Drawing upon philosophy and social theory, Social Theory of International Politics develops a theory of the international system as a social construction. Alexander Wendt clarifies the central claims of the constructivist approach, presenting a structural and idealist worldview which contrasts with the individualism and materialism which underpins much mainstream international relations theory. He builds a cultural theory of international politics, which takes whether states view each other as enemies, rivals or friends as a fundamental determinant. Wendt characterises these roles as 'cultures of anarchy', described as Hobbesian, Lockean and Kantian respectively. These cultures are shared ideas which help shape state interests and capabilities, and generate tendencies in the international system. The book describes four factors which can drive structural change from one culture to another - interdependence, common fate, homogenization, and self-restraint - and examines the effects of capitalism and democracy in the emergence of a Kantian culture in the West.

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Social Theory of International Politics

Personalized web services strive to adapt their services (advertisements, news articles, etc.) to individual users by making use of both content and user information. Despite a few recent advances, this problem remains challenging for at least two reasons. First, web service is featured with dynamically changing pools of content, rendering traditional collaborative filtering methods inapplicable. Second, the scale of most web services of practical interest calls for solutions that are both fast in learning and computation.In this work, we model personalized recommendation of news articles as a contextual bandit problem, a principled approach in which a learning algorithm sequentially selects articles to serve users based on contextual information about the users and articles, while simultaneously adapting its article-selection strategy based on user-click feedback to maximize total user clicks.The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we propose a new, general contextual bandit algorithm that is computationally efficient and well motivated from learning theory. Second, we argue that any bandit algorithm can be reliably evaluated offline using previously recorded random traffic. Finally, using this offline evaluation method, we successfully applied our new algorithm to a Yahoo! Front Page Today Module dataset containing over 33 million events. Results showed a 12.5% click lift compared to a standard context-free bandit algorithm, and the advantage becomes even greater when data gets more scarce.

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A contextual-bandit approach to personalized news article recommendation

1.. HARD CASES 5. Legal Rights A. Legislation . . . We might therefore do well to consider how a philosophical judge might develop, in appropriate cases, theories of what legislative purpose and legal principles require. We shall find that he would construct these theories in the same manner as a philosophical referee would construct the character of a game. I have invented, for this purpose, a lawyer of superhuman skill, learning, patience and acumen, whom I shall call Hercules. I suppose that Hercules is a judge in some representative American jurisdiction. I assume that he accepts the main uncontroversial constitutive and regulative rules of the law in his jurisdiction. He accepts, that is, that statutes have the general power to create and extinguish legal rights, and that judges have the general duty to follow earlier decisions of their court or higher courts whose rationale, as l

Taking Rights Seriously

PART FOUR: COMMENTARIES HIKING THE RANGE HUMANITY AS AN END IN ITSELF A MISMATCH OF METHODS HOW I AM NOT A KANTIAN PART FIVE: RESPONSES ON HIKING THE RANGE ON HUMANITY AS AN END IN ITSELF ON A MISMATCH OF METHODS HOW THE NUMBERS COUNT SCANLONIAN CONTRACTUALISM THE TRIPLE THEORY PART SIX: NORMATIVITY ANALYTICAL NATURALISM AND SUBJECTIVISM NON-ANALYTICAL NATURALISM THE TRIVIALITY OBJECTION NATURALISM AND NIHILISM NON-COGNITIVISM AND QUASI-REALISM NORMATIVITY NORMATIVE TRUTHS METAPHYSICS EPISTEMOLOGY RATIONALISM AGREEMENT NIETZSCHE WHAT MATTERS MOST APPENDICES WHY ANYTHING? WHY THIS? THE FAIR WARNING VIEW SOME OF KANT'S ARGUMENTS FOR HIS FORMULA OF UNIVERSAL LAW KANT'S CLAIMS ABOUT THE GOOD AUTONOMY AND CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVES KANT'S MOTIVATIONAL ARGUMENT ON WHAT THERE IS Notes to Volume Two References Bibliography Index

On What Matters

Attitudes held with strong moral conviction (moral mandates) were predicted to have different interpersonal consequences than strong but nonmoral attitudes. After controlling for indices of attitude strength, the authors explored the unique effect of moral conviction on the degree that people preferred greater social (Studies 1 and 2) and physical (Study 3) distance from attitudinally dissimilar others and the effects of moral conviction on group interaction and decision making in attitudinally homogeneous versus heterogeneous groups (Study 4). Results supported the moral mandate hypothesis: Stronger moral conviction led to (a) greater preferred social and physical distance from attitudinally dissimilar others, (b) intolerance of attitudinally dissimilar others in both intimate (e.g., friend) and distant relationships (e.g., owner of a store one frequents), (c) lower levels of good will and cooperativeness in attitudinally heterogeneous groups, and (d) a greater inability to generate procedural solutions to resolve disagreements.

Moral conviction: another contributor to attitude strength or something more?

David Copp: Introduction: Meta-Ethics and Normative Ethics PART I: Meta-Ethics 1: Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Moral Realism 2: Philip Quinn, University of Notre Dame: Theological Voluntarism 3: Nick Sturgeon, Cornell University: Ethical Naturalism 4: Jonathan Dancy, University of Reading and University of Texas at Austin: Non-Naturalism 5: Simon Blackburn, University of Cambridge: Anti-Realist Expressivism and Quasi-Realism 6: Philip Kitcher, Columbia University: Biology and Ethics 7: Justin D'Arms, The Ohio State University, and Dan Jacobson, Bowling Green State University: Sensibility Theory and Projectivism 8: Michael Slote, University of Miami: Moral Sentimentalism and Moral Psychology 9: Jamie Dreier, Brown University: Moral Relativism and Moral Nihilism 10: Peter Railton, University of Michigan: Human Theory of Practical Rationality 11: Stephen Darwall, University of Michigan: Morality and Practical Reason: A Kantian Approach 12: John Martin Fischer, University of California, Riverside : Free Will and Moral Responsibility PART II: Normative Ethical Theory 13: Thomas Hurka, University of Toronto: Value Theory 14: David Brink, University of California, San Diego and University of San Diego Law School: Some Forms and Limits of Consequentialism 15: David McNaughton, Florida State University, and Piers Rawling, Florida State University: Deontology 16: Hillel Steiner, University of Manchester and British Academy: Moral Rights 17: Thomas E Hill, Jr, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: Kantian Normative Ethics 18: Julia Annas, University of Arizona: Virtue Ethics 19: Virginia Held, City University of New York, Graduate School: The Ethics of Care 20: Mark Lance, Georgetown University, and Margaret Little, Georgetown University: Particularism and Anti-Theory 21: Michael DePaul, University of Notre Dame: Intuitions in Moral Inquiry 22: Gerald Dworkin, University of California, Davis: Theory, Practice, and Moral Reasoning

The Oxford handbook of ethical theory

Moral claims not only purport to be true, they also purport to guide our choices. This book presents a new theory of normative judgment, the "standard-based theory," which offers a schematic account of the truth conditions of normative propositions of all kinds, including moral propositions and propositions about reasons. The heart of Copp's approach to moral propositions is a theory of the circumstances under which corresponding moral standards qualify as justified, the "society-centered theory." He argues that because any society needs a social moral code in order to enable its members to live together successfully, and because it would be rational for a society to choose such a code, certain moral codes, and the standards they include, are justified. According to the standard-based theory then, if certain moral standards are indeed justified, corresponding moral propositions may be true. Copp's approach to morality and explaining normativity and the truth conditions of moral claims, raises a number of important issues in moral theory, as well as in metaphysics and the philosophy of language.

Morality, Normativity, and Society

Analyse normative de la relation entre un etat criminel et la population et le territoire democratiques sur lequel il impose sa loi. Soulevant la question de l'autorite morale du gouvernement, l'A. rejette l'idee d'un droit de legiferer propre a l'etat et d'une obligation des sujets a obeir a la loi dans les limites des frontieres territoriales. Defendant l'existence d'une variete de droits par analogie avec la typologie des benefices etablie par N. Hohfeld, l'A. interprete le droit de legiferer dans le sens 1) d'un droit de commandement sur les residents; 2) d'un droit de controle sur le territoire; 3) d'un droit de non-interference (souverainte). Soutenant l'idee de la legitimite de l'etat a partir d'un argument fonde sur les besoins de la societe, l'A. distingue la question de l'illegimite de la question de l'injustice d'un etat

The Idea of a Legitimate State

Moral realism and antirealist-expressivism are of course incompatible positions. They disagree fundamentally about the nature of moral states of mind, the existence of moral states of affairs and properties, and the nature and role of moral discourse. The central realist view is that a person who has or expresses a moral thought is thereby in, or thereby expresses, a cognitive state of mind; she has or expresses a belief that represents a moral state of affairs in a way that might be accurate or inaccurate. The view of antirealist-expressivism is that such a person is in, or expresses, a conative state of mind, one that consists in a certain kind of attitude or motivational stance toward something, such as an action or a person. Realism holds that moral thoughts have truth conditions and that in some cases these truth conditions are satisfied so that our moral thoughts are true. Antirealist-expressivism holds, to a first approximation, that the distinctive moral content of a moral thought does not have truth conditions.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0265052500002880

Realist-Expressivism: A Neglected Option for Moral Realism

Does morality override self-interest? Or does self-interest override morality? These questions become important in situations where there is conflict between the overall verdicts of morality and self-interest, situations where morality on balance requires an action that is contrary to our self-interest, or where considerations of self-interest on balance call for an action that is forbidden by morality. In situations of this kind, we want to know what we ought simpliciter to do. If one of these standpoints over-rides the other, then there is a straightforward answer. We ought simpliciter to act on the verdict of the overriding standpoint.For purposes of this essay, I assume that there are possible cases in which the overall verdicts of morality and self-interest conflict. I will call cases of this kind “conflict cases.” The verdict of morality in a conflict case would be a proposition as to what we ought morally to do, or as to what we have the most moral reason to do; the verdict of self-interest would be a proposition as to what we ought to do in our self-interest, or as to what action is best supported by reasons or considerations of self-interest. These propositions are action-guiding or normative in a familiar sense. The conflict between morality and self-interest in conflict cases is there-fore a normative conflict; it is a conflict between the overall verdicts of different normative standpoints. I take it that the question of whether morality overrides self-interest is the question of whether the verdicts of morality are normatively more important than the verdicts of self-interest. In due course, I will explain the idea of normative importance as well as the ideas of a normative proposition and of a reason.

David Copp

Papers

The Oxford handbook of ethical theory

Morality, Normativity, and Society

The Idea of a Legitimate State

Realist-Expressivism: A Neglected Option for Moral Realism

The Ring of Gyges: Overridingness and The Unity of Reason *