Hugh Edmond Breakey

Liberalism and intellectual property rights

Justifications for intellectual property rights are typically made in terms of utility or natural property rights. In this article, I justify limited regimes of copyright and patent grounded in no more than the rights to use our ideas and to contract, conjoined at times with a weak right to hold property in tangibles. I describe the Contracting Situation plausibly arising from vesting rational agents with these rights. I go on to consider whether in order to provide the best protection for the voluntary activities and consensual interactions occurring within the Contracting Situation, it might be appropriate or even necessary to move to institutions qualitatively similar to copyright and patent. I conclude that in at least some circumstances limited regimes of copyright and patent may be defendable solely on the basis of these very basic rights.

Weak Links in the Chain of Authority: The Challenges of Intervention Decisions to Protect Civilians

The United Nations Security Council mandates peacekeeping operations to protect civilians, and regularly authorizes operations to use force to achieve this objective. Yet in the challenging situations facing contemporary peacekeeping operations, local civilians remain vulnerable to extreme violence. One set of reasons for this unwelcome result surrounds the decisions to protect civilians forcefully in any given context. This paper describes how peacekeeping operations vest discretion over the use of robust force across multiple agents. Using signal detection theory to model the decision-making of these agents, our analysis shows how the iterative nature of the decision-making process gives rise to a chain of authority where the most conservative decision-maker tends to prove decisive. With this analysis in tow, we turn our attention to recent protection initiatives, including Security Council Resolution 2098 (2013) and its controversial mandate for the new ‘Intervention Brigade’ in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Natural Intellectual Property Rights and the Public Domain

No natural rights theory justifies strong intellectual property rights. More specifically, no theory within the entire domain of natural rights thinking – encompassing classical liberalism, libertarianism and left-libertarianism, in all their innumerable variants – coherently supports strengthening current intellectual property rights. Despite their many important differences, all these natural rights theories endorse some set of members of a common family of basic ethical precepts. These commitments include non-interference, fairness, non-worsening, consistency, universalisability, prior consent, self-ownership, self-governance, and the establishment of zones of autonomy. Such commitments have clear applications pertaining to the use and ownership of created ideas. I argue that each of these commitments require intellectual property rights to be substantially limited in scope, strength and duration. In this way the core mechanisms of natural rights thinking ensure a robust public domain and categorically rule out strong intellectual property rights.

Tourism and Aldo Leopold's “cultural harvest”: creating virtuous tourists as agents of sustainability

Sustainable tourism aims to achieve a balance between the needs of tourists, the environment, local people, and businesses – a situation complicated by the numerous ethical issues at play. This paper presents an original account of the ethics of Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), a key figure in the development of modern environmental ethics, as it unfolds in his classic work, A Sand County Almanac. We argue that prior interpretations failed to incorporate Leopolds lynchpin cultural harvest idea into his larger “land ethic”, and that a proper understanding of the cultural harvest reveals how tourism and other recreational activities can drive a persons ethical development. Ultimately, the land ethic helps us protect and nurture the most precious sustainability resource: human beings that value and respect the environment. The paper will be of value to tourism scholars, to heritage interpreters, to travel journalists, to tourism marketing staff, and to tourism managers. It shows the enormous opportunities for better marketing and heritage interpretation, notes the potential value of slow tourism, and the need for opening five key areas of the cultural harvest for tourists: storytelling, learning and knowledge, beauty and aesthetic appreciation, rarity and the hunt for trophy, and signature/personality.

Dividing to conquer: using the separation of powers to structure institutional inter-relations

The separation of powers constitutes a vital feature of western democracies, enshrined in myriad federal and state constitutions. Yet, as a broad principle, theorists struggle to pin down its precise nature, and many contend that the tripartite separation of state powers into legislative, executive and judicial branches proves simplistic and infeasible. I argue we should understand the separation of powers as a strategy used to structure relations between the separated institutions. This process of structuring empowers the creation of novel inter-relations among institutions (relations of balancing, checking, dividing, coordinating and so on), with the goal of improving their institutional integrity. In short, we separate only to reconnect.

Is there a right to tourism

With international tourist numbers surpassing 1 billion in 2012, the increasing consideration of the ethical issues in the Tourism Studies literature, and the investigation of “rights” in the broader context, it is surprising that the right to tourism has remained a relatively unexamined philosophical question. Indeed, even broader rights, such as the right to leisure, the right to freedom of movement, and the right to the pursuit of happiness, have little philosophical treatment—compared to the well-trammeled ground of rights of property, free speech, and suffrage, for example. While it is not possible (in a short review article) to mount a comprehensive case, in this review article Noreen and Hugh Breakey position their argument in the context of the international law of human rights, and offer a prima facie justification of the right to tourism on a number of ethical grounds, and present what they argue to be the philosophical right to pursue tourism.

Positive Duties and Human Rights: Challenges, Opportunities and Conceptual Necessities:

Can human rights impose positive duties to act, as well as negative duties constraining action? At first glance there seem to be strong reasons for wishing human rights could impose positive duties – such reasons include the promotion of welfare rights and the positive protection of liberty rights (e.g. police protection against assault). However, any attempt to construct rights-based positive duties threatens to dissolve hallmark features of rights. In this article the duty-properties possessed by uncontroversial rights-based negative duties are comprehensively analysed. Drawing on this analysis, a range of key properties is developed, including ‘regime-level right-holder universality’ and ‘many-to-one directedness’, as well as a ‘centres of pressure’ vision of rights, by which it is argued that positive duties can accord with the keystone commitments of rights-based moral theories. In so doing, a conceptual space for rights-based positive duties is defended.

Wired to Fail: Virtue and Dysfunction in Baltimore’s Narrative

Abstract How can public institutions achieve their goals and best nurture virtue in their members? In this chapter, I seek answers to these questions in a perhaps unlikely place: the television series The Wire. Known for its unflinching realism, the crime drama narrates the intertwined lives of police, criminals, politicians, teachers and journalists in drug-plagued urban Baltimore. Yet even in the thick and quick of institutional dysfunction the drama portrays, human virtue springs forth and institutions (despite themselves) sometimes perform their roles. I begin this exploration of The Wire by drawing on Montesquieu and other political theorists to evaluate the problems facing state institutions – problems of diversity and principle as much as selfishness and power-mongering. I then turn to the prospects for virtue within modern institutions, developing and applying the system of Alasdair MacIntyre and paying particular attention to the role of narrative in cementing and integrating virtue.

Protection Norms and Human Rights: A Rights-Based Analysis of the Responsibility to Protect and the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict

In the international context, human rights are rarely secured by the black letter of law, but rather by the soft laws, political policies and moral prescriptions of protection norms. Two key international protection norms are the well-established Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict (PoC) and - recently added in the last decade - the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP). Yet there is substantial confusion about the specific nature of these two norms, their relationship to one another, and their relationship to the human rights that are held to ground and shape each of them. These questions are complex not merely because there are several distinct PoC norms, nor because all these norms differ one from another. The complexity arises because the relevant differences apply to separate dimensions of each norm. In this way it is possible for a norm to be in one sense narrower than another, yet in another sense to be deeper, and in distinct further senses to be both broader and weaker. With such intricacies in mind, this paper develops a five-dimensional rights-based analysis of norms and uses it to differentiate RtoP from three separate PoC norms, and to illustrate the distinct ways each protection norm provides multi-layered rights protection.

Conceptualizing Personal and Institutional Integrity: The Comprehensive Integrity Framework

Abstract In this paper, we present a conceptual and terminological system – what we term the ‘Comprehensive Integrity Framework’ – capable of applying to both personal and institutional integrity, and to different levels of institutions (including sub-institutions and institutional complexes). We distinguish between three sorts of integrity: consistency-integrity (whether the agent’s acts accord with her claimed values); coherence-integrity (whether the agent’s character and internal constitution accord with her claimed values); and context-integrity (whether the agent’s environment facilitates her living up to her claimed values). We then employ this conceptual system to explore similarities, differences and overlaps between personal and institutional integrity, drawing in particular on moral philosophic work on personal integrity (on the one hand) and on ‘integrity systems’ and public administration approaches to institutional integrity (on the other).