Melina Constantine Bell (2021) argues that J. S. Mill's harm principle permits society to coercively interfere with the use of bigoted insults, since these insults are harmful on “a more expansive, modern, conception of harm.” According to Bell, these insults are harmful in virtue of their contributing to detrimental objective states like health problems. I argue that people with illiberal dispositions might have intense and sustained negative subjective reactions to behavior that the harm principle ought to protect, reactions intense enough to affect their health or other objective interests. Bell's way of thinking about harm therefore has illiberal implications. Yet I agree with her that bigoted insults should be regarded as harmful. I therefore propose an alternative way of understanding harm according to which subjective pain is a harm when it is intentionally caused.

This paper reports the results of a cross-sectional study investigating the acquisition of the syntactic properties associated with the null subject (meso-)parameter in English as a second language (L2) among Hebrew-speaking youngsters (18-year-olds). The two languages differ concerning these properties, with Hebrew allowing null subjects and related properties (although inconsistently) and English disallowing these properties altogether. One hundred four intermediate learners and 97 English-speaker controls provided grammaticality judgments and corrections concerning constructions involving expletive and referential null subjects, post-verbal subjects, and complementizer-trace sequences. The results reveal limited evidence for transfer from the learners’ mother tongue (first language [L1]) and indicate that learners have met the native standard concerning null and post-verbal subjects. These findings support both the meso-parametric view of cross-linguistic variation and feature reassembly on functional heads in L2 acquisition, while partially rejecting the Interpretability Hypothesis. Learners nevertheless deviate from the native standard concerning complementizer-trace sequences. This finding is unaccounted for by the meso-parametric approach, feature reassembly, or interpretability, but can instead be attributed to L1 transfer. Controls also demonstrate variability concerning complementizer-trace sequences, suggesting that the performance of all participants regarding this configuration is affected by processing difficulties, lower frequency in the input, and methodological issues with the items and/or the task.

In political decision-making processes in Greenland, comparisons are often drawn with Denmark, Scandinavia, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland. With Greenland as a case, this article analyses a series of aspects across the societies to highlight the politics of comparisons, which are taken for granted, and to emphasise contextual conditions. Comparisons are central to cultural meaning-making and navigation with nation building strategies. We conclude that the current comparisons are significant in terms of explaining Greenland’s challenges with a vulnerable economy and with the sustainable use of natural and human resources. To utilise local resources and create a sustainable livelihood, there is a need to break from the existing trajectories based on the current politics of comparison to explore local conditions more carefully and find other models of inspiration. By developing the concept of island operation, the article unfolds distinct characteristics of the Greenlandic socio-economic structures and includes statistical data on trade, education, and the labour market to support the identification of conditions that can contribute to future analyses of Greenland’s sustainable development. This analysis has relevance for societies that share geographical and cultural conditions with Greenland and post-colonial countries that must deal with complex path dependencies to navigate towards sustainable development.

This article recovers a lost era of Sino-American constitutional imagination surrounding the drafting of the 1946 Republic of China Constitution. It examines the transnational dynamics that led the Constitution's initial drafter, Zhang Junmai or Carsun Chang, to travel to the U.S. in 1945 to ostensibly study the ideas of Thomas Jefferson then ascendant in New Deal constitutional rhetoric. Recovering this episode recontextualizes Chang's early and late life as one of China's cosmopolitan intellectuals emerging from its contentious post-1911 dynastic politics who shaped China's engagement with evolving institutions of the modern international legal order. This recontextualization broadens and revises extant accounts of Chang's engagement with the 1946 constitutional drafting process by challenging accepted understandings of Chang's personal and intellectual trajectory and illuminating how the geopolitics of the Chinese Civil War intersected with presumptions about the overseas projection of American constitutional values increasingly embedded in twentieth-century American internationalism. Herein, Chang's long-standing interest in Jefferson's constitutional ideals was reshaped by the strategic considerations he faced situated between his consistent criticism of Guomindang leader Chiang-Kai Shek and Chang's suddenly heightened status among American political leaders. His near year-long stay in the U.S. before the 1946 drafting process involved many little known but determinative turns, including the role of a subset of Roosevelt and Truman Administration officials actively enamored with Jefferson's own study of Confucianism. The article also details the telling contours of Chang's post-1949 life as a political exile in the United States. Ultimately, this recovered episode demonstrates the pervasive and impactful nature of transnational dynamics in modern Sino-American relations which blur the line between national and international legal history. Most broadly, the fallout from the 1946 drafting process and the varied Chinese interpretations of thinkers like Jefferson reflect the mid-twentieth century transition of America from a global symbol of constitutional revolution to a global symbol of racialized empire. Recapturing this era thus also has implications for originalist-styled constitutional arguments made in contemporary Taiwan as well as for evaluating the international dimensions of Jefferson's problematic domestic legacy.

The career of the composer, performer, educator and diplomat Hans-Joachim Koellreutter was exceptionally varied, taking place over three continents. A refugee from Nazi Germany, he is primarily known for introducing serialism to Brazil. However, he not only returned to his native Germany for a short period but also lived and worked in India and Japan, before going back to Brazil. His life and work epitomize the role played by migrants in constructing a global diasporic network, illustrating both the promises and the shortcomings of global musical modernism. The consequences he drew, however, drove him to embrace a form of universalism that was at odds with the increasing ideological polarization of the 1970s and 1980s, notably in a Latin American intellectual climate dominated by dependency theory.

Norcross's recent book has a two-part title: Morality by Degrees: Reasons without Demands. In this essay I focus on the second part of the title – the idea that there are moral reasons without demands. I do not think that it is at all obvious what this means, and whether it is distinct from Norcross's central (and compelling) idea, that moral reasons come in degrees. I explore several possible ways of cashing out a distinctive claim that morality does not make demands, and argue that we should not accept that morality does not make demands. It does make demands, but it sometimes makes them in degrees.

I agree that a good pensions system should embody some form of collective risk pooling and that this would be to the advantage of everyone. There are some difficult issues of adverse selection to be solved, however. Moreover, egalitarian concerns are of crucial importance in most countries and they require to go further than collective risk pooling and to take into account that society is more than a system of self-interested monetary transfers between and within cohorts.