Normative Issues Research Articles

Six Questions About Overcriminalization

The allegation that criminal justice systems (and that of the United States in particular) have become guilty of overcriminalization is widely accepted by academics and practitioners on nearly all points along the political spectrum ( Dillon 2012 ). Many commentators respond by recommending that states decriminalize given kinds of conduct that supposedly exemplify the problem. I urge those who are theoretically minded to proceed cautiously and address several preliminary matters that must be resolved before genuine progress is possible. In the absence of a position on several controversial normative and conceptual issues, discussions of overcriminalization and decriminalization are bound to be oversimplified and superficial. My review is organized around six of these issues. I invite commentators to examine ( a) what the criminal law is; ( b) what overcriminalization means; ( c) why overcriminalization is thought to be pernicious; ( d) whether overcriminalization is a de jure or de facto phenomenon, i.e., whether it is a function of the law on the books or the law in action; ( e) what normative criteria might be invoked to alleviate the predicament; and ( f) whether and to what extent overcriminalization is a serious concern in our penal system. Even though these six issues are analytically distinct, positions about one invariably blur into commitments about the others. Although theorists rarely dissent from the claim that states are guilty of something called overcriminalization, uncertainties about the foregoing topics mar their treatments. I conclude that a deep understanding of the problem of overcriminalization depends on how these six issues are resolved.

A New Dark Age? Truth, Trust, and Environmental Science

This review examines the alleged crisis of trust in environmental science and its impact on public opinion, policy decisions in the context of democratic governance, and the interaction between science and society. In an interdisciplinary manner, the review focuses on the following themes: the trustworthiness of environmental science, empirical studies on levels of trust and trust formation; social media, environmental science, and disinformation; trust in environmental governance and democracy; and co-production of knowledge and the production of trust in knowledge. The review explores both the normative issue of trustworthiness and empirical studies on how to build trust. The review does not provide any simple answers to whether trust in science is generally in decline or whether we are returning to a lessenlightened era in public life with decreased appreciation of knowledge and truth. The findings are more nuanced, showing signs of both distrust and trust in environmental science.

Tech Industries Pattern Case Study in Modern Society Based on Political Economy

The media and communication political economics approach examines the production, distribution, and consumption of resources, especially communication resources while the commodity-form is the capitalistic economics approach in a society. A commodity is a good that is traded for a certain amount of money. Google is a profit-driven business, therefore understanding how Google's commodities production, distribution, and consumption processes of communication operations are critical. Yet, comprehensive study of Google's growth, success and capital accumulation process seems to be missing. Hence, adopting a qualitative approach with in-depth literature review and content analysis this case study is of Google's normative aspects, whether it is "good" or not. Critical theorists do not make the moral demand and stand on normative judgement. This implies that a critical study of Google goes beyond moral censure or moral celebration. Thus the objective herein is to contribute to contextualizing normative issues concerning Google in the political economy of modern society.

Public value creation and robotic process automation: normative, descriptive and prescriptive issues in municipal administration

PurposeThis paper aims to highlight problems and opportunities for introducing digital automation in public administration (PA) and to propose implications for public value creation of robotic process automation (RPA) through the perspective of good bureaucracy as a guiding framework.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual paper addresses the purpose by applying three normative ideal types: Weber’s ideal type for a bureaucracy, new public management and public value management. This paper synthesizes an analytical framework in conducting case studies of the implementation of RPA systems in municipal administration.FindingsThis paper contributes to new insights into public value creation and digital automation. The following four implications are proposed: the deployment of RPA in municipal administration should emphasize that organizing administrative tasks is essentially a political issue; include considerations based on a well-grounded analysis in which policy areas that are suitable for RPA; to pay attention to issues on legal certainty, personal integrity, transparency and opportunities to influence automated decisions; and that the introduction of RPA indicates a need to develop resources concerning learning and knowledge in the municipal administration.Originality/valueThis paper is innovative, as it relates normative, descriptive and prescriptive issues on the developing of digital automation in PA. The conceptual approach is unusual in studies of digitalization in public activities.

From Ethical Analysis to Legal Reform

Ethical analysis may result in recommendations for legal reform. This article discusses the problem of how academic researchers can go from ethical normative judgments to recommendations for law reform. It develops a methodological framework for what may be called ‘ethical transplants’: transplanting ethical normative judgments into legislation. It is an inventory of the issues that need to be addressed, but not a substantive normative theory. It may be especially helpful for Ph.D. students and beginning researchers working in interdisciplinary projects combining ethical and legal analysis.I distinguish three stages in the process from ethics to law: translation, transformation, and incorporation. The latter stage can be divided into three clusters of issues, these being legal, empirical, and normative ones. Most of the philosophical literature on the legal enforcement of morals focuses on the normative issues. My aim is to broaden the perspective in two ways. First, I show that this is only one relevant issue and that we should address legal and empirical issues and the processes of translation and transformation as well. Second, I argue that we should pay more attention to pluralism and variation.

An intuitive approach to judicial expertise

Research shows that expert performance in many fields of activity is embodied in an expert level of intuition. This appears to be true in predictable domains with fixed rules. However, evidence suggests that this type of expertise also exists among representatives of more naturalistic domains, such as firefighters or art specialists. This paper considers whether a kind of expertise embodied in expert intuition can occur in judges. It supports the thesis that it is possible to achieve expert intuition in the scope of some types of court situations consisting of legal problems with an objective legal standard for solving them. However, legal intuition is ineffective in cases involving legal problems with no such standard, and thus it cannot be developed to the expert level in this respect. The paper discusses two model examples of comparable legal problems: those that generate a completely novel normative issue for judges, and those that create a conflict between judicial intuitions, frequently regarding the relation between law and morality. In both of these situations there are no visible environmental regularities (repetitive patterns of legal practice) to adapt, and hence, it is impossible to perform a deliberate practice – a form of training indispensable for developing expert intuition – for legal decision-making. Legal intuitive expertise, therefore, appears to be powerless in determining the holistic answers to some legal court cases, despite the skills and experience of the judge.

Reply to Tahir Abbas, Naomi Kloosterboer, and Rik Peels

ABSTRACT A reply to Tahir Abbas, Naomi Kloosterboer, and Rik Peels, focusing on the issues of radicalisation, normativity, and fundamentalism

Reconceptualising housing emptiness beyond vacancy and abandonment

The academic reflection on different manifestations of building emptiness is broad, intersecting the last sixty years of various debates on urban issues. Despite this, the conceptualisation of building emptiness and its nuances is not yet completely satisfactory. Definitions are blurred and different phenomena are often mixed. It is against this backdrop that, after a short state-of-the-art review, this paper proposes a precise conceptualisation of the main states of emptiness of housing assets. Four critical conditions are identified: i) uncompletedness, that is the condition of a building which, during the construction phase, is left unfinished; ii) long-term vacancy, that is the state of a property which remains on the real estate market for a prolonged period of time, for any reason other than the conventional circumstances of the ordinary life of a building; iii) under- and unoccupancy, which are conditions of finished properties that are not available for sale or rent and are either used occasionally (under-occupancy) or not put to any residential use (unoccupancy); iv) abandonment, that is the state of an empty building which has not been inhabited and maintained for a long time, thus being detached from the housing market due to its physical decay. Subsequently, the implications of such conceptualisation are stressed, with reference to both descriptive and normative issues. For instance, this conceptualisation could help a finer understanding of the negative externalities of different states of housing emptiness, as well as it could favour more careful ethical judgements.

ПРОСТИ СИНТАКТИЧНИ ГРУПИ С ГЛАВЕН ЧЛЕН ГЛАГОЛ И ПОДЧИНЕН ЧЛЕН ПРИЛАГАТЕЛНО ИМЕ В БЪЛГАРСКИЯ ЕЗИК (V → A) / SIMPLE SYNTACTIC GROUPS FORMED BY A HEAD VERB AND A SUBORDINATE ADJECTIVE IN THE BULGARIAN LANGUAGE (V → A)

The article discusses the possible realisations of simple syntactic groups formed by a head verb and a subordinate adjective in Bulgarian. One of the realisations of this construction is analysed in detail with respect to two linguistic mechanisms that play a role in linking lexemes in grammatically correct constructions: connotation and syntactic accommodation. The description of the members of the group takes into account the characteristics of the lexical classes that make it up as well as its syntactic variants. The paper also describes normative issues of the linguistic realisation of the group that arise from the selection of values for the grammatical categories of gender and number. Keywords: simple syntactic groups, connotation, syntactic accommodation, verbs, adjectives, Bulgarian language

Online and Offline Battles: Usage of Different Political Conflict Frames

Conflict framing is key in political communication. Politicians use conflict framing in their online messages (e.g., criticizing other politicians) and journalists in their political coverage (e.g., reporting on political tensions). Conflicts can take a variety of forms and can provoke different reactions. However, the literature still lacks a systematic and theoretically-grounded conceptual framework that accounts for the multi-dimensionality of political conflict frames. Based on literature from political epistemology, political communication, and related fields such as psychology, we present four conceptual dimensions of political conflicts: (1) the style (civil/uncivil); (2) the subject (personal/substantive); (3) whether it is about underlying moral/epistemic principles or not (deep/superficial conflict); and (4) whether it concerns a normative or factual issue. Results of a content analysis of newspaper articles and politicians’ tweets confirm the usage of these conflict dimensions in the Netherlands during a non-election period. Interestingly, most of the conflicts are civil, substantive, and do not highlight deep fundamental clashes. In light of the current societal concerns about the lack of respect in political debates and the deepening of our political divides, these findings can be considered encouraging.

Sustainable AI and Intergenerational Justice

Recently, attention has been drawn to the sustainability of artificial intelligence (AI) in terms of environmental costs. However, sustainability is not tantamount to the reduction of environmental costs. By shifting the focus to intergenerational justice as one of the constitutive normative pillars of sustainability, the paper identifies a reductionist view on the sustainability of AI and constructively contributes a conceptual extension. It further develops a framework that establishes normative issues of intergenerational justice raised by the uses of AI. The framework reveals how using AI for decision support to policies with long-term impacts can negatively affect future persons. In particular, the analysis demonstrates that uses of AI for decision support to policies of environmental protection or climate mitigation include assumptions about social discounting and future persons’ preferences. These assumptions are highly controversial and have a significant influence on the weight assigned to the potentially detrimental impacts of a policy on future persons. Furthermore, these underlying assumptions are seldom transparent within AI. Subsequently, the analysis provides a list of assessment questions that constitutes a guideline for the revision of AI techniques in this regard. In so doing, insights about how AI can be made more sustainable become apparent.

Certain aspects of implementation of Ukraine’s commitments under the agreement on association with the EU in the part of energy

This article analyzes the implementation of the EU energy policy directives into the legislation of Ukraine in accordance with the Energy Community membership and signing the so-called «Association Agreement with the EU», first of all, the adoption of the Law «On the Market of Natural Gas», the Law «On the Market of Electricity»
 Law. Law «On Energy Efficiency», Law «On Earth Energy and Legal Regional Earth Regional Energy Obbles», separate provisions of the Tax Code of Ukraine, Ukraine’s Energy Strategy for the period up to 2035 «Security, Energy Efficiency, Competitiveness, etc. allowed to conclude that the implementation that the implementation EU Energy Directives in Ukrainian legislation are fragmented, unsystematically, without clear economic miscalculations and expected result, which increases their overall purpose of providing Ukraine’s energy security. It is concluded that despite the adoption of the Law of Ukraine «On the Market of Electricity Market» in fact remained a normative unrivaled issue of the introduction of parallel markets, generating capacities and the problem of accumulation of debts, detailed regulatory and technical infrastructure. The rapid transition to green energy and extremely high price on it, in the conditions of the permanent economic crisis, causes excessive load to the state budget of Ukraine. Under such conditions, the functioning of large power plants from renewable energy sources is characterized by sharply variables in the work of the united energy system of Ukraine. It is indicated that the adopted Law of Ukraine
 «On Energy Efficiency» provides for the national and regional energy management system for energy security and energy efficiency for energy safety and energy efficiency, at the same time without proper financing and preparation of a sufficient number of energy efficiency specialists, it risks its exclusively declarative character.

Towards gender-inclusive innovation: Assessing local conditions for agricultural targeting

The importance of gender norms in agricultural innovation processes has been recognized. However, the operational integration of these normative issues into the innovation strategies of agricultural interventions remains challenging. This article advances a replicable, integrative research approach that captures key local conditions to inform the design and targeting of gender-inclusive interventions. We focus on the gender climate across multiple contexts to add to the limited indicators available for assessing gender norms at scale. The notion of gender climate refers to the socially constituted rules that prescribe men's and women's behaviour in a specific geographic location-with some being more restrictive and others more relaxed. We examine the gender climate of 70 villages across 13 countries where agriculture is an important livelihood. Based on data from the GENNOVATE initiative we use multivariate methods to identify three principal components: 'Gender Climate', 'Opportunity' and 'Connectivity'. Pairwise correlation and variance partitioning analyses investigate the linkages between components. Our findings evidence that favourable economic or infrastructure conditions do not necessarily correlate with favourable gender normative conditions. Drawing from two case-study villages from Nepal, we highlight opportunities for agricultural research for development interventions. Overall, our approach allows to integrate local knowledge about gender norms and other local conditions into the planning and targeting strategies for agricultural innovation.

Adat Law and Legal Pluralism in Indonesia: Toward A New Perspective?

Adat law is part of Indonesia's legal system with unwritten characteristics. To some extent, it embeds with religious values. As a country with pluralist societies, adat law plays an important role in Indonesia that increasingly adds the critical discourse of legal pluralism since it originates from indigenous values based on habits to execute from the older generation. This study aimed to analyze the contextual development of adat law in Indonesia through a historical perspective and its applicability to its emerging positivization in the form of state law. It emphasized the recent development of transforming adat law into state regulation through by-laws with the following prospects and challenges. This study used socio-legal method research, a cross-disciplinary approach in nature through the form of analysis to the normative and contextual issues of adat law. This paper concluded that constituting the state regulation contains the boundaries to implement adat law as the right of adat community, adat court, and the adoption of the adat values. The positivization has developed by adopting adat law to by-laws at the regional level of governments. By-law is assumed to have law enforcement that binds the community because it comes from the habits of the community. Therefore, it indicates a new paradigm in recognizing and protecting adat law, not through by-laws, in which both adat and state laws are different and could not be a unity law.
 KEYWORDS: Adat Law, State Law, Legal Pluralism, Indonesian Law.

Life in the hole: practices and emotions in the cultural political economy of mitigation deterrence

Negative emissions techniques (NETs) promise to capture greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and sequester them. Since decarbonisation efforts have been slow, and the climate crisis is intensifying, it is increasingly likely that removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere will be necessary to meet internationally-agreed targets. Yet there are fears that pursuing NETs might undermine other mitigation efforts, primarily the reduction (rather than removal) of greenhouse gas emissions. This paper discusses the risk of this phenomenon, named ‘mitigation deterrence’. Some of us have previously argued that a cultural political economy framework is needed for analysing NETs. Such a framework explains how promises of future NETs deployment, understood as defensive spatio-temporal fixes, are depoliticised and help defend an existing neoliberal political regime, and its inadequate climate policy. Thus they risk deterring necessary emissions reductions. Here we build on that framework, arguing that to understand such risks, we need to understand them as the result of historically situated, evolving, lived practices. We identify key contributing practices, focussing in particular but not exclusively on climate modelling, and discuss how they have been reproduced and co-evolved, here likened to having dug a hole for ourselves as a society. We argue that understanding and reducing deterrence risks requires phronetic knowledge practices, involving not just disembodied, dispassionate technoeconomic knowledge-making, but also strategic attention to political and normative issues, as well as emotional labour. Reflecting on life in the hole hurts.

Citizenship, self-efficacy and education: A conceptual review

Primary and secondary schools across the world are expected to contribute to the citizenship development of their pupils. Most citizenship curricula focus on the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of skills and attitudes. Citizenship-related self-efficacy beliefs are often neglected in the literature on citizenship education, although they appear to play a crucial role in learning processes, among others as explanatory factors for the inequalities between students in different educational tracks. As such, studies on the development of citizenship-related self-efficacy beliefs have the potential to inform practice in a way that fosters greater equality of opportunity. However, as the literature on civic and political self-efficacy uses different dimensions and conceptualizations, this poses challenges to both the scientific accumulation of knowledge and translation to teaching practices. Here, we analyse the conceptual challenges and propose a framework for the study of self-efficacy in citizenship education research that incorporates social and political tasks of citizens and distinguishes the variety of communities in which citizens perform those tasks on two axes, namely formality and size. In doing so, we argue for fine-grained distinctions based on context instead of the all-encompassing notions of civic and political self-efficacy political theorists appear to prefer. We end by discussion two normative issues.

When can religious employers discriminate? The scope of the religious ethos exemption in EU law

AbstractWhen are religious employers exempt from the prohibition of discrimination (i.e., when can they discriminate against non-adherents)? The European Union (EU) Equality Framework Directive exempts religious employers from the prohibition of religious discrimination, but the scope of the religious ethos exemption is disputed and its interpretation by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Egenberger and IR v JQ has been criticised for being ultra vires and for disrespecting the constitutional identities of the EU Member States. This article clarifies the religious ethos exemption, by examining the underlying legal and normative issues that determine its scope. It shows that the scope of the exemption depends not just on the Framework Directive but also on the relationship between EU law and national constitutional law and that between EU law and international law. Thus, this article not only provides clarity regarding the religious ethos exemption, but also uses these judgements as an opportunity to revisit these related constitutional issues, and in particular the role of the CJEU and EU legislature in defining the place of national constitutional identity in EU law.

‘Sustainability of what, for whom? A critical analysis of Chinese development induced displacement and resettlement (DIDR) programs

Most studies and influential agencies propose a shift to sustainability thinking and regard it as an important means of coordinating economic, social and environmental development. However, much less research focusses on conflicts over resources, the issue of asymmetrical power, and value-and-cultural conflicts behind the trajectories of sustainable development. For countries speeding up transitions such as China, it can be asked how and why might accelerating sustainability transitions through resettlement become a new utopia or a poverty trap? To examine the significance of this question for sustainability, we explore three development-induced displacement and resettlement (DIDR) programs in China: dam-induced resettlement, poverty-alleviation oriented relocation (including ecological migration) and agglomeration of villages. This research examines normative issues of Chinese policies for sustainability. We find that building sustainability via DIDR will not be as easy as projected and could lead to new poverty traps that disadvantage some groups of people, such as resettlees. We highlight three themes, the change of resettlees’ financial conditions, land access and local governance, to explore how competition is skewed between resettlees and local governments while speeding up to pursue more ambitious goals. We find that with the increased pace of implementation of quick sustainability policies that power lies with local governments to the detriment of resettlees. DIDR can become a just governance tool to build sustainability, but only if there is sufficient agreement among all stakeholders on a transparent, accountable and collaborative approach. Without inclusion and equality in transitions, potential risks and challenges can eclipse sustainable development.

Approaches to human security

Traditionally the idea of "security" has been framed in neo-pragmatist terms, connecting with ensuring the regional trustworthiness and political power of countries. The 1994 report given by the UNDP moved the focal point of the worldwide talk on security. The productive conversation of normative and experimental issues connected with the new security idea made it soon a focal thought on the worldwide security plan. During the last decades the rise of a wide scope of new security threats at the nearby, local, national, and worldwide level, including risks connected with an ethnic violation and common conflicts, fierce radicalism, environmental change, illegal exchange. Human security indicates a multi-faceted and all-encompassing way to deal with security that depends on the conviction that issues like human rights, advancement of the individuals, and instability in struggle zones are firmly interrelated. This normative work analyzes the concept of human security and its implication in worldwide. This paper also discusses the different approaches to human security.

The Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence: Some Normative Concerns

Abstract The creation of increasingly complex artificial intelligence (AI) systems raises urgent questions about their ethical and social impact on society. Since this impact ultimately depends on political decisions about normative issues, political philosophers can make valuable contributions by addressing such questions. Currently, AI development and application are to a large extent regulated through non-binding ethics guidelines penned by transnational entities. Assuming that the global governance of AI should be at least minimally democratic and fair, this paper sets out three desiderata that an account should satisfy when theorizing about what this means. We argue, first, that an analysis of democratic values, political entities and decision-making should be done in a holistic way; second, that fairness is not only about how AI systems treat individuals, but also about how the benefits and burdens of transformative AI are distributed; and finally, that justice requires that governance mechanisms are not limited to AI technology, but are incorporated into a range of basic institutions. Thus, rather than offering a substantive theory of democratic and fair AI governance, our contribution is metatheoretical: we propose a theoretical framework that sets up certain normative boundary conditions for a satisfactory account.