Normative Terms Research Articles

Forms of Law for the Anthropocene: Civil Liability Revisited

Abstract Rapid, unpredictable ecological changes and the resulting instability that are characteristic of the Anthropocene call for a re-examination of the role of law in governing interactions between humans and ecosystems and facilitating adaptation to ecological change. The scope and scale of environmental change we are experiencing seem to call for a regulatory approach, namely forms of law that are designed to pursue well-defined material objectives, often through instruction rules designed to guide behavior to line up with those objectives. Such forms of law have a crucial role to play. However, the negligence principle at the heart of civil liability law is also capable of absorbing and circulating information about environmental risk and means of addressing it, and of translating that information from empirical to normative terms. The grounding of negligence in domestic civil liability law could be a serious obstacle to its effectiveness given the global, Earth system-wide nature of environmental degradation. However, the negligence principle increasingly operates through networks that traverse jurisdictional boundaries, as well as the boundaries between social systems. I propose such a network approach to analyze interactions between the negligence principle and corporate due diligence obligations embedded in domestic legislation and international texts such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). One important result would be the imposition of expanded epistemic obligations on firms, which would in turn require their serious engagement with domestic, international, and transnational environmental and sustainability norms.

A PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION OF Q.S AN-NISA: 34: A COMPREHENSIVE EXPLORATION OF FAMILY LEADERSHIP IN THE FIELD OF GENDER

Modernism's understanding of family law construction often targets women's capabilities as much as the head of the family. But in normative terms, women's leadership is textually inconsistent with the provisions of Surah an-Nisa: 34. The textuality of the sentence is now criticized by the gender idea that women can be placed on an equal footing with men if they can. The initiation aims to interpret Q.S. an-Nisa: 34 with Gadamer's hermeneutic theory, to better understand comprehensively the contextuality of sentences in the demands of the times. This research is library research by studying literature related to research topics. Using Gadamer's interpretation, it can be seen that Q.S. an-Nisa: 34 contains fertilization of family leadership more flexibly. The leadership of the head of the family can be held not only by men but also by women. However, it should also be based on a qualified person, that is, someone who can cater to the family's financial needs and has good leadership skills.

Sustainable Institutions: How to Secure Values

AbstractSocial sustainability plays a prominent role in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, but a proper analysis of the concept is still lacking. According to a widespread conception, a system is sustainable when it is preserved or developed in a robust manner. I argue, however, that social sustainability is best understood in explicitly normative terms. Formulating suitable development goals requires a conception of the kind of society that is worth sustaining. I propose that, for a system to be socially sustainable is for it to secure a range of values, including justice. Furthermore, I argue that social sustainability is first and foremost a property of institutions. I go on to ask what it takes for an institution to secure values and why justice is so important for institutions. The answers culminate in a social sustainability framework, which explains why making institutions more sustainable is so challenging.

Вербальні ідентифікатори ворога: культуромовні й деестетизовані моделі

The article is devoted to the study of verbal identifiers of the enemy, their ranking in terms of normativity / abnormality of public communication is shown, and distinguished are stylistically neutral and stylistically colored language units. Described are the secondary nominations with negative connotations, as well as determining their communicative and pragmatic load. Achieving the goal was facilitated by the use of a descriptive method, methods of observation, contextual‑semantic and complex analysis. The corpus of the research material were national Ukrainian and regional mass media texts from 2022 to the beginning of 2023. It was found that during the specified time period, the linguistic identifiers of the invaders, which do not violate the canons of written forms of newspaper journalism, were activated. The secondary nominations are aimed at the expressiveness of language expression, the expression of contempt and hatred for one’s enemies and the creation of a specific communicative and pragmatic effect, which, although deaestheticizing the journalistic space, does reorganize the established media space, clearly reflecting the social perception of Ukrainians to the realities of the Russian‑Ukrainian war. The linguistic creativity of Ukrainian journalists expresses a combination of pathos and irony, usually employed to humiliate the Russian enemy.

Eleştiri ve Polemiğin Ötesinde: Çevrimiçi ve Dışı Kamusal Tartışmalar Üzerinden Bakım Etiğinin Sınırlarının Sorgulanması

This article investigates the state of public communication on and offline as a test case for the viability of care ethics to deal with the fundamental disagreements that characterize our communicative interactions. The argument proceeds in four steps. First, I adumbrate two styles of argumentation that I link with two influential modern ethical theories, the critical-deontological and the polemical-utilitarian. I claim that restricting ourselves to these four terms imprisons us to oscillations between two apparently incompatible frameworks that picture public communication either in normative terms or in terms of power politics. Second, I claim that care ethics offers promising conceptual and normative resources to overcome these oscillations between critique and polemic. Third, I show how this is the case because of the unique way in which care ethics seeks to overcome the opposition between dependence and independence by reconfiguring the standard picture of the separation between morality and politics. Finally, I claim that the real limitation of care ethics is not to be found in its lack of universalizable norms or precise standards, but rather in its insufficient questioning of the extent to which disagreement as dissensus might characterize contemporary politics.

Російсько-українська війна і українська мова (попередні спостереження). ІІ

The article highlights the main changes in the Ukrainian language as a result of the current Russia-Ukraine war (since 2014, especially after February 24, 2022). The changes have already covered both the corpus (structure) of the Ukrainian language and various aspects of its realization and its social status. Within the language corpus, it becomes the most noticeable, of course, in the field of nomination. In this field, firstly, naturally has been foregrounded the military vocabulary; secondly, it focused on the language images, on the one hand, of Ukraine (accentuating the «statist» connotations of the word family parts), and on the other hand, of Russia as an aggressor state (with a greater frequency and number of names associated with it, and the negative expressive connotations they have acquired); thirdly, there have been drastic changes towards de-communization (de-sovietization) and de-russification (both in cultural-historical and normative terms) of various thematic classes of the country’s proper names. In general, there has been an increase in tendencies towards the further de-russification of the Ukrainian literary language. In the stylistic palette, increases the use of, on the one hand, elevated (as to «one’s own» and «one’s people»), and on the other, degraded (relative to the aggressor state) vocabulary and phraseology. In the pragmatics of this period’s discourses on the topics of the historical «fate» of Ukraine, you may already posit the final transition from the image of the Ukrainians as a victim people to the cultivation of its heroism. The media practices lowercase spelling of proper names associated with current Russia (as a manifestation of extreme disrespect for the designated objects). The letters V and Z have quite unexpectedly become the linguistic signs of modern Russian imperialism. In regard to the functioning in modern Ukraine of the two main languages of communication, the position of the Ukrainian language strengthens.

A cognitive-semiotic approach to impoliteness: Effects of conventionality and semiotic system on judgements of impoliteness by Russian and Swedish speakers

Abstract The field of (im)politeness studies has been steadily growing and developing but the role of conventionality and the type of semiotic system (e.g., language vs. gesture) for impoliteness perception has not been sufficiently explored. We used a cognitive-semiotic framework combining a reaction-time experiment and in-depth interviews with sixty participants to explore how Russian and Swedish native speakers evaluate and describe highly and less conventional impolite behaviour expressed either through speech or through gesture. The results showed a positive correlation between the conventionality of expressions and how impolite they are judged to be, and that highly conventional expressions lead to faster judgements. Few differences were found between impolite expressions in the experiment, but some were reflected in the interviews. Further, we found that Swedish participants evaluated language and gestures as very impolite more often than Russian participants did. We discuss these findings through the lens of the proposed framework and offer a three-dimensional analysis of the concept of conventionality in terms of frequency, normativity, and encodedness.

Reasons for Belief in Context

AbstractThere is currently a lively debate about whether there are practical reasons for belief, epistemic reasons for belief, or both. I will argue that the intuitions on all sides can be fully accounted for by applying an independently motivated contextualist semantics for normative terms. Specifically, normative terms must be relativized to a goal. One possible goal is epistemic, such as believing truly and not believing falsely, while another possible goal is practical, such as satisfying desires, or maximizing value. I will argue that we have practical reasons given the practical goal and epistemic reasons given the epistemic goal. Disagreement disappears when we make the context explicit. The result is an independently motivated version ofpluralism.

COVID-19 vaccination and governance in the case of low, middle and high-income countries

BackgroundGlobal crises, regardless of the place where they started to spread or of the factors that triggered them, require a comprehensive approach, primarily based on good communication, cooperation and mutual support. No individual and no institution should remain indifferent to crises but, on the contrary, be fully aware that any involvement in curbing them matters. Although humanity can be affected by various types of crises, in this paper we refer to the one related to COVID-19 pandemic. There are certain reasons that come to justify our choice: first of all, being a shock with a strong impact on people, its analysis should be performed from several angles; this may bring to light an image with its disparate propagation and measures to counteract it both in developed countries, and especially in those with a shortage of resources. Secondly, in the context of the emergence of vaccines against COVID-19, it is helpful to have an overview of COVID-19 through the lens of the relationship between the vaccination process and the elements that characterize governance, with a differentiated dashboard by country categories worldwide: low, middle and high-income countries. Our study is far from capturing the complexity arising from such social problem, but rather aims to outline the defining role of governance when it comes to providing firm reactions to the COVID-19 crisis.MethodsGiven that our sample consists of a large number of countries, namely 170, first, examined all together, and then, split into three groups (high, middle and low-income), it is challenging to address governance in association with COVID-19 vaccination, in order to see how much they interact and how each of the six aggregate governance indicators of the World Bank (Worldwide Governance Indicators) is reflected in this process. Even if they do not oscillate strongly over relatively short periods of time, reporting on health issues requires a sequential inventory, considering closer time intervals, so as to be able to act promptly. Thus, to better distinguish how the COVID-19 vaccination process evolved in low, middle and high-income countries, but also how it was imprinted by governance, we present the situation quarterly (March, June, September and December), in 2021, the year when the immunization campaigns were the most intense at the global level. Regarding the applied methods, we mention both OLS regressions with robust estimators and a panel model, used to investigate the determinants of COVID-19 vaccination, some of them describing the good governance, as well as other dimensions.ResultsThe findings point out that the influence of governance on COVID-19 vaccination differs depending on whether a country belongs to high, middle or low-income typology: the strongest determinism of governance on vaccination is encountered in high-income countries, and the weakest in low-income ones; in some cases, governance does not matter significantly. However, exploring the three groups of states included in the research, it is observed that the most relevant factors in this relationship are government effectiveness, regulatory quality and control of corruption.ConclusionsBesides the order of importance of governance indicators on COVID-19 vaccination, our study indicates that, overall, governance positively shapes the vaccination rate at the level of the chosen sample. In normative terms, these findings can be translated particularly by the fact that they can serve as information to raise awareness on the relevance of the existence of an institutional framework that allows the formulation of strategies according to the patterns of each country, especially since the actionable tools depend on the available resources. As a general conclusion, public policies should be designed in such a way as to strengthen trust in vaccination regulations and in governments, to reduce the multifaceted negative effects of this health crisis and to hope for its total end.

Quality of care in the oncological outpatient setting: Individual interviews with people receiving cancer treatment.

To describe how patients receiving cancer treatment perceive quality of care in the oncological outpatient settings. A strategic sample of 20 adult patients with cancer treated in four oncological outpatient settings in four hospitals in Sweden participated in the study. Participants were interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide with open-ended questions. The interviews were audio-recorded, and the transcripts were analysed using a phenomenographic approach. Three descriptive categories emerged from the data: The patient's care is designed to meet individual needs, The patient's dignity is respected, and The patient feels safe and secure with the care. Overall, quality of care in the oncological outpatient setting is perceived as something positive and described in normative terms by the participants. The results emphasises that in order to achieve quality of care it is important to the patients that they are able to meet with the same well-educated, professional, caring and sensible health care professionals every time.

Problems and thoughts in clinical safety evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine

Amid the modernization and internationalization of traditional Chinese medicine(TCM), the safety of TCM has attracted much attention. At the moment, the government, scientific research teams, and pharmaceutical enterprises have made great efforts to explore methods and techniques for clinical safety evaluation of TCM. Although considerable achievements have been made, there are still many problems, such as the non-standard terms of adverse reactions of TCM, unclear evaluation indicators, unreasonable judgment methods, lack of evaluation models, out-of-date evaluation standards, and unsound reporting systems. Therefore, it is urgent to further deepen the research mode and method of clinical safety evaluation of TCM. Based on the current national requirements for the life-cycle management of drugs, this study focused on the problems in the five dimensions of clinical safety evaluation of TCM, including normative terms, evaluation modes, judgment methods, evaluation standards, and reporting systems, and proposed suggestions on the development of a life-cycle clinical safety evaluation method that conformed to the characteristics of TCM, hoping to provide a reference for future research.

Inferentialism and social delusion

AbstractThis work sets out to present how the notion of delusion may be understood (and extended) within the semantic framework of Robert Brandom's inferentialism. The mechanisms of reliability and community‐oriented proprieties, among others, provide inferentialists with effective tools for understanding commitments (and so beliefs) in communities. These tools may be used to describe and assess both commitments that we might consider sound and commitments that we might consider delusional, both in terms of how they arise and in terms of how they may be reinforced. Delusions are accordingly rendered in perspectival and normative terms, which is elaborated through a number of examples. The picture of how a delusional commitment may be understood, how it may be reinforced, and its character as community internal or external provide some interesting perspectives on delusions in shared social contexts, as well as how they may originate intractable conflicts and disconnects between sub‐groups within a broader linguistic community.

Pollination and the Horrors of Yield: Scarcity and Survival in the Glasshouse

Pollination is a lynchpin anchoring multispecies survival, but in the racial capitalist configurations of condensed environment agriculture, pollination politics are informed by life-depleting and carceral logics, as well as imaginaries steeped in racial hierarchies and sex binaries that ground future survival in colonial, heteropatriarchal, and normative terms. This article argues that pollination politics are focused on intensifying agriculture and increasing yield within carceral infrastructures, and that the orchestration of pollination is governed by socio-sexual schemas about fitness and fecundity that are governed by a normative reproductive futurism. Joining feminist STS and queer theory, the article traces how forms of life in greenhouses and other agricultural infrastructures are “gardened” in the interests of modes of sustainability that are fundamentally exploitative. Biodiversity is domesticated and depoliticized, and all forms of human and non-human vitality are directed towards increased yield. The naturalization of sexual difference influences how plant life is managed, but also how temporary foreign labor is biopolitically managed in controlled environment agricultural infrastructures. The article reads the perverse politics of scarcity through the South African film Glasshouse (2021) and ends by speculating on how “wild pollination” might present more decolonial, anti-racist, queer, and liberatory sustainable futures.

Digital economy as a legislative term: problematic issues of the formation of the conceptual apparatus

The article is devoted to the study of such a phenomenon as "digital economy" and is determined by an attempt to understand complex modern economic and legal trends, which are caused by the progressive development of technical and economic relations throughout the world and are characterized by the emergence of many new concepts that significantly enrich the vocabulary of specialists. But it should be noted that this is not a simple appearance of new words, but the latter are gradually turning into normative terms, the essence of which should be understood by both specialists and ordinary citizens, and they should be fixed at the legislative level with a certain meaning, in particular, in special legislation. Thus, the appearance of the term "digital technologies" is gaining more and more popularity and expanding its application, giving rise to more and more new concepts and terms, including the digital economy.
 At the same time, with all the imbalance of modern legislation of Ukraine, legal terminology needs precision in defining concepts and their application with a single meaning. Therefore, this scientific article is devoted to the justification of the activities of legislative bodies and the emphasis is placed on the fact that it is not necessary to quickly create normative acts, apply new terminology and promote such terms as "digital competence" for all persons, since it is first necessary to decide what special knowledge is needed which sectors of the population, specialists and which areas in the digital economy the state should give priority and support to.
 For this purpose, we will analyze various regulatory acts of various departments, analyze dictionaries, which reveal certain terms related to the digital economy, and in particular this term, and express an opinion on how these terms and concepts are consistent with each other. And also analyzed, adopted by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU on May 22, 2018, the Framework program of updated key competences for lifelong learning (2018/C 189/01), in which "digital competence is recognized as one of the eight key competences for a fulfilling life and activity EU citizens".

Zur Bedeutung von Verlegenheit für einen Begriff politischer Öffentlichkeit

Abstract The paper examines the significance of embarrassment for a concept of political publicity. It is critical of how the common interpretation of this apparently social phenomenon as a “milder form of shame” leads to a functionalist interpretation. According to this interpretation, embarrassment regulates given normative structures by initiating or even motivating self-criticism. In contrast, the article shows, first, that embarrassment cannot occur at all in a public sphere that is thought of exclusively in normative terms, and second, that the phenomenon is primordially not reflexive. In embarrassment, one is not immediately “thrown back on oneself” but tries to find a relation to one’s public figure. A philosophical reflection on this pursuit reveals the constitution of normative structures. In this light, embarrassment presents itself as a genuinely political phenomenon.

Constructing the Legitimacy of Journalists’ Marketing Role

ABSTRACT U.S. journalists work in a digital environment in which they actively promote their news stories – and themselves – via social media. Prior research has identified an emergent marketing function, albeit one that journalists seemed hesitant to embrace in normative terms. This study seeks to understand how the legitimacy of this marketing function has been discursively constructed in the U.S. over 25 years. In line with discursive institutionalism – which sees institutional discourse as sites for normative contestation, (re)creation, and (re)interpretation – we seek to understand the ways in which a marketing function is being legitimized as a morally viable social role. This study analyzes 1978 examples of journalistic discourse from 20 online sites where primarily (but not exclusively) U.S.-based journalism is discussed and debated. We find the marketing function gaining traction as a normative role but falling short of formalization. Journalists continue to see a tension between emerging marketing work and longstanding journalistic norms.

The Relevance of ‘International Society’ in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities in a Potential Post-Liberal Order

In this paper, I aim to update and apply the idea and practices of “international society,” as developed in the classic book written by Hedley Bull (1977). This, by assessing its continuing relevance in the first decades of the 21st century. For scholarly, practical, and policy reasons, I believe that Bull’s masterpiece offers a relevant ‘guide to the perplexed’ to navigate world politics in our turbulent times. The two research questions to be addressed in the paper are: First, what are the challenges confronting the idea of the contemporary international society and its practices in the third decade of the 21st century? Second, what is the relevance of the idea of the international society and its practices nowadays? To answer the first question, I compile a list of significant contemporary challenges to the international society. In a nutshell, these include the rise of non-state actors and their challenge to the centrality of states; the impact of globalization and the preponderance of global issues (such as COVID-19 and climate change); and the lack of agreed global and shared norms, in both cultural and normative terms, which make international cooperation more difficult to obtain. Facing these four intertwined challenges, I argue that the idea and practices of international society can be updated to face the complex realities of our times. I sustain this argument by linking the concept and practices of the international society to the relevant mechanisms of global and regional governance, including the institutions of the international society. I refer to alternative world orders from the North and the South that reflect the resilience of the international society. Moreover, the opportunities for the flourishing of international society might include its potential decoupling from the Liberal International Order.

The restriction of fundamental rights in the face of public security

The 1988 Brazilian Constitution guarantees the right to life, freedom, health, work, housing, leisure, assistance to the homeless, among others, as well as the right to security. Public security is a complex issue with peculiarities that evolve with society, and it is a constitutional right. In the military regime of 1964, fundamentals were repressed and restricted. With the inauguration of a civilian president, Brazil takes as scope, the formation of a democratic country, formed in 1985. There was the construction of a new Constitution, which only on October 5, 1988 was finalized and promulgated. The objective of this article is to carry out an approach on Public Security and its restrictions in the light of the Brazilian constitutions granted or enacted during and after the military regime. A bibliographical research was carried out in the databases of the World Wide Web. It brings together a theoretical basis on fundamental rights and their restrictions as a consequence of guaranteeing public security, throughout the Constitutions of 1967 and 1969, in contrast to the affirmation of these rights on the Federal Constitution of 1988. It can be seen that, in normative terms, there has been an evolution in the guarantee of fundamental rights, as well as in the scope of public security.

Firms as coalitions of democratic cultures: towards an organizational theory of workplace democracy

ABSTRACT The theory of the firm initially developed by Ronald Coase has made explicit the political nature of firms by putting hierarchy at the heart of the economic process. Theories of workplace democracy articulate this intuition in the normative terms of the conditions under which this political power can be legitimate. This paper presents an organizational theory of workplace democracy, and contends that the democratization of firms requires that we take their organizational dimension explicitly into account. It thus construes democracy as an organizational principle and juxtaposes it to market, hierarchy, and norm-compliance as rival principles for the organization of economic activities. Attempts to construe democracy as an organizational principle with unique features in the tradition of transaction-cost economics are discussed before proposing an innovative solution based on an updated version of grid/group cultural theory of politics, adjusted to accommodate the basic requirements of democratic theory.

Shifting terms: Development discourses and moral imaginaries in Indian state service provision

How are multiple visions of state–society relations accommodated within the daily practices of the post-liberalization Indian state? How does state service provision relate to these shifting normative framings of state duty and citizen responsibility? This article examines these questions through an ethnographic study of citizen–state encounters in rural north India. Focusing on the presentation of social services and programmes through a single village council, I trace how development discourses under the post-liberalization state oscillate between welfarist principles of distribution and neoliberal values of self-sufficiency. As the state is fashioned variously as a provider or a more distant facilitator of enterprising activity, I explore how citizens manage these shifting normative terms, negotiate the varied demands of bureaucratic claims-making, and engage with moral ideals of responsibility and care.