infonet-economy

Human gene patents are patents on human genes that have been removed from human bodies and scientifically isolated and manipulated in a laboratory. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (the USPTO) has issued thousands of patents on such genes, and patents have also been granted by the European Patent Office, (the EPO). Legal and moral justification, however, are not identical, and it is possible for a legal decision to be immoral although consistent with legal precedent and procedure. So, it is surprising to learn that some people believe that the legal justification of human gene patents can remove the most serious moral objections to them. Yet, those who are well-versed in patent law often believe that confusion over some quite basic legal and scientific facts accounts for moral objections to such patents and, in particular, for the belief that they justify the ownership of one person by another. Once these confusions are removed, they contend, we will see that there is nothing especially alarming about patents on human genes, and no reason to believe them immoral. Such claims seem especially surprising because the morality of an invention is generally supposed to have little role in decisions about whether or not an invention deserves a patent under U.S. law. Although the European Patent Convention’s article 53 (a) prohibits patenting inventions, the publication or exploitation of which would be contrary to public order or morality, it turns out that this clause rarely justifies withholding a patent from an invention that otherwise meets legal criteria. Thus, although more than 320,000 patents have been granted by the EPO since its creation, this clause has never been used successfully to strike down a claim for a patent. Indeed, Ulrich Schatz explains, “Poisons, explosives, extremely dangerous chemical substances, devices used in nuclear power stations, agro-chemicals, pesticides and many other things which can threaten human life or damage the environment have been patented, despite the existence of the public order and morality bar” in almost all European countries. Indeed, this paper shows, while ethical objections to human gene patents are often controversial, they need not be unreasonable, nor need they depend on mistaken assumptions about patent law. Rather, they may reflect familiar ethical concerns about the dominance of commercial imperatives in modern societies; concerns about the disparities in power and wealth amongst individuals and countries; and concerns about the lack of public discussion, transparency and accountability surrounding significant changes in people’s rights, status and opportunities. Hence, I conclude, ethical concerns cannot be easily dismissed and, indeed, point to the need to think harder about the nature and justification of patent law, itself.

Compulsory voting is sometimes thought to be justified in democracies because it promotes high levels of voting and mitigates inequalities of turnout amongst social groups. Proponents of compulsory voting also argue that it helps to prevent the free-riding of non-voters on voters. This article casts a sceptical eye on both arguments. Democratic citizens do not have a duty to promote their self-interest,and their duties to others do not generally require them to vote, or to attend the polls. So, while people are sometimes morally obliged to vote, and to vote one way rather than another, legal compulsion to vote or to turn out is generally unjustified and inconsistent with democratic government.

Lisa Hill’s response to my critique of compulsory voting, like similar responses elsewhere,1 remind me how much a child of the 1970s I am, and how far my beliefs and intuitions about politics have been shaped by the electoral conflicts, social movements and violence of that period. But my perceptions of politics have also been profoundly shaped by my teachers, and fellow graduate students, at MIT. Theda Skocpol famously urged political scientists to ‘bring the state back in’ to their analyses,2 and to recognize that political identities, interests and coalitions cannot be read off straightforwardly from people’s socio-economic positions. In their different ways, this was the lesson that Suzanne Berger, Charles Sabel and Joshua Cohen tried to teach us, emphasizing that political participation and conflict, themselves, can change people’s identities, their sense of what is desirable and possible, and their ability to make common cause with others.3 I do not take it as self-evident, therefore, that the poor and seemingly powerless should be politically apathetic, unwilling to vote, or incapable of imagining a political solution to at least some of the problems confronting them. Nor do I suppose that non-voters are all of a piece, and that their shared interests are, inevitably, more significant than those that divide them. Such assumptions seem mistaken in the case of voters, and I see no reason why they should be true of non-voters. The people we find in these categories are not predestined to be in one rather than the other; they do not always stay where they start off; and at an individual level, the reasons why people fall into one group, rather than another, are likely to be complex and sometimes unpredictable.

This article shows that judicial review has a democratic justification, although it is not necessary for democratic government and its virtues are controversial and often speculative. Against critics likeWaldron and Bellamy, it shows that judges, no less than legislators, can embody democratic forms of representation, accountability and participation.Hence, judicial review is not undemocratic simply because it enables unelected judges to over-rule elected legislators when people disagree about rights. Against recent defenders of judicial review, such as Eisgruber and Brettschneider, it shows that democratic arguments for judicial review do not require judges to be better at protecting rights than legislators.Hence a democratic justification for judicial reviewdoes not depend on complex and inevitably controversial interpretations and evaluations of judicial as opposed to legislative judgments. Democratic government does not demand special virtue, competence or wisdom in its citizens or their leaders. From a democratic perspective, therefore, the case for judicial review is that it enables individuals to vindicate their rights against government in ways that parallel those they commonly use against each other. This makes judicial review normatively attractive whether or not it leads to better decisions thanwould be made by other means.

How should trial experts approach cases of racial profiling? As a British philosopher, albeit one who has lived and worked in the States, all I can offer are some suggestions and some questions to help readers make the most of their expertise. These are motivated by two concerns. First, from a British perspective, American jury selection is alien to our understanding of the ideal that people are tried by ‘a jury of their peers’. In particular, the American practice of selective strikes raises the worry that you cannot consistently ask jurors to evaluate the use of race-based expectations by police when the jury selection process, itself, is shaped by the idea that race is a good predictor of people’s beliefs and behaviour. The second concern is an extension and generalisation of the first, and exemplifies the problems posed by racial profiling: what does it mean to treat people as equals in a world where people are disadvantaged because of their race? I will take these concerns in reverse order, briefly say something about them, and then suggest some approaches to racial profiling that, I hope, will be of practical, as well as theoretical, use.

It is argued that the binational state model is and should be considered as a model sui generis. Concentrating on three levels of analysis (recognition, autonomy, and authority i.e the majority prolem), an operational definition of binationalism allows for an idealtypical discussion of the homogeneity problem and the question of state sovereignty, showing that the problem of power imbalance (assymetry) is, in fact, a theoretical (and concrete) impasse, leading usually to the conclusion of "impossibility" of the binational state construction. However, an attempt to define the aforesaid symmetry/asymmetry (as drawn from Constraint Theory) in terms of stability of outcomes rather than in terms of power exclusively, offers a perspective that does not condemn the binational state model as fatally precarious.