This paper discusses abductive reasoning---that is, reasoning in which explanatory hypotheses are formed and evaluated. First, it criticizes two recent formal logical models of abduction. An adequate formalization would have to take into account the following aspects of abduction: explanation is not deduction; hypotheses are layered; abduction is sometimes creative; hypotheses may be revolutionary; completeness is elusive; simplicity is complex; and abductive reasoning may be visual and non-sentential. Second, in order to illustrate visual aspects of hypothesis formation, the paper describes (...) recent work on visual inference in archaeology. Third, in connection with the evaluation of explanatory hypotheses, the paper describes recent results on the computation of coherence. (shrink)

Background Forward-looking, democratically oriented governance is needed to ensure that human genome editing serves rather than undercuts public values. Scientific, policy, and ethics communities have recognized this necessity but have demonstrated limited understanding of how to fulfill it. The field of bioethics has long attempted to grapple with the unintended consequences of emerging technologies, but too often such foresight has lacked adequate scientific grounding, overemphasized regulation to the exclusion of examining underlying values, and failed to adequately engage the public. Methods (...) This research investigates the application of scenario planning, a tool developed in the high-stakes, uncertainty-ridden world of corporate strategy, for the equally high-stakes and uncertain world of the governance of emerging technologies. The scenario planning methodology is non-predictive, looking instead at a spread of plausible futures which diverge in their implications for different communities’ needs, cares, and desires. Results In this article we share how the scenario development process can further understandings of the complex and dynamic systems which generate and shape new biomedical technologies and provide opportunities to re-examine and re-think questions of governance, ethics and values. We detail the results of a year-long scenario planning study that engaged experts from the biological sciences, bioethics, social sciences, law, policy, private industry, and civic organizations to articulate alternative futures of human genome editing. Conclusions Through sharing and critiquing our methodological approach and results of this study, we advance understandings of anticipatory methods deployed in bioethics, demonstrating how this approach provides unique insights and helps to derive better research questions and policy strategies. (shrink)

This essay engages Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus as a salient intervention into modern political theory. I analyze the work as a cipher for the tensions inhabiting Euro-modernity’s stitched together fictions of racial determinism and racial dynamism legible in slavery, assimilationist projects and White fears reverberating throughout. Adapting the mythical ancient Prometheus as one who steals fire from the gods to create humans and civilization, Frankenstein dramatizes the risks and monstrous results of White imperial masculinity as a (...) Euro-colonial Promethean project of subject formation and race-making. Viewed through the prism of the Modern Prometheus, modernity in general and liberal humanism in particular are recast as monster-making projects. The European “discovery” of Indigenous peoples amplified Promethean aspirations to create subjects through civilizational processes of religious conversion, the infusion of Enlightenment rationality, and assimilation into whiteness. Politically, the Promethean capacity to engineer humans and proto-humans using Native peoples as raw material allowed progressives to argue against outright extermination in favor of cultural genocide. Seeking to create a subserviant species, Victor Frankenstein confronts a revolting insurrection of his own making—a Creature who refuses slavery, claims mastery over his creator and demands a female companion. Yet Frankenstein’s fear of creating “a race of devils” betrays a terror of what Whites know, but refuse to acknowledge, about themselves and racial others. (shrink)

Francis Bacon's New Atlantis -- Galileo and the authority of science -- Rene Descartes : workshop thinking -- Giambattista Vico : going mad rationally -- Mary Shelley's hideous idea -- Auguste Comte's religion of humanity -- Max Weber : authority and bureaucracy -- Kemal Atatørk : science and patriotism -- Edmund Husserl : cultural crisis -- Hannah Arendt : action -- Conclusion.

Poets are "the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers who draw into a certain ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Robert Leo CRITICISM OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN SHELLEY'S A DEFENCE OF POETRY IN his "Ode to Liberty" Shelley locates by encircling and enfolding metaphors a mythic Hellenic moment, one in which verse was yet "speechless" and philosophy still burdened with "lidless eyes." Greece— always for Shelley either the displaced Garden of prethematic unity or the mythic dream of integrated civic and aesthetic life—is about to inaugurate (...) Athens and the "wrinkled image" of historical consciousness.1 Poetry, thinking, and the tilling of an earth "to human use" are implicitly related and foreseen as destiny: from their enchanted caves Prophetic echoes flung dim melody. On the unapprehensive wild The vine, the corn, the olive mild, Grew savage yet, to human use unreconciled; And, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea, Like the man's dark thought in the infant's brain, Like aught that is which wraps what is to be, Art's deathless dreams lay veiled by many a vein Of Parian stone; and, yet a speechless child, Verse murmured, and Philosophy did strain Her lidless eyes for thee... (11. 49-60). Shelley could be describing the reading or speaking of a text, for poetic experience is an originating moment which unfolds our reflections and anticipations. Poetry elides speechlessness and the empty gaze. Its goings are all returnings, its experience is always inventive before meanings codify and resolve: "Every original language near to its source," we find in the Defence (p. 279), "is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem; the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry." What was dark to experience is now illumined, 46 John Robert Leo47 as different regions in experience are uncovered or redistributed by language across our shifting horizons. Thus this bringing-foward-intoclarity, this moving of the previously inexpressed into articulation, is the pattern not only behind Shelley's view ofGreece producing a "sun-fire garlanded" Athens (1. 68), but also the more pervasive design describing other regarded experience. James Edie puts it this way: "We... can learn to make distinctions in our experience by attending to differences of meaning which are normally below the level of our own cultural threshold. By attending to a given region of experience, we can lower the differential thresholds already sedimented in our language almost indefinitely and make what was implicit in our experience more and more explicit."2 Edie's comments may be taken as responses to questions emerging from modernist readings of Shelley and other visionary poets—Blake, Hart Crane, or Charles Olson are instances—who sense the poetic project as a criticism of consciousness, within the lived body, as it struggles to make a world. How do language and the imagination consort in the critical regeneration of our lives? In what sorts of ways is renascence the uncovering and unfolding of an indefinite wholeness by the unlayering of fixed habits and attitudes? How does Shelley's Defence of Poetry, both a text on aesthetics and a reading of the world, suggest their alignment? What methods from critical discourse make Shelley's poetics present to our experience and thought? The adjustment of these issues is the task of the remainder of my article. First I examine Shelley's organization of consciousness into "reason" and "imagination" and trace the meanings of these functions in their immediate social context. A brief dispute with the reductive idealism of Platonic tradition allows for my third procedure, which is a phenomenological description of the imaginative field according to Husserl. Finally, I try to explicate Shelley's understanding of imaginative "decentering" within our experience. I Poetry and prose are saturated with references to phenomena. Texts refer to interior and exterior events (memory, rain), which are objects ofandfor consciousness. Shelley grasps this co-givenness of consciousness and world, their correlativity, as a condition revealed and strengthened by metaphor, which itself arrests us as "that of which we are speaking through words."3 But if it is the nature of language to be both perceptual and yet transcendental, both present and absent, it still exists as the imagination's voice in... (shrink)

In Byron, Shelley, and Goethe’s Faust, author Ben Hewitt has provided us with a carefully done and convincing study. Given this, it would have been interesting to see Hewitt’s effort to integrate Mary Shelley’s work into his narrative. Apart from any similarities between Faust and Frankenstein, it bears remembering that Goethe himself remained unconvinced by efforts to clearly demarcate works as “tragic” or “epic”; a fact that becomes especially clear in the number of works he’d devoted to rewriting (...) the story of Prometheus. One cannot help but wish that Hewitt had considered the connection between these works and Shelley’s own “Modern Prometheus” in juxtaposition to his reading of P.B. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, for this would have made for an especially good ending to Hewitt’s story. Wayne Deakin’s consideration of Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition does indeed close with a brief consideration of Mary Shelley’s Prometheus, but this comes only at the end of a much longer set of considerations. In this book Deakin adopts a similar strategy as that of Hewitt, namely, foregoing any historical recovery of Hegel’s direct influence on the English Romantics—in Deakin’s case, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and P.B. Shelley—to focus instead on a reading of key poetic works in concert with their Hegelian framework. This reading essentially flows from Deakin’s effort to rethink Hegel’s relatively early notion of self-consciousness through his late lectures on aesthetics. For Deakin, this leads to “aesthetic recognition”; a situating of the self in relation to the world that remains in tension so far as the subject’s drive for autonomy will automatically be humbled by its reception of and to alterity—be that other “Nature” or other subject. (shrink)

Recent debates about the most appropriate political agents for realising social justice have largely focused on the potential value of national political parties on the one hand, and trade unions on the other. Drawing on the thought of Murray Bookchin, this article suggests that democratic municipalist agents – democratic associations of local residents that build and empower neighbourhood assemblies and improve the municipal provision of basic goods and services – can often also make valuable contributions to projects of just social (...) change. I identify a long-term and a more short-term argument for the value of democratic municipalist agency in Bookchin's thought and claim that the latter provides a compelling case for the valuable contributions this form of action can make to the achievement of a wide variety of visions of social justice. This provides a useful partial corrective to recent political theorising about the nature of the partisanship and trade unionism necessary to secure social justice. (shrink)

How we envision God’s forgiveness shapes our thinking about human forgiveness as well. Whereas some contemporary Christians such as Miroslav Volf struggle to square victims’ demands with a God who forgives and keeps no record of wrongs, many early Christians expected God to fastidiously punish or reward every deed. In contrast to both extremes, I revisit recent philosophical work on purgatory, which emphasizes sanctification over satisfaction. This approach reveals how God’s forgiveness is consonant with restorative justice. By considering an alternate (...) vision of God’s justice, we can thereby reimagine how our forgiveness too is compatible with—and in fact necessitates—the work of moral repair. (shrink)

The provocative essays in this volume respond to Foucault's call to question what is regarded as natural, inevitable, ethical, and liberating, while they ...

The information theoretic principle of rational adaptation predicts that individuals with aphasia adapt to their language impairments by relying more heavily on comparatively unimpaired non-linguistic knowledge to communicate. This prediction was examined by assessing the extent to which adults with chronic aphasia due to left-hemisphere stroke rely more on conceptual rather than lexical information during verb retrieval, as compared to age-matched neurotypical controls. A primed verb naming task examined the degree of facilitation each participant group received from either conceptual event-related (...) or lexical collocate cues, compared to unrelated baseline cues. The results provide evidence that adults with aphasia received amplified facilitation from conceptual cues compared to controls, whereas healthy controls received greater facilitation from lexical cues. This indicates that adaptation to alternative and relatively unimpaired information may facilitate successful word retrieval in aphasia. Implications for models of rational adaptation and clinical neurorehabilitation are discussed. (shrink)

We examine how the shift to remote work altered responsibilities for domestic labor among partnered couples and single parents. The study draws on data from a nationally representative survey of 2,200 US adults, including 478 partnered parents and 151 single parents, in April 2020. The closing of schools and child care centers significantly increased demands on working parents in the United States, and in many circumstances reinforced an unequal domestic division of labor.

Much new global genetic research employs whole genome sequencing, which provides researchers with large amounts of data. The quantity of data has led to the generation and discovery of more incidental or secondary findings and to vigorous theoretical discussions about the ethical obligations that follow from these incidental findings. After a decade of debate in the genetic research community, there is a growing consensus that researchers should, at the very least, offer to return incidental findings that provide high‐impact, medically relevant (...) information, when it is not unduly burdensome to the research enterprise to do so. Much as genetic research has been limited to U.S. and European settings, the incidental findings debate has primarily focused on research conducted in high‐income countries. In a 2015 paper, Alberto Ortiz‐Osorno, Linda Ehler, and Judith Brooks note salient differences between the circumstances of research participants in low‐ and high‐resource settings that alter the analysis of when and why incidental findings should be offered to research participants. In this article, we expand on their analysis and present a framework for thinking about how investigators’ obligations to return genomic data might change in low‐resource settings, particularly in settings where participants do not have access to the medical care needed to treat, assess, or monitor incidental findings that are actionable in settings with plentiful resources. (shrink)

In her groundbreaking text Epistemic Injustice, Miranda Fricker evaluates types of harms incurred by individuals undergoing unrecognized and inarticulable oppression. At issue in epistemic and hermeneutic injustice are prejudicial comportments to and evaluations of reality. In the following, I focus on hermeneutic and epistemic injustice in relation to the formation of intellectual and ethical virtues. When reading Fricker and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics together, there is a clear pathway to improve ethical development. In particular, ethical development ought to cultivate the proper (...) virtues that promote understanding. Gadamer’s emphasis on the qualities of a researcher and the epistemic virtues that Fricker highlights reveal an educative path for addressing injustice. In other words, cultivating these virtues counteracts injustice wherein recognition and articulation of reality is challenged or at issue. (shrink)

The enforcement of racial segregation during apartheid was aimed not only at regulating public spaces, residential areas and the workforce, but also at shaping the subjectivities of individuals who were socialised to see themselves through the lens of a white racial hierarchy. The ideology of white supremacy and superiority that informed apartheid policy was largely justified using Christonormative epistemologies that sought to legitimate the racial hierarchy as having basis in Holy Scripture and as an extension of God’s will. At the (...) same time, apartheid policy fragmented religious communities, entrenching race as a central component of spiritual subjectivities. Twenty years after the end of apartheid, the legacy of apartheid continues to shape the lives and opportunities of all people living in South Africa, despite many gains made in working towards a non-racial, non-sexist democracy. While much scholarly attention has been paid to postapartheid contexts of work, residency and recreation, relatively little attention has been paid to spaces of worship. This is surprising, given that religious belief and practice are widespread in South Africa in the first instance, and that Christian belief, in particular, was so central to the social imaginary of apartheid, in the second. Thus, in efforts to transform society and advance social justice, it is imperative to consider diversity, difference and otherness from the perspective of, and in relation to, contemporary religious communities and contexts. This article will consider some of the factors shaping dynamics of diversity and difference within the context of religious communities in South Africa, over 20 years into democracy. (shrink)

Previous research on cross-situational word learning has demonstrated that learners are able to reduce ambiguity in mapping words to referents by tracking co-occurrence probabilities across learning events. In the current experiments, we examined whether learners are able to retain mappings over time. The results revealed that learners are able to retain mappings for up to 1 week later. However, there were interactions between the amount of retention and the different learning conditions. Interestingly, the strongest retention was associated with a learning (...) condition that engendered retrieval dynamics that initially challenged the learner but eventually led to more successful retrieval toward the end of learning. The ease/difficulty of retrieval is a critical process underlying cross-situational word learning and is a powerful example of how learning dynamics affect long-term learning outcomes. (shrink)

Hortense Spillers ends “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe” with a provocative suggestion: “Actually claiming the monstrosity … ‘Sapphire’ might rewrite after all a radically different text for female empowerment.” In this article, I knead the material, representational, and performative powers operating through conceptually separate and yet deeply entangled contested terrains: the “real,” or the scene of “actual mutilation,” whose high crimes against the flesh coincide with the construction of the “symbolic.” Through Baradian performativity, I read Spillers's theorization on the name as (...) an event wherein proprietary relationships, which necessarily oscillate between material/signification binaries, are called forth in historical terrain in the moment of racial address. Paying close attention to her grammar, the first half of this article tracks Spillers's movement through an undercurrent of American historical mythology that, as she demonstrates, misnames the black mother. The rest of this article then takes up to what extent certain “mocking doubles”—minstrel and/or monstrous tropes resuscitated but not redeemed or even necessarily renamed—might agitate their way toward new texts for female empowerment and the cultivation of the black mother's power to “name.”. (shrink)

Contestations over the rights of sexual minorities and gender-nonconforming people in Africa are profoundly shaped by two discourses that both emerge from polarized domestic political debates in the United States: a human rights–centered discourse of “LGBT*I” identity politics that promotes visibility and equal protections and privileges for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and intersex individuals; and a Christonormative “family values” agenda that promotes the heterosexual nuclear family as the foundation of civilization. Analysis considers these contemporary discourses in relation to entangled colonial (...) constructions of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy used to justify the conquest and exploitation of Africa. This article takes particular interest in the power relations that are constituted through these discourses so as to uncover the underlying interests at stake within them. Through consultation with critiques advanced within critical race and critical queer theory, and critical philosophical arguments on the epistemic dimensions of racialized, sexed, and gendered oppressions, it is argued that these discourses advance U.S. hegemonic interests and reinscribe Western hegemony. It is concluded that struggles for equality among sexual minorities and gender-nonconforming people must be approached as part-and-parcel of decolonial struggles to dismantle white supremacist and Western structures of oppression. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 143-150 [Access article in PDF] Species Nova [To See Anew]Art as Ecology David Haley Looking Back From space, looking back at earth, we may see three key issues: the accelerating increase of the human species, the accelerating decrease of other species, and the accelerating effects of climate change. We might ask, how are we to cope with these changes creatively?That our societies (...) tend to value economics over ecology, and monoculture and agro-industry over diversity and permaculture, is certainly worthy of ethical attention. Here I want to invoke a call for integrating art as a necessary contribution to ecological intervention. I consider how artists may engage uncertainty, and how art may be used to develop new ways of seeing and "drawing." This is art for evolutionary survival, not commodification. Art that practices care, shared responsibility, and diversity in the pursuit of eco-centric cultures. Although this paper mainly references visual art forms, this should not be taken to exclude others. Here I am primarily concerned with identifying some of the possible forms of ecological or eco-art. This is art practiced by artist and inventors in the manner of the archetype of Daedalus and worthy of the name implied by the root of the word art. Rt, an ancient term from the Rg Vedas, refers to the virtuous, continuing creation of the cosmos. [End Page 143] Seeing is Believing/ Uncertainty in View The suffix species nova is ascribed by scientists to a new bacterium species, prior to the confirmation of its existence in the appropriate academic journals. The word species means "to look" and "a class of things, living organisms capable of exchanging genes, classified as a taxonomic rank below a genus and denoted by a Latin binomial." It also refers to "the visible form of each of the elements of consecrated bread and wine in the Eucharist." Nova refers to the mistaken sighting of a new star, a flash of brightness that quickly dims. Something novel is a new kind of nature, something strange or previously unknown, and novelty refers to invention. Species nova: two words that evoke ideas about innovations of visual experience and belief.I use the phrase to denote the potential for understanding a new order and evolutionary change—"to see anew." I am also aware that species nova could mean a mistaken religious experience, or a class of living things that flashes brightly and quickly dims. Uncertainty is embedded in the richness of meanings.It is ten years since the Earth Summit in Rio popularized the notion of sustainable development and introduced Agenda 21 as a strategy to achieve it. Sadly, culture and art, two of the systems that define humanity, were not mentioned among the necessary tools for building a better future.But what is sustainable development? Is it about conservation, restoration, or regeneration? Will it stop global warming and feed the poor, or is it like candyfloss—a confection of transient comfort, with no real meaning? Has it become a corrupt cultural construct, an anthropocentric myth in the vain pursuit of hope?Recently the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed that "most of the warming observed over the past 50 years is attributable to human activities." However, the projections and models that have been developed for policy makers to envisage climate change scenarios demonstrate the limits of our ability to understand the situation, let alone adapt to it. A recent review in Nature, comparing two twenty-year forecasts ironically concluded: Uncertainties therefore remain that are beyond the statistical uncertainties described in the two papers. But both sets of authors point out that the upper bound on the potential warming for 2100 may well be [End Page 144] above the IPCC figure of 5.8K under 'heavy emissions' scenarios. So policy-makers should not discount the possibility of a very warm climate considering long-range policy options. (Funnel 2001, 5) A subsequent article in Nature's Climate Change Review reveals even more concern about communicating scientific uncertainty, because models that simulate long-term climate changes cannot be tested using real... (shrink)

We live in anagewhere"progressive" intellectualspresuppose that true democracy demands the affirmation of "global values" and the drive toward a world government, a"universal and homogenous state." Intellectuals, journalists, and educators bemoan the effects of "globalization" even as they uncritically endorse cosmopolitanism and dismissnational attachments as parochial and outdated. They confuse thoughtful patriotism - and commitment to the self-governing nation - with the narrowest form of nationalism. In a wonderfullylucid and learned essay, Trevor Shelley recovers a humane liberal tradition, from Montesquieu (...) to Manent, that takes the political seriously and does full justice to the legitimate claims of both universality and particularity. Whether discussing Tocqueville's critique of the pantheistic reveries of democratic man or Pierre Manent's erudite defense of the nation, the political form that provides the indispensable framework for democratic self-government, Shelley thoughtfully illumines the place and limits of globalization in a democratic age. --Daniel J. Mahoney, Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship, Assumption College. (shrink)

For over 20 years, the Schmid Training Course (STC) has offered unique opportunities for marine biology students from European universities to learn about marine model organisms. While the topics of the course have continuously changed over the years with the advent of new research techniques and discoveries, the pedagogical approach has remained largely the same – a combination of lectures, lab practicals, and field excursions. Several life science researchers, who have taught in the STC for many years, sought to bring (...) the course's pedagogical approach into the 21st century, and with the support of Erasmus+ Programme of the European Community funding, the Digital Marine project was developed. Digital Marine began in 2018 as an international partnership between the six research centers from which the STC instructors hail, and its main objective was to introduce a flipped, blended approach to learning and teaching with respect to established and emerging marine biological model systems. The Digital Marine platform, which covers 12 marine model organisms, is now publicly available. (shrink)

In two studies, we used the Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ) to investigate the relationship between individual differences in moral philosophy, involvement in the animal rights movement, and attitudes toward the treatment of animals. In the first, 600 animal rights activists attending a national demonstration and 266 nonactivist college students were given the EPQ. Analysis of the returns from 157 activists and 198 students indicated that the activists were more likely than the students to hold an "absolutist" moral orientation (high idealism, (...) low relativism). In the second study, 169 students were given the EPQ with a scale designed to measure attitudes toward the treatment of animals. Multiple regression showed that gender and the EPQ dimension of idealism were related to attitudes toward animal use. (shrink)

The moral/conventional task has been widely used to study the emergence of moral understanding in children and to explore the deficits in moral understanding in clinical populations. Previous studies have indicated that moral transgressions, particularly those in which a victim is harmed, evoke a signature pattern of responses in the moral/conventional task: they are judged to be serious, generalizable and not authority dependent. Moreover, this signature pattern is held to be pan‐cultural and to emerge early in development. However, almost all (...) the evidence for these claims comes from studies using harmful transgressions of the sort that primary school children might commit in the schoolyard. In a study conducted on the Internet, we used a much wider range of harm transgressions, and found that they do not evoke the signature pattern of responses found in studies using only schoolyard transgressions. Paralleling other recent work, our study provides preliminary grounds for skepticism regarding many conclusions drawn from earlier research using the moral/conventional task. (shrink)

According to the perspective developed in this article, widely shared, hegemonic cultural beliefs about gender and their impact in what the authors call “social relational” contexts are among the core components that maintain and change the gender system. When gender is salient in these ubiquitous contexts, cultural beliefs about gender function as part of the rules of the game, biasing the behaviors, performances, and evaluations of otherwise similar men and women in systematic ways that the authors specify. While the biasing (...) impact of gender beliefs may be small in any one instance, the consequences cumulate over individuals’ lives and result in substantially different outcomes for men and women. After describing this perspective, the authors show how it sheds newlight on some defining features of the gender system and illustrate its implications for research into specific questions about gender inequality. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a proliferation of non-governmental organisations with a mission to help redress various social and environmental problems, but the effectiveness of these organisations in carrying out their stated goals is rarely assessed or critically examined. It has become increasingly clear, however, that these organisations vary greatly in their level of competence and professionalism. Many of them are ineffective, and in some cases they may even exacerbate the problems they set out to solve. These difficulties are based upon (...) flawed assumptions about how civil society can correct social ills, and about how institutions that are intermediate between the individual and the state can carry out effective change. To illustrate these points with an environmental example, we present the case of Jamaica's coral reefs, which have been under stress for decades. Both the causes of reef degradation and the solutions to these problems can be clearly outlined. Many well-intentioned organisations and individuals have been involved in the attempt to stem or reverse the damage, and significant funding has been channelled through these agencies. In spite of this, there has been no documented improvement in the condition of the reefs, apart from some natural regeneration that owed nothing whatever to any human activity. The problem is that the known solutions have not been implemented. This has happened for several reasons. First, government organisations have actively encouraged NGOs to undertake the responsibility of protecting sections of the coastline, but without any proper assessment of the capacity of those organisations to do so, and in some cases actively preventing them from acquiring that capacity. Second, the proliferation of NGOs has been counter-effective, resulting in duplication of effort, competition for limited funds, and conscious or unconscious misrepresentation of results. Third, the utilisation of NGOs to solve environmental problems often results in an increase in the number of levels of management, resulting in inefficient utilisation of funds. The known solutions to the degradation in the Jamaican marine environment principally involve reducing fishing pressures at a national level and the reduction of pollution by local municipalities. The effective role of NGOs in bringing about these two solutions therefore differs: where national changes are necessary, government centralisation and effective enforcement are necessary, although NGOs could still play a useful auxiliary or augmenting role. With local problems like municipal pollution, NGOs may be better able to lead in catalysing and implementing change, although the government could usefully provide coordination and support. These differences illustrate the fallacy in the simplistic assumption that rising public concern, increased levels of funding and a growing number of people and/or organisations involved in conservation will lead to environmental improvement. Effective hierarchical organisation is still a prerequisite for bringing about effective solutions, although the mode of organisation adopted should be a function of the particular solution necessary. Finally, since many NGOs have effectively functioned as parasitical organisations that have consumed public funding without any discernible public benefit, NGOs should be subject to the same scrutiny and assessment as any private sector organisation contracted to the government and/or donor agencies, and those who fail to perform should be barred from further receipt of public funds. (shrink)

Voices on the political right have long claimed that the welfare state ought to be kept small, and that charities can take over many of the tasks involved in helping those at the bottom of society. The arguments in favor of this claim are controversial, but even if they are accepted at face value the policy proposal remains problematic. For the proposal presupposes that charities would, in fact, be able to raise enough money to provide adequate help to those in (...) need, and therefore assumes that charities are able to very significantly increase the number and/or size of donations they receive. We argue that there are good reasons for doubting that charities will be able to do this. Our argument turns on the fact that the most powerful strategy for eliciting donations—namely, allowing donors to use their donation to signal their pro-sociality—has an inbuilt upper limit. If too much emphasis is placed on the signaling opportunities donating to charity provides, donating no longer functions as an effective signal and the motivation to donate declines. (shrink)

The colonization of a new planet will inevitably bring about new bioethical issues. One is the possibility of pregnancy during the mission. During the journey to the target planet or moon, and for the first couple of years before a colony has been established and the colony has been accommodated for children, a pregnancy would jeopardize the safety of the crew and the wellbeing of the child. The principal concern with a pregnancy during an interplanetary mission is that it could (...) put the entire crew in danger. Resources such as air, food, and medical supplies will be limited and calculated to keep the crew members alive. We explore the bioethical concerns of near-future space travel. (shrink)

Witty, sexy and radiantly beautiful, the Shelley translationof Plato's great Dialogue on Love is by far the best in theEnglish language. It has been described as conveying "much of the vivid life, the grace of movement, and the luminous beauty of Plato" -- "the poetry of a philosopher rendered by the prose of a poet." Although a masterpiece in its own right, the Shelley translation was suppressed and then bowdlerized for well over a century. In 19th century Britain, (...) male love -- at the heart of the dialogue -- was unmentionable. The Banquet and Shelley's accompanying essay, "A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks," were not published in their entirety until 1931, and then in an edition of 100 copies intended "for private circulation only." The Pagan Press edition is complete, authentic and readable. For the first time this work has received the editing and typography it deserves. (shrink)

Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers on the nature of desert and justice, their relations with each other and with other values.