[This download contains the Table of Contents and Chapter 1.] This first book-length study of confabulation breaks ground in both philosophy and cognitive science.

When laws or legal principles mention mental states such as intentions to form a contract, knowledge of risk, or purposely causing a death, what parts of the brain are they speaking about? We argue here that these principles are tacitly directed at our prefrontal executive processes. Our current best theories of consciousness portray it as a workspace in which executive processes operate, but what is important to the law is what is done with the workspace content rather than the content (...) itself. This makes executive processes more important to the law than consciousness, since they are responsible for channeling conscious decision-making into intentions and actions, or inhibiting action.We provide a summary of the current state of our knowledge about executive processes, which consists primarily of information about which portions of the prefrontal lobes perform which executive processes. Then we describe several examples in which legal principles can be understood as tacitly singling out executive processes, including principles regarding defendants’ intentions or plans to commit crimes and their awareness that certain facts are the case, as well as excusatory principles which result in lesser responsibility for those who are juveniles, mentally ill, sleepwalking, hypnotized, or who suffer from psychopathy. (shrink)

[This download includes the table of contents and chapter 1.] -/- When we praise, blame, punish, or reward people for their actions, we are holding them responsible for what they have done. Common sense tells us that what makes human beings responsible has to do with their minds and, in particular, the relationship between their minds and their actions. Yet the empirical connection is not necessarily obvious. The “guilty mind” is a core concept of criminal law, but if a defendant (...) on trial for murder were found to have serious brain damage, which brain parts or processes would have to be damaged for him to be considered not responsible, or less responsible, for the crime? The authors argue that evidence from neuroscience and the other cognitive sciences can illuminate the nature of responsibility and agency. They go on to offer a novel and comprehensive neuroscientific theory of human responsibility. (shrink)

Neuroscience can relate to ethics and normative issues via the brain’s cognitive control network. This network accomplishes several executive processes, such as planning, task-switching, monitoring, and inhibiting. These processes allow us to increase the accuracy of our perceptions and our memory recall. They also allow us to plan much farther into the future, and with much more detail than any of our fellow mammals. These abilities also make us fitting subjects for responsibility claims. Their activity, or lack thereof, is at (...) the heart of culpability. For instance, planning to kill someone is strong evidence of what the law calls mens rea—a guilty mind. Claims about norms, or ethical “should” claims, express two-level propositions, directed at the behaving person at one level, and at that person’s mind and cognitive control network at another level. Thus, “People should stop themselves from hurting others,” is a claim about how people should behave and also a claim about how their cognitive control networks should behave—i.e., they should inhibit harmful behavior, or the intentions leading up to it. Planning is both an ability of the full person, and of that person’s mind. Neuroscience affirms the common notion, seen both in law and folk psychology, that what makes us guilty or culpable are certain events and states that exist in our minds. Overt behavior, including speech, is fallible evidence of these states and processes. Cases of negligence still involve the executive processes, but “negatively,” in that negligence results when certain types of executive activity fail to take place. (shrink)

[This download contains the introductory chapter.] People confabulate when they make an ill-grounded claim that they honestly believe is true, for example in claiming to recall an event from their childhood that never actually happened. This interdisciplinary book brings together some of the leading thinkers on confabulation in neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy.

Cases in which people are self-deceived seem to require that the person hold two contradictory beliefs, something which appears to be impossible or implausible. A phenomenon seen in some brain-damaged patients known as confabulation (roughly, an ongoing tendency to make false utterances without intent to deceive) can shed light on the problem of self-deception. The conflict is not actually between two beliefs, but between two representations, a 'conceptual' one and an 'analog' one. In addition, confabulation yields valuable clues about the (...) structure of normal human knowledge-gathering processes. [The hypothesis defended here is significantly altered and greatly expanded in my book Brain Fiction.]. (shrink)

[This download contains the Table of Contents and Chapter 1]. I argue here that the claim that conscious states are private, in the sense that only one person can ever experience them directly, is false. There actually is a way to connect the brains of two people that would allow one to have direct experience of the other's conscious, e.g., perceptual states. This would allow, for instance, one person to see that the other had deviant color perception (which was masked (...) by correct linguistic practice). This could be achieved by connecting one person's set of executive processes (or cognitive control network) to the conscious perceptual states of the other. Chapter 5 contains an internalist physicalist account of color according to which colors exist only as brain states. Their function is to enable more precise causal interactions between the executive processes and the brain's perceptual systems. This in turn allows for more precise action: I can select the red apples and leave the green ones. (shrink)

We present a theory of human artistic experience and the neural mechanisms that mediate it. Any theory of art has to ideally have three components. The logic of art: whether there are universal rules or principles; The evolutionary rationale: why did these rules evolve and why do they have the form that they do; What is the brain circuitry involved? Our paper begins with a quest for artistic universals and proposes a list of ‘Eight laws of artistic experience’ -- a (...) set of heuristics that artists either consciously or unconsciously deploy to optimally titillate the visual areas of the brain. One of these principles is a psychological phenomenon called the peak shift effect: If a rat is rewarded for discriminating a rectangle from a square, it will respond even more vigorously to a rectangle that is longer and skinnier that the prototype. We suggest that this principle explains not only caricatures, but many other aspects of art. Example: An evocative sketch of a female nude may be one which selectively accentuates those feminine form-attributes that allow one to discriminate it from a male figure; a Boucher, a Van Gogh, or a Monet may be a caricature in ‘colour space’ rather than form space. Even abstract art may employ ‘supernormal’ stimuli to excite form areas in the brain more strongly than natural stimuli. Second, we suggest that grouping is a very basic principle. The different extrastriate visual areas may have evolved specifically to extract correlations in different domains , and discovering and linking multiple features into unitary clusters -- objects -- is facilitated and reinforced by direct connections from these areas to limbic structures. In general, when object-like entities are partially discerned at any stage in the visual hierarchy, messages are sent back to earlier stages to alert them to certain locations or features in order to look for additional evidence for the object . Finally, given constraints on allocation of attentional resources, art is most appealing if it produces heightened activity in a single dimension rather than redundant activation of multiple modules. This idea may help explain the effectiveness of outline drawings and sketches, the savant syndrome in autists, and the sudden emergence of artistic talent in fronto-temporal dementia. In addition to these three basic principles we propose five others, constituting a total of ‘eight laws of aesthetic experience’. (shrink)

The patient with Capgras’ syndrome claims that people very familiar to him have been replaced by impostors. I argue that this disorder is due to the destruction of a representation that the patient has of the mind of the familiar person. This creates the appearance of a familiar body and face, but without the familiar personality, beliefs, and thoughts. The posterior site of damage in Capgras’ is often reported to be the temporoparietal junction, an area that has a role in (...) the mindreading system, a connected system of cortical areas that allow us to attribute mental states to others. Just as the Capgras’ patient claims that that man is not his father, the patient with asomatognosia claims that his arm is not really his. A similar account applies here, in that a nearby brain area, the supramarginal gyrus, is damaged. This area works in concert with the temporoparietal junction and other areas to produce a large representation of a mind inside a body situated in an environment. Damage to the mind-representing part of this system (coupled with damage to executive processes in the prefrontal lobes) causes Capgras’ syndrome, whereas damage to the body-representing part of this system (also coupled with executive damage) causes asomatognosia. (shrink)

Contrary to the widely-held view that our conscious states are necessarily private (in that only one person can ever experience them directly), in this paper I argue that it is possible for a person to directly experience the conscious states of another. This possibility removes an obstacle to thinking of conscious states as physical, since their apparent privacy makes them different from all other physical states. A separation can be made in the brain between our conscious mental representations and the (...) executive processes that manipulate them and are guided by them in planning and executing behaviour. I argue here that these executive processes are also largely responsible for producing our sense of self in the moment. Our conscious perceptual representations themselves reside primarily in the posterior portions of the brain's cortex, in the temporal and parietal lobes, while the executive processes reside primarily in the prefrontal lobes. We can imagine an experiment in which we sever the association fibers that connect the posterior regions with these prefrontal regions and, instead, connect the posterior regions to the prefrontal regions of another person. According to my hypothesis, this would produce in the latter person the direct experience of the conscious perceptual states of the first person. (shrink)

When people confabulate, they make an ill-grounded claim that they honestly believe is true, for example recalling an event from their childhood that never actually happened. This interdisciplinary book brings together some of the leading thinkers on confabulation in neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy.

Almost everyone who has a limb amputated will experience a phantom limb--the vivid impression that the limb is not only still present, but in some cases, painful. There is now a wealth of empirical evidence demonstrating changes in cortical topography in primates following deafferentation or amputation, and this review will attempt to relate these in a systematic way to the clinical phenomenology of phantom limbs. With the advent of non-invasive imaging techniques such as MEG (magnetoencephalogram) and functional MRI, topographical reorganization (...) can also be demonstrated in humans, so that it is now possible to track perceptual changes and changes in cortical topography in individual patients. We suggest, therefore, that these patients provide a valuable opportunity not only for exploring neural plasticity in the adult human brain but also for understanding the relationship between the activity of sensory neurons and conscious experience. We conclude with a theory of phantom limbs, some striking demonstrations of phantoms induced in normal subjects, and some remarks about the relevance of these phenomena to the question of how the brain constructs a 'body image.'. (shrink)

Several recent lines of inquiry have pointed to the amygdala as a potential lesion site in autism. Because one function of the amygdala may be to produce autonomic arousal at the sight of a significant face, we compared the responses of autistic children to their mothers’ face and to a plain paper cup. Unlike normals, the autistic children as a whole did not show a larger response to the person than to the cup. We also monitored sympathetic activity in autistic (...) children as they engaged in a wide range of everyday behaviours. The children tended to use self-stimulation activities in order to calm hyper-responsive activity of the sympathetic (`fight or flight’) branch of the autonomic nervous system. A small percentage of our autistic subjects had hyporesponsive sympathetic activity, with essentially no electrodermal responses except to self-injurious behaviour. We sketch a hypothesis about autism according to which autistic children use overt behaviour in order to control a malfunctioning autonomic nervous system and suggest that they have learned to avoid using certain processing areas in the temporal lobes. (shrink)

This chapter explains how mindmelding — the direct experience by one person of another's conscious states — is in fact possible. The temporal lobes causally interact with the prefrontal lobes by way of fiber bundles that run underneath the cortical surface. This provides the perfect first experiment in mindmelding: to ‘branch’ those fiber bundles and run the other end into the brain of another person. Evidence is provided that these bundles have close connections to consciousness, in that whatever affects them (...) has immediate effects on consciousness. Then, before responding to several objections, the chapter considers another issue brought up by these experiments — the question of the relation between mindmelding and mindreading. Is mindmelding similar to mindreading? Does the existence of a mindreading system help us achieve mindmelding? (shrink)

This chapter presents the following hypothesis: There is a perfectly sensible conception of the mind, consciousness, the self, what we mean by ‘I,’ how we perceive and know, and how we remember and decide, all of which cohere amongst one another as well as with what we know about the brain, according to which it is possible for one person to experience directly the conscious states of another person. Not only can one person be directly aware of the conscious states (...) of another person, he can be more aware of them than their original owner. He can even be aware of them when their original owner will never be aware of them. Mindmelding is possible, and this possibility removes much of the force from the mind-body problem by removing the impasse caused by the belief in privacy. It removes what some philosophers saw as a need to posit strange metaphysical categories. The subject's sense of self can be separated from the object of her conscious awareness which can be bound to another's sense of self. (shrink)

[This is a response to a target article in BBS]. Although the art-historical context of a work of art is important to our appreciation of it, it is our knowledge of that history that plays causal roles in producing the experience itself. This knowledge is in the form of memories, both semantic memories about the historical circumstances, but also episodic memories concerning our personal connections with an artwork. We also create representations of minds in order to understand the emotions that (...) artworks express. (shrink)

According to several current theories, executive processes help achieve various mental actions such as remembering, planning and decision-making, by executing cognitive operations on representations held in consciousness. I plan to argue that these executive processes are partly responsible for our sense of self, because of the way they produce the impression of an active, controlling presence in consciousness. If we examine what philosophers have said about the "ego" (Descartes), "the Self" (Locke and Hume), the "self of all selves" (William (...) James), we will find that it fits what is now known about executive processes. Hume, for instance, famously argued that he could not detect the self in consciousness, and this would correspond to the claim (made by Crick and Koch, for instance) that we are not conscious of the executive processes themselves, but rather of their results. (shrink)

Neurological syndromes in which consciousness seems to malfunction, such as temporal lobe epilepsy, visual scotomas, Charles Bonnet syndrome, and synesthesia offer valuable clues about the normal functions of consciousness and ‘qualia’. An investigation into these syndromes reveals, we argue, that qualia are different from other brain states in that they possess three functional characteristics, which we state in the form of ‘three laws of qualia’. First, they are irrevocable: I cannot simply decide to start seeing the sunset as green, or (...) feel pain as if it were an itch; second, qualia do not always produce the same behaviour: given a set of qualia, we can choose from a potentially infinite set of possible behaviours to execute; and third, qualia endure in short-term memory, as opposed to non-conscious brain states involved in the on-line guidance of behaviour in real time. We suggest that qualia have evolved these and other attributes because of their role in facilitating non-automatic, decision-based action. We also suggest that the apparent epistemic barrier to knowing what qualia another person is experiencing can be overcome by using a ‘bridge’ of neurons; and we offer a hypothesis about the relation between qualia and one's sense of self. (shrink)

The emerging neuroscience of psychopathy will have several important implications for our attempts to construct an ethical society. In this article we begin by describing the list of criteria by which psychopaths are diagnosed. We then review four competing neuropsychological theories of psychopathic cognition. The first of these models, Newman’s attentional model, locates the problem in a special type of attentional narrowing that psychopaths have shown in experiments. The second and third, Blair’s amygdala model and Kiehl’s paralimbic model represent the (...) psychopath’s problem as primarily emotional, including reduced tendency to experience fear in normally fearful situations, and a failure to attach the proper significance to the emotions of others. The fourth model locates the problem at a higher level: a failure of psychopaths to notice and correct for their attentional or emotional problems using “executive processes.” In normal humans, decisions are accomplished via these executive processes, which are responsible for planning actions, or inhibiting unwise actions, as well as allowing emotions to influence cognition in the proper way. We review the current state of knowledge of the executive capacities of psychopaths. We then evaluate psychopaths in light of the three major philosophical theories of ethics, utilitarianism, deontological theory, and virtue ethics. Finally, we turn to the difficulty psychopath offenders pose to criminal law, because of the way psychopathy interacts with the various justifications and functions of punishment. We conclude with a brief consideration of the effects of psychopaths on contemporary social structures. (shrink)

This chapter shows that mindmelding is metaphysically possible, i.e., that it does not violate any laws governing the metaphysical nature of reality. Metaphysical issues are fundamental and lie at the core of the most difficult parts of the problems of privacy and the mind-body problem itself. There is nothing stopping us from placing the idea of mindmelding on clear, unproblematic, and plausible metaphysical foundations. It is argued that the position of privacy is the one on shaky metaphysical grounds. Two metaphysical (...) theses are examined: the thesis of privacy, and the idea that all conscious states must have a subject, which is called ‘inseparability’ because it posits that the subject is inseparable from the conscious state. (shrink)

Recent evidence points to widespread underconnectivity in autistic brains owing to deviant white matter, the fibers that make long connections between areas of the cortex. Subjects with autism show measurably fewer long-range connections between the parietal and prefrontal cortices. These findings may help shed light on the current debate in the consciousness literature about whether conscious states require both prefrontal and parietal/temporal components. If it can be shown that people with autism have conscious states despite such underconnectivity, this would constitute (...) an argument for the claim that conscious states can exist in posterior cortex without associated prefrontal activity. This in turn lends support to a class of theories according to which microconsciousness is possible—consciousness in small areas of cortex without active connections to the prefrontal cortex, as opposed to the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, according to which conscious states can only occur when posterior cortical areas (in the parietal or temporal lobes) have active connections to the prefrontal cortex. In this chapter, after listing several candidate examples of consciousness without accompanying prefrontal connections, I will argue that autism provides yet another such example. I will also examine a recent version of the higher-order theory that acknowledges these cases of consciousness without prefrontal activity and, instead depicts consciousness as requiring higher-order thoughts located in posterior cortex. In the final section, I will examine the consequences of these views for our understanding of the metaphysical nature of consciousness itself—the classic mind-body problem. (shrink)

The cases that Doris chronicles of confabulation are similar to perceptual illusions in that, while they show the interstices of our perceptual or cognitive system, they fail to establish that our everyday perception or cognition is not for the most part correct. Doris's account in general lacks the resources to make synchronic assessments of responsibility, partially because it fails to make use of knowledge now available to us about what is happening in the brains of agents.

One of the final obstacles to understanding consciousness in physical terms concerns the question of whether conscious states can exist in posterior regions of the brain without active connections to the brain's prefrontal lobes. If they can, difficult issues concerning our knowledge of our conscious states can be resolved. This paper contains a list of types of conscious states that may meet this criterion, including states of coma, states in which subjects are absorbed in a perceptual task, states in brains (...) with damaged prefrontal lobes, states of meditation and conscious states of some infants and animals. Recent evidence also suggests that conscious states of some people with autism may meet this criterion. (shrink)

This paper examines Todd Feinberg's theory of the misidentification syndromes.

Child soldiers, who often appear to be both victims and perpetrators, present a vexing moral and legal challenge: how can we protect the rights of children while seeking justice for the victims of war crimes? There has been little stomach, either in domestic or international courts, for prosecuting child soldiers—but neither has this challenge been systematically addressed in international law. Establishing a uniform minimum age of criminal responsibility would be a major step in the right direction; we argue that such (...) a standard ought to be guided by the best evidence from neuropsychology about the development, during childhood and adolescence, of the executive functions that give rise to morally and legally responsible agents. In light of that evidence, which suggests that the brain’s executive functions are still maturing into early adulthood, we recommend a graded structure of culpability for child soldiers. (shrink)

The psychological literature now differentiates between two types of psychopath:successful (with little or no criminal record) and unsuccessful (with a criminal record). Recent research indicates that earlier findings of reduced autonomic activity, reduced prefrontal grey matter, and compromised executive activity may only be true of unsuccessful psychopaths. In contrast, successful psychopaths actually show autonomic and executive function that exceeds that of normals, while having no difference in prefrontal volume from normals. We argue that many successful psychopaths are legally responsible for (...) their actions, as they have the executive capacity to choose not to harm (and thus are legally rational). However, many unsuccessful psychopaths have a lack of executive function that should at least partially excuse them from criminal culpability. Although a successful psychopath's increased executive function may occur in conflict with, rather than in consonance with their increased autonomic activity - producing a cognitive style characterized by self deception and articulate-sounding, but unsound reasoning - they may be capable of recognizing and correcting their lack of autonomic data, and thus can be held responsible. (shrink)

US criminal courts have recently moved toward seeing juveniles as inherently less culpable than their adult counterparts, influenced by a growing mass of neuroscientific and psychological evidence. In support of this trend, this chapter argues that the criminal law’s notion of responsible agency requires both the cognitive capacity to understand one’s actions and the volitional control to conform one’s actions to legal standards. These capacities require, among other things, a minimal working set of executive functions—a suite of mental processes, mainly (...) realized in the prefrontal cortex, such as planning and inhibition—which remain in significant states of immaturity through late adolescence, and in some cases beyond. Drawing on scientific evidence of how these cognitive and volitional capacities develop in the maturing brain, the authors sketch a scalar structure of juvenile responsibility, and suggest some possible directions for reforming the juvenile justice system to reflect this scalar structure. (shrink)

Drawing on a passage from Ramsey's Truth and Probability, we formulate a simple, plausible constraint on evaluating the accuracy of credences: the Calibration Test. We show that any additive, continuous accuracy measure that passes the Calibration Test will be strictly proper. Strictly proper accuracy measures are known to support the touchstone results of accuracy-first epistemology, for example vindications of probabilism and conditionalization. We show that our use of Calibration is an improvement on previous such appeals by showing how it answers (...) or sidesteps problems that have been raised for previous work in this area. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Awarding rights to rivers, forests, and other environmental entities (EEs) is a new and increasingly popular approach to environmental protection. The distinctive feature of such rights of nature (RoN) legislation is that direct duties are owed to the EEs. This paper presents a novel rebuttal of the strongest argument against RoN: the no interest argument. The crux of this argument is that because EEs are not sentient, they cannot possess the kinds of interests necessary to ground direct duties. Therefore, they (...) cannot be legitimate rights-bearers. After considering and rejecting standard responses to this argument, the paper challenges its fundamental assumption: that rights-correlative duties must be grounded in the interests of the rights-bearer. The paper then presents the RoN critic with a dilemma. The critic must either accept that EEs are legitimate rights-bearers, or delegitimise many well-established rights-bearers along with EEs. Either way, the no interest argument loses its force. (shrink)

Are interpersonal comparisons of desire possible? Can we give an account of how facts about desires are grounded, that underpins such comparisons? This paper supposes the answer to the first question is yes, and provides an account of the nature of desire that explains how this is so. The account is a modification of the interpretationist metaphysics of representation that the author has recently been developing. The modification is to allow phenomenological affective valence into the “base facts” on which correct (...) interpretation is grounded. To use this extra resource within that theory to vindicate interpersonal comparisons, we will need to appeal rational connections between level of valence and level of desire, which this paper sets out and examines. (shrink)

Albert and Cederman couch the neorealist perspective in terms of ‘systems’ theorizing, Ferguson and Mansbach rhetorically discuss issues and non-issues which are readily addressed within the neoliberal perspective, and of course, Onuf is unabashedly a constructivist. Below, I discuss each theoretical perspective relative to the articles assigned, and, thereafter conclude with some observations on the three articles and theoretical frameworks.

After nearly 76 years following the UN Charter, the dominant feature of the multilateral international order has shifted from a focus on states’ sovereignty to the rights of the individual. It is now widely accepted that human rights are not the province of any one state’s domestic affairs, but of importance to the entire international community. The UN Security Council sits atop the supra-state order, and holds the ultimate authority to initiate consensus-based, collective action so as to limit or prevent (...) gross human rights violations. Yet, many times the Security Council is slow to act, and consensus is exceedingly rare. This begs the question: in the face of gross human rights violations and Security Council inaction, is unilateral humanitarian intervention justified? The present state of international law on the matter is unsettled and controversial to many. What follows is a discussion on the development of international law relating to unilateral humanitarian intervention, the permissibility of intervention for gross human rights violations, and justification for intervention under existing international law. I conclude that under the present multilateral regime, unilateral humanitarian intervention is legally justified, despite fears that the principle may be invoked for the purposes of cloaking acts of aggression. (shrink)

For the purposes of this enquiry—an account of what Equiano’sa modernity was, and which particular historical ‘demarcations’ of modernity provided for an enslaved man to achieve freedom through great fortune and great cunning, I will assume a definition of ‘modernity’ as defined by Kathleen Wilson: “. . . not one moment or age, but a set of relations that are constantly being made and unmade, contested and reconfigured, that nonetheless produce among their contemporaneous witnesses the conviction of historical difference.” By (...) adopting this definition, modernity in the times of Equiano refers to, “the cultural practices and representations that produced certain kinds of subjects and objects of knowledge, upheld widely-shared notions of space and time, or facilitated the formation of cultural identities that resulted in pluralities and contradictions as well as unities and coherences,” which provided for a slave to acquire freedom amidst eighteenth-century imperialism, slave-trade, and emerging abolitionist sentiments within bourgeois culture. (shrink)

Does it seem that with each reported state cyberattack, there comes an announcement of discovery, an attribution to one of a handful of usual suspects, some threatening language suggesting imminent retribution, and then nothing more? Increased incidence of cyberattack makes its occurrence seem simultaneously rampant in terms of publicity and minimal in terms of threat of war. If rampant, how can repeated deployment by the same actors carry no punitive consequences? How is such audaciousness tolerated? For some, a cyberattack by (...) a state is an act of war. Its prevalence suggests there must be a void somewhere that facilitates its use without consequence. Others think state cyberattack is like other internet novelties: digital malfeasance, amounting to a nuisance that naturally follows from a digital‐based existence, particularly since non‐state actors are typically involved. Yet, state‐on‐state hostilities are historically perilous on a vast scale, and there is a multilateral system for regulating the use of force in the context of war. Acts of war, even when seeming minimal in impact, are not by‐products of a digital fad, and cyberattack is now described as far more than ‘nuisance’. If anywhere, the place for clarity on hostile state cyberoperations use should be accounted for in International Humanitarian Law. Yet, in its present form, it is ambiguous if not silent on the subject, suggesting that cyberattack currently presents an advantage to perpetrating states. Does this void or these ambiguities make cyberattacks more legally advantageous to states than traditional, kinetic weaponry? I examine whether existing IHL is sufficiently adaptable to state cyberoperations through a mixed legal and theoretical approach and conclude that they do. (shrink)

Justiciability sets the boundaries of judicial review and the rule of law. A justiciable issue is that which is appropriate within a judicial forum. That is, where an "independent and impartial body" can remedy rights violations of identifiable claimants, the issue before it is justiciable. If it falls beyond what is judicially determinable, it is 'non-justiciable'. The principle is not fixed, as it does not permanently set the boundaries of that which is appropriate for judicial determination. Rather, it evolves "from (...) context to context," and expands and narrows along what falls within judicial competencies at a particular time. On an elementary level, it is distinct from jurisdiction, as it establishes boundaries of subject matter on policy or constitutional grounds, whereas jurisdiction is grounded in established legal rules. However, questions of jurisdiction can be subsumed under broader questions of justiciability. (shrink)

For Rousseau, humankind is in a perpetual state of decay—decadency from an earlier, natural, primitive, and perfect state. For Rousseau, the natural man, or man in the state of beast, was of an era where humankind was unencumbered by that which is now entirely associated with society—that is, “. . . establishment of laws and of the right of property . . . the institution of magistracy . . . and the conversion of legitimate into arbitrary power.” For Kant, humankind (...) is in its natural state. For Kant, nature brings about conditions that continually develop and refine humankind’s dispositions, purposefully setting about societies in order to facilitate a foundation within all civilized society, whereby all of humankind’s goals may be achieved. All matters have their place—placed there by nature, as though with purpose. For Kant, nature intended for humankind to employ reason, to acquiesce to coercion for social cohesion, and to strive to build a society that is ever-increasingly progressing towards perfection. Nature uses humankind’s dispositions, including ‘antagonistic’ behavior to gradually bring about a, “perfectly just civil constitution.” Humankind’s highest goal yet to be achieved is for that just civil constitution to emerge from trial and error (in the form of wars, revolutions, secessions, abdications), over time, ultimately providing for development of other dispositions within a perfect society. (shrink)

Kant's formulae ought to effectively produce the same result when applied to the moral validity of any particular maxim; further, no valid maxim produces contradictory results when applied against Kant's Universal Law and Humanity formulae. Where one uses all formulae in the assessment of a maxim, one gains a more complete understanding of the moral law, thereby bridging principles of reason with intuition within the agent who has undertaken to evaluate the morality of a particular action. These formulae command without (...) regard to any particular interests, but are instead unconditional; further, these formulae effectively limit choice of action and therefore give rise to duty. Kant implies that the structure of all maxims requires different formulae of the same moral law, i.e., all maxims have a ‘form’ and a ‘matter’, which prompt reconfiguring of the categorical imperative into different formulae in order to test the morality of a maxim. (shrink)

Under the UDHR, all persons have the right to "seek and to enjoy . . . asylum from persecution." From this designation as fundamental followed codification of the right in the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol Relating (collectively 'the Convention'), the "centrepiece" of treaties and customary norms that make up international refugee law. It defines and regulates the status and rights of refugees; its purpose is to safeguard the basic rights of persons "outside (...) their country of origin," who have fled due to a legitimate fear of persecution. Fundamentally, it guarantees that asylees and refugees enjoy rights without discrimination; without penalization for illegal territorial entry; and, without expulsion or return to "territories where . . . life or freedom would be threatened on account of . . . race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion," —or 'non-refoulement'. What follows is background on development of the principle of non-refoulement, evasive US Asylum Cooperative Agreements ('ACAs') and implementing legislation, and the resulting erosion to the right to asylum. (shrink)

A phronetic approach takes into account everything possible. By this, the phronetic researcher ought to be better-informed of the practical—that which is readily available in order to solve localized political problems and to direct political participants to think in terms of value-rational understanding and action. Phronetic knowledge ought to be of utility to the citizenry—and not only to academia. It does not only explain phenomena, but also provides for altering the outcomes associated with political phenomena by integrating value judgments and (...) broader ethical precepts into the analysis. This is instrumental in producing knowledge that provides for practical application of problem solving that can be deemed good or better, and provides a means for ascertaining the bad or worse in a given political scenario. This paper examines how knowledge is produced by the phronetic approach, what knowledge can be known by the phronetic approach, and whether there are inherent limitations to the phronetic approach to understanding. (shrink)

The local opposes the global or the macro opposes the micro and vice versa, respectively. This dialectical relationship further exposes that scales are socially and politically constructed, representative of a phenomena that is relational, and is thus of important consideration in analysis beyond simple labeling. That is, scale represents more than ‘size’ and ‘complexity’, but also reveals the relational. It is the relational—the relationship between the ‘global’ and its contents or the ‘local’—which provides for or is wont for analytic complexity (...) and theorizing. (shrink)