Richard Matthews challenges the increasing acceptability of state-sponsored torture interrogation, repudiating any possible justifications. He confronts its various supporters - ticking time bomb and tragic choice theorists, utilitarians, legal scholars - and draws from philosophy, medicine, psychiatry, survivor and torturer narratives, history, feminism, the experience of working intelligence officials, anthropology, and game theory to illustrate that no moral justification for torture can be supported.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Combinatorial Optimization, ISCO 2016, held in Vietri sul Mare, Italy, in May 2016. The 38 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 98 submissions. They present original research on all aspects of combinatorial optimization, such as algorithms and complexity; mathematical programming; operations research; stochastic optimization; and graphs and combinatorics.
This book theoretically and empirically explores why Japanese banks engaged in seemingly contradictory behaviors in the 1990s, namely, the credit crunch and evergreening, i.e., inefficient additional lending. A credit crunch occurs when banks are unwilling to finance good and efficient projects. Evergreening implies that banks reluctantly lend additional money to poorly performing and financially vulnerable firms. The authors hypothesize that these practices stemmed from violation of the absolute priority rule (APR) by creditors, thus making it possible to explain this seemingly contradictory banking behavior in a consistent way. In Japan, the APR has often been violated legally by courts and some governmental acts. Examples from the 1990s involve legal abuse in the form of short-term tenancy protection (tanki chinshaku ken) and political intervention in the liquidation of Housing Loan Companies, or Ju-sen. The Supreme Court of Japan has issued critical decisions leading to serious violations of APR in the early 1990s. Evidence provided here supports theoretical results. Empirical testing for a significant difference in banking behavior before and after the Court decision using data from Japanese firms in the 1980s and 1990s found that theoretical arguments were empirically supportable in the last half of the 1980s and through the 1990s. Finally, based on their analysis, from the theoretical point of view the authors consider the optimal legal scheme to achieve the best assessment of initial and additional lending in light of the legal reform of the 2000s.
DIVTranslated into English for the first time, this work portrays a different side of Hegel -- not just as a philosopher preoccupied with abstract ideas but a man deeply enmeshed and active in the pressing, concrete political issues of his time./div
This book provides an interdisciplinary review of one of the great unsolved mysteries that has fascinated scientists for over 150 years: the origin of chirality in biomolecules. Current advances in fields as diverse as space exploration, prebiotic chemistry and high-energy physics may help to provide an answer. Important pieces of information will come from observations at the two frontiers of science: outer space and the subatomic world. Observation of distant planets, galaxies, and even actual sampling of celestial objects from beyond the solar system are projects currently underway. At the other end of the spectrum, there are experiments that study the elemental properties of matter, such as symmetry, and interactions with the fundamental forces. Completely revised and updated this new edition once again unifies all the theories of the origin of biomolecular homochirality together in a single source. This complete, interdisciplinary review of an intriguing subject condenses a large and disparate range of contributions from journals in almost every scientific field. The various theories have been organized, interrelated and explained in a unified way. It is fundamental, comprehensive and structured to be accessible for educational purposes.
Recent work in theoretical syntax has revealed the strong explanatory power of the notions of economy, competition, and optimization. Building grammars entirely upon these elements, Optimality Theory syntax provides a theory of universal grammar with a formally precise and strongly restricted theory of universal typology: cross-linguistic variation arises exclusively from the conflict among universal principles.Beginning with a general introduction to Optimality Theory syntax, this volume provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art, as represented by the work of the leading developers of the theory. The broad range of topics treated includes morphosyntax (case, inflection, voice, and cliticization), the syntax of reference (control, anaphora, and pronominalization), the gammar of clauses (complementizers and their absence), and grammatical and discourse effects in word order. Among the theoretical themes running throughout are the interplay between faithfulness and markedness, and various questions of typology and of inventory. Contributors Peter Ackema, Judith Aissen, Eric Bakovic, Joan Bresnan, Hye-Won Choi, João Costa, Jane Grimshaw, Edward Keer, Géraldine Legendre, Gereon Müller, Ad Neeleman, Vieri Samek-Lodovici, Peter Sells, Margaret Speas, Sten Vikner, Colin Wilson, Ellen Woolford
This book appears at a time of intense debate on how states should respond to refugees: some philosophers argue states are not necessarily obligated to admit a single refugee, others argue states should continually admit refugees until the point of societal collapse. Some politicians argue for increasing refugee resettlement, others seek to prevent refugees from arriving at the border. Some countries provide expansive welcome schemes and have taken in over a million refugees, others have erected concrete walls and barbed wire fences. The Ethics of State Responses to Refugees provides an account of what an ethical response would be by developing an understanding of the moral duties that states have towards refugees. The first half of the book analyses state practices used in response to refugees, to understand the negative duties of states not to harm or violate the rights of innocent refugees. The second half analyses morally significant features of contemporary refugee displacement, to understand the positive duties of states to alleviate the distinctive harms and injustices that refugees face. The two halves together thereby outline the negative and positive duties of states towards refugees which together constitute the elements of an ethical response. The book then demonstrates this ethical response is not only urgently required but is also within reach.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics, HM 2010, held in Vienna, Austria, in October 2010. The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions.
