The problem of no hands: responsibility voids in collective decisions

The problem of no hands concerns the existence of so-called responsibility voids: cases where a group makes a certain decision, yet no individual member of the group can be held responsible for this decision. Criteria-based collective decision procedures play a central role in philosophical debates on responsibility voids. In particular, the well-known discursive dilemma has been used to argue for the existence of these voids. But there is no consensus: others argue that no such voids exist in the discursive dilemma under the assumption that casting an untruthful opinion is eligible. We argue that, under this assumption, the procedure used in the discursive dilemma is indeed immune to responsibility voids, yet such voids can still arise for other criteria-based procedures. We provide two general characterizations of the conditions under which criteria-based collective decision procedures are immune to these voids. Our general characterizations are used to prove that responsibility voids are ruled out by criteria-based procedures involving an atomistic or monotonic decision function. In addition, we show that our results imply various other insights concerning the logic of responsibility voids.

Paradoxes of Proof

This chapter offers a review of scholarship concerning the proof paradoxes along with some critical comments of my own. Particular attention is given to problems of naked statistical evidence and the conjunction paradox, along with some thoughts on the discursive dilemma as applied to jury voting. For the sake of clarity, I try to separate what is known concerning human intuitions concerning these puzzles, how they are treated by existing law (to the extent they are noticed at all), and which results might be best from a normative perspective.

The Trauma of Child Death: The Discourse of Mourning in Camille Laurens's and Laure Adler's Autobiographical Writings

This article addresses a noteworthy development in French women's autobiographical texts of the extreme contemporary: the painful writing of mourning subsequent to the traumatic death of a child. Trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth, Susan Brison, Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub insist on the importance of the narration of the traumatic experience in the form of a 'meaningful [...] story' (Caruth, 1996: 117) enabling the object of the trauma to become the subject of her own story, and thus effecting a transformation of her status from passive victim to agential subject. If, however, trauma is beyond words and 'unspeakable' (in both senses of the adjective), how can one find the adequate discursive means to represent it, how can one transform the traumatic experience into a narrative? Drawing on theories of trauma and mourning, the article analyzes the ways in which two contemporary French writers, Laure Adler and Camille Laurens, deal with this daunting discursive dilemma, following the passing of their respective infants. Using various textual strategies, Adler and Laurens both succeed in narrating poignant accounts of loss, producing in each case a 'livre-tombeau' which is simultaneously a book of death and a book of life, allowing the deceased infant to live on through the writing of the trauma of mourning.