"Decision Making in Europe: Were Spain and Poland Right to Stop the Constitution in December 2003?"

This paper tries to explain why Spain and Poland stopped the Draft Constitution for the European Union in December 2003 and discusses whether this action was compatible with these countries long term interests. The author finds that the decline in power – measured by a power index – arising for Spain and Poland when going from the Nice Treaty to the Draft Constitution cannot explain their veto. While the two countries lose power when shifting from Nice to the Draft Constitution other countries’ power shrinks even more. Other measures - passage probability, blocking leverage and fairness - cannot explain the two countries’ opposition either. This paper contends that the Spanish and Polish rejection can be explained by the weakness of government in the Polish and the need for a reelection topic in the Spanish case. Furthermore this paper asserts that the Spanish and Polish government’s veto was against the medium and long term interest of their own countries. Poland and Spain must have been able to anticipate that the Nice Treaty would not last due to most EU countries’ dislike of it. An analysis of reasonable alternative voting schemes in the EU finds that Spain and Poland would not have been better off in any of these cases and worse off in most; under the voting rules agreed upon under the Irish presidency in June 2004 the two countries are weaker than under the Draft Constitution

Voting and the Cardinal Aggregation of Judgments

The paper elaborates the idea that voting is an instance of the aggregation of judgments, this being a more general concept than the aggregation of preferences. To aggregate judgments one must first measure them. I show that such aggregation has been unproblematic whenever it has been based on an independent and unrestricted scale. The scales analyzed in voting theory are either context dependent or subject to unreasonable restrictions. This is the real source of the diverse 'paradoxes of voting' that would better be termed 'voting pathologies'. The theory leads me to advocate what I term evaluative voting. It can also be called utilitarian voting as it is based on having voters express their cardinal preferences. The alternative that maximizes the sum wins. This proposal operationalizes, in an election context, the abstract cardinal theories of collective choice due to Fleming and Harsanyi. On pragmatic grounds, I argue for a three valued scale for general elections

Sino-African Philosophy: A Re-“Constructive Engagement”

“Constructive-Engagement” is a meta-philosophical and meta-methodological “strategy” suggested by Chinese and comparative philosophy scholar Bo Mou for analyzing and enriching philosophical exchange. In this paper, I will use this strategy towards an end, on a scale, and with a topic not attempted before. I will use it as a “template” for redesigning a poorly developing area of cross-cultural comparison I call Sino-African reflective studies (SARS). My goal in this work-in-progress is to design a plan for reconstituting SARS as Sino-African philosophy (SAP), an inclusive yet coherent field of research and innovation unified through organizing principles. I will design the overhaul of SARS in three stages. First, by surveying SARS for its basic features including its structural flaws. Second, by remapping SARS in line with “renovation” principles drawn from its literature. Third, by blueprinting SARS in line with “construction” principles theorized from the constructive-engagement strategy (CES)

Voting and the Cardinal Aggregation of Judgments

The paper elaborates the idea that voting is an instance of the aggregation of judgments, this being a more general concept than the aggregation of preferences. To aggregate judgments one must first measure them. I show that such aggregation has been unproblematic whenever it has been based on an independent and unrestricted scale. The scales analyzed in voting theory are either context dependent or subject to unreasonable restrictions. This is the real source of the diverse 'paradoxes of voting' that would better be termed 'voting pathologies'. The theory leads me to advocate what I term evaluative voting. It can also be called utilitarian voting as it is based on having voters express their cardinal preferences. The alternative that maximizes the sum wins. This proposal operationalizes, in an election context, the abstract cardinal theories of collective choice due to Fleming and Harsanyi. On pragmatic grounds, I argue for a three valued scale for general elections.approval voting; cardinal utility; instant runoff voting; plurality voting; voting paradoxes

Investigating subclasses of abstract dialectical frameworks

Dialectical frameworks (ADFs) are generalizations of Dung argumentation frameworks where arbitrary relationships among arguments can be formalized. This additional expressibility comes with the price of higher computational complexity, thus an understanding of potentially easier subclasses is essential. Compared to Dung argumentation frameworks, where several subclasses such as acyclic and symmetric frameworks are well understood, there has been no in-depth analysis for ADFs in such direction yet (with the notable exception of bipolar ADFs). In this work, we introduce certain subclasses of ADFs and investigate their properties. In particular, we show that for acyclic ADFs, the different semantics coincide. On the other hand, we show that the concept of symmetry is less powerful for ADFs and further restrictions are required to achieve results that are similar to the known ones for Dung's frameworks. A particular such subclass (support-free symmetric ADFs) turns out to be closely related to argumentation frameworks with collective attacks (SETAFs); we investigate this relation in detail and obtain as a by-product that even for SETAFs symmetry is less powerful than for AFs. We also discuss the role of odd-length cycles in the subclasses we have introduced. Finally, we analyse the expressiveness of the ADF subclasses we introduce in terms of signatures

Issues in conductive argument weight

The concept of conductive argument weight was developed by Carl Wellman and later by Trudy Govier. This concept has received renewed attention recently from another informal logician, Robert C. Pinto. Argument weight has also been addressed in recent years by theorists in AI & Law. I argue from a non-technical perspective that some aspects of AI & Law’s approach to argument weight can be usefully applied to the issues addressed by Pinto. I also relate some of these issues to the work of argument theorist Harald Wohlrapp

ODNI as an analytic ombudsman: is Intelligence Community Directive 203 up to the task?

In the wake of 9/11 and the assessment of Iraq's WMD, several inquiries placed the blame primarily on the Intelligence Community. Part of the reform that followed was a codification of analytic tradecraft standards into Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 203 and the appointment of an analytic ombudsman in the newly created Office of the Director of National Intelligence charged with monitoring the quality of analytic products from across the intelligence community. In this paper we identify three assumptions behind ICD203: (1) tradecraft standards can be employed consistently; (2) tradecraft standards sufficiently capture the key elements of good reasoning; (3) good reasoning leads to more accurate judgments. We then report on two controlled experiments that uncover operational constraints in the reliable application of the ICD203 criteria for the assessment of intelligence products. Despite criticisms of the post-9/11 and post-Iraq reform, our results highlight that ICD203, properly applied, holds potential to improve precision and accountability of intelligence processes and products

Elaborations on a communitarian approach to transtemporal obligations

Grande parte da população atual acredita dever algo às gerações futuras. Poucos negariam que gastar e consumir desregradamente hoje seria errado. No entanto, as pessoas futuras ainda não existem. Não temos como saber quais são os seus interesses, nem como acordar conjuntamente princípios de distribuição. Ademais, a existência de pessoas futuras depende das nossas ações presentes, o que torna problemático afirmar que a escolha de uma política em lugar de outra hoje causará dano a futuros indivíduos. A maioria das teorias éticas e políticas contemporâneas tem dificuldade em responder aos pontos levantados acima, e, consequentemente, em oferecer uma defesa teórica válida da existência de obrigações entre pessoas separadas pelo tempo. A teoria comunitária, pelo contrário, por tomar como unidade básica uma entidade que é inerentemente transtemporal (comunidades), é capaz de estabelecer ligações moralmente relevantes entre indivíduos ao longo do tempo. Nesta dissertação, baseando-me na compatibilidade entre conceitos comunitários e o contexto transtemporal, e combinando-os com outras teorias filosóficas – como o contratualismo moral -, proponho alguns argumentos a favor da existência de obrigações entre pessoas cujas vidas nunca se cruzam temporalmente. Termino a dissertação com um outro argumento, este contra a cada vez mais difundida ideia de que o cumprimento das nossas obrigações para com as gerações futuras poderá justificar a implementação de práticas não-democráticas.A majority of present people feel that they owe something to future generations. Few wouldn’t think it wrong to spend and consume unreservedly today. However, future people don’t yet exist. We have no way of knowing what their interests might be or of according with them any principles of distribution. Moreover, their existence is dependent on our actions today, so it is not unproblematic to claim that we will harm future persons by presently choosing one policy over another. Most ethical and political theories struggle to overcome these issues, and consequently fail to provide a sound account of obligations between temporally-separated persons. Communitarian theory, however, by taking as its basic unit an entity that is inherently transtemporal (communities), is capable of establishing morally relevant connections between individuals across time. In this dissertation, I draw on the adequateness of communitarian concepts to the cross-temporal context, and combine them with ideas from other philosophical theories – like moral contractualism – to provide a set of accounts of transtemporal obligations. I end the dissertation with an argument against the growing idea that the effective discharging of our obligations to future persons might justify non-democratic practices