (...) place-based and communal; second, its form is ‘relational’; and finally, as intrinsically contingent, it is pluralistic in the sense that its civic-transformative potential is dependent on successfully integrating a range of other values. The article emphasises both the possibility and necessity of ‘convergence’ – that is, a pluralistic and pragmatic alliance of values which might help protect not only USTs, but other embattled sites of nature. (shrink)

In their important book, Causation in the Law, H. L. A. Hart and Tony Honore argue that causation in the law is based on causation outside the law, that the causal principles the courts rely on to determine legal responsibility are based on distinctions exercised in ordinary causal judgments. A distinction that particularly concerns them is one that divides factors that are necessary or sine qua non for an effect into those that count as causes for purposes of legal responsibility (...) and those that do not. Hart and Honore claim that this distinction is often one of fact rather than of legal policy, and that the factual basis is to be found in the ordinary distinction we draw between causes and 'mere conditions'. If this claim is correct, we may hope to illuminate the legal distinction by articulating the principles behind the ordinary one. This is a challenging task since, as in the case of most cognitive skills, we are far better at making particular judgments than we are at stating the general principles that underlie them. Hart and Honore devote the first part of their book to this difficult task. We have, then, two large projects. One is to articulate our ordinary notion of causation, especially the distinction between cause and mere condition. This is the project of constructing an 'ordinary model'. The other is to argue for what we may call the 'shared concept claim', the claim that the concept of legal cause is based on the ordinary notion of causation, that 'causal judgments, though the law may have to systematize them, are not specifically legal. They appeal to a notion which is part of everyday life' (1985, p. lv; all references to follow are from this edition). This essay will focus on Hart and Honore's ordinary model, rather than on their shared concept claim. In my judgment, Hart and Honore's case for some version of the shared concept claim is strong, so they are right to maintain that a better understanding of our ordinary notion of.. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill is generally considered to be a utilitarian; indeed, he himself supposed that he was one. On one principle of division, there are sometimes said to be two kinds of utilitarian, hedonistic utilitarians and agathistic utilitarians. Both of these agree that what makes an act right is whether or not the consequences of performing it are good, or are supposed by the agent to be good, but the hedonistic utilitarian thinks that only pleasure is good, whereas the agathistic (...) utilitarian thinks that other things ate good as well. Commentators frequently complain that john Stuart Mill regarded himself as a hedonistic utilitarian, whereas in fact he was an agathistic one.On another principle of division, there are also two kinds of utilitarian, act utilitarians and rule utilitarians. An act utilitarian thinks that the rightness of an action depends upon the goodness of its consequences; a rule utilitarian thinks that the rightness of an act depends upon the consequence of the rule to which it conforms or fails to conform. (shrink)

I quote Griffiths' translation: ‘A crown of many designs with all kinds of flowers had girt her lofty head; in its centre a flat disk above the forehead shone with a clear light in the manner of a mirror or indeed the moon, while on its right and left it was embraced by coils of uprising snakes; from above it was adorned also with outstretched ears of corn’. This is the detailed description of the crown worn by Isis in her (...) epiphany to Lucius at Cenchreae. ‘Sulcis’ is strange; it can only refer to the tracks or furrows left by snakes, a notion wholly irrelevant here – we require a noun referring to actual physical parts of the two snakes which border Isis' moon-disk on either side, preferably a reference to their hanging coils – so Griffiths' translation runs ‘on its right and left it was embraced by coils of uprising snakes’, though this does not render his text, which keeps ‘sulcis’. Read ‘spiris’, a word of similar shape to ‘sulcis’; ‘spirae’ is twice used of the coils of snakes by Vergil, at Aen. 2.217 and 12.848; ‘serpentum spiris’ in the latter passage may influence Apuleius’ ‘spiris…viperarum’. The alliteration and assonance of ‘spins’ and ‘spicis’ would be very much in Apuleius' manner as a jingle involving the change of a single consonant between two words – cf. Florida 3 ‘ita Marsyas in poenam cecinit et cecidit’, Apologia 85 ‘acerbiores morsus viventi et videnti offeruntur’ and H. Koziol, Der Stil des L. Apuleius, 204–5. (shrink)

In a recent article JRS, 68 f. Nicholas Horsfall sought to demonstrate that Corythus, which Virgil makes the original home of Dardanus, should be identified with Tarquinii, some 50 miles north-west of Rome, on the coast of Etruria, rather than with Cortona, roughly twice as far away, to the north, and inland. In doing so he expressed surprise that the Virgilian evidence should have been completely ignored by previous writers on the subject : and, using the Aeneid as the main (...) source on which his own argument was based, he supported his conclusion with a careful examination of several other aspects of the problem. (shrink)

The anti-metaphysical kind of philosophy known as Deconstruction, associated with the name of Derrida, has done much to trouble the conventional distinctions between philosophy and literature. Its project of "textualizing" metaphysical works in order to expose their rhetorical components and reliance on metaphor, their groundless erection of fundamenta inconcussa, has radically affected, among other things, literary criticism. Even where literary critics dissociate themselves from the deconstructive enterprise, their activity betrays an increasing involvement with issues that once belonged to the domain (...) of philosophy alone. Eugene Kaelin's book on "The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett" is an example of this relatively recent and problematical marriage between philosophy and literary analysis. (shrink)