A ceux qui se montrent désireux de saisir l'épaisseur politique et historique du droit constitutionnel, les différends opposant les corps constitués peuvent apparaître, dans leurs expressions les plus marquées, comme des objets d'étude particulièrement stimulants. En effet, ces conflits peuvent se présenter comme de singuliers laboratoires où devient brusquement visible la texture politique des lois constitutionnelles dont les dispositions sont parfois si fortement tissées d'incertitudes et d'ellipses qu'elles laissent soudain jaillir l'imprévisible. D'une part, le conflit constitutionnel n'est pas une simple (...) controverse constitutionnelle participant généralement d'un processus historique de pacification des différends politiques par le droit : d'autre part, il constitue un conflit politique dont la particularité réside dans le fait que les acteurs s'efforcent d'étayer leur raisonnement par des arguments juridiques tirés d'une lecture de la lettre constitutionnelle, chaque camp accusant la partie adverse d'une mésinterprétation ou d'une violation de ses dispositions. Lors d'une telle crise, mis à l'épreuve de sa propre force, le droit constitutionnel prend toute la mesure de l'indétermination et de la duplicité de ses règles. Qu'ils portent sur l'interprétation ou sur l'application des dispositions constitutionnelles relatives aux modalités d'exercice de la puissance étatique, les différends entre organes constitués peuvent ainsi, dans certaines circonstances, dépasser le stade de la simple controverse pour épouser la forme plus dense du conflit constitutionnel. En effet, quand la difficulté de mettre un terme au différend est telle que les processus de discussion et de délibération codifiés par le droit sont eux-mêmes impuissants à imposer une solution reconnue acceptable par tous les acteurs, le durcissement de la crise peut alors conduire à une situation qu'il est possible de qualifier de conflit constitutionnel. Le présent ouvrage recueille les Actes de la Journée d'études organisée à la Faculté de droit et de science politique de Rennes, le 28 novembre 2008, par le Laboratoire d'Etude du Droit Public de l'université de Rennes 1. (shrink)

This book reconceives disability as a set of social relations and practices, as experienced embodiment, and as an emancipatory movement, as well as a biomedical phenomenon. The author brings new attention to complex ethical questions surrounding disability, looking at not only the biomedical understanding of impairment, but also its cultural representations and social organization.

In discourses on digitization and the data economy, it is often claimed that data subjects shall beownersof their data. In this paper, we provide a problem diagnosis for such calls fordata ownership: a large variety of demands are discussed under this heading. It thus becomes challenging to specify what—if anything—unites them. We identify four conceptual dimensions of calls for data ownership and argue that these help to systematize and to compare different positions. In view of this pluralism of data ownership (...) claims, we introduce, spell out and defend a constructive interpretative proposal: claims for data ownership are charitably understood as attempts to call for theredistributionof material resources and the socio-culturalrecognitionof data subjects. We argue that as one consequence of this reading, it misses the point to reject claims for data ownership on the grounds that property in data does not exist. Instead, data ownership brings to attention a claim to renegotiate such aspects of thestatus quo. (shrink)

Research on sustainability assurance is still in its beginnings. One of the key questions in this field that also is of the highest practical relevance is concerned with the quality of the assurance process. However, a common understanding of assurance quality and how it should be measured is still missing. We try to close this gap by building on the financial audit literature. We introduce a definition of assurance quality that comprises two key aspects: the depth of the assurance process (...) and the breadth of the assurance statement. Based on prior research, we hypothesize that a firm’s sustainability performance is related to the depth of the assurance process, while the type of the assurance provider, more precisely the affiliation to the accounting profession, is related to the breadth of the assurance statement. Results for a sample of 122 European firms reveal a negative relationship between sustainability performance and assurance process depth as well as between the affiliation to the accounting profession and assurance statement breadth. Thus, we find evidence that poor sustainability performers ask for in-depth assurance services, most likely as a means to enhance their internal sustainability-related processes and systems. Assurance providers that do not belong to the accounting profession in turn are associated with broader assurance statements. (shrink)

In this article, I investigate whether algorithmic fairness is an inconsistent concept (the inconsistency thesis). Drawing on the work of Kevin Scharp, inconsistent concepts can apply and disapply at the same time (2.). It is shown that paradigmatic issues of algorithmic fairness fit this description (3.). Similarities and differences to received views (4.) and alternatives to the inconsistency thesis are considered (5.). Suggestions are articulated on how the inconsistency thesis might hold ground nevertheless, or at the very least denotes a (...) distinctive option in argumentative space whose status and implications merit further evaluation. (shrink)

La maladie de l'ame... la belle expression platonicienne n'a de cesse d'etre d'actualite. Non seulement elle est prompte a revenir d'epoque en epoque, mais elle semble particulierement friande de la notre. Que cette maladie designe une vague tristesse, un taedium vitae, ou, plus grave, une depression, elle implique tout a la fois la souffrance morale et la souffrance physique. L'ame et le corps sont divises mais se retrouvent dans la douleur si bien que la maladie de l'ame vient de ce (...) que nous avons un corps. De ce constat paradoxal Jackie Pigeaud tire une histoire, celle du triomphe du dualisme, du fardeau de l'ame et du corps contraints a etre separes et ensemble a perpetuite. Cette histoire trouve son origine dans le monde grec, et plus exactement dans sa philosophie. La division entre maladies de l'ame et autres maladies, c'est-a-dire maladies du corps, appartient a la philosophie. La medecine aurait ete bien soulagee de cette partition. Est-ce a dire qu'elle n'entendait pas etre philosophique? Sans doute: Hippocrate en offre un bon exemple. L'accord, tacite, est le suivant: l'ame appartient au philosophe et le corps au medecin. Ciceron s'occupe des passions et Galien suspend son jugement des qu'il approche la psyche. Chacun y trouve son compte mais les consequences sont importantes: la partition du champ des maladies, la place du malade dans la societe, les traitements a apporter, notamment a la folie, dependent de ce dualisme initial. Si le legs de la medecine greco-romaine est riche, il est aussi fort lourd et trouve des developpements tout au long de l'histoire de la medecine, jusqu'a la constitution au XVIIIe siecle de la psychiatrie. D'une ecriture et d'une pensee personnelles et profondes, ce livre est un essai sur l'histoire de la pensee medicale, depuis l'Antiquite jusqu'a nos jours. La Maladie de l'ame a ete un succes des sa parution, et ce succes n'a pas ete dementi depuis. L'ouvrage n'etait malheureusement plus disponible: les livres ont leur destin commentait l'auteur. Avec cette edition revue et augmentee, accompagnee d'une preface nouvelle, le livre connait enfin le sort qu'il merite.Jackie Pigeaud est professeur emerite de litterature latine a l'Universite de Nantes et membre de l'Institut universitaire de France. On lui doit egalement, aux Belles Lettres, Folie et cures de la folie chez les medecins de l'Antiquite greco-romaine. La manie. (shrink)

The concepts of love and business do not seem to match very well, despite attempts to operationalize love as agape or neighborly love. In line with the emerging literature, this contribution uses a profane and analytical approach to agape as an ‘Agenda for Growth and Affirmation of People and the Environment’. Within this agenda we define agape as ‘the commitment to the well-being and flourishing of others’ and operationalized it to measure the concept in a substantial sample of 420 medium-sized (...) and large companies in The Netherlands. At the core of the research lies the question whether and to what extent companies, represented by senior managers and members of the works council, are committed to the well-being of their employees. This article analyses the concept of agape and its application in a business context and presents the results of a survey. The results show that, on average, respondents report that their organization is committed to employees’ well-being in line with the organization’s values. Though not the aim of agape, since organizations that apply the concept reap tangible business benefits from it, the concept becomes suitable to a wider range of businesses. (shrink)

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great new trends of Jewish thought emerged whose widely varied representatives--Kabbalists, philosophers, and astrologers--each claimed that their particular understanding revealed the actual secret of the Torah. They presented their own readings in a coded fashion that has come to be regarded by many as the very essence of esotericism. Concealment and Revelation takes us on a fascinating journey to the depths of the esoteric imagination. Carefully tracing the rise of esotericism and its function in (...) medieval Jewish thought, Moshe Halbertal's richly detailed historical and cultural analysis gradually builds conceptual-philosophical force to culminate in a masterful phenomenological taxonomy of esotericism and its paradoxes. Among the questions addressed: What are the internal justifications that esoteric traditions provide for their own existence, especially in the Jewish world, in which the spread of knowledge was of great importance? How do esoteric teachings coexist with the revealed tradition, and what is the relationship between the various esoteric teachings that compete with that revealed tradition? Halbertal concludes that, through the medium of the concealed, Jewish thinkers integrated into the heart of the Jewish tradition diverse cultural influences such as Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticisims. And the creation of an added concealed layer, unregulated and open-ended, became the source of the most daring and radical interpretations of the tradition. (shrink)

This paper argues that the existence of a canon of established and privileged texts in the primary literacy curriculum in England can be traced historically and has informed current national policy and practice. This canonisation of a particular set of literature has served to marginalise popular cultural and media texts, often the preferred texts of children in contemporary society. The paper examines the historical development of an established, hegemonic body of texts and critically analyses current national curricula frameworks for primary (...) literacy in order to determine the way in which reading material is framed. It is argued that current national policy enshrines particular textual traditions at the expense of more popular forms of material and that this has major implications for the relevance of the future primary literacy curriculum. (shrink)

St. Stephen's Society, Hang Fook Camp, Kowloon, Hong Kong was formally registered in 1981, but its origins go back to 1966. It is a member of the Hong Kong Council of Social Services and the central Registry of Drug Abuse. The Society works in cooperation with the courts, doctors and social workers to provide a spiritual, physical, emotional, educational and social rehabilitation programme. St. Stephen's houses about 300 people on any given day. It meets in Hang Fook Camp which is (...) leased to them by the Hong Kong Government where a regular meeting is held for Christian Fellowship, the Hang Fook Christian Fellowship. (shrink)

This narrative symposium examines the relationship of bioethics practice to personal experiences of illness. A call for stories was developed by Tod Chambers, the symposium editor, and editorial staff and was sent to several commonly used bioethics listservs and posted on the Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics website. The call asked authors to relate a personal story of being ill or caring for a person who is ill, and to describe how this affected how they think about bioethical questions and the (...) practice of medicine. Eighteen individuals were invited to submit full stories based on review of their proposals. Twelve stories are published in this symposium, and six supplemental stories are published online only through Project MUSE. Authors explore themes of vulnerability, suffering, communication, voluntariness, cultural barriers, and flaws in local healthcare systems through stories about their own illnesses or about caring for children, partners, parents and grandparents. Commentary articles by Arthur Frank, Bradley Lewis, and Carol Taylor follow the collection of personal narratives. (shrink)

The pandemic years have taught bioethicists a lot about the experience of working on an issue at the same time as being directly affected by it. Under normal circumstances, if we can remember what those were, we are very often thinking and writing about a situation of moral difficulty that we know, and can only know, as outsiders. We...

In this contribution we will briefly discuss the shareholders' need for social, ethical and environmental information and the efforts of corporations to address this need. Looking at three cases, we will raise some doubt with regard to the adequacy of corporate SEE reporting to meet the needs of shareholders. We will discuss the following three cases: BP's investments in Azerbaijan, Nike's management of its labour conditions, of child labour and security issues, and Monsanto's production of genetically modified seeds.

Susan has been profoundly deaf since childhood. She is a hearing aid wearer, and likes to use the induction loops built into some public spaces, such as theaters and cinemas, to help cut down the background noise that can make hearing speech very difficult. But this depends on the building having an induction loop fitted and properly maintained. Like many other induction loop users, Susan frequently finds that the advertised loop system is either working poorly or not working at all. (...) Almost as often, she then has the experience of making a complaint about it only to have the problem denied. If she persists, she is often then met... (shrink)

The work of a bioethicist carries distinctive responsibilities. Alongside those of any worker, there are responsibilities associated with giving guidance to practitioners, policy makers and the public. In addition, bioethicists are professionally exposed to and required to identify situations of moral trouble, and as a result may find themselves choosing to work as advocates or activists, with responsibilities that are distinct from those generally acknowledged within academia. The requirement for bioethics to make normative judgements entails taking a stance, which means (...) there cannot be a sharp line between ‘academic’ or ‘objective’ bioethics, and advocacy/activism, but a continuum of bioethicists’ engagement and an associated continuum of responsibilities. (shrink)

In this paper a dialogue game for critical discussion is developed. The dialogue game is a formalisation of the ideal discussion model that is central to the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. The formalisation is intended as a preparatory step to facilitate the development of computational tools to support the pragma-dialectical study of argumentation. An important dimension of the pragma-dialectical discussion model is the role played by speech acts. The central issue addressed in this paper is how the speech act perspective (...) can be accommodated in the formalisation as a dialogue game. The starting point is an existing ‘basic’ dialogue game for critical discussion, in which speech acts are not addressed. The speech act perspective is introduced into the dialogue game by changing the rules that govern the moves that can be made and the commitments that these result in, while the rules for the beginning, for the end, and for the structure of the dialogue game remain unchanged. The revision of the move rules is based on the distribution of speech acts in the pragma-dialectical discussion model. The revision of the commitment rules is based on the felicity conditions that are associated with those speech acts. (shrink)

Argument schemes are abstractions substantiating the inferential connection between premise(s) and conclusion in argumentative communication. Identifying such conventional patterns of reasoning is essential to the interpretation and evaluation of argumentation. Whether studying argumentation from a theory-driven or data-driven perspective, insight into the actual use of argumentation in communicative practice is essential. Large and reliably annotated corpora of argumentative discourse to quantitatively provide such insight are few and far between. This is all the more true for argument scheme corpora, which tend (...) to suffer from a combination of limited size, poor validation, and the use of ad hoc restricted typologies. In the current paper, we describe the annotation of schemes on the basis of two distinct classifications: Walton’s taxonomy of argument schemes, and Wagemans’ Periodic Table of Arguments. We describe the annotation procedure for each, and the quantitative characteristics of the resulting annotated text corpora. In doing so, we extend the annotation of the preexisting US2016 corpus of televised election debates, resulting in, to the best of our knowledge, the two largest consistently annotated corpora of schemes in argumentative dialogue publicly available. Based on evaluation in terms of inter-annotator agreement, we propose further improvements to the guidelines for annotating schemes: the argument scheme key, and the Argument Type Identification Procedure. (shrink)

Mitochondrial replacement techniques are intended to avoid the transmission of mitochondrial diseases from mother to child. MRT represent a potentially powerful new biomedical technology with ethical, policy, economic and social implications. Among other ethical questions raised are concerns about the possible effects on the identity of children born from MRT, their families, and the providers or donors of mitochondria. It has been suggested that MRT can influence identity directly, through altering the genetic makeup and physical characteristics of the child, or (...) indirectly through changing the child's experience of disease, and by generating novel intrafamilial relationships that shape the sense of self. In this article I consider the plausibility and ethical implications of these proposed identity effects, but I focus instead on a third way in which identity may be affected, through the mediating influence of the wider social world on MRT effects on identity. By taking a narrative approach, and examining the nature and availability of identity narratives, I conclude that while neither direct genetic nor indirect experiential effects can be excluded, social responses to MRT are more likely to have a significant and potentially damaging influence on the generation of MRT children's narratives of identity. This conclusion carries some implications for the collective moral responsibility we hold to ensure that MRT, if implemented, are practised in ethically justifiable ways. (shrink)

Pandemics such as COVID-19 place everyone at risk, but certain kinds of risk are differentially severe for groups already made vulnerable by pre-existing forms of social injustice and discrimination. For people with disability, persisting and ubiquitous disablism is played out in a variety of ways in clinical and public health contexts. This paper examines the impact of disablism on pandemic triage guidance for allocation of critical care. It identifies three underlying disablist assumptions about disability and health status, quality of life, (...) and social utility, that unjustly and potentially catastrophically disadvantage people with disability in COVID-19 and other global health emergencies. (shrink)

This article draws on data from a qualitative research study undertaken in an old UK university with the main aim of investigating the issue of the gender dimension of academic careers. It examines the idea of an individualistic academic career that demands self-promotion, which is still used as a measure of achievement by those in senior positions. However, there is a basic contradiction. While this idea is upheld, men simultaneously gain by an in-built patriarchal support system. They do not have (...) to make a conscious effort to be helped by it, thereby perpetuating the cultural hegemony of individualism. Women are not admitted to this support system, and if they are seen as needing or wanting to set up their own system, this is viewed as a weakness. The answer appears to be for women to strategically harness feminist ways of working in a collaborative and supportive way. (shrink)

The practical superiority of markets over governments has become readily apparent. Only the most dogmatic of state apologists continue to deny this obvious fact—at least with respect to the production of many goods and services. Free-market economists and libertarians go much further, of course. They affirm the market’s superiority in nearly all realms. Yet only a handful of anarchocapitalists, most notably Murray Rothbard, have dared claim that a free market could also do a better job of providing protection from foreign (...) states.1 National defense is generally considered the most essential of all government services. This widely conceded exception to the efficacy of markets seems to have irrefutable empirical confirmation. If private defense is better than government defense, why has government kept winning over the centuries? Indeed, the state’s military prowess has more than seemingly precluded the modern emergence of any anarchocapitalist society. At one time, as far as we know, all humankind lived in stateless bands of hunter-gatherers and had done so since the emergence of modern man some fifty thousand years ago. But beginning around 11,000 B.C., a gradual transition to.. (shrink)

Trust is one of the big buzzwords in debates about the shaping of society, democracy, and emerging technologies. For example, one prominent idea put forward by the High‐Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence appointed by the European Commission is that artificial intelligence should be trustworthy. In this essay, we explore the notion of trust and argue that both proponents and critics of trustworthy AI have flawed pictures of the nature of trust. We develop an approach to understanding trust in AI (...) that does not conceive of trust merely as an accelerator for societal acceptance of AI technologies. Instead, we argue, trust is granted through leaps of faith. For this reason, trust remains precarious, fragile, and resistant to promotion through formulaic approaches. We also highlight the significance of distrust in societal deliberation, as it is relevant to trust in various and intricate ways. Among the fruitful aspects of distrust is that it enables individuals to forgo technology if desired, to constrain its power, and to exercise meaningful human control. (shrink)

This paper is based on linked qualitative studies of the donation of human embryos to stem cell research carried out in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and China. All three studies used semi-structured interview protocols to allow an in-depth examination of donors’ and non-donors’ rationales for their donation decisions, with the aim of gaining information on contextual and other factors that play a role in donor decisions and identifying how these relate to factors that are more usually included in evaluations made (...) by theoretical ethics. Our findings have implications for one factor that has previously been suggested as being of ethical concern: the role of gratitude. Our empirical work shows no evidence that interpersonal gratitude is an important factor, but it does support the existence of a solidarity-based desire to “give something back” to medical research. Thus, we use empirical data to expand and refine the conceptual basis of bioethically theorizing the IVF–stem cell interface. (shrink)

Efforts to combat the COVID-19 crisis brought mountains of legislation and guidance to coerce or encourage people to stay at home and reduce the spread of the virus. During peak lockdown in the United Kingdom regulations defined when people could or could not leave their homes. Meanwhile guidance on social distancing advised people to stay within ‘households’. This paper explores the legislation under lockdowns in the UK from March to October 2020 and the implications for women’s gendered caring roles. The (...) regulations and guidance assumed that households were separate units and ignored the interdependencies which exist between households and between individuals and wider society. The continuing focus in the lockdown regulations has been on households as autonomous, safe, adequate and secure. This overlooks the interdependency of human life, gendered aspects of caring and the inequalities of housing and living conditions, highlighted by feminist scholarship. (shrink)