Law and morality in Kant

How do law and morality relate to each other in Kant's philosophy? Is law to be understood merely as an application of general moral principles to legal institutions, or does law have its own normativity that cannot be traced back to that of morality? This volume of new essays is a comprehensive treatment of law and morality in Kant, which also sheds new light on Kant's practical philosophy more broadly. The essays present different approaches to this core issue and address related topics including the justification of legal coercion, the role of freedom and autonomy for law and politics, legal punishment and the question of its ethical presuppositions, moral luck, and the role of permissive laws in Kant's legal and political philosophy. The volume will be of interest to researchers and graduate students working on Kant's moral and legal philosophy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core

Rethinking business process simulation: A utility-based evaluation framework

Business process simulation (BPS) is a key tool for analyzing and optimizing organizational workflows, supporting decision-making by estimating the impact of process changes. The reliability of such estimates depends on the ability of a BPS model to accurately mimic the process under analysis, making rigorous accuracy evaluation essential. However, the state-of-the-art approach to evaluating BPS models has two key limitations. First, it treats simulation as a forecasting problem, testing whether models can predict unseen future events. This fails to assess how well a model captures the as-is process, particularly when process behavior changes from train to test period. Thus, it becomes difficult to determine whether poor results stem from an inaccurate model or the inherent complexity of the data, such as unpredictable drift. Second, the evaluation approach strongly relies on Earth Mover’s Distance-based metrics, which can obscure temporal patterns and thus yield misleading conclusions about simulation quality. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework that evaluates simulation quality based on its ability to generate representative process behavior. Instead of comparing simulated logs to future real-world executions, we evaluate whether predictive process monitoring models trained on simulated data perform comparably to those trained on real data for downstream analysis tasks. Empirical results show that our framework not only helps identify sources of discrepancies but also distinguishes between model accuracy and data complexity, offering a more meaningful way to assess BPS quality

Kant on permissive law

The concept of permissive law comes into play in several key passages of Kant’s writings in legal philosophy. Many scholars argue that Kant conceives of permissive laws as suspending moral demands, thus ‘permitting’ in the sense of tolerating morally wrong actions. In opposition to this view, this chapter submits that Kant takes permissive law to be a kind of moral licence. It lays the foundation of this interpretation through a reading of Kant’s discussion of permissive law in Perpetual Peace. As it argues, Kant follows Achenwall and Baumgarten in taking permissive law to be a species of prohibitive law, developing the concept of a law that specifies under which conditions certain actions are allowed. The function of the permissive law in Kant’s legal philosophy is neither to tolerate transgressions of prohibitions nor to regulate as such morally indifferent matters. As it shows, permissive laws are norms that specify under which conditions certain actions are allowed that would otherwise be forbidden. A permissive law licenses certain actions with respect to certain conditions. In the sphere of this licence, the actions are not merely tolerated, but genuinely permitted

Using large language models for preprocessing and information extraction from unstructured text: A proof-of-concept application in the social sciences

Recent months have witnessed an increase in suggested applications for large language models (LLMs) in the social sciences. This proof-of-concept paper explores the use of LLMs to improve text quality and to extract predefined information from unstructured text. The study showcases promising results with an example focussed on historical newspapers and highlights the effectiveness of LLMs in correcting errors in the parsed text and in accurately extracting specified information. By leveraging the capabilities of LLMs in these straightforward, instruction-based tasks, this research note demonstrates their potential to improve on the efficiency and accuracy of text analysis workflows. The ongoing development of LLMs and the emergence of robust open-source options underscores their increasing accessibility for both, the quantitative and qualitative, social sciences and other disciplines working with text data

Digital threads and regional ties: the study of global services trade and regional favoritism

The global economy has undergone profound transformations over the past few decades, driven by advancements in technology, shifts in political power, and the growing interdependence of markets and regions. My dissertation, Digital Threads and Regional Ties: The Study of Global Services Trade and Regional Favoritism, uncovers factors that contribute to a persistence of regional economic disparities inspite the opportunities brought about by this transformation. It explores two themes central to this evolution - the rise of services trade, and the interplay between political power and regional resource allocation. By combining innovative data sets with causal inference methods and structural modeling, I delve into these themes to uncover the patterns and mechanisms driving regional and sectoral economic outcomes. At its core, this dissertation is motivated by two interrelated questions. First, to what extent can the integration of global digital markets level the economic playing field for regions in developing countries? Second, how do the distribution of political power and the allocation of resources influence the geography of economic development? In addressing these questions, this work documents frictions that hinder global inclusive growth and brings evidence that points to the importance of investments in human capital and strong institutions to alleviate them. The importance of addressing regional disparities in income and opportunity is powerfully highlighted by the current political turmoil brought about by populist political agendas instrumentalizing these inequalities and the increasing migration flows caused by them