Recently, the outsourcing of Information Technology activities to offshore locations has been gaining significant momentum, with some associated backlash by the workforce in the United States. Based on their 2005 survey [6], Global Insight, a private consulting firm, estimated that U.S. companies will spend about $38.2 billion in offshore IT services by 2010, compared with about $15.2 billion in 2005, primarily because the expected cost savings will grow by $11.7 billion in the same time period. Binder writing in "Foreign Affairs" (...) [2] states that offshoring expenditures will continue to increase dramatically, and the changes the offshoring phenomenon will bring will transform society. This paper focuses on the social impact of offshoring and the effects of the weighing of costs and benefits as a result of offshoring activities. (shrink)

The scholarly literature suggests high or increased tax burdens tend to reduce economic growth, lowering incomes. Some argue, however, that low taxes and high economic growth can have adverse income distribution consequences or can lead to utility-reducing under-consumption of needed public goods. Evidence is presented questioning those assertions. People seek happiness by moving, and tend to migrate to low tax areas. Moreover, there is little evidence that governmental expansion leads to truly greater equality. Appropriately measured, income equality is actually far (...) greater than typically claimed. Moreover, income data suggest that the international equalization of incomes and global reduction of poverty largely reflect private sector activity, namely market forces working where the rule of law and strong protection of property rights prevails. (shrink)

De Long's criticisms of our explanation of unemployment patterns in the United States are empirically false. His assertion that we have the direction of causation reversed collapses in light of the lag between artificially high wages and unemployment. Nor are his claims about the nature of cyclical movements in productivity and real wages consistent with the data. Finally, his contention that the model we present does not work in the post‐World War II era is, at best, misleading. The evidence shows (...) with remarkable consistency that government attempts to prop up wages have caused twentieth‐century increases in U.S. employment. (shrink)

PROSPERITY AND UPHEAVAL: THE WORLD ECONOMY 1945?1980 by Herman Van der Wee translated by Robin Hogg and Max R. Hall Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. 621pp., $14.95 Van der Wee uncritically accepts that Keynesianism is responsible for post?war economic stability. Against this belief, it is argued that an analysis of the historical record shows no significant efforts at countercyclical fiscal management in the post?war era, while efforts to control the economy via monetary policy were associated with increasing instability, culminating (...) in the crisis years of the 1970s. Thus, in the American case at least, post?war stability has been the result of self?correcting market tendencies, while instability has followed government macroeconomic intervention. (shrink)

One of the distinctive developments of the postwar era in the United States has been the relative decline in the economic significance of labor unions. Melvyn Dubofsky offers the hypothesis that this has resulted from a shift in public policy that represents a return to pre‐New Deal notions of the proper relationship between government and unions. But a much more likely explanation lies in the changing nature of American life. Increases in education and advances in transportation and communications have weakened (...) greatly the traditional worker‐versus‐capitalist paradigm that is at the core of Dubofsky's thinking. As this has happened, labor unions have increasingly become relics of a previous age. (shrink)

In their Out of Work: Government and Unemployment in Twentieth Century America, Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway contend that government intervention in American labor markets has caused unemployment by raising the real price of labor. In my critique of the book, I allowed that while this might sometimes be the case, it is not as important as Vedder and Gallaway claim. Their Reply does not succeed in vindicating their argument, because their wage averages fail to take into (...) account variations in wages within phases of the business cycle; because they fail to take into account the effects of unemployment on potential productivity, distorting their measures of real wages; and because they ignore the vast literature on the subject. (shrink)

This is the third edition of a classic book first published in 1960, which has sold thousands of copies in two paperback edition and has been translated into several foreign languages. Popkin's work ha generated innumerable citations, and remains a valuable stimulus to current historical research. In this updated version, he has revised and expanded throughout, and has added three new chapters, one on Savonarola, one on Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, and one on Pascal. This authoritative treatment of the (...) theme of scepticism and its historical impact will appeal to scholars and students of early modern history now as much as ever. (shrink)

Written across the disciplines of art history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and theology, the ten essays comprising the collection all insist on multidimensional definitions of evil. Taking its title from a moment in Shakespeare's Tempest when Prospero acknowledges his responsibility for Caliban, this collection explores the necessarily ambivalent relationship between humanity and evil. To what extent are a given society's definitions of evil self-serving? Which figures are marginalized in the process of identifying evil? How is humanity itself implicated in the production (...) of evil? Is evil itself something fundamentally human? These questions, indicative of the kinds of issues raised in this collection, seem all the more pressing in light of recent world events. The ten essays were originally presented at the First Global Conference on Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, held in March 2000 in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. (shrink)

A selection of speeches and essays from the author's second decade as president of Yale University.

Thinking through the body: educating for the humanities -- The body as background -- Self-knowledge and its discontents: from Socrates to somaesthetics -- Muscle memory and the somaesthetic pathologies of everyday life -- Somaesthetics in the philosophy classroom: a practical approach -- Somaesthetics and the limits of aesthetics -- Somaesthetics and Burke's sublime -- Pragmatism and cultural politics: from textualism to somaesthetics -- Body consciousness and performance -- Somaesthetics and architecture: a critical option -- Photography as performative process -- Asian (...) ars erotica and the question of sexual aesthetics -- Philosophy as awakened life : everyday aesthetics of embodiment in American transcendentalism and Japanese Zen practice -- Somatic style. (shrink)

"This is one of the most significant contributions to Locke studies in the twentieth century.

Strangers, Gods and Monster is a fascinating look at how human identity is shaped by three powerful but enigmatic forces. Often overlooked in accounts of how we think about ourselves and others, Richard Kearney skillfully shows, with the help of vivid examples and illustrations, how the human outlook on the world is formed by the mysterious triumvirate of strangers, gods and monsters. Throughout, Richard Kearney shows how strangers, gods and monsters do not merely reside in myths or fantasies (...) but constitute a central part of our cultural unconscious. Above all, he argues that until we understand better that the Other resides deep within ourselves, we can have little hope of understanding how our most basic fears and desires manifest themselves in the external world and how we can learn to live with them. (shrink)

Conditionalization is one of the central norms of Bayesian epistemology. But there are a number of competing formulations, and a number of arguments that purport to establish it. In this paper, I explore which formulations of the norm are supported by which arguments. In their standard formulations, each of the arguments I consider here depends on the same assumption, which I call Deterministic Updating. I will investigate whether it is possible to amend these arguments so that they no longer depend (...) on it. As I show, whether this is possible depends on the formulation of the norm under consideration. (shrink)

What we value, like, endorse, want, and prefer changes over the course of our lives. Richard Pettigrew presents a theory of rational decision making for agents who recognise that their values will change over time and whose decisions will affect those future times.

According to certain normative theories in epistemology, rationality requires us to be logically omniscient. Yet this prescription clashes with our ordinary judgments of rationality. How should we resolve this tension? In this paper, I focus particularly on the logical omniscience requirement in Bayesian epistemology. Building on a key insight by Hacking :311–325, 1967), I develop a version of Bayesianism that permits logical ignorance. This includes: an account of the synchronic norms that govern a logically ignorant individual at any given time; (...) an account of how we reduce our logical ignorance by learning logical facts and how we should update our credences in response to such evidence; and an account of when logical ignorance is irrational and when it isn’t. At the end, I explain why the requirement of logical omniscience remains true of ideal agents with no computational, processing, or storage limitations. (shrink)

What system of morals should rational people select as the best for society? Using a contemporary psychological theory of action and of motivation, Richard Brandt's Oxford lectures argue that the purpose of living should be to strive for the greatest good for the largest number of people. Brandt's discussions range from the concept of welfare to conflict between utilitarian moral codes and the dictates of self-interest.

When making decisions, people naturally face uncertainty about the potential consequences of their actions due in part to limits in their capacity to represent, evaluate or deliberate. Nonetheless, they aim to make the best decisions possible. In Decision Theory with a Human Face, Richard Bradley develops new theories of agency and rational decision-making, offering guidance on how 'real' agents who are aware of their bounds should represent the uncertainty they face, how they should revise their opinions as a result (...) of experience and how they should make decisions when lacking full awareness of, or precise opinions on relevant contingencies. He engages with the strengths and flaws of Bayesian reasoning, and presents clear and comprehensive explorations of key issues in decision theory, from belief and desire to semantics and learning. His book draws on philosophy, economics, decision science and psychology, and will appeal to readers in all of these disciplines. (shrink)

In this paper I defend what I call the argument from epistemic reasons against the moral error theory. I argue that the moral error theory entails that there are no epistemic reasons for belief and that this is bad news for the moral error theory since, if there are no epistemic reasons for belief, no one knows anything. If no one knows anything, then no one knows that there is thought when they are thinking, and no one knows that they (...) do not know everything. And it could not be the case that we do not know that there is thought when we believe that there is thought and that we do not know that we do not know everything. I address several objections to the claim that the moral error theory entails that there are no epistemic reasons for belief. It might seem that arguing against the error theory on the grounds that it entails that no one knows anything is just providing a Moorean argument against the moral error theory. I show that even if my argument against the error theory is indeed a Moorean one, it avoids Streumer's, McPherson's and Olson's objections to previous Moorean arguments against the error theory and is a more powerful argument against the error theory than Moore's argument against external world skepticism is against external world skepticism. (shrink)

Most recent accounts of will-power have tried to explain it as reducible to the operation of beliefs and desires. In opposition to such accounts, this paper argues for a distinct faculty of will-power. Considerations from philosophy and from social psychology are used in support.

Most individuals realise that we have a moral obligation to avoid the evils of war. But this realization raises a host of difficult questions when we, as responsible individuals, witness harrowing injustices such as ""ethnic cleansing"" in Bosnia or starvation in Somalia. With millions of lives at stake, is war ever justified? And, if so, for what purpose? In this book, Richard J. Regan confronts these controversial questions by first considering the basic principles of just-war theory and then applying (...) those principles to historical and ongoing conflicts. Part One presents two opposing viewpoints: first, that war is not subject to moral norms and, second, that war is never morally permissible. The author rejects both perspectives, and moves to define the principles of just-war theory. He evaluates the roles of the president, Congress and, most importantly, the UN Security Council in determining when long-term US military involvement is justified. The moral limits of war conduct and the moral problem of using, or threatening to use, nuclear weapons are also discussed. On the just cause to wage war, Regan argues that defense of nations and nationals - whether in self-defense or in defense of others - remains the ""only"" classical cause that in the modern world would justify resorting to war. With respect to military intervention in secessionist and revolutionary wars, he contends that such intervention might be justified, but that prudence dictates extreme caution. In considering acceptable war conduct, Regan elaborates the specific principle of discrimination and proportionality; he maintains that civilians uninvolved in the enemy's war should not be directly targeted and that the costs of military action must be proportionate to the anticipated benefits of destroying military targets. The second part of the book presents case studies of eight historical wars - World War I, the Vietnam War, the Falklands War, the revolution and civil war in Nicaragua, the civil war in El Salvador, the Gulf War, the intervention in Somalia, and the Bosnian War - and poses several provocative questions about each. It invites readers and students to apply just-war principles to complex war-related situations and to understand the factual contingencies involved in moral judgements about war decisions. The book should be of particular interest to students of the moral issues of international relations and to readers interested more generally in philosophy, theology and political science. (shrink)

This book gives a descriptive analysis of specific Madhyamika texts. It compares the ideology of Kumarajiva (a translator of the four Madhyamika treatises 400 A.D.) with the ideologies of the three Chinese contemporaries - HuiYuan, Seng-Jui and Seng-Chao. It envisages an intercultural transmission of religious and philosophical ideas from India to China.

Despite wide acceptance that the attributes of living creatures have appeared through a cumulative evolutionary process guided chiefly by natural selection, many human activities have seemed analytically inaccessible through such an approach. Prominent evolutionary biologists, for example, have described morality as contrary to the direction of biological evolution, and moral philosophers rarely regard evolution as relevant to their discussions. -/- The Biology of Moral Systems adopts the position that moral questions arise out of conflicts of interest, and that moral systems (...) are ways of using confluences of interest at lower levels of social organiation to deal with conflicts of interest at higher levels. Moral systems are described as systems of indirect reciprocity: humans gain and lose socially and reproductively not only by direct transactions, but also by the reputations they gain from the everyday flow of social interactions. -/- The author develops a general theory of human interests, using senescence and effort theory from biology, to help analye the patterning of human lifetimes. He argues that the ultimate interests of humans are reproductive, and that the concept of morality has arisen within groups because of its contribution to unity in the context, ultimately, of success in intergroup competition. He contends that morality is not easily relatable to universals, and he carries this argument into a discussion of what he calls the greatest of all moral problems, the nuclear arms race. (shrink)

Can we decide to trust? Sometimes, yes. And when we do, we need not believe that our trust will be vindicated. This paper is motivated by the need to incorporate these facts into an account of trust. Trust involves reliance; and in addition it requires the taking of a reactive attitude to that reliance. I explain how the states involved here differ from belief. And I explore the limits of our ability to trust. I then turn to the idea of (...) trusting what others say. I suggest that we sometimes decide to trust people to be sincere and knowledgeable; and that having taken this attitude towards them, we come to believe what they say. I spell out some consequences that this has for an account of testimony, and for van Fraassen's decision theoretic principle of Reflection. (shrink)

In this review of Leon Kass’s Life, liberty and the defense of dignity and Deryck Beyleveld and Roger Brownsword’s Human dignity in bioethics and biolaw. I consider the prospects for a theory of dignity as a basis for bioethics research. I argue that dignity theories are worth exploring in more detail, but that research needs to consider both “antitheory” accounts of the language of bioethics, and to give more weight to accounts of dignity as an outcome of holding positive liberties (...) and as something that has a psychological dimension. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists by Chris VoparilRichard Kenneth AtkinsChris Voparil. Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 377. Hardback, $74.00.A house divided cannot stand, or so Jesus tells us. As far as I can ascertain, Jesus was right about many things (his followers perhaps less so). Accordingly, that the house early pragmatists built, (...) with all of its subsequent divisions and internecine controversies, still stands is something of an anomaly. Perhaps it is explained by the fact that pragmatists have also been blessed by peacemakers, among whom Chris Voparil is to be numbered. In this carefully researched and clearly written book, Voparil examines the ties that bind Richard Rorty to his pragmatist predecessors: C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, and Jane Addams. The hope animating Voparil's book is that with a closer look at these ties he "can unsettle the current map of opposing pragmatist camps by uncovering previously obscured or overlooked alignments and common aims" (259). He argues that Rorty did not misunderstand his predecessors but "consciously radicalized" (280) their positions.The book is five chapters long, with each of the chapters devoted to Rorty's relationship to one of the five aforementioned classical pragmatists, in that order. There are also substantial introductory and concluding chapters. The more controversy-laden chapters are the first (on Peirce) and third (on Dewey). As Voparil explains in chapter 1, Peirceans are wary of Rorty's apparent antirealism. But to soothe the worries of wary Peirceans, Voparil argues that commitments to realism can be found in Rorty's early and later works and that some of the more outrageous statements from the middle period are exaggerations that are ultimately qualified, if not disavowed. The Peirce scholar may wish that Voparil had done more to distinguish different varieties of realism found in Peirce's writings, as Robert Lane has done in his recent Peirce on Realism and Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), but the crux of Voparil's argument is persuasive enough. Rorty did not deny that there is a world that affects us and that there is such a thing as "getting it right," even if he thought that varieties of representationalism about mental states and the correspondence theory of truth are not topics worthy of further discussion. Voparil does not [End Page 530] cite the footnote, but Rorty states the matter sufficiently clearly when he writes, "I think that [Nelson] Goodman's trope of 'many worlds' is misleading and that we need not go beyond the more straightforward 'many descriptions of the same world' (provided one does not ask 'And what world is that?'). But his point that there is no way to compare descriptions of the world in respect of adequacy seems to me crucial, and in the first two chapters of this book [Ways of Worldmaking] he makes it very vividly" (Consequences of Pragmatism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982], xlvii). Rorty's point is that talk of "the world" can play no interesting explanatory role in our accounts of truth, representation, and the like just because we cannot now (or at any given future time) claim to have the final vocabulary to talk about the world. There is an interesting parallelism to Peirce's theory of induction here that Voparil does not explore. On Peirce's theory of statistical induction, we cannot claim at any given time that we have ascertained the real frequencies in nature, but we can be assured that in the long run we will eventually approximate them. Similarly, for Rorty, we cannot claim at any given time that we have the final vocabulary for describing the world, but that does not prohibit us from claiming that we can improve our descriptions of the world, where improvement is relative to some purpose. As Rorty concedes, the descriptions of nature that emerge in the modern period are better descriptions than those of the Aristotelian physics, given various purposes that we have (Consequences of Pragmatism, 191).Turning to chapter 3, Rorty's misappropriations and misrepresentations of Dewey's views have peeved Dewey scholars. In particular, Rorty... (shrink)

At present, there is an enormous gulf between the visibility of evil and the paucity of our intellectual resources for coming to grips with it. We have been flooded with images of death camps, terrorist attacks and horrendous human suffering. Yet when we ask what we mean by radical evil and how we are to account for it, we seem to be at a loss for proper responses. Bernstein seeks to discover what we can learn about the meaning of evil (...) and human responsibility. He turns to philosophers such as Kant, who coined the expression 'radical evil', as well as to Hegel and Schelling. He also examines more recent explorations of evil, namely the thinking of Freud and Nietzsche on the moral psychology of evil. Finally, he looks at the way in which three post-Holocaust thinkers - Emmanuel Levinas, Hans Jonas, and Hannah Arendt - have sought to come to grips with evil "after Auschwitz." Bernstein's primary concern throughout this challenging book is to enrich and deepen our understanding of evil in the contemporary world, and to emphasize the vigilance and personal responsibility required for combating it. Radical Evil will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy, social and political theory, and religious studies. (shrink)

Rescorla (Erkenntnis, 2020) has recently pointed out that the standard arguments for Bayesian Conditionalization assume that whenever I become certain of something, it is true. Most people would reject this assumption. In response, Rescorla offers an improved Dutch Book argument for Bayesian Conditionalization that does not make this assumption. My purpose in this paper is two-fold. First, I want to illuminate Rescorla’s new argument by giving a very general Dutch Book argument that applies to many cases of updating beyond those (...) covered by Conditionalization, and then showing how Rescorla’s version follows as a special case of that. Second, I want to show how to generalise R. A. Briggs and Richard Pettigrew’s Accuracy Dominance argument to avoid the assumption that Rescorla has identified (Briggs and Pettigrew in Noûs, 2018). In both cases, these arguments proceed by first establishing a very general reflection principle. (shrink)

All humans have an equal basic moral status. They possess the same fundamental rights, and the comparable interests of each person should count the same in calculations that determine social policy. Neither supposed racial differences, nor skin color, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, intelligence, nor any other differences among humans negate their fundamental equal worth and dignity. These platitudes are virtually universally affirmed. A white supremacist racist or an admirer of Adolf Hitler who denies them is rightly regarded as beyond the (...) pale of civilized dialogue. However, a very simple line of argument developed by Peter Singer challenges our understanding of these platitudes and forces us to rethink the basis and nature of the moral equality of all humans. What I call the “Singer Problem” arises if one accepts that the morally significant cognitive capacities that are relevant to the determination of the fundamental moral status of a being vary from individual to individual by degree. The problem is to specify a moral principle determining fundamental moral status that assigns a superior status to humans compared to other animals on the basis of the superior cognitive capacities of humans but also assigns all human persons an equal fundamental moral status regardless of their differing cognitive capacities. More broadly posed, the problem is to specify moral principles that yield intuitively satisfactory implications for the treatment of human individuals and other individual animals given that cognitive capacities differ across species and individuals. A search for a resolution of the Singer problem leads to disappointing results. (shrink)

Big data and Machine learning Techniques are reshaping the way in which food safety risk assessment is conducted. The ongoing ‘datafication’ of food safety risk assessment activities and the progressive deployment of probabilistic models in their practices requires a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of these advances. In particular, the low level of trust in EU food safety risk assessment framework highlighted in 2019 by an EU-funded survey could be exacerbated by novel methods of analysis. The variety of processed (...) data raises unique questions regarding the interplay of multiple regulatory systems alongside food safety legislation. Provisions aiming to preserve the confidentiality of data and protect personal information are juxtaposed to norms prescribing the public disclosure of scientific information. This research is intended to provide guidance for data governance and data ownership issues that unfold from the ongoing transformation of the technical and legal domains of food safety risk assessment. Following the reconstruction of technological advances in data collection and analysis and the description of recent amendments to food safety legislation, emerging concerns are discussed in light of the individual, collective and social implications of the deployment of cutting-edge Big Data collection and analysis techniques. Then, a set of principle-based recommendations is proposed by adapting high-level principles enshrined in institutional documents about Artificial Intelligence to the realm of food safety risk assessment. The proposed set of recommendations adopts Safety, Accountability, Fairness, Explainability, Transparency as core principles (SAFETY), whereas Privacy and data protection are used as a meta-principle. (shrink)

Many philosophers nowadays believe Frege was right about belief, but wrong about language: The contents of beliefs need to be individuated more finely than in terms of Russellian propositions, but the contents of utterances do not. I argue that this 'hybrid view' cannot offer no reasonable account of how communication transfers knowledge from one speaker to another and that, to do so, we must insist that understanding depends upon more than just getting the references of terms right.