International Human Rights Law and the Protection of Medical Scientists against State Inference during COVID-19

The global COVID-19 pandemic has hosted a rising trend of state interference in medical science research against the virus. Such illiberal actions are counterproductive to hopes of addressing the virus because they impede the operations of scientific inquiry and threaten the integrity of scientific findings. State efforts to interfere in pandemic science work involve constraints upon medical scientists researching the virus. Such constraints risk violating the human rights of the scientists involved in COVID-19 research. International human rights law provides means of protecting scientists against state interference, and the reach of international human rights instruments approaches a scale comparable to the global reach of the pandemic. As a result, the exercise of international human rights law on behalf of medical scientists against state interference furthers the global urgency to resolve the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mandatory vaccination: is it ethical?

Mandatory – or compulsory – vaccinations are controversial, with some arguing that individuals should have the right to assert their personal decisions without state interference. The recent decision to make COVID-19 vaccination mandatory for frontline NHS workers in England, as well as those working in social care, has thrown the idea into the spotlight.

The pushback against state interference in science: how Lysenkoism tried to suppress Genetics and how it was eventually defeated

Genetics in the Soviet Union (USSR) achieved state-of-the-art results and had reached a peak of development by the mid-1930s due to the efforts of the scientific schools of several major figures, including Sergei Navashin, Nikolai Koltsov, Grigorii Levitsky, Yuri Filipchenko, Nikolai Vavilov, and Solomon Levit. Unfortunately, the Soviet government distrusted intellectually independent science and this led to state support for a fraudulent pseudoscientific concept widely known as Lysenkoism, which hugely damaged biology as a whole. Decades of dominance of the Lysenkoism had ruinous effects and the revival of biology in the USSR in the late 1950s–early 1960s was very difficult. In fact, this was realized to be a problem for Soviet science as a whole, and many mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and other scientists made efforts to rehabilitate genetics and to transfer biology to the “jurisdiction” of science from that of politics. The key events in the history of these attempts to pushback against state interference in science, and to promote the development of genetics and molecular biology, are described in this paper. These efforts included supportive letters to the authorities (e.g., the famous “Letter of three hundred”), (re)publishing articles and giving lectures on “forbidden” science, and organizing laboratories and departments for research in genetics and molecular biology under the cover of nuclear physics or of other projects respected by the government and Communist party leaders. The result was that major figures in the hard sciences played a major part in the revival of genetics and biology in the USSR.

如何看待政府在疫病中的干預？自由至上主義的道德困境

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. 在「自由至上主義」(Libertarianism)的政治哲學詞典中，「政府干預」(state interference)或「政府父權主義」(state paternalism)基本上是一個貶義詞，因為政府意味著官僚、腐敗、無效率，意味著對公民個體自由的干預和限制。然而，自2020年以來在全球範圍內爆發和流行的新冠疫情，讓一貫反政府干預、堅持「小政府」原則的自由至上派的學者倍受挑戰。 面對疫情的肆虐，許多人認為政府的干預（如封城、鎖國、宵禁、隔離、邊控等措施的實行）是必要的。本文探討自由至上主義的自由觀在疫病中所面臨的道德兩難以及政府應在公共衛生管理中扮演的角色。作者指出，雖然自由至上主義的一些有關自由的理念在現實生活中顯得過於教條和不切實際，但從另一個角度看，當我們一再倒向政府的力量以抗擊疫情之時， 我們更需要自由至上主義對我們的提醒，以防政府利用疫情不斷擴大自身的權力範圍，最終傷害每個人的自由權利。 For Libertarians, state interference or state paternalism has a pejorative meaning given that government often implies bureaucracy, corruption, and inefficiency. However, such a view has faced significant resistance since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. For the sake of public health, many people now believe that we must accept much greater governmental intervention in our lives and that it is morally permissible and necessary to have public policies such as lockdowns, mandatory social distancing, border restrictions, and mandatory vaccination. Is it true that “there are no libertarians in a pandemic”? This paper explores the role of the government and the meaning of individual liberty in the face of the current public health crisis. The author contends that the Libertarian views of civil liberty and self-ownership should be taken more seriously as the government obtains more power and a host of extraordinary interventions are being implemented during the pandemic.

State Paternalism: from Science to Scientometrics

The article presents the results of the study of public opinion in the context of science reforming. The adoption of the Law on the Russian Academy of Sciences has in fact liquidated academic freedoms and consolidated state interference into scientific life by simultaneously escalating the use of Scientometrics. Respondents' assessments of the use of Scientometric indicators and journal rankings indicate that most economists do not trust the Scientometric tools. Based on the results of a sociological survey of the community of economists in 2020, the article concludes that there is a "managerial failure" of the paternalistic state. An analysis of the Scientometric indicators used in Scopus is also presented, including three well-known metrics: CiteScore", SNIP, and SCImago (SJR). In addition to the description of the sample of journals and the scale of monitoring, the author presents the criterion of ranking the journals MWR and the algorithm of its definition in comparison with the SJR indicator in Scopus. The final part of the paper discusses the econometric model based on the hypothesis that there are links between the ranking of journals, obtained on the basis of a sociological survey of economists, and the estimates of the "usefulness" of the introduction of relevant Scientometric indicators by the same respondents. The calculations performed have confirmed the formulated hypothesis and allowed to quantitatively measure the impact of the respondents' attitude to Scientometric indicators on the value of private ratings reflecting the Scientific level of the journal, the public prestige of the journal and Interest in the journal publications.

GOING GENTLY INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT: THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF CONSENT IN CASES OF EUTHANASIA

Although consent is a justification ground in South African law, its applicability to cases of euthanasia has been the subject of controversy. It is submitted that relying on the distinction between omission and commission, or causation or intent will not prove useful in justifying mercy killing. In terms of the South African Constitution (and various human rights guaranteed therein), there may be compelling arguments for legalizing euthanasia. For instance, section 10 of the Constitution guarantees the right to dignity. A lack of control over your destiny essentially involves a loss of dignity. Further, the right to dignity and the qualified right to personal autonomy inform section 14: the right to privacy. This right holds that an individual can make certain fundamental private choices without state interference. Surely this would extend to how to end one’s life? This article advocates that a rights-based approach be used to inform the doctrine of consent. This would entail taking the victim’s shared responsibility into account thereby reducing the perpetrator’s fault.

Major Events, State Interference, and Resilience

This article elucidates the major events of the late Soviet underground, grouping them by trials (Chertkov’s from 1957, Brodsky’s from 1964, and Sinyavsky and Daniel’s from 1966); repressed exhibitions (the Manège exhibition of 1962 and the “Bulldozer Exhibition” of 1974); and publicity projects (Solzhenitsyn’s open letter to the 4th Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers from 1967 and the almanac Metropol’ in 1978). It argues that an “underground event” emerges through state interference into the sphere of unofficial art and literature, forcing individual members to surface from the underground. While most individual targets of repression were eventually expelled, the diffuse underground communities developed recurrent tactics of resilience. The article rounds off with distilling the patterns of resilience applied in the underground to undo the impact of the repression of the nonvoluntary protagonists of major underground events on others.

The pros and cons of rent-seeking: Political rent in various research paradigms

This article shows that how we look at political rent and rent-seeking depends on our position on state interference in the economy and which theory of regulation we are familiar with. Although the theory of rent-seeking is in accordance with the paradigm of the private interest (economic) theories of regulation, the researcher also needs an insight based on the public interest theories of regulation if he wants to judge the impact of rent-seeking and the creation of political rent on social well-being properly. The paper is also a conceptualization of political rent. It describes forms of rent-seeking and economic systems most amenable to it.

New Result on the Feedback Capacity of the Action-Dependent Dirty Paper Wiretap Channel

The Gaussian wiretap channel with noncausal state interference available at the transmitter, which is also called the dirty paper wiretap channel (DP-WTC), has been extensively studied in the literature. Recently, it has been shown that taking actions on the corrupted state interference of the DP-WTC (also called the action-dependent DP-WTC) helps to increase the secrecy capacity of the DP-WTC. Subsequently, it has been shown that channel feedback further increases the secrecy capacity of the action-dependent DP-WTC (AD-DP-WTC), and a sub-optimal feedback scheme is proposed for this feedback model. In this paper, a two-step hybrid scheme and a corresponding new lower bound on the secrecy capacity of the AD-DP-WTC with noiseless feedback are proposed. The proposed new lower bound is shown to be optimal (achieving the secrecy capacity) and tighter than the existing one in the literature for some cases, and the results of this paper are further explained via numerical examples.

Bruce Smith and Anglo-Australian Liberalism

Bruce Smith (1851–1937) was the most prominent Australian exponent of classical or ‘old’ liberalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Although his political career was not particularly successful, he was notable as the foremost defender of individualism as the authentic liberal creed, exemplified by his 1887 work Liberty and liberalism. He consistently attacked new liberalism, with its acceptance of extensive state interference, and socialism, as inimical to individual liberty and national prosperity. Although he is now recognized as an important figure in the Australian liberal pantheon, there has been relatively little attention to his thought outside Australia itself, despite his extensive connections to Britain. The general trajectory of Australian liberalism from ‘individualism’ to ‘collectivism’ was mirrored in Britain from the 1880s, especially during Prime Minister William Gladstone's second and third administrations, when the radicals within the Liberal party grew in influence and the aristocratic whig moderates waned. Smith maintained close links with the British Liberty and Property Defence League, which dedicated itself to fighting against collectivism, as well as with his personal hero, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, from whom his own politics derived much influence. This article considers Smith's thought through the prism of Anglo-Australian politics.