Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavor that has required new strategies in art-making. To explore recent American manifestations of these interests, the David and Alfred Smart Museum commissioned new projects from artists Mark Dion, Peter Fend, and Dan Peterman, each focusing on interrelationships between particular organisms—human beings-and a specific group of sites—a museum building, a river landscape, and a university campus. The results, exhibited at the Smart Museum during the summer of (...) 2000, evoke the varied scales, from the microscopic to the global, at which human actions affect the environment. This catalog documents each of the artists' projects through an array of images and words: Smart Museum Associate Curator Stephanie Smith provides an introduction and brief overviews of the three projects, each of the artists contribute statements, and photographers Susan Anderson and Tom van Eynde document—in over 100 images—the processes and projects that comprise the exhibition. (shrink)

The leading accounts of the nature of causation divide into probability-raising and process-linkage views. On the probability-raising view, causation is rooted in the comparative probability of the effect with the cause versus without. On the process-linkage view, causation is rooted in the existence of a connecting line from cause to effect. I propose a third alternative which synthesizes these views while solving their problem cases. On this alternative, causation is rooted in the comparative probability of the connecting line to the (...) effect with the cause versus without: causes as probability raisers of processes. In the first two sections, I (briefly) outline the probability-raising and process-linkage views and identify a space of problems, and then I focus on developing the alternative probability-raisers-of-processes solution. I identify problems for this view as well, though I conclude that it is at least in important respects a step forward. (shrink)

The present paper argues that a right to work, defined as social and legal guarantees to fair conditions of employment, should be an essential part of a democratic state with market arrangements. This argument proceeds along the following lines. First, I reconstruct an account of rights that defends the “correlativity” thesis of rights and duties. The basic idea is that a social member’s legitimate demand to something of value, such as gainful employment, implies duties on the part of others to (...) respect and fulfill it. These duties include the following with regard to that demand: avoiding actions that cause the harm, protecting it against standard threats, and otherwise providing aid in case it is deprived. Second, I sketch an outline of what a right to work will entail in terms of the correlative duties just described. This means that respect and fulfillment of the demand will require both social members and the democratic state alike to guarantee fair conditions of employment: first, by forbearing from actions that deprive members of access to work; and second, by protecting members against threats of deprivation and aiding them when they are so deprived. Third, I answer some ethical and empirical objections to the idea of a right to work: that it violates the legal rights of owners and employers, fails to impart self-respect, lacks economic efficiency, and erodes human capital by undermining competitive incentives. Finally, I make some concluding observations that a democratic right to work so conceived is ethically and economically superior to alternative arrangements that neither respect nor fulfill these correlative duties to avoid harm, protect against threats, and provide aid in cases of deprivation. (shrink)

Philosophy and the Problems of Work brings together for the first time important philosophical perspectives on the subject of labor and work. Ranging from selections by historical figures such as Plato, Rousseau, Smith and Marx to contemporary debates in political theory and philosophy of economics, the reader covers a variety of viewpoints across both analytical and Continental traditions, including ancient and modern thinkers, classical and welfare liberals, Marxists, anarchists and feminists.

Today more than ever Marxism is profoundly in need of a full and precise modern reappraisal. In his belief that this may only be accomplished along with an examination of the "humanistic" young Marx, Adam Schaff presents in this volume an illumination of the thinker's early work and its relationship to the world-shaking economic philosophy that stemmed from it.

Income inequality in democratic societies with market economies is sizable and growing. One reason for this growth can be traced to unequal forms of compensation that employers pay workers. Democratic societies have tackled this problem by enforcing a wage standard that all workers are paid regardless of education, skills, or contribution. This raises a novel question: Should there be equal pay for all workers? To answer it, we need to investigate some factors that are relevant to the unequal conditions of (...) power and authority in which wage offers are made. By clarifying these, we can determine whether wage inequality is morally permissible. If not, then a case might be made to pay all workers the same regardless of education, skills, or contribution. Even if it is permissible, another question worth considering is whether there are limits to how much inequality is acceptable. The argument here proceeds along the following lines. First, I summarize the economic and non-economic factors that determine the value of wages in labor markets. Second, I examine a particular problem that concerns whether the conditions of wage labor are coercive because they restrict alternatives or otherwise include threats to the welfare of workers. If there is coercion, we have good reasons to establish a standard that improve these conditions. Finally, I claim that establishing this standard requires increasing the value of low-wage work. Doing so will not only expand alternatives that are available to these workers, it will also diminish the potential threat to their welfare. (shrink)

This paper examines constitutional issues concerning same-sex marriage. Although same-sex relations concern broader ethical issues as well, I set these aside to concentrate primarily on legal questions of privacy rights and equal protection. While sexual orientation is neither a suspect classification like race, nor a quasi classification like gender, there are strong reasons why it should trigger heightened scrutiny of legislation using sexuality as a standard of classification. In what follows, I argue that equal-protection doctrine is better suited for including (...) same-sex couples where legal benefits and burdens of marriage are at stake. (1) I reconstruct arguments from privacy and the controversial ruling of Bowers v. Hardwick but discount this strategy for problematic legal reasons. (2) In order for equal protection to apply, sexual orientation must meet the criteria of suspect classification that the Court has established. (3) Since sexual orientation meets these criteria, heightened scrutiny should be applied to such legislation on equal-protection grounds. (4) Finally, I rely on some familiar Rawlsian arguments of public justification that demonstrate why this extension of marriage rights is consistent with basic constitutional principles. (shrink)

This article briefly review the fundamentals of structural equation modeling for readers unfamiliar with the technique then goes on to offer a review of the Martin and Cullen paper. In summary, a number of fit indices reported by the authors reveal that the data do not fit their theoretical model and thus the conclusion of the authors that the model was “promising” are unwarranted.

With technological advances in reproduction no longer confined to the laboratory or involving only the isolated individual, women and men are increasingly resorting to a variety of technologies unheard of a few decades ago to assist them in becoming parents. The public at large, and feminists as a group, are confused and divided over how to view these technologies and over what positions to take on the moral and legal dilemmas they give rise to. Farquhar argues that two perspectives have (...) tended to dominate feminist discussions of these issues. She labels these: "fundamental feminism" and "market liberalism." By linking a theoterical approach with a practical set of issues, Farquhar's The Other Machine provides a rigorous analysis of contemporary feminist debates. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Foucault’s conception of agency by reconstructing two complementary approaches he takes: the ‘analytics of power’, which examines the relation between norms and practice by charting the institutional development within which a set of norms emerge, and the concept of ‘problematization’, which examines reason-giving practices, or varieties of normative justification that legitimize rational institutions and agents’ participation in them. Contrary to the standard caricature, Foucault’s analysis of the relation between norms and institutions does not merely reduce (...) the former to relations of ‘power’. In short, he also thinks standards of justification are just as revisable as social practices themselves, and the focus here will be on the relation and importance of these two complementary approaches to his critique of normativity. Key Words: agency • critique • Foucault • normativity • social practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Ethics is receiving increased emphasis in civil and environmental engineering. However, despite the proliferation of college textbooks and courses encouraging ethical reasoning, engineers in practice often limit their understanding narrowly to their individual actions. Broader issues of global importance are usually addressed in an ad-hoc manner, if at all. Our goal is to present the topic of ethics in a way that appeals to engineers, especially those receptive to ‘systems thinking’. Our broader motivation is to encourage the development of (...) educated, virtuous and caring professionals who engage in contextual ethical reasoning about complex systems. To these ends, we summarise relevant theoretical and applied concepts for ethical analysis, building from a recent chapter that reflects on ethics from an engineering systems perspective (but applied to the healthcare industry). We emphasise virtue ethics and the ethics of care as crucial supplements to duty ethics and utilitarianism. Analytical methods we discuss include Value Sensitive Design, Design for Care, and a multi-level classification of ethical issues into the micro (individual), meso (institutional), and macro (societal) levels. This work collects relevant considerations for designers of civil and environmental engineering systems and researchers interested in developing related design and analysis methods that include practical ethical reasoning. (shrink)

Southeast Asia has numerous religions and diverse forms of state-governance, so the populations largely have the freedom to express themselves within the context of their society. Expressing oneself can occur within the context of their religion, using the language they have been cultured within, if they remain in their cultural-context. This paper explores the context of Buddhist nations using militarized-language, seen as problematic by Dr. Matthew Kosuta, who professes in his masters-thesis that it is a contradiction. A portion of my (...) article refutes his position, on the grounds that Buddhism developed within the Hindu-Brahmanism context and caste was normalized in regions influenced by such culture. Equally, it could be noted, the Buddha also used a language that was suitable for agriculturalists, merchants, Brahmins, so a militarized-language was just one way to speak to some people within their own social context, which was understandable not just to them, but to anyone interested in attaining Nibbāna. (shrink)

Growing economic inequality, workforce precarity, the perceived meaninglessness of many jobs, and the prospect of widespread technological unemployment have led to an unprecedented level of critical scrutiny of the institution of work. Some scholars go so far as to propose that we should take seriously, or even embrace, a “post-work” future. This volume aims to provide the first critical overview of the scholarly arguments about the design and desirability of such a “post-work” world. Topics addressed in its chapters include the (...) historical origins of the work ethic; work’s relation to freedom, leisure, and self-realization; alternative visions of a post-work world; the intersection of post-work thinking with economic justice; and post-work’s relevance to environmental sustainability, care work, and democratic change. (shrink)

Theoretic and historical study of international communist movement. The marxist concept of human relations and about social policy.

Canonical extension has proven to be a powerful tool in algebraic study of propositional logics. In this paper we describe a generalisation of the theory of canonical extension to the setting of first order logic. We define a notion of canonical extension for coherent categories. These are the categorical analogues of distributive lattices and they provide categorical semantics for coherent logic, the fragment of first order logic in the connectives ∧, ∨, 0, 1 and ∃. We describe a universal property (...) of our construction and show that it generalises the existing notion of canonical extension for distributive lattices. Our new construction for coherent categories has led us to an alternative description of the topos of types, introduced by Makkai in [22]. This allows us to give new and transparent proofs of some properties of the action of the topos of types construction on morphisms. Furthermore, we prove a new result relating, for a coherent category C, its topos of types to its category of models. (shrink)

With technological advances in reproduction no longer confined to the laboratory or involving only the isolated individual, women and men are increasingly resorting to a variety of technologies unheard of a few decades ago to assist them in becoming parents. The public at large, and feminists as a group, are confused and divided over how to view these technologies and over what positions to take on the moral and legal dilemmas they give rise to. Farquhar argues that two perspectives have (...) tended to dominate feminist discussions of these issues. She labels these: "fundamental feminism" and "market liberalism." By linking a theoterical approach with a practical set of issues, Farquhar's ____The Other Machine__ provides a rigorous analysis of contemporary feminist debates. (shrink)

Although many small businesses and a great number of large enterprises have environmental policies, the contents of such policies vary widely according to their emphases either on technical rationality and technocentrism/technocracy or on ecological rationality and ecocentrism/ecocracy. I present them in four categories: with regard to strong anthropocentrism, (1) the neo-technocratic enterprise and (2) the techno-environmentalist enterprise; and with regard to weak anthropocentrism, (3) the pseudo-environmentalist enterprise and (4) the quasi-environmentalist enterprise. Such a typology can be useful for business managers (...) to write and/or review their environmental policies. However, it only reflects the “ideal values” of the enterprise, not the corporate story with regard to environmental issues. (shrink)

Environmental ethics is generally searching for the intrinsic value in natural beings. However, there are very few holistic models trying to reflect the various dimensions of the experience-to-be a natural being. We are searching for that intrinsic value, in order to determine which species are holders of rights. In this article, I suggest a set of moral and rational principles to be used for identifying the intrinsic value of a given species and for comparing it to that of other species.

L'éthique n'a pas que des sources philosophiques ou religieuses-spirituelles. Elle peut aussi se nourrir des questionnements inscrits dans des oeuvres littéraires. La littérature est peut-être même le lieu privilégié où se donnent à voir et à comprendre doutes existentiels, dilemmes moraux, intuitions philosophiques. Si l'éthique consiste bien dans l'approfondissement de notre connaissance de la dimension morale de la conscience de soi, de la conscience du monde et de la conscience d'exister, elle trouvera dans l'oeuvre de l'écrivain un matériau riche et (...) complexe qui ouvrira la voie à son propre déploiement. C'est ce que propose cet ouvrage en puisant à l'oeuvre de cinq romanciers de la modernité classique allemande du début du vingtième siècle, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil et Stefan Zweig. (shrink)

This article argues for a rediscovery of a theology of work in South Africa that is based on the Protestant notion of calling and vocation. Such a view has the primary intention of emphasising obedience and faithfulness to God rather than self-fulfilment or achievement as the intentions of work. Such an approach can empower and equip the church and individual Christians for effective and faithful living in all spheres of life – both private and public. The article shows that the (...) influences of theological dualism, an unbalanced view of the clergy as primary agents of ministry and mission, and a structures-centred view of ministry and mission detracted from the importance of the church’s ministry in numerous spheres of society. A consequence of this was the introduction of a subtle dualism between faith and work. In response to this, the article considers how the church could become an agent of mission and transformation in the world of work. The conclusion of this article is that the South African church could benefit from revisiting and rediscovering a theology of work that is based on the Protestant emphasis of calling and vocation in the public sphere.Contribution: While this article engages the traditional protestant theological notions of calling and vocation, it argues that reconsidering these notions in relation to the contemporary world of work can renew a theology of work and ministry for South African churches to serve their members in achieving God’s will in society. (shrink)

Growing interest in Pacific issues has meant a surge in Pacific research across the globe. Sadly, some research on Pacific people has been done without Pacific knowledge, wisdom and culture. As Pacific researchers, we understand the importance of outputs that interweave our ancestral and cultural wisdom, whilst centring and privileging our people’s narratives. Through the birth of our Moanaroa Pacific Research group, we explore the importance of a research collective which decolonises and re indigenises research as we know it.

Corporate citizenship, social responsibility and sustainability reports could be analyzed from a philosophical viewpoint. In this article, we will use Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy to assess the narrativity of such reports. Out of a philosophical viewpoint, our exploratory study analyzes the contents of ten reports: two corporate citizenship reports, three corporate social responsibility reports, and five sustainability reports. Those reports are arising in-time and are thus referring to past corporate events and phenomena. Sometimes such reports introduce a corporate world-dream that (...) could emphasize various issues such as human dignity and inclusiveness/diversity, global health, and planetary stewardship. They could even convey a subversive ideal that could strongly shake the foundations of business. The way business corporations are understanding corporate citizenship and sustainability could, more or less radically, change the way we are doing business. However, those corporate citizenship, social responsibility and sustainability reports do not have any emplotment. They are thus stories that cannot be considered as narratives. We could call them “would-be” narratives. (shrink)

BackgroundThe overwhelming scarcity of organs within renal transplantation forces researchers and transplantation teams to seek new ways to increase efficacy. One of the possibilities is the use of personalized medicine, an approach based on quantifiable and scientific factors that determine the global immunological risk of rejection for each patient. Although this approach can improve the efficacy of transplantations, it also poses a number of ethical questions.MethodsThe qualitative research involved 22 semi-structured interviews with nephrologists involved in renal transplantation, with the goal (...) of determining the professionals' views about calculating the global immunological risk and the attendant ethical issues.ResultsThe results demonstrate a general acceptance of this approach amongst the participants in the study. Knowledge of each patient's immunological risk could improve treatment and the post-graft follow-up. On the other hand, the possibility that patients might be excluded from transplantation poses a significant ethical issue. This approach is not seen as something entirely new, given the fact that medicine is increasingly scientific and evidence-based. Although renal transplantation incorporates scientific data, these physicians believe that there should always be a place for clinical judgment and the physician-patient relationship.ConclusionsThe participants see the benefits of including the calculation of the global immunological risk within transplantation. Such data, being more precise and rigorous, could be of help in their clinical work. However, in spite of the use of such scientific data, a place must be retained for the clinical judgment that allows a physician to make decisions based on medical data, professional expertise and knowledge of the patient. To act in the best interests of the patient is key to whether the calculation of the global immunological risk is employed. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper, I pursue the question whether extending democratic rights to work is good in the broadest possible sense of that term: good for workers, firms, market economies, and democratic states. The argument makes two assumptions in a broadly consequentialist framework. First, the configuration of any relationship among persons in which there is less rather than more coercion makes individuals better off. Second, extending democratic rights to work will entail costs and benefits to both the power and authority (...) of employers and meaningful work for employees. These costs and benefits cannot be determined in advance because they are largely empirical, but there are still good reasons for expanding worker participation all-things-considered. First, I examine the parallel case for extending democratic rights to the workplace based on several similarities between politics and work organization. In addition, I consider the objections from voluntariness and efficiency. Although both objections raise interesting problems I believe that a properly formulated conception of democratic workplaces can answer them. In the final section, I sketch a minimal conception of these rights at the level of the firm that does not require a large-scale transformation of the market economy. (shrink)

In this paper, we will use Ricoeur's philosophy in order to present money laundering as a metaphor and a narrative. We will firstly analyze the corporate moral discourse of 10 banks about money laundering. We have selected 10 banks that have codes of ethics and a corporate moral discourse about money laundering. The banks come from six countries: United States (2), Canada (2), Switzerland (2), Spain (2), Germany (1), and Belgium (1). We will see how their moral discourse about money (...) laundering contributes to deepen the understanding of money laundering as a narrative. Then, we will see to what extent Ricoeur's philosophy could help us to better understand the moral discourse of banks. We will describe the main components of money laundering as a narrative. (shrink)

Partie 1. Le contexte scientifique et le langage de Spinoza -- I. Bref apercu du corpus spinozien -- II. Le contexte scientifique du XVIIe siecle -- Partie 2. Spinoza, une arme contre la superstition et les charlatans de la foi -- I. Le refus de la superstition -- II. Contre les charlatans de la foi ou l'actualité de la préface du Traité théologico-politique -- III. L'Ethique ou la connaissance comme arme de libération -- Conclusion.

This book provides a constructive criticism of the emerging practice of conscious capitalism from the perspective of world religions and spiritualities. Conscious capitalism, to many of its adherents, represents an evolutionary step forward beyond the dominant neo-liberal paradigm, where it often appears that just about everything is for sale. Is conscious capitalism consistent with the values inherent in religious and spiritual world-views and does it provide a better fit for bringing out the best that business has to offer? This book (...) answers these questions and many more. An appealing read for researchers in business ethics as well as any reader critical of the excrescences of capitalism. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that transnational as well as national political demands and expectations on the educational field are contributing to produce four ideological-based educational leadership discourses in the literature. In order to conceptualize these discourses, we turn to the work of Schmidt and Zizek. On that basis we identify four dominant educational leadership discourses: a personhood-based discourse, a profession-based discourse, a standard-based discourse, and a resource-based discourse. These discourses have—as we will show—various consequences for the way we think (...) and talk about education and educational leadership in our age. Using examples that stem from a project about educational leadership in Danish upper secondary school, we will illustrate how educational leaders’ beings and doings are ‘regulated’ by these discourses, which place them in a tension field where different and conflicting fantasies seem to be played out. Then, we will discuss how these fantasies can be challenged and how we can think and speak more intellectually about education and educational leadership. By using the term intellectual we are referring to educational leaders’ ability as human beings to critically reflect on their contemporary doings and beings within and beyond the existing social order. Hopefully this can help them to establish new ways for discussing not only what educational leadership is and should be about, but also what it could be about. (shrink)