Robust Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative democracy aspires to secure political liberty by making citizens the authors of their laws. But how can it do this in the face of deep disagreement, not to mention imperfect knowledge and limited altruism? Deliberative democracy can secure political liberty by affording each citizen an equal position as a co-author of public laws and norms. Moreover, fundamental deliberative democracy—in which institutional design is ultimately accountable to public deliberation but not necessarily subject to its direct control—does not strain knowledge or altruism. Thus, there is a place for deliberative democracy in a robust political economy

Boyle’s Reductive Occasionalism

Was Robert Boyle an occasionalist? And if so, what kind of occasionalist was he? These questions have long troubled commentators, as Boyle’s texts often seem to offer both endorsements of occasionalism and affirmations of bodies’ causal powers. I argue that Boyle’s position is best understood as reductive occasionalism, according to which bodily powers are relations between bodies and God’s action in the world, and there is no causal efficacy in bodies that is not strictly identical to God’s nomological causal efficacy

Locke’s Conflicted Cosmopolitanism: Individualism and Empire

In this chapter, Daniel Layman argues that there is not one Lockean conception of IR but rather (at least) two mutually incompatible conceptions: one a Ciceronian moral cosmopolitanism and the other a colonialism centered on British interests. Opposing Locke’s philosophical writings with his economic works, Layman’s reading acknowledges the contradictions and incoherence present in Locke’s IR theory

John Locke's republicanism

This dissertation is a study of the shape, function, and implications of republican ideals in Locke's political philosophy. I argue that according to Locke, a person is free only when she enjoys her natural rights on her own terms, without arbitrary dependence. The relationship Locke posits between the absence of arbitrary power and freedom is constitutive rather than instrumental; to attain the ideal of freedom just is to be free from arbitrary power within the scope of natural rights. The project proceeds in two parts. In the first part, which includes two chapters, I argue that Locke is centrally committed to a republican conception of freedom. I then develop a precise framing of that conception and locate it within the broader contours of Locke's theory of moral equality and obligation. In Chapter One, I argue that Locke's explicit statements about the value of freedom and its relationship to the wills of other people, together with his polemic against absolutism, establishes that Locke's ideal of freedom demands the absence not just of interference, but of domination. In Chapter Two, I turn to the relationship between Locke's republicanism and his heavily theological notions of moral equality and moral obligation. I argue that by Locke's lights, both moral equality and moral obligation depend on moral accountability, and God's role is to anchor our accountability relationships with one another. In the second part, I use Locke's reconstructed republicanism to address three problems that arise when Locke applies his fundamental political values to concrete political problems. The first problem, which occupies me in Chapter Three, concerns Locke's conception of private property. While there is good textual reason to doubt that Locke requires appropriating individuals to leave any particular amount of resources for others, he clearly indicates that there is something wrong with distributions in which some suffer while others thrive. But what exactly is the problem? I argue that once people use their natural rights to acquire large properties, Locke's republican norm of non-domination requires people to enter and support civil societies that guarantee physical wellbeing and independence from arbitrary power. In Chapter Four, I consider Locke's infamous consent doctrine, which stipulates that political power cannot be legitimate without the consent of those subject to it. I argue that Locke actually offers two distinct conceptions of political consent, one elective and one participatory. According to the elective conception of consent, individuals must freely choose to perform a discrete act of consent before any political authority can be legitimate with respect to them. This strand of Locke's thinking about consent is, I argue, almost entirely unsuccessful. But according to Locke's participatory framing of political consent, consent to government is a dimension of political participation itself, not a separate, elective act that precedes it. I argue that this second conception of consent, though little noticed, is much more successful in relation to Locke's central project of rendering political power compatible with individuals' freedom from arbitrary power.Doctor of Philosoph

Bias Crime Statutes: A Qualified Liberal Defense

Since American legislatures began passing bias crime statutes (which set more severe penalties for crimes committed from biased motives) in the 1980s, many legal philosophers have argued that such statutes are unjust on the grounds that they punish character traits and feelings rather than actions and intentions. It is unjust to punish character traits and feelings, these authors have supposed, because character traits and feelings are not under agents' direct autonomous control. I argue that while it is unjust for governments to punish feelings and character traits, not all bias elements of crimes are feelings or character traits. Rather, some bias elements of crimes are intentions. I urge that in cases of biased crime in which the bias element in play is an intention, governments may punish the crime more severely than parallel non-biased crimes without violating the requirement not to punish what is not under agents' direct autonomous control

Individual Behavior Drives Ecosystem Function and the Impacts of Harvest

Current approaches for biodiversity conservation and management focus on sustaining high levels of diversity among species to maintain ecosystem function. We show that the diversity among individuals within a single population drives function at the ecosystem scale. Specifically, nutrient supply from individual fish differs from the population average \u3e80% of the time, and accounting for this individual variation nearly doubles estimates of nutrients supplied to the ecosystem. We test how management (i.e., selective harvest regimes) can alter ecosystem function and find that strategies targeting more active individuals reduce nutrient supply to the ecosystem up to 69%, a greater effect than body size–selective or nonselective harvest. Findings show that movement behavior at the scale of the individual can have crucial repercussions for the functioning of an entire ecosystem, proving an important challenge to the species-centric definition of biodiversity if the conservation and management of ecosystem function is a primary goal

Seasonally resolved ice core records from West Antarctica indicate a sea ice source of sea-salt aerosol and a biomass burning source of ammonium

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2014. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 119 (2014): 9168–9182, doi:10.1002/2013JD020720.The sources and transport pathways of aerosol species in Antarctica remain uncertain, partly due to limited seasonally resolved data from the harsh environment. Here, we examine the seasonal cycles of major ions in three high-accumulation West Antarctic ice cores for new information regarding the origin of aerosol species. A new method for continuous acidity measurement in ice cores is exploited to provide a comprehensive, charge-balance approach to assessing the major non-sea-salt (nss) species. The average nss-anion composition is 41% sulfate (SO42−), 36% nitrate (NO3−), 15% excess-chloride (ExCl−), and 8% methanesulfonic acid (MSA). Approximately 2% of the acid-anion content is neutralized by ammonium (NH4+), and the remainder is balanced by the acidity (Acy ≈ H+ − HCO3−). The annual cycle of NO3− shows a primary peak in summer and a secondary peak in late winter/spring that are consistent with previous air and snow studies in Antarctica. The origin of these peaks remains uncertain, however, and is an area of active research. A high correlation between NH4+ and black carbon (BC) suggests that a major source of NH4+ is midlatitude biomass burning rather than marine biomass decay, as previously assumed. The annual peak in excess chloride (ExCl−) coincides with the late-winter maximum in sea ice extent. Wintertime ExCl− is correlated with offshore sea ice concentrations and inversely correlated with temperature from nearby Byrd station. These observations suggest that the winter peak in ExCl− is an expression of fractionated sea-salt aerosol and that sea ice is therefore a major source of sea-salt aerosol in the region.This work was supported by grants from the NSF Antarctic Program (0632031 and 1142166), NSF-MRI (1126217), the NASA Cryosphere Program (NNX10AP09G), and by an award from the Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Fellowship Program (DOE SCGF) to ASC.2015-01-2