abstract: Saying, "if Mary had watered Sam's plant, it wouldn't have died," is an ordinary way to identify Mary not watering Sam's plant as the cause of its death. But there are problems with this statement. If we identify Mary's omitted action as the cause, we seemingly admit an inordinate number of omissions as causes. For any counterfactual statement containing the omitted action is true (e.g. if Hillary Clinton had watered Sam's plant, it wouldn't have died). The statement, moreover, is mysterious because it is not clear why one protasis is more salient than any alternatives such as "if Sam hadn't gone to Bismarck." In the burgeoning field of experimental metaphysics, some theorists have tried to account for these intuitions about omissive causes. By synthesizing this data and providing a few experiments, I will suggest that judgments - and maybe metaphysics - about omissive causes necessarily have a normative feature. This understanding of omissive causes may be able to adequately resolve the problems above. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Philosophy 2013

The purpose of this study is, through qualitative interviews, to identify the reasoning behind working methods designed to counteract gender roles and norms, as applied by nine teachers working in three municipal preschools in Stockholm. Beside, another aim is to gain an understanding of their reasoning, and the methods used to promote gender equality among the children. As the pre-school's curriculum is an important document regulated by the government in all Swedish preschools, teachers are expected to follow it in their work. Within the curriculum there are rules and regulations related to equal rights and equality; therefore we also wish to examine how preschool teachers interpret and apply this curriculum. The qualitative methods used in this study help us to gain an understanding of the preschool teachers based upon their lived experiences of the studied issues. Through this study we have used previous scientific research by Arvidsson (2014), Eidevald (2009) and (2011), and Dolk (2013) to support our thesis. The theory applied is based on Giddens and Griffiths (2007) and Allwood and Erikson’s (2010) definition of social-constructionism. The results of this study show us that all the interviewed preschool teachers have some kind of awareness and knowledge of the subject. However the teachers’ knowledge of what gender- and equality work involves, and their knowledge on how to work gender-consciously, varies a lot. The main factor in this is their level of education and interest.

This essay is a bachelor’s thesis in the field of International Relations. The purpose is to make visible and analyse how problem representations in policies can reproduce norms, and how this has changed over a limited period of time. The purpose includes the ambition to be able to illustrate deficiencies in the European Union’s policies on gender equality. The essay intends to analyse the representations and norms in terms of a gender system. The theoretical framework consists of theories on normalization and gender system. The method used is called "What’s the problem?" developed by Carol Lee Bacchi. To achieve gender equality the EU produces policies on gender mainstreaming, this study analyses three of these policy documents. The result of the analysis shows that there has been no major change in the representation of problems in the documents and that they are reproducing stereotypical norms. The result also shows that the representations of problems are possible to explain with the theory on gender system, which allows further studies to develop a well-grounded critique of the EU policies.

Après la « ṧahada » (témoignage de foi), qui est le premier pilier de l’islam, la conversion impose au nouveau musulman d’obéir aux lois et aux règles inspirées du Qur’ân et de la tradition prophétique (Sunna). Un tel témoignage implique de suivre un ensemble de normes liées à la pratique religieuse qu’un musulman s’engage à respecter. Cette thèse analyse des cas de conversion, et tout en tenant compte des origines familiales et sociales de chaque converti. Elle s’est penchée sur les changements opérés dans la vie de ces nouveaux musulmans, suite à leur acte de conversion. Partant de là, la question posée est de savoir si, chez les convertis, un tel changement engendre des dilemmes avec les normes de vie antérieures, en vigueur dans un pays laïc, et si oui si ces dilemmes sont ou non durables ou intraitables. Ces dilemmes, loin de se limiter à quelques domaines précis (comme le port du voile, les prières etc.), s’étendent à une vision bien plus globale et plus générale, touchant le sujet dans sa complexité - autrement dit dans tous les domaines de son existence. Cette thèse a également pour objectif de préciser la vision portée globalement sur la place des convertis dans ce que l’on nomme « l’islam en France ». Or, cette vision suppose que l’islam est pensé en association avec l’immigration, alors que ces convertis, depuis un certain temps se multiplient en France, en n’étant pas des immigrés. Pour répondre à ces questions, cette thèse aborde la question de la responsabilité morale selon une approche en lien avec la sociologie de la morale et la sociologie des religions, en focalisant l’attention sur le respect des normes islamiques dans un pays laïc comme l’est la France. / After the "ṧahada" (the testimony of faith), which is the first pillar of Islam, conversion requires the new Muslim to obey the laws and rules inspired by the Qur'ân and the prophetic tradition (Sunna). It implies following a set of norms related to the religious practice that a Muslim commits himself to respect. This thesis analyzes cases of conversion, while taking into account the family and social origins of each convert. It examines the changes in the lives of these new Muslims, following their conversion. From this point of view, the question is whether, in the case of converts, such a change leads to dilemmas related to the pre-conversion respect of norms in a secular country, and whether or not these dilemmas are sustainable or intractable. These dilemmas, far from being limited to a few specific areas (such as wearing the veil, prayers, etc.), extend to the much broader field of the subject’s existence, in its complexity. This thesis also aims at clarifying the overall vision of the place of converts in is the so-called "Islam in France". However, this vision assumes that Islam is thought in association with immigration, whereas these converts are not immigrants. In order to answer these questions, this thesis addresses the question of moral responsibility according to an approach related to the sociology of morality and the sociology of religions, focusing on the respect of Islamic norms in a secular country such as France.

1 Morality and law For the most of us it is quite clear what law is. Most of us have certain idea what law represents. A lot of us may have a different idea, it is because of many elements which affect our law perception. On the most basic level, law is something which is connected to specific values in society. Based on this idea we can certainly say that law is something which guarantees balance in society and system which provides safety. On the other hand, morality is a subject of a discipline called ethics. This subject represents a system which provides and protects distinctive values which have different normative quality. This system is formed by high amount of appropriate rules of behavior and its way to realize this behavior. In the past, the connection between these two systems was very important, it was a noticeable fact that these two systems cooperate and communicate. Even though nowadays these systems are more and more divided, they still interact. In the law of Czech Republic the connection between morality and law can be observed especially in the good manners. Good manners are intentions which are projected throughout the whole law system. The main goal of good manners and morality is to fill the gaps in the law. Another important goal is also to straighten the perception of justice in the...

This dissertation consists of three essays exploring the heterogeneity of gender differences in behavior across contrasting societies. Are women naturally wired to behave differently than men or is it the social context in which the gender roles operate that motivate their behavior? I study this question in the contexts of risk, trust, and trustworthiness, moral hazard and repayment behavior in microfinance. I use the approach of conducting controlled field experiments in neighboring matrilineal and patrilineal societies in rural India. The two societies differ in gender roles but are comparable otherwise. Understanding the societal and cultural factors that drive gender differences in behavior helps to prescribe optimally-targeted policy designs. The first essay evaluates the universal policy of gender targeting to mitigate microfinance loan defaults and studies the reasons for such gender differences in default. I design and conduct microfinance field experiments with individual and group liability treatments in comparable matrilineal and patrilineal societies in India. I observe a reversal of gender effect on loan default across the two societies. I find that women have a lower default in the patrilineal society but higher default in the matrilineal society compared to their male counterparts. I also find that group liability leads to moral hazard among the individual group members but reduces overall default due to risk sharing among them. My results suggest that while women are better clients on average, a universal policy of gender targeting to reduce defaults in microfinance might be suboptimal. The second essay builds on the findings of the first essay that group liability contracts lead to moral hazard among the borrowers. In this essay, I evaluate the policy of gender targeting to mitigate moral hazard problems in microfinance and study the underlying reasons for such gender differences in moral hazard. I address this question by following a similar methodology to the first essay. My experimental design allows decomposing the different moral hazard channels through which default occurs in microfinance and interact them with gender and types of societies (matrilineal and patrilineal). I find that women in matrilineal society are more prone to exhibit moral hazard behavior than patrilineal women. Based on my findings, I argue that the gender differences in moral hazard is driven by the difference in social context, norms and the gender roles between the two societies. The final essay examines what drives gender differences in trust and trustworthiness, by conducting trust experiments in neighboring matrilineal and patrilineal societies in India. I find that on average the matrilineal subjects are more trusting as well as more trustworthy than the patrilineal subjects, but there is a significant heterogeneity in gender effects. Women in matrilineal society are both less trusting and less trustworthy than patrilineal women, compared to their male counterparts. This finding holds true even after controlling for risk preference and other individual characteristics. My findings suggest that societal structures are crucially linked to the observed gender differences in trust and trustworthiness.

Intellectual property law theory is premised on a utilitarian justification granting limited time monopolies for encouraging creation, innovation and its dissemination to society. However, in the last several decades, scholars have been mounting empirical evidence to show that in some industries, creativity and innovation exist outside the contours of intellectual property law and thrive despite their lack of reliance on the laws. Instead, what they uncovered is that creators in these industries follow norms that mitigate issues surrounding some kinds of copying. Intellectual property protection for fashion design in Canada is fragmented across a complex legal landscape that entails several different laws, unique in scope, eligibility requirements and rights. This complex framework is not unique to the fashion design industry but is similar for design industries generally. Navigating through these laws can be daunting and thus inaccessible for the some segments of the design industry that are small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) that have limited resources to expend on legal advice and registration. Using grounded theory methodology and qualitative and quantitative methods, this research explored the use of intellectual property law and social norms by the independent fashion design segment in Montreal and in Toronto and the contours of copying and the public domain. What the empirical research reveals is that independent fashion designers do not use the law to protect their designs and instead, use mechanisms that centre on the negative copying norm. Negative copying is copying that is negatively perceived. It is not necessarily legally infringing or economically harmful, although it can be both. Further, it can apply to subject matter that is not the subject matter of intellectual property law. This norm against negative copying is supported by extra-legal prevention and enforcement mechanisms that have been developed by individuals within the segment in order to mitigate the issue of copying. The empirical research also reveals that in addition to the economic incentives to create, there are also a number of non-economic incentives such as identity and reputational interests that drive creativity and help reinforce the norm against negative copying. Using grounded theory enabled me to draw on literature from a number of disciplines in order to help contextualize these findings and approach the analysis from the perspective of intellectual property theory, policy and law, social norms (sociology and psychology) as well as economic geography, and design.

L’interrogation première de cette thèse est issue de questionnements liés à notre activité professionnelle au sein de dispositifs dédiés à l’insertion professionnelle et au maintien en emploi des personnes handicapées. Comment mener des politiques spécifiquement destinées à ce public alors même que la définition de ce qui caractérisait les personnes handicapées n’était pas encore formalisée ? Après avoir fait porter nos analyses sur les limites des classifications actuelles du handicap, sur l’impossibilité de définir le handicap avec la rigueur des classifications scientifiques ou de le définir par le seul recours à la médecine, nous avons envisagé de concevoir le handicap comme une relation singulière entre normes sociales et expérience individuelle. En cela le recours aux premières œuvres de Foucault et à des écrits, pour une bonne part inédits, de Canguilhem nous était d’un grand secours. Ces auteurs nous permettaient de préparer notre formalisation du concept de handicap qui repose sur l’idée centrale de « corps-soi » empruntée à Yves Schwartz. Le handicap est alors considéré comme une expérience singulière du corps-soi à l’épreuve de normes sociales antagoniques. Notre thèse principale était alors la suivante : le concept de handicap peut servir de prisme pour renouveler l’analyse de pratiques humaines et de formes discursives théoriques. Nous l'avons alors soumis à trois procédures de test dans des domaines d’activité et des corpus théoriques pourtant bien connus. Notre thèse ainsi renforcée, nous avons pour finir tenté de proposer un réinvestissement de nos analyses dans les politiques publiques destinées aux personnes handicapées. / The original question this thesis started with arose in the context of our professional activities within organizations dealing with the integration of disabled people in the world of work. How could policies specifically addressed to this public be enforced when the very definition of what characterized disabled people had not yet been formulated? After focusing our analyses on the limits of the current classifications of disabilities, on the impossibility to define disability with the exactness of scientific classifications or by only resorting to medicine, we thought of conceiving disability as a singular relationship between social norms and individual experience. In so doing, Foucault’s first works and mostly unpublished writings by Canguilhem were a great help. These authors allowed us to prepare our formulation of the concept of disability which is based on Yves Schwartz’s central idea of “corps-soi” (body and self together). A disability is then considered as a singular experience of the “body and self” in the face of antagonistic social norms. This view of what disability is lead us then to present our main thesis: disability, considered as a concept, can be used as a prism to renew the analysis of human practices and of theoretical discourse. We then submitted our thesis to three different test procedures, so as to check if, with disability as a starting point, we could renew our understanding of activities and theoretical corpuses, well-known though they may be. We felt the process tended to validate our reflection and eventually made suggestions as to how public policies for the disabled could benefit from our thesis.

Empowerment-based approaches to social development has attracted substantial attention in the last two decades. At the core of this debate is the preposition that empowering marginalised groups can improve their agency, with possible favourable implications for their life outcomes. The household bargaining literature has examined the effect of women’s empowerment/bargaining power on development outcomes (e.g. health, education, agriculture and household expenditure). A core issue in this literature is the measurement of what constitute women’s empowerment. The literature in economics and human development has tended to rely on the use of proxies that capture women’s access to resources and or capabilities/functioning. This approach tends to ignore or deemphasise the importance of social norms/informal institutions (norms, values, traditions, beliefs etc), which via patriarchal gender stereotypes, restrict women’s voice and access to resources. Although some researchers in demography have used proxies that capture social norms, they have been used alone, thus telling a single sided story as in the case of the economics and human development literature. Secondly, the discussion on the instrumental importance of women’s empowerment in this literature seem to have focused mainly on mean development outcomes compared to the distributions of such outcomes in the population (inequality). Thus, the current study, using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from 20 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, computes a composite women’s empowerment Index (CWEI), together with two sub-indices (social norms and access to resources) representing two dimensions of CWEI. The study further examines the comparative effect of social norms and women’s access to resources on household health (i.e. mean health outcomes for women and children and poor child health inequality). Results suggest that in general, women from Southern Africa have a higher score on CWEI compared to their counterparts from East and Central Africa and West Africa. In addition, Southern African women are more able to negotiate social norms that constrain their voice and agency, whiles women from West Africa perform better on the access to resources index. Information from the DHS data and other external data sources (World Development Indicators database, International Labour Office and WEIGO), together with the SSA literature on the politics of liberation struggles and the formal/informal dichotomy of SSA economies, suggest that the sub-regional differences may be due to the unique history of liberation struggles in Southern Africa and the relatively large size of the informal sector in West Africa. Multivariate results also confirm the long held view that women’s empowerment positively influences household health (mean health outcomes and inequality), with social norms having a much higher effect on household health compared to women’s access to resources. In addition, the results suggest that other factors such as women’s education, household wealth, access to and availability of health services, rural/urban and provincial differences have a higher effect on household health compared to the two dimensions of women’s empowerment. The study concludes, advocating that interventions aimed at improving women’s empowerment and bargaining emphasise issues of social norms, since they are likely to constrain women’s voice, access to resources and consequently implications on household outcomes. This emphasis must however take into consideration the importance of other equally important factors (women’s education, household wealth, access to and availability of health services etc), given that women’s empowerment (especially informal institutions such as social norms) could take a long time to change and their effect realized in the long-term.

This thesis is about foreign policy analysis and what it could learn from an examination of Turkey's Outside Turks policy. More specifically, the thesis explores the implications of the post-Kemalist changes in Turkey on Outside Turks communities in the case of Kosovar Turks and offers a norm-based analysis of the constitutive relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy formation and conduct. Throughout the thesis, accordingly, the domestic norms guiding the way Turkey approaches Outside Turks, the conduct of domestic norms-guided Outside Turks policy and, finally, the implications of such policy for the Kosovar Turks are explored. Based on this, the study establishes firstly that the traditional policy of transforming the religiously defined Turkish speaking Muslim communities in the surrounding countries to nationally thinking and acting ethnic Turkish communities has changed after 1980s, but particularly during the Justice and Development Party rule. The aspiration shifted towards imagining Outside Turks in cultural and religious lines, other than in purely ethnic sense. Thus invoking and safeguarding the practice of Muslim identity, history and culture became a priority concern in the Outside Turks policy agenda. The thesis secondly establishes that this shift in approach has been generated by four post-Kemalist norms, namely Ottomania, de-ethnicized nationhood, Turkish Islam, and Islamic Internationalism. These post-Kemalist norms have manifested themselves as practices of transforming the ethnically mobilized and behaving Turkish community in Kosovo as religiously and historico-culturally thinking and acting community. The thesis thirdly establishes that the post-Kemalist approach to the Outside Turk community in Kosovo has been constitutive for the community. Accordingly, Turkey’s anti-nationalist practices and activities of restoring inter-ethnic relations in Ottoman lines have partly relieved the relations between Turks and Albanians, facilitated the transcending of ethnicity as a bases for organizing relations, and increased the scope for collaboration between Muslim communities in the country. However, such post-Kemalist policies could not deconstruct the dominant nationalist framings, it has rather been counter-productive. Therefore, due to the post-Kemalist approach, the ethnic Turkish identity has been sharpened, Ottomans have been ethnicized as a Turkish emperorship, the nationalism gained a reactionary character, and people now believe that their ethnic survival is jeopardized by Turkey’s anti-nationalism or ‘anti-Turkism’ as the community calls it. This in return has led the community to further embrace Kemalist frames and discourses to resist Turkey’s post-Kemalist approach and norms. The thesis, consequently, introduced a norm-based foreign policy analysis model for examining the overseas implications and influences of domestic norms and norm changes.