3. What is ‘justice’?

This chapter examines justice in an absolute sense, and also justice in the context of the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system is the set of rules and practices under which government institutions and agencies act in order to prevent or control crime, to deal with those who break the law, and to support victims. ‘Justice’ in the context of ‘criminal justice’ refers to the extent to which the system aims to prevent or reduce offending; ensures that those who are accused, convicted, and sentenced are treated fairly (justly); and works to support victims and communities. Justice should be guaranteed by the law, especially the criminal law, in any state and should be clearly present in all decisions about crime and social issues made by those working for the state. As such, justice is core to almost every aspect of the criminal justice system. The chapter also considers broad definitions of justice; frameworks called criminal justice models on which understandings of justice in the criminal justice system can be anchored; philosophical ideas about the concept of justice; and the main systems used to bring about criminal justice.

From Resistance to Resilience

Two themes in the organizational change literature for decades have been of recurring interest to organizational scholars and practitioners and are central to Theodore Zorn’s and Jennifer Scott’s chapter—‘Why Change? The Dark Side of Change and Change Resistance’. The first theme centers on the idea that most change programs fail—they don’t produce change as intended. The second theme centers on the idea that most change programs are resisted. This essay seeks to add additional nuance to the analysis by emphasizing the contingent nature of change failures and resistance. That is, change and resistance are neither good nor bad in an absolute sense. Appraisals of change failure and resistance depend: they depend on the element of change that is being assessed; the point in time that assessment is being made, and whose perspective on change is being privileged. These considerations open our eyes to the possibility that resilience underlies resistance.

Sobre o Caráter Absoluto ou Relativo da Noção de Bem em sua Conexão com as Noções de Forma e Matéria

In ethics, the good is the final cause of every action. All other causes are what they are relatively to the final cause, but the final cause is not relative to something else, except as means and efficient cause of an ulterior motive, whereby the supreme end, whose possession brings happiness, is the absolute in ethics. In physics, the same thing: the living being tends to the fullness of its eidos (form) and all matter is moved towards that end. But the notion of happiness is a kind of empty truism (everyone wants to be happy) and the correspondent good will also remain empty until determined by relation to some substantive content, and in that determination we will fatally see the polyphony and the antilogy break out. In the realm of nature, as long as the good is thought from a philosophy of form and as what is useful and advantageous, that strengthens, brings health and preserves life, we will then have a total relativization of its absolute sense, because one form needs to snatch the matter from the other to survive, and the good of one, therefore, will be the evil of another. How to determine the good from the point of view of a philosophy of matter?

BoskR – Testing Adequacy of Diversification Models Using Tree Shape

The study of diversification largely relies on model-based approaches, estimating rates of speciation and extinction from phylogenetic trees. While a plethora of different models exist – all with different features, strengths and weaknesses – there is increasing concern about the reliability of the inference we gain from them. Apart from simply finding the model with the best fit for the data, we should find ways to assess a model’s suitability to describe the data in an absolute sense. The R package BoskR implements a simple way of judging a model’s adequacy for a given phylogeny using metrics for tree shape, assuming that a model is inadequate for a phylogeny if it produces trees that are consistently dissimilar in shape from the tree that should be analyzed. Tree shape is assessed via metrics derived from the tree’s modified graph Laplacian spectrum, as provided by RPANDA. We exemplify the use of the method using simulated and empirical example phylogenies. BoskR was mostly able to correctly distinguish trees simulated under clearly different models and revealed that not all models are adequate for the empirical example trees. We believe the metrics of tree shape to be an intuitive and relevant means of assessing diversification model adequacy. Furthermore, by implementing the approach in an openly available R package, we enable and encourage researchers to adopt adequacy testing into their workflow.

Logical aliens and where to find them

This paper is concerned with Frege’s logical aliens argument against psychologism in logic. The paper argues that this argument becomes too radical in the context of current philosophy in logic. The possible answer to Frege’s argument could be inspirited by the philosophical ideas of later Wittgenstein: we play different language games, and some of them are logical games. However, different people have different criteria of certainty and not all of them can play logical games. This gives new comprehension of the normativity of logic that shows that there are no logical aliens in absolute sense. This view can give in turn a new understanding of what rationality is and show why logic and psychology should interact.

Utopian Nemesis

This chapter shows that it is possible to dignify outrage at wrongness in human arrangements with a particular name, nemesis. Nemesis is an ancient Greek word whose meanings evolved in complicated ways over hundreds of years, but in most of its acceptations it suggests, directly or indirectly, umbrage taken at a state of affairs or an action that in some basic or absolute sense is not right. It marks anger at some violation of nomos, where the latter — a noun with an even more diverse array of significations — betokens an apposite arrangement of things, the order that should prevail. Nemesis matters because in Greek and Latin writings it was closely bound up with an ideal still widely cherished, and on behalf of which countless people struggle, at the present time. That ideal is justice. There is ample warrant for understanding justice as, fundamentally, a condition of right arrangement. And once we have this point before us, it becomes still clearer that discontent with inadequate arrangement is not merely some embarrassing compulsion that attached itself contingently to serious utopian speculation. Rather, this discontent proves a propelling source of that speculation — one that, once recognized, illuminates how the achievement of justice is utopia's essential project.

Equality in Multi-door Criminal Justice

As contemporary criminal justice practices have grown more varied, the equality concerns they raise have grown more nuanced and complex. This essay explores the interplay between equality in criminal justice and the mix of punitive and non-punitive mechanisms that have proliferated in parallel in the criminal justice systems of many post-industrial societies in the last thirty years. Multi-door criminal justice does not fare well under the dominant conception of equality in American criminal law, which seeks to stamp out disparities in punishment and ensure roughly equal outcomes for roughly similar offenders. But we need not view that as fatal to multi-door criminal justice. Tension between a multi-door system and our reigning approach to equality might suggest reasons to question the latter more than it does the former. Alternative, more flexible, more process-oriented conceptions of equality might exist that could better accommodate a multi-door world while still protecting and advancing egalitarian norms and ideals. At the same time, shifting our perspective on equality will not eliminate all equality concerns that flow from multi-door criminal justice, and it likely will reveal new ones. The question then becomes not whether multi-door criminal justice is unequal in some absolute sense. The question is whether it is less unequal—or unequal in more palatable ways—than what we have now.

Detected Changes in Precipitation Extremes at Their Native Scales Derived from In Situ Measurements

The gridding of daily accumulated precipitation—especially extremes—from ground-based station observations is problematic due to the fractal nature of precipitation, and therefore estimates of long period return values and their changes based on such gridded daily datasets are generally underestimated. In this paper, we characterize high-resolution changes in observed extreme precipitation from 1950 to 2017 for the contiguous United States (CONUS) based on in situ measurements only. Our analysis utilizes spatial statistical methods that allow us to derive gridded estimates that do not smooth extreme daily measurements and are consistent with statistics from the original station data while increasing the resulting signal-to-noise ratio. Furthermore, we use a robust statistical technique to identify significant pointwise changes in the climatology of extreme precipitation while carefully controlling the rate of false positives. We present and discuss seasonal changes in the statistics of extreme precipitation: the largest and most spatially coherent pointwise changes are in fall (SON), with approximately 33% of CONUS exhibiting significant changes (in an absolute sense). Other seasons display very few meaningful pointwise changes (in either a relative or absolute sense), illustrating the difficulty in detecting pointwise changes in extreme precipitation based on in situ measurements. While our main result involves seasonal changes, we also present and discuss annual changes in the statistics of extreme precipitation. In this paper we only seek to detect changes over time and leave attribution of the underlying causes of these changes for future work.

Highly Enantioselective Catalytic Allylboration of Ketiminoesters: Practical and Scalable Synthesis of α-Fully-Substituted Amino Esters

We report the first catalytic enantioselective allylboration of α-ketiminoesters to afford chiral α-allyl-α-aryl and α-allyl-α-trifluoromethyl amino esters in excellent isolated yields and with high optical purity. This operationally simple allylation proceeds under ambient conditions with indium(I)-iodide/BOX-type ligand (5–10 mol%) and can be performed on a gram scale. A proposed qualitative model for the high stereoselectivity indicates that the origin of selectivity is likely due to attractive interactions between the substrate and the BOX ligand. Using a different BOX-type ligand reverses the reaction’s absolute sense of enantioselectivity. The allylated products are easily converted to enantiomerically enriched α-substituted proline derivatives.<br><br>

Highly Enantioselective Catalytic Allylboration of Ketiminoesters: Practical and Scalable Synthesis of α-Fully-Substituted Amino Esters

We report the first catalytic enantioselective allylboration of α-ketiminoesters to afford chiral α-allyl-α-aryl and α-allyl-α-trifluoromethyl amino esters in excellent isolated yields and with high optical purity. This operationally simple allylation proceeds under ambient conditions with indium(I)-iodide/BOX-type ligand (5–10 mol%) and can be performed on a gram scale. A proposed qualitative model for the high stereoselectivity indicates that the origin of selectivity is likely due to attractive interactions between the substrate and the BOX ligand. Using a different BOX-type ligand reverses the reaction’s absolute sense of enantioselectivity. The allylated products are easily converted to enantiomerically enriched α-substituted proline derivatives.<br><br>