Most opponents of somatic cell nuclear transfer and embryonic stem cell technologies base their arguments on the twin assertions that the embryo is either a human being or a potential human being, and that it is wrong to destroy a human being or potential human being in order to produce stem cell lines. Proponents’ justifications of stem cell research are more varied, but not enough to escape the charge of obsession with the status of the embryo. What unites the two (...) warring sides in ‘the stem cell wars’ is that women are equally invisible to both: ‘the lady vanishes.’ Yet the most legitimate property in the body is that which women possess in their reproductive tissue and the products of their reproductive labour. By drawing on the accepted characterisation in the common law of property as a bundle of rights, and on a Hegelian model of contract as mutual recognition, we can lessen the impact of the tendency to regard women and their ova as merely receptacles and women’s reproductive labour as unimportant. (shrink)

In British and continental constitutional theory, the sovereign provides a mouthpiece for the law, helping present a unified body politic. For Hegel too the sovereign is a function for the unity of the people. But it is the subject’s desire, which brings the sovereign into existence as guarantor of the law’s coherence and closure. The spontaneous insurrection of December 2008 in Greece weakened the hold of the sovereign on the subject. The post-political condition was challenged by the unplanned actions of (...) resistance and performance by people who have been excluded from political visibility. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the view that persons have a claim to deserved treatment, including many forms of punishment, against an objection resting on the principle that it is not possible to have a claim to harmful treatment. I do not challenge this principle, but argue, rather, that the harms wrongdoers typically deserve either (a) are not genuine harms at all (for reasons relevant to their being deserved) or (b) are not relevant to the content of these wrongdoers' claims.

Este ensayo analiza la relación dialéctica entre los conceptos de democracia y de ciudadanía a la luz de los debates actuales, en los que se combinan una transformación de la tradición filosófica y una evaluación de las situaciones en que se cuestiona la distinción jurídica entre el «ciudadano» y el «nacional». A partir de consideraciones sobre las tensiones semánticas de las categorías griegas y latinas (politeia, demokratia, isonomía, ius civitatis), se analizan las aporías de la democracia, entendida como modelo o (...) ideología, que filósofos como Jacques Rancière y Hannah Arendt nos permiten superar mediante la definición de la democracia como un proceso de insurrección permanente «anti-oligárquico» en lugar de un régimen estable. No es la propagación de la democracia, por lo tanto, lo que constituye el objeto primordial de la teoría política, sino la democratización de la democracia, de sí misma, especialmente en la forma de eliminación de la exclusión interna. Esta teoría se ilustra y se perfecciona aún más al referirse a los debates sobre la discriminación de clase y raza, las luchas violentas en busca del reconocimiento que afectan a las instituciones republicanas, las formas de ciudadanía nómadas o diaspóricas, y la relación entre derechos sociales y políticos. (shrink)

This paper attempts a response to two suggestions regarding the roots of and solutions to Africa’s social, economic and political concerns. Rather than trying to provide answers to the question “who should be blamed for the quagmires of Africa?”, the paper tries to provide further explanations of the problems using a specific case study of two pan-African scholars, Henry Kam Kah and Okori Uneke. Although their suggestions about the situation of Africa have received popular acceptance among scholars, this paper disputes (...) the viability of their assumptions and conclusions. Even if it is true that Africa is an innocent victim of colonial or post-colonial causes, their arguments fall short of providing a foundation for future, positive development. Instead, this paper attempts to go beneath superficial first layer investigations to identify a more meaning way forward for the people of post-colonial Africa. (shrink)

Using both Confucian texts and the work of American pragmatist John Dewey, this book offers a distinctly Confucian model of democracy.

In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial art market have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital artworks cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital artworks are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such (...) efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression. (shrink)