The Political Conception of Human Rights and Its Rule(s) of Recognition

The political conception makes sense of human rights strictly in light of their role in international human rights practice, more specifically by describing how they justify interventions against states that engage in or fail to prevent human rights violations. This conception is, therefore, normative and fact-dependent. Beyond this, it does not seem to have much to say about the actual nature of international human rights practice. The argument sustained here reinterprets the political conception by resorting to a heuristic device that explains how normativity can be fact-dependent: the Hartian model. The characteristics of H.L.A. Hart’s rule of recognition are useful to determine the characteristics of human rights practice from the viewpoint of the political conception. Also, they help to overcome some of the problems typically faced by the political conception, such as whether there is only one practice or many, whether the notion of human rights becomes too contingent on the way the world is currently organised, how agents can violate content-changing practices, or how reliance on current states of affairs leaves room for criticism of those states of affairs.

Doxographical Appropriation of Nāgārjuna’s Catuṣkoṭi in Chinese Sanlun and Tiantai Thought

This article reconstructs the Chinese “practice qua exegesis” which evolved out of the doxographical appropriation of the Indian Buddhist catuṣkoṭi (four edges), a heuristic device for conceptual analysis and a method of assorting linguistic forms to which adherents of Madhyamaka ascribed ambiguous potential. It could conceptually clarify Buddhist doctrine, but also produce deceptive speech. According to the Chinese interpreters, conceptual and linguistic forms continue to be deceptive until the mind realizes that all it holds on or distinguishes itself from is its own fabrication. Liberation from such self-induced deceptions requires awareness of the paradox that the desire to leave them behind is itself a way of clinging to them. Chinese Sanlun and Tiantai masters tried to uncover this paradox and to disclose to practitioners how the application of the catuṣkoṭi, on the basis of such awareness, enables proper conceptual analysis in exegesis. From this approach followed the Chinese habit of construing doxographies in which hermeneutical and soteriological intent coincide. Understanding the inner unity of doctrinal manifoldness in the translated sūtra and śāstra literature from India via exegesis also made it possible to apprehend the ineffable sense of liberation.

‘My favourite meme page’: Balenciaga’s Instagram account and audience fashion labour online

As fashion ‘goes viral’, adapting to digital popular cultural flows, streams, image aggregations and memes, there is a need for better grasping how these platforms feed into the aesthetics of mediations of fashion. Contemporary digitally mediated fashion is conditioned by what van Dijck and Poell refer to as a new media logic, one that permeates the ‘strategies, mechanisms, and economics underpinning these platforms’ dynamics’. This logic includes audience labour. This article focuses on how the audience is put to work and how such work becomes integral to the mediational aesthetic by using the Instagram account of Paris-based fashion brand Balenciaga as a heuristic device. In connecting perspectives from fashion and media studies, this article discusses how fashion mediation is entangled in processes that harness audience labour on Instagram. Balenciaga takes on communication strategies that expose the aesthetics of user engagement. On Instagram, the brand presents its take on fashion photography in the digital age as part of its visual identity on this platform. Furthermore, in feeding the comments section, users participate in ‘boundary maintenance’, separating Balenciaga insiders from outsiders who lack knowledge of the perpetually changing aesthetic codes of fashion imagery. Online audiences thus find themselves at the crossroads of consumption, production and gatekeeping.

Towards a Pricean foundation for cultural evolutionary theory

The Price equation is currently considered one of the fundamental equations – or even the fundamental equation – of evolution. In this article, we explore the role of this equation within cultural evolutionary theory. More specifically, we use it to account for the explanatory power and the theoretical structure of a certain generalised version of dual-inheritance theory. First, we argue that, in spite of not having a definite empirical content, the Price equation offers a suitable formalisation of the processes of cultural evolution, and provides a powerful heuristic device for discovering the actual causes of cultural change and accumulation. Second, we argue that, as a consequence of this, a certain version of the Price equation is the fundamental law of cultural evolutionary theory. In order to support this claim, we sketch the ideal structure of dual-inheritance theory and we stress the unificatory role that the Price equation plays in it.

The Team of Six Million

After seven weeks of lockdown from late March through to May, the so-called ‘team of five million’ had (temporarily) defeated the virus and the country’s focus swung back to the border and the threat posed by returning New Zealanders. As a companion piece to Murdoch Stephen’s intervention in this issue of Counterfutures, this intervention employs Chantal Mouffe’s reading of ‘Schmitt against Schmitt’ as a heuristic device for discussing the figure of the returnee. In an era punctuated by global political, economic, and environmental crises, by a failing neoliberal consensus and rising ethnonationalism, thinking through the issues posed by the figure of the returnee and the antagonisms that it embodies can tell us much about the politics of our moment, providing us a way to think about broader issues of displacement, citizenship, sovereignty, nationhood, and globalisation.

Balancing a budget or running a deficit? The offset regime of carbon removal and solar geoengineering under a carbon budget

The idea of the carbon budget is a powerful conceptual tool to define and quantify the climate challenge. Whilst scientists present the carbon budget as the geophysical foundation for global net-zero targets, the financial metaphor of a budget implies figuratively the existence of a ‘budget manager’ who oversees the budget balance. Using this fictive character of budget manager as a heuristic device, the paper analyses the roles of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM) under a carbon budget. We argue that both CDR and SRM can be understood as ‘technologies of offset’. CDR offsets positive carbon emissions by negative emissions, whereas SRM offsets the warming from positive greenhouse gas forcing by the induced cooling from negative forcing. These offset technologies serve as flexible budgeting tools in two different strategies for budget management: they offer the promise of achieving a balanced budget, but also introduce the possibility for running a budget deficit. The lure of offsetting rests on the flexibility of keeping up an ‘appearance’ of delivering a given budget whilst at the same time easing budget constraints for a certain period of time. The political side-effect of offsetting is to change the stringency of budgetary constraints from being regulated by geophysics to being adjustable by human discretion. As a result, a budget deficit can be normalised as an acceptable fiscal condition. We suggest that the behavioural tendency of policymakers to avoid blame could lead them to resort to using offset technologies to circumvent the admission of failure to secure a given temperature target.

Theoretical and Empirical Foundations for a Unified Pyramid of Human Motivation

<p>Revisions are proposed to the taxonomic model of human motivation of Forbes (2011) in order to incorporate a heretofore missing fourth life domain, the spiritual. The growing literature on spiritual motives is systematically reviewed in accordance with literature review standards for theory development (Templier & Paré, 2018) focusing on the objective of identifying comprehensive theoretical systems that explicitly incorporate the spiritual domain as one of a limited set of human life domains. The structure of the Forbes model is contrasted with thirteen theoretical systems that explicitly incorporate the spiritual as a fourth life domain. Consistent with the Forbes model, the spiritual domain is proposed to consist of three modes of existence (Being, Doing, Having) represented as justice motivation, moral motivation, and transcendental motivation, respectively, as well as both promotion and prevention goals within each of the three motives. Empirical evidence is reviewed in support of a revised heuristic device wherein the Spiritual domain is closely linked with the Intrapsychic and Interpersonal domains, but not the Instrumental domain, resulting in a pyramidal structure and corresponding set of five testable hypotheses.</p>

Theoretical and Empirical Foundations for a Unified Pyramid of Human Motivation

<p>Revisions are proposed to the taxonomic model of human motivation of Forbes (2011) in order to incorporate a heretofore missing fourth life domain, the spiritual. The growing literature on spiritual motives is systematically reviewed in accordance with literature review standards for theory development (Templier & Paré, 2018) focusing on the objective of identifying comprehensive theoretical systems that explicitly incorporate the spiritual domain as one of a limited set of human life domains. The structure of the Forbes model is contrasted with thirteen theoretical systems that explicitly incorporate the spiritual as a fourth life domain. Consistent with the Forbes model, the spiritual domain is proposed to consist of three modes of existence (Being, Doing, Having) represented as justice motivation, moral motivation, and transcendental motivation, respectively, as well as both promotion and prevention goals within each of the three motives. Empirical evidence is reviewed in support of a revised heuristic device wherein the Spiritual domain is closely linked with the Intrapsychic and Interpersonal domains, but not the Instrumental domain, resulting in a pyramidal structure and corresponding set of five testable hypotheses.</p>

Ecologies of Repair: A Post-human Approach to Other-Than-Human Natures

This conceptual paper explores the theoretical possibilities of posthumanism and presents ecologies of repair as a heuristic device to explore the association modes of different entities, which, when confronted with the effects of human-induced destructive events, seek to repair the damage and transform the conditions of coexistence of various life forms. The central idea is that severe socio-environmental crisis caused by an intensification of industrial activity are conducive to observing new sociomaterial configurations and affective dispositions that, through the reorganization of practices of resistance, remediation, and mutual care, are oriented to generating reparative and/or transformative processes from damaged ecologies and communities. Crises constitute true ontological experimentation processes where the presence of other-than-human natures, and of artifacts or devices that participate in reparative actions, become visible. A post-human approach to nature allows us to use languages and methodologies that do not restrict the emergence of assemblages under the assumption of their a priori ontological separation, but rather examine their reparative potential based on the efficacy of situated relationships. Methodologically, transdisciplinarity is relevant, with ethnography and other engaged methods applied over units of observation and experience called socio-geo-ecologies. The relevant attributes of these socio-geo-ecologies, beyond the individual, community, or institutional aspects, are the specific geological characteristics that make possible an entanglement of interdependent relationships between human and non-human agents. The conceptual analysis is illustrated with empirical examples stemming from socio-geo-ecologies researched in Southern Chile.