Lying,Speech and Impersonal Harm

Law and Philosophy - Should the law punish the mere utterance of lies even if the listener has not been deceived? Seana Shiffrin has recently answered this question in the affirmative. She argues...     

The Boundaries of Property: Complexity,Relationality, and Spatiality

What does the property boundary mean to laypersons? How do everyday geographies of property work? Merrill and Smith offer an influential set of hypotheses concerning the boundary's role in communicating simple messages of exclusion in the everyday world. The first goal of this article is to assess these claims. Drawing from qualitative data on gardening from Vancouver, I suggest that the messages of the boundary may also be complex, intersubjective, and ambiguous. The supposedly robust moral intuitions that inform people's interactions with boundaries are not always exclusionary. Drawing from the sharp distinction between the heterogeneity of the empirical record and the studied simplicity of Merrill and Smith's account, my second goal is to make some broader claims regarding property and the boundary. Rather than seeking universality, simplicity, and singularity, I suggest the necessity and value of working with complexity. A relational view of property and space (or “spatiality”), I suggest, offers us a better perspective in which to begin to think about the complex work of the everyday property boundary.     

Peacebuilding for faith-based development organisations: informing theory and practice

Faith leaders and their congregations have been recognised as holding the potential to engage positively in peacebuilding activities in a post-conflict context. Alongside this, faith-based development organisations (FBDOs) have the ability to engage with these constituencies to increase the peacebuilding impact of their activities. This paper presents a framework of faith engagement for FBDOs to work with local faith leaders and people of faith to develop the peacebuilding impact of development activities. A reworking of Anderson's “Do No Harm”, it encompasses the areas that FBDOs need to address in order to be effective peacebuilding actors in a faith context.     

The Alternative Vote and Coombs Rule versus First-Past-the-Post: a social choice analysis of simulated data based on English elections, 1992–2010

This paper presents a social choice analysis, using simulated data based on English general elections from 1992 through 2010, of the properties of three voting rules: First-Past-the-Post, the Alternative Vote, and the Coombs Rule. More specifically, the paper examines (1) the plurality, anti-plurality, and Condorcet status of candidates in each election and the interrelationships among these statuses, (2) the effects of strict and partial single-peakedness of voter preferences, and (3) the identity of winners, Condorcet efficiency, and the relationship between votes and seats under the three voting rules. The analysis considers only the case of three candidates and, in the manner of basic social choice theory, the set of candidates and voter preferences over them are taken to be fixed.     

Closeness matters: monotonicity failure in IRV elections with three candidates

A striking attribute of instant runoff voting (IRV) is that it is subject to monotonicity failure—that is, getting more (first-preference) votes may result in defeat for a candidate who would otherwise have won and getting fewer votes may result in victory for a candidate who otherwise would have lost. Proponents of IRV have argued that monotonicity failure, while a mathematical possibility, is highly unlikely to occur in practice. This paper specifies the precise conditions under which this phenomenon arises in three-candidate elections and applies them to a number of large simulated data sets in order to get a sense of the likelihood of IRV’s monotonicity problem in varying circumstances. The basic finding is that the problem is significant in many circumstances and very substantial when IRV elections are closely contested by three candidates.