The overall aim of this article is to explore the analytical potential and normative value of Helga M. Hernes' concept about woman-friendly welfare states in analysis of Scandinavian countries. The first part discusses the underlying theoretical, political and normative assumptions about gender equality and social justice related to dimensions such as redistribution, recognition and representation. The second part addresses the analytical potential of the concepts for understanding gender equality developments in Scandinavia. The focus is on three themes related to the (...) desirability, feasibility, and theoretical strength of the Scandinavian welfare and gender equality model and the underlying normative, empirical and theoretical premises. The analysis deals with debates about the public—private split in relation to woman-friendly policies, focusing on parental leave, childcare, and age restrictions in marriages involving foreigners. State feminism is explored in relation to women's political participation and representation and women's ability to influence gender equality policies. Furthermore, national variations in views about state feminism are identified. Finally, the article addresses the role of woman-friendly policies in debates about responses of Western welfare states to globalization, ageing and multiculturalism. (shrink)

Are there nonhuman animals who behave morally? In this paper I answer this question in the affirmative by applying the framework of care ethics to the animal morality debate. According to care ethics, empathic care is the wellspring of morality in humans. While there have been several suggestive analyses of nonhuman animals as empathic, much of the literature within the animal morality debate has marginalized analyses from the perspective of care ethics. In this paper I examine care ethics to extract (...) its core commitments to what is required for moral care: emotional motivation that enables the intentional meeting of another’s needs, and forward-looking responsibility in particular relationships. What is not required, I argue, are metarepresentational capacities or the ability to scrutinize one’s reasons for action, and thus being retrospectively accountable. This minimal account of moral care is illustrated by moral practices of parental care seen in many nonhuman animal species. In response to the worry that parental care in nonhuman animals lacks all evaluation and is therefore nonmoral I point to cultural differences in human parenting and to normativity in nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Business models are developed and managed to create value. While most business model frameworks envision value creation as a uni-directional flow between the focal business and its customers, this article presents a broader view based on a stringent application of stakeholder theory. It provides a stakeholder value creation framework derived from key characteristics of stakeholder theory. This article highlights mutual stakeholder relationships in which stakeholders are both recipients and creators of value in joint value creation processes. Key findings include that (...) the concept and analysis of value creation through business models need to be expanded with regard to different types of value created with and for different stakeholders and the resulting value portfolio, i.e., the different kinds of value exchanged between the company and its stakeholders. This paper details the application of the stakeholder value creation framework and its theoretical propositions for the case of business models for sustainability. The framework aims to support theoretical and empirical analyses of value creation as well as the management and transformation of business models in line with corporate sustainability ambitions and stakeholder expectations. Overall, this paper proposes a shift in perspective from business models as devices of sheer value creation to business models as devices that organize and facilitate stakeholder relationships and corresponding value exchanges. (shrink)

Although beauty, in the pre-modern Arab world, was enjoyed and promoted almost everywhere, Islam does not possess a general theory on aesthetics or a systematic theory of the arts. This is a study of the Arabic discourse on beauty. The author had to search for her evidence in written statements from a wide variety of sources, such as the Qur'an, legal, religious and Sufi texts, chronicles, biographies, belle-lettres, literary criticism, and scientific, geographic and philosophical literature. The result is a compendium (...) of references to beauty in chapters on the Religious Approach, Secular Beauty and Love, Music and Belle-Lettres, and the Visual Arts. This approach is informative and provocative. For the generalist, it provides comparative material for an understanding of the early Arab cultural context. For the specialist, it raises questions of sponsorship and purpose. (shrink)

Michael Freund (1902-1972) war der erste Professor für «Wissenschaft und Geschichte der Politik» an der Universität Kiel und gehörte damit zur einflussreichen Gründervätergeneration der westdeutschen Politikwissenschaft nach 1945. Sowohl Freunds universitäres und wissenschaftliches Wirken als Politikwissenschaftler und Historiker als auch sein politisches Engagement und seine umfangreiche journalistische Tätigkeit stehen im Fokus dieser Studie. Somit stellt die Arbeit nicht nur die erste Biographie Freunds dar, sondern bietet zugleich einen Einblick in eine stark historisch orientierte Richtung der frühen westdeutschen Politikwissenschaft. Darüber hinaus (...) leistet sie einen Beitrag zur Verständigung über Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte nach 1945. (shrink)

African (Bantu) philosophy conceptualizes morality through ubuntu, which emphasizes the role of community in producing moral agents. This community is characterized by practices that respond to and value interdependence, such as care, cooperation, and respect for elders and ancestral knowledge. While there have been attributions of morality to nonhuman animals in the interdisciplinary animal morality debate, this debate has focused on Western concepts. We argue that the ubuntu conception of morality as a communal practice applies to some nonhuman animals. African (...) elephant communities are highly cooperative and structured around elders; they alloparent, protect their communities, mourn their dead, and pass on cultural knowledge between generations. Identifying these as important moral practices, ubuntu provides a theoretical framework to expand our ethical concern for elephants to their communities. In practice, this will deepen our understanding of the wrongness of atrocities like culling for population management or trophy hunting. (shrink)

Many nonhuman animals have the emotional capacities to form caring relationships that matter to them, and for their immediate welfare. Drawing from care ethics, we argue that these relationships also matter as objectively valuable states of affairs. They are part of what is good in this world. However, the value of care is precarious in human-animal interactions. Be it in farming, research, wildlife ‘management’, zoos, or pet-keeping, the prevention, disruption, manipulation, and instrumentalization of care in animals by humans is ubiquitous. (...) We criticize a narrow conception of welfare that, in practice, tends to overlook non-experiential forms of harm that occur when we interfere with caring animals. Additionally, we point out wrongs against caring animals that are not just unaccounted for but denied by even an expansive welfare perspective: The instrumentalization of care and caring animals in systems of use can occur as a harmless wrong that an approach purely focused on welfare may, in fact, condone. We should therefore adopt an ethical perspective that goes beyond welfare in our dealings with caring animals. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that scientists working on the animal morality debate have been operating with a narrow view of morality that prematurely limits the variety of moral practices that animals may be capable of. We show how this bias can be partially corrected by paying more attention to the touch behaviours of animals. We argue that a careful examination of the ways in which animals engage in and navigate touch interactions can shed new light on current debates on (...) animal morality, like the study of consolation behaviour, while also revealing further forms that animal morality may take and that have been neglected so far, like capacities of tolerance or trust. This defence is structured as an analysis of the three main functions of touch: the discriminative function, the affiliative function, and the vigilance function. (shrink)

There is general acknowledgement that both the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex are implicated in reinforcement-guided decision making, and emotion and social behaviour. Despite the interest that these areas generate in both the cognitive neuroscience laboratory and the psychiatric clinic, ideas about the distinctive contributions made by each have only recently begun to emerge. This reflects an increasing understanding of the component processes that underlie reinforcement- guided decision making, such as the representation of reinforcement expectations, the exploration, updating and representation (...) of action values, and the appreciation that choices are guided not just by the prospect of reward but also by the costs that action entails. Evidence is emerging to suggest that the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex make distinct contributions to each of these aspects of decision making. (shrink)

This article suggests evidence for and reasons why prior acquisition may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of a new construction. It investigates acquisition of the German passive and future constructions which contain a lexical verb with either the auxiliary sein “to be” or werden “to become”, and are related through these to potential supporting constructions. We predicted that a supported construction should be acquired earlier, faster, and unusually rapidly. An inhibited construction should show an extended depressed usage. We analyzed a (...) dense corpus of a German boy between 2;0 and 5;0. He acquired the sein- before the werden-passive. The former was supported by his prior acquisition of the sein copula, whereas the werden-passive itself supported one werden copula construction. He acquired the werden-future extremely slowly due to the hindrance of a semantically identical construction. These results fit with an emergentist approach in which apparently “sudden” acquisition is still due to gradual learning mechanisms. (shrink)

van Behrens, Dierk Review(s) of: Darwin, God and the meaning of life: How evolutionary theory undermines everything you thought you knew, by Steve Stewart-Williams Cambridge University Press, 2010, ISBN 9780521762786.

Meetings are complex institutional events at which participants recurrently negotiate institutional roles, which are oriented to, renegotiated, and sometimes challenged. With a view to gaining further understanding of the ongoing negotiation of roles at meetings, this article examines one specific recurring feature of meetings: the act of proposing future action. Based on microanalysis of video recordings of two-party strategy meetings, the study shows that participants orient to at least two aspects when making proposals: 1) the acceptance or rejection of the (...) proposal; and 2) questions of entitlement: who is entitled to launch a proposal, and who is entitled to accept or reject it? The study argues that there is a close interrelation between questions of entitlement, aligning and affiliating moves, and the negotiation of institutional roles. The multimodal analysis also reveals the use of various embodied practices by participants for the local negotiation of entitlement and institutional roles. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Scholars have long debated how best to understand Nietzsche's “great politics.” But they have hitherto neglected Nietzsche's own suggestion that Thus Spoke Zarathustra provides a “formula” for it. This article thus provides a fresh interpretation of “great politics” based on a reading of Z. It argues that “great politics” is concerned above all with the question of how to overcome humankind in its present form. Such overcoming does not have a specific goal. Rather, Z suggests that a continuous overcoming (...) of the present is required in order to remain attuned to the nature of life itself and allow for human flourishing. In the “new peoples” Nietzsche anticipates, politics would take on a form that radically revalues many foundational assumptions of political philosophy. In offering a new understanding of “great politics,” this article therefore also suggests an answer to the question whether and in what sense Nietzsche is a political philosopher. (shrink)

Despite the immense societal importance of ethically designing artificial intelligence, little research on the public perceptions of ethical artificial intelligence principles exists. This becomes even more striking when considering that ethical artificial intelligence development has the aim to be human-centric and of benefit for the whole society. In this study, we investigate how ethical principles are weighted in comparison to each other. This is especially important, since simultaneously considering ethical principles is not only costly, but sometimes even impossible, as developers (...) must make specific trade-off decisions. In this paper, we give first answers on the relative importance of ethical principles given a specific use case—the use of artificial intelligence in tax fraud detection. The results of a large conjoint survey suggest that, by and large, German respondents evaluate the ethical principles as equally important. However, subsequent cluster analysis shows that different preference models for ethically designed systems exist among the German population. These clusters substantially differ not only in the preferred ethical principles but also in the importance levels of the principles themselves. We further describe how these groups are constituted in terms of sociodemographics as well as opinions on artificial intelligence. Societal implications, as well as design challenges, are discussed. (shrink)

How impartial are managerial decisions? This question is particularly concerning when it comes to making green investment decisions in the face of stakeholder pressures. When managers respond to stakeholder pressures, their personal cognition, judgment, and past experiences play a role in determining their responses. The salience of particular stakeholder claims may be determined by deeply rooted individual preferences. This research investigates how a manager’s past experiences can influence green investments. Data are gathered from 247 managers about their past experience and (...) their employer’s performance data. These data are combined with managerial responses to a vignette-based experiment, which required managers to make green investments based on a decision scenario where they are exposed to different types and strength of stakeholder pressure. Results suggest that managers’ years of experience, their employers’ financial performance, and their employers’ market performance influence investment decisions even when making decisions under new and different set of circumstances. While the employers’ financial performance influences managers to invest more, the employers’ market performance only influences managers’ investment in the presence of either high consumer or high community pressure. Compared to less-experienced managers, experienced managers invest more in response to consumer pressure but less in response to community pressure. Practical and theoretical implications of these findings in green management are explored. (shrink)

This article explores the political potential of Kierkegaard's Repetition and develops a model of non-sovereign agency by analysing the figure of the ‘young man’, the main protagonist of the book. A curious reference in Schmitt's Political Theology serves as a cue for exploring Repetition through contrast with Schmitt's notions of sovereignty, decision and exception, as well as his critique of occasionalism in Political Romanticism. As in the case of Schmitt's sovereign, the young man's conflict is centred on the question of (...) the exception. But by contrast to the former, the young man struggles with the exception from a position of opposition to the powers that govern. Furthermore, the exception in Repetition does not seek to stabilise a given order in the face of a threat, but, rather, to destabilise and transform order. The perspective offered facilitates a shift from thinking the exception as a state of exception, a concept that mostly concerns state politics, to an exception from the state. Kierkegaard's Repetition is thus shown to be relevant for conceptualising transformative agency from a position of marginalisation and exclusion from the hegemonic political order. (shrink)

I give an account how the principle of ‘respect for autonomy’ dominates the field of bioethics, and how it came to triumph over its competitors, ‘respect for persons’ and ‘respect for free power of choice’. I argue that ‘respect for autonomy’ is unsatisfactory as a basic principle of bioethics because it is grounded in too individualistic a worldview, citing concerns of African theorists and other communitarians who claim that the principle fails to acknowledge the fundamental importance of understanding persons within (...) the nexus of their communal relationships. I defend the claim that ‘respect for persons’ is a more appropriate principle, as it is able to acknowledge both individual decision making and the essential relationality of persons. I acknowledge that my preference for ‘respect for persons’ is problematic because of the important debate around the definition of ‘personhood’ in bioethics discourse. Relying on Thaddeus Metz's conception of moral status, I propose a relational definition of personhood that distinguishes between persons with agency and persons without agency, arguing that we have different moral obligations to these distinct categories of persons. I claim that this conception of personhood is better able to accommodate our moral intuitions than conventional approaches, and that it is able to do so without being speciesist or question-begging. (shrink)

von Behrens, Dierk Review of: Brief encounters: Literature and beyond, by Satendra Nandan, IVY Press International Publishers LPO Box 8069, ANU, Acton, 0200, ACT, Australia, 1st Edition, 2015, pbk. pp. 257, $ 20.00.

von Behrens, Dierk Review of: How Echidna got its quills, by L and G Adams, illustrated by Barry Olive; Ali the Bold Heart, sensitively written by Jane Jolly and beautifully illustrated in watercolour by Elise Hurst.

von Behrens, Dierk Assimilation is a process by which a person or group belonging to one culture adopts the practices of another, thereby becoming a member of that culture.

von Behrens, Dierk Review(s) of: Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life Edited by Louise Antony New York: OUP; 2010; 320 pp.

von Behrens, Dierk Review of: The great philosophers, by Jeremy Stangroom and James Garvey, Arcturus Publishing, 160 pgs. 9.99 pounds Hard back. 69 pictures. 2005. Index. 978-1-84837-018-02005.

von Behrens, Dierk Review of: Snakes, by Barbara Taylor, 64-pages; Novum organum scientiarum, by Francis Bacon; The origin of species, by Charles Darwin.

There is a pervasive presumption that African thought is inherently anthropocentric and has little to contribute to environmental ethics. Against this view, a promising African environmentalism can be be found in a belief in a fundamental interrelatedness between natural objects. What establishes moral considerability on this African view is that entities are part of the interconnected web of life. This position accords moral standing to all living things, groups of living things, as well as inanimate natural entities. This view is (...) not only plausible, but also theoretically appealing. (shrink)

One of the goals of computerized tutoring systems is to optimize the learning of facts. Over a hundred years of declarative memory research have identified two robust effects that can improve such systems: the spacing and the testing effect. By making optimal use of both and adjusting the system to the individual learner using cognitive models based on declarative memory theories, such systems consistently outperform traditional methods. This adjustment process is driven by a continuously updated estimate of the rate of (...) forgetting for each item and learner on the basis of the learner's accuracy and response time. In this study, we investigated to what extent these estimates of individual rates of forgetting are stable over time and across different materials. We demonstrate that they are stable over time but not across materials. Even though most theories of human declarative memory assume a single underlying rate of forgetting, we show that, in practice, it makes sense to assume different materials are forgotten at different rates. If a computerized, adaptive fact-learning system allowed different rates of forgetting for different materials, it could adapt to individual learners more readily. (shrink)

Contrary to a pervasive presumption of anthropocentricism in African thought, I identify an emphasis on the interrelatedness or interconnectedness of everything in nature, and argue that this is best construed as a rejection of anthropocentrism, and as something similar in conception to, and yet distinct from, holist perspectives. I propose that this strand of African thought, suitably reconstructed, should be construed as providing the basis for a promising non-anthropocentric African environmentalism. I name this position 'African Relational Environmentalism', and suggest that (...) it is what distinguishes this position from holism that can most enrich environmental ethics. -/- . (shrink)

This thesis is a study of alienation in Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. The thesis is organized around three central questions: What does Sartre conceive alienation to be? What for Sartre are the causes and/or conditions of alienation? What are the prospects for overcoming alienation? ;In the course of this inquiry I arrived at a general definition of alienation, viz., that it is the process whereby the human subject is constrained to become 'other' than what he authentically is in (...) his being. The condition of otherness is characteristic of all alienation. But I discovered two notions of alienation in Sartre, one of which is a fundamental ontological condition rooted in the structure of human existence conceived as praxis, and the other more historically specific and akin to Marxian theories of alienation. The former is an ineliminable element of the "human condition" as well as the necessary, though not sufficient condition of the latter alienation, which is historically surpassable. I argue that the key to understanding Sartre's theory of alienation is to be found in his philosophical anthropology, a theory of man as perpetually self-transcending and self-objectifying activity whose activity leads to alienation. (shrink)