1,480 research outputs found

    Competence, fairness, and caring – the three keys to government legitimacy

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    Is Political Legitimacy Worth Promoting?

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    In this paper I develop and defend a new account of political legitimacy. I argue that a regime is legitimate insofar as it achieves quality assent to rule. Assent to rule is an evaluative assessment of the regime, by its subjects, about whether the regime realizes some goods through the exercise of power and authority. Assent is quality assent just when it is consistent with what I call the minimal claim of ruling, namely, the provision of basic security for all subjects. When legitimacy is characterized in these terms, its achievement will be naturally correlated with the realization of key political goods: non-alienation, stability, and political alignment among subjects. What makes this account distinctive, and attractive, is that it captures the crucial insights from both sides of the theoretical divide in the existing literature on political legitimacy, namely (i) that legitimacy is a good-making feature of a regime, but also (ii) that legitimacy depends upon people's subjective attitudes

    Tyranny, Tribalism, and Post-truth Politics

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    Consent and political legitimacy

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    Consent plays a leading role in many theories of political legitimacy. Two approaches to theorizing about why consent matters for legitimacy have been dominant: the hypothetical consent approach, which argues that a regime is legitimate insofar as all of its subjects would agree to it under idealized conditions, and the express consent approach, which argues that a regime is legitimate for each subject insofar as that subject has expressly consented to it. In this paper, I argue that both views involve unacceptable idealizations. Instead, I develop and defend a new conception of political legitimacy based on actual consent. According to this view, a state is legitimate insofar as it achieves actual quality consent to rule. Quality consent obtains when a subject consents to her state on the basis of a judgment of governance success, provided that the judgment does not conflict with the government’s minimal aim, i.e. basic security for all subjects. The view that I develop, therefore, values consent to rule in a novel way, permitting it to count in favor of legitimacy even when it is not unanimous. Accordingly, a state comes to be legitimate by governing in such a way as to be widely recognized as doing so successfully by its subjects

    Legitimacy without Liberalism: A Defense of Max Weber’s Standard of Political Legitimacy

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    In this paper I defend Max Weber's concept of political legitimacy as a standard for the moral evaluation of states. On this view, a state is legitimate when its subjects regard it as having a valid claim to exercise power and authority. Weber’s analysis of legitimacy is often assumed to be merely descriptive, but I argue that Weberian legitimacy has moral significance because it indicates that political stability has been secured on the basis of civic alignment. Stability on this basis enables all the goods of peaceful cooperation with minimal state violence and intimidation, thereby guarding against alienation and tyranny. Furthermore, I argue, since Weberian legitimacy is empirically measurable in terms that avoid controversial value judgments, its adoption would bridge a longstanding divide between philosophers and social scientist

    Is Sincerity the First Virtue of Social Institutions? Police, Universities, and Free Speech

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    In the final chapter of Speech Matters, Seana Shiffrin argues that institutions have especially stringent duties to protect speech freedoms. In this article, I develop a few lines of criticism. First, I question whether Shiffrin’s framework of justified suspended contexts is appropriate for institutional settings. Second, I challenge the presumption that the knowledge-gathering function performed by police is necessarily compromised by insincere practices. Third, I criticize Shiffrin’s characterization of the university as involving a complete repudiation of enforced consensus, and I express doubts about the close connection between education and democratic legitimation that Shiffrin endorses. Finally, I raise a problem with the book’s overall argument: even if one agrees that speech freedoms are necessary for moral development, they also may be threatening to moral development. The upshot is that the protection of speech should be modulated in order to account for the potential conflicts between sincerity and other valuable ends, rather than being oriented above all to sincerity

    Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements

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    The psychological and neurobiological processes underlying moral judgement have been the focus of many recent empirical studies1–11. Of central interest is whether emotions play a causal role in moral judgement, and, in parallel, how emotion-related areas of the brain contribute to moral judgement. Here we show that six patients with focal bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a brain region necessary for the normal generation of emotions and, in particular, social emotions12–14, produce an abnor- mally ‘utilitarian’ pattern of judgements on moral dilemmas that pit compelling considerations of aggregate welfare against highly emotionally aversive behaviours (for example, having to sacrifice one person’s life to save a number of other lives)7,8. In contrast, the VMPC patients’ judgements were normal in other classes of moral dilemmas. These findings indicate that, for a selective set of moral dilemmas, the VMPC is critical for normal judgements of right and wrong. The findings support a necessary role for emotion in the generation of those judgements

    Cell non-autonomy amplifies disruption of neurulation by mosaic Vangl2 deletion in mice

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    Post-zygotic mutations that generate tissue mosaicism are increasingly associated with severe congenital defects, including those arising from failed neural tube closure. Here we report that neural fold elevation during mouse spinal neurulation is vulnerable to deletion of the VANGL planar cell polarity protein 2 (Vangl2) gene in as few as 16% of neuroepithelial cells. Vangl2-deleted cells are typically dispersed throughout the neuroepithelium, and each non-autonomously prevents apical constriction by an average of five Vangl2-replete neighbours. This inhibition of apical constriction involves diminished myosin-II localisation on neighbour cell borders and shortening of basally-extending microtubule tails, which are known to facilitate apical constriction. Vangl2-deleted neuroepithelial cells themselves continue to apically constrict and preferentially recruit myosin-II to their apical cell cortex rather than to apical cap localisations. Such non-autonomous effects can explain how post-zygotic mutations affecting a minority of cells can cause catastrophic failure of morphogenesis leading to clinically important birth defects

    Epithelial dynamics shed light on mechanisms underlying ear canal defects

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    Defects in ear canal development can cause severe hearing loss as sound waves fail to reach the middle ear. Here we reveal new mechanisms that control human canal development and highlight for the first time the complex system of canal closure and reopening. These processes can be perturbed in mutant mice and in explant culture, mimicking the defects associated with canal aplasia. The more superficial part of the canal forms from an open primary canal that closes and then reopens. In contrast, the deeper part of the canal forms from an extending solid meatal plate that opens later. Closure and fusion of the primary canal was linked to loss of periderm, with failure in periderm formation in Grhl3 mutant mice associated with premature closure of the canal. Conversely, inhibition of cell death in the periderm resulted in an arrest of closure. Once closed, re-opening of the canal occurred in a wave, triggered by terminal differentiation of the epithelium. Understanding these complex processes involved in canal development sheds light on the underlying causes of canal aplasia

    Punica granatum (Pomegranate) juice provides an HIV-1 entry inhibitor and candidate topical microbicide

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    BACKGROUND: For ≈ 24 years the AIDS pandemic has claimed ≈ 30 million lives, causing ≈ 14,000 new HIV-1 infections daily worldwide in 2003. About 80% of infections occur by heterosexual transmission. In the absence of vaccines, topical microbicides, expected to block virus transmission, offer hope for controlling the pandemic. Antiretroviral chemotherapeutics have decreased AIDS mortality in industrialized countries, but only minimally in developing countries. To prevent an analogous dichotomy, microbicides should be: acceptable; accessible; affordable; and accelerative in transition from development to marketing. Already marketed pharmaceutical excipients or foods, with established safety records and adequate anti-HIV-1 activity, may provide this option. METHODS: Fruit juices were screened for inhibitory activity against HIV-1 IIIB using CD4 and CXCR4 as cell receptors. The best juice was tested for inhibition of: (1) infection by HIV-1 BaL, utilizing CCR5 as the cellular coreceptor; and (2) binding of gp120 IIIB and gp120 BaL, respectively, to CXCR4 and CCR5. To remove most colored juice components, the adsorption of the effective ingredient(s) to dispersible excipients and other foods was investigated. A selected complex was assayed for inhibition of infection by primary HIV-1 isolates. RESULTS: HIV-1 entry inhibitors from pomegranate juice adsorb onto corn starch. The resulting complex blocks virus binding to CD4 and CXCR4/CCR5 and inhibits infection by primary virus clades A to G and group O. CONCLUSION: These results suggest the possibility of producing an anti-HIV-1 microbicide from inexpensive, widely available sources, whose safety has been established throughout centuries, provided that its quality is adequately standardized and monitored
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