Responsibility for implicit bias

Research programs in empirical psychology from the past two decades have revealed implicit biases. Although implicit processes are pervasive, unavoidable, and often useful aspects of our cognitions, they may also lead us into error. The most problematic forms of implicit cognition are those which target social groups, encoding stereotypes or reflecting prejudicial evaluative hierarchies. Despite intentions to the contrary, implicit biases can influence our behaviours and judgements, contributing to patterns of discriminatory behaviour. These patterns of discrimination are obviously wrong and unjust. But in remedying such wrongs, one question to be addressed concerns responsibility for implicit bias. Unlike some paradigmatic forms of wrongdoing, such discrimination is often unintentional, unendorsed, and perpetrated without awareness; and the harms are particularly damaging because they are cumulative and collectively perpetrated. So, what are we to make of questions of responsibility? In this article, we outline some of the main lines of recent philosophical thought, which address questions of responsibility for implicit bias. We focus on (a) the kind of responsibility at issue; (b) revisionist versus nonrevisionist conceptions of responsibility as applied to implicit bias; and (c) individual, institutional, and collective responsibility for implicit bias

Kite-marks, standards and privileged legal structures; artefacts of constraint disciplining structure choices

As different countries and regions continue to develop policy and legal frameworks for social enterprises this paper offers new insights into the dynamics of legal structure choice by social entrepreneurs. The potential nodes of conflict between exogenous prescriptions and social entrepreneur’s own orientation to certain aspects of organization and what social entrepreneurs actually do in the face of such conflict is explicated. Kite-marks, standards and legal structures privileged by powerful actors are cast as political artefacts that serve to discipline the choices of legal structure by social entrepreneurs as they prescribe desirable characteristics, behaviours and structures for social enterprises. This paper argues that social enterprises should not be understood as the homogenous organisational category that is portrayed in government policy documents, kite-marks and privileged legal structures but as organisations facing a proliferation of structural forms which are increasingly rendered a governable domain (Nickel & Eikenberry, 2016; Scott, 1998) through the development of kite marks, funder / investor requirements and government policy initiatives. Further, that these developments act to prioritise and marginalise particular forms of social enterprises as they exert coercive, mimetic and normative pressures (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) that act to facilitate the categorising of social enterprises in a way that strengthens institutional coherence and serves to drive the structural isomorphism (Boxenbaum & Jonsson, 2017; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) of social enterprise activity. Whilst the actions of powerful actors work to maintain (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006) the social enterprise category the embedded agency of social entrepreneurs acts to transform it (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009). The prevailing Institutional logics (Ocasio, Thornton, & Lounsbury, 2017; Zhao & Lounsbury, 2016) that serve to both marginalise and prioritise those legal structures are used to present argument that the choice of legal structure for a social enterprise is often in conflict with the social entrepreneur's orientation to certain aspects of how they wish to organise. Where the chosen legal structure for a social enterprise is in conflict with the social entrepreneur's own organising principles as to how they wish to organise then this can result in the social entrepreneur decoupling (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009) their business and/or governance practices from their chosen legal structure in order to resolve the tensions that they experience. Social entrepreneurs also experiencing the same tension enact a different response in that they begin to create and legitimate new legal structures on the margins of the social enterprise category through a process of institutional entrepreneurship (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009; Hardy & Maguire, 2017)

Unwrapping crocodiles

Preprint of an article by Jules Winterton, Associate Director and Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies

\u3ci\u3eZiglar v. Abbasi\u3c/i\u3e and the Demise of Accountability

Part I of this Article discusses Ziglar in light of the Court’s other cases challenging aspects of the executive’s conduct in the struggle against terrorism. Part II compares Ziglar with other case law that suggests that the Ziglar Court’s focus on the potential availability of injunctive relief is not of central importance to its dismissal of the Bivens claims. This Article continues in Part III with a historical discussion of official accountability for unconstitutional conduct during times of national crisis or exigency and early leaders’ views regarding such official accountability, and provides instances where unconstitutional official conduct was met with damages liability. Finally, this Article concludes that Ziglar is at odds with the basic precepts of the framers’ view of the judicial role in addressing official claims of necessity during times of national emergency or serious crisis

Monad Transformers for Backtracking Search

This paper extends Escardo and Oliva's selection monad to the selection monad transformer, a general monadic framework for expressing backtracking search algorithms in Haskell. The use of the closely related continuation monad transformer for similar purposes is also discussed, including an implementation of a DPLL-like SAT solver with no explicit recursion. Continuing a line of work exploring connections between selection functions and game theory, we use the selection monad transformer with the nondeterminism monad to obtain an intuitive notion of backward induction for a certain class of nondeterministic games.Comment: In Proceedings MSFP 2014, arXiv:1406.153

The game semantics of game theory

We use a reformulation of compositional game theory to reunite game theory with game semantics, by viewing an open game as the System and its choice of contexts as the Environment. Specifically, the system is jointly controlled by $n \geq 0$ noncooperative players, each independently optimising a real-valued payoff. The goal of the system is to play a Nash equilibrium, and the goal of the environment is to prevent it. The key to this is the realisation that lenses (from functional programming) form a dialectica category, which have an existing game-semantic interpretation. In the second half of this paper, we apply these ideas to build a compact closed category of `computable open games' by replacing the underlying dialectica category with a wave-style geometry of interaction category, specifically the Int-construction applied to the cartesian monoidal category of directed-complete partial orders

Career in law librarianship: in memory of Gillian Sands

A tribute to the late Gillian Sands.Preprint of an article by Jules Winterton, Associate Director and Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies