Recent work in moral philosophy has emphasized the foundational role played by interpersonal accountability in the analysis of moral concepts such as moral right and wrong, moral obligation and duty, blameworthiness, and moral responsibility (Darwall 2006; 2013a; 2013b). Extending this framework to the field of moral psychology, we hypothesize that our moral attitudes, emotions, and motives are also best understood as based in accountability. Drawing on a large body of empirical evidence, we argue that the implicit aim of (...) the central moral motives and emotions is to hold people - whether oneself or others - accountable for compliance with the demands of morality. Moral condemnation is based in a motive to get perpetrators to hold themselves accountable for their wrongdoing, not, as is commonly supposed, a mere retributive motive to make perpetrators suffer (�2). And moral conscience is based in a genuine motive to hold oneself accountable for behaving in accordance with moral demands, not, as is commonly supposed, a mere egoistic motive to appear moral to others (�3). The accountability-based theory of the moral motives and emotions we offer provides better explanations of the extant empirical data than any of the major alternative theories of moral motivation. Moreover, conceiving of moral psychology in this way gives us a new and illuminating perspective on what makes morality distinctive: its essential connection to our practice of holding one another accountable (�4). (shrink)

Debriefing is a standard ethical requirement for human research involving the use of deception. Little systematic attention, however, has been devoted to explaining the ethical significance of debriefing and the specific ethical functions that it serves. In this article, we develop an account of debriefing as a tool of moral accountability for the prima facie wrong of deception. Specifically, we contend that debriefing should include a responsibility to promote transparency by explaining the deception and its rationale, to provide (...) an apology to subjects for infringing the principle of respect for persons, and to offer subjects an opportunity to withdraw their data. We also present recommendations concerning the discussion of deception in scientific articles reporting the results of research using deception. (shrink)

In this essay I analyze some conceptual difficulties associated with the demand that global institutions be made more democratically accountable. In the absence of a world state, it may seem inconsistent to insist that global institutions be accountable to all those subject to their decisions while also insisting that the members of these institutions, as representatives of states, simultaneously remain accountable to the citizens of their own countries for the special responsibilities they have towards them. This difficulty seems insurmountable in (...) light of the widespread acceptance of a state-centric conception of human rights, according to which states and only states bear primary responsibility for the protection of their citizens' rights. Against this conception, I argue that in light of the current structures of global governance the monistic ascription of human rights obligations to states is no longer plausible. Under current conditions, states are bound to fail in their ability to protect the human rights of their citizens whenever potential violations either stem from transnational regulations or are perpetrated by non-state actors. In order to show the plausibility of an alternative, pluralist conception of human rights obligations I turn to the current debate among scholars of international law regarding the human rights obligations of non-state actors. I document the various ways in which these obligations could be legally entrenched in global financial institutions such as the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank. These examples indicate feasible methods for strengthening the democratic accountability of these institutions while also respecting the accountability that participating member states owe to their own citizens. I conclude that, once the distinctions between the obligations to respect, protect and fulfill human rights are taken into account, no conceptual difficulty remains in holding states and non-state actors accountable for their respective human rights obligations. (shrink)

This paper presents an ethnomethodological analysis of the representation of space in hand-drawn maps. The rendering practice of hand drawn maps includes some systematic devices by which real space is transformed into two-dimensional space on paper and a map is recognized as the map representing a certain space. In other words, members use these devices not only to trace real space but also to enable the recognition of space in a specific mode. The paper deals with three distinctive patterns affording (...) accountability of geographical features: retention of the three-dimensionality of real space; formal resemblance with intertextuality; and identification of space by means of words. Retention of the 3D of space on map is the device that assigns 3D effect to maps and contributes to the perception of the figure as being similar to real space. Intertextuality bestows formal resemblance on various maps to secure the intersubjectivity and scientific objectivity of maps. Words entered on hand-drawn maps enable a reading of a correspondence of maps with real space. The representation of space makes sense by virtue of these devices that accomplish the recognizability of space between the drawers and readers of hand-drawn maps. (shrink)

Within liberal democratic theory, ‘democratic accountability’ denotes an aggregative method for linking political decisions to citizens’ preferences through representative institutions. Could such a notion be transferred to the global context of human rights? Various obstacles seem to block such a transfer: there are no ‘world citizens’ as such; many people in need of human rights are not citizens of constitutional democratic states; and the aggregative methods that are supposed to sustain the link are often used in favour (...) of nation-state strategic action rather than human rights. So what could accountability mean in relation to human rights? This article argues that discourse theory offers resources for approaching these problems and for rethinking a normative notion of accountability in relation to human rights. It is suggested that accountability should link political decisions to universal agreements through global rights institutions and that the link should be sustained by deliberative rather than aggregative procedures. (shrink)

The debate between legal constitutionalists and critics of constitutional rights and judicial review is an old and lively one. While the protection of minorities is a pivotal aspect of this debate, the protection of disenfranchised minorities has received little attention. Policy-focused discussion—of the merits of the Human Rights Act in Britain for example—often cites protection of non-citizen migrants, but the philosophical debate does not. Non-citizen residents or ‘denizens’ therefore provide an interesting test case for the theory of rights as (...) trumps on ordinary representative politics. Are they the ultimate success story of the human rights framework? Or was Michael Walzer correct to describe government of denizens by citizens as a modern form of ‘tyranny’? This paper argues that neither liberal rights theorists nor democratic republicans provide a coherent response to the existence of denizens. Liberal rights theorists overstate the extent to which a politically powerless status can secure individual rights, while democratic republicans idealise the political process and wrongly assume that all those affected by laws are eligible for political participation. The paper outlines an alternative model for assessing the accountability of states to their non-citizen population, informed by the republican ideal of non-domination. It identifies gaps in state accountability to denizens–such as where there is inadequate diplomatic protection—and argues that these gaps are particularly troubling if their exit costs of leaving the state are high. (shrink)

Social reintegration of self-demobilised child combatants can be seriously imperilled by the lack of accountability for human rights violations allegedly carried out during their soldiering life and the failure to pursue reconciliation with their respective communities. This paper examines the circumstances leading young soldiers to voluntarily exit armed groups and militias and the extent to which resettling in the community can be facilitated by restorative justice mechanisms. The findings suggest a large support by war-affected communities for restorative justice (...) peacemaking circles as potential accountability and reconciliation measures to help reintegrate self-demobilised soldiers into society. These results were obtained from interviews, focus group discussions and descriptive statistics in which 1447 respondents participated. These included young ex-soldiers, students, educators, government official, members on NGOs, traditional leaders and councils, Security Services, and the Police. The inquiry was conducted between 3 May and 17 December 2014 in North Kivu Province, Democratic Republic of Congo. (shrink)

By investigating conceptions of experience from Descartes to Kant, this book shows that one of the central questions of the early-modern period was how humans can instantiate in their actions the principles of rational moral agency, while at the same time responding with their bodies to the causal play of nature. Through the analysis of this question, the book draws attention to the bodily underpinnings of the ability to experience thoughts and feelings. It thus challenges overly subjectivist interpretations that concentrate (...) on the inner realm of the experiencing mind and because of this fail to account for the worldly dimension of being experientially responsive to the affections of the body. (shrink)

E. Haavi Morreim's book, Holding Health Care Accountable , insightfully describes several features of the current crisis in malpractice in relation to the health care marketplace. In this essay, I delineate the key and eminently practical guide for reform that she lays out. I argue that her insights bring us to more fundamental aspects than immanent medical economy and accountability - aspects that are ignored at present. I describe the features of immanent economy and how they tend to cover (...) over epistemological and existential finitude in medicine, show how economy can in fact create new medical knowledge, and show that necessary error is a real feature of day-to-day medical practice. The current system, even with Morreim's reforms, remains at the level of immanent economy, but with modifications may point to the features of medicine that transcend medical knowledge and economy. The gifts of medicine cannot be reduced to the immanent medical economy, and any attempt to do so results in crisis. A health care that points to finitude and fallibility is one that points to the mystery of human existence and mortality. Any health care financing system that helps to delineate finitude - both epistemological and existential - is one that will give patients a new lease on living and dying. (shrink)

Accountability and responsibility are key concepts in the academic and societal debate on Autonomous Weapon Systems, but these notions are often used as high-level overarching constructs and are not operationalised to be useful in practice. “Meaningful Human Control” is often mentioned as a requirement for the deployment of Autonomous Weapon Systems, but a common definition of what this notion means in practice, and a clear understanding of its relation with responsibility and accountability is also lacking. In this (...) paper, we present a definition of these concepts and describe the relations between accountability, responsibility, control and oversight in order to show how these notions are distinct but also connected. We focus on accountability as a particular form of responsibility—the obligation to explain one’s action to a forum—and we present three ways in which the introduction of Autonomous Weapon Systems may create “accountability gaps”. We propose a Framework for Comprehensive Human Oversight based on an engineering, socio-technical and governance perspective on control. Our main claim is that combining the control mechanisms at technical, socio-technical and governance levels will lead to comprehensive human oversight over Autonomous Weapon Systems which may ensure solid controllability and accountability for the behaviour of Autonomous Weapon Systems. Finally, we give an overview of the military control instruments that are currently used in the Netherlands and show the applicability of the comprehensive human oversight Framework to Autonomous Weapon Systems. Our analysis reveals two main gaps in the current control mechanisms as applied to Autonomous Weapon Systems. We have identified three first options as future work for the design of a control mechanism, one in the technological layer, one in the socio-technical layer and one the governance layer, in order to achieve comprehensive human oversight and ensure accountability over Autonomous Weapon Systems. (shrink)

When there have been substantial failures by institutional leadership in their oversight responsibility to protect research integrity, the public should demand that these be recognized and addressed by the institution itself, or the funding bodies. This commentary discusses a case of research failures in developing genomic predictors for cancer risk assessment and treatment at a leading university. In its review of this case, the Office of Research Integrity, an agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services, focused (...) their report entirely on one individual faculty member and made no comment on the institution’s responsibility and its failure to provide adequate oversight and investigation. These actions missed an important opportunity to emphasize the institution’s critical responsibilities in oversight of research integrity and the importance of institutional transparency and accountability. (shrink)

What is the relationship between human rights and the rights of states? Roughly, while cosmopolitans insist that international morality must regard as basic the interests of individuals, statists maintain that the state is of fundamental moral significance. This article defends a relational version of statism. Human rights are ultimately grounded in a relational norm of reciprocal independence and set limits to the exercise of public authority, but, contra the cosmopolitan, the state is of fundamental moral significance. A relational (...) account promises to justify a limited conception of state sovereignty while avoiding the familiar cosmopolitan criticisms of statist accounts. (shrink)

This article argues that human flourishing is grounded in relationships of mutual judgement according to which we live and grow as characters in the stories of others. More specifically, it will make a theological case that true human flourishing emerges in a world governed by the judgement of the triune God who creates us to find fulfilment in Jesus Christ, by the Spirit, according to the will of the Father. In so doing, it contends that human flourishing (...) is both grounded in and brought about by relationships of accountability. (shrink)

The paper firstly reconstructs Mario Calderoni’s criticism of the Jamesian version of pragmatism, which corresponds to his philosophical choice in favor of the ethical value assigned by Peirce to the scientific-experimental method. In this light, I propose a reading of some Calderoni’s arguments concerning the link between the construction of beliefs, practical norms and moral or legal responsibility, trying to reassess his criticisms of James and then his conception of philosophy as a practical and therapeutic activity. The latter will be (...) discussed considering Wittgenstein’s analysis of intentional verbs and Calderoni’s approach to the issues of freedom, of the definition of voluntary acts as well as of individual responsibility, both moral and legal. In particular, I will focus on the paradigm shift suggested by Wittgenstein with regard to the problem of human will, which seems useful for enhancing Calderoni’s pragmatist insights. (shrink)

This essay investigates Dasan Jeong Yak‐yong's (1762–1836) account of human‐nature‐as‐taste, by comparing his commentaries on significant chapters in the Mengzi to Zhu Xi's commentaries. Dasan argues that human nature is understood through giho, taste sentiments and desires, and not as Principle (li). I first introduce Dasan's account of human‐nature‐as‐taste in his commentaries to 3A1 and 7A4. Next, I argue that giho is most appropriately translated as “taste,” because this term captures the dispositional characteristics of giho as a (...) mental faculty as well as its mental effects, such as desires, sentiments, and preferences. I then examine Dasan's and Zhu Xi's commentaries on 6A7 and 6A6, to illustrate how Dasan's view of human‐nature‐as‐taste interprets the chapters differently from Zhu Xi's metaphysical account of human‐nature‐as‐Principle, which Dasan considers as unsupported by the philological and contextual grounds. This exploration of Dasan's empirical account of human‐nature‐as‐taste, serving as a preliminary for a philosophical study of his reinterpretation of the Confucian Classics and his performative account of moral self‐cultivation, will provide us with an alternative perspective to the Neo‐Confucian metaphysic‐epistemic account of human nature. (shrink)

What is the right thing to do? -- "You have nothing to fear if you've done nothing wrong" -- Between culpable and blameless -- Are all mistakes equal? -- Report, disclose, protect, learn -- A just culture in your organization -- The criminalization of human error -- Is criminalization bad for safety? -- Without prosecutors, there would be no crime -- Three questions for your just culture -- Why do we blame?

The notion of accountability was introduced by Harold Garfinkel in the opening pages of Studies in Ethnomethodology as part of his ‘central recommendation’ for sociological inquiry. Though the term itself first appears in the Studies, it will be argued that elements of the idea were already discernible in earlier writings. The current article traces the development of the notion from its early emergence in the proto-ethnomethodological period, through its elaboration in the Studies, and, finally, to its refinement in certain (...) later works produced toward the end of the author’s career. In so doing, it reveals the centrality of the notion to ethnomethodologically-informed study and shows its enduring contribution to social theory. (shrink)

The philosophy of human rights has stalled over a debate between orthodox theorists committed to a moral understanding of human rights and political theorists who adopt a positivist approach. A New Philosophy of Human Rights challenges both, offering a novel deliberative account that bridges this divide.

Needs matter; but not all needs do. Needs range from the urgent and dire to the insignificant and even trivial. Given this, a central task for the needs theorist is to give some account of which ne...

Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What’s Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on (...) challenges related to social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development results from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and “looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term “human nature” altogether. (shrink)

Sexual abuse by clergymen, poisoned water, police brutality—these cases each involve two wrongs: the abuse itself and the attempt to avoid responsibility for it. Our focus is this second wrong—the cover up. Cover ups are accountability failures, and they share common strategies for thwarting accountability whatever the abuse and whatever the institution. We find that cover ups often succeed even when accountability mechanisms are in place. Hence, improved institutions will not be sufficient to prevent accountability failures. (...) Accountability mechanisms are tools that people must be willing to use in good faith. They fail when people are complicit. What explains complicity? We identify certain human proclivities and features of modern organizations that lead people to become complicit in the wrongdoing of others. If we focus exclusively on the design of institutions, we will fail to constrain the perpetrators of wrongdoing. Understanding complicity is key to understanding accountability failures. (shrink)

Accountability for developing, deploying, and using any emerging weapons system is affirmed as a guiding principle by the Group of Governmental Experts on Emerging Technologies in the Area of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems. Yet advances in emerging technologies present accountability challenges throughout the life cycle of a weapons system. Mindful of a lack of progress at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons since 2019, this essay argues for a mechanism capable of imputing accountability when individual agent (...) class='Hi'>accountability is exceeded, forensic accountability unreliable, and aspects of political accountability fail. (shrink)

According to a popular line of thought, being excluded from interpersonal life is to be exempted from accountability, and vice versa. In ordinary life, this is most often illustrated by the treatment of people with serious psychological disorders. When people are excluded from valuable domains on the basis of their arbitrary characteristics (such as race and sex), they are discriminated against, prevented from receiving the benefits of participation in those domains for morally irrelevant reasons. Exemption from accountability—via exclusion (...) from the interpersonal domain—seems to prevent exempted parties from receiving crucial human goods for morally irrelevant reasons. This chapter discusses two widely deployed ways of trying to ameliorate morally costly disabilities. Both fail to apply viably to various psychopathologies. The solution involves disentangling accountability and interpersonality in a way that also provides insights into our shared human nature. (shrink)

This article takes issue with procedural reductionism, which is the inclination to reduce all matters of judgement and responsibility to the following of some procedure or rule. Two scenarios provide content for a discussion of professional discretion in the context of accountability. The author shows that in professional life there will always be situations that stand beyond the rules of procedures and require the unique judgement of the professional at the time. While this judgement may be determined by the (...) facts available in a situation of uncertainty, it cannot be reduced to the facts (including facts about rules and procedures). The moral judgement will still have an essential indeterminancy about it. (shrink)

Algorithmic decision making is used in an increasing number of fields. Letting automated processes take decisions raises the question of their accountability. In the field of computational journalism, the algorithmic accountability framework proposed by Diakopoulos formalizes this challenge by considering algorithms as objects of human creation, with the goal of revealing the intent embedded into their implementation. A consequence of this definition is that ensuring accountability essentially boils down to a transparency question: given the appropriate reverse-engineering (...) tools, it should be feasible to extract design criteria and to identify intentional biases. General limitations of this transparency ideal have been discussed by Ananny and Crawford :973–989, 2018). We further focus on its technical limitations. We show that even if reverse-engineering concludes that the criteria embedded into an algorithm correspond to its publicized intent, it may be that adversarial behaviors make the algorithm deviate from its expected operation. We illustrate this issue with an automated news recommendation system, and show how the classification algorithms used in such systems can be fooled with hard-to-notice modifications of the articles to classify. We therefore suggest that robustness against adversarial behaviors should be taken into account in the definition of algorithmic accountability, to better capture the risks inherent to algorithmic decision making. We finally discuss the various challenges that this new technical limitation raises for journalism practice. (shrink)

Different people have different perceptions about artificial intelligence (AI). It is extremely important to bring together all the alternative frames of thinking—from the various communities of developers, researchers, business leaders, policymakers, and citizens—to properly start acknowledging AI. This article highlights the ‘fruitful collaboration’ that sociology and AI could develop in both social and technical terms. We discuss how biases and unfairness are among the major challenges to be addressed in such a sociotechnical perspective. First, as intelligent machines reveal their nature (...) of ‘magnifying glasses’ in the automation of existing inequalities, we show how the AI technical community is calling for transparency and explainability, accountability and contestability. Not to be considered as panaceas, they all contribute to ensuring human control in novel practices that include requirement, design and development methodologies for a fairer AI. Second, we elaborate on the mounting attention for technological narratives as technology is recognized as a social practice within a specific institutional context. Not only do narratives reflect organizing visions for society, but they also are a tangible sign of the traditional lines of social, economic, and political inequalities. We conclude with a call for a diverse approach within the AI community and a richer knowledge about narratives as they help in better addressing future technical developments, public debate, and policy. AI practice is interdisciplinary by nature and it will benefit from a socio-technical perspective. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I analyze and critique Charles Griswold’s work Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration. Griswold’s theory of forgiveness is structured around the notion that human frailty, imperfection, and susceptibility to unfortunate circumstances are cornerstones of the human experience. While Griswold’s paradigm of forgiveness is compelling on the whole, I argue that this “human frailty thesis” creates unintentional and problematic consequences that undermine major goals of his paradigm. In particular, the human frailty thesis undermines Griswold’s requirement (...) that forgiveness hold an offender accountable for wrongdoing. After identifying and discussing the consequences of the human frailty thesis, I will propose revisions to Griswold’s paradigm that redeem it from the problems I have identified. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s11406-011-9327-4 Authors Hailey Huget, 430 7th St, Brooklyn, NY 11215, USA Journal Philosophia Online ISSN 1574-9274 Print ISSN 0048-3893. (shrink)

This paper examines how accounting can both entrench and challenge an inhumane and costly neoliberal policy—namely, the Australian government’s offshore detention of asylum seekers. Drawing on Bruff, Rethinking Marxism 26:113–129 (2014) and Smith, Competition & Change 23:192–217 (2019), we acknowledge that the neoliberalism underpinning immigration policies and the practices related to asylum seekers takes an _authoritarian_ tone. Through the securitisation and militarisation of the border, the Australian state politicises and silences marginalised social groups such as asylum-seekers. Studies have exposed accounting (...) as a technology that upholds neoliberalism by representing policy as objective and factual. Curiously, there has been a wilful intention by successive Australian governments to silence the accounting for offshore detention. We seek to demystify this _un_accounting and _un_accountability by exploring counter-accounts produced by meso-level organisations that support asylum seekers. We apply a close-reading method in analysing limited governmental accounts and various counter-accounts to demonstrate how counter-accounts give visibility to practices that an authoritarian neoliberal regime has obfuscated. We also reflect on the potential for counter-accounting to foster broader social change by holding the Australian government accountable to moral and ethical standards of care for human life. This paper considers the intersections between accounting and authoritarian neoliberalism and presents counter-accounts as mechanisms that can challenge these neoliberal norms. (shrink)

The paper is in four parts. The first part offers a brief reminder of the historical context for human rights as women's rights. The second part notes the relative lack of attention in human rights theory to the roles of social meaning and what has been called the ‘social imaginary’. The third part suggests that the social imaginary — understood in terms of the always present backdrop to meaningful social action — may be seen as a fruitful ‘middle (...) ground’ upon which negotiations may take place between human rights and cultural norms. The fourth part examines a case where women's entitlements to basic human rights are compromised by men's claims to cultural or group rights. I conclude by arguing that if human rights are to accommodate women's rights then women must be recognized as legitimate stakeholders in, and valuable contributors to, the necessarily ongoing re-invention and recreation of social meaning and cultural identity. (shrink)

As is well known, ethics occupies a prominent role in Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy. However, considerable controversy exists surrounding the nature of this prominence. Two main lines of thought exist in the secondary scholarship, one that attempts to develop in Levinas’s philosophy something resembling a traditional theory of ethics and another that treats Levinas’s concern with ethics as substantially different from traditional ethical theories.1 In what follows I argue that the centrality of ethics to Levinas’s philosophy is for phenomenological purposes, describing (...) the nature of ethical relations and teasing out their implications, for the sake of criticizing and reformulating traditional understandings of. (shrink)

This paper considers the UN efforts to introduce a legally binding Treaty on corporate accountability for human rights impacts in the context of other proposed legislation at country level, on the one hand, and existing voluntary initiatives like the UN Guiding Principles (2011), on the other. What we are interested in is whether the proposed Treaty signals a transition from voluntary initiatives (based on moral commitments) to law (that is, a focus on compliance), and the extent to which (...) it might stimulate or hinder links between judicial and non-judicial initiatives. The scholars who have explicitly addressed these two divides are – Michael Sandel, on theory v. practice; and Amartya Sen, on law v. morality. We engage with their views, in sections II and III respectively, seeking to build an integrated approach to help us overcome these dualisms. We further consider John Ruggie’s “principled pragmatism”, a strategy that he uses to build the Protect, Respect and Remedy (henceforth, PRR) Framework; and we invoke arguments from casuistry as well as a practice-focused deontology (Thomas Donaldson’s) in favour of an ethics ‘beyond cognition’, which we consider better suited than either utilitarian or principle-based theories to guide the debate on human rights. This is because it allows us to take non-rational factors into account (such as emotions and personal affiliations), when judging the kind of common good we consider worth pursuing. In the last section of the paper, we investigate whether and how might the Treaty illustrate the two divides, trying to (a) distinguish between purely legal elements and those of a wider nature, to do with morality; and (b) understand what might help bridge the gap between theoretical commitments to the universality of human rights and various practical challenges. Our aim is not to evaluate the Treaty, from a legal viewpoint, or suggest improvements to it (lawyers are better placed to do that); rather, we seek to investigate the way in which the proposed Treaty – which is the first attempt to address the challenge of transnational business and human rights in international law – combines moral and legal aspects, and what this tells us about the world we live in. (shrink)

A just culture is a culture of trust, learning and accountability. It is particularly important when an incident has occurred; when something has gone wrong. How do you respond to the people involved? What do you do to minimize the negative impact, and maximize learning? This third edition of Sidney Dekker's extremely successful Just Culture offers new material on restorative justice and ideas about why your people may be breaking rules. Supported by extensive case material, you will learn about (...) safety reporting and honest disclosure, about retributive just culture and about the criminalization of human error. Some suspect a just culture means letting people off the hook. Yet they believe they need to remain able to hold people accountable for undesirable performance. In this new edition, Dekker asks you to look at 'accountability' in different ways. One is by asking which rule was broken, who did it, whether that behavior crossed some line, and what the appropriate consequences should be. In this retributive sense, an 'account' is something you get people to pay, or settle. But who will draw that line? And is the process fair? Another way to approach accountability after an incident is to ask who was hurt. To ask what their needs are. And to explore whose obligation it is to meet those needs. People involved in causing the incident may well want to participate in meeting those needs. In this restorative sense, an 'account' is something you get people to tell, and others to listen to. Learn to look at accountability in different ways and your impact on restoring trust, learning and a sense of humanity in your organization could be enormous. (shrink)

In addressing bioethical issues at the beginning of human life, such as abortion, in vitro fertilization, and embryonic stem cell research, one primary concern regards establishing when a developing human embryo or fetus can be considered a person. Thomas Aquinas argues that an embryo or fetus is not a human person until its body is informed by a rational soul. Aquinas's explicit account of human embryogenesis has been generally rejected by contemporary scholars due to its dependence (...) upon medieval biological data, which has been far surpassed by current scientific research. A number of scholars, however, have attempted to combine Aquinas's basic metaphysical account of human nature with current embryological data to develop a contemporary Thomistic account of a human person's beginning. In this article, I discuss two recent interpretations in which it is argued that a human person does not begin to exist until a fetus has developed a functioning cerebral cortex. (shrink)

Health authorities increasingly request that general practitioners use information and communication technologies such as electronic patient records for accountability purposes. This article deals with the use of EPRs among general practitioners in Britain. It examines two ways in which GPs use the EPR for accountability purposes. One way is to generate audit reports on the basis of the information that has been entered into the record. The other is to let the computer intervene in the clinical process through (...) prompts. The article argues that GPs' ambivalence toward using the EPR makes them active in finding ways that turn the EPR into a meaningful tool for them, that is, a tool that helps them provide what they see as good care. The article's main contribution is to show how accountability and autonomy are coproduced; less professional autonomy does not follow from more requests to document one's work. Instead, new forms of autonomy are produced in the sociotechnical network that is made up by health policy and local engagements with patients and technology. (shrink)

Grounds for Respect broaches a question that is of vital importance to all; namely, what grounds do we need in order to justify respect for others? In exploring this question the author provides not only a critical overview of traditional and contemporary approaches to — and critiques of — the concept of a common humanity, but also offers a distinctively new approach as to what it might mean to be human.

Human beings persist in an extraordinary range of ecological settings, in the process exhibiting enormous behavioural diversity, both within and between populations. People vary in their social, mating and parental behaviour and have diverse and elaborate beliefs, traditions, norms and institutions. The aim of this theme issue is to ask whether, and how, evolutionary theory can help us to understand this diversity. In this introductory article, we provide a background to the debate surrounding how best to understand behavioural diversity (...) using evolutionary models of human behaviour. In particular, we examine how diversity has been viewed by the main subdisciplines within the human evolutionary behavioural sciences, focusing in particular on the human behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution approaches. In addition to differences in focus and methodology, these subdisciplines have traditionally varied in the emphasis placed on human universals, ecological factors and socially learned behaviour, and on how they have addressed the issue of genetic variation. We reaffirm that evolutionary theory provides an essential framework for understanding behavioural diversity within and between human populations, but argue that greater integration between the subfields is critical to developing a satisfactory understanding of diversity. (shrink)

This book addresses two central questions: What does it mean to shift the epistemic centre of human rights thinking and to decolonise global human rights? And, how to study the 'active' conceptual, empirical, epistemic and political life of rights in 'most of the world'? To address these questions, this book introduces and develops the framework of vernacular rights cultures. The study of vernacular rights cultures is an interdisciplinary, conceptual, epistemic, methodological and empirical project. It intervenes in the current (...) impasse of human rights debates to offer a framework through which the complexity and dynamism of rights-based mobilisations might be analytically captured, not simply as those which are mimetic, and engaged in the translation, enactment and localization of 'global human rights', but rather as those which have their specific languages of rights and entitlements grounded in specific political imaginaries, justificatory premises and subjectivities. Through a conceptual and ethnographic tracking of the Urdu/Arabic word haq across subaltern citizen mobilizations in India and Pakistan, the book analyses the deployment of rights in the vernacular in South Asia including the political, epistemic and ethical agency released by this rights politics. By focusing on the claims for rights/haq by marginalised and very poor women including dalit and indigenous women within grassroots mobilisations demanding rights to food, employment, public information/accountability and land rights in rural movements in India and Pakistan, the book documents the specific gendered political imaginaries that inform rights struggles in the subcontinent. (shrink)

The adoption of the Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights by the United Nations in 2011 created a new governance instrument aimed at improving the promotion of human rights by business enterprises. While reaffirming states duties to uphold human rights in law, the UNGPs called on firms to promote the realization of human rights within global markets. The UNGPs thus have sought to embed human rights more firmly within the field of corporate social responsibility (...) and to use CSR practices to improve corporate human rights accountability. In this paper, we explore how this incorporation of human rights into the CSR field has affected the business practices and public commitments British firms have made to promote human rights. We analyse the CSR reports published by the 50 largest British firms over a 20-year period starting in the late 1990s and interview senior CSR managers of these firms. We find that these firms have expanded how they articulate their responsibility for human rights over time. These commitments however remain largely focused on improving management practices such as due diligence and remediation procedures. Firms are often both vague and selective about which substantive human rights they engage with in light of their concerns about their market competitiveness and broader legitimacy. These outcomes suggest that, while firms cannot completely resist the normative pressures exerted by the CSR field, they retain significant resources and agency in translating such pressure into concrete practices. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that a certain understanding of “animality” – or that a certain problematization of the traditional human-animal hierarchy and divide – is central to Nietzsche’s account of the good life. Nietzsche’s philosophical project is primarily directed against those “metaphysical oppositions of values” that traditionally structure how we think, feel and live, and in this paper I submit that, for Nietzsche, the classical opposition between the human and the animal is the most basic and the (...) most pernicious, for it undergirds the oppositional hierarchy between rationality and irrationality that has turned human life against itself. I draw primarily from Nietzsche’s second “Untimely Meditation” and from a passage from Daybreak in order to make the case that, for Nietzsche, we must reject any facile ontological opposition between human beings and non-human animals and that we must recognize and live in consonance with the “animal” conditions of our existence: human beings must recuperate and reintegrate rather than suppress their “animality” in order to thrive. For Nietzsche, we can say that virtue is a certain cultivated balance between our “humanity” and our “animality.”. (shrink)

Spurred by Judith Butler’s seminal work, Pamela Anderson finds herself challenged to rethink her ontological assumptions, away from the traditional conceptions of the self. This essay is an attempt to face this challenge upfront, and come to terms with the kind of vulnerability that Anderson wants to vindicate. I start with distinguishing different contrastive but interlocking pairs of concepts of vulnerability: the ontological and the ethical, the pathogenic and the self-enhancing, the inherent and the circumstantial. I then argue for the (...) relevance of ontological vulnerability and suggest that it reveals the apparent normative structure of human agency and indicates the root of mutual accountability. In this perspective, human vulnerability to love and love’s own vulnerability can be appreciated and reassessed as a distinctive drive to cooperative interactions and shared agency, which allows finite and interdependent agents to deal and cope with contingency and temporality, by relying on mutually accountable relations. Focusing on the dynamic reciprocal permeability which is distinctive of love, I concur with Anderson that emotional vulnerability is not the source of burdens and constraints but a precious capacity that enables relations of mutual accountability, shapes human identity, expands individual agency, and shapes integrity in interactive and historical ways. (shrink)