Alternative Justification Research Articles

Intuitive Solutions in Game Representations: The Shapley Value Revisited

We show that any transferable utility game can be represented by an assignment of facilities to players, in which it is intuitively obvious how to allocate the total cost of the facilities. The intuitive solution in the representation turns out to be the Shapley value of the game, and thus serves as an alternative justification of the value.

The Public Health-Quarantine Model

One of the most frequently voiced criticisms of free will skepticism is that it is unable to adequately deal with criminal behavior and that the responses it would permit as justified are insufficient for acceptable social policy. This concern is fueled by two factors. The first is that one of the most prominent justifications for punishing criminals, retributivism, is incompatible with free will skepticism. The second concern is that alternative justifications that are not ruled out by the skeptical view per se face significant independent moral objections (Pereboom 2014:153). Despite these concerns, I maintain that free will skepticism leaves intact other ways to respond to criminal behavior—in particular incapacitation, rehabilitation, and alteration of relevant social conditions—and that these methods are both morally justifiable and sufficient for good social policy. The position I defend is similar to Derk Pereboom’s (2001, 2013, 2014), taking as its starting point his quarantine analogy, but it sets out to develop the quarantine model within a broader justificatory framework drawn from public health ethics. The resulting model—which I call the public health-quarantine model (Caruso 2016, 2017a)—provides a framework for justifying quarantine and criminal sanctions that is more humane than retributivism and preferable to other non-retributive alternatives. It also provides a broader approach to criminal behavior than Pereboom’s quarantine analogy does on its own since it prioritizes prevention and social justice. In Section 1, I begin by (very) briefly summarizing my arguments against free will and basic desert moral responsibility. In Section 2, I then introduce and defend my public health-quarantine model, which is a non-retributive alternative to criminal punishment that prioritizes prevention and social justice. In Sections 3 and 4, I take up and respond to two general objections to the public health-quarantine model. Since objections by Michael Corrado (2016), John Lemos (2016), Saul Smilanksy (2011, 2017), and Victor Tadros (2017) have been addressed in detail elsewhere (see Pereboom 2017a; Pereboom and Caruso 2018), I will here focus on objections that have not yet been addressed. In particular, I will respond to concerns about proportionality, human dignity, and victims’ rights. I will argue that each of these concerns can be met and that in the end the public health-quarantine model offers a superior alternative to retributive punishment and other non-retributive accounts.

The Past, Present, and Future of Resulting Trusts

This article considers the nature and future of resulting trusts, and offers a critique of the Birks/Chambers theory of resulting trusts. It argues that the current law cannot be explained, as the Birks/Chambers theory suggests, on the basis of the reversal of unjust enrichment. Instead, the law of resulting trusts is based on an old fiction whereby the owner of property is regarded as holding a beneficial interest which may be retained when the legal ownership has been transferred to another person. Unfortunately, this ‘retention’ idea does not provide a doctrinally satisfying justification for the current law. A logical response would be to discard those aspects of the law of resulting trusts that depend on the retention idea and, therefore, to dispense with presumed resulting trusts. The article argues that, in fact, in English law the purchase-money resulting trust has already been made irrelevant by the common intention constructive trust. However, the article argues for the continued recognition of gap-filling (i.e. ‘automatic’) resulting trusts on the basis that an alternative justification can be identified for such trusts.

In a moral dilemma, choose the one you love: Impartial actors are seen as less moral than partial ones.

Although impartiality and concern for the greater good are lauded by utilitarian philosophies, it was predicted that when values conflict, those who acted impartially rather than partially would be viewed as less moral. Across four studies, using life-or-death scenarios and more mundane ones, support for the idea that relationship obligations are important in moral attribution was found. In Studies 1-3, participants rated an impartial actor as less morally good and his or her action as less moral compared to a partial actor. Experimental and correlational evidence showed the effect was driven by inferences about an actor's capacity for empathy and compassion. In Study 4, the relationship obligation hypothesis was refined. The data suggested that violations of relationship obligations are perceived as moral as long as strong alternative justifications sanction them. Discussion centres on the importance of relationships in understanding moral attributions.

Writing Language: Composition, the Academy, and Work

This paper argues that while college composition courses are commonly charged with remediating students by providing them with the literacy skills they lack, they may instead be redefined as providing the occasion for rewriting language and knowledge. By bringing to the fore the dependence of language and knowledge on the labor of writing, a pedagogy of recursion, mediation, and translation of knowledge through writing and revision counters neoliberalism’s commodification of knowledge and language, and offers an alternative justification for continuing education as the occasion for students to remediate language and knowledge through writing.

CATEGORICAL HARMONY AND PATH INDUCTION

AbstractThis paper responds to recent work in the philosophy of Homotopy Type Theory by James Ladyman and Stuart Presnell. They consider one of the rules for identity, path induction, and justify it along ‘pre-mathematical’ lines. I give an alternate justification based on the philosophical framework of inferentialism. Accordingly, I construct a notion of harmony that allows the inferentialist to say when a connective or concept is meaning-bearing and this conception unifies most of the prominent conceptions of harmony through category theory. This categorical harmony is stated in terms of adjoints and says that any concept definable by iterated adjoints from general categorical operations is harmonious. Moreover, it has been shown that identity in a categorical setting is determined by an adjoint in the relevant way. Furthermore, path induction as a rule comes from this definition. Thus we arrive at an account of how path induction, as a rule of inference governing identity, can be justified on mathematically motivated grounds.

Welfare lower bounds and strategy-proofness in the queueing problem

We investigate the implications of welfare lower bounds together with queue-efficiency and strategy-proofness in the context of the queueing problem. First, we introduce the k-welfare lower bound, which requires that each agent should be guaranteed her utility at the kth queue position with zero transfer. For each k, we show that the k-pivotal rules (Mitra and Mutuswami, 2011) achieve the minimal deficit in each problem among all rules satisfying queue-efficiency, strategy-proofness, and the k-welfare lower bound. Next, we consider the identical costs lower bound, which is a counterpart of the identical preferences lower bound in our context, and show that when there is an odd number of agents, the k-pivotal rules with k=n+12 achieve the minimal deficit in each problem among all rules satisfying queue-efficiency, strategy-proofness, and the identical costs lower bound. Our results provide an alternative justification for the k-pivotal rules.

BALANCING SECURITY AND LIBERTY

AbstractThis paper examines the legitimacy of the US government’s argument that it must “balance liberty and security” with regard to its policy of trying enemy belligerents in military commissions rather than federal courts. I distinguish between three senses of “balance,” and argue that the policy is ambiguous between the second (internal) and third (emergency external) senses of balance. Neither line of reasoning justifies the policy, however. On the second sense, it is unjustified because it constitutes an arbitrary limitation of the rights of some for the sake of the security of others. It thus violates the government’s duty to decide questions of policy in accordance with accepted legal procedures. Alternately, if the policy is intended to be an exercise of emergency powers, then it violates what I call the government’s juridical duty to serve as a guardian of justice. I offer an alternative justification for emergency measures, one that is based on the model of self-defense. I conclude that although the exercise of military commissions in times of emergency can be justified, the current exercise is illegitimate.

Hayek's "Scientism" essay: the social aspects of objectivity and the mind

In his essay "Scientism and the study of society" Hayek argues that attitudes are central to the moral sciences. Since the natural sciences show that "ordinary experience" often does not reproduce the relations between things in the external world, the understanding of attitudes is possible due to the similarity between the mind of the moral scientist and that of the agent. I argue that Hayek’s arguments for the differentiation between the natural sciences and what he calls "ordinary experience" are problematic. I offer an alternative justification by appealing to the manifold goals and social contexts of inquiry. I also elucidate his claim that minds are similar, and how this relates to our understanding of others—both as ordinary agents and as economists. In so doing, I discuss two alternative accounts found in Hayek's work: the first account suggests that understanding is a projection of mental categories from behavioral evidence; the second account—which is found in The sensory order—suggests that understanding is the result of a functional correspondence between structures in the central nervous system.

Greed, Envy, and the Criminalization of Insider Trading

In October 2011, a U.S. district court sentenced Raj Rajaratnam to eleven years in federal prison for insider trading. This is the longest sentence for insider trading in U.S. history, but it is significantly less than the nineteen to twenty-four-year term requested by the government. Such harsh prison terms (equal in some cases to those meted out for murder or rape) require sound justification in a liberal society. Yet jurists, politicians, and scholars have failed to offer a clear articulation of either the economic harm or the moral wrong committed by the insider trader. This Article looks to fill this gap by offering a rigorous analysis of insider trading, its criminalization, and its punishment from multiple economic and moral perspectives. This analysis reveals that of the three forms of insider trading currently proscribed under section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, two are economically harmful and morally impermissible, but, surprisingly, one is not—nonpromissory insider trading, where the insider trades on material nonpublic information while having made no promise or other commitment not to trade. Having reached this conclusion, this Article explores alternative justifications or explanations for criminalizing nonpromissory insider trading. Virtue theory offers an alternative justification for the criminalization of nonpromissory insider trading, particularly the vice of greed. But while insider trading often reflects the vice of greed, a moralistic contempt for this character flaw cannot justify the criminalization of otherwise morally innocent conduct, as this would violate the firmly held, liberal harm principle famously articulated by John Stuart Mill.

Thomas Piketty and the Justice of Education

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is best known for its documentation of increasing social inequality, but it also has a notable normative aspect. Although Piketty is far less clear on the normative level than on the empirical, his view of justice can be summarised as meritocratic luck egalitarianism. This leads him to condemn as unjust the fact that inheritance is once again becoming more important than education for determining social position. In this paper, I discuss whether Piketty's normative conception can justify this condemnation. My main thesis will be that Piketty ends up in a dilemma that he cannot resolve with the normative resources he has at his disposal. The horns of this dilemma are defined by whether or not we accept what Susan Hurley calls ‘the regression requirement’, and in both cases the normative distinction between inheritance and education as ways to achieve social positions disappears. Toward the end, I shall suggest an alternative justification for the moral superiority of education over inheritance, which makes use of one of Piketty's key empirical arguments.

The Econometrics of the Hodrick-Prescott Filter

The Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter is a commonly used tool in macroeconomics used to extract a trend component from a time series. In this paper, we derive a new representation of the transformation of the data that is implied by the HP filter. This representation highlights that the HP filter is a symmetric weighted average plus a number of adjustments that are important near the beginning and end of the sample. The representation allows us to carry out a rigorous analysis of properties of the HP filter without using the ARMA-based approximation that has been used previously in the literature. Using this new representation, we characterize the large T behavior of the HP filter and find conditions under which it is asymptotically equivalent to a symmetric weighted average with weights independent of sample size. We also find that the cyclical component of the HP filter possesses weak dependence properties when the HP filter is applied to a stationary mixing process, a linear deterministic trend process, or a process with a unit root. This provides the first formal justification of the use of the HP filter as a tool to achieve weak dependence in a time series. In addition, a large smoothing parameter approximation to the HP filter is derived, and using this approximation, we find an alternative justification for the procedure given in Ravn and Uhlig (2002) for adjusting the smoothing parameter for the data frequency.

Fan Mobilization and the Minnesota Sport-Stadium Campaign

As state- and local-government subsidies to professional sport organizations have increased over the past 3 decades, economic arguments have been crafted to justify these subsidies, such as Crompton’s claims of increased community visibility, enhanced community image, stimulation of other development, and psychic income. The purpose of this study was to examine the public relations strategy of a professional sport organization campaigning to secure public funding for a new stadium. Specifically, the authors focused on the use of press releases by the Minnesota Vikings, a National Football League team, over the 3 seasons preceding the completion of their successful sport-stadium campaign. This study was timely in that these press releases were from 2010, 2011, and 2012 and the new Vikings stadium grand opening is set for 2016. Through a qualitative analysis, the authors identified the arguments made by the team to garner support for the stadium plan during the Vikings’ campaign. In all, 71 press releases were collected, examined, and coded by investigators. Findings are discussed to provide insight into these 4 alternative justification arguments.

Justificación y error en Descartes: un argumento pragmatista en la validación cartesiana del criterio de claridad y distinción

The clear and distinct perception is the element on which Descartes’s metaphysical certainty is justified. However, the exposition of the skeptical arguments referred to the Cartesian methodical doubt has shown that is necessary to find another justification for the clearness & distinctness criterion. From attempts based on indubitability of the perception or warranty arising from the divine goodness, it will be defended a pragmatist alternative justification.

Free Will Skepticism and Criminal Behavior

One of the most frequently voiced criticisms of free will skepticism is that it is unable to adequately deal with criminal behavior and that the responses it would permit as justifi ed are insuffi cient for acceptable social policy. This concern is fueled by two factors. The fi rst is that one of the most prominent justifi cations for punishing criminals, retributivism, is incompatible with free will skepticism. The second concern is that alternative justifi cations that are not ruled out by the skeptical view per se face signifi cant independent moral objections (Pereboom, 2014, p. 153). Yet despite these concerns, I maintain that free will skepticism leaves intact other ways to respond to criminal behavior—in particular incapacitation, rehabilitation, and alteration of relevant social conditions—and that these methods are both morally justifi able and suffi cient for good social policy. The position I defend is similar to Derk Pereboom’s (2001, 2013, 2014), taking as its starting point his quarantine analogy, but it sets out to develop the quarantine model within a broader justifi catory framework drawn from public health ethics. The resulting model—which I call the public healthquarantine model—provides a framework for justifying quarantine and criminal sanctions that is more humane than retributivism and preferable to other non-retributive alternatives. It also provides a broader approach to criminal behavior than Pereboom’s quarantine analogy does on its own.

Second Person Rules: An Alternative Approach to Second-Personal Normativity

Stephen Darwall’s moral theory explains moral obligation by appealing to a “second-person” standpoint where persons use second-person reasons to hold one another accountable for their moral behavior. However, Darwall claims obligations obtain if and only if hypothetical persons endorse them, despite tying the second-person standpoint to our real-world moral practices. Focus on hypothetical persons renders critical elements of his account obscure. I solve this problem by distinguishing two ideas quietly working in tandem, (i) the hypothetical endorsement of moral norms and (ii) the hypothetical recognition of these norms. Hypothetical endorsement is a plausible source of normativity; hypothetical recognition is not. A more plausible account of second-person normativity must combine hypothetical endorsement with actual recognition. I term these alternative conceptions justification and easy publication. To combine justification and easy publication in an account of moral obligation, second-person normativity should be applied first to rules. Following other moral philosophers, I introduce the concept of a “social-moral” rule into an account of moral obligation. Social-moral rules acquire normative force when they are justified for and easily published by the relevant moral community. I conclude that a rule-centric account of second-personality is superior to Darwall’s reason-centric account.

Nematic phases with spontaneous splay–bend deformation: standard elastic description

ABSTRACTRecently, possible deformed states in nematic liquid crystals have been discussed assuming that Frank’s bend elastic constant is negative. The presence of a stable deformed state has been justified by introducing in the elastic energy density a term proportional to the second derivative square of the deformation parameter. This term, widely used in field theory, has been introduced in the elastic theory of liquid crystals mainly to investigate the effect of the splay–bend term in the nematic deformation in confined samples. Nevertheless, in the analysis of bulk properties this term is questionable. An alternative justification of possible spontaneous distortions in nematic liquid crystals is proposed. Our description of the elastic properties is based on an elastic energy density expanded to the fourth order in the deformation parameter. In this framework, we show that a stable nematic state characterised by a uniform deformation, related to a position-independent elastic energy density, is possible.

Autonomous Authorization of Deception in Sport

Two recent articles in this journal – one by Morris, the other by Pfleegor & Rosenberg – have revived the philosophical discussion of the ethics of deception in sport which had largely laid dormant since the 1973 publication of Pearson’s ‘Deception, Sportsmanship, and Ethics’. Morris and Pfleegor & Rosenberg both share with Pearson the view that ethical deceptive sport acts are those that relate to sport-specific skills. However, whereas Pearson ultimately grounds this view in the agreement she takes to obtain amongst sport participants, both recent treatments overlook this fundamental aspect of her account and offer alternative justifications for that view. I argue, though, that in both cases the arguments offered are incomplete precisely because they require an appeal to the agreement amongst participants that lies at the foundation of Pearson’s account. On all three treatments, I argue, what ultimately determines an action’s ethical status is not its relation to sport-specific skills, but its conformity to, or violation of, that agreement. I conclude with a discussion of what this implies for future work on deception in sport.

Formulation of the relativistic heat equation and the relativistic kinetic Fokker–Planck equations using GENERIC

In this paper, we formulate the relativistic heat equation and the relativistic kinetic Fokker–Planck equations into the GENERIC (General Equation for Non-Equilibrium Reversible–Irreversible Coupling) framework. We also show that the relativistic Maxwellian distribution is the stationary solution of the latter. The GENERIC formulation provides an alternative justification that the two equations are meaningful relativistic generalizations of their non-relativistic counterparts.

Leadership and the Logic of Absurdity

Empirical research has cast doubt on the soundness of justifying the commitments and sacrifices that leadership requires in terms of expected consequences. This raises the question of what alternative justifications may exist for maintaining the engagement of intelligent leaders. This paper considers three possibilities: delusion, the logic of identity, and a new construct called the logic of absurdity. According to the logic of absurdity, expected consequences are embraced without distortion or complaint, and then flouted in favor of an arbitrary yet fervent devotion to leading.