The problem of simultaneous measurement of incompatible observables in quantum mechanics is studied on the one hand from the viewpoint of an axiomatic treatment of quantum mechanics and on the other hand starting from a theory of measurement. It is argued that it is precisely such a theory of measurement that should provide a meaning to the axiomatically introduced concepts, especially to the concept of observable. Defining an observable as a class of measurement procedures yielding a certain prescribed result for (...) the probability distribution of the set of values of some quantity (to be described by the set of eigenvalues of some Hermitian operator), this notion is extended to joint probability distributions of incompatible observables. It is shown that such an extension is possible on the basis of a theory of measurement, under the proviso that in simultaneously measuring such observables there is a disturbance of the measurement results of the one observable, caused by the presence of the measuring instrument of the other observable. This has as a consequence that the joint probability distribution cannot obey the marginal distribution laws usually imposed. This result is of great importance in exposing quantum mechanics as an axiomatized theory, since overlooking it seems to prohibit an axiomatic description of simultaneous measurement of incompatible observables by quantum mechanics. (shrink)

We analyze the meaning of the violation of the marginal probability law for situations of correlation measurements where entanglement is identified. We show that for quantum theory applied to the cognitive realm such a violation does not lead to the type of problems commonly believed to occur in situations of quantum theory applied to the physical realm. We briefly situate our quantum approach for modeling concepts and their combinations with respect to the notions of “extension” and “intension” in theories (...) of meaning, and in existing concept theories. (shrink)

The international law principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources posits that governments bear the sovereign rights to manage natural resources on behalf of citizens. That citizens have rights over natural resources at all however detaches from governance realities showcasing citizen marginalization. This necessitates revisiting the issue of what rights citizens actually have over natural resources. Qualitatively investigating this issue reveals rights of citizens over natural resources now embedded in the doctrine of peoples-based permanent sovereignty over natural resources (PPSNR). However, (...) this doctrine appears to be subject to international law limitations and might not be effective within domestic jurisdictions. Alternatively, PPSNR may be domestically driven by common ownership and environmental justice claims. These two drivers may be able to advance distributive justice rights of citizens to returns from natural resources exploitation within domestic jurisdictions. These rights could be actuated through rent distribution practices. This results in functional distributive justice. (shrink)

Resources are typically discussed in economics as factors of production. This article proposes defining resources from the perspective of human needs, thereby dividing resources into two categories: material resources and information resources. The key distinction lies in whether they can be replicated, which determines if their marginal cost of supply is zero, and leads to their different distribution in society. For material resources, the main indicator is wealth, and the distribution of wealth follows a power law. This (...) means that a small minority of people control a large amount of wealth, leading to severe inequality issues. This led to Karl Marx's idea of abolishing private property, which ultimately failed. For information resources, the article suggests that reputation can serve as a main indicator for observation and proposes an algorithm for calculating reputation scores. The article points out that the distribution of reputation scores does not follow a power law, contrary to wealth distribution, and results in a multi-centered, star-like social structure. A star chart model is introduced to visualize this structure, illustrating the roles of creators, reflectors, and recipients in information dissemination. Thus, the social structure resulting from information activities has a relatively low level of inequality. Furthermore, the modern information infrastructure has lowered barriers to knowledge acquisition and reputation building, potentially mitigating wealth inequality by providing new income channels. It also addresses challenges in the digital age, such as cyberbullying and misinformation, proposing principles for effective governance of online spaces. (shrink)

As a scientific discipline and profession, law has been for centuries at the heart of social and political power of many Western societies. Professors of law, as influential representatives of the profession, are important powerbrokers between academia, politics and the corporate world. Their influence is based on scientific reputation, institutional mandates inside and outside academia or privileged network connections with people in powerful positions. In this study, based on a full sample of all Swiss law professors in the years 1957, (...) 1980 and 2000, we contrast two theories of the distribution of power among law professors: Bourdieu’s thesis on the trade-off between scientific reputation and -academic institutional power vs. the thesis of an opposition between a group of established incumbents and socio-demographically marginal challengers who try to gain access to the profession. We show that among Swiss law professors the endowment with scientific capital is not opposed to the possession of institutional power within academia. Our findings reveal rather an opposition between a challenging group of professors devoid of resources and an incumbent fraction with a high amount of scientific, institutional and social capital alike. In the conclusion we discuss a series of explanations of this specific power structure, including the specific status scientific reputation and social capital can have for law professors. (shrink)

Many commentators lament that American democracy is in crisis. It is becoming a system of minority rule, wherein a party with a minority of the nationwide vote can control the national government. Partisan gerrymandering in the House of Representatives fuels this crisis, as does the equal representation of small and large states in the Senate. But altering these features of the legislature would not end minority rule. Indeed, it has long been held that majority rule cannot be guaranteed within any (...) district system, as a minority of voters nationwide can be efficiently distributed such that a minority party wins a majority of districts by narrow margins. -/- This Article offers a way to save majority rule. Since the way a party can gain control of the legislature with a minority of the vote is to win a majority of districts by narrow margins of victory and lose a minority of districts by large margins of victory, the solution is to make margins matter. Hence, this Article proposes that we preserve electoral districts in which the candidate with the most votes wins, while making the weight of their vote in the legislature (a representative’s “legislative power”) a function of margins of victory. The first goal of this Article is to outline how this proposal, which I call “weighted voting by margin of victory” (WVMV), retains the democratic virtues of district systems while ending minority rule. This is the first basis for the democratic imperative to make margins matter. -/- There is, however, a second basis for that same imperative, which turns on the political equality of voters. The U.S. Supreme Court has long held that the democratic equality should be understood in terms of equal voting power (one person, one vote). But when margins of victory don’t matter, the power of a vote lies exclusively in its potential decisiveness. A vote that changes the margin of victory without changing the victor is “wasted”. But it is an electoral reality that votes in competitive districts are more likely to be decisive, and votes in uncompetitive districts are more likely to be wasted; as a result, candidates and parties are more responsive to some voters than others. So voters are not political equals. They do not have equal voting power, except in an empty formalistic sense. By contrast, WVMV gives votes a second type of power. The power of a vote is to potentially decide who wins and to actually change the legislative power of the victor. Each vote, in effect, transfers a unit of political power to a democratic representative. This “transference” power can be meaningfully equalized between voters. A voter in an uncompetitive district is far less likely to change who wins, but is equally able to change the margin of victory, such that their vote is no longer wasted. This gives candidates and parties a strong reason to be more equally responsive to all voters who can change the margins. Hence, there is a democratic imperative to make margins matter, in order to give voters a meaningfully equal form of voting power. -/- The final goal of this Article is to explain how we can implement WMVM in modern democracies, focusing on three particularly challenging cases: the U.S. Senate, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and the U.S. House of Representatives. These cases are challenging for several reasons, the most pertinent of which turn on the ways we should understand margins of victory when electorates are of unequal sizes (as in the U.S. Senate) or are contested by more than two parties (as in the U.K.) or are conducted under different voting procedures (as in many districts in the U.S. House). I argue that WVMV should be considered feasible in such contexts, and hence offers a practical, rather than purely theoretical, alternative to the status quo. (shrink)

In the face of limited resources during the COVID-19 pandemic response, public health experts and ethicists have sought to apply guiding principles in determining how those resources, including vaccines, should be allocated.

A formal language is positional if it involves a positional connecitve, i.e. a connective of realization to relate formulas to points of a kind, like points of realization or points of relativization. The connective in focus in this paper is the connective “R”, first introduced by Jerzy Łoś. Formulas [Rαφ] involve a singular name α and a formula φ to the effect that φ is satisfied relative to the position designated by α. In weak positional calculi no nested occurences of (...) the connective “R” are allowed. The distribution problem in weak positional logics is actually the problem of distributivity of the connective “R” over classical connectives, viz. the problem of relation between the occurences of classical connectives inside and outside the scope of the positional connective “R”. (shrink)

It is shown that the lattice-theoretic distributive law does not fail to hold in the two slit-experiment for the general case offinite slit widths and for a position measurement which localizes the observed particle to afinite region of the screen. Comments are made on previous and less general discussions of the case considered.

We compare diverse degrees of compactness and finiteness in Boolean algebras with each other and investigate the influence of weak choice principles. Our arguments rely on a discussion of infinitary distributive laws and generalized prime elements in Boolean algebras. In ZF set theory without choice, a Boolean algebra is Dedekind finite if and only if it satisfies the ascending chain condition. The Denumerable Subset Axiom implies finiteness of Boolean algebras with compact top, whereas the converse fails in ZF. Moreover, we (...) derive from DS the atomicity of continuous Boolean algebras. Some of the results extend to more general structures like pseudocomplemented semilattices. (shrink)

Recent studies of semantic memory have investigated two theories of optimal search adopted from the animal foraging literature: Lévy flights and marginal value theorem. Each theory makes different simplifying assumptions and addresses different findings in search behaviors. In this study, an experiment is conducted to test whether clustering in semantic memory may play a role in evidence for both theories. Labeled magnets and a whiteboard were used to elicit spatial representations of semantic knowledge about animals. Category recall sequences from (...) a separate experiment were used to trace search paths over the spatial representations of animal knowledge. Results showed that spatial distances between animal names arranged on the whiteboard were correlated with inter-response intervals during category recall, and distributions of both dependent measures approximated inverse power laws associated with Lévy flights. In addition, IRIs were relatively shorter when paths first entered animal clusters, and longer when they exited clusters, which is consistent with marginal value theorem. In conclusion, area-restricted searches over clustered semantic spaces may account for two different patterns of results interpreted as supporting two different theories of optimal memory foraging. (shrink)

We discuss the relationship between various weak distributive laws and games in Boolean algebras. In the first part we give some game characterizations for certain forms of Prikry’s “hyper-weak distributive laws”, and in the second part we construct Suslin algebras in which neither player wins a certain hyper-weak distributivity game. We conclude that in the constructible universe L, all the distributivity games considered in this paper may be undetermined.

A number of articles and empirical studies over the past decade, most by Paul Robinson and co-authors, have suggested a relationship between the extent of the criminal law's reputation for being just in its distribution of criminal liability and punishment in the eyes of the community – its "moral credibility" – and its ability to gain that community's deference and compliance through a variety of mechanisms that enhance its crime-control effectiveness. This has led to proposals to have criminal liability (...) and punishment rules reflect lay intuitions of justice – "empirical desert" – as a means of enhancing the system's moral credibility. In a recent article, Christopher Slobogin and Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein (SBR) report seven sets of studies that they argue undermine these claims of empirical desert and moral credibility and instead support SBR's proposed distributive principle of "individual prevention," a view that focuses on an offender's future dangerousness rather than on his perceived desert. -/- The idea that there is a relationship between the criminal law's reputation for justness and its crime-control effectiveness did not originate with Robinson and his co-authors. Rather, it has been a common theme among a wide range of punishment theory scholars for many decades. A particularly important conclusion of recent Robinson studies, however, is their confirmation that this relationship is a continuous one: even small nudges in moral credibility can produce corresponding changes in the community's deference to the criminal law. This is important because it shows that even piecemeal changes or changes at the margin – as in reforming even one unjust doctrine or procedure – can have real implications for crime-control. SBR's studies, rather than contradicting the crime-control power of empirical desert, in fact confirm it. Further, SBR's studies do not provide support for their proposed "individual prevention" distributive principle, contrary to what they claim. -/- While SBR try to associate their principle with the popular "limiting retributivism" adopted by the American Law Institute in its 2007 amendment of the Model Penal Code, in fact it is, in many respects, just the reverse of that principle. With limiting retributivism, the Model Code's new provision sets desert as dominant, never allowing punishment to conflict with it. SBR would have "punishment" essentially always set according to future dangerousness; it is to be constrained by desert only when the extent of the resulting injustices or failures of justice is so egregious as to significantly delegitimize the government and its law. This ignores the fact that even minor departures from justice may have an important cumulative effect on the system as a whole. What SBR propose – essentially substituting preventive detention for criminal justice – promotes the worst of the failed policies of the 1960s, where detention decisions were made at the back-end by "experts," and conflicts with the trend of the past several decades of encouraging more community involvement in criminal punishment, not less. (shrink)

In his Law of Peoples, Rawls severely restricts our duties of justice towards the global poor. Many of his critics have replied that there actually exists a global basic structure and that hence the difference principle applies on a global scale.However the shipwrecked of globalization do not contribute in any substantial way to the creation of global wealth. We show that Martha Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan solution to this problem is unsatisfactory because it ignores scarcity as one of the circumstances of justice.If (...) the marginalized of progress want to raise a claim of justice rather than appeal to our beneficence, they can only do so on the basis of a principle of compensation: their fate has been deteriorated by the development of a global economy they did not ask for. Towards the end of the article we point at some typical blind spots in the treatment of these problems in the literature on international distributive justice: the idea that development problems can be solved merely by transfers of money and the presupposition that the gulf between rich and poor is growing all the time. (shrink)

Summary A good deal of the late-twentieth-century commentary on Kant's ‘Perpetual Peace’ essay accepted its author's view that his conception of cosmopolitan justice had superseded the law of nations, some of whose leading exponents—Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel—Kant characterised as ‘miserable comforters’. Focusing on the case of Vattel, in this paper I begin to subject Kant's claim to an historical investigation, asking whether his ‘Perpetual Peace’ did indeed supersede Vattel's Law of Nations in terms of the actual uses of the texts (...) in a variety of historical contexts. In pointing to an array of evidence against Kant's widely accepted claim, I develop a different and more historical way of assessing the relation between the two writers. Kant, I argue, should be approached as a political metaphysician whose conception of cosmopolitan justice formed part of a factional theological and philosophical attack on the law of nations tradition. Vattel, however, was a diplomatic official whose text operates within the horizon of the European state ensemble and functioned as a summative abstraction of a wide variety of post-Westphalian public-law treaties and diplomatic rules and conventions. This accounts for the wide distribution, use, and influence of Vattel's work in a variety of Anglophone contexts from the late eighteenth century through to the end of the nineteenth, where Kant's text was marginal to discussion. (shrink)

In his Law of Peoples, Rawls severely restricts our duties of justice towards the global poor. Many of his critics have replied that there actually exists a global basic structure and that hence the difference principle applies on a global scale.However the shipwrecked of globalization do not contribute in any substantial way to the creation of global wealth. We show that Martha Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan solution to this problem is unsatisfactory because it ignores scarcity as one of the circumstances of justice.If (...) the marginalized of progress want to raise a claim of justice rather than appeal to our beneficence, they can only do so on the basis of a principle of compensation: their fate has been deteriorated by the development of a global economy they did not ask for. Towards the end of the article we point at some typical blind spots in the treatment of these problems in the literature on international distributive justice: the idea that development problems can be solved merely by transfers of money and the presupposition that the gulf between rich and poor is growing all the time. (shrink)

Here's a brief introduction to the philosophical puzzle of free will.View HTMLSend article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select (...) to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.INTRODUCTIONVolume 18, Issue 52Stephen LawDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S147717561900006XYour Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. INTRODUCTIONVolume 18, Issue 52Stephen LawDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S147717561900006XAvailable formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. INTRODUCTIONVolume 18, Issue 52Stephen LawDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S147717561900006XAvailable formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

This short article looks at a move made by some theists in defence of theism: the suggestion is that because the atheist has failed fully to grasp what the theist means by ‘God’ etc. so the atheist's criticisms must miss their target.View HTMLSend article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. (...) Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.MISS THE TARGET: HOW SOME ‘SOPHISTICATED’ THEISTS DODGE ATHEIST CRITICISMVolume 17, Issue 50Stephen LawDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175618000167Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. MISS THE TARGET: HOW SOME ‘SOPHISTICATED’ THEISTS DODGE ATHEIST CRITICISMVolume 17, Issue 50Stephen LawDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175618000167Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. MISS THE TARGET: HOW SOME ‘SOPHISTICATED’ THEISTS DODGE ATHEIST CRITICISMVolume 17, Issue 50Stephen LawDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175618000167Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

Nine selection‐survival strategies were implemented in a genetic algorithm experiment, and differences in terms of evolution were assessed. The moments of evolution (expressed as generation numbers) were recorded in a contingency of three strategies (i.e., proportional, tournament, and deterministic) for two moments (i.e., selection for crossover and mutation and survival for replacement). The experiment was conducted for the first 20,000 generations in 46 independent runs. The relative moments of evolution (where evolution was defined as a significant increase in the determination (...) coefficient relative to the previous generation) when any selection‐survival strategy was used fit a Log‐Pearson type III distribution. Moreover, when distributions were compared to one another, functional relationships were identified between the population parameters, revealing a degeneration of the Log‐Pearson type III distribution in a one‐parametrical distribution that can be assigned to the chosen variable—evolution strategy. The obtained theoretical population distribution allowed comparison of the selection‐survival strategies that were used. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity, 2012. (shrink)

What is the proper role of cost-benefit analysis in understanding the tort concept of negligence or reasonable care? A straightforward question, you might think. But it is a question that manages to elicit groans of exasperation from those on both sides of the controversy. For most utilitarians and adherents to law and economics, the answer is obvious: to say that people should not be negligent is to say that they should minimize the sum of the costs of accidents and the (...) costs of preventing accidents. Under the economic formulation of the famous Learned Hand test, they should take a precaution if but only if the marginal costs (or burden, B) of that precaution are less than its marginal benefits (in the form of reduced risks of injury, measured by multiplying the probability (P) of the injury times the magnitude (L) of the injury if it occurs). If B>PxL, it would be absurd to require the greater expenditure, B. For many advocates of a fairness, corrective justice, rights-based, or contractualist perspective, the opposite answer is equally obvious. Permitting a person to impose risks of harm on others merely because he would thereby obtain a benefit (or would otherwise incur a burden) greater than the discounted value of the harm he might inflict, amounts to authorizing him to dump the costs of his risky activities on innocent victims. To permit this type of sacrifice of individuals on the altar of aggregate social welfare is morally abhorrent. Both sets of criticism have important elements of truth. Neither an unqualified cost-benefit analysis nor an unqualified rights-based rejection of tradeoffs is defensible - either as a description of tort doctrine and practice or as a normative prescription. However, a qualified (sensitive) consequentialist approach can accommodate legitimate criticisms of cost-benefit analysis: the consequentialist can launder preferences, and can consider the distribution of risk both in the social welfare calculus and in determining whether to compensate. At the same time, a qualified (tough-minded) deontological approach can accommodate the legitimate need to recognize tradeoffs: the deontologist can permit intrapersonal but not interpersonal aggregation of risks and benefits, can apply the concept of threshold deontology to risky activity, and can consider individual rather than population risk. I conclude that the formulation of the Learned Hand test found in the Restatement Third of Torts is broad enough to encompass each of these qualified approaches. (shrink)

Journals have been described as “duty bearers” of upholding fundamental ethical principles that are essential for maintaining the ethical integrity of newly generated and disseminated knowledge. To play our part, we evaluated diversity and inclusion in the leadership and management of global and international health journals. We developed Journal Diversity Index (JDI) to measure three parameters of diversity and representation (gender, geographic, socioeconomic status). Relevant information regarding editorial board members of systematically screened journals was sequentially extracted and job titles were (...) categorized into five editorial roles. Chi-squared test was utilized to study associations between gender and geographic distribution of editors along with the Medline indexing of the journal and its impact factor. Out of 43 journals included, 62.7% were published from two high-income countries. Women comprised 44% of the total editors. Among all the editorial board members, we did not find any information suggesting the representation of non-binary and transgender individuals. Furthermore, 68.2% of editors were based in high-income countries with 67.3% of the editors belonging to the Global North. This disparity in geographic region and socioeconomic level was observed across all five editorial roles. Among all women editors, more than 70% worked in non-Medline and non-impact factor journals. Only two journals scored “excellent” on JDI. Despite the continuous evolution of the definition of global health ethics, marginalized individuals, and their perspectives remain underrepresented in this field. Thus, we call for swift action regarding the decentralization and redistribution of global and international health journal editorial boards. (shrink)

The widespread application of QR code technology is best represented by the health codes used in China’s pandemic prevention and control. This technology has enhanced the country’s ability to manage the pandemic by achieving higher efficiency and accuracy. Unfortunately, a certain segment of the older population has encountered difficulties in adapting and maintaining their daily activities. This indicates the limitations of QR code technology in achieving social isolation. This article argues that for a more comprehensive pandemic prevention and control policy (...) system to be established, managing the implementation of this very technology should be done in a more humane fashion, i.e. under the guidance of three moral principles: benevolence, justice, and non-maleficence. By doing so, implementation of QR code technology is done in a way that is not only conducive to COVID-19 prevention and control but also mitigate marginalization of the older people. In the post-pandemic era, the socialization of digital technology will accelerate. Therefore, in the field of public health, we should direct attention not only to the fair distribution of resources but also to the issue of identity that arises due to digital divide. (shrink)

One of the central issues in comparative law and political economy is whether the forces of globalization will result in the convergence of public policies across countries. Noting in particular that taxes collected still cover a considerable range across industrialized countries — from a low of 20% of GDP to a high of 50% — some have argued that globalization has not resulted in a loss of tax sovereignty. However, following a review of the evidence, in this Article we conclude (...) that globalization has had significant but subtle effects on tax levels and structures. Moreover, these pressures will make it increasingly difficult for countries to raise revenue to finance new public needs and to structure their tax systems in order to achieve a more socially acceptable distribution of income than what market forces dictate. Tax levels in most countries have remained essentially flat over the past twenty years, but there is a host of reasons for thinking they would have continued to rise were it not for the pressures of globalization. Statutory corporate tax rates have declined dramatically and, although corporate tax revenues have remained robust, this has been due to factors unrelated to deliberate tax policy choices. Personal marginal tax rates have also declined sharply and tax revenues have been increasingly raised by regressive consumption taxes. These trends stem from tax competition brought on by the forces of globalization, not from changing ideas or other political variables. In this Article we conclude that in order to prevent tax competition from completely eroding the ability of countries to fashion their own tax systems, there will have to be considerable cooperation among the major countries and some harmonization of aspects of their tax systems, particularly as they apply to footloose factors of production. (shrink)

Cosmopolitans argue that the account of human rights and distributive justice in John Rawls's The Law of Peoples is incompatible with his argument for liberal justice. Rawls should extend his account of liberal basic liberties and the guarantees of distributive justice to apply to the world at large. This essay defends Rawls's grounding of political justice in social cooperation. The Law of Peoples is drawn up to provide principles of foreign policy for liberal peoples. Human rights are among the necessary (...) conditions for social cooperation, and so long as a decent people respect human rights, a common good, and the Law of Peoples, it is not the role of liberal peoples to impose upon well-ordered decent peoples liberal liberties they cannot endorse. Moreover, the difference principle is not an allocative or alleviatory principle, but applies to design property and other basic social institutions necessary to economic production, exchange and consumption. It presupposes political cooperation—a legislative body to actively apply it, and a legal system to apply it to. There is no feasible global state or global legal system that could serve these roles. Finally, the difference principle embodies a conception of democratic reciprocity that is only appropriate to cooperation among free and equal citizens who are socially productive and politically autonomous. a Footnotesa I am grateful to K. C. Tan for many helpful discussions and criticisms of this essay. I am also grateful to the other contributors to this volume for their comments, and to Ellen Paul for her many helpful suggestions in preparing the final version of this essay. (shrink)

Is the virtue of the good citizen the same as the virtue of the good man? Aristotle addresses this in Politics 3.4. His answer is twofold. On the one hand, (the account for Difference) they are not the same both because what the citizen’s virtue is depends on the constitution, on what preserves it, and on the role the citizen plays in it, and because the good citizens in the best constitution cannot all be good men, whereas the good man’s (...) virtue is uniform. On the other hand, (the account for Identity) the two virtues are identical in the good men in the best constitution, in which all are good citizens, each possessing the ability for ruling and for being ruled. This nuanced answer can be seen as Aristotle’s synthesis of a Periclean view (contribution to state blots out personal wrongs) and a Socratic view (no good citizen is without justice). Its nuances reflect the extent to which Aristotle’s conceptions of good citizenship and the best constitution accommodate deviations of what is probable from the human ideal set out in his ethical writings. In the present chapter, I will first address three puzzles regarding the nuances of Aristotle’s answer. Second, I will consider one question about its implication: Does Aristotle’s account for Difference turn out to entail something ultra-Periclean: that no one can simultaneously be a good man and a good citizen in any constitution other than the best? I shall argue the negative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ECHIC—The European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres 2023 Annual ConferenceIlenia Vittoria CasmiriEcological Mindedness and Sustainable Wellbeing, ECHIC—The European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres 2023 Annual Conference, May 25–27, 2023, University of Ferrara, ItalyThis year’s annual conference of the European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres (ECHIC) invited international scholars with diverse backgrounds to explore visions of a desirable future world that is both environmentally sustainable and socially (...) just. In stressing the social and political relevance of the humanities in Europe today, the main goal of the Consortium, as it is articulated on the conference website, is the pursuit of the highest international standards of excellence with a spirit of innovation and exploration of new research areas:Since the World Commission on Environment and Development published Our Common Future (1987) [commonly known as the Brundtland Report], the notion of... sustainability has been expanded to incorporate environmental, cultural, legal, and economic features of a low-carbon future and to encompass the wellbeing of all living species, which involves material aspects such as the social acceptance of resource-efficient transitions and immaterial ones such as flourishing human capabilities. [End Page 625]The participants of the 2023 ECHIC conference on Ecological Mindedness and Sustainable Wellbeing presented original, multidisciplinary perspectives, and offered valuable opportunities to develop holistic approaches to the prismatic issue of environmental sustainability. Bringing together cultural diversity as well as local and global perspectives, keynoters and panelists addressed the vast array of challenges imposed by the perpetuation of anthropocentric worldviews. Their challenge to traditional demarcations between the humanities, the social sciences, economy, law, architecture, engineering, and the life and medical sciences, generated synergies for exploring interconnections between life forms, resources, and heritage. While the theoretical frameworks varied considerably, they all advocated for the need to overcome ideological, cultural, and spatial barriers in favor of broader, more inclusive approaches to other disciplines, other cultures, other humans, other species. Overall, the conference not only exposed the cultural and economic roots of social inequality and of uneven distribution of resources, thanks to unsustainable modes of capitalist production and consumption, but also highlighted the media’s positive effect in eliciting pro-environmental behaviors.Toward More Sustainable FuturesThe prismatic nature of the concept of sustainability inspired keynote speakers Alexa Weik von Mossner (University of Klagenfurt), Adrian Ivakhiv (University of Vermont), Tim Waterman (University College London), and Antonio López (John Cabot University) to address climate apocalypse impacts on the human physical and psychological well-being from diverse personal and academic backgrounds.In the opening keynote lecture, “Growing Hope: Narratives of Food Justice and Sustainability,” Weik von Mossner explores the psychological implications of affect and emotion in the communication of environmental issues. Her diachronic account illustrates the rise and fall of the South Central Farm in Los Angeles, a sanctuary for locals by providing fresh produce, stimulating a sense of community, and representing a symbol of resilience against systemic inequalities. Weik Von Mossner elucidates the psychological benefits accruing from exposure to such a sustainably inhabited space. Her analysis of Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s documentary, The Garden (2008), affirms that climate change narratives across media may prompt food justice activism (Retzinger 2011, 337) by eliciting the emotional engagement of its audience. [End Page 626]However, observes von Mossner, the greater the popularity of the Farm, the greater the threat posed to its existence. Through documentaries, news articles, and online campaigns, the South Central Farm has received national and international attention. At the same time, media have shed light on the struggles faced by marginalized communities and provided a solid basis for discussions on social justice, environmental activism, and the value of communal spaces. She explains that activists used social media to voice their concerns about the potential eviction and the loss of a vital resource for the local community, leading to an outpouring of support from environmentalists and celebrities who had realized to what extent the predominantly low-income, minority community was affected by limited access to fresh food and green spaces.Adrian Ivakhiv, delivering his keynote “How to Face the Angel of History: A Call to Anthropocenic Conscience” the following day, suggests that a pervasive lack of an emotional... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:VIOLENCE AND NONVIOLENCE IN HINDU RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS Francis X. Clooney, SJ. Boston College Outline I.Violence, Sacrifice and Ritual 1. Some basic attitudes toward the killing of animals 2.Resolving the problem of sacrificial violence by internalization 3.Substitutions 4.Renunciation and nonviolence: an elite pathway 5.Violence andnonviolenceinrelation to vegetarianism: Hans Schmidt's theses?. Traditional Hindu Theorizations of Violence in Mimamsa Ritual Theory and Vedanta Theology 1. The ritual analysis (at Mimamsa Sutra 1.1.2) (...) of the Shyena rite which is performed in order to harm enemies 2.The Vedanta analysis (at Uttara Mimamsa Sutra 3.1.25) of ritual violence in relation to the prohibition of violence??. Violence in the Life of the State HOFrancis X. Clooney, S.J. 1. The royal power to punish (danda) 2.The synthesis of the ideals of brahmin and king a..The distribution and management of violence in the Laws ofManu (1st century CE) b. Policy toward warfare in the Arthashastra of Kautilya 3.The collapse of the brahmanical synthesis—and the emergence of a (seemingly) more nonviolent Hinduism 4.A comment on Gandhi (1 869-1948) and the contemporary emergence of post-Gandhian Hindu perspectives IV.Alternate Views from Outside the Sanskritic Tradition 1. Tamil Wisdom on Violence and Nonviolence: a.Tirukkural (c. 2nd century CE) b.Cilappatikaram (5th century CE) 2.Blood and Goddesses 3.From a Village Perspective a. Some Trouble with Cows b.Mahasweta Devi and the Literary Exposure of Violence V.The Question of a Christian Perspective on the Hindu Treatment of Violence and Religion: Are Victims Necessary? Some Presuppositions: • The following reflections, complex as they are, are governed by a reluctance to simplify Hindu teaching. I seek to avoid the view that the Hindu traditions had only one view of violence and nonviolence. • I use the term "Hindu" loosely and as a shorthand, without claiming that there is a single Hindu tradition, or a single creed shared by all Hindus, or a single attitude toward violence. But neither do I claim that there are simply many traditions without any common elements which justify the appellation "Hindu." • I am reluctant to idealize the Hindu traditions as if nonviolence must necessarily be taken as the epitome ofHindu thought. India's traditions are complex, and require complex treatment. • A serious artificiality of this paper is that I treat Hinduism without simultaneously lookinginto Buddhist andJain materials, though both were traditions with important and enduring commitments to nonviolence. Particularly with respect to the renunciant, marginal components of traditions, one ought not to make overly neat or decisive distinctions Violence and Nonviolence in Hindu Religious Traditions 1 1 1 between the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain theories and practices related to violence and nonviolence. • I attempt to give preference to indigenous discussions ofissues related to violence and nonviolence; the context and mode of thinking are important, notjust the conclusions drawn. I therefore avoid simply mining Hindu texts for an answer to a contemporary question, "What is the Hindu attitude toward violence and nonviolence?" • In most ofwhat follows we must distinguish contexts where "violence" indicates "physical action which causes pain to some living being," from contexts where "violence" indicates "an intention, rooted in anger or malice, to hurt someone." I use the word "violence" for both in order to highlight the complex issues of distinction involved. In considering the Sanskrit formulations, one likewise has to distinguish himsa as "causing pain" from himsa as "intending to harm." • It is often difficult to date ancient texts, and even when one narrows down a date—within 200-300 years—its significance still depends on other, often equally broadly stated dates. Nevertheless, I do offer dates throughout, as summarized here: •ancient Vedic sacrificial practices, from before 1200 BCE •Vedic ritual analyses and reformulations of sacrifices as ritualized acts, in the Brahmanas, from after 1000 BCE •the Upanishadic exploration of the deeper meanings of ritual and interiorized alternatives to ritual, from after 900 BCE •the Buddha, c. 500 BCE •key texts in the theorization of royal power, The Laws of Manu (beginning of Common Era) and Arthashastra (c. 150 CE) •the Tamil wisdom text Tirukkural (100 CE) •Goddess texts as evidenced in Sanskrit formulations, from after 500 CE... (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Drawing extensively on Bentham's unpublished civil and distributive law writings, classical and recent Bentham scholarship, and contemporary work in moral and political philosophy, Kelly here presents the first full-length exposition and sympathetic defense of Bentham's unique utilitarian theory of justice. Kelly shows how Bentham developed a moderate welfare-state liberal theory of justice with egalitarian leanings, the aim of which was to secure the material and political conditions of each citizen's pursuit of the good life in cooperation with each other. A (...) striking and original addition to the growing literature on Bentham's legal and political thought, this incisive study also makes a valuable contribution to contemporary political philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself, and: Maimonides and His HeritageLouis E. NewmanLove Thy Neighbor as Thyself Lenn E. Goodman New York: Oxford, 2008. 235 pp. $55.00.Maimonides and His Heritage Edited by Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Lenn E. Goodman, and James Allen Grady Albany: SUNY, 2009. $24.95.Perhaps no principle is more central to Western religious ethics than that of “loving your neighbor as yourself.” It is at the heart of the (...) Hebrew Bible’s ethic [End Page 196] of caring for others, especially those most marginalized, both within and outside of the Israelite community. It is rooted in the belief that all humans are created in the divine image, and its implications extend to a myriad of specific injunctions designed to secure the rights of individuals as individuals as well as to ensure the just distribution of goods within society. It has been the subject of extended reflection by generations of Jewish and Christian philosophers (among many others), has spawned multiple versions of the Golden Rule, and has received modern philosophical expression in Kant’s categorical imperative. It should not surprise us, then, that any treatment of such a far-reaching religious–moral principle will require a scholar whose reach extends from the Bible to contemporary moral theory.Lenn Goodman demonstrates in this book that he is more than equal to the task. First given as two of the 2005 Gifford Lectures (the others that year were given by a Christian, a Muslim, and a secular philosopher), these chapters explore the ways in which love of neighbor is at the very heart of biblical ethics, as well as the theory of ethical obligation that it implies. Goodman’s erudition is on full display here as he moves easily from Aristotelian virtue ethics to medieval Jewish Bible commentators to contemporary natural law theorists.Following the long line of commentators who read “as thyself” as a gloss on “neighbor”—namely, that we love the other because she is a person, like oneself—Goodman writes that “our first obligation to one another is respect for subjecthood” (14). All other biblical injunctions with respect to moral behavior are merely corollaries of the notion that all persons are of equal worth insofar as they are equally created in God’s image and so entitled to equal consideration. Goodman takes pains to emphasize that this commandment, though, cannot be reduced to the sum total of positive injunctions; it aims to inculcate an attitude (“love”) that both motivates our moral behavior and extends its scope to encompass the infinite task of emulating God.The most philosophically interesting part of Goodman’s discussion comes in his treatment of monotheism’s contribution to ethics. After all, the command to love our neighbor is presented to us both as a command from God and as a command to love God by loving God’s creatures. How are our idea of God and our relationship with God correlated with our understanding of the nature of moral duty and the scope of moral life?As Goodman sees it, monotheism asserts that “God... is not just a judge but an ontic principle, the greatest reality, highest good and source of all goods, which are conceived as God’s work, expressions of his generosity and wisdom” (45). At the same time, he eschews any simple divine command theory of morality according to which the good is determined by God, either verbally or ontologically. For, “It’s not just that we know the right because we know God’s will. We also know God’s will because we know what is right” (51). This dialectical understanding of God and the good is best captured in Goodman’s claim that “we bring our moral notions, suasions, customs, instincts, attitudes [End Page 197] and intuition to the Law, and they enter into dialogue with what we read, informing our hermeneutic, as scripture itself and the conception of the God encountered in scripture, inform them in turn” (53).Goodman acknowledges that such a view runs headlong into the problem of divinely sanctioned mass murder (see the book of Joshua) and, most famously, the injunction to utterly destroy the Amalakites (Deut. 25:17... (shrink)

In John Rawls’s theory, the role of the principles of justice is to regulate the basic structure of society—its major social, political and economic institutions—and to specify the fair terms of cooperation for free and equal persons. Some have interpreted Rawls as excluding contract law, and perhaps the private law as a whole, from the basic structure. However, this interpretation of Rawls is untenable, given the motivations for his emphasis on the basic structure and the highly inclusive characterisations he gives (...) of it. Yet if he includes private law within the basic structure, he seems committed to holding that its design and operations should be regulated by his two principles of justice, which govern the distribution of basic liberties, economic resources and opportunities. This would leave it unclear whether there was any room for values other than distributive values to inform the design of private law. Leaving no role for other values might be unproblematic if distributive justice were a master normative category with equal regulative authority over all basic social institutions. But we should not assume that this ‘distributivist paradigm’ gives the best interpretation either of private law or of the fair terms of cooperation for a society of free and equal people. We need to think further about how non-distributive values may inform the principles of justice that regulate the institutional structure of society. And we need to ask how much of law, whether public or private, is regulated solely by principles of justice that focus on the distribution of basic liberties, economic resources and opportunities. (shrink)

What is the cultural value of illegal works that violate the copyrights of popular fiction? Why do they persist despite clear and stringent intellectual property laws? Drawing on the disciplines of new media, law, and literary studies, Illegal Literature suggests that extralegal works such as fan fiction are critical to a system that spurs the evolution of culture. Reconsidering voices relegated to the cultural periphery, David S. Roh shows how infrastructure--in the form of legal policy and network distribution--slows or (...) accelerates the rate of change. He analyzes the relationship between intellectual property rights and American literature in two recent copyright disputes. And, in comparing American fan fiction and Japanese dojinshi, he illustrates how infrastructure and legal climates detract from or encourage fledgling creativity. Illegal Literature fills a crucial gap between the scholarly and the popular by closely examining several modes of marginalized cultural production. Roh makes the case for protecting an environment conducive to literary heresy, the articulation of an accretive rather than solitary authorial genius, and the idea that letting go rather than holding on is important to a generative creative process. In a media ecology inundated by unauthorized materials, Illegal Literature argues that the proliferation of unsanctioned texts may actually benefit literary and cultural development. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction A Global Distribution Principle? Problems with Globalizing the Difference Principle Conclusion Notes.

According to the tradition of natural law justice is inherent to, and should always be observed in, all interpersonal relations: the science of natural law is nothing more or less than the expression of such principles of justice. The theoretical peculiarities that crop up regarding the lawfulness of appropriation are determined by the indirect interpersonal relations that take place within the process of appropriation: though appropriation is an action directed not towards another person or his property, but towards tangible external (...) goods, this action may have important consequences for other people. Therefore Locke's theory of appropriation is a theory of justice.Locke's solution is made possible by the methodological improvement which allows a clear separation between the natural law and the historical and empirical conditions of its application: this improvement is a consequence of the distinction between modes and substances established in Locke's Essay. (shrink)

Recently, P. D. Finch and R. Groblicki determined all bivariate probability densities with specified margins. We point out that their result follows immediately from the complete solution to the problem of determining all n-dimensional cumulative probability distribution functions with specified one-dimensional margins, which was solved by one of us in 1959.

Over the centuries, many philosophers have written about injustice. More recently, attention has turned to a previously little-recognized form of injustice – epistemic injustice. The philosopher Miranda Fricker coined the phrase ‘epistemic injustice’ – an example being when your credibility as a source of knowledge is unjustly downgraded (perhaps because you are ‘just a woman’ of the ‘wrong’ race). This interview with Miranda explores what epistemic injustice is, and why it is important.

Nozick (1977) formulated a challenge to Austrians related to the application of the Law of diminishing marginal utility in the context of notion of indifference. To be able to claim that the value or attributed utility of the subsequent units of goods decreases, we must compare comparables, even if deliberate choice means that we have chosen a particular as being value-different. This causes a logical paradox. One cannot be indifferent and demonstrate a particular preference at the same time. It (...) is mutually exclusive. The paper discusses a critique of Wysocki (2021), who proposes a solution to the paradox in terms of a counterfactual perception of the Law. The critique points to the essence of why neo-Misesians cannot resolve the paradox, which lies in the interpretation of the origin of valuation within the particular value scale. The paper offers an alternative solution based on Hayek’s concept of mental order-ness with the implication of the general applicability of the Law to any order in reality. (shrink)

The laws of distribution follow at once from Lyndon's interpolation theorem and the fact that the fallacy of many terms is a fallacy.

This is a groundbreaking application of contemporary philosophy to human rights law that proposes significant innovations for the progressive development of human rights. Drawing on the works of prominent 'philosophers of the Other' including Emmanuel Levinas, Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Judith Butler and, most centrally, the Argentine philosopher of liberation Enrique Dussel, this book develops an ethics based on concrete face-to-face relationships with the Marginalized Other. It proposes that this should inspire a human rights law that is grounded in transcendental justice (...) and framed from the perspective of marginalized groups. This would continuously deconstruct the original violence found in all human rights treaties and tribunals and promote preferential treatment for the marginalized. It would be especially attentive to such issues as access to justice, voice, representation, agency and responsibility. This differs markedly from more conventional theories that prioritize the autonomy of the ego, state sovereignty, democracy and/or equality. (shrink)