Causal judgments about atypical actions are influenced by agents' epistemic states

A prominent finding in causal cognition research is people’s tendency to attribute increased causality to atypical actions. If two agents jointly cause an outcome (conjunctive causation), but differ in how frequently they have performed the causal action before, people judge the atypically acting agent to have caused the outcome to a greater extent. In this paper, we argue that it is the epistemic state of an abnormally acting agent, rather than the abnormality of their action, that is driving people's causal judgments. Given the predictability of the normally acting agent's behaviour, the abnormal agent is in a better position to foresee the consequences of their action. We put this hypothesis to test in four experiments. In Experiment 1, we show that people judge the atypical agent as more causal than the normally acting agent, but also judge the atypical agent to have an epistemic advantage. In Experiment 2, we find that people do not judge a causal difference if no epistemic advantage for the abnormal agent arises. In Experiment 3, we replicate these findings in a scenario in which the abnormal agent's epistemic advantage generalises to a novel context. In Experiment 4, we extend these findings to mental states more broadly construed and develop a Bayesian network model that predicts the degree of outcome-oriented mental states based on action normality and epistemic states. We find that people infer mental states like desire and intention to a greater extent from abnormal behaviour when this behaviour is accompanied by an epistemic advantage. We discuss these results in light of current theories and research on people's preference for abnormal causes

Rescuing Relationships: Toward an Understanding of Exchange Relationship Disruption and Recovery

Research investigating business-to-business (B2B) exchange supports the position that cultivating strong exchange relationships is vital to the long-term success of both parties involved in an exchange. However, while much is known about how exchange relationships are developed and organized to yield maximum benefits for buyers and sellers, very little research has been advanced to understand how B2B exchanges experience disruptive events and what impact disruptions have on the long-term health of these relationships. Across three essays, this dissertation utilizes a multi-method approach to examine the nature and impact of disruptive events on inter-firm exchange relationships to address this shortcoming in the literature. Essay 1 draws from multiple literature bases, including seminal research from both the B2B exchange literature and the business-to-consumer (B2C) service failure literature, to develop a new conceptualization of relational disruption and relational recovery in B2B exchanges. Additionally, using the critical incident technique (CIT) and a sample of over 600 business professionals, this research examines the multitude of ways exchange relationships are disrupted. The findings indicate that lower-magnitude disruptive events such as service failures are far more commonly experienced relative to high-magnitude events such as opportunistic acts. Building from the findings in Essay 1, in Essay 2 we work with a large consumer goods manufacturer to analyze the impact of supplier-caused product and service disruptions on customer purchasing using exclusively the secondary data furnished by the manufacturer. The results indicate that disruptive events result in a significant post-disruption decrease in customer spending, and a unique pattern of effects is observed in which decreased sales are not generally realized until a period 4-6 months after the disruption (marking a lagged effect), peak in a period 7-9 months after the disruption, and then return to normal levels 10-15 months after the disruption. Finally, in Essay 3 over 650 of the manufacturer’s customers are surveyed to establish how customer evaluations of satisfaction, trust, and loyalty in exchange relationships are impacted by disruptive events. The results demonstrate that supplier-caused disruptive events have a significant negative impact on customer evaluations of service quality, satisfaction, and loyalty intentions

Getting it right: an account of the moral agency of NGOs

This thesis provides an outline for how we should think of the ethics of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) by giving sense to what it means to treat an NGO as a moral agent. That is, it aims to answer the following question: Which special moral obligations do NGOs have in virtue of the distinctive type of organisation that they are? In brief, the answer provided by this thesis is that NGO agency is defined by the multiple relationships that threaten to undermine its unity. Obligations are identified as what an NGO must do in order to maintain such a unified organisational self. In Chapter 1, I define an NGO as an autonomous, norm-enacting organisation not motivated by profit and reliant on voluntary interaction. The idea of NGOs as unique agents is then developed indirectly in the middle four chapters. Each chapter engages with a central topic pertaining to NGO ethics, arguing for a particular position with respect to the topics of accountability (Chapter 2), resource allocation (Chapter 3), contributions to domestic and global justice (Chapter 4), and NGOs’ impact on the viability of universal welfare rights (Chapter 5). The second task performed by each chapter is the identification of a particular ability, or power, possessed by NGOs as agents. These four abilities characterise the moral agency of an NGO and form the basis for identifying four types of NGO obligation: 1) accountability, 2) acting consistently with organisational norms, 3) demonstration of positive social change, and 4) epistemic procedural virtue. In Chapter 6 I produce a basic framework for NGOs to use as a way of assessing themselves with respect to these four obligations. This framework is then connected to the findings from a 10-month qualitative research project, conducted from 2007-2008, on the ethical perspectives of NGO workers in Mongolia

How Understanding the Nature of Corporate Norms Can Prevent Their Destruction by Settlements

Scholars have long celebrated the importance of norms in corporate law. Indeed, norms likely guide corporate actors more than the omnipresent threat of shareholder suits. This Article divides corporate norms into two distinct groups: aspirational norms and arbiter norms. Aspirational norms announce socially desirable objectives for corporate managers and encourage certain disclosure practices; arbiter norms identify distinct transactions for closer scrutiny by an independent body, the court. This Article shows that even though aspirational norms and arbiter norms serve different objectives, they share a common characteristic—overbreadth. This feature exists whether the norm is set forth by statute or found in judicial doctrine. Such overbreadth explains some, but by no means all, of the problems accompanying shareholder litigation, including the frequency of suits and inconsequential settlements. This Article also develops the paradoxes that accompany corporate norms. The inherent overbreadth of both aspirational and arbiter norms can be of great assistance to their protection against inconsequential settlements. Using the recent decision In re Trulia, Inc. Stockholder Litigation, this Article addresses how courts can fulfill their role in the non-adversarial setting of the settlement hearing. When asked to approve a settlement, the court should anchor its scrutiny of the adequacy and reasonableness of a settlement in the norm that is central to the suit. By doing so, the court can more positively contribute to the ongoing development of corporate norms

Metatheory

Constitutional theory has been challenged in recent years, by significant figures in the legal field, as essentially pointless. Too much normativity, not enough neutrality; too much conjecture, not enough data; too much politics, not enough truth. How should we constitutional theorists answer this basic challenge to the foundation of our research program? I suggest one possible solution here: we can make the discipline more rigorous by changing the way in which we assess competing claims in constitutional theory. Drawing on important work in epistemology, the philosophy of science, and legal theory, I examine the question of theory assessment and selection. I propose a set of criteria for constitutional theory selection consistent with the most cutting edge work in these fields and explain how we can use these criteria—simplicity, consilience, conservatism, and fruitfulness—and demonstrate how they operate to make theory assessment more sophisticated by applying them to two distinct sets of competing theoretical claims. Along the way, I discuss perennial debates like the controversy between those who claim that adjudication should be conducted with reference to legal reasons only and those who claim that courts may consider extra-legal reasons, including moral reasons, to decide cases. I then turn to examine a much more recent debate about the nature of certain doctrinal structures in constitutional adjudication. I argue, in the end, that more nuanced theory assessment techniques will advance constitutional theory in a manner that simultaneously answers foundational challenges and makes the research program more likely to produce testable, provable claims about the nature of constitutionalism going forward

The performance and persistence of transitional justice and its ways of knowing atrocity

Transitional justice, like other peacebuilding endeavours, strives to create change in the world and to produce knowledge that is useful (Goetschel and Pfluger 2014: 55). But the politics of how this knowledge is produced, shared and rendered legitimate depends upon the relationships between different epistemic communities, the way in which transitional justice has developed as a field, and the myriad contexts in which it is embedded at local, national and international levels. In particular, forms of ‘expert’ knowledge tend to be legal, foreign and based on models to be replicated elsewhere. Work on epistemic communities of peacebuilding can be usefully brought to bear on transitional justice, speaking to current debates in the literature on positionality, justice from below, marginalisation and knowledge imperialism. This paper offers two contributions to the field of transitional justice: (1) an analysis of the way the field has developed as an epistemic community(ies) and the relevance of this for a politics of knowledge, and (2) an argument for the politics of knowledge to be more widely discussed and understood as a factor in shaping transitional justice policy and practice, and as a call to a more ethical relationship with the supposed beneficiaries of transitional justice interventions

Rethinking the Less as More Thesis: Supranational Litigation of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the Americas

In their 2005 law review article Less as More: Rethinking Supranational Litigation of Economic and Social Rights in the Americas, James Cavallaro and Emily Schaffer argue for a rethinking of strategies to advance economic, social and cultural rights in the Americas. They posit that to achieve higher rates of real-world protection for such rights, social rights advocates should do two things: first, bring less litigation and, second, frame any marginal litigation that is pursued as violations of classic civil and political rights. According to the authors, this recommended course will increase the legitimacy of the litigation and lead to higher rates of real-world change because, in their estimation, only civil-political rights have corresponding justiciable obligations and are considered ripe for litigation by Latin American governments. This Article questions the legal and factual bases on which this thesis is constructed, highlighting the practical inconsistencies that result from its application and advocating a more technical and jurisdictional approach to social rights litigation. It demonstrates that, by underappreciating the legal significance of justiciability, legitimacy, and the adjudicable, as distinct from monitorable, dimensions of human rights obligations, the authors propose a thesis that in fact will have the inverse result: more distributive justice claims framed as absolute/immediate entitlements that are inattentive to justiciability rules, political realities, practical implementation time-tables, queue-jumping concerns, and social movement synergies - precisely the types of cases that are least likely to be admissible under contentious processes or to have long-term real-world impacts. The author calls for a rethinking of the proposed less as more thesis, reframing it from a technical-jurisdictional perspective that focuses not on decontextualized notions of justiciable rights but rather on the scope and nature of the claims made under those rights. In this sense, she insists that it is not rights that are or are not justiciable, but rather the claims advanced under them that fulfill or fail to fulfill the elements of a justiciable controversy. The number of justiciable claims thus cuts equally across all rights. On this critical understanding, the author sets out a new quadrant-based framework for thinking about the dimensions of human rights obligations that may properly be applied by adjudicators in individual petitions processes. She argues that while the full dimensionality of human rights obligations corresponds to all rights, only some of those dimensions are cognizable under contentious process, an insight reflected in the jurisprudential record, if not yet recognized in human rights theory. The author concludes that good lawyering, based on well-crafted claims that adhere to the fundamental elements of a justiciable case, not transparent decoys designed to hoodwink governments into thinking they are dealing with immediately-enforceable civil and political rights, is needed to expand legitimate protection of economic, social, and cultural rights in the Americas. Once jurisdictional issues are properly taken into account, the horizon for social rights litigation, both at national and supranational levels, is vast

Rethinking the Less as More Thesis: Supranational Litigation of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the Americas

In their 2005 law review article Less as More: Rethinking Supranational Litigation of Economic and Social Rights in the Americas, James Cavallaro and Emily Schaffer argue for a rethinking of strategies to advance economic, social and cultural rights in the Americas. They posit that to achieve higher rates of real-world protection for such rights, social rights advocates should do two things: first, bring less litigation and, second, frame any marginal litigation that is pursued as violations of classic civil and political rights. According to the authors, this recommended course will increase the legitimacy of the litigation and lead to higher rates of real-world change because, in their estimation, only civil-political rights have corresponding justiciable obligations and are considered ripe for litigation by Latin American governments. This Article questions the legal and factual bases on which this thesis is constructed, highlighting the practical inconsistencies that result from its application and advocating a more technical and jurisdictional approach to social rights litigation. It demonstrates that, by underappreciating the legal significance of justiciability, legitimacy, and the adjudicable, as distinct from monitorable, dimensions of human rights obligations, the authors propose a thesis that in fact will have the inverse result: more distributive justice claims framed as absolute/immediate entitlements that are inattentive to justiciability rules, political realities, practical implementation time-tables, queue-jumping concerns, and social movement synergies - precisely the types of cases that are least likely to be admissible under contentious processes or to have long-term real-world impacts. The author calls for a rethinking of the proposed less as more thesis, reframing it from a technical-jurisdictional perspective that focuses not on decontextualized notions of justiciable rights but rather on the scope and nature of the claims made under those rights. In this sense, she insists that it is not rights that are or are not justiciable, but rather the claims advanced under them that fulfill or fail to fulfill the elements of a justiciable controversy. The number of justiciable claims thus cuts equally across all rights. On this critical understanding, the author sets out a new quadrant-based framework for thinking about the dimensions of human rights obligations that may properly be applied by adjudicators in individual petitions processes. She argues that while the full dimensionality of human rights obligations corresponds to all rights, only some of those dimensions are cognizable under contentious process, an insight reflected in the jurisprudential record, if not yet recognized in human rights theory. The author concludes that good lawyering, based on well-crafted claims that adhere to the fundamental elements of a justiciable case, not transparent decoys designed to hoodwink governments into thinking they are dealing with immediately-enforceable civil and political rights, is needed to expand legitimate protection of economic, social, and cultural rights in the Americas. Once jurisdictional issues are properly taken into account, the horizon for social rights litigation, both at national and supranational levels, is vast