In this article, John Locke's accounts of political liberty and legitimate government are read as expressions of a normative demand for non-arbitrariness. I argue that Locke locates infringements of political liberty in dependence on the arbitrary will of another, whether or not interference or restraint actually takes place. This way Locke is tentatively placed in that tradition of republican thought recently brought to our attention by Pettit, Skinner and others. This reading shifts the focus on legitimacy and identifies (...) the independent moral argument for legitimate government as ruling for the good of the people. Consent is left with a hypothetical role to play. (shrink)

While Montesquieu (1689–1755) is often regarded as the thinker who discovered the importance of fundamental principles such as the rule of law and the separation of powers, systematic research of his theory of the state is surprisingly limited. In this article, I argue that his masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), points to a theory of the non-arbitrary state. Montesquieu’s comparative study of various governments demonstrates that modern liberty depends on the rule of law. Since many states have (...) laws but few of them guarantee liberty, he stressed that the rule of law requires the separation of the judicial from the legislative and executive powers. The constitution of an independent judicial branch separates the sphere of justice from the political sphere, which creates the basic structure of the non-arbitrary state. Depending on the distribution of power in either of the two spheres, non-arbitrary states can guarantee their citizens more or less liberty. The concept of the non-arbitrary state thus illuminates Montesquieu’s significance for the variety of political projects that emerged in the age of revolutions. (shrink)

Democratic institutions and practice depend on trust, in two ways. Citizens must trust each other to abide by shared rules and norms that together govern a political community; it is a feature of democratic states that they direct their resources not to enforcement of rule abidingness, but rather towards providing collective and public goods. Instead, states rely on the semi-voluntary compliance of citizens with these shared norms and laws. Citizens must also trust their political representatives, who via their election are (...) granted discretion to make decisions that will have significant impact on the lives of those they represent. Yet, according to many scholars across many disciplines, this trust is at risk of being undermined, if it hasn’t yet been so. The possible reasons for weakened and broken trust are many, ranging from escalating wealth inequalities, to increasing cultural and ethnic diversity, to political incompetence of both voters and political representatives, to corruption among political representatives. In this article, I examine the trust that underpins the discretion accorded to elected representatives, to identify when the improper use of this discretion may reasonably be thought to be a source of distrust. In particular, I argue that where discretion is used arbitrarily, it may threaten to undermine the trust relations between citizens and their representatives, and therefore the efficient and effective running of democratic states. (shrink)

Liberal political thought has traditionally been hostile to the arbitrary power of rulers. It has, however, qualified this hostility through its promotion of what Locke calls ?prerogative?, the need for rulers to act in defence of the public good ? but on occasion outside the constraints of law. Liberal thought has tended to overlook the arbitrary powers of citizens and private organisations. This is due, first, to its commitment to individual liberty. But it is also due ?more substantially (...) ? to the belief that private agents and corporations, even when not constrained by law, are none the less subject to the non?legal sanctions and rewards imposed by the market and other aspects of civil society. Neo?liberalism is not rendered distinctive by its promotion of arbitrary power, since this has always featured in liberal government. Neo?liberalism is distinguished rather by its promotion of arbitrary powers across the full range of organs of governance ? from departments of government, through publicly and privately owned corporations, to ostensibly non?governmental bodies like charities, churches and so on. This advance in liberal promotion of arbitrary power has significant implications for the evolution of contemporary democracy. (shrink)

The paper offers a new account of the rule of law, revising my previous view, and criticising some alternatives. It focuses on the rule of law's aim to avoid arbitrary government, and on its relation to the essential functions of government. The rule of law requires that government action will manifest an intention to protect and advance the interests of the governed. As such it is almost a necessary condition for the law's ability to meet other (...) moral demands, and it facilitate coordination and cooperation internally and internationally. -/- . (shrink)

My hope has been to persuade readers that Hobbes's mighty thought experiment of the state of nature distorts our conceptual learning because it ignores the second morality. Instead, it inflates the first morality as the whole of morality. This inflation arises from Hobbes's exclusive preoccupation with universalizable reason. As important as universal reason undeniably is, it does not encompass the whole of moral reality. To suppose that it does is to distort moral reality. Like so many Enlightenment figures, Hobbes would (...) have political theory be more like logic than life.To refer once again to the Enlightenment allows me to observe that the drive to universality through reason is a distinctive feature of European civilization. To proceed along this line might lead to the conclusion that the pursuit of the universal is a cultural artifact. It is itself culturally relative. I am in no position to argue that point here at the end of the day, but did not the universal criteria propounded by the Enlightenment prove serviceable in the justification of European imperialism? By the universal standards of the Enlightenment only Europe was civilized.Reason is often a weapon. Alasdair MacIntyre has termed the search for rationality in moral philosophy a masquerade. MacIntyre sees the quest for rationality to be a quest for authority. He cites John Maynard Keynes's observations that “in practice, victory [in moral argument] was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility.” Rationality is a weapon. “In moral argument the apparent assertion of principles functions as a mask for expressions of personal preference.” Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985), pp. 9, 17, and 19. Seasoned participants in academic conferences and learned seminars realize the intensity of involvement in what Sheila Ruth has called “The Hunt.”Sheila Ruth, “Methodocracy, Misogyny, and Bad Faith,” Men's Studies Modified, Dale Spender (ed.) (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981), p. 48. The speaker is the quarry. The others, the auditors are the hunters. Some are accomplished, others are not yet blooded. They wait for the weak point. It's blood. They attack. The inexperienced hunters are enthusiastic. The seasoned hunters take their time. The quarry defends. An arbitrary time limit ends the combat, and after tea it is someone else's turn. Can anyone say that this is the best way to search out alternatives, weigh experience, assess implications, evaluate assertions? My title “The Government of Reason” is deliberately ambiguous. On the one hand it might mean governing according to the light of reason. This was, of course, the avowed aim of the Enlightenment. The conduct of political life would follow the bright line of reason. On the other hand, the title could mean governing reason, taking control of reason and using it as a weapon. Here we may be forgiven for thinking of Michel Foucault on the use of knowledge as power. The ambiguity of the title is meant to reflect the ambiguity of reality where both alternatives have occurred. Only half of the moral realm has been made the subject of political theory. (shrink)

Can stable regularities be explained without appealing to governing laws or any other modal notion? In this paper, I consider what I will call a ‘Humean system’—a generic dynamical system without guiding laws—and assess whether it could display stable regularities. First, I present what can be interpreted as an account of the rise of stable regularities, following from Strevens [2003], which has been applied to explain the patterns of complex systems (such as those from meteorology and statistical mechanics). Second, since (...) this account presupposes that the underlying dynamics displays deterministic chaos, I assess whether it can be adapted to cases where the underlying dynamics is not chaotic but truly random—that is, cases where there is no dynamics guiding the time evolution of the system. If this is so, the resulting stable, apparently non-accidental regularities are the fruit of what can be called statistical necessity rather than of a primitive physical necessity. (shrink)

This dissertation explores a family of theoretical models of humanitarian military intervention. A number of recent theorists, including Tesón, Caney, Buchanan, Orend, Moellendorf, and Wheeler, build their models from a perspective called ‘cosmopolitanism.’ They offer arguments based on the moral supremacy of human rights, the arbitrary character of territorial boundaries, and the duty to protect individual human beings exposed to serious and systematic violence by their own governments. I develop a model of intervention that recognizes the moral significance of (...) political self-government. To the extent that international society should countenance a ‘duty to protect’ human rights, the duty ought to be constrained by a commitment to the values of self-government. The model developed in this dissertation also recognizes the significance of international law enforcement. Insofar as we should permit a role of enforcement for international human rights, that role should be constrained by formally accepted global principles and in particular by positive obligations to prevent and punish actions regarded as international crimes. These other global values are viewed with suspicion by cosmopolitan theorists, who tend to construe them in stark contrast to the vision of global responsibility for human rights protection. But I will show how these other values emerged simultaneously with cosmopolitanism and share many of its underlying intuitions. Because self-government and law enforcement are linked politically to the cosmopolitan vision, these two distinctive global values can be utilized as tools to fortify or expand cosmopolitanism by enlarging the global sense of responsibility for human rights. The aim of this project is to explain how these other values came to be neglected by cosmopolitan theorists, and why they should not be forgotten. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Adam Smith’s contribution to the conversation on the nature and value of free government in the eighteenth century. Smith contributes to this conversation in two ways. First, by embedding the idea of free government in a narrative of the progress of government, which traces the interplay between natural progress and social circumstances, and culminates in the establishment of modern free government in Britain. Second, by offering a theory of the form of free (...) class='Hi'>government fit for modern commercial states. Drawing on the “rational system of liberty” established in Britain, the Smithian model of free government is based on a “happy mixture” of republicanism and monarchism. Looking beyond the rational system, it merges the traditional concern for constitutional security against arbitrary power with a new science of policy intended to moderate the oppressive inclinations of legislators. The article contests Duncan Forbes’ reading of Smith as questioning the relation between individual liberty and free government, and brings Smith closer to Quentin Skinner’s work on the neo-Roman understanding of liberty. It suggests that Smith’s work may offer insight into some of the ways in which neo-Roman ideas were being creatively reformulated in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

This paper seeks to remedy in part the lack of empirical studies on practices of.political speech in Australia by investigating local governments’ powers and perceptions of their role in regulating practices of political speech. It reports on the results of an empirical study conducted in 2003–04 of local government regulation of political speech within the public space constituted by pedestrian malls. Regulatory provisions are considered in the context of attitudes towards, and experiences of, practices of political speech within these (...) arenas. I argue that local governments possess wide ranging powers to regulate political speech in pedestrian malls, but further and more importantly that those powers are mediated via their inconsistent and at times arbitrary application, combined with a cultural hostility to political speech. We therefore see a precarious level of protection of opportunities for political communication, as well as an important politico-cultural component in determining the fate of political speech in Australia. I conclude by outlining an alternative ‘enabling principle’ against which local governments may reconsider and reconfigure their regulatory practices in relation to this important political freedom. (shrink)

It would be good to end the controversy over Locke's ideological orientation. In the most well-known of recent commentaries on Locke's political thought his ideological placement ranges across the spectrum. Ashcraft believes Locke's thought is that of a radical left-wing revolutionary; Macpherson argues that the Second Treatise provided a conservative justification for the class rule of the rising bourgeoisie; and Gough finds that Locke stands mid-way between the two extreme positions in politics, *¾*his position is not, however, exactly mid-way between (...) these two extremes, but inclines somewhat toward the left*¾*. Each of these analyses rests largely on a particular interpretation of Locke's view of the franchise in the Two Treatises of Government (1690), and this kind of ideological analysis is historically problematic. Yet the premise seems plausible: the authoritarian, arbitrary rule of an absolute sovereign is the position of the far right in seventeenth-century England, and egalitarian popular democracy is the position of the far left at this time. Given this structure, Locke does stand between the extremes, but he is inclined towards the right. This is the position argued for in this essay: Locke's seemingly radical arguments were designed to reinforce socially conservative beliefs. Presenting the evidence for Locke's ideological commitment may help illuminate some other unsettled, secondary, points of interpretation. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic triggered a crisis affecting many spheres of socio-economic life. Both the authorities and entrepreneurs found themselves in a new and unusual situation. The lockdown introduced in the Polish economy in March 2020 has changed drastically environment and conditions for entrepreneurs and companies in Poland. The article touches on the problem of changes in the system of formal and informal institutions during that period. An attempt was made to answer the question: to what extent was the institutional state (...) order compatible with the spontaneous order during that period, did the paths of entrepreneurs and the government meet and an agreement was reached in the name of setting a common policy direction to support the economy in the difficult period of the pandemic, or did the paths of these parties diverge? The research hypothesis requiring verification was that the institutional crisis in Poland deepened during the Covid-19 pandemic, as reflected in the slow erosion of the principles of institutional governance. The analysis shows that the progressing institutional weakness of the state during the period under review deepened the crisis of institutions. Its symptom was the gradual disappearance of social dialogue and arbitrary decisions taken by the government. The rules of law did not take into account the needs of entrepreneurs. Over time, the trust in the government and the law has declined. In a response to the prolonged lockdown in many sectors of the Polish economy, some desperate entrepreneurs took steps to circumvent the law, and there were active protests of entrepreneurs against the government’s decisions. The government might defend its authority only with ineffective repressions applied to entrepreneurs. (shrink)

Why it's OK to Be Amoral argues that self-righteous moralism has replaced religion as a source of embattled and gratuitous certainties. High-minded moral convictions invoke the authority of sacred moral truths; but there are no such truths. In reality, moral passions are rooted in atavistic emotional dispositions and arbitrary social conventions. While public and private discourse is saturated with guilt, shame, and righteous indignation, professional philosophers, under cover of clever argumentation, promote the utopian idea that all practical questions have (...) uniquely right answers-providing that you adopt the right moral principles. But their justifications for those principles appeal to contested "foundations," among which no rational adjudication is possible. Moreover, because there are two discrepant ways of understanding motivation, our access to agents' true reasons is never sufficiently reliable to warrant moral praise or blame. Finally, every agent has a wide diversity of reasons for action; yet moralists claim that some reasons trump all others, because they are "moral" reasons. Since these too must be grounded in facts, that amounts to double counting some reasons. Having exposed these aspects of the institution of morality, this book suggests that if we cannot abstain altogether from moralising, we can at least try to use it against itself. (shrink)

Three hundred years ago per capita incomes in China and Japan were about equal and fairly close to the global mean. At the end of the twentieth century Japanese per capita incomes are about as high as Western incomes and about seven times as high as Chinese incomes. How could this happen? Manchu China and Tokugawa Japan did not establish equally safe property rights for merchants and producers as the West did. But political fragmentation and feudalism within Japan provided something (...) like checks and balances against arbitrary government which China lacked. Moreover, a similar lack of respect for merchants in both countries had more favourable consequences for early commercialisation in Japan than in China. (shrink)

Catharine Macaulay’s The History of England challenges Hume’s interpretation of the history of the Stuarts, as developed in his The History of Great Britain, and is grounded in meta-ethical, religious, and political principles that are also fundamentally opposed to those developed by Hume, as she makes clear in her Treatise on the Immutabilty of Moral Truth. Here it is argued that the contrast between them poses a problem for a number of recent accounts of the enlightenment period, and that Macaulay’s (...) work demonstrates that one path to radical politics went via an optimistic strand of intellectualist theism. Macaulay’s ‘republican’ history, which was read on both sides of the Atlantic as justifying the overthrow of arbitrary governments, was grounded in conceptions of liberty, virtue, and sincere theistic belief, similar to those of the Cambridge Platonists. By contrast, Hume’s moral and religious scepticism led naturally to the political conservatism evident in his history. This paper offers an outline of their alternative accounts of the significance of the two English revolutions, and the opposing metaphysical and meta-ethical positions that underpin those accounts. It concludes with a discussion of the contrast between their concepts of liberty and their consequent very different evaluations of the value of liberty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Aristotelianism of Locke's PoliticsJ. S. MaloyThose, then, who think that the positions of statesman, king, household manager, and master of slaves are the same are not correct. For they hold that each of these differs not innly in whether the subjects ruled are few or many... the assumption being that there is no difference between a large household and a small city-state.... But these claims are not true.Aristotle, (...) Politics, 1252a1The Power of a Magistrate over a Subject may be distinguished from that of a Father over his Children, a Master over his Servant, a Husband over his Wife, and a Lord over his Slave. All which distinct Powers happening sometimes together in the same Man, if he be considered under these different Relations, it may help us to distinguish these Powers one from another, and show the difference betwixt a Ruler of a Common-wealth, a Father of a Family, and a Captain of a Galley.Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 2.22 [End Page 235]When the political theory of John Locke first appeared in print in 1689, the imposing authority of Aristotle stood ready to defeat it. So believed many of Locke's critics, at any rate. After his death in 1704, when it was confirmed that the internationally renowned author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding had also written the anonymously published Two Treatises of Government, Locke was widely taken to represent a distinctive type of political theory based on individual rights and the social contract. Learned opposition to this sort of voluntaristic account of politics has often rested on Aristotle, "the Philosopher," the ancient authority on the human instinct for sociability and the hierarchal communities arising therefrom. Within the modern academy "liberals," "communitarians," and "republicans" have again made a habit of pronouncing the names of Locke and Aristotle in tones of antagonism. In broad outline the reasons have not changed in two or three centuries ago: the first stands for natural-rights individualism and the second for an organic conception of community.3What are we to make of this conventional opposition in light of the awkward fact that the second of Locke's Two Treatises, "Of Civil Government," takes the reclamation of the Aristotelian conception of political power as its principal purpose? Locke announced in the opening chapter of that essay that his chief target, Robert Filmer, had misunderstood the nature of distinctively political relationships, mainly by ignoring the differences between authority in political society and authority within the family (L 2.1–2). Locke alleged that this basic conceptual mistake of the Filmerian theory of "absolute" and "arbitrary" government was the source of its disastrous practical ramifications, which he had summed up in the first Treatise as "Chains for all Mankind" (L 1.1). Filmer, in turn, had taken Plato's side in the debate about political and familial rule which Aristotle had joined in the opening lines of his Politics (A 1252a). Though a perceptive reader long ago noticed the Aristotelianism of Locke's response to Filmer—Locke and Algernon Sidney were the "two famous men" to whom Rousseau alluded as having defended Aristotle against Filmer's Platonic notions of power—no modern scholar has attempted a full explanation of the significance of Locke's intervention in this debate.4 [End Page 236]The analysis below will show that Aristotle was the classic source for both the principal theoretic argument of Locke's second Treatise and the method employed to pursue it, i.e. using analogies of power for conceptual comparison and distinction. But my argument for the Aristotelianism of Locke's politics will rest on contextual as well as textual grounds. Not only was Locke pursuing an evident variation on the central theme of bk. 1 of Aristotle's Politics; he was far from alone in doing so. This sort of project was by the 1680s typical of radical constitutionalist writing in Europe, including not only English Whigs like Sidney and James Tyrrell but also a long line of writers on both sides of the English Channel, stretching back at least a century, who deployed a particular interpretation of Aristotle in the service... (shrink)

Summary Much recent historiography assumes that republican calls for religious liberty in seventeenth-century England were limited to Protestant dissenters. Nevertheless there is evidence that some radical voices during the Civil War and Interregnum period were willing to extend this toleration even to ?false religions?, including Catholicism, provided their members promised loyalty and allegiance to the government. Using the case study of the republican Henry Neville, this article will argue that toleration for Catholics was still an option during the Exclusion (...) Crisis of the late seventeenth century despite new fears of a growth of ?popery and arbitrary government?. Neville's tolerationist approach, it will be shown, was driven by his Civil War and Interregnum experience, as well as by political pragmatism and very personal circumstances which shaped his attitude towards Catholics in his own country and abroad. (shrink)

In this essay, the author both reviews Scott Sowerby's book Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution and makes a late contribution to, or comment on, the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies”. Sowerby opposes the “Whig interpretation” that James II was attempting to reinstate Stuart “popery and arbitrary government” and instead presents James II's policies as aimed at liberation of the Stuart monarchy from the borough, county, and clerical elites that had brought it back to power and (...) regarded restoration of the Church of England as their instrument and identity. The king thus had his own reasons for upholding the liberty of conscience, and so James II can be found using the language of a skeptical Enlightenment, while at the same time affirming the absoluteness of his authority and incurring the suspicion of popery. How “toleration” of Catholics and dissenters came about in Britain must be told by narrating the “hard” histories of various state structures, but there is a larger and “softer” history of Enlightenment to be extracted from that of the European ancien régime, in whose history and downfall “British history” has a part that can be narrated in both “hard” and “soft” terms. The recent revisionist accounts of James II — of which Sowerby's is said in this review to be among the best — offer the king a new role at that regime's beginnings. This review concludes by arguing that the pursuit of history as it has come to be practiced is among the “softest” modes of explanation — since it consists of the unending and unlimited pursuit of the contexts in which actions, words, and processes have been situated and need to be studied — and that the more there are of these, the more meanings the actions may bear and the fewer reasons there are for the use of Occam's razor. “The notion of ‘fuzziness’ ” does not disturb historians, as it does scholars in some other disciplines, since historians have at their disposal an established contextualist “means of navigating it.”. (shrink)

Much has been written about the fittingness, epistemic, and standing norms that govern blame. In this paper, we argue that there exists a norm of blame that has yet to receive philosophical discussion and without which an account of the ethics of blame will be incomplete: a norm proscribing comparatively arbitrary blame. By reflecting on the objectionableness of comparatively arbitrary blame, we stand to elucidate a substantive, and thus far overlooked, norm governing our attributions of responsibility. Accordingly, our (...) aim in this paper is to develop a comparative non-arbitrariness condition on blame that can enrich our understanding of the ethics of blame. (shrink)

With its long history of the rule of men, particularly during its first three decades of communist rule, China has experienced arbitrary governance and social control that heavily relied on "giants" who arose from peasant wars. Even today, the personal orders of administrative and Party officials often take the place of legal rules and procedures. China's human rights record, because of practices such as the imprisonment of some citizens for political conscience and the suppression of free speech, remains an (...) object of international criticism and disputes. On the other hand, in the past twenty years China has shown remarkable progress in implementing the rule by law. Because progress and problems in the rule of law are two sides of a coin in China, the legal circumstances of the country are complicated, and research and evaluation of China's legal system and culture are difficult. (shrink)

Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published in 1792, has proved a problematic ‘classic text’ for feminism. This paper focuses on the liberal concept of self‐ownership to show how the Vindication both confronts and perpetuates the dilemmas of ‘liberal feminism’. Self‐ownership is not a term used by Wollstonecraft herself, but I make use of it in this paper because I believe it captures what she means by ‘independence’, arrived at by a combination of reflection, self‐government and (...) labour. It implies a natural right to resist oppression and arbitrary government and so reaches the heart of Wollstonecraft's argument against patriarchy as a particular form of arbitrary power. As Alan Ryan argues, ‘each of us is obliged to obey the government so long as it upholds our natural rights, but if it violates them, we are not obliged to obey’. As a liberal concept, self‐ownership is fraught with ambiguity for feminism. Donna Dickenson argues that it can be interpreted both as ‘masculinist through and through’ and as ‘the essence of feminism’. Its very ambiguity makes it an appropriate conceptual lens through which to view Wollstonecraft's own contradictory arguments. (shrink)

A reexamination of democracy, which during the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment seemed to offer a much-desired escape from arbitrary class structures and oppressive governments, but has not proven to be a sure formula or a simple solution. An awareness of the true complexities of democracy requires an understanding of a perennial dialectic residing at the heart of democracy, and manifesting itself in specific dialectical relationships: between elitism and populism, liberty and equality, smallness and bigness, religion and secular life, politics and economics, (...) etc. This book argues that such dialectical relationships, originally most explicit in particular nations, are also manifest in international relations. (shrink)

Christian theology conceives of ‘sacrificium intellectus’ to account for the message of Saint Paul that he will “take every thought captive to obey Christ”. Human insight gives way to the revealed truths of religion. In modern western cultures to explain the natural world has become the domain of science, and the imposition of collective rules of how we should live was shifted to democratically elected parliaments. In Germany legislation of bioethical issues is often justified with reasons that violate standards of (...) cognitive rationality. Is this another case of sacrificium intellectus? The Federal Constitutional Court refrains from the control of legislative arguments by conceding a broad margin of appreciation for the legislator. People have, however, a right to justification; they must not be subjected to arbitrary legal power. While the practice of democratic rule may seldom comply with the expectations of ‘government by discussion’, it is neither likely to gain acceptance as ‘government without discussion’. To impose legal force on the basis of false arguments and unsound reasoning is not a legitimate sacrificium intellectus, it is an intellectual scandal. (shrink)

Social conventions are those arbitrary rules and norms governing the countless behaviors all of us engage in every day without necessarily thinking about them, from shaking hands when greeting someone to driving on the right side of the road. In this book, Andrei Marmor offers a pathbreaking and comprehensive philosophical analysis of conventions and the roles they play in social life and practical reason, and in doing so challenges the dominant view of social conventions first laid out by David (...) Lewis. Marmor begins by giving a general account of the nature of conventions, explaining the differences between coordinative and constitutive conventions and between deep and surface conventions. He then applies this analysis to explain how conventions work in language, morality, and law. Marmor clearly demonstrates that many important semantic and pragmatic aspects of language assumed by many theorists to be conventional are in fact not, and that the role of conventions in the moral domain is surprisingly complex, playing mostly an auxiliary and supportive role. Importantly, he casts new light on the conventional foundations of law, arguing that the distinction between deep and surface conventions can be used to answer the prevalent objections to legal conventionalism. Social Conventions is a much-needed reappraisal of the nature of the rules that regulate virtually every aspect of human conduct. (shrink)

The nonlinear differential equation governing the periodic motion of the one-dimensional, undamped, and unforced cubic-quintic Duffing oscillator is solved exactly by obtaining the period and the solution. The period is given in terms of the complete elliptic integral of the first kind and the solution involves Jacobian elliptic functions. We solve the cubic-quintic Duffing equation under arbitrary initial conditions. Physical applications are provided. The solution to the mixed parity Duffing oscillator is also formally derived. We illustrate the obtained results (...) with concrete examples. We give high accurate trigonometric approximations to the Jacobian function cn. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Why Asset Ownership? The Content of Work: Meaningful Work The Governance of Work: Protection against Arbitrary Interference The Status of Work: Workers as Property Owners Conclusion References.

ABSTRACT It is fruitless to interpret Constant's modern liberty from the binary perspective of either the negative/positive freedom opposition or the liberal/republican freedom opposition. Both oppositional perspectives reduce the relationally complex nature of modern liberty to one or another component of the relation. Such reduction inevitably results in an incomplete and, therefore, inadequate interpretation of Constant's modern liberty. Consequently, either of these binary frames of interpretation obscures rather than illuminates the full nature of Constant's modern liberty. Boxed into their irreconcilably (...) opposed alternatives, both binary perspectives fail to appreciate that Constant's conception of modern liberty is a complex achievement irreducible without loss to either liberal negative liberty as non-interference or republican freedom as non-domination. Nor does combining liberal negative freedom and positive freedom (in the sense of ancient liberty), as Holmes well establishes, adequately tells the whole story of Constant's modern liberty. As a complex achievement, Constant's conception of modern liberty, I shall argue, blends negative freedom as associated with neo-Roman republican freedom as non-subjection to arbitrary power, negative freedom as non-interference, associated with the liberal tradition, positive freedom in the sense of inner self-development, and positive freedom as collective self-government or civic republican freedom. (shrink)

"Territorial Presence As A Ground For Claims: Some Reflections" returns to political theory to assess the moral and legal position of those individuals who are inside the territory of liberal democratic states, but whose very presence has been unauthorised by the state. The author asks the question as to what their bodily presence means and does from a political perspective. The paper is part of a broader political phenomenology of territoriality in liberal national thought and puts emphasis on the idea (...) that it is migrants’ bodily presence within the state’s territory that lies at the analytical heart of the conversation about irregular immigrants. What is paradoxical about territorial presence of unauthorised migrants is that such presence is simultaneously the source of the offence states invoke as a justification for making them ‘illegal’; the basis for protections the migrants may claim against the state for basic fair treatment while present; and the ground for claims they make to remain present – i.e., to stay in the territory. Territorial presence is thus a fertile ground for the analysis of arbitrary law-making in migration. The author sets out to analyse some recent legal developments pertaining to the governance of irregular non-citizen immigrants in the United States. These developments bear on the project of theorising "immigrant justice" as resistance to the growing illiberalization of migration policy. In her view, the very existence of a class of people designated as irregular migrants within state polities presupposes that such polities maintain formal exclusionary border regimes and that in such regimes, some persons are predesignated as ineligible for entry. And even though those exclusion rules do not function to fully preclude entry and presence of such persons, states do not treat their arrival as an automatic basis for full membership either. Hence, irregular immigrants are territorially present in a state that purports to eschew that presence. The author then explores how the idea of “sanctuary” relates to the kinds of claims that both liberal humanitarians and immigrant justice advocates have been making over the last few years. These are claims which ground protection in what exponents cite as the overriding ethical significance of immigrants’ territorial presence – their already-hereness – as the basis for recognition and rights. In particular, the author makes the case that even though "sanctuary" provides a logic of safe harbour, it fails to end the predicament of constitutive based in border exclusionism. For her, the political, social, but also philosophical, struggle for the idea of border abolitionism requires a figurative sword that must go beyond sanctuary so that borders are not just mitigated, but radically deconstructed and even destroyed. The author takes this to be the vital imperative that confronts all legal and political theorists who must engage the normative challenge of rethinking arbitrary law-making in view of the new inequalities that a global political order grounded on sovereign borders produces. (shrink)

Is there a public good? A prevalent view in political science is that democracy is unavoidably chaotic, arbitrary, meaningless, and impossible. Such scepticism began with Condorcet in the eighteenth century, and continued most notably with Arrow and Riker in the twentieth century. In this powerful book, Gerry Mackie confronts and subdues these long-standing doubts about democratic governance. Problems of cycling, agenda control, strategic voting, and dimensional manipulation are not sufficiently harmful, frequent, or irremediable, he argues, to be of normative (...) concern. Mackie also examines every serious empirical illustration of cycling and instability, including Riker's famous argument that the US Civil War was due to arbitrary dimensional manipulation. Almost every empirical claim is erroneous, and none is normatively troubling, Mackie says. This spirited defence of democratic institutions should prove both provocative and influential. (shrink)

Shepard has argued that a universal law should govern generalization across different domains of perception and cognition, as well as across organisms from different species or even different planets. Starting with some basic assumptions about natural kinds, he derived an exponential decay function as the form of the universal generalization gradient, which accords strikingly well with a wide range of empirical data. However, his original formulation applied only to the ideal case of generalization from a single encountered stimulus to a (...) single novel stimulus, and for stimuli that can be represented as points in a continuous metric psychological space. Here we recast Shepard's theory in a more general Bayesian framework and show how this naturally extends his approach to the more realistic situation of generalizing from multiple consequential stimuli with arbitrary representational structure. Our framework also subsumes a version of Tversky's set-theoretic model of similarity, which is conventionally thought of as the primary alternative to Shepard's continuous metric space model of similarity and generalization. This unification allows us not only to draw deep parallels between the set-theoretic and spatial approaches, but also to significantly advance the explanatory power of set-theoretic models. Key Words: additive clustering; Bayesian inference; categorization; concept learning; contrast model; features; generalization; psychological space; similarity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy by J. B. SchneewindFrederick RauscherJ. B. Schneewind. The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xxii + 624. Cloth $69.95.For most of the twentieth century ethics has been relegated to the status of a hanger-on to other pursuits in philosophy. Only in the past three decades has ethics re-emerged as (...) a significant independent subject in the discipline. J.B. Schneewind has taken this development a step further by examining the history of ethics as a distinct branch of philosophy. He argues that modern ethics responded to a separate set of concerns from the surrounding scientific revolution’s epistemological and metaphysical subjects, and while his analysis does not prove this in every case, his treatment certainly shows that ethics does have a vital role in the history of philosophy. The Invention of Autonomy offers the most comprehensive and informative review of moral philosophy in the modern era yet published. But Schneewind supplies more than just the best historical review; he also assesses theories and arguments within the context of the great political, social, religious, and moral debates of their time and shows how those debates brought us to our present conception of moral philosophy. The Invention of Autonomy is a superb example of how to do philosophical history of philosophy.Three interrelated themes thread their way through the narrative. The first concerns the gradual replacement of an ethic of obedience with the concept of self-governance, culminating in Kant’s idea of the dignity of all autonomous rational agents. The second involves the debate between voluntarists, who hold that God imposed morality on us by an arbitrary act of will, and intellectualists, who hold that morality stems from eternal standards in God’s intellect. The third conveys the debates about human moral psychology, in particular our awareness of morality and our motivations to act, and their relation to metaphysical and epistemological claims.These themes cut across the four main, roughly chronological groupings into which Schneewind divides his theorists. Here I can only generalize their characteristic tenets and must omit one of the best features of this book: the detailed analysis of the debates and differences even among theorists who are commonly taken to share the same views. The natural law theorists’ most influential voice is Hugo Grotius. Schneewind identifies a “Grotian problematic”—the existence of conflict stemming from self-interest amid our desire to form a society together—which is taken up by other natural lawyers and eventually by Kant [Hobbes’ theory is “Grotianism at the limit” (82)]. Most but not all natural lawyers gave no substantial role to God in ethics because disagreement about religion is one of the causes of conflict in society. Only by finding rules for behavior, backed by self-interested concerns and threats of punishment, could harmony [End Page 627] reign. The chief shortcoming of natural law theory was its inability to explain the ground of moral duty which concerned only the self.The perfectionists—primarily rationalists—put more emphasis on conforming our-selves to what we know of our place in God’s plans for the universe. The complete human being will not only treat others in decent ways but also adopt a virtuous character which seeks the good. Our motivation to take our proper place in the universe stems not from fear of punishment but from a desire to realize our own happiness and from obligation to the God who created us. Perfectionism’s faults lie with its strong ties to religious belief.The third set of philosophers includes mostly the eighteenth-century empiricists. They went further than the natural lawyers in seeking to divorce morality from dependence upon God by grounding it in human nature. A moral sense or sentiment generates moral normativity and indirectly motivates behavior. This dependence on human nature opens these theorists to the charge of voluntarism or worse, since there appears to be no truly objective foundation for morality.Finally come the theorists who develop autonomy, culminating in Kant. Some writers of the German and French Enlightenment, particularly Rousseau, sought to show that morality... (shrink)

One of Han Fei’s most trenchant criticisms against the early Confucian political tradition is that, insofar as its decision-making process revolves around the ruler, rather than a codified set of laws, this process is the arbitrary rule of a single individual. Han Fei argues that there will be disastrous results due to ad hoc decision-making, relationship-based decision-making, and decision-making based on prior moral commitments. I lay out Han Fei’s arguments while demonstrating how Xunzi can successfully counter them. In doing (...) so, I argue that Xunzi lays out a political theory restricting the actions of the ruler through both the use of ritual and law, which allows him to develop a theory that legitimizes government while at the same time constraining itself. Xunzi’s political theory makes important strides in its attempt to recognize the importance of the ruler as a moral exemplar while also restricting his control in the political process. (shrink)

The Clerk's Tale is the most elusive and least reassuring of Chaucer's religious tales. Though bad things happen to good people in the other religious narratives in the Canterbury collection, repeated assurances in those tales confirm that the world is governed by a powerful God intent on rewarding his faithful followers. By comparison, the Clerk and his tale are disturbingly silent on the subject of God's plan until the very end, leading many readers to categorize the tale as secular, developing (...) in what seems “a moral void” , or worse, a perverse story of a bullying tyrant and his spineless wife. In spite of Griselda's virtue, which is attributed to God's grace, she suffers alone, and the reasons for her suffering are made to seem arbitrary and weak. A domestic story of husband and wife set neither in the remote past nor far off in a heathen-filled land, the tale proceeds without the special effects of divine intervention that help guide our response to the stories of Constance, St. Cecilia, and the child-martyr of the Prioress's Tale. Miracles, mass conversions, and mysterious sea journeys seem out of the question in the closed and predictable world of Saluzzo. Even when Walter's people urge him to consider the problem of death, as arbitrary as it is inevitable, the solution they put forward is not transcendent or spiritual but prudential: Walter should settle down, take a wife, and produce an heir. Walter answers the people's mundane “preyere” to “delivere us out of al this bisy drede” in the pragmatic spirit in which it was delivered: he agrees to marry and promptly produces a child , removing what seems the only obstacle to complete “felicitee” in the realm. (shrink)

Firms use algorithms to make important business decisions. To date, the algorithmic accountability literature has elided a fundamentally empirical question important to business ethics and management: Under what circumstances, if any, are algorithmic decision-making systems considered legitimate? The present study begins to answer this question. Using factorial vignette survey methodology, we explore the impact of decision importance, governance, outcomes, and data inputs on perceptions of the legitimacy of algorithmic decisions made by firms. We find that many of the procedural governance (...) mechanisms in practice today, such as notices and impact statements, do not lead to algorithmic decisions being perceived as more legitimate in general, and, consistent with legitimacy theory, that algorithmic decisions with good outcomes are perceived as more legitimate than bad outcomes. Yet, robust governance, such as offering an appeal process, can create a legitimacy dividend for decisions with bad outcomes. However, when arbitrary or morally dubious factors are used to make decisions, most legitimacy dividends are erased. In other words, companies cannot overcome the legitimacy penalty of using arbitrary or morally dubious factors, such as race or the day of the week, with a good outcome or an appeal process for individuals. These findings add new perspectives to both the literature on legitimacy and policy discussions on algorithmic decision-making in firms. (shrink)

One of the most pressing points in the philosophy of sport is the question of a definition of sport. Approaches towards sport vary based on a paradigm and position of a particular author. This article attempts to analyse and critically evaluates a recent definition of sport presented by Jim Parry in the context of argument that e-sports are not sports. Despite some innovations, his conclusions are in many ways traditional and build on the previous positions. His research, rooted in the (...) conceptual analysis, starts with a stipulation that sport is paradigmatically Olympic sport. He defines it then as an ‘institutionalised, rule-governed contest of human physical skill’ i.e., identifies six necessary elements of sport: human (not animals), physical (not chess), skill (not jogging), contest (not mountaineering), rule-governed (not ‘field sports’), institutionalized (not hula-hooping). Our claim is that this definition, despite its methodological clarity, is not accurate and does not sufficiently represent sport outside the Olympic context. First, to say for something to be a sport it is necessary to be a contest leads to a narrow concept of sport. Secondly, Parry’s account lacks the emphasis on game and play-like structures that are inherently present in sport (even in the Olympic sport), namely non-necessity, non-ordinariness, arbitrariness and gratuitousness. We try to direct the attention precisely on these structures and offer an alternative account of sport understood as a modern ‘hard core’ sport that nevertheless reaches important congruences with Parry’s definition. The originality of this contribution lies in presenting the essential qualities of modern ‘hard core’ sports, which, although sometimes hidden in the modern emphasis on high level performances, competition, and results, play an important role in the question how sport ought to be played and approached. (shrink)

Unconscious stimuli can influence participants’ motor behavior but also more complex mental processes. Recent research has gradually extended the limits of effects of unconscious stimuli. One field of research where such limits have been proposed is spatial cueing, where exogenous automatic shifts of attention have been distinguished from endogenous controlled processes which govern voluntary shifts of attention. Previous evidence suggests unconscious effects on mechanisms of exogenous shifts of attention. Here, we applied a cue-priming paradigm to a spatial cueing task with (...) arbitrary cues by centrally presenting a masked symmetrical prime before every cue stimulus. We found priming effects on response times in target discrimination tasks with the typical dynamic of cue-priming effects indicating that central symmetrical stimuli which have been associated with endogenous orienting can modulate shifts of spatial attention even when they are masked. Prime–Cue Congruency effects of perceptual dissimilar prime and cue stimuli suggest that these effects cannot be entirely reduced to perceptual repetition priming of cue processing. In addition, priming effects did not differ between participants with good and poor prime recognition performance consistent with the view that unconscious stimulus features have access to processes of endogenous shifts of attention. (shrink)

:Building on John Rawls’s account of the Law of Peoples, this paper examines the grounds and scope of the obligations of transnational corporations that are owned by members of developed economies and operate in developing economies. The paper advances two broad claims. First, the paper argues that there are conditions under which TNCs have obligations to fulfill a limited duty of assistance toward those living in developing economies, even though the duty is normally understood to fall on the governments of (...) developed economies. Second, by extending Rawls’s account to include a right to protection against arbitrary interference, the paper argues that TNCs can be said to have negative and positive obligations in the areas of human rights, labor standards, and environmental protection, as outlined in the U.N. Global Compact. More generally, the paper aims to further our understanding of the implications of Rawls’s account of justice. (shrink)

In response to criticisms made by Keith Dowding (hereafter KD) of `Capitalists Rule OK', this article argues (1) that there is a genuine structural conflict of interest between consumers and producers, voters and politicians, and capitalists and governments, and (2) that only by ad hoc and arbitrary limitations on the scope of the concept of power can it be denied that consumers collectively have power over producers and capitalists (collectively) have power over government. KD accepts that voters (collectively) (...) have power over governments. Ironically, however, this is by far the most tenuous and generally problematic of the three putative power relations. Furthermore, there is no plausible way of conceding that voters (collectively) have power over politicians without also having to accept the validity of a power relation in the other two cases. The implication is that the thesis that is supposed to justify the standard North American or western European politico-economic system, according to which consumers and voters have power but capitalists do not, is nothing more than ideology, in Marx's sense of a fantastical picture of the world designed by the beneficiaries of the status quo to protect their privileged positions against legitimate demands for revolutionary change. The article concludes by taking up KD's primary objection to `Capitalists Rule', which is its rejection of the proposal to equate power with resources. According to KD's official definition, `resources' are the means of raising and lowering others' utilities. I pointed out in `Capitalists Rule' that KD himself acknowledges the inadequacy of this definition, since he almost immediately goes on to say that people do not necessarily have the power that is attributed to them. Obviously, `power' in this new sense must be something different, and is, in fact, the ability to get people to do what you want them to do or to refrain from doing things you do not want them to do. This is precisely my own proposed definition in `Capitalists Rule'. The only remaining disagreement arises from KD's wish to turn everything that lies between power in his first sense and power in his second (and my) sense into a further `resource'. I argue that this is obfuscatory and, in any case, infeasible. Key Words: power • democracy • capitalism. (shrink)

Neo-republicanism seems well suited to provide insight into current policies for the control and restriction of immigration. In this paper, I discuss three different accounts of domination to assess whether they can provide intuitively acceptable responses to the types of domination experienced by different groups of immigrants. First, I present and criticize an argument offered by Philip Pettit in support of the view that immigration restrictions could in principle avoid being dominating. My criticism focuses on Pettit’s account of non-arbitrary (...) governmental action that claims that laws and policies are not dominating when people have democratic control over the government’s activity. Given the failure of Pettit’s argument, I turn to the proceduralist account of non-arbitrary state action proposed by Frank Lovett, and discuss the limitations of the account in diagnosing all ways in which border controls and immigration policy can generate domination. Finally, I present and defend the view that governmental action is not dominating when there are adequate checks that protect the objective interests of individuals. (shrink)

This is a comment on a translation of Franz von Kutschera's paper ‘Ein verallgemeinerter Widerlegungsbegriff für Gentzenkalküle’, which was published in German in 1969. The paper is an important predecessor of what is nowadays called ‘proof-theoretic semantics’, which describes the view that the meaning of logical connectives is determined by the rules governing their use in a proof system. Von Kutschera adopts this view in this paper, and more specifically, a bilateralist view on this subject in that his aim is (...) to give a general framework that provides generalized rule schemata for arbitrary connectives both for proving and refuting and to use this as a reference to prove completeness of certain systems of operators purely proof-theoretically. The main logical system in focus here has been shown to be equivalent to N4, Nelson's constructive logic with strong negation. In order to understand the translated paper better, a contextualizing comment is offered referring and relating it to a preceding paper by von Kutschera. (shrink)

Logic is usually considered to be the study of logical consequence – of the most basic laws governing how a statement’s truth depends on the truth of other statements. Some of the pioneers of modern formal logic, notably Hilbert and Carnap, assumed that the only way to get hold of the relation of consequence was to reconstruct it as a relation of inference within a formal system built upon explicit inferential rules. Even Alfred Tarski in 1930 seemed to foresee no (...) kind of consequence other than one induced by a set of inference rules: "Let A be an arbitrary set of sentences of a particular discipline. With the help of certain operations, the so-called rules of inference, new sentences are derived from the set A, called the.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Good Neighbors Make Good Fences: Frost’s “Mending Wall”Zev TrachtenbergDefenders of the institution of private property have considered at length its benefits to individuals: for Aristotle it allows for the practice of certain virtues; for Hegel it allows for the expression of free human personality. 1 Property is also, of course, seen as the foundation of political society: for Locke men form government to enforce their property rights; for (...) Jefferson property enables citizens to participate in their institutions of self-government. 2But there is a level of human experience between simple individuality and the formal rules and rights articulated and enforced by society. I have in mind the more immediate form of human association evoked by the word community. Let me offer a rough-and-ready distinction. The social contract tradition prompts us to think of society in terms of the cooperative human enterprise of protecting individuals’ interests; the concept of society calls to mind formal voluntary agreements and associations, contracts, the economy, ultimately laws and rights. 3 We can think of community, by contrast, in affective terms; it calls to mind the direct human relations of people who share a place and mode of living. 4 A society has laws and a government; a community has customs and a culture.In this essay, then, I want to explore the relationship between property and community. It is, I think, an ambiguous one: property can be accused of corroding the human connections that constitute community life, but the maintenance of a property regime can also be seen as itself a communal enterprise. 5 This ambiguity is displayed vividly in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” 6 Reading the poem can help us see the complex ways in which property and community are intertwined. [End Page 114]I“Mending Wall” has two characters: its narrator and his neighbor, owners of adjacent farms, who meet each Spring to repair the stone wall that stands between their properties. The narrator, at first glance, seems to take a somewhat skeptical attitude toward property. (We shall see that his attitude is in fact more complicated.) The poem opens with his words “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”—a phrase he repeats later, making it a kind of slogan for the position on property he personifies. That position seems to reject human attempts to inscribe the arbitrary divisions of property holdings on the land. The narrator sees in natural processes an attempt to cast off this artificial imposition: that which doesn’t love a wall “sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, /And spills the upper boulders in the sun.” He recognizes that asserting a separation between the two parcels of property by erecting a wall is futile. For, he recognizes, the two parcels are one, connected underneath the wall by natural forces that work unconsciously but actively against human efforts to divide them.The neighbor, by contrast, speaks for an individualistic belief in the value of marking property holdings. “Good fences make good neighbors” are his only words in the poem, repeated in the last line like a counter-slogan to the narrator’s. The neighbor first offers his slogan in response to the fact that the wall is not needed for the practical purpose of keeping his and the narrator’s goods separate. Their goods do not need a wall to be kept apart: they have no cows to wander back and forth across the line, and the narrator’s “apple trees will never get across/And eat the cones under [the neighbor’s] pines.” For the neighbor, that is, the utility of the wall is not economic. Rather it serves to define the sort of relationship he wishes to have with those who surround him: his slogan expresses an ideology of human separation. In the neighbor’s eyes, apparently, all that makes a neighbor is the mere fact of owning an adjacent farm, hence what makes a good neighbor is his separateness. For what else could characterize the goodness of neighbors who are made good by fences?The neighbor thus personifies a position on property that disvalues community. Property is marked by walls, whose main function in his view... (shrink)

This book studies the history of intercultural human rights. It examines the foundational elements of human rights in the East and the West and provides a comparative analysis of the independent streams of thought originating from the two different geographic spaces. It traces the genesis of the idea of human rights back to ancient Indian and Greco-Roman texts, especially concepts such as the Rigvedic universal moral law, the Upanishadic narratives, the Romans' model of governance, the rule of law, and administration (...) of justice. It also looks at Cicero's concept of rights and duties which focuses on quality of compassion and fair play, and Seneca's expositions on mercy, empathy, justice and checks on the arbitrary exercise of power. An important contribution, this book fills a significant gap in the study of human rights. It will be useful for students and researchers of political science, ancient history, religion and civilizations, philosophy, history, human rights, governance, law, sociology, and South Asian studies. The book also caters to general readers interested in the history of human rights. (shrink)

The administrative practices of officials who process the admission of immigrants show severe variations in the ways in which migration policy is enforced on the ground. For the author, inequality of treatment lies in the very hierarchy of tasks and services of what he dubs, following Pierre Bourdieu, the immigration "field". According to the author, the governments’ securitizing priorities favour the sort of suspicion towards foreigners that the media then reproduces, thus authorizing so-called street-level bureaucrats to act with great leeway (...) with regard to immigrants. Under pressure, governments implement what the author calls a "trompe-l’oeil policy" that explores the ambivalence between international and domestic law: while the state enforces repressive laws that apparently comply with fundamental human rights, it leaves to low-ranking civil servants enough discretion to make those rights ineffective. This point is the author’s central contention. The arbitrariness of these officials is neither contingent nor accidental: it actually constitutes a purposive "front-line policy" to enlarge the discretionary power of street-level bureaucrats in charge of regulating admissions. Unequal treatment comes in three flavours in this context. First, officials are asked to ensure that each right granted to a foreigner will not threaten the national order, which means the economic, social and political order. They are therefore in a position to judge the suitability of each application in view of their own arbitrary interpretation of what such "threats" consist of. The question of discretionary power is in this way intimately linked to the problem of equality before the law. Second, the scarcity of material and human resources allocated to services in charge of welcoming migrants starkly contrasts with the expenditure incurred to deport foreigners. Inequality also arises from how agents perceive users and the leeway they have to implement the law. Third, inequality is related to foreigners’ abilities and means to challenge discretionary power, especially through the legal tools they use or through legal intermediaries. The author thus concludes that such "front-line policy" has increasingly been used as a weapon against migrants, especially since the early 2000s, when immigration and detention policies were generalized in France. More broadly, in Europe as well as in United States, immigration reforms have made greater use of detention and focused on enforcement rather than on hosting programs and services for asylum seekers. But they have also strengthened the role of legal intermediaries. Hence the need to investigate how discretionary power is challenged as it sheds light on the power relations between states and migrants. Keywords: foreigners, discretion, sociology, participant observation, front-line policy, illegalism, jobs, insecurity, legal intermediaries. (shrink)

This article examines Swedish, Danish and Norwegian governments’ participation in the European Return Platform for Unaccompanied Minors project and its failed attempts to deport unaccompanied minors to Afghanistan. It argues that ERPUM is an interesting and urgent case of a “deportation corridor”, and suggests that this framework can benefit from analysis through normative and applied ethics and in particular discussions of feasibility constraints. It therefore identifies and critically assesses two nationalistic arguments for deportation common in Nordic politics, based on appeals (...) credibility and humanitarianism. Considering the growth of nationalistic immigration policies in Nordic states, the article turns the usual discussions of feasibility on its head by showing that not only cosmopolitan, but also nationalistic ethics must face up to charges of lacking realism. More specifically, it argues that the case of ERPUM illustrates how nationalistic deportation ethics can rely on inconsistent normative and erroneous empirical assumptions, which can be criticized for their arbitrariness, ideological grounding and lacking feasibility. (shrink)

This paper examines the legitimacy of the US government’s argument that it must “balance liberty and security” with regard to its policy of trying enemy belligerents in military commissions rather than federal courts. I distinguish between three senses of “balance,” and argue that the policy is ambiguous between the second (internal) and third (emergency external) senses of balance. Neither line of reasoning justifies the policy, however. On the second sense, it is unjustified because it constitutes an arbitrary limitation (...) of the rights of some for the sake of the security of others. It thus violates the government’s duty to decide questions of policy in accordance with accepted legal procedures. Alternately, if the policy is intended to be an exercise of emergency powers, then it violates what I call the government’s juridical duty to serve as a guardian of justice. I offer an alternative justification for emergency measures, one that is based on the model of self-defense. I conclude that although the exercise of military commissions in times of emergency can be justified, the current exercise is illegitimate. (shrink)

RESUMO O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a concepção de liberdade encontrada em "Discourses concerning government" de Algernon Sidney. Mantendo a perspectiva republicana, a liberdade é definida pela ausência de dominação, ou seja, pela não submissão, sujeição ou exposição à vontade arbitrária de outra pessoa; e assumindo a perspectiva jusnaturalista, a liberdade é considerada um direito natural, inerente à condição humana, que deve ser preservado e assegurado pela autoridade política. Pretende-se discutir como Sidney articula essas duas perspectivas em sua (...) teoria política, projetando a concepção republicana de liberdade na modernidade.ABSTRACT The objective of this paper is to analyze the concept of freedom found in Algernon Sidney’s "Discourses Concerning government". Keeping the republican thought, freedom is defined by the absence of domination, i.e., the denial of submission, bondage or exposure to the arbitrary will of another person; and taking the jusnaturalist thought, freedom is considered a natural right inherent to the human condition, which must be preserved and guaranteed by the political authority. I intend to discuss how Sidney articulates these two perspectives in his political theory, outlining the republican conception of freedom in modernity. (shrink)

Logic is usually considered to be the study of logical consequence – of the most basic laws governing how a statement’s truth depends on the truth of other statements. Some of the pioneers of modern formal logic, notably Hilbert and Carnap, assumed that the only way to get hold of the relation of consequence was to reconstruct it as a relation of inference within a formal system built upon explicit inferential rules. Even Alfred Tarski in 1930 seemed to foresee no (...) kind of consequence other than one induced by a set of inference rules: "Let A be an arbitrary set of sentences of a particular discipline. With the help of certain operations, the so-called rules of inference , new sentences are derived from the set A , called the consequences of the set A . To establish these rules of inference, and with their help to define exactly the concept of consequence, is again a task of special metadisciplines; in the usual terminology of set theory the schema of such definition can be formulated as follows: The set of all consequences of the set A is the intersection of all sets which contain the set A and are closed under the given rules of inference." (p. 63) Thereby also the concept of truth came to be reconstructed as inferability from the empty set of premises. (More precisely, this holds only for non-empirical, necessary truth; but of course logic never set itself the task of studying empirical truth.) From this viewpoint, logic came to look as the enterprise of explication of consequence in terms of inference. (shrink)

This is a comment on a translation of Franz von Kutschera's paper ‘Ein verallgemeinerter Widerlegungsbegriff für Gentzenkalküle’, which was published in German in 1969. The paper is an important predecessor of what is nowadays called ‘proof-theoretic semantics’, which describes the view that the meaning of logical connectives is determined by the rules governing their use in a proof system. Von Kutschera adopts this view in this paper, and more specifically, a bilateralist view on this subject in that his aim is (...) to give a general framework that provides generalized rule schemata for arbitrary connectives both for proving and refuting and to use this as a reference to prove completeness of certain systems of operators purely proof-theoretically. The main logical system in focus here has been shown to be equivalent to N4, Nelson's constructive logic with strong negation. In order to understand the translated paper better, a contextualizing comment is offered referring and relating it to a preceding paper by von Kutschera. (shrink)

Any organised society needs some method for determining common policy: public decisions must be forged from private preferences, and particular interests must find a reconciliation in the general good. A society is tolerable only if its decisions are reached by a rational path; for, just as a reasonable man decides his private life on the basis of reasonable procedures, so a reasonable society must formulate its communal behaviour on the basis of reasonable principles. If the Principle of Rationality is violated, (...) society collapses into an anarchic tohubohu, governed by naked power or arbitrary caprice. (shrink)