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To protect the rule of law based legal system against abusive use of the loopholes, imperfections, contradictions of the law, to avoid legal inertia legal positivist arguments are needed to convince and mobilize the legal mind. The same applies when the blind fortune of democracy provides the opportunity to erase the legally enthroned injustice and domination of illiberal regimes. When it comes to legal enactments that serve legal cheating the rule of law must respond to systemic abuse of the law, and that requires and justifies a rule of law based exceptionalism and a systemic remedy.

Those put-off by the putative counterexamples to Act Consequentialism may consider Rule Consequentialism a more appealing alternative. Michael Huemer goes so far as to suggest that it is "not a crazy view." In this post, I'll explain why I think Rule Consequentialism is not well-supported -- and, at least as standardly formulated, may even be crazy.There are three main motivations for Rule Consequentialism (RC).  One -- most common amongst non-specialists -- stems from the sense that it would be better (in practice) for people to be guided by generally-reliable rules than to attempt to explicitly calculate expected utilities on a case-by-case basis.  But of course this is no reason to prefer RC as a criterion of right; this consideration instead pulls one towards multi-level act utilitarianism (on which the right decision procedure is something other than constant calculation).A better argument for RC (and the one that seems to motivate Huemer) is that it better systematizes our moral intuitions about cases.  But I think this is bad moral methodology -- matching superficial intuitions about cases is much less important than conforming to our deeper understanding of what really matters.  And RC is notoriously difficult to reconcile with the idea that promoting well-being (rather than blindly following rules) is what matters.Perhaps the most principled argument for RC stems from the contractualist ideal of acting on principles that are systematically justifiable to others.  Parfit's project in On What Matters was to argue that such contractualist foundations should lead one to Rule Consequentialism.  But as I argue in chapter 5 of Parfit's Ethics, it's obscure why we should want the rules we act upon, rather than simply our acts themselves, to be justifiable to others:[T]he
mere fact that the best uniform (or universal) principles recommend an act does not mean that this specific act is any good—the
principles' benefits may stem from other cases. This prompts a
couple of deep challenges to Parfit's rule-based approach: (i) When
an optimal act is ruled out by optimal principles, why prioritize
the principles—why should acting optimally ever be considered
"unjustifiable"? (ii) Different people might do better to be guided
by different principles—so, even on a rule- or principle-based
approach, why require uniformity?So I'm dubious of the putative reasons to favour RC in the first place.  Moreover, it seems to me that RC is subject to powerful objections.(1) It's subject to all the standard objections to views that aren't fundamentally consequentialist: (i) it gives bad (rule-fetishizing) answers to the question of what fundamentally matters; (ii) it implies that benevolent spectators should often hope that (fully-informed) agents act wrongly;  (iii) it's subject to the paradoxes of deontology, both old and new.(2) More distinctively, RC (at least as standardly formulated) has absurd implications in any scenario where the optimific rules were good to accept but not good to act upon.For example, an evil demon could threaten to torture us all unless we come to accept & approve of torturing puppies. (Crucially, the actual act of torturing puppies does not achieve any good whatsoever in this scenario; the belief is enough.) Obviously, one should not torture puppies in this case -- there isn't even the slightest reason to do so.This is very different from putative counterexamples to act consequentialism, where one might feel that the act "seems wrong", but you can at least see how there are weighty reasons counting in its favour (e.g. saving more lives!).  In this case, what we're able to show is that the Rule Consequentialist's assumed link between reasons for accepting a moral code and reasons for acting upon it is fallacious. There's just no essential connection there.  But that's the basis for the whole theory.Could RC be saved by reformulating it in terms of rules that are good just in virtue of the value of the acts that they lead to?  I don't recall seeing anyone else formulate the view this way, but it does seem an essential move in order to address this (otherwise decisive) objection.  The resulting view starts to look increasingly ad hoc, however -- once you've gone this far, why not simply accept the multi-level act utilitarian view that the rules are mere rules of thumb, rather than in-principle determinants of rightness or normative reasons for actions?(3) As Podgorski argues, RC is subject to the "distant world" objection, as it "determines what we ought to do by evaluating worlds that differ from ours in more than what is up to us."  It seems that this will inevitably lead to clearly bad recommendations in special cases (such as Podgorski's "duds").(Caleb Perl claims to "solve" this by jettisoning counterfactual evaluation in favour of the "consilience" principle that "the moral value of
a rule R is everything actual that's agent-neutrally
good or bad to the extent it's caused by actions that
R classifies as morally right."  But such a blinkered form of evaluation will surely be subject to even more egregious counterexamples.  E.g. suppose that R permits both good and extremely bad acts, but we're in a world where people have only performed the good acts.  We shouldn't conclude from this that R is a good rule, or that its non-actual (extremely bad!) instances are permissible.)(4) RC is a structural mess. As I explain in my (2012) 'Fittingness' paper:Rule consequentialists first identify the rules that are best in terms of
impartial welfare (or what's antecedently desirable), and then specify that
we have decisive reasons to act in accordance with these rules. Finally, they
might add, we have overriding reasons to desire that we so act. This way,
a prohibited act may be 'best' according to the antecedent (agent-neutral
welfarist) reasons for desire, and yet be bad (undesirable) all things considered. This avoids the incoherence [of preferring to act wrongly]. But it also brings
out how convoluted the view really is. It is recognizably consequentialist in
the sense that it takes (some) reasons for desire as fundamental, and subsequently derives an account of reasons for action. But then it goes back and
"fills in" further reasons for desire — trumping the original axiology — to
make sure that they fit the account of right action. In this sense it exhibits
a deontological streak: reasons for action are at least partly prior to reasons
for desire. In other words, the initial axiology includes only some values
(the 'non-moral', agent-neutral welfarist ones), and what's right serves to
determine the remaining ('post-moral', all things considered) good.I don't have a further argument against accepting a moral theory with this structure.  It's not strictly incoherent or anything. I just think it's unappealing once brought to light, especially when the view lacks significant compensating advantages.  (I think this also brings out why we might reasonably regard RC as not really consequentialist, despite its name.)

The second post in our symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River. This one is from Dr. Cameron Harrington, an Assistant Professor in International Relations at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. His research centres on the shifting contours of security in the Anthropocene, with a particular focus on the concept … Continue reading Engineers Rule the World

Spain is going through turbulent times, marked by a strong political polarization and an increasingly evident decline in the rule of law due to the partisan takeover of institutions. This situation has been exacerbated by President Sánchez's investiture agreements with pro-independence parties, particularly Junts, led by the fugitive Puigdemont, who spearheaded the Catalan secessionist insurrection in the autumn of 2017. The bill grants amnesty for crimes committed in connection with secessionist efforts, including, among others, misappropriation of public funds, prevarication, and attacks against authority. The amnesty, as it currently stands, violates both the Spanish Constitution and basic tenets of the rule of law.

This is the latest research article from the Everyday Misinformation
Project that I'm leading. The project, which is funded by the Leverhulme
trust, began in April 2021 and runs until March 2024.

For this piece, we explored a previously-unexamined practice our fieldwork
uncovered: when users create "group rules" to prevent misinformation
entering their everyday interactions.

This year is the second winter that thousands of asylum seekers will spend on the cold streets of Brussels. More than 2700 of them are still without any material assistance and shelter. 869 of them have a domestic court order recognising their right to reception, yet the Belgian government has consistently refused to implement them. This deliberate refusal to secure the human rights of migrants, especially where these are single males, is not only creating a humanitarian disaster in Belgium's streets but also undermines the raison d'être of Belgian democracy. While the government's actions have been condemned by human rights experts and courts alike, we argue it is arguably reflective of a worrying wider trend in the EU of the impotence of the law to secure human rights for migrants.

It is never a good sign when Viktor Orbán celebrates the election results of another country. Last Wednesday was one of those days. For the first time in the history of Dutch politics, a far-right party became by far the biggest party in the Dutch parliament. It is bad news in many respects, and even more, because the Dutch constitutional system knows a lack of formal rule of law safeguards. In contrast to countries such as Italy or Germany, the Dutch constitutional system is not prepared for a democratic move to the anti-liberal far right.

Expect more strikes, fewer government services, and more tax increases to pay for pension obligations.

Taliban-led governance in Afghanistan faces several critical weaknesses, the least not being the lack of a recognisable constitution. Absent other forms of legitimising institutions, regime survival will increasingly rely on force and violence.

By Veronica Anghel. This contribution delves into the intricate interplay between formal and informal institutions in contemporary
European political landscapes. It investigates the vital role of informal institutions in supplementing and at times
circumventing the formal rules that define the parameters of political functioning.

Joseph Kimble (WMU–Cooley Law School) has posted Rule-Of-Law Judge? That's Code for Ideologically Conservative Judging (Michigan Lawyers Weekly, February 15 2023) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Judges often proclaim—typically during a political campaign—that they are a "rule-of-law judge." This...

The past year was an eventful one, to put it mildly. In fact, the world has endured so much war, disruption, tension and uncertainty that we're left to wonder whether the rules-based global order, which ...

The European Union's Digital Markets Act will inadvertently compromise established smartphone security systems in attempts to foster digital openness.
The post The EU Rules Risk Smartphone Security appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux
may helm Shreveport, but its gerrymandered
Democrat supermajority City Council keeps spending more money than the city
has that puts off a more severe day of reckoning which perhaps cloaks a cynical
exercise.

This
week, the Council approved the 2024 budget, making several changes to
Arceneaux's plan
that had the effect of spending more or putting off debts. In all, for its
general operations the city will shell out $283 million, down $11 million budgeted
for this year, but overall spending is pegged at $676 million, up $81 million,
largely as a result of increased revenue projections for water and sewerage and
righting retained risk costs, which in the past couple of years ate into general
fund reserves.

But Arceneaux's plans to begin replenishing general
fund reserves, which dove by two-thirds over that period to around $25 million,
the Council thwarted by amending away a 20 percent increase in water and sewerage
rates, a $3 monthly solid waste charge, and retaining open positions in public
safety, with police particularly understaffed, altogether which could have recaptured
$25 million. The Council unanimously wanted to keep open proactively the
ability to hire into public safety departments, and in the cases of the higher
charges felt the public not sufficiently prepared to endure the increases at
this time.

Arceneaux and the two Republican councilors
acquiesced, but with the Administration warning that revenues attached to bonds
in water and sewerage for the past two years didn't cover those debt costs and
without the rate increase that would continue. That imbalance is courtesy of
the city's consent decree over water and sewerage provision for quality
violations that must be repaired, even as the costs keep on growing. Democrat
former Mayor Adrian Perkins preferred to raid reserves that now approach the
minimum legal level for the general fund and make more difficult paying off revenue
bonds in the future.

The mayor knows this and is trying to fix it, but
the Council Democrats won't let him. Forestalling rate increases blocks most of
his solution while kicking the can down the road, although while a small
portion of that would have come from not filling the public safety vacancies, which
at least is money that can be saved if not spent on new hires, which Arceneaux
would have handled through supplemental appropriations.

And the reason he's not allowed to pursue his
solution may derive from partisan political opportunism. Council Democrats shy
away from being seen as foisting rate hikes, while at the same time by not
acting to prevent the crisis from magnifying allows them to blame Arceneaux for
it a couple of years down the road when likely he tries for reelection and rate
or tax hikes and/or service cuts become more obviously needed from failure to
address problems today. Yet they also can claim they were addressing public
safety concerns by keeping job slots open, even if hiring is lackluster due to
the city's reputation as a violent crime hotbed and past police foibles. Indeed,
at the same meeting the Council called upon Arceneaux to
declare a state of emergency over crime, whatever that could accomplish.

Democrat partisans loathe the idea that a white
Republican serves as mayor over their black-majority and Democrat-plurality
city. Making him appear as a failure in time for the 2028 makes it easier for
the more ambitious among them to take his place in what appears to be a golden opportunity
for a black Democrat politician. Continually rebuffing his sensible plans to
put the city back on more solid footing rather than it careening further
towards fiscal crisis may be part of a plan like that.

In January 2023, Italy's new government adopted a reform that heavily curtailed immigrant rights to speed up return procedures. Between September and October, several judgments issued by the Catania Tribunal declared the reform in violation of EU law. The judgments led to backlash, with PM Meloni and other members of the government accusing them of being politically motivated. While such political attacks on judges must always be condemned, they are particularly unwarranted given that the Catania Tribunal's judges were correct in finding the new Italian border procedures incompatible with EU law.