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To achieve that more ambitious outcome, says Gene Kimmelman, a former chief counsel to the Justice Department’s antitrust division, the government does not have to go so far as to convince the courts that their past decisions were wrong. But it would have to convince judges that those earlier precedents have to be adapted to the competitive realities of today’s winner-take-all markets — markets where customers all want to use the same network or supplier, the price of a product can be zero, and the competitive threat comes from small start-ups offering a different product or technology. Even as these cases proceed through the courts, the issues they raise will also be actively debated in Congress, where there is considerable bipartisan interest in restraining the power of Big Tech. And what happens in one forum is likely to inform and affect the other. The filing of the court cases, for example, is likely to give further impetus to legislative proposals to strengthen the antitrust laws and create a new agency to directly regulate digital platforms, much in the way the Federal Communications Commission regulates telephone and cable companies and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regulates electric utilities. In addition to regulating business practices and approving mergers, such an agency could also address issues of privacy, data ownership and regulation of disinformation and hate speech. Just this week, both the British government and the European Union unveiled a proposal for such an agency.

While the Supreme Court may have historically been able to act as political cover for the President and/or Congress, that is not true in a world post-Bush v. Gore. The Court is seen today as a politicized body, and especially now that we are in the era of the Roberts Court, with a Chief Justice hand picked by the President and approved by the Congress, it is highly unlikely that Court action will not, at least to some extent, be blamed on and/or credited to the President and Congress. The Court can still get away with a lot more than the elected branches since people don't understand the technicalities of legal doctrine like they understand the actions of the elected branches; this is, in part, because the media does such a poor job of covering legal news. Nevertheless, it is preposterous to argue that the Court is entirely insulated from politics, and equally preposterous to argue that Bush and the Congress would not receive at least a large portion of the blame for a Court ruling that, for whatever reason, received the attention of the public.

A clash between Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Chief Justice John Roberts is igniting a partisan fight over the Supreme Court as the justices move forward with a politically-charged docket during an election year.

Schumer stepped onto a political landmine when he warned that two conservative justices would “pay the price” if they voted against abortion rights, earning a rare rebuke from Roberts who called the comments “dangerous.”

The system of mass incarceration depends entirely on the steady stream of misinformation it imposes on the humans it looks to control. If overnight everyone charged with victimless crimes exercised their constitutional rights, the shortage of judges, lawyers, and cops would be exposed right away in the handling of overflowing jury trial cases. Can we just imagine if the number of people demanding their trial rights just doubled or tripled in occurrence? It would be absolute chaos for the justice system. This immediate crisis would ‘bullet train’ mass incarcerations to the number one priority for judges and politicians. They would only be left with the option to either throw out a lot of the ‘criminal’ cases filed, for example drug possession, disobeying unjust laws, and victimless crimes. Or go with the more difficult option and try to amend the Constitution to turn the tables into their favor. Crashing the system by being informed and exercising our rights is an achievable concept. Even the dissolution of the Drug War could be commenced with this powerful tool. Sparing the destruction of innocent lives on the civilian side and senseless overreach on the police side. Leaving it to the individual to decide what to put into their own bodies without being raided, kidnapped, and locked up for a precious portion of their life.

Likewise, the Carnian pluvial episode, a smaller mass-extinction event that I’m also fond of and that occurred some 230 million years ago, was so pivotal that the scientists who study this episode describe it as “the dawn of the modern world.” For millions of years, an extremely dry climate had extended across the supercontinent of Pangaea, until an episode of massive volcanism made the planet hotter and much more humid. It rained for about a million years, perhaps in waves that matched the four eruptive peaks of the volcanism. This global wetting led to another profound disappearance of many species, particularly of herbivorous reptiles that had adapted to arid conditions. But on this newly wet planet, a dazzling diversification of more modern coral reefs, conifer trees, dinosaurs, crocodiles, insects, and mammals began. “The origin of modern systems was triggered by the crisis,” Michael Benton, a prominent researcher of this extinction and a professor at the University of Bristol, in England, told me. Extinction is often cast as a destructive force, but in this light, it is also generative. Even in the face of extinction, existing body plans—think of higher taxonomic categories such as phylum, class, or order—rarely disappear entirely. Meanwhile, the environmental changes that drive extinction events also drive the emergence of new body plans, notes the paleontologist Norman MacLeod, a professor at Nanjing University, in China. Extinction also removes the advantages of ecological incumbents—who themselves took advantage of a previous episode of rapid diversification, in many cases after an extinction event—and opens up opportunities for other groups. As a result, extinction has increased the overall range of diversity in the biosphere over time, a phenomenon known as evolutionary stacking. “All these factors underscore the creative role extinction has played in promoting biodiversity,” MacLeod told me. “If there had been no extinction over the course of Earth history, our planet would be home to a far less diverse array of species than it is.” Other than the emergence of new species, extinction is likely the most common evolutionary process on Earth. It is as necessary a part of evolution as death is of life, making space for new species—even whole new ecosystems—to emerge. And this kind of creative destruction is happening constantly: More dramatic events such as the Late Devonian fade into thousands or millions of more everyday extinction events that have made the world as we know it today. Extinction’s beneficent side puts us in an awkward, even discomforting position. The world, after all, is on the upslope of another significant extinction event. Climate change, habitat loss, pollution, and a slew of other environmental problems are radically transforming ecosystems and resulting in a loss of biodiversity unprecedented in the history of our species, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)—the global body of researchers aiming to do for our current crisis of extinction what the IPCC does for climate change. In Earth’s history of extinctions, this one is distinct from all those previous in that it’s clearly caused by us. In the pursuit of our own interests, humans are profoundly reordering every environment on the planet, and extinguishing multitudinous lineages of organisms—the assemblage of species we live alongside. Where does this leave us? Extinction is a tragedy for the species affected, but if we are just the latest in a series of evolutionary pressures, should we then be indifferent? The answer is the intuitive one: We absolutely need to be worried about what humans are doing to the planet. But we should be worried about the transformations we’re causing and all the destruction of ecosystem services that they entail not because extinction is inherently bad, but—first and foremost—because these transformations might well destroy us. Traditional environmental thinking tends to rely on the ideal of preservation to condemn human-driven extinction: Our actions are upsetting a supposed balance of nature that would persist if not for us, so our responsibility is to uphold that balance, guarding or re-creating a version of nature that does not so obviously reveal our influence. “The ravages committed by man subvert the relations and destroy the balance which nature had established between her organized and her inorganic creations,” the diplomat George Perkins Marsh, perhaps America’s first environmentalist, wrote in his 1864 text, Man and Nature—foundational to the conservation movement. More than a century and a half later, this same conceit governs environmental thought. You can see it, for instance, in the way environmental groups and thinkers describe the initiative to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone National Park: After human actions “ruined” the ecosystem, the wolves were able to “restore balance” by reducing the number of elk in the park. (Never mind that for at least eight years after the wolves returned, humans still killed more elk in the park than they did.) This continuously recurring notion of some harmonious stability ignores the reality of nature’s constant dynamic flux. In trying to preserve an imagined natural balance, many conservationists assume that the current way the world is organized, with its current assemblage of species, is the way that it must always be. Evolution itself disproves that assumption: It has no purpose or direction, and does not end once a given condition is achieved. And any attempt to restore that imagined world in balance has involved making judgments, implicit or explicit, about which species are most worth saving. Beyond the self-interest of maintaining ecosystem services that benefit us, humans can and do have good reasons for trying to save polar bears, pandas, whales, tigers, sea turtles, rhinoceroses, orangutans, penguins, and other charismatic species from disappearing, but those decisions rely on human moral preferences. We have also deliberately eradicated the virus that causes smallpox, and if you accept that as a triumph or protest that those are just microbes, then you accept that not all species have an equal right to existence: that whales and orangutans—and people—are more important than bacteria and viruses. In many ways, fidelity to the idea that humans upset nature’s balance holds us back from addressing the perils of extinction. The conservation biologist Mark Vellend worries, for instance, that counts of biological diversity disregard new species in novel, human-influenced ecosystems—where extant species occur in new combinations or abundances. He gives the example of New Zealand. Since humans arrived, some three-quarters of that country’s forest has been converted for their use, a sizable chunk of all endemic birds have gone extinct, and non-native species have multiplied. But in that same period, he says, the number of plant species has doubled, the number of bird species overall has stayed roughly the same, and dozens of land mammals have moved in where none had lived. So is New Zealand an example of a biodiversity crisis, or a biodiversity success? Vellend and others stress that this doesn’t mean global biodiversity is doing fine. Rather, it indicates that the erroneous belief that evolution follows a particular direction may be skewing our assessment. And if we do want to maintain, more or less, the current global assemblage of species—the assemblage to which we humans are adapted—then scientists need to be able to measure it accurately.

The same applies to academic research and those who engage in its discursive construction. As a venue for human communication, all educational research is interpretive. Researchers endeavor to convey the meaning they make of surveys, interviews, and bodies of research literature. They also engage in conflicts over interpretation through their studies of social and education phenomena, conflicts that drive subsequent research paradigms along with the politics of research funding and publishing. Tensions over the racial meaning of things are ever-present in the production of educational research, which takes place in academic institutions that are organizationally divided not just along racial identity lines but moreover into ideological camps that wage interpretive battles over race.

For those in the educational research community, none of this is breaking news. Rather, it is the stuff of normal, everyday talk in the hallways and offices of the academy. Thus, it is quite perplexing that educational researchers, who are clearly self-aware that they are immersed in daily struggles over racial interpretation, do not place central importance on hermeneutics, which is the study of the theories and methodologies of interpretation ( Morrow & Brown, 1994 ), in debates about research methodology. Broadly, hermeneutical scholars seek to reveal the presuppositions that guide interpretive processes ( Gallagher, 1992 ). Importantly, the field of hermeneutics, particularly in more critical approaches, instructs us that interpreters are typically not conscious of their hermeneutical presuppositions ( Habermas, 1989 ), meaning that many tend to see interpretation as little more than “common sense” or “differences of opinion.” Why is the avoidance of hermeneutics so pervasive, even among those who might benefit from a critical study of it, such as those doing work in critical studies of race? What are the consequences of avoiding the study of hermeneutics in educational research, particularly as it relates to racial power? Who benefits from the avoidance of a critical approach to the interpretation of race in a white supremacist social system? Is this part of a white supremacist academic desire to constrain racial interpretations for fear that a focus on a critical version of a racial hermeneutics might let the proverbial “cat out of the bag” in the production of educational research?

In fact, the notion of American globality I have begun discussing here already exceeds negri and Hardt’s formulation to the extent that it is a global racial formation, and more pointedly a global mobilization of a white supremacist social formation (read: a united States of America formed by the social-economic geographies of racial chattel slavery and their recodification through the post-13th Amendment innovation of other technologies of criminalization and imprisonment). The US prison regime’s production of human immobilization and death composes some of the fundamental modalities of American national coherence. It inscribes two forms of domination that tend to slip from the attention of political theorists, including Negri and Hardt: first, the prison regime strategically institutionalizes the biopolitical structures of white racial/nationalist ascendancy—it quite concretely provides a definition for white American personhood, citizenship, freedom, and racialized patriotism. Second, the prison regime reflects the moral, spiritual, and cultural inscription of Manifest Destiny (and its descendant material cultural and state-building articulations of racist and white supremacist conquest, genocide, and population control) across different historical moments. to invoke and critically rearticulate negri and Hardt’s formulation, the focal question becomes: How does the right of the uS-as-global police to kill, detain, obliterate become voiced, juridically coded, and culturally recoded? the structure of presumption—and therefore relative political silence—enmeshing the prison’s centrality to the logic of American globality is precisely evidence of the fundamental power of the uS prison regime within the larger schema of American hegemony. In this sense the uS prison regime is ultimately really not an “institution.” rather it is a formulation of world order (hence, a dynamic and perpetual labor of institutionalization rather than a definitive modernist institution) in which massively scaled, endlessly strategized technologies of human immobilization address (while never fully resolving) the socio-political crises of globalization. The US prison regime defines a global logic of social organization that constitutes, mobilizes, and prototypes across various localities. What would it mean, then, to consider state-crafted, white supremacist modalities of imprisonment as the perpetual end rather than the self-contained means of American globality? I am suggesting a conception of the prison regime that focuses on what cultural and political theorist Allen Feldman calls a “formation of violence,” which anchors the contemporary articulation of white supremacy as a global technology of coercion and hegemony. Feldman writes, the growing autonomy of violence as a self-legitimating sphere of social discourse and transaction points to the inability of any sphere of social practice to totalize society. Violence itself both reflects and accelerates the experience of society as an incomplete project, as something to be made. As a formation of violence that self-perpetuates a peculiar social project through the discursive structures of warfare, the US prison regime composes an acute formation of racial and white supremacist violence, and thus houses the capacity for mobilization of an epochal (and peculiar) white supremacist global logic. This contention should not be confused with the sometimes parochial (if not politically chauvinistic) proposition that American state and state-sanctioned regimes of bodily violence and human immobilization are somehow self-contained “domestic” productions that are exceptional to the united States of America, and that other “global” sites simply “import,” imitate, or reenact these institutionalizations of power. In fact, I am suggesting the opposite: the US prison regime exceeds as it enmeshes the ensemble of social relations that cohere uS civil society, and is fundamental to the geographic transformations, institutional vicissitudes, and militarized/economic mobilizations of “globalization” generally. to assert this, however, is to also argue that the constituting violence of the US prison regime has remained somewhat undertheorized and objectified in the overlapping realms of public discourse, activist mobilization, and (grassroots as well as professional) scholarly praxis. Here I am arguing that it is not possible to conceptualize and critically address the emergence and global proliferation of the (uS/global) prison industrial complex outside a fundamental understanding of what are literally its technical and technological premises: namely, its complex organization and creative production of racist and white supremacist bodily violence. It is only in this context, I would say, that we can examine the problem of how “the Prison” is a modality (and not just a reified product or outcome) of American statecraft in the current political moment. It is only a theoretical foregrounding of the white supremacist state and social formation of the united States that will allow us to understand the uS prison regime as an American globality that materializes as it prototypes state violence and for that matter, “state power” itself through a specific institutional site.

The humanist paradigm originates in the illustrious knowledge tradition of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment (see Crosson, 2021). By emphasizing human agency over divine authority, asserting the triumphant power of objective and instrumental human reason over natural conditions and superstitions, and marking the rational capacity of the human species as exceptional and superior over all other forms of life, key thinkers of the Enlightenment positioned human reason, potentiality, and achievement at the very center of scientific enterprise, social purpose, and global progress. At the same time, the first declarations of the “Rights of Man” asserted the existence of essential properties and rightful protections unique to human beings as a consequence of their special capacity for rational development. Protective rights against others became perceived as necessary because the philosophers of the Enlightenment also posited a basic competitive human drive, which not only naturalized the rational desire for individual accumulation of property and the nascent capitalist system as the fullest expression of this desire, but also explained the constant progress of civilization through the competitive advance of technologies and other products of human cleverness. Yet, this intellectually and culturally explosive time of the European Enlightenment was also a period of imperial expansion and, in this context, grand claims regarding universal human reason, and the equal “Rights of Man” quickly became scaled down as already-evident gender and race hierarchies within humanity became further entrenched through colonization and associated practices of slavery (see Crosson, 2021). The ostensibly universal character of “human” reason was realigned more particularly as a superior quality claimed by the hetero-patriarchal white subject of the imperial enterprise, whose defining European cultural achievements likewise were assumed as the aspirational markers of any civilization worthy of the name. Indeed, as Edward Said (1978, 1993) famously explained in his seminal analysis of colonial comportment in Orientalism, and subsequently in Culture and Imperialism, European colonial society was able to construct itself as scientific, progressive, and culturally advanced only through an interested contrast against non-Western peoples, who were portrayed at best as superstitious and socially inferior, having inscrutable motives and questionable ethics; or at worst backward, immoral, unproductive, and barely human at all. In this way, by asserting the rational superiority of some divisions of humanity over others, Western humanism came to act as a perverse justification for colonialism. Colonial humanism is, then, closely intertwined with racism (see Bernasconi, 2001). Alexander Weheliye explains: “If racialization is understood not as a biological or cultural descriptor but as a conglomerate of socio-political relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans, then blackness designates a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot” (2014, 3). The “scientific evidence” for claims about natural European human superiority was supposedly found in the physical differences observable between Indigenous Australian, Native American, African, Asian, and European bodies, and especially by the measurement of crania and their surface characteristics, which were taken to indicate relative differences in natural intelligence (Fforde, 2004). For many, in accordance with Christian orthodoxy, the aim was to collect evidence for underlying principles of unity that showed human difference was the result of environmentally influenced divergence from a single primordial stock. On this view, the various human “races” were all participants in a universal humanity, and colonization was justified on “humanitarian” grounds that aimed to elevate “primitive” peoples to a more advanced (European) standard of human achievement and civilization. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, coinciding with the height of global slave trade, a view prevailed that racial differences were so great as to indicate separate species of human, springing not from a single source but from plural origins. The polygenic insistence on human incommensurability supported claims about the “natural propensity” of the different races to different kinds of activity; thus, European anatomists claimed the typically larger body mass and phrenology of the “inferior black races” made them “naturally suited to slavery” (Fforde, 2004, 20). Produced in the modern era through scientific debates concerning the origin and nature of human diversity, the “racialised assemblages” that discipline humanity into “full humans, not-quite-humans and nonhumans” (Weheliye, 2014, 3 and above) not only influenced the course of imperial government in Africa and Asia and operations of slavery out of these locales, but also the development of British policy for the “just” treatment and “protection” of Indigenous peoples during the settler-colonization of Australia, Aotearoa-New Zealand, Canada, and the Americas. In the most extreme cases – for example, in Canadian British Columbia and across much of Australia – colonial invasion and settlement proceeded on the basis of the imperial “doctrine of discovery” and the associated fantasy that the newly “discovered” lands were Terra Nullius: empty lands without peoples and devoid of preexisting sovereign entitlements, making them freely available for appropriation (see Reynolds, 1996). In fact, the colonial explorers were well aware of the presence of the Indigenous inhabitants of these so-called empty lands. Maintaining the fiction of Terra Nullius therefore at times required the actual elimination of the First Peoples, which indeed is evidenced by the series of genocidal massacres that mark the settler-colonial project. Or, at the very least, colonialism demanded the dehumanization and degradation of Aboriginal people and cultures, the denial of Indigenous systems of law and governance, and the forced dispersal of Indigenous polities so as to assert their inferior, nonsovereign status and provide support for the colonial claim that Indigenous polities effectively counted for nothing and could be disregarded. The imposition of settler-colonial sovereignty could then be justified as a “humanitarian” obligation, which Rudyard Kipling referred to in 1898 as the “White Man’s Burden” to raise nonsovereign “primitive” societies to a higher state of civilization through Christian morality and Western science. This racist imperial agenda, and its attendant Eurocentric notions of progress and civilization, was typically manifest in settler-colonial societies through phased policies of segregation and assimilation. Often informed by Social Darwinism, settler-colonial nations including Australia and Canada initially viewed “backward” Indigenous populations as vulnerable and likely to “die out naturally” and be replaced by a “fitter species” of human. Accordingly, colonial policies of “protection” established mission reserves where Aboriginal communities could be charitably housed, clothed, and educated in “civilised” ways, so as to “smooth the dying pillow” (see Eshet, 2015; Chesterman & Galligan, 1997). Conveniently for settler-colonials, the dispersal and resettlement of Indigenous collectives in mission reserves at the same time vacated land that was traditionally Aboriginal-owned and occupied, which then became more freely available for colonial appropriation (see Reynolds, 1996). When this colonial phase of land acquisition had been largely accomplished, and it became apparent that Indigenous peoples would not simply “die out,” colonial policy changed focus from segregation to assimilation. Especially in light of a burgeoning “half-caste” population, the revised aim of government was to incorporate new generations of Indigenous individuals into white society where (it was claimed) they could eventually be rid of the perceived taint of their Aboriginality, become useful as a labor force, and become absorbed into the nascent colony. Formal policy regimes of child removal or “uplifting” existed across settler-colonial states including Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa-New Zealand. These persisted formally in some places until the 1990s and continue informally today, as is evidenced by the disproportionate numbers of Indigenous children taken into care. For instance, in 2007 there were 9054 Indigenous children identified as wards of the State in Australia. By 2016, this figure had increased to 16816 and continues to climb (see Behrendt, 2017). Under such policies, Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families, communities, and traditional lands, stripped of their Aboriginal identities, and placed in institutions as wards of the State or rehomed (often as domestic servants) in white households (Haebich, 2000; Eshet, 2015). Frequently indentured and unwaged, these “Stolen Generations” of Aboriginal and Maori children formed a compelled workforce supporting the development of the settler-colony, and many suffered terrible abuse at the hands of their so-called “protectors” (HREOC, 1997; Eshet, 2015). Typically, such children never found their way back to their birth families, and many are only now linking up with the cultures and communities they had lost. This, then, is one of the darkest aspects of the imperial humanist legacy that settler-colonial nations are still struggling to reckon with.

For Black artists, negotiating fair and equitable contracts with record labels and other industry players is crucial to achieving success and financial stability in the music industry. The music industry has a history of exploiting Black artists and perpetuating economic disparities through unfair contract terms and unequal bargaining power. As such, Black artists must clearly understand the key contract considerations they should be aware of when negotiating with industry players. This section will discuss some suggested contract considerations for Black artists, including definitions, transparency, plain English contract drafting, morals clauses, non-disclosure agreements, and inclusion riders. By understanding these considerations and advocating for their rights, Black artists can work toward building more equitable and sustainable careers in the music industry.

A. USE OF UNIFORM DEFINITIONS

visual artists pour their heart and soul into their creations, and it’s only fair that they’re afforded legal protections for their works. This is where the Visual Artists Rights Act (“VARA”) comes into play. If you’re an artist looking to safeguard your artistic legacy, this guide is for you. In this blog post, we’ll break down VARA, demystify its complexities, and show you how to use it to your advantage while optimizing for search engines along the way.

Understanding VARA: What Is It?

WASHINGTON — In a crucial win for the First Amendment right to protest, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana ruled in favor of DeRay Mckesson, a prominent civil rights activist and Black Lives Matter movement organizer. The court held that a protest leader cannot be held legally responsible for injuries inflicted by another person’s violent act at the protest, when it is undisputed that the leader didn’t intend for that violence to occur. Though the Fifth Circuit had appeared to accept that theory in an earlier decision in this case, the district court held that, in light of more recent Supreme Court caselaw, negligence can never suffice to hold a person exercising their First Amendment freedoms at a protest liable; intent is required.

“The goal of this lawsuit was to prevent people from showing up at a protest out of the fear that they might be held responsible if anything happens, which makes this decision a win not only for me, but for all protest leaders and organizers across the country who are going to continue to show up and speak out. It’s heartening to know that the Constitution still protects our right to protest,” said Mckesson. “This has been a grueling eight-year process, and now that it is behind me, I can continue to channel all of my energy into the day-to-day work of envisioning a world beyond policing.”

Charles City County unveiled a historical marker dedicated to Black Political activism and the historic rights movement during an Oct. 15 ceremony.

The movement was spearhead by four individuals in Charles City County, NAACP leader Richard Bowman, James Bradby, Iona W. Adkins, and Edward T. Banks.

This spring, HBO’s television series Game of Thrones concluded after eight seasons. Throughout its tenure, the show was incredibly popular while also earning the dubious distinction of the most pirated television program. The severity of piracy is duly illustrated by the show’s season four finale, which, within 12 hours of its original broadcast in June 2014, was illegally downloaded 1.5 million times, amounting to 2 petabytes transferred in just half a day. While an upsurge in piracy around the time of the original broadcast may be natural, a steady level of interest for pirated copies of older episodes has continued unabated, well after the episodes became available at retailers online. Despite ongoing issues with illegal downloads — there were 1 billion of the show’s seventh season — HBO seems to have no real plans to counter the illegal streaming services and lets off perpetrators with only a slap on the wrist.

This inaction on HBO’s part may have some economic merit: Our research shows that a moderate level of piracy — not too much, not too little — can actually benefit the manufacturer, the retailer, and consumers, all at the same time.

My thesis has a strong form and a weak one. The strong form, again, is that moral theory does not provide a solid basis for moral judgments. The weak form is that even if moral theory can provide a solid basis for some moral judgments, it should not be used as a basis for legal judgments. Moral theory is not something that judges are, or can be, made comfortable with or good at, it is socially divisive, and it does not mesh with the actual issues in cases. I shall focus on the strong form of the thesis in Part I of the Lectures. The distinct arguments for the weak form will emerge in Part II, which is much shorter, not only because it builds on Part I, but also because, independently of the arguments in Part I, the case for the weak form is stronger. The argument in Part I is complex and to some extent counterintuitive. It requires careful groundwork, which is the task of this and the next two sections. "Morality," as I shall use the word, is the set of duties to others (not necessarily just other people) that are designed to check our merely self-interested, emotional, or sentimental reactions to serious questions of human conduct. It is about what we owe, rather than what we are owed, except insofar as a sense of entitlement (to happiness, selffulfillment, an interesting life, the opportunity to exercise our talents, or the opportunity to realize ourselves) might generate a duty on the part of others to help us get what we are entitled to. I do not question the existence or genuineness of morality - I do not argue that it is just a cynical cover for the operation of self-interest - although I do argue that it has less effect on behavior than many moralists believe. Nor do I disparage morality as a subject of inquiry or question the practicability or importance of normative reasoning. If "moral theory" is used in its broadest possible sense, as a synonym for normative reasoning, you will find no criticism of moral theory as such in these Lectures. As for the frequent use of the word "moral" as an impressive synonym for "political,"' my only criticism is that labeling political arguments "moral" invites confusion. My concern is with the type of moral theory that I call "academic moralism," the type found in the writings of present-day academic philosophers such as Elizabeth Anderson, Sissela Bok, Ronald Dworkin, David Gauthier, Alan Gewirth, Frances Kamm, Thomas Nagel, Martha Nussbaum, John Rawls, Joseph Raz, and Judith Jarvis Thomson. This is a diverse list, but there is at least a family resemblance among the persons listed; and the family is what I am calling academic moralism. Some of those listed are considered primarily legal philosophers (for example, Dworkin and Raz) or political philosophers (for example, Rawls) rather than moral philosophers. But they all want the law to follow the teachings of moral theory, though not always at a close distance. 2 I present a series of reasons for doubting that academic moralism will help people who are seeking answers to moral questions, though as I have not read, let alone studied, every important work in the domain of academic moralism, I may have overlooked works that might still my doubts. Because Dworkin stands squarely at the intersection of the two bodies of literature that I discuss, academic moral theory and moralistic legal theory, I pay particular attention to his views. I confess to a visceral dislike (no doubt reciprocated) of academic moralism. A lot of it strikes me as prissy, hermetic, censorious, naive, sanctimonious, self-congratulatory, too far Left or too far Right, and despite its frequent political extremism, rather insipid. But these vices in the bosom of the virtuous are perhaps not very serious. Moreover, they may reflect nothing deeper than the fact that, as in many other academic fields today, too many people, driven by the imperative "Publish or perish," are writing on moral theory. The best of the literature is free from these vices, and I want to focus on the best. I also want to be constructive. In Part II, I try to show that normative reasoning in law can be freed from dependence on the sort of moral theory that academic moralists propagate. Very briefly, my reasons for doubting the fruitfulness of academic moralism, even in settings remote from law, are as follows. First, morality is local. There are no interesting moral universals. There are tautological ones, such as "Murder is wrong," where "murder" means "wrongful killing," and there are a few rudimentary principles of social cooperation - such as "Don't lie all the time" or "Don't break promises without any reason" or "Don't kill your relatives or neighbors indiscriminately" - that may be common to all human societies.3 If one wants to call these rudimentary principles the universal moral law, fine; but as a practical matter, no moral code can be criticized by appealing to norms that are valid across cultures, norms to which the code of a particular culture is a better or a worse approximation. Those norms, the rudimentary principles of social cooperation that I have mentioned, are too abstract to serve as standards for moral judgment. Any meaningful moral realism is therefore out, and moral relativism (or rather a form of moral relativism, an important qualification to which I'll return shortly) is in. Relativism suggests an adaptationist conception of morality, in which morality is judged - nonmorally, in the way that a hammer might be judged well or poorly adapted to its function of hammering nails - by its contribution to the survival, or other goals, of a society. My analysis also suggests that no useful meaning can be given to the expression "moral progress" and that no such progress can be demonstrated. Second, many so-called moral phenomena can be explained without reference to moral categories. This point reinforces my thesis that the content of moral codes is local by showing that most moral principles that claim universality are better understood as mere workaday social norms in fancy dress. It also implies that the domain of moral theory is smaller than academic moralists believe. This is not to deny the existence of universal moral sentiments, such as guilt and indignation and certain forms of disgust 4 (as distinct from altruism, which is not primarily a moral sentiment). But these moral sentiments are objectneutral, and hence not really moral. "Moralistic" would be a better word for them. They are instruments rather than ends. Third, academic moralism cannot succeed in its aim of improving human behavior, for a number of reasons: i. Knowing the moral thing to do does not furnish a motivation for doing it; the motivation has to come from outside morality. 2. The analytical tools employed in academic moralism - whether moral casuistry, or reasoning from the canonical texts of moral philosophy, or reflective equilibrium - are too feeble to override either narrow self-interest or moral intuitions. As a result, academic moralism is helpless when moral intuitions clash or self-interest opposes them, and otiose when there is no such conflict. So "right answers" moral realism is hopeless, just like the metaphysical kind. And academic moralists have neither the rhetorical resources nor the detailed knowledge of social reality that might enable them to persuade without good methods of inquiry and analysis. 3. There is so much disagreement among academic moralists that the reader can easily find a persuasive rationalization for his preferred course of conduct, whatever it is. 4. The character of a modern academic career in philosophy is not conducive to moral innovation or insight. 5. Exposure to moral philosophy may actually lead people to behave less morally by making them more adept at rationalization. There is empirical evidence that moral reflection undermines the capacity for effective moral action. Fourth, it would be a disaster if moral theorists succeeded in their implied aim of imposing a uniform morality on society. Of course, these theorists, in our society anyway, do not agree on what that morality should be. But every moral theory takes for granted that a uniform morality is desirable, while what a society like ours needs is moral variety. In fact, we need some immoralists, or at least amoralists. It may be asked how, if academic moralism is ineffectual in changing people's behavior, moral change comes about. My answer emphasizes the role not only of material conditions, but also of moral entrepreneurs, and shows why the modern university professor is not well situated to play the role of moral entrepreneur. As for why there is moral debate if it is as inconclusive as I believe, the answer is that the fruitful moral debates take place outside the precincts of academic moralism. So why hasn't academic moralism withered and died? I suggest that it survives because of the religious needs of people who are attracted to a career in moral philosophy and the rhetorical needs of people who want courts to play an aggressive role in the formation of social policy.

If moral rights are Rights of Impression Management, some form of the right of integrity is essential to their function. One cannot manage the social self without regulating, to some extent, its use, modification, etc. At the same time, however, the empirical view of the social self is one that changes based on audience interpretation, something that the author cannot totally control.

How much control depends, as it does in all other moral rights, on the strength of the underlying justification of the Investment Theory. On the one hand, then, the right of integrity must persist in some form—in a form that enables the author to manage the presentation of her externalized self. On the other hand, this is unlikely to be anything as strong as it is in France, where the right allows the author to object to “any alteration or modification, no matter what its importance.”166 If a modification has no importance to the maintenance of the social self—but instead relates only to some idiosyncratic tendency of the author—then moral rights seem unlikely to protect it. This conclusion is reinforced by the view of the externalized self as empirical and negotiated rather than fixed and dictated. Based on the foregoing, conceiving of moral rights as Rights of Impression Management suggests the integrity right may be important, but it is unlikely to include rights to prevent violations as such. This means moral rights likely will not include the rights to prevent distortions as such, mutilation as such, modifications as such, impairments as such, and uses that violate any of the aforementioned rights (AR1a, AR2a, AR3a, AR4a, AR5a). The remaining two types of integrity rights protect the author’s honor and reputation (ARnb) and intellectual and personal interest (ARnc). Turning our attention to honor and reputation (ARnb): for the moment, let us set aside the differences between “distortion,” “mutilation,” “modification,” and “impairment,” and focus instead on only the idea of prejudice to honor or reputation. Would moral rights as Rights of Impression Management endorse this standard of harm? Does honor or reputation accurately capture the harm against which Rights of Impression Management attempt to protect?

Generally, the attribution right includes the right to prevent the affixation of a non-author’s name to a work (AR2). It is not clear, however, whether the right on my account also includes any of the other rights mentioned above (AR3-6).150

Orthodox moral rights scholars tend to think that the right of attribution does not entail the right to prevent the author’s name from being affixed to another’s work (AR5) or being identified as the author of such a work (AR6d), though some French courts have decided otherwise. 151 The rationale, like that for moral rights generally, is that central feature that deserves protection—the connection between the author and the work— does not exist. In other words, the right not to be known as the author of another’s work—either by the affixation of the author’s name or otherwise—cannot be based on the connection between the work and the wrongly-named-author because no connection exists. (The actual author, of course, still has a claim for a violation of her attribution right.) Similar reasoning applies to the rights of anonymity and pseudonymity (AR3-4 and AR6a-b, d): the author’s connection to the work gives them a right to insist on attribution and authorship, but not to insist on hiding that connection. These rights as applied to authorship (AR6) are not particularly clear. Adeney has remarked that, at least in France, the right to “respect for . . . [the author’s] authorship”152 refers to (1) the author’s right to have his titles, academic qualifications etc[.] mentioned in association with the work, and (2) the author’s right to be known as author rather than as some other participant in the work’s production, and as the sole author rather than co-author (if this is the case).153

examining moral rights in the united states,” U.S. Copyright Office, April, Available Online at https://www.copyright.gov/policy/moralrights/full-report.pdf, Accessed 07-13-2024) JM

Other Forms of Private Ordering

I believe that we will increasingly understand good and evil, right and wrong, in scientific terms, because moral concerns translate into facts about how our thoughts and behaviors affect the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves. If there are facts to be known about the well-being of such creatures—and there are—then there must be right and wrong answers to moral questions. Students of philosophy will notice that this commits me to some form of moral realism (viz. moral claims can really be true or false) and some form of consequentialism (viz. the rightness of an act depends on how it impacts the well-being of conscious creatures). While moral realism and consequentialism have both come under pressure in philosophical circles, they have the virtue of corresponding to many of our intuitions about how the world works. Here is my (consequentialist) starting point: all questions of value (right and wrong, good and evil, etc.) depend upon the possibility of experiencing such value. Without potential consequences at the level of experience—happiness, suffering, joy, despair, etc. —all talk of value is empty. Therefore, to say that an act is morally necessary, or evil, or blameless, is to make (tacit) claims about its consequences in the lives of conscious creatures (whether actual or potential).I am unaware of any interesting exception to this rule. Needless to say, if one is worried about pleasing God or His angels, this assumes that such invisible entities are conscious (in some sense) and cognizant of human behavior. It also generally assumes that it is possible to suffer their wrath or enjoy their approval, either in this world or the world to come. Even within religion, therefore, consequences and conscious states remain the foundation of all values. 

This piece examines the contours of tomorrow’s security environment. It briefly examines current conflict data and then generates insights on how changes in today’s environment could alter trends in future conflicts. It concludes with a summative forecast on the frequency and character of interstate and intrastate conflict as well as a set of judgments for the national security and policy community. This assessment examines the period between 2016 and 2035. The basic research issue which frames this effort involves defining trend data in interstate and intrastate conflicts and exploring how the contexts that influence trends of the last two decades might evolve. Despite commentary from numerous authors, according to at least three published institutional reports, current conflict levels are increasing, not decreasing. Moreover, battle-related deaths and other human costs of conflict are sharply up, not declining. Trends from the last 20 years appear to be in transition, which suggests that the cycles of history are once again in motion. Present near-term trends of increased frequency and ferocity of conflict could be reversed (if history is a guide), but one must explain the logic that will take events in a positive direction. In light of this information, the intelligence and analytical communities must develop an awareness of the geopolitical context that could evolve from a plausible evaluation of drivers in the near future and the potentially grave consequences that may emerge. Contrary to assumptions about linearity in past patterns, trends are not immutable, and they do not proceed in only one direction. Neither perpetual global peace nor persistent conflicts are preordained. Trends are the consequence of a dialectic between several variables; the most important of which have been either overlooked or ignored. Given the wide disparity of conclusions from divergent schools of thought, how should one evaluate the possibilities of an unknowable future? Few predicted the emergence of the Islamic State five years ago, and only one strategist, Colin Gray, foresaw Russia’s aggression into Ukraine. The national security policy community is best served by historically grounded and realistic forecasts instead of illusions that war will go away. In that vein, the following study examines the present and strives to explore the future to 2035. To examine the future, this paper identifies the trends or drivers that might cause crises and create demands for our Nation’s Armed Forces. Most scholars normally expect multiple drivers to cause war and are leery of mono-causality. Therefore, this article examines a total of seven possible drivers to assess possible changes over the forecast period and how they could impact the frequency or casualty levels in either interstate (between states) or intrastate wars (civil, ethnic and societal conflicts): - Geopolitical Competition - U.S. Engagement and Capacity Levels - Alliance Cohesion and Capacity - Peacekeeping Support - Democratic Governance - Resource Competition - Technological Diffusion The assessment section of this research project reviews these seven factors. The analysis shows that there are several reasons to think that both interstate and intrastate wars are more likely to occur and with greater consequences than many scholars had recently projected. The number of conflicts is again on the rise as both states and violent actors contend for influence and seek to establish their position. Contrary to optimistic depictions of the present international system, there are powers seeking to alter or undermine the existing order. Furthermore, the alliance system and military power that supported both strategic and conventional deterrence is weakening; there is no consensus supported by the authoritarian leaders in Beijing or Moscow about international norms; and competitors are certainly vying for influence in Asia, the Persian Gulf, and along Europe’s frontiers. History does not move continuously in one direction, and forecasts must examine history to identify key drivers and the conditions which influence the onset of wars. When this project was initiated, the study team hypothesized about the potential for increases in conflict. As this project concluded, the hypothesis was no longer a question but an operative fact. As the data shows, more violence is already occurring. Based on the analysis, the following forecast judgments were developed for consideration by the U.S. security policy community: Policy makers should be leery of prognostications about war going away. U.S. security requirements are not and should not be analytically tied to short-term trends like the ongoing number of conflicts. Interstate conflict is assessed as increasing in probability after an era in which it was very rare. While the likelihood of interstate war is rising, states will also find means short of war to compete for advantage that still produce adverse security implications for the United States. Non-state actors will exploit a broader set of military capabilities and are likely to exploit means that will produce higher degrees of violence and lethality. While interstate conflict may be infrequent, the proliferation of precision weapons and low-cost, smart munitions is likely to pose higher risks and greater casualties to U.S. forces.

Our argument is that simply identifying inappropriate methods as the key source of the problem in forecasting conflict may give us the wrong diagnosis and lead us down less productive avenues. A more fundamental problem is models that provide a poor basis for forecasting by disregarding the motives for conflict to arise, or by only considering motives in a relatively superficial manner. Models that have been proposed for research on the democratic peace, notably the work of Russett & Oneal (2001), are primarily intended to examine whether certain characteristics of liberal institutions, such as democracy and trade, make conflict on average less likely relative to baseline risks of conflict. Although these approaches may be appropriate for testing the original propositions of interest, they essentially ignore the contentious issues that might cause states to resort to violence and instead treat these contentious issues as exogenous features, typically hidden inside a so-called ‘black box’ of the baseline risk of conflict. Our own initial foray into out-of-sample prediction for a state-level model indicates that spatial information about other conflict events can help to improve forecasts (see Ward & Gleditsch, 2002). Although this allows predictions of conflict to be conditional on other observed events rather than treating each conflict as an independent observation, the approach still ignores the issues over which such conflicts may have arisen initially.