bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Crawford Emily
Published: January 2022

The law of armed conflict (international humanitarian law or IHL) is one of the most regulated fields of international law, and there are dozens of treaties regulating the treatment of civilian populations, prisoners of war, specific means and methods of warfare, and the protection of cultural property. As political and social events, together with advances in technology, have changed how armed conflicts are conducted, so too has the law of armed conflict changed to better respond to these new developments. As such there has been a trend towards modifying this reactive quality to IHL-making. States, civil society organisations, and experts, usually acting in small groups, have published manuals of instruction on emergent means and methods of warfare that are unregulated or underregulated under existing law, culminating in the form of non-binding instruments (soft law). However, despite their non-binding nature they are frequently positioned as authoritative statements of the law. The proliferation of these non-binding instruments raises some substantive and procedural issues, in addition to concerns about their legitimacy regarding their legality. Are the instruments treated as legal documents and, if so, what implications arise? Do they have any authority to be instructive or influence behaviour? Do they deserve any deference as (semi-)authoritative statements? Are these instruments effective? How have they been received by the participants? Do they shape or influence practice in conflicts? Questions regarding their legitimacy and legality are ever more pressing. This book seeks to answer these questions and sets out the doctrinal and theoretical framework for analysis.
The Emergence of National Human Rights Institutions and their Global and Regional Networks
Authors: Langtry David , Lyer Kirsten Roberts
Published: January 2022

National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) were established after a long process of consideration at the United Nations. Since 1993, they have become widely accepted institutions that exist throughout the world. Furthermore, their voices on human rights are listened to both nationally and internationally. This chapter examines how NHRIs have arrived at this point by exploring the history and establishment of NHRIs at the United Nations, from the earliest considerations of their establishment in the mid-1940s up to the adoption of the United Nations Paris Principles in 1993. It then considers the progress made by NHRIs in establishing and developing their own networks and how their engagement with regional and international organizations have been finalized.
Who Runs National Human Rights Institutions? Membership, Leadership, and Staffing
Authors: Langtry David , Lyer Kirsten Roberts
Published: January 2022

Independent leadership is critical to the independence and functioning of NHRIs. This chapter examines a range of crucial issues for National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs), central to which is the question of who runs the NHRI. This chapter begins by examining how NHRIs should reflect the nature of the society in which they operate, including representation of women and diverse societal groups. It then moves on to the area that has received the most focus in Sub-Committee on Accreditation reviews: the selection and appointments process, including the formalization of the process in the enabling law, the composition of the selection panel, and the procedure for nominations and appointment. Finally, this chapter considers the related issues of security of tenure, functional immunity, and staffing. Together, the issues dealt with in this chapter go to the heart of the functional and structural requirements for the compliance of NHRIs with the Paris Principles.
Human Rights Mandate—Promotion and Protection Functions
Authors: Langtry David , Lyer Kirsten Roberts
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines the Sub-Committee on Accreditation’s (SCA) recommendations in relation to several important areas of the mandate of National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs)—in particular, their human rights mandate, and their promotion and protection functions. There are several interrelated questions examined in this chapter. First, is the definition of human rights sufficiently broad in the NHRI’s enabling law? Second, are promotion and protection functions sufficiently provided for in the enabling law, and are they being used by the NHRI in practice? Third, does the NHRI have a mandate to encourage the ratification of international instruments? Finally, if the NHRI has a complaints-handling function, is this function compliant with the Paris Principles?
Revolutionary Tourists
Authors: Pettitt Clare
Published: January 2022

Chapter 1 plunges into the Paris of the second republic with a group of writer-tourists: Arthur Stanley; Arthur Hugh Clough; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Geraldine Jewsbury; Elizabeth (‘Betsy’) Paulet; Richard Monckton Milnes; Fanny Lewald; Benjamin Jowett; William Forster; Francis Palgrave; and Arthur Stanley. The chapter shows how they felt and wrote about the 1848 revolution, suspended uncomfortably as they were between witnessing and participation. Their reliance on second-hand information and contradictory press accounts of the incomprehensible events that were happening just outside their windows created a stark awareness of the mediatedness of all revolutionary experience for everyone. Try as they might, they never felt quite there, at the centre of it. The British poet Arthur Clough and the American writers Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, all of whom we first meet in Paris, reappear in subsequent chapters, in Rome, in Florence, and in America.
Moving Pictures
Authors: Pettitt Clare
Published: January 2022

Queen Victoria was astonished by the speed of ‘the dreadful events [of 1848] … as if we had gone through 20 years’ experience all at once’. Chapter 2 suggests this sense of speed was the result of a rapidly connecting and newly illustrated media. The lifting of press censorship across Europe unleashed an outpouring of newsprint. The technologies that made illustrations cheap and fast to produce were only just becoming readily available in 1848, so that the sweep of revolutions was among the first news to offer itself to the new visual media techniques. Because of the sharing of ‘stereotypes’ or printing plates, identical illustrations of barricades, insurgent fighting, and newly constituted parliaments appeared in illustrated journals in Britain, Germany and France, Italy, Austria, and Hungary. The result was a new visual praxis which this chapter argues was key to creating a sense of social connectivity and identity across Europe.
The Ragged of Europe
Authors: Pettitt Clare
Published: January 2022

Chapter 3 suggests that the most important serial category of 1848 was ‘the ragged’. The terrible human effects of the economic depression were visible in the want and despair on the streets of every city in Europe. And a new media culture was representing this ragged majority not only to their increasingly frightened rulers, but also to the poor themselves. Chapter 3 starts with the chiffonnier, or rag picker: a highly politically charged figure in France in the 1840s. Raggedness becomes newly visible in the city-mystery serial novels of this period too. Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842–3) took the poorest quarters of Paris as its subject and was cited as one of the causes of the 1848 revolution. Sue’s novel copied itself across Europe, in translation and in adaptations written about city-localities as diverse as Hamburg, Melbourne, and St Petersburg. The city itself became a serial category.
Serially Speaking
Authors: Pettitt Clare
Published: January 2022

Chapter 6 focuses on another rapidly evolving media form of the 1840s: the lecture. The rapid growth of print in this decade energized the civic spaces of American and British cities, and the lecture and the mass-meeting became popular components of a renovated public sphere. The written word and print elicited and supported a new focus on oral communication and bodily presence. This chapter focuses on the performances of two famous and very different orators: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass. Both syncopated their lecturing and writing so that each activity promoted the other, and both created a linked chain of public ‘appearances’, both bodily and in print, in order to keep themselves constantly in front of the public and to keep their ideas continuously in play. This chapter follows their UK lecture circuits and shows how their experiences in revolutionary Europe challenged their thinking about American democracy and citizenship.
The Grammar of Revolution
Authors: Pettitt Clare
Published: January 2022

Chapter 10 suggests that the 1840s were critical for the political and literary formation of the novelist and journalist Charles Dickens. In these years he was extraordinarily mobile, travelling to the United States for the first time, then to Switzerland, and Italy. His political despair and his restlessness also led to his brief editorship of the Daily News. This chapter navigates the effects that his newspaper work and these many journeys had on the development of his literary style. Dombey and Son (1847) is a very different novel, after all, to Barnaby Rudge (1841). A reading of A Tale of Two Cities, with its obstinately insistent political determinism, suggests that by 1859 Dickens saw the events of 1848 as part of a continuum of the long revolutionary process which was still unspooling across Europe after its dramatic initiation in the French Revolution of 1789.
Defending Espionage
Authors: Fabre Cécile
Published: January 2022

There are swathes of information which members of a political community may wish to keep secret, such that they have a right that such information be treated as such by outsiders. This chapter examines the grounds on which outsiders may justifiably procure those secrets against their bearers’ consent. It argues that a political community may justifiably spy on another political community, but only as a means to thwart rights violations. It then defends the duty to spy to those same ends. It exposes an infinite regress at the heart of the defence of espionage set out here and offers a tentative solution to the problem. The final section considers the controversial practice of espionage between allies.
Economic Espionage
Authors: Fabre Cécile
Published: January 2022

Economic espionage is a tried and tested tool of statecraft. Rulers have long resorted to it so as to help their own firms gain a competitive commercial advantage; strengthen national security; promote their citizens’ vital interests; and advance their geopolitical and strategic aims on the world stage. There is little scholarly work in that area. The stupefyingly extensive empirical literature on espionage tends to concentrate on state-on-state intelligence activities. This chapter provides a qualified defence of state-sponsored economic espionage against private businesses. It starts with a defence of the right to economic secrecy. It then mounts a defence of economic espionage as the acquisition of economic secrets. The final section responds to four objections.
Deception
Authors: Fabre Cécile
Published: January 2022

If the information which political communities need in order to thwart violations of fundamental rights were available through open sources, the task of justifying its acquisition would be relatively easy. If no one sought to appropriate secrets unwarrantedly, the task of justifying counter-intelligence activities would be unnecessary. Intelligence activities usually require deception. This is precisely why Kant denounces espionage as an ‘infernal art’. This chapter examines deception in the service of those activities. It offers a brief account of deception and sketches out reasons why it is presumptively wrongful. It then shows why and when deception in the service of espionage and counter-intelligence is morally permissible, and shows why and when it is morally mandatory. It responds to two objections, before exploring some of the dilemmas which operatives face when conducting deception operations.
Advance care planning and goals of care discussions
Authors: Myers Jeff , Simon Jessica
Published: January 2022

Advance care planning (ACP) conversations and goals of care (GOC) discussions prepare patients and their substitute decision-makers for medical decision-making. When rooted in a patient’s values and person-centred in approach, ACP and GOC discussions can optimize the likelihood a person receives care that is concordant with their goals. This chapter explores the definitions and clinical processes for ACP and GOC discussions and describes how a patient’s values and goals can directly inform medical decision-making. Differences in ACP among healthy and seriously ill individuals, common communication challenges, and the pitfalls of a treatment-centred approach are described. The chapter underscores the importance of illness understanding and provides tips on addressing prognosis. Finally, healthcare system impacts of ACP and GOC are considered.
Visceral pain
Authors: Downing Michael
Published: January 2022

Virtually every person will experience abdominal pain at some point. Although symptoms of pain are often vague and entwined with emotional overtones, careful assessment, combined with knowledge of the relationship of embryology and pain characteristics, will be most helpful to the clinician in diagnosing and using optimal mechanism-based treatment. Some pains are localized, and others ‘referred’; some pains are acute and potentially lethal, while others are chronic and ‘miserable’. ‘Total pain’ components such as worry, anger or depression always accompany and may exacerbate the severity of actual physical pain etiology. This chapter focuses particularly on the understanding the complexities and assessment of pain to enhance clinical acumen, leading to best practice management.
Neuropathic pain
Authors: Chary Srini , Boyle Anne B. , Herx Leonie M. , MacDonald Susan
Published: January 2022

Neuropathic pain is pain that arises from somewhere in the nervous system—from the most peripheral nerve to the most central place in the brain. Neuropathic pain may have specific features that distinguish it from somatic or visceral pain. There may be numbness, tingling, or electrical shock sensations associated. The longer a patient has neuropathic pain, the more embedded the pain pathways become, creating a permanent condition. While opioids are still part of the therapeutic regime for treatment, they are less effective in neuropathic pain than in other pains. Adjuvant medications, such as tricyclic antidepressants and anticonvulsants, can be useful treatments. Patients with neuropathic pain require careful assessment, the development of reasonable and reachable goals of therapy, and an understanding that success may be slower and require more medications than average. Persistence and a willingness to try different combinations may eventually succeed.
Dyspnoea and lung disease
Authors: Kain Danielle , MacDonald Susan , Nayar Shalini
Published: January 2022

Patients experiencing dyspnea are commonly referred for advance symptom management in palliative care. Dyspnea is a challenging symptom to manage and requires an understanding of both respiratory mechanics and disease process. This chapter will review strategies to identify, diagnose and prognosticate lung diseases that are associated with significant morbidity. In addition, strategies to effectively manage symptom burden will be reviewed in detail. Case examples are used to illustrate what a patient suffering from respiratory complications or end-stage lung disease could experience. By the end of this chapter, the reader will be able to effectively identify the complexity of prognostication in common end-stage lung diseases and provide ongoing management of patients with dyspnea.
Malignant bowel obstruction
Authors: Bromwich Carl
Published: January 2022

Malignant bowel obstruction is a common complication of malignancy and is particularly so in the context of gastrointestinal and gynaecological malignancies. It has a profound negative impact on the quality of life of affected patients. While it portends a grim prognosis in advanced disease, it may also be the presenting feature of an early stage of a gastrointestinal cancer. Management may include surgery and use of self-expanding stents, as well as pharmacological intervention. Malignant bowel obstruction is regarded by many to be among the clinical situations considered to be palliative care emergencies.
Urological symptoms and complications in palliative care
Authors: Pereira José
Published: January 2022

Patients with serious illnesses such as advanced cancer experience many urological symptoms and complications that can significantly reduce their quality of life. This chapter will address several of these, including haematuria, urinary blood clots, strangury, tenesmus, vesicovaginal and vesicoenteric fistulae, and upper and lower urinary tract obstructions. A number of clinical assessment and treatment options are available for each of these. Clinicians need to be acquainted with the potential causes, and assessment and treatment options and consider their respective benefits versus burdens when deciding on the optimal management approach. The patient’s estimated survival and other factors such as wishes, setting of care and access to certain treatments should also be considered. This chapter describes the various assessment and treatment options for these complications in the context of cases, and their respective roles depending on the illness trajectory.
Neurological disorders
Authors: Gofton Teneille
Published: January 2022

Palliative care is applicable to many patients with neurological disorders. It is applicable to people living with serious sequelae of neurological or neurosurgical illnesses. People with oncological and non-oncological illnesses of the neurological system may benefit from a palliative approach to care. This chapter reviews some common elements of a palliative approach to care for people living with serious stroke, motor neuron disease, advanced parkinsonism, advanced multiple sclerosis, and seizures, as well as some common challenges encountered such as cognitive impairment and communication challenges.
Renal failure
Authors: Welihinda Hasitha
Published: January 2022

This chapter focuses on the most clinically common scenarios related to kidney failure. The first case revolves around prognosis and the risk of needing dialysis in individuals with kidney disease, and provides references to help in goals of care conversations. The second and third cases deal with how symptom management needs to be modified in renal failure. This includes the most common symptoms encountered due to renal failure, pain management, and management of end of life with dialysis withdrawal. An introduction to reduced-dose (sometimes called ‘palliative’) dialysis is addressed, though the specifics of how to modify the dialysis prescription are beyond the scope of this chapter.
Sinitic languages
Authors: Arcodia Giorgio Francesco , Basciano Bianca
Published: January 2022

This chapter provides a historical and typological overview of Sinitic languages. It first discusses the terminology related to Chinese, clarifying the meaning of ‘language’, ‘dialect’, and ‘standard’ in this context. It then proposes a concise overview of the diachronic development of Sinitic languages, with a focus on diversity and on the concept of ‘standard/official language’ throughout the linguistic history of China, as well as on the relationship between spoken and written language in the Chinese tradition. It then discusses the periodization of Chinese and the classification of Sinitic languages, elaborating on the complex interplay between genealogy and contact, and on the areal typology of Sinitic and of unrelated languages of the North and East Asia region.
Introduction
Authors: Horowitz Jeremy
Published: January 2022

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s arguments and describes its contributions to the literature on electoral politics in Africa’s diverse, multiparty systems. The book offers a novel conceptualization of swing voters in contexts where ethnic identities, rather than policy positions or ideological orientations, structure voter preferences. It explains why presidential candidates concentrate campaign efforts on reaching potential swing voters arrayed across a diverse electorate. It traces through how the pursuit of swing voters affects policy choices. The chapter situates Kenya in the context of broader regional trends and describes the data used to examine voter behavior, campaign strategies, and policymaking.
Electoral Competition and Policymaking in Ghana
Authors: Horowitz Jeremy
Published: January 2022

This chapter shows that the swing-targeting approach developed in this book has relevance beyond Kenya by examining a second case: Ghana. It demonstrates that ethnicity plays an important role in structuring core and swing in Ghana’s presidential elections. It then shows that the competition for voters in swing communities that are less aligned with the major parties leads politicians to adopt broad-based electoral strategies. Finally, it demonstrates that electoral competition incentivizes the adoption of universal public policies. To document the connection between electoral strategies and policymaking, the chapter focuses on the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) rise to power in the 1990s and the health sector reforms it pursued after winning the presidency in 2000.
Tony Harrison and Rome
Authors: Harrison Stephen
Published: January 2022

Tony Harrison’s school study of Latin was a central part of the Leeds Grammar School education that created tensions with his working-class roots. At the University of Leeds, he began a doctoral thesis on translations of Virgil. This chapter traces Tony Harrison’s engagement with Roman literature and culture in, for example, the translations of Catullus and Martial and his many allusions to other Roman poems and plays. The chapter demonstrates that this engagement shows features characteristic of Harrison’s work as a whole: pillorying and defiance of oppressive political authority, fascination with ancient spectacle, and an impressive range of literary allusion.
Harrison’s Deployment of Some Elements from Classical Greek Culture
Authors: Byrne Sandie
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines the deployment in Tony Harrison’s poetry of some objects and concepts which ‘the lad’ who worked ‘the hardest in his class at his translations’ (‘Classics Society’) will have encountered in his study of classical languages and cultures. That Harrison worked on ‘Cissy-bleeding-ro’s’ (‘Me Tarzan’) and other Latin authors’ prose and poetry is not forgotten, but the examples considered here are from Greek. They are: the orchestra of the classical theatre, which figures in Harrison’s work as a light-filled circle, or O, and its opposing black circle, associated with destructive fire; the Greek concept of ßíoς‎ (bios), life, which the chapter associates with both endurance and celebration; the πρ‎óσωπον‎ (prosopon), the mask worn by classical actors, whether Thalia or Melpomene; and a μῆλον‎ (melon), apple, or any fruit grown on a tree. Each of these is a σῆμα‎ (sêma), a sign or symbol but also in Greek, significantly given Harrison’s representations of death and memorials, a tomb.
Invisible Hand Explanations
Authors: Kornberger Martin
Published: January 2022

This chapter introduces invisible-hand explanations. It discusses markets as a form of collective action. Theoretically, it engages with Adam Smith and some of the other main thinkers of invisible-hand explanations. It concludes with a critique of invisible-hand explanations as lacking purpose and direction.
Changing Landscapes, New Maps
Authors: Kornberger Martin
Published: January 2022

This chapter takes stock of the discussion so far. It highlights why and how the organizational landscape has changed (due to focus on knowledge and the spread of communication technologies). In response, the chapter criticizes the four main modes of collective action as they do not map onto new organizational landscapes. It argues for the need for a new vocabulary that combines scalability and openness, creativity and goal orientation
Network Strategy
Authors: Kornberger Martin
Published: January 2022

This chapter asks the question: How can open and distributed collectives develop a sense of shared direction? Building on the example of urban strategy, the chapter argues that strategy shapes the socio-cognitive infrastructure (the thought style) with which a collective thinks about its futures. The chapter puts forward a few stratagems for network strategy.
Ajax in Athens
Authors: Bocksberger Sophie Marianne
Published: January 2022

This chapter examines the reception of Ajax in Athens during the archaic and the classical period. The discussion is organized in three sections which reflect distinct manners in which the Athenians related to the hero, and which also correspond to different phases in the history of Athens. The first section investigates the role Ajax played in the Athenians’ struggle to take control over Salamis in the sixth century. It analyses the different entries on Ajax in epic catalogues (Catalogue of Ships, Teichoscopia, Catalogue of Women) and surveys the archaic representations of the hero in Attic art. Amongst other things, the chapter broaches the question of the possible influence that the use of the Iliad in Athens may have had on the literary transmission of the poem. The second section ranges approximatively from the time of Cleisthenes’ reform to that of the advent of a more radical form of democracy in Athens in the middle of the fifth century BCE. It investigates the different roles the figure of Ajax plays as one of Athens’ tribal heroes and as a symbol of the Greeks’ victory against the Persians following the battle of Salamis. Ajax’s genealogical connection with the Philaid Miltiades and Cimon is scrutinized. This leads to a discussion the fragments of Aeschylus alleged trilogy on Ajax. The last section focuses on Ajax’s reception in the second part of the fifth century BCE. It mainly shows the way Sophocles exploited the various forms of the myth of Ajax in his eponymous play.
Towards a New Framework
Authors: Obeng-Odoom Franklin
Published: January 2022

As Chapters 1 and 2 have shown, mainstream ecology and economics are incapable of addressing the complex, long-term problems of economic uncertainty, health crises, inequality and racism, segmentation and stratification, and the stresses of global migration. This chapter develops a more holistic framework for analysing the processes and experiences of global migration. Drawing on modified versions of the classical economics of Henry George, old institutional economics of J.R. Commons and the emerging subfield of stratification economics developed by black political economists, notably William Darity Jr, the chapter seeks to provide firmer theoretical foundations to answer questions raised in Chapter 1, which the frameworks in Chapter 2 struggle to address. Holistic and historical, this chapter prepares the ground for more empirical analyses in the rest of the book.
The Migrant Town
Authors: Obeng-Odoom Franklin
Published: January 2022

Even when migrants are able to overcome the obstacles described in Chapter 5, the political economics I have so far described also shapes the migrant experience where migrants settle when they arrive at their destination. A major contributor to negative attitudes towards migrants is that they exert pressure on the infrastructure of the host communities without making any (substantial) contribution to the host economy and society. This negative sentiment, centred on the idea that migrants are parasites, is particularly acute in cities, where pressure on amenities is concentrated and more visible. In turn, migrant neighbourhoods are particularly despised. The migrant town is often dismissed and caricatured, but how do such towns form? In what ways do migrants transform urban space? How do migrants experience social stratification? Drawing on multiple sources of evidence, including archival research at local libraries, and longitudinal interviews with long-time residents of Australia’s largest necropolis, this chapter shows that, even in obscure towns formed as resting places for the dead, migrants can, and often do, transform them socio-economically when they settle in, using ways that make a positive and lasting contribution to the host economy and to society more generally. Ironically, in a process in which urban land is the private property of absentee landlords, this transformation also generates gentrification, and both migrants and their children face systemic social stratification.
Remittances and Return
Authors: Obeng-Odoom Franklin
Published: January 2022

Returning is intrinsically tied to migrating. Both mainstream and humanist models of migration posit the process as a response to crises. Structuralists are interested interest in return, too, Afterall, returning must be part of changing the structure. The study of remittances and return can enable us to evaluate the contention that there is a spatial fix to socio-ecological problems. Migrants constantly dream of return. Sending remittances to build homes to which they can return is one concrete step towards realising this dream. So, this chapter examines the connection between source problems, destination challenges, and the dream of return. While mainstream economists claim that remittances generated from transnational, overseas work can be counted as aid to poorer nations, for example in terms of providing funding to improve housing conditions, this chapter shows that housing-based remittances can exacerbate the present housing conditions of migrants, as money that can help to ease their own housing conditions is sent overseas, while urban land contradictions intensify where they are presently located. The problem, then, is not so much about the remittances, but the urban land contradictions, both in the source and destination of the remittances.
The Targeted Killing of Jesus Christ
Authors: Weiler JHH
Published: January 2022

Targeted killings are usually defined as extrajudicial executions, that is, of a person—guilty or not—without a trial. But is a ‘rigged’ trial not simply another form of a targeted killing? If so, was then the crucifixion of Christ, a form of a targeted killing? Even if we take the Gospel accounts as ‘Gospel truth’ (no serious historian does), was the trial of Jesus fair? Was his conviction for blasphemy before the Sanhedrin justified? Tomes and reams have been written about this, the most famous trial and execution in the history of the West. This essay is but an appetizer to that rich literature.
Rocking the Human Rights Boat
Authors: Koskenniemi Martti
Published: January 2022

The essay is a response to Philip Alston’s claim that those he calls ‘critical scholars’ have unwittingly weakened human rights precisely at the time they were needed—at a time of a populist backlash against many things the rights culture (and the critical scholars themselves) hold valuable. The essay suggests that at least part of that backlash is caused by strategic problems in the human rights agenda and an inability or unwillingness among ‘human rights people’ to come to terms with the political character of their agenda. What critical scholars, and today also many human rights activists, seek to attain, and they are likely to include Alston himself, is a more widely conceived political project to deal with the structural injustices of late modern global society.
Reconsidering Personhood—From ‘Civil Death’ to ‘Civil Life’ for Persons with Disabilities
Authors: Quinn Gerard
Published: January 2022

In this chapter, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) is placed in a broader context. It is argued that Article 12 of the UNCRPD makes sense when viewed against the backdrop of developments across a range of disciplines that have been silently evolving over the past two decades or more. These new theories are about the nature, function, and outer boundaries of personhood. They debunk the idea that cognitive capacity is a central or ‘essentialist’ criterion of personhood. It is suggested that it is these changes that convert the seemingly utopian ideal of Article 12 into a valid legislative and policy goal for states into the future. The UNCRPD encapsulates a new approach to law reform, in terms of how received understandings of personhood have in fact changed in a variety of disciplines in recent times. Finally, it is argued that we need to move away from a traditional human rights default that aims to police how we limit rights (as in guardianship) to a human rights perch that explores how to give life to rights (through appropriate supports). This entails a completely different policy imagination.
Necessity with Gaps
Authors: Striker Gisela
Published: January 2022

In chapter A 13 of the Prior Analytics, Aristotle describes statements about what happens for the most part or by nature as contingency statements. He explains that in those cases the necessity has gaps, because natural processes may be interrupted. A few lines later he claims that there may be demonstrative knowledge of such cases, unlike mere coincidences. This clearly conflicts with his claim in the Posterior Analytics that only necessary truths can be known in the strict sense and that the premises of demonstrations must also be necessary. The apparent contradiction could be avoided if statements about natural events were understood as conditionals with an antecedent of the form ‘there is no obstacle’. But the limited syntax of Aristotle’s syllogistic did not allow him to see those statements as anything but contingently true.
Two Kinds of Deliberation: Aristotle and the Stoics
Authors: Striker Gisela
Published: January 2022

Both Aristotle and the Stoics developed accounts of deliberation; but while Aristotle focused almost exclusively on finding the best way to reach a given goal, the Stoics were above all interested in deliberation about right and wrong. The first part of this chapter discusses the various meanings of the word προαίρεσις‎ and argues that the result of deliberation is often a plan for action. By distinguishing between theoretical and practical reasoning, Aristotle also showed that there are two different intellectual virtues. The Stoics did not take over this distinction, including practical wisdom in wisdom in general, and describing it as concerned with what ought or ought not to be done. Stoic deliberation aims at determining what it is appropriate to do (or not to do) according to both human and universal nature, but since the success of an action does not affect its moral character, they did not find effective means–ends reasoning necessary for virtue.
Disordered, Disabled, Disregarded, Dismissed
Authors: Shoemaker David
Published: January 2022

According to a popular line of thought, being excluded from interpersonal life is to be exempted from accountability, and vice versa. In ordinary life, this is most often illustrated by the treatment of people with serious psychological disorders. When people are excluded from valuable domains on the basis of their arbitrary characteristics (such as race and sex), they are discriminated against, prevented from receiving the benefits of participation in those domains for morally irrelevant reasons. Exemption from accountability—via exclusion from the interpersonal domain—seems to prevent exempted parties from receiving crucial human goods for morally irrelevant reasons. This chapter discusses two widely deployed ways of trying to ameliorate morally costly disabilities. Both fail to apply viably to various psychopathologies. The solution involves disentangling accountability and interpersonality in a way that also provides insights into our shared human nature.
Legal Insanity and Moral Knowledge
Authors: Sifferd Katrina
Published: January 2022

This chapter argues that a successful plea of legal insanity ought to rest upon proof that a criminal act is causally related to symptoms of a mental disorder. Diagnosis of a mental disorder can signal to the court that the defendant had very little control over relevant moral ignorance or incompetence. Must we draw the same conclusion for defendants who lack moral knowledge due to miseducation or other extreme environmental conditions, unrelated to a mental disorder? Adults who were brainwashed as children, for example, might seem “insane” due to their lack of moral knowledge. However, since legal culpability rests on the capacity to understand the criminal law’s moral demands, to reflect on these demands across time, and to control one’s behavior in light of them, simple ignorance of morality’s demands does not excuse.
Scrupulosity and Moral Responsibility
Authors: Summers Jesse S. , Sinnott-Armstrong Walter
Published: January 2022

Scrupulosity is a form of OCD where patients obsess about morality and sometimes compulsively confess or atone. It involves chronic doubt and anxiety as well as deviant moral judgments. This chapter argues that Scrupulosity is a mental illness and that its distortion of moral judgments undermines, or at least reduces, patients’ moral responsibility. The authors go on to argue that this condition challenges popular deep-self theories of responsibility, which assert that one is only blameworthy or praiseworthy for actions that arise from one’s deep self, from what one truly values. Patients with ego-syntonic Scrupulosity, however, identify with their condition and seem to have cares that reflect their deep selves, yet do not seem fully responsible for their actions or their consequences, such as neglecting the needs of their loved ones. Other theories, particularly reasons-responsiveness theories, better capture the ways in which responsibility in Scrupulosity is reduced.
Environment
Authors: Pasqualetti Martin J.
Published: January 2022

Chapter 5 presents an overview of the environmental costs that accrue from satisfying our need for energy in all its forms. It explains the types and intensity of environmental impacts from fossil fuels, nuclear power, and renewable energy. It addresses the environmental costs of energy on air, land, and water. At the same time, it explores whether the United States should proceed with a renaissance of nuclear power generation as a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels. It traces out what would happen to the environment with a wholesale shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy resources; that is, would such a shift help save damaged reefs, reduce radioactive fallout and forced migration, and reverse the shrinking of wilderness areas and the extinction of species? Are the environmental costs of energy avoidable, or are they inevitable?
Policy
Authors: Pasqualetti Martin J.
Published: January 2022

Chapter 7 considers the role of energy policies in supporting one resource over another and the effect each choice can make on everyone’s future health. It emphasizes the relative positions of energy policy and energy technology, explaining why policy decisions can have significant and long-lasting repercussions. It inspects the shortcomings of rapidly shifting energy policies on the march toward future energy transitions and emission control. It also compares the efficacy of energy policies within a democratic government style and the efficacy of such policies in a centralized government. It describes the relative importance of sustainability, competitiveness, and security in establishing energy policy, and it differentiates how energy policies differ at state, national and international scales. It explains the role of government energy policies in bringing new energy technologies into commercial use, illustrates the arguments used by lobbyists for fossil fuels versus solar energy, and identifies the different advantages and drawbacks of state versus national energy policies
Lifestyles
Authors: Pasqualetti Martin J.
Published: January 2022

Chapter 11 compares the quality of lifestyles at different positions on the energy ladder, beginning with low-density non-commercial fuels such as dung, and rising to the pure energy form of electricity. How you live depends on where you are on the energy ladder. The chapter seeks to identify how energy availability and consumption tie to personal aspirations and desires, as well as fertility rates and standards of living. It compares energy consumption in the Global South with the Global North, while explaining how and why total energy demand in China has been rising so abruptly. Likewise, it predicts that renewable energy will substantially contribute to the aspirations of people in non-industrialized countries who continue to be challenged by inadequate access to quality energy supplies. The chapter asserts that having access to plentiful and affordable energy supplies is the key to how people live their lives, whether they are healthy and safe, and whether their hopes and goals are realistic or beyond their reach. Everything depends on where they are on the energy ladder.
Dangers
Authors: Pasqualetti Martin J.
Published: January 2022

Chapter 12 points out that handling energy can be a dangerous business, whether producing it, consuming it, or living near any energy activity. It illustrates the risks and hazards that accompany the energy we use and ranks the dangers associated with various fossil fuels, nuclear fuels, and alternative fuels such as solar and wind. It simplifies the reasoning supporting the view that society should abandon the use of radioactive fuels to generate electricity, differentiates between the hazards of oil production and those of gas production, and identifies how the dangers of using fossil and nuclear fuels have changed over time. Black lung disease, explosions, blowouts, radiation poisoning, mine fires, subsidence, toxic waste spills, and many other hazards have always been a part of the energy picture. Will alternative energy lessen these concerns?
My Internal Censor
Authors: Pinto Jerry
Published: January 2022

This chapter describes a major constraint on the creative writer―the internal censor, or what has been termed “the scissors in your head”. We need to learn, and want to be free to learn, with our choices unlimited, but we live in a real world, and not an ideal one. The creative writer has an audience as co-creator of what he or she is doing, which the writer may imagine as the restrictive Reasonable Person or as the Unreasonable Person (who is more accommodating to the writer’s risk-taking creativity). Yet, far from existing in different compartments of the writer’s mind, there is an interplay between external and internal censorship, between what we know and what we hope.
Four Poems
Authors: Khan Peer
Published: January 2022

This chapter contains four sonnets by Peer Khan. Each of the four sonnets deals with a different, disturbing aspect of contemporary India, commenting on how the relaxed sensuality of the earlier Indian tradition has given way to prudery and repression (Khajuraho); on the “saffron terror” of recent years (Saffron); on the intolerance of caste (Outcaste); and on the rise of thuggish vigilante terrorism by Hindu extremists (From Ape to Ape).
The Censor’s Tail
Authors: Padmanabhan Manjula
Published: January 2022

This chapter contains a comic-strip cartoon by Manjula Padmanabhan. Here Padmanabhan that takes a cynical, tongue-in-cheek look at the role of the censor in India.
Here Is a Country …
Authors: Sahgal Nayantara
Published: January 2022

This chapter describes the grim situation that led the author of the chapter to return her Sahitya Akademi Award of 1986. It references the spate of murders of rationalist intellectuals, the threat to all supporters of Indian pluralism and the country’s multi-religious, multicultural heritage, the targeting of Muslims, and troubling circumstances that suggest that evil-doers now have the protection of the law. The author of this chapter is a writer of fiction―politics, the chapter claims, is “natural material”, because each of the author’s works has drawn on political material and reflected the political atmosphere of its time. The chapter notes that the author called her letter to the Sahitya Akademi “The unmaking of India”, because these recent disturbing events went against everything that India had stood for and striven for since independence.
Caste on the Plate
Authors: Nagpaul-D’Souza Dipti
Published: January 2022

This chapter discusses the politicisation of food in India. Not shying away from such controversial topics as meat-eating and vegetarianism, the chapter recounts how the documentation of culinary practices in India has discriminated against those of the Dalits, as a weapon of exclusion and oppression. The “cookbook tradition” is comparatively recent in India, and associated with urban middle-class women. A majority of the urban middle and upper-middle class is also upper-caste, so it is their tastes and “moral” preferences that are reflected in cookbooks. Food has always been central to the question of “untouchability”, and continues to be used as a means of censorship as well as of “otherisation”. Most recently, it has emerged as a factor defining national politics, with regard to the debate over cow-slaughter.
Rules in Art?
Authors: Irvin Sherri
Published: January 2022

In making contemporary artworks, artists may fabricate objects and also sanction custom rules that govern how those objects are to be displayed, preserved, and interacted with by audiences. These rules result in works that may be subject to variable display or evolution over time and that may shape the work’s meanings, as we see in examining works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Sigalit Landau. The rules of contemporary art are in some ways similar to the rules of a game or to a musical work: the rules constitute the work’s structure and specify requirements and permissions in relation to it, but perfect compliance with the rules is not required for something to count as a display of the work, a playing of the game, or a performance of the musical work.
Rules as Medium
Authors: Irvin Sherri
Published: January 2022

As many contemporary artists have rejected traditional artmaking techniques and materials, some theorists have complained about the decline of medium, which structures artists’ projects and provides standards according to which we can understand and assess their works. I argue that rules function as medium in contemporary art: they are symbolic supports whose use is governed by community practices and conventions. Rules serve all the functions of traditional artistic media: they provide a framework within which the artist’s choices are meaningful and they partially (or wholly) constitute the work. Rules are expressive in themselves and also help to highlight the relevant meanings of the diverse array of objects and materials the artwork might include.
Rule Violations and Authenticity
Authors: Irvin Sherri
Published: January 2022

What happens when an institution violates a rule constituting the work, either accidentally or for good reason? When the rule violation affects only a specific display, it may be of minimal import or may disqualify the display from counting as a true display of the work, depending on the extent and effects of the violation. Institutions may have good reason to adopt a display or conservation procedure that systematically violates a rule, such as to protect the audience or the artwork’s material elements. When the institution adopts rules that conflict with those sanctioned by the artist, these rules are artificial and should not be understood as expressive. Institutions should provide audiences with the information they need to understand the rules sanctioned by the artist and to imaginatively reconstruct the experience the artist designed for them.