Search Results (95)

This article examines the theory of miracles formulated by the distinguished Shī’ī-Mu’tazilī theologian, al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā (965–1044 CE), specifically to contextualize his controversial doctrine of Qurʾānic iʿjāz, known as ṣarfah. The study reconstructs al-Murtaḍā’s general theory of miracles by analyzing his primary works and comparing his positions with standard Muʿtazilī theology. The investigation focused on how his metaphysical and moral frameworks interact to define the nature of miracles. I argue that al-Murtaḍā articulated a “minimal theory of miracles,” wherein miracles function as restricted, localized, and audience-relative “breaches of norms” (khawāriq al-ʿādāt) rather than violations of universal laws. In his view, miracles are morally necessary but temporally restricted acts of God, designed solely to authenticate a prophet to their immediate community. Al-Murtaḍā’s theory shifts the evidential burden of prophetic proof—including the Qur’ān—from continuing intrinsic supernatural qualities to discrete historical testimony. Finally, this study suggests that al-Murtaḍā appears to offer a rationally coherent alternative notion of miracles, that may well succeed from some of the most pressing contemporary intellectual challenges. Full article

Intelligent personnel safety management is a critical component of smart manufacturing infrastructure. This paper presents an integrated framework combining a structurally optimized neural network (enhanced with spatial and channel feature fusion mechanisms for multi-scale detection) with an agent-based large language model (LLM) enhanced with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities for factory safety monitoring. The visual detection component employs the Similarity-Aware Channel Pruning (SACP) method for automated, performance-preserving compression by identifying and suppressing redundant channels based on similarity and norm regularization, while the agent-based LLM with RAG capabilities dynamically integrates real-time violation data with established safety management protocols to generate precise diagnostic reports and operational recommendations. The optimized network achieves real-time violation detection in parallel video streams, and the LLM-powered assistant facilitates intelligent decision-making through natural language querying. Extensive evaluations on multiple benchmark datasets and a real-world safety helmet detection dataset demonstrate the scheme’s superior performance in both accuracy and practical applicability for industrial deployment. Full article

This study examines the welfare conditions, legal ambiguities, and economic inefficiencies inherent in Korea’s traditional bullfighting practices. The study analyzes field data collected during 2025 (February–June), covering 131 contests across six venues, collected by the Animal Liberation Wave (ALW); the results reveal pervasive welfare violations, as evidenced by high avoidance (41.2%) and injury (62.3%) rates among bulls, alongside notable physiological and behavioral stress markers. From a legal perspective, the Animal Protection Act of Korea displays a core inconsistency: it prohibits cruelty to animals yet exempts bullfighting on cultural grounds, thereby compromising legal coherence and undermining welfare standards. Public opinion surveys further demonstrate declining societal support, particularly among younger and urban populations. Comparative cases from Spain, Mexico, and the European Union illustrate alternatives and possible reforms that may preserve cultural identity while eliminating harm against animals. Accordingly, this study proposes a phased policy framework comprising immediate welfare oversight, gradual redirection of subsidies toward humane cultural programs, and legislative amendment to remove the exemption clause. Ultimately, this study contends that harmonizing Korea’s cultural heritage with international welfare norms is both ethically significant and legally necessary, offering a model for culturally sensitive reform in the global context. Full article

This piece examines the persistent conceptual and normative challenges surrounding corruption in international law. It revisits classical definitions and perceptions of corruption, highlighting their influence on contemporary understandings. It critiques the approach of key international instruments, which, despite extensive efforts to combat corruption, have refrained from providing a unified definition, opting instead for pragmatic frameworks that result practically on criminal types. The analysis interrogates the traditional classification of corruption into petty and grand forms, acknowledging the growing recognition of institutional corruption as a distinct and equally destructive category. The article also highlights the bias in existing frameworks that focus predominantly on public-sector misconduct, often overlooking harmful practices in the private sector that are closely linked to broader dynamics of institutional corruption. Finally, it engages with the dual characterization of corruption as both a criminal offence and a potential violation of human rights. It argues for a paradigm shift: international law should focus less on definitional debates and more on recognizing the tangible harms of corruption, enabling accountability and reparations for acts that undermine democratic institutions and violate human rights. Full article

Pre-trial detention is intended to be a measure of last resort, yet it is excessively applied across jurisdictions worldwide. This paper examines its use, with particular emphasis on its application to women and its incompatibility with international human rights law, standards, and norms. We demonstrate that the inappropriate and widespread use of custodial remand violates fundamental human rights, while exposing the gendered and intersectional barriers that impede women’s access to bail. We further underscore the far-reaching social, economic, and emotional consequences of women’s incarceration. Drawing on a limited but expanding body of research, we argue that pre-trial detention operates as a form of gendered punishment that reflects and reinforces structural inequalities, producing enduring harms for women, their families, and communities. The paper concludes by calling for investment in gender-sensitive, non-custodial, and community-based alternatives that advance women’s decarceration. These measures must be underpinned by reforms that give practical effect to human rights law, standards, and norms, while also addressing the structural conditions that lead to women’s involvement in the criminal-legal system, and ending the unnecessary imprisonment of those who are legally innocent. Full article

There are limited studies related to safety violations among Hong Kong construction workers. This study seeks to fill a gap in previous research and provide insight into the current safety violation phenomenon by examining the causes of safety violations. A mixed-method strategy is adopted for this study. The quantitative questionnaire survey, with 365 valid responses, examined the relationships by adapting the framework of the Theory of Planned Behaviour. Thirty-seven semi-structured interviews were then completed to explore the phenomenon. The findings show that intention has a significant impact on safety violations. Two proximal factors (perceived behavioural control (PBC) and attitude) significantly influence their intention, with PBC being the most significant factor. High Reliability Organising, which is the distal factor contributing to PBC, attitude, and descriptive norms, offers a new era of construction safety management that requires a sense of reflectiveness for ongoing improvement. To enhance workers’ intentions, practical interventions can be developed that focus on PBC and attitude. Training should be tailor-made to cater to the specific characteristics demonstrated by different work groups such as young and elderly workers. The government should also review the current weaknesses of safety training. Full article

Background: Road traffic accidents continue to be a leading cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide. Psychological and behavioural factors play a crucial role in traffic safety and are not yet fully understood. Among these, the relationship between individuals and road rules plays a key role in driving behaviour and risk perception. We introduce and validate the MORDE (Moral Disengagement in Road Driving Evaluation) scale, a novel instrument designed to assess the specific cognitive mechanisms through which drivers morally justify risky or rule-violating behaviours. Methods: The scale was developed and validated through a three-step process involving 1336 licensed drivers. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to test its factorial structure, and internal consistency was evaluated using Cronbach’s alpha. Convergent and predictive validity were assessed using self-reported measures of traffic violations and road safety attitudes. Results: The final 14-item version of the MORDE scale shows a robust two-factor structure: (1) Normative Justification of Transgressive Driving and (2) Attribution of Blame and Displacement of Responsibility. The instrument demonstrates strong internal reliability and significant predictive power for driving behaviours and road safety attitudes, beyond what is explained by general moral disengagement. The MORDE scale thus shows good psychometric properties and incremental validity. Conclusions: By identifying psychological risk factors that contribute to unsafe and unsustainable driving, the MORDE scale provides a validated tool that can support educational interventions, traffic safety campaigns, and behaviour change programs. Its use may contribute to the promotion of a safer, more responsible, and environmentally sustainable road culture. Full article

This paper presents a novel support vector machine (SVM) classification approach that simultaneously accounts for both overall and extreme misclassification errors via a dual-norm regularization strategy. Traditional SVMs minimize the $L_1$-norm of slack variables to control global misclassification, while least squares SVM (LSSVM) minimizes the sum of squared errors. In contrast, our method preserves the classical $L_1$-norm penalty to maintain overall classification fidelity and incorporates an additional $L_{\infty }$-norm term to penalize the largest slack variable, thereby constraining the worst-case margin violation. This composite objective yields a more robust and generalizable classifier, particularly effective when occasional large deviations disproportionately affect decision boundaries. The resulting optimization problem minimizes a regularized objective combining the model norm, the sum of slack variables, and the maximum slack variable, with two hyperparameters, $C_1$ and $C_2$, balancing global error against extremal robustness. By formulating the problem under convex constraints, the optimization remains tractable and guarantees a globally optimal solution. Experimental evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves comparable or superior classification accuracy while reducing the impact of outliers and maintaining a sparse model structure. These results underscore the advantage of jointly enforcing $L_1$ and $L_{\infty }$ penalties, providing an effective mechanism to balance average performance with worst-case error sensitivity in support vector classification. Full article

Administrative law is about articulating norms and promoting the adoption and enforcement of human behaviour practices in areas where individual choice conflicts with the public good. Law must fairly describe to the citizenry what is allowed and what is conditionally restricted by administrative law and what is prohibited in criminal law. The conditional use of animals in industrial production of food and fibre for human consumption is allowed (non-criminal), but the conditions which are considered acceptable by society are changing. Humane transportation of livestock is a public concern and the temptation of transporters to load as many animals as possible is an easily understood risk to animal welfare. Livestock hauling has been regulated in Canada since 1857 and is currently regulated by the Health of Animals (Act) Regulations Part XII and enforced nationally by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. After over 30 years of challenging industry consultation, a major revision to the humane transport provisions was proclaimed in 2020. Surprisingly, the revision failed to articulate numerical thresholds that clearly indicate an overcrowding violation. This paper reviews 20 cases from 2004 to 2024 where transporters appealed a penalty for overcrowding livestock transported by land. The paper describes the decision to penalize transporters where there is no bright line definition of an offence. The paper suggests both regulator and regulated choose to work in an intentionally inefficient institutional arrangement, preferring opacity to clarity in what constitutes a violation in law, because “that’s the way we like it”. Full article

The 1958 autonomous episcopal elections and consecrations in China represent a significant episode in the history of the Chinese Catholic Church. One of the central issues at stake was the violation of canonical norms regarding episcopal consecrations; therefore, the Code of Canon Law became a subject of internal debate within the Chinese Catholic Church. This study examines how Chinese Catholic discourse on Canon Law evolved between November 1957 and December 1958, during the early implementation of the policy of self-election (自选) and self-consecration (自圣) of bishops promoted by the Chinese Government. Drawing on Chinese-language sources—most notably articles from Guangyang 广扬, the journal of the Catholic Patriotic Association of Tianjin, and the proceedings of local assemblies held in some dioceses such as Rehe—this study documents how prevailing attitudes toward the Code of Canon Law shifted over the course of these months, from a moderately conciliatory stance to a more radical one. Already dominant in study sessions and political-ideological campaigns of mid-1958, these radical positions appear to have become preponderant toward the end of the year, especially in the wake of Pope Pius XII’s 1958 encyclical Ad Apostolorum Principis, which condemned the autonomous election and consecration of bishops without papal mandate. Full article

While poetry has long relied on musical and visual elements for its communicative power, numerous contemporary poets are drawing so dramatically on the resources of the visual arts and on elements of musical scoring that their poems become inter-arts hybrids. The interdisciplinary character of environmental writing and its attachment to material conditions of planetary life particularly invite the use of visual and/or audio technologies as documentation or as prompts toward multisensory attention that may shift readers’ perceptions of the more-than-human world. This essay examines four recent works of ecopoetry from the US to explore some of the diverse ways in which, by integrating into volumes of poetry their own visual and musical art, poets are expanding the environmental imagination and enhancing their environmental messaging. The visual and musical elements, I argue, offer fresh perceptual lenses that help break down cognitive habits bolstering separations of Western humans from more-than-human realms or dampening awareness of social and cultural norms that foster environmental degradation and violations of environmental justice. The multi-modal works discussed are Jennifer Scappettone’s The Republic of Exit 43, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies, Danielle Vogel’s Edges & Fray, and Jonathan Skinner’s “Blackbird Stanzas.” Full article

The ability to effectively engineer robots with appropriate social behaviors that conform to acceptable social norms and with the potential to influence human behavior remains a challenging area in robotics. Given this, we sought to provide insights into “what can be considered a socially appropriate and effective behavior for robots charged with enforcing social compliance of various magnitudes”. To this end, we investigate how social robots can be equipped with context-inspired persuasive behaviors for human–robot interaction. For this, we conducted three separate studies. In the first, we explored how the android robot “ERICA” can be furnished with negative persuasive behaviors using a video-based within-subjects design with N = 50 participants. Through a video-based experiment employing a mixed-subjects design with N = 98 participants, we investigated how the context of norm violation and individual user traits affected perceptions of the robot’s persuasive behaviors in the second study. Lastly, we investigated the effect of the robot’s appearance on the perception of its persuasive behaviors, considering two humanoids (ERICA and CommU) through a within-subjects design with N = 100 participants. Findings from these studies generally revealed that the robot could be equipped with appropriate and effective context-sensitive persuasive behaviors for human–robot interaction. Specifically, the more assertive behaviors (displeasure and anger) of the agent were found to be effective (p < 0.01) as a response to a situation of repeated violation after an initial positive persuasion. Additionally, the appropriateness of these behaviors was found to be influenced by the severity of the violation. Specifically, negative behaviors were preferred for persuasion in situations where the violation affects other people (p < 0.01), as in the COVID-19 adherence and smoking prohibition scenarios. Our results also revealed that the preference for the negative behaviors of the robots varied with users’ traits, specifically compliance awareness (CA), agreeableness (AG), and the robot’s embodiment. The current findings provide insights into how social agents can be equipped with appropriate and effective context-aware persuasive behaviors. It also suggests the relevance of a cognitive-based approach in designing social agents, particularly those deployed in sensitive social contexts. Full article

Orthographic knowledge is a critical component of skilled language use, yet its large-scale behavioral signatures remain understudied in Spanish. To address this gap, we developed OrthoKnow-SP, a megastudy that captures spelling decisions from 27,185 native Spanish-speaking adults who completed an 80-item forced-choice task. Each trial required selecting the correctly spelled word from a pair comprising a real word and a pseudohomophone foil that preserved pronunciation while violating the correct graphemic representation. The stimuli targeted six high-confusability contrasts in Spanish orthography. We recorded response accuracy and reaction times for over 2.17 million trials, alongside demographic and device metadata. Results show robust variability across items and individuals, with item-level metrics closely aligned with independent norms of word prevalence. A composite difficulty index integrating speed and accuracy further allowed fine-grained item ranking. The dataset provides the first population-scale norms of Spanish spelling difficulty, capturing regional and generational diversity absent from traditional lab-based studies. Public release of OrthoKnow-SP enables new research on the cognitive and demographic factors shaping orthographic decisions, and provides educators, clinicians, and developers with a valuable benchmark for assessing spelling competence and modeling written language processing. Full article

This paper is a critical, historical review of the literature on intelligence and moral development. In this review we come to a number of conclusions. For example, we identify methodological issues in past research on intelligence in relation to moral development, from Wiggam’s paper in 1941 through the first quarter of the 21st century, and we commend research done with methodological improvements we specify. Also, we conclude that Heyes’ evolutionary psychology that humans have a specifiable “starter kit” of processes that produce “cognitive gadgets,” including those used in normative thinking, should be given further attention. But, importantly, we note that these “gadgets” may be “malware” or be missing. Another conclusion is that Gert’s account of harms and benefits, of the moral rules, of how the rules are justified, and of how violations are justified, can be a fruitful component of the study of moral development. Furthermore, we argue that the work on wisdom by Sternberg, Kristjansson, and others is important to grasp for its relevance to putting morality into action. Lastly, we discuss areas for future research, especially in neuroscience, and we recommend paying attention to practices for the building of practical wisdom and morality. Full article

Background/Objectives: Conduct Disorder (CD) involves persistent behavior violating societal norms and others’ rights. A subgroup of adolescents with CD exhibits callous–unemotional (CU) traits, which are linked to severe antisocial behavior and poorer long-term outcomes. Research suggests parenting plays an important role in the development of CU traits. However, few studies have explored the role of maternal and paternal parenting practices mediating the link between CU traits and violence within the same study. Methods: This study included 222 adolescents with Conduct Disorder (M_age = 15.7, 68% male) and examined whether perceived parental warmth and hostility, measured using the Quality of Parental Relationships, mediated the association between callous–unemotional (CU) traits and youth involvement in violent crime and gun violence, assessed via the Violent Crime Assessment and Gun Violence Questionnaire. Results: Double mediation models showed that only maternal hostility mediated the link between CU traits and violence, while maternal warmth and paternal parenting practices did not. Conclusions: Findings emphasize the role of maternal hostility in exacerbating violence, including gun violence, among adolescents with CD and CU traits. Full article