Normative Terms Research Articles

Private electoral finance and democratic theory

Private electoral finance and democratic theory

Moore’s Paradox and Normative Detachment

It is paradoxical to make a moral statement and, in the same breath, disavow commitment to it. Following G. E. Moore, who first identified an analogous paradox—albeit, in the case of factual statements and disavowal of belief in them—these are called Moore paradoxical statements. Richard Hare argues that in order to determine whether an ‘ought’ is a moral one, one only needs to examine if this attitudinal adherence necessarily accompanies the judgement in question. If not, Moore paradoxicality hits and the ‘ought’ in question is not a moral ‘ought’. Hare’s test poses a problem for Joseph Raz who argues (along with natural lawyers, despite himself being a self-proclaimed legal positivist) that normative terms such as ‘ought’ have the same meaning in legal and moral statements. Raz, however, acknowledges a dilemma this brings in its wake: It is possible to make legal statements without necessarily endorsing them, which creates a presumption against these being equivalent to moral statements. To tackle the dilemma, Raz challenges the very idea of commitment to normative statements by arguing that it is also possible to make detached moral judgements. This paper argues that Raz’s idea of ‘detached normative statements’ falters in that the purported examples of detached normative statements Raz uses turn out upon closer examination to be non-normative statements using either norm-relative or non-normative ‘oughts’.

Alienation and action in the young Marx, Aristotle, and Arendt

Alienation and action in the young Marx, Aristotle, and Arendt

Biological constraints as norms in evolution

Biology seems to present local and transitory regularities rather than immutable laws. To account for these historically constituted regularities and to distinguish them from mathematical invariants, Montévil and Mossio (Journal of Theoretical Biology 372:179–191, 2015) have proposed to speak of constraints. In this article we analyse the causal power of these constraints in the evolution of biodiversity, i.e., their positivity, but also the modality of their action on the directions taken by evolution. We argue that to fully account for the causal power of these constraints on evolution, they must be thought of in terms of normativity. In this way, we want to highlight two characteristics of the evolutionary constraints. The first, already emphasised as reported by Gould (The structure of evolutionary theory, Harvard University Press, 2002), is that these constraints are both produced by and producing biological evolution and that this circular causation creates true novelties. The second is that this specific causality, which generates unpredictability in evolution, stems not only from the historicity of biological constraints, but also from their internalisation through the practices of living beings.

The Limits of Repair

In this response essay, the author returns to his arguments in Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (2020) to further consider the limits of repair as advanced by the book’s crew of Jamaican lottery scammers. The author reconsiders some of the arguments to examine more deeply the issues of respectability, violence, and refusal, doing so in conversation with Patricia Noxolo, Beverley Mullings, and Kevon Rhiney—Caribbean and Caribbeanist geographers who help explore the scam as representative of repair within Jamaica’s violent, impoverished, and seemingly inescapable circumstances. Further analyzing the possibility of repair as advanced by the scammers, the essay identifies and contests the normative terms of politics that complicate those reparative claims, arguing that the scam moves past the politics of social incorporation and resistance in Jamaica and instead represents a form of political suspension that avoids the reconciliation of respectability and refusal typical of Caribbean postcolonial social production.

Normative generics and social kind terms

ABSTRACT Generic statements are commonly expressed using the bare plural – ‘tigers are striped’ – or the indefinite singular – ‘a tiger is striped’. Notoriously, some generics can be expressed using the bare plural locution, but not the indefinite singular; bare plural generics and indefinite singular generics pattern differently. I explore this phenomenon as it applies to normative generic statements: expressions like boys don’t cry, women are kind and nurturing, children are seen and not heard – that convey something over and above (and even distinct from) the descriptive reading. I argue that we should look to a metalinguistic theory of generics to understand indefinite singular normative generics. That is, a normative indefinite singular generic is a proposal about what to include in the extension of the generic term. This theory explains why it is more often than not that felicitous indefinite singular generics are about social kind terms. I argue that this explains a crucial way in which language shapes the social world. When we say things like (2), we propose definitions and uses for the word ‘boy’. Such proposals and their consequences actually impact the behavior of the groups they pick out, as well as the attitudes of others towards those groups.

The Limits of Metalinguistic Negotiation: The Role of Shared Meanings in Normative Debate

AbstractAccording to philosophical orthodoxy, the parties to moral or legal disputes genuinely disagree only if their uses of key normative terms in the dispute express the same meaning. Recently, however, this orthodoxy has been challenged. According to an influential alternative view, genuine moral and legal disagreements should be understood as metalinguistic negotiations over which meaning a given term should have. In this paper, we argue that the shared meaning view is motivated by much deeper considerations than its recent critics recognize, and that much would be lost in opting for the explanation of normative disputes as metalinguistic negotiations.

Improving interpreters’ normative ethics discourse by imparting principled-reasoning through case analysis

The vocabulary available to community interpreters regarding professional ethics is typically limited to a set of prohibitions—what interpreters should not do. These prohibitions are disproportionately more prevalent in ethical documents and discourse than guidance on what interpreters should do. Both types of guidance are examples of normative ethical messages. However, when interpreters are asked to justify decisions which lead to them taking action rather than refraining from action, they are left with insufficient vocabulary to do so. Without a broader normative vocabulary allowing conversation regarding action-taking, interpreters tend to rely on unhelpful, non-normative language such as metaphors which fail to advance professional dialogue and development of the field. Ethics scholars link such discourse deficiencies with underdeveloped reasoning abilities, often citing the need to ground normative discourse within the principles and values of a profession. “Principled-reasoning” in part involves the ability to weigh the import of conflicting ethical obligations, such as principles that compel action versus inaction. Ethicists consider principled-reasoning to be the highest order of ethical reasoning. While there are theoretical and pedagogical developments in community interpreting that can further principled-reasoning skills, there remain significant barriers. One is the profession’s failure to incorporate widely recognised ethical principles such as non-maleficence, beneficence, justice, and autonomy in its normative messaging and discourse. Another is the profession’s lack of normative terms to convey intermediate ethical concepts. A third is the still-limited adoption of structured reflective practices, such as case analysis and supervision, to impart principled-reasoning skills both during and after interpreters’ formal education years.

Splintering, Specificity, Unsettlement: A Commentary on Splintering Urbanism

ABSTRACT This short commentary seeks to supplement the conceptualization of infrastructural splintering with the ways in which the agential functioning of infrastructure—infrastructure as a verb—not only articulates bodies, things, materials, and spaces in cascading relationality, but produces specificities incapable of definitive measure. Here, specific constellations of urban inhabitants refuse to be governed in terms of a calculus that seeks to make judgments about the efficacy of particular living spaces, and their relative sustainability or value. Such specificity is one component of the ways in which infrastructure engenders unsettlement, of both position and sensibility. Part of Splintering Urbanism’s enduring value is found in the multifaceted dimensions of detachment, materialized both in the production of urban operations that resist ready translation into the normative terms of efficacy and in the undermining of normative social relations.

\u201cComplete Labelling\u201d and Domestic Prosecutions for Crimes Against Humanity

Fair labelling is an established principle of criminal justice that scrutinises the way that States use language in labelling criminal defendants and their conduct. I argue that “complete labelling” is a related but separate principle which has not received any explicit attention from commentators. Whereas fair labelling focuses, usually, on the protection of defendant’s rights, the principle of complete labelling explains and justifies whether the labels attached appropriately represent the nature and scale of the wrong done to the community. As a case study, I apply this lens in the context of regional (U.S./Mexican) criminal justice responses to crimes against humanity perpetrated by “drug-cartels” in the context of the Mexican Drug War. Successive administrations in Mexico and the U.S. have tended to charge cartel leaders (and/or their political supporters) with so-called “transnational crimes” (for example, drug-trafficking, money-laundering, bribery/corruption). This is despite the fact that many of the most powerful cartels have controlled territory, attacked entire towns, carried out acts of terror, and disappeared thousands of people. The principle of complete labelling is useful in normative terms because it helps in the critical examination of a State’s prosecutorial practices, exposing problems that might otherwise be missed. In relation to the case study discussed, for example, a focus on complete labelling helps to expose the regional prosecutorial policy as either an unjustified exercise in selectivity or, at worst, an expression of collective denial. After considering certain counteracting reflexions which speak to some of the foundational anxieties of international criminal justice, the article concludes that domestic prosecutions for crimes against humanity in the context of drug-cartels may, sometimes, be justified.

The fittingness of emotions

We often assess emotions as appropriate or inappropriate depending on certain evaluative aspects of the world. Often using the term ‘fittingness’ as equivalent to ‘appropriateness’, many philosophers of emotion take fittingness assessments of emotions to be a broadly representational matter. On this sort of view, an emotion is fitting or appropriate just in case there is a kind of representational match between the emotion and the object, a matching analogous to truth for belief (or veridicality for perception). This view provides an account of the relationship between emotion and value that many have found plausible. In this paper, I argue that the fittingness of emotions should not be understood in representational terms. Rather, as is common in the literature on fittingness, we should interpret the notion in normative terms. After providing four arguments against the representational interpretation, and for a normative interpretation, of emotional fittingness, I discuss two ways to develop the normative picture of emotional fittingness. I also clarify the relevant issues that will have to be tackled by philosophers of emotion in the future, issues which cannot be tackled without attending to action theory and the philosophy of normativity.

On the Promise and Limits of Prosocial Neoclassical Economic Approaches to Shareholder Primacy

Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales (Hart 2020; Hart and Zingales 2017a,b,c; Zingales 2017, 2018a,b, 2019a,b, 2020) have proposed to amend the influential view about the nature and function of the firm typically associated with Milton Friedman (1962, 1970). The core of their proposal is that ethical and social values should be given a more central role in an account of the objective function of the firm. The caliber of the authors and the growing concern with the ethical flaws in the traditional model of shareholder primacy, helps to explain why their recent contributions have received much attention. The paper utilizes Hart and Zingales’ account to examine whether neo-classical economics can offer an account of the objective function of the firm that is ethically sound. To assess this, we formulate two set of principles. The first highlights that the investigation into the objective function of the firm is normative. It requires thinking in normative terms of both managers and shareholders. Moral norms filter the desires that managers should promote on shareholders’ behalf. The second set of principles highlights the conceptual diversity of our normative language; any appropriate account of the objective function of the firm needs to have a rich normative conceptual vocabulary to reflect such diversity. The paper shows that while neoclassical economics may often meet the first set of principles, it lacks the resources to meet the second. It also shows that any account of the nature firm that is descriptively and prescriptively adequate needs economics to work hand in hand with legal scholarship and moral philosophy.

Against normativism about mental attitudes

AbstractNormativists argue that the mind is essentially normative and any adequate account of our mental attitudes must involve normative terms and judgments. In particular, one brand of Normativism defends the claim that mental attitudes are defined by constitutive norms. Against this, Anti‐normativists have offered non‐normative accounts of mental states.The goal of this paper is to bolster Anti‐normativism by undermining one key argument in favor of Normativism.

Worlds of Labour: Introducing the Standard-Setting, Privileging and Equalising Typology as a Measure of Legal Segmentation in Labour Law

Abstract The Standard Employment Relationship (SER) in industrialised countries is associated with strong protection for employees who fulfil its criteria but tends to neglect those who do not. Although the theoretical concept of SER has had repercussions around the world, its global empirical incidence and the variation of regulatory patterns associated with it have not been scrutinised so far. Comparative quantitative research in labour law has mainly focused on the overall level of employment protection in the countries of the Northern Hemisphere. Against this background, we ask how legal segmentation in labour law, that is, the exclusion from and gradation in employment protection which seems to be connected with the SER, can be conceptualised and measured in a global perspective. Drawing on leximetrics, a method to measure and quantify norms, we make use of and extend existing data sets such as the Centre for Business Research Labour Regulation Index (CBR-LRI) and Employment Protection Legislation Index (EPLex) in order to grasp the nature of legal segmentation. We identify three main functions of individual employment law in the protection/segmentation context: the standard-setting (S), the privileging (P) and the equalising (E) functions. We develop the SPE-employment law model on the assumption that the three functions are mutually independent in normative terms. The SPE typology offers a genuinely new perspective for comparative labour regulation research, making it possible to see the differentiation of patterns of legal segmentation and their path dependencies in 115 countries. First findings on a global scale show that in 2013 no fundamental difference between the levels of regulation in the Global South and North can be found. Moreover, familiar patterns can be observed such as a tendency to stable and low protection levels in liberal welfare states, and a tendency to universalist types of regulation in former socialist countries.

Journalism Employability in the Modern Newsroom: Insights From Applicant Resumes and Cover Letters

What skills, attributes, and experiences are needed for a visual journalism job in a contemporary print and digital newsroom? Previous attempts at answering this question examine it through insights from hiring managers or news editors, often collected retrospectively or at arbitrary times of the year through surveys; analyses of position descriptions, which are often framed in normative terms; or through analyzing journalism curricula, which perpetually struggle to adapt nimbly to evolving industry demands. This signaling theory study adopts a novel approach by examining, through qualitative thematic analysis, all applicants’ resumes and cover letters submitted by candidates for a visual journalism job posted in 2019. The hiring organization sought a candidate who could not only tell newsworthy stories through images but also one who could “write their own stories,” “have strong organizational skills,” and be “knowledgeable about current digital technology and applications for smartphone photography.” The results provide insight into the types of applicants who apply to such a position; the skills, attributes, and experiences employers regard as worthy of shortlisting; and the strategies candidates adopted in addressing the position description and selection criteria.

Russian Science Diplomacy at a Crossroads

Nowadays science diplomacy tends to be one of most relevant and important fields of applied research in International Relations. In general, it can be regarded as a functional expression of both foreign and science policy conducted by states and non-state actors on the world arena. The emergence of the modern concept of science diplomacy has been taking place since the second half of the 2000s and is basically linked to a close intertwining of research and diplomatic practices. Still, most of the existing research works in the above area both in Russia and abroad can be described as somewhat fragmentary and focusing on specific case studies without providing a holistic picture of national science diplomacy models, including the Russian one. Considering this, the author of the article casts light upon the key features of the Russian science diplomacy complex based on a systematic approach and looks into its three main elements, i.e. "science in diplomacy", "diplomacy for science" and "science for diplomacy". In this context, he analyses the activity of the Russian science diplomacy main stakeholders in positive (how it is) and normative (how it should or could be) terms. The synthesis of the respective results reveals structural drawbacks of the system in question, which in 2020 have become even more acute than they used to be before. However, the outlined trends and tendencies infer that the ongoing pandemic did hardly bring on new problems, but can rather be seen as a catalyst for processes, which have already been witnessed in this field. Working from these premises, the author formulates a number of concrete and applicable policy recommendations aimed at optimizing the current practices, which might potentially be of use for decision-makers in Russian science and foreign affairs.

Sexuality politics on the football field: queering the field in Turkey

AbstractFocusing on queer-identified amateur football teams, this article investigates the potentials of the mobilities and alliances of gender non-conforming footballing people to disrupt the seemingly effortless structure of the football field. While football is arguably one of the sports with the strongest discriminatory attitudes toward gender non-conforming people, it has also become a site of resistance for queers in Turkey as of 2015. How political opposition groups relate to the football field, which is mostly considered as a male-dominant and heterosexualized space where social norms are reproduced, are classified into three groups in my research: resistance through, against, and for football. I give particular attention to the category “resistance for football” as a distinctive way for gender non-conforming people to inhabit the field. I discuss how the link between sexual and spatial orientations shapes the domain of what a body can do, both in terms of normativity and capacity, and I explore what these teams offer in order to exceed spatial and sexual boundaries. Lastly, I present recent queer interventions in the value system of the game through which I reflect upon the concept of “queer commons” and the processes of bonding, belonging, and border-making in queer communities.

Emotions and challenges to justice

ABSTRACT In this special issue, our aim is to analyse the role of emotions with particular attention to shaping political actions in the face of present challenges to justice. The relationship between the widespread rise of collective emotions and the experience of injustice in our societies is a pressing issue, both in our everyday practice of ethical and political discourse and in philosophical reflection and discussion. Some negative emotions—such as fear, resentment, greed, distrust towards institutions, and disrespect for basic human rights—are often manipulated and amplified. Other, more positive, emotions, such as respect, hope, solidarity, and affinity, often seem to be not enough to give rise to alternative policies. This worldwide problem reflects a deep economic, social, and existential crisis. In this framework, philosophical reflection on emotions can be put fruitfully in dialogue with the contemporary philosophical analysis of collective intentionality and collective agency, which aims at investigating the nature of different types of groups and their main features as well as phenomena such as sense of group membership and group agency. Indeed, it is often argued that collective emotions boost the sense of group belonging in individual members and act to reduce uncertainty in joint actions. In normative terms, feelings such as the rejection of cruelty have been proposed as the foundation of moral equality, and even rationalistic approaches tend to focus on respect first of all as a feeling, as Kant maintained.

МЕТОДИКА ПОДОВЖЕННЯ ПОКАЗНИКІВ ДОВГОВІЧНОСТІ ЗРАЗКІВ ОЗБРОЄННЯ ТА ВІЙСЬКОВОЇ ТЕХНІКИ НА ЕТАПІ ЕКСПЛУАТАЦІЇ

An analysis of the content and features of works on the extension of the assigned service life is presented, a method for determining the average value of the residual resource is developed, and the necessary number of technical products and the duration of observations for the extension of the resource are estimated. The experience of the Joint Forces operation in the east of the country has revealed significant shortcomings in the reliability of armaments and military equipment during operation, which are primarily due to the fact that the condition of a significant number of samples of weapons in operation is close to the limit. Therefore, it is considered appropriate, based on the analysis of the content and features of work to extend the service life (resource) of samples of weapons and military equipment, to develop a methodology for determining the average value of residual resources and assess the required number of samples of weapons and duration of observations. For most models of armaments and military equipment involved in a joint force operation, this problem can be partially addressed by adjusting (extending) the assigned service life (resource). The accumulated experience of development and operation of armaments and military equipment shows that in some cases the duration of operation of armaments may exceed the normative terms specified in the technical documentation. Therefore, it is very important to have methods for calculating their residual resource for statistically significant support of the decision-making process in the implementation of their development plans. To achieve the result, work on extending the assigned service life (resource) of weapons samples is analyzed on the basis of data on their operation or using methods of accelerated consumption of resources and service life and determine the average value of their residual life based on operational tests. To solve this problem, an analysis of the content and features of work to extend the service life (resource), developed a method and content for determining the average value of the residual resource and estimated the required number of samples of weapons and the duration of their observations when extending the resource. The analysis of works on extension of the appointed service life (resource) of samples of armament and military equipment testifies to expediency of use of this tool of improvement of their reliability at operation. Further research should focus on the economic assessment of the size of the resource that is being extended, as solving the problem of improving the reliability of the operation of weapons models by extending the resource is associated with certain economic costs. And this, in the end, saves the much-needed resources. Keywords: technicalproduct, operation, servicelife, lifeextension.

Husserl on Eidetic Norms

Edmund Husserl often characterizes essences and eidetic laws in normative terms. Many of his statements to this effect are however highly puzzling as they appear at odds with Husserl’s general understanding of normativity. In this paper I focus on this puzzle and I argue that we can reconcile most of the apparent tensions between these two dimensions of Husserl’s philosophical thought. In the first part of the paper, drawing on the contemporary literature on kinds of norms, I focus on Husserl’s work on the varieties of normativity. I submit that, on his view, essences and eidetic laws are never intrinsically normative, and that not all essences and not all corresponding eidetic laws can function as norms for their instances. Crucially, however, I argue that, according to Husserl, essences and eidetic laws can function as norms for a range of the subject’s acts. In the second part of the paper I further examine this thesis, thus explaining in what sense Husserl thinks that essences and eidetic laws can have this function. I show that formal eidetic laws can engender deontic and evaluative norms for correct or rational judgments, evaluations, desires, and acts of the will. I also contend that material essences and material eidetic laws also have a normative function for judgments. I conclude that this shows how Husserl’s view makes room for norms that are not context-dependent or subjectively grounded.