Many normative nonnaturalists find normative naturalism to be completely implausible. Naturalists and nonnaturalists agree, provided they are realists, that there are normative properties, such as moral ones. Naturalists hold that these properties are similar in all metaphysically important respects to properties that all would agree to be natural ones, such as such as meteorological or economic ones. It is this view that the nonnaturalists I have in mind find to be hopeless. They hold that normative properties (...) are just too different from natural properties for it to be possible they are natural properties. I aim to defuse this intuition. “Non-analytic naturalism” has made progress in defusing the intution. According to non-analytic naturalists, normative properties can be represented in thought in two ways, by an ordinary normative concept and by a naturalistic concept, where, the non-analytic naturalist concedes, normative concepts are not, and are not analyzable in terms of, naturalistic concepts. Non-analytic naturalism seems to avoid many of the standard objections to naturalism, but the Just Too Different intuition is resilient in the face of non-analytic naturalism, for even if one thinks that normative concepts are not analyzable at all, one might think that clarity about the concepts can show that naturalism is hopeless. I therefore think it is important for naturalists to address the intuition directly. In this paper, I argue that the intuition plausibly rests on certain characteristic pre-theoretical ways of thinking of the normative properties that we acquire in the ordinary course of moral learning, together with a drive to vindicate these ways of thinking, something of which people may be unaware. This drive to vindicate our ways of thinking is pervasive, and it is characteristic of rational agents. It explains our tendency to think well of those we love, for example, and to think ill of those with whom we are angry. It also explains a strong inclination to form beliefs that, if true, would seemingly vindicate our ways of thinking of normative properties. A result of this, I contend, is the intuition that normative naturalism cannot be true. Yet, as I further argue, the vindication process does not track the truth and the drive to vindicate our states of mind cannot be relied on as a guide to the metaphysics of normativity. (shrink)

While resilience is a major concept in development, climate adaptation, and related domains, many doubts remain about how to interpret this term, its relationship with closely overlapping terms, or its normativity. One major view is that, while resilience originally was a descriptive concept denoting some adaptive property of ecosystems, subsequent applications to social contexts distorted its meaning and purpose by framing it as a transformative and normative quality. This article advances an alternative philosophical account based on (...) the scrutiny of C.S. Holling’s original work on resilience. We show that resilience had a central role among Holling’s proposals for reforming environmental science and management, and that Holling framed resilience as an ecosystem’s capacity of absorbing change and exploiting it for adapting or evolving, but also as the social ability of maintaining and opportunistically exploiting that natural capacity. Resilience therefore appears as a transformative social-ecological property that is normative in three ways: as an intrinsic ecological value, as a virtue of organizations or management styles, and as a virtuous understanding of human–nature relations. This interpretation accounts for the practical relevance of resilience, clarifies the relations between resilience and related terms, and is a firm ground for further normative work on resilience. (shrink)

People have always tried to make predictions; they are necessary and useful, but very often they commit obvious errors, which have negative consequences on decision-making. Prediction errors are in some cases, not few, unavoidable, because the world itself is unpredictable, subject to chance (or randomness in mathematics). Chance is a property of nature. The causes of random events are physically determined, but so numerous and complex that they (the events) are unpredictable. Science is not about certainty. Human knowledge itself (...) is not certain. We can only have provisional truths. Therefore, we must manage to reach a state of accommodation with uncertainty and unpredictability. The complexity of natural phenomena generates events that we cannot control through theoretical modeling precisely because of the ignorance of the causal mechanisms, which exist in their privacy but have not (yet) been revealed by the data and observations at our disposal. We have, on the one hand, life experience taken over and assimilated and established in society and, on the other hand, experience gained from real life. Norm and chance follow each other rather chaotically. The duration of validity of a norm and the moment of occurrence of the random event are unpredictable. However, norms and events coexist in our consciousness. Order and predictability are born (formed and exist) from rules; chance and unpredictability are born from the lack of rules. The highest truths, recognized as such by society cannot be transposed into the life of society only by the force of reason. It is imperative that they are reinforced and embedded in the social behavior of all citizens. Rules are needed. Without rules there is no freedom. (shrink)

Adaptive preferences are preferences formed in response to circumstances and opportunities – paradigmatically, they occur when we scale back our desires so they accord with what is probable or at least possible. While few commentators are willing to wholly reject the normative significance of such preferences, adaptive preferences have nevertheless attracted substantial criticism in recent political theory. The groundbreaking analysis of Jon Elster charged that such preferences are not autonomous, and several other commentators have since followed Elster’s lead. On (...) a second front, Capacity Theorists Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen have objected that adaptive preferences lead people away from objective goods and constitute an impediment to progressive change in developing countries. In this paper I argue that the criticisms of Elster, Sen and Nussbaum fail on the one hand to take into account what may be positively said in favour of this type of preference formation, and fail on the other hand to distinguish between different types of psychological changes – with the result that many of the critiques offered have a narrower purview than is currently allowed. My analysis of adaptive preferences, even in their most ideal form, is however not entirely positive; I adduce reasons why we can be cautious about allowing adaptive preferences to play certain types of roles in political processes, even as we accept those very preferences as normative and autonomous for the agent holding them. [International scholars without access to the AJPAE are invited to email [email protected] for a pdf copy of this article.]. (shrink)

This article discusses the phenomenon of normative resilience, with a focus on evaluative resilience. An object can become more or less valuable. In addition to this change in an object's value, the object's value can become more or less resilient. If it is less resilient, it cannot withstand as much evaluative change without its degree of value changing, as compared to an object with more resilient value. The article consists of three parts. First, examples of resilience (...) are presented to give the reader an intuitive understanding of the phenomenon, Second, the Fitting Attitudes Analysis of value is invoked to provide a formal account of evaluative resilience. Third, the theoretical and practical advantages of acknowledging the existence of evaluative resilience are brought to light. (shrink)

The Construction of Property identifies the structural and institutional foundations of property, and explains how these features can accommodate various normative agendas. Offering rich and cutting-edge analysis, the book studies the spectrum of property regimes including private, common and public property as well as innovative forms of property hybrids such as US-style residential community associations, the British Private Finance Initiative, the Israeli Renewing Kibbutz, community land trusts and grassroots phenomena of property ordering in (...) publicly-owned open spaces. It also investigates the protagonists of property beyond the individual and the state, identifying the key role that community organisations and business corporations play for both the private and public aspects of property. The book then addresses property's greatest challenge: the move from a largely domestic legal construct into one that accommodates the increasing social and economic forces of globalisation. (shrink)

This article redescribes early modern European defenses of private property in terms of a theoretical project of seeking to establish the true or essential nature of property. Most of the scholarly literature has focused on the historical and normative issues relating to the various accounts of original acquisition around which these defenses were organized. However, in my redescription, these so-called “original acquisition stories” appear as methodological devices for an analytic reduction and resolution of property into its (...) fundamental elements and axioms. Through these stories, property is “created” in the form of the classical liberal paradigm of presumptively exclusive, private ownership of material things. The problem is that this project of “creation” is also a project which arbitrarily excludes or marginalizes other forms and systems of property, and especially usufructuary forms of common property. After critically explicating this early modern project of creation, I go on to argue that the classical liberal paradigm and its problems continue to inform property theory and discourse in the late modern era. (shrink)

Traditional methods for deriving property-based representations of concepts from text have focused on either extracting only a subset of possible relation types, such as hyponymy/hypernymy (e.g., car is-a vehicle) or meronymy/metonymy (e.g., car has wheels), or unspecified relations (e.g., car—petrol). We propose a system for the challenging task of automatic, large-scale acquisition of unconstrained, human-like property norms from large text corpora, and discuss the theoretical implications of such a system. We employ syntactic, semantic, and encyclopedic information to guide (...) our extraction, yielding concept-relation-feature triples (e.g., car be fast, car require petrol, car cause pollution), which approximate property-based conceptual representations. Our novel method extracts candidate triples from parsed corpora (Wikipedia and the British National Corpus) using syntactically and grammatically motivated rules, then reweights triples with a linear combination of their frequency and four statistical metrics. We assess our system output in three ways: lexical comparison with norms derived from human-generated property norm data, direct evaluation by four human judges, and a semantic distance comparison with both WordNet similarity data and human-judged concept similarity ratings. Our system offers a viable and performant method of plausible triple extraction: Our lexical comparison shows comparable performance to the current state-of-the-art, while subsequent evaluations exhibit the human-like character of our generated properties. (shrink)

This paper provides moderate criticism of so-called normative theories of thinking and reasoning. The discussion focuses on the problems of idealization, adequacy, inconsistent yet non-trivial logics, logical omniscience etc. I called them “internal” to the normative approach, because they stem from the very properties of formal systems used to model these two human activities. Some arguments, however, refer to the current theories in cognitive science, including those which are developed within “descriptive” framework.

I describe a number of views in which metaphysical fundamentality is accounted for in normative terms. After describing many different ways this key idea could be developed, I turn to developing the idea in one specific way. After all, the more detailed the proposal, the easier it is to assess whether it works. The rough idea is that what it is for a property to be fundamental is for it to be prima facie obligatory to theorize in terms (...) of that property. (shrink)

Why are the fundamentals of education apparently so little changed in our era of digital technology? Is their obstinate persistence evidence of resilience or obsolescence? Such questions can best be answered not by imagining an uncertain high-tech future, but by examining a well-documented past--a history of instruction and media that extends from Gilgamesh to Google. Norm Friesen looks to the combination and reconfiguration of oral, textual, and more recent media forms to understand the longevity of so many educational arrangements (...) and practices. Friesen examines the interrelationship of reading, writing, and pedagogy in the case of the lecture and the textbook--from their premodern to their postmodern incarnations. Over hundreds of years, these two forms have integrated textual, oral, and (more recently) digital media and connected them with changing pedagogical and cultural priorities. The Textbook and the Lecture opens new possibilities for understanding not only mediated pedagogical practices and their reform but also gradual changes in our conceptions of the knowing subject and of knowledge itself. Drawing on wide-ranging scholarship in fields as diverse as media ecology and German-language media studies, Foucauldian historiography, and even archaeological research, The Textbook and the Lecture is a fascinating investigation of educational media. (shrink)

Resilience is the process and outcome of healthy adaptation despite significant adversity. Proliferation of research on the resilience construct has led to scientific concerns about the operationalization and measurement of resilience for assessment science and practice. Various studies that have investigated the psychometric properties and construct validity of the Resilience Scale for Adolescents have yielded inconsistent findings, which could partly be due to variations in the methodological approaches. This study investigated the factor structure and construct validity (...) of the READ in four European regions participating in the Universal Preventive Resilience Intervention Globally Implemented in Schools to Improve and Promote Mental Health for Teenagers project. Participants included adolescents aged 10–15 years from Spain, Iceland, Italy, and Poland. The five-factor model of the READ was similar across gender and participating regions. Construct validity of the READ was supported. After establishing construct separability, incremental validity was supported. The READ is a valid and reliable measure of protective factors involved in resilience and demonstrates promise for cross-cultural applicability. Recommendations for measuring resilience and validating the READ in future investigations are provided. (shrink)

Property enhances autonomy for most people, but not for all. Because it both empowers and disables, property requires constant vigilance. A Liberal Theory of Property addresses key questions: how can property be justified? What core values should property law advance, and how do those values interrelate? How is a liberal state obligated to act when shaping property law? In a liberal polity, the primary commitment to individual autonomy dominates the justification of property, founding (...) it on three pillars: carefully delineated private authority, structural pluralism, and relational justice. A genuinely liberal property law meets the legitimacy challenge confronting property by expanding people's opportunities for individual and collective self-determination while carefully restricting their options of interpersonal domination. The book shows how the three pillars of liberal property account for core features of existing property systems, provide a normative vocabulary for evaluating central doctrines, and offer directions for urgent reforms. (shrink)

The Resilience Scale for Adolescents is a highly rated scale for measuring protective factors of resilience. Even though the READ has been validated in several different cultural samples, no studies have validated the READ across samples in German from Switzerland and Germany. The purpose of this study was to explore the construct validity of the German READ version in two samples from two different countries and to test the measurement invariance between those two samples. A German sample and (...) a German-speaking Swiss sample of seventh graders completed the READ, Hopkins Symptom Checklist, Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, General Self-Efficacy Scale, and Satisfaction with Life Scale. The expected negative correlations between READ and HSCL-25 and the positive correlations between RSE, self-efficacy, and SWL were supported. Furthermore, the results of the measurement invariance demonstrated that the originally proposed five-dimensional structure is equal in the German and Swiss samples, and it can be assumed that the same construct was assessed by excluding one item. The five-factor, 27-item solution is a valid and reliable self-report measure of protective factors between two German-speaking samples. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the influence of an organisation's structure, such as that of the National Education System, in the emergence of desirable social properties. In this case the concern is schools with adequate performance. It is assumed that there is a circular causality between structure and the social results of schools. I highlight some of the structural requirements to have justice, sense of belonging, trust, honesty and cooperation as emerging properties of these schools, beyond normative statements. These (...) are requirements for effective citizenship. In order to study this, it is necessary to observe the structures that constitute collectives into organisations. Central to this paper is a case study that I carried out at Millfield Primary School in the U.K., which focused on the observation of citizenship as a dynamic process permanently being constructed. This case went beyond the normative understanding of citizenship as established in the new school curriculum to be implemented from September 2002. I take the view that the aim of citizenship is to build up a community in which one is constituted as a citizen. For that purpose we need enabling people to build up their own communities. My conclusion from this case study suggests that current educational methodologies aim at teaching a "model of" citizenship rather than at providing the necessary tools to think about and create suitable spaces "for" citizenship. The case study shows that it is necessary to reinforce in schools practical methods to create membership and respect for others. (shrink)

This article sets out a new conception of ‘property as an asset of resilience’. Building on Fineman’s emphasis on ‘webs’ of resilience, and applying insights from Actor-Network Theory and Resilient Property Theory, we examine how the rhetorical claims asserted by owners and non-owners, individually and collectively, and the ways that law recognizes and endorses those claims, affect the production of property-as-resilience. Applying Fineman’s framework, we argue that the ‘embodiment’ and ‘embeddedness’ of human vulnerability is (...) revealed by the necessary and inevitable relationship we have with land, housing and place. Everyone—including homeless people—must ‘be’ somewhere (embodiment); however, it is our ability to access ‘assets of resilience’ through our social embeddedness in institutional structures and relationships that mitigates (or not) our experience and life opportunities. In this article we analyze the nature of real property as an asset of resilience, the consequences of exclusionary concepts of ownership for how resilience is allocated, and the implications for how we think and talk about ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ in property theories and property law. We consider the roles that states perform in the allocation of property as an asset of resilience: both directly, through the protection and enforcement of private property rights and official narratives about the nature of private property; and indirectly, as owners leverage the hinterland of privilege extended to ‘ownership’ and owners to deepen their own networks of resilience. (shrink)

This paper explores the connection between two philosophical debates concerning the nature of properties. The first metaethical debate is about whether normative properties are ordinary natural properties or some unique kind of non-natural properties. The second metaphysical debate is about whether properties are sets of objects, transcendent or immanent universals, or sets of tropes. I argue that nominalism, transcendent realism, and immanent realism are not neutral frameworks for the metaethical debate but instead lead to either metaethical naturalism or non-naturalism. (...) We can therefore investigate the metaethical question on its own terms only within the framework of trope theory. (shrink)

This book provides a detailed account of the role of property in German Idealism. It puts the concept of property in the center of the philosophical systems of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel and shows how property remains tied to their conceptions of freedom, right, and recognition. The book begins with a critical genealogy of the concept of property in modern legal philosophy, followed by a reconstruction of the theory of property in Kant's Doctrine of Right, (...) Fichte's Foundations of Natural Right, and Hegel's Jena Realphilosophie. By turning to the tradition of German Rechtsphilosophie, as opposed to the more standard libertarian and utilitarian frameworks of property, it explores the metaphysical, normative, political, and material questions that make property intelligible as a social relation. The book formulates a normative theory of property rooted in practical reason, mutual recognition, and social freedom. This relational theory of property, inspired by German Idealism, brings a fresh angle to contemporary property theory. Additionally, it provides crucial philosophical background to 19th century debates on private property, inequality, labor, socialism, capitalism, and the state. The Concept of Property in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in 19th Century German philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, political theory, and political economy. (shrink)

The problem area of distributive justice includes at its core questions about what ought to be owned, how it can be owned and who ought to own it. A fundamental assumption behind recent attempts to address these questions is that the power to shape the property institutions of a society lies entirely in that society's laws. This view, I argue, is mistaken. In this dissertation I provide an account of how property institutions are related to other social practices (...) in a society. A consequence of this account is that property law does not solely determine what property looks like in a society. ;The analysis begins with the observation of Enlightenment-era natural rights theorists that property is, first and foremost, a conventional social norm. I then turn to modern developments in game theory and social psychology to propose a novel account of how conventional social norms guide agents. On this account, a norm guides an agent by influencing their practical reasoning in one of two ways: either rationally, by generating a belief that behavior in those circumstances is required by that norm, or sub-rationally, by structuring the agent's practical reasoning, without the agent being aware of it, in such a way that ensures the formation of intentions to act in a manner required by the norm. This second form of norm guidance, which I call 'passive norm guidance', provides grounds for the claim that property norms can exist and function independently of recognition by the law. I go on to show how the independent existence of property norms can support a robust natural law account of property rights according to which property rights exist independent of recognition by the law. The dissertation ends by show how this account, while radical, is also consistent with the dominant Twentieth Century analytic jurisprudence accounts of property. (shrink)

:A norm of equal treatment is cited regularly in the American jurisprudence of property “takings” under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, as a benchmark of fair treatment of owners. According to an increasingly prevalent version of this equality norm, courts should look to parity of treatment among property owners in investigating whether particular regulations “take” property. This essay argues, however, that such an equality norm is misplaced, and that courts should judge fairness by the (...) criterion of expectation—including reasonable expectations of regulation.A norm of equality becomes problematic in the face of the economic theory of the evolution of property. This theory posits that as resources become more congested, their uses carry increasing common pool costs or “externalities”—a scenario that should predictably result in more stringent resource management—up to and including the establishment of regulatory regimes as well as property rights themselves. This evolutionary pattern, however, places earlier and later resource users in different positions vis-à-vis both common pool externalities and regulatory responses, and their different temporal positions fragment the meaning of equal treatment and destabilize it as a jurisprudential norm. This essay argues that while equal treatment may be a benchmark for special or invidious cases, like those relating to civil rights, the great bulk of takings cases involve regulatory responses to congesting resources, where a norm of equal treatment breaks down. Thus, in seeking fair treatment, takings jurisprudence should downplay equality and instead look to the understanding of property as a basis of expectations—but those expectations should include the anticipation of reasonable regulatory responses to resource congestion. (shrink)

After Marx, dissenting economics almost always used 'the labour theory' as a theory of value. This paper develops a modern treatment of the alternative labour theory of property that is essentially the property theoretic application of the juridical principle of responsibility: impute legal responsibility in accordance with who was in fact responsible. To understand descriptively how assets and liabilities are appropriated in normal production, a 'fundamental myth' needs to be cleared away, and then the market mechanism of appropriation (...) can be understood. On the normative side, neoclassical theory represents marginal productivity theory as showing that (a metaphorical version of) the imputation principle is satisfied ('people get what they produce') in competitive enterprises. Since that shows the moral commitment of neoclassical economics to the imputation principle, the labour theory of property is presented here as the actual non-metaphorical application of the imputation principle to property appropriation. The property-theoretic analysis at the firm level shows how the neoclassical (and much heterodox) analysis in terms of 'distributive shares' wholly misframed the basic questions. Finally, the paper shows how the imputation principle (modernised labour theory of property) is systematically violated in the present wage labour system of renting persons. The paper can be seen as taking up the recent challenge posed by Donald Katzner for a dialogue between neoclassical and heterodox microeconomics. (shrink)

This article asks whether resilience is a normative term, and answers this question in the affirmative. I start by explaining two arguments that have been offered in favour of the ‘resilience-as-descriptive’ thesis (RD). Then I criticize this view by advancing five reasons why resilience should be considered a normative term (RN).

The administrators of the human genome project were eager to stimulate public discussion, academic debate, legal and legislative deliberation of how individuals and institutions should respond to the revolution in genomics. Paramount among the issues whose discussion they encouraged are three obvious matters: The threat which access to our genetic information poses for heath insurance, employment, and social discrimination the nefarious consequences for scientific advance of turning basic scientific discoveries about genomes into private property The permissibility of prenatal genetic (...) screening, germline therapy, cloning and other in- vitro reproductive processes. It should not be surprising that there is a great deal of uniformity of views about most of the problems that come under these three headings. For they do not raise issues different in kind from those we faced in bioethics before the genomic revolution. Even starting from divergent moral theories, by and large people have come to broadly similar conclusions about which newly available choices are morally permissible and which are not. Our moral intuitions and articulated moral theory have stood us in good stead, providing substantial grounds for disapproving new genomically inspired examples of old practices–like eugenics, the paternalism of health-care experts, and the sacrifice of individual rights to.. (shrink)

In this paper, we engage with the question of the normative content of the resilience concept. The issues are approached in two consecutive steps. First, we proceed from a narrow construal of the resilience concept – as the ability of a system to absorb a disturbance – and show that under an analysis of normative concepts as evaluative concepts resilience comes out as descriptive. In the second part of the paper, we argue that (1) for (...) systems of interest (primarily social systems or system with a social component) we seem to have options with respect to how they are described and (2) that this matters for what is to be taken as a sign of resilience as opposed to a sign of the lack of resilience for such systems. We discuss the implications of this for how the concept should be applied in practice and suggest that users of the resilience concept face a choice between versions of the concept that are either ontologically or normatively charged. (shrink)

The literature on management identifies three models for the relationships between a company’s management, its board, its shareholders and other stakeholders, as well as the corporation’s goals: the shareholder model of corporate governance, the employee governance model and the stakeholder model. One can identify in current business practice a further model of corporate governance, which may be entitled “the controlling shareholder model”. The goal of this paper is to show that these models are grounded in long-standing philosophical ideas. The philosophical (...) basis of the shareholder model is to be traced to John Locke’s theory of private property; Karl Marx’s approach underlies the employee governance model; the stakeholder model reflects the Aristotelian theory of the golden mean; and the controlling shareholder model expresses Thomas Hobbes’s conception of the sovereign power. We wish to argue that recognizing these philosophical ideas at the basis of the models of corporate governance would facilitate the analysis of the difficulties inherent to these models. We also maintain that this recognition is instrumental in forming a normative position concerning the meaning of corporate governance to present-day society. (shrink)

In 1942 Robert K. Merton tried to demonstrate the structure of the normative system of science by specifying the norms that characterized it. The norms were assigned the abbreviation CUDOs: Communism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, and Organized skepticism. Using the results of an on-line survey of climate scientists concerning the norms of science, this paper explores the climate scientists’ subscription to these norms. The data suggests that while Merton’s CUDOs remain the overall guiding moral principles, they are not fully endorsed or (...) present in the conduct of climate scientists: there is a tendency to withhold results until publication, there is the intention of maintaining property rights, there is external influence defining research and the tendency to assign the significance of authored work according to the status of the author rather than content of the paper. These are contrary to the norms of science as proposed by Robert K. Merton. (shrink)

Jamie Morgan's commentary (Morgan, 2016) on my paper 'The Labour Theory of Property and Marginal Productivity Theory' (Ellerman, 2016) and Ted Burczak's later comments (Burczak, 2016) raise a number of issues that surely will occur to other readers and that need to be addressed. I take the occasion to expand upon the arguments and to explore some related issues. In the narrative that unfolds, Frank H. Knight plays the role of the sophisticated defender of the system of renting, hiring (...) and employing human beings. He was quite clear that the social role of economics is to develop an idealised model, the competitive free enterprise model, and then to frame the normative discussion in terms of that model. Knight would agree with the whole thread of heterodox 'criticism' that the actual economy falls far short of the ideal – which is why I largely eschewed the descriptive shortcomings of ideal model as a purported model of the actual economy. Instead my paper focused on developing a critique of the key part of the idealised model, the marginal productivity theory of distribution under competitive conditions. That critique is based on the usual juridical principle of imputing legal responsibility in accordance with factual responsibility – the principle whose property-theoretic application is the modern treatment of the labour theory of property. Historically, heterodox economics faced a fork in the road in the 19th century: whether to criticise 'the system' by developing the inchoate 'labour theory' as a theory of value or a theory of property. Marx and much of left-wing economics took the labour-theory-of-value road, whereas my paper is part of a modern attempt – Thomas Hodgskin (1832) being an earlier attempt – to take the labour-theory-of-property road. As we will see, much of the debate still revolves around these two roads. Read David Ellerman's original paper "The Labour Theory of Property and Marginal Productivity Theory" › Read Jamie Morgan's commentary on David Ellerman's paper ›. (shrink)

Karl Widerquist is one of the world’s leading theorists and proponents of Universal Basic Income (UBI). His argument for UBI, however, is only one important cornerstone of his broader theory of justice and freedom. This theory entails a critical reassessment of the justification and proper scope of property rights. This is the task of The Problem of Property, a nifty little book which originates in previously unpublished parts of his doctoral thesis—the same thesis that formed the foundation of (...) his Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: Freedom as the Power to Say No (2013, New York: Palgrave MacMillan). The current book is thus a welcome companion piece to that magnum opus. At the same time, The Problem of Property, thanks to its brevity and clarity, is a decent standalone introduction to Widerquist’s philosophy. While some fans of his previous works might be disappointed that UBI takes an unexpected backseat, the book’s narrow critical focus on the normative justifications of property rights makes it a goldmine for political philosophers. Even Lockean right-libertarians, his ostensible main targets, should find its freedom-based arguments familiar and easy to grasp, even if they may be puzzled by some of the radical conclusions that he draws from them. (shrink)

Despite the variety of competing interpretations of domination, a common feature of the most influential analyses of the concept is their reliance on a normative criterion: the detrimental effect of domination on those subject to it. This article offers a non-evaluative, non-consequence-based definition of domination, in line with the perspective on power developed by the theory of the social exchange. Domination, it is argued, should be seen as a structural property of a power relation, and consists in an (...) extreme inequality in the social distribution of power. It is contended, accordingly, that the postulation of a society in which domination is avoided (or minimized) should rely on the ideal of the minimization of inequality, and, more specifically, that it should be based on a distributional pattern of maximally equal social resources. (shrink)

Phenomenologists are yet another group of philosophers who have also dealt with the problem of values and valuation. What do they have to say about it? Heidegger, to be sure, emphatically warned that we’d better stop approaching serious philosophical problems in terms of valuing and values. It is actually the result of all the efforts to the contrary, he claimed, that has brought nihilism into history and has continued to enhance it along with the accompanying despair. Values and nihilism are (...) in fact the outcome prepared by the dynamics of the traditional metaphysical dichotomy between a positing subject and a posited there-standing object with properties—valuing and values being just one of its latest expressions. Scheler and Hartmann, on the other hand, devoted their lives to the effort of elucidating valuing and values. However, here we will focus on the thoughts that Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement, developed regarding this problem. This is necessary if we want to deepen our understanding of the intensity and the breadth of the work that the phenomenologists he inspired developed on the possibility (or impossibility) of a philosophy of values. It is also necessary for an assessment of the real prospects of such a project, which today seems to attract progressively greater attention. To this effect, the structure of the present paper is as follows. In §2, I describe the basic features of the way Husserl carried out phenomenological-philosophical research. I will focus in particular on the meaning of “intentionality,” of “phenomenological method,” and of “intentional constitution.” In §3, I present Husserl’s idea regarding the possibility and meaning of a phenomenological critique of reason in general. The general outline and fundamental orientation of Husserl’s original project for a critique of the axiological and practical reason as well as of his essentialist-normative philosophy of valuing and of values is presented in §4. Section 5 contains an account of Husserl’s approach to emotive phenomena and to value-appearance in the Logical Investigations (1900/01) and in subsequent treatments of the issue along the lines of that original project. In §6, I present the key issue and the key problem in Husserl’s essentialist-normative Axiology. Finally, in §7 I sum up the conclusions and make some further critical remarks. (shrink)

This paper defends the Blockian Proviso against its critics, Kinsella in particular, and interprets it as a law of non-contradiction in the theory of just property rights. I demonstrate that one may not lawfully appropriate in such a way as to forestall others from appropriating an unowned land because such appropriation would result in conflict-generating norms, and conflict-generating norms are not rationally justifiable and just norms. The Blockian Proviso, which precludes forestalling, operates therefore at the level of original appropriation (...) and determines, according to the homestead principle of justice in first acquisition, what may and what may not be lawfully appropriated. Hence, the Blockian Proviso is not an add-on to the homestead principle but part and parcel thereof. (shrink)

The article aims to analyze the legal norms that regulate the protection of the property right in the legal system of the Republic of Macedonia. In most cases, the protection of property right is realized through suits; however, our legal system provides for the possibility that the protection of property right can also be realized through the registration of immovable property rights in the respective Public Registries. Given the fact that in the Republic of North Macedonia (...) the normative regulation of property suits is not contained in a single normative act, but rather extends to several such acts, the article, based on the practice of the high courts, seeks to analyze the legal cases related to property rights that qualify as rights similar to property rights, but which enjoy legal protection provided by law. The article will mainly elaborate on the basic provisions on property protection suits contained in the Law on Ownership and other Real Rights (2001). However, in this context, the provisions on property protection that are contained in the Law on Real Estate Cadastre (2008), the Law on Contentious Procedure (2005), the Law on Securing of Claims (2007), the Law on Construction Land (2008), etc., will also be taken into consideration. (shrink)

Some philosophers think that normative properties are identical to descriptive properties. In this paper, I argue that this entails that it is possible to say which descriptive properties normative properties are identical to. I argue that Frank Jackson's argument to show that this is possible fails, and that the objections to this argument show that it is impossible to say which descriptive properties normative properties are identical to. I conclude that normative properties are not identical to (...) descriptive properties. I then show that if we combine this conclusion with the conclusion of a different argument that Jackson has given to show that there are no irreducibly normative properties, it follows that there are no normative properties at all. (shrink)

In the current study, we provided the evidence of satisfactory validity of the RS-14 scale in the Lithuanian adolescents’ sample, based on its internal structure, and relations to other variables. The results of the study indicated an acceptable model fit for a single-factor structure of the scale with a high internal consistency. We also confirmed the scalar measurement invariance across groups of adolescents in terms of their age and mental health profile as well as partial scalar gender invariance. Adolescents characterized (...) by high levels of socio-emotional problems reported lower levels of resilience, in comparison to adolescents that reported low levels of socio-emotional problems. However, the data indicated that adolescents from emotional problems and behavioral problems groups cannot be differentiated with the RS-14 scale. (shrink)

State ownership, worker ownership, and household ownership are the three main forms in which productive assets (firms) can be held. I argue that worker ownership is not wise in economies with high capital-labor ratios, for it forces the worker to concentrate all her assets in one firm. I review the coupon economy that I proposed in 1994, and express reservations that it could work: greedy people would be able to circumvent its purpose of preventing the concentration of corporate wealth. Although (...) extremely high corporate salaries are the norm today, I argue these are competitive and market determined, a consequence of the gargantuan size of firms. It would, however, be possible to tax such salaries at high rates, because the labor - supply response would be small. The social-democratic model remains the best one, to date, for producing a relatively egalitarian outcome, and it relies on solidarity, redistribution, and private ownership of firms. Whether a solidaristic social ethos can develop without a conflagration, such as the second world war, which not only united populations in the war effort, but also wiped out substantial middle-class wealth in Europe - thus engendering the post-war movement towards social - insurance is an open question. (shrink)

This article focuses on the analysis of the main positions of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania in the cases of intellectual property law. In the article three judgments and the positions of the Constitutional Court extracted therefrom are analysed. The Constitutional Court has formed several important positions with reference to intellectual property law regarding usage of property protection norms for the protection of intellectual property, requirements of application of compensation as an alternative to (...) damages compensation and the calculation of criterions thereof as well as functional legal protection of trademarks. It should be noted that Article 23(1) of the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania has extended protection to property and, as the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania has noted, the constitutional protection of property covers not only the protection of tangible, but also of intellectual property. In the same judgment, the Constitutional Court stated another important intellectual property related rule, namely that constitutionally established property protection rights have to be implemented regardless of whether a corresponding international treaty has not been ratified, as protection of authors’ rights is granted under Articles 23 and 42(3) of the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania. However, the second position stating that the rights of foreign subjects are to be implemented even though a corresponding international treaty has not been signed is to be criticised as by coming to such a conclusion the Constitutional Court has ignored the otherwise generally recognised principle of territoriality of intellectual property rights. In two other cases the Constitutional Court has made important statements relevant to intellectual property law. First of all, the Court stated that compensation instead of claiming actual damages is constitutional. By analysing the positions formulated by the Court, an indirect conclusion can be made to the effect that compensation instead of claiming actual damages is necessary in order to ensure effective protection of intellectual property rights. In other words, the purposes of compensation can be recognised: restoring (compensating) the infringed interests of the injured party; simplifying judicial proceedings, whereby faster proceedings (litigation) and easier substantiation is sought; and the preventive purpose (strong preventive effect). However, the Court’s argument regarding the criterion of compensation calculation, saying that the damages incurred by the intellectual property rights owner depend on the sale value of the product concerned is criticisable, as it is rarely the case that the licence fee or profit acquired in the result of unauthorised use of intellectual property objects is calculated with reference to the final sale price of the product. Notwithstanding the arguably weak argument of the Court, the Court’s position regarding the criterion of final sale price itself does not preclude the possibility of reaching a fair final decision. Finally, the Court acknowledged that trademark protection was limited to the economic functions of the trademark and the full protection thereof. (shrink)

This paper examines some consequences of the (quasi-)epiphenomenalism implied by a property dualistic view of phenomenal consciousness. The focus is upon the variation of phenomenal content over time. A thought-experiment is constructed to support two claims. The weaker claim exhibits an incompatibility which arises in certain logically possible situations between a conscious subject’s epistemic norms and the requirement that one be aware of one’s conscious experience. This could be interpreted as providing some epistemic grounds for the postulation of bridging (...) laws between the physical/functional and phenomenal domains. The stronger claim has it that the ontology of property dualism is not properly able to account for the certainty I have of being phenomenally conscious. The problem is viewed as resulting from the neglect of the intensional context involved in a proper representation of the argument for property dualism. It is argued that only a transcendental move can do justice to this certainty I have. (shrink)

We compared the ability of three different contextual models of lexical semantic memory and of a simple associative model to predict the properties of semantic networks derived from word association norms. None of the semantic models were able to accurately predict all of the network properties. All three contextual models over-predicted clustering in the norms, whereas the associative model under-predicted clustering. Only a hybrid model that assumed that some of the responses were based on a contextual model and others on (...) an associative network successfully predicted all of the network properties and predicted a word's top five associates as well as or better than the better of the two constituent models. The results suggest that participants switch between a contextual representation and an associative network when generating free associations. We discuss the role that each of these representations may play in lexical semantic memory. Concordant with recent multicomponent theories of semantic memory, the associative network may encode coordinate relations between concepts, and contextual representations may be used to process information about more abstract concepts. (shrink)

Today, resilience is used in many societal contexts for understanding how things respond to risks and for improving their performance in this regard, having also become a prominent approach for adapting to climate change. Yet, despite the broad appeal of resilience and resilience-based approaches within and outside academia, there are persisting puzzles about how to interpret resilience, its relation to competing concepts and approaches, or its desirability. Some proponents of resilience advise caution with the (...) class='Hi'>normative use of the term, noting that resilience is a purely descriptive and ambivalent quality, which can be good in some circumstances but not in others. Critics have also noted that resilience approaches can be technocratic and that they tend to conceal the needs and vulnerabilities of the poor. -/- These examples demonstrate the need for reflecting on the status and significance of a term that is so widely used in academia and across the science-policy divide, but whose meaning and value are so fiercely disputed. Given that resilience is already informing many large-scale and significant societal efforts, they also raise the need to ask under which conditions such efforts could be just. -/- This work uses philosophical perspectives from ethics, metaethics and justice theory for revisiting recent debates on the meaning and normative status of this concept, with special emphasis on understanding the normative guidance that diverse interpretations of resilience can offer and disclosing the implications that this may have for achieving justice in and through resilience-based interventions. (shrink)

This research article analyzes the right of disposal of marital property in relation to the undertaking of those legal actions that imply the highest authorizations that legal subjects can have over things. Having in consideration the fact that according to the legislation in the Republic of Macedonia, marital property is joint as are the authorizations of spouses over their joint items, it is important to determine the extent of the disposal, i.e. who disposes of the items of the (...) joint property and to what extent. Referring to the normative framework, which regulates disposal relations of spouses, the article emphasizes the concept and importance of the authorization of disposal of things, through legal activities. In this context, the article tends to draw a divisive line between the administration with the joint item, referring to continuative actions and measures and the disposal of the thing, which is not continuative but, due to legal consequences it causes, has great importance in practice, and as a result, enjoys greater attention in legislators in terms of its limitation compared to the acts of administration with joint items in marriage. (shrink)

The philosophical debate on paternalism is conducted as if the property of being paternalistic should be attributed to actions. Actions are typically deemed to be paternalistic if they amount to some kind of interference with a person and if the rationale for the action is the good of the person interfered with. This focus on actions obscures the normative issues involved. In particular, it makes it hard to provide an analysis of the traditional liberal resistance to paternalism. Given (...) the fact that actions most often have mixed rationales, it is not clear how we should categorize and evaluate interfering actions for which only part of the rationale is the good of the person. The preferable solution is to attribute the property of being paternalistic not to actions, but to compounds of reasons and actions. The framework of action–reasons provides the tools for distinguishing where exactly paternalism lies in the complex web of reasons and actions. (shrink)

Throughout the evolution of public political discourse we have repeatedly seen the effects of scandals on the careers of many politicians. Although the cultural and societal norms that have traditionally dictated the results of such scandals have changed dramatically within the last two centuries, I believe that the aftermath of these scandals may be better understood by analyzing and comparing the politician’s previously established public image to the scandal at hand. I will argue that a negative impact only occurs if (...) and when there is a clear contradiction of character that presents the politician as a deceitful or hypocritical person in the media sphere and therefore the eyes of the public. (shrink)

Five experiments provide evidence for a class of ‘dual character concepts.’ Dual character concepts characterize their members in terms of both (a) a set of concrete features and (b) the abstract values that these features serve to realize. As such, these concepts provide two bases for evaluating category members and two different criteria for category membership. Experiment 1 provides support for the notion that dual character concepts have two bases for evaluation. Experiments 2-4 explore the claim that dual character concepts (...) have two different criteria for category membership. The results show that when an object possesses the appropriate concrete features, but does not fulfill the appropriate abstract value, it is judged to be a category member in one sense but not in another. Finally, Experiment 5 uses the theory developed here to construct artificial dual character concepts and examines whether participants react to these artificial concepts in the same way as naturally occurring dual character concepts. The present studies serve to define the nature of dual character concepts and distinguish them from other types of concepts (e.g., natural kind concepts), which share some, but not all of the properties of dual character concepts. More broadly, these phenomena suggest a normative dimension in everyday conceptual representation. (shrink)

Are property rights absolute? This paper attempts to reframe this question by drawing on insights from the field of social ontology. My main claim is that, even if we accept the most extreme view of the absoluteness of property rights, there are some non-normative conceptual limitations to these rights. The conceptual limitations are based on two claims about the nature of property rights and their subject matter, namely objects in the world: (1) property law regulates (...) relations between persons through the use of objects, and not relations between persons and objects; (2) even when owned, objects retain some of their ‘independent’, unowned, existence. Taken together, these claims confine property law to the institutional meaning that is given to objects, which is distinct from their social and natural meanings. Since property law defines objects in a certain way, it makes space for other social considerations but without the need to qualify property rights. (shrink)

Aims The study aims to test the Turkish validity and reliability of the Rushton Moral Resilience Scale (RMRS) and examine the effect of moral resilience on moral distress. Background Moral distress is a phenomenon that negatively affects health workers, health institutions, and the person receiving care. In order to eliminate or minimize the negative effects of moral distress, it is necessary to increase the moral resilience of nurses. Moral resilience involves developing systems that support a culture (...) of ethical practice in healthcare and aim to increase an individual’s capacity to cope with moral challenges. Methods A methodological and descriptive-predictive study design was adopted. Sociodemographic Information Form, Measure of Moral Distress – Healthcare Professionals (MMD-HP), and Rushton Moral Resilience Scale were used to collect data from the nurses. A total of 255 clinical nurses were recruited. Ethical considerations Hacettepe University’s non-interventional ethics committee approved the study’s protocol and informed consent was obtained from the participants. Results The original four-factor structure of the scale was tested with confirmatory factor analysis, and the index values were evaluated and found at an acceptable level. The Cronbach Alpha coefficient of the scale was found to be 0.826. Moral resilience predicted moral distress total, intensity, and frequency levels. A moderate and weak relationship was found in the negative between all sub-dimensions of moral distress and moral resilience. Conclusions The Rushton Moral Resilience Scale Turkish version showed good psychometric properties. Moral resilience has a reducing effect on moral distress. Young nurses who have less experience are at risk because they have lower moral resilience levels, while nurses working in intensive care units are at risk because of their high moral distress levels. A healthy workplace can be created by developing specific approaches to improve moral resilience in reducing the impact of moral distress in the healthcare environment. (shrink)

The process of completing, correcting and prioritising specifications is an essential but very complex task for the maintenance and improvement of software systems. The preservation of functionalities and the ability to accommodate changes are main objectives of the software development cycle to guarantee system reliability. Logical theories able to fully model such processes are still insufficient. In this paper we propose a full formalisation of such operations on software systems inspired by the Alchourrón–Gärdenfors–Makinson paradigm for belief revision of human epistemic (...) states. We represent specifications as finite sets of formulas equipped with a priority relation that models functional entrenchment of properties. We propose to handle specification incompleteness through ordered expansion, inconsistency through ordered safe contraction and prioritisation through revision with reordering, and model all three in an algorithmic fashion. We show how the system satisfies basic properties of the AGM paradigm, including Levi’s and Harper’s identities. We offer a concrete example and complexity results for the inference and model checking problems on revision. We conclude by describing resilience and evolvability of software systems based on such revision operators. (shrink)

The article provides an outline of the basic principles and conditions of criminalisation of interferences with others’ property rights in the context of a specific context: a liberal, social democratic state, the legitimacy of which depends primarily on its impartiality between moral doctrines and the fair distribution of liberties and resources. I begin by giving a brief outline of the conditions of political legitimacy, the place of property and the conditions of criminalisation in such a state. With that (...) framework in place, I argue that interferences with others’ property rights should be viewed as violations of political duties stemming from institutions of distribution. I then discuss three implications of this view: the bearing of social injustice on the criminal law treatment of acts of distributive injustice; the expansion of criminalisation over the violation of distribution-related duties, which are considered criminally irrelevant under moral conceptions of criminalisation; and, finally, the normative significance of the modus operandi. (shrink)

Locke's claims about the "inadequacy" of substance-ideas can only be understood once it is recognized that the "sort" represented by such an idea is not wholly determined by the idea's descriptive content. The key to his compromise between classificatory conventionalism and essentialism is his injunction to "perfect" the abstract ideas that serve as "nominal essences." This injunction promotes the pursuit of collections of perceptible qualities that approach ever closer to singling out things that possess some shared explanatory-level constitution. It is (...) in view of this norm regulating natural-historical inquiry that a substance-idea represents a sort for which some such constitution serves as the "real essence," i.e. as that on which all the sort's characteristic "properties" depend. (shrink)