151,179 research outputs found
Intellectual Property, Globalization, and Left-Libertarianism
Intellectual property has become the apple of discord in todayâs moral and political debates. Although it has been approached from many different perspectives, a final conclusion has not been reached. In this paper I will offer a new way of thinking about intellectual property rights (IPRs), from a left-libertarian perspective. My thesis is that IPRs are not (natural) original rights, aprioric rights, as it is usually argued. They are derived rights hence any claim for intellectual property is weaker than the correlative duties attached to self-ownership and world-ownership rights, which are of crucial importance in any left-libertarian view. Moreover, IPRs lack priority in front of these two original rights and should be overridden by stronger claims of justice. Thus, as derived rights, IPRs should not benefit of strong enforcement like any original rights especially if it could be in the lattersâ detriment
Reconstructing nation, state and welfare: The transformation of welfare states
About the book: This edited volume provides new empirical evidence of far-reaching changes to welfare states globally, which have changed the boundaries of the 'public' and 'private' domain within the mixed economies of welfare. Various modes of policy intervention are investigated, providing a nuanced account of reforms in the past decade
Philosophy of Disability as Critical Diversity Studies
Critical diversity studies (CDS) can be found within âtraditional,â or âestablished,â
university disciplines, such as philosophy, as well as in relatively newer departments
of the university, such as African studies departments, womenâs and gender studies
departments, and disability studies departments. In this article, therefore, I explain why
philosophy of disability, an emerging subfield in the discipline of philosophy, should
be recognized as an emerging area of CDS also. My discussion in the article situates
philosophy of disability in CDS by both distinguishing this new subfieldâs claims
about disability from the arguments about disability that mainstream philosophers
make and identifying the assumptions about social construction and antiessentialism
that philosophy of disability shares with other areas of CDS. The discussion is
designed to show that a (feminist) philosophy of disability that draws upon the work
of Michel Foucault will transform how philosophers understand the situation of
disabled people. By drawing upon Foucault, that is, I offer philosophers of disability
and other practitioners of CDS a new understanding of disability as an apparatus of
power relations
Is Subjectivity Possible - the Post-Modern Subject in Legal Theory
This article puts forward a thesis and then attempts to prove (or at least to develop) that thesis in two related areas. The thesis is that legal theory in general, and critical legal theory in particular, has concentrated too much on critiques of objectivity, wrongly assuming that subjectivity was an unproblematic term. Subjectivity, like mortality, has seemed not only attainable but inevitable. It is objectivity which is presumed to be the problematic goal of our theories and our attempts at doctrinal interpretation. This article reverses the focus, concentrating on the construction of subjectivity in law and social theory... Having pointed out that critical theories focus mainly on the impossibility of reaching objectivity, I show that some of the same critiques can be turned on the construction of subjectivity as well. The parallelism is more than mere symmetry. Just as the concept of objectivity can be used to armour decisions or social practices, so theoretical results and ideological slant can be dictated by loading up the abstract subject of a political or economic theory with a particular set of drives, motivations, and ways of reasoning...I then turn to the legal subject around whom the law revolves and try to develop a sketchy history of the changing qualities which that subject has been believed to possess. I conclude that the ideas associated with postmodernism are a useful framework for understanding the subject in legal theory and in legal practice. In fact, bizarre as it may seem, the law already incorporates a more postmodern view of the subject than either economics or mainstream political theory
Two Views of Animals in Environmental Ethics
This chapter concerns the role accorded to animals in the theories of the English-speaking philosophers who created the field of environmental ethics in the latter half of the twentieth century. The value of animals differs widely depending upon whether one adopts some version of Holism (value resides in ecosystems) or some version of Animal Individualism (value resides in human and nonhuman animals). I examine this debate and, along the way, highlight better and worse ways to conduct ethical arguments. I explain that two kinds of appeals (which I call intuition and reductio) are questionable foundations for environmental ethics and that representatives of both schools occasionally appeal unhelpfully to intuition or caricature the commitments of the other side. I review two stronger arguments for Ecoholism (inference and eco-organisms) and show that they have performed a useful function in
environmental ethics. Ultimately, however, both arguments fail because their proponents are unable to answer four critical objections: weakness of will, no eco-organisms, no teleology, and is/ought. I then show that Animal Individualism operates on more secure footing when it comes to philosophical and scientific assumptions. I also propose that Animal Individualism is more
likely to prove effective in establishing progressive environmental policies insofar as it builds on existing legal concepts, especially the concept of moral rights, and political institutions, such as democratic states. I note that wild animals are not inherently more valuable than domestic animals and, finally, offer a brief outline of an animal rights environmental ethic
Elongated Intimacy: The intimate experience of owning / commissioning a craft object
âHow will you (craftspeople) make things that others will value, give a place in their
intimate space and include in the rituals of their daily life?â (Unger 2007)
Little has been written in either social science or material culture research about the
way contemporary craft objects are encountered and consumed and the meanings
and values that they subsequently inherit. In my research as a silversmith and
jeweller the made object embodies a set of intentions with symbolic significance and
narrative agendas. Until now only anecdotal data existed to support whether the
reception was equal to the intentions. This paper reports on the findings of primary
empirical data gathered through intimate in-depth interviews. The respondents
(unlike many studies) were invited to participate because they had purchased,
commissioned or acquired an object created by the author. The complex results
elicited knowledge about the life of the objects and the values and meanings they
hold for those who own them. The findings are presented in the context of current
critical debate in contemporary craft and describe how they inform creative practice.</p
These Walls Can Talk! Securing Digital Privacy in the Smart Home Under the Fourth Amendment
Privacy law in the United States has not kept pace with the realities of technological development, nor the growing reliance on the Internet of Things (IoT). As of now, the law has not adequately secured the âsmartâ home from intrusion by the state, and the Supreme Court further eroded digital privacy by conflating the common law concepts of trespass and exclusion in United States v. Jones. This article argues that the Court must correct this misstep by explicitly recognizing the method by which the Founding Fathers sought to âsecureâ houses and effects under the Fourth Amendment. Namely, the Court must reject its overly narrow trespass approach in lieu of the more appropriate right to exclude. This will better account for twenty-first century surveillance capabilities and properly constrain the state. Moreover, an exclusion framework will bolster the reasonable expectation of digital privacy by presuming an objective unreasonableness in any warrantless penetration by the state into the smart home
On the Persistence of Homogeneous Matter
Some recent philosophical debate about persistence has focussed on an
argument against perdurantism that discusses rotating perfectly homogeneous
discs (the `rotating discs argument'; RDA). The argument has been mostly
discussed by metaphysicians, though it appeals to ideas from classical
mechanics, especially about rotation. In contrast, I assess the RDA from the
perspective of the philosophy of physics.
After introducing the argument and emphasizing the relevance of physics
(Sections 1 to 3), I review some metaphysicians' replies to the argument
(Section 4). Thereafter, I argue for three main conclusions. They all arise
from the fact, emphasized in Section 2, that classical mechanics
(non-relativistic as well as relativistic) is both more subtle, and more
problematic, than philosophers generally realize.
The main conclusion is that the RDA can be defeated (Section 6 onwards).
Namely, by the perdurantist taking objects in classical mechanics (whether
point-particles or continuous bodies) to have only temporally extended, i.e.
non-instantaneous, temporal parts: which immediately blocks the RDA.
Admittedly, this version of perdurantism defines persistence in a weaker sense
of `definition' than {\em pointilliste} versions that aim to define persistence
assuming only instantaneous temporal parts. But I argue that temporally
extended temporal parts are supported by both classical and quantum mechanics.Comment: 100 pages, no figures; an extract of this paper is at:
physics/040602
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