We typically think of prosecutorial ethics as encompassing a special set of obligations for prosecutors during the pretrial and trial stages of a criminal case. In the literature and in rules of professional responsibility much attention is paid to the charging function, contact with unrepresented persons, plea negotiations, discovery, and courtroom decorum. Our concern with prosecutorial ethics at these stages is rooted primarily in due process and fairness to the accused. [W]hile he may strike hard blows, the Supreme Court wrote (...) in Berger v. United States, [a prosecutor] is not at liberty to strike foul ones. Whether it is a recognition that the prosecutor acts as a representative of the sovereign or that he or she possesses extraordinary power over people's lives, we speak about the prosecutor's ethical duties as special or additional to those of ordinary lawyers. By preventing a prosecutor from litigating unfairly, the aim is to protect a criminal defendant from an unjust or unwarranted conviction. What, then, are the ethical duties of prosecutors after the defendant has had his fair shot at trial, but lost? The literature and standards are surprisingly silent, with rare exception, on the post-conviction ethics of prosecutors. Constraints on the prosecutorial function seem to reach their apex at trial. Why? Are the reasons for special or additional ethics for prosecutors non-existent on appeal? Is the vast discretion, present at the pretrial and trial stages and thought by some to justify special ethical duties, absent on appeal? As a recent case from Texas illustrates, ethical issues still abound even after a jury returns a verdict of guilty. Nevertheless, the traditional discourse on pre-conviction duties can help us determine how prosecutorial discretion should be exercised after a conviction has been obtained. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 241-246 [Access article in PDF] News and Views The 1999 International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter Barbara BernsteinWilmette, IllinoisThe 1999 International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter (IBCTE), also known as the Abe-Cobb Group, met at the Westin Hotel in Indianapolis, Indiana from April 15 to April 18. There were four papers on the theme "Social Violence." This theme followed last year's, which was "Environmental Violence." Each paper was read (...) beforehand; and to guide the discussion, each session was begun by a respondent.It was reported at the first session that the 2000 IBCTE will take place August 3-6 at Tacoma, Washington just prior to the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies International Conference on "Buddhism, Christianity, and Global Healing." The theme for next year's encounter will be "The Economic Factors in Social and Environmental Violence." This theme will build on the dialogue generated by the topics of the previous two years, namely, environmental and social violence. Papers will be prepared by Sulak Sivaraksa, John B. Cobb, Jr., Judith Simmer-Brown, and Carol Johnston. Responses will be made by Stephanie Kaza, David Chappell, Valerie Karras, and Terry Muck.It was also announced at that session that six of our membership will present a panel on the IBCTE at the Parliament of the World's Religions in Cape Town, South Africa in December 1999. That panel will share the fruits of the 15-year history of the IBCTE. Those who will attend this Parliament are: David Lochhead, David Chappell, Schubert Ogden, the Ven. Yifa, Judith Simmer-Brown, and Rosemary Ruether.The following is a summary of each of the eight dialogue sessions at the 1999 meeting: First Paper (April 16 Morning Session) Discussion began with Taitetsu Unno's response to David Lochhead's paper entitled, "Monotheistic Violence." Unno began by examining the relationship between deep personal faith (vertical) and the social/ethical elements of religion (horizontal). This led to further discussion on violence and the construction of "the other." Unno raised the questions: Who decides what constitutes the other? Further, who ultimately [End Page 241] decides if the other is or is not enemy/neighbor? Unno pointed out that, following Matthew 5, if God does not discriminate good from evil, then who can determine who is just and unjust? This comment pointed to the great problem for minorities in North American society.Unno also made some comments on Lochhead's use of liberation theology: If all economic systems are prone to misuse, then does a critique of capitalism do us much good?Lochhead's reply to Unno began with the issue of dualism and non-dualism. Here, Lochhead talked about a "soft" dualism, in that our world is constituted by relationships such that God and neighbor are the names that appear in this discourse. Like Martin Buber's path in I and Thou, dualistic construction comes out of relationships. Lochhead clarified that this dualism is not the same as a hard dualism, which is what Unno referred to as subject/object dualism. This led to the relevant question: What kind of violence is involved in the construction of the other? If God is a name for something beyond me, then how can the construction of the self in relationship to God be a form of violence? And would not this nonviolent, soft dualistic construction hold for any other person or living being? Lochhead then suggested that it is when relationships somehow degenerate into I-it, in Buber's terms, that the construction can become violent.Much rich insight was brought to light when the dialogue opened for general discussion. José Cabezón asked if violence demands the construction of the other? He pointed out that for the human realm differentiation is necessary for human life. Stephanie Kaza contributed to the discussion by suggesting that biological necessity is very hard for people to understand. There can be different bases of knowing, and religious knowing is from a privileged point of view for understanding our relationship with the natural environment. Larry Cunningham reminded us that relationships in Christianity are crucial because... (shrink)

Demystifying Legal Reasoning defends the proposition that there are no special forms of reasoning peculiar to law. Legal decision makers engage in the same modes of reasoning that all actors use in deciding what to do: open-ended moral reasoning, empirical reasoning, and deduction from authoritative rules. This book addresses common law reasoning when prior judicial decisions determine the law, and interpretation of texts. In both areas, the popular view that legal decision makers practise special forms of reasoning is false.

Little is known about how and why corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerged in lesser developed countries. In order to address this knowledge gap, we used Chile as a test case and conducted a series of in-depth interviews with leaders of CSR initiatives. We also did an Internet and literature search to help provide support for the findings that emerged from our data. We discovered that while there are similarities in the drivers of CSR in developed countries, there are distinct differences (...) as well. In particular, we found that different sectors drive CSR in Chile. In contrast to other geographies where consumer demand and government regulation provided the impetus for CSR efforts, multinational companies (MNCs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are key actors in Chile. MNCs imported their CSR beliefs, skills, and processes into Chile. Their efforts resulted in a virtuous cycle. Once large domestic firms felt pressured by their MNC rivals, they too adopted CSR initiatives. The ability to manage relationships with multiple stakeholders and perceptions of authenticity were also critical to the success of CSR in Chile. Using network theory as a lens, we suggest that network density and centrality largely determine whether CSR efforts will be authentic. Based on these contentions, we suggest avenues for future research. (shrink)

An extensive literature has demonstrated that encoding information in a self-referential manner enhances subsequent memory performance. This ‘self-reference effect’ is generally elicited in paradigms that require participants to evaluate the self-descriptiveness of personality characteristics. Extending work of this kind, the current research explored the possibility that explicit evaluative processing is not a necessary precondition for the emergence of this effect. Rather, responses to self cues may enhance item encoding even in the absence of explicit evaluative instructions. We explored this hypothesis (...) by testing memory for items encoded in either an evaluative or relational context. The relational context was achieved by requesting participants to report the spatial relationship between target stimuli, and visual or verbal referent cues. The results revealed a self-referent memory advantage, regardless of the encoding context or triggering cue. The theoretical implications of these findings are considered. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that punishment should be proportional to desert; that desert turns solely on culpability and not on results: that culpability is a function of what the actor perceives are the risks of his act to others’ interests and the reasons he perceives that might justify, excuse, or aggravate taking those risks; that because culpability is a complex function, ordinally ranking acts in terms of culpability is quite difficult; that converting the ordinal ranking into cardinal measures of (...) deserved punishment must perforce be controversial; and that deserved punishment, which is deserved suffering, must somehow deal with the fact that the actor may have already suffered undeservedly. (shrink)

Nihilism is the logic of nothing as something, which claims that Nothing Is. Its unmaking of things, and its forming of formless things, strain the fundamental terms of existence: what it is to be, to know, to be known. But nihilism, the antithesis of God, is also like theology. Where nihilism creates nothingness, condenses it to substance, God also makes nothingness creative. Negotiating the borders of spirit and substance, theology can ask the questions of nihilism that other disciplines do not (...) ask: Where is it? What is it made of? Why is it so destructive? How can it be made holy, or overcome? Genealogy of Nihilism rereads Western history in the light of nihilistic logic, which pervades two millennia of Western thought and is coming to fruition in our present age in a virulently dangerous manner. From Parmenides to Alain Badiou, via Plotinus, Avicenna, Duns Scotus, Ockham, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze and Derrida, a genealogy of nothingness can be witnessed in development, with devastating consequences for the way we live. Conor Cunningham's elaborate and sophisticated theology, spanning the disciplines of philosophy, science and popular culture, permits us to see not simply how modernity has formulated its philosophies of nothing, but how these philosophies might be transfigures by the crucial difference theology makes, and so be reconcilable with life and the living - with the very gift which being is. (shrink)

Although discussions of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice generally refer to Rawls’ two principles of justice, and although Rawls himself labels his principles “the two principles of justice”, Rawls actually sets forth three distinct principles in the following lexical order: the liberty principle, the fair equality of opportunity principle, and the difference principle. Rawls argues at some length for the priority of the liberty principle over the other two. On the other hand, Rawls offers hardly any argument at all (...) for the priority of the fair equality of opportunity principle over the difference principle. In this article I will argue that making the fair equality of opportunity principle separate from and lexically prior to the difference principle is both intuitively unattractive and inconsistent with Rawls’ method of deriving principles of justice from the choices of rational contractors in the original position. (shrink)

In this short paper, I shall answer the title’s question first in the context of criminal law and then in the context of tort law. In that latter section, I shall also mention in passing contractual and other forms of civil liability that are strict, although they will not be my principal focus. My conclusions will be that strict liability is never proper as the basis for retributive punishment; that it is a very crude device for achieving deterrence through nonretributive (...) penalties; and that with respect to tort liability, it is best justified as a means of defining insurance categories. (shrink)

The scientific study of emotion faces a potentially serious problem: after over a hundred years of psychological study, we lack consensus regarding the very definition of emotion. We propose that part of the problem may be the tendency to define emotion in contrast to cognition, rather than viewing both “emotion” and “cognition” as being comprised of more elemental processes. We argue that considering emotion as a type of cognition (viewed broadly as information processing) may provide an understanding of the mechanisms (...) underlying domains that are traditionally thought to be qualitatively distinct. (shrink)

First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The problem of Nishida Kitaro's historical philosophy and an introduction to the psychedelic paradigm -- The Zen nexus between Nishida Kitaro and modern psychedelic experience -- Experience and the self: the early phase of Nishida's thought (1911-1931) -- Nishida Kitaro's historical world (1931-1945) -- A psychedelic paradigm of history -- Hallucinating the end of history: reflections on myth, the eschaton and the problem of overcoming modernity.

Existing and proposed provisions of the Model Penal Code refer to believing something “recklessly.” In this chapter, we examine the notion of reckless beliefs and determine what that notion cannot be and what it might be.

Dirigido a docentes, el texto aborda las implicaciones educativas de un enfoque actualizado e integrador del desarrollo moral, que recomienda diferenciar entre los dominios personal, convencional y moral. Desde esa perspectiva, examina dos temas relacionados, según los diferentes niveles educativos o de edad: Primero, la importancia del clima social y emocional predominante en las aulas y escuelas, ya que los climas caracterizados por la calidez, la equidad y la confianza promueven la conducta prosocial y una “orientación de buena voluntad”. Especial (...) atención se le presta a los riesgos de las camarillas y la exclusión entre pares durante la adolescencia, así como a la necesidad de subdividir las escuelas grandes en comunidades educativas más pequeñas ―o a escala humana―. Segundo, la importancia práctica y ética de complementar una atmósfera moral positiva con una disciplina constructivista o evolutiva. Una disciplina que además de las metas comunes de control y eficiencia, también se propone elevar la competencia social y moral de los estudiantes enfatizando la motivación intrínseca, las habilidades de solución de problemas sociales, y un uso moderado de las consecuencias lógicas del mal comportamiento; en lugar del énfasis usual en modelar la conducta mediante recompensas y castigos extrínsecos. (shrink)

Self-defense and other-defense are uses of force against another person—an attacker—for the purpose of preventing the attacker from harming a victim. When such force is exercised by the victim, it is self-defense; when by a third party, other-defense. Self-defense and other-defense are preemptive uses of force because they occur before the acts they are intended to prevent occur. Thus, they operate in the realm of epistemic uncertainty. Victims and third parties can never be certain the feared acts will occur. They (...) can never be certain of what their consequences will be if the acts occur. They can never be certain what alternative exists to self-defense and other-defense for averting the feared harms. And they can never be certain what the status of the presumed attacker is—that is, whether the presumed attacker is culpable or nonculpable. Such epistemic points are addressed in this chapter. (shrink)

This article explores the accounts of eugenics made by a small but important group of British scientists and clinicians working on the new genetics as applied to human health. These scientists and clinicians used special rhetorical strategies for distancing the new genetics from eugenics and to sustain their professional autonomy. They drew a number of boundaries or distinctions between eugenics and their own field, describing eugenics as politically distorted "bad science, " as being technically unfeasible, a feature of totalitarian regimes, (...) the abuse of neutral knowledge, and as the manipulation of the population's gene pool as opposed to diagnosing and treating individuals with genetic conditions. Their more sophisticated defense strategies invoked the importance of individual choice and the relationship between nature and nurture. The article highlights the ambiguities and difficulties in professionals' use of this rhetoric, drawing on historical and sociological analyses of eugenics, genetics, and medical science and technology more broadly. (shrink)

The hallmark of modern liberalism is its embrace of the Millian harm principle and its antipathy to legal moralism. In this article I consider whether aesthetic regulations can be justified under the harm principle as that principle has been elaborated by Joel Feinberg. I conclude that aesthetic and other regulations that most liberals regard as unproblematic are actually instances of legal moralism.

In the UK and USA ‘Hate crime’ has become a topic of public controversy and social mobilization around issues of violence and harassment. This has largely but not exclusively addressed racism, homophobia and gender based violence. This article has three objectives. First, to situate hate crime legislation within a broad theory of modernity;secondly to examine the politics of its emergence as a public issue; thirdly to use data from the authors' recent research in Greater Manchester to illuminate the complexity of (...) the concept of ‘hate crime’. The centrality of ‘hate crime’ to current debates derives from the importance of rights-based regulation of complex societies and the juridical management of emotional life. Hatred and violence have become problematic behaviour thrown into relief by a long term civilizing process. Hate crimes have thus acquired powerful rhetorical focus for mobilization of victim and identity politics. With reference to racist violence in Oldham and elsewhere in Greater Manchester, we argue that in its application and construction, however, ‘hate crime’ is a complex phenomenon that might dramatize rather than regulate the problems it seeks to address. (shrink)

Discusses the reasons for believing in the existence of God and ways of making God part of one's life.

The psychology of ownership is rooted in self-ownership. The human brain has an evolved interoceptive sense of owning the body that supports self-ownership and the ownership of external things as extensions of the self-owning self. In this way, evolutionary neuroscience supports a Lockean liberal conception of equal natural rights rooted in natural self-ownership.

In this chapter I analyze two fundamental hallmarks of liberalism—freedom of religion and freedom of expression. No society can rightly be called “liberal” if it does not endorse those freedoms. Yet, what are those freedoms, and are they realizable? I conclude that neither freedom can be given a principled elaboration. The approach to them must be pragmatic and reflect a contingent modus vivendi rather than an accommodation demanded by principle.

The concepts, health and disease, have received considerable attention in philosophy of medicine. The first goal of this paper is to demonstrate that three prominent analyses of health and disease can be synthesized if one assumes that medicine is both theoretical and practical, and, therefore, value-laden. The second goal of this paper is to give an account of one route by which evaluative and factual claims come together in medical knowledge, during medical conversations between clinicians and patients. Accomplishing these two (...) goals together yields an epistemology of medicine that moves past debates about health and disease. On this view the conceptual foundations of medicine rest on subjective and objective claims about health states and their evaluations. By making subjective and objective claims, patients and clinicians negotiate whether patients’ health states are sufficiently dysfunctional to warrant medical intervention, leading to the formation of complementary illness narratives, which are anchored to different degrees in personal experience and medical theory. On this view, health and disease are supplanted as the conceptual foundations of medicine. Rather, medicine is better understood in terms of two basic aims: The first aim of medicine is to fully understand patients in scientific and personal terms; the second aim is to intervene upon patients’ states of illness in ways that are consistent with full understanding. (shrink)

Before one can construct scales of minimal complexity in the Real Core Model, K(R), one needs to develop the fine-structure theory of K(R). In this paper, the fine structure theory of mice, first introduced by Dodd and Jensen, is generalized to that of real mice. A relative criterion for mouse iterability is presented together with two theorems concerning the definability of this criterion. The proof of the first theorem requires only fine structure; whereas, the second theorem applies to real mice (...) satisfying AD and follows from a general definability result obtained by abstracting work of John Steel on L(R). In conclusion, we discuss several consequences of the work presented in this paper relevant to two issues: the complexity of scales in K(R) and the strength of the theory ZF + AD + ¬ DC R. (shrink)

This title presents not two, but three questions. The third question, the one that lies behind and is obscured by the two more obvious ones, concerns the nature of American philosophy. What qualifies as “American” philosophy? Is it, as some have suggested, philosophy as it is practiced in any of the Americas – North, Central, or South? Or is it perhaps philosophy as it is pursued by practitioners living in North America, or even in a more restricted sense, by practitioners (...) living in the Unite... (shrink)

A constitution is, as Article VI of the United States Constitution declares, the fundamental law of the land, supreme as a legal matter over any other nonconstitutional law. But that almost banal statement raises a number of theoretically vexed issues. What is law? How is constitutional law to be distinguished from nonconstitutional law? How do morality and moral rights fit into the picture? And what are the implications of the answers to these questions for such questions as how and by (...) whom should constitutions be interpreted? These are the issues that I shall address.Alexander proceeds as follows: In section I he takes up law's principal function of settling controversies over what we are morally obligated to do. In section II he then relate law's settlement function to the role of constitutional law. In particular, he discusses how constitutional law is distinguished from ordinary law, and he also discusses the role of constitutions in establishing basic governmental structures and enforcing certain moral rights. In section III he addresses the topic of constitutional interpretation, and in section IV the topic of judicial review. Finally, in section V, he discusses constitutional change, both change that occurs through a constitution's own rules for amendments and change that is the product of constitutional misinterpretations and revolutions. (shrink)