A substantial body of scholarship highlights the role of core values as elements of liberalism–conservatism. However, researchers have yet to fully appreciate the contribution of premises, or abstract descriptive beliefs. This disjuncture has occurred despite the fact that for centuries, philosophers have used premises about human nature and society to ground their religious, political and economic theories. In the observational and experimental studies described in this article, the authors examine the extent to which such premise disputes stand independently from value conflicts as ideological ingredients. The findings suggest that premises are distinct and meaningful elements of political cognition, analogous in importance to several well-worn values.

This article discusses the data embassy, a new international legal concept created in response to a pressing problem. In 2007, Estonia fell victim to ‘distributed denial-of-service attacks’ and consequently, made Estonia's entire public sector data communications network inoperable. Their response was to strengthen their protection against and penalization for cybercrime, and to develop the concept of a ‘data embassy’. On 20 June 2017 the Republic of Estonia and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg signed an ‘Agreement on the hosting of data and information systems’, to host Estonian data in Luxembourg. Such data embassies perform a unique function and benefit from many privileges and immunities, but their legal status has been unclear. This article addresses the question concerning the legal status of the premises of the data embassy.

Philosophers should express their ideas clearly. They should do this in any field of specialization, but especially when they address issues of practical consequence, as they do in bioethics. This article dissects a recent and much-debated contribution to philosophical bioethics by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, examines how exactly it fails to meet the requirement of clarity, and maps a way forward by outlining the ways in which philosophical argumentation could validly and soundly proceed in bioethics.