Comparative Inquiry Research Articles

Happiness in Classical Confucianism: Xúnzǐ

This essay contributes to comparative inquiry concerning happiness through a case study of Xunzǐ, a major Confucian thinker. Xunzǐ’s ethical theory presents values and norms that fill the role of happiness indirectly, through the ideal figure of the gentleman. However, his working conception of psychological happiness and individual well-being turns on aesthetic values that go beyond the universal prudential values to which his ethical theory appeals. Hence I argue that his implicit conception of happiness actually revolves around a way of life grounded in what Susan Wolf has called “reasons of love.”

Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion

Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion

Conditions of Comparison: Reflections on Comparative Intercultural Inquiry

Conditions of Comparison: Reflections on Comparative Intercultural Inquiry

Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion by Wesley J. Wildman

<i>Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion</i> by Wesley J. Wildman

Jin-Bao Nie, Nanyan Guo, Mark Selden, and Arthur Kleinman (eds): Japan’s wartime medical atrocities: comparative inquiries in science, history, and ethics

Jin-Bao Nie, Nanyan Guo, Mark Selden, and Arthur Kleinman (eds): Japan’s wartime medical atrocities: comparative inquiries in science, history, and ethics

Japan's Wartime Medical Atrocities: Comparative Inquiries in Science, History, and Ethics

With four editors, eleven authors (from China, Japan, the United States, New Zealand, Europe, and Russia), eleven chapters, an annotated bibliography, and two appendices, Japan's Wartime Medical Atrocities attempts and largely succeeds in covering a range of history, science, and ethical issues related to the human medical and biological warfare experiments of the notorious Unit 731 led by Dr. (and Lt. General in the Japanese Army) Ishii Shiro that resulted in the deaths of approximately three thousand Chinese. After an excellent introduction surveying many of the issues to be covered in more detail later in the book, the three chapters in Part 1 examine the history of Unit 731 (engaged in human experimentation with anthrax, cholera, plague, tuberculosis, etc.) and medicine-related war crimes trials. With the exception of a few Japanese who murdered American airmen and were subsequently caught and tried by the U.S. Navy, only the Soviet Union's Khabarovsk Trial tried and convicted any Japanese officers involved in medical atrocities of war crimes. These Japanese officers were caught during the Soviet Union's invasion of Manchuria in 1945, the location of Unit 731 and other Japanese biological warfare facilities. Meanwhile, the United States decided not to prosecute Dr. Ishii and his colleagues in their custody after a secret report—known as the Hill and Victor Report of December 1947—concluded: “Information had accrued with respect to human susceptibility to those diseases as indicated by specific infectious doses of bacteria. Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation” (30–31). The U.S. government actually paid Dr. Ishii and his colleagues money for his medical information gained by human experimentation and did not prosecute him at the Tokyo War Crimes trials.

What’s in the Names: Philosophy of Religion as Religious Philosophy, Theology as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry into Ultimate Matters

What’s in the Names: Philosophy of Religion as Religious Philosophy, Theology as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry into Ultimate Matters

Response to Amesbury, Knepper, and Schillbrack

This is a response to three commentary papers on Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion (SUNY, 2010).

Assessing Wesley Wildman’s Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry

Wesley Wildman is one of the foremost philosophers of religion calling for the evolution of the discipline from its present narrow focus on theistic beliefs to become a discipline concerned with religions in all their diversity. Towards this end, he proposes that philosophers of religion understand what they do as multidisciplinary comparative inquiry. This article assesses his proposal.

Kevin Jon Heller and Markus D. Dubber (eds), The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law

In an era of rapid evolution of international criminal law, with attention focused on global justice initiatives, comparative criminal studies remain a largely unexplored area. Kevin Jon Heller’s and Markus D. Dubber’s The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law (Handbook) is the first step towards filling this gap. This book is a breakthrough not only because it pays due regard to comparative criminal studies, which have been largely neglected to date, but also because it covers numerous jurisdictions and thereby moves away from the traditional eurocentric vision of law inherent to most of the current comparative scholarship.1 Such a versatile approach is particularly helpful to international criminal law academics and practitioners interested in exploring national legal orders for the purpose of adducing general principles of law. Article 21(1)(c) of the Rome Statute assigns ‘general principles of law derived by the Court from national laws of legal systems of the world’ the role of a secondary source of law for the International Criminal Court (ICC). Consequently, the ICC is entitled to rely on national criminal law in its jurisprudence. As there are currently 121 state parties to the Rome Statute, any comparative inquiry into domestic law gains more legitimacy in the context of international proceedings if it is representative of the legal systems from the various regions of the world. The geographically diverse collection of essays contained in this compilation adopts this truly global perspective.

Tracing the Progress of Process Tracing

Building on a Lakatosian approach that sees Social Science as an endeavour that confronts rival theories with systematic empirical observations, this article responds to probing questions that have been raised about the appropriate ways in which to conduct systematic process analysis and comparative enquiry. It explores varieties of process tracing, the role of interpretation in case studies, and the relationship between process tracing and comparative historical analysis.

South Korea as an ‘Ordinary’ Country: A Comparative Inquiry into the Prospects for ‘Permanent’ Immigration to Korea

South Korea has often been portrayed as a special country. Certainly, its rapid rise from a poor, technologically backward economy in the 1950s to a significant, even dominant, economic player in high-tech consumer and industrial markets by the 1990s has been exceptional. There is no denying, moreover, that the country has unique historical and cultural characteristics. Nonetheless, this paper argues that, in terms of those processes related to economic, social and political transformation, South Korea is an ‘ordinary’ country. One of the most salient of these processes is associated with migration which, in almost every industrialised democracy, moves from temporary foreign-worker migration to permanent settlement. Because of South Korea's rigidly monocultural and exclusionary heritage, however, many observers have assumed that the permanent settlement of large numbers of ‘foreigners’ was out of the question. Yet, a close and comparative analysis of the economic, political and social dynamics of international migration to South Korea shows that this will not necessarily be the case. Indeed, this paper asserts that there is good reason to believe that South Korea will become a ‘country of immigration’.

Electoral Majorities, Political Parties, and Collective Representation

In practice, democracies privilege plurality parties. Theories of the democratic process challenge the democratic credentials of this practice. Abstract social choice theory wonders whether an electoral majority even exists. A more optimistic line of argument, prominent in research on collective representation, assumes that the policy position of the median voter embodies the majority electoral preference. The conflict between what democracies actually do and what two leading theories of the democratic process say calls for a comparative inquiry into electoral majoritarianism. For each of a dozen countries, the authors ask whether any political party commands a predominant majoritarian position among voters—that is, is a Condorcet winner—and, if so, which party it is. They find that a Condorcet winning party exists in all 12 countries and that the plurality party can lay more claim to representing the popular majority than the left—right median party. These findings have important implications for the study of democratic representation, which the authors consider in their conclusions.

Settlement, ADR, and Class Action Superiority

When a defendant sets up a private voluntary compensation scheme or includes an arbitration clause in its form contracts, the resulting alternative dispute resolution (ADR) system bears striking resemblance to the typical endpoint of class action litigation—a settlement that sets up an administrative claims resolution scheme as an alternative to litigation on a mass basis. This article addresses the question of when the existence of one of these ADR systems—offering a shortcut to the same endpoint—should block future class action litigation. It examines important differences in timing, bargaining dynamics, and agency costs in these three contexts. And it argues that a court asked to certify a class in the face of an existing private resolution scheme should undertake a functional and essentially comparative inquiry, considering not only the potential savings in transaction and agency costs but also the underlying bargaining dynamics that may make these ADR shortcuts more vulnerable to unilateral manipulation by defendants than class action settlements.

On Divergent Tracks?: The ODA Policies of Korea and Japan in Comparison

This paper aims to conduct a comparative study of South Korean and Japanese ODA policies. Koren has been generally considered to follow in Japan's footsteps in its ODA policies and in its institucional mechanisms. Are Korea's ODA programs simply modeled after those of Japan? This paper tries to test the validity of the hypothetical proposition that Korea's foreign assistance development policy was established based on the Japanese experience by conducting comparative inquiries on the philosophy and purpose, implementation system, and the regional allocarion and sectoral distriburion. After analyzing the two countries, this paper argues that even though Korea and Japan share many traits in ODA polices. Korea is more likely to pursue humanitarian objeccives with its ODA rather than the politico-strategic goals of Japan.

Religious philosophy as multidisciplinary comparative inquiry: envisioning a future for the philosophy of religion

Religious philosophy as multidisciplinary comparative inquiry: envisioning a future for the philosophy of religion

Creating a Diasporic Archaeology of Chinese Migration: Tentative Steps Across Four Continents

This article calls for a specific form of comparative inquiry within historical archaeology as drawn from diaspora studies. Such a project encourages archaeologists to compare research from emigrant areas alongside work at overseas sites. This diasporic approach provides new potentials for engaging with the modern world by intersecting with both traditional and new aspects of archaeological practice. In order to showcase these aspects of a diasporic approach, the author explores three case studies from Montana, Peru, and New Zealand – connecting each to its related home area. The case studies explore how data drawn from a group’s homeland can support established heritage practices, engage with modern social problems, and illuminate complexities arising within sites based on ethnolinguistic differences within populations.

Views on death and dying among health care workers in an Indian cancer care hospice: Balancing individual and collective perspectives

In providing palliative and end-of-life care, professional and lay hospice workers alike attend to patient and family needs to encourage a dignified death. However, there are few comparative inquiries documenting how differential workplace preparation affects the processes and outcomes related to being confronted to death and dying. This qualitative study explores and compares these experiences among a diverse sample of health workers (N = 25) in a grassroots cancer care hospice in Bangalore, India. Our findings underscore how personal views, socio-economic status, beliefs and values, occupational experience, and workplace interventions interact to shape ‘worldviews’ about death and dying. Whereas health workers report conflicting feelings of relief and sadness when confronted with the death of their patients, these mixed emotions are often lessened through open dialogue among newly trained and more experienced health workers. Moreover, experienced hospice workers wished to ensure that less experienced ones are provided with the necessary workplace support to lessen psychological ‘hardening’ that may occur with repeated exposure to death. In dealing with the diverse needs of hospice workers, both individual and collective needs must be considered to ensure an optimal workplace climate. Future work should study how hospice workers’ views on death and dying evolve with time and experience.

Reply to Carr and Ivanhoe

I want to thank the authors and XIAO Yang for allowing me the opportunity to further the conversation. Carr and Ivanhoe identify my theoretical worries with their project as the problem of underdeterminacy in their definition and application of the term “religion,” and they disagree that a “working definition” of religion would have been helpful to their account in fleshing out the various uses of concepts like “faith,” “salvation,” and “spirituality.” They note the lack of consensus within the field on the definitional properties of “religion” and suggest we employ the Wittgensteinian notion of family resemblances to “understand individual religious expressions and how they are similar to or different from those we already know”: “Religions share only a family resemblance; one needs to study and compare the features of a given tradition and only then can one ascertain whether or not it is part of this or some other family.” The authors take my question, “how deep can the differences run before a comparative study becomes untenable?,” to mean that we need a priori criteria or some set of necessary and sufficient conditions before comparative inquiry can proceed. Carr and Ivanhoe suggest that we “jump in and see” and that the “proof” is only a “matter of making the case and the only way to make the case is to make it.” First, I would agree entirely with the Wittgensteinian approach to the study of religion, seeing the pursuit of essences and necessary and sufficient conditions as Platonic quests doomed to failure. I would argue, as the authors note at the beginning of their book, that definitions and taxonomies in the study of religion in the post-Enlightenment West have often served apologetic purposes that reinscribe forms of “cultural hegemony.” And with Carr and Ivanhoe, I would also encourage a liberalization of terms like “religion” to cast as wide a theoretical net as possible in order to facilitate comparison. My concerns with Carr and Ivanhoe do not involve defining the essence of religion nor drawing boundaries around proper warrants for comparative inquiry but Dao (2011) 10:253–254 DOI 10.1007/s11712-011-9208-3

The Counterfactual that Came to Pass: What if the Founders Had Not Constitutionalized the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus?

What if, this Essay asks, the Founding generation had not constitutionalized the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus? As is explored below, in many respects, the legal framework within which we are detaining suspected terrorists in this country today — particularly suspected terrorists who are citizens — suggests that our current legal regime stands no differently than the English legal framework from which it sprang some two-hundred-plus years ago. That framework, by contrast to our own, does not enshrine the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus as a right enjoyed by reason of a binding and supreme constitution. Instead, English law views the privilege as a right that exists at the pleasure of Parliament and is, accordingly, subject to legislative override. As is also shown below, a comparative inquiry into the existing state of detention law in this country and in the United Kingdom reveals a notable contrast — namely, notwithstanding their lack of a constitutionally based right to the privilege, British citizens detained in the United Kingdom without formal charges on suspicion of terrorist activities enjoy the benefit of far more legal protections than their counterparts in this country.