Despite significant progress in business and human rights (BHR) discourse and the practices of multinational corporations (MNCs), persons with disabilities and disability rights are absent from both the key instruments and practice of BHR. This lacuna exists despite the near-universal ratification of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, as well as the fact that disabled persons constitute over 15 per cent of the global population and MNC operations impact them greatly and disproportionately. We argue that MNCs have a central role, responsibility and opportunity to foment change globally in fulfilling the human rights of persons with disabilities through their employment practices and by leveraging their economic power to fulfil other aspects of disability-based human rights. Doing so requires the development and self-enforcement of disability-specific human rights due diligence (HRDD) processes, and creating a general culture of diversity, equity and inclusion that encompasses disability.

The Middle English period is well known as one of widespread lexical borrowing from French and Latin, and scholarly accounts traditionally assume that this influx of loanwords caused many native terms to shift in sense or to drop out of use entirely. The study analyses an extensive dataset, tracking patterns in lexical retention, replacement and semantic change, and comparing long-term outcomes for both native and non-native words. Our results challenge the conventional view of competition between existing terms and foreign incomers. They show that there were far fewer instances of relexification, and far more of synonymy, during the Middle English period than might have been expected. When retention rates for words first attested between 1100 and 1500 are compared, it is loanwords, not native terms, which are more likely to become obsolete at any point up to the nineteenth century. Furthermore, proportions of outcomes involving narrowing and broadening (often considered common outcomes following the arrival of a co-hyponym in a semantic space) were low in the Middle English period, regardless of language of origin.

This article examines how villa baths in the north-western Roman empire can help us understand how rural regions were incorporated in the Roman cultural sphere despite the absence of cities and secondary agglomerations. Whereas in the first phase of Roman rule the addition of private baths to a villa could be interpreted as a marker of a Roman way of life, the ever larger and more luxurious bathhouses of the second and third centuries ad can only be understood in the context of intra-elite competition, revealing a real concern for displaying wealth and underlining social status, but also for leaving a family legacy. Here, a case-study in the rural north-west examines the role of baths in the self-representation of elites, the consolidation of elite peer interaction networks, the creation of social exclusion, and the inclusion of new ideas into local cultures.

Cross-cultural exchanges between India and China during the first millennium are often understood through a Buddhist lens; by investigating the impact of Indian Buddhist sources, be they literary, doctrinal, or artistic, to receiving Chinese communities. In these cultural transactions, instigated by traveling pilgrim-monks and enacted by imperial power players in China, India emerges as a remote, idealized, and perhaps “hollow” center. Imagined or real, the importance of images of India in medieval Chinese Buddhist landscape has been established beyond doubt. What seems to be missing in this unidirectional looking is the impact of these cultural communications in India. What were the Indian responses to Chinese Buddhists' demands and their physical presence? How was China imagined and translated in medieval India? This essay proposes to locate the activities of Chinese monks in India and the iconographies of China-inspired Indian Buddhist images within the larger historical context of shifting cultural and political geography of the medieval Buddhist world. By exploring different types of evidence from borderlands, vis-à-vis the monolithic concepts of China and India, the essay also complicates the China–India studies' comparative model.

The COVID-19 crisis has been accompanied by an extensive use of indicators, such as those related to COVID infections and deaths, but also a good number of COVID policy indicators. This paper discusses these indicators from the perspective of a legal scholar with an interest (and some expertise) in comparative law and empirical legal studies. This means that this paper does not engage in the details concerning epidemiological and medical issues of COVID infections and deaths. Rather, it focuses on two main issues: first, it develops and maps a general causal scheme of indicators and their underlying real-world phenomena in the COVID crisis; second, it shows how such a causal scheme has been, and can be, applied in comparative empirical legal research. Yet, it also notes the difficulties of proving causal relationships and some attempts to overcome them.

This article engages with the legal regulation of end-of-existence decisionmaking for novel beings, specifically assisted nonexistence for such entities. The author explains the concept of a legal model for assisted death by reference to the substantive features of legal regimes in three jurisdictions in which assisted suicide or euthanasia is lawful. He considers how these models might fit novel beings who may require or prefer assistance to end their own existence by reference to the constituent features—abstract legal ingredients—that models for assisted death share. The author argues that extant models may block some novel beings’ access to end-of-existence assistance or fail to track what matters to them. He then examines the merits of adopting a universal model for assisted nonexistence, that is, a legal framework whose substantive features capture the end-of-existence concerns of both human and novel beings. Consideration of a unified legal framework may illuminate the discussion of assisted nonexistence for humans and novel beings. However, the paper proposes that whereas novel beings may have similar interests to humans, they may be relevantly different also. The prima facie case for adopting a one regime to rule us all approach to assisted nonexistence may be defeated by reasons for divergent regulation.

The 2019 Global Health Security Index (GHS Index) assessed the US and the UK as the two countries best prepared to address a catastrophic pandemic. The preparedness rankings of this index have had little correlation with the actual experiences of COVID-19 in various countries. In explaining this disrepancy, the paper argues that better indicators and more data would not have fixed the problem. Rather, the prevailing paradigm of global health security that informs instruments such as the GHS Index needs to be interrogated. This dominant paradigm narrowly conceptualises global health security in terms of the availability of a technical infrastructure to detect emerging infectious diseases and prevent their contagion, but profoundly undertheorises the broader social and political determinants of public health. The neglect of social and political features is amplified in instruments such as the GHS Index that privilege universalised templates presumed to apply across countries but that prove to be inadequate in assessing how individual societies draw on their unique histories to craft public health responses.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts to quantitatively measure the global health situation and/or governments’ reaction vis-à-vis the pandemic have flourished. In spite of the significance of data in the fight against the pandemic, however, such global knowledge is largely questionable, insofar as it exposes itself to the many hazards and fallacies associated with global attempts to frame the social world in numbers. This is why the paper attempts to identify the hazards and fallacies most commonly associated with global measurements of social phenomena and to verify whether and to what extent these hazards and fallacies affect numerical representations of the pandemic and its effects. To this end, the paper analyses ten English-language global numerical initiatives that were launched between January and May 2020, and reviews them in light of existing critical literature on global numbers. The aim is to provide a deeper understanding of global measurements of health and related law-and-policy measures, and to suggest caution about their use as a basis for knowledge and action in the context of the pandemic.

Emerging biotechnologies and advances in computer science promise the arrival of novel beings possessed of some degree of moral status, even potentially sentient or sapient life. Such a manifestation will constitute an epochal change, and perhaps threaten Homo sapiens’ status as the only being generally considered worthy of personhood and its contingent protections; as well as being the root of any number of social and legal issues. The law as it stands is not likely to be capable of managing or adapting to this challenge. This paper highlights the likely societal ramifications of novel beings and the gaps in the legislation which is likely to be relied upon to respond to these. In so doing, the authors make a case for the development of new regulatory structures to manage the moral issues surrounding this new technological upheaval.

What exactly is it that makes one morally responsible? Is it a set of facts which can be objectively discerned, or is it something more subjective, a reaction to the agent or context-sensitive interaction? This debate gets raised anew when we encounter newfound examples of potentially marginal agency. Accordingly, the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and the idea of “novel beings” represent exciting opportunities to revisit inquiries into the nature of moral responsibility. This paper expands upon my article “Artificial Moral Responsibility: How We Can and Cannot Hold Machines Responsible” and clarifies my reliance upon two competing views of responsibility. Although AI and novel beings are not close enough to us in kind to be considered candidates for the same sorts of responsibility we ascribe to our fellow human beings, contemporary theories show us the priority and adaptability of our moral attitudes and practices. This allows us to take seriously the social ontology of relationships that tie us together. In other words, moral responsibility is to be found primarily in the natural moral community, even if we admit that those communities now contain artificial agents.

New areas of research and education are emerging under the banner of Global Asian Studies (GAS). This paper examines the intellectual background of the rise of GAS and proposes a research agenda for the further development of GAS to facilitate the extraction of globally relevant findings with the potential to restore an intellectual foundation for connectedness in an increasingly divided world. The paper examines the ongoing repositioning of Asia studies in relation to the Asianization of Asian studies, new methodologies for a new era, the increasing importance of multi-lingual research, and theorizes the potential of area studies “inside-out” in relation to trends in and studies of globalization. Proposing four focal themes as a platform from which a new GAS may depart, this manifesto paper aims primarily to open up a discussion to eventually serve as a foundation for sustained research and education in the field of GAS.

The discussion about the moral status of novel beings tends to focus on artificial intelligence, robots, and other man-made systems. We should, however, also consider a likelier kind of novel beings: animals that are genetically modified to develop human-like cognitive capabilities. This paper focuses on the possibility of conferring human characteristics on nonhuman primates (NHPs) in the context of neuroscientific research. It first discusses the use of NHPs for neuroscientific research and then, second, describes recent developments that promise to revolutionize the field and how that may lead to NHPs attaining human-like cognitive capabilities. Third, an account of moral status is developed to ground the central claim, that making the NHP brain more human-like is unproblematic as long as the NHPs do not become persons. In conclusion, this paper discusses the implications for the moral status of cognitively enhanced NHPs, as well as the implications for other novel beings.

The spread of COVID-19 has seen a contest over health governance and sovereignty in Global South states, with a focus on two radically distinct modes: (1) indicators and metrics and (2) securitisation. Indicators have been a vehicle for the government of states through the external imposition and internal self-application of standards and benchmarks. Securitisation refers to the calling-into-being of emergencies in the face of existential threats to the nation. This paper contextualises both historically with reference to the trajectory of Global South states in the decades after decolonisation, which saw the rise and decline of Third-World solidarity and its replacement by neoliberalism and global governance mechanisms in health, as in other sectors. The interaction between these modes and their relative prominence during COVID-19 is studied through a brief case-study of developments in Kenya during the early months of the pandemic. The paper closes with suggestions for further research and a reflection on parallel trends within Global North states.

In response to Sato and Sonoda's “Asian Studies ‘inside out’: research agenda for the development of Global Asian Studies,” members of the Global Asias Collaborative at Rutgers University – comprised of a diverse group of scholars of Asia and the Asian diaspora located in history, literature, art history, geography, among other disciplines – offer responses to this generative prompt to remap the place and field of “Asia” in its heterogeneous and interwoven temporalities and topologies.

There is growing interest in machine ethics in the question of whether and under what circumstances an artificial intelligence would deserve moral consideration. This paper explores a particular type of moral status that the author terms psychological moral patiency, focusing on the epistemological question of what sort of evidence might lead us to reasonably conclude that a given artificial system qualified as having this status. The paper surveys five possible criteria that might be applied: intuitive judgments, assessments of intelligence, the presence of desires and autonomous behavior, evidence of sentience, and behavioral equivalence. The author suggests that despite its limitations, the latter approach offers the best way forward, and defends a variant of that, termed the cognitive equivalence strategy. In short, this holds that an artificial system should be considered a psychological moral patient to the extent that it possesses cognitive mechanisms shared with other beings such as nonhuman animals whom we also consider to be psychological moral patients.