Governments today often apologize for past injustices and scholars increasingly debate the issue, with many calling for apologies and reparations. Others suggest that what matters are victims of injustice today, not injustices in the past. Spinner-Halev argues that the problem facing some peoples is not just the injustice of the past, but that they still suffer from injustice today. They experience what he calls enduring injustices, and it is likely that these will persist without action to address them. The (...) history of these injustices matters, not as a way to assign responsibility or because we need to remember more, but in order to understand the nature of the injustice and to help us think of possible ways to overcome it. Suggesting that enduring injustices fall outside the framework of liberal theory, Spinner-Halev spells out the implications of arguments for conceptions of liberal justice and progress, reparations, apologies, state legitimacy and post-nationalism. (shrink)

Groups around the world are increasingly successful in maintaining or winning autonomy. However, what happens to individuals within the groups who find that their group discriminates against them? This volume brings together sixteen distinguished scholars who examine the balance between group autonomy and individual rights in relation to conflicts involving gender, religion, culture, and indigenous rights in the national and international sphere.

Advocates of remedying historical injustices urge political communities to take responsibility for their past, but their arguments are ambiguous about whether all past injustices need remedy, or just those regarding groups that suffer from current injustice. This ambiguity leaves unanswered the challenge of critics who argue that contemporary injustices matter, not those in the past. I argue instead for a focus on injustices that have roots in the past, and continue to the present day, what I call enduring injustice. Instead (...) of focusing on finding the party responsible for the injustice, I argue that we use history to help us understand why some injustices endure, which I suggest is partly due to the limitations of liberal justice. I conclude with a conception of responsibility for repairing enduring injustice that deemphasizes searching for the causal agent, and instead focuses on how to repair the injustice, which I explain through an expansive conception of shared space. (shrink)

Liberal theorists often link autonomy and identity together, since, these liberals argue, an education that bestows a particular identity on children undermines their autonomy. The charge of schools ought to be to teach children to be open to a variety of identities. Encounters with diversity and cosmopolitanism are good, since they encourage students to think deeply about their own identity, while traditional religions and nationalism seek to impress a particular identity on students. This standard liberal account, echoed in some of (...) the essays in this book, underplays the ways in which education is a cultural practice like many others. Moreover, as other essays in this volume point out, there are good reasons to want aspects of a common culture to be transmitted in schools—in democratic states we want citizens to be able to understand one another, and to have some understanding of important historical events in the country’s history. Yet schools that teach an honest history of one’s country, and that teach about the country’s political principles, will impress upon students only a partially shared identity. That this identity be only partly shared is important: it allows for differences among students, differences that ought to be understood, at least to some extent. (shrink)

The Protestant conception of religion as a private matter of conscience organized into voluntary associations informed early liberalism's conception of religion and of religious toleration, assumptions that are still present in contemporary liberalism. In many other religions, however, including Hinduism (the main though not only focus of this article), practice has a much larger role than conscience. Hinduism is not a voluntary association, and the structure of its practices, some of which are inegalitarian, makes exit very difficult. This makes liberal (...) religious toleration an awkward fit for Hinduism; granting religious toleration in India undermines equality and autonomy in severe ways. Yet Hinduism is not without its virtues, and has historically been what I call externally tolerant-it has been relatively tolerant of other religions. Liberal toleration, by contrast, is internally tolerant-it is tolerant of religions that fit the Protestant model, while its tolerance of others is considerably more qualified. I briefly speculate at the end of the article about how to combine these two models of toleration. (shrink)

Meet the Sorbs. They are a Slavic people in Germany who number around sixty thousand. They are not mistreated or oppressed by the German government. They live in two German states, but they are interspersed with other Germans. Do the Sorbs deserve special, group rights to help maintain their culture? The recent arguments of many theorists suggest that they do. Iris Marion Young has recently argued that all marginalized groups should have group rights. Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal maintain that (...) all cultural groups have certain rights. Will Kymlicka suggests that all ‘societal cultures’ have group rights, which might include the Sorbs. (shrink)

I argue here against recent trends in liberal and feminist theory contending that the state should insist that religious groups internalize liberal justice and equality. Doing so dangerously ascribes too much power to the state, and threatens liberty and stability. I argue instead that the liberal state must balance different values. I begin by claiming that while Rawls worries that religious people want to impose their way of life on others, a more accurate concern is that of liberalism imposing its (...) way of life on religious conservatives. I also contend that Rawls’s concern about stability leads him wrongly to think that there must be widespread agreement on the principles of justice, which leads to considerable intrusion in conservative religions. This widespread agreement is unattainable; a better route to stability is through extensive agreement on decision making procedures. Feminist arguments are less concerned with stability, but share with Rawls the idea that private values should be congruent with public ones. I argue that doing so leads to unacceptable intrusions on liberty. Religious groups can be internally non-liberal as long as there is pluralism within the society, exit from groups is assured, and their members all receive a decent education. (shrink)

Liberal theorists often link autonomy and identity together, since, these liberals argue, an education that bestows a particular identity on children undermines their autonomy. The charge of schools ought to be to teach children to be open to a variety of identities. Encounters with diversity and cosmopolitanism are good, since they encourage students to think deeply about their own identity, while traditional religions and nationalism seek to impress a particular identity on students. This standard liberal account, echoed in some of (...) the essays in this book, underplays the ways in which education is a cultural practice like many others. Moreover, as other essays in this volume point out, there are good reasons to want aspects of a common culture to be transmitted in schools—in democratic states we want citizens to be able to understand one another, and to have some understanding of important historical events in the country's history. Yet schools that teach an honest history of one's country, and that teach about the country's political principles, will impress upon students only a partially shared identity. That this identity be only partly shared is important: it allows for differences among students, differences that ought to be understood, at least to some extent. (shrink)

Nili’s important book presents us with an intriguing idea in chapter five. If we see the liberal state as having integrity then that means certain kinds of policies should be prioritized by the state. I cast doubt on this argument by contending that the priorities of liberal integrity are either no different from liberal egalitarianism or are misguided. I also argue that history has little normative force as Nili suggests.

Many of the most popular liberal arguments for cultural rights all note that the world is formed into groups. But in the attempt to universalise these arguments, it is too often assumed that the nation is the most important of these groups. This focus upon the nation ignores the many and varying bases of self?respect. It overlooks the fact that self?respect may be tied to many different kinds of groups. Further, most discussions of cultural rights are fuelled by the experience (...) of particular groups. Which groups depends on the theorist and issue at hand. The discussion may be sound for the particular group being discussed. But then many cultural rights theorists, in generalising from one case to others, may not have good reason to do so, leading into a mistaken universalism. The study of cultural rights arguments, with closer reference to the case studies that underpin them, should serve to limit illicit generalisation and to illuminate the true value of cultural rights arguments. (shrink)

Defenders of Aboriginal rights such as James Tully have argued that members of majority populations should allow Aboriginal peoples to argue within their own preferred intellectual frameworks in seeking common moral ground. But how should non-Aboriginal academics react to claims that seem insufficiently critical or even incoherent? This essay argues that there are two reasons to be especially wary of attacking such errors given the historical injustices perpetrated by settler states against Aboriginal peoples. First, attempts to root out error will (...) often be misplaced, because they will fail to consider the full range of possible reasons for particular kinds of social practices. Second, such attempts will often have counterproductive social effects in disrupting conversations and prolonging Aboriginal alienation. This essay thus argues that non-Aboriginal academics should be willing to exercise considerable self-restraint toward apparent intellectual errors, because such a strategy will be most conducive to realizing justice over the long term. (shrink)

In her groundbreaking text Epistemic Injustice, Miranda Fricker evaluates types of harms incurred by individuals undergoing unrecognized and inarticulable oppression. At issue in epistemic and hermeneutic injustice are prejudicial comportments to and evaluations of reality. In the following, I focus on hermeneutic and epistemic injustice in relation to the formation of intellectual and ethical virtues. When reading Fricker and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics together, there is a clear pathway to improve ethical development. In particular, ethical development ought to cultivate the proper (...) virtues that promote understanding. Gadamer’s emphasis on the qualities of a researcher and the epistemic virtues that Fricker highlights reveal an educative path for addressing injustice. In other words, cultivating these virtues counteracts injustice wherein recognition and articulation of reality is challenged or at issue. (shrink)

Much new global genetic research employs whole genome sequencing, which provides researchers with large amounts of data. The quantity of data has led to the generation and discovery of more incidental or secondary findings and to vigorous theoretical discussions about the ethical obligations that follow from these incidental findings. After a decade of debate in the genetic research community, there is a growing consensus that researchers should, at the very least, offer to return incidental findings that provide high‐impact, medically relevant (...) information, when it is not unduly burdensome to the research enterprise to do so. Much as genetic research has been limited to U.S. and European settings, the incidental findings debate has primarily focused on research conducted in high‐income countries. In a 2015 paper, Alberto Ortiz‐Osorno, Linda Ehler, and Judith Brooks note salient differences between the circumstances of research participants in low‐ and high‐resource settings that alter the analysis of when and why incidental findings should be offered to research participants. In this article, we expand on their analysis and present a framework for thinking about how investigators’ obligations to return genomic data might change in low‐resource settings, particularly in settings where participants do not have access to the medical care needed to treat, assess, or monitor incidental findings that are actionable in settings with plentiful resources. (shrink)

For over 20 years, the Schmid Training Course (STC) has offered unique opportunities for marine biology students from European universities to learn about marine model organisms. While the topics of the course have continuously changed over the years with the advent of new research techniques and discoveries, the pedagogical approach has remained largely the same – a combination of lectures, lab practicals, and field excursions. Several life science researchers, who have taught in the STC for many years, sought to bring (...) the course's pedagogical approach into the 21st century, and with the support of Erasmus+ Programme of the European Community funding, the Digital Marine project was developed. Digital Marine began in 2018 as an international partnership between the six research centers from which the STC instructors hail, and its main objective was to introduce a flipped, blended approach to learning and teaching with respect to established and emerging marine biological model systems. The Digital Marine platform, which covers 12 marine model organisms, is now publicly available. (shrink)

We examine how the shift to remote work altered responsibilities for domestic labor among partnered couples and single parents. The study draws on data from a nationally representative survey of 2,200 US adults, including 478 partnered parents and 151 single parents, in April 2020. The closing of schools and child care centers significantly increased demands on working parents in the United States, and in many circumstances reinforced an unequal domestic division of labor.

Previous research on cross-situational word learning has demonstrated that learners are able to reduce ambiguity in mapping words to referents by tracking co-occurrence probabilities across learning events. In the current experiments, we examined whether learners are able to retain mappings over time. The results revealed that learners are able to retain mappings for up to 1 week later. However, there were interactions between the amount of retention and the different learning conditions. Interestingly, the strongest retention was associated with a learning (...) condition that engendered retrieval dynamics that initially challenged the learner but eventually led to more successful retrieval toward the end of learning. The ease/difficulty of retrieval is a critical process underlying cross-situational word learning and is a powerful example of how learning dynamics affect long-term learning outcomes. (shrink)

Voices on the political right have long claimed that the welfare state ought to be kept small, and that charities can take over many of the tasks involved in helping those at the bottom of society. The arguments in favor of this claim are controversial, but even if they are accepted at face value the policy proposal remains problematic. For the proposal presupposes that charities would, in fact, be able to raise enough money to provide adequate help to those in (...) need, and therefore assumes that charities are able to very significantly increase the number and/or size of donations they receive. We argue that there are good reasons for doubting that charities will be able to do this. Our argument turns on the fact that the most powerful strategy for eliciting donations—namely, allowing donors to use their donation to signal their pro-sociality—has an inbuilt upper limit. If too much emphasis is placed on the signaling opportunities donating to charity provides, donating no longer functions as an effective signal and the motivation to donate declines. (shrink)

The enforcement of racial segregation during apartheid was aimed not only at regulating public spaces, residential areas and the workforce, but also at shaping the subjectivities of individuals who were socialised to see themselves through the lens of a white racial hierarchy. The ideology of white supremacy and superiority that informed apartheid policy was largely justified using Christonormative epistemologies that sought to legitimate the racial hierarchy as having basis in Holy Scripture and as an extension of God’s will. At the (...) same time, apartheid policy fragmented religious communities, entrenching race as a central component of spiritual subjectivities. Twenty years after the end of apartheid, the legacy of apartheid continues to shape the lives and opportunities of all people living in South Africa, despite many gains made in working towards a non-racial, non-sexist democracy. While much scholarly attention has been paid to postapartheid contexts of work, residency and recreation, relatively little attention has been paid to spaces of worship. This is surprising, given that religious belief and practice are widespread in South Africa in the first instance, and that Christian belief, in particular, was so central to the social imaginary of apartheid, in the second. Thus, in efforts to transform society and advance social justice, it is imperative to consider diversity, difference and otherness from the perspective of, and in relation to, contemporary religious communities and contexts. This article will consider some of the factors shaping dynamics of diversity and difference within the context of religious communities in South Africa, over 20 years into democracy. (shrink)

(2008). Genetic Engineering and the Speciation of Superions from Humans. World Futures: Vol. 64, Postformal Thought and Hierarchical Complexity, pp. 436-443.

In Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement, Ian Alexander Moore investigates Martin Heidegger’s use of releasement. Moore argues that this conceptual development was greatly influenced by Meister Eckhart’s thought. In addition to their shared use of releasement, Moore suggests, both Heidegger and Eckhart share similar philosophical strategies. The task of Moore’s monograph is to illuminate how releasement functions in Heidegger’s work and to argue that Eckhart was one of Heidegger’s central influences. This review examines Moore’s method for assessing the (...) function of releasement in Heidegger and Eckhart’s thought, while noting the distinctive and compelling aspects of this monograph. (shrink)

Contestations over the rights of sexual minorities and gender-nonconforming people in Africa are profoundly shaped by two discourses that both emerge from polarized domestic political debates in the United States: a human rights–centered discourse of “LGBT*I” identity politics that promotes visibility and equal protections and privileges for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and intersex individuals; and a Christonormative “family values” agenda that promotes the heterosexual nuclear family as the foundation of civilization. Analysis considers these contemporary discourses in relation to entangled colonial (...) constructions of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy used to justify the conquest and exploitation of Africa. This article takes particular interest in the power relations that are constituted through these discourses so as to uncover the underlying interests at stake within them. Through consultation with critiques advanced within critical race and critical queer theory, and critical philosophical arguments on the epistemic dimensions of racialized, sexed, and gendered oppressions, it is argued that these discourses advance U.S. hegemonic interests and reinscribe Western hegemony. It is concluded that struggles for equality among sexual minorities and gender-nonconforming people must be approached as part-and-parcel of decolonial struggles to dismantle white supremacist and Western structures of oppression. (shrink)

The moral/conventional task has been widely used to study the emergence of moral understanding in children and to explore the deficits in moral understanding in clinical populations. Previous studies have indicated that moral transgressions, particularly those in which a victim is harmed, evoke a signature pattern of responses in the moral/conventional task: they are judged to be serious, generalizable and not authority dependent. Moreover, this signature pattern is held to be pan‐cultural and to emerge early in development. However, almost all (...) the evidence for these claims comes from studies using harmful transgressions of the sort that primary school children might commit in the schoolyard. In a study conducted on the Internet, we used a much wider range of harm transgressions, and found that they do not evoke the signature pattern of responses found in studies using only schoolyard transgressions. Paralleling other recent work, our study provides preliminary grounds for skepticism regarding many conclusions drawn from earlier research using the moral/conventional task. (shrink)

We often evaluate belief-forming processes, agents, or entire belief states for reliability. This is normally done with the assumption that beliefs are all-or-nothing. How does such evaluation go when we’re considering beliefs that come in degrees? I consider a natural answer to this question that focuses on the degree of truth-possession had by a set of beliefs. I argue that this natural proposal is inadequate, but for an interesting reason. When we are dealing with all-or-nothing belief, high reliability leads to (...) high levels of truth-possession. However, when it comes to degrees of belief, reliability and truth-possession part ways. The natural answer thus fails to be a good way to evaluate degrees of belief for reliability. I propose and develop an alternative method based on the notion of calibration, suggested by Frank Ramsey, which does not have this problem and consider why we should care about such assessments of reliability even if they are not tied directly to truth-possession. (shrink)

This book provides an original and provocative combination of ethnomethodological analysis and the concepts of linguistic philosophy with a breadth and clarity unusual in this field of writing. It is designed to be read by sociologists, psychologists and philosophers and concerns itself with the contributions of Wittgenstein, defending the claim for his relevance to the human sciences. However, this book goes some way beyond the usual limitations of such interdisciplinary works by outlining some empirical applications of ideas derived from the (...) Wittgenstein tradition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 143-150 [Access article in PDF] Species Nova [To See Anew]Art as Ecology David Haley Looking Back From space, looking back at earth, we may see three key issues: the accelerating increase of the human species, the accelerating decrease of other species, and the accelerating effects of climate change. We might ask, how are we to cope with these changes creatively?That our societies (...) tend to value economics over ecology, and monoculture and agro-industry over diversity and permaculture, is certainly worthy of ethical attention. Here I want to invoke a call for integrating art as a necessary contribution to ecological intervention. I consider how artists may engage uncertainty, and how art may be used to develop new ways of seeing and "drawing." This is art for evolutionary survival, not commodification. Art that practices care, shared responsibility, and diversity in the pursuit of eco-centric cultures. Although this paper mainly references visual art forms, this should not be taken to exclude others. Here I am primarily concerned with identifying some of the possible forms of ecological or eco-art. This is art practiced by artist and inventors in the manner of the archetype of Daedalus and worthy of the name implied by the root of the word art. Rt, an ancient term from the Rg Vedas, refers to the virtuous, continuing creation of the cosmos. [End Page 143] Seeing is Believing/ Uncertainty in View The suffix species nova is ascribed by scientists to a new bacterium species, prior to the confirmation of its existence in the appropriate academic journals. The word species means "to look" and "a class of things, living organisms capable of exchanging genes, classified as a taxonomic rank below a genus and denoted by a Latin binomial." It also refers to "the visible form of each of the elements of consecrated bread and wine in the Eucharist." Nova refers to the mistaken sighting of a new star, a flash of brightness that quickly dims. Something novel is a new kind of nature, something strange or previously unknown, and novelty refers to invention. Species nova: two words that evoke ideas about innovations of visual experience and belief.I use the phrase to denote the potential for understanding a new order and evolutionary change—"to see anew." I am also aware that species nova could mean a mistaken religious experience, or a class of living things that flashes brightly and quickly dims. Uncertainty is embedded in the richness of meanings.It is ten years since the Earth Summit in Rio popularized the notion of sustainable development and introduced Agenda 21 as a strategy to achieve it. Sadly, culture and art, two of the systems that define humanity, were not mentioned among the necessary tools for building a better future.But what is sustainable development? Is it about conservation, restoration, or regeneration? Will it stop global warming and feed the poor, or is it like candyfloss—a confection of transient comfort, with no real meaning? Has it become a corrupt cultural construct, an anthropocentric myth in the vain pursuit of hope?Recently the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed that "most of the warming observed over the past 50 years is attributable to human activities." However, the projections and models that have been developed for policy makers to envisage climate change scenarios demonstrate the limits of our ability to understand the situation, let alone adapt to it. A recent review in Nature, comparing two twenty-year forecasts ironically concluded: Uncertainties therefore remain that are beyond the statistical uncertainties described in the two papers. But both sets of authors point out that the upper bound on the potential warming for 2100 may well be [End Page 144] above the IPCC figure of 5.8K under 'heavy emissions' scenarios. So policy-makers should not discount the possibility of a very warm climate considering long-range policy options. (Funnel 2001, 5) A subsequent article in Nature's Climate Change Review reveals even more concern about communicating scientific uncertainty, because models that simulate long-term climate changes cannot be tested using real... (shrink)

The information theoretic principle of rational adaptation predicts that individuals with aphasia adapt to their language impairments by relying more heavily on comparatively unimpaired non-linguistic knowledge to communicate. This prediction was examined by assessing the extent to which adults with chronic aphasia due to left-hemisphere stroke rely more on conceptual rather than lexical information during verb retrieval, as compared to age-matched neurotypical controls. A primed verb naming task examined the degree of facilitation each participant group received from either conceptual event-related (...) or lexical collocate cues, compared to unrelated baseline cues. The results provide evidence that adults with aphasia received amplified facilitation from conceptual cues compared to controls, whereas healthy controls received greater facilitation from lexical cues. This indicates that adaptation to alternative and relatively unimpaired information may facilitate successful word retrieval in aphasia. Implications for models of rational adaptation and clinical neurorehabilitation are discussed. (shrink)

Hortense Spillers ends “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe” with a provocative suggestion: “Actually claiming the monstrosity … ‘Sapphire’ might rewrite after all a radically different text for female empowerment.” In this article, I knead the material, representational, and performative powers operating through conceptually separate and yet deeply entangled contested terrains: the “real,” or the scene of “actual mutilation,” whose high crimes against the flesh coincide with the construction of the “symbolic.” Through Baradian performativity, I read Spillers's theorization on the name as (...) an event wherein proprietary relationships, which necessarily oscillate between material/signification binaries, are called forth in historical terrain in the moment of racial address. Paying close attention to her grammar, the first half of this article tracks Spillers's movement through an undercurrent of American historical mythology that, as she demonstrates, misnames the black mother. The rest of this article then takes up to what extent certain “mocking doubles”—minstrel and/or monstrous tropes resuscitated but not redeemed or even necessarily renamed—might agitate their way toward new texts for female empowerment and the cultivation of the black mother's power to “name.”. (shrink)

Cross‐situational word learning (XSWL) tasks present multiple words and candidate referents within a learning trial such that word–referent pairings can be inferred only across trials. Adults encode fine phonological detail when two words and candidate referents are presented in each learning trial (2 × 2 scenario; Escudero, Mulak, & Vlach, ). To test the relationship between XSWL task difficulty and phonological encoding, we examined XSWL of words differing by one vowel or consonant across degrees of within‐learning trial ambiguity (1 × (...) 1 to 4 × 4). Word identification was assessed alongside three distractors. Adults finely encoded words via XSWL: Learning occurred in all conditions, though accuracy decreased across the 1 × 1 to 3 × 3 conditions. Accuracy was highest for the 1 × 1 condition, suggesting fast‐mapping is a stronger learning strategy here. Accuracy was higher for consonant than vowel set targets, and having more distractors from the same set mitigated identification of vowel set targets only, suggesting possible stronger encoding of consonants than vowels. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a proliferation of non-governmental organisations with a mission to help redress various social and environmental problems, but the effectiveness of these organisations in carrying out their stated goals is rarely assessed or critically examined. It has become increasingly clear, however, that these organisations vary greatly in their level of competence and professionalism. Many of them are ineffective, and in some cases they may even exacerbate the problems they set out to solve. These difficulties are based upon (...) flawed assumptions about how civil society can correct social ills, and about how institutions that are intermediate between the individual and the state can carry out effective change. To illustrate these points with an environmental example, we present the case of Jamaica's coral reefs, which have been under stress for decades. Both the causes of reef degradation and the solutions to these problems can be clearly outlined. Many well-intentioned organisations and individuals have been involved in the attempt to stem or reverse the damage, and significant funding has been channelled through these agencies. In spite of this, there has been no documented improvement in the condition of the reefs, apart from some natural regeneration that owed nothing whatever to any human activity. The problem is that the known solutions have not been implemented. This has happened for several reasons. First, government organisations have actively encouraged NGOs to undertake the responsibility of protecting sections of the coastline, but without any proper assessment of the capacity of those organisations to do so, and in some cases actively preventing them from acquiring that capacity. Second, the proliferation of NGOs has been counter-effective, resulting in duplication of effort, competition for limited funds, and conscious or unconscious misrepresentation of results. Third, the utilisation of NGOs to solve environmental problems often results in an increase in the number of levels of management, resulting in inefficient utilisation of funds. The known solutions to the degradation in the Jamaican marine environment principally involve reducing fishing pressures at a national level and the reduction of pollution by local municipalities. The effective role of NGOs in bringing about these two solutions therefore differs: where national changes are necessary, government centralisation and effective enforcement are necessary, although NGOs could still play a useful auxiliary or augmenting role. With local problems like municipal pollution, NGOs may be better able to lead in catalysing and implementing change, although the government could usefully provide coordination and support. These differences illustrate the fallacy in the simplistic assumption that rising public concern, increased levels of funding and a growing number of people and/or organisations involved in conservation will lead to environmental improvement. Effective hierarchical organisation is still a prerequisite for bringing about effective solutions, although the mode of organisation adopted should be a function of the particular solution necessary. Finally, since many NGOs have effectively functioned as parasitical organisations that have consumed public funding without any discernible public benefit, NGOs should be subject to the same scrutiny and assessment as any private sector organisation contracted to the government and/or donor agencies, and those who fail to perform should be barred from further receipt of public funds. (shrink)