Making norms concrete

In systems based on organisational specifications a reoccurring problem remains to be solved in the disparity between the level of abstractness of the organisational concepts and the concepts used in the implementation. Organisational specifications (deliberately) abstract from general practice, which creates a need to relate the abstract concepts used in the specification to concrete ones used in practice. A solution for this problem is the use of counts-as statements, which, by defining the social reality, provide the concrete concepts their institutional and organisational meaning. Continuing work on the implementation of counts-as to relate abstract and concrete concepts in agent-based systems, this paper investigates the implementation of counts-as statements in Drools to relate abstract organisational specifications and its norms to concrete situations.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Customary (and Not So Customary) International Environmental Law

In this article, Professor Bodansky examines the creation and importance of customary international law. He suggests that the debate over the legal status of any given norm may be misplaced. Instead, he suggests that international lawmakers should spend their time and energy incorporating norms, regardless of their true status, into concrete treaties and actions. The author begins his discussion by providing a working definition of customary international law. He asserts that such law can be based not just on uniformities of state behavior, as is traditionally held, but also on regularities in behavior. Thus, customary international law can be formed even when states do not fully comply with a particular norm. Next, Professor Bodansky contends that state declarations may be just as indicative and useful in uncovering customary international law as state behavior. but the author goes on to state the such declarative law does not and should not carry the same weight as customary norms based on state behavior. Because such norms are non-legal, courts and other arbiters cannot enforce them against a state. the author concludes, however, that these non-legal norms may play a significant role in setting the terms of the debate, especially in negotiations between states. These norms can then be incorporated into treaties and other international agreements, making them more concrete and enforceable. Ultimately, as the author states, the international community should spend less time debating a norm\u27s legal status and more time translating general norms into enforceable treaties

Capturing Individual Harms

The aggregated lifestyles and behaviors of individuals impose significant environmental harms yet remain largely unregulated. A growing literature recognizes the environmental significance of individual behaviors, critiques the failure of environmental law and policy to capture harms traceable to individual behaviors, and suggests and evaluates strategies for capturing individual harms going forward. This Article contributes to the existing literature by approaching the problem of environmentally significant individual harms through the lens of environmental federalism. Using climate change and individual greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions as an exemplar, the Article illustrates how local information, local governments, and local implementation can enhance policies designed to capture individual environmental harms. Local information and community-level implementation may enhance norm management efforts designed to influence GHG-emitting behaviors by (1) allowing for the identification of concrete behaviors that are feasible to target through norm management in a given community; (2) informing the design and content of norm campaigns, including the selection of the abstract norm that will form the basis of the appeal for specific behavioral change; and (3) facilitating effective implementation strategies. This framework supports a preference for local action expressed, but to date largely unexamined, in the broader norm management literature. Additionally, the Article argues that obstacles to using mandates to influence GHG-emitting behaviors may be less formidable when mandates are developed and enforced locally. Local development and enforcement of mandates can reduce intrusion objections because (1) individuals are accustomed to local control over day-to-day behaviors; (2) familiarity with local attitudes and practices enables the design of mandates that avoid intrusion objections; and (3) local governments are in a better position to structure time, place, and manner restrictions that channel behavior while preserving some individual choice. Local design and enforcement of mandates may also minimize the key enforcement challenges of expense, numerosity, and (in)visibility

The effect of local political deliberation on the publicity of reason

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The institutionalisation of human rights reconceived: the human rights state as a sociological 'ideal type'

In the contemporary political world order that continues to be structured by the principle of national sovereignty, the fate of human rights ultimately depends on states as the main guarantors and transgressors of rights. The analysis of the conditions and processes of their effective institutionalisation therefore requires a focus on the state level without losing sight of human rights’ universalistic potential. This article develops the ideal type of the human rights state as a sociological framework for the systematic qualitative study and assessment of human rights institutionalisation. To this end, it reconceptualises Benjamin Gregg’s normative political theory of the human rights state as an analytical yardstick that refers to the necessary conditions for the effective implementation of human rights as locally valid, state-based norms of universalistic scope. Based on the extrapolation of human rights’ core traits and their synthesis into a unified, coherent concept, the ideal type of the human rights state provides guidance for the empirical study of factual processes of human rights institutionalisation within states both as an analytical grid and benchmark for their critical evaluation. By integrating the divergent perspectives on legal, political and wider societal dimensions of human rights institutionalisation, this article contributes to the multidisciplinary field of human rights research as well as to the developing field of human rights sociology

Discourse or dialogue? Habermas, the Bakhtin Circle, and the question of concrete utterances

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via the link below.This article argues that the Bakhtin Circle presents a more realistic theory of concrete dialogue than the theory of discourse elaborated by Habermas. The Bakhtin Circle places speech within the “concrete whole utterance” and by this phrase they mean that the study of everyday language should be analyzed through the mediations of historical social systems such as capitalism. These mediations are also characterized by a determinate set of contradictions—the capital-labor contradiction in capitalism, for example—that are reproduced in unique ways in more concrete forms of life (the state, education, religion, culture, and so on). Utterances always dialectically refract these processes and as such are internal concrete moments, or concrete social forms, of them. Moreover, new and unrepeatable dialogic events arise in these concrete social forms in order to overcome and understand the constant dialectical flux of social life. But this theory of dialogue is different from that expounded by Habermas, who tends to explore speech acts by reproducing a dualism between repeatable and universal “abstract” discursive processes (commonly known as the ideal speech situation) and empirical uses of discourse. These critical points against Habermas are developed by focusing on six main areas: sentences and utterances; the lifeworld and background language; active versus passive understandings of language; validity claims; obligation and relevance in language; and dialectical universalism

Hegel and the Ethics of Brandom’s Metaphysics

In order to develop his pragmatist and inferentialist framework, Robert Brandom appropriates, reconstructs and revises key themes in German Idealism such as the self-legislation of norms, the social institution of concepts and facts, a norm-oriented account of being and the critique of representationalist accounts of meaning and truth. However, these themes have an essential ethical dimension, one that Brandom has not explicitly acknowledged. For Hegel, the determination of norms and facts and the institution of normative statuses take place in the context of Sittlichkeit (‘ethical life’). By engaging with some of the more ontologically and ethically substantive points raised by Hegel, I argue that, from a Hegelian perspective, Brandom’s project regarding the social determination of truth and meaning cannot be divorced from ethics, specifically, the ethical dimension of social recognition. Furthermore, I argue that, in real situations (as opposed to ideal ones), claims to normative authority cannot be considered independently from the legitimacy of those claims, a legitimacy that Brandom is unable to reasonably explain. Finally, I argue that a Hegelian solution to the problems facing Brandom’s framework calls into question the unity of reason that is at the core of Brandom’s normative pragmatics and inferential semantics

Assuming Personal Responsibility for Improving the Environment: Moving Toward a New Environmental Norm

There is general agreement that we are nearing the end of achieving major gains in pollution abatement from traditional sources, that a significant portion of the remaining environmental problems facing this country is caused by individual behavior, and that efforts to control that behavior have either failed or not even been made. The phenomenon of individuals as irresponsible environmental actors seems counterintuitive when polls show that people consistently rate protecting the environment among their highest priorities, contribute to environmental causes, and are willing to pay more to protect environmental resources. This article is the author\u27s second effort at understanding why people who consider themselves to be “environmentalists” or support environmental causes behave in environmentally destructive ways, and what, if anything, can be done to change that behavior. The first article endorsed expansion of the abstract environmental protection norm to include individual environmental responsibility and concluded that doing this is the most promising approach to overcoming barriers to behavioral change. That article also identified environmental groups as the most effective “norm entrepreneurs” that can bring about widespread change in personal environmental conduct through carefully tailored information campaigns. This article expands on the earlier article’s discussion of the role norms play in influencing personal behavior and why changing them is a critical part of any campaign to make individuals more environmentally responsible. The best way to change norms is through education, as the first article acknowledged, but supplemental measures may be necessary. This article identifies what those additional measures might be and assesses their effectiveness. A third article will explore how republican theory supports the critical role that education performs in altering public behavior through changing norms. All three articles rest on the premise that the global climate change crisis has created circumstances in which norm change can take place, namely the occurrence of a second environmental republican moment, in which people are open to being educated about their civic responsibilities, including those pertaining to the environment. To develop these ideas, section II provides background information about individual contributions to environmental problems. Section III discusses various barriers to changing personal environmental behavior, such as the role federal laws play in perpetuating the myth that only industry is responsible for environmental harm. That section also explores certain cognitive heuristics that influence how people process information and personal barriers to changing behavior such as habits, inconvenience, cost, unavailability of alternatives, and self-interest. The role of norms in influencing behavior and how norms are formed and changed are examined in section IV. Next, section V investigates how a new norm of environmental responsibility might arise and displace competing norms. However, that section recognizes that the development of a new norm may not be an easy task because of some of the same barriers identified in section III. In section VI, acknowledging that neither norms nor the happenstance of an environmental republican moment will inexorably lead to changes in personal behavior, various norm and behavior-changing tools, such as public education, shaming and other sanctions, and market-based incentives are identified. Section VI examines the inherent strengths and weaknesses of these tools, as well as particular problems with their application to individual behavior. Section VII concludes that no single approach will work, but a combination of any or all of the above, depending on the source and nature of the problem, is called for. However, any combination of tools must include public education if a permanent new environmental norm is to emerge and change individual behavior in the long term