From the early 1900s to 1914, an informal, but dedicated, group of English-Canadian actors took up the cause of urban planning, forming connections with the international planning cohort, and circulating foreign innovations and expertise across the country. This article considers such urban planning networking, first exploring the local urban context from which interest in planning emerged, then, through the use of case-studies, studying the four key channels through which English-Canadian actors acquired and disseminated foreign planning information. Through this analysis, the conscious and critical nature of local interactions with the wider urban planning cohort is emphasized.

In this article I make plausible ‘a metaphysics of belief’ by showing how Collingwood's metaphysics of absolute presuppositions helps us understand various comments and fragments by Wittgenstein regarding ‘the metaphysical subject’. For both, metaphysical beliefs are presuppositional; as such, they constitute twin foci – a terminus ad quem and a terminus a quo – without which the activity of thinking rationally, scientifically, and morally is impossible. Finally, although for both philosophers metaphysical beliefs are not susceptible to conventional modes of explanation, justification, and verification, both seem to suggest in various ways that metaphysical beliefs are nevertheless susceptible to a certain kind of ‘practical’ justification.

Perfectionism, the view that well-being is a matter of developing characteristically human capacities, has relatively few defenders in the literature, but plenty of critics. This article defends perfectionism against some recent formulations of classic objections, namely, the objection that perfectionism ignores the relevance of pleasure or preference for well-being, and a sophisticated version of the ‘wrong properties’ objection, according to which the intuitive plausibility of the perfectionist ideal is threatened by an absence of theoretical pressure to accept putative wrong properties cases. The article argues that these objections are unsuccessful, but introduce a new worry, the deep problem: perfectionism fails to offer a satisfying foundational justification for why developing the human essence is valuable. The article responds to the deep problem, ultimately arguing that it is a puzzle put to all theories of well-being to provide a justification for their normative significance.

Some – particularly Australasian – authors who have published in Polar Record may be familiar with the debate around the acceptability of the word ‘expeditioner’. The term is regularly used by Australians and New Zealanders, in both casual and official contexts. In The Antarctic Dictionary, Bernadette Hince (herself Australian) classifies the word as particularly (although not solely) Australian, notes its regular use by the Australian national programme, which publishes an Expeditioner Handbook, and defines it as ‘A member of an [A]ntarctic expedition, including a government expedition’ (Hince 2000: 118–119). However, ‘expeditioner’ appears in the Oxford English Dictionary only as a rare and obsolete term. The sole example cited in the OED Online is from 1758, in a non-polar context; the definition provided is ‘One engaged in an expedition’. Neither The Australian Oxford Dictionary (2nd edition, 2004) nor The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary (2005) includes ‘expeditioner’, although the term is included in the Australian Macquarie Dictionary (5th edition, 2009) and the US-based Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1993). There is clearly significant national variation in the term's acceptability and its use in an academic publication can draw negative attention (Stone 2003: 172 – not coincidentally, a British review of a book by an Australian author). This note argues that ‘expeditioner’ should not be dismissed as an idiolectic ungrammatical term unsuitable for use in British publications. We make a case for the use of ‘expeditioner’ on three grounds: conceptual appropriateness, precedence and convenience of expression.

The concept of liability is currently at the centre of contemporary debates on interpersonal defensive killing and war. This often leads to radically asymmetrical moral positions between aggressors and victims, and between just and unjust combatants. This article argues that the dichotomy liable/non-liable is too rigid to adequately capture the moral landscape in many relevant defensive killing situations. By contrast, it proposes a more granulated framework that takes seriously both the conceptual features of rights as essentially individualistic entities and their strength in moral reasoning. Finally, the article also shows that far from creating problems for the morality of killing in war, the proposed framework allows us to better accommodate for the position of unjust combatants than standard revisionist accounts of just war theory.

Mark Rowlands gives a compelling argument that, if John Rawls's contractarianism is consistently applied, and Rawls's premises fully explained, then we have powerful reasons to believe that representatives behind the Veil of Ignorance should be blind to species membership in the same way that they are blind to economic status and natural talent.1 I argue that even if we suppose this to be correct, these agents would not choose the two principles of justice, but instead ones that more closely resemble utilitarian principles.

On the standard account of supererogation, an act is supererogatory if and only if it is morally optional and there is more moral reason to perform it than to perform some permissible alternative. And, on this account, an agent has more moral reason to perform one act than to perform another if and only if she morally ought to prefer its outcome to that of the other. I argue that this account has two serious problems. The first, the latitude problem, is that it has counterintuitive implications in cases where the duty to be exceeded is one that allows for significant latitude in how to comply with it. The second, the transitivity problem, is that it runs afoul of the plausible idea that the one-reason-morally-justifies-acting-against-another relation is transitive. I argue that both problems can be overcome by an alternative account: the maximalist account.

Half of the drug offenders incarcerated in the United States are black, even though whites and blacks use and sell drugs at the same rate, and blacks make up only 13 per cent of the population. Non-comparativists about retributive justice see nothing wrong with this picture; for them, an offender's desert is insensitive to facts about other offenders. By contrast, comparativists about retributive justice assert that facts about others can partially determine an offender's desert. Not surprisingly, comparativists, especially comparative egalitarians, contend that differential punishment is retributively unjust. I agree with this assessment, but take issue with the reasons egalitarians cite in its favour. In this article, I argue that differential punishment violates retributive justice because it contributes to structural racial oppression. Over the course of developing and defending this claim, I identify the shortcomings of both comparative egalitarianism and respectarianism, which is the most popular and plausible brand of non-comparativism.

This article explores a core question in the law of slavery: how was an individual's status as slave or free socially discerned and formally adjudicated? Under the doctrine of “freedom by prescription,” a person who had in good faith “lived as free” could argue that the absence of exercise of ownership for a specified term of years extinguished a prior owner's title. In the medieval Siete Partidas of Alfonso the Wise, which continued as a legal point of reference in Louisiana well after the end of Spanish rule, both the law of status and the law of property confirmed this path to freedom. From 1808 onward, Louisiana jurists and legislators sought to eliminate the remnants of the doctrine, but it lingered in popular and even judicial consciousness. The 1853 kidnapping of a woman named Eulalie Oliveau, six of her children, and eleven of her grandchildren for sale in the New Orleans slave market brought the question of “freedom by prescription” back into the courts. The awkward resolution of that case, and the uncertain fate of Eulalie Oliveau and her children, foreshadowed Reconstruction-era struggles over the content of legal freedom and the rights that freedom might bring to those who had once been held as property.

During the period at issue in this paper–the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when trial juries were first employed in English felony cases–felonious homicide was a catch-all category, with no formal distinction drawn between murder and manslaughter. Nevertheless, juries did distinguish among different types of homicide as they sorted the guilty from the innocent, and the irremediably guilty from those worthy of pardon. Anger was one of the factors that informed this sorting process. This paper builds upon an earlier analysis of the meaning of felony, which posited that the medieval paradigm of felony was an act that involved deliberation and forethought, an exercise of a person's reasoning capacity and volition in the absence of necessity, and moral blameworthiness. Anger complicates this scenario. On the one hand, anger was seen to be a product of an ill-formed conscience. This potentially placed anger within the felonious area of moral blameworthiness. On the other hand, anger in its more extreme manifestations was seen to inhibit a person's ability to reason and to inspire behavior resembling insanity, thereby possibly pointing toward a partial excuse. This paper takes a fresh methodological approach for the study of emotion in the common law, placing legal texts within a broader cultural context in order to illuminate the concerns and priorities of jurors.

This article examines one kind of conscientious refusal: the refusal of healthcare professionals to treat sexual dysfunction in individuals with a history of sexual offending. According to what I call the orthodoxy, such refusal is invariably impermissible, whereas at least one other kind of conscientious refusal—refusal to offer abortion services—is not. I seek to put pressure on the orthodoxy by (1) motivating the view that either both kinds of conscientious refusal are permissible or neither is, and (2) critiquing two attempts to buttress it.

Arguments against physicians’ claims of a right to refuse to provide tests or treatments to patients based on conscientious objection often depend on two premises that are rarely made explicit. The first is that the protection of religious liberty (broadly construed) should be limited to freedom of worship, assembly, and belief. The second is that because professions are licensed by the state, any citizen who practices a licensed profession is required to provide all the goods and services determined by the profession to fall within the scope of practice of that professional specialty and permitted by the state, regardless of any personal religious, philosophical, or moral objection. In this article, I argue that these premises ought to be rejected, and therefore the arguments that depend on them ought also to be rejected. The first premise is incompatible with Locke’s conception of tolerance, which recognizes that fundamental, self-identifying beliefs affect public as well as private acts and deserve a broad measure of tolerance. The second premise unduly (and unrealistically) narrows the discretionary space of professional practice to an extent that undermines the contributions professions ought to be permitted to make to the common good. Tolerance for conscientious objection in the public sphere of professional practice should not be unlimited, however, and the article proposes several commonsense, Lockean limits to tolerance for physician claims of conscientious objection.

The career of the composer, pianist, teacher and conductor William Sterndale Bennett (1816–1875) provides an excellent example of how early musical promise by no means guarantees adult success. In Bennett’s case, enthusiastic, but not undeserved, endorsements from Mendelssohn and Schumann, combined with equally high expectations from his compatriots, proved to be more of a curse than a blessing and resulted in a crisis of confidence. Drawing on many contemporary sources, among them letters, reviews and personal reminiscences, this article investigates the way in which this began to afflict Bennett in his mid-twenties. It manifested itself in various ways: first, he found it increasingly difficult to finish compositions for publication; second, and as a result of this, his output shrank considerably between the early 1840s and the late 1850s; third, most of the works he did complete were on a smaller scale than the earlier ones; fourth, as he is known to have been working on a number of works at this time of which no trace survives, one can only presume that he destroyed them. The burden of expectation, negative criticism and a dread of producing substandard work all contributed to his loss of self-belief, which was also reflected in the observable decline in his ability as a conductor. Lastly, an attempt is made to unravel the curious inverse connection between Bennett’s creativity and his marriage, and possible connections between his fantasy overture Paradise and the Peri and Schumann’s cantata of the same name. In conclusion, it reflects on the emotional ties between Bennett and two of those particularly close to him, his wife and Schumann, and posits a tentative link between their deaths and his regaining of his compositional voice.

There are several reasons for accommodating health professionals’ conscientious objections. However, several authors have argued that among the most important and compelling reasons is to enable health professionals to maintain their moral integrity. Accommodation is said to provide “moral space” in which health professionals can practice without compromising their moral integrity. There are, however, alternative conceptions of moral integrity and corresponding different criteria for moral-integrity-based claims. It is argued that one conception of moral integrity, the identity conception, is sound and suitable in the specific context of responding to health professionals’ conscientious objections and their requests for accommodation. According to the identity conception, one maintains one’s moral integrity if and only if one’s actions are consistent with one’s core moral convictions. The identity conception has been subject to a number of criticisms that might call into question its suitability as a standard for determining whether health professionals have genuine moral-integrity-based accommodation claims. The following five objections to the identity conception are critically examined: (1) it does not include a social component, (2) it is a conception of subjective rather than objective integrity, (3) it does not include a reasonableness condition, (4) it does not include any substantive moral constraints, and (5) it does not include any intellectual integrity requirement. In response to these objections, it is argued that none establishes the unsuitability of the identity conception in the specific context of responding to health professionals’ conscientious objections and their requests for accommodation.