In the intellectual confusion prevailing since the demise of Marxism and “marxism”, the attempt is made to define democracy as a matter of pure procedure, explicitly avoiding and condemning any reference to substantive objectives. It can easily be shown, however, that the idea of a purely procedural “democracy” is incoherent and self-contradictory. No legal system whatsoever and no government can exist in the absence of substantive conditions which cannot be left to chance or to the workings of the “market” (...) but must be posited as objectives of political activity. The confusion results from a deficient understanding of what makes a society and an empty idea of “freedom”. The objective of politics is not happiness, an affair to be left to the individuals, but it certainly is liberty understood as participation in the governance of the polity; it is also the pursuit of the common good, defined as the sum of the prerequisites and facilitations of individual autonomy depending on collective action, and as the realization of commonly agreed collective goals. (shrink)

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross‐cultural principles of law? In a between‐subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and (...) also whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross‐culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice. (shrink)

Although it is an increasingly popular assumption that leader mindfulness may positively affect leader behaviors and, in turn, employee outcomes, to date, little empirical evidence supports this view. Against this backdrop, the present research seeks to develop and test a serial mediation model of leader mindfulness. Specifically, we propose that leader mindfulness enhances employee performance and that this relationship is explained by increased leader procedural justice enactment and, subsequently, reduced employees’ emotional exhaustion. We conducted three studies to test this (...) model. Study 1 involved employees from a wide range of organizations in the USA. Study 2 used a sample of leaders and employees from China and measured our model variables at three different points in time. Both studies provide consistent support for our hypotheses. Finally, Study 3 involved a laboratory experiment in which 62 senior executives were assigned to either a mindfulness induction or to a control condition. Again, results revealed a significant and positive link between leader mindfulness and leader procedural justice enactment. In sum, these findings expand our understanding of mindfulness to the domain of leadership, a key area of organizational research. Moreover, they complement prior studies by showing that mindfulness dynamics go beyond intrapersonal effects but also influence the attitudes and behaviors of others. We discuss our findings in light of their contributions to the mindfulness, ethics, and leadership literatures and point out implications for practice. (shrink)

This paper develops a new kind of approach to conspiracy theories – a procedural approach. This approach promises to establish that belief in conspiracy theories is rationally criticisable in general. Unlike most philosophical approaches, a procedural approach does not purport to condemn conspiracy theorists directly on the basis of features of their theories. Instead, it focuses on the patterns of thought involved in forming and sustaining belief in such theories. Yet, unlike psychological approaches, a procedural approach provides (...) a rational critique of conspiracist thought patterns. In particular, it criticises these thought patterns for failing to conform to procedures prescribed by reason. The specific procedural approach that I develop takes its cue from the Kantian notion that reason must be used self-critically. I tentatively suggest that conspiracy theorists fail to engage in the relevant sort of self-critique in at least three ways: they do not critically examine their own motivations, they avoid looking at matters from the point of view of others, and they fail to reflect on the limits of human knowledge. (shrink)

In “The Promise and Reality of Public Engagement in the Governance of Human Genome Editing Research,” Conley et al. raise (2023) important critiques of several public engagement practices in the re...

Committees established for the ethical review of research involving animals have become a widespread legal standard around the world. Despite many differences in their composition, powers, and institutional settings, they share many common problems related to the well-established standards of procedural justice in administrative practice. The paper adapts the general theory of procedural justice to the specific context of ethical review committees. From this perspective, the main concerns over the procedural aspects of the ethical evaluation of research (...) projects are identified and examined. They include in particular the standards of the committees’ composition, impartiality, fair hearing, appeal, transparency, and benevolence. Their proper reflection in the regulatory regimes of animal ethics committees is necessary to secure the standards of fairness of the ethical review itself. This, in turn, is a condition of the moral and social legitimacy of all administrative and quasi-administrative procedures, including the committees’ operations. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years, technical advances have taken place in medicine that have greatly increased the possibilities of life-prolonging intervention. The increased possibilities of intervening have brought along new ethical questions. Not everything that is technically possible is appropriate in a specific case: not everything that could be done should be done. In the 1980s, a new term was coined to indicate a class of inappropriate interventions: “medically futile treatment”. A debate followed, with contributions from the USA and several (...) western European countries. A similar debate later took place in Mediterranean countries, although with a different terminology. The purpose of this article is to provide an up-to-date and systematic analysis of the concept of futility, and to draw some conclusions on its operationalisation in medical practice. While the concept of “medical futility” in theory applies to all kinds of medical intervention that might be performed without being medically indicated—things such as certain medical screenings and cosmetic surgery—in practice the literature on “futility” deals only with life-saving and life-sustaining medical interventions. This article deals with this more limited application of the concept of “futility”. (shrink)

Central to Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia is a defense of the legitimacy of the minimal state’s use of coercion against anarchist objections. Individuals acting within their natural rights can establish the state without committing wrongdoing against those who disagree. Nozick attempts to show that even with a natural executive right, individuals need not actually consent to incur political obligations. Nozick’s argument relies on an account of compensation to remedy the infringement of the non-consenters’ procedural rights. Compensation, however, cannot (...) remedy the infringement, for either it is superfluous to Nozick’s account of procedural rights, or it is made to play a role inconsistent with Nozick’s liberal voluntarist commitments. Nevertheless, Nozick’s account of procedural rights contains clues for how to solve the problem. Since procedural rights are incompatible with a natural executive right, Nozickeans can argue that only the state can enforce individuals’ rights without wronging anyone, thus refuting the anarchist. Thanks to Annette Dufner, Arnt Myrstad, Arthur Ripstein, Gopal Sreenivasan, James Sterba, Chloe Taylor, Sergio Tenenbaum, and Shelley Weinberg. Thanks also to Matt Zwolinski and Jonelle DePetro, who commented on earlier versions of the paper at the Central APA 2007 and at the 2006 Illinois Philosophical Association Conference (respectively). Finally, thanks to my graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for their active engagement with the ideas during a seminar on liberal theories of justice (fall 2007). (shrink)

The U.S. Supreme Court held, in American Manufacturers Mutual Insurance Co. v. Sullivan, 119 S. Ct. 988, that state workers’ compensation system insurers cannot be sued for withholding health care benefits for work-related injuries while they decide whether the treatment is “reasonable” and “necessary.” The respondents, ten employees and two organizations representing employees who received medical benefits under the Workers’ Compensation Act, brought a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 action against state officials, the Pennsylvania State Workers’ Insurance Fund, private insurers, and (...) the school district, alleging that their due process rights were violated by provisions of the Pennsylvania Workers’ Compensation Act, 77 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. § 1 et seq.. The Act permits suspension of benefits without notice or opportunity to be heard pursuant to a “utilization review” process.To control costs, Pennsylvania amended its workers’ compensation system in 1993. Under the Act, an employer or its insurer must pay for all reasonable and necessary medical treatment. (shrink)

Most critics of our contemporary meritocratic practices and institutions believe their arguments speak to the defects of the ideal of meritocracy itself. I argue that this is a misguided generalization because meritocracy can take many forms depending on the conception of the good and broader theory of justice to which the distributive principle of merit it is attached. To illustrate, I contrast two radically different forms of meritocracy – a telic or end-oriented model based on Plato’s Kallipolis and a (...) class='Hi'>procedural model inherent in our free market of careers open to talents. Far from being a unified ideal, meritocracy is a spectrum of social and political arrangements, ranging between the telic and the procedural poles. Thus, identifying ‘merit’ and ‘meritocracy’ as the main sources of injustice in our contemporary societies further conceals the background conditions and underlying commitments that should be subject to our critical scrutiny. (shrink)

This paper re-interprets the precautionary principle as a ‘social epistemic rule’. First, it argues that sometimes policy-makers should act on claims which have not been scientifically established....

Resumen: El artículo ofrece un replanteamiento del debate sobre la conveniencia de atribuir poderes probatorios al juez. Para ello, se sostiene, por un lado, que la respuesta para ese debate debe vincularse necesariamente al modelo de proceso y de juez que se pretenda implementar, así como a la necesidad de sostener el objetivo de averiguación de la verdad en el proceso judicial. Por otro lado, una respuesta adecuada al problema planteado requiere un análisis cuidadoso de los distintos poderes probatorios y (...) del reparto de los mismos entre el juez y las partes. Abstract: The paper analyzes the debate on the convenience of attributing evidential powers to the judge. Ii is argued, on the one hand, that any response for this debate depends necessarily upon 1) the features of two models to be implemented: the model of the judicial process and that of the judge; as well as upon 2) the need to assume the search for truth as the aim in every judicial process. On the other hand, a correct answer to the problem needs a careful analysis of the different -and differently distributed- evidential powers the judge and the parties have. (shrink)

I argue that Habermas’s proposed system of rights fails to offer an adequate account of the relation between rights and moral injury. In providing a non-moral justification for rights, Habermas’s functional-normative argument excludes the moral intuition that persons are worthy of being protected from a class of injurious actions (i.e. false imprisonment, religious persecution). Habermas does offer clearly stated reasons for his proposed normative, yet non-moral foundation for a legitimate legal order, including the claim that the functional imperatives of modern (...) legal systems cannot be reduced to morality. My positive thesis is that at least some rights are moral norms whose content and justification derive from a moral point of view informed by the idea of persons as free and equal. (shrink)

A challenge for the theorising of climate justice is that even when the agents whose actions are supposed to be regulated are cooperative and act in good faith, they may still disagree about how the burdens and benefits of dealing with climate change should be distributed. This article is a contribution to the formulation of a useful role for normative theorising in light of this bounded nature of climate justice. We outline a theory of pure procedural climate justice; its (...) content, function in relation to international climate diplomacy, and justification. The theory is ‘pure’ in the sense that it does not rely on an independent criterion of what are just outcomes in negotiations of climate responsibilities. Rather, it specifies procedural fairness norms, such as transparency, reciprocity and participation, which make the process of negotiation fair independently of which account of substantive climate justice happens to be correct. Such procedural fairness norms are justified in part by being expressions of an ideal of a reasonable negotiator, an ideal which itself commands respect. They are also justified as means to an effective coordinated response to dangerous climate change in virtue of their capacity to create trust, predictability and accountability. (shrink)

This paper questions the view that knowledge must be articulable or at least experiential. It asserts that what distinguishes habitual yet intentional action from a mechanistic response is its grounding in a suitable claim to knowledge. However, it denies that a necessary condition for knowing how to perform an action is the ability of the subject to either articulate the particulars of that act, or experience it as appropriate.

Workplace procedural justice is an important motivator for employee work attitude and performance. This research examines how procedural justice affects employee engagement. We developed three propositions. First, based on the group engagement model, we hypothesized that procedural justice enhances employee engagement through employee organizational identification. Second, employees with stronger moral identity centrality are more likely to be engaged in their jobs. Third, procedural justice compensates for the effect of moral identity centrality on employee engagement. Specifically, when (...) procedural justice is higher, employee moral identity centrality plays a less significant role in employee engagement; whilst when procedural justice is lower, the effect of moral identity centrality on employee engagement is stronger. Research findings based on an employee survey in a leading financial service organization provide support for the above propositions. (shrink)

Typically, thalamic aphasias appear to be primarily lexical-semantic disorders representing difficulty using stored declarative memories for semantic information to access lexical word forms. Yet, there also is reason to believe that the thalamus might play a role in linguistic procedural memory. For more than two decades, we have known that basal ganglia dysfunction is associated with difficulties in procedural learning, and specific thalamic nuclei are the final waypoint back to the cortex in cortico-basal ganglia-cortical loops. Recent analyses of (...) the role of the thalamus in lexical-semantic processes and of the role of the basal ganglia in linguistic processes suggest that thalamic participation is not simply a matter of declarative vs. procedural memory, but a matter of how the thalamus participates in lexical-semantic processes and in linguistic procedural memory, as well as the interaction of these processes. One role for the thalamus in accessing lexical forms for semantic concepts relates to the stabilization of a very complex semantic-lexical interface with thousands of representations on both sides of the interface. Further, the possibility is discussed that the thalamus, through its participation in basal ganglia loops, participates in two linguistic procedural memory processes: syntactic/grammatical procedures and procedures for finding words to represent semantic concepts, with the latter interacting intricately with declarative memories. These concepts are discussed in detail along with complexities that can be addressed by future research. (shrink)

This Article examines consumer law enforcement in the EU. It shows how the effectiveness of collective and individual redress is intrinsically linked to the interplay between administrative and judicial enforcement and alternative dispute resolution. It addresses the trends and the contradictions of EU enforcement policies and their impact on national systems by looking at the role of general principles and fundamental rights, in particular Article 47 of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. It concludes with policy recommendations concerning how the (...) various consumer enforcement mechanisms should be coordinated at the EU and national level to ensure comprehensive and effective protection in compliance with fundamental rights. (shrink)