At the forefront of international concerns about global legislation and regulation, a host of noted environmentalists and business ethicists examine ethical issues in consumption from the points of view of environmental sustainability, economic development, and free enterprise.

Liberalism generally holds that legitimate political power is limited and is to be impartially exercised, only for the public good. Liberals accordingly assign political priority to maintaining certain basic liberties and equality of opportunities; they advocate an essential role for markets in economic activity, and they recognize government's crucial role in correcting market breakdowns and providing public goods. Classical liberalism and what I call “the high liberal tradition” are two main branches of liberalism. Classical liberalism evolved from the works of (...) Adam Smith and the classical utilitarian economists; its major 20th century representatives include Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The high liberal tradition developed from John Stuart Mill's works, and its major philosophical representatives in the 20th century are John Dewey and, later, John Rawls. This paper discusses the main distinguishing features of the classical and the high liberal traditions and their respective positions regarding capitalism as an economic and social system. Classical liberals, unlike high liberals, regard economic liberties and rights of private property in productive resources to be nearly as important as basic liberties. They conceive of equality of opportunity in more formal terms, and regard capitalist markets and the price system as essential not only to the allocation of production resources, but also as the fundamental criterion for the just distribution of income, wealth, and economic powers. High liberals, by contrast, regard the economic liberties as subordinate to the exercise of personal and civic liberties. They are prepared to regulate and restrict economic liberties to achieve greater equality of opportunities, reduce inequalities of economic powers, and promote a broader conception of the public good. And while high liberals endorse markets and the price system as essential to allocation of productive resources, they do not regard markets as the fundamental criterion for assessing just distributions of income, wealth, and economic powers and positions of responsibility. The paper concludes with some reflections upon the essential role that dissimilar conceptions of persons and society play in grounding the different positions on economic justice that classical and high liberals advocate. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Essay 1.

D. In doing x an agent acts incontinently if and only if: 1) the agent does x intentionally; 2) the agent believes there is an alternative action y open to him; and 3) the agent judges that, all things considered, it would be better to do y than to do x.

Mark Freeman's inspiring account of the burgeoning field of the psychological humanities presents a clear and compelling vision of what the discipline of psychology might become. Engaging and accessible, this bold, provocative book is destined to spark significant discussion and debate in audiences including advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and professionals in the field of psychology with interests in theoretical and philosophical psychology.

Problems of Rationality is the eagerly awaited fourth volume of Donald Davidson 's philosophical writings. From the 1960s until his death in August 2003 Davidson was perhaps the most influential figure in English-language philosophy, and his work has had a profound effect upon the discipline. His unified theory of the interpretation of thought, meaning, and action holds that rationality is a necessary condition for both mind and interpretation. Davidson here develops this theory to illuminate value judgements and how we (...) understand them; to investigate what the conditions are for attributing mental states to an object or creature; and to grapple with the problems presented by thoughts and actions which seem to be irrational. Anyone working on knowledge, mind, and language will find these essays essential reading. (shrink)

The author believes that large‐scale rationality on the part of the interpretant is essential to his interpretability, and therefore, in his view, to her having a mind. How, then are cases of irrationality, such as akrasia or self‐deception, judged by the interpretant's own standards, possible? He proposes that, in order to resolve the apparent paradoxes, one must distinguish between accepting a contradictory proposition and accepting separately each of two contradictory propositions, which are held apart, which in turn requires to conceive (...) of the mind as containing a number of semi‐independent structures of interlocking beliefs, desires, emotions, memories, and other mental states. (shrink)

Part 1. Introduction -- Introduction: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm in Light of a Thirty-Five Year Debate -- Thirty-Five Year Climate Change Policy Debate -- Part 2. Priority Ethical Issues -- Ethical Problems with Cost Arguments -- Ethics and Scientific Uncertainty Arguments -- Atmospheric Targets -- Allocating National Emissions Targets -- Climate Change Damages and Adaptation Costs -- Obligations of Sub-national Governments, Organizations, Businesses, and Individuals -- Independent Responsibility to Act -- Part 3. The Crucial Role of Ethics in Climate (...) Change Policy Making -- Why Has Ethics Failed to Achieve Traction? -- Conclusion: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction A Global Distribution Principle? Problems with Globalizing the Difference Principle Conclusion Notes.

Two things become one thing, something having parts, and something becoming something else, are cases of many things being identical with one thing. This apparent contradiction introduces others concerning transitivity of identity, discernibility of identicals, existence, and vague existence. I resolve the contradictions with a theory that identity, number, and existence are relative to standards for counting. What are many on some standard are one and the same on another. The theory gives an account of the discernibility of identicals using (...) phrases like “insofar as”. And it holds that standards for counting remain or shift depending on our purposes. (shrink)

John Rawls says: “The main problem of distributive justice is the choice of a social system.” Property-owning democracy is the social system that Rawls thought best realized the requirements of his principles of justice. This article discusses Rawls’s conception of property-owning democracy and how it is related to his difference principle. I explain why Rawls thought that welfare-state capitalism could not fulfill his principles: it is mainly because of the connection he perceived between capitalism and utilitarianism.

Applies and extends the conclusions of the preceding chapters by examining cases of self‐deception of a puzzling sort emerging from cases of fantasizing and imagining, found in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The author is particularly interested in what can be described as the ‘divided mind of self‐deception’, the mind that produces an imagination due to its realising the state of the world that motivates the fantasy construct and the possessor's eventual acquisition (...) of the belief that the fantasy construct represents reality accurately. In the process of deceiving oneself, he holds, no clear line can be drawn between imaginative activities that are not yet self‐deceptive and those that are. (shrink)

John Rawls's focus on principles of justice for the basic structure of primary social institutions evolved from his early discussion of practices, social rules and Humean conventions, and his apparent commitment to a version of rule‐utilitarianism. Rawls says that there are two sources for the primacy assigned to the basic structure: the profound effects of basic social institutions on persons and their future prospects, and the need to maintain background justice. The chapter discusses three different kinds of reasons for the (...) primacy of principles for the basic structure: social nature of human relationships, ideals of persons and society, distributive justice and the importance of background justice. It concludes with a discussion of some prominent objections: monism vs dualism; capitalism, incentives and the institutional division of labor; the principles of justice are neither consequentialist nor prioritarian; social justice vs cosmopolitan justice. (shrink)

The Twentieth Century has seen a dramatic rise in the use of probability and statistics in almost all fields of research. This has stimulated many new philosophical ideas on probability. _Philosophical Theories of Probability_ is the first book to present a clear, comprehensive and systematic account of these various theories and to explain how they relate to one another. Gillies also offers a distinctive version of the propensity theory of probability, and the intersubjective interpretation, which develops the subjective theory.

Repr. as Essay 14 in Davidson, Donald, _Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation_, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK (Clarendon, 2001). 215-226.

An approach to argument macrostructure -- The dialectical nature of argument -- Toulmin's problematic notion of warrant -- The linked-convergent distinction, a first approximation -- Argument structure and disciplinary perspective : the linked-convergent versus multiple-co-ordinatively compound distinctions -- The linked-convergent distinction, refining the criterion -- Argument structure and enthymemes -- From analysis to evaluation.

No one who reads Derrida closely could accuse him of “technophobia.” More than any other contemporary thinker, on the contrary, he has shown the limit of attempts to protect thinking and even being itself from technē. Yet, Derrida nevertheless insists that “deconstruction” is neither a “technique” nor the technology of thinking that modern philosophy calls “method.” What allows Derrida to exclude “technique” and “method” when he himself shows, in relation to Heidegger above all, that a certain technicity and methodicity always (...) remain irreducible? After outlining its stakes (§I), this article seeks to raise this question by reconstructing Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger concerning the questions of technology (§II) and of method (§III) before turning to the techno-methodicity that Derrida attempts to dissociate from deconstruction in turn (§IV). (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The concept of complexity has become very important in theoretical biology. It is a many faceted concept and too new and ill defined to have a universally accepted meaning. This review examines the development of this concept from the point of view of its usefulness as a criteria for the study of living systems to see what it has to offer as a new approach. In particular, one definition of complexity has been put forth which has the necessary precision and (...) rigor to be considered as a useful categorization of systems, especially as it pertains to those we call living. This definition, due to Robert Rosen, has been developed in a number of works and involves some deep new concepts about the way we view systems. In particular, it focuses on the way we view the world and actually practice science through the use of the modelling relation. This mathematical object models the process by which we assign meaning to the world we perceive. By using the modelling relation, it is possible to identify the subjective nature of our practices and deal with this issue explicitly. By so doing, it becomes clear that our notion of complexity and especially its most popular manifestations, is in large part a product of the historical processes which lead to the present state of scientific epistemology. In particular, it is a reaction to the reductionist/mechanistic view of nature which can be termed the Newtonian Paradigm. This approach to epistemology has dominated for so long that its use as a model has become implicit in most of what we do in and out of science. The alternative to this approach is examined and related to the special definition of complexity given by Rosen. Some historical examples are used to emphasize the dependence of our view of what is complex in a popular sense on the ever changing state of our knowledge. The role of some popular concepts such as chaotic dynamics are examined in this context. The fields of artificial life and related areas are also viewed from the perspective of this rigorous view of complexity and found lacking. The notion that in some way life exists at the edge of chaos is examined from the perspective of the second law of thermodynamics given by Schneider and Kay. Finally, the causal elements in complex systems are explored in relation to complexity. Rosen has shown that a clear difference in causal relations exists between complex and simple systems and that this difference leads to a uniquely useful definition of what we mean by living. Rosen makes it very clear that the class of systems which are complex is a much larger class than those which we call living. For that reason, the focus of this review will be on complexity as a stepping stone towards the deeper question of what makes a system alive. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Notes.

Human attitudes to animals have changed as non-humans have become more widely incorporated in the category of moral agents who deserve some respect. Parallels between the functioning of humans and non-humans have been made for thousands of years but the idea that the animals that we keep can suffer has spread recently. An improved understanding of motivation, cognition and the complexity of social behaviour in animals has led in the last 30 years to the rapid development of animal welfare science. (...) Early attempts to define welfare referred to individuals being in harmony with nature but the first usable definition incorporated feelings and health as part of attempts to cope with the environment. Others considered that welfare is only about feelings but it is argued that as feelings are mechanisms that have evolved they are a part of welfare rather than all of it. Most reviews of welfare now start with listing the needs of the animal, including needs to show certain behaviours. This approach has used sophisticated studies of what is important to animals and has replaced the earlier general guidelines described as freedoms. Many measures of welfare are now used and indicate how good or how poor the welfare is. Naturalness is not a part of the definition of welfare but explains why some needs exist. In recent years, welfare has become established as one of various criteria used to decide on whether a system is sustainable because members of the public will not accept systems that cause poor welfare. The study of welfare has become part of the scientific basis upon which important political decisions are made. (shrink)

John Searle began to discuss his recently published book `The Construction of Social Reality' with Anthony Freeman, and they ended up talking about God. The book itself and part of their conversation are introduced and briefly reflected upon by Anthony Freeman. Many familiar social facts -- like money and marriage and monarchy -- are only facts by human agreement. They exist only because we believe them to exist. That is the thesis, at once startling yet obvious, that philosopher (...) John Searle explores in The Construction of Social Reality. (shrink)

Mystery: the scalpel that split consciousness -- Beauty: sirens of the gene -- Reality: capers of the unseen sun -- Sensory: fitness beats truth -- Illusory: the bluff of a desktop -- Gravity: spacetime is doomed -- Virtuality: inflating a holoworld -- Polychromy: mutations of an interface -- Scrutiny: you get what you need, in both life and business -- Community: the network of conscious agents -- Precisely: the right to be wrong.