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Criminalisation theorists who try to explain when substantive criminal law may appropriately be deployed to shrink the scope of our presumptive initial liberty, often take their project as requiring them to identify the sorts of conduct for which may the state criminally convict. I argue that this is a mistake. While such theories of ‘convictability’ have their place, they do not completely explain the use of substantive criminal law to limit our presumptive initial liberty. Convictions ensue only after pleas of justification and excuse fail, but the substantive criminal law coercively limits liberty well before conviction, when it creates a pro tanto criminal proscription. Even those who can escape conviction by pleading a justificatory or excusatory defence were, in fact, subject to authoritative criminal law guidance proscribing (or sometimes, requiring) specified conduct. Although that guidance is sometimes trumped by the additional guidance contained in defences, it is not null and void, and it continues to have a liberty-limiting effect. In other words, substantive criminal law already shrinks our initial liberty by pro tanto criminally proscribing some conduct. Therefore, I argue that we also need a theory of criminalisation that addresses the appropriate domain of pro tanto criminal proscriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exemption from blameworthiness is bound to implicit or explicit claims of diminished agency, or even non-agency. This poses a dilemma in navigating moral relationships affected by mental illness. While it is crucial for assessments of responsibility to be responsive to the significance of mental illness, must this responsiveness come at a cost to symmetrical moral relations? In this paper we argue, contra recent critiques, that Strawsonian accounts of responsibility are able to navigate this dilemma, and can accommodate significant exculpation on the basis of mental illness while maintaining symmetrical relations. We understand this to be part of the larger recognition that while we have certain fundamental entitlements within our moral relationships, it is also possible to be over-entitled, and to expect too much of others. Our account draws, in particular, on the moral significance of difficulty. Difficulty is inherently scalar, and in drawing on this explanatory framework we explicate a theory of both excuse and exemption by degree. We argue for a significant realm of excuse on the basis of mental illness that is fully compatible with symmetrical relations. However, we also acknowledge the limits of this accommodation on Strawsonian grounds, and argue that these limits are justified and appropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a Competitive Leverage model, and apply it to analyze the impact of tariffs on the attitudes of domestic import-competing firms, especially regarding their disincentives to maintain a Competitive Stance against foreign competitors in the domestic market. We propose that tariffs are a disincentive to the pursuit and maintenance of production efficiency in firms and industries. When countries implement tariff protection for their domestic firms, the most common excuse sounds reasonable, except that it is also economically flawed. While the short-run impacts of such a measure might seem plausible, its long-term effects appear to be less than favorable, and may, in fact, turn out to be damaging to the economy. The paper applies the competitive leverage concept in a unique way to highlight how tariffs distort the output levels of domestic firms, and gives an empirical analysis of the model, using USA data to verify the predictions of the model. Particularly, we develop a Cournot-competition type Competitive Leverage model, and use it to examine the role played by tariffs as a disincentive to a typical firm's pursuit and maintenance of production efficiency. The competitive leverage model is formulated and applied to verify the effects of tariff protection from the typical domestic firm's strategic interaction standpoint. We further apply crosssectional data to carry out an empirical analysis of the model, to verify how tariffs impact the domestic firm's output and pricing decisions. Our findings would enable us to contribute to the debate about the need to remove protective tariffs, on the grounds that tariffs do not only enable domestic firms to operate inefficiently, but also tends to distort the output and pricing outcomes that would otherwise have been realized in the free market. The results from the study are used to propose some major policy implications of imposing tariff protection, among which are that there is need for implementation of more deliberately sustained Research and development program on the part of domestic firms in the economy, to enable them withstand vigorous competition in a free-trade world. Also, since protective tariffs significantly increase firms' profit rates, which in turn enables them to unduly earn and accumulate economic rents that amount to inefficiencies and distortions in free-market prices and quantities outcomes, governments should always resist any pressures from big businesses to impose protective tariffs against competition from international rivals. Yet a clear public policy implication from this paper is that, at the macro level, as the results suggest that a government policy that aims at protecting domestic firms through imposition of tariffs may have an adverse effect on the firms' competitive stance in the industry, a practical message is for the government to impose only a moderate tariff at the most, if it must, especially as it relates to agricultural products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here is a crucial principle for debates about moral luck, responsibility, and free will: a subject is blameworthy for an act only if, in acting, she did what she ought not to have done. That is, 'blameworthiness' implies 'ought not' (BION). There are some good reasons to accept BION, but whether we accept it mainly depends on complex questions about the objectivity of ought and the subjectivity of blameworthiness. This paper offers an exploratory defence of BION: it gives three prima facie reasons to accept it, provides a plausible interpretation of it, and shows how holding out against objections can yield fruitful lessons. Five objections to BION are considered: the objection from conscience, from reasons, from suberogation, from objectivity, and from excuses. Their main problem is to either over-subjectify blameworthiness or to over-objectify obligations. To accept BION, we must occupy a desirable middle ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates how people can manipulate their beliefs in order to obtain the self-image of an altruistic person. I present an online experiment in which subjects need to decide whether to behave altruistically or selfishly in an ambiguous environment. Due to the nature of ambiguity in this environment, those who are pessimistic have a legitimate reason to behave selfishly. Thus, subjects who are selfish but like to think of themselves as altruistic have an incentive to overstate their pessimism. In the experiment, I ask subjects how optimistic or pessimistic they feel about an ambiguous probability and then, through a separate task, I elicit their true beliefs about the same probability. I find that selfish subjects claim to be systematically more pessimistic than they truly are whereas altruistic subjects report their pessimism (or optimism) truthfully. Given the experiment design, the only plausible explanation for this discrepancy is that selfish subjects deliberately overstate their pessimism in order to maintain the self-image of an altruistic person. Altruistic subjects, whose behavior has already proven their altruism, have no such need for belief manipulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The act of wittingly or suspiciously buying stolen goods is ethically questionable, legally punishable consumer behavior. Hence, purchasing stolen goods can lead to various cognitive and emotional sufferings, such as cognitive dissonance, ethical conflict, and feelings of guilt. In the context of buying stolen goods, consumer dissonance is a very significant predictor of consumer guilt. However, our findings did not confirm an expected positive relationship between ethical conflict and guilt. While buying stolen goods, consumer excuse and neutralization strategies are used to cope with both cognitive and emotional sufferings resulting from wrongdoings. The findings of this study are based on survey research conducted among the consumers of the stolen goods market, locally named Chor Bazaar (Theif Market) in India, focusing on Delhi and Mumbai. The findings confirmed that consumer’s use of excuse and neutralization strategies moderates the relationship between consumer guilt and the purchase of stolen goods. However, there is no direct relationship between neutralization and the purchase of stolen goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A looming deadline. A difficult situation at home. A heated phone conversation that redirects our attention. Certain features of our circumstances can be (at least partially) excusing; sometimes, agents who act wrongly in the face of circumstantial pressures are not (that) blameworthy for having done so. But we're rather bad at detecting these factors that excuse others from blame. When put together, these two observations yield an under-appreciated problem: we fall short of procedural norms of blame in fairly systematic ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a review article of a book celebrating Pasinetti's 90th birthday in 2020, Pasinetti and the Classical Keynesians: Nine Methodological Issues , edited by Enrico Bellino and Sebastiano Nerozzi. His demise in 2023 is, of course regrettable - but it is no excuse for giving a view of a book that was published in his lifetime. The view expressed in this article considers Pasinetti as a vintage member of the Cambridge Keynesian Group, which encompasses, in addition to those near Keynes, those second-generation scholars who also made a contribution—sometimes decisive—to various aspects of Keynesian Economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to a common view, criminal law should be structured in a way that allocates the conditions of criminal liability to different types of legal rules, given the content of the condition and the nature of the rule. This view classifies some conditions as elements of offenses and others as (part of) justificatory defenses or of excusatory defenses. While this view is attractive, I argue that it should be rejected, since it is incompatible with two plausible propositions about legal rules. The first is that foundational reasons are not concerned with the structure of the law as such. The second is that legal rules should be constructed in a way that reflects (the balance of) all the applicable reasons and not just some of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I address the theory of excuse, or more precisely, exculpatory excuse, and the question of what it is that justifies the category of excuse. I address different potential grounds for the law of excuse, which are often run together in ways that confound rather than clarify, focusing on the role of blamelessness and unfairness of expectations in the theory of excuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nimā Yushij's comprehensive look at poetry and the understanding that any change in poetry must be fundamental and general, prompted all elements in Nimā's "free verse" to undergo a fundamental transformation. Compared to classical poetry, one of the elements that underwent significant change in Nimā's free verse poetry was "language". The issue of language in Nimā's poetry has been the concern of his supporters and the excuse for his opponents since the beginning. Mahdi Akhavān-Sāles was an advocate of Nimā who sought to resolve the complexities and difficulties of his language and wrote the first independent book about the language of Nimā's poetry. This research initially deals with the opinions of Nimā's supporters and opponents regarding the language of his poetry. Then Akhavān's ideas in his book (Atā va laqāye Nimā Yushij) are analyzed using the "critical analysis" method. The study clarifies that Akhavān has tried to defend Nimā's style by finding analogies from the classic poetry for Nimā's language deviations in order to prove that Nimā has used most of the permissions and facilities available to his predecessors. Despite some mistakes, he has also pointed out some subtle points in his discussions, which were later expanded and completed by later researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that there are two importantly distinct normative relations that can be referred to using phrases like ‘X is obligated to Y,’ ‘Y has a right against X,’ or ‘X wronged Y.’ When we say that I am obligated to you not to read your diary, one thing we might mean is that I am subject to a deontological constraint against reading your diary that gives me a non‐instrumental, agent‐relative reason not to do so, and which you are typically in a unique position to waive with consent. I call this first relation the constraint relation. A second thing we might mean is that you are in a position to fittingly hold me personally accountable for reading your diary by demanding that I not read your diary, resenting me if I do so without excuse, and deciding whether to forgive me for this afterwards. I call this second relation the accountability relation. Though these two kinds of directed obligation often coincide, I argue that they are extensionally dissociable and play different normative roles. We cannot provide an adequate theory of ‘obligation to’ until we recognize that this phrase denotes not one relation, but two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to many philosophers there are only pro tanto oughts to believe relative to a standard of assessment: there are epistemic oughts to believe, moral oughts to believe, prudential oughts to believe etc. But there are no oughts to believe simpliciter. Many of the same philosophers who hold this view, also hold that ought to believe is to be understood deontologically – such that if S violates such an ought without excuse, S is blameworthy for doing so. I here argue that on a deontological understanding of ought to believe there must be ought to believe simpliciter and that it is the violation of this ought that determines whether we are to blame for our beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This critical policy discourse analysis examines how No Excuses charter schools communicate their school goals and environments, and how they represent and portray their current and prospective students in online materials. We also aim to understand how the No Excuses paradigm has evolved and how, if at all, it is currently represented by these charter networks. We focus on whether and how the discourse in these materials may reflect deficit perspectives or contain language that shapes the construction of students and their families as policy targets, and thus create discourses that may ultimately be harmful to racially-minoritized students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently popular theories of epistemic responsibility rest on the (perhaps implicit) assumption that justification and excuse exhaust the relevant normative categories. One gets the sense that, once we've laid down the conditions for justified belief, and once we've laid down the conditions of excusably unjustified belief, the work is done; all that's left is to clock out. Against this backdrop, one is naturally led to think that if an agent's doxastic state—her various beliefs and belief-like attitudes, or a subset thereof—fails to be justified, it is thereby unjustified, perhaps excusably so. The aim of this paper is to argue that that natural thought is mistaken; some agents are epistemically incompetent, and in virtue of their incompetence, their doxastic states are neither justified nor unjustified (even excusably). Instead, the doxastic states of such agents are exempt from epistemic evaluation altogether. I argue that what underlies this point about exemptions is that epistemic competences or abilities play an important and typically overlooked role in epistemology, especially in theories of epistemic responsibility. Here, I am interested in uncovering that role and explaining what it is, and also in explaining how one could accommodate it within various epistemological frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Murray Rothbard's perspective on war and foreign policy, emphasizing their crucial role in shaping a free society and preserving individual autonomy and peaceful cooperation. Rothbard recognized the dilemma of granting governments power to protect property, acknowledging the inherent risk of state overreach and aggression domestically and internationally.

While internet connectivity is a key promise of progress and the rule of law, criminal contestation of state control over territory is considered one of the main obstacles for development. This article provides the first known quantitative approach to the link between urban lawlessness and internet provision. Taking the Santiago Metropolitan Region (SMR) – the capital of Chile – as a case study, the authors discuss the origins of Red Zones (areas where telecommunication companies do not provide fixed broadband). A first hypothesis is based on the corporate excuse given by telcos for Red Zones: criminal activities – and not just socioeconomic discrimination – are a force majeure that impede internet connectivity in specific neighbourhoods. An alternative hypothesis acknowledges criminal governance in Latin American cities, admitting the possibility of criminal redistribution being favourable to internet connectivity where state control is contested. Employing a random effects regression model with panel data from 52 boroughs during the 2012–2020 period, the two hypotheses are tested. Contestation of the territorial control by the state is significantly and positively correlated to fixed broadband connectivity in the SMA. In contrast, lower connectivity is linked to higher presence of poor households, favouring a profit-based explanation for the Red Zones. The results hold when replacing the percentage of contested territory per borough with the murder rates. This research contributes to heterodox views within institutional economics and highlights the need of state-led redistribution in order to retake control of contested territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Excuse doctrine presents one of the great enigmas of contract law. Excuse allows courts to release parties from their contractual obligations. It thus stands in sharp contrast to the basic principles of contract law and adds signifcant uncertainty to contract adjudication. This Article offers a crucial missing perspective on the doctrine of excuse: the view from a macroeconomic lens. Macroeconomics offers a new justifcation for the law of excuse and new ways of understanding the doctrine’s mysteries, creating Excuse 2.0. We offer a simple macroeconomic model of excuse doctrine, highlighting the role the doctrine plays under conditions of economic crisis and potential recession. Our analysis illustrates a counterintuitive advantage of excuse doctrine, suggesting that the legal uncertainty surrounding the doctrine can induce loss-sharing between contractual parties, thus minimizing the costs of long-term economic instability. In the COVID crisis, for example, excuse doctrine facilitated an extraordinary wave of contractual renegotiation and loss sharing—without triggering excessive litigation. We discuss the interpretive and normative implications of our analysis and highlight its signifcance for contemporary policy debates in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To help explain in a principled way why criminal law doctrine tends to abstract away from motives and other individualized circumstances, I have defended an insufficient regard theory of criminal culpability that is more objective in certain respects than other views in the same camp. This has led Alec Walen to object that my view is too objective to be an account of culpability and is better understood as a theory of criminal wrongs. This challenge is important not least because it requires getting clearer about what wrongness and culpability are and what roles they play on a legal moralist picture of the criminal law. Here, I argue that Walen's objection is mistaken. Once we get clearer on what distinguishes wrongness and culpability, it becomes clear that my account is best seen as a theory of culpability. This is so even though it calculates degrees of culpability in a more objective way than other insufficient regard views. Besides just defending my account from Walen's objection, this paper aims to make a positive contribution by developing a more sophisticated version of the Manifestation Account I proposed earlier. To do this, I focus on the main area of criminal law doctrine where culpability comes apart from wrongness – namely, excuse cases. My earlier Manifestation Account is implausible – or at least limited – because it has nothing distinctive to say about how to determine the culpability of excused misconduct. Accordingly, the theory would be, if not outright false, at best incompatible with the orthodox view in criminal law theory, which takes excuses to accept wrongdoing but deny culpability. To solve this problem and enhance the Manifestation Account's explanatory value, I show how to extend the theory to account for the culpability of wrongs where a putatively excusing condition is in play. This not only fills a gap in the Manifestation Account but has the further benefit of providing a unified reasons-based account of the main categories of misconduct in the criminal law, which shows what separates criminal wrongness from culpability both in justification cases and excuse cases. The hope is that this effort will shed light on the distinct roles of wrongness and culpability in legal moralist theories of the criminal law and provide a better understanding of degrees of culpability for criminal wrongs – not only when justifications are at issue, but also when excuses are involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Introduction: To improve our understanding of how people engage in altruistic behavior, it is important to investigate the motives provided by help recipients and how these motives influence givers’ helping behaviors. Method: In the present study we conduct three experiments (total N = 606), exploring how the financial motivation of help recipients can aect givers’ helping behaviors. Results and discussion: We find that people like to help others but resent helping those motivated by immediate financial gains. Study 1 shows that the recipient of help influenced the responses of the helpers depending on whether the recipient was making a sales profit from this help or not. An influencing factor was whether the recipient could provide an excuse for making such a profit. Study 2 replicated these findings also in conditions in which other kinds of profits were applied. Study 3 confirmed the results in conditions in which helpers were informed about recipients’ financial motives before deciding whether to help. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I respond to Tim Smartt's (2023) skepticism about epistemic blame. Smartt's skepticism is based on the claims that (i) mere negative epistemic evaluation can better explain everything proponents of epistemic blame say we need epistemic blame to explain; and (ii) no existing account of epistemic blame provides a plausible account of the putative force that any response deserving the label "blame" ought to have. He focuses primarily on the prominent "relationship-based" account of epistemic blame to defend these claims, arguing that the account is explanatorily idle, and cannot distinguish between epistemically excused and epistemically blameworthy agents. I argue that Smartt mischaracterizes the account's role for judgments of epistemic relationship impairment, leading to mistaken claims about the account's predictions. I also argue that the very feature of the account that Smartt mischaracterizes is key to understanding what epistemic blame does for our epistemic responsibility practices that mere negative epistemic evaluation cannot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading is not only a mental decoding activity but also a social, material, bodily, and affective practice. It is learned; changes over time; varies across situations; and is crucial for academic institutions. Nonetheless, academics practice reading largely individually. Yet, reading remains an undervalued part of how professional research (work) is done. In this paper, we take a practice-oriented approach: How is reading enacted as a seemingly self-evident academic technique? Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and collective auto-ethnographic reflections of our readings in the RUSTlab at Ruhr University Bochum, we explore how reading is structured with respect to different goals--be it for critique, fun, teaching, or writing. We consider aspects of the material infrastructure such as pens and (missing) couches, and analyze how situations, bodies, and settings enact and afford different modes of reading. We organize the modes of reading into reading about, reading around, and reading aloud. This paper argues that reading is a craft that requires care and companionship, and that it matters who gets to read, when and where reading is done, and what the legitimate excuses for not reading are. We polemicize that academics would do well to bring reading practices from the individualized margins to the heart of collective exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The police in the United States typically pull over about 19 million drivers a year for routine violations such as speeding and running a stop sign. The verbal exchanges that occur during traffic encounters embody one of the ideal principles of procedural justice: giving citizens an opportunity to speak (voice) before a decision is made. The accounts and excuses that drivers articulate represent the logical outcome of opportunities provided to drivers to explain the reason for their legal violations. This paper examines the accounts and excuses that drivers proffer during routine traffic encounters. The findings indicate that drivers' responses to police solicitation of accounts fall into three types: remaining 'silent' during encounters and forgoing an opportunity to voice their concerns; crafting excuses and apologies in response to the announcement of an infraction; and denial of knowledge. The implications for police procedural justice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely agreed that ignorance of fact exculpates, but does moral ignorance exculpate? If so, does it exculpate in the same way as non-moral ignorance? In this paper I will argue that on one family of views explaining exculpating non-moral ignorance also explains exculpating moral ignorance. The view can be loosely stated in the following way: ignorance counts as an excuse only if it is not the result of a failure to meet some applicable reasonable epistemic standard—call this the Reasonable Epistemic Standards Thesis and call views that accept some version of this principle reasonable standards views. I argue that any plausible reasonable standards view ought to allow that moral ignorance exculpates, at least sometimes, and defend such views against the charge that they are susceptible to clear counterexamples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses some theses developed by John Gardner that deal with the relations between different concepts of responsibility and how these are useful for understanding the relationships between agency, reasons and responsibility practises. In the first two sections, the text introduces the Aristotelian view developed by John Gardner, focussing on how he understood the relationships between the concepts of basic responsibility, consequential responsibility and prospective responsibility. Sections III. and IV. then review two challenges that arise from the author's treatment of the concept of basic responsibility. The first is the difficulty of understanding some types of responsibility and the second is how we can make sense of the role of excuses in our responsibility practises. Finally, some philosophical tools that Gardner developed in his last works are presented in order to deal with those challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Insofar as, in the context of privatized war, the mercenary's job entails enforcing rights on behalf of a state, not independently, the state must grant, through contract, a moral permission to the mercenary to use force on its behalf in order for I that i use to be non-arbitrary. Soldiers - and, as we shall see, only soldiers - can be regarded as extended agents of the state, because one essential feature of the status of soldier, as defined by the constitutive rules of soldiery, is that they respond to the I chain of command i within the official structure of the military. In turn, the state should not consider itself wronged if the mercenary fails to comply, for this failure is only possible as a result of the state's previous wrongful failure to release the mercenary. If, by contrast, the state (wrongly) accepts the mercenary's promise, it would still be wrong for the state to demand that the mercenary comply with the offer's terms. Therefore, whenever a state attempts to enforce that duty on the mercenary - including, for example, by threatening them with economic sanctions if they do not perform - the state wrongs the mercenary. [Extracted from the article]

This paper starts with the contention that the category of 'violence' is culturally constructed and varies according to one's cultural and historical context. This is not intended to excuse contemporary acts that violate our laws and standards, but instead to provide a platform for examining Roman ideas of acceptable and unacceptable force so far as we can access them via texts written by male members of the elite. By examining Nero's treatment of Octavia as it is depicted in Tacitus' Annals , I argue that we can identify Roman social/moral condemnation of (technically legal) violence inflicted on Octavia by Nero. However, comparison with the depiction of the same events in the anonymous Octavia demonstrates how conditional this condemnation could be on the victim's presentation as a moral and social exemplar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of ABHATH is the property of ABHATH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

People often offer an excuse or an apology after they do something wrong in an attempt to mitigate any potential negative consequences. In this paper, we examine how individuals employ social accounts when explaining their interpersonal transgression of meeting lateness to others in actual work settings. We examined the different combinations of social accounts and the social outcomes (forgiveness, helping behaviors, and intentions to continue interaction) of being late to a meeting. Across two studies using complementary experimental and survey methods, we found that a majority of late arrivers’ explanations included remorse and that including remorse significantly influences helping behaviors. Furthermore, we found no interaction between excuses and offering remorse. Implications of these findings and future directions are discussed.

It is a common picture that Kant is committed to an uncompromising account of moral responsibility that leaves no room for excuses. I argue that this picture is mistaken. More specifically, I reconstruct a Kantian quality of will account of excuses according to which an agent is excused for performing a morally wrong (or omitting a morally obligatory) action if and only if the action (or omission) does not manifest a lack of good will on the part of the agent. Based on this Kantian quality of will account of excuses, I explain why agents are often excused in cases that involve physical constraint, unintentional bodily movement, ignorance, coercion or necessity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether sustainability concerns play and should play any role in EU merger control. While competition authorities have commenced exploring pathways to excuse prima facie anticompetitive mergers on sustainability grounds, little progress has been made in setting out whether and under which conditions mergers that adversely affect sustainability parameters can be found anticompetitive. Under the EU merger control regime, the adverse effects of mergers on sustainability are only cognizable as innovation-related issues, as recently evidenced in Dow/Dupont and Bayer/Monsanto. In these cases, the Commission pioneered a novel approach aimed at predicting the impact of a merger not only on prices but also on innovation competition. This theory of harm, although a welcome improvement to the current framework of merger analysis, fails to accommodate all competition-relevant sustainability concerns because of its exclusive focus on innovation capabilities, efforts, and output. On this basis, we argue that innovation competition should not be understood only as an output-maximizing device but also as a polycentric process under which independent decision-makers pursue various innovation paths. Such an approach gives prominence to the diversity, quality, and direction of innovation and constitutes an alternative to the predominant output-centred understanding of innovation. To operationalize this notion of innovation competition as a polycentric process we explore four pathways: adopting quality-related and sustainability-sensitive innovation metrics; using indicators of industry-wide structural effects; endorsing a structural filter; and protecting nascent competitors. Adding such an approach to the existing analytical framework would, arguably, enable the Commission to deal with all sustainability concerns related to the notion of innovation competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Economic Forum (WEF) was established in 1971 with the nominal purpose of bringing together leaders to discuss global problems. However, it is well on its way to becoming the most powerful institution in the world, merely by setting forth an agenda for global management that is attractive to many political and business leaders. Two of the central issues on which the WEF has focused are climate change and the pandemic. The first has a depth of scientific support, but the WEF's stance and official pronouncements on the latter were never based on normal scientific review procedures. Since the WEF was a catalyst in the rush to judgment on COVID‐19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates, this suggests that the WEF is primarily guided by political motives, not by science. In fact, the way the WEF approaches the climate issue—as an excuse to restrict freedom without promoting renewable energy sources—makes evident the true motives of the WEF. As a result of the WEF's political use of the climate issue, the validity of climate science has been tarnished in the public mind. If there were true political will to solve the existential problem for future generations, the following could be undertaken immediately: To convert the oil industry to renewable energy, national governments of the world could agree to require that the fossil fuel companies receiving tax dollars convert to renewable energy at a rate of 7%–8% per year. Compounded, within 10 years, these companies would still be dominating the energy game, but with safe sustainable alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Ik was blij dat ik die man een hand heb kunnen geven'. Over veroorzakers van letsel en hun relationele belangen in de civiele letselschadepraktijk: Lange tijd kende de letselschadepraktijk een vrij eenzijdige focus op de financiële en juridische aspecten van letsel. Mede onder invloed van empirisch onderzoek naar de persoonlijke ervaringen van slachtoffers in de letselschadepraktijk hebben in de afgelopen decennia de niet-financiële behoeften van letselschadeslachtoffers aan aandacht en importantie gewonnen. In deze ontwikkelingen is tot op heden amper aandacht uitgegaan naar de persoonlijke ervaringen van veroorzakers van letsel. Het proefschrift van de auteur En de veroorzaker dan? zet hun ervaringen in het licht. De kern van het promotieonderzoek is een interviewstudie met wegens letselveroorzaking aangesproken zorgverleners en verkeersdeelnemers. Deze bijdrage beschrijft de daaruit gebleken immateriële belangen die aan veroorzakerzijde kunnen leven, en relateert deze aan de reeds bekende immateriële behoeften van letselschadeslachtoffers. De bijdrage sluit af met een oproep tot meer aandacht voor het veroorzakerperspectief, ook in praktijkinitiatieven die gericht zijn op het bevorderen van slachtoffer-veroorzakercontact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes images of both movement and immobility in Nina Bunjevac's Fatherland, a Canadian graphic memoir in which the author/illustrator traces her father's involvement in a Serbian nationalist terrorist cell. Although, as scholars such as Mihaela Precup have convincingly argued, Bunjevac depicts her father as trapped by historical circumstances he cannot control--and her larger family as "frozen in disbelief, anger, and sadness" (220)--I maintain that such immobility is paradoxically the consequence of constant movement. In the course of her narrative, Bunjevac, while she does not excuse her father's actions or even depict him sympathetically, nevertheless shows how three generations of wartime displacement and transnational migration traumatized her father and in turn her immediate family. Thus, I maintain that her graphic narrative demonstrates how Astrid Erll's concept of "travelling memory" might be enlarged to address how traumatic memories follow, and become uncannily reenacted by, migrants and displaced people. Bunjevac's text is a particularly effective demonstration of this dimension of travelling memory because its very form as a graphic memoir necessarily depends on such elements of fracture, repetition, and difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019 a series of articles detailing decades of sexual abuse in Southern Baptist churches. Reports revealed that the convention and its congregants downplayed rather than confront the abuses by relying on two doctrinal components, congregational autonomy and scriptural inerrancy, to excuse inaction and silence survivors. Kenneth Burke argues that orientations such as the Southern Baptist Convention is governed by a moral order that is established, maintained, and enforced by a group of rhetors he terms "priests" who are granted ownership of the key rhetorical components. Building from Burke's positions, I argue that when confronted by moral failings, priests will use their associations with the symbols of authority in an orientation to rationalize inaction. Priests will argue that to act would be to reject core terms in the orientation's identity and rely on communal allegiance to bypass responsibility. This rhetorical maneuver is demonstrated in the Southern Baptist sexual abuse scandal. The leadership of the convention and local congregations relied on key denominational terms to champion inaction when confronted. However, a closer inspection of their rhetoric on other issues, such as women in ministry and LGBTQIA + issues shows that their operations are more complicated than advertised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates two registers of dehumanization in the Brereton Report. It begins with the dehumanization of Afghan civilians that is reflected in the Brereton Report, which alleges that SOTG personnel adopted a liberal interpretation of the rules of engagement to justify using lethal force against Afghan civilians. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed, we draw attention to the gendered and racialized assumptions that constituted the Afghan people as a potential threat, which worked to enable and excuse the violence inflicted upon them. At the same time, we argue that the Brereton Report reproduces and reinforces these dehumanizing assumptions in its decision not to investigate split second decisions made in the 'heat of battle'. We argue that the language used to justify this omission reinforces orientalist tropes about Afghanistan as an dangerous, perilous and ungovernable space, which helped to normalize the violence inflicted upon the Afghan people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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People often offer an excuse or an apology after they do something wrong in an attempt to mitigate any potential negative consequences. In this paper, we examine how individuals employ social accounts when explaining their interpersonal transgression of meeting lateness to others in actual work settings. We examined the different combinations of social accounts and the social outcomes (forgiveness, helping behaviors, and intentions to continue interaction) of being late to a meeting. Across two studies using complementary experimental and survey methods, we found that a majority of late arrivers' explanations included remorse and that including remorse significantly influences helping behaviors. Furthermore, we found no interaction between excuses and offering remorse. Implications of these findings and future directions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There's heated debate around whether people who did terrible things in the past, at a time when there was widespread acceptance of such actions, are appropriately blamed by us, on the grounds they weren't really morally ignorant, or their ignorance was itself culpable. I point to puzzles that arise if we blame them. We need to explain how they could act so badly if they weren't fully ignorant. I argue that plausible answers to that question entail that they're not blameworthy, or that we lack standing to blame them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) (2015), 36 U.S. states have adopted chronic absenteeism as an indicator of school quality and student success. It is also being increasingly utilized within schools to identify students at risk for future educational problems, as research consistently shows that early absences are related to later achievement issues. By leveraging readily available attendance records, schools can identify students at risk of poor outcomes early in their educational lives and provide them with supports before challenges worsen. Despite its pervasive use, major theoretical assumptions underlying this indicator have never been validated. The current study represents the first empirical test of the most basic assumption of chronic absenteeism—that all absences from school are equally useful in providing diagnostic information to determine future risk status. To test the diagnostic utility of different absence types across the early elementary grades, this study employed ROC analyses with administrative data from a large, urban school district. Findings indicate that only unexcused absences provide diagnostic accuracy in determining future achievement status in the early elementary grades, whereas excused absences provide no diagnostic accuracy and actually dampen the ability of unexcused absences to determine students' achievement risk status when used in conjunction with them. These results have implications for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners and necessitate additional empirical studies that test the underlying assumptions of chronic absenteeism to ensure that it is being used both effectively and ethically in the early identification of at-risk students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Jurídica (0103-3506) is the property of Revista Juridica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

On the classical understanding, an agent is fully excused for an action if and only if performing this action was a case of faultless wrongdoing. A major motivation for this view is the apparent existence of paradigmatic types of excusing considerations, affecting fault but not wrongness. I show that three such considerations, ignorance, duress and compulsion, can be shown to have direct bearing on the permissibility of actions. The appeal to distinctly identifiable excusing considerations thus does not stand up to closer scrutiny, undermining the classical view and giving us reason to seek alternative ways of drawing the justification/excuse distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]