Law, Liberty and the Rule of Law (in a Constitutional Democracy)

In the hunt for a better--and more substantial--awareness of the “law,” The author intends to analyze the different notions related to the “rule of law” and to criticize the conceptions that equate it either to the sum of “law” and “rule” or to the formal assertion that “law rules,” regardless of its relationship to certain principles, including both “negative” and “positive” liberties. Instead, he pretends to scrutinize the principles of the “rule of law,” in general, and in a “constitutional democracy,” in particular, to conclude that the tendency to reduce the “democratic principle” to the “majority rule” (or “majority principle”), i.e. to whatever pleases the majority, as part of the “positive liberty,” is contrary both to the “negative liberty” and to the “rule of law” itself

Global equality of resources and the problem of valuation

The principle that every individual on the planet has a claim to an equal share of Earth’s natural resources has an intuitive attraction. Yet the Principle of Natural Resource Equality is not without its problems. This article focuses on the problem of valuation. Unless and until its adherents are able to develop an adequate theoretical mechanism for determining the comparative value of two or more bundles of natural resources the principle lacks applicability and persuasive force. Three adequacy constraints on such a mechanism are presented and then applied to a theorisation of the Principle of Natural Resource Equality that I have already expounded elsewhere: Global Equality of Resources. In each case I try to argue that Global Equality of Resources could satisfy the adequacy constraint, provided that both this theory and the relevant constraint are properly understood

Provisions Relating to IETF Documents

This document specifies a padding convention for use with the AES Key Wrap algorithm specified in RFC 3394. This convention eliminates the requirement that the length of the key to be wrapped be a multiple of 64 bits, allowing a key of any practical length to be wrapped. Status of This Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Copyright and License Notice Copyright (c) 2009 IETF Trust and the persons identified as th

In defence of global egalitarianism

This essay argues that David Miller's criticisms of global egalitarianism do not undermine the view where it is stated in one of its stronger, luck egalitarian forms. The claim that global egalitarianism cannot specify a metric of justice which is broad enough to exclude spurious claims for redistribution, but precise enough to appropriately value different kinds of advantage, implicitly assumes that cultural understandings are the only legitimate way of identifying what counts as advantage. But that is an assumption always or almost always rejected by global egalitarianism. The claim that global egalitarianism demands either too little redistribution, leaving the unborn and dissenters burdened with their societies' imprudent choices, or too much redistribution, creating perverse incentives by punishing prudent decisions, only presents a problem for global luck egalitarianism on the assumption that nations can legitimately inherit assets from earlier generations – again, an assumption very much at odds with global egalitarian assumptions

Egalitarian justice and expected value

According to all-luck egalitarianism, the differential distributive effects of both brute luck, which defines the outcome of risks which are not deliberately taken, and option luck, which defines the outcome of deliberate gambles, are unjust. Exactly how to correct the effects of option luck is, however, a complex issue. This article argues that (a) option luck should be neutralized not just by correcting luck among gamblers, but among the community as a whole, because it would be unfair for gamblers as a group to be disadvantaged relative to non-gamblers by bad option luck; (b) individuals should receive the warranted expected results of their gambles, except insofar as individuals blamelessly lacked the ability to ascertain which expectations were warranted; and (c) where societal resources are insufficient to deliver expected results to gamblers, gamblers should receive a lesser distributive share which is in proportion to the expected results. Where all-luck egalitarianism is understood in this way, it allows risk-takers to impose externalities on non-risk-takers, which seems counterintuitive. This may, however, be an advantage as it provides a luck egalitarian rationale for assisting ‘negligent victims’

Weighted Dirac combs with pure point diffraction

A class of translation bounded complex measures, which have the form of weighted Dirac combs, on locally compact Abelian groups is investigated. Given such a Dirac comb, we are interested in its diffraction spectrum which emerges as the Fourier transform of the autocorrelation measure. We present a sufficient set of conditions to ensure that the diffraction measure is a pure point measure. Simultaneously, we establish a natural link to the theory of the cut and project formalism and to the theory of almost periodic measures. Our conditions are general enough to cover the known theory of model sets, but also to include examples such as the visible lattice points.Comment: 44 pages; several corrections and improvement

Extinctions and Correlations for Uniformly Discrete Point Processes with Pure Point Dynamical Spectra

The paper investigates how correlations can completely specify a uniformly discrete point process. The setting is that of uniformly discrete point sets in real space for which the corresponding dynamical hull is ergodic. The first result is that all of the essential physical information in such a system is derivable from its $n$-point correlations, $n= 2, 3, >...$. If the system is pure point diffractive an upper bound on the number of correlations required can be derived from the cycle structure of a graph formed from the dynamical and Bragg spectra. In particular, if the diffraction has no extinctions, then the 2 and 3 point correlations contain all the relevant information.Comment: 16 page

Theorising Disability: Beyond Common Sense

This article seeks to introduce the topic of disability to political theory via a discussion of some of the literature produced by disability theorists. The author argues that these more radical approaches conceptualise disability in ways that conflict with ‘common-sense’ notions of disability that tend to underpin political theoretical considerations of the topic. Furthermore, the author suggests that these more radical conceptualisations have profound implications for current debates on social justice, equality and citizenship that highlight the extent to which these notions are also currently underpinned by ‘common-sense’ notions of ‘normality’

How is rape a weapon of war?: feminist international relations, modes of critical explanation and the study of wartime sexual violence

Rape is a weapon of war. Establishing this now common claim has been an achievement of feminist scholarship and activism and reveals wartime sexual violence as a social act marked by gendered power. But the consensus that rape is a weapon of war obscures important, and frequently unacknowledged, differences in ways of understanding and explaining it. This article opens these differences to analysis. Drawing on recent debates regarding the philosophy of social science in IR and social theory, it interprets feminist accounts of wartime sexual violence in terms of modes of critical explanation – expansive styles of reasoning that foreground particular actors, mechanisms, reasons and stories in the formulation of research. The idea of a mode of critical explanation is expanded upon through a discussion of the role of three elements (analytical wagers, narrative scripts and normative orientations) which accomplish the theoretical work of modes. Substantive feminist accounts of wartime sexual violence are then differentiated in terms of three modes – of instrumentality, unreason and mythology – which implicitly structure different understandings of how rape might be a weapon of war. These modes shape political and ethical projects and so impact not only on questions of scholarly content but also on the ways in which we attempt to mitigate and abolish war rape. Thinking in terms of feminist modes of critical explanation consequently encourages further work in an unfolding research agenda. It clarifes the ways in which an apparently commonality of position can conceal meaningful disagreements about human action. Exposing these disagreements opens up new possibilities for the analysis of war rape

Intergenerational justice of what: welfare, resources or capabilities?

An important aspect of intergenerational justice concerns the specification of a 'currency of advantage' that can be used to evaluate distributive outcomes across time. Environmental theorists have introduced several innovative currencies of justice in recent years, such as ecological space and critical natural capital. However they have often downplayed the application of established currencies (such as welfare, resources or capabilities) to issues of futurity. After exploring the merits of a number of rival currencies, it is argued that the currency of 'capabilities to function' provides a promising basis for a theory of justice that takes seriously the rights and duties of intergenerational justice