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This chapter describes how readers can become more critical of the advice they read. The advice examined in the previous chapters contains four characteristics that limit both its validity and its actionability. When individuals programmed with Model I theories-in-use adhere to Model I social values and comply with the requirements of organizational defensive routines, they are largely unaware of these limits. So, they actually approve the advice, value it, and feel good about it. By definition, they do not see how Model I advice, in operation, produces skilled unawareness, let alone the skilled incompetence that accompanies it. These are the four main reasons why: the advice represents espoused theories of effectiveness; it contains evaluations and attributions that are neither tested nor testable; it is based on self-referential logic that produces limited knowledge about what is going on; and the advice does not specify causal processes.

This chapter explores Piaget's conception of the sensorimotor infant. It contends that Piaget made a risky assumption which plagued developmental psychology for many years thereafter: he mistook infants' motor incompetence for conceptual incompetence. Piaget's view of image formation, his theory to conceptual thought, and motor incompetence versus cognitive incompetence are discussed.

Cognitive incompetence cannot adequately explain the special character of children's moral status. It is, in fact, because children lack preference structures that are sufficiently stable over time that they are not ’temporally extended agents’. They are best viewed as 'special agents’, and parents have the responsibility of fostering the development of temporally extended agency and other necessary related moral capacities. Parental authority should be exercised with the view to assisting children to acquire the capacities that facilitate their transition from 'special agents’ to full and functioning members of the moral community.

Political theorists claim that political trust is located on the continuum that runs from blind faith to enforceable contract. Trust ‘as passion’ borders on blind faith, while trust ‘as calculation’ comes close to enforceable contract. More often located between these extremes, political trust is usually a mix of faith and calculation, varying from largely irrational responses to the charisma of political leaders to largely calculated ‘bets on the actions of others’. This chapter discusses political distrust in post-Communist Europe and looks at four broad categories of potential influences (all negative) on political trust: distrustful citizens, untrustworthy institutions, discordance between citizens and government, and hard times. It also examines incompetence, scandal, dishonesty, and corruption; responsiveness and fairness; the untrustworthiness of elected and unelected officials; and the unfairness that citizens perceive or actually experience.

This chapter presents an overview of the central theme of the book—the overcoming of “Southern European exceptionalism” and approximation over the past four decades of state capacities and public policies typical of other West European democracies—which the chapter hypothesizes is in large measure a product of the interaction among three forces, democratization, socioeconomic modernization, and Europeanization. The chapter presents a historical overview of the nature of Southern European exceptionalism, one aspect of which the chapter calls “state-heavy” characteristics: frequent resort to repression; corporatism and state intervention in the economy; excessive centralization of state power; and heavy reliance on patronage. At the same time, exceptionalism included several “weak-state” features: an inadequate and regressive system of taxation; strong and autonomous local elites; weak civilian control over the military; bureaucratic incompetence (in both civilian and military sectors); inadequate government services; weak legitimacy of the state; and economic inefficiencies that retarded economic development.

The chapter begins with Paul Ramsey's argument which offers the most prominent and persuasive argument against nonbeneficial pediatric research. Ramsey argues that nonbeneficial pediatric research is necessarily unethical because it involves exploitation, exposing those who cannot consent to risks for the benefit of others. To evaluate this argument it is necessary to consider the importance of informed consent, when is it necessary and why. The chapter then considers a number of prominent views which hold, effectively, that we do not need a justification for nonbeneficial pediatric research because such research does not raise serious ethical concern in the first place. Commentators offer a number of arguments for this view, citing the fact that the risks of most nonbeneficial pediatric research studies are low or children would consent to it if they could consent.

This chapter illustrates the deeply entrenched prejudice of political philosophers, including some democratic theorists, against “the rule of the dumb many.” It offers a critical literature survey showing how most traditional approaches to democracy either deny or circumvent the question of the people's competence to rule, with the exception of a tiny but growing literature on “epistemic democracy.” In fact, with the exception of the latter, the question of the cognitive competence of average citizens and the related question of the performance of democratic institutions either raises profound skepticism or is avoided altogether in contemporary democratic theory, both positive and normative. As a result, many theories and justifications of democracy tend to be competence insensitive, either denying that citizens' political incompetence is a problem or circumventing what they do see as a problem through an “elitist” definition of democracy as rule by the elected enlightened.

Many of the questions of the day are not decided in the courts of law or even in judicial tribunals. These issues are not ‘justiciable’. They are entrusted to commissions of inquiry, to inspectors, and licensing bodies. Not being justiciable, they are not subject to appeal to courts of Law. But it is very important that their proceedings should be conducted fairly. To this end, the courts have evolved processes by which to control them. Especially as on some occasions these bodies may make findings or come to conclusions very adverse to the individual. However, the chapter first deals with the judges themselves. They too are not perfect. They may make mistakes and thereby do injustice. In many cases, a mistake of a judge can be corrected on appeal. But some mistakes cannot be corrected due to ignorance, incompetence, bias, or even malice.

When Sophocles won his trial on questions about his mental incompetence, he recited a substantial portion of his play, which was a master piece, and convinced the court of his competence. This was because Sophocles seemed more plausable in the debate. The truth was not the main concern, but the believability of reasons was. This is what this chapter refers to as reasoning without knowledge. This chapter focuses on the process of good judgment (euboulia) in the First Democracy in which the power of reasoning is practiced. Debates and voting were considered valuable in the process as they could allow for different perspectives being heard.

The BIS has given up on the idea of enforcing standard rules for all. Banks are to be self-regulating. The IMF has been given more power but is not competent nor qualified to deal with tricky politicians and secretive bankers.

This chapter introduces the concept of a judicial “role conception”. A role conception assists the court in maintaining democratic legitimacy, adherence to opinions and execution of orders. The nature of these demands is contingent on the constitutional polity in which a court finds itself. The Chapter argues that the South African Constitutional Court enjoys a catalytic role conception, which explains the variety of stances towards judicial review that it adopts when adjudicating economic and social rights. The choice of a particular stance is responsive to whether government intransigence, incompetence or inattentiveness has caused the rights-infringement in question. This explanation is offered as one superior to the distinction between negative and positive obligations, the maturity of the jurisprudence, or whether the right is quantifiable or costly. A catalytic court seeks to lower the political energy that is required by other legal actors to secure economic and social rights

The topic of immigration journalism is of the utmost interest and public importance but it is seldom, if ever, systematically examined. Bringing academics, policy analysts, and policymakers together with journalists who cover immigration is a splendid idea. This chapter opens with some observations about immigration law. It then turns to the handiwork of immigration journalists who write in two elite newspapers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It argues that immigration journalists are congenitally and perhaps professionally and ideologically drawn to individual stories, usually stories of incompetence or illegality by the immigration agency. By exposing the injustices “the little guy” suffers at the hand of a cold-hearted bureaucracy, journalists perform a tried-and-true public service. The chapter suggests that journalists should also strive to inform readers about the more systemic, less individualized effects of immigration and the challenges and trade-offs encompassed in immigration policy and control in a modern democracy.

This chapter examines how the practice of social work was judged during the Colwell Inquiry and focuses particularly on the tensions that existed between competing understandings of its nature and purpose. First, it establishes the local context for the reorganisation of services that had followed from the implementation of the Local Authority Social Services Act of 1970. The two social workers most directly concerned with Maria Colwell's care were Daphne Josephine Kirby of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and Diana Lees of East Sussex Social Services Department. The charges laid against the social workers involved in the Colwell case fall into four broad categories: simple incompetence in carrying out their duties properly; the flawed nature of some of their fundamental assumptions about children and families; failures in the exercise of professional judgement; and a lack of awareness of the proper boundaries of social work. Taken together, these charges also constituted a powerful critique of social work itself.

This chapter deals with various cases in order to discuss the conduct of judges. If a judge made a mistake, then his mistake would give rise to a new trial and cause much expense to the parties. In many cases, a mistake of a judge can be corrected on appeal. But there are mistakes that cannot be corrected as a result of ignorance, incompetence, bias, or malice. No one would dream of making the judge personally liable for an innocent mistake. But sometimes a judge might make a mistake owing to a misunderstanding, as a result of which a man might be wrongly detained in prison. This chapter discusses in detail whether the judge could be made liable in such damages or not.

This chapter delineates the information doctors consider relevant to making a diagnosis, how data are gathered and interpreted in clinical practice, what happens when clinicians disagree, how those seeking evaluation are told their results, how the answers to these questions differ according to whether evaluations are conducted by a neurologist or a psychiatrist, and whether or not anything is really being done to help patients after they are diagnosed. Despite the seemingly obvious disciplinary differences, data reveal codified routines that support a common goal of moving individuals from the category of “potential patients” to that of patients, and ultimately research subjects, by establishing trust and highlighting uncertainty. Work practices support the routine collection of information, standardized symptom classification techniques, and assumptions of patient incompetence while discouraging qualitative, narrative data. Uncovering the tropes that clinicians use demonstrates how organizational ethos and work practices influence the social fabric of cognitive evaluations.

This chapter describes the crisis that has enveloped the ideal of merit since the mid-1960s. It begins and ends with a paradox: Americans had spent two centuries devising ways to reconcile advancement by merit with equal rights and popular consent only to hear from critics, mainly academics, that merit could never be reconciled with these other ideals of the Founding. Entering the late 1960s, merit had one notably exposed flank: in seeking to reconcile merit with equal rights and popular consent, most Americans had never viewed the effects of class on life trajectories as indelible. Since the 1970s, however, fears of America's declining international competitiveness, a culture of antagonism toward expert authority, and intensifying partisan divisions have deflected interest from merit-versus-quality to merit-versus-incompetence and to an obsessive concern with the evaluation of professionals.

This chapter follows the shifting Venetian tax legislation to show how fiscal policy coalesced with the interests of specific dragomans and brokers to articulate new ideas about linguistic incompetence as the quintessential property of foreign and, especially, Ottoman and Safavid merchants. The ability of specific trans-imperial subjects to claim familiarity with multiple state institutions was often pegged on both their foreign provenance and their long sojourns in a host country (spatial ambiguity was clearly of the essence in such pronouncements of familiarity). The chapter illustrates how, by assuming the linguistic helplessness of certain foreign merchants, Venetian officials reinforced the association of brokerage with bilingualism and thus ultimately furthered the claim of converts, redeemed slaves, and other bilingual trans-imperial subjects to be ideal intermediaries between supposedly mutually unintelligible and clearly demarcated groups.

Practitioners have always been liable to accusations of incompetence or neglect, but the New Poor Law exacerbated the pressures on medical men at the same time that expectations for their performance of salaried service were being heightened. Therefore this chapter examines instances of neglect which resulted in patient deaths, and accusations of manslaughter leveled by coroners’ inquests. It also evaluates practitioners’ involvement in abortion, a procedure which inherently requires a death.