This chapter explains the mechanism of proxy agency whereby a group (or individual) acts through another authorized to represent it.

This paper gives an account of proxy agency in the context of collective action. It takes the case of a group announcing something by way of a spokesperson as an illustration. In proxy agency, it seems that one person or subgroup's doing something counts as or constitutes or is recognized as (tantamount to) another person or group's doing something. Proxy agency is pervasive in institutional action. It has been taken to be a straightforward counterexample (...) to an appealing deflationary view of collective action as a matter of all members of a group making a contribution to bringing about some event. I show that this is a mistake. I give a deflationary account of constitutive rules in terms of essentially collective action types. I then give an account of one form of constitutive agency in terms of constitutive rules. I next give an account of status functions—of which being a spokesperson is one—that also draws on the concept of a constitutive rule. I then show how these materials help us to see how proxy agency is an expression of the agency of all members of the group credited with doing something when the proxy acts. (shrink)

Proxy agency is the capacity of individuals and groups to act for other individuals or groups in specific social transactions. For example, a legal team acts as a proxy for a client in a courtroom, or the Prime Minister acts as a proxy for the UK Government when attending international meetings, etc. Although a very common social phenomenon, it has not yet received enough philosophical treatment. Currently, the most developed account of this capacity is Ludwig’s (...) class='Hi'>proxy agency in collective action. Yet, his account relies on a deflationary, we-content approach to collective intentionality (á la Bratman). In this chapter, I argue that this approach is far too weak to explain proxy agency in institutional contexts—where the individuals and groups formally authorised to perform rule-guided group activities for the principal hold a strong, non-conditional we-commitment. In order to elucidate this feature, I provide an account of proxy agency based on a more robust, we-mode approach to collective intentionality (á la Tuomela). I suggest with this that, for institutional proxy agency to operate as expected, there must be appropriate conditions of sociality in place—which ultimately coheres with the larger project developed by Tuomela on social ontology. (shrink)

Intentionalism is the view that statutes should be interpreted in accordance with the intentions of the legislatures that produce them. As a theory of legislative interpretation, intentionalism has been very influential, but it has also been subject to much critical attention. It is claimed that legislatures will seldom have any relevant intentions, and that even if they did, we could not come to know them. I propose a modification of intentionalism that significantly mitigates the severity of these problems. I begin (...) by noting that legislation is seldom (if ever) written by an entire legislature. Instead, it is commonly written by individuals or subgroups acting as proxies on behalf of the legislature. I then argue that the reasons why legislation should be interpreted in accordance with the intentions of legislatures are equally applicable to the intentions of proxies. This is significant because proxies are much more likely to have ascertainable intentions. (shrink)

The world is witnessing a rise in speech-enabled devices serving as epistemic informants to their users. Some philosophers take the view that because the utterances produced by such machines can be phenomenologically similar to an equivalent human speech, and they may deliver the same function in terms of delivering content to their audience, such machine utterances should be conceptualized as “assertions”. This paper argues against this view and highlights the theoretical and pragmatic challenges faced by such a conceptualization which seems (...) to be based on a “functionalist” account of assertion. Instead, the paper argues that the view that some such machine utterances can be “proxy assertions”, made on behalf of the designers and/or deployers of such machines is more tenable. Existing accounts of such a view, however, need further refinement, which is provided here. The paper then discusses implications of this view for design of such machines, particularly those enabled and equipped with machine learning capabilities. (shrink)

Kirk Ludwig presents a philosophical account of institutional action, such as action by corporations and nation states, arguing that it can be understood exhaustively in terms of the agency of individuals and concepts constructed out of materials that are already at play in our understanding of individual action. He thus argues for a strong form of methodological individualism. The book provides a new account of the logical form of grammatically singular group action sentences (e.g. 'Company laid off 10,000 workers'), (...) and features new analyses of the concepts of a constitutive rule, status function, status role, collective acceptance, and proxy agency. He also provides an analysis of the structure of corporate action, including the status of corporations as legal persons, and of the nature of state action in relation to its citizens. This is the companion volume to From Individual to Plural Agency (OUP 2016), extending the multiple-agents account of collective action set out in the earlier volume. (shrink)

Kirk Ludwig presents a philosophical account of institutional action, such as action by corporations and nation states. He argues that it can be fully understood in terms of the agency of individuals, and concepts derived from our understanding of individual action. He thus argues for a strong form of methodological individualism.

The study discusses a new approach to parental agency in pediatric palliative care based on an active form of caregiving. It also explores the possibility of a positive conceptualization of parental agency in its relational context. The paper begins with an illustrative case study based on a clinical situation. This is followed by an analysis of various aspects of parental agency based on empirical studies that disclose the insufficiencies of the traditional approach to parental agency. In (...) the next step, parental agency is analyzed from a reality‐based perspective as an activity focused on relationships and the cognitive capacity of parents vis‐a‐vis their seriously ill children. The paper also considers the importance of the cultural and social contexts in which parental agency and decision‐making take place. This agency is addressed not as individualistic in form, and nor is it exercised in terms of fixed choices. Rather, the focus is on its dynamic and future‐oriented aspects. Consequently, parental agency should be comprehended not only as a form of proxy agency representing the child's best interests but also as a complex decision‐making process in which the parents learn from their child how to become good, compassionate caregivers and at the same time good parents. (shrink)

The standard event-causal theory of action says that an intentional action is caused in the right way by the right mental states. This view requires reductionism about agency. The causal role of the agent must be nothing over and above the causal contribution of the relevant mental event-causal processes. But commonsense finds this reductive solution to the “agent-mind problem”, the problem of explaining the relationship between agents and the mind, incredible. Where did the agent go? This paper suggests that (...) this challenge against event-causal reductionism is importantly related to debates about fundamentality. It also suggests that extant event-causal answers to the agent-mind problem, ones that suggest that part of an agent’s mind can stand proxy for the agent herself, fail against the challenge. It sketches an alternative reductive view that appeals to entity grounding. This view resolves the commonsense challenge and promises to be theoretically fruitful with respect to other longstanding problems with the event-casual view. The paper concludes with a burden-shifting argument against emergentist agent-causal theories and non-reductive event-causal theories of agency. (shrink)

Where artificial agents are not liable to be ascribed true moral agency and responsibility in their own right, we can understand them as acting as proxies for human agents, as making decisions on their behalf. What I call the ‘Moral Proxy Problem’ arises because it is often not clear for whom a specific artificial agent is acting as a moral proxy. In particular, we need to decide whether artificial agents should be acting as proxies for low-level agents (...) — e.g. individual users of the artificial agents — or whether they should be moral proxies for high-level agents — e.g. designers, distributors or regulators, that is, those who can potentially control the choice behaviour of many artificial agents at once. Who we think an artificial agent is a moral proxy for determines from which agential perspective the choice problems artificial agents will be faced with should be framed: should we frame them like the individual choice scenarios previously faced by individual human agents? Or should we, rather, consider the expected aggregate effects of the many choices made by all the artificial agents of a particular type all at once? This paper looks at how artificial agents should be designed to make risky choices, and argues that the question of risky choice by artificial agents shows the moral proxy problem to be both practically relevant and difficult. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Medical technology, specialization, and the corporatization of health delivery systems in the late twentieth century have all helped give birth to an unwelcome but unavoidable responsibility for individuals with family or friends—serving as a health care proxy. The responsibility comes without monetary compensation, is often involuntary, and lacks any real guidelines beyond the duty to make life-and-death decisions in circumstances over which the proxy has little control.The parameters of the proxy's job have evolved somewhat awkwardly in statutes (...) and case law, as lawmakers and judges have tried to apply conventional concepts to novel circumstances. This article examines the legal and functional status of the proxy, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of current public policy as reflected by state advance directive and surrogate decision-making laws. The first section of the article provides a historical perspective of our current notions of agency law as relevant to health care proxies. (shrink)

Medical technology, specialization, and the corporatization of health delivery systems in the late twentieth century have all helped give birth to an unwelcome but unavoidable responsibility for individuals with family or friends—serving as a health care proxy. The responsibility comes without monetary compensation, is often involuntary, and lacks any real guidelines beyond the duty to make life-and-death decisions in circumstances over which the proxy has little control.The parameters of the proxy's job have evolved somewhat awkwardly in statutes (...) and case law, as lawmakers and judges have tried to apply conventional concepts to novel circumstances. This article examines the legal and functional status of the proxy, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of current public policy as reflected by state advance directive and surrogate decision-making laws. The first section of the article provides a historical perspective of our current notions of agency law as relevant to health care proxies. (shrink)

This essay is an investigation into the social construction of agents and agency, linked directly to a cross-cultural predilection toward accumulation, categorization and data distribution in the interest, whether latent or manifest, of community formation. It is presented as a mediation on mediation, emerging out of ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration1 oriented around creative design of multiple interfaces into distributed information spaces, accessed through utilization of an agent technology called the “Information personae.” As such it is tenuously positioned at the nexus (...) of art, computer science, engineering and cultural studies, sitting comfortably at home in none. (shrink)

Epistemic impairment has been the decisive yardstick when excluding infants from political agency. One of the suggestions to bypass the epistemic requirement of political agency and to encourage the inclusion of infants in representative democracies is to resort to proxies or surrogates who share or advocate interests which may be coincidental with their interests. However, this solution is far from desirable, given that it privileges the political agency of parents, guardians and trustees over other adult citizens. This (...) article offers an alternative to this conceptual frame of reference by making a case for the political agency of infants. Firstly, it maintains that political agency can be understood in terms of the several facets involved in political representation. Secondly, it claims that the all-affected principle can be reformulated as an ‘infant-affected-interests principle’ in light of which infants are members of the class of the represented. Thirdly, it explores the ways through which this political agency can occur without having to resort to alternative conceptions of representation. The conclusion ascertains that infant enfranchisement is highly undesirable and that there are more viable forms to promote infant political agency, such as virtual representation, infant-beneficial principles of political action and ombudspersons for infants. (shrink)

The patient preference predictor is a computer-based algorithm devised to predict the medical treatment that decisionally incapacitated patients would have preferred. The target paper argues against various criticisms to the effect that the use of a PPP is inconsistent with proper respect for patient autonomy.1 In this commentary, I aim to add some clarifications to the complex relationship between autonomy and the PPP. First, I highlight one way in which the decision of a surrogate designated by the patient realises respect (...) for patient autonomy in a way that PPP cannot realise by introducing the idea of shared agency. Second, I show how the attempt to predict someone’s hypothetical choice can be disrespectful to her autonomy. Following the treatment decision of a surrogate designated by the patient counts as a way of respecting the patient’s own autonomy. Designating someone as one’s surrogate is a case of entrusting her with the task of making important life decisions on one’s behalf. To entrust someone with a certain matter is to assign her the responsibility for that matter based on the trust that she will take a good care of it. When a patient entrusts a surrogate decision-maker, what is the matter that she is trusted to take a good care of? In many contexts, the surrogate is r egarded as an epistemic proxy, one who is likely to know the patient’s preferences the best. It is often thought that the point of practising surrogate decision making is to respect the patient’s autonomy by following what the patient most likely would have preferred. Using a PPP in the decision-making process has the same goal of making a more accurate prediction of the patient’s treatment preference. However, at least in some cases, designating the patient’s intimates or ones she loves and cares …. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 368-389, April 2022. Epistemic impairment has been the decisive yardstick when excluding infants from political agency. One of the suggestions to bypass the epistemic requirement of political agency and to encourage the inclusion of infants in representative democracies is to resort to proxies or surrogates who share or advocate interests which may be coincidental with their interests. However, this solution is far from desirable, given that it privileges the (...) political agency of parents, guardians and trustees over other adult citizens. This article offers an alternative to this conceptual frame of reference by making a case for the political agency of infants. Firstly, it maintains that political agency can be understood in terms of the several facets involved in political representation. Secondly, it claims that the all-affected principle can be reformulated as an ‘infant-affected-interests principle’ in light of which infants are members of the class of the represented. Thirdly, it explores the ways through which this political agency can occur without having to resort to alternative conceptions of representation. The conclusion ascertains that infant enfranchisement is highly undesirable and that there are more viable forms to promote infant political agency, such as virtual representation, infant-beneficial principles of political action and ombudspersons for infants. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 368-389, April 2022. Epistemic impairment has been the decisive yardstick when excluding infants from political agency. One of the suggestions to bypass the epistemic requirement of political agency and to encourage the inclusion of infants in representative democracies is to resort to proxies or surrogates who share or advocate interests which may be coincidental with their interests. However, this solution is far from desirable, given that it privileges the (...) political agency of parents, guardians and trustees over other adult citizens. This article offers an alternative to this conceptual frame of reference by making a case for the political agency of infants. Firstly, it maintains that political agency can be understood in terms of the several facets involved in political representation. Secondly, it claims that the all-affected principle can be reformulated as an ‘infant-affected-interests principle’ in light of which infants are members of the class of the represented. Thirdly, it explores the ways through which this political agency can occur without having to resort to alternative conceptions of representation. The conclusion ascertains that infant enfranchisement is highly undesirable and that there are more viable forms to promote infant political agency, such as virtual representation, infant-beneficial principles of political action and ombudspersons for infants. (shrink)

Six people were interviewed about the possibility of becoming posthumous body donors. Interview transcripts were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Individual-level analysis suggested a common interest in Personhood Concerns and a common commitment to Enlightenment Values. Investigations of these possible themes across participants resulted in identification of two sample-level themes, each with two subthemes: Autonomy, with subthemes of agency and consent, and Rationality, with subthemes of knowledge/epistemology and materialism/ontology. This paper concentrates on the former. Consent for posthumous body donation (...) was felt to sometimes fall short of adequately identifying donors’ preferences about what happened after consent was given, even with respect to actions for which consent established permission. In turn, paucity of information about donors’ preferences limited others’ ability to act as proxy agents to facilitate donors’ posthumous autonomy. Thus, while consent may curtail violations of people’s autonomy by authorizing actions for which permission has been established, it may fall short of facilitating their autonomy in ways that might be possible with greater knowledge of those people’s desires. Alternative methods of establishing consent are explored that might better-determine people’s desires and thereby improve others’ ability to act as proxy agents for them to facilitate their subsequent (even posthumous) autonomy. (shrink)

In Sweden, most patients are recruited into biobank research by non-researcher doctors. Patients' trust in doctors may therefore be important to their willingness to participate. We suggest a model of trust that makes sense of such transitions of trust between domains and distinguishes adequate trust from mistaken trust. The unique position of doctors implies, we argue, a Kantian imperfect duty to compensate for patients' mistaken trust. There are at least three kinds of mistaken trust, each of which requires a different (...) set of countermeasures. First, trust is mistaken when necessary competence is lacking; the competence must be developed or the illusion dispelled. Second, trust is irrational whenever the patient is mistaken about his actual reasons for trusting. Care must therefore be taken to support the patient's reasoning and moral agency. Third, some patients inappropriately trust doctors to recommend only research that will benefit them directly. Such trust should be counteracted by nurturing a culture where patients expect to be asked occasionally to contribute to the common good. (shrink)

In China, Buddhism and Taoism are two major religions. Using a sample of 10,363 firm-year observations from the Chinese stock market for the period of 2001–2010, I provide strong and robust evidence that religion (i.e., Buddhism and Taoism on the whole) is significantly negatively associated with owner-manager agency costs. In particular, using firm-level religion data measured by the number of religious sites within a radius of certain distance around a listed firm’s registered address, I find that religion is significantly (...) negatively (positively) associated with expense ratio (asset utilization ratio), the positive (reverse) proxy for owner-manager agency costs. This finding is consistent with the following view: religiosity has remarkable effects on the way how an individual thinks and behaves, and thereof can curb managers from unethical business practices. Moreover, my findings suggest that the negative association between religion and owner-manager agency costs is attenuated for firms with strong external monitoring mechanisms such as higher Marketization and high-quality auditors. Furthermore, after separating Buddhism from Taoism, my finding indicates that above conclusions are only available for Buddhism, suggesting that different religions may have asymmetric influence on owner-manager agency costs. Above results are robust to various measures of religiosity and a variety of robustness checks. (shrink)

This study investigates the link between female board directors and company financial performance and agency costs in Sri Lanka's publicly listed companies. In order to investigate the impact of board gender diversity on firm financial performance, a dynamic panel generalised method of moment estimation is applied. Three variables are used as proxies for gender diversity of the board of directors, namely the percentage of women on the board, a dichotomous dummy and the Blau index. A Tobit model with endogenous (...) regressors is used to investigate the impact of female board members on agency cost, using growth opportunities as a measure of agency cost. After controlling for size, industry and other corporate governance measures, this study finds a significant negative relationship between the proportion of women on boards and firm value along with an increase in company agency cost. This evidence provides insights for governments and academic institutions in their efforts to provide resources that will help enhance women's leadership skills. (shrink)

Plantation workers have seemingly little opportunities for labour agency, defined as the worker’s ability to act and improve their conditions. In response to a call for a better understanding of the horizontal dimension shaping labour agency, this article questions what local factors determine the worker’s ability to act by analysing the institutional constraints embedded in the national context through a mixed methods approach. A combination of qualitative and quantitative data is used to understand what shapes and constrains the (...) potential for labour agency in the case of plantation workers in the pineapple sector of Costa Rica. We provide new empirical evidence of the relation between the local opportunity structure—proxied by perceived job security and union awareness—and labour agency in terms of a worker’s intention to choose forthright (voice), evasive (exit) or repressed (loyalty) actions. The model results indicate that a lack of job security and a lack of union awareness significantly reduce the likelihood to use forthright actions (such as voicing concerns, striking or joining a union) compared to evasive (such as leaving the job) or repressed actions (such as doing nothing). In addition, the qualitative analysis of the local opportunity structure identifies four institutional constraints: weak employment protection, vulnerability of migrant workers, limited workers’ representation and insufficient labour law enforcement. Besides overcoming these institutional constraints, empowering workers to make their voices heard also requires awareness raising about their collective bargaining rights and more job security. (shrink)

We argue that the counterfactual representations of popular culture, like their religious cognates, are shaped by cognitive constraints that become visible when considered in aggregate. In particular, we argue that comic-book literature embodies core intuitions about sociality and its maintenance that are activated by the cognitive problem of living in large groups. This leads to four predictions: comic-book enforcers should be punitively prosocial, be quasi-omniscient, exhibit kin-signalling proxies and be minimally counterintuitive. We gauge these predictions against a large sample of (...) 19,877 characters that were derived from 72,611 comics using data scraping techniques. Our results corroborate the view that cognitive constraints exercise a selective effect on the transmission of popular culture. (shrink)

In its January 20th, 2010 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, the United States Supreme Court ruled that certain restrictions on independent expenditures by corporations for political advocacy violate the First Amendment of the Constitution, which provides that “Congress shall make no law […] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Justice Kennedy, writing for the 5-4 majority, (...) held that “[b]y suppressing the speech of manifold corporations, both for-profit and non-profit, the Government prevents their voices and view-points from reaching the public and advising voters on which person or entities are hostile to their interests” (Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission 558 U.S. 38-9 (2010); emphasis added). Much of the language of the opinion, and some of its reasoning, as this passage illustrates, presupposes that corporations are agents capable of speech, and that it is (at least in part) in the light of this that limitations on political advocacy by corporations are prohibited by the Constitution. -/- While there are other strands in the argument, they are interwoven with the conception of the corporation as agent and speaker, with its voice and its viewpoints. The dissenters on the court objected on precisely this point (among others). Justice Stevens wrote sarcastically in his dissent, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, that “[u]nder the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech” (558 U.S. 33 (2010)). Justice Sotomayor suggested in oral argument that the Court’s century-old practice of treating corporations as persons rests on a conceptual mistake. -/- My concern in this essay is not with the question whether the restrictions violate the Constitution. There are many issues that bear on this which will be outside the scope of my discussion. My concern is with the proper conceptual framework for understanding the agency of corporations and corporate speech, and the role that conceptions of these play in the background of the majority’s reasoning. The issue is legal, but it also has philosophical, conceptual and semantic aspects. It will be the latter aspects, and their potential to shed light on legal reasoning, that are my main focus. An adequate framework requires saying what properly speaking the corporation is, how agency is expressed through the corporation, whose agency it is, centrally whether the corporation is an agent or person in its own right, and in what sense it can be said to be capable of speech. I draw on recent work in collective action theory, particularly with respect to the semantics of collective action sentences (Ludwig 2007) and the analysis of the proxy agency in collective action (Ludwig 2014), to show (i) that corporations are neither genuine agents nor (therefore) capable of engaging in genuine speech, (ii) that consequently the First Amendment does not apply to corporations per se, and (iii) that a better understanding of the mechanisms of corporate agency casts doubt on more indirect arguments for extending the First Amendment to “corporate speech” as well. (shrink)

Legal norms are an invention. This paper advances a proposal about what kind of invention they are. The proposal is that legal norms derive from rules which specify role functions in a legal system. Legal rules attach to agents in virtue of their status within the system in which the rules operate. The point of legal rules or a legal system is to solve to large scale coordination problems, specifically the problem of organizing social and economic life among a group (...) of people and their successors, though not every legal rule pertains to a coordination problem. The framework for thinking about legal norms that I describe is a framework for thinking about institutions and policies more generally. The idea is to show that legal norms are a species of institutional norm. There are two central ideas. The first is the idea of a role in an institution. The second is the idea of proxy agency. Proxy agency involves one agent or group acting under the authorization of another agent or group (perhaps subsuming it) in a way that makes the actions of the proxy count as actions (under a description) of the individual or group for which it is a proxy. We get the characteristic structure of a legal system by conceiving of an institutional group, itself conceived of as a set of interlocking roles realized in individuals, as having one or more roles for proxy agents who are authorized by the group to make policy for the group. The set of rules governing the basic constitution of the group and spelling out the powers of the policy proxies determine fundamental norms for the group with specific role responsibilities attaching to particular positions in institutional arrangements. The policies determine further norms whose force derives from the fundamental norms. We must then say some further things to distinguish institutions and policies which we wish to designate as legal. (shrink)

Corporations have often been taken to be the paradigm of an organization whose agency is autonomous from that of the successive waves of people who occupy the pattern of roles that define its structure, which licenses saying that the corporation has attitudes, interests, goals, and beliefs which are not those of the role occupants. In this essay, I sketch a deflationary account of agency-discourse about corporations. I identify institutional roles with a special type of status function, a status (...) role, in which the collectively accepted function is expressed in part through its occupier’s intentional expression of her agency in that role. I identify institutions as systems of status roles and show how this is compatible with seeing the agency of institutions generally, even over time periods in which there is complete change in role occupiers, as a matter of the contributions only of individual agents. I explain how the reduction of the institution to its members is compatible with its potentially having had a completely different membership. I show in the case of the corporation in particular that, once we see its origins and function, the surface features of legal discourse about corporate agency are misleading and are compatible with a deflationary account of corporate agency. I show in connection with this that the corporation is to be identified with its shareholders, and that where a corporation separates ownership and control, its managers and employees are proxy agents of the shareholders doing business under the corporate form. Finally, I canvass the legitimate ways of construing ordinary talk about corporate intention, belief, and so on, in light of this, none of which support the attribution of genuine agency or intentionality to any group per se associated with the corporation. (shrink)

The paper provides a taxonomy of group speech acts whose main division is that between collective speech acts (singing Happy Birthday, agreeing to meet) and group proxy speech acts in which a group, such as a corporation, employs a proxy, such as a spokesperson, to convey its official position. The paper provides an analysis of group proxy speech acts using tools developed more generally for analyzing institutional agency, particularly the concepts of shared intention, proxy agent, (...) status role, status function, convention and constitutive rule. (shrink)

The leading accounts of the ethics of proxy decision making implicitly draw on internalist conceptions of the philosophy of mind, or so this essay tries to demonstrate. Using the views of Ronald Dworkin as its jumping‐off point, the essay argues that accepting the sort of externalism associated with writers such as Putnam and Burge would alter Dworkin's conclusions concerning how we should respond to the current or precedent decisions of people suffering from dementia. Building on the views of Agnieszka (...) Jawarska, it argues that accepting “active” externalism à la Clark and Chambers would provide currently competent people with new resources for establishing the authority of their present values over inconsistent values they might come to entertain should they become demented. (shrink)

Church asylum, a practice aimed at assisting migrants with precarious residence statuses, has been enacted in Finland particularly since the 2010s. As a result of migrants’ insecure residency, their capacities of action are often restricted. They have been deprived of access to health and social services and schooling, and their movements limited due to fear of the police and deportation. This article analyses the autonomy and capacities of action of those in church asylum and the congregations assisting them, following Albert (...) Bandura’s classification of individual, proxy and collective agency. The data consists of interviews with employees of congregations and people who have been in church asylum. According to the results, the agency of people in church asylum was often drastically limited, which led to a need for proxy and collective agencies. Immigration regulation created a structure controlling the autonomy and capacities of both migrants and congregations. All modes of agency were inventively applied. (shrink)

Law and the legal system through which law is effected are very powerful, yet the power of the law has always been limited by the laws of nature, upon which the law has now direct grip. Human law now faces an unprecedented challenge, the emergence of a second limit on its grip, a new “species” of intelligent agents (AI machines) that can perform cognitive tasks that until recently only humans could. What happens, as a matter of law, when another species (...) interacts with us, can be integrated into human minds and bodies, makes “real-world” decisions—not through human proxies, but directly—and does all this “intelligently”, with what one could call autonomous agency or even a “mind” of its own? The article starts from the clear premise that control cannot be exercised directly on AI machines through human law. That control can only be effected through laws that apply to humans. This has several regulatory implications. The article’s first discusses what, in any attempt to regulate AI machines, the law can achieve. Having identified what the law can do, the article then canvases what the law should aim to achieve overall. The article encapsulate its analysis in a list of both doctrinal and normative principles that should underpin any regulation aimed at AI machines. Finally, the article compares three transnational options to implement the proposed regulatory approach. (shrink)

This article deals with a modern disease of academic science that consists of an enormous increase in the number of scientific publications without a corresponding advance of knowledge. Findings are sliced as thin as salami and submitted to different journals to produce more papers. If we consider academic papers as a kind of scientific ‘currency’ that is backed by gold bullion in the central bank of ‘true’ science, then we are witnessing an article-inflation phenomenon, a scientometric bubble that is most (...) harmful for science and promotes an unethical and antiscientific culture among researchers. The main problem behind the scenes is that the impact factor is used as a proxy for quality. Therefore, not only for convenience, but also based on ethical principles of scientific research, we adhere to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment when it emphasizes “the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics in funding, appointment and promotion considerations; and the need to assess research on its own merits rather on the journal in which the research is published”. Our message is mainly addressed to the funding agencies and universities that award tenures or grants and manage research programmes, especially in developing countries. The message is also addressed to well-established scientists who have the power to change things when they participate in committees for grants and jobs. (shrink)

Climate change's impact on investor behavior is a scantly investigated area in finance. This paper examines the performance of socially responsible exchange trade funds (ETFs) concerning conventional ETFs, in response to climate change events. We proxy climate change signals with a list of natural disaster events that NASA scientists relate to climate change. We contribute to existing literature, by using a very extensive information set of ETF strategies, not influenced by rating agencies' subjective evaluation policies, and covering almost 90% (...) of the universe of worldwide sustainability thematic-oriented ETFs. This sample allows us to identify the socially responsible investment behavior in response to unpredictable climate change shocks. Our identification strategy accounts for endogeneity concerns and relies on two-stage least square (2SLS) approach finding that responsible investors react to climate change events by purchasing socially responsible investments. The relationship between climate change signals and return of investment in themes linked to the development of sustainability is positive. Interestingly enough, the sign of this relationship is different, when we disentangle the empirical results according to the asset type, confirming that investors shift their investments from equity funds to bond funds when market sentiment worsens. Our results indicate that policymakers should increase the support of firms adopting environmentally conscious business practices, while managers should boost a sustainable business strategy. (shrink)

Today’s bodies are akin to ‘walking sensor platforms’. Bodies either host, or are the subjects of, an array of sensing devices that act to convert bodily movements, actions and dynamics into circulative data. This article proposes the notions of ‘disembodied exhaust’ and ‘embodied exhaustion’ to conceptualise processes of bodily sensorisation and datafication. As the material body interfaces with networked sensor technologies and sensing infrastructures, it emits disembodied exhaust: gaseous flows of personal information that establish a representational data-proxy. It is (...) this networked actant that progressively structures how embodied subjects experience their daily lives. The significance of this symbiont medium in determining the outcome of interplays between networked individuals and audiences necessitates that it is carefully contrived. The article explores the nature and function of the data-proxy, and its impact on social relations. Drawing on examples that depict individuals engaging with their data-proxies, the article suggests that managing a virtual presence is analogous to a work relation, demanding diligence and investment. But it also shows how the data-proxy operates as a mode of affect that challenges conventional distinctions made between organic and inorganic bodies, agency and actancy, mortality and immortality, presence and absence. (shrink)

Among all their sensations, agents need to distinguish between those caused by themselves and those caused by external causes. The ability to infer agency is particularly challenging under conditions of uncertainty. Within the predictive processing framework, this should happen through active control of prediction error that closes the action-perception loop. Here we use a novel, temporally-sensitive, behavioural proxy for prediction error to show that it is minimised most quickly when volatility is high and when participants report agency, (...) regardless of the accuracy of the judgement. We demonstrate broad effects of uncertainty on accuracy of agency judgements, movement, policy selection, and hypothesis switching. Measuring autism traits, we find differences in policy selection, sensitivity to uncertainty and hypothesis switching despite no difference in overall accuracy. (shrink)

In their efforts to prevent democratic backsliding, militant democrats have traditionally been sympathetic to technocratic arrangements. Does this sympathy imply a logical congruence? Comparing theories of militant democracy and epistemic technocracy (aka epistocracy), I discover a common approach to basic aspects of representative democracy. Both theories see voters as fallible or ignorant instead of capable political agents; and they both understand political parties to be channels of state rule rather than democratic expression. This shared suspicion of grassroots political agency (...) explains why they employ non-democratic means to pursue their goals. But the two theories appear to be also analytically co-extensive. Like militant democrats, epistemic technocrats polemicize antidemocrats inasmuch as the latter are proxies for epistemically foul decision-making. Conversely, militant democrats try to block ‘incorrect’ decisions as long as these lead to democratic subversion, thereby producing a distinct type of militant technocracy. The article ends by drawing the implications of this symbiosis of epistemic and militant democratic ideas for contemporary democratic theory. (shrink)

This study examines the impact of bank corporate governance reforms in the wake of the financial crisis. These reforms correspond to criticism of shareholder-focused agency-based corporate governance practices and a renewed focus on the stakeholder impact of corporate governance lapses in the financial sector. This study differs from previous studies of corporate governance in the financial sector in using performance indicators that proxy the interests of customers and the community. Drawing on data from 134 countries over an eight-year (...) period from 2004 to 2011, we find that the post-crisis corporate governance reforms in the banking sector appear to be effective in promoting greater bank attention to non-shareholder stakeholders’ interests. This study provides a means to conceptualize measures of bank performance from a stakeholder perspective in order to test emerging ideas about governance effectiveness in the financial sector. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Patient Self-Determination ActElizabeth Leibold McCloskey (bio)What are the ethics of extending the length of life? We know that we cannot artificially end life (Thou Shalt not Kill), but how about artificially extending life? Is that always good, sometimes good?... In ethics, is keeping people alive the highest good? Should our priority be to keep people breathing?... What does basic religious ethics say about this?(John C. Danforth, letter to (...) the author, 19 August 1989)The Patient Self-Determination Act, signed into law as part of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (OBRA '90) last November, marks the first time that Congress has passed legislation concerning the ethics of life-sustaining medical treatment. The bill was spearheaded by Senator John C. Danforth (RMO), who has a special interest in this area. An Episcopal priest, Danforth was formerly an assistant chaplain at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and now sits as a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid. Although Senator Danforth's legislative initiative was not a result of the Cruzan case, it was in his state of Missouri that the U.S. Supreme Court case involving removal of Nancy Cruzan's feeding tube arose (Cruzan v. Director of Missouri Department of Health, U.S. Supreme Court, 58 LW 4916, 26 June 1990). From his unique vantage point, he felt it was time to craft a legislative response to some of the difficult issues surrounding prolongation of life.The short answer to Senator Danforth's questions about when to artificially extend life is simple enough: people must be free to determine that for themselves. Common law and common sense dictate such a conclusion; living will and health care proxy statutes, enacted in almost every state, codify that right. The Catholic moral tradition teaches that one is not morally obligated to use extraordinary means to prolong life, a tradition shared both by the mainline Protestant and the reform and conservative Jewish community. Yet most people are unaware of their fundamental legal right to make such decisions, and as court cases from Quinlan (In re Quinlin, 137 N.J. Super. 227, 1975) to Cruzan demonstrate, few know [End Page 163] how to make arrangements for this right to be exercised if they become incapacitated.Meanwhile, health care practices are often driven by a denial of death. When Senator Danforth and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) introduced the bill on October 17, 1989, Senator Danforth said:More and more it is arguable that we play God by subjecting people to unwanted and sometimes unnecessary treatment, treatment that unnaturally prolongs the dying process. Our health care system has become obsessed with extending life, at times neglecting the caring component of medicine and trampling on the rights of patients.(Congressional Record 1989, 135:5.13566)The American Hospital Association estimates that 70 percent of deaths now occur after a determination to withhold or withdraw medical treatment. Many of those decisions are made without the benefit of an incapacitated patient's views, yet a Harvard study revealed that 95 percent of the population would like to prepare in advance for such decisions. Only 4 percent of hospitals have a systematic method of asking patients if they have an advance directive. Family members confront painful choices in the face of uncertainty about their loved one's wishes and it can be even more painful when a family knows the patient's desires but providers and the courts act otherwise because clear evidence is lacking.The Patient Self-Determination Act is rooted in the belief that people should be given information that enables them to specify the extent of medical treatment they wish to receive should they become incapacitated. The public should be educated about applicable state laws that protect the individual's right to make such choices through the use of an advance directive.The Act moves toward that goal by promoting knowledge of state laws. It requires every hospital, nursing home, home health agency, hospice, and health maintenance organization that participates in Medicaid or Medicare to routinely give all adult patients information about advance directives. Patients will also be given information on the... (shrink)

The United States Environmental Protection Agency has begun to encourage innovative market-based approaches to address nonpoint source water pollution. These water quality trading programs have the potential to achieve environmental standards at a lower overall cost. Two fundamental questions must be answered before these benefits can be realized: How will trades between point and nonpoint sources be monitored and enforced? and, How will nonpoint sources be included within a trading market? ;Point-nonpoint source trading can be accommodated through either a (...) technology-based or performance-based approach. The technology-based approach accommodates trading through the use of a proxy for unobservable, individual nonpoint source emission reductions. While trading ratios can effectively deal with the uncertainty associated with using a proxy for actual abatement, they are inefficient and ineffective for dealing with problems of hidden action. The alternative use of performance-based trading approaches requires the use of team contracts that provide individual incentives linked to the performance of the entire group. Such contracts must be designed to overcome both adverse selection and moral hazard problems. Performance-based approaches promise efficiency gains in terms of reducing the problems of asymmetric information, and by introducing flexibility into the choice of nonpoint source abatement technologies and practices. ;Nonpoint sources are exempted from direct regulation under the polluter-pays-principle. As a result, their participation in trading markets is voluntary, thus preventing a baseline cap on pre-trade emissions. To determine whether this arrangement should be changed, we must ask if there something that morally prohibits the direct regulation of nonpoint sources of pollution. While a morally relevant distinction can be made between point and nonpoint sources of emission based on differences in the ability to observe individual emission levels, this relevance is limited to the case of performance-based policy instruments. The moral legitimacy of applying the polluter-pays-principle to nonpoint sources of pollution must be made on a case by case basis, as it is dependent upon existing social, economic, and other practical factors. However, it can be stated that there is no general moral barrier to prohibit the application of the polluter-pays-principle to nonpoint sources of pollution. (shrink)

Mary Ann Meeker’s article admirably reminds readers that family members are involved in—or “responsively manage”—the care of relatives with severe illness in ways that run considerably beyond the stereotypes at play in many bioethical discussions of advance directives. Her observations thus make thinking about the role of families in healthcare provision more adequate to the facts, and this is an important contribution. There’s reason to be worried, however, that one explicit aim of the article—to ease the standing anxieties that many (...) clinicians and ethicists have about the reliability of family members as proxy decision makers—will be frustrated by its very success. Those already inclined to suspicion may tend to think that the more intricate and pervasive the ways in which families influence the healthcare decision making of their sick, the more chances they have for altering the connection between patients’ interests and the actions of professional providers.To determine whether and when such alterations are something to be concerned about, we’ll need to supplement a better grasp of the pertinent facts with a deeper sense of how human agency works and why we value it. We may also need some reminders about the defensibility of diverse moral understandings. Although both professionals and family members may profess an ethic that sets patients’ interests above those of non-patients—as Meeker’s own results suggest—any strict allegiance to such a framework may be more notional than normative—as her findings also hint. The actual working norms (among professionals, as well as within families) will likely be more complex, but not necessarily any the less defensible for that. (shrink)

Climate change is not a “natural” disaster, but a creation of the system that is aimed in pursuit of private profit at increasing scale. The implications and effects of climate change can be considered as one of the key factors in determining not only the welfare of human being but also the existence of other life forms and our planet. The principal submission of this paper is, extending and advancing the insight of Dr Mahbubul Haq and his team’s work on (...) Human Development Index, to another important step by including the negative impact of climate change. This paper uses carbondioxide emission of a given country as a proxy to capture the adverse effects on climate change and incorporates that into the HDI in a way that higher carbondioxide emissions lowers the HDI and renamed it as Clean Air Adjusted HDI. The new index changes the current HDI ranking of countries by pushing down the countries with heavy air pollution. Findings of this study can be useful specifically to countries with higher level of emissions to reconsider their relative ranking in terms of Clean Air Adjusted HDI, to bring down the emission levels. Further, International Agencies work on Human Development can give country specific recommendations to improve HDI ranking and also to mitigate adverse consequences on the environment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Spiritual Experience and Psychopathology”Roland Littlewood (bio)Keywordsreligion, innovation, psychosis, culture, diagnosisThis is an ambiguous though clinically valuable paper. Jackson and Fulford suggest that the distinction between their two categories, spiritual experience and mental illness, is conventional, yet their emphasis on issues of correct practice from the medical perspective threatens to return both into distinct ontological categories, albeit with a shared phenomenology. I do not understand why any single (...) instance must either be pathological or spiritual, except through clinical and clerical demands for clarity and order.Mental illness and spirituality are not two distinct natural phenomena “out there,” existing independently of human volition. They are both social—cultural if one prefers—ascriptions. Neither has some substantive core whose elucidation through psychophysiological, phenomenological or ultrahuman procedures could enable us to define its essence and thus differentiate it from the other. Neither experience is a self-evident datum. Both are easily susceptible to critiques, either that they do not exist as natural categories, or else that they should more properly be described as something else—as the workings out of social exclusion in the case of mental illness, as cosmological understanding or mass hysteria in the case of spirituality. Neither, I would suggest, can be specified by physiology or ultrahuman interventions respectively, but rather through shared cultural meanings which in turn are experientially validated by the biosocial phenomena themselves. It is not that we need to exclude the possibility of concurrences in brain states, but rather that these cannot specify the meaning and experience of the phenomena.Note that I emphasize “experienced through cultural meanings,” not “influenced by” culture: I do not accept that psychophysiology can have any existence independent of the social world through which it occurs. The psychiatrists’ form/content distinction, an optimistic proxy for nature/culture (Birnbaum 1923; Schneider 1928) may remain a convenient heuristic device, but it has a curious, perhaps doubtful, intellectual history (see the Endnote following).Cross-cultural comparisons argue that local idioms which we might approximate to current Western notions of mental illness and religion are quite varied. And the validity of particular instances of both “spiritual experience” and “psychopathology” may be contested in any society. While the social consequences of a pattern may determine the approbation accorded to a pattern such that patterns recalling chronic schizophrenia [End Page 67] are regarded as a deficit (and here I agree with James [1902] and the two authors), they are not necessarily aligned to categories of physical illness, but may be seen as a spiritual failure or obstruction. Unsuccessful or inappropriate shamanic practice among Amerindian and circumpolar societies is the classic instance (Eliade 1964). Within Western societies, demonic possession may be read by doctors as mental illness. (It is just as much a “spiritual experience”: why introduce the religionist’s distinctions between different types of ultrahuman agency? Compare Maslow on “peak” experiences. The terms “spiritual” and “religious world view” are naturalized idioms of late Christianity rather than cross-culturally valid terms [Tambiah 1990].) But also the converse (Koch 1972). And this depends on our professional interests. Clearly, psychiatrists prefer to perceive the world in a psychopathological idiom, while religious enthusiasts and clergy may favor divine intercession or demonic possession; and a Christian psychiatry not surprisingly may claim to act as arbiter (Sims 1991). Any specific instance may be perceived differently by individuals in accordance with their interests and affiliations.The paper’s terminology—“spiritual psychotic experience,” “genuine spiritual experience”—is confusing in that it does imply realist, not conventional claims (cf. Endnote 1, Jackson and Fulford). It is not necessary. A less laden idiom—such as “statistically or normatively unusual brain states and their experiential correlates” (Littlewood 1993, 257)—may be just too unwieldy for repetition, but I would propose that at this level of detail we need rather four categories depending or not on concordance with (i) something close to psychiatry’s recognition of a major mental illness, and (ii) something like an anthropological notion of religious or spiritual experience (cf. Littlewood 1991):[Table 1]PsychosisReligious ExperiencePresentAbsentPresentABAbsentCDSo Jackson and Fulford’s three cases fall into group “A” if the PSE was scored... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Theravada Buddhism and The British Encounter: Religious, Missionary, and Colonial Experience in Nineteenth Century Sri LankaTerry C. MuckTheravada Buddhism and The British Encounter: Religious, Missionary, and Colonial Experience in Nineteenth Century Sri Lanka. By Elizabeth Harris. London: Routledge, 2006. 274 pp.Of all the facets of the multifaceted interactions among Buddhists and Christians, the one sure to generate the most heat is mission: Christians spreading the gospel, Buddhists spreading (...) the dhamma, Christians preaching and Buddhists preaching at the same time in the same places. This is the central topic of Elizabeth Harris’s Theravada Buddhism and the British Encounter: Religious, Missionary, and Colonial Experience in Nineteenth Century Sri Lanka. By throwing light on this crucial encounter, Harris greatly reduces the heat generated by these competing missions and makes greater understanding possible. At least, that would be one hoped-for outcome.Harris challenges the standard postcolonial critique (SPC) of what happened to Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhism and Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhists when Christian missionaries, riding on the coattails of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonialists, invaded the peaceful and pristine island of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. SPC posits Western colonial missionaries gaining power through their political proxies, shaping Western understandings of Theravada Buddhism to fit their Puritan and rationalistic preconceptions, and then attempting to destroy this made-in-the-West Buddhism, using aggressive and triumphalistic mission tactics that not only failed, but generated such a backlash that still, today, Buddhist-Christian relationships in Sri Lanka are poisoned almost beyond remedy.Harris challenges the SPC not by denying the obvious truths embedded in the various elements of this version of the sad story, but by convincingly showing us that the SPC is only one side of a very complex story. The SPC, Harris argues, needs to be complexified by realizing that not all British in nineteenth century Ceylon fit the stereotypical missionary model, that Sri Lankan Buddhists had agency in shaping what became known as Protestant Buddhism in the twentieth century Buddhist revival, and that the Buddhist mission effort that corresponded to the Christian mission effort led to a system of competing mission efforts that must be factored into any attempt to understand the influence of the nineteenth century on the twentieth—and the twenty-first.British ChristiansHarris uses three paradigms to show the diversity of British interlocutors with Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhism and Buddhists. The first paradigm is an early (1796–1830), middle (1830–1870), late (1870–1900) periodization that corresponds to parts 1, 2, and 3 of the book. By means of this paradigm Harris shows that development took place in British understandings of Buddhist precept and practice. The earliest observers made mistakes, even when they based their observations on texts and [End Page 188] practicing Buddhist informants. As with most such developments, the changes and depths of understanding were uneven, with later commentators sometimes repeating the howlers and biases of the earliest commentators, even as they in some areas went far beyond them in depth of understanding. Later was not always better, but it usually was.The second paradigm one might call vocational. The British did not all come to Ceylon for the same reason. Some came as political overseers for the colonial government. Some came as merchants, looking for a way to turn the island’s abundant natural resources into pounds in their bank accounts back home. Some came simply as “tourists” looking to find out more about what was in the nineteenth century a very exotic culture indeed to European eyes. Some came as missionaries to spread the Christian gospel story. And a trickle of scholars seeking data for research topics gradually turned into a fairly broad stream by the end of the century. Each of these five groups came asking slightly different questions. Because Buddhism was so ubiquitous among the people of Ceylon, Buddhism was always part of the answer to the different questions politicos, businesspeople, travelers, Christians, and professors asked, but the different questions produced different products: statements of public policy vis-à-vis Buddhism, Southeast Asian versions of Weber’s observations about religion and economics, diaries and travelogues, theologies of religion, and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Politics of Practical Reason: Why Theological Ethics Must Change Your Life by Mark RyanDavid ElliotThe Politics of Practical Reason: Why Theological Ethics Must Change Your Life Mark Ryan eugene, or: cascade books, 2011. 229 pp. $20.80If the spirited debate between Stanley Hauerwas and Jeffrey Stout remains front-page news in theological ethics, then Mark Ryan’s subtle and penetrating The Politics of Practical Reason will help keep it there. (...) Ryan argues that practical reason is the hinge of ethical thinking and that it is “political” in the sense of shaping the community or polis. Given this hinge, the pressing question is of course, “Whose practical reason?” To answer this, Ryan probes major contemporary ethicists from Charles Taylor to Alasdair MacIntyre, but the book always circles back to Hauerwas and Stout. Their debate is ultimately decided by proxy, through a mediating philosopher whose work on practical reason Ryan sees both as the gold standard and as the indispensable background for understanding Hauerwas. Expecting this to be MacIntyre, the reader may be surprised—and perhaps even convinced—that the philosopher who best explains and possibly vindicates Hauerwas is in fact Elizabeth Anscombe, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s protégé, close friend, and translator.The book opens with Anscombe’s Intention (1957), which Donald Davidson called “the most important treatment of action since Aristotle.” In it, Anscombe argued that intention presupposes desire and is declared in public language within a context of social practices presupposed for agency to be intelligible. The implication is that we form intentions as members of a community with a particular form of life sustained by social practices. With human desire as its motivating nisus, Ryan insists that intention “is part of the very form of practical reasoning, then, to be political” (144).Having retrieved Anscombe’s model of practical reason, Ryan examines the field of contemporary ethics to see who measures up. Charles Taylor fails to place agents in a particular community, locating us instead in that bloated abstraction called “modernity.” Ryan therefore concludes that Taylor’s is an “ethics for anybody,” which leaves the self finally disembodied (94–98). Stout fares little better due to his refrain that Hauerwas went astray when he abandoned justice talk. Ryan counters that Stout’s sort of justice should be abandoned; lacking a substantive vision of the good and a teleology of freedom, Stout’s justice is reckoned a blind guide who cannot see or say why the polis should pursue one end and not another. Hauerwas, on the other hand, specifies a particular polis within which practical reason can intelligibly function: the church. It has [End Page 218] a substantive vision of the good (i.e., the peaceable kingdom) located in a scriptural narrative displayed by social practices requiring formation in the virtues (119–21). Ryan therefore endorses Hauerwas’s politics of practical reason, indebted to MacIntyre and made possible by Anscombe.I see one lacuna in this otherwise excellent book. Ryan seemingly advocates a pragmatic model of practical reason that is wholly internal to the polis rather than grounded in “truths of human nature as such” (101). This makes Anscombe an uneasy ally. Her “Modern Moral Philosophy” famously proposed a retrieval of virtue that required an overhauled “account of human nature … and above all of human flourishing” (41). This move opened the door for ethical naturalism, perhaps even natural law—both of which Anscombe and the later MacIntyre endorse. But these look suspiciously like what Ryan calls an “ethics for anybody.” So in the end are Anscombe and MacIntyre turncoats, or do Hauerwas and Ryan not follow them far enough? This crucial question remains unanswered.Despite this wrinkle, Ryan’s book is the best intervention in the Hauerwas–Stout debate that we now have. It throws light on Hauerwas, challenges Stout, shows why Anscombe matters, and gives practical reason its generous due. Philosophically deft and charitable in tone, it deserves to be read and studied as a major contribution to the field.David ElliotUniversity of Notre DameCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The focus of this study is to explore the impact of transformation from living as a community and perceiving cooperation as a responsibility to meet each other’s needs to individualized society of the modern life due to the capitalist market system on religious obligations with economic implications through emerging institution in the modern period. This study will first analyze how the proxy-embeddedness has led to a transformation in the society from the perspective of Islamic economics under four categories: (1) (...) the weakening of Muslims’ relations with their relatives and neighbours; (2) Equalization of worship for different purposes on a common denominator; (3) Lack of social awareness due to deprivation of the experience of performing worship personally; and (4) the prioritization of those capable of being productive over unproductive people in terms of being beneficiaries of zakat or other types of benefits. Worships such as zakāt and sacrifice are among the acts of worshipping that enable wealthy Muslims to help those in need financially. Although the transfer of material resources to the needy people through modern institutions ensures the fulfilment of worship, through which principles and objectives this transfer is carried out are also important. Significant transformations are observed in the way these worships are performed compared to the pre-modern period, as institutions that carry out zakāt and sacrificial meat collection and distribution activities in line with capitalist principles such as low transaction costs and efficiency. First, it is expected from a Muslim to be aware of the social environment he/she is in, be aware of the needy, and maintain social relations within this awareness. All kinds of charity and financial aid at the level of individual relations, especially zakāt and sacrifice, ensure the continuation of this awareness. If Muslims perform these worships and charity activities through institutions, the awareness of one’s environment will weaken. A second transformation is to make these worships indistinguishable from each other by equating them to the common denominator of paying money. This situation leads to the equalization of worship at the material level and causes the differences to be invisible for Muslims who perform the worship. A third transformation is that the realization of worship by institutions through the proxy system causes Muslims to be deprived of the experience of performing worship individually. While these prayers are performed through institutions in an efficient and low-cost way, the only thing expected from Muslims is to make the necessary payment through the bank. In this case, the spiritual contributions expected to be realized during the fulfilment of the worship decrease. Finally, we see that some institutions utilize capitalist principles and goals to decide who should receive financial aid. For this reason, people who can become a productive factor due to the help they receive are prioritized over others. There is a rational choice behind this decision mechanism: It is aimed to reduce the number of needy people in society by transforming zakat recipients into zakāt payers. On the other hand, Islamic sources do not consider such a priority among those who deserve to receive zakāt. Moreover, this situation will lead to the permanent postponement of people who are not included as a productive factor in the capitalist system but in need. In the second part of the study, an analysis of the agency (vekalet) system, which allows individuals to transfer some of their responsibilities to private institutions to spend time more efficiently, is conducted through the example of nursing houses. Another example of the fulfilment of zakat and sacrifice through the proxies given to institutions is that Muslims fulfil their responsibilities towards their relatives through institutions such as nursing houses. The reason for such a need arises from the fact that people, who take place as human capital in the capitalist system, are required to spend their time to improve themselves, get new education and gain more experience, instead of spending their time taking care of their relatives so that the production process can continue to grow. Although this type of service contract is formally valid in terms of Islamic law when evaluated in terms of the bond that Islamic morality envisages to be established between Muslims and their relatives and the protection of this bond, institutions such as nursing houses can lead to the commodification of family ties due to the transfer of responsibilities to relatives in return for a service fee. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The National Commission on AIDSDonald S. Goldman (bio) and Jeff Stryker (bio)A decade after the first cases were recognized in the United States, AIDS continues to vex policymakers and fascinate the public. It has been said that AIDS acts as a prism, refracting a spectrum of controversial topics. For bioethicists, these topics include: equity in the allocation of resources for treatment and research; forgoing life-sustaining care and proxy (...) decision making; informed consent in the context of HIV testing and screening; the ethical duties of health care workers to provide care for persons with HIV disease; and competing obligations of health care professionals to patients and to third parties who may be put at risk.The Role of CommissionsIf AIDS is the quintessential case study for bioethicists, it is a potential quagmire for politicians. The association of HIV disease with drug use and sexual behavior makes it a topic that all but the most courageous (or the most homophobic) politicians shy away from. A frequent political response is to form a commission.Alexander Capron, who was executive director of the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine, has described some roles commissions play: a watchdog, overseeing the work of particular government agencies; a crucible, providing a means for "publicly hammering out conclusions on controversial issues when consensus, both in the public and in the relevant disciplines, is not yet apparent"; and "a lightning rod for public concern—or viewed less charitably, dumping ground for an issue that is too difficult for the ordinary political process to handle" (Capron 1983, p. 9).Nearly every state has created a gubernatorial-level task force or commission on AIDS. The National Commission on AIDS was established under the Health Omnibus Program Extension (HOPE) Act of 1988, which was signed by President Reagan on November 4, 1988. The official charter of the commission was approved August 2, 1989 and its original two-year term was extended for a third year. The mission statement crafted by the commission to reflect its Congressional mandate reads: [End Page 339]The National Commission on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is an independent body of 15 members created to advise the President and Congress. The Commission seeks to build a broad public understanding on the magnitude, scope and urgency of the HIV/AIDS epidemic; provide and inspire leadership at all levels of both the public and private sectors; empower individuals and communities; and advocate for effective, cooperative and non-discriminatory resources required for prevention, comprehensive care, and the research necessary to halt the epidemic.As the mission statement implies, the National Commission on AIDS has viewed itself from the outset not only as a crucible for policy analysis, but also as a forum for those affected by HIV disease. In site visits and hearings the commissioners have met with hundreds of people living with HIV disease, and with caregivers on the front lines. This odyssey has taken the commission on visits to homeless shelters in New York City; to "shooting galleries" where intravenous drug users congregate in Seattle; to Native American communities in four states; to private homes in rural Georgia; and to hospitals, HIV antibody testing centers, drug treatment clinics, and hemophilia treatment centers throughout the nation. It quickly became clear during the commission's travels that HIV disease cannot be understood outside the context of the racism, homophobia, poverty and unemployment that provide the medium that fosters its spread. It also became apparent that issues of HIV prevention, care and treatment, and clinical research are inextricably intertwined and must be dealt with as such.Early InitiativesUnder the leadership of Chairperson June Osborn and Vice-chairperson David Rogers, the commission decided that the problems it saw in its first few meetings were too urgent to await a full-length annual report. Hence the commission entered the fray with a series of brief interim reports on particular aspects of AIDS. These reports enabled the commission to draw attention to urgent problems of limitations in access to health care and to underscore the plight of people with HIV disease who might otherwise garner little media attention, such as prisoners and drug users (National Commission... (shrink)

The main aim of this study was to empirically analyze whether Institutional Quality moderates the relationship between corporate governance and stock liquidity through the light of agency and information asymmetry theory. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first finance study. The sample consists of 230 non-financial firms listed on the Pakistan stock exchange during the period of 2009–2019. We used an instrumental variable approach and our new Institutional Quality index composed of world governance indicators and a (...) corporate governance index, developed via principal component analysis, to demonstrate a relationship between corporate governance and stock liquidity and check the moderating role of Institutional Quality by following the resources complementary phenomenon. Our results show a significant, positive relationship between the corporate governance index and stock liquidity, suggesting that well-governed firms have high liquidity. The results show that the Institutional Quality index has a positive moderating impact on the relationship between corporate governance and stock liquidity, suggesting that corporate governance in Pakistan is weak. Our results are robust to a series of endogeneity checks using alternative proxies of stock liquidity. (shrink)