慶応義塾大学法学部のゼミナール「伊東乾民事訴訟法研究会」の卒業生の会「乾会」による論文集。今回はテーマを民事訴訟法に限ることなく、現在関心を持っている法律分野について執筆した。.

I CATEGORIES AND PRINCIPLES ii Introductory Remarks The value of linguistics as a cognitive science lies largely in its potential for providing insights ...

This paper offers a new insight on the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) in the theory of epistemic democracy. This theorem states that democratic decision-making leads us to correct outcomes under certain assumptions. One key assumption is the ‘independence condition’, which requires that voters form their beliefs independently when they vote. This paper examines the role of an opinion leader as an informational source, which potentially violates independence. We demonstrate that voters’ beliefs may be correlated in the presence of the leader, (...) and that the CJT can fail if the leader’s opinions are reliable. This leads us to the following paradoxical observation: for epistemic democracy, good leaders may be bad, while bad leaders may be good. (shrink)

This paper provides two brief proofs of Arrow’s general possibility theorem. The second one is simple and short. Our proofs are inspired by the pioneering work by Inada (Ann. Inst. Stat. Math. 6:115–122, 1954).

Since Condorcet discovered the voting paradox in the simple majority rule, many scholars have tried to investigate conditions that yield “social-preference cycles”. The paradox can be extended to two main approaches. On the one hand, Kenneth Arrow developed a general framework of social choice theory; on the other hand, direct generalizations of the paradox were offered. The motivation and surface meaning of the two approaches are different, as are the assumed background conditions. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between (...) the two approaches by taking a close look at two works, Ferejohn and Fishburn and Schwartz. (shrink)

「語の意味」とは何か?『類語大辞典』の編集・執筆に関わってきた著者が、「意味の本質」「同義・類義・多義」「意味記述の方法」「辞書と意味記述」の4部に渡って、これまで深めてきた考察を明らかにする、「こと ばの意味」の研究に大きく資する一冊。.

The implications of the repugnant conclusion for consequentialist theories, such as total utilitarianism, have been extensively discussed since the work of Derek Parfit. These discussions make the paradoxes of population ethics depend on welfarist conditions, like the dominance condition (or the Pareto Principle). Thus, one might think that the repugnant conclusion is not a practical problem for deontologists, who deny that we always ought to do what produces the most aggregate welfare. In this study, we offer two impossibility results using (...) what we call the limit aggregation property. This states that when welfaristic and non-welfaristic considerations conflict, there is a threshold number of persons such that the former can override the latter as long as more people than the threshold number can enjoy increases in well-being levels. We argue that this property should be accepted even by deontologists, insofar as they do not commit themselves to the implausible absolutist position that fails to assign any moral weight to aggregate welfare. Our results therefore state that any normative population theory that is not absolutist entails (a variant of) the repugnant conclusion or some other implausible conclusion. Therefore, the repugnant conclusion must be taken seriously even by non-absolutist deontologists, not just consequentialists. (shrink)

In Part III of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Robert Nozick presents what he calls ‘the model of possible worlds’ (307) to examine the formal properties of utopia, defined as ‘the best of all possible worlds’ (298). The basic idea is that each person is given the power to create any possible world and its inhabitants by imagining them. Two definitions of stability have been proposed: (a) the non-circular definition according to which a world is stable if and only if (...) nobody can imagine a better world and (b) the circular definition according to which a world is stable if and only if nobody can imagine a better world that is also stable. In this paper, we prove four theorems (namely, the indeterminacy theorem, the stable dystopia theorem, the nobody’s utopia theorem and the redundancy theorem) that provide us with decisive reasons to reject the circular definition and opt for the non-circular definition of stability to analyse Nozick’s theory of utopia. (shrink)

Conditional egalitarianism is a form of egalitarianism that responds to the levelling-down objection by asserting that equality is intrinsically valuable only when it benefits some individuals. Andrew Mason’s original formulation of conditional egalitarianism faces criticism from Nils Holtug, who proposes a refined formulation that introduces a clause regarding the effects of additional benefits on equality. However, Holtug’s own formulation encounters internal inconsistencies. This paper proposes a positional refinement of Holtug’s conditional egalitarianism, emphasizing the importance of impartiality in evaluating distributions. This (...) refinement incorporates an anonymity condition, ensuring that distributional evaluations remain invariant under permutations of individuals. By emphasizing how the non-instrumental value of equality is conditional on benefiting positions impartially, the proposed positional conditional egalitarianism reconciles egalitarian aims with concerns about inequality-enhancing benefits. This nuanced formulation provides a potential rebuttal to arguments against conditional egalitarianism and suggests a novel approach to distributive justice. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to investigate a relationship between egalitarian equivalence and envy-freeness in a continuum-agent economy, where tastes vary continuously across individuals. Under efficiency, the two criteria of equity are not compatible, except in the knife-edge case. In particular, when individual utility functions are restricted to the class of Cobb–Douglas-type functions, there exists an efficient, egalitarian-equivalent, and envy-free allocation if and only if all individuals have the same taste over commodities.

In this study, we propose a new direction of research on the axiomatic analysis of approval voting, which is a common democratic decision method. Its novelty is to examine an infinite population setting, which includes an application to intergenerational problems. In particular, we assume that the set of the population is countably infinite. We provide several extensions of the method of approval voting for this setting. As our main result, axiomatic characterizations of the extensions are offered by revealing a direct (...) link between approval voting and the Borda rule. The characterized methods are natural extensions of the standard approval voting method for the finite-population case and are regarded as minimum requirements for other possible infinite-population extensions, which are reasonably democratic. (shrink)

-/- This unique book develops an operational approach to preference and rationality as the author employs operators over binary relations to capture the concept of rationality. -/- A preference is a basis of individual behavior and social judgment and is mathematically regarded as a binary relation on the set of alternatives. Traditionally, an individual/social preference is assumed to satisfy completeness and transitivity. However, each of the two conditions is often considered to be too demanding; and then, weaker rationality conditions are (...) introduced by researchers. This book argues that the preference rationality conditions can be captured mathematically by “operators,” which are mappings from the set of operators to itself. This operational approach nests traditional concepts in individual/social decision theory and clarifies the underlying formal structure of preference rationality. -/- The author also applies his approach to welfare economics. The core problem of ‘new welfare economics,’ developed by Kaldor, Hicks, and Samuelson, is the rationality of social preference. In this book the author translates the social criteria proposed by those three economists into operational forms, which provide new insights into welfare economics extending beyond ‘new welfare economics.’ . (shrink)

L’imposition est l’un des principaux sujets de la théorie de la propriété des droits, mais il a pourtant été assez négligé jusque récemment. La communauté académique des philosophes avance de nos jours des arguments pour discuter avec ardeur des types d’imposition qui sont légitimes, s’il en est, et l’on doit beaucoup en ce domaine à l’ouvrage de Liam Murphy et Thomas Nagel The Myth of Ownership. Dans leur ouvrage polémique, les auteurs soutiennent qu’il n’existe pas de droit légitime permettant d’imposer (...) par préemption ni la propriété ni les droits naturels à la propriété et que le processus d’imposition n’empiète certes jamais sur les droits de propriété, qui sont le fruit d’une institution par décret gouvernemental. Murphy et Nagel prennent pour cible principale Richard Epstein qui prône une vue libertarienne ou « libérale classique » contraire à ce propos. Epstein compare l’imposition à une expropriation publique et argumente en faveur de l’impôt sur le revenu. Nous discutons ici la thèse d’Epstein sur la propriété privée, avec laquelle nous nous trouvons en accord quoique moyennant des nuances notables. Nous examinons la théorie étatiste de la propriété de Murphy et Nagel et nous soutenons que leur égalitarisme est surtout le fait d’un présupposé. Nous concluons que l’impôt sur la propriété foncière est la forme d’imposition la plus apte à être légitimée à partir de la perspective libertarienne sur les droits naturels, plus en tous cas que l’impôt sur le revenu et que la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée, formes d’impôt qui sont les plus habituelles. Surtout, nous soutenons qu’il y a là une forme d’imposition que la Constitution du Japon autorise. (shrink)

Andrić and Herlitz (2022) object to Timeslice Prioritarianism on the basis that it violates two purportedly uncontroversial properties: prudence and Weak Pareto. We will claim that their objection does not undermine Timeslice Prioritarianism because the basis of their objection is just a straightforward implication of utilitarianism. To establish this argument, we will show that a timeslice view satisfies prudence and Weak Pareto if and only if it is utilitarianism.

It has been shown that the Mere Addition Paradox occurs in a choice-functional approach with Path Independence (Stewart R.T., 2021, Path independence and a persistent paradox of population ethics, Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming). The present study is a three-part response to this finding. First, I show that Path Independence is not an essential property leading to this paradox and that logically weaker properties can get the same result. Second, I present a rationalizable choice function that does not yield the paradox. (...) And third, I argue that menu-dependent relations are nicely examined if Path Independence is relaxed to Property $\alpha $ (or equivalently, Contraction Consistency). (shrink)

仏教には本来、社会倫理的な実践が大きな要素として備わっていた。近代的な宗教観のもとで見落とされがちだった日本仏教の倫理性・社会性の側面が、現代社会の中で再び顕わになりつつある。本書は、「正法」理念に着 目しながら、日本仏教の実践思想の系譜を捉え直し、宗派主義の枠を超えた新しい日本仏教史像を描く試みである。.

本巻は、「他者」とされた異教・女性・被差別民の問題と、「境界」に位置した北海道・沖縄という異文化に焦点をあて、宗教との関価を論じる。.

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study found that even though children from all East Asian countries outperformed American children, American students reported higher self-evaluation of their math and science abilities than did students from East Asian countries such as China, Korea, and Japan (Mullis, Martin, Gonzalez, & Chrostowski, 2004). Such cross-cultural differences in self-appraisal fit the stereotype of the modest East Asian and contribute to the received view that East Asians have less positive self-concepts than Americans. This view (...) was summarized recently by Heine, Lehman, Markus, and Kitayama (1999) as follows: ‘‘The need for positive self-regard, as it is currently conceptualized, is not a universal, but rather is rooted in significant aspects of North American culture’’ (p. 766; but cf. Sedikides, Gaertner, & Vevea. (shrink)

This paper explores the notion of species-relative critical levels, which is a crucial ethical issue in multi-species population ethics. First, the formal conditions are provided under which there are species-relative critical levels (e.g., the critical level for human beings is different from that for non-human beings). In particular, we find it a salient question of animal ethics whether the existence of a human being is morally better than that of a non-human animal when their utility levels are the same. Subsequently, (...) we illustrate two general classes of multi-species critical-level utilitarian orderings. One class employs species-relative critical levels, which entails either the animal repugnant conclusion or the animal sadistic conclusion. The other employs species-relative critical levels plus species-lexical ordering. Although it can avoid both the animal repugnant conclusion and the animal sadistic conclusions, it has the problem of speciesism. (shrink)