Recent research has shown that the corporate social responsibility system has a positive impact on consumer behavior regarding products or services that promote social responsibility. Thus, it can be stated that customer loyalty to a particular company derives not only from commercial benefits but also from the components of corporate social responsibilities practiced by the company. The vast majority of company managers in Romania do not understand what it means to be a socially responsible company, which is why they do (...) not even agree with most of the definitions given to corporate social responsibility; secondly, when asked to explain what social responsibility means, they are not able to make logical arguments; I argue that the involvement of companies in social responsibility activities has a purely economic motivation and that it is related to the size of the company, rather large companies integrating the implementation of CSR activities in its vision. From a marketing perspective, corporate social responsibility has proven its ability to generate many benefits for companies, implementing and communicating specific policies and actions in this regard with the potential to improve satisfaction and loyalty, both among customers and of employees. The main objective of the article is to analyze the way in which consumers in Romania perceive the corporate social responsibility system of companies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:138 In 2010 the city of Colorado Springs was strapped for cash. Government officials announced that they would either have to raise revenue through increased taxation or cut public services—­ in some cases rather severely—­ including, perhaps, police and fire protection, and even more basic bits of municipal infrastructure. The city shut down one-­ third of residential streetlights and closed public restrooms. Citi­ zens were outraged, but a majority (...) of voters had recently defeated a proposed tax increase. It’s tempting to suppose that the city was trying to teach its citizens a lesson: if you want public services, you have to be willing to pay for them. Colorado Springs is, and has been for some time now, a died-­in-­the-­wool small-­government, anti-­tax-­increase, fiscally conservative town. As Colorado Springs resident Bo Sharifi put it, “As soon as I hear government [say] ‘Oh, we need more money’... I guess I kind of automatically assume there’s probably some other things you could probably cut before firemen, policemen, city lights and that sort of thing.”1 On the surface, that seems reasonable. So... what comes to mind? How about food stamps? What about WIC? Of course these are federal services, not funded by Coloradans alone. There’s government, and then there’s government. Well, how about... well... what? Doesn’t the government spend money on all sorts of things we could very easily do without? Perhaps. Isn’t it part of our job to know or to decide which things these are? If we don’t trust government, even more obviously we don’t trust it with our money, though we pretty clearly have no idea how public funds are actually allocated or spent. When asked whether he remembered the proposed tax increase that the city had voted against, Sharifi replied, “maybe.” Bo and his wife were charged $125 to have Connected: How Trains, Genes, Pineapples, Piano Keys, and a Few Disasters Transformed Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century By Steven Cassedy Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014 JOHN MARIANA Book Reviews 139 their streetlight turned back on. Bo’s wife Sara viewed this as extortion. “By shoveling out a hundred dollars to turn on a streetlight that we kind of felt was supposed to be on anyway, that it was giving them what they wanted,” she said. They who? One resident wrote the city of Colorado Springs a check for $300 to turn the lights on for his entire neighborhood. City Councilwoman Jan Martin pointed out to him that the total cost to the individual Colorado Springs taxpayer to keep the streetlights on—­and to fund the maintenance of public parks and medians, as well as community centers and pre-­recession-­level police and fire services—­by approving the tax increase would have been: $200. He replied that he would never vote for a tax increase. In other words, as the reporter who covered the story (Robert Smith) observed, he would rather pay more to keep the streetlights on in his own neighborhood than to pay for all city services combined. Smith remarked that “Colorado Springs was stepping away from one of the things that we take for granted in most American cities: that we’re all in it together—­ at least when it comes to basic services.”2 As near as I can tell, this is the moral of Steven Cassedy’s exceptionally timely Connected: that we’re all in it together. For much of the book Cassedy merely traces the history of the emergence in the consciousness of ordinary Americans of the concept of the social network, but he is not so much talking about the notion of a network society as such, as I understand him. Or, at any rate, the network society as such is not really his main concern. He is talking about the idea of social, political, national, and ultimately global and universal human interconnectedness that was a distinct product of the complex networked structures (both concrete and abstract) that came to constitute modern American life in the twentieth century (and of course life pretty much everywhere ), and about our understanding of ourselves as so networked.3 On this... (shrink)

Childhood looms large in our understanding of human life as it is a phase through which all adults have passed. Childhood is foundational to the development of selfhood, the formation of interests, values and skills and to the lifespan as a whole. Understanding what it is like to be a child, and what differences childhood makes, are essential for any broader understanding of the human condition. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is an outstanding reference source (...) to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into five parts: ¿ Being a child ¿ Childhood and moral status ¿ Parents and children ¿ Children in society ¿ Children and the state. Questions covered include: What is a child? Is childhood a uniquely valuable state, and if so why? Can we generalize about the goods of childhood? What rights do children have, and are they different from adults¿ rights? What gives people a right to parent? What role, if any, ought biology to play in determining who has the right to parent a particular child? What kind of rights can parents legitimately exercise over their children? What roles do relationships with siblings and friends play in the shaping of childhoods? How should we think about sexuality and disabilility in childhood, and about racialised children? How should society manage the education of children, and what values should inform such practices? What is a good school? How are children¿s lives affected by being taken into social care? The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of childhood, political philosophy and ethics as well as those in related disciplines such as education, psychology, sociology, social policy, law, social work, youth work, neuroscience and anthropology. (shrink)

Concerns about the under-representation of female academic philosophers and about the stereotype that philosophy is best done by men have recently led to efforts to make academic philosophy a more inclusive discipline. An example is the Gendered Conference Campaign, encouraging event organisers and volume editors to include women amongst invited speakers and authors. Initiatives such as the GCC raise worries about tokenism. Potential invitees may be concerned about unfairness towards whose who would have been invited in their place in the (...) absence of affirmative action and about the way in which affirmative action can affect the quality of the conference or volume in question. And women philosophers often worry that, if formal rules or significant social pressures towards gender inclusiveness play a role in selection processes, their achievements will be discounted. I argue there is no good reason for these fears: there is no pure meritocracy in academia, nor is the ideal of pure meritocracy either feasible or desirable. There are several legitimate grounds — independent of professional competence — for including people in positions of visibility and prestige; gender is such a legitimate reason. (shrink)

Há uma filosofia da diferença que precisa ser mais considerada nos nossos tempos, visto que se opõe à tradição filosófica identitária dos pré-socráticos à atualidade, que se apegou obstinadamente à ideia de identidade, que vislumbra o real, somente através da referência ao idêntico. Nessa perspectiva, os anseios e peculiaridades dos mais diversos movimentos sociais precisam ser ouvidos de modo mais efetivo pela filosofia e pela ciência. Mesmo nas ciências exatas, a teoria não é eterna, quanto mais nas sociais aplicadas, como (...) é na ciência da informação, e consequentemente, na organização do conhecimento. Posto isto, este trabalho tem como objetivo inter-relacionar alguns aspectos históricos da epistemologia geral com as epistemologias feministas, destacando-se a corrente pós-estruturalista. E assim, compreendermos alguns dos seus desdobramentos na organização do conhecimento, a fim de percebermos se ela está disposta a incorporar novas práticas, a partir de reinvindicações de movimentos, como o feminista. Constatamos que além de toda historicidade das relações de poder que tem raízes profundas e muito antigas, há nos dias hodiernos um grupo despreocupado em ratificar novas práticas mais humanizadas e coerentes às várias esferas, dentre as quais está a organização do conhecimento, por questões não só políticas, mas econômicas. (shrink)

The evaluation of labour markets and of particular jobs ought to be sensitive to a plurality of benefits and burdens of work. We use the term 'the goods of work' to refer to those benefits of work that cannot be obtained in exchange for money and that can be enjoyed mostly or exclusively in the context of work. Drawing on empirical research and various philosophical traditions of thinking about work we identify four goods of work: 1) attaining various types of (...) excellence; 2) making a social contribution; 3) experiencing community; and 4) gaining social recognition. Our account of the goods of work can be read as unpacking the ways in which work can be meaningful. The distribution of the goods of work is a concern of justice for two conjoint reasons: First, they are part of the conception of the good of a large number of individuals. Second, in societies without an unconditional income and in which most people are not independently wealthy, paid work is non-optional and workers have few, if any, occasions to realize these goods outside their job. Taking into account the plurality of the goods of work and their importance for justice challenges the theoretical and political status quo, which focuses mostly on justice with regard to the distribution of income. We defend this account against the libertarian challenge that a free labour market gives individuals sufficient options to realise the goods of work important to them, and discuss the challenge from state neutrality. In the conclusion, we hint towards possible implications for today’s labour markets. (shrink)

Children's vulnerability gives rise to duties of justice towards children and determines when authority over them is legitimately exercised. I argue for two claims. First, children's general vulnerability to objectionable dependency on their caregivers entails that they have a right not to be subject to monopolies of care, and therefore determines the structure of legitimate authority over them. Second, children's vulnerability to the loss of some special goods of childhood determines the content of legitimate authority over them. My interest is (...) in the so-far little-discussed goods of engaging in world discovery, artistic creation, philosophical pursuits and experimentation with one's self. I call these ‘special goods of childhood’ because individuals, in general, only have full access to them during childhood and they make a distinctive and weighty contribution to wellbeing. Therefore, they are part of the metric of justice towards children. The overall conclusion is that we ought to make good institutional care part of every child's upbringing. (shrink)

There is a broad philosophical consensus that both children’s and prospective parents’ interests are relevant to the justification of a right to parent. Against this view, I argue that it is impermissible to sacrifice children’s interests for the sake of advancing adults’ interest in childrearing. Therefore, the allocation of the moral right to parent should track the child’s, and not the potential parent’s, interest. This revisionary thesis is moderated by two additional qualifications. First, parents lack the moral right to exclude (...) others from associating with the child. Second, children usually come into the world as part of a relationship with their gestational mother; often, this relationship deserves protection. (shrink)

The article has two aims. First, to show that a version of luck egalitarianism that includes relational goods amongst its distribuenda can, as a matter of internal logic, account for one of the core beliefs of relational egalitarianism. Therefore, there will be important extensional overlap, at the level of domestic justice, between luck egalitarianism and relational egalitarianism. This is an important consideration in assessing the merits of and relationship between the two rival views. Second, to provide some support for including (...) relational goods, including those advocated by relational egalitarianism, on the distribuenda of justice and therefore to put in a good word for the overall plausibility of this conception of justice. I show why relational egalitarians, too, have reason to sympathise with this proposal. (shrink)

Abstract:Jessica Elkayam asks Mariana Ortega about the influence both Latina feminisms and Martin Heidegger have had on the development of Ortega's mestiza theory.

Traditionally, most philosophers saw childhood as a state of deficiency and thought that its value was entirely dependent on how successfully it prepares individuals for adulthood. Yet, there are good reasons to think that childhood also has intrinsic value. Children possess certain intrinsically valuable abilities to a higher degree than adults. Moreover, going through a phase when one does not yet have a “self of one’s own,” and experimenting one’s way to a stable self, seems intrinsically valuable. I argue that (...) children can have good lives, on several understandings of well-being – as a pleasurable state, as the satisfaction of simple desires or as the realization of certain objective goods. In reply to the likely objection that only individuals capable of morality can have intrinsic value, I explain why it is plausible that children have sufficient moral agency to be as deserving of respect as adults. (shrink)

What would the institution of the family look like, if it were reformed according to republican desiderata? Would it even survive such re-shaping?

SummaryThis article focuses on the analysis of sensibility in the works of three major late eighteenth-century philosophers: Smith, Cabanis and the young Wilhelm von Humboldt. It analyses to what extent Smith's concept of sympathy influenced Cabanis in France and Humboldt in Germany. It argues that modern anthropology, based on a specific theory of sensibility, assumes a strong connection between knowledge acquisition and life in society. This article reveals the strong links between the three authors which were made possible precisely because (...) of their common philosophical background. It proves, for the first time, that Humboldt had access to Condillac's ideas before 1798, since in an early work on the state, the former makes numerous borrowings from speeches Cabanis wrote for Mirabeau, which were in turn strongly influenced by Condillac. (shrink)

The Unconscious as Space explores the experience of being and the practice of psychoanalysis by thinking of the unconscious in mathematical terms. Anca Carrington introduces mathematical models of space, from dimension theory to algebraic topology and knot theory, and considers their immediate psychoanalytic relevance. The hypothesis that the unconscious is structured like a space marked by impossibility is then examined. Carrington considers the clinical implications, with particular focus on the interplay between language and the unconscious as related topological spaces (...) in which movement takes place along knot-like pathways. The Unconscious as Space will be of appeal to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and mental health professionals in practice and in training. (shrink)

Uncovering an archive of laughter, from the forbidden giggle to the explosive guffaw.

Traditionally, most philosophers saw childhood as a state of deficiency and thought that its value was entirely dependent on how successfully it prepares individuals for adulthood. Yet, there are good reasons to think that childhood also has intrinsic value. Children possess certain intrinsically valuable abilities to a higher degree than adults. Moreover, going through a phase when one does not yet have a “self of one’s own,” and experimenting one’s way to a stable self, seems intrinsically valuable. I argue that (...) children can have good lives, on several understandings of well-being – as a pleasurable state, as the satisfaction of simple desires or as the realization of certain objective goods. In reply to the likely objection that only individuals capable of morality can have intrinsic value, I explain why it is plausible that children have sufficient moral agency to be as deserving of respect as adults. (shrink)

I propose, defend and illustrate a principle of gender justice meant to capture the nature of a variety of injustices based on gender:A society is gender just only if the costs of a gender-neutral lifestyle are, all other things being equal, lower than, or at most equal to, the costs of gendered lifestyles.The principle is meant to account for the entire range of gender injustice: violence against women, economic and legal discrimination, domestic exploitation, the gendered division of labor and gendered (...) socialization. The sense of “costs” employed is similarly wide. Costs can be material, psychological and social.I defend the principle by appeal to the values at the core of liberal egalitarian justice: equality of access and the good of individual choice. I illustrate my case through a discussion of the injustice of a gendered division of labor. Some feminists doubt that liberal egalitarianism has the theoretical resources to recognize the unjust nature of the gendered division of labor. I argue that it does.If the principle advanced here is correct, then gender injustice is pervasive. At the same, it does not affect only women but also men. Liberal egalitarianism is capable of acknowledging this fact without denying that, overall, gender norms oppress women more than they oppress men: Arguably, women who wish to lead a gender-neutral lifestyle have to pay higher costs that men who wish to do the same. (shrink)

Because families disrupt fair patterns of distribution and, in particular, equality of opportunity, egalitarians believe that the institution of the family needs to be defended at the bar of justice. In their recent book, Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift have argued that the moral gains of preserving the family outweigh its moral costs. Yet, I claim that the egalitarian case for abolishing the family has been over-stated due to a failure to consider how alternatives to the family would also disturb (...) fair distributions and, in particular, equality of opportunity. Absent the family, children would continue to be exposed to care-givers of different levels of ability, investment in childrearing and beneficial partiality. In addition, social mechanisms other than the family would lead to the accumulation of economic inequalities. Any kind of upbringing will fail to realise equality for reasons that go deeper than the family: our partiality and unequal abilities to nurture. (shrink)

This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, exiles, and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega’s project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist (...) thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega’s work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits. (shrink)

Three claims about love and justice cannot be simultaneously true and therefore entail a paradox: (1) Love is a matter of justice. (2) There cannot be a duty to love. (3) All matters of justice are matters of duty. The first claim is more controversial. To defend it, I show why the extent to which we enjoy the good of love is relevant to distributive justice. To defend (2) I explain the empirical, conceptual and axiological arguments in its favour. Although (...) (3) is the most generally endorsed claim of the three, I conclude we should reject it in order to avoid the paradox. (shrink)

Several philosophers argue that individuals have an interest-protecting right to parent; specifically, the interest is in rearing children whom one can parent adequately. If such a right exists it can provide a solution to scepticism about duties of justice concerning distant future generations and bypass the challenge provided by the non-identity problem. Current children - whose identity is independent from environment-affecting decisions of current adults - will have, in due course, a right to parent. Adequate parenting requires resources. We owe (...) duties of justice to current children, including the satisfaction of their interest-protecting rights; therefore we owe them the conditions for rearing children adequately in the future. But to engage in permissible parenting they, too, will need sufficient resources to ensure their own children's future ability to bring up children under adequate conditions. Because this reasoning goes on ad infinitum it entails that each generation of adults owes its contemporary generation of children at least those resources that are necessary for sustaining human life indefinitely at an adequate level of wellbeing. (shrink)

Parenting involves an extraordinary degree of power over children. Republicans are concerned about domination, which, on one view, is the holding of power that fails to track the interests of those over whom it is exercised. On this account, parenting as we know it is dominating due to the low standards necessary for acquiring and retaining parental rights and the extent of parental power. Domination cannot be fully eliminated from child-rearing without unacceptable loss of value. Most likely, republicanism requires that (...) we minimise children’s domination. I examine alternative models of child-rearing that are immune to republican criticism. (shrink)

Women continue to be in charge of most childrearing; men continue to be responsible for most breadwinning. There is no consensus on whether this state of affairs, and the informal norms that encourage it, are matters of justice to be tackled by state action. Feminists have criticized political liberalism for its alleged inability to embrace a full feminist agenda, inability explained by political liberals’ commitment to the ideal of state neutrality. The debate continues on whether neutral states can accommodate two (...) feminist demands: to enact policies aimed at dismantling the feminization of caregiving, especially childrearing, and to compensate women for some of the disadvantages they incur by being primary care-givers. I contribute to this debate with three arguments in support of policies meant to de-gender care-giving and compensate care-givers. The first appeals to equality of opportunity to positions of advantage and justifies policies that prevent or mitigate statistical discrimination and implicit biases. The second draws attention to a possible causal relationship between the specialization of women in early childcare and misogyny; since the latter is incompatible with political liberal justice, it yields the conclusion that political liberals ought to further investigate the causal hypothesis with the aim of establishing or refuting it. The third argument concludes that legitimate childrearing prohibits adults from socializing children or, at least girls, into gender norms; it justifies duties of justice on the side of parents, educators, and economic agents, and state policies meant to offset foreseeable breaches of some of these duties. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that we should limit procreation – for instance, to one child per person or one child per couple – in order to reduce our aggregate carbon footprint. I provide additional support to the claim that population size is a matter of justice, by explaining that we have a duty of justice towards the current generation of children to pass on to them a sustainable population. But instead of, or, more likely, alongside with, having fewer children in in (...) each family, we could also create families with more than two parents. I explore this possibility by pointing out the ways in which multi-parenting can advance children’s interests: in higher levels of well-being, in non-monopolistic child-rearing, and in a future opportunity to become themselves parents. (shrink)

Analytic philosophers tend to agree that intentional parental genetic shaping and intentional parental environmental shaping for the same feature are, normatively, on a par. I challenge this view by advancing a novel argument, grounded in the value of fair relationships between parents and children: Parental genetic shaping is morally objectionable because it unjustifiably exacerbates the asymmetry between parent and child with respect to the voluntariness of their entrance into the parent–child relationship. Parental genetic shaping is, for this reason, different from (...) and more objectionable than parental environmental shaping. I introduce a distinction between procreative decisions one makes qua mere procreator—that is, without the intention to rear the resulting child—and procreative decisions one makes qua procreator-and-future childrearer. Genetic shaping is objectionable when undertaken in the latter capacity: Both selection and enhancement are objectionable because they introduce an unnecessary and avoidable inequality in the parent–child relationship; in the case of enhancement, this also results in harm to the future child. (shrink)

Food is intimately associated with the body, and what a person chooses to consume can easily be used to craft one's identity. Food brings people together, in much the same way as culinary preferences can divide. As veganism is gaining traction around the world, this article examines its origins in religious practices, philosophy, literature, and economic trade within the Middle Ages, elucidating how contemporary decisions to abstain from animal consumption mirror medieval ones and further how similar obstacles to this lifestyle (...) exist today. (shrink)

Knowing the level of quality from which the context is no longer valuable in a Context-Aware Data Mining (CADM) system is an important information. The main goal of this research is to study the variations of the predictions in case of different levels of noise and missing context data in practical scenarios for predicting soil moisture. The research has been performed on two locations from the Transylvanian Plain, Romania and two locations from Canada. The values predicted for the soil moisture (...) were compared in mixed scenarios that vary the quantity of noise and missing context data. The studied behavior was performed using Deep Learning, Decision Tree and Gradient Boosted Tree machine learning algorithms. It has been shown that when using the air temperature as context for predicting soil moisture, variations of noise and missing data do not influence the results proportionally with the levels of noise and missing data applied. Also, Gradient Boosted Tree algorithm proves to be the best algorithm from the ones studied, to be considered when predicting soil moisture with the CADM approach. (shrink)

Common sense morality and legislations around the world ascribe normative relevance to biological connections between parents and children. Procreators who meet a modest standard of parental competence are believed to have a right to rear the children they brought into the world. I explore various attempts to justify this belief and find most of these attempts lacking. I distinguish between two kinds of biological connections between parents and children: the genetic link and the gestational link. I argue that the second (...) can better justify a right to rear. (shrink)

This chapter argues that there is a collective responsibility to have enough children in order to ensure that people will not, in the future, suffer great harm due to depopulation. Moreover, if people stopped having children voluntarily, it could be legitimate for states to incentivize and maybe even coerce individuals to bear and rear children. Various arguments against the enforceability of an individual duty to bear and rear children are examined. Coercing people to have children would come at significant moral (...) cost; however, none of the arguments against enforceability seem decisive. The existence of a collective responsibility to have children bears on the question of whether parents and non-parents ought to shoulder the costs of childbearing and child rearing together. (shrink)

Draws from Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory to explore the concept of selfhood. This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, (...) exiles, and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega’s project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega’s work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits. Mariana Ortega is Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University and coeditor (with Linda Martín Alcoff) of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

One of the main problems one is faced while dealing with Roma issues is to find reliable statistics. The Roma refuse to declare themselves as Roma, if they participate at all in the research. Whether it is a problem related to their Roma identity, if their refusal is a well thought action we will try to find out in this paper. We will discuss the issue of Roma identity, we will present data showing the discrepancy between the official number of (...) Roma living in different countries and approximations made by competent organizations, as well as reasons one can consider for Romaís refusal do declare their identity. Theoretical aspects related to decision making will also be reviewed in the final attempt to establish whether the attitude Roma have towards declaring their identity is a result of a difficult decision making process, or just an instant rejection reaction. (shrink)

Emprunte au domaine de la lumiere et assimile au domaine de la pensee, le diaphane designe pour Aristote, son inventeur, une nature commune a tout milieu dans lequel la vue et la visibilite des choses s'achevent en regard recepteur et en image recue du monde diurne. Car, il ne suffit pas qu'il y ait de la lumiere et du solide pour que le monde puisse etre vu dans ses couleurs et connu sous ses formes et ses especes; il faut aussi (...) qu'il y ait du diaphane, c'est-a-dire un tertium quid qui relie les choses entre elles et ouvre a travers lui la porte de la reception sensible et de l'entendement. Des lors, la notion de diaphane en vient a impregner tacitement toute la representation du monde sous son double aspect sensible et intelligible; il s'opere la une veritable mutation du physique au metaphysique. (shrink)

Anca Gheaus considers the reasons we owe our children a sustainable world.

Talk of gender identity is at the core of heated current philosophical and political debates. Yet, it is unclear what it means to have one. I examine several ways of understanding this concept in light of core aims of trans writers and activists. Most importantly, the concept should make good trans people’s understanding of their own gender identities and help understand why misgendering is a serious harm and why it is permissible to require information about people’s gender identities in public (...) life. I conclude that none of the available accounts meets these essential criteria, on the assumption that the gender norms of femininity and masculinity are unjustified. But we can, and should, pursue the feminist project without “gender identity”. Such feminism can include trans people because it is possible to account for the specific harm of misgendering without assuming a claim to the recognition of our gender identities. I conclude that we should eliminate the concept of “gender identity.” To understand the phenomena that are putatively captured by “gender identity,” we are better off employing other concepts, such as “sexual dysphoria,” (assigned or aspirational) “gender roles,” and (internalised or endorsed) “gender norms”. These concepts can usefully replace “gender identity” in an individual evaluation of each of the trans people’s claims to inclusion into particular spaces. (shrink)

Care-supporting policies incentivise women’s withdrawal from the labour market, thereby reinforcing statistical discrimination and further undermining equality of opportunities between women and men for positions of advantage. This, I argue, is not sufficient reason against such policies. Supporting care also improves the overall condition of disadvantaged women who are care-givers; justice gives priority to the latter. Moreover, some of the most advantageous existing jobs entail excessive benefits; we should discount the value of allocating such jobs meritocratically. Further, women who have (...) a real chance to occupy positions of advantage have most likely already enjoyed more than their fair share of opportunities; they lack a claim to more. Women can have a complaint grounded in the expressive disvalue of sexist discrimination. This gives them special claims against men occupying the vast majority of top positions and against their higher share of opportunities for positions of advantage. But their claim does not speak against care-supporting policies. (shrink)

There is wide agreement that children have human rights, and that their human rights differ from those of adults. What explains this difference which is, at least at first glance, puzzling, given that human rights are meant to be universal? The puzzle can be dispelled by identifying what unites children’s and adults’ rights as human rights. Here I seek to answer the question of children’s human rights – that is, rights they have merely in virtue of being human and of (...) being children – by exploring how children’s interests are different from adults’, and how respect for children’s and adults’ moral status yields different practical requirements. If human rights protect interests, then children have many, but not all, of the human rights of adults, and, in addition, have some human rights that adults lack. I discuss the way in which children’s human rights, as I conceive of them here are, or fail to be, reflected in the law; as an illustration, I use the most important legal document listing children’s rights, namely the 1990 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. (shrink)

This chapter explores a so-far neglected way of avoiding the bads of loneliness: by learning to value solitude, where that is understood as a state of ‘keeping oneself company’, as J. David Velleman puts it. Unlike loneliness, solitude need not involve any deprivation, whether subjective or objective. This chapter considers the various goods to which solitude is constitutive or instrumental, with a focus on the promise that proper valuing of solitude holds for combating loneliness. The overall argument is this: If (...) loneliness significantly detracts from individual wellbeing, and if the ability to value solitude protects against loneliness, then such an ability is obviously valuable to human flourishing. If, further, loneliness raises concerns of justice, then supporting people’s ability to value solitude is a way to implement a desideratum of justice. Individuals can cultivate their ability to value solitude, an ability that others can promote or hinder. (shrink)

John Tillson argues, on grounds of children’s well-being, that it is impermissible to teach them religious views. I defend a practice of pluralistically advocating religious views to children. As long as there are no monopolies of influence over children, and as long as advocates do not use coercion, deceit, or manipulation, children can greatly benefit without having their rational abilities subverted, or incurring undue risk to form false beliefs. This solution should counter, to some extent, both perfectionist and antiperfectionist reasons (...) against initiating children into religions. (shrink)

In times of crises, public health leaders may claim that trials of public health interventions are unethical. One reason for this claim can be that equipoise—i.e. a situation of uncertainty and/or disagreement among experts about the evidence regarding an intervention—has been disturbed by a change of collective expert views. Some might claim that equipoise is disturbed if the majority of experts believe that emergency public health interventions are likely to be more beneficial than harmful. However, such beliefs are not always (...) justified: where high quality research has not been conducted, there is often considerable residual uncertainty about whether interventions offer net benefits. In this essay we argue that high-quality research, namely by means of well-designed randomized trials, is ethically obligatory before, during, and after implementing policies in public health emergencies (PHEs). We contend that this standard applies to both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions, and we elaborate an account of equipoise that captures key features of debates in the recent pandemic. We build our case by analyzing research strategies employed during the COVID-19 pandemic regarding drugs, vaccines, and non-pharmaceutical interventions; and by providing responses to possible objections. Finally, we propose a public health policy reform: whenever a policy implemented during a PHE is not grounded in high-quality evidence that expected benefits outweigh harms, there should be a planned approach to generate high-quality evidence, with review of emerging data at preset time points. These preset timepoints guarantee that policymakers pause to review emerging evidence and consider ceasing ineffective or even harmful policies, thereby improving transparency and accountability, as well as permitting the redirection of resources to more effective or beneficial interventions. (shrink)

According to Brehm's intensity of emotion theory, if an emotion has motivational properties, its intensity should be non-monotonically affected by factors similar to those determining the intensity of motivational states. These factors are called deterrents. In the case of emotion, one category of deterrents consists of factors that can potentially interfere with feeling the emotion, such as reasons for not feeling the emotion. Two experiments were carried out to examine whether happiness is a motivational state and, thus, if its intensity (...) is non-monotonically determined by the importance of reasons for not feeling happy. We expected happiness to be reduced by a low importance reason for not feeling happy, to remain high in the presence of a moderately important reason, and to be reduced or eliminated by a very important reason. Both experiments supported the cubic function that results from these expectations, and when the results of the two studies were combined, each of the individual legs of the cubic function was found to be reliable along with the cubic function itself. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed. (shrink)

Plato’s Parmenides is one of the main sources to reconstruct Zeno’s ideas. It has usually been held that Plato presents him there as a follower of Parmenides, whose book intends to defend his master’s argument against those who try to ridicule it. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Plato never presents Zeno as an advocate of monism, but rather as an expert on the antilogikètékhne, which is used by him to examine and refute pluralism as well as (...) monism. In order to prove this hypothesis, I will consider first the testimony of the Phaedrus, and specially Phdr. 261d6–8 (dk 29 a 13), where Plato explains some characteristics of the antilogiké that are essential to understand the goals of Zeno’s method. Then I will analyze some passages of the Parmenides (Prm. 127a7-d5, 128a1-e4, dk 29 a 11–12; 127d6-128a1; 135d3-6; 136a4-b6; 136e1-4) to show how this method is presented as an intellectual gymnastic, which could be considered as a propaedeutic for the acquisition of truth and knowledge. (shrink)

Luck egalitarianism provides a reason to object to conditionality in health incentive programmes in some cases when conditionality undermines political values such as solidarity or inclusiveness. This is the case with incentive programmes that aim to restrict access to essential healthcare services. Such programmes undermine solidarity. Yet, most people's lives are objectively worse, in one respect, in non-solidary societies, because solidarity contributes both instrumentally and directly to individuals' well-being. Because solidarity is non-excludable, undermining it will deprive both the prudent and (...) the imprudent citizens of its goods. Thereby, undermining solidarity can make prudent citizens worse off than they would have otherwise been, out of no fault or choice of their own, but rather as a result of somebody else's imprudent choice. This goes against the spirit of luck egalitarianism. Therefore (luck egalitarian) justice can require us to save the imprudent and avoid conditionality in access to essential healthcare services. (shrink)

Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance: Chronotopes of Law develops a post-metaphysical framework for analyzing the spatio-temporal workings of law and other forms of governance. In this regard, it does not seek merely to combine analyses of legal temporality carried out by anthropologists with analyses of law and space carried out by geographers and socio-legal scholars. Adding two metaphysical abstractions together does not produce anything but somewhat more complex, but equally metaphysical, abstractions. After Kant, 'time' and 'space' are simply categories of human (...) understanding, not metaphysical entities. And, in this book Mariana Valverde develops an anti-metaphysical theoretical approach to law that aims not to theorize the world in general, but rather to be useful to researchers who seek to shed light on the actual workings of law and other forms of governance. Written by one of the foremost theorists in the area, this theoretically innovative work constitutes a major contribution to contemporary studies in law and society. (shrink)

The overall aim of this project is to provide an explanation of Dasein that takes into account both Dasein's social and individual characters as well as both Division I and II of Being and Time. Chapter 1 provides an exposition of the existentialia of Dasein which illustrate the difference between Heidegger's characterization of human beings as Dasein and the traditional Cartesian epistemic subject. Chapter 2 analyzes the roles of das Man and Mitsein, the existential structures that are key in explaining (...) Dasein's social character. Furthermore, this chapter provides an account of what the individual character of Dasein amounts to, given that Dasein is an entity that has both das Man and Mitsein as part of its existential make-up. Chapter 3 concentrates on the important notion of authenticity or what Heidegger calls resoluteness. It addresses Heidegger's puzzling claims that authentic Being-one's-Self is a modification of das Man and that the das Man self is an existentiell modification of the authentic self. Lastly, Chapter 4 studies the role that the notion of choice plays in Heidegger's existential analytic as well as the relationship that an authentic Dasein has to history. ;In conclusion, this work shows that recent interpretations which portray Dasein as a being that is primarily social and that is completely defined by the norms of its community do not do justice to the fact that Dasein has an individual character which is a key element in its ontological make-up as well as in its ontic involvements, more specifically, in the ways in which, as authentic, it can appropriate the history of its community. In the end, we are left with a picture in which Dasein cannot be seen as wholly dominated by its sociality or as completely individualistic, but as an entity whose existential structure involves a social as well as an individual character, both of which contribute to its being-in-the-world. (shrink)