Attachment to Territory: Status or Achievement?

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avery Kolers
Keyword(s):  
Normative Force ◽  
Successful Theory ◽  
Territorial Rights

It is by now widely agreed that a theory of territorial rights must be able to explain attachment or particularity: what can link a particular group to a particular place with the kind of normative force necessary to forbid encroachment or colonization? Attachment is one of the pillars on which any successful theory of territory will have to stand. But the notion of attachment is not yet well understood, and such agreement as does exist relies on unexamined assumptions. One such assumption is that attachment is an achievement of some sort, as opposed to some kind of brute ascriptive status that a claimant has irrespective of anything it might do.But achievements do not come for free. ‘Achievement’ is a success term, and any theory predicated on success, no matter how minimal, requires a theory of failure. Yet theorists of territory have not grappled with the problem of failure.

scholarly journals Epistemic Blame and the Normativity of Evidence

Erkenntnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Conclusive Evidence ◽  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Norms ◽  
Plausible Assumption ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
Epistemic Trust ◽  
Conceptual Connection ◽  
Epistemic Blame

AbstractThe normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic norms practical. The first aim of this paper is to spell out this challenge for the normativity of evidence. I argue that the challenge rests on a plausible assumption about the conceptual connection between normative reasons and blameworthiness. The second aim of the paper is to show how we can meet the challenge by spelling out a concept of epistemic blameworthiness. Drawing on recent accounts of doxastic responsibility and epistemic blame, I suggest that the normativity of evidence is revealed in our practice of suspending epistemic trust in response to impaired epistemic relationships. Recognizing suspension of trust as a form of epistemic blame allows us to make sense of a purely epistemic kind of normativity the existence of which has recently been called into doubt by certain versions of pragmatism and instrumentalism.

Tort’s Indifference: Conformity, Compliance, and Civil Recourse

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Ahson Azmat
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Tort Law ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Internal Point ◽  
Loss Allocation ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
Extensional Structure ◽  
Do So

AbstractLeading accounts of tort law split cleanly into two seams. Some trace its foundations to a deontic form of morality; others to an instrumental, policy-oriented system of efficient loss allocation. An increasingly prominent alternative to both seams, Civil Recourse Theory (CRT) resists this binary by arguing that tort comprises a basic legal category, and that its directives constitute reasons for action with robust normative force. Using the familiar question whether tort’s directives are guidance rules or liability rules as a lens, or prism, this essay shows how considerations of practical reasoning undermine one of CRT’s core commitments. If tort directives exert robust normative force, we must account for its grounds—for where it comes from, and why it obtains. CRT tries to do so by co-opting H.L.A. Hart’s notion of the internal point of view, but this leveraging strategy cannot succeed: while the internal point of view sees legal directives as guides to action, tort law merely demands conformity. To be guided by a directive is to comply with it, not conform to it, so tort’s structure blocks the shortcut to normativity CRT attempts to navigate. Given the fine-grained distinctions the theory makes, and with the connection between its claims and tort’s requirements thus severed, CRT faces a dilemma: it’s either unresponsive to tort’s normative grounds, or it’s inattentive to tort’s extensional structure.

Nature Versus the Common Law

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David B. Schorr
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Water Law ◽  
Public Ownership ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Law

This article recovers a debate, played out over the course of a century, in courts across the « common law world », over whether nature had normative force in water law. It explores areas of water law, such as the extent of public ownership in rivers and the effects of shifting watercourses on ownership, in which some courts, not without controversy, departed from the established rules of English law in order to make rules more appropriate, as they saw it, to the local environment.

Gendered Sexuality

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelly Ronen
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Behaviors ◽  
Social Study ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Gay Liberation ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Normative Force

Sexuality encompasses diverse sexual practices including sexual behaviors, their sequencing, meanings, effects, pleasures, and risks, sexual identities, preferences or orientations, and the social construction of sexual acts and communities over history. Sexuality is undeniably shaped by gender as an individual, interpersonal, and institutional force. It is also shaped by intersecting axes of difference including class, race, ethnicity, age, and body morphology or disability status. These are in turn also affected by sexuality. The study of gendered sexuality has been an interdisciplinary undertaking. The sociological field incorporates insights from anthropology, feminist philosophy, gender and women’s studies, history, LGBTQIA+ studies, cultural studies, media studies, psychology, and queer studies. Early sociology failed to recognize sexuality as a domain of social study, so the subject only gained relevance in sociology in the second half of the 20th century. Touchstone texts from the subfield’s formation often draw on non-sociological works as well as biological, medical, and psychoanalytic approaches. Newer advances in the study of sexuality were initially spurred by feminisms and activist-scholars from the lesbian, bisexual, and gay liberation movement. As such, alongside theoretical development and empirical study, some work in the discipline retains a normative approach, seeking to clarify and advance varying definitions of sexual liberation. Contemporary sociological research on sexuality focuses on resultant inequalities: whether between genders (mostly still conceived of as either men and women) between sexual orientations (mostly still understood as either straight or gay) or between different races or ethnicities. As such, sociological study on sexualities focuses on the collective consequences of sexuality as a varied and changing institutional and normative force.

Normative Weighing and Legal Guidance of Conduct

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 359-391
Author(s):  
Noam Gur
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Daily Activity ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Correct Decision ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
Frequent Presence

Contemporary legal philosophers commonly understand the normative force of law in terms of practical reason. They sharply disagree, however, on how exactly it translates into practical reason. Notably, some have argued that the directives of an authority that meets certain prerequisites of legitimacy generate reasons for action that exclude some otherwise applicable reasons, while others have insisted that such directives can only give rise to reasons that compete with opposing ones in terms of their weight (an approach I will call the weighing model). Does the weighing model provide a normative framework within which law could adequately facilitate correct decision-making? At first glance, the answer appears to be ‘yes’: there seems to be nothing about law-following values—such as coordination reasons, the desirability of social order, deferential expertise, etc.—which prevents them from being factored into our decision-making in terms of normative weight that tips the balance in favor of compliance with law inasmuch as it is worthwhile to comply with it. This impression, however, turns out to be incorrect when, drawing on a body of empirical work in psychology, I observe that many of the practical difficulties law typically addresses are difficulties that have part of their root in biases to which we are systematically susceptible in the settings of our daily activity. I argue that the frequent presence of those biases in contexts of activity which law regulates, and the pivotal role law has in counteracting them, emphatically militate against the weighing model and call for its rejection.

scholarly journals Justifying republican patriotism

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-303
Author(s):  
Szilárd Tóth
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
The Third ◽  
Philip Pettit ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Intrinsic Character

My paper is on the republican version of patriotism and its justification, as developed most systematically by Philip Pettit and Maurizio Viroli. The essence of the justification is as follows: patriotism is to be viewed as valuable insofar as it is an indispensable instrument for the upholding of the central republican ideal, namely freedom understood as non-domination. My primary aim is to evaluate the normative force of this justification. In the first section, I introduce minimal descriptive definitions of the concepts of patriotism and the patria. Second, I reconstruct the republican patria-ideal to which patriotism is linked to. In the third section, I reconstruct the republican justification of patriotism. Finally, I ask what we justify when we justify republican patriotism. Two views are prevalent in this regard. According to the first, republican patriotic motivation, similarly to its justification, ought to be instrumental itself too (Pettit, Viroli). I argue that this view is untenable, since it is in tension with the minimal definition of patriotism. The conclusion is that the other view - according to which the patriotic motivation ought to be of intrinsic character (Miller) - possesses greater normative force.

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