Normative Claims Research Articles

Climate Guardians: Navigating the Future in the 2021 German Climate Verdict and Constitutional Landscape

In the realm of intergenerational justice, green constitutionalism underscores the necessity for present generations to make choices that do not jeopardize the capacity of future generations to fulfill their needs independently. The climate verdict defending the rights of future generations by the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) of March 2021 was a game changer in that regard. For the first time in Germany’s climate litigation, the fundamental rights of future generations were subject to constitutional claim and enforceable. They were no longer just a normative claim. Constitutional courts can be seen as defenders of the fundamental rights of future generations where constitutions include such normative perspectives. While the Court upheld the infringement of the fundamental rights of the adolescent plaintiffs in the future, the representation of not-yet-born generations remains unclear. This article examines how the 2021 German climate verdict and constitutional provisions address the representation and protection of the interests of future generations represented by the plaintiffs concerning climate change on the one hand and discusses the potential of protecting the fundamental rights of not-yet-born future generations. The article considers the implications for intergenerational justice and explores how these legal frameworks provided by the Constitution may contribute to the formulation of sustainable policies aimed at ensuring the long-term well-being of future generations. There is an urgent need to develop an institutional regime where the needs and rights of future generations are being considered and included in decision-making processes.

Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Private International Law in Classical Muslim International Law

Abstract Scholars in recent years have shown interest in challenging the historical origins of international law and its normative claims to universality. This Article challenges the prevailing conceptions of Islamic international law (al-siyar), first set out in English-language scholarship by Majid Khadduri, as primarily an ad-hoc response to the failed aspiration of a universal Muslim commonwealth. It shows that Islamic international law, in its classical phase (eighth–thirteenth centuries), as first formulated by Iraqi, and later, Central Asian, scholars (who together later came to be known as Ḥanafīs), understood all legal order as being rooted in sovereignty and territoriality, with shared religion a secondary concern. This theory of legal order arose out of an understanding of political order as emerging from a natural and universal condition of war that is incidental to the individual’s natural sovereignty. I trace the genealogy of this conception to the founding moment of the Muslim commonwealth and describe its manifestation in classical Ḥanafī solutions to a series of cases in “private international law.”

A decolonial critical theory of artificial intelligence

In this paper, I argue for a normative reconstruction, from a decolonial perspective of critical theory in Brazil and Latin America, of a democratic ethos that despite its weaknesses and normative deficits is capable of fostering an increasingly deliberative, participatory, and egalitarian democracy by making extensive use of new digital technologies (comprising both AI systems and digital governance). Its argumentative core boils down to the promotion of intersectional egalitarianism (socio-economic, gender, racial-ethnic, environmental) through digital inclusion, which seems only feasible to us from a perspective capable of accommodating the normative claims of a critical decolonial theory combined with a naturalistic view of sustainability, within a research program that I dubbed “mitigated social constructionism” in response to the phenomenological deficit of normative and naturalistic theories (including critical theory and neurophilosophy). If what matters is normativity, then to avoid the divide between naturalism and non-naturalist normativity one nonfoundationalist alternative is to resort to hermeneutical and procedural accounts of normativity as helpful clues to making sense of the naturalism-normativity problem, avoiding reductionist interpretations of both naturalism (Churchland) and normativism (Parfit).

Negotiating Public Land Rights in Rural China: Insights into Conflict Resolution

Land expropriation disputes, particularly those involving public land, are growing more prevalent in rural areas of China as urbanization picks up speed. Studies on land expropriation, urbanization, and farmers' rights abound, but there are very few that concentrate on the procedures used to settle public land disputes. There is a dearth of research on this topic, especially in rural areas where the focus is often on land expropriation during urbanization and urban land management challenges. This study uses interviews to examine the behaviors and effects of Chinese farmers who are pursuing public land rights to fill this research vacuum. To extract in-sights from the textual material provided by the interviews, the NVivo software tool was utilized in conjunction with the theme analysis technique. According to the study, these farmers mostly use normative claims and benefit distribution tactics, which reflects their intricate relationships inside the established legal system. Additionally, the study shows how farmers really implement land policy by using the social and political systems that are already in place to strengthen their negotiating position. These exchanges show that resolving conflicts over public land in rural areas is a social and political matter as much as a legal one, reflecting the dynamic shifts in power and interest structures within these communities. The study's conclusions give fresh viewpoints for comprehending and settling public land disputes in rural China, as well as important new information for developing and carrying out rural land policy.

From Image to Flesh in a World Seen from the South

This interview with the intellectual historian Gary Wilder explores the philosophical and methodological theses in his overall work, particularly focusing on his 2022 book Concrete Utopianism. The conversation explores such themes as relationships among solidarity, filiality, and freedom; the forces and fears of normative claims; the definition of an image; and the place of the flesh in a critical Marxism, among others. This is the second conversation in a series initiated by Salma Shamel (PhD candidate at New York University) with anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and media theorists whose work is located at the intersection of intellectual history, critical theory, and historical change.

Popperian ecology is a delusion.

During the last 50 years, a group of ecologists has repeatedly used Popper's falsificationism in normative claims concerning how research in ecology should be conducted and/or how ecology should be corrected. Other ecologists seem to be dissatisfied with these criticisms. Nevertheless, they have not provided systematic analyses of how and why the Popperian criticisms of ecology fail. I have two aims in this article First, I show how so-called Popperian ecologists have not only failed to use but have misused - if not abused - Popper in their criticisms of ecology. That is, the Popperian criticisms of ecology lack the justification the critics claim it has. Second, I claim that Popper's falsificationism is an unsuitable philosophy of science for ecology. In other words, ecology should not be criticized nor evaluated from the Popperian perspective in the first place.

Can Intuitions Justify Moral Claims?

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, many analytic philosophers turned to addressing questions of practical ethics, radically expanding the field of moral philosophy beyond the meta-ethical topics that had been its primary focus for most of the century. Yet addressing practical controversies quickly raised the question of how normative moral claims might be justified. Many analytic philosophers relied on intuitionism, which has a long pedigree in Anglophone moral philosophy. This paper assesses three ways in which twentieth analytic philosophers drew on intuitions to support or dispute moral claims. We argue that those methods failed in their aim of promoting trustworthy moral knowledge because they relied on assumptions that, when presumed in contexts of structural epistemic injustice, are systematically misleading. Even though intuitions are among the sources of knowledge on which moral agents should rely, moral epistemology must give careful attention to the social processes through which intuitions and other forms of evidence are gathered, refined, and assessed. Producing trustworthy moral knowledge requires democratic reasoning processes that are sensitive to the ubiquity of epistemic injustice and domination and develops strategies for countering these.

Knowledge generation between design, data and theory

Design-based research (DBR) is a diversified research genre: The combination of two worlds – that of research and that of education – and the different backgrounds and intentions of those involved entail different emphases, epistemological ideas, ideas on valuable outcomes and normative claims. This becomes visible in very different kinds of reasoning: No uniform structure of argumentation can be discerned, and so far, a differentiation into clear DBR types has not been convincingly achieved. This is a challenge for the orientation of DBR novices, the quality review of DBR studies, and the legitimation of DBR in the field of educational research. This article provides an empirical contribution to the discussion on argumentation: In a literature review, DBR studies are examined regarding their outcomes, the rationales authors use to justify their outcomes and indications for specific challenges in DBR reasoning. The analysis confirms for the sample that preliminary, prescriptive theory is most common alongside diverse practical outcomes. Authors often justify them with emphasis on variation, iteration, cooperation, and data triangulation. Different (standard) orientations, multi-level reasoning, and sub-studies present challenges for authors and readers, going back to the complexity of DBR projects. To justify their results in a comprehensible way, authors are confronted with the task to actively select an argumentation strategy.

Moving toward the Median: Compulsory Voting and Political Polarization

Should turning out to vote in mass elections be voluntary or compulsory? Previous normative arguments for compulsory voting often rely on contested normative claims about the moral duty to vote or about the democratic legitimacy conveyed by high turnout. Our article strengthens the normative case for compulsory voting by arguing that it could improve democracy by reducing polarization, which existing work suggests can lead to democratic backsliding. Drawing on spatial models of electoral competition, we argue that, by reducing more extreme voters’ ability to threaten to abstain due to alienation, the introduction of compulsory voting can push party platforms toward the median voter’s preferences. This directly decreases party polarization, defined as the distance between party platforms. We examine potential normative and empirical objections to this argument and provide scope conditions under which compulsory voting is likely to decrease polarization.

EGALITATEA: RESPINGEREA DIFERENȚELOR IRELEVANTE

Moral equality, the idea that people have equal moral value, is often justified by highlighting a key capacity or property that all people possess (like rationality or the capacity to conceive and pursue a life plan or anything else). This view is met with the objection that every human capacity is subject to empirical variability – therefore, we are not actually equal. Some have rejected this objection and emphasized the typological equality of people, that is, the idea that we are all members of the same natural type or species. Belonging to the same type would preclude any request to take account of empirically proven differences. Typological equality will allegedly encapsulate the very notion of moral equality along with the moral requirement of equal treatment. I will show that this strategy conflates equality with identity. A natural type is defined or constructed by reference to a characteristic and distinct property. The requirement to treat each human being equally derives from one’s typological identity and the normative claim that attaches moral value to the property that differentiates the natural type. Such inference makes moral equality a second-order moral principle. There is, however, a more fundamental meaning in which we could express human equality. It is the compelling force of the requirement to reject some differences as morally irrelevant that gives equality such a major significance for moral life. In the first part of this paper, I argue for the separation between fundamental and derivative equality, the latter being inferred from the idea of shared identity. The second part illustrates this first more fundamental sense of equality through the debate on the human races around 1790 by Herder and Blumenbach.

The social contract for science and the value-free ideal

While the Value-Free Ideal (VFI) had many precursors, it became a solidified bulwark of normative claims about scientific reasoning and practice in the mid-twentieth century. Since then, it has played a central role in the philosophy of science, first as a basic presupposition of how science should work, then as a target for critique, and now as a target for replacement. In this paper, we will argue that a narrow focus on the VFI is misguided, because the VFI coalesced in the midst of other important shifts in the relationship between science and society. In particular, the mid-twentieth century saw the acceptance of the “social contract for science,” a tacit agreement between scientists and government officials, and more broadly between science and society. It was built around three core concepts: a distinction between basic and applied science, a conception of scientific freedom that limited social responsibility for scientists, and a justification for public funding of basic science in the form of the linear model. Within the conceptual framework of the social contract for science, it is clearer both (1) why the VFI was adopted, (2) why it is difficult to replace the VFI within the old social contract, and (3) how we need to revise the social contract for science in order to replace the VFI.

Objektív felelősség és kiszámíthatóság

This article provides a critical analysis of the main claims of the Austrian school of law and economics on tort liability. It reviews the normative claims of the Austrian school. It identifies the requirements the Austrian achool articultes towards law and which can be described in five points. According to them positive law should be (i) abstract, (ii) simple, (iii) predictable, (iv) should change incrementally, and (v) should reflect the basic informal rules, social expectations. They maintain that in the case of tort liability, a prima facie strict liability would meet these requiremes much better than the negligence rule. The article contests this claim and argues that it is not clear that the strict liability would be more predictable or better suited to informal social rules.

How the case against empathy overreaches

ABSTRACT Many people think of empathy as a powerful force for good within society and as a crucial component of moral cognition. Recently, prominent theorists in psychology and philosophy have challenged this viewpoint and mounted a case against empathy. The most compelling versions of this case rely heavily on empirical evidence from psychology and neuroscience. They contend that the inherent partiality and parochialism of empathy undermines its potential to serve moral ends. This paper argues that the argument against empathy overreaches; it makes an unwarranted inference from descriptive evidence about our empathic capacities to normative claims about the proper role of empathy in culture, society, and ethics. The paper concludes with suggestions about how to use insights from the empirical literature to build a more nuanced and contextually sensitive account of the role of empathy in our ethical lives.

The myth of translational bioethics.

In recent years, the case has been made for special attention to be paid to a branch of research in the field of bioethics called 'translational bioethics'. In this paper, we start by considering some of the assumptions that those advancing translational approaches to bioethics make about bioethics and compare them to the reality of bioethics as an academic field. We move on to explain how those who make this case, implicitly or explicitly, for translational bioethics go awry because of how they understand the 'gap' between bioethical inquiry and practical settings that requires bridging. We consider three interpretations of this 'translation gap' in bioethics: (i) the gap between theory and practice, (ii) the gap between the force of normative claims and practical contextual realities and (iii) the gap between relevance or applicability to practice and actual application or implementation in practice. In each case, we show how a proper understanding of the nature of the academic field of bioethics undermines how these gaps have been formulated, and how any need for talk of 'translational bioethics' is removed.

Towards achieving transnational research partnership equity: lessons from implementing adaptive platform trials in low- and middle-income countries.

Use of adaptive clinical trials, particularly adaptive platform trials, has grown exponentially in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Implementation of these trials in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has been fostered through the formation or modification of transnational research partnerships, typically between research groups from LMICs and high-income countries (HICs). While these partnerships are important to promote collaboration and overcome the structural and economic disadvantages faced by LMIC health researchers, it is critical to focus attention on the multiple dimensions of partnership equity. Based on informal literature reviews and a meeting with leaders of one of the multinational COVID-19 adaptive platform trials, we describe some important considerations about research partnership equity in this context. We organize these considerations into eight thematic categories: 1) epistemic structures, 2) funding, 3) ethics oversight, 4) regulatory oversight, 5) leadership, 6) post-trial access to interventions, data, and specimens, 7) knowledge translation and dissemination, and 8) research capacity strengthening and maintenance. Within each category we review normative claims that support its relevance to research partnership equity followed by discussion of how adaptive platform trials highlight new dimensions, considerations, or challenges. In aggregate, these observations provide insight into procedural and substantive equity-building measures within transnational global health research partnerships more broadly.

Revisiting the energy justice framework: Doing justice to normative uncertainties

Energy justice is often approached through the four tenets of procedural, distributive, restorative and recognition justice. Though these tenets are important placeholders for addressing what type of justice issues are involved, they require further normative substantiations. These are achieved by using principles of justice to specify why – normatively speaking – something is just or unjust within each category or tenet of justice. In addressing the principles of justice, it is important to acknowledge normative uncertainties, or the fact that different (incompatible) conceptions of justice might be morally defensible, leading to different normative conclusions or policy recommendations. This paper reviews the definitions of tenets in energy justice scholarship, the occurrence of normative claims, and how these claims are justified. The review shows that the scholarship ignores to a large extent normative uncertainties. In response, we propose a revisited energy justice framework, focusing on four aspects that help us to articulate the normative uncertainties in both the principles and the tenets of energy justice. These aspects are (i) the scale of justice (i.e. whether justice is considered at a local, national, regional, multinational or global scale), (ii) the subject of justice, (iii) the body of knowledge that is assumed and (iv) the time frame in which justice issues are being considered. We hope to provide a conceptual framework that make explicit the different types of normative assumptions underlying claims of justice, which will ultimately improve the quality and legitimacy of normative conclusions such as policy recommendations that follow.

Transparenz, Erklärbarkeit, Interpretierbarkeit, Vertrauen: digitalethische Doppelgänger des Verantwortungsbegriffs

Abstract The paper examines four key concepts of digital and AI ethics, which make normative (“ought”) claims: “transparency,” “explainability,”“interpretability,” and “trust.” The idea is that with the help of these concepts, digital transformation should be “responsibly” shaped, and there is even an aspiration to establish an independent digital ethics. The analysis in this paper questions approaches of this type. It elaborates differences between the tradition of philosophical appeals to responsibility and the digital-ethical buzzwords. The concept of responsibility may be a vague concept and have traits of a mere moral-ethical signalling. However, its digital-ethical lookalikes are not even normative; they stand for technical quality criteria or product features of a descriptive nature. The phrase “digital ethics” is used misleadingly to suggest the existence of an ethical dimension.

Intersectionality and Science and Technology Studies

Over the past thirty years, intersectionality has become a nearly ubiquitous framework for understanding, critiquing, and intervening in complex social inequalities. Emerging from critical race and feminist studies, intersectionality has many shared analytic priorities with science and technology studies (STS), including an emphasis on co-emergent social forces, historical contingency, and interventions that challenge and enhance knowledge production. Despite these shared affinities, STS and intersectionality remain largely nonoverlapping scholarly discourses. Based on a systematic review of intersectionality in eight STS journals, we observe a slight increase in intersectionality’s usage over time but find that its relevance is contained largely to venues outside of the STS mainstream. Our study identifies some ways STS scholars have modeled intersectionality’s responsible use through citation practices, methodological integration, and normative claims about justice/injustice. We also consider what epistemic exclusion of intersectionality might foreclose. We argue that increased use of intersectionality would amplify engagement with justice in STS work, not only by introducing new questions and theoretical frames but also opening possibilities for new interdisciplinary formations. This is not simply an argument for greater inclusion of a term, but rather for transformation in epistemic accountability toward feminist studies and other social justice–oriented fields.

How the cervix killed the cervimeter: A nonstandard story of successful measurement

This paper connects the historical case of mid-twentieth century cervimetry in the US to contemporary examples which suffer from similar methodological problems. By examining why past and current technological attempts at measuring the cervix have failed, this paper offers not only a compelling description of enduring methodological problems in standardized cervimetry, but also a normative claim: We need no better instrument for measuring cervical dilation than the human hand. This paper outlines why we are unlikely to ever see a successful replacement for the manual method, why the human hand is a surprisingly capable instrument, and rightly caution that further efforts at designing a cervimeter would be misguided and fruitless. This counter-intuitive history of how a non-standard measuring method succeeds, in the wake of decades of standardized failures, can shed light on broader concerns in the clinical measurement community about how to achieve meaningful, usable measures.

Some Comments on the Other Contributions to This Antitrust-Policy-Focused Issue

This response to the other Articles in this issue acknowledges the importance of some of the obstacles to sound antitrust-policy analysis that others find insurmountable but contends that they can and must be overcome, explains why I think some critiques of my approach are ill-specified and indefensible, clarifies some oligopolistic-conduct-related concepts my study uses about which one contributor poses questions, restates in my terminology the arguments of two contributions that delineate and evaluate particular E.U. antitrust policies and comments on some of the normative claims these two articles consider, and expresses my appreciation of the positive book review that two scholars have supplied.