It has been debated whether the so-called attention economy, in which the attention of agents is measured and sold, jeopardizes something of value. One strand of this discussion has focused on so-called attention rights, asking: should attention be legally protected, either by introducing novel rights or by extending the scope of pre-existing rights? In this paper, however, in order to further this discussion, we ask: How is attention already protected legally? In what situations does a (...) person have the right to attention under current law? -/- Unlike (Chomanski, Neuroethics 16:1–11, 2023), who discusses an overall right to attention, or (Puri, Rutgers Law Record 48:206–221, 2021), who discusses an overall right to attentional privacy, in this paper we focus on two types of situations in which a person’s attention is already protected by legal regulation. Sustained attention-requiring tasks can be jeopardized by distractions whereas attentiveness to certain kind of stimuli can be jeopardized by immersive stimuli. That is why distractions are regulated in situations where an agent has what we call a concentration right and immersive stimuli are regulated in situations where an agent has what we call a duty to be attentive. The further analysis of these situations provides an understanding of the legal means by which attention is already regulated, which can be helpful when thinking about how it should be regulated in the future. (shrink)

In 1985, German sociologist Niklas Luhmann published a monograph on ecology, which appeared in English translation in 1989 as Ecological Communication. It contained many original insights for ecological thinking and, despite being well-reviewed upon publication, has had a relatively minor impact on Anglophone environmental discourse. This inattention is also present in environmental law, which has recently seen an increase in legal theories that challenge its mainstream. This contribution first investigates why Ecological Communication has received scant attention, pointing to changes (...) in the climatic context in which it first appeared and the reactionary nature of its arguments. Recognising that the work nevertheless contains critical theoretical insights for environmental law scholarship, the second aim of the article is to spotlight what from Ecological Communication remains relevant at the hand of three common claims progressive researchers level against mainstream environmental law: The critique of law's marriage to Cartesian dualism, that law should be better informed by climate science,of and law's anthropocentrism. Finally, environmental lawyers are called upon not to ignore Ecological Communication but to engage with it fruitfully. (shrink)

Properties have an important role in specifying different views on laws of nature: virtually any position on laws will make some reference to properties, and some of the leading views even reduce laws to properties. This chapter will first outline what laws of nature are typically taken to be and then specify their connection to properties in more detail. We then move on to consider three different accounts of properties: natural, essential, and dispositional properties, and we shall see that different (...) conceptions of properties also result in different views of the modal status of laws, such as the question of whether laws are metaphysically necessary or contingent. Finally, there are also important links specifically between properties, natural kinds, and laws of nature that deserve our attention. (shrink)

Certain results, most famously in classical statistical mechanics and complex systems, but also in quantum mechanics and high-energy physics, yield a coarse-grained stable statistical pattern in the long run. The explanation of these results shares a common structure: the results hold for a 'typical' dynamics, that is, for most of the underlying dynamics. In this paper I argue that the structure of the explanation of these results might shed some light --a different light-- on philosophical debates on the laws of (...) nature. In the explanation of such patterns, the specific form of the underlying dynamics is almost irrelevant. The conditions required, given a free state-space evolution, suffice to account for the coarse-grained lawful behaviour. An analysis of such conditions might thus provide a different account of how regular behaviour can occur. This paper focuses on drawing attention to this type of explanation, outlining it in the diverse areas of physics in which it appears, and discussing its limitations and significance in the tractable setting of classical statistical mechanics. (shrink)

Social scientists have paid insufficient attention to the role of law in constituting the economic institutions of capitalism. Part of this neglect emanates from inadequate conceptions of the nature of law itself. Spontaneous conceptions of law and property rights that downplay the role of the state are criticized here, because they typically assume relatively small numbers of agents and underplay the complexity and uncertainty in developed capitalist systems. In developed capitalist economies, law is sustained through interaction between private agents, (...) courts and the legislative apparatus. Law is also a key institution for overcoming contracting uncertainties. It is furthermore a part of the power structure of society, and a major means by which power is exercised. This argument is illustrated by considering institutions such as property and the firm. Complex systems of law have played a crucial role in capitalist development and are also vital for developing economies. (shrink)

Language suggestive of natural law ethics, similar to the Catholic understanding of ethical foundations, is prevalent in a number of disciplines. But it does not always issue in a full-blooded commitment to objective ethics, being undermined by relativist ethical currents. In law and politics, there is a robust conception of "human rights", but it has become somewhat detached from both the worth of persons in themselves and from duties. In education, talk of "values" imports ethical considerations but hints at a (...) subjectivist view of them. In the psychology and sociology of drug use, ethically thin concepts of "harm minimisation" and "selfimage" dominate discussion and distract attention from the virtue of temperance and the training of character. A more forceful assertion of an ethics based on the worth of persons in these cases would be most desirable. Arguments against objectivity in the fundamentals may be replied to by examining the parallel between ethics and the discipline whose objectivity has been least challenged by relativist arguments, mathematics. (shrink)

Vague expressions are omnipresent in natural language. As such, their use in legal texts is virtually inevitable. If a law contains vague terms, the question whether it applies to a particular case often lacks a clear answer. One of the fundamental pillars of the rule of law is legal certainty. The determinacy of the law enables people to use it as a guide and places judges in the position to decide impartially. Vagueness poses a threat to these ideals. In borderline (...) cases, the law seems to be indeterminate and thus incapable of serving its core rule of law value. -/- In the philosophy of language, vagueness has become one of the hottest topics of the last two decades. Linguists and philosophers have investigated what distinguishes "soritical " vagueness from other kinds of linguistic indeterminacy, such as ambiguity, generality, open texture, and family resemblance concepts. There is a vast literature that discusses the logical, semantic, pragmatic, and epistemic aspects of these phenomena. Legal theory has hitherto paid little attention to the differences between the various kinds of linguistic indeterminacy that are grouped under the heading of "vagueness ", let alone to the various theories that try to account for these phenomena. -/- Bringing together leading scholars working on the topic of vagueness in philosophy and in law, this book fosters a dialogue between philosophers and legal scholars by examining how philosophers conceive vagueness in law from their theoretical perspective and how legal theorists make use of philosophical theories of vagueness. The chapters of the book are organized into three parts. The first part addresses the import of different theories of vagueness for the law, referring to a wide range of theories from supervaluationist to contextualist and semantic realist accounts in order to address the question of whether the law can learn from engaging with philosophical discussions of vagueness. The second part of the book examines different vagueness phenomena. The contributions in part 2 suggest that the greater awareness to different vagueness phenomena can make lawyers aware of specific issues and solutions so far overlooked. The third part deals with the pragmatic aspects of vagueness in law, providing answers to the question of how to deal with vagueness in law and with the professional, political, moral, and ethical issues such vagueness gives rise to. (shrink)

Certain results, most famously in classical statistical mechanics and complex systems, but also in quantum mechanics and high-energy physics, yield a coarse-grained stable statistical pattern in the long run. The explanation of these results shares a common structure: the results hold for a ‘typical’ dynamics, that is, for most of the underlying dynamics. In this paper I argue that the structure of the explanation of these results might shed some light—a different light—on philosophical debates on the laws of nature. In (...) the explanation of such patterns, the specific form of the underlying dynamics is almost irrelevant. The constraints required, given a free state-space evolution, suffice to account for the coarse-grained lawful behaviour. An analysis of such constraints might thus provide a different account of how regular behaviour can occur. This paper focuses on drawing attention to this type of explanation, outlining it in the diverse areas of physics in which it appears, and discussing its limitations and significance in the tractable setting of classical statistical mechanics. (shrink)

In recent years, an active research program has emerged that aims to develop a Humean best-system account (BSA) of laws of nature that improves on Lewis’s canonical articulation of the view. Its guiding idea is that the laws are cognitive tools tailored to the specific needs and limitations of creatures like us. While current versions of this “pragmatic Humean” research program fare much better than Lewis’s account along many dimensions, I will argue that they have trouble making sense of certain (...) key features of the practice of fundamental physics. Indeed, these features seem to go against the very idea that laws are useful for agents like us. In my view, Humeans can address these issues by paying more attention to the explanatory role of laws. Following this idea, I will propose an account on which what makes a systematization the best is a kind of explanatory power, understood along the lines of the unificationist theory of explanation. The resulting view, I will argue, can make sense of those features of laws that other pragmatic accounts of laws have trouble explaining. (shrink)

The debate between natural law and positivist law has been received much attention. Ronald Dworkin exposes the limitation of positivist law through the argument of hard cases. This argument is furthered strengthened when we apply the interpretation of Martin Luther King Jr and the voluntarist natural law tradition, and Lon Fuller’s ‘procedural view’ and the application of the ‘principles of legality’.

The author discusses natural law reasoning, from the 1960s in the context of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae, to recent cultural and intellectual currents and their influence on the tradition. The challenges that have skewed acceptance of a common human nature and the existence of natural law are addressed. The author shows how the debate on contraception initiated this challenge against natural law reasoning and led to a more evolutive concept of human nature. Attention is drawn to a need (...) for natural law theorists trained in both modern science and Thomistic philosophy to engage the different scientific fields to clarify, adapt, rethink, and even modify the natural law language in accord with the latest discoveries compatitible with evolutionary findings. (shrink)

Since our moral and legal judgments are focused on our decisions and actions, one would expect information about the neural underpinnings of human decision-making and action-production to have a significant bearing on those judgments. However, despite the wealth of empirical data, and the public attention it has attracted in the past few decades, the results of neuroscientific research have had relatively little influence on legal practice. It is here argued that this is due, at least partly, to the discussion (...) on the relationship of the neurosciences and law mixing up a number of separate issues that have different relevance on our moral and legal judgments. The approach here is hierarchical; more and less feasible ways in which neuroscientific data could inform such judgments are separated from each other. The neurosciences and other physical views on human behavior and decision-making do have the potential to have an impact on our legal reasoning. However, this happens in various different ways, and too often appeal to any neural data is assumed to be automatically relevant to shaping our moral and legal judgments. Our physicalist intuitions easily favor neural-level explanations to mental-level ones. But even if you were to subscribe to some reductionist variant of physicalism, it would not follow that all neural data should be automatically relevant to our moral and legal reasoning. However, the neurosciences can give us indirect evidence for reductive physicalism, which can then lead us to challenge the very idea of free will. Such a development can, ultimately, also have repercussions on law and legal practice. (shrink)

In this ground-breaking article submitted for publication in mid-1986, Lucinda Vandervort creates a radically new and comprehensive theory of sexual consent as the unequivocal affirmative communication of voluntary agreement. She argues that consent is a social act of communication with normative effects. To consent is to waive a personal legal right to bodily integrity and relieve another person of a correlative legal duty. If the criminal law is to protect the individual’s right of sexual self-determination and physical autonomy, rather than (...) simply to regulate the type and degree of force that may be used to obtain compliance from a victim, the point of reference must be the individual complainant, as a person who makes choices, not social norms or objective tests based on the ordinary person. To determine whether consent is voluntary, attention must be directed to the presence or absence of factors that had a coercive impact on the individual complainant, a specific person with a collection of social, cultural, and psychological experiences, needs, fears, values, and priorities. Individuals have the right to exercise self-determination in accordance with their own values and perceptions, not those of a mythical victim. Accordingly, Vandervort argues that the prosecution may show either refusal, the absence of affirmative voluntary agreement (including passivity or the absence of consent due to unconsciousness), or circumstances that invalidate any apparent consent. Any of these prove the absence of consent for the purposes of establishing the actus reus of sexual assault. -/- The definition of consent as the affirmative communication of voluntary agreement is also shown to have a variety of implications for the interpretation and application of the law of sexual assault and the handling of evidentiary issues at trial in sexual assault cases. Key among these is the pivotal significance of the legal definition of consent as a tool to bar availability of the defence of “mistaken belief in consent.” Vandervort argues that in many cases the defence of “mistaken belief in consent” is based on ignorance of the law of consent, mistake about the legal definition of consent, or a failure to appreciate the legal significance of facts that are well-known, and not on a mistaken belief in an erroneous set of facts. The broad proposition asserted here is that a statutory criminal law is enforceable only if all defences based directly or indirectly on belief in the validity of extra-legal norms that authorize infringement of rights protected by the criminal law are barred. This proposition and the characterization of some mistakes about consent as legal, not factual, are also shown to be useful to exclude rape-myths and stereotypical assumptions---the stuff of which “social” definitions of consent have long been constructed---from the decision-making process at trial. -/- . (shrink)

Apart from his critique of Kant, Maimon’s significance for the history of philosophy lies in his crucial role in the rediscovery of Spinoza by the German Idealists. Specifically, Maimon initiated a change from the common eighteenth-century view of Spinoza as the great ‘atheist’ to the view of Spinoza as an ‘acosmist’, i.e., a thinker who propounded a deep, though unorthodox, religious view denying the reality of the world and taking God to be the only real being. I have discussed this (...) aspect of Maimon’s philosophy in other places, and though the topic of the current paper has an interesting relation to certain doctrines of Spinoza, I will not develop this issue here. Neither of these two issues -- Maimon’s criticism of Kant or his original interpretation of Spinoza -- was considered by Maimon as his main contribution to philosophy. There is little doubt that if Maimon were asked to point out his single most important innovation he would have picked his doctrine of the Principle of Determinability [Satz der Bestimmbarkeit]. Regarding this doctrine Maimon writes: ... [T]he principle of determinability laid down in this work is a principle of all objectively real thought, and consequently of philosophy as a whole too. All the propositions of philosophy can be derived from, and be determined by it [woraus sich alle Sätze herleiten und wodurch sie sich bestimmen lassen]. … I have made available a supreme principle of all objectively real thought, viz., the principle of determinability... and have established as the ground of the whole of pure philosophy -- a principle which, if it is ever grasped, will, I hope, withstand every scrutiny. These claims may strike the reader as somewhat presumptuous, to say the least. But, if we pay attention to the last sentence of the passage, we can see that Maimon doubts whether his great finding will ever be understood. It is not unlikely that in this phrase (“wenn er nur einmal eingesehen werden wird”) Maimon was reacting to his own repeatedly unsuccessful attempts to explain the principle. The fate of Maimon’s principle has not been much better in the few works written on Maimon’s philosophy, and though almost all commentators agree that the principle of determinability is the linchpin of the positive philosophy Maimon was trying to develop, we do not yet have a clear explanation of this principle, or of the reason why Maimon assigns such importance to it. Recently, Oded Schechter developed an excellent reading of this principle, and in most aspects my view agrees with his (primarily, in its rejecting the attempt to explain the principle as a version of Leibniz’s predicate-in-subject [Praedicatum inest subjecto] containment thesis). My paper consists of two parts. The first is expository in nature. In this part, I spell out briefly the main aspects of Maimon’s principle of determinability and its aims. In the second part, I examine Maimon’s surprising claim that once we accept the principle of determinability, we have to deny the possibility of two subjects sharing the same predicate. Maimon provides several proofs for this highly counterintuitive claim, and I will try to clarify and evaluate these proofs. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years, there has been a great deal of philosophical interest in laws of nature, perhaps because of the essential role that laws play in the formulation of, and proposed solutions to, a number of perennial philosophical problems. For example, many have thought that a satisfactory account of laws could be used to resolve thorny issues concerning explanation, causation, free-will, probability, and counterfactual truth. Moreover, interest in laws of nature is not constrained to metaphysics or philosophy of (...) science; claims about laws play essential roles in areas as diverse as the philosophy of religion (e.g., in the argument from design) and the philosophy of mind (e.g., in the formulation of Davidson’s anomalous monism). In my dissertation, I consider and reject the widely-held thesis that the facts concerning laws can be reduced to the facts concerning the particular entities that the laws “govern,” and that the laws thus have no independent existence. I instead defend a version of nomic primitivism, according to which the facts about laws cannot be reduced to facts that are themselves non-nomic – i.e., to facts that do not fundamentally involve laws, counterfactuals, causes, etc. Insofar as the truth or falsity of reductionism about laws has implications for many of the problems mentioned above, I think that this result should be of interest even to those who who do not work in metaphysics or the philosophy of science. My methodology, which I lay out and defend in Chapter One, is a version of Carnapian explication. This method emphasizes the importance of articulating and maintaining clear distinctions between (1) the vague concept (or concepts) law of nature inherent in ordinary language and scientific practice and (2) the precise analyses of “law of nature” that philosophers have proposed as potential replacements for this concept. I argue that metaphysics-as-explication has clear advantages over rival conceptions of metaphysical methodology; in particular, it allows us to formulate evaluative criteria for metaphysical claims. In Chapter Two, I offer an example of how careful attention to concepts already in use can help resolve philosophical debate. Specifically, I argue that much recent literature has mistakenly assumed that there is only one concept of “law of nature” in use, while there are in fact at least two. Strong laws are the principles pursued by fundamental physics: they are true, objective, and bear distinctive relationships to counterfactuals and explanation. Weak laws, by contrast, lack at least one of these distinctive characteristics but play central roles in both the “special sciences” and in everyday life. In Chapters Three and Four, I offer extended arguments against the two most prominent versions of reductionism about laws – Humeanism and law necessitarianism. According to philosophical Humeans, the laws of nature supervene upon the non-modal, non-nomic facts concerning the behavior of particular things at particular times and places. Law necessitarians, by contrast, argue that the laws are in fact metaphysically necessary, and that which laws there are is determined by a class of primitive, modally loaded facts concerning the essences, natures, or dispositions. I argue that both of these views are mistaken insofar as they disagree with well-entrenched scientific practices and those in favor of reductionism have failed to provided sufficient reason for thinking that these practices should be revised. Much of my argument is focused on the role played by a number of supposed methodological principles, including appeals to intuition, parsimony, and methodological naturalism. While the conclusions of this dissertation are explicitly constrained to laws, many of the arguments should be of interest to those who are concerned about philosophical methodology (especially in the role of intuition in philosophical argument) or the appropriate relation between metaphysics, science, and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Offers an original interpretation of Plato’s Laws and a new account of its enduring importance. Ballingall argues that the republican regime conceived in the Laws is built on "reverence," an archaic virtue governing emotions of self-assessment—particularly awe and shame. Ballingall demonstrates how learning to feel these emotions in the right way, at the right time, and for the right things is the necessary basis for the rule of law conceived in the dialogue. The Laws remains surprisingly neglected in the scholarly (...) literature, although this is changing. The cynical populisms haunting liberal democracies are focusing new attention on the “characterological” basis of constitutional government and Plato’s Laws remains an indispensable resource on this question, especially when we attend to the theme of reverence at its core. (shrink)

A reflection intended to orient a reading of the Laws as a whole, with special attention to the range of philosophical issues included and excluded from the Athenian's reach, as this is indicated by the dramatic context, to the vision of the god as the measure of the laws that provides the centering goal of the Athenian's labors, and to the dialectical structure of the Athenian's address to the Magnesians.

This book is the first comprehensive study of the meaning and measure of enforceability. While we have long debated what restraints should govern the conduct of our social life, we have paid relatively little attention to the question of what it means to make a restraint enforceable. Focusing on the enforceability of legal rights but also addressing the enforceability of moral rights and social conventions, Mark Reiff explains how we use punishment and compensation to make restraints operative in the (...) world. After describing the various means by which restraints may be enforced, Reiff explains how the sufficiency of enforcement can be measured, and he presents a unified theory of deterrence, retribution, and compensation that shows how these aspects of enforceability are interconnected. Reiff then applies his theory of enforceability to illuminate a variety of real-world problem situations. (shrink)

The question of whether the Pyrrhonist adheres to certain logical principles, criteria of justification, and inference rules is of central importance for the study of Pyrrhonism. Its significance lies in that, whereas the Pyrrhonist describes his philosophical stance and argues against the Dogmatists by means of what may be considered a rational discourse, adherence to any such principles, criteria, and rules does not seem compatible with the radical character of his skepticism. Hence, if the Pyrrhonist does endorse them, one must (...) conclude that he is inconsistent in his outlook. Despite its import, the question under consideration has not received, in the vast literature on Pyrrhonism of the past three decades, all the attention it deserves. In the present paper, I do not propose to provide a full examination of the Pyrrhonist’s attitude towards rationality, but to focus on the question of whether he endorses the law of non-contradiction (LNC). However, I will also briefly tackle the question of the Pyrrhonist’s outlook on both the canons of rational justification at work in the so-called Five Modes of Agrippa and the logical rules of inference. In addition, given that the LNC is deemed a fundamental principle of rationality, determining the Pyrrhonist’s attitude towards it will allow us to understand his general attitude towards rationality. (shrink)

This Article draws attention to a conceptual point that has been overlooked in recent discussions about the theoretical foundations of contract law. I argue that, rather than enforcing the obligations of promises, contract law concerns complaints against promissory wrongs. This conceptual distinction is easy to miss. If one assumes that complaints arise whenever an obligation has been violated, then the distinction does not seem meaningful. I show, however, that an obligation can be breached without giving rise to a valid (...) complaint. This Article illustrates the importance of this conceptual distinction by focusing first on the doctrine of substantive unconscionability. I claim that the doctrine can be best explained by the way in which a party who engages in exploitative behavior may lose her moral standing to complain. It is because such a party has lost her moral standing to complain that the law, through unconscionability doctrine, bars her from bringing a legal complaint. This explanation avoids the oft-issued charge of paternalism and it also offers benefits over an alternative state-oriented account developed recently by Seana Shiffrin. Using the conceptual distinction behind this account of unconscionability, this Article further argues that recent theoretical debates about the relationship between contract law and morality have been largely misconceived. Those debates have focused on whether contract law and morality impose parallel obligations. Once one appreciates the difference between imposing obligations and recognizing complaints, the comparison looks quite different. Contract law recognizes valid complaints against broken promises, much as morality recognizes moral complaints. (shrink)

This paper seeks to identify the distinctive moral wrong of stalking and argues that this wrong is serious enough to criminalize. We draw on psychological literature about stalking, distinguishing types of stalkers, their pathologies, and victims. The victimology is the basis for claims about what is wrong with stalking. Close attention to the experiences of victims often reveals an obsessive preoccupation with the stalker and what he will do next. The kind of harm this does is best understood in (...) relation to the value of privacy and conventionally protected zones of privacy. We compare anti-stalking laws in different jurisdictions, claiming that they all fail in some way to capture the distinctive privacy violation that stalking involves. Further reflection on the seriousness of the invasion of privacy it represents suggests that it is a deeply personal wrong. Indeed, it is usually more serious than obtrusive surveillance by states, precisely because it is more personal. Where state surveillance genuinely is as intrusive as stalking, it tends to adopt the tactics of the stalker, imposing its presence on the activist victim at every turn. Power dynamics —whether rooted in the power of the state or the violence of a stalker —may exacerbate violations of privacy, but the wrong is distinct from violence, threats of violence and other aggression. Nor is stalking a simple expression of a difference in power between stalker and victim, such as a difference due to gender. (shrink)

In the ‘Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic’ of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant contends that the idea of God has a positive regulative role in the systematization of empirical knowledge. But why is this regulative role assigned to this specific idea? Kant’s account is rather opaque and this question has also not received much attention in the literature. In this paper I argue that an adequate understanding of the regulative role of the idea of God depends on the (...) specific metaphysical content Kant attributes to it in the Critique and other writings. I show that neither a heuristic principle of conceptual systematicity, nor conceiving God as a hypothesis of an intelligent designer, can satisfy the demands of reason to make the unity and necessity of the laws of nature intelligible. Regarding the positive account about the metaphysical content of the idea of God, I support my argument by referring to Kant’s pre-critical discussion of the usefulness of the conception of God for the project of science, and by expounding Kant’s critical account of the necessity of the laws of nature. Thus my account sheds light on the continuity of Kant’s conception of God and his appropriation of his own rationalistic metaphysics. (shrink)

We reconstruct Kuhn’s philosophy of measurement and data paying special attention to what he calls the “fifth law of thermodynamics”. According to this "law," there will always be discrepancies between experimental results and scientists’ prior expectations. The history of experiments to determine the values of the fundamental constants offers a striking illustration of Kuhn’s fifth law of thermodynamics, with no experiment giving quite the expected result. We highlight the synergy between Kuhn’s view and the systematic project of iteratively determining (...) the value of physical constants, initiated by spectroscopist Raymond Birge, that was ongoing when Kuhn joined Berkeley in 1956. Our analysis sheds light on various underappreciated aspects of Kuhn’s thought, especially his notion of progress as improvement in measurement accuracy. (shrink)

Reasoning by default is a relevant aspect of everyday life that has traditionally attracted the attention of many fields of research, from psychology to the philosophy of logic, from economics to artificial intelligence. Also in the field of law, default reasoning is widely used by lawyers, judges and other legal decision-makers. In this paper, a philosopher of language (Carlo Penco) and a philosopher of law (Damiano Canale) attempt to explore some uses of default reasoning that are scarcely considered by (...) legal theory. In particular, the dialogue dwells on the notion of literal meaning, witness testimony, and the problem of disagreement among experts in legal proceedings. The paper is intended as a sort of brain storming useful to identify new lines of research straddling philosophy of law, cognitive psychology and philosophy of language. (shrink)

We address the question of whether it is possible to operate a time machine by manipulating matter and energy so as to manufacture closed timelike curves. This question has received a great deal of attention in the physics literature, with attempts to prove no- go theorems based on classical general relativity and various hybrid theories serving as steps along the way towards quantum gravity. Despite the effort put into these no-go theorems, there is no widely accepted definition of a (...) time machine. We explain the conundrum that must be faced in providing a satisfactory definition and propose a resolution. Roughly, we require that all extensions of the time machine region contain closed timelike curves; the actions of the time machine operator are then sufficiently "potent" to guarantee that closed timelike curves appear. We then review no-go theorems based on classical general relativity, semi-classical quantum gravity, quantum field theory on curved spacetime, and Euclidean quantum gravity. Our verdict on the question of our title is that no result of sufficient generality to underwrite a confident "yes" has been proven. Our review of the no-go results does, however, highlight several foundational problems at the intersection of general relativity and quantum physics that lend substance to the search for an answer. (shrink)

The publication of Guido Calabresi’s book “The Future of Law and Economics” has drawn a substantial amount of attention among law and economics scholars. We thought that the best way to devote special attention to this book was to devote a Special issue to it. This article situates Calabresi’s book among other reflections on the future of the discipline, introduces and explains the reasons behind this Special issue and discuss the organization and content of it. -/- We emphasize (...) how Calabresi’s historical-conceptual standpoint allows him to isolate the stakes of different future developments around the question of how could further appreciation of legal institutions that defy the standard economic assumptions help the field develop theoretically. Overall, the contributors all shared Calabresi’s attempt to restore the balance between Law and Economics and the need to better account for the “whole unanalysed experience of human race”, often neglected by the Economic Analysis of Law approach. Most disagreements are about the ‘how’. In any case, the search for the Law and Economics ‘not (yet) taken’ or for other “Law and … ” approaches is always open to the Future. (shrink)

Much scholarly attention has recently been devoted to ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) might weaken formal political democracy, but little attention has been devoted to the effect of AI on “cultural democracy”—that is, democratic control over the forms of life, aesthetic values, and conceptions of the good that circulate in a society. This work is the first to consider in detail the dangers that AI-driven cultural recommendations pose to cultural democracy. This Article argues that AI threatens to (...) weaken cultural democracy by undermining individuals’ direct and spontaneous engagement with a diverse range of cultural materials. It further contends that United States law, in its present form, is ill equipped to address these challenges, and suggests several strategies for better regulating culture-mediating AI. Finally, it argues that while such regulations might run afoul of contemporary First Amendment doctrine, the most normatively attractive interpretation of the First Amendment not only allows but encourages such interventions. (shrink)

My goal in this paper is to argue that the principled approach to hearsay is consistent with the rule of law. I begin by contrasting an instrumental conception of the rule of law with a conception that views the rule of law in primarily normative terms. I then turn my attention to a recent criticism of the Supreme Court of Canada’s principled approach to hearsay and suggest that if Michael Oakeshott’s normative interpretation of the rule of law is adopted, (...) there is no tension between the principled approach to hearsay and the rule of law. (shrink)

We draw attention to a series of implicit assumptions that have structured the debate about Frege’s Puzzle. Once these assumptions are made explicit, we rely on them to show that if one focuses exclusively on the issues raised by Frege cases, then one obtains a powerful consideration against a fine-grained conception of propositional-attitude content. In light of this consideration, a form of Russellianism about content becomes viable.

Despite the attention equality before the law has received, both laudatory and critical, peculiarly little has been done to precisely define it. The first ambition of this paper is to remedy this, by exploring the various ways in which a principle of equality before the law can be understood and suggest a concise definition. With a clearer understanding of the principle in hand we are better equipped to assess traditional critique of the principle. Doing so is the second ambition (...) of this paper. I will argue that traditional criticisms are unpersuasive, but that there is a different, powerful argument against equality before the law. The third ambition of the paper is to argue that there is a sense, overlooked by both proponents and critics, in which the principle still captures something important, albeit at the cost of shifting from intrinsic to instrumental value. (shrink)

The role that the desire for self‐worth plays in international relations has become a prominent topic in contemporary political theory. Contemporary accounts are based on the notion of national self‐worth as a function of status; therefore, the desire for national self‐worth is seen as a source of anxiety and conflict over status. By contrast, according to Christian Wolff, there exists a duty to take care that both one's own and other political communities deserve to be esteemed. In his view, this (...) duty is grounded in the duty of self‐perfection because the qualities for which communities deserve to be esteemed are those that promote the self‐perfection of individuals. From this perspective, he argues that duties of esteem toward political communities should not be seen as an outcome of power relations but rather as an outcome of the fulfillment of functions of the law of peoples. Wolff's line of argument draws attention to the possibility that anger over a violation of the desire for honor could be mistaken for an expression of specific culture‐specific sensitivities, while what really may be expressed is a diverging interpretation of the implications of dependence in international relations. (shrink)

The following article was written to honour Johan Buitendag’s contribution to the discipline of eco-theology. Assuming an interdisciplinary stance, eco-theology in general and his work, in particular, is observed from the position of legal theory and sociology. As such, eco-theology is not assessed on theological grounds but is treated interdisciplinary through comparison with environmental law. More specifically, the project of eco-theology is shown to share certain characteristics with the nascent subdiscipline of Earth systems law within environmental law. It is argued (...) that one of the most important of these is the use of norms as an ecological strategy. This is understandable as both the religious and legal systems rely on the norm form to a lesser or greater extent. However, in the legal sociology of systems theory, the shortcomings of norms have been eloquently argued. This article thus posits the limits of norms to eco-theology and Earth systems law as a challenge deserving attention. However, social systems theory has its shortcomings, and a preliminary line of flight away from this challenge is suggested in the shape of Agamben’s description of the monastic form-of-life, where life and norm overlap so intensely that suggestions of a new worldview gain plausibility. (shrink)

The idea of permit trading in the United States can be traced as far back as the 1970s, but emissions trading has really only became a popular and exportable idea with the more recent demands that environmental protection acknowledge economic pressures through such ideas as sustainable development. Now the idea of emissions trading has caught on in South America, China and Europe as well. Yet in the eagerness of governments and industry to work out the technical details and legal mechanics (...) of the emissions trading tool, insufficient attention has been paid to its underlying legal and ethical assumptions. In this article, it is emphasized that emissions trading is a part of compliance with environmental law, not a market alternative to compliance. The difference between the two greatly effects and is affected by theories of rights. As part of the scheme of rights and accompanying duties, the author questions whether an implicit right to pollute has been created through emissions trading, as exemplified by the comparison of the systems in the U.S., China and Europe. (shrink)

This article discloses topical issues of the need for constant monitoring of changes in the business activity in enterprise structures. The main purpose of the study is to monitor the business activity of industrial enterprise structures of Ukraine to predict their development under martial law. A critical analysis of the content of scientific publications to solve the problem of improving the management of business activity of business structures revealed the lack of attention of scientists to the problems under study. (...) The relevance of its solution is due to the scale of the impact of military conflicts on the business activity in enterprise structures, which requires its monitoring to further establish the state and ensure compliance of the business with the norms that are considered necessary to maintain a certain level of stability of development or to survive, to determine areas where the business can improve its activities and become more profitable. The methodological basis is the system of methods used to obtain the final results of the study: theoretical generalization – to deepen the essence of the concept of «monitoring business activity»; analysis, synthesis and logical generalization – to obtain conclusions during monitoring of business confidence and business climate in industry; prognostic – to predict the development of industrial business structures of Ukraine under martial law. The object of research in the work is the business activity of business structures. The article presents the results of monitoring business confidence and business climate in the industry of Ukraine under martial law. Analysis, synthesis and logical generalization of monitoring results became the basis for further forecasting the development of business structures. The results of the study can be useful for business structures that seek to maintain a certain level of stability of development and identify areas of improvement. (shrink)

Legal philosophers and property scholars sometimes disagree over one or more of the following: the meaning of the word 'property,' the concept of property, and the nature of property. For much of the twentieth century, the work of W.N. Hohfeld and Tony Honoré represented a consensus around property. The consensus often went under the heading of property as bundle of rights, or more accurately as a set of normative relations between persons with respect to things. But by the mid-l 990s, (...) the consensus was under attack. Key figures in the attack were James Penner, a legal philosopher, and Thomas W. Merrill and Henry E. Smith, two highly regarded professors of property law. This article aims to repel the attack and argues for property as a set of normative relations between persons with respect to things. The positive case for this view of property pays special attention to the philosophy of language and the analysis of concepts. The positive case also maintains that the right to use and the power to transfer are as central to property as the right to exclude. It is possible that the virtues of Smith's modular theory of property differ from the virtues of a well-crafted bundle theory. Indeed, it may be the case that these two theories throw light on different features of property law and are not, save at the margin, competitors with each other. The label 'new essentialism' sometimes applied to the work of Penner, Merrill, and Smith seems inapt if property does not have an essence. Of course, they might refuse the label. (shrink)

The papers of this special issue are the outcome of a two-­‐day conference entitled “The Second-­‐Person Standpoint in Law and Morality,” that took place at the University of Vienna in March 2013 and was organized by the ERC Advanced Research Grant “Distortions of Normativity.” -/- The aim of the conference was to explore and discuss Stephen Darwall’s innovative and influential second-­‐personal account of foundational moral concepts such as „obligation“, „responsibility“, and „rights“, as developed in his book The Second-­‐Person Standpoint: Morality, (...) Respect, and Accountability (Harvard University Press 2006) and further elaborated in Morality, Authority and Law: Essays in Second-­‐Personal Ethics I and Honor, History, and Relationships: Essays in Second-­‐Personal Ethics II (both Oxford University Press 2013). -/- With the second-­‐person standpoint Darwall refers to the unique conceptual normative space that practical deliberators and agents occupy when they address claims and demands to one another (and to themselves). The very first sentence of Darwall’s examination of the second-­‐personal conceptual paradigm summarizes the gist of the argument succinctly when he claims that “the second-­‐person standpoint [is] the perspective that you and I take up when we make and acknowledge claims on one another’s conduct and will.” (Darwall 2006, 3) The Second-­‐Person Standpoint reminds us that this perspective has been ignored for much too long and that it better take centre stage in any philosophical analysis of moral phenomena, in order to yield a satisfying account of morality as a social institution. The negative part of Darwall’s strategy is to show that neither a purely first-­‐personal approach (represented by Kant and contemporary Kantians), nor a third-­‐personal state-­‐of-­‐affairs-­‐perspective (represented by most varieties of contemporary consequentialism) are capable of accounting for the categorical bindingness characteristic of moral obligation. The latter feat can only be accomplished, and this is the positive part of Darwall’s argument, when those second-­‐ personal normative “felicity conditions” and conceptual presuppositions are acknowledged and spelled out that are already presupposed in every instance of issuing (putatively valid) claims and demands. It is especially second-­‐personal competence and second-­‐personal authority that are the bedrock of these normative conceptual presuppositions, without which engaging in any meaningful address would be impossible. Kantians and utilitarians alike have neglected this critical dimension of the normative landscape. -/- In addition to working out an original conception of moral obligation, the first eight chapters of The Second-­‐Person Standpoint articulate this fundamental insight with respect to a variety of traditional projects in ethical theory such as developing accounts of moral responsibility, rights, dignity, and autonomy. In this context, special emphasis is to be awarded, on the one hand, to Darwall’s refreshing second-­‐personal interpretation of Strawson’s influential account of reactive attitudes and moral responsibility and, on the other, to his historically well-­‐informed reconstruction of Samuel Pufendorf’s often neglected version of an enlightened theistic voluntarism concerning moral authority. Darwall dedicates the second part of The Second-­‐Person Standpoint to the urgent question: how should one respond to the sceptical challenge that expresses utter indifference to the second-­‐person standpoint, including all its multifarious normative presuppositions and implications? What commits us to all this? It is at this point that Darwall, firstly, refines his criticisms of the Kantian, first-­‐personal, paradigm of normativity and emphasizes that only if one already incorporates the second-­‐personal conceptual apparatus into a Kantian analysis of moral obligation is the latter going to yield a convincing account. Secondly, and this certainly is one of the highlights of Darwall’s theory, the Second-­‐Person Standpoint employs themes from Fichte’s philosophy of right in order to strengthen the case for the inescapability of taking up the second-­‐person standpoint of moral obligation. In his contribution for this special issue Darwall further develops his diagnosis that Fichte’s thought offers in many respects a more promising, since more second-­‐personal, foundation of morality than, for example, Kant’s. -/- By now, the impact of Darwall’s second-­‐person standpoint theory has far transcended the confines of contemporary debates on moral obligation. Darwall has put to use the second-­‐personal apparatus to critical engagements with Joseph Raz’s theory of legal authority and Derek Parfit’s convergence arguments for his recent Triple Theory of moral wrongness. The constant theme that unifies all these diverse applications remains the one so impressively presented in The Second-­‐Person Standpoint: without paying attention to the “interdefinable” and “irreducible” circle of (four) foundational second-­‐ personal concepts (valid demand, practical authority, second-­‐personal reason, and accountability), neither superior epistemic status (Raz) nor the identification of optimific states of affairs (Parfit) are potent enough sources to generate anything close to the authority relationships that underlie the idea involved in obligating ourselves and one another. Given all of the above, it comes as no surprise that Darwall reserves his strongest sympathies for a specific ethical theory, namely contractualism. Our commitment to equal basic second-­‐personal authority, that Darwall arrives at through his Fichtean rectification of the Kantian project, leads him to the endorsement of a contractualist paradigm in the spirit of broadly Rawls and Scanlon. -/- . (shrink)

In this monograph, the authors summarized and supplemented the results of many scientific justifications and developments. Considerable attention is paid to the study of accounting and taxation issues in the context of modern management concepts and risks of martial law in Ukraine.

Laws of nature are sometimes said to govern their instances. Spelling out what governance is, however, is an important task that has only recently received sustained philosophical attention. In the first part of this paper, I argue against the two prominent reductive views of governance—modal views and grounding views. Ruling out the promising candidates for reduction supports the claim that governance is sui generis. In the second part of this paper, I argue that governance is subject to a contingency (...) requirement. Laws govern their instances only if those instances are metaphysically contingent. I end by defending the resulting account of governance from two potential objections. (shrink)

According to the governing conception of the laws of nature, laws, in some sense, determine concrete goings-on. Just how to understand the sort of determination at play in governance is, however, a substantial question. One potential answer to this question, which has recently received some attention, is that laws govern by grounding what happens in the concrete world. If this account succeeded, it would show that governance can be understood in terms of an independently motivated and widely accepted notion. (...) Thus far, though, the grounding conception of governance has not been developed or evaluated in detail. In this paper, I fill this gap by mapping out and evaluating various possible ways of developing this conception of governance. My main conclusion is that the grounding conception runs into serious difficulties in trying to capture the key idea that governing laws determine the distribution of fundamental property instances. (shrink)

Much recent philosophy of physics has investigated the process of symmetry breaking. Here, I critically assess the alleged symmetry restoration at the fundamental scale. I draw attention to the contingency that gauge symmetries exhibit, that is, the fact that they have been chosen from an infinite space of possibilities. I appeal to this feature of group theory to argue that any metaphysical account of fundamental laws that expects symmetry restoration up to the fundamental level is not fully satisfactory. This (...) is a symmetry argument in line with Curie’s first principle. Further, I argue that this same feature of group theory helps to explain the ‘unreasonable’ effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and that it reduces the philosophical significance that has been attributed to the objectivity of gauge symmetries. (shrink)

“Bodily autonomy” has received significant attention in bioethics, medical ethics, and medical law in terms of the general inviolability of a patient’s bodily sovereignty and the rights of patients to make choices (e.g., reproductive choices) that concern their own body. However, the role of the body in terms of how it can or does contribute to a patient’s capacity for, or exercises of their autonomy in clinical decision-making situations has not been explicitly addressed. The approach to autonomy in this (...) paper is aligned with traditional theories that conceive autonomy in terms of an individual’s capacities for, and exercises of rational reflection. However, at the same time, this paper extends these accounts by arguing that autonomy is, in part, embodied. Specifically, by drawing on phenomenological conceptions of the experience of autonomy, we argue that, in principle, the body is a necessary component of the capacity for autonomy. Secondly, through the presentation of two different cases, we highlight ways in which a patient’s body can contribute to the autonomy of treatment choices. Ultimately, we hope to encourage others to explore additional conditions under which a concept of embodied autonomy should be employed in medical decision making, how its underlying principles might be operationalised in clinical situations, and its consequences for approaches to patient autonomy in healthcare practice, policy, and law. (shrink)

Legal positivists maintain that the legality of a rule is fundamentally determined by social facts. Yet for much of legal history, ordinary officials used legal terminology in ways that seem inconsistent with positivism. Judges regularly cited, analyzed, and predicated their decisions on the ‘laws of justice’ which they claimed had universal legal import. This practice, though well-documented by historians, has received surprisingly little philosophical attention; I argue that it invites explanation from positivists. After taxonomizing the positivist’s explanatory options, I (...) suggest that the most viable option appeals to conceptual change: classical Romans, early modern Europeans, founding-era Americans were not using ‘law’ (or ‘lex’ or ‘jus’) to refer to the subject matter of contemporary legal philosophy. But the strategy is costly. It renders positivism’s truth surprisingly parochial. And it supplies new reasons for doubting positivist accounts of contemporary practices, including the treatment of moral principles in modern adjudication. (shrink)

Analyses of factual causation face perennial problems, including preemption, overdetermination, and omissions. Arguably, the thorniest, are cases of omissive overdetermination, involving two independent omissions, each sufficient for the harm, and neither, independently, making a difference. A famous example is Saunders, where pedestrian was hit by a driver of a rental car who never pressed on the (unbeknownst to the driver) defective (and, negligently, never inspected) brakes. Causal intuitions in such cases are messy, reflected in disagreement about which omission mattered. What (...) these analyses mistakenly take for granted, is that at issue is the 'efficacy' of each omission. I argue, on the contrary, the puzzle of omissive overdetermination favors taking the act/omission distinction seriously. Factual causation, properly understood precludes omissions (i.e. omissions are not causal). Of course, the law also attaches liability to omissions, but this works differently from liability for real causes (e.g. omissions have a duty requirement, they also respond differentially to difference-making considerations). The manner in which liability attaches for omissions differs from that of straightforward causal liability, and is entirely dependent on the underlying causal structure. Attention to that structure (e.g. that the driver's hitting the pedestrian with his car is what actually caused the injury) sheds light on which omissions matter (e.g. driver's failure to press on the brakes) and why (because that failure removes a defense the driver would have to liability for the accident he caused). Other cases, where the parties' connection is entirely omissive (e.g. two physicians fail to detect independently lethal conditions), come out differently (tracking moralized elements). The analysis offered makes better sense of both why omissive determination cases are puzzling and how to resolve them. (shrink)

Attention has turned from Hobbes the systematic thinker to his inconsistencies, as the essays in the Hobbes symposium published in the recent volume of Political Theory suggest. Deborah Baumgold, in “The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation,” shifted the focus to “the history of the book,” and Hobbes’s method of serial composition and peripatetic insertion, as a major source of his inconsistency. Accepting Baumgold’s method, the author argues that the manner of composition does not necessarily determine content and that fundamental paradoxes (...) in Hobbes’s work have a different provenance, for which there are also contextual answers. Hobbes was a courtier’s client, but one committed early to a materialist ontology and epistemology, and these commitments shackled him in treating the immediate political questions with which he was required to deal, leading to systemic paradoxes in his treatment of natural law, liberty, authorization, and consent. (shrink)

Stephen Jay Gould argued that replaying the ‘tape of life’ would result in radically different evolutionary outcomes. Recently, biologists and philosophers of science have paid increasing attention to the theoretical importance of convergent evolution—the independent origination of similar biological forms and functions—which many interpret as evidence against Gould’s thesis. In this paper, we examine the evidentiary relevance of convergent evolution for the radical contingency debate. We show that under the right conditions, episodes of convergent evolution can constitute valid natural (...) experiments that support inferences regarding the deep counterfactual stability of macroevolutionary outcomes. However, we argue that proponents of convergence have problematically lumped causally heterogeneous phenomena into a single evidentiary basket, in effect treating all convergent events as if they are of equivalent theoretical import. As a result, the ‘critique from convergent evolution’ fails to engage with key claims of the radical contingency thesis. To remedy this, we develop ways to break down the heterogeneous set of convergent events based on the nature of the generalizations they support. Adopting this more nuanced approach to convergent evolution allows us to differentiate iterated evolutionary outcomes that are probably common among alternative evolutionary histories and subject to law-like generalizations, from those that do little to undermine and may even support, the Gouldian view of life. (shrink)

The ideas that law is (or can be regarded as) a legal system, and that law evolves over time in adaptation to its context, are two of the most widely shared and presupposed ideas in contemporary legal theory. However, even if much interest has been dedicated in legal theory and legal dogmatics to the evolution of specific legal concepts or institutions, as well as legal norms in particular, not so much attention has been dedicated to the evolution of legal (...) systems in themselves. In this chapter, I will try to offer an overview of the evolution of the concept of legal system and critically analyse whether an evolutionary theory of legal systems - i.e., a theory about the evolution of legal systems - can be reconstructed and laid down for the analysis both of the past, the present, and the future of legal systems. (shrink)

How can the law be characterized in a theory of collective intentionality that treats collective intentionality as essentially layered and tries to understand these layers in terms of the structure and the format of the representations involved? And can such a theory of collective intentionality open up new perspectives on the law and shed new light on traditional questions of legal philosophy? As a philosopher of collective intentionality who is new to legal philosophy, I want to begin exploring these questions (...) in this paper. I will try to characterize the law in terms of the layered account of collective intentionality that I have introduced in some earlier writings (Schmitz 2013; 2018). In the light of this account I will then discuss a traditional question in the philosophy of law: the relation between law and morality. I begin by giving a brief sketch of the layered account in the next section. Collective intentionality should be understood in terms of experiencing and representing others as co-subjects, rather than as objects, of intentional states and acts on different layers or levels. I distinguish the nonconceptual layer of the joint sensory-motor-emotional intentionality of joint attention and joint bodily action, the conceptual level of shared we-mode beliefs, intentions, obligations, values, and so on, and the institutional level characterized through role differentiation, positions taken in role-mode, e.g. as a judge or attorney, and writing and other forms of documentation. In the third section I introduce a set of parameters for representations such as their degree of richness, of context-dependence, of density and differentiation of representational role and of durability and stability, which can be used to more precisely distinguish different layers. I also put forward the hypothesis that these properties are connected and tend to cluster, and that higher levels can only function and determine conditions of satisfaction against lower level ones. In the fourth and final section I critically discuss the sharp positivistic separation of morality and the law according to which whether something is a law is completely independent of its moral merits. I argue that this only seems plausible if we take an observational stance towards the law, but not towards morality. When we treat them the same way, it rather appears that the moral attitudes of the co-subjects of a society will determine whether and to what extent they will accept its legal order. I conclude by proposing to think of the law as being itself an institutionalized form of morality. (shrink)

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse approaches to the sharing economy from the perspective of public policy science. In the first part of the text, attention is paid to perceiving the development of the emerging sharing economy not only as phenomenon with positive economic effects but also as a set of public problems (e.g., on the labour market and for existing economic structures) that require intervention at the level of national governments as well as at international level. (...) Subsequent sections identify possible actions for regulating the development of the sharing economy. The role of soft law, stakeholders’ networks, self-regulation and standardisation are discussed in the chapter. The summary includes potential directions for further research. (shrink)

It does not seem particularly daring to say that one objective of science education is to enable students to understand different phenomena in the world in their mutual relationship. This is roughly equivalent to promoting knowledge of scientific explanations, which involve resorting to regular relationships between certain phenomena and which, certainly, is different from knowledge of this or that type of event taken in isolation. In this text, we will draw attention to two opposing tendencies that, however, tend towards (...) the common result of hindering the achievement of such an objective. On the one hand, we find characterizations of scientific explanation that assimilate it to argumentation and, therefore, lose sight of what specifically makes explanations explanatory; that is, they ask too little of a scientific explanation. On the other hand, those that consider paradigmatic cases of scientific explanation −such as those achieved by subsuming phenomena such as tides to Newton's laws− do not really constitute explanations but merely descriptions; it is about asking too much of an explanation here. We will therefore point out that a greater attention to the elaborations provided by the philosophy of science about the notion of explanation is crucial to better serve educational purposes. (shrink)

Autonomous weapons systems (AWS), sometimes referred to as “killer robots”, are receiving evermore attention, both in public discourse as well as by scholars and policymakers. Much of this interest is connected with emerging ethical and legal problems linked to increasing autonomy in weapons systems, but there is a general underappreciation for the ways in which existing law might impact on these new technologies. In this paper, we argue that as AWS become more sophisticated and increasingly more capable than flesh-and-blood (...) soldiers, it will increasingly be the case that such soldiers are “in the power” of those AWS which fight against them. This implies that such soldiers ought to be considered hors de combat, and not targeted. In arguing for this point, we draw out a broader conclusion regarding hors de combat status, namely that it must be viewed contextually, with close reference to the capabilities of combatants on both sides of any discreet engagement. Given this point, and the fact that AWS may come in many shapes and sizes, and can be made for many different missions, we argue that each particular AWS will likely need its own standard for when enemy soldiers are deemed hors de combat. We conclude by examining how these nuanced views of hors de combat status might impact on meaningful human control of AWS. (shrink)