Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan Recent documents in James M. Donovan en-us Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:19:42 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/55 http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/55 Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:13:08 PDT In an environment of too many--and too many ill-designed--surveys, our twin aims should be to reduce the number of surveys overall and to improve the quality of those that do circulate. This burden falls on both those who distribute questionnaires--to make them as efficient as possible--and those answering--to decline to participate in any project that shows signs of unthoughtful design, thereby forcing surveyors to "up their game." Good surveying, a difficult task in the best of circumstances, becomes even more complicated when pushed through the favored medium of the online discussion list (commonly called a listserv), a choice that can nullify the results of an otherwise well-designed project. Rising to these challenges requires a strong grounding in the basics of survey design, some of which I review below. Executed correctly, the worst errors can be avoided, allowing surveys to offer solid insights on a variety of interesting questions of law librarianship. James M. Donovan Legal Research and Bibliography Libraries http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/54 http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/54 Fri, 15 May 2009 06:14:33 PDT Only Congressman Paul Broun could compress so many misleading statements and factual errors into such a brief space, beginning with his appeal to the Founding Fathers.Online version available at http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/051509/let_439920953.shtml James M. Donovan Civil Rights Sexual Orientation http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/53 http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/53 Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:10:14 PDT In this brief response to Richard A. Danner's "Skating with Donovan: Thoughts on Librarianship as a Profession," the author finds new reasons to doubt the merits of a "weak" model of librarianship that overemphasizes user demands at the expense of professional ethical commitments to collect, organize, and preserve.A draft version of this article is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1357671 James M. Donovan Libraries http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/52 http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/52 Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:06:45 PST Comment in response to Bob Ostertag, "Why Gay Marriage Is the Wrong Issue," Flagpole, January 14, 2009. Slightly different version available online at http://flagpole.com/Weekly/Comment/GayMarriageTheIssue.11Feb09 James M. Donovan Civil Rights Sexual Orientation http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/51 http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/51 Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:02:37 PST Outside of specialized contexts, moral philosophy lacks an appreciation of the ethical commitments embedded within social roles such as that of "friend" and "spouse." The costs of this blindspot become especially high when considering certain problems that depend upon commonsense intuitions to discern what is or is not the "right" outcome. The problem of partiality--viewing one's relationships and projects as having intrinsic worth in themselves, rather than as a means to some other end, such as can be the case in some forms of utilitarianism--is one such example. The present paper shows how unpacking the moral entailments of the roles of specific actors can alter our understanding of common case examples, rendering results contrary to the those traditionally assigned in moral writings. Moreover, if social roles become widely recognized for their impact upon general ethical thinking, that change can force major revisions in the methodology of moral philosophy. James M. Donovan Anthropology Philosophy http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/50 http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/50 Tue, 04 Nov 2008 10:36:34 PST Predictions about the end of libraries point to a real crisis, but assign the wrong cause. Libraries will not be displaced by technology like Google, but can be undermined by librarians' own reactions to patron demand for Google-like experiences. Librarians can respond with a "weak model" that prioritizes the satisfaction of patrons, or a "strong model" that recognizes higher values rooted in the status of librarianship as a profession. Although recent trends favor the dominance of the weak model, only by embracing the strong model can librarians survive the challenges that threaten libraries. A draft version is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1347151 James M. Donovan Libraries http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/49 http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/49 Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:24:31 PDT Wittgenstein's philosophy remains influential. If its tenets impose constraints on either the possibility of scientific definition at all, or upon the kinds that will be valid, then those limits should be recognized and to the extent possible, observed. Locating the locus of meaning in ordinary use does appear to preclude certain types of definitional strategies. Stipulative definitions of terms that have ordinary currency but which are idiosyncratic and not grounded in that common usage would appear to be most troublesome. It is not that one could not attempt such definitions (quite the contrary, they are offered at every turn), but only that their success in providing a stable and precisely delimited referential standard would be called into question. Flaunting convention in this way would open the scientific discourse to questions about what it "means": "I don't know what you're talking about, but when I talk about religion, I'm talking about something entirely different!" Beyond the philosophical, this strategy also incurs costs for science as a social enterprise: If people think they know what is being said because ordinary terms are being used, but then are told they didn't understand the claims at all, this will have no effect so much as to reduce popular support for the project.While neologisms provide one feasible solution to this obstacle--new terms have no history of established use, and therefore the term can be introduced and grounded in the ordinary uses of the relevant reference speech community, the specialists--many technical concepts that science wields have labels taken from common speech. The results of this discussion have offered one possibility for resolution by basing the technical definition upon the ordinary language meaning, but with procedures that inductively extract the concept's core and comparatively essential attributes by study of how the speech community deploys the term. The isolated associations are then framed as testable hypotheses in order to explicitly plumb the nature of the asserted association. If found to be reliable, then indeed, as Wittgenstein observed, "what to-day counts as an observed concomitant of a phenomenon will to-morrow be used to define it." James M. Donovan Philosophy http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/48 http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/48 Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:16:06 PDT As Christopher Bobonich (1993, p. S92) reminds us, "The idea of basing an ethical theory on human nature has attracted Western philosophers from the very beginning of philosophical reflection on ethics." Unfortunately many philosophers have not kept apace with the best research in the empirical disciplines exploring that topic, with the result that their works contain more impractical idealism than they intend. In order to ensure the soundness and persuasiveness of their ethical conclusions, philosophers should routinely confront the relevant social scientific literature and situate their initial assumptions within that corpus. Before expounding on how humans ought to live, the writer must first understand how they do live.Rawls and Nussbaum have offered their own contributions to this deeply complex project to ground political philosophy in assumptions of human nature. While both fall short of the goal of complete success, the implications of that shortfall differ for their respective ethical systems.Nussbaum's failure to satisfy the criteria of both external validity and internal consistency arise from her failure to include necessary arguments to defend her positions (e.g., that it is reasonable to insist that human beings are basically benevolent rather than self-interested) or to accept the implications of those positions even when they contradict her other intuitive preferences, such as an opposition to world government. The limitations within the work of Rawls, however, strike the reader as being contained within the structure of this theory itself. Both his unconvincing psychology within the original position that requires ignorance of and interest in the self, and confusion as to whether the conviction that fellow citizens are free and equal is an initial intuition or a learned social belief, each claim--the thesis and its antithesis--are critical at different points within his justice as fairness argument. These are not gaps in the discussion such as Nussbaum commits, but rather serious tensions within Rawls's conceptualization itself. While Nussbaum's shortcomings are thus of the quality of an error, Rawls's are a problem that may or may not be remediable without a significant reconceptualization of his larger project. The present review has shown that Nussbaum's work contains promissory notes on matters that should have been more completely elaborated before asking her readers to commit to her vision of political justice. These missing links in her argument are all the more surprising in light of the "gross flood of words appearing under her name" (Harpham 2002 p. 52). While it may be the case that given time she can fill in the gaps, it is also possible that fuller details on these fundamental issues will force significant rethinking about later features of her scheme. In this sense Nussbaum has rushed prematurely into print with her account, but supporters can still hope that when the full argument is finally available it will deliver the hoped-for impact. In contrast the present discussion has identified no gaps within Rawls, but instead genuine tensions. Again, it may be the case that further work can explain why these seeming inconsistencies are more apparent than real, promising real work for philosophers, as compared to the imagining in which one might indulge to anticipate Nussbaum's next move--the difference, perhaps, between the need for a literary analysis of a Dickens novel versus the speculation as to the contents of the final Harry Potter volume. Rawls's offering therefore emerges as a more mature philosophical text that rises or falls upon our understanding of what he has actually written within its pages, without recourse to unpublished materials that may or may not satisfactorily address the questions. While the Nussbaum's capabilities approach may one day eclipse the justice as fairness model of Rawls, today is not that day. James M. Donovan Law and Society Philosophy http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/47 http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/47 Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:07:45 PDT Edmundson characterizes the historical emergence of the idea of human rights out of the conceptual divergence between objective and subjective right, which he places in the Middle Ages. Objective right recognizes the justice of a given state of affairs. "Suppose I take St. Francis' sandals without his permission. 'Thou shalt not steal'--I have violated objective right, I have transgressed God's commandment. But where does St. Francis come into the picture? We want to add, 'St. Francis has a right to his sandals'" (Edmundson 2004, p. 9). He considers the appearance of this psychological foregrounding of the right-holder as a necessary precondition to saying that the idea of rights has appeared in a given society. Human rights would therefore not be a universal in the sense required by the moral picture, but are rather contingent on a particular relationship of persons within the culture. If we are to believe Hegel, it is the experience of private property that creates that image.As an empirical matter, this model suggests that the idea of universal human rights will be most prevalent in contexts where private property ideologies predominate, and where the individual has emerged out of the social background as an entity of subjective awareness--again according to Hegel, a necessarily simultaneous happening. This in fact appears to be the case: human rights are often accused of being a "Western" idea, as opposed to more communitarian Asian cultural models that have not prioritized ownership by individuals to be same extent. Heretofore this divide has been a fact retrospectively accounted for with varying success; the present model, however, predicts the uneven distribution of human rights discourse in a way that does not disparage late-comers as being in some way morally retarded.This has not been a simplistic claim that rights are economic claims, but only that the idea of a right follows from ways of thinking engrained by experience with economic exchanges. Transplanted from the material world of exchange to the ethical realm, one arrives at the basic idea of the "right." The thesis that rights are an extension of the economics-based ideas of fairness, rather than the morally-grounded intuitions of justice, seems both well-founded and productive. James M. Donovan International Law Philosophy http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/46 http://works.bepress.com/james_donovan/46 Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:01:19 PDT Human rights have, over the last fifty years, risen to the forefront of foreign relations. Whereas Marx could refer them as the "so-called human rights," few today would be so bold as to question the cogency of the category itself. Despite this pervasive influence, the concept of human rights sits uneasily with other deeply-entrenched categories, not least being the sovereign state. Without some ethical reconciliation between these two, enforcement of these rights will remain opportunistic.Some will argue that, just as the rights are predicated on the universal concept of the human, the mechanisms for their enforcement should also be universal, leading to considerations of the possibility of the eventual formation of one world-state. The greater part of this essay, however, has been to demonstrate that that outcome is precluded on theoretical grounds. Any State intending to be more than an organization for the exercise of power, one that instead aims toward the realization of right and freedom, requires self-consciousness and a political identity grounded in those rights and freedoms, both of which necessarily out of contrast and recognition by contrastive others. States organized in these terms are therefore several if they exist at all.A different solution to human rights enforcement can be found, however, in that same need for mutual recognition. States as states immediately acquire rights and obligations that can be used to regulate behaviors between states. Moreover, the correlative duties that go along with those rights justify the enforcement of human rights (which impose duties upon all) even when doing so involves crossing national borders. Critical to the success of this project is the principled disentanglement of the human from the civil rights. This project can be intimidating. As one example, while Winfield would be expected to include among the fundamental human rights that of political participate, Jean Cohen would not:"To construe popular sovereignty or democracy as a human right is to make a category mistake: it collapses political into moral categories, reducing the citizen to "person. Popular sovereignty is a regulative principle, not an individual right." Clearly, there remains much work to be done. James M. Donovan International Law Philosophy