Alm, Margit Review of: Countdown: Our last, best hope for a future on earth?, by Alan Weisman, First Published in the US by Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group ISBN 978-1-4087-0267-3.

Alm, Margit Review of: Growing for broke: How the government has sold out to private interests, by Peter North, Published in 2016 by Tomorrow Press, PO Box 238, Berwick, Vic. 3806 ISBN 978-168418977-9.

This article addresses the sacredness of Ayahuasca from the perspective of the global shamanic vocation. If encounters with Ayahuasca are said to revitalize forms of sacredness in contemporary societies, this is perhaps clearest in cases where individuals understand themselves to be called to lead ceremonies. Recognizing the global scale of Ayahuasca shamanism, we compare facilitators of ceremonies in two societies to discern differences and similarities in how Ayahuasca vocations exist in differently modernized societies: Peru, a predominantly Catholic society with a (...) substantial Indigenous Amazonian population and an active Ayahuasca shamanism tourism sector, and Denmark, a secular society in Northern Europe, where Ayahuasca is illegal. Building on recent reappraisals of Weber’s reflection on vocation and Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, we argue that being called by Ayahuasca to follow shamanic vocations in contemporary societies leads to tensions around the need to both justify and resist the rationalization of Ayahuasca. (shrink)

We define a complete theory SHF e of separably closed fields of finite invariant e (= degree of imperfection) which carry an infinite stack of Hasse-derivations. We show that SHF e has quantifier elimination and eliminates imaginaries.

I distinguish between two forms of consequentialism: reductionist and anti-reductionist. Reductionist consequentialism holds that the deontic properties of rightness and wrongness are identical with the axiological properties of optimality and suboptimality, respectively. Anti-reductionist consequentialism denies this identification, hence accepting what I call the autonomy of the deontic. In this article I ignore reductionist consequentialism. Instead I argue that anti-reductionist consequentialism is deeply problematic or even incoherent. Simply put, the main point is that the criterion of rightness of any ethical theory (...) that respects the autonomy of the deontic must entail that an object that meets that criterion is an action, and anti-reductionist consequentialism does not meet that requirement (while certain competing theories arguably do). (shrink)

The paper addresses an understudied but highly relevant group of people within corporate organizations and society in general—the marginalized—as well as their narration, and criticism, of personal lived experiences of marginalization in business. They are conventionally perceived to lack traditional forms of power such as public influence, formal authority, education, money, and political positions; however, they still possess the resources to impact their situations, their circumstances, and the structures that determine their situations. Business ethics researchers seldom consider marginalized people’s voices (...) and experiences as resources to understand their lives, as demonstrated through a review of 7500 articles published in the Journal of Business Ethics and Business Ethics Quarterly (2000–2019). Only 78 studies included aspects of marginalized groups. 69 of those studies discussed the topic of marginalized groups of people, but without integrating their explicit voices into the text. Only 9 of the 78 articles featured marginalized people’s explicit voices about their marginalization experiences incorporated into the text as a source for exploration. None of the identified studies discussed the potential for theorizing based on such voices. This paper contributes to business ethics theory by developing four theoretical possibilities vis-à-vis the critical voices of marginalized people’s experiences in business: (a) marginalized theory on critical agency and freedom of speech; (b) the gatekeeping role of academia; (c) primary sources; and (d) a participative perspective. Discussing the theoretical potential of quoting the above voices can enrich business ethics research in terms of the theoretical understanding of marginalized groups in business. (shrink)

Muscle synergies reflect the presence of a common neural input to multiple muscles. Steering small sets of synergies is commonly believed to simplify the control of complex motor tasks like walking and running. When these locomotor patterns emerge, it is likely that synergies emerge as well. We hence hypothesized that in children learning to run the number of accompanying synergies increases and that some of the synergies’ activities display a temporal shift related to a reduced stance phase as observed in (...) adults. We investigated the development of locomotion in 23 children aged 2–9 years of age and compared them with seven young adults. Muscle activity of 15 bilateral leg, trunk, and arm muscles, ground reaction forces, and kinematics were recorded during comfortable treadmill walking and running, followed by a muscle synergy analysis. We found that toddlers and preschoolers utilize a “walk-run strategy” when learning to run: they managed the fastest speeds on the treadmill by combining double support and flight phases. In particular the activity duration of the medial gastrocnemius muscle was weakly correlated with age. The number of synergies across groups and conditions needed to cover sufficient data variation ranged between four and eight. The number of synergies tended to be smaller in toddlers than it did in preschoolers and school-age children but the adults had the lowest number for both conditions. Against our expectations, the age groups did not differ significantly in the timing or duration of synergies. We believe that the increase in the number of muscle synergies in older children relates to motor learning and exploration. The ability to run with a FP is clearly associated with an increase in the number of muscle synergies. (shrink)

This article examines non-statutory executive powers, which are commonly employed in the modern state but rarely studied as a distinct concept. The article assesses three treatments of these powers available in current English public law—prerogative, common law powers which rely on analogies between the state and legal persons, and judicial review—and argues that they fail to provide a proper balance between legality and need. Royal prerogative connotes a shrinking reservoir of ancient powers, while non-statutory powers respond to unexpected futures and (...) statute’s intrinsic eventual failings. Analogies to legal persons fail to address the particularities of executive powers. Judicial review provides only a partial solution, since absence of parliamentary approval is not, in itself, ground for special treatment of executive action. The author joins calls for theoretization of public law and advances a model of executive powers that draws on a composite theory of the executive branch and its functions.This article examines non-statutory executive powers, which are commonly employed in the modern state but rarely studied as a distinct concept. The article assesses three treatments of these powers available in current English public law—prerogative, common law powers which rely on analogies between the state and legal persons, and judicial review—and argues that they fail to provide a proper balance between legality and need. Royal prerogative connotes a shrinking reservoir of ancient powers, while non-statutory powers respond to unexpected futures and statute’s intrinsic eventual failings. Analogies to legal persons fail to address the particularities of executive powers. Judicial review provides only a partial solution, since absence of parliamentary approval is not, in itself, ground for special treatment of executive action. The author joins calls for theoretization of public law and advances a model of executive powers that draws on a composite theory of the executive branch and its functions. (shrink)

This article focuses on healthcare ethics discussions in Estonia. We begin with an overview of the reform policies that the healthcare institutions have undergone since the region regained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The principles of distributing healthcare services and questions regarding just what ethical healthcare should look like have received abundant coverage in the national media. An example of this is the exceptionally public case of V—a woman with leukemia whose expensive drugs the national health insurance fund (...) refused to compensate. In our subsequent discussion, we focus on a grand-scale local healthcare and research project—the Estonian Genome Project—that attempts to include 1 million DNA samples into one database. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence systems are becoming increasingly autonomous and will soon be able to make decisions on their own about what to do, AI researchers have started to talk about the need to align AI with human values. The AI ‘value alignment problem’ faces two kinds of challenges—a technical and a normative one—which are interrelated. The technical challenge deals with the question of how to encode human values in artificial intelligence. The normative challenge is associated with two questions: “Which values (...) or whose values should artificial intelligence align with?” My concern is that AI developers underestimate the difficulty of answering the normative question. They hope that we can easily identify the purposes we really desire and that they can focus on the design of those objectives. But how are we to decide which objectives or values to induce in AI, given that there is a plurality of values and moral principles and that our everyday life is full of moral disagreements? In my paper I will show that although it is not realistic to reach an agreement on what we, humans, really want as people value different things and seek different ends, it may be possible to agree on what we do not want to happen, considering the possibility that intelligence, equal to our own, or even exceeding it, can be created. I will argue for pluralism which is compatible with objectivism. In spite of the fact that there is no uniquely best solution to every moral problem, it is still possible to identify which answers are wrong. And this is where we should begin the value alignment of AI. (shrink)

In this article we argue that puzzle of tax compliance can be explained, at least in part, by recognizing the typically neglected role of ethics in individual behavior; that is, individuals do not always behave as the selfish, rational, self-interested individuals portrayed in the standard neoclassical paradigm, but rather are often motivated by many other factors that have as their main foundation some aspects of “ethics.” We argue that it is not possible to understand fully an individual’s compliance decisions without (...) considering in some form these ethical dimensions. Specifically, we argue here that there is much direct and indirect evidence that ethics differ across individuals and that these differences matter in significant ways for their compliance decisions. We then put this in the larger context of the inability of the standard neoclassical paradigm to explain compliance of at least some individuals, and we suggest several possible avenues by which theory can be expanded to incorporate ethics. We conclude by arguing that a full house of compliance strategies is needed to combat tax evasion, strategies that include the traditional “enforcement” paradigm suggested by and consistent with neoclassical theory, a less traditional “service” paradigm that recognizes the important role of a “kinder and gentler” tax administration in encouraging compliance, and, importantly, a new “trust” paradigm that is built on the foundation of ethics, in which the tax administration must recognize that it can erode the ethics of taxpayers by its own decisions. (shrink)

This article provides a short survey of Joachim Kopper’s understanding of Kant’s theory of cognition in CPR. Kant’s critical thought is developed via a dogmatic method but marks a transition to transcendental thought delivered from dogmatic assertions. The assertion that cognition emerges from the relation between mind and objects is made at the beginning of CPR. Kopper holds that transcendental reflection starts not on the basis of this distinction but on the impossibility of logical assertion about existence as it is (...) reached in antinomic. The fact of experience must thus be explained otherwise than by dogmatic assertions of relations between objects or between objects and thought. Reflection on necessity, affirmed by the law of causality, enables transcendental inspection to understand experience and human life in one unrelational meaning. (shrink)

Whereas in the 1970s early bioethicists believed that bioethics is an arena for the application of philosophical theories of utilitarianism, deontology, and natural law thinking, contemporary policy-oriented bioethicists seem rather to be keen on framing ethical issues through political ideologies. Bioethicists today are often labeled “liberal” or “communitarian,” referring to their different understandings of the relationship between the individual and society. Liberal individualism, with its conceptual base of autonomy, dignity, and privacy, enjoyed a long period of dominance in bioethics, but (...) it has increasingly come under attack from ideologies promoting a more salient role for concepts of solidarity, community, and public interest. (shrink)

In this paper I take another look at the view, defended by C. Nino, that we may punish criminals because, by knowingly breaking a law, they have consented to becoming liable to the prescribed punishment. I will first rebut the criticisms usually aimed at this view in the literature, aiming to show that they are inconclusive. They are all efforts to show that criminal offenders in fact do not consent to becoming liable to punishment simply by committing crimes. I then (...) turn to a different line of criticism, which I find more promising. I argue that the moral power of effecting normative changes by consenting reflects the power holder’s value as a person, and show how this idea makes sense of how refusal to recognize that power wrongs a person. I then argue that the “power” of consenting to punishability does not fit that model, and is better explained as reflecting the value of other people, whom the offender has wronged. Hence the power of consenting is not involved in typical cases of wrongdoing. (shrink)

Atomism is defined as the view that the moral value of any object is ultimately determined by simple features whose contribution to the value of an object is always the same, independently of context. A morally fundamental feature, in a given context, is defined as one whose contribution in that context is determined by no other value fact. Three theses are defended, which together entail atomism: (1) All objects have their moral value ultimately in virtue of morally fundamental features; (2) (...) If a feature is morally fundamental, then its contribution is always the same; (3) Morally fundamental features are simple. (shrink)

The bulk of this volume consists of a somewhat revised version of the Axel Hägerström Lectures given in Uppsala, Sweden in 1991. It also contains previously published papers on the relevance of philosophy of language to ethics and the interpretation of Kant’s moral philosophy. The latter, in particular, deserves comment, but space considerations force me to devote my attention to the Hägerström Lectures, entitled “A Taxonomy of Ethical Theories.”.

In this article I will describe the main elements of the Norwegian press’s moral confrontation with the Government Pension Fund’s ethical investment management when it was in an introductory phase in early 2005, with special emphasis on one newspaper, Stavanger Aftenblad. The press criticized the fund’s fresh investment profile and intended exclusionary practice before it had really started in earnest. Then I will focus on how the press’s unilateral criticism of the fund’s investment practice at the time overshadowed a discussion (...) of any defects in the ethical principles for investment. And I will focus on the press’s lack of distinguishing between information and sensation. In conclusion I point out that in 2006 the press has abandoned its critical stance from 2005 and has now a tendency to idealize the fund’s exclusionary practice and the underlying principles. (shrink)

According to what we could call the "liberal" theory of distributive justice, people do not deserve the money they are able to make in the market for contributing to the economy. Yet the standard arguments for that view, which center on the fact that persons have very limited control over the size of their contributions, would also seem to imply that persons cannot deserve admiration, appreciation, esteem, praise and so on for these and other contributions. The control asymmetry is this: (...) the first conclusion of these arguments is acceptable but the second not. This paper is an effort to defend that claim, but without appeal to the notion of control. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize the standard argument for deontological egalitarianism, understood as the thesis that there is a moral claim to have an equal share of well-being or whatever other good counts. That argument is based on the idea that equals should be treated equally. I connect the debate over egalitarianism with that over comparative justice. A common theme is a general skepticism against comparative claims. I argue (i) that there can be no claim to equality based simply on (...) the fact of equal worth as that fact itself does not have any value for the supposed claim holder; and (ii) intuitions that suggest otherwise can be explained away without appealing to comparative claims. (shrink)

Moral Rights and Their Grounds offers a novel theory of rights based on two distinct views. The first--the value view of rights--argues that for a person to have a right is to be valuable in a certain way, or to have a value property. This special type of value is in turn identified by the reasons that others have for treating the right holder in certain ways, and that correlate with the value in question. David Alm then argues that the (...) familiar agency view of rights should be replaced with a different version according to which persons' rights, and thus at least in part their value, are based on their actions rather than their mere agency. This view, which Alm calls exercise-based rights, retains some of the most valuable features of the agency view while also defending it against common objections concerning right loss. This book presents a unique conception of exercise-based rights that will be of keen interest to ethicists, legal philosophers, and political philosophers interested in rights theory. (shrink)

The intentions to simulate human cognition are permanently increasing. Nonetheless, our knowledge about human cognition is based on fragments of different points of view. Hence, it is necessary to examine which demands these points of view make on technologies aiming at simulating human cognition. In this paper it is argued that no technology can function beyond the cognitive abilities of its constructor. It seems that the cognitive limits and constrains of the constructor will also be implanted in the technologies. It (...) is perhaps the right time to think about what kind of future we are going to create by means of an artificial cognition built upon fragmentary, and many times confusing, premises. (shrink)

Burial in the forest is a recent, non-confessional alternative to the established cemeteries owned and run by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark. Danish forest burials fulfil common criteria for non-religion and they are an example of institutionalized non-religion. Their non-confessional character is emphasized in the information material directed towards potential buyers of forest burial plots. Forest burials appeal to both non-members and members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church; in fact, nearly two-thirds of those who had a forest burial by (...) the end of 2021 were members of the church. I have participated in seven tours conducted at different forest burial sites, and I have interviewed nearly fifty participants about their motives for considering buying a forest burial plot. In my analyses, I structure the interviews along the three dimensions, knowing, doing, and being. I found that the motives for people to choose a forest burial reflected both non-religious and religious/spiritual considerations. Forest burials exemplify a religious complexity where nature, non-religion, religion, and spirituality intersect. In this complexity, I see the institution of forest burial as a non-religious vessel, which the buyers fill with their individual thoughts and acts. (shrink)

This reply focusses on three aspects: advantages and disadvantages of our proposed ‘cooperative entry certificates’ for the countries of origin, for the migrants, and for the host countries. It analyzes in what respects our proposal can be improved based on the valuable points made by the commentators. In addition, the question of how to deal with winners and losers within the three groups is discussed.

Large-scale migration is one of the most topical issues of our time. There are two main problems. First, millions of persons will enter Europe in the short and middle run in spite of the firewalls we have built. When the income levels in the development countries raises, the migration pressure will even become stronger for a long time. Second, the present integration policy in most European countries is deficient. In contrast to common knowledge, strong social benefits for migrants, multicultural policies (...) and fast naturalization do not further integration. To address these two problems we propose a procedure that takes into account that most migrants react to incentives in a rational way. Migrants in our countries are joining a cooperative and take advantage of many collective goods and social institutions the citizen of the immigration countries have provided. Migrants therefore should pay an entry fee to join the cooperative. This proposal has positive consequences for both the countries of immigration and of origin, as well as for actual and would-be immigrants. It has many advantages compared to other schemes. (shrink)

Performance evaluation in research is more and more based on numbers of publications, citations, and impact factors. In the wake of New Public Management output control has been introduced into research governance without taking into account the conditions necessary for this kind of control to work efficiently. It is argued that to evaluate research by output control is counterproductive. It induces to substitute the ‘taste for science’ by a ‘taste for publication’. Instead, input control by careful selection and socialization serves (...) as an alternative. (shrink)

Open source software production is a successful new innovation model which disproves that only private ownership of intellectual property rights fosters innovations. It is analyzed here under which conditions the open source model may be successful in general. We show that a complex interplay of situational, motivational, and institutional factors have to be taken into account to understand how to manage the ‘tragedy of the commons’ as well as the ‘tragedy of the anticommons’. It is argued that the success of (...) this new innovation model is greatly facilitated by a well balanced portfolio of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, low costs for contributors and governance mechanisms that do not crowd out intrinsic motivation. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the view that persons have a claim to deserved treatment, including many forms of punishment, against an objection resting on the principle that it is not possible to have a claim to harmful treatment. I do not challenge this principle, but argue, rather, that the harms wrongdoers typically deserve either (a) are not genuine harms at all (for reasons relevant to their being deserved) or (b) are not relevant to the content of these wrongdoers' claims.

The acid rain issue came into prominence because scientists kept telling the world of acid rain's potential devastating effects. Yet, the acid rain debate was marked by mistrust between American and Canadian scientists. The signing of the Air Quality Accord in 1991 appears to have quelled this divisiveness and promises to bring about a new era of scientific cooperation. Using surveys of acid rain scientists in the United States and Canada across three time periods, this study finds both similarities and (...) differences between how Canadian and American scientists view many of the issues surrounding the acid rain debate. (shrink)

Auf die Frage nach der Rationalität des Glaubens hat William P. Alston, einer der prominentesten Vertreter der Analytischen Religionsphilosophie, eine zeitgemäße, aber auch spannungsreiche Antwort vorgelegt. Alstons Ansatz wird in diesem Buch systematisch aufgearbeitet und damit einer breiteren Rezeption im deutschsprachigen Raum zugänglich gemacht. Die Analyse der Autorin Margit Wasmaier macht deutlich, dass Alston angesichts der Frage, ob man religiöse Überzeugungen heute überhaupt noch begründet vertreten kann, einen pragmatischen Weg einschlägt, ohne aber den Standpunkt eines metaphysischen Realismus zu verlassen.

Two generally recognized moral duties are to reciprocate benefits one has received from others and to compensate harms one has done to others. In this paper I want to show that it is not possible to give an adequate account of either duty – or at least one that corresponds to our actual practices – within a contractualist moral theory of the type developed by T. M. Scanlon (1982, 1998). This fact is interesting in its own right, as contractualism is (...) a leading contemporary contender among deontological moral theories, and the two duties I have mentioned are fairly standard ingredients of such theories. But it also serves to highlight a general problem with contractualism, at least in Scanlon’s version – namely its one-dimensional view of the keystone of any plausible deontological theory: the idea of respect for persons. (shrink)

In his political philosophy, John Rawls has a normative notion of reasonable behaviour expected of citizens in a pluralist society. We interpret the various strands of this idea and introduce them to the discourse on stakeholder dialogue in order to address two shortcomings in the latter. The first shortcoming is an unnoticed, artificial separation of words from actions which neglects the communicative power of action. Second, in its proposed new role of the firm, the discourse of political CSR appeared to (...) offer a promising synthesis of deliberation and action. However, the discourse has been criticized for its shortcoming in failing to provide a regulatory environment for corporation—stakeholder dialogue. Through our interpretation of Rawls’ notion of reasonableness in citizens, the article makes two important theoretical contributions to the debate on stakeholder dialogue. First, we transfer Rawls’ injunction in insisting that dialogues between business corporations and their weaker stakeholders must be understood as consisting of both verbal exchanges and actions. Second, we propose that the coercive power of government ought to provide a necessary context for stakeholder dialogue, and that by doing so, it can provide a way forward for the discourse of political CSR. We illustrate the usefulness of this contribution from Rawls in an analysis of BP’s behaviour towards thousands of victims following the Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010. (shrink)