On the solely jurisdictional reading, the nonestablishment clause in the US Constitution's First Amendment was designed to confirm that power over politics in relation to religion was assigned solely to the several states. This article first summarizes two presentations of that view (those of Steven D. Smith and Akhil Reed Amar), offers a critique of it, and then outlines an alternative. The critique is theoretical, seeking to show the incoherence of the solely jurisdictional reading, such that any theorist who assumes its internal consistency cancels her or his own interpretation of the First Amendment. This incoherence is present because that reading assumes the suprarational character of religious or comprehensive convictions, even while those citizens who hold any such conviction believe that justice depends on the ultimate terms of political evaluation they affirm. On the alternative outlined, religious freedom makes sense if and only if the ultimate terms of evaluation are given in common (adult) human experience, and thus the question about them is itself rational.

This article draws on empirical research conducted with European Commission officials in three Directorates-General and its other services on their perception of how the legislative and policy-making process facilitates the interaction of science and environmental law. This article deploys Sheila Jasanoff's theoretical framework of co-production as an important lens to examine how the European Commission creates this interaction of science and law in environmental policy making and identifies how the Commission incorporates different voices and stakeholders in this policy area. The Commission can be seen as a vehicle of co-production of science and law in EU environmental policy by building strong expert identities, putting in place institutional processes and instruments, and creating discourse between scientists and lawyers leading to outputs of co-production. It is argued that in actively facilitating co-production, the Commission underpins the legislative and policy-making process with its institutional values.

This paper uses a case study of a 1970s controversy in artificial-intelligence (AI) research to explore how scientists understand the relationships between research and practical applications. It is part of a project that seeks to map such relationships in order to enable better policy recommendations to be grounded empirically through historical evidence. In 1972 the mathematician James Lighthill submitted a report, published in 1973, on the state of artificial-intelligence research under way in the United Kingdom. The criticisms made in the report have been held to be a major cause behind the dramatic slowing down (subsequently called an ‘AI winter’) of such research. This paper has two aims, one narrow and one broad. The narrow aim is to inquire into the causes, motivations and content of the Lighthill report. I argue that behind James Lighthill's criticisms of a central part of artificial intelligence was a principle he held throughout his career – that the best research was tightly coupled to practical problem solving. I also show that the Science Research Council provided a preliminary steer to the direction of this apparently independent report. The broader aim of the paper is to map some of the ways that scientists (and in Lighthill's case, a mathematician) have articulated and justified relationships between research and practical, real-world problems, an issue previously identified as central to historical analysis of modern science. The paper therefore offers some deepened historical case studies of the processes identified in Agar's ‘working-worlds’ model.

A year ago, in Jam v International Finance Corporation, fishing and farming families from rural India achieved a historic US Supreme Court victory over one of the world’s largest financial institutions. The Supreme Court decided that the World Bank Group, and similar international organizations, do not automatically enjoy ‘absolute’ immunity from suit, but instead can be sued under the same circumstances as foreign governments can be sued in United States (US) courts – including suits based on their commercial activities in the US.

Urban expansion in the early twentieth century had a profound impact on India's urban land economies. Historians argue that in this period, urban India went through an increasing marketization of land and that improvement trusts had a significant hand in accelerating land speculation. In the case of Bombay, we still understand little of the relationship between the activities of the Bombay Improvement Trust and rising land values. The article examines key legal disputes around compensation for land acquired by the Trust for public purpose before and after World War I. Such cases show how the Trust and the judiciary shaped changing expectations around what comprised ‘market value’ and consequently became deeply involved in Bombay's land economy. Where officials had earlier resisted valuations that they believed encouraged speculation, after the 1920s the resolution of disputes incorporated future value as a legitimate and necessary part of the economy.

Dont has been claimed to be an exception to the ‘subject island’ constraint (Tellier, 1991; Sportiche and Bellier, 1989; Heck, 2009) and to contrast with true relative pronouns such as de qui. We provide corpus data from a literary corpus (Frantext), which show that relativizing out of the subject is possible with dont and de qui in French relative clauses, and is even the most frequent use of both relative clauses. We show that it is not a recent innovation by comparing subcorpora from the beginning of the twentieth century and from the beginning of the twenty-first century. We also show, with an acceptability judgement task, that extraction out of the subject with de qui is well accepted. Why has this possibility been overlooked? We suggest that it may be because de qui relatives in general are less frequent than dont relatives (about 60 times less in our corpus). Turning to de qui interrogatives, we show that extraction out of the subject is not attested, and propose an explanation of the contrast with relative clauses. We conclude that in this respect, French does not seem to differ from other Romance languages.

The Levelling-Down Objection is a standard objection to monistic egalitarian theories where equality is the only thing that has intrinsic value. Most egalitarians, however, are value pluralists; they hold that, in addition to equality being intrinsically valuable, the egalitarian currency in which we are equal or unequal is also intrinsically valuable. In this paper, I argue that the Levelling-Down Objection still minimizes the weight that the intrinsic badness of inequality could have in the overall intrinsic evaluation of outcomes, given a certain way of measuring the badness of inequality, namely, the Additive Individual-Complaints Measure.

What will be the consequences of the criminalization of aggression? In 2010, the International Criminal Court made aggression a crime for which individuals can be prosecuted. But questions around what constitutes aggression, who decides, and, most important, how effective this legal change will be in reducing the incidence of war remain. This essay considers these questions in light of two recent books on the criminalization of aggression: Noah Weisbord's The Crime of Aggression: The Quest for Justice in an Age of Drones, Cyberattacks, Insurgents, and Autocrats and Tom Dannenbaum's The Crime of Aggression, Humanity, and the Soldier. While the authors argue in favor of the efficacy of the criminalization of aggression as a means to reduce future war, it is also likely that the criminalization of aggression will reshape war in potentially profound ways.

The Sustainable Development Goals have attracted both defenders and critics. Composed of seventeen goals and 169 targets, the overly broad scope of the SDGs raises the question of whether there are priorities that need to be set within them. This essay considers the SDGs from the perspective of a “basic goods approach” to development policy, which takes a needs-based and basic-subsistence-rights view on policy priorities. It focuses on a subset of SDGs that directly address the provision of nutritious food, clean water, sanitation, health services, education services, and human security services. In doing so, it proposes a set of seven “basic development goals” and ten associated targets. It argues that this more focused approach can better protect basic rights, more effectively contribute to progress on human wellbeing, and make accountability more likely.

What are the philosophical arguments justifying limited strikes? This essay, as part of the roundtable “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” adopts a French perspective both because France is, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, one of the states that launched such limited strikes in recent years, and because it developed a limited warfare ethos. There is something specific about such an ethos that makes it particularly receptive to the jus ad vim framework and, therefore, to the issue of limited strikes. This essay also builds on the case of the use (or threat) of limited force in Syria as a response to the country's use of chemical weapons between 2013 and 2018. Presented as a way to “punish” the Syrian regime as much as to “deter” it from using chemical weapons again, these limited strikes are a good illustration of the traditional retributive/preventive dichotomy of penal philosophy. I argue that the moral justification of those strikes should be guided by a consequentialist ethic, preventive rather than retributive. From a consequentialist perspective, limited strikes are justified when they “work”—that is, when they have a deterrent/compellent effect. For that to happen, they need to be credible and imply the potential of an escalation; the challenge being to keep the escalation under control. Carrying the risk of inefficacy at one end of the spectrum and of escalation at the other, limited strikes are indeed a matter of balance.

Armed reprisals are the limited use of military force in response to unlawful actions perpetrated against states. Historically, reprisals provided a military remedy for states that had been wronged (often violently) by another state without having to resort to all-out war in order to counter or deter such wrongful actions. While reprisals are broadly believed to have been outlawed by the UN Charter, states continue to routinely undertake such self-help measures. As part of the roundtable, “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” this essay examines the doctrine of armed reprisals in light of recent instances of states using force “short of war” in this manner. We argue that the ban on reprisals has been largely ignored by states, and that recent attempts to apply the laws of armed conflict to the cyber domain (such as the Tallinn Manual) are further weakening this prohibition. We conclude that this is a potentially dangerous development that lowers the bar for resorting to military force, risking escalation and thereby further destabilizing the international system.

Limited air strikes present an attractive “middle-ground approach” for policymakers, as they are less costly to coercers than deploying troops on the ground. Policymakers believe that threatening and employing limited air strikes signal their resolve to targets. In this essay, as part of the roundtable on “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” I debunk this fallacy and explain how the same factors that make limited air strikes attractive to coercers are also those that undermine their efficacy as a coercive tool of foreign policy. The limited nature of these air strikes undermines the ability of coercers to effectively signal their resolve. In turn, coercive threats of limited air strikes are less likely to be credible, creating a vicious cycle: policymakers threaten to employ air strikes because they are less costly but then often need to follow through on those threats as target states fail to acquiesce to their demands, precisely because limited air strikes are less costly for the coercer. Limited air strikes, therefore, can actually be a source of conflict escalation and lead policymakers to engage in military action that they would prefer to avoid. I further explain why failing to follow through on such coercive threats can undermine a leader's reputation for resolve and lead to future crisis escalation. Finally, I discuss what this quagmire means for the ethics of the threat and the use of air strikes, particularly for the principles of right intention, likelihood of success, and probability of escalation.

In her new memoir, The Education of an Idealist, Samantha Power reflects on her eight years in the Obama administration. Although she claims that the experience did little to change her views, there is a considerable disjuncture between her point of view in her award-winning earlier book “A Problem from Hell,” in which she criticizes U.S. officials for not doing the right thing, and her point of view in The Education of an Idealist, in which she defends indifference of U.S. officials under somewhat similar circumstances during the Obama years. The author of Problem could not have written Education, and the author of Education could not have written Problem. What does this tell us about the possibility for ethics in foreign policy?