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Given that the generalist element of international legal doctrine has been virtually silent on the problem and implications of the effectiveness and determinacy of international legal regulation, this study examined the material accumulated in doctrine and practice for the past several decades, including the relevant jurisprudence of all major international tribunals. Effectiveness in interpretation serves the more general principle of completeness, determinacy and effectiveness of legal regulation. The methods of interpretation are aimed at preserving the original consent, will, and intention behind the relevant legal instruments and thus at ensuring the determinacy of the relevant provision by enabling its application to facts. These methods are consistently aimed at confronting claims as to the indeterminacy of treaty provisions.

Key concepts in the evolutionary theology provide primary grounding for an affirmation of divine suffering. Chapter 5 explores six elements that factor significantly into a proposal of divine passibility: the costly process of evolution, the reality of cosmic indeterminacy, God‐world interaction through whole‐part influence, the notion of the anthropic universe, the transcendent and immanent creativity of God, and the panentheistic paradigm of the God‐world relationship. It analyzes each element specifically in terms of its impact on a theology of the creative suffering of the Triune God. It concludes by analyzing the proposal of suffering in God according to the criteria delineated in chapter 4.

This chapter focuses on the claim that present day parties have inherited entitlements to property which, owing to historic injustice, is currently in the possession of others. Those who advocate restitution as a response to wrongdoing argue that such property should be returned to the heirs of the historical victims. This inheritance-based model has often been rejected at a domestic level by theorists who reject the justifiability of inheritance. This response, however, is not available to international libertarians, who endorse backward-looking accounts of distributive justice. The chapter examines Jeremy Waldron's claim that property rights lapse in the absence of sustained possession, and holds that this need not be accepted if one sees international libertarianism as based on historical entitlement. It proceeds to challenge Janna Thompson's claim that the inheritance model is flawed as a result of its indeterminacy, maintaining that it need not rest upon counterfactual reasoning.

The purpose of this chapter is to articulate an understanding of basic human rights that is sufficiently clear and cogent to serve as the core of a justice‐based moral theory of international law. To accomplish this goal, the concept of human rights is first analysed into its key elements, and the analysis is used to explain how assertions about human rights can be justified, and show that plausible justifications for basic human rights can be grounded in a diversity of moral and religious perspectives. Next, several objections to the claim that there are human rights or that they can play a fundamental role in a moral theory of international law are refuted, and it is argued that the right to minimally democratic governance should be included among the rights that international law ascribes to all persons—whether it is a human right or of instrumental value in securing human rights, or both. It is then shown that the use of coercion to protect basic human rights is compatible with a proper tolerance for the diversity of values, and the chapter concludes with a discussion of how the international legal order can cope with the ineliminable abstractness of human rights norms. The seven parts of the chapter are: I. Clarifying the Idea of Human Rights; II. The Justification of Assertions about the Existence of Human Rights; III. A Plurality of Converging Justifications for Human Rights; IV. Is democracy a Human Right?; V. Critiques of Human Rights; VI. Human Rights and the Bounds of Toleration; and VII. The Inelimable Indeterminacy of Human Rights and its Implications for the Moral Theory of International Law.

This chapter considers the changes that occur at the shoot apical meristem once the decision to flower has been taken by the plant. These changes involve the expression of a succession of floral meristem identity genes, which convert the meristem to the reproductive state. Floral meristem identity genes can be defined as those genes that specify the floral fate of lateral meristems arising from a reproductive shoot apical meristem. At the same time, it is important that apical meristem indeterminacy is maintained, to allow multiple flowers to be produced. Later chapters in this section will analyse the development of the floral organs from a floral meristem, and the development of the all-important gametes within the reproductive organs themselves.

Many theorists of vagueness take vagueness to be bound up with indeterminacy in a way that conflicts with classical logic and bivalence. Others, epistemicists like Timothy Williamson, hold that the only indeterminacy bound up with vagueness is epistemic — vagueness is just bound up with a certain kind of ignorance — and that vagueness does not conflict with classical logic and bivalence. Both types of view face well-known problems. This chapter presents a view on vagueness that sidesteps them. Let a sentence be first-level indeterminate if there are acceptable assignments of semantic values under which it lacks a classical, determinate truth-value; and let a sentence be second-level indeterminate if it has different truth-values under different assignments of semantic values. What this chapter proposes is that vagueness is primarily bound up with second-level indeterminacy, rather than first-level indeterminacy. In the course of defending this proposal, the chapter compares it to supervaluationism, which superficially can appear similar.

This chapter argues that a term is vague if it is indeterminate. As a special case of this, it argues that a predicate is vague if it has borderline cases. This was until recently the standard account of vagueness, but it has become quickly unpopular. A common objection has been that indeterminate terms with clearly demarcated boundaries of indeterminacy are not vague, and that it is better to identify vagueness in predicates with some kind of Sorites-sensitivity. Proposals of how to do this have been offered by Matti Eklund, Patrick Greenough, and Nicholas J. J. Smith. The chapter argues that this was a step backwards for several reasons. Some vague predicates are not Sorites-sensitive. And non-predicates are not Sorites-sensitive, although they can be vague. Moreover, if we have an epistemic understanding of the Sorites, then we will end up classifying some non-vague terms as vague, unless we assume that speakers know much more about the metaphysics underlying their language than they actually do.

This chapter argues that the counter-intuitive aspects of the epistemic theory of vagueness run deeper than is sometimes appreciated, and that Horwich's variant of epistemicism does not help with them. It considers the suggestion that we escape the problems with the epistemic theory by weakening the law of excluded middle as applied to vague language. It argues that standard ‘fuzzy logics’ are ultimately of no help with vagueness because they generate operators that draw sharp lines. But there are alternative ‘fuzzy logics’ that avoid these problems. Moreover, there are intuitive connections between the semantic paradoxes and the paradoxes of vagueness, and the fuzzy logics that avoid sharp lines seem to be just the ones that are compatible with making True() equivalent to p even in face of the semantic paradoxes. This chapter tentatively recommends treating vagueness and the semantic paradoxes together, using the same non-classical logic for both.

This chapter argues that vagueness, understood as a semantic phenomenon, can be accommodated within standard semantics by assimilating it to contingency in standard modal semantics and suitably modifying the pragmatics. It claims that vague predicates are not defective, assumes that their vagueness involves at least extensional indeterminacy, and then considers the three ways in which standard semantics allows for extensional indeterminacy: ambiguity, indexicality, and relativity to circumstances of evaluation (e.g. contingency). The third of these is found to be most promising, and is outlined in more detail. It involves treating assertability, but not truth, supervaluationally. This explains the seductiveness of Sorites arguments and yields a fine account of borderline cases. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of higher-order vagueness and a comparison of the view outlined with other views.

This chapter argues for the following theses. There are perfectly possible meanings (ones of a sort one would think are possessed by many vague predicates) which would necessitate a predicate's being gappy. Many arguments against the coherence of truth value gaps depend on a very narrow picture of saying, which ignores the possibility of such things as sui generis denial. Frege/Geach objections to things like sui generis denial dissolve once we observe that ‘not’ and other sentence compounding devices lead a double life, sometimes contributing to sense, sometimes to force. There is a simple compositional story about how (for instance) embedding a denial operator within a ‘force conditional’ makes if not A, then B fit to perform a sort of speech act which, when combined with B's denial, commits one to the aptness of asserting A. The trisection thesis — predicates trisect their domains into three groups, those they are true of, those they are false of, and the rest — is correct. The objection to the trisection thesis —that it is inconsistent with the idea that there are no sharp boundaries in a Sorites series — is not compelling: there is no conception of a ‘sharp boundary’ on which it's plausible, both that there are no sharp boundaries in a Sorites series, and that trisection involves the creation of sharp boundaries. Once we recognize that talk of indeterminacy is contrastive, we also recognize that higher order vagueness is not inconsistent with trisection. We also, once we think of indeterminacy as contrastive, come to see that indeterminacy itself is indeterminate: if it is indeterminate whether p, that indeterminacy itself is not something that is settled, but is itself indeterminate.

Recent advances in the theory of complexity have engendered a shift away from ‘physicalism’, where all nature is reducible to fundamental physical laws towards ‘naturalism’, where natural phenomena are considered within a circumscribed domain of time and space. The study of ecological networks has led the way in this shift, because it can be demonstrated that ecological dynamics are incompatible with the fundamental assumptions that have supported science since Newton. The direction in which causality operates in ecosystems proves more likely to come from the larger configurations of processes (networks) towards their more ephemeral and complicated constituents and their attendant mechanisms. This focus on the macroscopic makes possible a self-consistent description of ecosystem dynamics based solely on the attributes of the network of processes.

This chapter analyzes the limits to Hart's account of an official-operated rule of recognition as an account of the existence and borders of legal systems. The argument is developed via assessment of the success of the account's solutions to problems of circularity and indeterminacy in the identification of a distinct class of legal officials whose practices constitute the rule of recognition. It is shown that while the problem of circularity may have been adequately addressed in explanation of state legal systems, its solutions leave intact the problem of indeterminacy and reveal a strong presumption of hierarchy which threatens to run past rather than solve issues at the borders of legality. This is true in explanation of state legal systems, but the difficulties are particularly troubling in explanation of international law, as analysis of Hart's view of international law makes plain.