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Liberty and personal responsibility in Dworkin’s theory of rights
No full textHuman and constitutional rights protect every person’s status as free and equal, and accordingly, a useful and convincing theory of rights must include attractive accounts of freedom and equality. Somewhat surprisingly, however, rights theorists have given relatively little attention to freedom and equality in recent decades and have instead focused on proportionality, the right to justification, and the culture of justification. One notable exception to this trend is Ronald Dworkin, who in the last years of his life revised and restated his famous theory of rights as trumps and presented rights as giving effect to an equality principle (the principle of intrinsic value) and a liberty principle (the principle of personal responsibility). This article explores the roles of liberty and personal responsibility in Dworkin’s theory of rights. It demonstrates that from a moral and philosophical perspective, Dworkin’s doctrine of liberty is somewhat deficient. However, from a legal or constitutional perspective, it achieves something which proportionality and the culture of justification cannot and do not want to deliver, namely a ‘good enough’ protection of a distinct sphere of liberty. This, the article suggests, makes Dworkin’s final statement on rights and liberty the first in his long career to become a candidate for being judicially endorsed and applied
Las agencias reguladoras en tiempos de populismo: la experiencia de México
No full textEn los últimos años, la repolitización de las instituciones públicas —incluyendo las agencias reguladoras— ha cobrado fuerza en distintos contextos democráticos. Este ha sido un fenómeno impulsado tanto por crisis económicas como políticas. El presente artículo examina esta tendencia en México durante el gobierno de Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), quien buscó debilitar o controlar a las agencias reguladoras del país. A partir de una estrategia metodológica comparada y de triangulación de fuentes, se analiza la relación entre el presidente y ocho agencias mexicanas, identificando mecanismos para debilitar su autonomía, capacidades y reputación institucional. El estudio contribuye al debate internacional sobre populismo y regulación, y destaca los límites del diseño institucional frente a los liderazgos de corte populista
Supplemental nutrition assistance program and parents' time investments in children
No full textAn emerging literature explores whether social policy programs have benefits to families and their children, above and beyond economic and human capital outcomes. We investigate whether the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), an anti-poverty program, is associated with the time that parents invest in their children. We assess the association between SNAP and parental time investments by leveraging the temporary expansion of SNAP benefits provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. Applying a difference-in-difference with Coarsened Exact Matching approach to data from the American Time Use Survey, we investigate whether increased SNAP benefit levels were associated with parental time investments in basic care, management, play, and teaching activities. We find that ARRA-induced increases in SNAP benefit levels were associated with a decreased probability of time spent on management activities and an increased probability of time spent on basic care among single parents. This suggests that SNAP benefit increases influence how parents allocate time to their children
What if AI becomes conscious?
No full textThe question of whether Artificial Intelligence can become conscious is not just a philosophical question but a political one. Given that an increasing number of people are forming social relationships with AI systems, the calls for treating them as persons with legal protections might not be far off. In this interview based on his book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI, Jonathan Birch argues that we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the possibility that AI could become conscious, but warns that we are not ready, conceptually or societally, for such an eventuality
Accessibility-oriented territorial governance
No full textThis chapter focuses on accessibility planning through the lens of territorial governance. Beyond traditional transport-centred planning approaches based on a limited understanding of mobility, the accessibility perspective opens up new avenues to think about and intervene in our territories, while also unveiling the complexity of integrated governance mechanisms requiring multi-level and multi-sectoral coordination. To ensure equitable access for all to services and opportunities, it is necessary to address not just the physical infrastructure but also the socio-political frameworks that influence the production of this public good. The authors reflect on the key dimensions of accessibility governance, which cross administrative boundaries and traditional planning sectors, and involve public and private actors. A conceptual framework for accessibility-oriented territorial governance is proposed to help decision-makers consider how the various dimensions of governance come into play. Some European experiences illustrate how the governance of accessibility can be put into practice at different levels, combining different policy sectors
Coming of age in- and out-of-place: frictions of adolescent mobility in island Southeast Asia
No full textThrough a comparison of adolescent experience in Manggarai, eastern Indonesia, and amongst children of migrants in Sabah, Malaysia, this article argues for the value of attending to the spatiality of adolescence as a period of transition. Biocultural development expands both adolescents’ concrete experiences of mobility and their sense of the possibility of movement. However, the ability to move is influenced by various frictions, most notably those of border infrastructures, as well as understandings of gender and kinship. I show how, in rural Manggarai, adolescence was entangled with different scales of mobility. By contrast, in urban Sabah, adolescence was a time of growing immobility. In both contexts, tensions between adolescent and parental expectations also shaped the emotionality, experience, and expectations of movement and in urban Kota Kinabalu, adolescents explicitly compared their situation with the imagined ‘freedom’ of adolescence in rural Indonesia. Ultimately, the spatiality of ‘coming of age’ is very different in a context like Manggarai, where young people are understood as ‘in‐place’, as compared with one like Sabah, where they are considered ‘out‐of‐place’
Ivana Marková, 10 February 1938 – 1 December 2024: elected Fellow of the British Academy 1999
No full textIvana Marková was an unconventional psychologist and an uncompromising interdisciplinary scholar whose body of work reflected deeply humanist concerns grounded in her biography and her experience of the impact of historical and societal events on individual lives. Her work was both theoretical and applied, but it was the theoretical contribution for which she was particularly known in psychology and beyond. Her writings freely combined philosophy, history, and linguistics with social, developmental and cultural psychology, with the result that her contribution was a highly distinctive one. She never detached her thinking from a more general reflection on the epistemology of psychology, and throughout her long career she never lost the imprint of her training in the Czech philosophical and linguistic tradition
Familialization, de-familialization, and family policy change in high-income countries
No full textThis article provides country-specific accounts of family policy change in twenty-one high-income countries between 1990 and 2015. It relies on a measure including twelve indicators across three dimensions: financial transfers, childcare services, and leave schemes. Indicators within each dimension are classified using the concepts of (de)familialization, widely employed in feminist social policy scholarship, and two original composite scores—the familialization and de-familialization scores—are constructed to capture the magnitude and direction of family policy change. Against a backdrop of overall policy expansion, the analysis identifies four distinct trajectories mirroring Leitner’s ideal-typical “varieties of familialism”: explicit familialization, optional familialization, implicit (or partial) de-familialization, and de-familialization. The article further shows that family policy change is largely path-dependent, with countries often undergoing trajectories specific to their family policy regime. In particular, familializing trends are most prominent in Mediterranean and liberal countries, whereas de-familializing trends are observed in social democratic and conservative countries