Hardt and Negri's Empire is a welcome and often inspiring antidote to the defeatism that has infected so much of the left. Their analysis includes a number of important insights, such as the capacity of American forms of power to penetrate other states. But their political economy is crude, and the promising discussions they open drift towards an empire without any material center. At the same time, their revolutionary commitments to transformation from below refuses to engage the complexities of agency (...) and organization. In the end we are, disappointingly, left with a virtual empire confronting a virtual proletariat. (shrink)

The first three sections of this lecture address the need for better historical-materialist theorisations of capitalist competition, capitalist classes and capitalist states, and in particular the institutional dimensions of these – which is fundamental for understanding why and how capitalism has survived into the twenty-first century. The fourth section addresses historical materialism’s under-theorisation of the institutional dimensions of working-class formation, and how this figures in explaining why, despite the expectations of the founders of historical materialism, the working classes have not, (...) at least yet, become capitalism’s gravediggers. While recognising that a better historical materialism along these lines will not necessarily provide us with a gps route to a socialist world beyond capitalism, it does suggest a number of guidelines for socialist strategy, with which the lecture concludes. This includes the need for building new institutions capable of defining, mobilising and representing the working class broadly, as well as recognising that the types of parties that can transform working classes into leading agents of social transformation have yet to be invented. A strategic priority must be to start anew at creating the kinds of working-class political institutions which can rekindle the socialist imagination, and develop the socialist capacities to get there. (shrink)

Giovanni Arrighi made a remarkably broad-ranging and original contribution to comparative political economy and historical sociology over five decades. His last book shares these qualities. But Adam Smith in Beijing is unfortunately not mainly about the origins and dynamics of Chinese capitalism over the past three decades. It presents Adam Smith not as the apostle of free-market capitalism, but rather of a ‘non-capitalist market society’; and it uses this to make the case that since China’s economic development takes place outside (...) the European/North American capitalist ‘core’, it must, almost by definition, not be capitalist. Markets are conceived here as the instruments of states, yet the theory of the state advanced is severely undeveloped. Arrighi’s argument that China’s economic development is part and parcel of the demise of the US project for establishing itself as the ‘world state’ misinterprets the nature of the US empire as well as misses the extent of China’s integration with US-led capitalist globalisation. (shrink)

Philosophers often claim that forgiveness is a paradoxical phenomenon. I here examine two of the most widespread ways of dealing with the paradoxical nature of forgiveness. One of these ways, emblematized by Aurel Kolnai, seeks to resolve the paradox by appealing to the idea of repentance. Somehow, if a wrongdoer repents, then forgiving her is no longer paradoxical. I argue that this influential position faces more problems than it solves. The other way to approach the paradox, exemplified here by the (...) work of Jacques Derrida, is just too obscure to be by itself helpful. Yet, I argue that what I take to be its spirit is on the right track. I recommend distinguishing between the definition and the justification of forgiveness, and also between forgiveness understood as a mental phenomenon and an overt, communicative act. These distinctions are not given their due in the specialized literature, and I expose the nefarious consequences of this neglect. By focusing on forgiveness as a mental phenomenon I seek to analyze the root of the talk of paradoxes which surrounds the discussion of forgiveness. Finally, I present an analysis of forgiveness as a pure mental phenomenon, and argue that this analysis is the most important step in understanding forgiveness in any other sense. While my analysis reveals interesting aspects of forgiveness, it reveals, too, that forgiveness is not quite as paradoxical after all. (shrink)

The present volume contains articles of well-known representatives of the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) and other related linguistic theories. Founded by I. Mel'cuk and A. Zholkovsky in the sixties in Moscow, MTT soon became known in the West as a “prominent outsider” theory. The picture changed since then, though. MTT gained importance in several areas of linguistics and computational linguistics. It influenced the design of new grammar formalisms such as Dependency Tree Grammars. Also, specific parts of MTT have been directly overtaken (...) into other theories; consider, for example, the work on integrating Lexical Functions into Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon. The present volume is a further convincing demonstration of MTT's liveliness and relevance to the field's “burning” issues. The focus of the volume is on semantics, semantic representation and relation of semantics to surface in MTT. Six out of eight articles (Polguère; Escalier & Fournier; Paducheva; St.-Germain; Beck; Bogulavsky) deal with problems related to these topics, while the last two articles of the volume (Sgall and Rambow; Joshi) throw a bridge between MTT, or, more precisely, between dependency-based theories of which MTT is one instantiation, and other linguistic theories. (shrink)

"-- M. J. Silverthorne,The Humanities Association Review Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of ...

People tend to be repulsed by the idea of cash markets in kidneys, but support the trading of kidneys through paired exchanges or chains. We reject anti-commodification accounts of this reaction and offer an egalitarian one. We argue that the morally significant difference between cash markets and kidney chains is that the former allow the wealthy greater access to kidneys, while the latter do not. The only problem with kidney chains is that they do not go far enough in addressing (...) equality concerns, and we show how the introduction of cash payments by the state could remedy this. (shrink)

Consensus is lacking among research ethicists on the question of how broadly to understand the requirements of non-exploitation in international clinical research. Two types of principles have been proposed, minimalist and non-minimalist, grounded in two opposing conceptions of exploitation, transactional and systemic. Transactionalists have offered principles, which, it has been argued, are satisfied by minimal gains to vulnerable subjects measured against an unjust status quo. Systemicists have advanced principles with decidedly non-minimal mandates but only by conflating the obligations of clinical (...) research with those of First World citizenship. My aim here is to break this deadlock by offering grounds for a non-minimal requirement of international research ethics grounded in a transactional conception of exploitation. I do this by arguing that a subject's gains must be measured not only within the transaction, relative to her own starting point and to the share of gains enjoyed by her co-transactor, but also across transactions, so as to ensure parity of benefit to trial participants whenever, and wherever, parity of burden is assumed. (shrink)

Journal of Global Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, Page 329-343, December 2013.

The Canadian province of Quebec recently amended its Health Insurance Act to cover the costs of In Vitro Fertilization . The province of Ontario recently de-insured IVF. Both provinces cited cost-effectiveness as their grounds, but the question as to whether a public health insurance system ought to cover IVF raises the deeper question of how we should understand reproduction at the social level, and whether its costs should be a matter of individual or collective responsibility. In this article I examine (...) three strategies for justifying collective provisions in a liberal society and assess whether public reproductive assistance can be defended on any of these accounts. I begin by considering, and rejecting, rights-based and needs-based approaches. I go on to argue that instead we ought to address assisted reproduction from the perspective of the contractarian insurance-based model for public health coverage, according to which we select items for inclusion based on their unpredictability in nature and cost. I argue that infertility qualifies as an unpredictable incident against which rational agents would choose to insure under ideal conditions and that assisted reproduction is thereby a matter of collective responsibility, but only in cases of medical necessity or inability to pay. The policy I endorse by appeal to this approach is a means-tested system of coverage resembling neither Ontario nor Quebec's, and I conclude that it constitutes a promising alternative worthy of serious consideration by bioethicists, political philosophers, and policy-makers alike. (shrink)

Commercial surrogacy arrangements now cross borders; this paper aims to reevaluate the traditional moral concerns regarding the practice against the added ethical dimension of global injustice. I begin by considering the claim that global surrogacy serves to satisfy the positive reproductive rights of infertile first-world women. I then go on to consider three powerful challenges to this claim. The first holds that commercial surrogacy involves the commodification of a good that should not be valued in market terms, the second that (...) it involves the exploitation of the labor of disadvantaged women, and the third that it depends on the illegitimate privileging of positive rights over negative rights. I reject the first of these challenges and argue that global surrogacy arrangements are indeed exploitative on the dual basis of what I call intracontractual injustice and intercontractual coercion. The latter, I contend, depends on a preexisting negative rights violation, which cannot be permitted for the sake of satisfying another's positive reproductive entitlement. I conclude not in favor of a global ban but with suggestions on how developing nations that permit commercial surrogacy might better protect the negative reproductive rights of their female citizens, thereby making them less vulnerable to exploitation. (shrink)

Egalitarian liberal political philosophers have been at pains to show that there is a nonnegligible “place” for liberty within the framework of an egalitarian theory of justice. Thus, many have insisted that, when redistribution is required in order to achieve greater equality, assets should be transferred in the most abstract form possible, ideally through a system of cash transfers. In this article we argue that this strategy has the potential to generate significant violations of neutrality. The problem arises from the (...) fact that individuals with certain rates of time preference often want to use social institutions as self-binding mechanisms and as a result may exhibit a preference for in-kind benefits or other institutional arrangements that are frequently misclassified as paternalistic. We argue that egalitarians who rely on cash transfers as a way of accommodating the demands of liberty do so at the expense of neutrality. (shrink)

In Homos, he studies the historical, political, and philosophical grounds for the current distrust, within the gay community, of self-identifying moves, for the ...

According to Philippe Van Parijs, the superiority of an unconditional basic income (UBI) over conventional means-tested liberal welfare state programs lies in its decommodifying potential. In this article I argue that even if a UBI was sustainable at high enough a level to lessen the extent to which an individual is forced to sell his or her labor power in the market, it would nonetheless have the adverse and simultaneous effect of forcing that individual into further market transactions to satisfy (...) his or her most basic needs. I conclude that the relative directness with which a welfare regime responds to basic needs qualifies as a crucial dimension of decommodification, and that the conventional liberal welfare state scores rather higher along this dimension than a UBI would. (shrink)

A private, for-profit company has recently opened a pair of plasma donation centres in Canada, at which donors can be compensated up to $50 for their plasma. This has sparked a nation-wide debate around the ethics of paying plasma donors. Our aim in this paper is to shift the terms of the current debate away from the question of whether plasma donors should be paid and toward the question of who should be paying them. We consider arguments against paying plasma (...) donors grounded in concerns about exploitation, commodification, and the introduction of a profit motive. We find them all to be normatively inconclusive, but also overbroad in light of Canada’s persistent reliance on plasma from paid donors in the United States. While we believe that there are good reasons to oppose allowing a private company to profit from Canada’s blood supply, these concerns can be addressed if payment is dispensed instead by a public, not-for-profit agency. In short, we reject profiting from plasma while we endorse paying for plasma; we therefore conclude in favour of a new Canadian regime of public sector plasma collection and compensation. (shrink)

Anti-commodification theorists condemn liberal political philosophers for not being able to justify restricting a market transaction on the basis of what is sold, but only on the basis of how it is sold. The anti-commodification theorist is correct that if this were all the liberal had to say in the face of noxious markets, it would be inadequate: even if everyone has equal bargaining power and no one is misled, there are some goods that should not go to the highest (...) bidder. In this paper, I respond to the anti-commodification critique of liberalism by arguing that the political liberal has the wherewithal to account not only for the conditions under which goods should not be sold, but also for what kinds of goods should not be for sale in a market economy. The political liberal can appeal to a principle of equal basic rights, and to one of sufficiency in basic needs and the social bases of self-respect, I argue, to account for what’s problematic about markets in civic goods, necessary goods, and physical goods including body parts and intimate services. (shrink)

This collection of Leo Abse's last essays are writings that he was working on from 2006 up to and during his final illness.

How common are corporate codes of ethics in the UK and especially among Britain's most admired companies? The author is Wicklander Professor of Professional Ethics at DePaul University, Chicago, and current President of the American Society for Business Ethics.

The essays are based on a long and intimate familiarity with the works, but the essay on Aristotle is especially important as one of Strauss's few writings on ...

Offering an innovative approach to critical thinking, Good Reasoning Matters! identifies the essential structure of good arguments in a variety of contexts and also provides guidelines to help students construct their own effective arguments. In addition to examining the most common features of faulty reasoning--slanting, bias, propaganda, vagueness, ambiguity, and a common failure to consider opposing points of view--the book introduces a variety of argument schemes and rhetorical techniques. This edition adds material on visual arguments and more exercises.

A set X of nonnegative integers is computably enumerable (c.e.), also called recursively enumerable (r.e.), if there is a computable method to list its elements. Let ε denote the structure of the computably enumerable sets under inclusion, $\varepsilon = (\{W_e\}_{e\in \omega}, \subseteq)$ . We previously exhibited a first order ε-definable property Q(X) such that Q(X) guarantees that X is not Turing complete (i.e., does not code complete information about c.e. sets). Here we show first that Q(X) implies that X has (...) a certain "slowness" property whereby the elements must enter X slowly (under a certain precise complexity measure of speed of computation) even though X may have high information content. Second we prove that every X with this slowness property is computable in some member of any nontrivial orbit, namely for any noncomputable A ∈ ε there exists B in the orbit of A such that X ≤ T B under relative Turing computability (≤ T ). We produce B using the Δ 0 3 -automorphism method we introduced earlier. (shrink)

This uniquely fascinating volume is not merely a learned treatise in historical semantics; it is itself a stupendous display of world harmony as a creed-a vivid demonstration that "all is all.".

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 4, Page 347-371, November 2022. We sometimes have to choose between options that are seemingly incomparable insofar as they seem to be neither better than, worse than, nor equal to each other. This often happens when the available options are quite different from one another. For instance, consider a choice between prioritizing either criminal justice reform or healthcare reform as a public policy goal. Even after the relevant details of the goals and possible (...) reforms are filled in, it is plausible that neither goal is better than, worse than, nor equal to the other. Such seemingly incomparable options present a problem for rational choice since it is unclear how an agent might rationally choose between them. What we need are some principles to help govern rational choice when faced with seemingly incomparable options. I here present three such principles. While each principle is individually compelling, I show that they are jointly incompatible. I then argue that the correct response to this inconsistent triad is to reject the principle that rationally censures performing a sequence of choices one knows will result in a suboptimal outcome. The upshot is that when seeming incomparability is involved, an agent can money pump themselves without being less rational for it. (shrink)

The age-old debate about what constitutes just punishment has become deadlocked. Retributivists continue to privilege desert over all else, and consequentialists continue to privilege punishment's expected positive consequences, such as deterrence or rehabilitation, over all else. In this important intervention into the debate, Leo Zaibert argues that despite some obvious differences, these traditional positions are structurally very similar, and that the deadlock between them stems from the fact they both oversimplify the problem of punishment. Proponents of these positions pay insufficient (...) attention to the conflicts of values that punishment, even when justified, generates. Mobilizing recent developments in moral philosophy, Zaibert offers a properly pluralistic justification of punishment that is necessarily more complex than its traditional counterparts. An understanding of this complexity should promote a more cautious approach to inflicting punishment on individual wrongdoers and to developing punitive policies and institutions. (shrink)

A reissue of the 1975 edition, with four added essays, this collection offers a clear introduction to Strauss' views regarding the nature of political ...

Of her two granddaughters, Grandma Yvette clearly prefers Ruby Taylor's perfect--and perfectly Jewish--cousin, Sarah. They do everything together, including bake cookies and have secret sleep overs that Ruby isn't invited to. Twelve-year-old Ruby suspects Grandma Yvette doesn't think she's Jewish enough. The Jewish religion is matrilineal, which means it's passed down from mother to child, and unlike Sarah, Ruby's mother isn't Jewish. But when Sarah starts acting out--trading in her skirts and cardigans for ripped jeans and stained t-shirts, getting in (...) trouble at school--Ruby can't help but be somewhat pleased. Then Sarah suddenly takes things too far, and Ruby is convinced Sarah is possessed by a dybbuk, an evil spirit... that Ruby may or may not have accidentally released from Grandma Yvette's basement. Ruby is determined to save her cousin, but a dybbuk can only be expelled by a "pious Jew." If Ruby isn't Jewish enough for her own grandmother, how can she possibly be Jewish enough to fight a dybbuk? (shrink)