Machine-readable humanity is an evocative idea, and it is this idea which Hanley et al. spell out and critically discuss in their contribution. They are interested in exploring the technological as well as the moral side of the meaning of machine-readability. They start by differentiating between various ways to collect (and read) data and to develop classification schemes. They argue that traditional top-down data collection (first the pegs and then the collection according to the pegs) is less efficient than more recent machine readability, which is dynamic, because of the successive advances of data and predictive analytics (“big data”), machine learning, deep learning, and AI. Discussing the advantages as well as the dangers of this new way to read humans, they conclude that we should be especially cautious vis-à-vis the growing field of digital biomarkers since in the end they could not only endanger privacy and entrench biases, but also obliterate our autonomy. Seen in this light, apps (like AdNauseam) that restrict data collection as a form of protest against behavioral profiling also constitute resistance to the inexorable transformation of humanity into a standing reserve: humans on standby, to be immediately at hand for consumption by digital machines.

Chapter 6 uses this new understanding of chilling effects to elaborate the dangers of chilling effects both on an individual level and societal scale. The chapter elaborates the two dimensions of chilling effects – repressive and productive. The former speaks to how chilling effects today can repress speech and other rights on a mass scale; the latter speaks to how chilling effects are conforming effects, and thus produce conforming and compliant behavior on a societal scale, which has critical implications for individual identity, development, autonomy, and equality, but is also corrosive to democracy and democratic societies.

Failures of environmental law to preserve, protect and improve the environment are caused by law’s contingency and constitutional presumptions of supremacy over the self-regulatory agency of nature. Contingency problems are intrinsic to law and, therefore, invite deployment of technologies. Constitutional presumptions can be corrected through geo-constitutional reform. The latter requires the elaboration of geo-constitutional principles bestowing authority on nature’s self-regulatory agency. It is suggested that principles of autonomy, loyalty, pre-emption, supremacy and rights have potential to serve that aim and imply proactive roles for technologies in environmental governance. Geo-constitutional reform is necessary to prevent the fatal collapse of the natural regulatory infrastructure enabling life and a future of environmental governance by design. Once environmental catastrophe has materialized, however, geo-constitutionalism loses its raison d’être.

This chapter examines some ways in which human agency might be affected by a transition from legal regulation to regulation by AI. To do that, it elucidates an account of agency, distinguishing it from related notions like autonomy, and argues that this account of agency is both philosophically respectable and fits common sense. With that account of agency in hand, the chapter then examines two different ways – one beneficial, one baleful – in which agency might be impacted by regulation by AI, focussing on some agency-related costs and benefits of transforming private law from its current rule-based regulatory form to an AI-enabled form of technological management. It concludes that there are few grounds to be optimistic about the effects of such a transition and good reason to be cautious.

In Chapter 6, I analyze a set of in-between and underground sites. I show that these places have worked in tandem with Imam-Hatips but also in competition with them. Like Imam-Hatips, these sites eschewed conventional politics, focused on early and prolonged habituation to alternative lifestyles, and advocated for a totalistic vision of Islam. But unlike Imam-Hatips, parallel education sites pursued dispositional training in its most rigorous form (mainly because they were unchecked by authorities) while also connecting individuals within them to a countercultural milieu so as to facilitate the prefiguring of an Islamic society. Specifically for this reason, I argue, underground sites constituted the main foundation of Islamist politics. The chapter draws from a series of vignettes to delineate the process of creating the pious subject through politicizing personal habits and convincing individuals that making their lives congruent with religion is an indispensable aspect of solving society’s problems.

Regulation of the beginning and end of life raises myriad medical, legal, philosophical, moral and ethical issues. It also implicates a range of rights, most notably the right to life, freedom from ill-treatment and the right to private life. This chapter considers the ways in which State regulation of abortion, withdrawal/refusal of medical treatment and assisted dying engage rights protected by the ECHR. In particular, this chapter examines when life begins for the purposes of Article 2 (right to life) and whether the right to life precludes or, indeed, requires that States enable access to assistance in dying. Domestic law is considered, demonstrating the ways in which the margin of appreciation operates to confer a significant degree of latitude on States to regulate the beginning and end of life.

Jan KlabbersThis epilogue takes stock of the volume and sketches some of the ramifications: if the vacuum assumption (i.e. international organizations only interact with their member states) no longer holds, assuming it ever did, then what? The author proposes that international organizations are better seen as political and economic actors in their own right. They may be given a function upon establishment, but usually develop a certain autonomy. This renders them closer to administrative agencies and offers a more realistic foundation on which to build further legal thought – and thus might be able to take third parties into account.

This chapter explores the role of law in organizational interaction. In contrast with recent work on international institutional law that seeks to overcome functionalism and make legal sense of interaction, this chapter argues that interaction among international organizations is a legally constituted phenomenon, in two specific senses. First, law constitutes the space of the interaction (that is, the ‘organizational ecosystem’). Second, law provides the background norms for organizational autonomy and the vocabulary for the decoupling of the organization’s practice and its formal goals. Such a decoupling through institutional law allows international organizations to flexibly interact with each other and adapt to external pressures. Thus, in its dual role, international law provides the building blocks of interaction, playing a crucial role before the need to ‘regulate’ interaction even appears.

This chapter lays out the ways in which Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851) influenced the development of the concept of thought experiment. Ernst Mach (1838–1916) is currently more often credited with laying the foundations of contemporary views, and he is sometimes thought to have been little (if at all) influenced by Ørsted. Against these standard accounts, I will show that Ørsted’s and Mach’s descriptions have key features in common. Both thinkers hold that thought experiments: (1) are a method of variation, (2) require the experimenter’s free activity, and (3) are useful in educational contexts for guiding students to arrive at certain conclusions on their own (i.e., to genuinely appropriate new concepts). The process of variation is guided by the search for invariants, some of which do not directly appear in experience. Since it is important that teachers and students be able to bring the same ideal objects to mind, thought experiments play a key role for both Ørsted and Mach in math education. While Ørsted’s emphasis on the role of thought experiments in math has been proposed as a reason why his descriptions are not relevant for contemporary use of thought experiments, I will show how their role in mathematical thinking – stemming from Kant’s descriptions of the method of construction in geometry – are part of a wider account of thought experiments that encompasses their role in the sciences and also philosophy.

Kierkegaard and Ørsted were not just contemporaries but personally knew each other. In this chapter, I argue that Kierkegaard probably learned the term Tankeexperiment from Ørsted. This chapter contextualizes Kierkegaard’s use of “imaginary construction” (Experiment) in his work as a whole, including his well-known uses of paradoxes. I will show how the core elements of Ørsted’s account – thought experiment as a method of variation, the need for free and active constitution, and the use of thought experiments for facilitating genuine thought – are echoed in Kierkegaard’s discussions. Along the way, I will describe some decisions on how to translate Experiment and Tankeexperiment that are unfortunate in some ways and fortuitous in others, as I will explain. In these ways, Kierkegaard indirectly takes up Kant’s proposal that “construction” (i.e., Experiment in Danish) is a means of achieving cognition.

This is an account of Kant’s understanding of the conditions of the possibility of willing in general. Kant’s definition of the will as “a capacity to act in accordance with the representation of laws” is analyzed at length, and I argue that this capacity is present not only in maxim-making but also in the making of judgments regarding how the world works imbedded in hypothetical imperatives. I provide a discussion of the nature of hypothetical imperatives, their relation to maxims, and their relation to the categorical imperative. The chapter concludes with a defense of Kant’s derivation of the categorical imperative from its mere concept, highlighting the central role played by the concept of autonomy in it. The upshot of this chapter is that the use of the higher faculty of intelligence must be present if the will is to operative at all.

This chapter provides an analysis of Kant’s categorical imperative. It shows (a) that the first formulation of the categorical imperative is action-guiding; (b) that properly understood, the contradiction in conception test in the Formula of Universal Law reveals contradictions in maxims of murder and mayhem; (c) that Kant is justified in his claim that each of the principal formulations of the categorical imperative – the Formula of Universal Law (FUL), the Formula of Ends in Themselves (FEI), and the Formula of the Kingdom of Ends (FKE) “unites the other two in it” (4:436). I show why these three formulations can be understood as intentionally equivalent. This is accomplished through a close reading of Kant’s four examples. Understanding how FUL exposes a contradiction in maxims of suicide holds the key to why the three formulations can be considered intentionally equivalent. This intentional equivalence is based on the idea of autonomy at the basis of each formulation. The different formulations share an intentional core; the distinct features of each formulation are analytically developed out of this intentional core.

Traditional pastoral practices have maintained Alpine grasslands over thousands of years, and Alpine biodiversity now depends on these practices. Grasslands are also central to the identity of pastoral communities: They are biocultural landscapes. Across the Alps, these landscapes are now threatened by high rates of agricultural land abandonment as traditional, labor-intensive agricultural methods become uneconomic, and small-scale development increases. The Autonomous Province of Bozen/Bolzano-South Tyrol, Italy, experiences some of the lowest rates of land abandonment and high rates of grassland retention. The case study explores the functions of regulatory intervention and coordination, two of the regulatory functions advanced by this book’s CIRCle Framework of regulatory functions for addressing cumulative environmental problems. It investigates how a diverse set of regulatory interventions provides for maintaining and restoring grasslands in South Tyrol, and how diverse forms of coordination – links between areas of laws, coordinating institutions, and dispute resolution processes – facilitate implementation in a context of deep multilevel governance.