Childhood bads,parenting goods,and the right to procreate

Abstract

Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, together with many other philosophers, think that adults’ interests in raising a child can give them a moral right to parent when they will be adequate parents. We consider whether the same interest could give such adults a moral right to procreate, as a means of acquiring a child to raise. We argue that the interest in parenting cannot support a right to procreate, because the features of childhood that make parenting uniquely valuable for adults are bad for children. Adults may have a right to procreate, but they do not have that right due to their interest in a parent–child relationship.     

US state government privatization: Implications for social equity and inequality?

Privatization of state government services is commonplace, but our understanding of its effects is limited by data availability. We study the relationship between American state government contracting and public sector wages. Governments have used public sector employment to support a variety of goals, including social equity and economic development, but privatization, as a new public management (NPM) reform, may shift the focus. Our empirical analysis shows that state privatization of service delivery is associated with decreases in the public sector wage premium, but that these effects are not driven by gender, race, or low-levels of educational attainment. The fidelity of the implementation to NPM values conditions these effects. We also find that contracting service delivery is associated with a lower public sector wage premium for middle-class workers.     

Punishing Mothers for Men’s Violence: Failure to Protect Legislation and the Criminalisation of Abused Women

Feminist Legal Studies - This article explores the gender dynamics of ‘causing or allowing a child to die’, contrary to the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004,...     

The Moderating Effect of Debates on Political Attitudes

In theory, candidate debates can influence voters by providing information about candidates' quality and policy positions. However, there is limited evidence about whether and why debates influence voters in new democracies. We use a field experiment on parliamentary debates during Ghana's 2016 elections to show that debates improve voters' evaluations of candidates. Debates have the strongest effect on partisan voters, who become more favorable toward and more likely to vote for opponent-party candidates and less likely to vote for co-partisans. Experimental and unique observational data capturing participants' second-by-second reactions to the debates show that policy information was the most important causal mechanism driving partisan moderation, especially among strong partisans. A follow-up survey shows that these effects persist in electorally competitive communities, whereas they dissipate in party strongholds. Policy-centered debates have the potential to reduce partisan polarization in new democracies, but the local political context conditions the persistence of these effects.     

Geographical versus social displacement: the politics of return and post-war recovery in Northern Uganda

The civil war in Northern Uganda in the period 1986–2006 fundamentally altered former ways of life and created diverse and complex needs. Protracted conflict and displacement create, reveal, and enforce vulnerability, which can undermine resilience. Based on in-depth interviews with internally displaced persons and returnees, both before and after their return to Amuru District and Gulu District, this article argues that war and displacement constitute more than a temporary disruption. The physical and social wounds of war are engraved and embedded in people’s lives. Therefore, recovery interventions must take these effects into account to forge a new post-war future.     

Lavascape: legal spectacle at Kīlauea

ABSTRACT

In considering the theme “Exploring Legal Discourse: A Sociosemiotic (Re)Construction,” this paper examines the symbolic relationship between law and chaos in the changing landscape of Kīlauea Volcano on Hawai’i Island. The socio-legal dimensions of this relationship provide insight into law’s project of governance in the dynamic natural environment. Most recently, in the summer of 2018, lava spouted and then flowed from Kīlauea in over twenty-four fissures which opened up within two heavily populated residential subdivisions. Law's response to the ensuing chaos provides keen insight into the epistemological positionality of law toward nature. In an attempt to tame this enlivened lavascape of persons and lava, law asserts authority over the spectacle in the areas of sightseeing, access, and mapping. In other words, the legal spectacle of lava eruption is an attempt to jurisdictionally frame the legal imagination of human risk in this dynamic landscape through legal semiotics, legal materiality, and legal topology. However, as this paper will explore, the source of chaos is actually law itself. Attempts to manage chaos are actually attempts to manage human nature as visitation to the erupting volcanic environment is ultimately beyond law's complete control. In a larger sense, this study of Kīlauea's lavascape as a constructed legal spectacle illustrates the phenomenological framing of law's incomplete jurisdiction over kinetic environments.     

The association between Ugandan adolescents’ viewing of specific television genres and sex-related normative beliefs and behaviours

Growing evidence in Western nations indicates that exposure to high levels of sexual media content influences adolescents’ sexual attitudes and behaviours in those countries. Although media in many sub-Saharan markets contain increasingly higher levels of sexual content, little research has investigated the effects of that content on adolescents’ HIV-related risk and protective behaviours. This project used cultivation theory to examine Ugandan adolescents’ media use, and to test the relationship between their exposure to specific television genres and their sex-related normative beliefs and behaviours. Three hundred and sixty secondary school students from four purposively sampled schools filled out a questionnaire about their television viewing, their beliefs about the prevalence of sexual intercourse among their peers, and their own sexual behaviours. Preliminary evidence of relationships between watching comedy and cartoon programming, and high estimates of the proportion of adolescents who engage in sexual intercourse, were observed. Watching comedy programming and non- African programming was associated with the higher likelihood to have ever had sexual intercourse.