We examine enforcement action in China’s emerging markets by focusing on the agents that impose this action and the role played by supervisory boards. Using newly available databases, we find that supervisory boards play an active role when Chinese listed companies face enforcement action. Listed firms with larger supervisory boards are more likely to have more severe sanctions imposed upon them by the China Security Regulatory Commission, and listed companies that face more severe enforcement actions have more (...) supervisory board meetings. Our findings are of interest, as supervisory boards in China are generally perceived to be dysfunctional. This study contributes to the existing literature in three ways. First, we shed light on the effects of supervisory boards whose role in a fraud setting has not yet been examined. Second, the study has important policy implications for governance reform. Finally, our analyses provide the most up-to-date picture of fraud and governance issues in China’s ever-growing markets. (shrink)

Over the last few years, an increasingly sophisticated literature devoted to normative questions arising out of the enforcement of immigration law had developed. In this essay, I consider what sorts of constraints considerations of justice and legitimacy may place on the enforcement of immigration law, even if we assume that states have significant discretion in setting their own immigration policies, and that open borders are not required by justice. I consider constraints placed on state or national governments, constraints (...) on enforcement by substate governments, and constraints on the actions of individuals. I show that there are significant limits on what states may do and what they may require substate governments and individuals to do, in enforcing their immigration laws, but that these constraints are not clearly incompatible with significant state discretion in setting immigration policy. Nonetheless, consideration of justice in enforcement is necessary for any complete normative account of immigration. (shrink)

Against Patrick Devlin, H. L. A. Hart rejects the enforcement of morals as such. Hart defends an expanded version of John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, but this expanded version is no more defensible than Mill’s original claim. Hart’s discussion fails to clarify what is really at stake in controversies regarding the moral acceptability of criminal prohibition of such activities as suicide and assisted suicide, recreational drug use, prostitution, and so on. Regarding the enforcement of morals as such, we (...) should acknowledge that the jury is still out. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Legal Enforcement of Moral Norms against Causing Harm Legal Requirements to Perform Acts That Benefit Others Requirements to Refrain from Acts that Cause Indirect Harm to Others Requirements to Refrain from Actions That Hurt Oneself Requirements to Refrain from Acts That Offend Others Requirements to Refrain from Acts Others Believe Are Immoral References.

In debating the ethics of immigration, philosophers have focused much of their attention on determining whether a political community ought to have the discretionary right to control immigration. They have not, however, given the same amount of consideration to determining whether there are any ethical limits on how a political community enforces its immigration policy. This article, therefore, offers a different approach to immigration justice. It presents a case against legitimate states having discretionary control over immigration by showing both how (...) ethical limits on enforcement circumscribe the options legitimate states have in determining their immigration policy and how all immigrants (including undocumented immigrants) are entitled to certain protections against a state’s enforcement apparatus. (shrink)

The concept of cooperative communities that enforce norm conformity through reward, as well as shaming, ridicule, and ostracism, has been central to anthropology since the work of Durkheim. Prevailing approaches from evolutionary theory explain the willingness to exert sanctions to enforce norms as self-interested behavior, while recent experimental studies suggest that altruistic rewarding and punishing—“strong reciprocity”—play an important role in promoting cooperation. This paper will use data from 308 conversations among the Ju/’hoansi (!Kung) Bushmen (a) to examine the dynamics of (...) norm enforcement, (b) to evaluate the costs of punishment in a forager society and understand how they are reduced, and (c) to determine whether hypotheses that center on individual self-interest provide sufficient explanations for bearing the costs of norm enforcement, or whether there is evidence for strong reciprocity. (shrink)

I shall develop and defend a view of the reparation (e.g., rights to compensation) and enforcement rights (i.e., rights to use force) that individuals have in response to rights-transgressions. The general nature of the account is intermediate to two well-developed alternatives. Pure responsibility accounts hold that reparation and enforcement rights hold only to the extent that the transgressor is culpable, or in some way responsible, for the transgression or resulting harm. Strict liability accounts hold that reparation and (...) class='Hi'>enforcement rights hold merely in virtue of the transgression and independently of the agent’s culpability orresponsibility. I shall defend an account according to which: (1) in agreement with pure responsibility accounts, there are reparation rights against a transgressor only to the extent that the transgressor is responsible for transgression-harm (i.e., harm from a transgression), and (2) in agreement with strict liability accounts, there are enforcement rights even against innocent transgressors—although, in agreement with pure responsibility accounts, the extent of the enforcement rights depends in general on the extent to which the transgressor is responsible for the harm and for acting wrongfully. The central feature of the proposed account is that reparation and enforcement rights in a particular context are sensitive to the extent to which their implementation will reduce (in a way specified below) direct transgression-harm. (shrink)

The longstanding debates aver how to enforce codes of ethics reflect a serious flaw in understanding the nature of ?accountability.?; Fuzziness aver that basic notion has allowed the quantity of codes to expand, without any improvement in their quality or in media behavior. The essay maintains that we repeat the same arguments today that moralistic journalists did in the 1920s, because we lack intellectual precision aver such issues as internal vis a vis external controls, ethics vis a vis First Amendment (...) freedoms, and different forms and degrees of accountability to government, to fellow professionals, and to the general public. Self?imposed media codes?with enforcement provisions?and thorough analysis of social ethics are recommended. (shrink)

Enforcing Morality is written for scholars and graduate students working in the fields of philosophy, law and political theory. It provides both a critical overview of debates on the enforcement of morality and a defense of a distinctive position on the topic.

Normative reflection on the ethics of migration has tended to remain at the level of abstract principle with limited attention to the practice of immigration administration and enforcement. This paper explores the implications of this practice for an ethics of immigration with particular attention to the problem of bureaucratic domination. I contend that migration administration and enforcement cannot overcome bureaucratic domination because of the inherent vulnerability of migrant populations and the transnational enforcement of border controls by multiple (...) public and private actors. The implication is that even if restrictive immigration policies are permissible in principle, the attempt to enforce them leads to injustices that make them ethically unacceptable in practice. (shrink)

Peter Vanderschraaf. Reputational Enforcement of Covenants.

The notion of 'quality of life' frequently features in discussions about how it is appropriate to treat folk at the beginning and at the end of life. It is argued that there is a disjunction between its use in these two areas (1). In the case of disabled babies at the very beginning of life, 'quality of life' considerations are frequently used to justify enforced death on the basis that the babies in question would be better off dead. At times, (...) babies with severe disabilities are thus allowed to die or even killed. In the case of terminally ill people 'quality of life' is also important in guiding the actions of doctors. However, in the case of individuals who do not wish to live any longer because their quality of life is so poor that they would rather be dead, quality of life is likely to be dropped as a guiding principle. Thus patients who wish to die and ask to be killed, will most often be forced to endure enforced life. (shrink)

A continuing issue of contract law is what purported contracts should be legally enforced. This article considers what principles rational persons would want courts to use in enforcing commitments in a society in which they expected to live. By reviewing the promise, economic value, and reasonable expectations approaches, the principles of freedom of transfer, enforceable commitments, and collective good are developed. Then, less general principles of consideration, past benefits, reliance, gratuitous commitments, and contract modification are presented. These latter principles specify (...) the more general principle of legally enforceable commitments. The resulting set of principles provide the basic outlines of legally enforceable commitments that would be acceptable to rational persons living in a contemporary, industrialized Western common-law society. (shrink)

Many anarchists believe that a stateless society could and should feature laws. It might appear that, in so believing, they are caught in a contradiction. The anarchist objects to the state because its authority does not rest on actual consent, and using force to secure compliance with law in a stateless society seems objectionable for the same reason. Some people in a stateless society will have consented to some laws or law-generating mechanisms and some to others – while some will (...) have consented to none. Someone’s obedience to a legal requirement could be justly enforceable absent the state, nonetheless, given either her actual consent to the requirement or to a mechanism responsible for generating it or the coextensiveness of the legal requirement with a moral requirement. And it could thus be just on the anarchist’s own terms to enforce a narrow range of positive legal requirements even against outlaws who had declined to consent to them. (shrink)

Over the last decade, cities, counties, and states across the United States have enacted higher minimum wages, paid sick leave and family leave, domestic worker protections, wage theft laws, “Ban the Box” removal of questions about conviction history from job applications, and fair scheduling laws. Nevertheless, vulnerable workers still do not trust government to come forward and report labor law violations. The article argues that while increasing the size of the labor inspectorate and engaging in strategic enforcement are necessary, (...) they are not sufficient. It argues that co-enforcement, in which government partners with organizations that have industry expertise and relationships with vulnerable workers, has the potential to manage the shifting and decentralized structures of twenty-first-century production, which were explicitly designed to evade twentieth-century laws and enforcement capabilities. The article aims to contribute to a broader understanding of the role of organizations in enforcement and the circumstances in which their effectiveness can be maximized. It sets forth a set of scope conditions and mechanisms and examines empirical cases of co-enforcement in Austin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The main findings are that co-enforcement is most enduring when government agencies and worker organizations recognize each other’s unique capacities, rather than attempt to substitute for one another ; the effort focuses on a specific industry; and the collaboration receives strong political support. Sustaining the impacts of co-enforcement is found to require greater formalization of the partnership and funding streams. (shrink)

Rick Johnstone's plea for liberal federalism and a supranational mechanism for enforcing “human rights” is reminiscent of what Thomas Hobbes said about “Christian commonwealths.” Behind their appeal to universal morality and religious doctrine was the frenzied attempt to shift rule “from Christian kings and sovereign assemblies absolute in their own territories” to “one Vicar of Christ, constituted of the universal church, to be judged, condemned, or deposed, or put to death as he shall think expedient, or necessary, for the common (...) good.” Johnstone is proposing or justifying a similar shift of authority for existing sovereign states to self-appointed vicars of…. (shrink)

This essay differentiates two approaches to understanding the concept of coercion, and argues for the relative merits of the one currently out of fashion. The approach currently dominant in the philosophical literature treats threats as essential to coercion, and understands coercion in terms of the way threats alter the costs and benefits of an agent’s actions; I call this the “pressure” approach. It has largely superseded the “enforcement approach,” which focuses on the powers and actions of the coercer rather (...) than the perspective of the coercee. The enforcement approach identifies coercion with certain uses of the kinds of powers that agents need to accumulate and wield in order to be able to make significant, credible threats. Though there is considerable overlap extensionally in the instances of coercion recognized by the two approaches, the enforcement approach encompasses some uses of power to coerce that do not involve threats . It also circumscribes which threats should be counted as coercive, though notably it provides a picture of coercion that is non-moralized in its essentials. While there may be specific purposes for which a pressure account is to be preferred, I argue that the enforcement approach better describes how coercion works, and elucidates factors that are often tacitly assumed by pressure accounts. It also is more useful for explaining the social and political significance of coercion, and why coercion is thought to have the implications commonly associated with it. In particular, I argue that it helps us understand why uses of coercion are in general a matter of ethical significance, why state authority depends on commanding a monopoly on the right to use coercion, and why being coerced may reasonably provide one a defense against being held responsible for actions one is coerced into taking. (shrink)

Legitimate political institutions sometimes produce clearly unjust laws. It is widely recognized, especially in the context of war, that agents of the state may not enforce political decisions that are very seriously unjust or are the decisions of illegitimate governments. But may agents of legitimate states enforce unjust, but not massively unjust, laws? In this paper, I respond to three defences of the view that it is permissible to enforce these unjust laws. Analogues of the Walzerian argument from patriotism, the (...) Vitorian epistemic argument, and the proceduralist argument found in Rawls, Estlund, and others do not show that law enforcement is usually permitted to enforce unjust laws. Finally, I develop a proceduralist argument for the thesis that law enforcement is permitted to disregard unjust laws. I conclude by considering objections concerning the problem of optimizing society for justice and the problem of law enforcement agents with deplorable moral beliefs. (shrink)

Enforced disappearance is not a new type of human rights violation. This phenomenon is taking place all over the world. Nevertheless, with the exception of the single provision in the Rome Statute, there is no universal legally binding document which would be applicable in all the cases of enforced disappearances. This article introduces the phenomenon of enforced disappearances, analyses its multiple nature, and overviews the latest developments in drafting legally binding documents within the UN framework.

In debating Patrick Devlin, H. L. A. Hart claimed that the “modern form” of the debate over the legal enforcement of morals centered on the “significance to be attached to the historical fact that certain conduct, no matter what, is prohibited by a positive morality.” This form of the debate was politically important in 1963 in Britain and America, and it remains politically important in these countries today and elsewhere; but it is not the philosophically most interesting form the (...) debate can take. An older form of the debate appealed to natural law or critical morality. It centered on the question of whether political authorities could properly use the criminal law to enforce critical morality, including prohibitions on conduct that was not harmful or disrespectful to others. This paper engages with this older form of the debate. It offers some reasons for thinking that there is a presumption in favor of the view that it is a proper function of the criminal law to enforce critical morality, including that part of critical morality that is not directly concerned with preventing harm or disrespect to others. It then defends this presumption against some arguments recently pressed by Ronald Dworkin. (shrink)

The role of the ‘enforcer’ in elite-level sports contests is a familiar one. Simply, the role involves establishing or restoring a ‘moral balance’ to the sporting encounter when it is absent – usually when match officials are thought to be failing to apply the laws/rules of the game. How the enforcer secures this outcome is more morally contentious as it may involve deliberate violations of the laws/rules of the sport. In this paper we consider the role of the enforcer in (...) rugby union. First we interrogate some of the extant sports ethics literature and explore the notion of ‘fairness’ in the well-played game, including the role of the enforcer. Second, we illustrate conceptually how the ethos of elite sport as a moral discourse creates a theoretical platform from which to assess the intervention of an enforcer. Third, we address the role of match officials as members of the practice community from an institutional sense (what the international governing body for rugby union makes explicit) and from an empirical sense (what actually occurs or might occur) in the circumstances that precipitate the intervention of ‘enforcers’. We conclude that the conceptual tension between the laws and the spirit (ethos) of the game is reflected in the choices facing players when playing the game. (shrink)

A desirable quality of a coreference resolution system is the ability to handle transitivity constraints, such that even if it places high likelihood on a particular mention being coreferent with each of two other mentions, it will also consider the likelihood of those two mentions being coreferent when making a final assignment. This is exactly the kind of constraint that integer linear programming (ILP) is ideal for, but, surprisingly, previous work applying ILP to coreference resolution has not encoded this type (...) of constraint. We train a coreference classifier over pairs of mentions, and show how to encode this type of constraint on top of the probabilities output from our pairwise classifier to extract the most probable legal entity assignments. We present results on two commonly used datasets which show that enforcement of transitive closure consistently improves performance, including improvements of up to 3.6% using the b3 scorer, and up to 16.5% using cluster f-measure. (shrink)

The use of law enforcement officers in American schools has rapidly expanded since its inception in the 1950s. This growth can in part be attributed to the Safe Schools Act of 1994, the establishment of the Community Oriented Policing Services Office, and tragic events that have occurred in our nation's schools. Law enforcement officers in the school environment traditionally have primary roles of protection and enforcement, although many have ancillary roles of educating and mentoring students. However, the (...) use of police in schools has also been associated with the formalization of student discipline and the criminalization of minor misconduct. Specifically, an increase in the number of officers in schools has mirrored an increase in the number of arrests and citations for relatively minor offenses. We argue that officers' socialization and training create role conflict in that the duty to enforce the law competes with other duties to mentor and nurture students. We present several hypothetical dilemmas and then illustrate how the “right thing to do” is determined by the perceived duties of the school safety officer. We conclude by presenting some modest suggestions on how to address the potential role conflict experienced by law enforcement officers working in schools. (shrink)

States are not only claiming the right to grant or deny entry to their territories but also enforcing this right against non-citizens in ways that cause significant harm to these individuals. In this article, I argue that endorsing the presumptive right to restrict immigration does not settle the question of when or how it may permissibly inflict harm on individuals to enforce this right. I examine three distinct justifications for causing harm to individuals. First, the justification of defensive harm holds (...) that harming individuals is morally permissible when they pose an unjustified threat to others. Second, the justification of protecting property states that harming individuals is morally permissible when they pose an unjustified threat to others’ property interests. Third, I consider the state punishment justification, which maintains that harming individuals is morally permissible when punishment is an appropriate response to their previous conduct. I conclude that any immigration enforcement measure that involves lethal force or the infliction of severe bodily harm is morally impermissible, whether it is used to defend the state or its property. Moreover, criminal sanctions for immigration violations are difficult to justify. (shrink)

I articulate and defend a principle governing enforcement rights in response to a non‐culpable non‐just rights‐intrusion (e.g., wrongful bodily attack by someone who falsely, but with full epistemic justification, believes that he is acting permissibly). The account requires that the use of force reduce the harm from such intrusions and is sensitive to the extent to which the intruder is agent‐responsible for imposing intrusion‐harm.

Drawing from ethnographic research in the Research Triangle of North Carolina and Williamsburg, Virginia, the authors build on Anzaldúa's conceptualization of “borderlands” to analyze how borders of social membership are constructed and enforced in “el Nuevo South.” Our gender analysis reveals that intersecting structural conditions—the labor market, the organization of public space, and the institutional organization of health care and other public services—combine with gendered processes in the home and family to regulate women's participation in community life. Enforcers of borders (...) include institutional actors, mostly women, in social services and clinics who occupy institutional locations that enable them to define who is entitled to public goods and to categorize migrants as undeserving “others.” We reveal how a particularly configured matrix of domination transcends the spheres of home, work, and community to constrain women migrants' physical and economic mobility and personal autonomy and to inhibit their participation in their societies of reception. (shrink)

To improve the quality and efficiency of research, groups within the scientific community seek to exploit the value of data sharing. Funders, institutions, and specialist organizations are developing and implementing strategies to encourage or mandate data sharing within and across disciplines, with varying degrees of success. Academic journals in ecology and evolution have adopted several types of public data archiving policies requiring authors to make data underlying scholarly manuscripts freely available. The effort to increase data sharing in the sciences is (...) one part of a broader “data revolution” that has prompted discussion about a paradigm shift in scientific research. Yet anecdotes from the community and studies evaluating data availability suggest that these policies have not obtained the desired effects, both in terms of quantity and quality of available datasets. We conducted a qualitative, interview-based study with journal editorial staff and other stakeholders in the academic publishing process to examine how journals enforce data archiving policies. We specifically sought to establish who editors and other stakeholders perceive as responsible for ensuring data completeness and quality in the peer review process. Our analysis revealed little consensus with regard to how data archiving policies should be enforced and who should hold authors accountable for dataset submissions. Themes in interviewee responses included hopefulness that reviewers would take the initiative to review datasets and trust in authors to ensure the completeness and quality of their datasets. We highlight problematic aspects of these thematic responses and offer potential starting points for improvement of the public data archiving process. (shrink)

The Public Relations Society of America's Member Code of Ethics 2000 assumes professional standing for PRSA members, emphasizes public relations' advocacy role, and stresses education rather than enforcement as key to improving industry standards. Code development involved more than 2 years of research and writing and the counsel of outside ethics experts. In this article I review the code development process, providing an insider's perspective on the ethics initiative.

Within a social justice ethical framework, the use of ‘enforcement’ measures to prevent people from engaging in ‘street activities’, such as begging and street drinking, can only be morally justified if such initiatives can be shown to benefit the welfare of the vulnerable ‘street users’ affected. It may be hypothesized that this is unlikely, and such measures are bound to be regressive in their effects, but in fact evidence from an evaluation conducted in five locations across England suggests otherwise. (...) Drawing on a normative framework which engages with both moral and political philosophy, this paper argues that the motivations and impacts associated with enforcement are more ethically complex, and less punitive, than they may at first appear. It demonstrates that the use of enforcement measures, when accompanied by appropriate support, can in fact lead to beneficial outcomes for some individuals involved in begging or street drinking in some situations. The outcomes for other members of the street population can, however, be very negative, and are highly unpredictable, such that the use of enforcement is always a high-risk strategy, even if ethically justifiable in certain circumstances. (shrink)

We posit and find evidence consistent with a new mechanism of intra-firm enforcement spillovers: the leakage of scarce compliance resources across facilities within a firm. Using a facility-level panel data set of Clean Air Act (CAA) enforcement actions from 2005 to 2017, we find a facility is more likely to violate the CAA following penalties on its same-industry-same-state siblings. In contrast, there is no significant spillover across firms. We show that the intra-firm spillover is not due to changes (...) in regulatory attention or production shifting. Instead, our results suggest it may result from the redeployment of scarce compliance resources across siblings. Consistent with this mechanism, we find compliance leakage only occurs at privately held firms and facilities that lack the resources to invest in pollution prevention. The findings contribute to understanding the efficacy of environmental enforcement and have important implications for intra-firm management of environmental performance and regulatory enforcement approaches. (shrink)

The events of the beginning of the millennium have made it necessary to try to find a new philosophical sense of power enforcement as a social phenomenon. Conceptualization of the phenomenon involves its all-round consideration both as activity itself and social practice as its variety. The role of power enforcement in the life of the society, its social determinants, and its correlation with culture and state should also become a part of thorough comprehension. Power enforcement as a (...) variety of social practice is on the one hand aimed at forcible acquisition of products, territories, but on the other hand it is counteraction to it. Power enforcement, due to constant shortage of resources for subsistence, has always played a very important role in the course of historical development. It can be violent or nonviolent. Violent variety of power enforcement is the one, which purposes are parasitical and the means are illegal. Power enforcement has always been a corporate part of life of the human society; therefore it is not going to disappear forever. To neglect this fact means to have an inexcusable illusion. Under conditions of globalization, increasing of violent threats of unmilitary nature and in the first place the threat of terrorism is a peculiarity of the present day power enforcement. At the same time the threat of full-scale wars doesn’t seem to weaken but to some extent it is growing. The mission of philosophers is tounderstand these threats and to seek the ways to prevent them. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Following a Code of Ethics Reporting Misconduct Enforcing a Code of Ethics Necessary Actions.

This paper asks whether (human) rights enforcement is permissible given that it may entail infringing on the rights of innocent bystanders. I consider two strategies that adopt a rights-sensitive consequentialist framework and offer a positive answer to this question, namely Amartya Sen’s and Hillel Steiner’s. Against Sen, I argue that trade-offs between rights are problematic since they contradict the purpose of rights, which is to provide a pluralist solution to disagreement about values, i.e. to allow agents to act in (...) accordance with their values. I further argue that Steiner’s compensation strategy does not succeed in avoiding trade-offs so it falls prey to the same criticism. I propose a non-trade-off solution that is implicit in the accounts discussed and is more consistent with the meta-ethical framework advocated by Sen. This solution relies on an enforceable duty to share in the costs of rights enforcement hence it entails a degree of redistribution for enforcement purposes. (shrink)

There are important reasons for states to recognize and enforce the judgments of other states’ courts. There are also reasons that may militate against recognition or enforcement of certain foreign judgments, making it appropriate to calibrate or “fine tune” the presumption favoring recognition and enforcement so it is not applied too broadly. Most calibration principles, such as the principle that a judgment from a court lacking jurisdiction should not be recognized, are case-specific. However, one calibration principle that is, (...) to our knowledge, unique to the law of the United States stands out: the principle of systemic calibration, according to which U.S. courts must not recognize or enforce foreign judgments “rendered under a system which does not provide impartial tribunals or procedures compatible with the requirements of due process of law.” In this Article, we aim to shed empirical light on how U.S.-style systemic calibration operates in practice. We find that state-of-origin indicator scores related to systemic adequacy are on average higher when U.S. courts recognize or enforce foreign judgments than when they refuse to do so. Moreover, the probability of recognition and enforcement increases as these indicator scores increase. However, in only six of the 587 opinions in our dataset did a court refuse recognition or enforcement based explicitly on the systemic inadequacy ground. Thus, while the level of systemic calibration in U.S. courts is high, it is mostly achieved implicitly. Finally, even judgments from states with low systemic adequacy scores are sometimes recognized or enforced by U.S. courts. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to describe the new experiences that close female family members of disappeared persons have after the enforced disappearance. These relatives experience rupture with their pre-disappearance lives. Their everyday routines cease and the search for the disappeared person takes over. Some relatives experience impoverishment and many lose their children or spouse to emigration. Parts or all of their extended family cut off ties, friendships end, and some neighbors avoid them. A local humanitarian or human rights (...) organization and an association of relatives of disappeared persons come to occupy a central place in relatives’ lives and become “like a second family.” Focusing on enforced disappearance during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, this research is based on interviews with relatives of people who disappeared, on a year’s participant observation with a group of these relatives, and on the examination of relatives’ denunciatory art. (shrink)

Drawing on signaling theory, we suggest that a supplier’s enforcement of ethical codes sends signals about the supplier that affect a buyer’s decision to continue their commitment to the supplier. We then draw on side-bet theory to hypothesize how switching costs influence the importance of a supplier’s enforcement of ethical codes in predicting a buyer’s continuance commitment to a supplier. We empirically test our model with data from 158 purchasing managers across three manufacturing industries. Results confirm the connection (...) between ethical code enforcement and continuance commitment, but suggest that a supplier’s enforcement of ethical codes matter less when switching suppliers is perceived as too costly. (shrink)

When someone is poised to fail to fulfil a moral duty, we can respond in a variety of ways. We might remind them of their duty, or seek to persuade them through argument. Or we might intervene forcibly to ensure that they act in accordance with their duty. Some duties appear to be such that the duty-bearer can be liable to forcible interference when this is necessary to ensure that they comply with them. We’ll call duties that carry such liabilities (...) enforcement-apt. Not all duties seem to be enforcement-apt. Some, for example, accept that a person in a monogamous marriage has a moral duty to refrain from infidelity, but deny that a spouse can be compelled to comply with their duty to be faithful without transgressing her rights. More controversially, some think that our duties to assist others in severe need are not enforcement-apt. What could explain the contrast between duties that are enforcement-apt while and those that are not? We’ll call this the puzzle of enforceability and our paper considers three broad strategies for responding to it. The first strategy takes the form of identifying some substantive feature or features that are necessary and/or sufficient for a duty to possess some enforcement status. We consider a range of candidate explanations of this sort but find that none are plausible. The second strategy rejects the idea that there are genuinely enforcement-inapt duties and instead seeks to explain why there can nonetheless be marked differences amongst duties concerning how they can be enforced and who can enforce them. We find that this strategy too is largely unsuccessful. The third strategy offered seeks an explanation of differences in enforcement status by appeal to the broader social costs of enforcing certain kinds of duties. We find that this approach holds some promise but note that it requires adopting a controversial set of moral commitments. We conclude by considering our options in the absence of a solution to our puzzle. (shrink)

A new Arrovian impossibility is obtained without invoking independence of irrelevant alternatives type assumptions. The new conditions leading to the impossibility are based on the concept of power of enforcement, and specify how this power can (see A3) or cannot be expanded (see A1, A2 and A4).

Article deals with the situation of enforcement of intellectual property rights in Lithuania after the implementation of 2004 Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the enforcement of intellectual property rights. First, the authors outline the importance of the proportionality principle which is embedded in the text of the directive, but sometimes may be overlooked because of the rhetoric openly orientated to right holders. Then, the legislative changes in Lithuania’s intellectual (...) property laws and tendencies in case law are analyzed. The main findings of the research show that despite considerable changes in Lithuanian laws, the situation in case law was not in fact influenced. (shrink)

Israeli enforcement law uses both direct and indirect enforcement — the former via attachment of assets, and the latter via imprisonment of the debtor. The use of indirect enforcement via imprisonment is problematic, as it violates the basic rights of the debtor. I will argue that in response to this problem, the law created a framework for the "debtor of limited means." I will demonstrate that not only does this create an improper definition of the task of (...) the Chief Enforcement Officer, but that it is also an inefficient way of dealing with an insolvent debtor. I will propose that the system differentiate between debtors who cannot pay their debts and those who do not want to pay their debts. I believe that encouraging the insolvent debtor to file for of bankruptcy will avoid the problem of imprisonment and enable the Chief Enforcement Officer to return to his natural role as judge of enforcement. Additionally, I suggest creating a separate track of "consumer enforcement," which would avoid the whole system of installments, imprisonment, and debtors of limited means, at least regarding consumer credit. (shrink)

Recent years have yielded many discussions on how to endow autonomous agents with the ability to make ethical decisions, and the need for explicit ethical reasoning and transparency is a persistent theme in this literature. We present a modular and transparent approach to equip autonomous agents with the ability to comply with ethical prescriptions, while still enacting pre-learned optimal behaviour. Our approach relies on a normative supervisor module, that integrates a theorem prover for defeasible deontic logic within the control loop (...) of a reinforcement learning agent. The supervisor operates as both an event recorder and an on-the-fly compliance checker w.r.t. an external norm base. We successfully evaluated our approach with several tests using variations of the game Pac-Man, subject to a variety of “ethical” constraints. (shrink)

Public shaming plays an important role in upholding valuable social norms. But, under what conditions, if any, is it morally justifiable? Our aim in this paper is systemically to investigate the morality of public shaming, so as to provide an answer to this neglected question. We develop an overarching framework for assessing the justifiability of this practice, which shows that, while shaming can sometimes be morally justifiable, it very often is not. In turn, our framework highlights several reasons to be (...) concerned about the increasingly widespread phenomenon of online public shaming. (shrink)

Social norms have played a key role in the evolution of human cooperation, serving to stabilize prosocial and egalitarian behavior despite the self-serving motives of individuals. Young children’s behavior mostly conforms to social norms, as they follow adult behavioral directives and instructions. But it turns out that even preschool children also actively enforce social norms on others, often using generic normative language to do so. This behavior is not easily explained by individualistic motives; it is more likely a result of (...) children’s growing identification with their cultural group, which leads to prosocial motives for preserving its ways of doing things. (shrink)

The relevance of the study lies in the fact that in the reforms of the system of compulsory enforcement of decisions stipulated the possibility of performing these functions by private enforcers. The purpose of the article is to consider problematic aspects of the legal status of a private enforcer as a participant of legal relations in the enforcement process. The results of the study contain generalizations on the analysis of the legal status of a private enforcer, proposals for (...) amendments to current legislation on private enforcers and the protection of the rights of the parties of enforcement proceedings. Finally, conclusions were formulated, which may be useful to practitioners of various legal professions such private enforcers, lawyers, judges, as well as citizens and legal persons, including those who are parties to the executive procedure. (shrink)