Alfonso Ballesteros

This chapter analyses the surrogate motherhood case law of the European Court of Human Rights. A case law that focuses on the protection of everyone’s right to respect for private and family life (art. 8 ECHR). Usually the case decision is about the States’ refusal to recognise a birth certificate from a foreign country that has allowed a surrogacy agreement. Court’s decision does not recognize a right to become a father or a mother. And it does not usually declare the right to respect for family or private life of the intended parents has been violated. The decision often states that the right to private life of the children has been violated. Children’s identity and inheritance rights should be protected and the State condemn. This case law leads to protecting children but it leaves little room for the States to oppose surrogacy, whitening the practice.

This paper is an approach to the characteristics of the digital power of large technology companies -or, digital soft power-, and how this power deteriorates democracy. Its forms of manifestation (persuasion, seduction and manipulation) are studied here, as well as its purpose, which is to capture attention. The central aspect of the work, which gives it its title, is addressed in the last section: how this power has led us to a crisis of individual and collective attention, which is one of the causes of the crisis of democracy.

Resumen: Hannah Arendt aborda el problema del racismo contra la población negra en los Estados Unidos en el ámbito social y en el político, dos esferas de la vida humana que distingue cuidadosamente. Esta doble perspectiva ofrece un perfil completo de lo que denomina el “delito original” de los Estados Unidos: la esclavitud y la exclusión del pueblo negro e indio de la Constitución de 1787. Sus reflexiones sobre la educación pública segregada y sobre la desobediencia civil entre la población negra constituyen una oportunidad de repensar el problema de la inclusión jurídica en el mundo actual. Abstract: Hannah Arendt addresses the problem of racism against African-Americans in the social and in the political realm. She makes a careful distinction between these two realms and this double perspective provides a complete profile of what she calls the "original crime" of the United States: Black slavery and the exclusion of Black and Indian people of the 1787 Constitution. His reflections on segregated public education and civil disobedience among African-Americans are an opportunity to rethink the problem of legal inclusion today.

Scant attention has been paid to the notion of property in Hannah Arendt’s thought, and this paper aims to address this gap. For Arendt, property is the realm of privacy, located in the house. She argues that the modern age represented its loss with the expropriation of the peasant classes after the Reformation. As a result, wealth started to be accumulated and became productive through the labor of the new propertyless classes. This new way of dealing with property needed a new notion of property for the laborers. Locke’s understanding gave the laborers the hope of being property-owners through their labor and simultaneously justified the unending accumulation of money; nevertheless, property in its true meaning was never recovered. Arendt believes that recovering property under conditions of equality is an essential consideration, and this egalitarian vision of property only can be achieved if law protects property as well as set limits on the accumulation of wealth.

Digitalisation is attracting much scholarly attention at present. However, scholars often take its benefits for granted, overlooking the essential question: “Does digital technology make us better?” This paper aims to help fill this gap by examining digitalisation as a form of government (digitocracy) and the way it shapes a new kind of man: _animal digitalis_. I argue that the digitalised man is animal-like rather than machine-like. This man does not use efficient and cold machine-like language, but is rather emotionalised through digital technology. If those who are ruled acted like machines, data would not be produced on a mass scale, and machine learning would stop learning. Digital man has animal features and is ruled by his brain’s reward system. We need to abandon this new form of government and the resulting man. To overcome digitalisation, we need a humanism that recovers the proper place of man over animals and artefacts, but maintains respect for the value of nature.

Scant attention has been paid to the notion of property in Hannah Arendt’s thought, and this paper aims to address this gap. For Arendt, property is the realm of privacy, located in the house. She argues that the modern age represented its loss with the expropriation of the peasant classes after the Reformation. As a result, wealth started to be accumulated and became productive through the labor of the new propertyless classes. This new way of dealing with property needed a new notion of property for the laborers. Locke’s understanding gave the laborers the hope of being property-owners through their labor and simultaneously justified the unending accumulation of money; nevertheless, property in its true meaning was never recovered. Arendt believes that recovering property under conditions of equality is an essential consideration, and this egalitarian vision of property only can be achieved if law protects prop- erty as well as set limits on the accumulation of wealth.