One of the new ways used by companies to demonstrate their social responsibility is to encourage employee volunteering, whereby employees engage in socially beneficial activities on company time, while being paid by the company. The reasoning is that it is good for employee motivation (internal effects) and good for the company reputation (external effects). This article reports an empirical investigation of the internal effects of employee volunteering conducted amongst employees of the Dutch ABN-AMRO bank. The study showed that (a) socio-demographic (...) characteristics from employee volunteers markedly differ from those of non-volunteers and community volunteers and (b) employee volunteering seems to have positive effects on attitudes and behavior towards the organization. (shrink)

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this article, I assess the prospects for the limitarian thesis that someone has too much wealth if they exceed a specific wealth threshold. Limitarianism claims that there are good political and/or ethical reasons to prevent people from having such ‘surplus wealth’, for example, because it has no moral value for the holder or because allowing people to have surplus wealth has less moral value than redistributing it. Drawing on recent literature on distributive justice, I defend two types of limitarian (...) principles of justice. First, limitarian midlevel principles draw on the limitarian thesis to specify normative commitments for guiding institutional design and individual actions. Second, the limitarian presumption draws on that thesis to specify what a just allocation of wealth requires under epistemic constraints. Such a presumption says that without substantive reasons to the contrary, we should regard a distribution as unjust if some people’s wealth exceeds the limitarian threshold. Furthermore, I will argue that we must reject a possible but implausible interpretation of limitarianism as an ideal distributive pattern. Yet both as a midlevel principle and as a presumption, limitarianism can play an important role in theorizing about justice in the real world. (shrink)

A central question in contemporary ethics and political philosophy concerns which entities have moral status. In this article, I provide a detailed analysis of the view that moral status comes in degrees. I argue that degrees of moral status can be specified along two dimensions: (i) the weight of the reason to protect an entity’s morally significant rights and interests; and/or (ii) the rights and interests that are considered morally significant. And I explore some of the complexities that arise when (...) we link degrees of moral status to the weight of reasons to protect bundles and/or the content and size of these bundles, in particular regarding the attribution of moral status to nonparadigmatic entities (e.g. people with severe cognitive disabilities, children, embryos and foetuses, robots, non-human animals, ecosystems, and rivers). (shrink)

BackgroundConsent for data research in acute and critical care is complex as patients become at least temporarily incapacitated or die. Existing guidelines and regulations in the European Union are of limited help and there is a lack of literature about the use of data from this vulnerable group. To aid the creation of a patient-centred framework for responsible data research in the acute setting, we explored views of patients and next-of-kin about the collection, storage, sharing and use of genetic and (...) health-related data for observational research.MethodsWe conducted qualitative interviews (n = 19) with Dutch sudden cardiac arrest survivors who donated clinical and socio-economic data and genetic samples to research. We also interviewed their next-of-kin. Topics were informed by ethics literature and we used scenario-sketches to aid discussion of complex issues.ResultsSudden cardiac arrest survivors displayed limited awareness of their involvement in health data research and of the content of their given consent. We found that preferences regarding disclosure of clinically actionable genetic findings could change over time. When data collection and use were limited to the medical realm, patients trusted researchers to handle data responsibly without concern for privacy or other risks. There was no consensus as to whether deferred consent should be explicitly asked from survivors. If consent is asked, this would ideally be done a few months after the event when cognitive capacities have been regained. Views were divided about the need to obtain proxy consent for research with deceased patients’ data. However, there was general support for the disclosure of potentially relevant post-mortem genetic findings to relatives.ConclusionsSudden cardiac arrest patients’ donation of data for research was grounded in trust in medicine overall, blurring the boundary between research and care. Our findings also highlight questions about the acceptability of a one-time consent and about responsibilities of patients, researchers and ethics committees. Finally, further normative investigation is needed regarding the (continued) use of participants’ data after death, which is of particular importance in this setting. Our findings are thought to be of relevance for other acute and life-threatening illnesses as well. (shrink)

In The March of Unreason, Dick Taverne expresses his concern that irrationality is on the rise in Western society, and argues that public opinion is increasingly dominated by unreflecting prejudice and an unwillingness to engage with factual evidence. Discussing topics such as genetically modified crops and foods, organic farming, the MMR vaccine, environmentalism, the precautionary principle, and the new anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements, he argues that the rejection of the evidence-based approach nurtures a culture of suspicion, distrust, and cynicism, (...) and leads to dogmatic assertion and intolerance. Science, with all the benefits it brings, is an essential part of a civilized and democratic society: it offers the most hopeful future for humankind. (shrink)

Carl Knight argues that lexical sufficientarianism, which holds that sufficientarian concerns should have lexical priority over other distributive goals, is ‘excessive’ in many distinct ways and that sufficientarians should either defend weighted sufficientarianism or become prioritarians. In this article, I distinguish three types of weighted sufficientarianism and propose a weighted sufficientarian view that meets the excessiveness objection and is preferable to both Knight’s proposal and prioritarianism. More specifically, I defend a multi-threshold view which gives weighted priority to benefits directly above (...) and below its thresholds, but gives benefits below the lowest threshold lexical priority over benefits above the highest threshold. (shrink)

Despite the prominence of thresholds in theories of distributive justice, there is no general account of what sort of role is played by the idea of a threshold within such theories. This has allowed an ongoing lack of clarity and misunderstanding around views that employ thresholds. In this article, I develop an account of the concept of thresholds in distributive justice. I argue that this concept contains three elements, which threshold views deploy when ranking possible distributions. These elements are (i) (...) the level of the threshold, (ii) what constitutes the value of the threshold, and (iii) how benefits above and below the threshold must be allocated. I highlight three contributions that this particular account of thresholds makes: it clarifies the nature of the shift that occurs at the threshold; it resolves a common misunderstanding about headcount principles; and it shows how the arbitrariness objection can be met. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that limitarian policies are a good means to further political equality. Limitarianism, which is a view coined and defended by Robeyns, is a partial view in distributive justice which claims that under non-ideal circumstances it is morally impermissible to be rich. In a recent paper, Volacu and Dumitru level two arguments against Robeyns’ Democratic Argument for limitarianism. The Democratic Argument states that limitarianism is called for given the undermining influence current inequalities in income and wealth (...) have for the value of democracy and political equality. Volacu and Dumitru’s Incentive Objection holds that limitarianism places an excessive and inefficient burden on the rich in ensuring political equality. The Efficacy Objection holds that even if limitarianism limits excessive wealth it still fails to ensure the preservation of political equality. In this paper, I will argue that both of these objections fail, but on separate grounds. I argue that the Incentive objection fails because one could appeal to limitarian policies that are different from the ones discussed by Volacu and Dumitru and which escape the problem of reduced productivity. I argue against the Efficacy Objection that limitarian policies are a partial but highly valuable step towards establishing political equality, and that they can and should complement or be complemented by other strategies. (shrink)

The goal of tranquility through non-Assertion, Advocated by sextus empiricus, Is examined and his method criticized. His understanding of non-Assertion is compared with that of seng-Chao (383-414) and chi-Tsang (549-623). Zen buddhism shares the quest for tranquility, But offers more than sextus did to help us attain it, And avoids the excessively metaphysical thought of these two chinese buddhists. Wittgenstein, Whose goal was that philosophical problems completely disappear, And austin, Who rejected many standard western dichotomies, Offer a method superior to (...) that of sextus, Or to that of chi-Tsang and seng-Chao, But an ideal short of the tranquility sought by all the rest. The thought that zen buddhism and ordinary language philosophy may be looking in the same direction is supported by appealing to john canfield's article "wittgenstein and zen" and his analysis of "understanding without thought.". (shrink)

_The Intellectual as Stranger_ explores the historical association between images of the intellectual and those of the stranger, or the outsider to society. Using detailed case-studies, Pels examines the ambiguous strangerhood of political intellectuals such as Marx, Durkheim, Sorel, Freyer and Hendrik de Man.

In this article, I assess the prospects for the limitarian thesis that someone has too much wealth if they exceed a specific wealth threshold. Limitarianism claims that there are good political and/or ethical reasons to prevent people from having such ‘surplus wealth’, for example, because it has no moral value for the holder or because allowing people to have surplus wealth has less moral value than redistributing it. Drawing on recent literature on distributive justice, I defend two types of limitarian (...) principles of justice. First, limitarian midlevel principles draw on the limitarian thesis to specify normative commitments for guiding institutional design and individual actions. Second, the limitarian presumption draws on that thesis to specify what a just allocation of wealth requires under epistemic constraints. Such a presumption says that without substantive reasons to the contrary, we should regard a distribution as unjust if some people’s wealth exceeds the limitarian threshold. Furthermore, I will argue that we must reject a possible but implausible interpretation of limitarianism as an ideal distributive pattern. Yet both as a midlevel principle and as a presumption, limitarianism can play an important role in theorizing about justice in the real world. (shrink)

This paper discusses some of the anthropological andphilosophical features of the use of self-managementplans by patients with a chronic disease, focusing onpatients with asthma. Characteristics of thistechnologically mediated form of self-care arecontrasted with the work of Mauss and Foucault on bodytechniques and techniques of self. The similaritiesand differences between self-management of asthma andFoucault's technologies of self highlight some of theways in which self-management contributes tomodifications in the definitions of patients andphysicians. Patients, in measuring their lungfunction, first come to rely on (...) measurements more thanon felt disturbances, but next, felt disturbancesbecome modified by previous measurements. Physicians,on the other hand, see their role changed from expertto being a participant in a joint treatment. It isargued that the concept of agency is more appropriatefor describing the advantage of self-management forpatients than autonomy. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a novel characterization of sufficientarianism. I argue that sufficientarianism combines three claims: a priority claim that we have non-instrumental reasons to prioritize benefits in certain ranges over benefits in other ranges; a continuum claim that at least two of those ranges are on one continuum; and a deficiency claim that the lower a range on a continuum, the more priority benefits in that range have. This characterization of sufficientarianism sheds new light on two long-standing philosophical (...) debates, namely about the distinctiveness of sufficientarianism as a distributive principle and about the common objections to sufficientarianism. (shrink)

RESUMO O pensamento de Bakhtin, dos primeiros e dos últimos textos, se concentrou nas imagens do corpo humano. Entende-se o corpo ao contemplá-lo: ver é saber. Esse “contemplar” não tem nenhuma das qualidades objetivantes do que hoje é conhecido como “olhar”. A filosofia inicial de Bakhtin é baseada em um compromisso compassivo pelo qual uma pessoa ajuda a outra a ver e a se conhecer como um todo e, além disso, como um todo amado. Por mais limitante que seja, argumentarei (...) que sua concepção inicial de corpo ainda tem muito valor. O argumento então se volta para as imagens posteriores e muito mais familiares de Bakhtin sobre o corpo grotesco. Enquanto, inicialmente, suas ideias voltam-se para um corpo estático, agora vemos o corpo envolvido em uma interação tumultuada e interminável com seu ambiente social e natural. Seria essa uma alegoria antissoviética ou uma visão alternativa do corpo humano que remonta à pré-história? Ofereço duas ilustrações em defesa da ideia de que esta era, na verdade, uma filosofia do corpo. ABSTRACT Bakhtin's thinking, early and late focused upon images of the human body. A body is a thing understood by looking at it: to see is to know. This 'looking' has nothing of the objectivising qualities of what is known today as the 'gaze'. Bakhtin's early philosophy is based on a compassionate engagement whereby one person helps another see and know themselves as a whole, and moreover, as a loved whole. As limiting as it is, I shall argue his early conception of the body still has much value. The argument then turns to Bakhtin's later and much more familiar images of the grotesque body. While his early body is static, now we see the body engaged in a tumultuous and unending interaction with its social and natural environment. Was this an anti-Soviet allegory, or an alternative vision of the human body that reaches back into pre-history? I offer two illustrations in defence of the idea that this was indeed a philosophy of the body. (shrink)

Clifford, Dick The world outlook is rather grim. Greece is bankrupt, the efforts to cure the problem by making new loans to the banks and cutting living standards is likely only to postpone the date when bankruptcy is declared. Italy and Spain are in a similar position. Britain, Europe and the USA are loaded with debt, only a few countries like Iceland are adopting methods which are the reverse of what conventional economics requires and seem to be recovering from (...) their problems slowly. (shrink)

Animals in Disasters is a comprehensive book on animal rescue written by Dr. Dick Green who shares his experiences, best practices and lessons learned from well over 125 domestic and international disasters. It provides a step-by-step process for communities and states to more effectively address animal issues and enhance their animal response capabilities. Sections include an overview of the history of animal rescue, where we are today, and the steps needed to better prepare for tomorrow. This how-to book for (...) emergency managers who want to develop programs, craft policy, and build response capability/capacity is an ideal companion to their work. Clearly identifies the components of building a resilient community Introduces the Community Preparedness Checklist Helps readers develop and deliver effective animal response training. (shrink)

Research shows that after layoffs, employees often report decreased commitment and performance which has been coined the survivor syndrome. However, the mechanisms underlying this effect remain underexplored. The purpose of the paper is to show that reduced organizational identification can serve as an explanation for the survivor syndrome. We conducted a laboratory experiment, in which participants work as a group of employees for another participant who acts as employer. In the course of the experiment, the employer decides whether one of (...) his or her employees should be laid off or not. Mediation analysis supports a social identity-based explanation for the emergence of the survivor syndrome: downsizing causes lower identification with the employer which in turn relates to lower performance of employees. (shrink)

Limitarianism holds that there is an upper limit to how many resources, such as wealth and income, people can permissibly have. In this article, I examine the conceptual structure of limitarianism. I focus on the upper limit and the idea that resources above the limit are ‘excess resources’. I distinguish two possible limitarian views about such resources: (i) that excess resources have zero moral value for the holder; and (ii) that excess resources do have moral value for the holder but (...) that their claim to such resources is outweighed by other normative concerns. Moreover, I argue that, depending on the values limitarianism seeks to promote, limitarians should care about the number of people with excess resources or the total amount of excess resources (or both), that they can adopt redistributive measures and/or predistributive measures, and that some versions of limitarianism should take into account the distribution of risk among those above the riches line. (shrink)

This article examines the definitions of place or location (topos) and as a consequence, space, in Byzantine philosophy, from Maximos the Confessor to Photios. These philosophers draw, on one hand, on the Aristotelian, Platonic, and Neoplatonic sources, and on the other hand, on the Judeo-Christian tradition. Firstly, Maximos the Confessor sets out a novel definition in which place is conceptually inseparable from time, is needed for substances to exist, and in which place is the boundary between the created and uncreated. (...) In Anastasios of Sinai’s writing, God is the archetypical place for all things and is likewise necessary for substances. John of Damascus, in contrast, extends Aristotle’s definition of place in the Physics in new directions, by investigating the place of angels, which is determined by their incorporeal limits. Finally, Photios produces a systematic and astute account of how the properties of the containing and contained bodies come together to make places. The article concludes with an evaluation of these theories, and briefly considers their relationship to theories of place and location in modern physics. (shrink)

This article explores some aspects of the long-standing metaphoric conjunction between the images of the intellectual and that of the stranger in the history of social thought . Recently, this conjunction has re-emerged in the self-complimentary image of the `exilic' or `nomadic' intellectual, who is torn between identities and transgresses cultural and linguistic traditions . The article offers a critical appraisal of the intellectualist presumption lurking behind such self-identifications, and raises the issue of intellectual spokespersonship in the novel conditions of (...) a postmodern `society of strangers'. (shrink)

Almost everyone believes that freedom from deprivation should have significant weight in specifying what justice between generations requires. Some theorists hold that it should always trump other distributive concerns. Other theorists hold that it should have some but not lexical priority. I argue instead that freedom from deprivation should have lexical priority in some cases, yet weighted priority in others. More specifically, I defend semi-strong sufficientarianism. This view posits a deprivation threshold at which people are free from deprivation, and an (...) affluence threshold at which people can live an affluent life, even though their lives may be even further improved beyond that point. I argue that freedom from deprivation in one generation lexically outweighs providing affluence in another generation; in all other cases, freedom from deprivation does not have lexical priority. (shrink)

Despite the prominence of thresholds and limits in theories of distributive justice, there is no general account of their role within such theories. This has allowed an ongoing lack of clarity and misunderstanding around threshold views in distributive justice. In this thesis, I develop an account of the conceptual structure of such views. Such an account helps understand and characterize threshold views, can subsume what may seem to be different debates about such views under one conceptual header, and can be (...) used to further examine and develop patterns of justice that draw on thresholds. In light of this account, I propose a novel characterization of sufficientarianism which sheds new light on the distinctiveness of sufficientarianism as a distributive principle and on the common objections to sufficientarianism. Moreover, I examine and defend limitarianism, which is the view that people should not have more than a certain amount of wealth. In particular, I argue in favour of limitarianism as a midlevel principle for guiding institutional design and individual actions and, furthermore, as a specification of what a just allocation of wealth requires under epistemic constraints. (shrink)

What is so special about science? Taking up the old epistemological challenge, this article seeks to rephrase the question of scientific autonomy beyond conventional essentialist criteria of demarcation between science and society. The specificity of science is primarily sought in its studied `lack of haste', its socially sanctioned withdrawal from the swift pace of everyday life and from `faster' cultures such a politics and business. This `unhastened' quality defines science's peculiar delaying tactics, which systematically slow down and objectify ordinary conversations, (...) actions, and conflicts, attracting `slow' personalities who read and write more and talk less than the `fast cats' who are attracted to more decisionist, stress-driven and hasty cultures. Such a description, rather than claiming performative innocence, simultaneously expresses the ambition to strengthen what it characterizes, i.e. to liberate science from the stress and haste which are increasingly imposed upon it by the `external' pressures and performance criteria of enterprise culture and political correctness, and by the growing impact of media publicity and the academic celebrity system. In this fashion, the article simultaneously advances a new factual description of the specificity of scientific practice and a new normative/political project to enhance scientific and intellectual autonomy. (shrink)

We prove that all extensions of Heyting Arithmetic with a logic that has the finite frame property possess the de Jongh property.

The Intellectual as Stranger explores the historical association between images of the intellectual and those of the stranger, or the outsider to society. Using detailed case-studies, Pels examines the ambiguous strangerhood of political intellectuals such as Marx, Durkheim, Sorel, Freyer and Hendrik de Man.

In earlier work on limitarianism, I argued that setting an upper limit to the amount of wealth that people can permissibly have is justified when decision-makers are unaware of or disagree about the appropriate distributive criterion or if they are unaware of people’s relevant features (or both). Robert Huseby has raised several powerful objections to this presumptive argument for limitarianism. Some of these objections call for a revision of my defence of presumptive limitarianism while others call for clarification, both of (...) which I aim to do in this chapter. I will argue that unless decision-makers have substantive reasons to suggest otherwise, they must act as if there is an upper limit to the amount of wealth that people can permissibly have. (shrink)

This article explores some aspects of the long-standing metaphoric conjunction between the images of the intellectual and that of the stranger in the history of social thought. Recently, this conjunction has re-emerged in the self-complimentary image of the `exilic' or `nomadic' intellectual, who is torn between identities and transgresses cultural and linguistic traditions. The article offers a critical appraisal of the intellectualist presumption lurking behind such self-identifications, and raises the issue of intellectual spokespersonship in the novel conditions of a postmodern (...) `society of strangers'. (shrink)

In this rethinking of Marxism and its blind spots, Dick Howard argues that the collapse of European communism in 1989 should not be identified with a victory for capitalism and makes possible a wholesale reevaluation of democratic politics in the U.S. and abroad. The author turns to the American and French Revolutions to uncover what was truly "revolutionary" about those events, arguing that two distinct styles of democratic life emerged, the implications of which were misinterpreted in light of the (...) rise of communism. Howard uses a critical rereading of Marx as a theorist of democracy to offer his audience a new way to think about this political ideal. He argues that it is democracy, rather than Marxism, that is radical and revolutionary, and that Marx could have seen this but did not. In Part I, Howard explores the attraction Marxism held for intellectuals, particularly French intellectuals, and he demonstrates how the critique of totalitarianism from a Marxist viewpoint allowed these intellectuals to see the radical nature of democracy. Part II examines two hundred years of democratic political life -- comparing America's experience as a democracy to that of France. Part III offers a rethinking of Marx's contribution to democratic politics. Howard concludes that Marx was attempting a "philosophy by other means," and that paradoxically, just because he was such an astute philosopher, Marx was unable to see the radical political implications of his own analyses. The philosophically justified "revolution" turns out to be the basis of an anti-politics whose end was foreshadowed by the fall of European communism in 1989. (shrink)

In their substantive introduction, the editors first revisit two classical sites of controversy which have offered frameworks for theorizing the interplay between materiality and sociality: reification and fetishism. Obviously, these critical vocabularies emerge as crucial sites of perplexity as soon as the ontological boundary between subjects and objects is rendered equally problematic and fluid as the epistemological boundary between the imaginary and the real. A thumbnail sketch of the history of the two discursive traditions provides an elaborate systematic framework for (...) introducing the individual articles. The first axis of debate is generated by conceptual residues of the traditional tug-of-war between idealism and materialism which continues to infiltrate recent redescriptions of the web of sociality/materiality. The concern here is how much autonomy and agency can be granted to material objects in view of their social inscription and symbolic construction, and how far conceptual experiments with the ontological symmetry between humans and nonhumans may take us and/or should be permitted to go. The second axis of debate concerns the fate of critical theory and of ethico-political sensibility in the face of heightened uncertainties about the distinction between what is real, what is constructed, and what is imaginary, and between what may count as a person and what as a thing. (shrink)

The issue of the relation between financial derivatives, money and crisis remains one of on-going debate within Marxism. This paper takes issue with a recent contribution to this debate by Tony Norfield. We contend that the relationship between financial derivatives and the concept of ‘money’ needs to be framed in the context of a changing understanding of liquidity, and that issues of crisis and renewed accumulation are better understood though this path than via debates about speculative versus real investment and (...) productive versus unproductive capital. Indeed these latter taxonomies are being superseded by current developments within finance, and Marxian analysis needs to be attuned to these current developments. (shrink)

The author investigates how the conception of legal validity as a specific mode of existence, adopted by Kelsen in Allgemeine Theorie der Normen (General Theory of Norms), can be reconciled with a conception of the legal system in which conflicts of legal norms remain of logical concern. To this end he makes use of Ludwig Wittgenstein's picture theory of the proposition as set out in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The conclusion is that in order to reconcile the two conceptions, the legal (...) system itself must be conceived of as consisting of three sub-systems, namely, (i) a sub-system of perceptible legal judgments, (ii) a sub-system of valid legal conditions, and (iii) a sub-system of observable social practices. (shrink)

Cultural Writing. This classic of alternative art theory is available again in this second edition. Dick Higgins was co-founder of Happenings and later Fluxus. He was active in music, studying with John Cage and Henry Cowell and is the author of many books of poetry including Buster Keaton Enters Into Paradise (Left Hand) and Book About Love And Death (Something Else), also available from SPD. From his early (1964) essay on Intermedia, which gave the term to the language, up (...) through the his influential essay on the concept of an allusive referential, the impulse of his work was to describe rather than to prescribe. These essays continue to offer tools which may be useful in developing theories and opinions for the next generation of artists, writers and critics. A Dialectic Of Centuries is book to work within the new century. (shrink)