Different Sets Of Norms Research Articles

In defence of a distinctively legal domain

ABSTRACT In Law as a Moral Practice, Scott Hershovitz defends the pluralist view that there are many sets of legal norms which we can validly employ for different purposes, none of which qualifies as uniquely legal. He claims, further, that there is no set of moral rights and duties that is distinctly legal either, because the domain of morality is unified. I argue, against Hershovitz, that the existence of different sets of norms within legal practice does not mean that no set is basic, or fundamental. There is arguably one set (the actual moral rights and duties that law re-arranges) which is fundamental, and from which all the other sets are derivative. I argue, moreover, that we have strong deontological reasons to doubt that the domain of morality is unified. If political morality comprises distinct domains, not collapsible to a single moral concern, then the possibility of a distinctively legal domain of morality remains open.

Translating global gender norms in Islamic Relief Worldwide

Based on a case study of Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), this article analyses organizational processes of norm translation, asking how IRW understands and employs global norms of gender equality. Approaching IRW as an organization positioned in between two different normative environments, the analysis explores the ways in which it seeks to align different sets of norms, balance between different kinds of expectations and create resonance with different audiences. In these processes, actors make use of a range of different strategies, including bridging, thinning and parallel co-existence, testifying to the complexities involved in translating organizational norms.

Reclaiming Proportionality (Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Lecture 2016)

Reclaiming Proportionality (Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Lecture 2016)

Therapy, Enhancement, and Medicine: Challenges for the Doctor–Patient Relationship and Patient Safety

There are ethical guidelines that form the foundation of the traditional doctor–patient relationship in medicine. Health care providers are under special obligations to their patients. These include obligations to disclose information, to propose alternative treatments that allow patients to make decisions based on their own values, and to have special concern for patients’ best interests. Furthermore, patients know that these obligations exist and so come to their physicians with a significant level of trust. In this sense, therapeutic medicine significantly differs from straightforward business practices such as the buying and selling of houses, cars, cell phones, etc. However, we argue that this relationship differs when medicine is used for enhancement rather than therapy. When patients seek enhancements they are not as vulnerable as when they are ill. And in an enhancement setting, physicians have little role outside of medical risks to discuss motivation and alternatives. Therefore, we conclude that a more reasonable alternative may be for doctors and patients to use ethical norms associated more with straightforward business practices, specifically sales. We believe that full disclosure of this different set of norms will benefit both physicians and patients.

Incoming Editorial

Incoming Editorial

Loving Whiteness to Death: Sadomasochism, Emotionality, and the Possibility of Humanizing Love

Although scholars have articulated how whites institutionally, economically, and socially invest in their whiteness, they have paid little attention to white emotionality. By explicating a critical, more humanizing theory of love that accounts for the painful process of sharing in the burden of creating humanity, this psychoanalytic theoretical essay illustrates how the norms and values of white emotionality are premised on a sadomasochistic notion of love. Finally, the authors re-imagine a different set of norms and values through a critical humanizing pedagogy of love, one that can only be realized when whites learn to “love whiteness to death.” That is, whites need to find not just the political will but also the emotional strength (i.e., vulnerability) necessary to eliminate the white race as a sociopolitical form of human organization and free themselves and others from the shackles of the institution of race.

Self-Injury and the Internet

Previous models of therapeutic treatment for self-injury have been focused on individualistic psycho-medical approaches that isolate and stigmatize people who cut, burn, and otherwise self-harm. The rise of cyber communities of self-injury, beginning in the early 2000s but evolving dramatically over the first decade of the twenty-first century, has offered a diversity of groups that individuals can join, cycling through different ones as their movement through their career of self-injury evolves. These groups offer a significantly different set of norms and values relating to self-injury, engaging in some combination of defining it, normalizing it, supporting it, and offering a range of techniques for combatting it. In this article we discuss the various ways different people participate in these cyber communities, their relationships between the cyber and face-to-face worlds, and the effects of the Internet on self-injury. We conclude by discussing the instrumental and expressive effects of cyber self-injury support groups, and the way these groups function to normalize the behavior and foster its moral passage.

Enhancing Phonological Patterns of Young Children With Highly Unintelligible Speech

Enhancing Phonological Patterns of Young Children With Highly Unintelligible Speech

Regime Interplay in Public-Private Governance: Taking Stock of the Relationship Between the Paris Club and Private Creditors Between 1982 and 2005

Despite new interest in the implications of growing institutional density for international cooperation, and in so-called public private governance, the interplay between public and private regimes has so far been largely overlooked. This article draws on the emerging literature on parallel regimes in international governance to analyze the evolution of the norms and rules governing sovereign debt restructuring from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s, with a particular focus on the interplay between those covering official bilateral (or Paris Club) debt, and those dealing with private credits. It shows how, from the mid-1990s onward, changes in market and political environments turned burden sharing between bilateral and private creditors into a contentious issue, partly undermining the existing framework for public-private cooperation, and confirms that a focus on institutional interplay can help identify some of the key dynamics behind public-private cooperation. Keywords: parallel regimes, institutional interplay, public-private governance, sovereign debt restructuring, Paris Club. ********** Acknowledging the multiplication of international agreements and norms, scholars have begun to question the implications of growing institutional density for international cooperation. (1) Concepts such regime overlap, nesting, or regime complex have been developed to attempt to account for the phenomenon, and explore its consequences. Yet while the interplay between state-led regimes has attracted rising scholarly attention, that between private regimes, or between state and private regimes, has remained virgin territory, despite early calls for a thorough analysis. (2) In light of the growing interest in issues relating to public-private governance, the fact that the interaction between state and nonstate sets of principles, norms, and rules has largely been overlooked seems especially puzzling. One reason might be the lack of a clear line between state and nonstate. Virginia Haufler identifies a private regime as one in which co-operation among private actors is institutionalized, and in which states do not participate in formulating the principles, norms, rules or procedures which govern the regime members' behaviour. (3) However, private regimes, like their exclusively state-led counterparts, are best seen one end of a continuum along which the proportion of state and private influence varies. In some areas, regimes are created by states on private foundations (e.g., human rights); in others, regimes are established by private actors under the watchful eye of the state (e.g., maritime insurance or Internet access). In yet others, state and private actors share in the definition, implementation, and monitoring of norms and rules (e.g., intellectual property rights or the Basel II framework). Yet when focusing on the two ends of the continuum (i.e., contrasting primarily state-led and primarily private-led institutional arrangements), important differences emerge that may influence institutional design and evolution. In particular, whereas market actors are primarily accountable to their shareholders and investors and therefore must obey commercial imperatives, state actors are subject to electoral accountability and their decisions tend to reflect geopolitical considerations and domestic political pressures. How these differences impact the interplay between public and private regimes, creating synergy or conflict, is thus of major interest. Drawing on the emerging literature on parallel regimes in international governance, I analyze the evolution of the bilateral and private regimes for sovereign debt restructuring from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s, with a particular focus on the interplay between the two. As will be shown below, the existence of different sets of norms and practices governing official bilateral and commercial debt first attracted scholarly interest in the 1980s, with the Latin American debt crisis. …

The two faces of revenge: moral responsibility and the culture of honor

Retributive emotions and behavior are thought to be adaptive for their role in improving social coordination. However, since retaliation is generally not in the short-term interests of the individual, rational self-interest erodes the motivational link between retributive emotions and the accompanying adaptive behavior. I argue that two different sets of norms have emerged to reinforce this link: (1) norms about honor and (2) norms about moral responsibility and desert. I observe that the primary difference between these types of retribution motivators lies in where the normative focus is placed after an offense. In the first form of retribution, the normative focus is on the offended party. In the second, it is on the offender. Next, I show how each class of norms is well tailored to the particular features of the environment in which these forms of retributive behavior emerge. Finally, I consider some philosophical implications of these observations. I suggest that my account, if correct, would pose tough challenges for contemporary philosophical theories of moral responsibility and punishment.

Ambivalence and the Paradoxes of Grandparenting

This paper focuses on ‘normative talk’ about grandparenting. It is based on a secondary analysis of a study involving 46 interviews with grandparents. It identifies two main cultural norms of grandparenting that emerged from the data – ‘being there’ and ‘not interfering’. There were very high levels of consensus in the study that these constituted what grandparents ‘should and should not’ do. However, these two norms can be contradictory, and are not easy to reconcile with the everyday realities of grandparenting. The study found that norms of parenting and also of self determination were also very important for the grandparents in the study. They had a keen sense of what being a ‘good parent’ (to their own adult children) should mean – especially in terms of allowing them to be independent – but this could sometimes conflict with their sense of responsibility to descendant generations of grandchildren. Using the concept of ambivalence and drawing on the accounts of grandparents in the study, the paper explores and offers an explanation for both the coexistence and conflict between different sets of norms, as well as for the remarkably high levels of consensus about ‘being there’ and ‘not interfering’. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the limitations of the data and the analysis, and with suggestions for the development of further work in this area.

Trail Making Test in traumatic brain injury, schizophrenia, and normal ageing: Sample comparisons and normative data

The Trail Making Test (TMT) has been a useful assessment tool to investigate executive function. Several studies have recently improved the existing TMT norms by mean of large samples of healthy individuals stratified by a number of demographic variables from different populations. In contrast, criticisms have been raised about the utility of norms from healthy samples to detect changes across time in clinical samples where TMT performance used to be altered. In addition, few studies have compared groups of patients with deficits in TMT performance, making it difficult to decide whether a single set of norms is sufficient to assess different clinical populations. We provide normative data from three large samples of patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) ( n = 90), schizophrenia spectrum disorders ( n = 127), and healthy Spanish speakers ( n = 223). Differences between healthy participants and patients in all TMT direct (TMT-A, TMT-B) and derived (B–A, B:A, B–A/A) scores were found. TMT performance was poorer in TBI patients than in schizophrenia patients except for the B:A and B–A/A scores, suggesting a similar underlying executive deficit. Normal ageing impaired both direct and derived TMT indices, as revealed by lower scores in the healthy elderly group (55–80 years old) as compared with young (16–24) and middle-aged (25–54) healthy participants. Three different sets of norms stratified by age, education, or both are presented for clinical use. Recommendations on TMT scores are made for future research.

Creative Practice in African Music: New Perspectives in the Scrutiny of Africanisms in Diaspora

The quest for the meaning of various aspects of African music has taken center stage for many Africanists from the humanities and social sciences.(1) To attain this objective in the field of ethnomusicology, new trends of inquiry focus on the impact of the contextual interplay of myriad physical and conceptual cultural elements in the process of musical creativity.(2) Seen from this perspective, one objective of these trends is to reveal the meaning of musical practice by detecting the extent to which the respective cultural fabric is reflected in the total process of musical creativity pertaining to given community (wa Mukuna 1993, 154). In his book Musical Practice and Creativity: An African Traditional Perspective (1991), for example, Meki Nzewi provides an excellent case study of reflectivity by casting the creative musical process of the Igbo in Nigeria against the philosophy of Mbari art. He asserts: Its [Mbari art] objective is in its fulfillment not in its utility. Its essence is the celebration of its momentousness: socio-spiritual regeneration and sustainment. Its philosophy is that death or demise is the essence of growth. The lesson of Mbari is that an achievement is its own end: the thrill and dynamism to achieve burns out with achieving, and, thereby, gives scope for the growth of fresh incentive for another achievement: philosophy from which the practice of performance-composition in music also derives. (12) Nzewi implies that the improvisational creative process in instrumental music, like the Mbari art, is an attainment in itself. It exists as process of fulfillment during the creation and ceases to exist after its completion. This parallelism is corroborated with examples from various music cultures in Africa. Nevertheless, distinctions are to be made between categories of musical compositions to reveal that those performance-compositions belonging to categories of social and religious contexts, for which the efficacy of their ritual requests rigorous fidelity in music and dance reproduction, follow different set of norms. In this context, musical composition or dance exists in perpetuity and does not necessarily become a past referential framework for new creative experience every subsequent performance occasion, as Nzewi would like us to believe (1991, 12). Despite the enormous literature devoted to the explanation of the nature of African music, its meaning and governing principles continue to challenge casual scholars--who prefer to simplify them by casting or assessing them outside their cultural context--and those who refuse to accept that the creative process of African music is governed by set of principles different from those of Europe. Whereas Nzewi's argument holds true for instrumental music, it presents difficulties when tested against vocal music. In this essay, assert that the total concept of the creative process in the vocal music of Africa is contained in the different levels of its languages and that the demise of African languages in the New World rendered musical elements vulnerable to modification or replacement by others with different principles of organization. In other words, the creative process in African music is culturally defined, inspired by variety of cultural manifestations and practices peculiar to an ethnic group. To comprehend this concept, it is pertinent to delve into linguistic analysis. The examination of the nature of vocal music in Africa reveals that languages play paramount role in its organization. Language, vehicle par excellence for the conveyance of the African philosophy of existence, I belong, therefore am, is crucial to the understanding of the creative process of vocal music. Its tonal inflections are not only vital in the process of melodic construction and heterophonic implication; they are also influential in the selection of certain musical instruments used by an ethnic group. …

Syntactic Norms in Finnish Children's Literature

AbstractOwing to children's developing reading skills and world knowledge, readability (comprehensibility as well as speakability) can be regarded as an important requirement of children's literature. This article focusses on one determinant of readability, the frequency of nonflnite constructions in children's books both originally written in Finnish and translated from English into Finnish. A high frequency of complex nonfinite constructions is likely to have a negative effect on readability, and consequently they might be expected to occur relatively infrequently both in original and in translated children's literature. A quantitative study of a large number of children's books shows that Finnish originals have indeed tended to favour finiteness, whereas translations show a higher degree of non-finiteness. The translations thus fail to conform to one of the syntactic norms of the receiving literature. The article discusses potential reasons for this syntactic difference, considers the possibility of the existence of different sets of norms for translated and originally Finnish children's books, and speculates upon the innovatory influence of translations.

Managers and Consultants as Manipulators

A businessperson acts, qua businessperson, in two institutional contexts which in principle are completely distinct, and normally entail two different ways of relating to other people; on the one hand as an actor in the market, and on the other as the employees’ manager. We shall assume that different sets of norms govern how to relate to trading partners in the market and how to relate to subordinates in the company. The moral problems which arise in the two different institutions for conducting human relations consequently also differ. The main problem relating to market operations originates in the fact that one achieves the most desirable consequences when the objective as such is difficult to justify on moral grounds. Profit is the target, if necessary at the expense of the person one is dealing with. In this context—i.e. in the market—altruistic considerations, or acting out of consideration for the other party, can produce socially undesirable results. The problems confronting the businessperson as manager are of a different nature. We shall not be considering all aspects of management or consultancy ethics, only what we regard as in principle the fundamental problem, one which in fact applies to all management in modern society.

Managers and Consultants as Manipulators Reflections on the Suspension of Ethics

AbstractA businessperson acts,quabusinessperson, in two institutional contexts which in principle are completely distinct, and normally entail two different ways of relating to other people; on the one hand as an actor in the market, and on the other as the employees’ manager. We shall assume that different sets of norms govern how to relate to trading partners in the market and how to relate to subordinates in the company. The moral problems which arise in the two different institutions for conducting human relations consequently also differ. The main problem relating to market operations originates in the fact that one achieves the most desirable consequences when the objective as such is difficult to justify on moral grounds. Profit is the target, if necessary at the expense of the person one is dealing with. In this context—i.e. in the market—altruistic considerations, or acting out of consideration for the other party, can produce socially undesirable results. The problems confronting the businessperson as manager are of a different nature. We shall not be considering all aspects of management or consultancy ethics, only what we regard as in principle the fundamental problem, one which in fact applies to all management in modern society.