Ideal Contractualism views principles of justice as corresponding to what rational, mutually disinterested persons would collectively choose behind a veil of ignorance. It is well-known that Ideal Contractualism faces profound challenges in accounting for justice between generations. We present a unified solution to these problems that involves rejecting the assumption that the parties conceive of their choices as causally efficacious and assumes instead that the parties choose in light of the news value of their decision. And we explore what concrete principles would be chosen by the parties as governing intergenerational justice against the backdrop of this assumption.

Many of the most significant goods in human life are fleeting, fragile, and subject to loss. But this aspect of such goods, what I call their preciousness, is undertheorized. Here I provide an account of the nature of precious goods, and argue that this category of goods is significant. I argue that while the preciousness of goods is not a consistent contributor to their intrinsic value, preciousness nevertheless calls for a distinct attitudinal response on the part of rational agents: a focused, joyful attention I refer to as cherishing.

The best known historical narrative of the international mental hygiene movement among English-speaking audiences locates its origins in the publication of A Mind That Found Itself, the autobiographical account of Clifford Beers (1876–1943), a Yale graduate and former psychiatric patient. The success of the book is thought to have prompted the creation of the first Society for Mental Hygiene in Connecticut in 1908. Beers’ biography, published as Advocate for the Insane in 1980, contends that mental hygiene abroad developed from seeds first sown in the USA and subsequently in Canada.

This article offers a critical reappraisal of that narrative and advances an alternative framework for understanding the history of the international mental hygiene movement during the first half of the twentieth century. It draws on a body of scholarship, emerging since the 1980s, that has sought to decentre the prevailing account, exposing the multiplicity of forces at work in a history that diverges from any straightforward, linear trajectory radiating from a single point of origin.

By tracing this decentred history, the article highlights the contested nature of the ‘international’ in the context of the mental hygiene movement. Case studies from the USA, France, Brazil, and Argentina reveal both the conflicts it engendered and the diverse meanings and significance it assumed within distinct national settings.

Production of seafood has received relatively little attention in agri-food debates despite the fact that, since the 1960s, seafood production has been transformed through the industrialization of fisheries and globalization of seafood commodity chains. Intensive aquaculture emerged as a new industry in response to declining fish catches. Global commodity chains of seafood and capital accumulation processes changed tremendously, leading to complex international trade dynamics and rising inequalities. The Turkish aquaculture sector has also been transformed via government subsidies, and a few vertically integrated aquaculture companies started to produce farmed sea bass and sea bream (SBSB) in Turkish waters, while organizing their operations both upstream (processing of fish feed in Africa) and downstream (sales and distribution in Europe) in the global SBSB value chain. We adopted a single commodity approach to uncover how seafood production has been transformed via expanding commodity frontiers of capital-intensive SBSB production by focusing on the strategies of Turkish aquaculture enterprises, trade dynamics, and socio-ecological implications of SBSB production via in-depth interviews with key stakeholders and a review of legislative documents and trade data. Our analysis offers critical insights into the agrarian-change debate in Turkey by analyzing the global and regional socio-ecological inequalities created by Turkish SBSB production.

Since Foucault’s seminal work in the 1960s on the consequences of eighteenth-century discursive shifts in medicine, the establishment of hospitals during this period has often been interpreted as a progressive innovation driven primarily by medical scientists. However, less attention has been given to the ways in which the founding of hospitals was intertwined with domestic traditions and the practical challenges inherent in their implementation. By examining the establishment of the Seraphim Hospital in Stockholm, along with subsequent hospital foundations in Sweden, the practical difficulties involved become evident. Some of these challenges, particularly those related to funding difficulties, bear a striking resemblance to contemporary discussions on enhancing the efficiency of healthcare, despite the differing historical contexts. In the Swedish eighteenth-century context, ecclesiastical authority in medical matters persisted and played a role in the establishment process, while the military character of the kingdom also influenced hospital development. The conclusion drawn is that both national and local conditions shaped how medical reforms were conceived and practised. The historiographical emphasis on novelty and change may, at times, obscure the continuity of past practices, which undeniably played a crucial role in shaping the new. The concept of path dependency is thus employed not only to trace these historical connections but also to explore the ways in which they influenced the Swedish context, ultimately shaping the trajectory of hospital development in the country.

Developments such as the opening of the first psychiatric outpatient clinic, the emergence of psychiatric social work, the surge of interest in psychology and psychiatry, and the tightening of notions about sexual hygiene, intersected with the rise of the mental hygiene movement in India from 1930s. There exists little to no discussion on how mental hygiene developed in the colonies. This study is the first to shed light on the lesser-known chapter of psychiatry in India. The dynamics of family, childhood, and nation-state when merged with ideas about racism, caste, and communalism were critical in the making of new nation-states like India. Moreover, the trajectory of India’s participation in international health movements, such as psychoanalysis and mental hygiene, allowed for exchange and participation. India’s participation in the mental hygiene movement allowed the growth of psy-disciplines in innumerable ways. This paper fills in a major lacuna in historical writing by providing an outline of the number of interconnected developments in the colonies, which are often sidelined. The international visibility of India also permitted India to take centre stage in many significant studies that were conducted by the World Health Organization after the Second World War.

Following the decisions of the scientific session ‘For the further flourishing of Pavlov’s doctrine’ of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR in 1950, important reforms were introduced under political control in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc countries. Research plans of science institutions and medical university curricula were changed according to these decisions. Scientists and university professors were forced to adopt courses in Pavlovian doctrine. The reforms affected the work of hospitals and sanatoriums, whose staff was instructed to reform the everyday practice. Regarding the clinical work, the session had two main consequences: the introduction of the so-called Curative-Protective Hospital Regime and the introduction of sleep therapy for the treatment of psychiatric diseases, hypertension, ulcers, rheumatism, and other diseases. As a widespread therapeutic method, it was established in the 1950s in the USSR and in the countries of the Eastern Bloc as a general reform of health politics. Political (Soviet influence), ideological (dialectical materialism), theoretical (Pavlovian teaching), and practical medical considerations intersected in the implementation of the therapeutic methods which made patients objects of this treatment. This study explores the process of dissemination and establishment of sleep therapy in Bulgarian hospital practice based on the hospital documentation of the Pediatrics Clinic at the Medical Academy and the Clinic of Cardiac Diseases in Sofia in 1952–1953.

This paper scrutinizes an early childhood education institution introduced by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey in the early 2000s. Making Quran kindergartens public, which were previously run only by private enterprises and religious sects, marked a new development for the country. In an effort towards building its cultural hegemony, the AKP established Turkey’s first public Islamic kindergartens as a part of its “raising a new pious generation” policy. This article explores the emergence of these public Islamic kindergartens, referred to as “Quran kindergartens,” and analyzes how these institutions form the concept of the “Muslim child” through their educational practices while also contributing to the transformation of the role of mosques in Turkey. The study was based on qualitative research, comprising interviews with educators and parents.

This article sheds light on the understudied significance of Islam, Communism, and global politics in defining what constituted an acceptable “religion” (shūkyō 宗教) in wartime Japan. An analysis of the Japanese Imperial Diet’s debates on the place of Islam in the Religious Organizations Law of 1939, which defined state-sanctioned religious organizations, reveals that Muslim attention from around the world, international politics, the global spread of Communism, and the relatively short history of Islam in Japan, affected politicians’ decision not to mention Islam as a religious organization in the law. While previous literature on the Religious Organizations Law has not adequately addressed the significance of international and non-Euro-American transnational influences, this article argues that lawmakers viewed the power of transnational Muslim and Communist networks as crucial when defining both officially acceptable “religion” and the Shrine (jinja 神社), or Shrine Shinto, as the national core to be protected under this law. The debates surrounding Islam offer fertile ground for examining the significance of global affairs in determining acceptable forms of “religion” in Japan, as well as the broader implications of what Japanese state officials called “religion” and “thought” (shisō 思想) in wartime Japanese and world politics.

Silvennoinen (2025) analyzes the stored sequence going forward as an adverb that inherits adverb-class morphosyntax. This reply challenges that categorization on empirical grounds. The construction fails the key distributional test for adverbs: it cannot occur in integrated-medial position between subject and verb (*We going forward will prioritize replication), the diagnostic slot for core adverbs (We certainly will prioritize replication). Analysis of Silvennoinen’s corpus (n = 1,517) confirms this restriction – apparent ‘medial’ tokens prove either to be NP-internal modifiers or parenthetical supplements, never integrated clausal constituents. Instead, going forward patterns with PP adjuncts, occurring clause-initially, clause-finally, or as supplements. Internally, deverbal going heads the construction and licenses a directional complement forward(s), parallel to established deverbal prepositions like according [to …] and depending [on …]. The construction thus projects PP, not AdvP, aligning with The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’s flexible-complement analysis of prepositions. This case demonstrates that storage and semantic specialization do not force categorical reanalysis.

Shmuel Nili’s Beyond the Law’s Reach? is an inquiry into the moral duties of the world’s established democracies in a world rife with violent and undemocratic states. Nili argues that these “consolidated” democratic states are “entangled” with the leaders of such violent polities—and uses this entanglement to derive an elegant and plausible series of political duties. In response, this essay seeks to undermine the distinction between the established democracies and the violent states, by showing that some democratic states—including, most centrally, the United States—are as violent as those societies considered by Nili as the focus of international moral obligation. This fact, however, does not impugn the moral obligations identified by Nili; instead, it demonstrates that Nili’s duties might demand something like a necessary form of moral hypocrisy—in which a democratic state might be effectively able to undermine violence abroad, even while incapable of effectively eliminating that violence on its own territory.

In Beyond the Law’s Reach? Shmuel Nili examines the moral responsibilities of affluent democracies toward poorer countries to whose misfortunes they contributed. Because of their entanglement, Nili argues, affluent democracies are (often, but not always) morally barred from pursuing policies more obviously aligned with their moral preferences when another policy would benefit the weakened state more. In this essay, I discuss some of the challenges of trying to repay a moral debt between states. The affluent democracy has incentives to underestimate the extent of its moral debt, while the weakened state benefits from overestimating the harm it suffered. Moreover, since the state is not a unitary actor, different members of a state might disagree on which actions should count as proper forms of atonement. I argue that moral debts cannot ever be fully repaid, but that such impossibility does not undermine the moral requirement to try to pay them; and, further, that the inability to fully settle a moral debt is not a shortcoming to lament, but closer to a blessing in disguise, because acknowledging past misdeeds and embracing the moral implications of deep entanglement may foster greater reciprocity and solidarity in the international realm.

Michael Blake, Yuna Blajer de la Garza, and Alex Zakaras offer insightful critiques of several arguments central to my book Beyond the Law’s Reach? In the process, they raise large questions in political philosophy more generally, especially as it pertains to global affairs. Blake is skeptical about the distinction, driving much of the book, between consolidated liberal democracies and jurisdictions where the “shadow of violence” prevails. Blajer de la Garza worries that the international reparative duties that the book highlights may linger indefinitely, and, consequently, be exploited by cynical political actors. Finally, whereas Beyond the Law’s Reach? argues that liberal democracies’ collective integrity is affected by their entanglement in violence and corruption abroad, Zakaras doubts whether this collective moral problem carries over into the individual level, given individual citizens’ reasonable ignorance of policy details. I offer responses to each of these critiques in turn. I conclude by highlighting the picture of democratic civic responsibility that emerges from these responses.