Modal concord refers to the phenomenon where the co-occurrence of two modal elements with the same flavor and force (e.g. may possibly, must certainly) gives rise to the interpretation of single modality. Given their (arguably) equivalent semantics, constructions with modal concord and single modal (e.g. may, must) can function as alternative choices in different contexts of use – how do speakers choose between them, and how is the choice perceived? In this article, we take a ‘Register’ approach and report an experimental study of MC in US English, addressing their linguistic and social meanings with versus without situational context. The results show that (i) modal concord constructions differ from single modal ones in linguistic meanings, which casts doubt on the concord assumption, and (ii) modal concord has distinct social meanings from those of single modal constructions. Our findings suggest a correlation between the meaning strength of a linguistic expression and the social perception about the speaker. Context, manipulated via the single situational parameter of interlocutor relation (close vs. distant), did not interact with the linguistic or social meaning of modal concord constructions, the implications of which are discussed in relation to the multidimensional nature of conversational situations and the method applied.

The extraction of salt from seawater is one of the most direct ways of exploiting the marine environment. In the historic period, the production of salt formed an important component of the global economy. In temperate locations such as Ireland, archaeological evidence of extracting salt from seawater comprises a range of expressions and locations dictated by the energy resource required. This article presents the results of the first archaeological excavations of a saltworks complex in Ireland, at two sites that produced salt from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Partial excavation of a seventeenth-century complex at Ballyreagh Lower revealed a crude structure that was not capable of supplying all of the area’s needs. By contrast, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pan site at Broughanlea shows a step-change in scale, efficiency, and infrastructure that reflects new economic networks in a country predominantly relying on agricultural produce.

Performers have enacted Beethoven in ways that disclose overt similarities in the ways through which they conceptualize both the composer’s music, and their own ambitions in performing it. This article looks at the pianist Anton Rubinstein (1829–1894) who became known as ‘Van II’ not for his compositions but rather his performances. The focus the late nineteenth-century demand for autobiographic readings, and their blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction, sets the scene for Rubinstein’s role in the creation of a Russian obsession with the performance of Beethoven’s piano works. Rubinstein’s fame for being a ‘son born of Beethoven’ continued well beyond his death, and set a precedent for other pianists to look to his Beethoven legacy to fashion themselves as what Stefaniak has termed ‘revelatory interpreters’ of the composer. The resulting Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis resulted in a counterpart obsession that peaked in the late-Soviet landscape of the mid-twentieth century. The article turns to the case of Heinrich Neuhaus (1888–1964) to give a sense of how this active myth-making reflected itself in the construction of a performance narrative by a pianist who had never seen or heard Rubinstein but who felt compelled to enact the language, metaphors, and physical trope of the Beethoven-Rubinstein synthesis. It suggests how, in Neuhaus’s case, enacting the Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis perhaps underpinned aspects of his own pianism (such as the concept of intonirovaniye (a way of intoning sound) as a manifestation of revelatory interpretation) in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A-flat major Opus 110.

I explore and defend the unusual view that the replacement of matter taking place in the human body undermines egoistic reasons, and that we therefore have little or no basis for long-term egoistic concern. I begin by arguing that you should not have egoistic concern for a replica, i.e. a person resulting from a complete and sudden replacement of matter. I then argue that when it comes to egoistic concern, replication is not relevantly different from the slower and more gradual form of replacement found in human metabolism: if the former undermines egoistic reasons, so does the latter. I grant that the resulting view is, in some respects, hard to accept, but I conclude that we should at least treat it as a serious possibility.

This paper renews the contemporary and enduring salience of archaic and discredited concepts of spatiality and physical geographic determinism, but historicises, repurposes and reworks them: it is an essay in critical and decolonial palaeo-territorialisation. Concreteness may well have been misplaced, but place – and space – might not have been altogether mis-concretised. Rethinking the global is an opportunity to step back and think about macro-scales and macro-scalarity more broadly. This paper exhumes and decolonially/critically reappropriates Carl Schmitt’s Großraum concept (re-examining, along the way, if not quite rehabilitating the Meer und Land thesis and Mackinder’s ‘geographical pivot’ (Mackinder 1904)) as a heuristic device to explore the overlooked scales of continents and continentality in the genealogy of a global geographic imaginary that is as much geotectonic as geo-historical. ‘The Global’ would then come to signify pre-eminently – or perhaps has always signified – as the intercontinental rather than the international: a space or set of spaces in some ultimate sense conditioned by the configuration of the planetary crust yet nonetheless produced through historical processes. We may never have been global, but we have been (inter)continental for the last half-millennium. State sovereignty, (racial) capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, public international law, fascism, communism and neoliberal globalisation have all been projects or formations – directly or indirectly, by design or accident – producing, pursuing, exploiting, organising and ordering continental Großräume. Contemporary regional trade blocs, regional international governmental organisations, regional human rights systems, military alliances and even putative civilisational divides all reflect the perdurable continental horizons of our ostensibly global imaginary.

The openness of decision-makers to be influenced by and invest in proposals for policy reform is not constant. Timing is key, as are the diversity and depth of interests, levels of knowledge, and nature of the policy challenge itself; these can all affect how governments absorb information that might fall beyond the usual cost-benefit assessments of day-to-day policymaking. This essay explores how and when the policy environment provides opportunities to introduce a more nuanced discussion of competing moral values in migration governance and, critically, the new policy directions to which they might give rise. In doing so, it will utilize a range of examples from national, EU, and global debates of the past decade, to highlight moments when a dilemmas approach has been—or could have been—useful to effect policy change. Stressing ethical dilemmas can influence migration policymakers when the conditions are right.

Today’s controversies about territorial access and rights of refugees and the cohesion of the nation-state can be traced back to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and Kant’s ideas about hospitality. Seyla Benhabib has argued that the resulting dilemma can be softened and bridged through “democratic iterations,” and that the EU deliberation offers a suitable perspective. However, the complex construction of the EU asylum framework has led to a paradox of highly regulated rights and closed borders, and to disappointment and opposition. The sudden opening of borders and free choice for the Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression open a new perspective to address the dilemma, in line with EU principles of free choice and openness.

Theories of liberal justice depend upon ideas of how much we can expect ordinary people to be motivated by the moral interests of others; there are limits to the motivational power of such notions as altruism and sympathy. This means, however, that the theories of justice we have may have difficulty in understanding how to rightly respond to the moral claims that might emerge in the face of widespread migration in response to climate change. This essay argues that liberal states may face a dilemma in response to this migration—one in which a state must do what cannot be justified toward either the migratory or the sedentary. This claim, further, might represent a new site of intergenerational injustice, in which future generations are given political problems to which our best theories of political justice can provide little assistance.

Organizations often face moral dilemmas. For example, in 2004 the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) needed to decide whether to help refugees in enclosed camps in Pakistan repatriate to Afghanistan. On the one hand, helping with repatriation might have made UNHCR complicit in forced returns, as refugees sought to repatriate just to avoid life without freedom in Pakistan. On the other hand, refusing to help with repatriation would leave refugees stranded in camps: perhaps repatriation was the best option if this was what refugees wanted. When organizations face this and other dilemmas, it is not clear how they should proceed. In other words, it is unclear which policy they should pursue when all feasible policies seem wrong. Some might think that, at least for hard dilemmas, every choice is just wrong, and so no choice is right. But that is not quite true. Even difficult dilemmas can be resolved using certain methods. One method is to ask those affected by potential policies what they think the most justifiable policy is. A second method is to choose what to do randomly. Randomly selecting a course of action can sometimes be the fairest way of determining what to do when every option seems wrong.

Witness testimony in a judicial setting is commonly viewed as a form of evidence—a means to inform a judicial body of relevant facts in a given case. In this perspective, witnesses are merely instrumental to the process of adjudication. While this viewpoint provides a useful account of how we think of witness testimony in courts today, it is illsuited to the way witnesses and their role were perceived in the ancient world. Drawing on a cross-cultural analysis of ancient and late antique texts, the article recovers a different perception of the role of witnesses that once prevailed in the societies that gave rise to Western civilization. According to this alternate view, witnesses were not seen as passive providers of information but rather as active agents with the power to adjudicate—a role that we would now associate with judges. The article offers a new conceptualization of this historical transformation, outlining two paradigms that can help us critically examine the implied assumptions about the role of witnesses in adjudication: “the instrumental paradigm,” which is dominant in contemporary thought, and “the authoritative paradigm,” emerging from ancient texts, wherein witnesses held a far more authoritative role than the contemporary understanding suggest. The study argues that the instrumental paradigm reflects a radical transformation in the meanings of testimony and witness as legal concepts—a shift that marks an unexamined revolution in the history of legal thought.

The essay examines the lessons from the international intervention in Afghanistan, highlighting the failures of externally imposed state building, including neglect of local governance structures and prioritizing donor interests over Afghan ownership. The international peace- and state-building intervention in Afghanistan, which spanned two decades, culminated in the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2021, leading to the Taliban’s swift resurgence. This event has sparked a critical examination of the strategies employed by NATO and allied nations during their engagement in Afghanistan. This essay aims to distill seven key lessons from this intervention, emphasizing the need for future peacebuilders to adapt their approaches to better align with local contexts and realities. The analysis highlights the failures of liberal peacebuilding, the importance of local ownership, the necessity of effective and legitimate institutions, and the detrimental impact of corruption. Furthermore, it underscores the significance of coherence among international actors and the need for a nuanced understanding of regional dynamics. By reflecting on these lessons, the essay seeks to provide actionable insights for future international interventions in fragile and conflict-affected states.

The secrecy of intelligence institutions might give the impression that intelligence is an ethics-free zone, but this is not the case. In The Ethics of National Security Intelligence Institutions, Adam Henschke, Seumas Miller, Andrew Alexandra, Patrick Walsh, and Roger Bradbury examine the ways that liberal democracies have come to rely on intelligence institutions for effective decision-making and look at the best ways to limit these institutions’ power and constrain the abuses they have the potential to cause. In contrast, the value of Amy Zegart’s and Miah Hammond-Errey’s research, in their respective books, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence and Big Data, Emerging Technologies and Intelligence: National Security Disrupted, is the access each of them provides to the thoughts and opinions of the intelligence practitioners working in these secretive institutions. What emerges is a consensus that the fundamental moral purpose of intelligence institutions should be truth telling. In other words, intelligence should be a rigorous epistemic activity that seeks to improve decision-makers’ understanding of a rapidly changing world. Moreover, a key ethical challenge for intelligence practitioners in liberal democracies is how to do their jobs effectively in a way that does not undermine public trust. Measures recommended include better oversight and accountability mechanisms, adoption of a ‘risk of transparency’ principle, and greater understanding of and respect for privacy rights.

Many aspects of migration policy involve hard moral dilemmas. Whether the dilemmas are concerned with refugee accommodation and integration, temporary labor migration, or the prospects of rejected asylum seekers, policymakers must sometimes make tough choices between competing and equally compelling moral values. Through in-depth discussion of various concrete examples, contributions to this roundtable argue that recognition and systematic analysis of the “ethics of migration policy dilemmas” can both increase philosophical and social-scientific understanding of public debates and policymaking on migration and provide ethical guidance for migration policy. Before introducing the roundtable’s individual contributions, this essay argues for the distinct epistemic value of the Dilemmas perspective by contrasting it with an approach that emphasizes the “busting” of myths; that is, the empirical uncovering of influential falsehoods in public and policy debates, often in the hope of improving policymaking through stronger evidence. We argue that while such myth busting can be valuable, it is insufficient and sometimes unhelpful for understanding how migration policy comes about and can be improved. Policymaking is not just shaped by empirical facts and understandings but also by interests and goals, including moral ones, that give empirical considerations deeper meaning and action-guiding potential. Often, these moral goals are numerous, similarly or equally compelling, and in profound tension with one another. Where this is the case, we should not simply introduce more and more accurate factual descriptions; we must also analyze dilemmas.