Dworkin's "one right answer" thesis

Dworkin believes legal arguments are evaluative arguments of political morality and so his legal theory depends on the idea that there are one-right-answers to most evaluative questions. That objective truth – or fallibility – is embedded in morally evaluative discourse is obvious from its logic. For we can't deny that there is no moral truth merely because there is nothing 'external' or 'demonstrable' that determines that truth; that denial merely affirms moral permissibility (by saying it is not false, eg, that abortion is wrong). However, our discourse could be in error and the better argument for one-right-answers is morally evaluative, not descriptive-analytic. There are two such moral arguments. The first is that 'demonstrable' truth, implied by the 'external' criticism, implies a rigid sense of community and makes little sense of the complexity of our moral rights. The second is that abandoning truth altogether would mean that morality was no more than 'making things up' arbitrarily. As a corollary, the 'unity of value' thesis means not much more than that, given the moral requirement of non-demonstrable truth, lawyers and other political moralists have a duty to construct final justifications that assume competitive tensions between relevant principles are resolved without logical contradiction or conflict

Anthropogenic disturbance in tropical forests can double biodiversity loss from deforestation

© 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. Concerted political attention has focused on reducing deforestation, and this remains the cornerstone of most biodiversity conservation strategies. However, maintaining forest cover may not reduce anthropogenic forest disturbances, which are rarely considered in conservation programmes. These disturbances occur both within forests, including selective logging and wildfires, and at the landscape level, through edge, area and isolation effects. Until now, the combined effect of anthropogenic disturbance on the conservation value of remnant primary forests has remained unknown, making it impossible to assess the relative importance of forest disturbance and forest loss. Here we address these knowledge gaps using a large data set of plants, birds and dung beetles (1,538, 460 and 156 species, respectively) sampled in 36 catchments in the Brazilian state of Pará. Catchments retaining more than 69-80% forest cover lost more conservation value from disturbance than from forest loss. For example, a 20% loss of primary forest, the maximum level of deforestation allowed on Amazonian properties under Brazil's Forest Code, resulted in a 39-54% loss of conservation value: 96-171% more than expected without considering disturbance effects. We extrapolated the disturbance-mediated loss of conservation value throughout Pará, which covers 25% of the Brazilian Amazon. Although disturbed forests retained considerable conservation value compared with deforested areas, the toll of disturbance outside Pará's strictly protected areas is equivalent to the loss of 92,000-139,000 km2 of primary forest. Even this lowest estimate is greater than the area deforested across the entire Brazilian Amazon between 2006 and 2015 (ref. 10). Species distribution models showed that both landscape and within-forest disturbances contributed to biodiversity loss, with the greatest negative effects on species of high conservation and functional value. These results demonstrate an urgent need for policy interventions that go beyond the maintenance of forest cover to safeguard the hyper-diversity of tropical forest ecosystems

UTILIZATION OF ULTRAVIOLET-LIGHT IN THE IMPROVEMENT OF ASPERGILLUS-NIGER FOR CITRIC-ACID PRODUCTION

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Extrapulmonary tuberculous abscess in chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) treated with fludarabine: Case report and review of literature [1]

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Charles Hartt, Louis Agassiz, and the controversy over Pleistocene glaciation in Brazil

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