In this chapter, we describe the context of the 2020 presidential election campaign, including the COVID-19 pandemic, racial justice protests, a highly contentious debate, and challenges to the integrity of the election. We review the state of the literature, showing that messages from the candidates, political parties, and the news media inform voters about the candidates’ policy positions, policy priorities, and personal characteristics. And campaign messages, via the candidates or the news media, can alter the criteria voters consider when evaluating the competing candidates. Finally, aspects of the campaign can encourage or discourage participation in the election. We turn next to presenting the citizen-centered theory of campaigns. We argue that people’s predispositions (i.e., political and psychological) drive the procurement and assimilation of information, which influence how individuals evaluate campaign events and campaign issues, and ultimately these evaluations influence their views of the competing candidates and their voting decisions. Finally, we discuss our three-way panel study where we gather information from the same individuals at different points during the 2020 campaign, allowing us to model how campaign events change people’s attitudes about the presidential candidates.

The term “content moderation,” a holdover from the days of small bulletin-board discussion groups, is quite a bland way to describe an immensely powerful and consequential aspect of social governance. Today’s largest platforms make judgments on millions of pieces of content a day, with world-shaping consequences. And in the United States, they do so mostly unconstrained by legal requirements. One senses that “content moderation” – the preferred term in industry and in the policy community – is something of a euphemism for content regulation, a way to cope with the unease that attends the knowledge (1) that so much unchecked power has been vested in so few hands and (2) that the alternatives to this arrangement are so hard to glimpse.

This chapter concludes the book offering a final analysis of the story of the continuing Kazakh Spring.

The chapter delves into the question of whether medicine is a science, examining arguments that suggest medicine is not a science due to differing aims, progress criteria, and moral commitments (as proposed by Munson 1981; Pellegrino 1998; Miller and Miller 2014). The chapter counters these arguments by challenging assumptions about science’s aims. Rather than simply increasing knowledge, the chapter defends the "Understanding Thesis" (informed by debates in epistemology and philosophy of science with reference to authors such as Kitcher 2001; 2008; 2011; Kvanvig 2003; Bird 2007; 2019a; 2019b; Douglas 2009; Pritchard 2010; Grimm 2014; Potochnik 2017), which holds that science’s aim is understanding, making the world more transparent. This aim is inherently practical, driven by our interest in manipulating the environment and bolstering our agency, thus making scientific inquiry responsive to promoting human agency and autonomy. As such, science, like medicine, is a moral enterprise, and there is no significant difference in terms of aims, progress criteria, or moral commitments that would disqualify medicine from being considered a science. It concludes by discussing the implications of this for scientists’ responsibilities.

Mood disorders are more common in persons with medical illness than in the general population, and add to suffering, morbidity, and mortality. As to diagnosis, emotional states seen in the context of illness range from denial to bland indifference to “normal” sadness, to pathological anxiety and depressive or manic syndromes. Within this range fall both primary mood disorders and mood disorders secondary to the primary illness and its treatment.Treatment is complicated by difficulties with patient engagement and retention, limited clinical trial data, illness-related sensitivity to medications and alterations in drug metabolism, drug side effects, and drug interactions. Limited data are available about potentially valuable treatments such as exercise, transcranial magnetic stimulation, ketamine and psychedelics. Collaborative care models for depression treatment in medical settings are effective but demanding to implement and sustain. Special considerations apply to treatment of patients near the end of life and those requesting hastened death. Psychiatric treatment of the medically ill patient can evoke strong feelings in the treatment provider.

Chapter 26 explores the role of the English language and the culture of Britain on Goethe’s development. The influences began in his childhood, and became particularly significant in his twenties, owing not least to his friendship with Herder and their shared enthusiasm for Shakespeare and Ossian. The chapter also emphasises the importance of visitors from Britain in furthering Goethe’s knowledge of a country to which he never travelled himself, and examines his relationship with contemporary British writers, above all Byron and Carlyle. It closes with an overview of the reception of Goethe in Britain.

This chapter brings to light the main conclusions of this work, while also presenting generalizable principles for future research to expand on. This part of the book contributes to the theoretical study of mediation and aims to encourage further first-level analysis approaches to the study of mediation and mediators. Most importantly, it clarifies the actual input of Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Staffan de Mistura to the mediation efforts in Syria. It leaves readers with a detailed record of what Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Staffan de Mistura have done in their roles as mediators in Syria and presents a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics that shaped their decision-making. Outside the cases of these three mediators, it introduces a method by which to forensically identify a mediator’s fingerprints on the mediation process and charts a map to guide investigations into the decision-making processes of mediators. In doing so, it hopefully serves to encourage steps toward developing institutional mechanisms to evaluate the performance of these mediators – to hold them accountable for their successes and their failures.

In this chapter, I discuss in what sense and to what extent institutions have political authority. I take institutions with legitimate authority to be justified in wielding political power, where this political power is backed by the threat of coercion. Against the position that international institutions are not coercive, I claim that applying an adequate conception of coercion – which takes the concept of enforcement as paradigmatic for coercion, rather than the concept of pressure – enables us to understand some international institutions as coercive. It also lays open the assumption that a single conception of authority applied to all international institutions misconceives the diversity in aims and purposes of international institutions. Institutions that coordinate morally mandatory aims and institutions that coordinate mutual advantage can both be plausibly understood as coercive, even though their authority differs in scope and in what standards they must satisfy. Finally, I discuss whether the standard of state consent is appropriate for international institutions: while it is plausible for institutions that coordinate mutual advantage, it is implausible as a standard of legitimacy for institutions that coordinate morally mandatory aims – such as institutions of international criminal justice.