Arguments In Support Research Articles

Towards a new model of global health justice: the case of COVID-19 vaccines

This paper questions an exclusively state-centred framing of global health justice and proposes a multilateral alternative. Using the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines to illustrate, we bring to light a broad...

Debt Spillovers in a Monetary Union: A Novel Rationale for Central Bank Independence

Abstract Central bank independence has been championed on the grounds that it avoids political business cycles, the time-inconsistency problem of discretionary monetary policy, and political conflicts. However, after the financial crisis, central banks have resorted to unconventional monetary policies and embraced additional tasks, making monetary authorities more exposed to political interference. This new reality has put into question the long-lasting consensus on the desirability of central bank independence. We add to this debate a new argument in support of that independence, namely, it internalizes the fiscal spillovers that arise in a monetary union, which is not a full fiscal union.

Minimal contents, lying, and conventions of language

One recurrent objection against minimalism is that minimal contents have no theoretical role. It has recently been argued that minimal contents serve to draw the distinction between lying and misleading. In Sect. 1 and Sect. 2 I summarise the main argument in support of that claim and contend that it is inconclusive. In Sect. 3 I discuss some cases of lying and some of misleading that raise difficulties for minimalism. In Sect. 4 I make a diagnosis of the failure of minimalism with those cases. In Sect. 5 I strengthen the case against minimal contents by addressing two received says-based definitions of lying. My analysis of the failure of minimalism suggests that the distinction between lying and misleading, at least in some important cases, calls for a kind of utterance content that is grounded on conventions of language.

4. Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory, A Model for the Experimental Workshop

Abstract Grotowski concludes that theatre can exist without sets, without costumes, without music and without light effects and even without text. The argument in support of this surprising thesis comes from the very history of the theatre. In the evolution of theatrical art, the text was one of the last elements to be added. The theatre cannot exist without actors, not even the puppet theatre, behind the stage being hidden another manipulative actor. Furthermore, it cannot exist without the audience. Consequently, following the successive eliminations, only two elements remain: the actor and the audience.

TWO ARGUMENTS FOR THE INCOHERENCE OF NON-TELEOLOGICAL DEISM

I argue that one form of deism, what I shall call ‘moderate non-teleological deism’, seems prima facie incoherent (at least on the assumption of the intuitive Anselmian conception of God). I offer two arguments in support of the prima facie incoherence view: the moral irresponsibility argument and the practical irrationality argument. On the one hand, the moral responsibility argument suggests that three of the essential attributes of such a deistic God are inconsistent: omniscience, omnipotence and moral perfection. This is, of course, a variation of the well-known argument from evil. On the other hand, the practical rationality argument suggests that were such a deistic God to create the universe but have no further interest, plan or goal for the universe, the very act would have committed a deistic God to practical irrationality. I argue that this result follows from a widely accepted understanding of the nature of practical rationality and agency. I briefly examine some objections to the two arguments and conclude that moderate non-teleological deism seems prima facie incoherent.

Cliophysics: A scientific analysis of recurrent historical events

Named after Clio, the Greek goddess of history, cliophysics is a daughter (and in a sense an extension) of econophysics. Like econophysics it relies on the methodology of experimental physics. Its purpose is to conduct a scientific analysis of (recurrent) historical events. Such events can be of sociological, political or economic nature. In this last case cliophysics would coincide with econophysics. The main difference between cliophysics and econophysics is that the description of historical events may be qualitative as well as quantitative. For the handling of qualitative accounts cliophysics has developed an approach based on the identification of patterns. To detect a pattern the main challenge is to break the “noise barrier”. The very existence of patterns is what makes cliophysics possible and ensures its success. Briefly stated, once a pattern is detected, it allows predictions to be made. As the capacity to make successful predictions is the hallmark of any science, it becomes easy to decide whether or not the claim made in the title of the paper is indeed justified. A number of examples of clusters of similar events will be given which should convince readers that historical events can be simplified almost at will very much as in physics. In the last part of the paper, we describe cliophysical investigations conducted over the past decades; they make us confident that cliophysics can be a valuable tool for decision makers. This is not an ordinary physics paper for it does not focus on a specific question but rather delineates a new field and outlines an innovative research program. Neither should it be seen as an opinion paper for, thanks to its nine co-authors, it offers objective arguments in support of its proposals.

Perception as controlled hallucination

Abstract“Perception is controlled hallucination,” according to proponents of predictive processing accounts of vision. I say they are right that something like this is a consequence of their view but wrong in how they have pursued the idea. The focus of my counterproposal is the causal theory of perception, which I develop in terms of a productive concept of causation. Cases of what otherwise seem like successful perception are instead mere veridical hallucination if predictive processing accounts are correct, I argue, because of the role played within such accounts by absences, which cannot enter into productive causal relations. I offer two arguments in support of the productive theory of perception. The first is loosely Kantian, focusing on the role that receptivity and spontaneity play in perception. The second focuses on what perception and hallucination have in common. I conclude with a series of objections and replies.

Property, ownership and employee ownership: employee control in ESOPs

PurposeMost people associate ownership with the ability to control something. In the USA, employee share (or stock) ownership plans (ESOPs) are one of the principal forms of employee ownership. However, most ESOPs give employees very limited rights of control over the company they own. This paper explore this conflict by examining theories of property and ownership to determine whether the right to participate in decision-making is inherent in the idea of ownership as it is generally understood. Ultimately, the author argues that the law governing ESOPs should be revised to give employees a larger role in the governance of their companies.Design/methodology/approachThis paper considers the concept of ownership both historically and analytically. The author examines the roots of property theory in the work of John Locke and contemporary theorists, as well as contemporary theorizing about ownership.FindingsThere are two kinds of ownership: legal ownership and psychological ownership. In legal ownership, the right to participation is inherent but alienable, so one can legally be an owner of something but have no right of participation. Psychological ownership primarily arises from a sense of control. Legal ownership confers some part of the bundle of rights associated with property. Psychological ownership conveys a feeling of efficacy, responsibility and control, but no formal rights. The author argues that, for employee ownership to be more than mere property-holding, it must include meaningful participation in decision-making, including governance.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper is only concerned with ESOPs in the USA. Although the findings may be applicable, it does not address other forms of employee ownership or employee ownership outside of the USA.Practical implicationsPeople associate ownership with the ability to control something, so when workers are told they own their company but then find they have few control rights, it may undermine their sense of ownership. This then has negative implications for the company's success. To ensure meaningful levels of governance rights, policy-makers should revise the laws governing ESOPs to require greater involvement by employees.Social implicationsClarifying ambiguities around ownership will help support arguments for affording employee-owners greater control rights in their companies, which will have various spill-over effects.Originality/valuePractitioners and scholars alike deploy the term, “ownership” but ascribe different meanings to it. The distinction between legal and psychological ownership is largely lacking in the ESOP literature. Clarifying this distinction will help to move the discussion forward regarding employee participation in ESOPs. In addition, the paper provides an original analysis of property that demonstrates the importance of the right to control, showing that the traditional ESOP structure may violate important aspects of that right.

The value of marine ecotourism for an European outermost region

Marine ecotourism is a pivotal sector in the blue economy strategies of many nations and is a vital economic activity for peripheral coastal regions and islands; yet a comprehensive understanding of its socioeconomic importance remains poorly quantified due to a lack of systematic evidence collation. This is even more pronounced when compared with other traditional marine activities (i.e. commercial fisheries), which are the target of monitoring programs that span several decades. The paucity of information on marine ecotourism and the disproportionate influence of traditional activities in decision-making arenas represent a practical impediment to promoting the broader agenda of blue growth and ecosystem-based management for Europe's regional seas. This study presents an assessment of the socioeconomic impact of non-extractive recreational activities closely associated with marine biodiversity (i.e. whale watching, diving and big game fishing) in one of Europe's outermost regions: the Azores archipelago (northeast Atlantic). Data were collected through a series of questionnaire surveys of the clients (n = 1740) and managers of marine-tourism businesses (n = 49). Our results suggest that in 2014 approximately 17% of total visitors to the Azores engaged in marine ecotourism activities generating approximately 80€ million in total expenditures to the regional economy (2.2% of regional Gross Domestic Product). Results also indicate that on average a typical marine ecotourist has longer stay and higher expenditure pattern compared to other visitors. These values add a new dimension to arguments in support of marine conservation and call attention to the comprehensive integration of marine ecotourism activities in management plans.

Racial Disparities in the Wake of Cannabis Legalization: Documenting Persistence and Change

One of the arguments in support of the legalization of cannabis is that it would help alleviate racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Using UCR data from Colorado and Washington, we explore trends in cannabis arrests disaggregated by rates using interrupted time-series analysis, linear mixed models, and data visualizations. The results demonstrate a general decline in cannabis arrests for nearly all racial groups, yet these declines were not consistent across racial groups or even across states. Moreover, substantial racial disparities persist following legalization, especially in Colorado. Overall, evidence suggests that while legalization has likely had a net positive effect on overrepresented populations by decreasing criminal justice contact, it is not a panacea and may only be minimally important for addressing disparities.

Relations Developing in Enforcement Proceedings and the Subject of Civil Procedural Law

The article considers the issue whether the relations developing in enforcement proceedings are included in the subject of civil procedural law. The important practical importance of the correct definition of the subject of the industry is indicated. The views of Professor A. K. Sergun on the nature of relations arising in connection with the enforcement of acts of jurisdictional bodies are considered. The author agrees with the position that the enforcement of court decisions is the final stage of civil proceedings, and the relations arising in enforcement proceedings are regulated by the branch of civil procedural law. A critical assessment is given to the arguments of supporters of the separation of relations arising from the compulsory execution of acts of jurisdictional bodies from the subject of civil procedural law. It is concluded that heterogeneous social relations can be united in the subject of the industry if it is practically justified by the need existing in society for their qualitatively peculiar, built on uniform principles of regulatory regulation.

Automated post scoring: evaluating posts with topics and quoted posts in online forum.

Online forumpost evaluationis an effective way for instructors to assess students’ knowledge understanding and writing mechanics. Manually evaluating massive posts costs a lot of time. Automatically grading online posts could significantly alleviate instructors’ burden. Similar text assessment tasks like Automated Text Scoring evaluate the writing quality of independent texts or relevance between text and prompt. And Automatic Short Answer Grading measures the semantic matching of short answers according to given problems and correct answers. Different from existing tasks, we propose a novel task, Automated Post Scoring (APS), which grades all online discussion posts in each thread of each student with given topics and quoted posts. APS evaluates not only the writing quality of posts automatically but also the relevance to topics. To measure the relevance, we model the semantic consistency between posts and topics. Supporting arguments are also extracted from quoted posts to enhance posts evaluation. Specifically, we propose a mixture model including a hierarchical text model to measure the writing quality, a semantic matching model to model topic relevance, and a semantic representation model to integrate quoted posts. We also construct a new dataset called Online Discussion Dataset containing 2,542 online posts from 694 students of a social science course. The proposed models are evaluated on the dataset with correlation and residual based evaluation metrics. Compared with measuring posts alone, experimental results demonstrate that incorporating topics and quoted posts could improve the performance of APS by a large margin, more than 9 percent on QWK.

Product Liability for Information products?: The CJEU Judgment in VI/KRONE -Verlag Gesellschaft mbH & Co KG, 10 June 2021 [C-65/20

In its Krone judgment, the Court of Justice interpreted the Product Liability Directive to determine whether a copy of a newspaper containing incorrect paramedical advice constitutes a defective product within the meaning of the Directive. The negative answer given by the Court is correct, although not all the arguments in support of it are convincing, and others can be identified. The issue of defining product and defect is central to the application of the Directive, and the Court’s views may also be of some use in the discussion on its modernization.

Do Conspiracies Tend to Fail? Philosophical Reflections on a Poorly Supported Academic Meme

AbstractCritics of conspiracy theories often charge that such theories are implausible because conspiracies of the kind they allege tend to fail. Thus, according to these critics, conspiracy theories that have been around for a while would have been, in all likelihood, already exposed if they had been real. So, they reason, they probably are not. In this article, I maintain that the arguments in support of this view are unconvincing. I do so by examining a list of four sources recently cited in support of the claim that conspiracies tend to fail. I pay special attention to two of these sources, an article by Brian Keeley, and, especially, an article by David Grimes, which is perhaps the single “best” article in support of the idea that conspiracies tend to fail. That is, it offers the most explicit and elaborate attempt to establish this view. Further, that article has garnered significant (uncritical) attention in the mainstream press. I argue that Grimes's argument does not succeed, that the common assertion that conspiracies tend to fail remains poorly supported, and that there are good reasons to think that at least some types of conspiracies do not tend to fail.

A Bayesian Exploration of C.S. Lewis’s ‘Argument from Desire’

C.S. Lewis’s ‘Argument from Desire’ is best summed up by his famous line, ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world’. In short, unfulfilled ‘seemingly transcendent desires’ point to fulfilment in another realm. Lewis’s argument is fraught with disagreement, and subsequently, questions remain as to its efficacy as a theistic argument. In this essay, I will take a novel approach by using Bayes’ theorem to assess the success of Lewis’s argument in support of theism over and against naturalism. As I will argue, a strength of this approach is that it allows me to largely bypass a significant area of disagreement within the literature, namely, whether these desires are best seen as natural or artificial. Additionally, I will argue for why these desires are the sort of good God would be interested in giving to persons. Then, I will proceed to outline what I take to be the best naturalistic accounts of these desires and outline some of the challenges these accounts face. Finally, I will conclude with plugging these results into Bayes’ theorem.

Can States Continue to Set the Agenda for Tobacco 21? Insights From US News Coverage Between 2012 and 2020.

Existing research on media examining the news content related to Tobacco 21 (T21) predate the adoption of most T21 laws. This study examined the discussion of T21 laws in top-circulating print media sources in the United States between 2012 and 2020. Systematic database searches using Access World News and Factiva identified T21-related news articles appearing in the top daily circulating newspapers in each state between January 2012 and December 2020 (n = 586 articles). Content analyses documented prevalence, types of articles and context related to framing of arguments for or against T21 laws. Newspaper coverage of T21 was highest in 2019 (42.8% of articles). The majority were news or features (75.4%) followed by editorials or opinions (24.6%) which largely supported T21. Most articles focused on state or local T21 action. Coverage of federal T21 increased in 2019. The most common argument supporting T21 included reducing youth tobacco prevalence (64.8%) while the most frequent objection was freedom infringement (25.1%). Tobacco and vape industries began voicing support for T21 in 2019. News coverage of state-level T21 in the United States began to increase in 2015 and peaked in 2019 with enactment of federal T21, a newsworthy event. As states adopt and amend T21 laws to align with federal law, advocates can use media to help shape the narrative and encourage strong T21 policies. This study described the volume and content of T21 print media coverage from 2012 to 2020, including common arguments used to support and oppose T21. Arguments in support of T21 included reducing youth tobacco use, particularly use of e-cigarettes, and related health effects while arguments against T21 focused on individual rights. Support for T21 reached a tipping point in 2019, including the tobacco industry's reversal in opposing such laws. States can and should continue to improve existing T21 laws and policies and increase public awareness about critical policy components such as inspection procedures and penalties.

SOCIAL CONTRACT: COMMUNICATIVE AND HERMENEUTIC ASPECTS

The article discusses the validity of the contractual theory of the origin of the state. Arguments of opponents and supporters are given. Their arguments in support of the existence of this theory are expressed. It is indicated that the natural language of communication has a conventional character, and is an unmanifested collective agreement. It is indicated that new generations join this convention in the process of socialization. From this it is concluded that the idea of the state and the relationship (interaction) with it also has an unmanifested contractual nature. The content of the social contract is considered. It is proposed to use hermeneutical methodology, in particular, the principle of questioning, for the study of such a contract. It is indicated that with the help of this principle, it is possible to identify the unmanifested content of the social contract. It is indicated on the questions and answers that underlie the contract. In the course of the study, the questions that the text of the contract can answer are identified, the ideas of the members of the society about interaction with the state are established. The article highlights the issue of the subjects (participants) of such a contract. It is concluded that the main of them are social groups. The largest group is the "people", which can also be considered as a hermeneutic community, that is, a community of people united by a single picture of the world and language. It is pointed out the importance of taking into account the provisions of the social contract in lawmaking and in the interpretation of law.

‘Market Substitution’ in the Context of Climate Litigation

Abstract In several countries where climate litigation has challenged the authorization of fossil-fuel extraction developments, resource companies have presented courts with a ‘market substitution’ argument (msa) in support of authorization. In these contexts msa is premised on the notion that if the fossil-fuel development in question is not approved, another one (or, broadly, increased production) elsewhere leading to similar amounts of greenhouse gas emissions will be approved to meet market demand. Some courts have accepted msa. Others have rejected it. In several cases, and in the academic literature, the argument has been rejected on one or more of four grounds: logic or law; evidence; economics; and jurisprudence. These rejections are all questionable. I argue that msa is not illogical or flawed in law, and therefore that it cannot be dismissed on a priori logical or legal grounds. I further argue that it is capable of being made out on evidence and does not suffer from economic or jurisprudential flaws. Courts and academic commentators should not be too quick to dismiss it.

Multidimensional Discrimination in the Online Rental Housing Market: Implications for Families With Young Children

ABSTRACT A half century after passage of the federal Fair Housing Act, studies continue to document racial discrimination in the housing market, which serves to reproduce racial inequality and residential segregation. Building on this work, we examine housing discrimination experienced by individuals belonging to multiple disadvantaged groups. Employing an online field experiment in 31 U.S. cities over 20 months, we investigate patterns of discrimination against female rental housing applicants at the intersections of race, ethnicity, family structure, and Section 8 housing voucher receipt. Consistent with prior work, we find discrimination against Black women and Section 8 recipients. We also find that only Black women and Latinas are penalized for being parents and for being single mothers to young children. Finally, examining the relevant policy landscape, we find evidence that state and local laws barring discrimination against Section 8 recipients may not be sufficient to protect voucher holders and their families and may instead prompt landlords to engage in subtler forms of discrimination (i.e., increased nonresponse). These findings reveal a dynamic pattern of multidimensional discrimination and support arguments for an intersectional approach to understanding and combatting inequality.

Corruption and distortion of public expenditures: evidence from Africa

This study investigates the effect of corruption on the trade-off between capital and current expenditures in a panel of 48 African countries over the period 2000–2016. Based on statistical yearbooks, we compile disaggregated data on public finances for African countries and find that a high prevalence of corruption distorts the composition of public expenditures at the expense of the share of capital expenditure. Specifically, an increase in corruption by one standard deviation is associated with a decrease in the proportion of capital expenditure from 29 to 18%. The results are robust to various specifications and estimation methods, including the fixed effects and instrumental variables approach. The supportive argument demonstrates that it seems more beneficial for corrupted bureaucrats to manipulate public spending in favor of current rather than capital expenditures. The latter relies on formal and traceable procedures, whereas current expenditure is known to be more open to the use of discretionary allocation.