scholarly journals The Enforcement Approach to Coercion

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott A. Anderson

This essay differentiates two approaches to understanding the concept of coercion, and argues for the relative merits of the one currently out of fashion. The approach currently dominant in the philosophical literature treats threats as essential to coercion, and understands coercion in terms of the way threats alter the costs and benefits of an agent’s actions; I call this the “pressure” approach. It has largely superseded the “enforcement approach,” which focuses on the powers and actions of the coercer rather than the perspective of the coercee. The enforcement approach identifies coercion with certain uses of the kinds of powers that agents need to accumulate and wield in order to be able to make significant, credible threats. Though there is considerable overlap extensionally in the instances of coercion recognized by the two approaches, the enforcement approach encompasses some uses of power to coerce that do not involve threats (in particular some direct uses of physical force). It also circumscribes which threats should be counted as coercive, though notably it provides a picture of coercion that is non-moralized in its essentials. While there may be specific purposes for which a pressure account is to be preferred, I argue that the enforcement approach better describes how coercion works, and elucidates factors that are often tacitly assumed by pressure accounts. It also is more useful for explaining the social and political significance of coercion, and why coercion is thought to have the implications commonly associated with it. In particular, I argue that it helps us understand why uses of coercion are in general a matter of ethical significance, why state authority depends on commanding a monopoly on the right to use coercion, and why being coerced may reasonably provide one a defense against being held responsible for actions one is coerced into taking.

Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1953 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 471-482
Author(s):  
JONAS E. SALK

The simple fact is: That an experimental method for inducing measurable amounts of antibody for the three known poliomyelitis viruses, employing a killed-virus vaccine is available, and it now becomes possible to determine whether—and to what extent—the incidence of naturally occurring paralysis may be influenced. All that should be inferred now is that studies are progressing satisfactorily; there have been no set-backs nor anything but revelations that shed more light on the course ahead. We must continue to regard the experimental developments to date as providing immunologic markers along the way that tell us whether we are on the right road. That there is more to do now than before indicates that we have not stumbled down a by-way but have selected a road, with many lanes, that seems long indeed. Our problem is to select not only the fast lane but the one that is safest and most certain.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Justin Nickel

Stanley Hauerwas and others argue that Luther’s understanding of justification denies the theological and ethical significance of the body. Indeed, the inner, spiritual person is the one who experiences God’s grace in the gospel, while the outer, physical (read: bodily) person continues to live under law and therefore coercion and condemnation. While not denying that Luther can be so read, I argue that there is another side of Luther, one that recognizes the body’s importance for Christian life. I make this argument through a close reading of Luther’s reflections on Adam and Eve’s Fall in his Lectures on Genesis (1545) and the sacramental theology in ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’. For this Luther, disconnection from our bodies is not a sign of justification but rather the sin from which justification saves us. Accordingly, justification results in a return to embodied creatureliness as the way we receive and live our justification.


Author(s):  
Cem Özatalay ◽  
Gözde Aytemur Nüfusçu ◽  
Gülistan Zeren

The use of blood money by powerful people during the judicial process following different kinds of homicides (workplace homicides, state homicides, gun homicides and so on) has become commonplace within the neoliberal context. Based on data obtained from five cases in Turkey, this chapter shows, on the one hand, how the use of blood money serves as an effective tool in the hands of powerful people to consolidate power relations, particularly necropower, as well as the relationship of domination, which rests upon class and identity-based inequalities. The analysis indicates that the blood money offers made by powerful people allows them to minimize potential penalties within penal courts and also to keep their privileged positions in the social hierarchy by purchasing the ‘right to kill’. On the other hand, the resistance of the oppressed and aggrieved people to the subjugation of life to the power of death is analysed with a particular focus on the role of power asymmetries between perpetrators and victims and their unequal positions in the social hierarchy. This conflictual relationship, which we qualify as an expression of necrodomination, offers novel insights into Turkey’s historically shaped system of domination.


Author(s):  
Robert Stern

This chapter covers Chapters 3 and 4 of The Ethical Demand. In these chapters, Løgstrup adds to his characterization of the demand by claiming that it is ‘radical’. He explains this radicality in terms of various further key features, including the way it may intrude on our lives and pick us out as individuals, while even the enemy is included in the requirement on us to care. At the same time, Løgstrup argues that we do not have the right to make the demand, while also denying that it is ‘limitless’. The features of the demand that make it radical distinguish it from the social norms, while the unconditional and absolute nature of the demand contrasts with the variable character of such norms, a contrast which he uses to respond to the challenge of relativism.


2020 ◽  
pp. 239965442093072
Author(s):  
Masaya Llavaneras Blanco

This article argues that intimacy and human (im)mobilities are interrelated, and that this relationship is integral to the way borders function and are experienced. I propose the concept of intimate-mobility entanglement to describe this relationship of interdependence. Based on primary research conducted with Haitian domestic workers that work in the Dominican Republic (DR), the article illustrates how intimate labour functions as a driver and a strategy for human (im)mobility. The article characterizes the interactions between (im)mobility and intimacy as a relationship of entanglement that is observable in domestic work, childrearing, intimate violence, border crossing and access to the right to nationality. The article centers on the spatial trajectory of Marie, a Haitian woman who works as a domestic worker in a Dominican border town after having lived and worked in several towns in the DR for twenty years. Marie’s spatial trajectories illuminate how the intimate-mobility entanglement is integral to the Dominican border regime. Through individual interviews, participant observation and mapping Marie’s journeys through Haitian and Dominican territories, the article revisits her spatial trajectories and sheds light on the dual relationship between the intimate-mobility entanglement and the border regime. On the one hand, the entanglement intervenes in the way the border is reinforced in the actual border strip while it also stretches out into Dominican territory. On the other, the border regime conditions Marie’s labour, how she moves and settles down, and influences how intimate labours are carried out and experienced. Building on a tradition of feminist and subaltern geographies, as well as on mobilities literature, the article presents a contextualized analysis of the politics of subaltern mobilities and explains how intimacy and intimate labours are critical aspects of how borders work.


Leadership ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ofelia A Palermo ◽  
Ana Catarina Carnaz ◽  
Henrique Duarte

In this paper, we argue that a focus on favouritism magnifies a central ethical ambiguity in leadership, both conceptually and in practice. The social process of favouritism can even go unnoticed, or misrecognised if it does not manifest in a form in which it can be either included or excluded from what is (collectively interpreted as) leadership. The leadership literature presents a tension between what is an embodied and relational account of the ethical, on the one hand, and a more dispassionate organisational ‘justice’ emphasis, on the other hand. We conducted 23 semi-structured interviews in eight consultancy companies, four multinationals and four internationals. There were ethical issues at play in the way interviewees thought about favouritism in leadership episodes. This emerged in the fact that they were concerned with visibility and conduct before engaging in favouritism. Our findings illustrate a bricolage of ethical justifications for favouritism, namely utilitarian, justice, and relational. Such findings suggest the ethical ambiguity that lies at the heart of leadership as a concept and a practice.


2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer-Olaf Schultze

The outcome of the election marks a deep shift not only in Bavarian politics but also corresponds to Germany’s ongoing restructuring of its electorate and the changing configuration of its party system at large: (1) The two catch-all parties suffered dramatic losses of more than ten percentage points; the conservative CSU lost its parliamentary majority in the state legislature, tallying less than 40 percent, the social-democratic SPD even less than ten percent of the total vote . (2) The voting behaviour is characterised by high volatility and processes of polarisation, caused by growing cleavages between town and country, between the generational as well as religious divides and the ongoing occupational differentiation in the electorate . Ideologically, these divides correlate with liberal and cosmopolitan mind-sets and (post-)modern urban lifestyles, the main electoral base of the Green party, on the one hand versus the more conservative and traditional rural electorates on the other . Their influence on the newly formed coalition between the CSU and the “Free Voters” will be more pronounced, while the populist and in part anti-pluralist electorate rallies behind the right-wing AfD . (3) In Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and Hesse, the Green party has now replaced the SPD as the main electoral contender of the Christian-democratic parties; it remains to be seen whether their electoral fortunes can be extended to the northern and eastern parts of the country in the near future .


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-255
Author(s):  
Benoît Challand

Abstract The article argues that the social life of racialization in Tunisia can be traced back to colonial norms and that one cannot speak of racialization in isolation of class differentials, elements that arose historically with the spread of the tandem colonialism-capitalism in North Africa. From a direct form of racialized violence leaving Muslim Tunisians on the low end of the colonial social ladder of worth, salaries, and the right to life, one moved to a more symbolic form of violence, with the south of the country quasi-racialized as less valuable than the urban coastal areas around Tunis and the Sahel in contemporary Tunisia. In a polity that reached independence more than six decades ago, one can witness the perpetuation of a north-south divide that dates back to the colonial times; but a historical reading of racialized brutality can help us recognize a distinct tradition of activism, in particular trade union activism around the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT) and protests in the southern part of the country, such as the one that led to the ousting of dictator Ben Ali in 2011. Through a discussion of diachronic forms of racialization, the article suggests that Giorgio Agamben's focus on juridical issues of exception is partly misleading, for many forms of exception arise outside of the realm of emergency.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 809-836
Author(s):  
Rubén Compagnucci de Caso

This study is about “legal acts”, which is a division of “the general aspects of private law. Most of the Civil Codes in the 20th and 21st centuries which include these general aspects, dedicate several of their articles to rule on said matter and determine in this way their nature, require-ments and effects .An example of all this are the Civil Codes in Germany (BGB), Brazil, Mexico, Switzerland among other countries. The new Civil and Commercial Code in force in Argentina since Au-gust 1st, 2015 deals with this matter in Book I, Title V, Chapter I (articles 257 to 264).Acts are external events within the social reality which have the power to alter or modify the surrounding environment. In this context, their analysis and study only apply to those actions or facts of a juridical nature and are therefore of interest to the law. All this makes it necessary to take a stand in order to explain when and why an event either natural o human is to be considered a “legal act”. To give an answer to this question, there are two opposed theories on the subject and some other irrelevant opinions. In this present, it has been intended to define and clarify the main points of both theories. One idea sustains that a legal act is the one which has in itself the character and the ability to achieve a goal, that is, the legal effect. This leads to defining it as the causal event of logical connection making it possible to get said legal effect then becoming a quality of the object itself. This theory is called “traditional” or “causative”. The second theory, supported by most of the Italian lawmakers and well spread in the modern doctrine considers that the legal acts themselves do not have a particular virtue but that their legal or juridical character is given by the fact that they are presupposed to have fulfilled all sta-tutory requirements. All this has been called fattispecie or “regulating factual presuppositions” by the Italian lawmakers.When a rule or law understands that to have a legal consequence it is necessary to do one or more acts, said acts become legal acts. For example , the birth or the death of a person is a “natural” act, but in most legislations the person who is born has the right to acquire, and the deceased to transfer their estate to their heirs. Other aspects have also been considered, in particular the classification of the legal acts, and the most important is the one which distinguishes natural acts from human acts which are tho-se where a human being takes part and with the expression of their will can do what are simply called “legal acts” or “legal transactions”.


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