The spinal cord provides an alternative model for nerve tissue grafting experiments. Anatomo-functional correlations are easier to make here than in any other region of the CNS because of a direct implication of spinal cord neurons in sensorimotor activities. Lesions can be easily performed to isolate spinal cord neurons from descending inputs. The anatomy of descending monoaminergic systems is well defined and these systems offer a favourable paradigm for lesion-graft experiments.

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can’t see it One in four American workers says their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers’ speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, (...) recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the concept of evil in the works of early modern rationalists—especially Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Prior to the seventeenth century, there was a consensus among medieval Christians that evil was a privation of goodness. By the eighteenth century, privation theory had been mostly abandoned by leading theists. How and why did this conceptual shift occur? I first explore the nature and role of privation theory in medieval accounts of evil. I then turn to the early modern (...) criticisms of this once dominant concept of evil and trace its abandonment. I conclude by wondering whether the early modern eclipse of privation theory has been wholly salutary for theists. (shrink)

The role of private food standards in agriculture is increasingly raising questions of legitimacy, particularly in light of the impacts such standards may have on food producers. While much work has been carried out at a macro policy level for developing countries, there have been relatively few empirical case studies that focus on particular food supply chains, and even fewer studies still of the impact of private standards on developed countries such as Australia. This study seeks to address (...) this imbalance, with a particular focus on examining the impact of private standards on an Australian vegetable supply food system in North Tasmania as well as tracing the impact of perceived and actual power relations among actors. Applying a governance framework and adopting a Foucauldian position we show that private standards are a “technology of power” that have risen out of a crisis discourse in the mid-1990s about on-farm food safety. Private standards have the effect of using knowledge from particular actors to establish truths about good agricultural practice (GAP), however we show that Tasmanian vegetable growers are not docile bodies and are employing alternative knowledge and technologies of power to challenge how GAP is implemented on-farm. (shrink)

Why government outsourcing of public powers is making us less free Many governmental functions today—from the management of prisons and welfare offices to warfare and financial regulation—are outsourced to private entities. Education and health care are funded in part through private philanthropy rather than taxation. Can a privatized government rule legitimately? The Privatized State argues that it cannot. In this boldly provocative book, Chiara Cordelli argues that privatization constitutes a regression to a precivil condition—what philosophers centuries ago called (...) "a state of nature." Developing a compelling case for the democratic state and its administrative apparatus, she shows how privatization reproduces the very same defects that Enlightenment thinkers attributed to the precivil condition, and which only properly constituted political institutions can overcome—defects such as provisional justice, undue dependence, and unfreedom. Cordelli advocates for constitutional limits on privatization and a more democratic system of public administration, and lays out the central responsibilities of private actors in contexts where governance is already extensively privatized. Charting a way forward, she presents a new conceptual account of political representation and novel philosophical theories of democratic authority and legitimate lawmaking. The Privatized State shows how privatization undermines the very reason political institutions exist in the first place, and advocates for a new way of administering public affairs that is more democratic and just. (shrink)

The cases of corruption reported by the media tend almost always to involve a private party (a citizen or a corporation) that pays, or promises to pay, money to a public party (a politician or a public official, for example) in order to obtain an advantage or avoid a disadvantage. Because of the harm it does to economic efficiency and growth, and because of its social, political and ethical consequences, private-to-public corruption has been widely studied. Private-to-private (...) corruption, by contrast, has been relatively neglected and only recently has started to receive the attention it deserves. The purpose of this paper is to offer some thoughts on the nature and importance of private-to-private corruption; the legal treatment it receives in some of the world''s leading countries; and the measures that companies can take to combat it, with special consideration of its ethical aspects. (shrink)

Privatization of state services has been a flashpoint for political conflict over the past several decades. The goal of this paper is to explain why someone who is a supporter of the welfare state might also support the privatization of certain state services, in certain cases. Recent philosophical literature has focused on the most problematic privatization initiatives, especially the introduction of private prisons and military contractors. As a counterpoint, this paper describes a set of anodyne privatizations, understood as privatizations (...) that no reasonable person could object to. The key step in this analysis involves showing that privatization is not a unitary phenomenon. There are different types of privatization, different degrees of privatization, and also different motives for privatization. There are also important normative differences between these initiatives, which might lead a reasonable person to support some but not others. (shrink)

It’s natural to think of acts of solidarity as being public acts that aim at good outcomes, particularly at social change. I argue that not all acts of solidarity fit this mold - acts of what I call ‘private solidarity’ are not public and do not aim at producing social change. After describing paradigmatic cases of private solidarity, I defend an account of why such acts are themselves morally virtuous and what role they can have in moral development.

A private property right is a collection of particular rights that relate to the control of an object. The ground for such moral rights rests on the value of project pursuit. It does so because the individual ownership of particular objects is intimately related to the formation and application of a coherent set of projects that are the major parts of a self-shaped life. Problems arise in explaining how unowned property is appropriated. Unilateral acts with regard to an object, (...) e.g., mixing in one’s labor into it, probably don’t ground particular rights to private property. Nor do bilateral contracts since a stable pre-institutional contract with regard to appropriation is not likely to form. However, a conventional method of appropriation can allow for such appropriation while at the same time preserving the pre-institutional nature of such rights. This theory can also account for a person’s property rights in her own body. However, the value of project formation requires that persons have at least some private property that is to serve as the object of their projects. These positive rights to property undermine the libertarian claim that all non-commitment-based rights are negative. However, a further empirical argument is needed in order to justify protecting these positive moral rights to private property by positive legal rights. (shrink)

Concerns about censorship have once again reached a fever pitch across the liberal West. In other historical periods, such concerns may have marked reactions to book bans and burnings. Often, they followed prosecutions and subsequent jailtime for things spoken or written. During the Red Scare, they were the hushed response to chilling state-sponsored watch-lists and employer-supported blacklists designed to ensure victory against communism. Against this history, complaints about the new censorship appear differently. With respect to the new censorship, there are (...) no books burnings, no prosecutions, no laws or committees. Indeed, there is no coercive state involvement at all. With a few notable exceptions, complaints about censorship in the 21st-century West are complaints about the behavior of private parties: social groups, employers, media conglomerates, social media platforms, and search engines. -/- To better understand the concerns surrounding nonstate interference with speech, Private Censorship offers an account of censorship, as well as an assessment of the ethical and political issues it raises across contexts. J.P. Messina asks and variously answers questions like: what should we think when employees get fired for things they say and how might patterns of such firings create a climate of fear inimical to free inquiry? When is it appropriate for social media firms to deplatform users, and what does it mean for our democracy that those in charge of such decisions are often wealthy Silicon Valley executives? Do search engines act as massive gatekeepers to information in troubling ways, and how might they be constrained, if they do? Along the way, Messina casts a critical eye on many popular proposals for responding to these complaints. Unlike these popular approaches, Private Censorship foregrounds the importance of rights to property, association, and free expression for thinking well about 21st-century censorship concerns. (shrink)

After the digital revolution, quality journalism is more necessary than ever. And yet, journalism is undergoing an unprecedented economic crisis precisely because the digital revolution led its advertisement-based funding system to collapse. How can we save journalism as a key institution for upholding the quality of democratic deliberation? Most approaches to this question focus either on media literacy campaigns, restricting the dissemination of disinformation, or fostering public media. This article explores another, largely neglected approach: the civic strategy in media policy, (...) which consists of distributing public funds among private news media through democratic allocation mechanisms. Civic media policies promise to create a more democratic media system, enhance media pluralism, and, crucially, secure robust funding for quality journalism. To examine how they might do so, I assess the four main proposals within this civic paradigm: Cagé’s proposal to create ‘nonprofit media organizations’, Latham’s ‘voter-funded media’ system, Ackerman’s ‘internet news voucher’, and McChesney and Nichols’ ‘citizenship news voucher’. Drawing on a critical examination of these proposals, I extract some lessons for designing more effective civic media policies in the future. (shrink)

In Aristotle’s account of change, lacking a form is called privation (Physics I.7 191a14). For example, someone takes on the form of being musical only from previously having the privation of being unmusical. However, he also states that “shape and nature are spoken of in two ways, for the privation too is in a way form” (Physics II.1 193b19). I will demonstrate that these seemingly contradictory statements are not actually in tension. Since all perceptible matter must be enformed, we would (...) have trouble discussing things that have yet to undergo generation, like menstrual fluid, and things that have undergone corruption, like corpses, if we did not cite the privation as a sort of form. I will argue that, given his commitment to hylomorphism, Aristotle is committed to privation being a form in a qualified sense. It cannot be a form in an unqualified sense because privation often spoils the matter such that it can no longer be reformed. The fact of the matter is we cannot draw a bright line between privation and form because the two are contraries and can be said to hold to different degrees at different points on a spectrum. (shrink)

This article explores how public–private collaboration can drive digital transformation in rural areas to foster social sustainability. Using the strategic approach to social sustainability as an analytical framework and drawing on an in-depth case study of the partnership between Convergenze S.p.A. Società Benefit and the municipal administrations of several small towns in Italy’s Cilento region, the research analyses the roll-out of fiber-to-the-home infrastructure in underserved and unattractive territories. The study identifies three interdependent factors that make collaboration effective (community needs, (...) mutual trust, and proximity) and shows how these elements enable digital investments to translate into social sustainability outcomes. The article demonstrates that public–private collaboration aimed at driving the digital transformation of rural areas can generate significant social sustainability impacts, which, in turn, reinforce the very foundations of the collaboration, thereby supporting new rounds of digital transformation and triggering a self-sustaining virtuous cycle. On this basis, the study proposes a circular model linking public–private collaboration, digital transformation, and social sustainability in rural contexts. It contributes both theoretically and practically to the literature on social sustainability and to the broader discourse on rural digitalization, offering actionable insights for policymakers, local administrators, and entrepreneurs. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes five key interpretations of the argument presented by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations I, §258. I also argue that on none of these five interpretations is the argument cogent. The paper is primarily concerned with the most popular interpretation of the argument: that which that makes it rest upon the principle that one can be said to follow a rule only if there exists a 'useable criterion of successful performance' (Pears) or 'operational standard of correctness' (Glock) for its (...) correct application. This principle, I suggest, is untrue. The private language argument upon which it rests therefore fails. (shrink)

Codes of conduct are the main tools to privately regulate worker rights in global value chains. Scholars have shown that while codes may improve outcome standards (such as occupational health and safety), they have had limited impact on process rights (such as freedom of association and collective bargaining). Scholars have, though, only provided vague or general explanations for this empirical finding. We address this shortcoming by providing a holistic and detailed explanation, and argue that codes, in their current form, have (...) limited impact on trade union rights due to (i) buyers paying lip service to trade union rights, (ii) workers being treated as passive objects of regulation in codes of conduct, (iii) auditing being unable to detect and remediate violations of trade union rights, (iv) codes emphasizing parallel means of organizing, (v) suppliers having limited incentives for compliance, and (vi) codes being unable to open up space for union organizing when leveraged in grassroots struggles. Our arguments suggest that there is no quick fix for codes’ limited impact on trade union rights, and that codes, in their current form, have limited potential to improve trade union rights. We conclude by discussing ways in which codes of conduct, and private regulation of worker rights more generally, could be transformed to more effectively address trade union rights. (shrink)

This article is part of a symposium on property-owning democracy. In A Theory of Justice John Rawls argued that people in a just society would have rights to some forms of personal property, whatever the best way to organise the economy. Without being explicit about it, he also seems to have believed that protection for at least some forms of privacy are included in the Basic Liberties, to which all are entitled. Thus, Rawls assumes that people are entitled to form (...) families, as well as personal associations which reflect their tastes as well as their beliefs and interests. He seems also to have assumed that people are entitled to seclude themselves, as well as to associate with others, and to keep some of their beliefs, knowledge, feelings and ideas to themselves, rather than having to share them with others. So, thinking of privacy as an amalgam of claims to seclusion, solitude, anonymity and intimate association, we can say that Rawls appears to include at least some forms of privacy in his account of the liberties protected by the first principle of justice. -/- However, Rawls did not say very much about how he understands people’s claims to privacy, or how those claims relate to his ideas about property-ownership. This is unfortunate, because two familiar objections to privacy seem particularly pertinent to his conception of the basic liberties. The first was articulated with customary panache by Judith Thomson, in a famous article on the moral right to privacy, in which she argued that talk of a moral right to privacy is confused and confusing, because privacy rights are really just property rights in disguise. The second objection has long been a staple of leftist politics, and is that the association of privacy with private property means that privacy rights are just a mask for coercive and exploitative relationships, and therefore at odds with democratic freedom, equality and solidarity. If the first objection implies that Rawls is wrong to think that protection for privacy can be distinguished from protection of personal property, the second objection implies that Rawls cannot hope to protect privacy without thereby committing himself to the grossest forms of capitalist inequality. -/- In this paper I will not discuss Rawls’ views of property-owning democracy. However, by clarifying the relationship between claims to privacy and claims to property-ownership, I hope to illuminate some of the conceptual, moral and political issues raised by Rawls’ ideas, and by work on the concept of a property-owning democracy, which he inspired. As we will see, privacy-based justifications of private ownership are not always unappealing, and privacy is sometimes promoted, rather than threatened, by collective ownership. The conclusion draws out the significance of these claims for the idea of a property-owning democracy. (shrink)

Most modern writers accept that a privation theory of evil should explicitly account for the evil of pain. But pains are quintessentially real. The evil of pain does not seem to lie in an absence of good. Though many directly take on the challenges this raises, the metaphysics and axiology of their answers is often obscure. In this paper I try to straighten things out. By clarifying and categorizing the possible types of privation views, I explore the ways in which (...) privationists about evil are—or should or could be—privationists about pain’s evil. (shrink)

The dominance of agency theory can reduce our collective scope to analyse private equity in all its diversity and depth. We contribute to theorisation of private equity by developing a contrasting perspective that draws on a rich tradition of virtue ethics. In doing so, we juxtapose 'private equity' with 'public good' to develop points of rhetorical and analytical contrast. We develop a typology differentiating various forms of private equity, and focus on the 'take private' form. (...) These takeovers are where private equity funds are used to buy all a firm's publicly listed shares. Take private deals reduce reporting requirements and lessen the amount of public scrutiny a firm comes under. They allow greater control of a firm's assets and resources but also have effects in terms of the wider social fabric. The 'public good' and virtue ethics offer an alternative basis for theorisation of these deals. This provides a needed contrast to accounts of private equity based on agency theory. (shrink)

Privatization and the Social Value of Water in Africa The paper assesses the current clamor and actual privatization of water in Africa. Though this is said to be done in view of wastage and declining access of people to water, this paper submits that the transformation of the social value of water to economic, is rather a continuation of capitalist quest for profit making, which eventually is at the expense of the poor majority.

Simon Blackburn objects that Wittgenstein's private language argument overlooks the possibility that a private linguist can equip himself with a criterion of correctness by confirming generalizations about the patterns in which his private sensations occur. Crispin Wright responds that appropriate generalizations would be too few to be interesting. But I show that Wright's calculations are upset by his failure to appreciate both the richness of the data and the range of theories that would be available to the (...) private linguist. (shrink)

It has gone largely unnoticed that when Deleuze opposes the “private thinker” to the “public professor,” he is invoking the existential thought of Lev Shestov. The public professor defends established values and preaches submission to the demands of reason and the State; the private thinker opposes thought to reason, “idiocy” to common sense, a people to come to what exists. Private thinkers are solitary, singular and untimely, forced to think against consensus and “the crowd.” Deleuze takes from (...) Shestov and Kierkegaard the idea that genuine thinking manifests itself in a thinking which rebels against rational necessity, a theme central to Shestov’s leading French interpreter, Benjamin Fondane. Although Deleuze at first expresses doubts as to whether Shestov’s critique of reason can overcome the legislative reason of Kant, or whether it is entirely free of ressentiment, I argue that Shestov and Fondane’s anti-rationalism is more radical than Deleuze sometimes admits, and show how Deleuze’s attitude toward Shestov became more unreservedly positive over the years. On the other hand, against Shestov and Fondane, I agree with Deleuze that the private thinker is in solidarity with the “strange powers” which can remake the world, and thus with “the people to come.” Nonetheless, I argue that Deleuze’s philosophy cannot form the basis of a politics of egalitarian consensus, but that “the people to come” can only be a “broken chain” of untimely and singular exceptions. (shrink)

Public-private partnerships are established to specifically harness the potential of Big Data in healthcare and can include partners working across the data chain—producing health data, analysing data, using research results or creating value from data. This domain paper will illustrate the challenges that arise when partners from the public and private sector collaborate to share, analyse and use biomedical Big Data. We discuss three specific challenges for PPPs: working within the social licence, public antipathy to the commercialisation of (...) public sector health data, and questions of ownership, both of the data and any resulting intellectual property or products. As a specific example we consider the case of the UK National Health Service providing patient data to Google’s DeepMind AI program to develop a diagnostic app for kidney disease. This article is an application of the framework presented in this issue of ABR. Please refer to that article for more information on how this framework is to be used, including a full explanation of the key values involved and the balancing approach used in the case study at the end. We use four specific values to help analysis these issues: public benefit, stewardship, transparency and engagement. We demonstrate how the Deliberative Framework can support ethical governance of PPPs involving biomedical big data. (shrink)

Surrogacy involves a private agreement whereby a woman who gestates a child attempts to surrender her (putative) moral right to become the parent of that child such that another person (or persons), of the woman’s choice, can acquire it. Since people lack the normative power to privately transfer custody, attempts to do so are illegitimate, and the law should reflect this fact.

The article assesses the achievements and limitations of the private regulation of global corporate conduct. Private regulation occurs through voluntary, private, nonstate industry and cross-industry codes that address labor practices, environmental performance, and human rights policies. The author argues that while private regulation has resulted in some substantive improvements in corporate behavior, it cannot be regarded as a substitute for the more effective exercise of state authority at both the national and international levels. Ultimately, private (...) regulation must be integrated with and reinforced by more effective state-based and enforced regulatory policies at both the national and international levels. (shrink)

Transnational corporations have become actors with significant political power and authority which should entail responsibility and liability, specifically direct liability for complicity in human rights violations. Holding TNCs liable for human rights violations is complicated by the discontinuity between the fragmented legal/political structure of the TNC and its integrated strategic reality and the international state system which privileges sovereignty and non-intervention over the protection of individual rights. However, the post-Westphalian transition—the emergence of multiple authorities, increasing ambiguity of borders and jurisdiction (...) and blurring of the line between the public and private spheres—should facilitate imposing direct responsibility on transnational firms. Mechanisms for imposing direct responsibility on TNCs are considered including voluntary agreements and international law. However, I conclude that a hybrid public-private regime which relies onnon-hierarchical compliance mechanisms is likely to be both more effective and consistent with the structure of the emerging transnational order. (shrink)

The privation account of moral evil holds that the badness of morally bad acts consists not in the positive act itself or in any positive feature of the act but rather in the act’s lack of conformity to the moral standard. Traditionally recognized for its theological usefulness, the account has been the target of at least five recent objections. In this paper I offer a positive philosophical argument for the account and then show that the objections fail.

Can the best arguments for a privation theory of evil be parodied, with equal plausibility, as arguments for a privation theory of good? The privation theory of evil claims that evil has no positive existence, and it is but a privation of good. The privation theory of good claims the opposite. I approach this topic as one element in the so-called evil-God Challenge. Stephen Law has argued that the epistemic support for belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect God (...) (theism) is on a par with the epistemic support for belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, but completely evil-God (maltheism). In fact, he concludes, the arguments for an evil God are symmetrical with, and isomorphic to, those for a good God. The privation theory of evil has often been used to defend theism against the argument from evil. Thus, part of the evil-God Challenge is to evaluate arguments for the privation theory of evil for their vulnerability to maltheist parody. I consider a broad range of arguments for the privation theory of evil, and I argue that most of them are vulnerable to parodic neutralization. Furthermore, I argue that although the thesis of the convertibility of being and goodness is often held to entail the privation theory of evil, or to be entailed by it (or to be equivalent to it), it is independent of the privation theory. I do find that David Oderberg’s recent argument for the privation theory of evil resists any easy maltheist parody, but I argue that it has a defect. I sketch an argument according to which his good-as-fulfillment account is compatible with a perfectly evil god. My tentative conclusion is that the privation theory of evil enjoys little more plausibility than does the privation theory of good. (shrink)

I try to explain the difference between three kinds of negation: external negation, negation of the predicate and privation. Further I use polygons of opposition as heuristic devices to show that a logic which contains all three mentioned kinds of negation must be a fragment of a Łukasiewicz-four-valued predicate logic. I show, further, that, this analysis can be elaborated so as to comprise additional kinds of privation. This would increase the truth-values in question and bring fragments of (more generally speaking) (...) Łukasiewicz-n-valued predicate logics into the scene. (shrink)

John White (2016) defends the UK private school system from the accusation that it allows an unfair form of ‘queue jumping’ in university admissions. He offers two responses to this accusation, one based on considerations of harm, and one based on meritocratic distribution of university places. We will argue that neither response succeeds: the queue-jumping argument remains a powerful case against the private school system in the UK. We begin by briefly outlining the queue-jumping argument (§1), before evaluating (...) White’s no-harm (§2) and meritocracy (§3) arguments. (shrink)

Private copying exception is an exception to copyright which is present both in Lithuanian national law and law of the European Union. Recent jurisprudence of Court of Justice of the European Union interpreted legal regulation of private copying exception in the laws of the European Union. The mentioned jurisprudence raised concern whether Lithuanian copyright laws on private copying exception and their interpretation in case law of Supreme Court of Lithuania are compatible with the European Union law. This (...) paper analyses the nature and intention of private copying exception, its reflection in Lithuanian and European copyright law and evaluates Lithuanian laws and case law in the light of recent jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The authors conclude that recent jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union on private copying exception shall not lead to any dramatic or substantial changes of Lithuanian national copyright laws. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze Jaakko and Merrill Hintikka’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s arguments against epistemic privacy. The main focus of the paper is to explore their views on this issue and examine the connections between their argumentation and that of Saul Kripke to see to what extent these views coincide. The reason for comparing the said authors is that they all oppose the received view of the argument against private language, which claims that the discussion of private language (...) begins with PI 243. In fact, these philosophers claim that Wittgenstein already discussed the issue of the impossibility of a private language in his rule–following reflections, especially in PI 201 and 202. We will also explore some drawbacks of the interpretation of Wittgenstein offered by the Hintikkas and attempt to provide an overall perspective of the viability of their position in relation to Wittgenstein’s argument against epistemic privacy. (shrink)

The conception of a private event as an inferred, theoretical construct is critically examined. The foundation of this conception in logical positivist epistemology is noted, and the basis of the radical behaviorist alternative is presented. Of particular importance is the radical behaviorist stance on the contributions of physiology and private behavioral events to psychological explanations. Two cases are then reviewed to illustrate radical behaviorist concerns about private events, theoretical terms, and the relation between them. The first is (...) the position of cognitive psychology toward internal states and processing mechanisms. The second is the recent suggestion that even radical behaviorists regard the private event as an inferred, theoretical construct. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Is a language necessarily shared with a community of speakers? Innate knowledge of a language Robinson Crusoe sails again Solitary cavemen and monologuists Private languages and ‘private languages’ Overview.

Augustine’s privation theory of evil maintains that something is evil in virtue of a privation, a lack of something which ought to be present in a particular nature. While it is not evil for a human to lack wings, it is indeed evil for a human to lack rationality according to the end of a rational nature. Much of the literature on the privation theory focuses on whether it can successfully defend against counterexamples of positive evils, such as pain. This (...) focus of the discussion is not surprising, given that the privation theory is a theory about the nature of evil. But it is also a theory that protects venerable theological concerns, namely, that God is the good creator of everything, and that everything is good. It is the purpose of this article to further this discussion on both fronts. I argue that the counterexample of pain still defeats the privation theory despite the most recent defense. What is more, I suggest, this is not theologically disastrous. The individual who rejects the privation theory is not obligated to reject the theological theses which motivate it. To show how a rejection of the privation theory is a live option, I offer an alternative view of evil that also maintains these theological theses and encompasses both privative and positive evils. (shrink)

This book is an intellectual and political history of private property from the seventeenth century onwards in the Anglophone Atlantic world. It studies what people imagine it means to live in a world where private property is dominant and their fears (and sometimes hopes) about living in a future world where private property has disappeared. In the propertied imagination, private property is a fragile thing, a socially positive institution beset by terrifying enemies. That threatened social chaos (...) is the central unifying story of this book. The narrative of private property as a source of harmony and social stability had to be told and retold precisely because of a simultaneously parallel narrative about the imminent disappearance of private property. The book provides a genealogy of ideas of private property within capitalist modernity and shows how modern conceptions of private property always have racial and gendered logics and a fear of the mob operating within them. (shrink)

The sections of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations which contain the Private Language (PL) Argument are dense, cryptic and wide ranging. I argue that a specific argument against a private language can be distilled from the text that is less involved and obscure than is often supposed in the immense secondary literature. It is also far less self-contained and isolated from the mainstream of philosophy than many make out, including Brian Garrettand Michael Ming Yang in recent papers in this journal. (...) It can be distinguished from arguments about rule-following, pain and the problem of other minds, forms of life, etc. and, as I have framed it, avoids Garrett's objections. Moreover, a number of would-be conclusions Garrett takes its proponents to draw from the argument, far from depending on it, are long standing positions, on some of which the PL Argument itself depends. (shrink)

Waging war for money has been frowned upon since the Peace of Westphalia and the rise of the modern nation-state. The stigma associated with private warfare translates, in legal terms, into a prohibition on mercenary activity and denying mercenaries the protection afforded to regular combatants . Noting the apparent similarities between mercenaries and private military contractors, some have sought to extend to the latter the restrictive regime applicable to the former. But the resemblance between these two types of (...) actors should not imply that private warfare, in its modern form, is condemnable outright. This Article argues that an inclusive approach to military outsourcing—drawing upon historical, legal and moral perspectives—is necessary to contend with the challenges raised by the growth of the private military industry. I examine the connection between history , morality , and law , to show that private warfare deserves a more nuanced and pragmatic treatment under international law. (shrink)

Very little of the expanding debate over private policing has employed the language of human rights. This is notable not just because private policing is a distinctly global phenomenon, and human rights have become, as Michael Ignatieff puts it, “the lingua franca of global moral thought.” It is notable as well because a parallel development that seems in many ways related to the spread of private policing—the escalating importance of private military companies—has been debated as a (...) matter of human rights. This Article asks whether discussions of private policing have been impoverished by their failure to employ the language of human rights. It begins by discussing the dramatic rise, over the past several decades, in the size and significance of private policing. It then summarizes the academic and public policy debates about that development and considers what, if anything, the language of human rights could add to those debates, and whether the addition would be welcome. One strand of the Article compares the debate over private policing with the debate over private military companies. Another strand compares private policing with private prisons, in light of the recent ruling by the Supreme Court of Israel declaring private prisons unconstitutional. The Article concludes that the benefits of introducing the language of human rights into debates about private policing are far from clear—with one exception. Human rights, particularly as codified in international treaties, do seem a promising way to get traction on a particular aspect of police privatization that has received less attention than it deserves: the way in which widespread reliance on private security firms may weaken public commitment to providing everyone with a minimally acceptable degree of protection against private violence. (shrink)

This paper approaches the public-private law problem by describing what it calls “drift.” Drift is the tendency of what is thought traditionally to be private law to become public (public drift), and the tendency of what is thought traditionally to be public law to become private (private drift). Though it is possible to distinguish public and private drift conceptually, drift is in practice a unified phenomenon: public and private drift go together. Drift is manifested (...) not only in formal, legal developments, but also in the informal processes by which public law frameworks now influence private ordering, private rulemaking, and private relationships, as well as the way private authorities have been entrusted with the responsibility to implement those public law frameworks. The paper describes various contemporary examples of drift, explains drift’s comparative ascendancy today, and speculates about possible future developments for drift. Drift in public and private law may not be driven primarily by anything innate or conceptually necessary in the disciplines believed to constitute private or public law. Drift is instead a political byproduct, the issue of social and cultural anxieties concerning the absence of anything like a common political project, anxieties that drive powerful actors toward manufacturing imaginary commonalities that they press with confounding certitude. The powerful exploit and manipulate areas of law that properly pertain to the public and private domains, repurposing them for new uses, because their regular use is ineffective in achieving their political objectives. The paper deliberately selects examples of drift that exhibit what would be conventionally described as conservative and progressive valences (in the meteoric rise of public nuisance, in the strategy of statutes like Texas’ S.B. 8, in the mixed public-private response to COVID-19, in the controversies about social media speech control, and others) to illustrate the universality of the phenomenon. Drift is a response to a perceived political void or emptiness in which public-private partnerships of powerful actors emerge to fill the void, capture the institutions of power, and coerce people’s behavior into certain ideological grooves. (shrink)

Chiara Cordelli’s The Privatized State offers a powerful critique of privatization and an inspiring vision of the kind of democratic governance that could secure citizens’ equal freedom. This essay raises questions about how Cordelli’s arguments apply in non-ideal theory. It asks whether her arguments about the illegitimacy of privatization provide us with adequate reasons to reject ongoing processes of privatization. It also queries some of her recommendations for how philanthropy should be practiced by individuals and incentivized by the state.

The impending missions to exploit natural resources of celestial bodies may at some point start interfering with the scientific interests, including those of astrobiology, in these bodies. While the legal status of celestial bodies at the highest level is clear, uncertainty has arisen as to the extent private property rights over such objects or over their resources are legally acceptable, legally impossible, or potentially legal. This also provides for a considerable amount of uncertainty regarding how the legal framework could (...) or may need to be changed to accommodate private interests. The article analyzes the two main international treaties relevant from this perspective, as well as their backgrounds, in order to outline the current legal status of celestial bodies and the resulting legal rights and obligations pertinent to both private exploitation and exploration. Based on such an analysis, it concludes by highlighting an approach that could actually incentivize the private sector and the science community to work together in a manner conducive to their interests in exploitation and exploration respectively. (shrink)

In Reciprocal Freedom, Weinrib offers a neat and powerful explanation of the relationship between private law, corrective justice, public law, and distributive justice. In the Kantian view, private law and corrective justice are conceptually prior to public law and distributive justice. The primary function of public law is to publicly determine and enforce private rights. Institutions of distributive justice are required to legitimize a system of private rights that creates the possibility of subordination. In this comment, (...) I argue that Reciprocal Freedom is a justification for what I will call ‘orthodox private law’ that, because it neglects the place of distributive justice within private law, fails to secure genuine independence for all persons. (shrink)

For several decades, Stephen Priest has championed a picture of the mind or soul as a private, phenomenological space, knowable by introspection and logically independent of behaviour. Something resembling this picture once dominated Western philosophy, but it suffered a severe setback in the mid-twentieth century as a result of Wittgenstein’s ‘private language argument’. While Priest has written about the threat posed by Wittgenstein’s argument to the picture of the mind that he favours, he has not explained how advocates (...) of that picture should respond to Wittgenstein. The present essay takes up this challenge, defending the picture of the mind as a private phenomenological space against four lines of argument drawn from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations § 243-315. (shrink)

The use of private military force by states has been a long-standing phenomena in the history of warfare. Armies of mercenaries, privateering and recruitment of foreign nationals into armed forces have been common during the Middle Ages and later on. However, with the invention of effective firearms and artillery, standing regular armies, conscription and other developments that resulted in the essential rise of costs of war, the role of private military entrepreneurs diminished. By the end of XIXth century (...) the state became almost the only subject that was able to wage a full-scale war. Nevertheless, already in the middle of the XXth century mercenarism has been reborn in Africa’s colonial and post-colonial wars. The end of the XXth century and the beginning of the XXI century witnesses an enormous rise of private security and military companies (PSMC) that are hired to perform different functions related to use of force not only by states, but also by other clients such as international organisations, transnational corporations, etc. A PSMC may be defined as a profit-seeking private enterprise, which is established according to the national law of the state and which is providing, on the basis of a contract, services directly or indirectly connected with the use of military force or its institutions whether in time of armed conflict or peace, notwithstanding how such company describes itself. International humanitarian law has no specific regulation of PSMC. Nevertheless, it would be erroneous to state that the activity of PSMC is not regulated, because international humanitarian law in any case, in one or another way, is applicable to the personnel of PSMC if it is engaged in armed conflict of either international or non-international character. (shrink)