Socialism for the Natural Lawyer

Increased participation in public affairs by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops during the highly contentious 2012 Presidential election has seemingly brought the traditions of Catholic social teaching and socialism into a high profile conflict. While it is clear that President Obama is not what most academics would consider a “socialist,” modern discourse still presents what I argue is a false dichotomy- one can be either endorse natural law (especially of the Catholic variety) or socialism, but not both. While my goal in this article is to refute the alleged incompatibility, not to determine its historical roots, some speculation about its origin may be illuminating. Recent work on religious identity in the United States suggests that Americans largely identify Christianity with the right wing of the American culture war. Additional research is required to fully grasp where this perception comes from, but one can venture several guesses: the rise of the “Christian Right” in Republican Party politics of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the concept of “social justice” being lampooned by Right-wing talk show hosts, and decades of a Catholic Church that firmly opposed Cold War-era Soviet Communism. The contrast between left-wing and right-wing thought on social issues (same-sex marriage, abortion, etc.) is very well documented and widely discussed. Differences between leftists and natural lawyers on economic issues, however, are more often assumed than argued for. Perhaps this is a matter of “guilt by association,” with those arguing that leftist social policy is at odds with natural law simply assuming that the same must be the case with leftist economic policy as well. Thus, natural law, long tied to Christianity throughout its history, is gratuitously appropriated by right-wing political ideology. Against this claim of incompatibility, I argue that one can rationally hold both socialism and natural law to be true. In his landmark Natural Law and Natural Rights, John Finnis offers what is arguably the twentieth century’s most complete theory of natural law. I will argue that the conception of socialism laid out by G.A. Cohen in his Why Not Socialism? is compatible with Finnis’s account of the human goods, and that natural lawyers can therefore reasonably endorse Cohen’s prescription for socialism

Reconsidering the Economics of Public Policy: An Institutionalist Critique of Neoclassical Welfare Economics

Welfare economics is sometimes described as “the tools of normative analysis.” This area of study is often used to describe and inform public policy and to predict the outcome of policy implementation. In this thesis, I will argue that welfare economics, as it is commonly conceived of within the neoclassical tradition, is vulnerable to a number of critiques from an institutionalist perspective. Further, I will argue that institutionalism can provide a richer backdrop for the study of welfare and public policy than neoclassical economics, due to its inherent focus on the key role played by social, political, and legal institutions in economic activity

On Web, Semantics, and Data Mining: Intrusion Detection as a Case Study

Proceedings of the NSF Workshop on Next Generation Data MiningWe examine the intersection of data mining and semantic web in this paper. We briefly identify some points where they can impact one another, and then develop a specific example of intrusion detection, an application of distributed data mining. We have produced an ontology specifying a model of computer attacks. Our model is based upon an analysis of over 4,000 classes of computer attacks and their corresponding attack strategies using data derived from CERT/CC advisories and NIST’s ICAT meta-base. We present our attack model first as a taxonomy and convert it to a target-centric ontology that will be refined and expanded over time. We state the benefits of forgoing dependence upon taxonomies for the classification of computer attacks and intrusions, in favor of ontologies. We illustrate the benefits of utilizing an ontology by comparing a use case scenario of our ontology and the IETF’s Intrusion Detection Exchange Message Format Data Model.https://ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/68/On-Web-Semantics-and-Data-Mining-Intrusion-Detection-as-a-Case-Stud

Individual and Cross-Cultural Differences in Semantic Intuitions: New Experimental Findings

In 2004 Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich published what has become one of the most widely discussed papers in experimental philosophy, in which they reported that East Asian and Western participants had different intuitions about the semantic reference of proper names. A flurry of criticisms of their work has emerged, and although various replications have been performed, many critics remain unconvinced. We review the current debate over Machery et al.’s (2004) results and take note of which objections to their work have been satisfactorily answered and which ones still need to be addressed. We then report the results of studies that reveal significant cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences in semantic intuitions when we control for variables that critics allege have had a potentially distorting effect on Machery et al.’s findings. These variables include the epistemic perspective from which participants are supposed to understand the research materials, unintended anchoring effects of those materials, and pragmatic factors involved in the interpretation of speech acts within them. Our results confirm the robustness of the cross-cultural differences observed by Machery et al. and thereby strengthen the philosophical challenge they pose.</jats:p

Modeling Computer Attacks: An Ontology for Intrusion Detection

Abstract. We state the benefits of transitioning from taxonomies to ontologies and ontology specification languages, which are able to simultaneously serve as recognition, reporting and correlation languages. We have produced an ontology specifying a model of computer attack using the DARPA Agent Markup Language+Ontology Inference Layer, a descriptive logic language. The ontology’s logic is implemented using DAMLJessKB. We compare and contrast the IETF’s IDMEF, an emerging standard that uses XML to define its data model, with a data model constructed using DAML+OIL. In our research we focus on low level kernel attributes at the process, system and network levels, to serve as those taxonomic characteristics. We illustrate the benefits of utilizing an ontology by presenting use case scenarios within a distributed intrusion detection system.