Private-property anarchism is a political philosophy and set of economic and legal arguments that maintains that markets and contracts should provide law and that the rule of law itself can only be understood as a private institution. This book presents the essays that explain, debate, and examine historical examples of stateless orders.

A dictionary definition of Bioethics is, 'the ethics, or moral principles and rules of conduct, of medical and biological research'. This book is an introductory text of just biological and not medical bioethics. It covers the ethics of experimentation, including genetic manipulation, in plants and animals; ethics and biodiversity, ethics and the environment. There is increasing interest in bioethics - both in academia and by the media and the general public. Awareness of bioethics is incorporated into Biological / Environmental Science (...) courses, plus the first dedicated modular courses on bioethics are starting up. * Includes case studies * Has questions for students * Chapters include environmental, animal, agricultural and reproductive ethics as well as a wide range of issues regarding genetic manipulation. (shrink)

Provides comprehensive, yet concise coverage of the broad field of bioethics, dealing with the scientific, medical, social, religious, political and international concerns.

What can Dungeons & Dragons teach us about the being of beings? This article argues that Dungeons & Dragons introduces us to a world composed of objects or entities, where the being of objects is defined not by their qualities, but rather by their powers, capacities or affects. Drawing on the thought of Spinoza, Deleuze and Molnar, objects are seen to be defined by what they can do or their capacities to act, such that qualities are effects of these acts. (...) Dungeons & Dragons is particularly suited to showing us this insofar as it focuses on the action of entities. (shrink)

Must the state handle the adjudication of disputes? Researchers of different perspectives, from heterodox scholars of law who advocate legal pluralism to libertarian economists who advocate the privatization of law, have increasingly questioned the idea that the state is, or should be, the only source of law. Both groups point out that government law has problems and that non-state alternatives exist. This Article discusses some problems with the public judicial system and several for-profit alternatives. Public courts lack both incentives to (...) embrace customer orientation and pricing mechanisms, plus they face problems associated with the bureaucratic provision of services. When parties are able to choose their tribunals, in contrast, those tribunals must provide service to customers and be mindful about conserving resources. Competition between arbitrators also can allow for experimentation and the provision of customized services rather than a centrally planned, one-size-fits-all system. Contracts with arbitration clauses can easily stipulate the choice of tribunal, and we argue that if government courts simply refused to overrule binding arbitration agreements, de facto privatization could easily take place. This Article discusses how the private adjudication of disputes could enable the market to internalize externalities and provide services that customers desire. (shrink)

During the English Civil War and subsequent Restoration, beekeeping provided a ready set of moral examples for those seeking answers about the ‘natural’ structure of society. The practice itself also underwent a number of substantial changes, moving from a traditional craft practice to a more knowledge-focused, technologically complex one. The advent of glass-windowed hives in the latter half of the sixteenth century allowed intellectuals from across the political spectrum to directly observe bees as a way of gathering knowledge about how (...) to understand the divine plan and, with that understanding, improve human society. (shrink)

This paper aims to better motivate the naturalization of metaphysics by identifying and criticizing a class of theories I call ’free range metaphysics’. I argue that free range metaphysics is epistemically inadequate because the constraints on its content—consistency, simplicity, intuitive plausibility, and explanatory power—are insufficiently robust and justificatory. However, since free range metaphysics yields clarity-conducive techniques, incubates science, and produces conceptual and formal tools useful for scientifically engaged philosophy, I do not recommend its discontinuation. I do recommend, however, ending the (...) discipline’s bad faith. That is, I urge that free range metaphysics not be taken to have fully satisfactory epistemic credentials over and above its pragmatic ones. (shrink)

The economic development of the West is under examined in terms of lessons there may be for development strategies employed in the global South today. This article examines the emergence of sustained change in economic growth in Britain in the 19th century, in light of the normative poverty eradication strategies of today. The article focuses not so much on what happened in Britain and why, as on what did not happen during this period of rapid economic development. The purpose of (...) this anachronistic examination is to search for helpful correctives to current poverty eradication thinking and practice. There are two major lessons. First, Britain’s experience of rapid economic growth suggests that social change is unpredictable and thus immune to today’s linear planning models. Second, Britain’s development is a story of changes in the individual and social identity of the British people themselves – the British people changed. A set of proposals in response to these findings is then described. (shrink)

Defends and transforms naturalism and materialism to show how culture itself is formed by nature. Bryant endorses a pan-ecological theory of being, arguing that societies are ecosystems that can only be understood by considering nonhuman material agencies such as rivers and mountain ranges alongside signifying agencies such as discourses, narratives and ideologies.

This article examines some of the reasons why banks and insurance companies have been accused of discrimination, and shows that this is by and large a false accusation. Economic analysis demonstrates that racial discrimination is not a profit‐maximizing strategy. Actually, unwise public policies are actually precluding many consumers from the market.

The essays in this collection show how law is relevant in both an "instrumental" and a "constitutive" sense, as a tool to accomplish particular purposes and as ...

Justice and Power in the Sociolegal Studies asks what interdisciplinary work in the law and society tradition tells us about the relationship of law and justice, as well as the way power operates in and through law. The fundamental concepts of justice and power provide points of departure for leading scholars to explore the various domains of socio-legal research. As they note the explicitness of the engagement with issues of power and the relative silence about -- or indirectness in taking (...) on -- questions of justice found in most law and society research, they ask how engagement with issues of power and silence about justice constituted law and society as a research field caught between a desire to have political impact and, at the same time, to maintain its scientific respectability. (shrink)

Draws on Marx and the first-generation Frankfurt School to make the case that cosmopolitanism must become a postcapitalist political theory.

The varied chapters of this book seek to capture the complexities of teaching and learning in today's schools, and they share an interest in exploring the influences of knowledge construction in the moment and over time. Teaching and learning are human processes, interrelated and dynamic. We assembled this collection to unpack what it means to teach and to learn, teasing out some of the implications and challenges of such complicated educational processes that are often misconstrued as causal or linear. As (...) educators currently residing in the United States, we find this a particularly pressing agenda, given the current focus on common core standards and reducing teaching and learning to conceptual and pedagogical stepby-step procedures. Our primary concern in putting together this book was to provide a conceptual and political foundation from which to construct and defend understandings and practices of teaching and learning that embody the complexity of educational endeavors and relationships. The isolation of teaching from learning, and the othering of both teachers and students, one from the other, suggests that knowledge is synonymous with information. This book challenges such assumptions. The project underlying this text can be seen as a means of rethinking how teachers' and students' perspectives of practice and curriculum influence what learning opportunities are provided to students. Chapters written by established and new thinkers in the field of education demonstrate the ways in which teachers reformulate relationships between teaching and learning in school settings. Our second objective is to examine local constructions of knowledge over time and how those constructions are consequential for teacher and student learning. By examining patterns of practice and processes of knowledge construction in elementary, secondary, and undergraduate classrooms, the authors of these chapters lay a foundation for examining commonalities and differences in the construction of knowledge and practices across educational levels, disciplines, and in-school and outof-school settings. (shrink)

A naturalistic impulse has taken speculative analytic metaphysics in its critical sights. Importantly, the claim that it is desirable or requisite to give metaphysics scientific moorings rests on underlying epistemological assumptions or principles. If the naturalistic impulse toward metaphysics is to be well-founded and its prescriptions to have normative force, those assumptions or principles should be spelled out and justified. In short, advocates of naturalized or scientific metaphysics require epistemic infrastructure. This paper begins to supply it. The author first sketches (...) her conception of suitably naturalized or scientific metaphysics. She then lays out a number of candidate epistemic principles centring around the notion of theoretical constraint. The author offers several arguments for the principles, based on statistical likeliness, agreement, falsity avoidance, and methodological efficiency and inefficiency. Finally, she shows how scientific metaphysics satisfies the epistemic principles and is therefore preferable to its traditional rivals. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently highlighted substantial affinities between causation and grounding, which has inclined some to import the conceptual and formal resources of causal interventionism into the metaphysics of grounding. The prospect of grounding interventionism raises two important questions: exactly what are grounding interventions, and why should we think they enable knowledge of grounding? This paper will approach these questions by examining how causal interventionists have addressed (or might address) analogous questions and then comparing the available options for grounding interventionism. I (...) argue that grounding interventions must be understood in worldly terms, as adding something to or deleting something from the roster of entities, or making some fact obtain or fail to obtain. I consider three bases for counterfactual assessment: imagination, structural equation models, and background theory. I conclude that grounding interventionism requires firmer epistemological foundations, without which the interventionist's epistemology of grounding is incomplete and ineffectually rationalist. (shrink)

This paper surveys some of the grounding literature searching for points of contact between theories of ground and science. I find that there are some places where a would-be naturalistic grounding theorist can draw inspiration. I synthesize a list of recommendations for how science may be put to use in theories of ground. I conclude that the prospects for naturalizing the metaphysics of ground are bright.

Vocal affect is a subcomponent of emotion programs that coordinate a variety of physiological and psychological systems. Emotional vocalizations comprise a suite of vocal behaviors shaped by evolution to solve adaptive social communication problems. The acoustic forms of vocal emotions are often explicable with reference to the communicative functions they serve. An adaptationist approach to vocal emotions requires that we distinguish between evolved signals and byproduct cues, and understand vocal affect as a collection of multiple strategic communicative systems subject to (...) the evolutionary dynamics described by signaling theory. We should expect variability across disparate societies in vocal emotion according to culturally evolved pragmatic rules, and universals in vocal production and perception to the extent that form–function relationships are present. (shrink)

When the U.S. conducts warfare, elements of a force are drawn from different services and work together as a single team to accomplish an assigned mission. To achieve such unified action, it is necessary that the doctrines governing the actions of members of specific services be both consistent with and subservient to joint Doctrine. Because warfighting today increasingly involves not only live forces but also automated systems, unified action requires that information technology that is used in joint warfare must be (...) aligned with joint doctrine. It requires also that the separate information systems used by the different elements of a joint force must be interoperable, in the sense that data and information that is generated by each element must be usable (understandable, processable) by all the other elements that need them. Currently, such interoperability is impeded by multiple inconsistencies among the different data and software standards used by warfighters. We describe here the on-going project of creating a Joint Doctrine Ontology (JDO), which uses joint doctrine to provide shared computer-accessible content valid for any field of military endeavor, organization, and information system. JDO addresses the two previously mentioned requirements of unified action by providing a widely applicable benchmark for use by developers of information systems that will both guarantee alignment with joint doctrine and support interoperability. (shrink)

The word ‘naturalism’ has a bewildering array of uses in philosophy. Roughly speaking, it connotes pro-scientific attitudes and approaches. This article introduces the subject of naturalism by sketching a history of pro-scientific attitudes and approaches in philosophy, from their origins in the early modern period through to the present day. It then distinguishes a number of distinct families of naturalism: metaphysical, logico-linguistic, epistemological, and methodological. The resulting taxonomy encompasses a plurality of loosely related views rather than a number of variations (...) on a single clear and unified theme. (shrink)

Continental philosophy has entered a new period of ferment. The long deconstructionist era was followed with a period dominated by Deleuze, which has in turn evolved into a new situation still difficult to define. However, one common thread running through the new brand of continental positions is a renewed attention to materialist and realist options in philosophy. Among the leaders of the established generation, this new focus takes numerous forms. It might be hard to find many shared positions in the (...) writings of Badiou, DeLanda, Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, and Žižek, but what is missing from their positions is an obsession with the critique of written texts. All of them elaborate a positive ontology, despite the incompatibility of their results. Meanwhile, the new generation of continental thinkers is pushing these trends still further, as seen in currents ranging from transcendental materialism to the London-based speculative realism movement to new revivals of Derrida. As indicated by the title The Speculative Turn, the new currents of continental philosophy depart from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself. This anthology assembles authors, of several generations and numerous nationalities, who will be at the centre of debate in continental philosophy for decades to come. (shrink)

Unethical pro-organizational behaviors are unethical, but prosocially-motivated, acts intended to benefit one’s organization. This study examines the extent to which employees are willing to perform UPB to benefit a liked leader. Based on social exchange theory, we hypothesized that LMX would mediate the association of interpersonal justice with UPB willingness. Moral identity and positive reciprocity beliefs were examined as moderators. Higher LMX was significantly and positively related to UPB willingness, and the indirect effect of interpersonal justice on UPB via LMX (...) was significant and positive. These findings suggest that LMX and interpersonal justice could have a previously-unexplored dark side. Moral identity had a negative direct relationship with UPB, but it did not moderate the relationship of LMX with UPB. Thus, LMX facilitates UPB willingness even when employees are high in moral identity. LMX is associated with many positive outcomes, but our results show that high LMX may also increase willingness to perform unethical behaviors to benefit one’s leader. These results contribute to the literature by identifying a potential negative outcome associated with high LMX. (shrink)

From one end of his philosophical work to the other, Gilles Deleuze consistently described his position as a transcendental empiricism. But just what is transcendental about Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism? And how does his position fit with the traditional empiricism articulated by Hume? In Difference and Givenness , Levi Bryant addresses these long-neglected questions so critical to an understanding of Deleuze’s thinking. Through a close examination of Deleuze’s independent work--focusing especially on Difference and Repetition-- as well as his engagement with (...) thinkers such as Kant, Mai;mon, Bergson, and Simondon, Bryant sets out to unearth Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism and to show how it differs from transcendental idealism, absolute idealism, and traditional empiricism. What emerges from these efforts is a metaphysics that strives to articulate the conditions for real existence, capable of accounting for the individual itself without falling into conceptual or essentialist abstraction. In Bryant’s analysis, Deleuze’s metaphysics articulates an account of being as process or creative individuation based on difference, as well as a challenging critique--and explanation--of essentialist substance ontologies. A clear and powerful discussion of how Deleuze’s project relates to two of the most influential strains in the history of philosophy, this book will prove essential to anyone seeking to understand Deleuze’s thought and its specific contribution to metaphysics and epistemology. (shrink)

Since Kant, philosophy has been obsessed with epistemological questions pertaining to the relationship between mind and world and human access to objects. In The Democracy of Objects Bryant proposes that we break with this tradition and once again initiate the project of ontology as first philosophy. Drawing on the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman, as well as the thought Roy Bhaskar, Gilles Deleuze, Niklas Luhman, Aristotle, Jacques Lacan, Bruno Latour and the developmental systems theorists, Bryant develops a realist (...) ontology that he calls “onticology”. This ontology argues that being is composed entirely of objects, properties, and relations such that subjects themselves are a variant of objects. By way of systems theory and cybernetics, Bryant argues that objects are dynamic systems that relate to the world under conditions of operational closure. In this way, he integrates the most vital discoveries of the anti-realists within a realist ontology that does justice to both the material and cultural. Onticology proposes a flat ontology where objects of all sorts and at different scales equally exist without being reducible to other objects and where there are no transcendent entities such as eternal essences outside of dynamic interactions among objects. This work will be of great interest to Continental philosophers, ecologists, cultural theorists, media theorists, and those following recent developments in the thought of speculative realists. (shrink)

In the 1920s, Ludwig von Mises argued correctly that the problem of making economic calculations without market‐generated prices would be an insuperable difficulty for socialist systems of production. Bryan Caplan is right to argue that there is no theoretical way to infer the magnitude of this difficulty, but he is wrong to insist that the history of poor economic performance displayed by real‐world socialism should be attributed not to the “socialist calculation problem,” but to inadequate work incentives. A state that (...) had solved the calculation problem would have well within its means the solution to the incentives problem, too. (shrink)