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Posted by NELB Staff on 03/28/2013 at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Last Edition's Most Popular Article:
In The Popular Press
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Posted by Adam Kolber on 03/22/2013 at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted by Adam Kolber on 03/22/2013 at 02:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
The announcement below is posted on behalf of Bennett Helm in the Department of Philosophy at Franklin & Marshall College:
The project, Love and Human Agency: An Interdisciplinary Investigation (http://www.loveandhumanagency.org), announces a prize competition for essays on love, caring, and human agency. Essays are invited on any of a wide range of topics related to the nature of caring or love (broadly construed), or to the roles that love or caring play in human thought and action. Examples of questions an essay might address include, but are not limited to: What is love? What is it to care about something or someone? How can an understanding of love contribute to our understanding of our capacity to value? What role does caring play in free or autonomous agency? What role should love play in the theory of practical reason? What connection is there between caring and moral character? How does the capacity for love develop in infants and children? What cognitive mechanisms or abilities are necessary for the capacity to care? What can we learn about the capacities to love and care from brain disorders that compromise these capacities? What role does the capacity to care play in moral or legal responsibility?
Essays are invited from philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, economics, law, and any other academic discipline whose methods can shed light on these or related questions. Essays must be unpublished and not accepted for publication at the time of submission, and they should be submitted electronically to submissions@loveandhumanagency.org no later than May 16, 2014.
Prizes will be awarded to three winning essays, with a top prize of $3000; they will also be considered for publication in an edited volume on love and human agency. Winners will be invited (travel and lodging expenses paid) to an interdisciplinary conference on love and human agency to be held at Franklin and Marshall College in Autumn, 2014, where prizes will be awarded.
The selection panel will be comprised of team members of the project on Love and Human Agency, in consultation with experts in specific disciplines as necessary. Winners will be announced in Summer, 2014.
Any questions about submission criteria or process should be sent to queries@loveandhumanagency.org.
Posted by NELB Staff on 03/18/2013 at 12:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted by Adam Kolber on 03/15/2013 at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
From the NYT:
His lawyer, Julia L. Gatto, called the verdict “devastating” and said the government had not proved its case. “This was a thought prosecution,” she said. “These are thoughts, very ugly thoughts, but we don’t prosecute people for their thoughts. And we’ll continue to appeal and continue to fight for Mr. Valle.”
Posted by Adam Kolber on 03/13/2013 at 09:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted by Adam Kolber on 03/13/2013 at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Here's one perspective (hat tip: Patrick Lin via FB):
Posted by Adam Kolber on 03/07/2013 at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Recently Posted to SSRN:
"The Psychological Foundations of Human Rights"
Oxford Handbook of Human Rights, (ed. Dinah Shelton) 2013, Forthcoming
ROBIN BRADLEY KAR, University of Illinois College of Law
Respect for human rights requires engagement of a special capacity to identify and respond to rights, but current research on the psychological causes and conditions of human rights violations has proceeded without a clear enough understanding of the distinctive ways this psychological capacity functions. This article integrates contemporary insights from social and cognitive psychology with findings from a broader range of fields, including philosophy and evolutionary theory, to develop a contemporary account of this special capacity. The account suggests that processes of so-called “dehumanization” are not as fundamental to the generation of human rights violations as current research has suggested. Humans have an innate capacity to identify and respond to rights, but it needs support to produce stable perceptions of rights beyond one's in-group. Distinctive factors engage this capacity and can help orient it to support a more stable and universally shared form of respect for human rights in the modern world.
Posted by NELB Staff on 03/06/2013 at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Recently Posted to SSRN:
"Biasing, Debiasing, and the Law"
Minnesota Legal Studies Research Paper No. 13-08
U of St. Thomas Legal Studies Research Paper No. 13-02
DANIEL PI, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities - School of Law
FRANCESCO PARISI, University of Minnesota - Law School, University of Bologna
BARBARA LUPPI, Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia (UNIMORE) - Faculty of Business and Economics, University of St. Thomas School of Law
In this essay, we build on the existing literature on the use of legal strategies for addressing problems of biased judgment and behavior, exploring how heuristics and biases may be exploited to foster efficiency in the presence of other incentive alignment problems. We also introduce two new categories: the hitherto unnoticed counterparts to debiasing and insulating strategies, which we will call "benevolent biasing," and "cognitive leveraging" strategies.
Posted by NELB Staff on 03/05/2013 at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Recently Posted to SSRN:
"Expert Paternalism"
Florida Law Review, Vol. 64, 2012
JEREMY A. BLUMENTHAL, Syracuse University - College of Law
Scholars and policymakers from multiple disciplines have long debated whether and when paternalistic intervention might be appropriate to guide ordinary decisionmakers choices and behaviors. Recently, the use of empirical data has begun to inform this debate. Some such research has demonstrated that individuals’ susceptibility to cognitive and emotional biases leads to nonoptimal decisions in a variety of areas, including health, finance, and safety, among others. This has led some scholars to suggest a role for third-party intervention to help protect citizens from their own biased decisionmaking.
Critics of this approach suggest that such intervention prevents individuals from learning from their mistakes; that it infringes not only on individuals' autonomy per se but also on their preference for choosing; or that those designing the interventions can truly know what principals' true preferences are. Substantial empirical evidence challenges these claims, however, showing that in many instances people do not learn from their mistakes or in fact prefer to leave choices to others.
Most recently, antipaternalists have challenged experts' ability to develop interventions in the first place, arguing that experts (a) are likely to be captured and act in their own interests, rather than the public's; and (b) are just as susceptible to the same cognitive and emotional biases as ordinary citizens, and thus deferring to their interventionist decisions is unwarranted.
As I have done for some of the earlier criticisms, in this Article I show that antipaternalists' arguments are contested by empirical evidence. First, citizens in fact tend to be more accepting of intervention than is typically assumed, especially when the process by which a policy is adopted is transparent and seen as in the public interest. Second, capture is less of a concern than is traditionally assumed. Third, despite findings that experts do also suffer some biases, most evidence shows that experts are better decision-makers than laypeople, both due to substantive expertise and to a smaller likelihood of being affected by the relevant biases. I show that other antipaternalist criticisms are either overbroad or are based on problematic assumptions about human psychology, e.g., people are often not motivated to learn or to self-correct and do not always act according to traditional rational choice assumptions.
In brief, even when subject to similar biases, experts are relatively better decisionmakers than laypeople. Thus, as with previous antipaternalist objections, criticisms of expert decisionmakers must meet higher hurdles than has been assumed. Paternalistic intervention is here to stay, and debate over the propriety of particular policies should continue, but taking into account its costs and benefits as well as the increasing body of relevant empirical findings.
Posted by NELB Staff on 03/04/2013 at 03:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Recently Posted to SSRN:
DAVID W. OPDERBECK, Seton Hall University - School of Law
This article describes and critiques the increasingly popular program of reductive neuroLaw. Law has irrevocably entered the age of neuroscience. Various institutes and conferences are devoted to questions about the relation between neuroscience and legal procedures and doctrines. Most of the new “neuroLaw” scholarship focuses on evidentiary and related issues, and is important and beneficial. But some versions of reductive NeuroLaw are, to put it bluntly, redolent of fascism. Although they claim to liberate us from false conceptions of ourselves and to open new spaces for more scientific applications of the law, they end up stripping away all notions of “selves” and of “law.” This article argues that a revitalized sense of transcendent causation is required to avoid the violent metaphysics of reductive neuroLaw and to maintain the integrity of both “law” and “science.”
Posted by NELB Staff on 03/02/2013 at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)