bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Comprehending “Evil”: Challenges for Law and Policy
Authors: Klusmeyer Douglas , Suhrke Astri 
Published: August 2006

In the aftermath of the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, the categories of “good” and “evil” have come to dominate the rhetorical response of the U.S. government. This article investigates the implications of using the concept of “evil” as a major public policy rationale. The article focuses on the Bush Administration's attempts to frame its policy around this term in the current campaign against terrorism, but also considers recent uses of the term in the growing literature on war crimes, genocide, and domestic repression. Because the concept of evil has deep roots in various theological understandings, we examine its religious meanings (largely within the Christian tradition) and the problems that arise when applying it in the secular context of government policy. In assessing these problems, we focus on Hannah Arendt's efforts to comprehend the evils of totalitarianism within a secular perspective.We argue that in contemporary policy discourse, “evil” is mostly invoked as a term of condemnation rather than an analytical concept, and that this usage tends to inhibit rather than encourage the search for explanation. It facilitates evasion of accountability within a secular framework of justice based on positive law. The alternative is to approach terrorism in the language of secular law, which rests on fixed criteria to regulate the use of force (in situations of war) and to prosecute and punish (in matters of crime). Such an approach complements and should encourage parallel efforts to comprehend events by examining their causes and historical context.
The Moral Basis of Humanitarian Intervention
Authors: Nardin Terry 
Published: August 2006

This article discusses the moral principles underlying the idea of humanitarian intervention. The analysis is in two parts, one historical and the other philosophical. First, the article examines arguments made in late medieval and early modern Europe for using armed force to punish the violation of natural law and to defend communities from tyranny and oppression, regardless of where they occur. It seeks to understand how moralists writing before the emergence of modern international law conceived what we now call humanitarian intervention.In the context of international law, humanitarian intervention is usually understood to be an exception to the nonintervention principle. However, the natural law tradition regards international law as less important than the moral imperative to punish wrongs and protect the innocent.Second, the article considers how humanitarian intervention is justified within the reformulation of the natural law tradition displayed in recent efforts to theorize morality along Kantian lines. In this reformulation, humanitarian intervention is a product of the duty of beneficence and, more specifically, of the right to use force to protect the innocent. The article draws upon the biblical injunction “Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor,” which has become a centerpiece of the modern reformulation, and briefly explores its application to humanitarian intervention in the context of international relations today. This reformulation of natural law explains why, despite modern efforts to make it illegal, humanitarian intervention remains, in principle, morally defensible.
Reviving Troubled Economies
Authors: Boorman Jack 
Published: August 2006

There would be few dissenters from the general proposition that we should try to deal justly with debt. We have all watched in horror the collapse that has taken place in Argentina and the enormous cost paid by so many people in that country—as well as by the creditors of Argentina—from the massive financial and economic dislocation and disruption. I do not believe that what has occurred was inevitable.Unfortunately, some who address this issue of dealing with unmanageable debt situations have offered advice that, while emotionally appealing, is not operationally helpful. I will describe and justify the rationale and design of the proposal put forward by the International Monetary Fund for a Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism (SDRM). Its major goal is to help reduce the unacceptably large costs associated with disorderly defaults by sovereign governments whose debt burdens have become unsustainable. The SDRM aims to get the countries' debts to sustainable positions and deal with the broader needs of the countries through the full array of aid and other mechanisms that are available— and, indeed, to enlarge and enhance these initiatives. I will also explain my misgivings about some of the other proposals, including the ones coming from the NGO community.
Representing Contemporary War
Authors: Campbell David 
Published: August 2006

“… Sontag not only challenges the compassion fatigue thesis; she questions the notion of the CNN effect. With regard to inaction in Bosnia despite the steady stream of images of ethnic cleansing that made their way out of Sarajevo, Sontag argues that people didn't turn off because they were either overwhelmed by their quantity or anaesthetized by their quality. Rather, they switched off because American and European leaders proclaimed it was an intractable and irresolvable situation. The political context into which the pictures were being inserted was already set, with military intervention not an option, and no amount of horrific photographs was going to change that….… In the Iraq war of 2003 imagery was central to the conflict and often the subject of conflict itself. In this context, the Pentagon's strategy of “embedding” reporters and their camera crews with fighting units, and having them operate at the behest of that unit, continues the long-running tradition of a close relationship between the media and the military…. Given this, Sontag is perhaps surprisingly sanguine about the genuineness of war photography in the contemporary period. While recognizing that many of the now iconic combat images of the pre-Vietnam period were staged, she sees Vietnam as a watershed such that “the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging them for the camera, seems on its way to becoming a lost art.” Insofar as Sontag is referring to the likelihood of individual photographers seeking to deceive, she may be right. There was, however, at least one notable instance in Iraq of digital manipulation. This resulted in the Los Angeles Times sacking award-winning staff photographer Brian Walski, whose altered image of a British soldier in Basra (he had combined two photos into one to improve marginally composition) was used on the paper's front page….… What is most striking about the embedded journalists' coverage of the Iraq war is the way in which the images of the conflict produced by the allies' media was so relatively clean, being largely devoid of the dead bodies that mark a major conflict. In this outcome, the media is a willing accomplice….”
The Global Warming Tragedy and the Dangerous Illusion of the Kyoto Protocol
Authors: Gardiner Stephen M. 
Published: August 2006

In 2001, 178 of the world's nations reached agreement on a treaty to combat global climate change brought on by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. Despite the notable omission of the United States, representatives of the participants, and many newspapers around the world, expressed elation. Margot Wallström, the environment commissioner of the European Union, went so far as to declare, “Now we can go home and look our children in the eye and be proud of what we have done.”In this article, I argue for two theses. First, the rhetoric and euphoria surrounding the 2001 deal is misplaced. This is not, as is often said, because the Kyoto agreement is too demanding but rather because it is much too weak. In particular, the Kyoto agreement does little to protect future generations. On the contrary, (at best) it seems to be a prudent wait-and-see policy for the present generation, narrowly defined. Hence, even those countries who have endorsed the Kyoto agreement should be wary of looking their children in the eye, and none should relish facing their children's children.Second, the failure of the Kyoto agreement can be explained in terms of the underlying structure of the problem. Climate change involves the intersection of a complex set of intergenerational and intragenerational collective action problems. This structure, and in particular its intergenerational aspect, has not been adequately appreciated. Yet until it is, we are doomed to an ineffectual environmental policy.
The Ghosts of Totalitarianism
Authors: Moyn Samuel 
Published: August 2006

Tzvetan Todorov's book, originally published in 2000 in French and now available in a superb translation, paused at the end of a violent century to attempt to assess-as the title and subtitle suggest-how to remember it and what lessons to learn. A contemporary figure in the long tradition of French-speaking moralists, Todorov writes beautifully and with ethical passion about some of the darkest crimes in humanity's recent history. For Todorov, these crimes are not just past: reflecting on them can provide guidance for contemporary international affairs, such as NATO's intervention in Kosovo or the current war on terrorism. Todorov's basic theses are two: first, totalitarianism counts as the primary novelty of the twentieth century and has to be the basis for moral reflection about it; second, there is a proper manner of response to totalitarianism, which consists of the defense of a democratic and pluralistic alternative politics, one that reacts to the disasters of the past with moral vigilance in the present.… Many in France since the mid-1970s have adopted the concept of “totalitarianism”-much criticized elsewhere-to refer to the new alternatives to democratic rule-fascist and communist-thrown up by the twentieth century. … Todorov is intervening in a characteristically French debate in which the distinction of the regimes from one another has become part of a much larger ideological dispute and therefore freighted with heavy implications.What implications? For of course, it is hard to gainsay Todorov's argument that it is necessary for the experience of politically evil regimes to be at the heart of moral reflection today. Even so, Todorov's book illustrates some of the difficulties toward which such a commitment can lead….
Interim Imposition
Authors: Arato Andrew 
Published: August 2006

[MacArthur] said that he had issued no orders or directives, and that he had limited himself merely to suggestions…. He stated that it was his belief, that it was his conviction, that a constitution, no matter how good, no matter how well written, forced upon the Japanese by bayonet would last just as long as bayonets were present, and he was certain that the moment force was withdrawn and the Japanese were left to their own devices they would get rid of that constitution.—Recorded on January 29,1946, by Nelson T. Johnson, Secretary-General of the Far East CommissionIn spite of the storm surrounding its first appearance, the cumbersomely named “Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period” (TAL) has been surprisingly immune from criticism in the West since its initial signing on March 8, 2004. American officials, anxious to declare victories where they can, as well as journalists seeking newsworthiness have insisted on the more accurate and revealing term “interim constitution.” Its technocratic name, designed to neutralize (or hide) its constitutional significance, may partly explain why it has received little critical attention, but a more likely explanation is that many of its readers have rightly or wrongly viewed it as offering better protections for rights, including those of minorities and women, and more safeguards against newforms of authoritarian rule than other constitutions in Islamic countries, especially those in the Arab Middle East, including Iraq's own constitutional past. Commentators are apt to overlook the imposed character of the production of the document, perhaps because they suspect that a more genuinely negotiated and consensual product would very possibly have included fewer supposed protections for rights and safeguards against dictatorship, or at least the “tyranny of the majority.”
Human Rights and Positive Duties
Authors: Cruft Rowan 
Published: August 2006

InWorld Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge presents a range of attractive policy proposals—limiting the international resource and borrowing privileges, decentralizing sovereignty, and introducing a “global resources dividend”—aimed at remedying the poverty and suffering generated by the global economic order. These proposals could be motivated as a response topositive dutiesto assist the global poor, or they could be justified onconsequentialistgrounds as likely to promote collective welfare. Perhaps they could even be justified onvirtue-theoreticgrounds as proposals that a just or benevolent person would endorse. But Pogge presents them as a response to the violation ofnegative duties; this makes the need for such remedial policies especially morally urgent—on a par with the obligations of killers to take measures to stop killing.In this essay, I focus on the claim that responsibility for world poverty should be conceived in terms of a violation of negative duties. I follow Pogge in distinguishing two questions (p. 134): What kind of duties (positive or purely negative?) would we be subject to in a just global society where everyone fulfilled their duty and there was no significant risk of injustice? And what kind of duties (positive or purely negative?) do we face given that our global society falls short of the just society?I tackle these questions in reverse order below. I argue, in contrast to Pogge, that positive duties are relevant to our answers to both questions.
Contributing and Benefiting: Two Grounds for Duties to the Victims of Injustice
Authors: Anwander Norbert 
Published: August 2006

Contrasting his own position with that of those who conceive the moral challenge of global poverty in terms of a positive duty to help, Thomas Pogge suggests that “we may be failing to fulfill our stringent negative duty not to uphold injustice, not to contribute to or profit from [emphasis added] the unjust impoverishment of others” (p. 197). We should conceive of our individual donations and of possible institutionalized initiatives to eradicate poverty not as helping the poor but “as protecting them from the effects of global rules whose injustice benefits us and is our responsibility” (p. 23, emphasis added). Pogge also claims that such activities should be understood in terms of compensation: “The word ‘compensate’ is meant to indicate that how much one should be willing to contribute toward reforming unjust institutions and toward mitigating the harms they cause depends on how much one is contributing to, and benefiting from, their maintenance” (p. 50, emphasis added).In characterizing wrongful involvement in an unjust social order and the compensatory duties that arise from it, Pogge refers to the terms contribution/responsibility as well as to benefit/profit (the latter are used interchangeably). The first of these factors is unobjectionable: we can take it for granted that there is a negative duty not to contribute to injustice and that those who are responsible for harmful institutions should compensate their victims. I want to raise doubts, however, about the role that Pogge assigns to benefiting from injustice in the determination of our duties toward the victims of injustice. I shall do so by challenging his claim that there is a negative duty not to benefit from injustice, and that the role that benefiting from injustice plays in determining our duties to work toward reforming unjust practices and mitigating their harmful effects is best understood in terms of compensation.
What Do We Owe the Global Poor?
Authors: Satz Debra 
Published: August 2006

In his provocative book World Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge employs two distinct argumentative strategies. The first is ecumenical: Pogge makes powerful arguments for redressing world poverty that aim to appeal to persons with divergent views regarding its causes, and also for the nature and extent of our obligations to the global poor. This is an extremely important part of his book: World Poverty and Human Rights argues that on any reasonable moral theory and across a wide range of views of the ultimate causes of world poverty, we will be seen to have obligations to the world's poor. Pogge's ecumenical argument shows that one does not have to accept a principle of global equality of resources in order to conclude that we have a general obligation to aid other human beings in severe need. I will discuss this strategy of argument at the end of my essay.In his second and main argumentative strategy, Pogge defends a distinctive normative and empirical perspective. For, at the heart of the book is the thesis that we in the developed countries have special obligations to end world poverty because we have significantly contributed to its existence. Pogge argues for a causal contribution principle, which holds that we are morally responsible for world poverty because and to the extent that we have caused it.Pogge also argues that our obligations not to harm others apply universally and are stronger than the obligations we have to provide aid. In fact, on Pogge's view global justice involves solely this negative duty—a duty not to inflict harm on others. The central innovation of the book is to defend a normative premise typically associated with libertarianism—that we have strong duties not to harm but only weak duties to benefit people we have not harmed—and conjoin it with an empirical claim to generate an argument for radical global redistribution.Although there is much else of interest in World Poverty and Human Rights, particularly Pogge's specific policy proposals to diminish global poverty, the causal contribution thesis and the identification of a duty not to harm as the fundamental principle of justice arguably form its intellectual core and central innovations. In this comment, I will critique both Pogge's use of the causal contribution principle as well as his attempt to derive all of our obligations to the global poor from the need to refrain from harming others.
On the Alleged Conflict between Democracy and International Law
Authors: Benhabib Seyla 
Published: August 2006

The period since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 has witnessed the rise of an international human rights regime. There has been a shift in international law from state-based treaty obligations to cosmopolitan norms whose subject is individuals and their rights and entitlements under international law. Along with the rise of cosmopolitan norms, conflicts between enactments by states, often through democratic legislatures, of laws and practices that may contradict these norms, has also intensified.The article focuses on one such set of cosmopolitan norms concerning the crossborder rights of immigrants within the context of the European Union. By examining a German Constitutional Court Case which denied long-term resident aliens voting privileges in local and district-wide elections, it illuminates the “paradox of democratic legitimacy.” The rights of foreigners and aliens are an intrinsic aspect of the self-understanding of a democratic people. The demos can alter the boundaries differentiating it from nonmembers. The line between citizenship and alienage can be renegotiated through processes of democratic iterations. Cosmopolitan norms can become guidelines informing the will and opinion formation of democratic peoples.
Canine neurological diseases in a referral hospital population between 1989 and 2000 in Switzerland
Authors: Fluehmann G. , Doherr M. G. , Jaggy A. 
Published: August 2006

Objectives:To merge clinical information from partly overlapping medical record databases of the Small Animal Teaching Hospital of the Vetsuisse Faculty, University of Berne. To describe the frequencies and localisations of neurological diseases in dogs, as well as their age, gender, breed and geographical distributions.Methods:In this retrospective study, a new database, with specific variables and a diagnosis key list ‘VITAMIN D’, was created and defined. A total of 4497 dogs (average of 375 per year) with a well‐documented neurological disease were included in the study. A key list for the diagnoses was developed and applied to either the presumptive or the clinical and neurohistopathological diagnosis, with a serial number, a code for localisation and a code for differential diagnoses.Results:Approximately 1159 dogs (26 per cent) had a neurohistopathological diagnosis confirmed, 1431 (32 per cent) had a clinical diagnosis confirmed and 1491 (33 per cent) had a presumptive diagnosis. The most frequent breeds were mixed‐breed dogs (577 of 4497, 13 per cent), followed by German shepherd dogs (466 of 4497, 10 per cent). The most common localisations were the forebrain (908 of 4497, 20 per cent) and the spinal cord at the thoracolumbar area (840 of 4497, 19 per cent). Most dogs were diagnosed with degenerative diseases (38 per cent), followed by inflammatory/infectious diseases (14 per cent). The highest number of submissions originated from geographic regions around the referral hospital and from regions with higher human population densities.ClinicalSignificance:By defining closed‐list fields and allocating all data to the corresponding fields, a standardised database that can be used for further studies was generated. The analysis of this study gives examples of the possible uses of a standardised database.
Comparison of the accuracy of two ultrasonographic measurements in predicting the parturition date in the bitch
Authors: Beccaglia M. , Luvoni G. C. 
Published: August 2006

Objectives:To compare the accuracy of two ultrasonographic measurements, inner chorionic cavity diameter and biparietal diameter, for the prediction of parturition date in small and medium size bitches. The effects of litter size and fetal sex ratio on the accuracy of the prediction were also investigated.Methods:Ultrasonographic examinations were performed on pregnant bitches and, depending on the stage of pregnancy, the inner chorionic cavity diameter and biparietal diameter were measured. The mean value of the data of each structure was calculated and the predicted day of parturition was obtained by the application of equations derived from growth curves we previously developed for different size bitches.Results:The parturition term was predicted with similar accuracy during early gestation, by the measurement of inner chorionic cavity diameter, as well as during late gestation, by the measurement of biparietal diameter. Litter size affected only biparietal diameter accuracy, whereas fetal sex ratio did not influence the estimation of the day of parturition.ClinicalSignificance:Inner chorionic cavity diameter and biparietal diameter were equally reliable parameters in obtaining a reasonably accurate prediction of parturition date at any gestational period at which a bitch is examined.