International Legitimacy

Wight defined international legitimacy as ‘the collective judgment of international society about rightful membership of the family of nations’. International legitimacy derived mainly from prescription and dynasticism, the customary rule of hereditary monarchs, until the American and French Revolutions instituted the popular and democratic principle of the consent of the governed. The increasing reliance on popular politics led to the triumph of national self-determination in the 1919 peace settlement, with certain exceptions, notably the decision not to conduct a plebiscite in Alsace-Lorraine. New principles, such as territorial contiguity and integrity, influenced decisions about the legitimacy of the frontiers of the states formed from the breakup of European colonial empires after the Second World War. India, for example, referred to the principle of territorial integrity to justify the acquisition of Hyderabad and Goa. Critics of colonial arrangements have regarded them as illegitimate and unacceptable by definition. A state seeking independence via secession can succeed in its bid for self-determination only if it can gain sufficient external support. Therefore Biafra’s bid failed while that of Bangladesh succeeded. Communist principles of legitimacy emphasize the self-determination of the proletariat under the guidance of the Communist party. Legitimacy principles are subject to pragmatic constraints, and in practice governments generally recognize whoever controls state power.

The potential for effective reasoning guides children’s preference for small group discussion over crowdsourcing

Communication between social learners can make a group collectively “wiser” than any individual, but conformist tendencies can also distort collective judgment. We asked whether intuitions about when communication is likely to improve or distort collective judgment could allow social learners take advantage of the benefits of communication while minimizing the risks. In three experiments (n=360), 7- to 10-year old children and adults decided whether to refer a question to a small group for discussion or “crowdsource” independent judgments from individual advisors. For problems which could be conclusively solved through “demonstrable” analytic or physical reasoning, all ages preferred to consult the group, even compared to a crowd ten times as large — consistent with past research suggesting that groups regularly outperform even their best members for reasoning problems. In contrast, we observed a consistent developmental shift towards crowdsourcing independent judgments when reasoning by itself was insufficient to conclusively answer a question. Results suggest sophisticated intuitions about the nature of social influence and collective intelligence may guide our social learning strategies from early in development.

Collective Intelligence

The chapter provides an introduction to the social science of ‘collective intelligence’, the aggregation of individual judgments for purposes of collective decision making. It starts from the basic logic of the Condorcet jury theorem and summarises the main determinants of the accuracy of collective cognition. The recent research has focused on developing and refining formal aggregation methods beyond majority voting. The chapter presents the main findings on the two general approaches, surveying and prediction markets. It then contrasts these techniques with informal deliberation as a basic and prevalent aggregation mechanism. One conclusion is that while deliberation is prone to herding and can distort collective judgment, it is also more versatile and robust than formal mechanisms.

The Complexity Landscape of Outcome Determination in Judgment Aggregation

We provide a comprehensive analysis of the computational complexity of the outcome determination problem for the most important aggregation rules proposed in the literature on logic-based judgment aggregation. Judgment aggregation is a powerful and flexible framework for studying problems of collective decision making that has attracted interest in a range of disciplines, including Legal Theory, Philosophy, Economics, Political Science, and Artificial Intelligence. The problem of computing the outcome for a given list of individual judgments to be aggregated into a single collective judgment is the most fundamental algorithmic challenge arising in this context. Our analysis applies to several different variants of the basic framework of judgment aggregation that have been discussed in the literature, as well as to a new framework that encompasses all existing such frameworks in terms of expressive power and representational succinctness.

The League of Nations, autonomy and collective security

This article tests the assumption that in institutional and legal design the League of Nations was incapable of providing collective security. The lens through which this issue is scrutinised is the concept of institutional legal autonomy, in other words the legal separation of the organisation from its member states. The thinking is not necessarily that the greater the autonomy the greater the potential of the organisation to fulfil its functions, but that the organisation already had sufficient autonomy in international relations to provide an effective form of ‘collective security’, a term that was not found in the Covenant but, by 1935, was being used to describe the response of the League to the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. This article tests the assumption that the League did not have sufficient autonomy in terms of collective judgment and power to deliver collective security.

AI Bias: How Does AI Influence The Executive Function Of Business Leaders?

By 2020, the AI market is expected to grow by $47 billion, with the international big data analytics industry expected to grow by $203 billion. The vast majority of AI development is conducted by a modest number of techno-giants (Twitter, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple...). There are over 7 billion people worldwide, yet all of the code is being written by a mere 10,000 people in seven countries. Therefore, the pathway of AI algorithms is deemed compromised, by being in the hands of a few. The purpose of this study is to systematically gather and review evidence which addresses AI, its inherent biases, and its effect on the executive function, which is the brain's command post, of business leaders. The review is carried out through the chaos and complexity theory lens. The amalgamation of data and codes have seeded the evolution of barely discernible algorithms that rewrite their own code, creating their own rules, and their own truth. This phenomenon rapidly detaches AI algorithms from human control. While AI algorithms remain unregulated and uncontested, leaders are overwhelmed with big data and precipitously surrendering, rejecting or suppressing their own cognitive instincts regarding AI and its bias, without question. This study supports the notion that decision-making using AI must be interrogated by leaders' sound elevated executive functioning and collective judgment, using standards and laws, to mitigate bias and to ensure human leaders have the last say in decision-making.

A novel technique based on the Law of Comparative Judgment for quality-related problems

<p class="Abstract">A relatively diffused problem in the quality engineering/management field is that in which a set of judges express their individual (<em>subjective</em>) judgments on a specific <em>attribute</em> of some <em>objects</em> and these judgments have to be fused into a <em>collective</em> one.</p><p class="Abstract">The goal of this paper is to develop a new technique that combines the Thurstone’s <em>Law of Comparative Judgment</em> with an <em>ad hoc</em> response mode based on preference orderings. This technique allows to express the collective judgment of the objects on a <em>ratio</em> scale and is applicable to a variety of practical contexts.</p>

Christopher Greenwood

I have also had the experience of sitting—though not silently—through deliberations in the ICJ. Often professors say, “Oh well you know, they were not quite clear where they were going because they had been ambiguous here.” The common law world of academia often misses the point spectacularly, because in common law courts—even when you have a lot of judges—the tradition is that a judge writes his or her own judgment, and either other judges agree or you have to distill the ratio decidendi of the case from the different judgments. It is a totally different exercise when the judges must produce a collective judgment, especially if they must produce it in more than one language. Had academics been a fly on the wall in the deliberations at the ICJ they would have known we knew exactly what we were doing: we did not all agree on the outcome, and this is a disagreement that has been reduced to writing in order to enable the court to move on.

Corruption and Anticorruption in Democratic Athens

The chapter examines a major corruption scandal that involved the Athenian orator Demosthenes and an official of Alexander the Great. This episode reveals how tensions between individual and collective decision-making practices shaped Athenian understandings of corruption and anticorruption. The various and multiple anticorruption measures of Athens sought to bring ‘hidden’ knowledge into the open and thereby remove information from the realm of individual judgment, placing it instead into the realm of collective judgment. The Athenian experience therefore suggests that participatory democracy, and a civic culture that fosters political equality rather than reliance on individual expertise, provides a key bulwark against corruption.

Ethical Responsibility - An Arendtian Turn

ABSTRACT:This article contends that Hannah Arendt’s writing can add value to current discussions on responsible leadership. Specifically, considering responsibility through an Arendtian lens offers insights that deepen our understanding of the interconnections among leadership, responsibility, and ethical action. Turning to Arendt can, therefore, increase our grasp of the complexities of leading responsibly. She shows how acting responsibly requires not only ethical forethought but also a willingness to judge for ourselves. Her emphasis on judgment enriches discussions on responsible leadership, encouraging us to think more deeply about what it might mean to act responsibly, and how such action connects with ethics. Examples of irresponsible action are explored as they concern individual and collective judgment in particular political and corporate contexts. Thus, it is by engaging with the messy realities of everyday life that an Arendtian turn can help us rethink leadership, ethics, and responsibility in new and productive ways.