Bhaktivedanta Swami, the founder of ISKCON, had a complex relationship with science and modernity, and many of his followers have consequently allied themselves with various kinds of critiques of the modern project. A favourite enemy has been Darwin’s theory of evolution. This article undertakes a close reading of the book Rethinking Darwinism, written by a Danish member of the society, Leif A. Jensen, and published by the movement’s official publishing house, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust in 2010. Contextualising the book (...) within the history of ISKCON’s relationship with science, the article asks what the motivations for challenging Darwin here are, how it is done, and what the consequences of it are for a movement often taken to be a fundamentalist one. (shrink)

The twentieth century saw a vigorous debate over the nature of rights. Will theorists argued that the function of rights is to allocate domains of freedom. Interest theorists portrayed rights as defenders of well-being. Each side declared its conceptual analysis to be closer to an ordinary understanding of what rights there are, and to an ordinary understand- ing of what rights do for rightholders. Neither side could win a decisive victory, and the debate ended in a standoff.

Leif Wenar examines the impact on takings scholarship of the redefinition of "property" early in the twentieth century. He argues that the Hohfeldian characterization of property as rights (instead of as tangible things) forced major scholars such as Michelman, Sax, and Epstein into extreme interpretations of the Takings Clause. This extremism is unnecessary, however, since the original objections to the idea that "property is things" are mistaken.

Based on specific documentary evidence, historian Lionel Jensen reveals how 16th- and 17th-century Western missionaries used translations of the ancient RU ...

What morality requires of us in a world of poverty and inequality depends both on what our duties are in the abstract, and on what we can do to help. T.M. Scanlon's contractualism addresses the first question. I suggest that contractualism isolates the moral factors that frame our deliberations about the extent of our obligations in situations of need. To this extent, contractualism clarifies our common-sense understanding of our duties to distant others. The second, empirical question then becomes vital. What (...) we as individuals need to know is how to fulfil our duties to the distant poor. Moral theorists tend to base their prescriptions on simple assumptions about how the rich can help the poor. Yet a survey of the empirical literature shows how urgently we need more information on this topic before we can know what contractualist morality — or any plausible morality — requires of us. Key Words: Scanlon • contractualism • global justice • global poverty • aid effectiveness. (shrink)

This article examines Rawls's and Scanlon's surprisingly undemanding contractualist accounts of global moral principles. Scanlon's Principle of Rescue requires too little of the world's rich unless the causal links between them and the poor are unreliable. Rawls's principle of legitimacy leads him to theorize in terms of a law of peoples instead of persons, and his conception of a people leads him to spurn global distributive equality. Rawls's approach has advantages over the cosmopolitan egalitarianism of Beitz and Pogge. But it (...) cannot generate principles to regulate the entire global economic order. The article proposes a new cosmopolitan economic original position argument to make up for this lack in Rawls's Law of Peoples. (shrink)

Digitalization is often associated with optimistic grand narratives about a future society in academic discourse. While the word is frequently linked with hopes and expectations of societal rebirth and beneficial changes for societies and organizations, there has been little attention given to systematically investigating the risks associated with digitalization. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between digitalization and risk, thereby characterizing “the digital risk society.” By conducting a narrative summary and thematic analysis of 34 academic papers three aggregated themes (...) were outlined: First, in the digital risk society, intangible technologies serve as solutions while simultaneously introducing new risks. Second, as an increasing number of tasks are delegated to machines with opaque inner functions, society is suffering from dehumanization. Third, scholars are calling for new approaches to govern these technologies, spurred by concerns over their potentially harmful use. (shrink)

Rights dominate most modern understandings of what actions are proper and which institutions are just. Rights structure the forms of our governments, the contents of our laws, and the shape of morality as we perceive it. To accept a set of rights is to approve a distribution of freedom and authority, and so to endorse a certain view of what may, must, and must not be done.

Recent research suggests that many microfinance institutions increasingly focus on financial performance at the expense of the social component of their dual objectives. Existing studies typically assume that capital providers and managers mainly drive this so-called mission drift. In this study, we investigate whether ‘personal mission drift’ at the credit officer level can further explain the reduced emphasis on poorer clients among microfinance institutions. We present both qualitative and quantitative evidence that more experienced credit officers tend to serve fewer vulnerable (...) clients. Specifically, we show that all else being equal, credit officer experience is negatively correlated with the provision of small loans, loans to young clients, and loans to clients with disabilities. Our qualitative analysis suggests that perceived client risk and preferences for increased time efficiency mainly drive more experienced credit officers’ relative neglect of more vulnerable clients. This drift appears to be reinforced by the industry’s incentive schemes. Therefore, credit officer incentives and training should be designed to prevent this mission drift, which is observed at the microfinance institution level but is actually initiated at the credit officer level. (shrink)

(1996). Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Ziauddin Sardar on Islam and science: Marginalization or modernization of a religious tradition. Social Epistemology: Vol. 10, Islamic Social Epistemology, pp. 273-287.

Social interaction and the constitution of mediated and nested space in the court of appeal -- Conclusion -- Concluding remarks: On becoming juridical -- Ways of spacing law and politics -- Becoming juridical -- Towards hybrid juridical spaces -- References -- Index.

Cet essai biographique sur Kierkegaard permet au lecteur de cheminer dans sa pensée au fil de ses oeuvres et de découvrir qu'elle se concentre autour de deux thèmes majeurs : l'amour et de la foi. Ils sont comme deux horizons qui reviennent constamment sous sa plume sous des éclairages les plus divers. Tout ce que Kierkegaard a écrit ne se rapporte pas directement à ces deux notions mais on peut risquer l'hypothèse que l'essentiel de ce qu'il a publié est une (...) longue méditation sur celles-ci. L'auteur présente aussi l'angoisse et le désespoir qui ont contribué à rendre le nom de Kierkegaard connu en dehors du monde des philosophes et des théologiens. Durant toute sa vie Kierkegaard a connu les veilleurs de nuit qui arpentaient les rues silencieuses de Copenhague. Le veilleur confortait le sommeil des habitants de la ville par son chant. Kierkegaard. au contraire, en choisissant le pseudonyme Vigilius Haufniensis espérait réveiller ses concitoyens à l'humain et à l'éthique chrétienne en déployant une activité littéraire presque surhumaine. À l'époque cependant, sa réussite fut limitée. Ce n'est qu'au XXe siècle que sa voix commença à être entendue dans son pays et ailleurs et aujourd'hui, presque deux cents ans après sa naissance, on peut légitimement penser qu'elle continue à surprendre et à déranger. (shrink)

A Northern Ireland politician declared not long ago that the British people had a right not to believe the IRA’s latest statement on disarmament. Therefore, he said, the British government had no right to allow the IRA further representation at the talks. Rights assertions like these are quite common in everyday talk, even if pronouncements linking epistemic and legal rights are less so.

Much fuss has been made of the “spatial turn” in recent years, across a range of disciplines. It is hard to know if the attention has been warranted. A confusion of terms has been used—such as space, place, spatiality, location—and each has signified a cluster of often contradictory and confusing meanings. This phenomenon is common to a range of disciplines in the humanities. This means, first, that it is not always easy to recognize what is being discussed under the rubric (...) of space, and second, that over-extended uses of the cultural turn have stymied meaningful engagement with materiality in discussions of space. This article shows how materiality has been marginalized both by a casual vocabulary and a vigorous a priori epistemological holism on the part of scholars, and how the spatial turn has been too closely linked to the cultural turn to allow it to develop its fullest explanatory potential. It demonstrates how historians might profitably theorize the significance of place and space in their work , and sets out some challenges for using space more effectively in explanatory systems. Inspired by environmental history, sociology, and science and technology studies, I propose a way of establishing space as different from conventional historical handling of materiality, and end by identifying some methodological problems that need to be solved if we are to proceed on a surer footing. (shrink)

Entrepreneurial agency—the individual power to change environments—is central to entrepreneurship research. Yet, from a social inequality perspective, beliefs in an entrepreneurial agency might differ based on the social class environments individuals are born into. Drawing on social cognitive theories, our findings across three data sets among students from Germany and entrepreneurs from the United States indicate that social class origins are associated with entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) beliefs in adulthood. Exploring the underlying mechanisms, we find that students’ early entrepreneurial experiences in (...) education and practice are indicative of reproducing the class gap in ESE. When individuals collect mastery experiences such as social mobility or entrepreneurial success, their lower social class origins turn out to be associated with enhanced entrepreneurial agency beliefs. We discuss the implications for further research on social class, inequality, and entrepreneurship. (shrink)

All of these claims for reparations have mobilized popular support, and all share a degree of intuitive plausibility. The challenge to the theorist is to judge whether and which of such demands are grounded in sound principles of political normativity, so as to be able to select out the valid claims and to measure how the urgency of these claims compares with other demands on the public agenda. The most basic question for those considering the justifications of reparations is how (...) to orient their theories within the space of reasons. Do valid claims for reparation rest at the deepest level on reasons we have for redressing a past injustice? Or do they rather rest on reasons we have to improve our current relations so that we can get along better in the future? Are valid reparative demands backward- or forward-looking? (shrink)

justice as fairness envisions a society of free citizens holding equal basic rights cooperating within an egalitarian economic system. His account of political liberalism addresses the legitimate use of political power in a democracy, aiming to show how enduring unity may be achieved despite the diversity of worldviews that free institutions allow. His writings on the law of peoples extend these theories to liberal foreign policy, with the goal of imagining how a peaceful and tolerant international order might be possible.

Abstract: In this article, I offer a proposal to clarify what I believe is the proper relation between value maximization and stakeholder theory, which I call enlightened value maximization. Enlightened value maximization utilizes much of the structure of stakeholder theory but accepts maximization of the long-run value of the firm as the criterion for making the requisite tradeoffs among its stakeholders, and specifies long-term value maximization or value seeking as the firm’s objective. This proposal therefore solves the problems that arise (...) from the multiple objectives that accompany traditional stakeholder theory. I also discuss the Balanced Scorecard, which is the managerial equivalent of stakeholder theory, explaining how this theory is flawed because it presents managers with a scorecard that gives no score—that is, no single-valued measure of how they have performed. Thus managers evaluated with such a system (which can easily have two dozen measures and provides no information on the tradeoffs between them) have no way to make principled or purposeful decisions. The solution is to define a true (single dimensional) score for measuring performance for the organization or division (and it must be consistent with the organization’s strategy), and as long as their score is defined properly, (and for lower levels in the organization it will generally not be value) this will enhance their contribution to the firm. (shrink)

Ethical decision making is of concern to researchers across all fields. However, researchers typically focus on the biases that may act to undermine ethical decision making. Taking a new approach, this study focused on identifying the most common compensatory strategies that counteract those biases. These strategies were identified using a series of interviews with university researchers in a variety of areas, including biological, physical, social, and health as well as scholarship and the performing arts. Interview transcripts were assessed with two (...) scoring procedures, an expert rating system and computer-assisted qualitative analysis. Although the expert rating system identified Understanding Guidelines, Recognition of Insufficient Information, and Recognizing Boundaries as the most frequently used compensatory strategies across fields, other strategies, Striving for Transparency, Value/norm Assessment, and Following Appropriate Role Models, were identified as most common by the computer-assisted qualitative analyses. Potential reasons for these findings and implications for training and practice are identified and discussed. (shrink)

Social enterprises in the microfinance industry need to adhere to both financial and social demands. Critics argue that there is a mission drift away from the social mission, and this has motivated the introduction of social rating agencies to strengthen the business ethics of microfinance institutions. Using a global dataset of 204 socially rated MFIs from 58 countries, we assess the factors that drive the social performance ratings of MFIs. Overall our results show that social ratings of MFIs are significantly (...) related to financial performance, greater outreach especially in rural areas, well-defined social objectives, staff commitment, service quality and an enhanced customer service. We observe that various rating agencies attach different importance to each of the social indicators. The public policy implication is that social rating agencies need to become more transparent, to reduce the information asymmetries between heterogenous socially motivated investors and the focal MFI. (shrink)

Although Professor Lewin is not testing existing views that, for people in politics, 'egoism rules' on deep theoretical grounds, he strongly argues that empirical facts do not support such views and thus opens a new chapter in the debate on ...

This article argues that the algorithms known as neural nets underlie a new form of artificial intelligence that we call indexical AI. Contrasting with the once dominant symbolic AI, large-scale learning systems have become a semiotic infrastructure underlying global capitalism. Their achievements are based on a digital version of the sign-function index, which points rather than describes. As these algorithms spread to parse the increasingly heavy data volumes on platforms, it becomes harder to remain skeptical of their results. We call (...) social faith in these systems the naive iconic interpretation of AI and position their indexical function between heuristic symbol use and real intelligence, opening the black box to reveal semiotic function. (shrink)

Paul Horwich has formulated a paradox which he believes to be even more virulent than the related Hempel paradox. I show that Horwich's paradox, as orginally formulated, has a purely logical solution, hence that it has no bearing on the theory of confirmation. On the other hand, it illuminates some undesirable traits of classical predicate logic. A revised formulation of the paradox is then dealt with in a way that implies a modest revision of Nicod's criterion.

BackgroundThe aim of the study was to explore symptoms of anxiety and depression, insomnia, and quality of life in a Norwegian community sample of older adults.MethodsA representative sample was drawn from home-dwelling people of 60 years and above, living in a large municipality in Norway.ResultsBased on established cut-off scores, 83.7% of the participants showed no symptoms of anxiety/depression, 12% had mild symptoms, 2.7% moderate symptoms, 1.5% showed severe symptoms of anxiety/depression. A total of 18.4% reported insomnia symptoms. Regarding health-related quality (...) of life, few participants reported problems with self-care, but pain and discomfort were common. Depression/anxiety, insomnia, and health-related quality of life showed moderate to strong associations.DiscussionThe results suggest a close interplay between anxiety/depression, insomnia, and health-related quality of life in older adults. (shrink)

The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to examine whether psychosocial working conditions may be a mediator between indoor physical working conditions and the type of vague general health symptoms included in the diagnosis of sick building syndrome (SBS). The study was based on survey data from 1505 British white-collar workers from 20 different organizations. A path analysis revealed that there was a significant direct relation between physical working conditions and vague symptoms and also psychosocial job strain (Effort-Reward Imbalance ratio), (...) which in turn also strongly related to the vague symptoms. The findings thus suggested a mediating role between physical working conditions and symptoms for psychosocial job strain. Due to the cross-sectional study design no conclusions on causality can be drawn. (shrink)

Romanticism was a philosophical movement concerned with the question of orders—orders of things, of persons, of being. Friedrich von Hardenberg, the Early German Romantic who called himself Novalis, writes that “only [the infinite stone] is firm // it is the dos moi, pu sto [give me a place to stand] of Archimedes” . It is strange to find, among the foundational texts of Early German Romanticism, anything having to do with foundations. The movement has often been characterized as “anti-foundational” and (...) even occasionalist . And yet statements revealing a fascination with figures of intervention, revolution, and .. (shrink)

“There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.” (Blackstone, p.

Self-organized criticality (SOC) is based upon the idea that complex behavior can develop spontaneously in certain multi-body systems whose dynamics vary abruptly. This book is a clear and concise introduction to the field of self-organized criticality, and contains an overview of the main research results. The author begins with an examination of what is meant by SOC, and the systems in which it can occur. He then presents and analyzes computer models to describe a number of systems, and he explains (...) the different mathematical formalisms developed to understand SOC. The final chapter assesses the impact of this field of study, and highlights some key areas of new research. The author assumes no previous knowledge of the field, and the book contains several exercises. It will be ideal as a textbook for graduate students taking physics, engineering, or mathematical biology courses in nonlinear science or complexity. (shrink)