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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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

The volume offers an assorted collection of studies showcasing digitalization methods. The focus on Romance languages (e.g. Latin, Italian, Romanian, Spanish) provides an entry point in digital humanities, at large, exemplified by a tripartite division of the collection: resources and digitalization, tools and interfaces, and computational methods.

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)

In philosophy, there are two competitor views about the nature and value of childhood: The first is the traditional, deficiency, view, according to which children are mere unfinished adults. The second is a view that has recently become increasingly popular amongst philosophers, and according to which children, perhaps in virtue of their biological features, have special and valuable capacities, and, more generally, privileged access to some sources of value. This article provides a conceptual map of these views and their possible (...) interpretations, and notes their bearing on issues of population ethics and on the duties that we are owed during childhood. (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)

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)

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)

The present study aims to underline the current discussions on the religiosity-health outcome relation, highlighting the tensions that may arise in the course of the medical practice on the following questions: a) Is religiosity itself an (independent) factor capable to affect the outcome of patients with heart failure, or is the association between religiosity and health benefits mediated by other social and psychological factors?; b) To what extent do religious beliefs conduct to illness avoidance or acceptance and to adequate treatment (...) commitment, in other words those beliefs support or contradict the medical approach?; c) What measures on social policies and medical counselling level would be more effective and appropriate for the Romanian system?; d) In which of the following policy areas could the bioethical dimension be more flexible and efficiently integrated: the doctor-patient relationship, the steps of the medical act, the curative decision making and/or the long-term support of the patient? A large understanding and evaluation of the ethical and legal frame regarding the patient’s information, treatment and healthcare is required for the medical practitioners as long as the shared decision making between patient and clinician is one based on modern medical principles followed by clinicians. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Professor’s DesireAnca Parvulescu (bio)Roland Barthes. THE NEUTRAL. Trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Trans. of Le Neutre. Paris: Seuil, 2002.I add: a reflection on the Neutral, for me: a manner—a free manner—to be looking for my own style of being present to the struggles of my time.—Roland Barthes, The NeutralWhat I am looking for, during the preparation of this course, is an (...) introduction to living, a guide to life (ethical project): I want to live according to nuance.—Roland Barthes, The NeutralLe Neutre reaches us late. Like an echo, it needed time, and it took its time to come. The second of the three courses Roland Barthes gave at the Collège de France between 1977 and 1980, Le Neutre was published in 2002 by Éditions du Seuil, following the editorial work of Thomas Clerc, under the direction of Éric Marty.1 Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier’s translation as The Neutral brought it to life in English in 2005. After thirty years, Le Neutre comes indeed late, but perhaps its lateness, the time of the echo, is part of its very scene.Barthes did not conceive of Le Neutre as a book. It was a course, to happen as a onetime affair and then be put aside: “We’ll have to hold on to the unsustainable for thirteen weeks: after that, it will fade” [13]; “This course is made to die on the spot” [250]. As such, the course is not only an attempt to do justice to a “subject,” to which, Barthes insists, we should not hold on once the course is over, but also to meditate on the very situation of teaching.2 The course on the neutral offers the occasion to ask, What is it to teach? And teaching, we soon find out, is a matter of desire: the course should have been called The Desire for the Neutral. The teacher follows his desire and, in doing so—Barthes is reminded by a student—inflects and curbs the student’s desire. What is it, then, that one desires when one desires the neutral? The teacher is pressed to offer something by way of definition:I define the Neutral as that which outplays [déjoue] the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles the paradigm. For I am not trying to define a word; I am trying to name a thing: I gather under a name, which here is the Neutral.[6]The neutral is a “thing” (no qualifying adjective) that outplays, baffles, or dodges the “implacable binarism” of language as seen through Saussurian linguistics: in order to [End Page 32]produce meaning, one is in the same breath choosing A and refusing B. The search here is for a ”thing” that might suspend, thwart, or elude the paradigm, what Barthes calls its arrogance. Indeed, what would it mean to escape the necessity of choosing, say—this is Barthes’s first example—between je ris (I laugh) and je lis (I read)?A problem for the teaching theater unfolds: the moment one names the “thing,” one brings it into the paradigm, constructing an opposition between the neutral and arrogance. The scene of teaching performs an aporia: “Neutral = impossible; to speak it is to defeat it but not to speak it is to miss its ‘setting up’ [...] to speak this cacophony, I need a course” [29]. There is an obvious tension between teaching, its demands for clear and transparent meaning-making and inherent institutional arrogance, and the neutral. “Arrogance”: “the taking of too much upon oneself as one’s right; the assertion of unwarrantable claims in respect of one’s own importance; undue assumption of dignity, authority, or knowledge” [OED]. The teacher is inevitably occupying the place of arrogance. Indeed, foregrounding its righteousness and authority, arrogance is standing, a position Barthes associates with a certain kind of fascism. The neutral teacher struggles to dodge the arrogance inherent to the teaching scene. Sitting, he stammers, cacophonizes. One speaks, but one accompanies speaking with a continuous performance of an apology for speaking.3 The teacher does not offer an anchor in... (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 Dohotariu ABSTRACT: This article seeks to identify and analyse the most significant changes regarding parental leave provision in post-communist Romania, as well as the extent to which its legal adjustments that took place after 1990 reveal both old trends inherited from the former political regime as well as new tendencies influenced by EU norms...

This paper explains alternative views about the nature and value of childhood, and how particular conceptions of childhood matter to a practical issue relevant to the topic of the book: children's voting rights. I don't defend any particular view on this matter; rather, I explain how recent accounts of what is uniquely good or bad about being a child bear on arguments for and against enfranchising children. I also explain why children who live in a society in which many adults (...) fail to comply with their duties of intergenerational justice have a weightier interest in voting, and hence why the case for children's enfranchisement is stronger in such cases. (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)

In this paper we provide a critical discussion of how the most progressive parental leave policies are doing with respect to three goods which we identify as essential for liberal egalitarian feminists interested in parental leaves: the good of parental care, the good of gender fairness, and the good of individual choice. Then we offer our own model, based on the power of defaults, which promotes the goods of parental care and gender justice by sacrificing as little as possible of (...) the good of individual choice. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that children who were selected for particular traits or genetically enhanced might feel, for this reason, less securely, spontaneously and fairly loved by their parents, which would constitute significant harm. ‘Parents’ refers, throughout this chapter, to the people who perform the social function of rearing children, rather than to procreators. I rely on an understanding of adequate parental love which includes several characteristics: parents should not make children feel they are loved conditionally, for features such (...) as intelligence, looks or temperament; they should not burden children with parental expectations concerning particular achievements of the child; and parental love is often expressed in spontaneous enjoyment and discovery of children’s features. This understanding of parental love provides a reason to question the legitimacy of parental use of selection and enhancement and to explain why parents should not engage on a quest for the ‘best child’. (shrink)

Le Sophiste est un des dialogues les plus difficiles de Platon, dans lequel se croisent deux questions principales : - qu'est-ce qu'un sophiste? - qu'est-ce que ce qui est? Platon les articule en dévoilant le pouvoir qu'a la parole de donner réalité à ce qui est. En mettant en scène le défi de la pensée confrontée au pouvoir démiurgique du langage hérité des poèmes archaïques, le Sophiste s'avère aussi être un dialogue entre un courant philosophique, l'éléatisme, et une pratique du (...) discours, la sophistique. Il apparaît alors comme le véritable contrepoint du Timée : y émerge, à partir d'une pensée de la rationalité du langage et de la cosmologie qu'elle fonde ou semble fonder, ce qu'Aristote, Plotin ou Jamblique reconnaîtront et critiqueront comme une science de l'être avant l'heure. Seule une telle lecture transversale du Sophiste permet d'y caractériser la thèse originale : la philosophie première habite une démiurgie."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Liam Shields’ sufficientarian commitments mean that he should subscribe to a child-centered account of the right to parent. This point most likely generalizes: sufficientarians who acknowledge children’s full moral status must embrace a child-centered account of the right to parent.

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)

Surrogacy involves a private agreement whereby a woman who gestates a child attempts to surrender her (putative) moral right to become the parent of that child such that another person (or persons), of the woman’s choice, can acquire it. Since people lack the normative power to privately transfer custody, attempts to do so are illegitimate, and the law should reflect this fact.

Defiendo la opinión de que la infancia es intrínsecamente valiosa en lugar de tener valor solo en la medida en que conduce a una buena edad adulta. Ni la visión de los “niños como adultos inacabados” ni la más extravagante de “los adultos como niños defectuosos” son convincentes por sí mismas porque ambas son formas incompletas de contar la historia de la infancia y la edad adulta. Un breve artículo no puede resolver la cuestión del valor relativo de la niñez (...) y la adultez, pero sugiero que es plausible que algunos tipos de valor que podemos disfrutar plenamente como niños sean, en el caso de la mayoría de las personas, diferentes de aquellos que podemos disfrutar como adultos. A medida que nos hacemos adultos mejoramos nuestros conocimientos y habilidades: acumulamos experiencia y controlamos mejor nuestras emociones. Por lo tanto, nos volvemos capaces de una plena agencia moral. Además, nos volvemos más decididos y adquirimos las habilidades ejecutivas necesarias para perseguir nuestros objetivos de manera efec-tiva y, por lo tanto, tenemos nuevos tipos de logros disponibles. Al mismo tiempo, en la transición a la edad adulta perdemos, en promedio, no solo habilidades físicas deseables como la agilidad y la flexibilidad, sino también gran parte de la plasticidad mental, la imaginación, la curiosidad y la percepción vívida, a veces sinestésica, del mundo (es decir, la capacidad de experimentar el mundo a través de más de un sentido a la vez). En el proceso, la capacidad de imaginar mundos radicalmente diferentes y las habilidades filosóficas y artísticas que teníamos de niños se pierden en general o al menos se reducen en gran medida. Por lo tanto, el cambio de la niñez a la edad adulta puede no ser en todos los sentidos un progreso, como diría la visión de los “niños como adultos inacabados”, o una regresión, como sugiere la visión de los “adultos como niños defectuosos”. Más bien, es una transformación de un tipo de ser humano intrínsecamente valioso a un tipo diferente de ser humano intrínsecamente valioso. Mi relato se basa en el trabajo en filosofía con niños y en nuevas investigaciones en psicología del desarrollo. Si bien hablo de los niños en general, no hace falta decir que las afirmaciones sobre las habilidades de los niños se aplican de manera diferente a los diferentes grupos de edad; sin embargo, asumo que la distinción entre “infancia” y “edad adulta” es, como tal, pertinente. (shrink)

The paper analyses how some types of postmodern art have been used as a means of copying by the aid of humour with the unpleasant restrictions and changes of the way of life during the emergency and alert states in Romania. Artă Reinterpretată is a Facebook page that offers posts on various aspects of life during the pandemics quarantine and lockdown, including isolation or exploiting love, couple and family difficulties; during the relaxation measurement and, finally, during rights restriction for those (...) whom do not have The Green Covid Card. It does so by reinterpreting classical paintings, by adding to them a text or an image or both and thus creating a humourist situation meant to ease upon the hardships of a situation we cannot change. (shrink)

Through a brief comparison between two Cappadocian trinitarian texts (On the Holy Spirit by Basil of Ceasarea and the 31st Discourse of Gregory Nazianzen), parallel modalities are revealed as to the position of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity and the definition of its function ; an attempt is thus made to establish the identity of the third hypostasis. In spite of the difference in their arguments, the doctrinal stance of the two theologians, Basil of Ceasarea and Gregory Nazianzen, is (...) the same, and their scriptural and philosophical sources are to a large extent identical. They share a common thesis : the Spirit at the same time accomplishes the Trinity as the complete manifestation of the divine and enables the advent of knowledge, so that, through the Trinity, humans are made to discover their proper condition. According to Cappadocian trinitarian theology, the Spirit is the hypostasis that relates the hypostases to each other (sun allêla) ; it is the hypostasis of their relation and that relation is identified to the very nature of the godhead. As the hypostasis of the relation, the Spirit at the same time establishes the unity of the Trinity and demonstrates the inseparability of the three. However, their unity is evidenced by the Spirit in a specific way : neither by the common divine ousia, nor by the link provided by their internal disposition (skhesis) which allows the hypostases to be described one by one (eis kai eis) according to their properties, but by taking over the part of the expression of the One (hen) via the relation (pros ti) leading through it to the unity within the One. Thus, the Spirit appears as the living expression of the relation that allows everyone to reach recognition by recognizing the divinity and the unicity of the other. In order to define the Spirit, the two Cappadocians conceive a twofold, ontological and theological, perspective of the Trinity : on the one hand, a Trinity whose divinity is ontic and consequently that evidences the Monarchy of the being ; on the other hand, a Trinity unconditioned by the being, accomplished in the privacy of mutual intellection by means of the unlimited attraction immanent to the act. To reach that twofold perspective as well as the knowledge that constitutes the Trinity, the two theologians borrow the instruments of philosophy. They resort to a topos of the reflexive experience of the divine in Platonic thought, i.e. the meeting of individual solitudes expressed in the formula one to one with the One. Such borrowing from Plotinus offers three types of stakes, which concern (i) the part assigned to the principle of homotetic similarity, (ii) the specific condition of otherness in the relation of the human and divine kinds, and (iii) the means that operates the transfer from the discursive to the contemplative dimensions of intellection, and hence to a revelation of the nature of the conjoined acts – being, living, thinking – proper to the common condition of the good or the divine to which the intellective soul pertains. (shrink)

This article brings into relief two desiderata in childrearing, the importance of which the pandemic has made clearer than ever. The first is to ensure that, in schools as well as outside them, children have ample opportunities to enjoy goods that are particular to childhood: unstructured time, to be spent playing with other children, discovering the world in company or alone, or indeed pursuing any of the creative activities that make children happy and help them learn. I refer to these (...) as “special goods of childhood.” The second desiderata is to turn childrearing into a more communal practice, with lesser parental monopoly of care. For this, we need to give children access to multiple caring adults, and thus more opportunities to form secure and protected relationships. (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)

The chapter advances two claims: first, that commitment to one’s spouse is only instrumentally valuable, adding no intrinsic value to the relationship. Moreover, commitment has costs: it partially forecloses the future, thus making one less attentive to life’s possibilities; therefore, it would be desirable for people to achieve the same goods without commitment. The second, more ambitious, claim is that commitment in general, and marital commitments in particular, are problematic instruments for securing the good of romantic and sexual love. It (...) makes sense to prefer that another person’s (perhaps especially, romantic or sexual) love for you is sustained by inclination rather than commitment. In addition, the pragmatic reasons for commitment are weak in relation to activities that, ideally, are process-oriented rather than goal-oriented—such as loving another person. (shrink)

This article intends to show the distance between work-life balance as a political and social issue at the EU and Romanian level, through the lens of the local gender equality policies following the process of EU accession. The article provides, in its first part, a brief presentation of the main theoretical axes structuring the available literature, followed up by the analysis of the occurrence of the work-life balance issue at the European level. Then the study examines the normative dimension of (...) work-life balance in post-communist Romania, seeking to understand to what extent work-life balance policies have been designed and implemented in the last 25 years. (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)

Recent corporate governance literature on gender diversity within boards has linked the effect of an increase in gender diversity to the firm’s corporate reputation. This paper analyzes the media impact of appointing new directors of Spanish companies at a particularly significant moment, during the period from 2007 to 2010, just a year before and 3 years after the Gender Equality Act was passed. By analyzing female and male board nominations in Spanish IBEX-35 companies, the paper examines whether appointing a female (...) does have greater visibility than appointing a male, and thus a potential signaling effect for corporate stakeholders and an effect on the firm’s reputation. Results indicate that the effect on press visibility of appointing a female versus a male is negligible, although there is significant media visibility for new executive directors, in particular for the case of the only woman nominated as an executive director during the period. The paper contributes to the existing literature on gender diversity in corporate governance, specifically its effect on corporate reputation. The paper also offers information relevant to policy making and in particular to the current debate over quotas for women on boards. (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)

Family relationships are often believed to have a unique value; this is reflected both in the special expectations that family members have from each other and in the various ways in which states protect family relationships. Commitment appears to set apart family relationships from other close relationships; however, commitment is in fact present in other close relationships. I conclude that family relationships do not have any special value; love does. In the case of families with children, however, a high degree (...) of commitment between adults may be useful or even necessary for advancing children's wellbeing. This could be a reason to give special protection to relationships between co-parents. (shrink)

Recent studies have proposed that the executive advantages associated with bilingualism may stem from language-switching frequency rather than from bilingualism per se (see for example, Prior & Gollan, 2011). Barbu, Gillet, Orban and Poncelet (2018) showed that high-frequency language switchers outperformed low-frequency switchers on a mental flexibility task but not on alertness or response inhibition tasks. The aim of the present study was to replicate these results as well as to compare proficient high and low-frequency bilingual language switchers to a (...) control group of monolingual participants. Two groups of proficient bilingual adults (30 high-frequency language switchers and 21 low-frequency language switchers) and a group of 28 monolinguals participated in the study. The results showed superior mental flexibility skills in high-frequency language switchers compared to low-frequency switchers and monolinguals; furthermore, the two latter groups showed no difference in mental flexibility skills. These results provide novel support for the hypothesis that the so-called bilingual advantage is, in fact, a result of language-switching habits. (shrink)