In this essay the author examines the burgeoning industry of ecotourism, analyzing definitions of "ecotourism" and exploring a number of compelling issues raised by the recent trend in worldwide tourism. She then examines three sample codes of ecotourism: one site-specific (Antarctic Traveller's Code), one from a major environmental group (National Audubon Society), and one developed by a consultant for a travel research firm (Code for Leisure Destination Development). The presuppositions, value, and limitations of these codes are then analyzed. On the (...) basis of this analysis, the author proceeds to a discussion of the frameworks for negotiating discourses about ecotourism. Stark argues that the limitations detected in the sample codes of ethics for ecotourism would be fruitfully addressed by J rgen Habermas's discourse ethics augmented by the feminist ethical and political theories of Seyla Benhabib who draws on the work of Hannah Arendt. While bracketing the debates surrounding the justification of Habermas's principle of universalizability, the author argues that the overemphasis on the rational aspects both of the principle itself and on the notion of "rational trust" stand in need of a corrective if discourse ethics is to be used successfully in negotiating real-life conflicts. Stark argues for a kind of "application discourse" using the feminist ethical and political theories of Benhabib drawn from Arendt's work in which "associational public spaces" are created through relational processes in the acts themselves of meeting and discourse. The author claims that Benhabib and Arendt's works contain fruitful theoretical approaches that also leave room to deal with policies and practical applications as debates about ecotourism increase around the world. Far from exhausting the possibilities, this essay opens up the connections between these theoretical approaches and a new area of environmental concern-- ecotourism. (shrink)
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its action-oriented offspring Corporate Citizenship (CC) currently trigger an intensifying debate on ethics, role and behavior of companies within civil society. For companies, CSR raises the question of what may be the "good reason(s)" for acting responsible towards its members, customers or society. In order to answer this question, we face the debate on CSR and its strategic engagement drivers on the levels of corporate culture, social innovation, and civil society. In this article, we provide (...) a conceptual framework based on the analytic distinction of legitimation and sensemaking. The conceptual framework developed in this article can serve as a basis to develop a company's CSR strategy. It provides measures and instruments to make complex CSR processes more visible and manageable. (shrink)
What is required for one thing to be a reason for another? Must the reason, more precisely, be or involve a principle? In this essay I target the idea that justification via reasons of one's beliefs (e.g., epistemic or moral) requires that the 'justifying reasons' be or involve (substantive and significant) principles. I identify and explore some potential sources of a principles requirement, and conclude that none of them (i.e., the normative function of reasons, the abstract structure of reasons, the (...) universalizability constraint on [moral] reasons, and even the pragmatic considerations that attenuate 'real-world' reason-giving) mandate that reasons be principles. I then explore implications of this conclusion, and note especially the resultant and paradoxical permissibility of justifying reasons that manage to be lawlike (a sine qua non for justifying reasons) even while consisting of highly-detailed and situation-specific proposition sets, e.g., novel-length narratives. (shrink)
Inspired in part by a renewed attention to Aristotle's moral philosophy, philosophers have acknowledged the important role of the emotions in morality. Nonetheless, precisely how emotions matter to morality has remained contentious. Aristotelians claim that moral virtue is constituted by correct action and correct emotion. But Kantians seem to require solely that agents do morally correct actions out of respect for the moral law. There is a crucial philosophical disagreement between the Aristotelian and Kantian moral outlooks: namely, is feeling the (...) correct emotions necessary to virtue or is it an optional extra, which is permitted but not required. I argue that there are good reasons for siding with the Aristotelians: virtuous agents must experience the emotions appropriate to their situations. Moral virtue requires a change of heart. (shrink)
Ethicists of care have objected to traditional moral philosophy's reliance upon abstract universal principles. They claim that the use of abstraction renders traditional theories incapable of capturing morally relevant, particular features of situations. I argue that this objection sometimes conflates two different levels of moral thinking: the level of justification and the level of deliberation. Specifically, I claim that abstraction or attention to context at the level of justification does not entail, as some critics seem to think, a commitment to (...) abstraction or attention to context at the level of deliberation. It follows that critics who reject a theory's use of abstraction at the level of justification have not shown that the theory recommends abstraction at the level of deliberation and that it, therefore, compels the deliberating agent to overlook morally salient details. (shrink)
Because contractarians see justice as mutual advantage, they hold that justice can be rationally grounded only when each can expect to gain from it. John Rawls seems to avoid this feature of contractarianism by fashioning the parties to the contract as Kantian agents whose personhood grounds their claims to justice. But Rawls also endorses the Humean idea that justice applies only if people are equal in ability. It would seem to follow from this idea that dependent persons (such as the (...) disabled) lack claims of justice. It appears, then, that the Kantian and Humean themes in Rawls conflict. I present a reading of Rawls that resolves this tension between the Kantian and Humean themes. The first theme, I argue, allows Rawls to maintain that persons as such are owed justice regardless of their ability to engage in social cooperation. The second theme, I argue, allows him to retain Hume's connection between justice and reciprocity, but confines the reciprocity condition to relations among nondependents. I conclude that Rawls's approach permits him to rebut recent criticisms leveled by disability theorists and others who claim that his theory excludes dependents. Key Words: Rawls • reciprocity • disability • dependency • circumstances of justice. (shrink)
Conflicts of interest pose special problems for the professions. Even the appearance of a conflict of interest can undermine essential trust between professional and public. This volume is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the ramifications and problems associated with important issue. It contains fifteen new essays by noted scholars and covers topics in law, medicine, journalism, engineering, financial services, and others.
. We explore a connection between different ways of representing information in computer science. We show that relational databases, modules, algebraic specifications and constraint systems all satisfy the same ten axioms. A commutative semigroup together with a lattice satisfying these axioms is then called an “information algebra”. We show that any compact consequence operator satisfying the interpolation and the deduction property induces an information algebra. Conversely, each finitary information algebra can be obtained from a consequence operator in this way. Finally (...) we show that arbitrary (not necessarily finitary) information algebras can be represented as some kind of abstract relational database called a tuple system. (shrink)
In a major revision of my earlier theoretical work on religion, I attempt to identify and connect the basic micro elements and processes underlying religious expression. I show that all primary aspects of religion-belief, emotion, ritual, prayer, sacrifice, mysticism, and miracle-can be understood on the basis of exchange relations between humans and supernatural beings. Although I utilize a cognitive definition of religion, this new version of the theory is especially concerned with the emotional and expressive aspects of religion. Along the (...) way I also clarify the difference between religion and magic and this sets the stage for explaining the conditions under which religion (but not magic) can require extended and exclusive exchange relations between humans and the gods, thus enabling some religions to sustain stable organizations based on a lay membership. (shrink)
What are the final limits of medicine? What should we not try to cure medically, even if we had the necessary financial resources and technology? This book philosophically addresses these questions by examining two mirror-image debates in tandem. Members of certain groups, who are deemed by traditional standards to have a medical condition, such as deafness, obesity, or anorexia, argue that they have created their own cultures and ways of life. Curing their conditions would be a form of genocide. Members (...) of other groups are seeking to provide medical treatment to what would conventionally be deemed 'cultural conditions'. Mild neurotics who take anti-depressants to elevate their mood, runners who use steroids, or men and women seeking cosmetic surgery are asking for medical treatment for problems that might be solved culturally, by changing norms, pressures, or expectations in the broader culture. Each of these two debates endeavors to locate medicine's final frontier and to articulate what it is that we should not treat medically even if we could. This volume analyzes what these two contemporary debates have to say to each other and thus offers a new way of determining medicine's final limits. (shrink)
The twentieth century was unprecedented in the scope and enormity of the terrible deeds that human beings perpetrated against their fellows. Oftentimes, the unjust detention, imprisonment, tortures, and executions were set in motion by the event of the arrest. This paper examines the phenomenon of the arrest as it is depicted in two of the century’s literary giants -- Franz Kafka and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Uncanny correspondences can be detected particularly between Kafka’s novel The Trial and Solzhenitsyn’s memoir The Gulag Archipelago. (...) Moreover, through Kafka’s powerful literary imagination, he created works containing many features that were later to stand at the heart of the terror of totalitarian regimes. This paper analyzes and explores the arrest and, as a result, a philosophical typology of the arrest emerges. Due to the power and scope of Kafka’s genius, his work both prefigures and expresses many of the essential characteristics of totalitarian regimes that come to be enacted in flesh and blood later in the century. In The Trial, the arrest may be seen as an eerie and surreal foreshadowing of the millions of morally outrageous and legally spurious arrests that were to come in the twentieth century. (shrink)
This paper proposes that global peace should be a professional concern because the issues are complex and require critical and creative thinking, and because professionals have status enabling them to convey information to empower others. Professionals must examine priorities in society's needs for application of their particular knowledge areas, and must each make their own unique contribution towards a more peaceful, less threatened planet.
The essay challenges the de facto dichotomy between the discipline of logic and the activity of social criticism, i.e., it provides an illustrated reminder to philosophers that the gulf between these two areas of philosophy is not quite as wide as our curriculum andspecialization designations tend to suggest. Social criticism plays some necessary roles in certain branches of logic, and the second-order accounting of the contents of these branches leads back to social criticism. These points suggest an adjusted conception of (...) logic that would, among other things, render phrases such as “applying logic to social criticism” as misleading since certain branches of logic would not even coherently exist apart from social criticism. The lead illustrations are the identification of basic, pervasive, and thought-impeding logical errors that have been missed by numerous logic texts, and the assessment of contemporary academic logic as properly a quest for communal sanity that lies caught between communal insanity and communal mendacity. (shrink)
SARA FLOUNDERS: The entire visit, except for landing at Tel Aviv airport, was in the West Bank and in Gaza. We didn�t have any chance to be within the [19]48 borders of Israel. Although we would like to, and that�s a later trip. We went the very first night from Ben Gurion Airport to East Jerusalem, and from there we went to Bethlehem and the nearby Deheisheh refugee camp, to the smaller towns of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala, the (...) larger towns of Ramallah and Nablus, and all through Gaza down to the southernmost point, to where the border of Egypt is. Among other aims, we carried medicines to doctors all over and now carry back their testimony about the condition of the people. (shrink)
Some psychologists have recently tried to develop new approaches to psychology incompatible with both natural-science views of the discipline and basic tenets of postmodernism. In her new book on psychology’s interpretative turn, Barbara Held refers to these thinkers as "middleground theorists" or MGTs. Most of the MGTs reject psychological laws, defend free choice and agency, stress the role of values in psychological inquiry, and argue for a hermeneutical methodology. Some reject scientific realism and embrace epistemological relativism. Both Held and (...) I express doubts about some of these views. (shrink)
: Stanley Cavell reflects on the writing of Barbara Cassin in light of his interest in interpreting certain philosophers as "philosophically destructive," where this destructiveness may in fact be understood as philosophically creative. Cavell suggests that the writings of Austin and Wittgenstein may be considered in these terms, and speculates on the potential interest these writers might have for Cassin. Cassin's call for a rethinking of philosophy might be seen as uniquely essential to the practice of Austin and Wittgenstein.
In this response to essays by Barbara J. King, Gregory R. Peterson, Wesley J. Wildman, and Nancy R. Howell, I present arguments to counter some of the exciting and challenging questions from my colleagues. I take the opportunity to restate my argument for an interdisciplinary public theology, and by further developing the notion of transversality I argue for the specificity of the emerging theological dialogue with paleoanthropology and primatology. By arguing for a hermeneutics of the body, I respond (...) to criticism of my notion of human uniqueness and argue for strong evolutionary continuities, as well as significant discontinuities, between primates, humans, and other hominids. In addition, I answer critical questions about theological methodology and argue how the notion of human uniqueness, theologically restated as the image of God, is enriched by transversally appropriating scientific notions of species specificity and embodied personhood. (shrink)
Barbara Jordan (1936?1996), a formidable politician, won election to the Texas Senate (1966) and to the US Congress (1972). She became one of the most celebrated African?American politicians of the twentieth century, acclaimed both by white and black. Jordan was a voluntarist, viewing individuals as able to change the world through their own actions. She was committed to the American dream of inclusion, and also to the importance of positive ties to elites; to coping with the ?world as it (...) is?, to the futility of confrontation, and also to changing and influencing the attitudes of men at the top. Jordan opposed civil disobedience, nonviolent or not. Yet she admired symbols of defiance like Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali. A highly public figure, she was also exceptionally self?repressed. Critics likened her to the conservative Booker Washington, yet she was a staunch defender of voting rights and a radical integrationist. (shrink)
A new essay to analyse the demonstration which Aristotle gave of Barbara ACP (first premise “actual”, second premise “contingent”, conclusion “possible”) is realized with the techniques of mathematicallogic. The critical points (conclusion “possible” from two premises “possible”, problem de dicto - de re, etc) are indicated; based on them it is considered that Aristotle’s proof is not conclusive.
: The response of Barbara Pfeffer Billauer to my article "If I Am Only My Genes, What Am I? Genetic Essentialism and a Jewish Response" highlights the conflict between a sociological understanding of religion and the resistance to such analysis from within a faith tradition. Ms. Billauer makes three main points; the first strangely credits to me, and then attacks, an argument the article takes great pains to refute, but does so to emphasize the faith's prescient guidance in matters (...) scientific. The second attempts to rebut my critical analysis of the tensions inherent in Jewish views of the body with an insistence that Judaism so perfectly balances the relation between the sacred and profane that there is not now, and never was, the slightest tension between corporeality and divinity in the Jewish corpus. The third uses my article as vehicle for her to expound on an interesting but tangential formulation of three Jewish terms. In all, the need to defend her interpretation of Judaism's solutions to the problems the article raises results in un-self-critical and ahistorical theorizing, making the utility of her arguments in a discussion of the sociology of religion unsatisfactory. (shrink)
In this response to Malt's and Prinz's commentaries, I argue that neo-empiricist hypotheses fail to threaten the argument for the elimination of ‘concept’ because they are unlikely to be true of all concepts, if they are true at all. I also defend the hypothesis that we possess bodies of knowledge retrieved by default from long-term memory, and I argue that prototypes, exemplars, and theories form genuinely distinct concepts.
