Should there be a right not to be manipulated? What kind of right? On Kantian grounds, manipulation, lies, and paternalistic coercion are moral wrongs, and for similar reasons; they deprive people of agency, insult their dignity, and fail to respect personal autonomy. On welfarist grounds, manipulation, lies, and paternalistic coercion share a different characteristic; they displace the choices of those whose lives are directly at stake, and who are likely to have epistemic advantages, with the choices of outsiders, who are likely to lack critical information. Kantians and welfarists should be prepared to endorse a (moral) right not to be manipulated, though on very different grounds. The moral prohibition on manipulation, like the moral prohibition on lies, should run against officials and regulators, not only against private institutions. At the same time, the creation of a legal right not to be manipulated raises hard questions, in part because of definitional challenges; there is a serious risk of vagueness and a serious risk of overbreadth. (Lies, as such, are not against the law, and the same is true of unkindness, inconsiderateness, and even cruelty.) With welfarist considerations in mind, it is probably best to start by prohibiting particular practices, while emphasizing that they are forms of manipulation and may not count as fraud. The basic goal should be to build on the claim that in certain cases, manipulation is a form of theft; the law should forbid theft, whether it occurs through force, lies, or manipulation. Some manipulators are thieves.

This chapter focuses on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) to explore Forster’s repeated, if sometimes reluctant, interest in modes of animality that threaten to unravel his humanism and complicate what critics, most notably Edward Said, have claimed to be his orientalising descriptions of the country and its people. It begins by looking at Forster’s depiction of beetles and wasps in the novel, examining how his later paratextual notes, added in 1942, undercut taxonomic precision. When placed in the context of the rise in popular entomology, Forster’s ‘unentomological’ approach to insects emerges as an important aesthetic feature of the novel. In part, it signals Forster’s hesitancy to impose western systems of knowledge on India, while it also differentiates his use of beastly language from writings by René Maran and Mulk Raj Anand. Bringing in intertextual material from Forster’s earlier novel Howards End (1910) and later account of visits to India, The Hill of Devi (1953), the chapter goes on to explore how he stages encounters with vaguely understood animal figures in which his anti-imperialism becomes, ironically, clearer.

This chapter offers a synoptic survey of work on the discourse dynamics of vague language. It starts by briefly introduction to the traditional philosophical puzzles of vagueness, to do with indeterminacy and tolerance. From there, it turns to evidence that vague language exhibits nontrivial discourse dynamics. Different approaches to the discourse dynamics of vagueness are taxonomized and critically evaluated. The chapter concludes by considering the prospects of leveraging an account of the dynamics of vague language to provide a solution to the traditional puzzles of vagueness.

After unpacking the sense in which Heidegger uses the term "contradiction," the chapter reviews his use of it in the strictly logical, “injunctive” sense as the “principle of non-contradiction” (PNC) and “law of thinking,” particularly as he wields it in the course of exposing what otherwise appear to be cases of vagueness or ambiguity. It then reviews his tendency in some contexts to align the PNC with a metaphysics that restricts being to being on hand (vorhanden) and the dilemma that this ontological interpretation presents, given his apparent adherence to the principle, even as he proposes a broader understanding of being. The chapter then suggests that his analysis of attunement in the 1929/30 lectures introduces a more expansive reading of the PNC and that this reading is corroborated by his existential interpretation of the principle in the Winter Semester of 1933/34. The interpretation is a ringing endorsement of the PNC and the sameness of reference it enjoins as a condition for being-with-one-another. The chapter concludes by probing the implications of this ontologically broader – or post-ontological – interpretation of the PNC for thinking and speaking of being itself, riddled with “nothingness” as it is.

With this chapter, we deal with the problem of research ‘uncertainty’: how it is defined and dealt with in the standard praxis of psychological research. It stresses that the idea of measurement ‘error’ (in the sense of variability) is predominantly valid under a substance ontology. The processual alternative is described, stemming from a complex dynamic systems framework, which embraces variability, a fuzziness of category boundaries, and multiplicity. As the notion of uncertainty is also inextricably linked with the fundamental concept of probability, we present a processual framework for understanding probability.

Chapter 2 considers legal uncertainty in the jus ad bellum as defined in the UN Charter and other sources of law. It describes paradigms, framing this law around ‘plain cases’ of lawful and unlawful force. Supervaluationism describes paradigms as determined not by one but several tests, overlapping but not co-extensive - cases may meet all or only some tests. Fuzzy logic refutes binary distinctions between lawful and unlawful force, arguing these are end-points of a continuum, separated by a ‘penumbra of uncertainty’. The chapter outlines ‘hard cases’ of force, different to cases the UN Charter most obviously prohibits: anticipatory self-defence, pre-emptive self-defence, self-defence against non-state actors, humanitarian intervention, use of force to prevent WMD proliferation. The chapter describes how interviewees and survey participants evaluated such justifications, the results displaying the vagueness already identified. The chapter identifies one possible explanation: lawyers align with different ‘interpretive cultures’, holding different opinions about valid legal tests and interpretive techniques. ‘Restrictivists’ prefer ‘formalist’ interpretation techniques, while ‘expansionists’ prefer ‘dynamist’ interpretation techniques.

Chapter 1 outlines the main issues that the book investigates: the nature of legal and factual uncertainty in 'hard cases' engaging international law governing resort to military force, the jus ad bellum; the role of competing interpretive and strategic cultures in generating and sustaining that uncertainty, by operationalising opposing intuitions about legal interpretation, and 'extra-legal' political, strategic and ethical assessment; and the potential usefulness in dealing with these dilemmas of insights from fields outside this area of law, such as international humanitarian law, legal risk management, and strategic intelligence assessment and forecasting. The chapter describes the research methods used: structured interviews and a survey with thirty-one UK-based international lawyers, and systematic textual analysis of key International Court of Justice cases and scholarly assessments of US-led interventions in Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Finally, the chapter outlines the overall structure and argument of the book.

Chapter 8 concludes the book by reviewing its arguments and conclusions, identifying weaknesses in the methods used, and proposing ways in which these might be addressed and the research developed further, for example by involving participants in other countries. The chapter importantly notes that uncertainty and contestation remain marginal problems in the jus ad bellum, as in most areas of international law. In most cases, the requirements of international law governing resort to military force are clear and uncontested. There are many reasons to believe that the contemporary jus ad bellum has contributed to global peace and stability. This book’s examination of legal and factual uncertainty and extra-legal intuitions seeks to support and assist lawyers and states in their mission to uphold and apply this crucial area of international law, not to encourage lawyers or states to undermine or abandon it.

This chapter introduces paradoxes from three areas. First, the famousantinomies from Frege–Cantor set theory are presented asconsequences of the naive set concept; the standard solution,Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory and the idea of iterative sets,is discussed and found to be problematic. Second, the soritesparadox for vague predicates/properties is presented, and somestandard solutions are discussed, putting the focus on“cutoff points.” A paraconsistent “glut”approach is recommended as the best way to accept the existence ofcutoff points, as inconsistent and not unique. Third, a puzzle aboutboundaries in space is presented, standard solutions discussed andfound wanting, and a paraconsistent response outlined. It issuggested that all three paradoxes are interrelated by the conceptof “revenge” and should be met with dialetheism.

The chapter argues that a commitment to human rights necessarily entails basic environmental protection duties as a matter of political morality. This is because egregious forms of environmental harm critically undermine the fundamental values that underpin human rights, chiefly human dignity and autonomy. Human rights must therefore contain a sub-category of protections which we can conceptualise as environmental human rights. The human interests that environmental human rights protect are the environmental conditions necessary for the preservation and flourishing of human life, namely clean water, food, air, and soil within a functioning ecosystem that includes diverse species of plants and wildlife. Those who challenge these rights as vague overlook the significant room for agreement in the pursuit of a comprehensive and universal notion of a ‘sound’ environment. Meanwhile, converns over potential conflicts with other rights are overstated, because balancing of competing interests is a pervasive and well-established feature of human rights law and contemporary environmental regulations are already being challenged on the basis of competing rights, for instance to property.

Contra assumptions regarding Bishop’s privileging of perspicacity as interlinked subject and method, this essay reflects on the persistence within her poems of a haptic incessancy pursued as though for the pleasure of its own sake. The affinity between Bishop’s formulation of peninsulas taking up the water that surrounds them “like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods” and the appearance in a late essay by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick of an identical gesture, what Sedgwick invokes as the weaver’s handshake, opens onto a consideration in both writers of an exacting inexactness resistant, for Sedgwick, to paranoid reading’s opposite tendency toward a clarity too often – in both queer theory and queer readings of Bishop’s work – treated as self-evident. Returning to Bishop’s under-examined engagement with Poe illuminates her own frequent challenging of epistemology’s queer promise, inviting our appreciation for a poetic wavering capable of withstanding even our best-intentioned corrections.

Socrates, the renowned philosopher, famously averred that “the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.” The veracity of that ageless quip is, of course, debatable from a rhetorical standpoint. The definition of terms may or may not mark the genesis of wisdom but, rest assured, conceptual reflection of term definitions indisputably constitutes a crucial early step in legal construction and interpretation. This chapter focuses on a simple, yet fundamental, question that remains unaddressed in modern literature: What exactly is genome editing? To that end, the chapter lays an interpretive and normative foundation that imports meaning into the term’s scope. It starts by highlighting how scientific literature has remarkably devoted substantial efforts to discuss ways to develop, use, improve, and expand the technology without actually attaching a particular meaning to the term. After exposing limitations associated with the use of dictionaries in legal analysis, the chapter argues that congruity and uniformity on genome-editing terminology is sorely needed now due to the increasing interdisciplinary reach of the technology. Accordingly, it advocates for the adoption of a unified definition of genome editing. The proposed definition undergoes rigorous analysis and, along the way, the chapter dispels the myth that law generally lags behind scientific progress.

Social choice is concerned with the selection of an ideal (or social) option, which can be a so-called ‘social state’, or a social ‘utility’, or a social ‘preference’, or a social choice ‘set’, on the basis of individual utilities, or individual utility functions, or individual preferences, or individual choice sets, or individual choice functions. A number of scholars have outlined the limited aspect of the notion of utility, including, notably and pre-eminently, Amartya Sen and Martha C. Nussbaum. Although they did not put it in such a strong phrase, the basic idea is to replace the notion of utility by the notion of capability (leaving aside ‘happiness’, a notion which for many is hardly distinguishable from utility). As has been remarked by Mozaffar Qizilbash, the development of the capability approach has been focused on the capability of an individual; and the idea of amalgamating or aggregating individual data is consubstantial with social choice. The purpose of this text is to propose some preliminary ideas regarding the aggregation of individual capabilities.

Expands the discussion of coordinate structures started in the previous chapter to another kind to syntactic ambiguity involving a prepositional phrase in the title of the Princeton University introductory linguistics course: Introduction to Language and Linguistics. On one interpretation, the left conjunct is only Language; while on the other, it is Introduction to Language. Each interpretation corresponds to a unique hierarchical structure. To determine why one interpretation is more appropriate than the other, it is necessary to consider the meaning of the words language and linguistics, including how they relate. This leads to a basic discussion of what a language is and what language is from the perspective of modern linguistics. This chapter wraps up the analysis of coordinate structures with a discussion of the use and misuse of coordinate structures in writing. It demonstrates how coordinate structures can be a source of ambiguity, redundancy, and vagueness—all hallmarks of poor writing.