As one of the most important episodes of change in the Ottoman Empire, the Tanzimat Era (1839-1876) was a phase when the state and its political and ideological formation witnessed structural transformation and reforms. During this period, privy councils were instituted at every level, as one of the basic changes in decision-making and the legislation process of the Ottoman State. Meclis-i Âlî-i Umûmî (the Supreme Council-General) is located at the top of the counsulting hierarchy of councils at (...) the administrative piramid, instituted in 1838. The Supreme Council-General also functioned as an equivalent to that of a “senate” of the modern parliament for the first time in this transition period. (shrink)

This work studies the Great Council of Malines as an institution. It analyzes the Council's internal organization and staff policy, its position within the broader society of the Austrian Netherlands, the volume and nature of litigation at the Council, and its final years and ultimate demise in the late 18th and early 19th century. By means of this institutional study, this volume provides insight into the role played by the Great Council in the process of state-building (...) in the 18th century Austrian Netherlands. While superior courts were once considered to be the prime agencies of change in the Early Modern Period, tools par excellence for the sovereigns' striving towards centralization and superiority, their position in the 18th century has so far been barely touched upon. This work focuses specifically on the 18th century supreme court of the Austrian Netherlands, and provides a broad overview with attention to other aspects of the tribunal's functioning and to its role in 18th century attempts at state formation. (shrink)

This personal view draws attention to the lack of regard, given by the BMA in its new guidance, to the symptomatic benefit of clinically assisted nutrition and hydration in patients who are not imminently dying. This article aims to identify how ignoring symptomatic benefit is a serious oversight and cause for concern given that this document, endorsed by the General Medical Council and courts, is created with the purpose of providing a framework for best interests decision-making. The new (...) BMA guidance on CANH, which is endorsed by the GMC,1 follows up on the Supreme Court case of An NHS Trust v Y,2 that any removal of CANH from a patient in prolonged disorder of consciousness no longer requires the approval of the court unless there is disagreement or the decision is finely balanced. The decision in …. (shrink)

One of the most obvious differences between recent Shi’ite and Sunni political activism is the dominance of clerical leadership in the former and lay leadership in the latter. This article examines the reasons for this difference, analysing the authority theories of three contemporary Iraqi Shi’ite clerics. Ayatallah Baqir al-Hakim, until his death in 2003, was the ideologue of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the military wing of which is the Badr Corps. Ayatallah Kazim al-Ha’iri is (...) considered the successor of the late Ayatallah Sadiq al-Sadr; the latter was the ideological inspiration for the Mehdi Army led by Sadiq al-Sadr’s son Muqtada al-Sadr. The relationship between Ha’iri and Muqtada has been tested in the recent past, and the two have distanced themselves from each other. In 2004, Ha’iri officially announced that Muqtada is not his representative in Iraq. Hence the analysis in this article represents the tradition of Shi’i thought from which Muqtada has emerged, rather than the specific doctrine to which he subscribes. Muqtada’s legal doctrine is difficult to ascertain given that he has not yet written a comprehensive work of jurisprudence. Grand Ayatallah Ali Sistani is certainly the most internationally respected of the three scholars. Considered the leading Ayatallah in Iraq (and perhaps the Shi’ite world in general), Sistani successfully negotiated the end to the occupation of Najaf by the Mehdi Army and is credited with masterminding the success of the United Iraqi Alliance in the Iraqi elections of January 2005. This article compares and contrasts the three thinkers’ theories of religious and political authority, including their differing conceptions of the ulama (scholarly elite) and their power within the community. This leads on to a brief consideration of the political theories of Baqir al-Hakim and Ha’iri. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Convention for Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Biomedicine: Convention on Human Rights and BiomedicineCouncil of EuropePreambleThe Member States of the Council of Europe, the other States and the European Community signatories hereto,Bearing in mind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948;Bearing in (...) mind the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 4 November 1950;Bearing in mind the European Social Charter of 18 October 1961;Bearing in mind the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966;Bearing in mind the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data of 28 January 1981;Bearing also in mind the Convention on the Rights of the Child of 20 November 1989;Considering that the aim of the Council of Europe is the achievement of a greater unity between its members and that one of the methods by which that aim is to be pursued is the maintenance and further realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms;Conscious of the accelerating developments in biology and medicine;Convinced of the need to respect the human being both as an individual and as a member of the human species and recognising the importance of ensuring the dignity of the human being; [End Page 277]Conscious that the misuse of biology and medicine may lead to acts endangering human dignity;Affirming that progress in biology and medicine should be used for the benefit of present and future generations;Stressing the need for international co-operation so that all humanity may enjoy the benefits of biology and medicine;Recognising the importance of promoting a public debate on the questions posed by the application of biology and medicine and the responses to be given thereto;Wishing to remind all members of society of their rights and responsibilities;Taking account of the work of the Parliamentary Assembly in this field, including Recommendation 1160 (1991) on the preparation of a Convention on bioethics;Resolving to take such measures as are necessary to safeguard human dignity and the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual with regard to the application of biology and medicine;Have agreed as follows:Chapter IGeneral provisionsArticle 1. (Purpose and object)Parties to this Convention shall protect the dignity and identity of all human beings and guarantee everyone, without discrimination, respect for their integrity and other rights and fundamental freedoms with regard to the application of biology and medicine.Each Party shall take in its internal law the necessary measures to give effect to the provisions of this Convention.Article 2. (Primacy of the human being)The interests and welfare of the human being shall prevail over the sole interest of society or science.Article 3. (Equitable access to health care)Parties, taking into account health needs and available resources, shall take appropriate measures with a view to providing, within their jurisdiction, equitable access to health care of appropriate quality. [End Page 278]Article 4. (Professional standards)Any intervention in the health field, including research, must be carried out in accordance with relevant professional obligations and standards.Chapter IIConsentArticle 5. (General rule)An intervention in the health field may only be carried out after the person concerned has given free and informed consent to it.This person shall beforehand be given appropriate information as to the purpose and nature of the intervention as well as on its consequences and risks.The person concerned may freely withdraw consent at any time.Article 6. (Protection of persons not able to consent)1. Subject to Articles 17 and 20 below, an intervention may only be carried out on a person who does not have the capacity to consent, for his or her direct benefit.2. Where, according to law, a minor does not have the capacity to consent to an intervention, the intervention may only be carried out with the authorisation of his or her representative or an authority or a person or... (shrink)

The principle of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) conceives of a broad set of measures that can be employed in preventing and responding to atrocity crimes. Nevertheless, the UN Security Council remains an important part of the implementation architecture, given what the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty referred to as its authoritative position in international society as the “linchpin of order and stability.” As part of the roundtable “The Responsibility to Protect in a Changing World Order: Twenty (...) Years since Its Inception,” this review of the Council's role in fulfilling its responsibility to protect advances two somewhat contrasting arguments about the original ICISS report. First, it suggests that the commissioners may have underestimated the Council's potential contribution, by concentrating on the authorization of coercive means to address crises of human protection. Over the past two decades, the Security Council has not only employed various diplomatic, political, and humanitarian measures to address atrocity crimes but also adjusted the purposes and practices of peace operations to advance protection goals and more subtly shaped discourses and expectations about state responsibilities for protection. However, I also argue that the willingness of the ICISS to identify potential alternatives to the Security Council when its members are paralyzed appears in retrospect to have been both bold and forward looking, in light of the Council's failures to act in a timely and decisive manner to protect amid crises and the contemporary realities of geopolitical rivalry. The article concludes by suggesting that future efforts to protect populations from atrocity crimes should focus not only on the herculean task of trying to change the behavior of P5 members of the Council but also on encouraging a new institutional balance between the Security Council and other intergovernmental bodies. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has (...) followed, has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

The General Medical Council (GMC) instructs doctors to act ‘reasonably’ in obtaining consent from patients. However, the GMC does not explain what it means to be reasonable: it is left to doctors to figure out the substance of this instruction. The GMC relies on the Supreme Court’s judgment in Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board; and it can be assumed that the judges’ idea of reasonability is adopted. The aim of this paper is to flesh out this idea (...) of reasonability. This idea is commonly personified as the audience that has to be satisfied by the doctor’s justification for offering, or withholding, certain treatments and related information. In case law, this audience shifted from a reasonable doctor to a ‘reasonable person in the patient’s position’; and Montgomery expands the audience to include ‘particular’ patients, too. Senior judges have clarified that the reasonable person is a normative ideal, and not a sociological construct; but they do not set out the characteristics of this ideal. John Rawls has conceived the reasonable person-ideal as one that pursues fair terms of co-operation with other members of society. An alternative ideal can be inferred from the feminist ethic of care. However, the reasonable patient from Montgomery does not align with either theoretical ideal; but, instead, is an entirely rational being. Such a conception conflicts with both real-life constraints on rationality and the doctor’s duty to care for the patient, and it challenges the practice of medicine. (shrink)

The British Medical Association and Royal College of Physicians have published new guidance, endorsed by the General Medical Council, on decision-making about clinically assisted nutrition and hydration and adults who lack capacity to consent. The development of the guidance follows a series of legal cases which has created confusion about the precise circumstances in which an application to the court is required before CANH is withdrawn which has culminated with the decision of the Supreme Court in National (...) Health Service Trust versus Y. 1 This confirmed that there is no requirement to go to court, providing there is agreement as to the patient’s best interests, the provisions of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 have been observed, and the relevant professional guidance has been followed. The new guidance covers all decisions to start, restart, continue, or stop providing CANH in patients who are not imminently dying, in circumstances where CANH is the primary life-sustaining treatment being provided. It goes beyond the category of patients in permanent vegetative state or minimally conscious state who have previously been the subject of court applications, and also covers decisions for patients with neurodegenerative conditions and patients who have suffered a sudden onset brain injury in addition to having multiple comorbidities or general frailty which is likely to impact on life expectancy. It provides a clear statement of doctors’ legal responsibilities, covers the importance of robust best interests’ assessments and sets out the process to be followed for sufficient independent scrutiny of decisions. In light of some of the identified problems with decisions about CANH, a particular focus of the guidance is on the importance of regular best interests’ assessments, and it provides detailed practical guidance about how to approach these. The development of …. (shrink)

The Supreme Court of the United States has recently been petitioned to revisit legal issues pertaining to the lawfulness of imposing a vaccine mandate on individuals with proof of natural immunity during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the petition accepts that the protection of public health during COVID-19 was an important governmental interest, the petitioners maintain that the imposition of a vaccine mandate on individuals with natural immunity was not ‘substantially related’ to accomplishing that purpose. In this short report, we (...) outline how some of the petition’s general arguments interact with points we raised in a 2022 article in this journal defending natural immunity exemptions, in light of new evidence. In particular, we reflect on new evidence pertaining to differences between vaccine-induced immunity, natural immunity, and so-called ‘hybrid’ immunity. We suggest that the nuanced nature of this evidence highlights the importance of making fine-grained judgements about proportionality and necessity when considering vaccine mandates. We conclude by claiming that if future pandemics necessitate the imposition of vaccine mandates, then those seeking to justify them should clearly articulate the relevance (and the evidence) for the comparative protection of vaccine-induced, natural, and hybrid immunity. (shrink)

The General Medical Council renewed its guidance on consent in 2020. In this essay, I argue that the 2020 guidance does not advance on the earlier, 2008 guidance in regard to treatments that doctors are obliged to offer to patients. In both, doctors are instructed to not provide treatments that are not in the overall benefit, or clinical interests, of the patient; although, patients are absolutely entitled to decline treatment. As such, consent has two aspects, and different standards (...) apply to each aspect. To explore this paradigm, I propose the reconceptualisation of consent as a person’s freedom to achieve treatment, using Amartya Sen’s approach. Sen explains that freedom has two aspects: process and opportunity. Accordingly, a patient’s freedom to achieve treatment would comprise a process for the identification of proper treatment, followed by an opportunity for the patient to accept or decline this treatment. As per Sen, the opportunity aspect is to be assessed by the standard of public reason, whereas the standard for the process aspect is variable and contingent on the task at hand. I then use this reconceptualised view of consent to analyse case law. I show that senior judges have conceived the patient’s opportunity to be encompassed in information, which is to be decided by public reason. On the other hand, the process aspect relies on the private reason of medical professionals. Given the nature of professionalism, this reliance is inescapable, and it is maintained in the case law that is cited in both guidances. (shrink)

A masterful attempt to express the teachings of Zen Buddhism in terms that the Western mind can understand. The book contains a wealth of psychological insight; one feels its force even in spite of a somewhat too literal translation. The chapter on anxiety is especially fine. Altogether a rich and important work.--D. R.

This article argues for a new interpretation of the Sanskrit compound gaṇḍa-vyūha as it is used in the common title of the Mahāyāna text the Gaṇḍavyūha-Sūtra.The author begins by providing a brief history of the sūtra’s appellations in Chinese and Tibetan sources. Next, the meanings of gaṇḍa (the problematic member of the compound) are explored. The author proposes that contemporary scholars have overlooked a meaning of gaṇḍa occurring in some compounds, wherein gaṇḍa can mean simply “great,” “big” or “massive.” This (...) general sense is particularly common in the compound gaṇda-śaila (a “massive rock” or “boulder”) and is found in such texts as the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the Harivaṃśa and the Harṣacarita. Following the discussion of Gaṇḍa, the author examines the term vyūha (“array”) as it is used in the Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra. The article concludes with the suggestion that a more appropriate translation of the Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra would be “The Supreme array Scripture.”. (shrink)

According to Kant, the supreme principle of morality is: “act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (G 4:421). This principle has come to be known as the Formula of Universal Law (“FUL”). Few philosophers believe it succeeds. But, I argue, few philosophers have understood what FUL means. This dissertation offers a full defense of FUL. It is, in fact, the supreme principle of morality—and it (...) can successfully derive a viable theory of permissible action and virtuous willing. Kant was right. Chapter 1 considers FUL’s role in relation to Kant’s subsequent formulations of the Categorical Imperative and the broader architectonic of duty he sets up in the Metaphysics of Morals. I argue that Kant’s formulations are equivalent insofar as they are each expressions of the very same moral principle. And I suggest that FUL’s two tests correspond to Kant’s later distinction between duties of right and duties of virtue. Thus, FUL’s contradiction-in-conception test can be used to derive duties governing permissible action, and FUL’s contradiction-in-the-will test can be used to derive duties governing virtuous willing. This sets up the framework for the remainder of the dissertation. Chapters 2 and 3 together interpret and defend Kant’s account of permissible action. In Chapter 2, I argue that we should fundamentally reconceive of the nature and purpose of Kant’s permissibility criterion. Kant’s contemporary interpreters have adopted too psychologistic an account of the maxim. Kantian maxims have little to do with the motivating principles of actual agents. Relying on Kant’s historical context and his account of maxims in rational agency, I argue that FUL tests means-end principles which describe act-types. When its permissibility test is applied to such principles, it can viably derive general duties. Chapter 3 continues this positive account of Kant’s permissibility test and defends it from common objections. I argue that the contradiction-in-conception test rejects an act-type when it would be inconceivable for all rational agents to be directly governed by the type’s means-end imperative as a universal practical law. So understood, FUL condemns act-types because: (1) they are hypocritically self-serving, (2) they inflict agential harm on other agents, or (3) they inflict self-harm motivated by self-love. I defend FUL’s derivations against such act-types against common criticisms, such as that they are circular or overbroad. Turning to prominent objections against Kant’s account of permissible action, I then argue that FUL correctly rules out all and only impermissible actions. Moreover, its conclusions are both nuanced and normatively defensible. In Chapter 4, I turn to Kant’s virtue ethics. I begin by considering the demands of Kantian virtue. I argue that we should reject accounts on which duties of virtue are merely less restrictive duties governing permissible action. Instead, I argue, they represent genuinely virtue-ethical requirements to promote morally worthy ends, namely, the ends of our own perfection and others’ happiness. I show that all of Kant’s duties of virtue can ultimately be traced back to one of these required ends. Then, I argue that FUL’s contradiction-in-the-will test can successfully derive our positive obligation to set the ends of virtue. I conclude that FUL is successful not only as a standard of permissibility, but also as the supreme principle of virtue. (shrink)

Congress implemented the Medicaid Act in 1965, acting pursuant to its Spending Clause authority to “provide for the…general Welfare.” Over time, the Act has been amended more than 50 times. Most recently, as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Congress required participating states to extend Medicaid eligibility to childless, non-disabled, and non-elderly adults with incomes below roughly 133% of the federal poverty level.Within hours of President Obama signing the ACA into law, four lawsuits were filed challenging (...) the con-stitutionality of the ACA, including a case in Florida that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court as National Federal of Independent Business v. Sebelius. As part of this case, officials from 26 states argued that Congress was improperly coercing them into participating in the Medicaid expansion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fighting Words:Turnus at Bay in the Latin Council (Aeneid 11.234–446)Elaine FanthamUntil the publication of Philip Hardie's important new discussion "Fame and Defamation in the Aeneid: The Council of Latins" (1998), Virgil's extended treatment of the Latin council had passed a generation of relative neglect—neglect all the more surprising because the debate occupies a quarter of the eleventh book.1 But then the book itself is generally treated (...) as a lowering of tension, a diversion of focus from the heroic business of male combat to an exchange of rhetoric and the ancillary exploits of the woman warrior Camilla. And despite his long– standing interest in Virgil's Iliad (e.g., 1984), K. W. Gransden's recent commentary on book 11 (1991) shows little interest in Virgil's sophisticated narrative technique.Virgil's writing in this book is no less serious than in its neighbors, and deserves further scrutiny. The Camilla narrative has begun to receive its due, but the rhetoric of the extended council, which includes Turnus' longest speech and the second longest formal speech in the Aeneid, has usually been passed over as alien to the concerns of epic.2This is certainly not Hardie's approach, though it is motivated in part by the same negative attitude toward rhetoric. For him the debate is primarily a starting point for a more far–reaching inquiry into the [End Page 259] ways in which Virgil uses the secondary narrative of speakers to project dissonant versions of events the audience has already experienced, and, by thus casting doubt on their credibility, extends a further shadow of doubt over the narrative enterprise. He states his aim as "to resituate the place of rhetoric within the Aeneid, with especial reference to the most elaborate and most formal exchanges between human actors in the poem. The focus of... discussion is not so much on the formal markers of a rhetorical manner, as on the relationship between the truth–functions of rhetoric and of a supposedly authoritative epic voice" (1998, 243).Now Hardie would probably accept a definition of rhetoric fairly close to "speech designed to persuade." But his reading of the episode shows a mistrust not simply of its most clearly dishonest speaker, but of the entire debate. He opens with Virgil's summary, Illi haec inter se dubiis de rebus agebant / certantes (445–46). Yet insofar as the sphere of rhetoric (as opposed to logic) is, as Aristotle declares, what is debatable, the uncertainty or insecurity of the Latins' circumstances hardly entitles Hardie to damn the entire council as "hot air... just so much rhetoric" (244). It seems that despite his magnificent understanding of epic, Hardie has no sympathy for rhetoric.3 For him "rhetoric" is only the abuse of eloquence. He equates it with public speeches invalidated by the speaker's misreading of circumstances, by distortion of the speaker's own experience,4 by misjudgment swayed by emotion,5 or by misrepresentation to deceive the audience—whereas the only error of several of these speakers is human ignorance of the divinely ordained consequences. Not only Latinus, "careful to provide the optimal conditions for a faithful account by the envoys," but the honest Venulus and right–minded Diomedes are discredited along with Drances, as if no valid speech were possible in a political context. [End Page 260]Hardie has many acute and rewarding comments on the debate, but his major critical contribution lies outside it, reaching even beyond the framework of the Aeneid. The more restricted approach I originally adopted toward the Latin debate, while composing earlier drafts of this essay, does not seem to have lost its usefulness: it is even possible that Hardie's long–sighted vision has produced a distortion that needs to be corrected by a study with a shorter focus. As in the subtle intertextual study by Burke (1978), my point of departure here is the effect of Drances' speech not only on the behavior of Turnus, but on the audience's or reader's reception of Turnus' reply and assessment of his character.6To start, then, let us briefly review the form and content of the council, paying special... (shrink)

The Supreme Court frequently uses two tools to gather information about which cases to hear following a petition for writ of certiorari: the call for response and the call for the views of the Solicitor General. To date, there has been no empirical analysis of how the Supreme Court deploys these tools and little qualitative study. This Article fills in basic gaps in the literature by providing concrete answers to common questions regarding these two tools and offers (...) detailed analysis of how and why states, private parties, and the United States (through the Solicitor General) respond to petitions. In addition, the Article provides much-needed data for litigators and litigants to be able to estimate the probability of their case being heard by the Court, and provides insight on how to react when the Court calls for a response or calls for the views of the Solicitor General. To reach these conclusions, the Article relies on detailed, quantitative analysis of a novel, 30,000-petition dataset, as well as interviews with top Supreme Court litigators, former Supreme Court clerks, and former staff of the Clerk’s office. (shrink)

This inexpensive book is an important addition to English translations of significant Latin medieval philosophical works. Boethius of Dacia for centuries has had the reputation of being, along with Siger of Brabant, a leading Averroist at the University of Paris about 1270. It is now known that Boethius was from Denmark, but not much is known about his life. It is possible that he became a Dominican in later life. The introduction to these works by Father Wippel is excellent, as (...) is the bibliography appended to these treatises. (shrink)

This project explores the "contradiction" that critics contend lies at the heart of the Supreme Court's capital sentencing jurisprudence. The doctrine of "guided discretion," represents the Court's attempt to achieve both consistency and individuation in capital sentencing. Guided discretion rejects the unbridled sentencing discretion of an earlier era that resulted in sentencing decisions that were "arbitrary and capricious." At the same time, guided discretion requires juries to give individualized consideration to the facts and circumstances of individual defendants. Critics contend (...) that consistency and individuation are mutually exclusive, and that "guided discretion" is a contradiction in terms. ;The analysis first attempts to isolate the moral dimension of the capital punishment debate, arguing that such analytical clarity is essential to any defensible view of capital punishment. Second, it sets forth and defends the coherence approach to moral and legal justification, according to which the specific moral and legal principles relevant to capital sentencing are evaluated for their compatibility with the principles of the legal system more generally. Third, the analysis canvasses the traditional justifications for punishment, as well as the development of the Court's capital sentencing jurisprudence, and identifies retribution and deterrence as the most promising rationales for the death penalty. Fourth, the claim of contradiction is considered in the context of legal liberalism, which, contrary to critics, has ample resources to accommodate the doctrinal balancing act that guided discretion entails. Moreover, examination of a typical capital sentencing statute establishes that the doctrine of guided discretion is compatible with at least some forms of retributivism and with traditional principles of deterrence. Finally, the analysis recognizes the limits of philosophical consistency. The capital sentencing process presents daunting practical challenges that a theoretical defense of guided discretion cannot fully address. Substantial reforms are needed before the theoretical coherence of guided discretion can be translated into a constitutionally defensible capital sentencing process. (shrink)

Recently, the Supreme Court of Nigeria in Tega Esabunor v Faweya & Ors (2019) LPELR 46961 (SC) dismissed an appeal seeking to quash the order of a magistrate court for the transfusion of blood to a baby. The appellants contended that the court had no jurisdiction to make theorder. The crux of the case was whether the parents’ right to consent to the child’s treatment based on religious beliefs supersedes the child’s right to live, thus reflecting the tension between (...) a parent’s right to give consent to the choice of treatment for their child, and the court’s power to override such rights through the inherent parens patriae jurisdiction of the state. The case also reflects the tension between the freedom of a parent to practise their religion and the right of a child to live, in the medical context. This article examines the findings of the Supreme Court in Tega Esabunor’s case, considering whether the court’s decision is in line with the generally accepted practice on when the state can intervene if persons with parental responsibility refuse medical treatment for an incompetent child because of religious beliefs.Cases from other jurisdictions are analysed to ascertain the position of foreign courts. It is submitted that the Supreme Court’s judgmentreflects accepted international practice regarding parental refusal of consent for medical treatment of a child. (shrink)

Many members of the public think of the General Medical Council (GMC) as the body which tries doctors: the doctors' law courts, as it were. And, except in the more sober of newspapers and news reports, the 'offences ' which receive the most publicity are those concerning alleged improper relations between doctors and patients. Professor Sir Denis Hill, in the following paper, which he read in the spring of this year to the annual conference of the London Medical (...) Group devoted to a discussion of human sexuality, chose to examine the whole function of the General Medical Council as a frame of moral reference for doctors. Judging allegations of professional misconduct by doctors is the function of the Council's Disciplinary Committee. Judging sexual misconduct forms only a small part of their work. The GMC's responsibility covers the whole notion of morals and morality as it concerns doctors in their professional work. Sir Denis Hill stresses the modern thinking that morality must be learned and that attitudes are always shifting as society alters its norms of what is moral conduct. That is not to say that all that was previously considered not to be moral has now become acceptable but rather that other concepts have entered the field of moral debate. Therefore the GMC must constantly review the frame of reference it offers to doctors and the public may be surprised to learn that that process is never static. Sir Denis Hill in this paper is speaking personally and not as a member of the General Medical Council or of any of that body's special committees. (shrink)

Although the ethical and legal worlds are often at odds, a wealth of information is gained by evaluating legal decisions from an ethical perspective. Evaluating court decisions from an ethical viewpoint, increases our knowledge, and helps to beneficially influence future court precedent. Of particular importance to the relationship between the law, business, and ethics, is the ideal of beneficence and non-maleficence. It is the court’s role to protect the rights of individuals, especially with regards to their health care provision. These (...) issues are especially present in conflicts that relate to the availability and access to health care and insurance coverage. Patient autonomy, physician malpractice and informed consent are all influenced by such current court precedent as addressed bythe Employee Retirement Income and Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). This leads us to the central theme of this discussion on the ethical implications of the Supreme Court precedent on ERISA. (shrink)

Lest we take Zhu Xi merely as a grand synthesizer who, in the words of Wing-tsit Chan, made "Neo-Confucianism truly Confucian" by countering and assimilating Buddhist and Daoist influences, this volume urges us to regard him as a profound philosopher who brought metaphysical and cosmological insights to bear on ethical cultivation and social praxis. The twelve essays assembled in Returning to Zhu Xi: Emerging Patterns within the Supreme Polarity, edited by David Jones and Jinli He, examine the manifold aspects (...) of Zhu's philosophy, including its contemporary resonance. The anthology functions on the whole as a general but thoroughly scholarly reference to the wide-ranging thought of Zhu Xi. What distinguishes the... (shrink)

The book analyses the Indian Supreme Court's jurisprudence on homosexuality, its current approach and how its position has evolved in the past ten years. It critically analyses the Court's landmark judgments and its perception of equality, family, marriage and human rights from an international perspective. With the help of European Court of Human Rights' judgments and international conventions, it compares the legal and social discrimination meted out to the Indian LGBTI community with that in the international arena. From a (...) social anthropological perspective, it demonstrates how gay masculinity, although marginalized, serves as a challenge to patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity. This unique book addresses the lack of in-depth literature on gay masculinity, elaborately narrating and analysing contemporary gay masculinity and emerging gay lifestyles in India and highlighting the latest research on the subject of homosexuality in general and in particular with respect to India. It also discusses several new issues concerning the gay men in India supported by the living law approach put forth by Eugen Ehrlich. (shrink)

The first major legislation of the new Scottish Parliament is an Education Act which has a dramatic impact on the General Teaching Council for Scotland. The Act has implications for the influence of teacher unions over the Council, for the dismissal of teachers who are deemed to be incompetent, and for the continuing professional development of teachers. Relationships between teachers and government are thus fundamentally changed by the new Parliament and its processes.

UK general practitioners (GPs) are self-employed entrepreneurs running small businesses with commercial considerations. In this situation there is no clear distinction between information, self-promotion and advertising. In response to the growing public demand for more information about medical services, the medical profession should voluntarily accept the notion of soft self-promotion in the form of 'notices' or 'announcements' placed in newspapers. Newspapers are the most effective way of giving easy access to information. The resistance to newspapers may be more concerned (...) with preserving certain medical traditions than consideration of the public interest. The General Medical Council's (GMC's) arguments against soft self-promotion are seen as misguided paternalism, inconsistent and irrational. (shrink)

After the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, a number of states have immediately banned abortion. Pro-choice activists are responding by promoting medication abortions – a do-it-yourself form of abortion. Women can take pills at home to induce an abortion in the first few weeks of pregnancy. -/- The Biden Administration [1] has backed the abortion pill, too. Attorney-General Merrick B. Garland and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra both issued statements endorsing it. -/- “We (...) stand ready to work with other arms of the federal government that seek to use their lawful authorities to protect and preserve access to reproductive care,” said the Attorney-General. “In particular, the F.D.A. has approved the use of the medication mifepristone. States may not ban mifepristone based on disagreement with the F.D.A.’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy.” -/- As the New York Times [1] has noted, this sets the scene for legal battles. The obvious one is: will anti-abortion states prosecute medication abortions? -/- But – based on experience in the United Kingdom - the use of the abortion pill could give pro-life doctors headaches as well. -/- In the past year, UK has witnessed the saga of two Catholic doctors who have been brought in front of the professional regulator, the General Medical Council, after accusations of professional misconduct. Their crime? They had supplied abortion pill reversal (APR) treatment to women. Accusations of this misconduct have been brought forward by pro-choice organisations [2]. -/- The problem is that some women might panic when they discover that they are pregnant or are pressured to make a rash decision. They obtain abortion pills, often without seeing a doctor faceto- face, and soon after taking the first pill, they regret their decision. -/- Is it too late for them to save their pregnancy? Not necessarily. -/- A treatment developed in the US works about half the time. It involves the woman taking progesterone after the first abortion pill to counteract the abortifacient action of the drug. -/- Seventy-three women in the UK are reported to have taken a full APR course, of whom, 38 – more than half — successfully remained pregnant. Admittedly, the procedure is controversial [3], with pro-choice writers denouncing it as unproven, unscientific, and unethical. This has triggered some healthcare practitioners and scholars to analyse the commitments of the pro-choice movement to APR. In a recently published paper in The New Bioethics [4], two colleagues, Dominic Whitehouse and Steven Bow, and I argue that those espousing a pro-choice worldview should actually support abortion pill reversal and that the current evidence indicates that they should actually be doing it. -/- While some pro-choice activists might be happy simply to expand women’s reproductive choices, some might also want to ensure that these choices are safe and effective at achieving the desired outcome, which in principle includes maintaining a pregnancy. -/- We then review the scientific evidence with respect to the ability of APR to halt an abortion, look at the potential impact of APR on mental health, as well as its procedural safety. While highlighting that gold-standard evidence is lacking, we note that APR is associated with about two times higher rate of embryo survival compared to not completing the full early medical abortion course, that there is large agreement in the literature that women who are ambiguous about abortion are at risk of poorer mental health outcomes after abortion (and argue that women who request APR fall into this category), and highlight that there is no evidence that APR is more dangerous than abandoning an initiated early medical abortion. -/- The latter fact is important, as the results of the only randomised-controlled trial of APR have been at times misrepresented in the media [5.6], creating the impression that APR is not safe while most of the adverse effects occurred in the study group that did not receive APR. As our paper argues, with respect to APR the two UK doctors were “champions of women’s choice and should be congratulated, not condemned, by pro-choice advocates”. -/- While the cases against the two doctors have now been dropped (and there have even been accusations against a member of one of these pro-choice organisations that they pressurised a patient into complaining about one of the doctors and twisted the patient’s experience of the treatment [7]), we argue that it is important to set-up systems to facilitate the future provision of APR to protect both patients and healthcare staff. -/- Our conclusion is that, while being open to any change in evidence, those espousing a pro-choice outlook should “support calls for an APR framework that will protect women and the healthcare professionals caring for them” “and certainly not oppose” APR. -/- The debate over abortion pill reversal will be heading to the United States soon. It is quite possible that it will be denounced as dangerous misinformation. It’s not. But pro-life defenders should be prepared to defend their ground. -/- This article was first published by Mercatornet. (shrink)

In 2005 the member states of the United Nations recognized a “responsibility to protect” (“R2P”) victims of mass atrocities such as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. They acknowledged a special role for the U.N. Security Council in responding to these atrocities, including potentially authorizing military action using its extensive powers under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. However, the Council has very rarely been able to agree on appropriate action, and the five permanent Council members (...) (“P5”), most notably China and Russia, have often vetoed or threatened to veto Council resolutions authorizing R2P action. The article argues that the veto poses a major impediment to the Council acting on its R2P responsibilities, and that to resolve it, the P5, and all U.N. member states, need to agree on a common ethical approach. The article proposes such an approach based on ethical concepts that are widely endorsed by states, especially in the U.N. Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and explores its implications for legal and ethical controversies relating to the role of the Council, its obligations under R2P, and proposed reforms of the veto. (shrink)

Kant’s announced aim in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals is “to seek out and establish the supreme principle of morality.” Kerstein focuses on Kant’s efforts to achieve the first task, which is seeking to identify the only possible supreme principle of morality. Kerstein explicitly sets aside the second task, which is to “establish” the supreme principle as necessary and binding on all rational agents. In other words, Kerstein is concerned with Kant’s “derivation” of the (...) class='Hi'>supreme moral principle but not with its “deduction.” Nevertheless, his project is important, for a successful derivation would entail that utilitarianism, perfectionism, and other competitors to the Categorical Imperative are not viable candidates for being the supreme moral principle. (shrink)

Two Councils dealt with the birth and rebirth of the Moscow Patriarchate: the general Council of Constantinople of 1593 and the local Council of Moscow in 1917. In the course of the discussions two speakers based their arguments in favor of the Russian Patriarchate on the authority of canons: they were the Patriarch of Alexandria Meletius Pigas and the archimandrite, later bishop and martyr, Hilarion Troitsky. Despite the common recourse to the most ancient and authoritative canonical sources, (...) the perspectives of the two speakers appear different. Meletius Pigas refers to the structure of the universal Church, that is to the number and order of the Patriarchal Sees, and he adapts all the legislation he quotes to this end. On the other hand, Hilarion Troitsky considers exclusively the particular Church and rather sees in those same canons the primary intent of safeguarding the ecclesiastical autonomy of local jurisdictions and, above all, the need for a Primacy in them. (shrink)

For almost 50 years, the Council of Europe through a series of documents has been helping to build up a set of rules, principles, and strategies related to culture, environment, ethics, and sustainable development. At the moment, one of the most important aims of the Council of Europe’s agenda deals with the elaboration of the General Principles for the Protection of the Environment and Sustainable Development, as raised in document CO-DBP (2003)2 related to the environmental subject. The (...) intention of the Council of Europe is to encourage national authorities to implement these General Principles into their national environmental policies. These principles should have an important effect, especially in those countries which are new members of the European Union. The primary target of this paper is the study of these principles and the setting of their entailed implications in order to establish a relation between values and policy making. Quite often, the conclusions adopted by the agreements generated within the framework of the European Union are controversial. Therefore, a study aiming to lay the foundations of these principles will make the exchange of ideas easier, providing a wider and more detailed scope in the European environmental policy. (shrink)

Over many long years, whenever a modest and not quite disinterested emissary of a member Association of the International Council of Philosophy and the Humanistic Studies came to visit Jean d'Ormesson at his headquarters in the rue Miollis, patiently clearing his path through mountains of dossiers and brochures, he did not, unlike the title of this paper, associate Jean d'Ormesson with the CIPSH - he simply identified the man before him with the CIPSH itself. An equation born of an (...) admiration barely suppressed under a veneer of polite restraint, an identification perhaps suggested to them by the president or secretary of their home association. Nevertheless a quite unfair one for anyone able to perceive with a greater deal of clarity (the office was very dark in overcast weather) what the ‘Secretary-General’ was, as well and much more, outside of the rue Miollis: the writer, the chronicler of his time, soon to become the assiduously active Academician, or even, dare I suggest, the blue-eyed charmer who graced debates on television. But this summary judgement could readily be forgiven, for the host of the premises had the good taste, when welcoming one to CIPSH, to assume only his mantle as Secretary-General. Besides, for the delegates of member Associations - and it was in this capacity that I first met Jean d'Ormesson before becoming his collaborator on the executive Bureau of CIPSH, and then briefly his successor - he appeared as the effective intermediary with that far-off but richly resourced galaxy called UNESCO. He was the man of warmth and charm who could be relied on to safeguard the subsidies that helped support our conferences and fund our voluminous compilations, which were vital tools for our research. (shrink)

What do the terms sex and gender identity, or gender history, mean in a medical context? When does it matter to a healthcare professional whether a patient has male or female reproductive biology?...

For anyone who teaches the philosophy of law this is an indispensible volume. Currie's intent is to provide a critical history of the Court's constitutional work for the first hundred years. In writing that history he displays the multiple methods of constitutional analysis and the techniques of opinion writing employed under seven Supreme Court justices. Not surprisingly, he concludes that judicial performance is not uniform. Currie makes no attempt to hide the vantage point from which he is writing. He (...) assumes that the Constitution is a law binding the judges no less than the other officials whose action the Court undertakes to review. He flatly states his conviction that judges have no right to ignore those constitutional limitations with which they disagree and adds that when Congress has acted within the powers granted by the Constitution, it is not for the Court to interfere. The same is true for state laws that do not offend the Constitution. "It follows," says Currie, "that the judges have no more right to invent limitations not found in the Constitution than to disregard those put there by the Framers. In short, when a judge swears to uphold the Constitution, he promises obedience to a set of rules laid down by someone else.". (shrink)

As global governance institutions proliferate and become more powerful, their legitimacy is subject to ever sharper scrutiny. Yet what legitimacy means in this context and how it is to be ascertained are often unclear. In a previous paper in this journal, we offered a general account of the legitimacy of such institutions and a set of standards for determining when they are legitimate. In this paper we focus on the legitimacy of the UN Security Council as an institution (...) for making decisions concerning the use of military force across state borders. The context for this topic has changed over the last decade as a result of the ongoing development of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) doctrine and extensive discussions about it in the United Nations. Yet the mostly widely accepted proposals for RtoP still require Security Council authorization for forceful intervention, and strictly limit the conditions under which such intervention may take place. (shrink)

In September 1998 the Bundesrztekammer, i.e., the German Medical Association, published new principles concerning terminal medical care. Even before publication, a draft of these principles was very controversial, and prompted intense public debate in the mass media. Despite some of the critics' suspicions that the principles prepared the way for liberalization of active euthanasia, euthanasia is unequivocally rejected in the principles. Physician-assisted suicide is considered to violate professional medical rules. In leaving aside some of the notions customarily used in the (...) euthanasia debate, e.g., passive euthanasia, the principles emphasize the obligation of physicians to offer and the right of patients to receive palliative care. The principles explicitly list modalities of basic treatment that are indispensable in all cases, such as the obligation to satisfy hunger and thirst. This statement is meant to resolve the dispute on nutrition and hydration at the end of life, as it shifts the focus of care from maintaining physiological parameters to satisfying subjective needs. For patients in a persistent vegetative state, artificial feeding is held to be obligatory. Yet, the principles make reference to recent German jurisdiction which permit the stopping of artificial feeding if it is in accordance with the patient's presumed will. Additionally, the wording concerning this issue is found to remain unclear. Patients' autonomy is strengthened by explicitly welcoming advance directives as a means to ascertain patients' wills. The principles mark some changes compared to earlier documents. They deserve careful analysis and should be considered in the international debate on issues concerning the end of life. (shrink)

The Second Vatican Council is not in vain, and with full responsibility is called a landmark event. Without exaggeration, we can say that he renewed the face of the Catholic Church.At that time, the issue of reform, but rather, said that the Church's restoration was virtually "vibrant in the air". Thus, for example, Pope Pius XII in the Encyclical "Mediator Dei" was entertaining over certain aspects of the modernization of the Liturgy. And in general, the world, which in (...) the middle of the last century had not yet recovered from two terrible wars that lived in a state of global hostility, called the Cold War, was particularly in need of an open Church. (shrink)

Medical research aims to achieve a better scientific understanding of health and disease. It is firstly undertaken for the improvement of medical care in general, not excluding a potential direct benefit for participants undergoing such research. There is a traditional conflict between the fundamental rights and the dignity of those participating individuals and the interests of science, researchers and even the society. The Convention of Human Rights and Biomedicine of the Council of Europe is a new legally binding (...) instrument for the solution of these conflicts. (shrink)

The Science Granting Councils Initiative (SGCI) in Africa aims to strengthen the capacities of selected science granting councils (SGCs) in sub-Saharan Africa in order to support research and evidence-based policies that will contribute to Africa’s economic and social development. As part of SGCI, a study was conducted in 2021 to investigate strategies that have been adopted by fifteen SGCs participating in SGCI in promoting ethical practice in research and innovation. Data collection for the study was mainly based on a data (...) abstraction form that was completed for each country by an assigned focal person with a background in research ethics. The focal persons relied on various methods including document and website review and interviews with senior officers at the SGCs. The study specifically sought to describe the strategies and activities being implemented by the 15 SGCs in promoting ethics and integrity in research and innovation. The study revealed various strategies that were being implemented by the 15 SGCs aimed at promoting ethics in research and innovation including requiring proof of research ethics committee approval before releasing research funds and the inclusion of ethics questions in the application form for funding. It was observed that some activities and strategies were generic to most SGCs for example the development of general/standard guidelines for the conduct of research in each respective country. Overall, the different SGCs were involved in a broad spectrum of activities aimed at promoting research ethics and this paper presents an opportunity for cross fertilization of ideas. By providing a summary of the various strategies that SGCs are using in promoting ethical conduct of research, it is hoped that this paper will lead to improvements in the ways SGCs provide support and oversight over the research that they fund. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment by Ulrich LehnerCarlos M. N. EireThe Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment. By Ulrich Lehner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. ix + 294. $37.99 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-19-762060-1.This marvelous book encapsulates the seismic shift in perspective that has taken place in the study of early (...) modern Catholicism in the past four decades, and, at the same time, it sharpens the historiographical cutting edge of this new approach. Instead of focusing on the Council of Trent, the papacy, the Inquisition, religious orders, institutional reforms, political issues, theological wrangling, heroic saintly figures, or any of the many other external features of reform that previously dominated scholarship on Catholic reform, Lehner dives deeply into sources that shed light on what many scholars have taken to calling “lived religion,” that is, on the myriad ways in which the lives of the Catholic faithful were transformed. As he puts it, his book focuses on “spiritual resources” and rediscovers “neglected perspectives by shedding light on the forms and methods early modern Catholics used to ‘reform’ themselves and achieve spiritual progress” (ix, 1).This is a detail-oriented book, a brilliant interweaving of cultural, intellectual, and social history reminiscent of the best histoire total produced by the Annales school. It is based on the premise that all assertions must be firmly grounded on evidence, a methodological principle to which Lehner adheres in exemplary fashion. Relying on a vast array of texts, he seeks to prove that the early modern Catholic concept of “church reform” was firmly centered on spiritual values, and that the chief aim behind every proposed or implemented change was “the conversion and sanctification of the sinful self” (2). [End Page 697]By focusing on the inner dimensions of Catholic reform, rather than the outward structural dimensions that have traditionally attracted attention, Lehner does not dismiss the significance of structural reforms. His approach to “lived religion” is reminiscent of Thomas Aquinas’s take on the role played by divine grace in the transformation of human beings: “grace does not destroy nature,” said St. Thomas, “but rather perfects it.” Lehner turns this theological dictum into a historiographical one. As he puts it: “Writing the history of transformative spiritual methods and actions of early modern Catholics does not deny these [other] dimensions and does not seek to replace them, but rather complements and elucidates them” (3).Lehner’s fact-driven examination of the myriad ways in which the inner transformation of individuals effected positive changes in the Church and society focuses on nine specific aspects of daily life. Beginning with an analysis of the general dynamics of reform, he proceeds to dissect reforms in nine key components of Catholic culture: the priesthood, sermons, catechesis, family life, lay associations, the sacraments of the Eucharist and confession, prayer, symbols and images, and devotion to Saints Mary and Joseph.Arguing that the spiritual side of reform, or “inner reform,” as he calls it, “represents core ideas and values of early modern Catholic identity, individually and collectively,” Lehner strives to show the ultimate value of his approach through a wealth of details, perhaps with potential critics in mind who might accuse him for valuing subjectivity over objectivity. But he vanquishes any such critics. Ultimately, his thousands of details support his claim that previous interpretations of early modern Catholic reforms that focused primarily on structural issues are not necessarily more “objective,” but actually perpetuate “a chimerical picture of a religion emptied of everything precious to contemporary believers” (158).Much of what Lehner highlights in this book relates to the emotions in one way or another, that is, to reforming impulses that affected the heart as much as the intellect, but he avoids reductionism, positing that much of the inner reform of Catholicism struck a careful yet tenuous balance between opposing dialectical poles. The Church, he insists, aimed at people’s hearts as much as their minds, and instilled fear of hell and purgatory as much as it stressed mercy and salvation. Sermons, he says, leaned toward preaching fear, but the... (shrink)

This paper discusses how the general and abstract concept of legitimacy applies to international institutions, using the United Nations Security Council as an example. We argue that the evaluation of the Security Council’s legitimacy requires considering three significant and interrelated aspects: its purpose, competences, and procedural standards. We consider two possible interpretations of the Security Council’s purpose: on the one hand, maintaining peace and security, and, on the other, ensuring broader respect for human rights. Both of (...) these purposes are minimally morally acceptable for legitimacy. Second, we distinguish between three different competences of the UNSC: 1) the decision-making competence, 2) the quasi-legislative competence, and 3) the referral competence. On this basis, we argue that different procedural standards are required to legitimise these competences, which leads to a more differentiated understanding of the Security Council’s legitimacy. While maintaining that the membership structure of the Council is a severe problem for its legitimacy, we suggest other procedural standards that can help to improve its overall legitimacy, which include broad transparency, deliberation, and the revisability of the very terms of accountability themselves. (shrink)

Āsakti has its roots in the ancient Indian knowledge system. It precipitates the concept of attachment in the Indian perspective. The following paper explores the psychological perspective of āsakti from the Shrimad Bhagavad Gita while maintaining its philosophical purpose and nature. Āsakti hinders the path of self-realization; hence, from the psycho-philosophical lens, its inquiry with scientific understanding is important for spiritual growth. Āsakti can be understood as a river with five tributaries. Each tributary branches out of the river as an (...) independent water body, but has its traces though in the river. Āsakti is a combination of Rāga (approach), Dveṣa (aversion) and Ahaṁkāra (ego focus), is related to the operation of Triguṇa, moving from āsakti to anāsakti brings peace, happiness and health. In its unregulated form, āsakti leads to intellectual, mental and spiritual decay. Its control and regulation leads to anāsakti, spiritual growth, liberation from bondages and surrenderance to the supreme power. (shrink)