Chapter 5 shows that power within the household and autonomy from the household most strongly predict women’s political participation. Using data from a census survey, it estimates the determinants of women’s (and men’s) political participation. Comparing within households, bargaining power is associated with women’s non-electoral political participation, though not their voting. Comparing within villages, autonomy from the household is a clear predictor of women’s political participation. In fact, the behavior of women who enjoy a high degree of autonomy from the household mirrors that of men. It also provides suggestive evidence that intra-household coercion plays a role in women’s political participation by showing a lack of correlation between political interest and participation in the household for women but not men and a negative correlation between regressive gender attitudes of the dominant male household member and women’s political participation.

The author argues that while State consent does contribute to international law’s legitimacy, it does not do so by providing a justification for it. States are not bound to obey international law because they have chosen to submit to its authority. Rather, international law provides them with a reason for action, and indeed they have a moral duty to obey it, if and only if they will do better at realizing justice if they act as the law directs them to act than if they act on their own judgment. As a means for crafting international law, State consent is, according to the author, valuable insofar as it yields international legal norms that satisfy this condition. He argues, that in a few cases, it may also constitute an intrinsically valuable expression of trust in the international political community or an international institution that exercises political authority.

The author attempts to unravel the close conceptual and practical connection between consent and autonomy. The chapter argues that consent is the vehicle of autonomy, vehicle through which States give themselves their own rules, both primary rules and secondary rules. Because the exercise of autonomy in the international society faces contextual limits, linked to the self (auto) and to the law (nomos), it is claimed, that consent appears not only to be characterized by power, but also by limitations. This holds true for consent in international law-making as much as for consent in international dispute settlement. The chapter focuses on both categories, discussing the theory of sources and institutional law-making with respect to the former and jurisdictional matters and applicable law with respect to the latter. It concludes – prospectively – with some thoughts on the future of autonomy and consent in international legal theory and practice

What are we to make of the sermon at the end of Either/Or? How does it stand in relation to the book’s preceding presentations of aesthetic and ethical life? Why is it presented under the title, “Ultimatum”? This chapter takes up these questions by showing how the sermon, and the fictional Jutland priest to whom it is attributed, serve to represent a certain development within ethical subjectivity. On the reading I develop, the sermon represents, namely, a way of trying to sustain a stance of participation in ethical life, in the face of experiences of human powerlessness and exposure to tragedy, without despair but also without succumbing to illusions of ethical independence. So understood, the sermon offers a perspective that, while it incorporates elements of both, provides a third alternative to the tragic outlook of “A” in Either/Or’s Volume 1 and the letters of Judge William in Volume 2.

Chapter 6 explores a different path: building privacy law on liability. Liability for material and immaterial privacy would improve the protection system. To achieve meaningful liability, though, laws must compensate privacy harm, not just the material consequences that stem from it. Compensation for financial and physical harms produced by the collection, processing, or sharing of data is important but insufficient. The proposed liability framework would address informational exploitation by making companies internalize risk. It would deter and remedy socially detrimental data practices, rather than chasing elusive individual control aims. Courts can distinguish harmful losses from benign ones by examining them on the basis of contextual and normative social values. By focusing on harm, privacy liability would overcome its current problems of causation quagmires and frivolous lawsuits.

In this chapter, I lay out a theory cataloguing the conditions under which international courts may be expected to issue audacious rulings. This theoretical framework relies on previous literature and insights gathered from interviews with experts in and around the Court. The necessary condition for audacious courts is a wide discretionary space within which they may act without fearing repercussions from states. Yet, such a wide discretionary space is not always given; when it is given, states might still attempt to influence courts through direct or indirect means. Such means include closing down courts’ discretionary space and widespread negative feedback, as well as related threats. International courts, in turn, are compelled to realign their priorities to react to or pre-empt such measures. This is a form of trade-off whereby courts adjust their behaviour to ensure continued access to resources and to preserve their reputation and public image. The chapter also introduces additional factors that increase the likelihood of audacious rulings (i.e., proposed new understandings’ congruence with changing societal needs, legal developments external to the regime, and civil society campaigns).

The harm principle sets a limit on the justified legal and social control of individuals. The principle also provides a widely accepted justification for such control. This chapter critically reviews John Stuart Mill’s understanding of the harm principle and the considerations he advanced in its support. It also draws on other discussions of the principle to assess its plausibility in general. Mill took the harm principle to be the sole ground for justified interference with the liberty of individuals, but less restrictive defenses of the principle are available. The content of the harm principle, on any of its formulations, is shaped by the characterization of harm that figures in it. A good characterization of harm should be both descriptively accurate and morally appealing, but these two desiderata can pull in opposing directions. This chapter argues that the characterization of harm that figures in the harm principle must advert to the grounds that justify the principle, but these grounds are multiple and can come into conflict. Mill presents both an autonomy argument and a social learning argument in support of the harm principle, but the ground of autonomy can speak in favor of interference in cases where the social learning argument speaks against it. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of harm, speech and offense.

This chapter develops a novel theory of meaningful work that is informed by the politics of working life perspectives and grounded in Critical Realism’s stratified theory of the human being. This combination allows us to identify the structural constraints and enablers of meaningful work as objective dimensions of meaningful work that interact with agential responses that we term subjective dimensions of meaningful work. Approaching meaningful work in this way promotes an understanding of meaningful waged work as a dynamic continuum that emerges from the interplay of its objective and subjective dimensions. The objective and subjective dimensions identify autonomy, dignity and recognition as the central pillars of meaningful waged work. The first part of this chapter recapitulates the relationship between structure and agency and establishes the key parameters of the stratified social ontology of human beings that guides our undertaking. This displays how the interplay between the structure, which is represented here as the objective dimensions of meaningful work, and the agential responses to it, encapsulated in the subjective dimensions of meaningful work, culminate in the experience of different forms of meaningful work or its absence.

Proponents of the harm principle often appeal to a notion of personal sovereignty in setting out their position. This notion helps to fix the application of the harm principle. Critics of the harm principle seize on this point and argue that, once a principle of sovereignty is introduced, it can do all the work that needs doing. Appeals to harm become otiose. Further, the critics contend, the harm principle cannot explain the impermissibility of certain “harmless” wrongs, such as those involved in harmless trespass. This chapter assesses this sovereignty-centered critique of the harm principle. It argues that neither the harm principle nor the sovereignty principle enjoys priority over the other. The two principles complement each other with neither meriting a privileged position. The chapter then discusses the content and stringency of the sovereignty principle, and its relation to the Volenti Maxim, which holds that a person is not harmed or wronged by that to which they consent. The critical discussion of the Volenti Maxim, in turn, reveals limits to the sovereignty principle.

Personal liberty can be viewed through the lens of the good or the right. Do we value liberty because it is part of our good, or a means to our good, or do we value it because it is our right to have it? This chapter considers the value of liberty from the standpoint of the good. The ethical environmentalism defended in previous chapters, it argues, must be sensitive to the value of liberty as a personal good. In an important sense, people only lead good lives if they lead free lives. The chapter begins with the common idea that there is, or ought to be, a general presumption in favor of liberty. It next considers deeper ideals of liberty, such as autonomy or authenticity, that can be appealed to in order to explain liberty’s value. These deeper ideals are shown to be genuine ideals but their value is qualified in ways that are not widely appreciated. The chapter concludes by considering expressive or conventional reasons for opposing coercive or manipulative liberty-reducing interventions. It argues that these reasons require a deeper explanation, and one that pulls us beyond the value of liberty understood as a personal good.

Since the advent of COVID-19, the widespread dissemination of misleading health information has impeded efforts to control the pandemic. The COVID-19 “infodemic,” as the World Health Organization has termed it, is a symptom of the larger “post-truth” phenomenon, which has its roots in deepening partisan divides, the rise of social media, the politicization of the news, the uncovering of research fraud, and the perceived impotence of government. But our inquiry centers on the role that law, especially health law, has played by unwittingly eroding trust in expertise regarding matters of health. We look particularly at the role of the evolving commercial speech doctrine, which has significantly limited government’s capacity to regulate potentially confusing or harmful commercial speech related to health. We also consider how generally salutary protections for autonomy, including those within the law of informed consent, may have left patients with the (mis)impression that all judgments about medical interventions are of equal weight. Blind reliance on expertise has its own problems, as shameful examples of the disregard for the well-being of vulnerable populations (as in the case of the Tuskegee study) suggest, Nevertheless, the public health consequences of the infodemic, from reduced compliance with mask wearing to distrust of potential vaccines, loom large. We conclude that re-assessing how health law can help rebuild trust in science is crucial if we wish to prepare for the inevitable pandemics ahead.

Did the ancients have the concept of nationhood? To raise that question is to enter a minefield. The issue of what counts as a nation has generated a flood of articles and monographs, mostly by anthropologists and sociologists, with a smattering by historians.

The very idea of a nation or nationhood has been preeminently associated with modern history. Its relevance for antiquity is not obvious and has prompted much debate. Those who see it as an exclusively modern phenomenon tend to associate it with the creation of new polities in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century as nation-states. Others, however, and they have been growing in number, argue that the existence of a unifying consciousness of affinity, kinship, and shared history goes back to antiquity and amounts to nationhood or whatever one wishes to call it.

There was not one unified revolutionary process in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, but several revolutions, each with its own rhythm and logic. In the last years of the eighteenth century, each population group asserted itself by opposing the others. The masters of the colony, the White settlers, wanted to be able to govern themselves, until they became practically independent. At first, they clashed with the property-owning men of color, who demanded civil equality for all free men. The revolt of the plantation slaves of the North Plain reshuffled the cards: general liberty and the reality of republican universalism were crucial starting in 1793. If the revolution upset the conditions and status of the whole population, it also took different forms, according to the pre-revolutionary social structures. Moreover, colonial revolutions are always in interaction with the phases of the revolution in the metropole. That interaction took the form of reaction by the white colonists bent on maintaining slavery and free people of color eager to preserve revolutionary achievements. It also took the form of harmony, in which case the search for equality before the law was offered as a step towards a new citizenship.

Leadership in crisis response has traditionally been strongly centralized and hierarchical. Top-down command and control is popular, because a strict hierarchy and clear lines of command enable rapid decision-making and coordinated actions. Critics, however, have argued that centralization is both impossible and undesirable during crises, because leaders lack situational awareness and cannot control frontline responders from a distance. They argue that operational personnel should take charge to ensure an adaptive frontline response, potentially at the cost of efficiency and speed. The operational dilemma of crisis leadership revolves therefore around the tension between centralization and decentralization. To deal with this dilemma, it is useful to study how influence is exercised and power circulates during crises. Rather than a static authority structure, different types and phases of crises require different forms of leadership. Authority structures have to be tested and adjusted throughout the response, so they can be continuously co-constructed by frontline responders and operational leaders, as the complex and dynamic crisis situation evolves.

Chapter 3 examines the formation of the Ethiopian state and the revolution of the 1970s. This analysis makes two contributions to understanding the EPRDF and its project of state-led development. The first is to show that long-run state formation and the revolution forged many features of the state that subsequently enabled the EPRDF’s development project, even if these state structures were not initially utilised for developmental purposes under the Derg. More problematically, however, state formation also resulted in a linguistically and culturally diverse population, which was increasingly politicised along ethnic lines. Second, the chapter emphasises the EPRDF’s revolutionary origins. The Emperor’s overthrow in 1974 resulted in competition between multiple revolutionary movements, including one that was overtaken by the military in urban areas and rural-based ethno-nationalist insurgencies that sought to fight their way to the centre. These revolutionary origins shaped the EPRDF’s strategy for gaining and maintaining power, and the structure of the party itself, as it transitioned from an ethno-nationalist movement to a national government.