The behavior of individuals currently living will generally have long-term consequences that affect the well-being of those who will come to live in the future. Intergenerational interdependencies of this nature raise difficult moral issues because only the current generation is in a position to decide on actions that will determine the nature of the world in which future generations will live. Although most are willing to attach some weight to the interests of future generations, many would argue that it is (...) not necessary to treat these interests as equivalent to those of the current generation. A common approach in this context is to use a system of discounting to evaluate future benefits and harms. This paper assesses the logic of discounting drawing on the writings of economists and philosophers. Much of the economic literature concerns the choice of an appropriate social discount rate. The social discount rate can be taken to reflect beliefs about the rights of future generations, a subject that has been extensively debated in the phioosophic literature. The writings of both economists and philosophers concerned with the weight to attach to the interests of future generations are reviewed and evaluated in this paper and the implications for environmental policy are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper I shall offer an hypothesis to explain the process by which the inventories of the contents of the three chambers of the Parthenon were inscribed in the fifth century and to account for all the surviving fragments of those inscriptions. At the end of their annual term the treasurers of Athena prepared separate inventories of the Pronaos, the Hekatompedon, and the cella which they called the Parthenon. But the four boards of treasurers whose terms filled a Panathenaic (...) penteteris co-operated with each other in stewarding the sacred possessions and began in 434/3 to have their inventories inscribed on the same stelai. The four inventories of the Pronaos filled one face of one stele, the four of the Hekatompedon one face of a second stele, and the four of the Parthenon one face of a third stele. In the course of time the treasurers began to post their records on the backs of stelai erected by their predecessors. This process was apparently changed in 410/09 to allow the four inventories to fill both the obverse and reverse faces of a smaller stele. In 406/5, with the creation of the unified board of the treasurers of Athena and the Other Gods, the inventories began to be inscribed year by year on individual stelai, and the Four Archai disappear. (shrink)

In a previous article in this journal I proposed the hypothesis that the First Stele of the Hekatompedon inventories was originally opisthographic. Subsequently, when eleven fragments of this stele were placed in plaster in the Epigraphical Museum, it became possible to examine its reverse face thoroughly and to see clearly the architectural features of the stone.

There has been much discussion of changing agricultural structure in the United States. In this paper, the author reviews some of the factors contributing to structural change in the United States and describes the policies adopted by the European Community with respect to agricultural structure. The European experience with structural policies suggests that this approach is not very promising for the United States where no specific structural policies exist. The argument developed in this paper is that structural changes in agriculture (...) are simply one example of economic adjustment in a capitalist economy, that economic adjustments are generally desirable although they are not costless, and that discussions of agricultural structure should focus on methods to alleviate the costs of adjustment rather than on efforts to prevent change. (shrink)

Twice in this chapter, according to the commentators, Plutarch has confused a pair of military engagements, Spartolos with Poteidaia and Nikias' campaign in the Megarid during 427 with that of Demosthenes in 424. In both instances this view seems to me to be of doubtful validity. In one case I would propose that instead of confusing two campaigns Plutarch simply misunderstood a very difficult passage in Thucydides, while in the second there is only flimsy evidence for rejecting Plutarch's version. His (...) statement that the Athenians under the command of Kalliades and Xenophon were defeated in Thrace by the Chalkidians refers to the battle of Spartolos , but it has become a critical dogma that Plutarch 'gives Kalliades as the commander, clearly by confusion with Kallias son of Kalliades',3 who led the Athenian forces at the battle of Poteidaia . The only apparent reason for this view is the coincidence of the names Kallias and Kalliades, but the frequent occurrence of these names makes this coincidence of no significance. (shrink)

Thucydides reports that in 414/13, after severe losses in Sicily, Nikias wrote to Athens, asking to be replaced in command and saying that it was necessary either to recall the expedition from the island or to send a new army as a reinforcement. The Athenians, however, [When the Athenians had heard his letter,] instead of relieving him of his command, chose two members of the force in Sicily, Menandros and Euthydemos, to act as additional commanders until the selection and arrival (...) of other colleagues, so that the position of sole commander would not cause Nikias suffering in his illness. They also voted to send another force, both military and naval, composed of Athenians on the muster-roll and of their allies. After the selection of Demosthenes, the son of Alkisthenes, and Eurymedon, the son of Thoukles, as Nikias' colleagues, they sent Eurymedon forthwith, around the winter solstice, to Sicily with ten ships and one hundred and twenty talents in silver …. (shrink)

‘The Greeks have two treaties with the King: the one which our city made, which all praise; and later the Lacedaemonians made the one which all condemn,’ says Demosthenes c. 350. Isocrates, however, did not always run with the pack, for a few years earlier he urged the Athenians to make peace on the basis of the treaty ‘with the King and the Lacedaemonians [which] commands the Greeks to be autonomous, the garrisons to depart from the cities of others, and (...) each people to have its own territory’. (shrink)

Thucydides reports that in 414/13, after severe losses in Sicily, Nikias wrote to Athens, asking to be replaced in command and saying that it was necessary either to recall the expedition from the island or to send a new army as a reinforcement. The Athenians, however,[When the Athenians had heard his letter,] instead of relieving him of his command, chose two members of the force in Sicily, Menandros and Euthydemos, to act as additional commanders until the selection and arrival of (...) other colleagues, so that the position of sole commander would not cause Nikias suffering in his illness. They also voted to send another force, both military and naval, composed of Athenians on the muster-roll and of their allies. After the selection of Demosthenes, the son of Alkisthenes, and Eurymedon, the son of Thoukles, as Nikias' colleagues, they sent Eurymedon forthwith, around the winter solstice, to Sicily with ten ships and one hundred and twenty talents in silver …. (shrink)

Property rights are important institutions that influence economic performance and reflect the historical, cultural, and political realities of particular societies. Drawing on a variety of concepts from legal and economic studies, a framework for explaining the origin and evolution of property rights is developed and applied to the specific case of changing ground water rights in Nebraska. The Nebraska case is an interesting example of reliance on local control in regulating water use. Despite the importance of local initiatives in ground (...) water management, this case also illustrates the need for external support from the judicial and legislative systems. The evolution of ground water property rights in Nebraska, as in other parts of the United States, has been conditioned by historical circumstances and changing values and attitudes as well as by economic and political forces. (shrink)

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Community (EC) has been criticized for causing a misallocation of resources, inequitable income transfers, and enormous budgetary costs. The purpose of this paper is to examine the political economy of agriculture and agricultural policy in the EC. The results of the analysis indicate that conflicts between national political objectives and broader, community-wide concerns are important factors in the performance of EC agriculture. The pressures for reform of the CAP will lead to modification (...) of the system, but changes in EC agricultural policy are likely to be moderate because of the inherent inertia of the policy-making process. As a result, the agricultural system in the EC will probably continue to evolve in an atmosphere of crisis with most reforms directed at symptoms rather than fundamental problems. (shrink)

The Turin manuscript containing the first three books of Oppian' Halieutica was almost completely destroyed in the fire of 1904, but a collation of it has recently come to light. In 1811 the noted classical scholar and Orientalist Vittorio Amedeo Peyron collated the manuscript against Schneider' first edition of the poem and also transcribed the scholia. He sent his results to Schneider for use in the preparation of his second edition , but they apparently arrived too late. Although the original (...) plan of this second edition called for the inclusion of the scholia, Schneider published only a text of the poem and turned over his materials on the scholia to G. H. Schaefer, including no doubt Peyron' collation of the Turin manuscript. Schaefer never did manage to produce his edition of the scholia and in some unknown way Peyron' collation and some of the other material came on to the open market in 1969. (shrink)

[1] Quotes from teachers presented in this article were originally supplied as evidence to the enquiry into the reduction in part‐time teaching funded by the Equal Opportunities Commission and the...

The Kyoto Protocol on global warming has provoked great controversy in part because it calls for heavier burdens on wealthy countries than on developing countries in the effort to control climate change. The U.S. Senate voted unanimously to oppose any agreement that does not require emissions reductions in low-income countries. The ethics of this position are examined in this paper which shows that there are good moral reasons for supporting the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol. Such a conclusion follows easily (...) from considerations of distributive justice but can also be supported by more narrowly self-interested arguments. (shrink)

How does perceptual learning take place early in life? Traditionally, researchers have focused on how infants make use of information within displays to organize it, but recently, increasing attention has been paid to the question of how infants perceive objects differently depending upon their recent interactions with the objects. This experiment investigates 10-month-old infants' use of brief prior experiences with objects to visually organize a display consisting of multiple geometrically shaped three-dimensional blocks created for this study. After a brief exposure (...) to a multipart portion of the display, each infant was shown two test events, one of which preserved the unit the infant had seen and the other of which broke that unit. Overall, infants looked longer at the event that broke the unit they had seen prior to testing than the event that preserved that unit, suggesting that infants made use of the brief prior experience to (a) form a cohesive unit of the multipart portion of the display they saw prior to test and (b) segregate this unit from the rest of the test display. This suggests that infants made inferences about novel parts of the test display based on limited exposure to a subset of the test display. Like adults, infants learn features of the three-dimensional world through their experiences in it. (shrink)

Needham, E; Stuart, SN Every three years the International Humanist and Ethical Union sponsors a World Humanist Congress, hosted by one of its member organizations, which this year was the British Humanist Association. The theme of this Congress was 'Freedom of thought and expression - forging a 21st-century Enlightenment'.

Needham, E; Stuart, SN We continue our account of the Oxford Congress in August, the theme of which was 'Freedom of thought and expression - forging a 21st-century Enlightenment'. We give further detail about the later plenary sessions and summarise select parallel sessions.

Salmon farming is a rapidly expanding industry. In order for it to develop in an ethical manner, many ethical issues must be confronted. Among these are questions regarding the quality of life of salmon on farms. To develop reasonable answers to these questions considerable thought must be devoted to developing appropriate standards of care for salmon. If these questions are not addressed the results could be bad both for salmon and for salmon farmers.

Debates over the causes and consequences of the “Axial Age” – and its relevance for understanding and explaining “modernity” – continue to rage within and across a wide variety of academic disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, archaeology, history, social theory, and cognitive science. We present a computational model that synthesizes three leading theories about the emergence of axial civilizations. Although these theories are often treated as competitors, our computational model shows how their most important conceptual insights and empirically based causal claims (...) can be integrated within a single computational architecture. The plausibility of the latter is supported by the results of our simulation experiments, which were able to simulate the emergence and growth of an axial civilization. The model shows how the relevant theories can be rendered consistent, while challenging the claims of any one to comprehensiveness. (shrink)

The essays in this volume have been selected for their contribution to Everett W. Hall's mature philosophical position, which was grounded in careful linguistic analysis and directed toward philosophically clarifying the major areas of culture. He emerges as skillful, meticulous, and patient in his exploration of language as a means of interpreting the categorial structure of the world. Originally published in 1964. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available (...) again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value. (shrink)

Confusion surrounds Catholic teaching on the use of assisted nutrition and hydration, specifically the question of when, if ever, its refusal or removal is ethical. This paper focuses on two often-neglected considerations: the relationship between means and mechanism, and an assessment of proportionality of the mechanism from the patient’s perspective. The authors draw on two critical principles of Catholic moral teaching: only ordinary means are required, and proportionality is subject to the perspective of the patient, not just that of experts (...) or the culture. The mechanisms that provide food and water have distinct benefits and burdens. Their proportionality is properly subject to analysis by the patient or surrogate, who determines which mechanism is acceptable in the patient’s situation. (shrink)

Colleges of agriculture are being forced to adapt to a changing world. The forces behind these changes affect all departments within the college. In this paper, the place of agricultural economics within the college and within the university is identified, the current situation facing the discipline is outlined, and strategies for responding to the forces of change are discussed. Three alternatives are available: continuation, termination, and metamorphosis. Different departments are likely to pursue different strategies. Some may disappear altogether or may (...) be absorbed into the parent discipline, economics, or into the business school. Other departments may transform themselves into specialized sub-disciplines, such as natural resources or agribusiness departments. Still others may continue with little or no change. Whatever course is followed, strategic planning will surely be necessary. (shrink)

This volume considers how current transitions in postsecondary education are impacting Higher Education institutions and subjects in a number of Northern nations, as well as how these transitions are indicative of the wider shift from the welfare to the market state. The university is now considered a key site for training and wealth generation in the so-called 'knowledge economy' that operates in a globalising, high tech world. Further, these transitions are underpinned by neo-liberal economic ideas that assume that the public (...) sector is a drag on the economy unless it is subject to the rules, regulations and assumptions that govern the private sector. This excellent volume - an important contribution to Education as well as Economics and Politics - furthers our understandings of universities as marketable entities as part of the globalized economy. (shrink)