Mingling and Strategic Augmentation of International Legal Obligations

Managing foreign affairs is in no small measure about anticipating the actions (and non-actions) of others, and about taking steps to limit the unexpected—and the undesired. Law has long been recognized as important to these tasks. Nevertheless, standard IR treatments often overlook important properties of law, even when trying to account for international law's effects on behavior. Chief among these overlooked properties is the fact that legal rules are formulated for general use, which means their provisions lack determinate meaning in relation to the full range of facts they may be applied to. Selecting and using legal rules to guide or assess behavior thus requires interpretation. Self-interested actors may differ regarding the applicability, scope, or meaning of individual rules, and still more so where multiple legal rules are in play. In situations where political stakes are high, powerful actors may not be content to leave all options on the table. Instead they may use interpretative tactics to mingle obligations from different agreements and, where needed, to augment relevant legal obligations in efforts to prospectively ensure, in the mode of Riker's heresthetics, that interlocutors feel compelled by legal circumstances to enact the more powerful actor's preferences. I demonstrate how agreement mingling and augmentation function in complex legal environments by reexaming US efforts to insulate its citizens from unwanted exercises of jurisdiction by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Human Dignity, Suicide, and Assisting Others to Die

The notion of human dignity is pervasive in political and philosophical discourse, but it can have various different meanings and in some contexts may have little determinate meaning at all. It is often invoked on both sides of the debate about the permissibility of assisting others to die. This chapter canvasses and critically evaluates various ways of understanding the concept human dignity, including that found in the work of Kant and some contemporary Kantians. It is argued that none of these understandings provide the basis for a convincing argument against the permissibility of suicide or of assisting others to die.

Expecting the Unexpected: How Gallery Visitors Experience Semantic Instability in Art

The perception of artworks rarely—if ever—results in the instantiation of a determinate meaning. Instead, when entering an art gallery, we often expect Semantic Instability (SeIns): the experience of perceptual and cognitive habits being challenged. By comparing the experience of an artistic movie in an exhibition with the experience in a laboratory via the Continuous Evaluation Procedure, we found that the movie was less semantically unstable and more pleasing to the eyes of gallery visitors than to those of participants in the laboratory. These findings suggest that a gallery context might induce the expectation of perceptual challenge, thus decreasing the intensity of SeIns and at the same time heightening the appreciation of SeIns. Exhibition visitors might even be on the lookout for challenging experiences.

Caring and the Boundary-Driven Structure of Practical Deliberation

When a reasonable agent deliberates about what to do, she entertains only a limited range of possible courses of action. A theory of practical reasoning must therefore include an account of deliberative attention: an account that both explains the patterns of deliberative attention that reasonable agents typically display and allows us to see why these patterns of deliberative attention are reasonable. I offer such an account, built around two, central claims. (i) A reasonable agent who cares about some end is disposed to exclude courses of action which she believes to be incompatible with that end from the range of possibilities that she will entertain as options in practical deliberation. As I shall put it, an agent’s cares establish deliberative boundaries for her practical thought. (ii) The stability of a deliberative boundary varies with the depth of the care that explains it. These two claims motivate the Boundary-Driven Model of the path that a reasonable agent’s deliberative attention will take in temporally extended deliberation. If we locate the model within a maximizing conception of practical rationality, then boundary-driven deliberation, of the sort that the model describes, can be understood and justified instrumentally, as a heuristic device. But if we suppose that there is no single index of value that successful practical choice maximizes, then boundary-driven deliberation is partly constitutive of reasonableness in practical thought. It allows an agent facing plural and incommensurable values to frame her deliberative problems narrowly enough that, in conjunction with deliberative devices which are not part of the model but which are compatible with it, she may be able to reach a non-arbitrary decision – and so give a determinate, verdictive sense to the phrase “the best course of action available to me” in cases in which a determinate meaning for this phrase would otherwise be lacking.

Non-Knowledge and the Symbolic Mode: Nikolai Khomeriki’s A Tale About Darkness (2009)

I use Khomeriki’s film to demonstrate how the symbolic mode enables signification outside the realm of rational knowledge whereby symbols relate to non-knowledge. In his critique of non-knowledge, Bataille infers that the subjects enters the transcendent whole and realises its own discontinuity (a crisis presented in Khomeriki’s film). The subject wishes to identify with the entirety of being—as a will to know and possess—but can never satisfy this desire because this being is nowhere. Non-being is substituted by non-knowledge, which Bataille conceived of in metaphorical terms, as an image of the night and return to what is there. I explore the concept of non-knowledge not as a matter of representation but rather as a matter that transcends representation through the principle of relation. Representation is always partial while non-knowledge is outside the limits of an individual’s horizon. This is because representation makes claims about the truth, ‘realism’, which gives way to a totalitarian logos, that is, as Derrida pointed out, truth is always an end in itself, the destination, hence ‘truth’ is internalised as a belief. Non-knowledge is about the realisation of self-presence which denies the possibility of determinate meaning, ‘truth’, and about revelation in place of representation.

Computational Economics

Computational economics is a relatively new research technique in economics, but it is inexorably taking its place alongside the more traditional methods of general theory, abstract modeling, data analysis, and the more recent experimental economics. Perhaps because of its relative newness, the term computational economics currently has no determinate meaning. In contemporary use, it refers to a heterogeneous cluster of techniques implemented on concrete digital computers ranging from the numerical solution of the Black-Scholes partial differential equation for pricing options through automated trading strategies to agent-based computer simulations of the evolution of cooperation. Because of this heterogeneity, it is not possible to provide a comprehensive coverage of the topic in this article. Another reason for this restricted scope is that many of the methods used in computational economics have considerable technical interest but no particular philosophical relevance.

Faithful Reading: Poststructuralism and the Sacred

In its subversive interrogations of universal values, objective criteria for meaning, canonicity and other hallmarks which distinguish the Literary, poststructuralism appears to confront all that is "sacred" in the privileged texts of Western culture. Particularly in biblical criticism, insofar as the sanctity of the text and the inviolability of its truth claims are held to be unquestionable, poststructuralism is often denounced as anathema, or at least inappropriate, to exegesis. It is argued that if determinate meaning is inaccessible through language, and universal truth a chimera, then according to poststructuralist tenets the Bible is, like all literature, "Just another text." This paper entertains another possibility: that poststructuralism in fact places the Bible in a position of singular significance. If claims for the "sacredness" of certain texts are precisely where poststructuralist critics direct their efforts, then biblical texts, whose claims for sacredness are more insistent and dogmatic than most, should provide poststructuralism's most contentious (and therefore most important) field of operation. Interrogating the sacred, far from being an iconoclastic pursuit, is an inevitable consequence of the reception of sacred texts-indeed, of language-in culture. By way of illustrating this point, I offer a reading of the Garden of Eden story (Gen. 2:4b-3:24) which incorporates insights offered by Jacques Derrida's critique of logocentrism. What poststructuralism demands, in the final analysis, is not the abandonment of meaning but its reconfiguration: notions of faithful reading and respect for the text which embrace difference, ambiguity and an understanding of the sacred as the site not of uncontestable command, but of enquiry and interpretation.