This is the third in a series of essays on the seminal role of the paradigms of essence-function and interpenetration in East Asian religious and philosophical thought. The first article, entitled "The Composition of Self-Transformation Thought in Classical East Asian Philosophy and Religion"[1] was a general introduction to these paradigms over the broad expanse of indigenous East Asian thought religious/philosophical thought. The second article, entitled "Essence-Function (t'i-yung): Early Chinese Origins and Manifestations,"[2] examined the earliest precursors of these notions in classics (...) such as the Book of Changes, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean , paying special attention to the unique role played by the concept of "sincerity" in manifesting and mediating presence of essencefunction and interpenetration. In this essay, we look at the role essence-function and interpenetration play in the Analects (Lunyu ). (shrink)

Political theorists have offered many accounts of collective decision-making under pluralism. I discuss a key dimension on which such accounts differ: the importance assigned not only to the choices made but also to the reasons underlying those choices. On that dimension, different accounts lie in between two extremes. The ‘minimal liberal account’ holds that collective decisions should be made only on practical actions or policies and that underlying reasons should be kept private. The ‘comprehensive deliberative account’ stresses the importance of (...) giving reasons for collective decisions, where such reasons should also be collectively decided. I compare these two accounts on the basis of a formal model developed in the growing literature on the ‘discursive dilemma’ and ‘judgment aggregation’ and address several questions: What is the trade-off between the (minimal liberal) demand for reaching agreement on outcomes and the (comprehensive deliberative) demand for reason-giving? How large should the ‘sphere of public reason’ be? When do the decision procedures suggested by the two accounts agree and when not? How good are these procedures at truthtracking on factual matters? What strategic incentives do they generate for decision-makers? My discussion identifies what is at stake in the choice between minimal liberal and comprehensive deliberative accounts of collective decisionmaking, and sheds light not only on these two ideal-typical accounts themselves, but also on many characteristics that intermediate accounts share with them. (shrink)

Can there be a global demos? The current debate about this topic is divided between two opposing camps: the “pessimist” or “impossibilist” camp, which holds that the emergence of a global demos is either conceptually or empirically impossible, and the “optimist” or “possibilist” camp, which holds that the emergence of a global demos is conceptually as well as empirically possible and an embryonic version of it already exists. However, the two camps agree neither on a common working definition of a (...) global demos, nor on the relevant empirical facts, so it is difficult to reconcile their conflicting outlooks. We seek to move the debate beyond this stalemate. We argue that existing conceptions of a demos are ill-suited for capturing what kind of a global demos is needed to facilitate good global governance, and we propose a new conception of a demos that is better suited for this purpose. We suggest that some of the most prominent conceptions of a demos have focused too much on who the members of a demos are and too little on what functional characteristics the demos must have in order to perform its role in facilitating governance within the relevant domain. Our new proposal shifts the emphasis from the first, “compositional” question to the second, “performative” one, and provides a more “agency-based” account of a global demos. The key criterion that a collection of individuals must meet in order to qualify as a demos is that it is not merely demarcated by an appropriate membership criterion, but that it can be organized, democratically, so as to function as a state-like agent. Compared to the existing, predominantly “compositional” approaches to thinking about the demos, this agency-based approach puts us into a much better position to assess the empirical prospects for the emergence of a global demos that can facilitate good global governance. (shrink)

Can we design a perfect democratic decision procedure? Condorcet famously observed that majority rule, our paradigmatic democratic procedure, has some desirable properties, but sometimes produces inconsistent outcomes. Revisiting Condorcet’s insights in light of recent work on the aggregation of judgments, I show that there is a conflict between three initially plausible requirements of democracy: “robustness to pluralism”, “basic majoritarianism”, and “collective rationality”. For all but the simplest collective decision problems, no decision procedure meets these three requirements at once; at most (...) two can be met together. This “democratic trilemma” raises the question of which requirement to give up. Since different answers correspond to different views about what matters most in a democracy, the trilemma suggests a map of the “logical space” in which different conceptions of democracy are located. It also sharpens our thinking about other impossibility problems of social choice and how to avoid them, by capturing a core structure many of these problems have in common. More broadly, it raises the idea of “cartography of logical space” in relation to contested political concepts. (shrink)

In a recent paper on ‘The Many as One’, Lewis A. Kornhauser and Lawrence G. Sager look at an issue that we take to be of great importance in political theory. How far should groups in public life try to speak with one voice, and act with one mind? How far should public groups try to display what Ronald Dworkin calls integrity? We do not expect the many on the market to be integrated in this sense. But should we expect (...) integration among the many in the legislature, for example, or among the many on the courts? We agree with Kornhauser and Sager about a number of their claims but think that they miss out on important detail and do not achieve a fully general perspective on the issues raised. Our own contribution is in three sections. We address, first, the nature of the integrity challenge; second, the range of cases in which the challenge arises; and third, the question of whether public groups should be designed and required to meet that challenge. (shrink)

Just as different sciences deal with different facts—say, physics versus biology—so we may ask a similar question about normative theories. Is normative political theory concerned with the same normative facts as moral theory or different ones? By developing an analogy with the sciences, we argue that the normative facts of political theory belong to a higher— more coarse-grained—level than those of moral theory. The latter are multiply realizable by the former: competing facts at the moral level can underpin the same (...) facts at the political one. Consequently, some questions that moral theories answer are indeterminate at the political level. This proposal offers a novel interpretation of John Rawls’s idea that, in public reasoning, we should abstract away from comprehensive moral doctrines. We contrast our distinction between facts at different levels with the distinction between admissible and inadmissible evidence and discuss some implications for the practice of political theory. (shrink)

Most accounts of welfare aggregation in the tradition of Arrow's and Sen's social-choice-theoretic frameworks represent the welfare of an individual in terms of a single welfare ordering or a single scalar-valued welfare function. I develop a multidimensional generalization of Arrow's and Sen's frameworks, representing individual welfare in terms of multiple personal welfare functions, corresponding to multiple 'dimensions' of welfare. I show that, as in the one-dimensional case, the existence of attractive aggregation procedures depends on certain informational assumptions, specifically about the (...) measurability of welfare and its comparability not only across individuals but also across dimensions. I state several impossibility and possibility results. Under Arrow-type conditions, insufficient comparability across individuals leads to dictatorship of a single individual, while insufficient comparability across dimensions leads to dominance of a single dimension. Given sufficient comparability both across individuals and across dimensions, a range of possibilities emerges. I discuss the substantive implications of the results. (shrink)

Since the late 1970s there has been within the world-wide environmental movement increasing dissatisfaction with moderate or reform environmentalism, and more radical tactics have been advocated and used to respond to the human destruction of nature. These range from typical kinds of political protest, such as rallies and marches, to environmental civil disobedience and the more militant environmental actions known as ‘monkey-wrenching’, ‘ecotage’, or ‘ecosabotage’. The use of these ‘ecotactics’ has led inevitably to controversy in the environmental movement itself and (...) in public discussions of environmentalism in North America and elsewhere. The same cannot be said, however, about academic philosophy, where it is rare to find assessments of these actions or of their connections to the wealth of philosophical ideas in environmental ethics and ecophilosophy. At the same time there are many traditional philosophical theories that have implications for these kinds of behaviour even though the theories were constructed originally without examples of ecotactics in mind. In particular, theories about the nature and justifications of civil disobedience provide yardsticks by which some forms of environmental disobedience can be assessed, and I will turn to two widely known philosophical accounts, those of John Rawls and Carl Cohen, to consider how well they accomplish this task. (shrink)

The triumvirate of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria have dominated our public health focus in the developing world. Having claimed millions of lives, these infectious diseases have prompted a large-scale response. Concomitant with these efforts has been a burgeoning bioethics literature examining global health and distributive justice. A scholarly waste-land only a decade ago, there is now a growing and rich literature that aims to unpack our moral obligations when it comes to diseases that affect the majority of the world (many (...) living in absolute poverty). Now, added to the persistent challenges posed by infectious diseases is the growing burden of diseases such as cancer, which disproportionately affect .. (shrink)

Plan-ahead becomes necessary for those movements which are over-and-done in less time than it takes for the feedback loop to operate. Natural selection for one of the ballistic movements (hammering, clubbing, and throwing) could evolve a plan-ahead serial buffer for hand-arm commands that would benefit the other ballistic movements as well. This same circuitry may also sequence other muscles (children learning handwriting often screw up their faces and tongues) and so novel oral-facial sequences may also benefit (as might kicking and (...) dancing). An elaborated version of the sequencer may constitute a Darwin Machine that spins scenarios, evolves sentences, and facilitates insight by offline simulation. An example is given of an evolutionary scenario from an apelike ancestor, demonstrating the transition behaviors and growth curve considerations that any such theory needs to have; this particular scenario (involving throwing improvements) also suggests an explanation for the puzzling design of the Acheulean "handaxe.". (shrink)

Due to the prevalent influence of legal trends in driving ethical homogenization and persistent decoupling between ethical substance and symbolism in today’s organizations, scholars are calling for a renewed interest in the structural makeup of ethical codes. This article explores the disclosure trends and examines the contents of codes of ethics in the context of Canadian publicly listed acquirers. Relying on the analysis of codes’ public availability, structure, purpose, and promoted values, four clusters of behavior are identified. Although many firms (...) avoid the public disclosure of their codes, the results indicate that code of ethics’ patterns in sample firms are not driven merely by regulatory forces but increasingly shaped by aspirations for building a sustainable values-based corporation. The reported differences across clusters demonstrate that many companies in Canada overcome isomorphic pressures by displaying some originality in the writing of their codes. While symbolism in codes of ethics’ design and adoption prevails in publicly listed acquiring firms, the study provides evidence of an emerging trend of substantial commitment to social responsibilities. (shrink)

This study investigates whether and to what extent publicly listed corporations voluntarily comply with and disclose recommended good corporate governance practices, and distinctively examines whether the observed cross-sectional differences in such CG disclosures can be explained by ownership and board mechanisms with specific focus on Saudi Arabia. The study’s results suggest that corporations with larger boards, a Big 4 auditor, higher government ownership, a CG committee, and higher institutional ownership disclose considerably more than those that are not. By contrast, the (...) study finds that an increase in block ownership significantly reduces CG disclosure. The study’s results are generally robust to a number of econometric models that control for different types of disclosure indices, firm-specific characteristics, and firm-level fixed effects. The study’s results have important implications for policy makers, practitioners, and regulatory authorities, especially those in developing countries across the globe. (shrink)

This study investigates the risk and return characteristics of impact investing in the public equity market. We use a unique hand-collected dataset of 50 US listed firms whose product (or service) addresses at least one of the global social and environmental challenges, as defined by the United Nations Social Development Goals (SDGs). We designate such firms Impact Firms, and we compare their financial performance to a matched sample of Non-Impact Firms in the time span 2002–2019. Our results show that Impact (...) and Non-Impact Firms have similar level of financial performance and both volatility and systemic risk over the entire sample period. At the same time, Impact Firms show a slightly lower negative skewness of the returns over the entire sample period, but not during crisis periods. However, compared to matched Non-Impact Firms, Impact Firms outperform during periods of market crisis, generating a valuable dampening of downside risk. (shrink)

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines have emerged as an important instrument used by firms to structure the content of sustainability reporting (SR). This development has led to the question of whether the elaboration of GRI SR is beneficial to a firm’s financial performance. In this study, building on signaling theory, we carry out an empirical investigation of the impact of GRI SR on firm profitability and the factors moderating that impact. Drawing from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research (...) (CSMAR), the WIND Economic, and the Chinese Research Data Services Platform (CNRDS) databases, we identified a sample of 122 listed firms with GRI SR in China. We then employed an event study method to compare the firms following GRI SR with a set of matched firms reporting sustainability without following the GRI guidelines. The results show that GRI SR significantly increases firm profitability. Moreover, firms with local political ties reap more benefits from GRI SR, while the moderating effect of central political ties is not significant. Surprisingly, the performance impact of GRI SR is negatively correlated to the firm’s internationalization level. (shrink)

The Editors thank Ken Peacock for his assistance.