bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Precedent-Based Critique of Legal Positivism
Authors: Goldberg John CP , Zipursky Benjamin C
Published: April 2023

Under the doctrine of vertical precedent, lower courts in a given jurisdiction must follow an on-point precedent issued by a higher court, or distinguish it. Lawyers are typically taught that distinguishing requires the lower court to articulate why the case before it is justifiably treated in a different manner than the precedent. Exclusive legal positivists are troubled by the phenomenon of distinguishing because the notion of justification built into the idea of distinguishing precedent appears to call for substantive normative reasoning by lower courts. One response to this apparent problem, that of Joseph Raz, treats ‘distinguishing precedent’ as a kind of legal change or amendment rather than as law application. This chapter contends that the “legal amendment” strategy cannot work because it simply gets the law wrong: lower courts are not generally empowered to amend the law. An undistorted description of the practice must recognize that courts engage in small-scale moral reasoning when they distinguish vertical precedents. The last half of the chapter utilizes common law cases on the affirmative duties of landowners to illustrate the power and authenticity of this anti-positivistic account.
Precedent and the Source–Norm Distinction
Authors: Shecaira Fábio Perin
Published: April 2023

This chapter proposes a conceptual framework for comparing the uses of precedent in civil law and common law systems. Central to the proposed framework is the distinction between legal sources (e.g. precedents) and the legal norms that may be derived from such sources by means of legal interpretation. The threefold ‘source–interpretation–norm’ distinction (abbreviated in the title as the ‘source–norm’ distinction) helps to clarify the various ways in which past cases may be invoked, read, and enforced by the courts of different legal systems. Particular attention is given to the legal systems of England, the US, and Brazil. The proposed framework is meant not only to clarify the role of precedent in legal systems on which international commentary is scarce—for example, the Brazilian legal system—but also to revisit the practice of legal systems whose doctrine of precedent is supposedly well established and well understood.
Shaping Our Relationship
Authors: Köpcke Maris
Published: April 2023

It is common to say that when judges set a precedent they exercise law-making power. But it is unclear in what sense this is true. Unlike legislating, setting a precedent is not a purposive way of making law. Precedent does not fit the received idea of legal power. To solve this riddle, the chapter identifies some main features of precedent outside law, and argues that these features hang together to make up a morally distinct form of action with discernible uses. The very idea of precedent presupposes that there is a relationship to which precedent-setting answers, primarily by way of specification of its normative requirements. By thus considering not merely what precedent is not, but positively developing an understanding of its moral purpose, the chapter articulates the important sense in which setting a legal precedent amounts to the exercise of a power, and the place of this power in a community’s pursuit of justice.
Partnering with the Dead to Govern the Unborn
Authors: Hurd Heidi M
Published: April 2023

This chapter canvasses a lengthy menu of arguments for why judges ought to adhere to precedents with which they disagree. Because the author does not share the conservative instincts of those who find precedent of obvious value, the chapter reaches to Edmund Burke’s impassioned defence of legal traditions as an honest means of exploring just what can be said for binding ourselves to rules laid down by the dead, and for binding those who will live long after us by legal innovations designed to serve the needs of the living, not the needs of the still unborn. As the chapter argues, each of the justificatory arguments that we might harvest from Burke’s writings comes at some philosophical cost. The burden of this chapter is to cash out the value of the four categories of defences—conceptual, psychological, moral, and aesthetic—that Burke’s conservatism provides for according precedent a weighty role in judicial decision-making.
Wrongs, Remedies, and the Persistence of Reasons
Authors: Oberdiek John
Published: April 2023

The “continuity thesis” is one of Gardner’s signal contributions to tort theory. It holds that the reasons justifying one’s primary duties persist even after one breaches the duties they justify, reasserting themselves by grounding secondary duties of redress. The continuity thesis has been enormously influential but it also has attracted criticism. Perhaps the most widespread criticism—leveled in different ways by John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky, Stephen Smith, Victor Tadros, and Charlie Webb—alleges that the continuity thesis fails to take seriously the role that wrongdoing plays in the justification of secondary duties. Chapter 10 assesses those criticisms and attempts to turn them back, defending the continuity thesis.
A Strategy of Limited Actions
Authors: Göransson Markus Balázs
Published: April 2023

This chapter considers the role of Russia’s ground-based contingent in the Russian military operation in Syria. The chapter, which covers the period 2015-2021, identifies six key strategic functions of the contingent, which is small in size but diverse in its composition. The functions reach beyond base security and support to the aerial forces that have spearheaded Russia’s operation, and include also the ability to carry out high-value tasks, provide capacity building to allied forces, facilitate ally coordination, and support escalation management. Importantly, Russia’s ability to operate forces with different degrees of deniability/officiality has lent it greater flexibility in managing allies, adversaries, and third-party actors.
Issues in morphome identification
Authors: Herce Borja
Published: April 2023

The morphome is a controversial and polarizing object of analysis, which is the reason why particular attention must be paid to the phenomenon’s definition and diagnosis. This chapter addresses all aspects that could be relevant for this: distinguishing systematic from accidental morphological identities (and polysemy from homophony), drawing the line between natural and unnatural morphosyntactic distributions in paradigms, assessing the morphological (vs phonological) character of an alternation pattern … It also explores the relevance of other notions (like blocking and stem spaces) in the phenomenon’s definition, and the possible interactions between morphomicity and other linguistic phenomena (like syncretism, syntagmatic order, heteroclisis, overabundance, defectiveness, and gender).
Morphomes in synchrony
Authors: Herce Borja
Published: April 2023

This chapter presents a synchronic database with 120 morphomic structures from 79 languages from all around the world. It starts by presenting the criteria that will motivate inclusion/exclusion from the database: being unmistakably unnatural and unmistakably systematic in a tabular paradigm. All morphomes that met these criteria are presented in detail, with diachronic and comparative insights when available, and are then deconstructed into the logically independent variables that determine morphome-to-morphome variation. The chapter concludes with a statistic overview of the quantitative data and with several findings: (i) there are cross-linguistically recurrent unnatural structures; (ii) Romance morphomes (the most frequently studied ones) are not particularly representative of the phenomenon; (iii) there is a bias/preference towards naturalness even among morphomes; and (iv) there is a tradeoff between the grammatical and lexical informativity of morphs that may drive and justify stem–affix segmentations.
Implications
Authors: Herce Borja
Published: April 2023

This chapter contains a reappraisal of the importance of morphemic structures. It is meant at a cautionary note that the book’s focus on unnatural structures should not detract or distract from the importance of syntactic and semantic features and values in morphological evolution. It therefore presents clear instances of meaning acting as a template for the distribution of morphs and morphological alternations, as well as clear examples that morphological categories like morphomes acting in the same way. Morphological theories should therefore come to terms with the fact that wordform-to-wordform predictive relations and feature value structure both decisively shape morphological and paradigmatic architecture.
Conclusions
Authors: Herce Borja
Published: April 2023

This concluding chapter wraps up the book. It briefly summarizes the contents of all previous sections, and recapitulates their main findings, both diachronic and synchronic, and its most important contributions to the field. It finishes by discussing how these findings might link to morphological theory and linguistic cognition. The existence and importance of highly unnatural structures in many languages, it is argued, should not obscure the fact that a general preference exists for less unnatural ones. Facts hence suggest that both language-specific purely morphological templates and more general syntactic and semantic feature values are fundamental to the nature of paradigms across languages.
Imagining Women's Property in Victorian Fiction
Authors: Rappoport Jill
Published: April 2023

Imagining Women’s Property in Victorian Fiction reframes Victorian women’s changing economic rights and their representation in nineteenth-century novels to show how a substantial redistribution of wealth was complicated by competing cultural traditions. The reform of married women’s property law between 1856 and 1882 constituted one of England’s largest economic transformations as well as one of its most significant challenges to family customs. By the end of this period, wives who had once lost their common-law property rights to husbands regained economic agency, forever altering the legal and theoretical nature of wedlock. Yet legal rights frequently clashed with other family claims, and the reallocation of wealth affected far more than marriage. In nineteenth-century fiction, women’s claims to ownership provide insight into the larger social networks forged through property transactions and also offer a lens to examine other social matters, including wills and copyright; evolution; the twin dangers of greed and generosity; inheritance and custody rights; the economic ramifications of family obligation; and the legacy of nineteenth-century economic practices for women today. This book explores the widespread ways in which women’s financial agency was imagined by fiction that engages with but also diverges from the law. Repeatedly, narratives by Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, and Oliphant suggest both that the law is inadequate to account for the way that property enables and disrupts relationships, and that the form of the Victorian novel—in its ability to track intimate and intricate exchanges across generations—is better suited to such tasks.
“Giv[ing] All She Had”
Authors: Rappoport Jill
Published: April 2023

Margaret Oliphant’s Hester uses the intense feelings provoked by a pearl necklace to explore two different models for thinking about women’s relationship to property: changing legal rights and family traditions. Awareness of these two models allows us to see how the novel takes what initially appears to be a contest between a naïve, helpless wife and a successful, single businesswoman and transforms it into opposing visions of daughters, one who manages to protect a maternal legacy for herself and the next generation against another who cannot. This shift in perspective forces us to see how these roles coexist, in tension, and also changes how we understand characters’ choices and relationships. Suggesting that their newfound rights to private property will not make women abandon other family traditions, Hester remains ambivalent about the costs and benefits of these rights and reminds us of the other extralegal forces and relational obligations that continued to shape women’s financial lives.
Introduction
Authors: Milburn Josh
Published: April 2023

What would the food system of an animal-rights-respecting state, or zoopolis, look like? That is this book’s question. Both ‘old’ (moral) and ‘new’ (political) approaches to animal rights endorse plant-based food systems. But this introduction establishes that this book argues for a non-vegan food system. It also lays out some preliminary considerations. This is a work of political philosophy, holding that animal rights are a matter of justice—not of ‘mere’ morality—and that animals have rights because they have interests. But animal rights are not the only concerns motivating the book’s arguments. Humans, too, matter, and can be victims of food injustice. This book is a work of ideal theory, focused on what a just food system would look like, and thus not primarily on how to alleviate injustice in the real world. The introduction concludes with a chapter-by-chapter breakdown.
The trouble with veganism
Authors: Milburn Josh
Published: April 2023

Although a plant-based food system would have lots of positives, there are problems with veganism. Some are pragmatic, but this chapter canvasses four sets of principled concerns. First, people disagree about what it means to live a good life. Many people’s conceptions of the good involve access to animal-based foods (or things associated with animal-based foods). Second, veganism may create or exacerbate food justice concerns. Third, arable agriculture is not always animal-friendly, raising the question of whether some animal products may be more animal-friendly than some plant-based products. Fourth, a vegan food system apparently lends itself to surprising pro-animal-extinction conclusions. Based on these considerations, the chapter argues that animal advocates should explore the possibility of non-vegan food systems in the zoopolis, and that the zoopolis should (probably) permit and even actively endorse non-vegan food production, providing that we can identify non-vegan, but animal-rights-respecting, food production methods.
Conclusion
Authors: Milburn Josh
Published: April 2023

This short conclusion summarizes the book’s arguments, including clarifying what the book has not argued. It also reflects on the possibility of audiences misunderstanding, or misusing, the book’s arguments. It then asks how scholars might take the book’s arguments further. They could consider foods that the book has not considered. Or they could consider goods beyond food. The book finishes with brief reflections on what it means to answer the questions the book has explored correctly, and the impact of getting them wrong.
The Black Social Economy
Authors: Benjamin Tatiana , Austin Sharon D. Wright
Published: April 2023

Using the concept of the Black social economy, racial capitalism theory, and the concept of Black social capital, we provide an analysis of the financial empowerment efforts of Black women in Brooklyn and Washington, D.C. In doing so, we emphasize their leadership in Susus, ROSCAs, and cooperatives as a way to assist female entrepreneurs, support the needs of immigrant women, empower women with poor or limited credit records, and generally provide them with financial independence. When examining this topic, we want to demonstrate how Black women pursue group-based initiatives and cooperatives to financially empower their communities. We primarily inquire about two questions. First, how have Black women in America used Susus to their benefit? Second, what successes/challenges have they encountered when trying to do so?
From Perception to Communication
Authors: Cooper Robin
Published: April 2023

The aim of this book is to characterize a notion of type which will cover both linguistic and non-linguistic action and to lay the foundations for a theory of action based on a theory of types called TTR (a Theory of Types with Records). The book argues that a theory of language based on action allows us to take a perspective on linguistic content which is centred on interaction in dialogue and that this is importantly different to the traditional view of natural languages as being essentially similar to formal languages such as logics developed by philosophers or mathematicians. At the same time it will argue that the tremendous technical advances made by the formal language view of semantics can be incorporated into the action-based view and that this can lead to important improvements both of intuitive understanding and empirical coverage. In this enterprise we use types rather than possible worlds as commonly employed in studies of the semantics of natural language. Types are more tractable than possible worlds and give us more hope of understanding the implementation of semantics both on machines and in biological brains.
From perception to intensionality
Authors: Cooper Robin
Published: April 2023

This chapter introduces a notion of perception of an object or situation as making a judgement that it is of a type. It presents basic notions of TTR, which builds to a great extent on ideas taken from the type theory of Per Martin-Löf. The overall approach owes much to the theory of situations and situation semantics presented by Barwise and Perry in the 1980’s. A central notion in TTR is that of record. The term “record” is used in computer science for what is often called an attribute-value matrix (AVM) or feature structure in linguistics. We use records and record types to model situations and situation types in a sense related to that of situation semantics as developed by Barwise and Perry. The records and record types are also related to discourse representation structures as introduced by Kamp
Modality and intensionality without possible worlds
Authors: Cooper Robin
Published: April 2023

This chapter argues that types of situations are better placed to deal with modality and intensionality than possible worlds. In standard formal semantics propositions are regarded as sets of possible worlds. Propositions are modelled as types rather than sets of possible worlds. One important difference is that sets of possible worlds are extensional sets whereas our types are intensional. Thus it is possible to have two distinct types which have exactly the same witnesses. Notions of conversational background and ideals in modality can be seen as resources based on types and topoi as introduced in the TTR literature. Attitudes like ‘believe’ can be seen as a relation between individuals and types. For an individual to believe a type it has to be the case that the type matches the type which models the beliefs (or long-term memory) of the individual.
Type-based underspecification
Authors: Cooper Robin
Published: April 2023

This chapter gives an account of how TTR types can be used to talk of content which is underspecified. The idea is to exploit the notion of types which can have several witnesses as “underspecifications” of those witnesses. Rather than associating contents with utterances as we have done in the earlier chapters, we associate types of contents with utterances. Thus a dialogue participant when observing a speech event associates it with a type of content rather than a particular content. We show how earlier ideas about the treatment of underspecification of quantifier scope and anaphora can be accommodated in this view
Patriarch Dioscorus of Alexandria
Authors: Menze Volker L.
Published: April 2023

Patriarch Dioscorus of Alexandria: The Last Pharaoh of Alexandria and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Later Roman Empire offers a thorough revision of the historical role of Dioscorus as patriarch of Alexandria between 444 and 451 ce. The monograph works on the premise that the Christological controversy of the fifth century can only be fully understood against the background of imperial politics in the Later Roman Empire. Christian theology did not develop without its historical context, and how ‘Orthodoxy’ was implemented depended on the mechanisms of late imperial (ecclesiastical) politics. The focus is on Dioscorus, one of the major protagonists of the Christological controversy, whose image is extremely distorted: he became a saint in those eastern church traditions which oppose the Council of Chalcedon, while western church traditions remember him as heretic and violent villain. Western scholarship maintains the image of Dioscorus as ‘ruthless and ambitious’, a ‘tyrant-bishop’ feared by his opponents—the ‘Attila of the Eastern Church’. The book breaks with these negative stereotypes and offers the first serious historical analysis of Dioscorus as ecclesiastical politician and reformer. It discusses the discrepancy that theologically Dioscorus was a loyal follower of his famous predecessor Cyril of Alexandria (412–444) while politically he was the protagonist of the anti-Cyrillian party in Alexandria. Analysing Dioscorus’ role as president of the Second Council of Ephesus in 449 and his downfall and deposition at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the book also offers a much-needed new reading of the acts of these two general councils.
Conclusion
Authors: Menze Volker L.
Published: April 2023

The conclusion briefly discusses the succession of Dioscorus as patriarch of Alexandria. At the same time, Dioscorus was sent into exile in Paphlagonia/Turkey where he died in 454. Although only deposed and not condemned as heretic at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, Dioscorus was immediately regarded as heretic in the Latin West. Eastern Chalcedonians also regarded him a heretic while the opponents of Chalcedon presented him as confessor for the faith. In the Coptic and Syriac traditions his sanctification began already in the fifth century. Neither the image of Dioscorus as condemned heretic nor as saint does justice to the historical Dioscorus as the book intends to prove.
Bringing Nuance to Autonomy-Based Considerations in Vaccine Mandate Debates
Authors: Blumenthal-Barby Jennifer
Published: April 2023

Several policy proposals have been made for how to address the problem of the unvaccinated during a pandemic, including public health education, persuasion, nudging, incentives, and mandates. Often, a Mill-based harm principle (the thought that individual liberty can be overridden when individual choice causes harm to others) is invoked to justify mandates. Application of the harm principle to justify mandates, however, requires a philosophical account of risk as harm, clarification regarding a threshold for when risk and harm to others are significant enough to trigger the harm principle, and consideration of whether there are alternative forms of mandates that would protect others the same amount as mandates while imposing less of a strain on individual autonomy (e.g. mandated daily testing or mandated proof of previous infection in the case of COVID-19). Using COVID-19 as a case example, I argue that the harm principle can likely be applied to justify vaccine mandates, but mostly because of harm posed to hospital workers and systems rather than transmission of harm to individual others. I also argue that even if vaccine mandates can be justified under the harm principle, they ought not to be dismissed as a minor autonomy infringement, as some are keen to do. This is a lesson not just for COVID-19 but for future pandemics.
Handling Future Pandemics
Authors: Kamm F. M.
Published: April 2023

This chapter considers how moral duties not to harm and those to aid differ, the idea of morally innocent threats, and the role of self-defense in making one safe when not all are safe. These ideas are used to help justify twelve proposals for dealing with future pandemics, including some moral requirements, that aim to be consistent with the views of even those most concerned about personal liberty. The chapter also examines the limits some moral philosophers recommend on interpersonally aggregating losses and benefits and how this affects the morality of hospitals postponing elective medical procedures and the morality of requiring lockdowns. It concludes that imposing relatively small harms on each of many people in order to prevent loss of others’ lives could sometimes be justified to those with libertarian-like views.
Tragic Choices during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Authors: Orfali Kristina
Published: April 2023

This chapter gives first an overview of the different approaches and ethical frameworks regarding the allocation of scarce resources in the USA versus in Europe, particularly during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic when uncertainty prevailed at all levels. Through observational data, media reporting, reviews, and interviews, the chapter gives a critical account of the harsh reality of triage during the early context of the pandemic in different countries with different healthcare systems. More or less explicit triage took place almost everywhere, often disguised into suboptimal care; excess mortality in nursing homes was a global phenomenon; countries who did well at the beginning were overwhelmed later. Finally, the chapter attempts to draw some lessons for future pandemics by learning from these cross-cultural experiences how to build trust and accountability to increase public support in situations of scarcity and uncertainty.
Ethical Hotspots in Infectious Disease Surveillance for Global Health Security
Authors: Parker Michael
Published: April 2023

At the time of writing, the world remains in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic. This, along with recent experiences of Ebola and Zika outbreaks, has led to calls for the development of better and more coordinated global strategies for effective pandemic preparedness, response, and prevention. Particular emphasis has been placed on the need for improved infectious disease surveillance and intelligence. Questions of social justice have been a prominent feature of public and academic debate during the pandemic. These have understandably tended to focus on interventions in pandemic response. This chapter argues that important questions of social justice also arise with respect to the impacts of pandemic preparedness and prevention and that infectious disease surveillance is a particularly important example. Although the development and implementation of an effective system of infectious disease surveillance constitutes a vitally important global public good, many of the costs of making this a reality will be borne by those living in marginalized communities in Africa, Latin America, and South-East Asia. Many of the interventions required are likely to have significant negative impact upon the well-being of those who live in such hotspots. New forms of surveillance will mean that these populations will become highly observed, monitored, and intervened upon. Against this backdrop, the chapter identifies a number of new ethical challenges arising in infectious disease surveillance and argues that significant obligations are owed to those who live in these regions. The chapter argues that infectious disease hotspots are also ethical hotspots.
Pandemic and Structural Comorbidity
Authors: Dias Maria Clara , Oliveira Fabio A. G.
Published: April 2023

This chapter demonstrates how the COVID-19 epidemic acted as an accelerator of social inequalities and structural vulnerability experienced by specific segments of the Brazilian population, particularly, and by countries in the Global South, in general. It presents the effects of the pandemic on “groups at risk”. It evaluates these effects against the moral and justice perspective developed by Dias, namely, the Functionings Approach (FA). This is a perspective that (1) aims to abandon current paradigms that violate basic functionings of individuals who remain at the margins of hegemonic epistemologies, and (2) claims a decolonial paradigm as a way to understand the colonial legacies that are still present in the structuring of social inequalities at global and local levels.
Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics
Authors: Bew Paul
Published: April 2023

The grand theme of modern Irish history is the political outworking—in a liberal democratic era—of the Catholic majority resentment of historic forcible dispossession. This resentment existed alongside an acute present sense of alienation derived from being a Catholic minority marooned in a majority Protestant state. This book is an attempt to examine the unfolding of this grand theme through the lives of two great Irish political leaders: Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant of Ascendancy stock, who built the Irish party in the 1880s into a major force in British politics, and John Dillon, an upper-middle-class Catholic, who was to be the last leader of the Irish party in Westminster. This text deliberately sweeps from broad social issues—in particular the Irish land question—to fine detail of personal behaviour and insider gossip. Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics: Judging Dillon and Parnell is an attempt to re-create the intense drama of these two political careers in a way which illuminates the personal idiosyncrasy of high-wire leadership as it attempts to cope with wider tides of popular emotion. This book also details the emergence of the doctrine of consent as it affected north-east Ulster.
Hereditary Patriotism
Authors: Bew Paul
Published: April 2023

Charles Stewart Parnell and John Dillon entered Irish politics in the mid 1870s. They rapidly assumed positions of exceptional influence: apparently united in their pursuit of nationalist objectives. They greatly strengthened Irish nationalism and helped restructure British party politics. Nevertheless, they were, in reality, rarely as one. To put it bluntly, self-government apart, they did not share a common political outlook. This was the case long before Dillon played a key role in destroying Parnell’s political career. The tensions between them reflect, in part, different family contexts. Both came from privileged Irish backgrounds but they were rather different; Parnell hailed from Protestant landed stock while Dillon’s inheritance was Catholic and professional. This study goes to the heart of Irish nationalist belief, but it also lays intense emphasis on presence—physical and moral—in politics. After Parnell’s death in 1891, Dillon moved formally into the leadership of the Irish parliamentary party, which Parnell had played such a key role in building, but he was always troubled by the interpretation of Parnell’s legacy. In the last fifty years, there has been a tendency, perhaps at times a little glib, to see him as unimaginative at best. The Irish government sponsored historic decade of centenaries (1912–22), now passed, has inevitably tended to focus to a significant degree on acts of violence. In the era covered by this book, violence was also important, but the relatively greater weight granted to politics and parliamentary process permits an analysis of a world which is just as intensely Irish because of, not despite, its intimate engagement with English politics and parties.
John Mitchel and his Legacy
Authors: Bew Paul
Published: April 2023

John Mitchel was the most influential late nineteenth-century Irish nationalist. He popularized the concept that the Irish famine was deliberate English genocide. In very poor health, he fought and won a parliamentary seat in Tipperary in 1885; all ambitious young nationalists like Parnell and notably Dillon, rallied around him despite Mitchel’s strong support for slavery. Mitchel’s last campaign encouraged young politicians to believe that there was—despite some appearances—a latent popular support for militant nationalist objectives if only it could be mobilized. John Mitchel delivered a slashing blow to the forces of conservatism in Irish politics. But it also weakened old-style Fenian militarism with a linked belief in physical force as the only means of liberating Ireland. Mitchel believed, above all, that advanced nationalists should go into electoral politics.
Curative Forgivingness
Authors: Mihut Cristian F.
Published: April 2023

Chapter 5 is the centerpiece of the project. It articulates and illustrates a two-level account of the human virtue of forgiveness rooted in the image of sin-bearing—curative forgivingness. Following Robert C. Roberts some of the way, the chapter articulates forgivingness as involving a sensibility attuned to various blame-reducing and beneficence-maintaining conditions. But it goes beyond his account to show that curative forgivingness also involves a conception of one’s life as a trusting participation in the story of a transcendently good God that cauterizes and contains our individual suffering. The chapter concludes with explanations and illustrations of three modes of such participation: the appropriation of a teleological meta-narrative, participation in grace as an aesthetic phenomenon, and developing a lifelong friendship with Christ.
Good Literature [bonae litterae] and the Good
Authors: Little Katherine C.
Published: April 2023

The humanist project was inherently contradictory, yoking together two traditions, the classical and Christian, that did not always match easily or smoothly. Doubts about that project, the usefulness of classical texts for Christian readers, emerged in the mid-sixteenth century, after the initial bloom of confidence in humanism began to fade. John Phillip’s play, The Play of Patient Grissell, explores these inevitable contradictions through a medieval exemplum, famously adapted by Geoffrey Chaucer: the story of Patient Griselda. For Philip, the exemplum as a form, a short story with a moral, provides an older model of engaging with classical texts that had been superseded by humanism, with its emphasis on imitation, its embrace of classical texts on their own terms. Reimagining this exemplum allows Phillip to confront the ways in which humanism has altered Christian morality even as it has insisted upon it.
A New Basis for Contract Law
Authors: Bogle Stephen
Published: April 2023

This chapter explains Stair’s new philosophical basis for the law of contract in Scotland. Four ideas are central to Stair’s novel approach. Bare promises and agreements are, in theory, enforceable. Commerce is a central pillar of society; on that basis, its needs should inform how we assess, along with equity, the existing law but also the development of law in novel situations. Freedom is fundamental to mankind and the laws and customs of Scotland are shaped by this principle, vitally, this includes a freedom to contract, which is a right. Yet this freedom should be guided by our conscience and our calling to bring glory to God. Yet how to marry this new philosophical framework to the cases, legislation, and sources of Scots law was fundamental to the success of the Institutions of the Law of Scotland account of the law of contract. This chapter explores how Stair did this and whether he was successful.
Benefit of Clergy
Authors: McGlynn Margaret
Published: April 2023

Using statutes, year books, and readings, Chapter 1 analyses the doctrinal development of benefit of clergy from 1215 to the late fifteenth century. It argues that while the common lawyers accepted that benefit of clergy was a legitimate right of the Church, they were willing to assert their role in the implementation and management of that right. The specific elements of concern changed over the centuries, but there was always a focus on determining who was eligible for benefit of clergy and how it might be claimed. Though the reading test emerged early as one possible means of identification, by the fifteenth century it was the standard means and it allowed for the elaboration of a version of benefit of clergy which allowed secular men to avoid execution.
Internal Constraints
Authors: Goodin Robert E.
Published: April 2023

A second driver of many of the mechanisms perpetuating advantage and disadvantage is more internal: the scarcity of time and attention that people can devote to processing information and utilizing other such resources as are available to them. In an information-rich society such as is given to us by the internet, problems of time and attention scarcity become acute. The ways we find for coping with those problems on the internet, and the biases built into them, are emblematic of our strategies for coping with scarcities of time and attention more generally. Search engines and decision algorithms are undeniably useful for processing the flood of internet information. But they are notoriously biased in their operations, sometimes in ways that are obvious and easily remedied but often in ways that are either opaque or hard to remedy even if detected. Even if people switch from one coping strategy to another, the new one might (indeed, we have every reason to suppose that it will) also be biased in some way or another. Since we need to devote time and attention to switching, and those are scarce, the coping mechanisms we employ will tend to be ‘sticky’, perpetually instantiating the same biases time and again.
Liberatory Virtue and Vice Epistemology
Authors: McKenna Robin
Published: April 2023

This chapter develops a non-ideal picture of our obligations and responsibilities as inquirers. This picture is developed within the theoretical framework of liberatory virtue and vice epistemology. On the liberatory virtue epistemologist’s picture, inquirers are deeply socially situated, and their character traits are shaped by social forces and influences largely outwith their control. The challenge for the liberatory virtue epistemologist is how to make sense of the idea that we are responsible for our intellectual virtues and vices, and the consequences thereof, even though they are shaped by factors outwith our control. The chapter argues that the version of liberatory virtue epistemology developed by José Medina has the resources to deal with this challenge. On Medina’s view, our social identities and roles do not constrain our agency and responsibility but are rather the grounds on which agency and responsibility are based.
Fragments of European Law
Authors: Linden-Retek Paul
Published: April 2023

Chapter 4 develops an analytic typology of constitutional ‘imaginaries’, or interpretive paradigms, that characterize prominent strands of European constitutional discourse: history, system, principle. Each imaginary orients citizens to constitutional politics with reference to a particular temporal heading of law and its corresponding set of political psychologies, conceptions of equal citizenship, and its privileged social actors. In history, we find the particularistic enclosure of historically rooted identities drawn from a national democratic community of will; in system, the commercial functionalism of an impersonal market administering evolving constellations of present interests; and in principle, the abstract norms of communicative reason that unite a future community of bearers of universal rights. These imaginaries differ in how they construct the sources of legal meaning and the place they assign to the past, present, and future. But each exhibits the common flaw of reification insofar as it privileges one temporal register while repressing others. Examining recent conflicts over European economic governance and the protection of fundamental rights, the chapter shows how this flaw has steered European jurisprudence towards fragmentation and ideological consolidation. It then formalizes this critique as a contrast between the ‘coherence’ of legal order and law’s ‘intelligibility’. ‘Coherence’ empties law of its reflexive resources for bridging competing values, motives, and aims and disparate conditions of social life. ‘Intelligibility’, by contrast, characterizes law as an object whose normative commitments are more modestly conceived as open-ended; as exceeding sovereign control; and in need of re-interpretation over time by divergent and marginal voices.
Conclusion
Authors: Linden-Retek Paul
Published: April 2023

Chapter 8 brings together the book’s various critiques and themes within a framework of cosmopolitan right. It takes stock of the main arguments of the work and highlights their implications in the present moment of uncertainty in EU constitutional politics and for Europe’s place in the world. The chapter closes by putting the spirit of these internal democratic reforms in relief against questions of global justice and returns once more to the field of migration. For perhaps nowhere are the questions of estrangement and remembrance more poignant today with respect to European politics than on the Mediterranean Sea and the southern shores of the European Union. The chapter reads Jean-Claude Juncker’s September 2015 ‘State of the Union’ address—in which he spoke, in part, of the crisis on the Mediterranean—in light of the policies the European Commission advanced to ‘manage’ migration. The contradictions therein suggest precisely the closure of the iterated, narrative space of law and judgement. Such flaw imperils not only refugee’s lives but also Europe’s own foundational authority to judge the merit of their claims. It reveals poignantly how, if the future of Europe and of postnational constitutionalism depends on a temporal view of identity and self-authorship, the fates of Europeans and refugees are drawn together.
Religious Legacy
Authors: Beiser Frederick C.
Published: April 2023

This chapter discusses the role of religion in the lives of Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Simmel. Nietzsche was the most outspoken atheist of the three. His religious life is characterized by his early struggle with his Protestantism. Dilthey was more an agnostic than an outspoken atheist and he planned to be a clergyman of the reformed faith. He was firm in the need to build a worldview on a secular basis; if we could not know God, he reasoned, God could not be a basis for ethics. Simmel grew up in a secularized Jewish family. The parents converted to Christianity and baptized their son in Protestantism. Simmel never openly declared atheism; in his later life he renounced Christianity, though this was no affirmation of his Jewish roots. However, he was sympathetic to religion, not as a source of faith but as a factor in the life of the individual.
Early Sugar and Ethanol Policy, 1933–1959
Authors: Eaglin Jennifer
Published: April 2023

This chapter examines the origins of the state’s intervention in ethanol production under the Institute of Sugar and Alcohol (Instituto do Açúcar e do Álcool [IAA]). State officials first supported ethanol production as a means of using up chronic excess sugar production in the country. In the state of São Paulo, the presence of coffee infrastructure provided sugar and alcohol production with a great deal of technical support, shaping the future ethanol industry in the region of Ribeirão Preto. The first boom in ethanol arrived during World War II, establishing the industry as a part of national security and validating government support since the 1930s. São Paulo producers gained market control of sugar at the same time, shifting political influence out of the sector toward the south and away from the northeast. By 1959, São Paulo was the leading producer of sugar and ethanol in the country.
Sugar, Ethanol, and Development, 1959–1975
Authors: Eaglin Jennifer
Published: April 2023

This chapter examines the changing reality of the sugar and ethanol sector in the 1960s and early 1970s as sugar exports increased and petroleum came to dominate the fuel market. The collapse of US-Cuban relations opened the door for Brazil to capitalize on a larger international sugar market in the 1960s. Sugar exports became a major part of the new military dictatorship’s development policy plan by the late 1960s. By the early 1970s, booming sugar prices drove massive investment in the sector through modernization programs such as Funproçúcar, which sugar producers redirected toward expanding their ethanol production capacity, anticipating and shaping a future ethanol program in the aftermath of the oil shock of 1973.
Building a Giant—or a Giant Failure?
Authors: Kurlantzick Joshua
Published: April 2023

This chapter introduces the key questions of the book. What has led Beijing to attempt to both build a global media superpower and wield rising political influence—its sharp power along with its soft power—within other countries in Asia and many parts of the world? How is China building its media apparatus, and how is it wielding influence in other ways within other societies? What are the potential implications of China gaining greater control over global media and the information “pipes” through which information flows? How might Beijing use its media and its control of these “pipes,” along with its diplomatic relationships, to advocate for its model of development and its model of a closed, heavily constrained internet? How might other countries respond?
The First Charm Offensive Sets the Stage for Today
Authors: Kurlantzick Joshua
Published: April 2023

This chapter explores how China’s soft power campaigns (and some sharp power efforts) in the 1990s and 2000s delivered successes for China, in terms of trade deals, diplomatic relations, and other measures. It shows how this era provided a blueprint for Chinese soft power that Beijing would build on in the next decade and combine with sharp power, increasingly using the two in concert. It further shows how Beijing followed a soft power strategy that had been used in the past by other powers, including the United States, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world. It also shows how Southeast Asian leaders made decisions, in part, because of Chinese influence but also, in part, because China’s growing power helped them as well.
Motivations for China’s Modern Influence Campaign
Authors: Kurlantzick Joshua
Published: April 2023

The chapter analyzes how China’s 1990s- softand 2000s-era soft power charm offensive came to an end and why public opinion in Asia and other parts of the globe began to turn against Beijing by the mid-2010s, as Beijing became more powerful and began to throw its power around in its near neighborhood and in other parts of the world. It also discusses how China’s state media remained propagandistic and wooden, which did not help Beijing’s global diplomacy. Within Chinese domestic politics, Xi Jinping became the top leader, turned China much more authoritarian, established a situation in which he could potentially be leader for life, created a cult of personality around himself, reinstituted many state controls on the private sector, and made clear he wanted China to play a much bigger role in the world and also potentially serve as a model to other states.
Xinhua and Content-Sharing Deals
Authors: Kurlantzick Joshua
Published: April 2023

This chapter shows how Xinhua, alone among Chinese state media, has made major inroads into the global media ecosphere and has become a real competitor to other newswires like the Associated Press and Reuters. Xinhua indeed has far more potential to serve as a vector for Beijing shaping information narratives than other state media like China Daily, CRI, or CGTN. Xinhua is often cheaper than its competitors for local news outlets to use; this allows Xinhua to increasingly dictate the news agenda, particularly in developing countries that use its service. The chapter also shows how Beijing has signed many content-sharing deals with media in other countries, including rich countries, which allows China to spread its message, often successfully, through a wide range of global media outlets, with readers sometimes not realizing that content is being pulled from Xinhua and other Chinese outlets.