BackgroundPrevious studies suggested a circadian variation of migraine attack onset, although, with contradictory results – possibly because of the existence of migraine subgroups with different circadian attack onset peaks. Migraine is primarily a brain disorder, and if the diversity in daily distribution of migraine attack onset reflects an important aspect of migraine, it may also associate with interictal brain activity. Our goal was to assess brain activity differences in episodic migraine subgroups who were classified according to their typical circadian peak (...) of attack onset.MethodsTwo fMRI studies were conducted with migraine without aura patients (n= 31 in Study 1,n= 48 in Study 2). Among them, three subgroups emerged with typical Morning, Evening, and Varying start of attack onset. Whole brain activity was compared between the groups in an implicit emotional processing fMRI task, comparing fearful, sad, and happy facial stimuli to neutral ones.ResultsIn both studies, significantly increased neural activation was detected to fearful (but not sad or happy) faces. In Study 1, the Evening start group showed increased activation compared to the Morning start group in regions involved in emotional, self-referential (left posterior cingulate gyrus, right precuneus), pain (including left middle cingulate, left postcentral, left supramarginal gyri, right Rolandic operculum) and sensory (including bilateral superior temporal gyrus, right Heschl’s gyrus) processing. While in Study 2, the Morning start group showed increased activation compared to the Varying start group at a nominally significant level in regions with pain (right precentral gyrus, right supplementary motor area) and sensory processing (bilateral paracentral lobule) functions.ConclusionOur fMRI studies suggest that different circadian attack onset peaks are associated with interictal brain activity differences indicating heterogeneity within migraine patients and alterations in sensitivity to threatening fearful stimuli. Circadian variation of migraine attack onset may be an important characteristic to address in future studies and migraine prophylaxis. (shrink)

Domestic sovereignty and international sovereignty have both been eroded in recent years, but the former to a much greater extent than the latter. An oppressed people's right to fight for liberal democratic reforms in their own country is treated as axiomatic, as the international responses to the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya illustrate. But there is a reluctance to accept that foreign intervention is always justified in the same circumstances. Ned Dobos assesses the moral cogency of this double (...) standard and asks whether intervention can be consistently and coherently opposed given our attitudes towards other kinds of political violence. His thought-provoking book will interest a wide range of readers in political philosophy and international relations. (shrink)

This book addresses the question of when and why it is justifiable for a polity to prepare for war by militarizing. In doing so it highlights the ways in which a civilian population compromises its own security in maintaining a permanent military establishment, and explores the moral and social costs of militarization.

Relative to the abundance of literature devoted to the legal significance of UN authorisation, little has been written about whether the UN’s failure to sanction an intervention can ever make it immoral. This is the question that I take up here. I argue that UN authorisation (or lack thereof) can have some indirect bearing on the moral status of a humanitarian intervention. That is, it can affect whether an intervention satisfies other widely accepted justifying conditions, such as proportionality, “internal” legitimacy, (...) and likelihood of success. The more interesting question, however, is whether the UN’s failure to provide a mandate can make a humanitarian operation unjust independently of these other familiar considerations. Is a proportional, internally legitimate humanitarian intervention, with a just cause and strong prospect of success, still morally unacceptable if it is not approved by the United Nations Security Council? This is the question that I turn to in the second half of the paper. (shrink)

Suppose it is foreseeable that you will soon encounter a drowning child, whom you will only be able to rescue if you learn to swim. In this scenario we might think that you have a “prospective duty” to take swimming lessons given that this will be necessary to perform the future rescue. Cécile Fabre argues that, by parity of reasoning, states have a prospective duty to build and maintain military establishments. My argument in this essay pulls in the opposite direction. (...) First, I emphasize that learning to swim is only a prospective duty under very specific circumstances. Normally there is no such duty; hence, we do not normally think that people deserve moral censure for choosing to forego swimming lessons. I then argue that, similarly, while a prospective duty to build a military can arise under some conceivable circumstances, these are not the circumstances that most states today find themselves in. I then suggest a more fitting domestic analogy to guide our thinking about this issue: Maintaining a standing army is less like learning to swim and more like keeping an assault weapon in the home “just in case.” This analogy supports a defeasible presumption against militarization. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethics of networking as a means of competition, specifically networking to improve one’s prospects of prevailing in formal competitive processes for jobs or university placements. There are broadly two ways that networking might be used to influence the outcome of some such process: through the “exchange of affect” between networker and selector, and through the demonstration of merit by networker to selector. Both raise ethical problems that have been overlooked but need to be addressed.

In many countries the military still threatens to punish personnel that disobey orders for the sake of self‐preservation. The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) in the U.S., for instance, makes it a crime for a soldier to refuse a directive from a superior unless what that order requires is “patently unlawful”. This qualification is usually interpreted narrowly to cover orders to commit war crimes or to victimize civilians, not orders that would require sacrifice of life or limb. In other (...) words, soldiers are afforded some right of conscientious disobedience, but no right of non‐conscientious, self‐regarding disobedience.We would not think it morally justifiable for any civilian employer to demand and enforce obedience unto death. In most countries it is not legally justifiable, either. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970), for instance, grants workers a right to disobey an instruction and request an official workplace inspection if ever ever they believe that an “imminent danger” exists, where this is defined in terms of a reasonable expectation “of death or serious physical harm.” 5 The Act protects employees who exercise this right from discharge or retaliation. If it is not permissible for civilian employers to enforce compliance with such “imminently dangerous” directives, then why is it permissible for the military? This paper consider a number of possible responses to this question. (shrink)

In a recent analysis of the principle of civilian immunity, Igor Primoratz asks whether the circle of legitimate targets in war might be expanded so as to include at least some civilian bystanders. However Primoratz’ formulation of the ‘responsible bystander’ argument depends for its cogency on there being natural or non-acquired positive duties, and this is controversial. Furthermore, we feel that the citizens of a government unjustly at war are primarily and specially obliged to undermine that war, and that this (...) is not simply a function of their being in the best position to do so, (which may not always be the case). Primoratz’ version of ‘responsible bystander’ cannot account for this. Here I develop an alternative formulation that does, and which is not reliant on controversial premises. I argue that to empower a government democratically is to assume a positive obligation to prevent that government from using its power to prosecute an unjust war, and that the neglect of this duty may render a significant portion of the duty-bound collective legitimate targets of necessary and proportionate violence. In closing I dispute Primoratz’ claim that this conclusion has “very little purchase on reality” or is irrelevant for practical purposes. (shrink)

One of the most commonplace worries about humanitarian intervention relates to the perverse incentives that it might create, or the adverse reactions that it might provoke. For instance, it is sometimes said that by weakening the norm of sovereignty humanitarian intervention can encourage unscrupulous states to wage aggressive wars of self-interest using human rights as a pretense. It is feared, in other words, that humanitarian intervention—even when it has the purest motives—might ultimately do more harm than good by inciting unwanted (...) reactions from other states or substate groups. I will refer to these kinds of knock-on effects as the mediated consequences of intervention. They are brought about via the interceding agency of parties other than the intervener. It is generally assumed that when judging the proportionality of a humanitarian intervention, these consequences must be factored into the equation. If an intervention is expected to provoke adverse reactions the accumulated costs of which will outweigh the benefits that the intervention will deliver, then the intervention is thought to be disproportional and, therefore, unjustified. I want to challenge this assumption. I begin by considering what the principle of proportionality can reasonably demand of rebels who are defending their own basic rights against an oppressive government. I argue that a rebellion in such circumstances cannot plausibly be rendered impermissible solely by the expectation of negative mediated consequences, even when those consequences outweigh the anticipated benefits of the rebellion. This would seem to imply that rebels may discount mediated consequence from the proportionality calculus. But if this is so, do we have sound reasons for withholding the same prerogative from humanitarian interveners pursuing similar ends and using similar means? Can we justify asymmetric standards of proportionality? (shrink)

The practice of humanitarian intervention, which involves one state intervening militarily into another state in order to prevent abuses of human rights, raises a plethora of ethical and political issues. How is foreign intervention to be reconciled with state sovereignty? Is intervention a threat to international peace and stability? Are alien values being imposed on the target society? Each of these questions has been thoroughly explored by both philosophers and jurists. But the notion that a state infringes the rights of (...) its own citizens by waging war to defend the human rights of foreigners has received relatively little attention. The only thorough philosophical exploration of this problem to date - Allen Buchanan's “The Internal Legitimacy of Humanitarian Intervention” - is the focus of this paper. My aim here is not to offer a resolution to the “internal” problem, but simply to show that Buchanan misrepresents it in several important respects. First, Buchanan understates the strength of this objection: it is much more resilient than he gives it credit for. Secondly, he overstates its scope, or the range of humanitarian interventions to which it applies. And finally, Buchanan is mistaken to think that whether or not an intervening state fulfils the rights of its own citizens can be determined prior to, and therefore independently of, the question of whether its actions are consistent with the rights of the society targeted by the intervention. (shrink)

The present article proposes an examination of the disciplinary evolution of demographic research in Communist Romania, as a case study of the mutually constitutive, multifaceted relationship between science, politics, ideology and memory. My research tries to compensate for the lack of access to the archives of the central institutions for population research during Communism, by combining published sources, with different archival documents, mainly coming from personal funds of two population researchers, from the fund of the Central Commission for Planning, of (...) the Chancellery of the Romanian Communist Party and from diplomatic archives. I pay attention to the side of the story offered by the actors themselves, focusing on the way in which the legacy of interwar demography was assumed and invoked in different post-war accounts regarding the history of demographic discipline in Romania. By doing so, I seek to contribute to writing a history of science as a product of complex entanglements between the different factors that circumscribe the process of knowledge production within a larger social and political context: specific professional interests and institutional settings, subjective interpretations, ideological pressures and attempts of political control. (shrink)

Soldiering has traditionally been thought of as something radically different from a job or career, but things are changing. Sociologists have observed an “occupational shift” in military service....

Professional musicians are expected to perform at a very high level of proficiency. Many times, this high standard is associated with perfectionism, which has been shown to prompt both adaptive and maladaptive motivational dynamics and outcomes among music students. The question about how perfectionism interplays with motivational dynamics in music students is still unanswered and research within this line is scarce, especially in Latin America. In the light of Self-Determination Theory, this cross-sectional study investigated the relationship between the perceptions of (...) motivational context, basic psychological needs, perfectionism, and flourishing in University music students from Lima, Peru. We performed a path analysis testing a model in which motivational teaching styles predicted both, perfectionism and flourishing via need satisfaction and frustration. The model's fit indices were ideal [χ2 = 7.48, p = 0.300, CFI = 0.998, TLI = 0.992, RMSEA = 0.021, SRMR =0.040]. In this model, perceived autonomy supportive style predicted need satisfaction positively and need frustration negatively; perceived controlling teaching style did not predict need satisfaction nor frustration. In turn, need satisfaction positively predicted adaptive perfectionism and flourishing; whereas, need frustration predicted maladaptive perfectionism. These results shed light on the relevance of perfectionism in the psychology of higher music education students. Lastly, we highlight the importance of autonomy support in fostering adaptive high standards and flourishing in music learning. (shrink)

The principle of absolute sovereignty may have been consigned to history, but a strong presumption against foreign intervention seems to have been left in its stead. On the dominant view, only massacre and ethnic cleansing justify armed intervention, these harms must be already occurring or imminent, and the prudential constraints on war must be satisfied. Each of these conditions has recently come under pressure. Those looking to defend the dominant view have typically done so by invoking international peace and stability, (...) or the value of communal self-determination. But the internal aspect of legitimacy has been overlooked in all of this. If a government insists on defending the human rights of foreigners, it must also be sure not to violate the rights of its own citizens in the process. I argue that the current presumption against humanitarian intervention cannot be substantially relaxed for internal reasons, or given the obligations that states owe to their own constituents. (shrink)

The United States is one of the most charitable nations, yet comprises some of the most materialistic citizens in the world. Interestingly, little is known about how the consumer trait of materialism, as well as the opposing moral trait of gratitude, influences charitable giving. We address this gap in the literature by theorizing and empirically testing that the effects of these consumer traits on charitable behavior can be explained by diverse motivations. We discuss the theoretical implications, along with implications for (...) charitable organizations, and offer suggestions for future research. (shrink)

The idea that jobs should be awarded purely on merit has become something of an axiom, but the moral basis of it remains elusive. If employers are under a duty to appoint the most qualified candidate, to whom exactly is this duty owed, and on what grounds? I distinguish two kinds of answers to this question. Candidate-centred arguments are those according to which qualifications generate entitlements for their bearer, such that the most qualified applicant for a job has some moral (...) claim or right to it. But of course job-seekers are not the only parties with a stake in personnel selection decisions. The existing employees of an organisation, its clients and creditors, its shareholders, and society more generally are also affected. The duty to hire on merit, one might argue, is owed ultimately to one or more of these “stakeholder” groups. I refer to arguments with this structure as stakeholder-centred. The purpose of the paper is to carefully distinguish, organise and scrutinise various arguments within these camps; to sketch a map of the ethical terrain, so to speak. What the sketch reveals is that both the scope and weight of the duty to hire on merit — the exceptions to it, and the stringency of it — vary depending on its grounds. The argumentative strategy that we adopt to justify meritocracy, then, is of both theoretical and practical importance. (shrink)

abstract Many reasons have been given as to why humanitarian intervention might not be justified even where rebellion with similar aims would be a morally legitimate option. One of them is that intervention involves the imposition of alien values on the target society. Michael Walzer formulates this objection in terms of a people's right to a state that ‘expresses their inherited culture’ and that they can truly ‘call their own’. I argue that this right can plausibly be said to extend (...) sovereignty to at least some illiberal governments, and therefore to impose at least some moral constraints on humanitarian intervention. The problem for Walzer is that this right cannot form the basis of a constraint that applies to foreign intervention exclusively. Once the details of Walzer's argument are teased out, it becomes apparent that civil war and revolution must be equally restricted by this right. Hence a people's prerogative to be governed in accordance with familiar traditions cannot coherently be invoked to show that intervention is impermissible in cases where insurrection is taken to be justified. (shrink)

The ‘working poor’ are paid below‐subsistence wages for full‐time employment. What, if anything, is wrong with this? The extant philosophical literature offers two kinds of answers. The first says that failing to pay workers enough to live on takes unfair advantage of them; the workers are exploited. The second says that employers who fail to pay living wages default on a duty of care grounded in a special relationship; the workers are neglected. These arguments, though generally sound, provide an incomplete (...) picture of the wrongdoing involved. Neither adequately captures the intuition that a firm treats its employees not just badly, but disdainfully, by failing to pay them a living wage. My goal is to bring this particular feature of the relationship to salience. Working full‐time in return for below‐subsistence, I will argue, is an arrangement under which the worker is demeaned or insulted. This becomes apparent once we appreciate the expressive power of wages, and the intimate connection between one's labour and one's self. (shrink)

To what extent does the ethicality of an advertisement depend on the good or service being advertised? This question has engaged business ethicists for decades. Some say that an ad for something good is always good, while an ad for something bad is always bad. Others insist that advert-evaluation and product-appraisal are entirely independent of one another—the ethics of selling has nothing to do with what is being sold. In this paper I add another dimension to the debate. I do (...) this not by offering an alternative answer to the question, but by inverting the questions itself. I ask: To what extent does our moral assessment of advertising influence our moral evaluation of particular products? I hope to show that one’s general attitude towards advertising invariably colours one’s appraisal of particular goods and services. If advertising is seen as a morally objectionable enterprise, products which may seem innocuous start to look not only useless, but baneful and corrupting. If advertising is seen as a morally, psychologically and socially valuable activity, the same innocuous products start to look fulfilling, enriching, and overall life-enhancing. (shrink)

Targeted killing has become a staple tactic in the “war in terror”. Since the beginning of the second Intifada, Israel is estimated to have killed over four hundred Palestinians in targeted strikes, while the US has killed over two thousand in Pakistan alone since 2004. These statistics include the deaths of innocent bystanders caught in the wrong place at the wrong time—“collateral damage”—as well as the deaths of the terrorists themselves. Be that as it may, the American and Israeli publics (...) have largely settled into an acceptance of the targeted killings carried out in their name.In Anna Goppel’s Killing Terrorists: A Moral and Legal Analysis, even the staunchest defender of targeted killing will find good reason to reconsider. The book does not bother developing an absolute, in-principle objection to targeted killing; it concedes to advocates of the practice that there are conceivable circumstances under which it might be justified. But these circumstances are shown to b .. (shrink)

An armed humanitarian intervention must have a reasonable prospect of success to be justified. It must also be a proportional last resort. These are necessary conditions for legitimate AHI. It has been suggested that, in addition to these necessary conditions, there are also ideal conditions of AHI, namely disinterest and multilateralism. These conditions are said to enhance the moral credentials of an armed intervention without being strictly required. The paper concerns itself with the relationship between these two ideals and the (...) requirement of a reasonable prospect of success. Specifically, I explore the suggestion that the former are in some way instrumental to the latter. On this view, we should aspire towards disinterest and multilateralism because these things contribute to a positive humanitarian outcome. If this is correct then the ideal conditions can be partly grounded in, or justified in reference to, the prospect of success principle. (shrink)

In this article, we will concentrate on the two true norm definitions that have existed throughout the history of the Deontic Logic: that offered by Professor Kalinowski and that proposed by the semantics of possible worlds. The former is based on Tarski’s definition of the true proposition, but it has the drawback of depending on a concrete, philosophical theory concerning the nature of norms. The latter, widely accepted nowadays, presents difficulties which we will analyse, using as a reference, K. Solt’s (...) critique. Despite its limitations, it offers the indisputable advantage of being independant of any concrete, philosophical option, and indicates, in our opinion, the correct way of proceeding. (shrink)

Violence constitutes an important element of reflection for political philosophy. Two proposed theories of violence are discussed here. One takes violence to be the condition of politics. This is Carl Schmitt’s proposal. He says that politics is always conflictive: political space is a battle cam..

In this writing it is presented Rawl’s proposal about the possibility of civil disobedience in the face of a democratic authority legitimately established. Rawlsian civil disobedience shows its antiauthoritarian claims depending on the maintenance of a fair order, and social society is the way of..

Elizabeth Anderson exalts the transition from the aristocratic to the modern ethic of debt as one of the most significant cultural achievements of capitalism. Whereas the debitor was once forced to compromise his liberty, dignity, and equality, today the rights and freedoms of insolvents are legally protected, and disadvantaged members of the community can readily obtain credit without personal supplication. Anderson’s intuition was, until recently, widely shared. Then came the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the ensuing global recession, triggered by (...) mass defaults among “sub-prime” borrowers. Many had entered the mortgage market with no proof of income, no assets behind them, no down-payment, a chequered credit history, and a generally reduced repayment capacity. Suddenly a flurry of criticism was unleashed against the lowering of credit standards and the government programs which pressured lenders to service the poor. My aim in this paper is not to assess the democratization of credit from the point of view of economic efficiency or political prudence, but rather to provide a much needed ethical appraisal. Any number of reasons might be advanced for why a particular government policy is morally objectionable. I will concentrate on the least controversial reason conceivable: the policy violates the rights of citizens. Whether this is true of government-driven credit-democratization - specifically, whether it violates the rights of the lenders compelled to act as agents of the policy, the rights of the third parties exposed to the risks associated with the expansion of credit markets, or both – is the question that I take up here. (shrink)

In the world of human resource management employees who deliberately “withhold effort” on the job are called “production deviants.” The implication is that workers are under a duty to perform as best they can, but why should we accept this? Three answers are presented and interrogated. The first says that employees who withhold effort are guilty of “time-banditry” or theft from their employers. The second says that withholding effort harms one’s colleagues or co-workers. The third suggests that employees owe their (...) employers a debt of gratitude, whose discharge requires that they be as productive as they reasonably can be. (shrink)

There is no denying that international human rights norms are enforced selectively. Some oppressive governments become the targets of military intervention, while the political sovereignty of other, equally oppressive regimes is left intact. My aim in this paper is to determine whether a military operation to defend human rights can possibly be made morally illegitimate by the fact that the state prosecuting it has failed, is failing or will fail to defend human rights under relevantly similar circumstances elsewhere.

En este texto se pretende mostrar la importante tarea que llevó a cabo Vico en torno a la diversidad de culturas, y la posibilidad de comprensión entre ellas, por medio del método hermenéutico que parte de la fantasía. Una apuesta por el pluralismo cultural y el entendimiento de los pueblos desde la categoría de lo (sentido) "común".

Discourses and the ideas, perceptions and templates upon which they are based exert a powerful influence on law-making, push policy-making in a precise direction and determine operational action and outcomes. British counterterrorist law and policy post 9/11 is heavily mediated through a conceptual filter that evokes a siege mode of democracy, which deliberately displaces the traditional rights-based model, and a security narrative based on a double asymmetry. By blending a discursive theoretical approach with an institutionalist perspective, the discussion examines the (...) siege mode of democracy and its implications and the double asymmetry underpinning the Government's framing of the threat and of the means to counter it. Both features of the Government's security discourse are critical in explaining not only British counter-terrorist legislation and policy evolution in the 21st century and the controversial operation ‘Kratos’ adopted by ACPO in 2002, but also their official depiction as necessary, and singular, responses to some structured necessity and the associated logic of ‘no alternative’. (shrink)