John Broome has proposed a theory of fairness according to which fairness requires that agents’ claims to goods be satisfied in proportion to the relative strength of those claims. In the case of competing claims for a single indivisible good, Broome argues that what fairness requires is the use of a weighted lottery as a surrogate to satisfying the competing claims: the relative chance of each claimant's winning the lottery should be set to the relative strength of each claimant's claim. In this journal, James Kirkpatrick and Nick Eastwood have objected that the use of weighted lotteries in the case of indivisible goods is unacceptable. In this article, I explain why Kirkpatrick and Eastwood's objection misses its mark.

I argue that there are two distinct views called ‘value pluralism’ in contemporary axiology, but that these positions have not been properly distinguished. The first kind of pluralism, weak pluralism, is the view philosophers have in mind when they say that there are many things that are valuable. It is also the kind of pluralism that philosophers like Moore, Brentano and Chisholm were interested in. The second kind of pluralism, strong pluralism, is the view philosophers have in mind when they say there are many values, or many kinds of value. It is also the kind of pluralism that philosophers like Stocker, Kekes and Nussbaum have advanced. I separate and elucidate these views, and show how the distinction between them affects the contemporary debate about value pluralism.

Cet article étudie l’évolution du lexème genre, depuis des emplois prépositionnels jusqu’aux emplois interphrastiques les plus récents. Les données étudiées proviennent de corpus oraux et de messages d’un forum internet. On montre qu’il y a bien une évolution dont on peut rendre compte en termes de conventionnalisation de valeurs contextuelles, mais dont il est difficile de reconstruire la chronologie, les valeurs existantes et les valeurs nouvelles se superposant et s’influençant mutuellement. Néanmoins, on peut repérer que les emplois les plus novateurs se trouvent massivement chez les locuteurs les plus jeunes, signalant une évolution récente.

Autant dire que établit une égalité de pertinence communicative entre deux énonciations. Peu usitée dans les systèmes comparatifs au sens strict, elle trouve son emploi dans des structures pseudo-paratactiques, entre deux énoncés. Précédé initialement d'un verbe modal, le marqueur fonctionne alors comme un connecteur destiné à articuler une relation discursive de « reformulation ». La « chute » du préfixe modal rend ce fonctionnement manifeste. Or une nouvelle variation semble intervenue récemment dans l'emploi de cette expression. Si ses emplois comme connecteur perdurent et semblent désormais stabilisés, ils semblent en effet marginalement céder devant un rôle de modalisateur.

Cet article explicite les points de départ théoriques de la réunion d’études empiriques présentée ici. Une première partie oppose « émergence » et « évolution » et précise en quoi l’approche émergentiste peut être stimulante pour aborder des faits d’usage transitoires qui se signalent par leur lien fort avec le discours. Une deuxième partie étudie les termes circulant actuellement dans la terminologie linguistique, et justifie le choix de modalisateur par rapport, notamment, à marqueur discursif. La dernière partie présente les études de cas réunies et formule l’enjeu de la recherche, à la fois sur la diachronie et sur les manières d’aborder la langue.

The weaknesses of our environmental laws stem in large part from the fact that legal systems treat the natural world as property that can be exploited and degraded, rather than as an integral ecological partner with its own rights to exist and thrive. This article analyzes the recent rise of a new generation of environmental laws which reject the ‘false dogma’ of ‘humans over nature’ and instead recognize our interconnectedness with the natural world and acknowledge its rights to exist, persist, and maintain its vital cycles. The article focuses on the transition from an anthropocentric approach, denoted by the ‘right to the environment’, to a biocentric approach constructed around ‘rights of nature’. This transition is evident in various new legal instruments – the Ecuadorian Constitution, certain Bolivian laws, and numerous ordinances of the United States – which incorporate and respect rights of nature, and grant legal rights to the natural world and enforcement rights to affected communities. These instruments serve as models for legal systems which can steer us towards more robust and effective environmental laws.

Although ethics is an essential component of undergraduate medical education, research suggests that current medical ethics curricula face considerable challenges in improving students’ ethical reasoning. This article discusses these challenges and introduces a promising new mode of graduate and professional ethics instruction for overcoming them. We begin by describing common ethics curricula, focusing in particular on established problems with current approaches. Next, we describe a novel method of ethics education and assessment for medical students that we have devised: the Medical Ethics Bowl (MEB). Finally, we suggest the pedagogical advantages of the MEB when compared to other ethics curricula.

Separation of craniopagus twins is fraught by ethical issues. The surgery is high risk and may involve the sacrifice of one twin. We review surgical successes in separation of craniopagus twins and consider ethical and legal concepts affecting the decision to undertake such procedures. Our discussion considers how Gillett’s potentiality principle and the concept of moral permissibility may be used to arrive at fair and realistic decisions.

Globalization now exerts an enormous impact on the human/animal relationship, which has momentous implications for both animal advocacy and the future of animal law. Animal abuse is being outsourced as animal experimentation heads east and agricultural animal production moves south. As a result of, among other things, outsourcing and other impacts of globalization on the industries of animal experimentation and animal agricultural production, parochialism and ‘one state’ strategies will not ultimately be effective in ending animal abuse. Animal advocates and lawyers must therefore construct theories, strategies, principles and campaigns that have resonance around the globe and traverse seemingly impenetrable cultural divides. To accomplish this crossing of cultural boundaries, it is paramount to fashion a common language – one which expresses cross-culturally accepted universal principles. This article proposes a methodology for generating these universal principles for animal advocacy and legal policy proposals, loosely based on Feminist Care Theory, positing that moral principles are based on feelings of compassion, sympathy and empathy. The specific basal notion proposed for grounding these universal principles for animal advocacy and legal policy proposals is the concept of ‘caring’, defined as ‘the suite of feelings and cognitions that an emotionally sound human experiences in response to focusing attention on the suffering of others’. Based on this foundational notion, several examples of uses of animals are analyzed and exemplar universal principles and legal policy proposals are derived.

This paper investigates historical quarry abandonment in Spitsbergen, Svalbard. A short-lived British marble quarry in Kongsfjorden lay deserted after 1920. We ask why this attempt at the large-scale development of Arctic marble was unproductive; whether there are structural features that affected the known historical trenches and boreholes; and whether the reason for abandonment was primarily geological. During interdisciplinary fieldwork rooted in industrial archaeology and structural geology, we employed medium-resolution ground penetration radar (GPR) to discern subsurface disturbances near the workings. Seven survey grids gave rise to both areas of fracturing and folding as well as areas of sound marble. Using complementary historical documents, we are able to dispel the myths that permafrost or shattered surface rock affected workability and profitability. Although structural disturbances were present, bedrock geology was, in fact, less important than the proportion of waste rock to marketable product. Whether a product was marketable depended on a multitude of other factors. This paper moves away from oversimplified reasoning in mining history and promotes the bridging of geological and historical scales in order to understand the full suite of local and global driving forces in the historical process.