A New Societal Self-Defense Theory of Punishment—The Rights-Protection Theory

In this paper, I propose a new self-defense theory of punishment, the rights-protection theory. By appealing to the interest theory of right, I show that what we call “the right of self-defense” is actually composed of the right to protect our basic rights. The right of self-defense is not a single, self-standing right but a group of derivative rights justified by their contribution to the protection of the core, basic rights. Thus, these rights of self-defense are both justified and constrained by the basic rights they are supposed to protect. I then explain how this theory responds to a common objection. Opponents argue that, to exercise the right of self-defense, some threat must be present. However, in the context of punishment, the threat has already taken effect or is already gone. Thus, the right of self-defense becomes irrelevant when we punish an offender. I show that this objection is based on an implausibly narrow conception of self-defense. A reasonable conception would allow us to exercise our right of self-defense when there is a present definite threat, a future definite threat, or a potential threat. Thus, we may still exercise our right of self-defense in the context of punishment

The Instrumental Value Arguments for National Self-Determination

David Miller argues that national identity is indispensable for the successful functioning of a liberal democracy. National identity makes important contributions to liberal democratic institutions, including creating incentives for the fulfilment of civic duties, facilitating deliberative democracy, and consolidating representative democracy. Thus, a shared identity is indispensable for liberal democracy and grounds a good claim for self-determination. Because Miller’s arguments appeal to the instrumental values of a national culture, I call his argument ‘instrumental value’ arguments. In this paper, I examine the instrumental value arguments and show that they fail to justify a group’s right to self-determination

The Universality and stability for a dilute Bose gas with a Feshbach resonance

We study the bosonic atoms with a wide Feshbach resonance at zero temperature in terms of the renormalization group. We indicate that this system will always collapse in the dilute limit. On the side with a positive scattering length, the atomic superfluid is an unstable local minimum in the dilute limit and it determines the thermodynamics of this system within its lifetime. We calculate the equilibrium properties at zero temperature in the unitary regime. They exhibit universal scaling forms in the dilute limit due to the presence of a nontrivial zero temperature, zero density fixed point. Moreover, we find that the T=0 thermodynamics of this system in the unitary limit is exactly identical to the one for an ideal Fermi gas.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure