Normative Status Research Articles

Discursive Constructions of Communicative Rationality in Kenyan Presidential Election Petitions of 2022 at the Supreme Court of Kenya

How communicative rationality is constructed and shared among interlocutors in a court in the seeking of justice, given the background of distrust in the Kenyan Presidential Election context, gave attention to this study. The study investigated the construction of communicative rationality in the courtyard. The study assessed the types of illocutionary forces and their discursive legal practices and determined how interlocutors redeem the illocutionary logic in the courtyard. A documentary review of the written judgment of Ruto against Odinga in the presidential election of 2022 was used as the data collection method. The analytical frameworks involved Austin's (1962b) Speech Act theory and Searle and Vanderveken's (1985) illocutionary commitments. The findings showed that petitioners chose illocutionary forces to downgrade respondents' claims. The discursive nature of their legal practices was characterized by a lack of fairness, transparency, and integrity of IEBC and its Chairperson. Respondents used illocutionary forces, including denials, for face protection and repair. Their discursive legal practices were characterized by compliance, transparency, and accountability to win the Court's decision. Petitioners and respondents used much propositional content, modes of achievement, and preparatory conditions to construct their validity claims. In achieving justice, the group of Judges must consider interlocutors' presentations of credible statements of truth and acceptable normative statements of legal practices. A group of Judges needs to take precautions against the interlocutors' tricks and manipulation of the Constitution for effective decision-making.

Two Ways of Limiting Moral Demands

Abstract How should we respond to moral theories that put excessive demands on individual agents? Intramoral strategies concern the content of morality and set limits on how exacting moral demands may be. Extramoral strategies concern the normative status of morality and set limits on how significant moral demands may be. While both strategies are often discussed separately, I focus on a specific aspect of how they relate to each other: Do intramoral approaches assume that extramoral approaches fail, and if so, does that render them implausible? This challenge becomes apparent when the two strategies are considered together, and my goal is to show how it can be dealt with. In particular, I argue that intramoral strategies do not depend on the failure of extramoral strategies: Even if morality has limited practical significance (which I also doubt), moral theories can be criticised for being too demanding in terms of content.

Exploring equity in social impact assessment

Social impact assessment as a concept and practice is generally framed as a process for delivering socially equitable outcomes, and in particular, a vehicle for improving the lives of society’s most vulnerable and marginalised people. For example, the International Association for Impact Assessment 2015 guidance document makes the normative statement that projects should benefit local communities and be a ‘force for positive social change and beneficial social development’. Yet most guidance provides little prescription for what this looks like in practice. More recently, the New South Wales 2021 guideline includes distributive equity as a principle for social impact assessment, but its application is yet to be tested. This article discusses key dimensions of equity concepts, drawing on international social impact assessment guidance documents, academic literature on equity, fairness and justice, and case studies in Australia. We elaborate process/procedural/participative and outcome/distributive dimensions of equity. We further argue that, to reflect the International Association for Impact Assessment position, social impact assessment needs to defend its normative purpose of advancing equity, rather than simply ‘considering’ equity impacts.

Challenges and Solutions to STI Control in the Era of HIV and STI Prophylaxis.

This article reviews current efforts to control bacterial sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) users and outlines the opportunities and challenges to controlling STIs within HIV PrEP programs. The incidence of STIs continues to rise globally especially among HIV PrEP users, with an estimated 1 in 4 PrEP users having a curable bacterial STI. STIs and HIV comprise a syndemic needing dual interventions. The majority of STIs are asymptomatic, and when testing is available, many STIs occur in extragenital sites that are missed when relying on urine testing or genital swabs. Optimal testing and treatment, including testing for antimicrobial resistance, pose difficulties in high income countries and is essentially non-existent in most low- and middle-income countries. Novel STI primary prevention strategies, like doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) for STI prevention, have proven to be highly efficacious in some populations. A few jurisdictions have issued normative guidelines and position statements for doxycycline PEP; however, clinical standards for implementation and data on public health impact are limited. STI incidence rates are high and rising in sexually active populations. Sexual health programs should leverage the expansion of HIV PrEP delivery services to integrate STI testing, surveillance, and novel STI prevention services.

Foucault and medicine: challenging normative claims

Some of Michel Foucault’s work focusses on an archeological and genealogical analysis of certain aspects of the medical episteme, such as ‘Madness and Civilization’ (1964/2001), ‘The Birth of the Clinic’ (1973) and ‘The History of Sexuality’ (1978/2020a). These and other Foucauldian works have often been invoked to characterize, but also to normatively interpret mechanisms of the currently existing medical episteme. Writers conclude that processes of patient objectification, power, medicalization, observation and discipline are widespread in various areas where the medical specialty operates and that these aspects have certain normative implications for how our society operates or should operate. The Foucauldian concepts used to describe the medical episteme and the normative statements surrounding these concepts will be critically analyzed in this paper.By using Foucault’s work and several of his interpreters, I will focus on the balance between processes of subjectification and objectification and the normative implications of these processes by relating Foucault’s work and the work of his interpreters to the current medical discipline. Additionally, by focusing on the discussion of death and biopower, the role of physicians in the negation and stigmatization of death is being discussed, mainly through the concept of biopower. Lastly, based on the discussion of panopticism in the medical discipline, this paper treats negative and positive forms power, and a focus will be laid upon forms of resistance against power. The discussed aspects will hopefully shed a different and critical light on the relationship between Foucault’s work and medicine, something that eventually can also be deduced from Foucault’s later work itself.

The politics of piety: Muslim self-fashioning in Pakistani cricketers’ autobiographies

ABSTRACT This article offers a pioneering exploration of the cultural politics of Muslim self-fashioning in the autobiographies of three Pakistani cricketers. It examines the autobiographies of Javed Miandad, Shoaib Akhtar, and Mushtaq Ahmed, and proposes that the very assertions of the players’ Muslim identity have the potential to serve as counter discourses vis-à-vis the racist and Islamophobic perspectives on Pakistan and its cricketing cultures. It further demonstrates that the cultural politics of these religious discourses are contingent on the nature of the particular texts’ engagement with certain Eurocentric conceptions of modernity. It argues that the autobiographies of Miandad and Akhtar have counterhegemonic implications in that the references to divine intervention and divine will serve to construct partially non-modern cricketing subjectivities that form a counterpoint to the normative status of rational and/or technological discourses in modern cricket. The article further argues that certain forms of Muslim self-fashioning assume regressive, Occidentalist overtones. Such an ‘othering’ of Western modernity is explicated with reference to the autobiography of Mushtaq Ahmed. By examining the heterogenous cultural politics of religious discourses found in these texts, the article underscores the complex ways in which the non-Western cricketing discourses engage with the predominantly Eurocentric semiotics of the contemporary sport.

Samuelson’s social welfare function and Buchanan’s critique: the struggle with normative science

A history of the transformation of public finance into public economics necessarily involves an understanding of the tension between positive and normative statements, that is a history of how public economists dealt with Robbins’s requirements that economists should not make normative statements. In this paper, we propose to contribute to this history by discussing and comparing the works of two major economists of the 20th century, Paul Samuelson and James Buchanan. We show that they both use the same strategy to deal with the positive/normative tension: they adopt a reduced scale of analysis to escape normative judgements – the family for Samuelson and small groups (clubs) for Buchanan. What they do manage at this level is to create examples or models which remove that normative response from the theorist, and ascribe it to the participants. The normative views of the theorist are not involved. Yet, when one shifts back to a larger scale, the positive element of the analysis is less clear, at least in Samuelson’s work.

Awareness of sustainable finance development in the world from a stakeholder perspective

Sustainable finance is one way to realize a new paradigm of sustainable development that incorporates social and environmental issues into economic calculations. However, in its implementation, each country faces different challenges in making and implementing policies to support sustainable finance. This study will analyze the public perception of Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority countries towards the implementation of sustainable finance in their respective countries and then analyze the stages of implementing sustainable finance. To analyze the level of implementation of sustainable finance, this study uses the concept of Attention-Interest-Desire-Action (AIDA). To collect data about the object of research using the methods of content analysis and field studies. Content analysis is all the efforts made by researchers in gathering information relevant to documents that explain the background of the existence of sustainable finance and its implementation in several countries. The field study is used to collect primary data regarding perceptions related to the context of sustainable finance, which can be used to determine the proportion of activities that substantially contribute to environmental objectives (climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts). Research results show that there is no difference in the views of respondents as development stakeholders regarding the implementation of sustainable finance in both Muslim-majority and minority countries. The majority of the two categories of country groups are still at the interest stage, reflected in high scores in normative statements and low scores in positive statements that describe real activities in running a sustainable finance system.

Exclusion of the principle of non-refoulement in article 33 paragraph 2 of the 1951 refuge convention

This study aims to examine whether non-refoulement in the refugee context has attained the status of a jus cogens norm or not and how the exceptions in Article 33(2) should be understood if non-refoulement is indeed considered as a jus cogens. This research adopts a normative juridical analysis approach to critically examine the status of the principle of non-refoulement. The study concludes that the principle of non-refoulement qualifies as a norm of jus cogens based on several key criteria. Firstly, it satisfies the requirements of a jus cogens norm by addressing matters of common concern to the international community, serving humanitarian purposes, and aligning with principles outlined in the UN Charter relating to treaties and the use of force in international relations. Secondly, the exception outlined in Article 33 Paragraph 2 of the Refugee Convention does not alter the non-derogable nature of the principle of non-refoulement. The fulfillment of Article 33 Paragraph 2 is contingent upon strict conditions and necessitates objective evidence to be provided by a country. The research is intended to contribute to the understanding of the normative status of the principle of non-refoulement within the framework of international refugee law.

The client's essential stakeholder collaboration activities at the front-end phase of a hospital construction project

PurposeThe research problem in this study is how a client (as a project owner) should organise early stakeholder involvement and integration in the front-end phase of a project. This study aims to create normative managerial statements as propositions from the client's perspective and to combine them into a set of activities enabling efficient organisation in the front-end phase of a hospital construction project.Design/methodology/approachAction design research (ADR) was carried out in a large hospital construction project where the first author acted as an “involved researcher” and the other authors acted as “outside researchers”.FindingsThe authors created seven normative managerial propositions that were verified by the case project stakeholders and developed a managerial framework describing the client's essential stakeholder involvement and integration activities in the front-end phase of a hospital construction project based on these propositions. The authors have also depicted the subphases of the front-end phase: value definition phase in the client permanent organisation, value proposition phase in the client Programme Management Office (PMO) and finally development phase in the alliance organisation ending on the final investment decision.Practical implicationsThe collaborative contract delivery model enables the early involvement and integration of stakeholders. It has been somewhat surprising to note the extent to which collaborative contracts change the client role in the project front-end. The results offer practical activities for how clients can manage front-end activities in collaborative contracts.Originality/valueThe case project offered a platform to analyse how the collaborative contract delivery model changes the emphasis of activities in the front-end of a project. One of the key benefits of collaborative contracts is that development, design and delivery occur partially in parallel, thereby enabling contributions from production to be included in the design and development. The benefit of having a real-life case under study provides the possibility to triangulate and analyse rich data, however limited by the qualitative case method.

Modal normativism on semantic rules

ABSTRACT According to Amie Thomasson's modal normativism, the function of modal discourse is to convey semantic rules. But what is a “semantic rule”? I raise three worries according to which there is no conception of a semantic rule that can serve the needs of a modal normativist. The first worry focuses on de re and a posteriori necessities. The second worry concerns Thomasson's inferential specification of the meaning of modal terms. The third worry asks about the normative status of semantic rules.

Being a Child: A Social Constructivist Account

In recent years, many scholars have offered innovative accounts of social categories such as gender, race, and disability. By contrast, comparatively little work has been done on the category of children. The goal of our paper is to offer a new account of what children are. We start by discussing the two main accounts that have been put forward so far in the literature: naturalistic accounts and normative accounts. According to the former, to be a child is a matter of possessing, or lacking, some ‘natural’ and ‘objective’ properties. According to the latter, to be a child is to possess a particular normative status. We argue that both naturalistic and normative accounts are subject to a variety of objections. We then propose our own social constructivist account. According to it, to be a child in any given society is to be regarded by the dominant ideology of that society as the target of a set of broadly paternalistic norms, in virtue of the possession of a cluster of natural properties such that, according to the dominant ideology of that society, it is justified to subject that individual to such norms. We conclude our paper by showing that our account meets the criteria of success for an account of what it is to be a child and by addressing some objections.

The double bind of social legitimacy: On disability, the sick role, and invisible work.

During the last few decades, the human rights paradigm has shifted the normative status of disabled people, providing, in principle, the right to full and equal participation. Particularly in neoliberal economies, however, participation in work life is a major constraint on social legitimacy, creating a predicament for people who cannot adhere to the ideal of the 'productive member of society'. In this article, I explore this predicament at the intersection of disability studies and the sociology of health and illness, reviewing literature and discussing key concepts. I argue that in neoliberal societies, two distinct and largely incompatible pathways to social legitimacy depend, respectively, on (a) a version of the classical sick role and (b) a more recently constituted able-disabled role. Of these, the first pathway has mainly been explored and critiqued in the sociology of health and illness, while the second features mainly in disability studies. However, both pathways can be understood (1) as ableist mechanisms for maintaining adherence to values of productivity and by (2) imposing on disabled people an unequal burden of invisible work-a key feature of ableism, driving inequality both within the group of disabled people and for the group as a whole.

Historicizing the Miraculous: Muslim Traditionalism and Colonial Modernity

Abstract The text introduced and translated below represents a fragment from the narration and proceedings of an interreligious polemical festival known as “The Festival of Deciding (or Recognizing) the (True) God” (Melah-e Ḳhudā-shināsī) that was held for two consecutive years in 1875 and 1876 in the village of Chandāpūr in the Shāhjahānpūr district of the United Provinces (UP). More specifically, the translation below presents the discourses of the leading Muslim scholar who participated at this event also featuring major Hindu scholars and Christian missionaries, Muḥammad Qāsim Nānautvī (d. 1877), one of the founders of the prestigious Islamic seminary the Deoband Madrasa, on the questions of prophetic miracles and the normative status of Hindu avatars in Islam. Nānautvī’s discourse on these issues showcases an excellent example of the confluence of Muslim traditionalism and resoundingly modern logics of religion and history.

WHAT IS THE HARM IN ADDICTION? AUTONOMY, VULNERABILITY, AND THE CASE FOR HARM REDUCTION DRUG POLICY

AbstractSuccessful drugs policy must be driven by thoughtful principle and intergovernmental consensus, not by departmental or legal inertia, nor by public (mis)conceptions about drug use. Perhaps the most pressing choice for drugs policymakers at present is between harm reduction and abstinence approaches to drugs policy. To choose between these two approaches, we need to know addiction's normative status: is having an addiction a misfortune or a harm in its own right, even setting aside knock-on health and wellbeing consequences? We argue that the harm of addiction is driven by poor policies, but that harm is not inevitable.

Normative Isolation: The Dynamics of Power and Authority in Gaslighting

AbstractGaslighting is a form of domination which builds upon multiple and mutually reinforcing strategies that induce rational acquiescence. Such abusive strategies progressively insulate the victims and inflict a loss in self-respect, with powerful alienating effects. In arguing for these claims, I reject the views that gaslighting is an epistemic or structural wrong, or a moral wrong of instrumentalization. In contrast, I refocus on personal addresses that use, affect, and distort the very practice of rational justification. Further, I argue that the social dimension of gaslighting cannot be fully explained by reference to bare social structures because this compound wrong succeeds via emotional person-to-person addresses. Rational justification becomes, then, the locus where the struggle for power takes place. This struggle involves and is operated by not only victims and wrongdoers but also third parties. They are crucial actors in wrongdoing as well as in rescuing the victims and restoring their normative status. Ultimately, this study shows that the deontic structure of wrong is multifocal, and its relationality points to modes of epistemic and moral rehabilitation that are also modes of social empowerment.

A Proposal for Advancing Implementation of the Responsibility to Protect

Abstract This article takes as its starting point the support for the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) expressed during the General Assembly’s 2022 debate on the R2P, and the express interest of states in shifting discussions about the R2P away from debate about the principle’s normative content and status, towards implementation. It asserts that efforts to advance the implementation of R2P face three key obstacles. First, the R2P is insufficiently defined, leaving room for damaging misperceptions about the R2P to be sustained. Second, states have not been supported to translate their in-principal commitment to the R2P into national strategies or plans. Third, the R2P is not sufficiently institutionalised either within the United Nations (UN) or regional organisations. Drawing on the atrocity prevention literature as well as the policy and practice of states, this article proposes a three-part strategy for advancing implementation of the R2P, responding to these three identified challenges.

SOLON, a common conceptual framework for both normative statements and research results

SOLON, a common conceptual framework for both normative statements and research results

Biopolitics and a right to tourism

ABSTRACT Tourism as a right was officially stated in the Global Code of Ethics for Tourism (1999) and it would be granted normative status once the Framework Convention on Tourism Ethics (2020) is legally binding. As such, the importance of the rights discourse in tourism has been largely acknowledged and its status is increasingly being reinforced. The rights discourse of tourism is particularly important as the world is facing at the Fourth industrial revolution, which can lead to a societal transformation like previous industrial revolutions. However, the position of tourism as a right has still been confronted with an ambivalent conjuncture and it still requires the relevant etudes to provide diverse perspectives for its justification or its discursive construction within a philosophical approach. By applying a Foucauldian discourse analysis for a close reading of international statements and demonstrating the relevance and applicability of biopolitics to the rights discourse in tourism, this article argues that a fuller understanding of the discourses and arguments made regarding a right to tourism is possible through a deeper consideration of biopolitics and that its legitimation needs to take place within the realm of biopolitical production.

Belief beyond groups

While groups can do many things, and are subject to important sorts of assessment, persons can exhibit some normative statuses that no group can realize. I defend an anti-realist position about group belief (and group agency, generally) and suggest that it can still, in a way, sympathetically accommodate the range of cases discussed by Lackey in her groundbreaking The Epistemology of Groups. The distinctive normative character of belief—its integration, in consciousness, into a framework of rational relations—makes it impossible for a group to believe. Our critique of a club, or a commission, or a community, or a company or corporation—in just the ways in which we seem also to evaluate individuals—can be explained in ways that do not require postulating that the group in question have beliefs: the evaluation is revealed as indicating a fundamentally different sort of feature. The group has perhaps failed, in a way that is worth attending to, but that failure was different in normative kind from the sort of flaw that characterizes, for example, irrational belief.