This paper explores whether the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a flexibility mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol, has contributed to poverty alleviation in countries that host CDM projects. We argue that the CDM should deliver pro-poor benefits to the communities in which projects are established, since poverty alleviation is integral to sustainable development, which is one of the main purposes of the CDM. After briefly discussing the background of the CDM, we discuss assessment difficulties to which research is prone when evaluating (...) CDM projects for alleged sustainable development contributions. Section 4 brings together and analyses available empirical research on the pro-poor benefits the CDM purportedly delivers to host country communities, concluding that the CDM has failed to deliver poverty alleviation. Therefore, without attempting to be exhaustive, we suggest policy reforms that aim to redirect the CDM to those most in need of assistance. (shrink)

McCullough, Kilpatrick, Emmons, and Larson (2001) posited that gratitude prompts individuals to behave prosocially. However, research supporting the prosocial effect of gratitude has relied on scenario and self-report methodology. To address limitations of previous research, this experiment utilised a laboratory induction of gratitude, a method that is potentially more covert than scenarios and that elicits actual grateful emotion. Prosocial responses to gratitude—operationalised as the distribution of resources to another—were paired with a self-report measure of gratitude to test the prosocial effect (...) of gratitude. To investigate positive mood as an alternative explanation, this experiment compared responses of individuals receiving a favour to responses of individuals receiving a positive outcome by chance. A total of 40 participants were randomly assigned to either a Favour or Chance condition. Participants receiving a favour helped more and reported more gratitude compared to participants in the Chance condition. (shrink)

The belief in free will has been frequently challenged since Benjamin Libet published his famous experiment in 1983. Although Libet’s experiment is highly dependent upon subjective reports, no study has been conducted that focused on a first-person or introspective perspective of the task. We took a neurophenomenological approach in an N = 1 study providing reliable and valid measures of the first-person perspective in conjunction with brain dynamics. We found that a larger readiness potential is attributable to more frequent occurrences (...) of self-initiated movements during negative deflections of the slow cortical potentials . These negative deflections occur in parallel with an inner impulse reported by an expert meditator which may in turn lead to a voluntary act. We demonstrate in this proof-of-principle approach that the first-person perspective obtained by an expert meditator in conjunction with neural signal analysis can contribute to our understanding of the neural underpinnings of voluntary acts. (shrink)

This comment explores the use of behavioral measures in the developmental study of guilt and gratitude reviewed by Vaish and Hepach. Although the use of behavioral measures in developmental...

Without denying the importance of the postmodernist approach to the narrative form and rhetorical strategies of historiography, the author, one of Germany's ...

This article critically examines the legal arguments presented on behalf of Charlie Gard’s parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, based on a threshold test of significant harm for intervention into the decisions made jointly by holders of parental responsibility. It argues that the legal basis of the argument, from the case of Ashya King, was tenuous. It sought to introduce different categories of cases concerning children’s medical treatment when, despite the inevitable factual distinctions between individual cases, the duty of the (...) judge in all cases to determine the best interests of the child is firmly established by the case law. It argues that the focus should not have been on a threshold for intervention but on whether his parents had established that the therapy they wanted was a viable alternative therapeutic option. In the April hearing, Charlie’s parents relied on the offer of treatment from a US doctor; by July they had an independent panel of international experts supporting their case although by this time the medical evidence was that it was too late for Charlie. One of Charlie’s legacies for future disputes may be that his case highlighted the need for evidence as to whether the treatment parents want for their child is a viable alternative therapeutic option before a court can determine which therapeutic option is in the best interests of the child. (shrink)

At first sight constitutionalism appears to be a key concept in public law discourse in the United Kingdom. It appears in all the major academic discussions from the rule of law and judicial review to the ‘new constitutional settlement’ and in relation to constitutional culture. And yet attempts to define the scope, meaning and role of constitutionalism remain vague. This article discusses the different fields in which constitutionalism is discussed and the different meanings that are attributed to the concept. It (...) shows that constitutionalism is routinely conflated by public law scholars with other constitutional values and principles, like the rule of law or separation of powers. This article argues that constitutionalism should either be conceived as distinct from those concepts or, failing that, can safely be eliminated from public law discourse. The article concludes by asking whether a nuanced and normative discussion of constitutionalism could have any meaningful application in the United Kingdom constitution. (shrink)

French existentialism is commonly regarded as the main impetus for the universal significance that Kafka gained in postwar France. A leading critic, Marthe Robert, has contended that this entailed an outright rejection of interest in the biographical, linguistic and historical dimension of Kafka's writing in order to interpret it as a general expression of the human condition. This article will consider this claim in the light of Sartre's original conceptualization of a dialectic of the universal and the particular in the (...) intercultural mediation of the work of art. The notion of a 'true universality' proposed by Sartre as a defence of Kafka during the 1962 Moscow Peace Conference will allow for a reassessment of Robert's criticism in a paradoxical reversal of terms: it is precisely the inevitable loss of context and the appropriation within one's own particular situation which allow the literary work to elucidate a foreign historical context and thereby gain a wider significance. Rather than a universal meaning of the work, Sartre's concept points to literature's potential to continually release specific meanings in new contexts. (shrink)

Currently, we find ourselves in a paradigm in which we believe that accepting climate change data will lead to a kind of automatic action toward the preservation of our environment. I have argued elsewhere (Fried 2020) that this lack of civic action on climate data is significant when placed in the historical, military context of the technologies that collect this data––Earth remote sensing technologies. However, I have not yet discussed the phenomenological or moral implications of this context, which are deeply (...) interconnected. In this paper, I assert that Earth remote sensing technologies can, if we are not careful, lead us to a kind of environmental deskilling. This assertion comes in four parts. First, the military context of Earth remote sensing technologies––which collect important data on climate change––acts as a kind of stability, as defined by Don Ihde and others. Second, I invoke Sir Patrick Heelan to argue that the theoretical underpinnings of Earth systems science do not translate from military to environmental praxes as we imagine they do. Third, Hannah Arendt makes the case that a state’s trust in simplifying narratives like that of climate data, meant to create “islands” of certainty in an uncertain world, can be self-defeating. That is to say, they can silence public action. I extend these arguments through Vallor’s analysis of moral deskilling, in which she points out that an overemphasis on autonomous data collection––and trust in a kind of automated decision-making on that data––can deskill us from important questions relevant to our collective flourishing. In all of these examples, the lines between environmental and military research are blurry. (shrink)

Seventeen million people have died in civil wars and rebel violence has disrupted the lives of millions more. In a fascinating contribution to the active literature on civil wars, this book finds that some contemporary rebel groups actually comply with international law amid the brutality of civil conflicts around the world. Rather than celebrating the existence of compliant rebels, the author traces the cause of this phenomenon and argues that compliant rebels emerge when rebel groups seek legitimacy in the eyes (...) of domestic and international audiences that care about humanitarian consequences and human rights. By examining rebel groups' different behaviors such as civilian killing, child soldiering, and allowing access to detention centers, Compliant Rebels offers key messages and policy lessons about engaging rebel groups with an eye toward reducing civilian suffering in war zones. (shrink)

Educational paraprofessionals have had an increased presence in English state schools since the first decade of the 21st century, but research has been limited in terms of who undertakes paraprofessional roles, what they entail and how such work is perceived by others. This paper compares one such paraprofessional role, the learning mentor, with the ‘community agent’, found in the United States of America during the 1960 s. It identifies a number of similarities around the lived experience of this work in (...) terms of status, career progression and policy assumptions about the efficacy of these roles. It argues that a historical analysis is invaluable in gaining a more complete understanding of how such roles have an air of impermanency, are subject to the vagaries of policy but nevertheless continue to be recycled as a limited and partial response to deepening social and educational inequalities. (shrink)

In 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre published several important articles of literary criticism on Blanchot, Camus and Bataille. In addition to propounding his own literary views, these articles functioned as a means of marking out his own version of existentialism, which risked being conflated with the Camusian absurd. Whereas Camus, according to Sartre, advocated a detached attitude in the face of the meaninglessness of existence, Sartre maintained that the subject cannot withdraw from the situation and that existence is ultimately meaningful. One author (...) in particular, Franz Kafka, acts as the figurative ‘prism’ through which Sartre challenges rival versions of existential thinking. He does so by introducing the concept of le fantastique on account of Kafka’s work. In so doing, Sartre not only rebutted the dominant interpretation, according to which Kafka was an absurd author, but also uncovered a historical critique implicit in the Prague author’s work. (shrink)

Grown out of the process of planning and publishing Dewey’s collected works at the Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University, this checklist provides the first exhaustive compilation of works about Dewey. It is an indispensable starting point for future scholarly study of any facet of Dewey’s career. It contains well over two thousand entries. It is structured in four major sections: published items about Dewey, unpublished items about Dewey, reviews of Dewey’s works, and reviews of works about Dewey. The (...) checklist not only gives the student easy access to writ­ings about Dewey but also reveals the major shifts and interests of modern scholarship. (shrink)

This volume republishes forty-four essays, reviews, and miscellaneous pieces from 1939, 1940, and 1941. In his Introduction, R. W. Sleeper characterizes the contents of this volume as “vintage Dewey. Ranging widely over problems of theory and practice, they reveal him commencing his ninth decade at the peak of his intellectual powers.” “Nature in Experience,” Dewey’s reply to Morris R. Cohen and William Ernest Hocking, “is a model of clarity and responsiveness,” writes Sleeper, “perhaps his clearest statement of why it is (...) that metaphysics does not play the fundamental role for him that it had regularly played for his predecessors.”. (shrink)

This article considers proposals to reform the law in response to recent high profile cases concerning the medical treatment of children, currently before Parliament in the Access to Palliative Care and Treatment of Children Bill 2019–21. It considers the proposed procedural change, to introduce a requirement for mediation before court proceedings, and argues that dispute resolution processes should be a matter of good practice rather than enshrined in law. It argues that the proposed substantive change to determination of best interests (...) would not result in different outcomes because the best interests analysis co-exist with the legal and professional duties of doctors to children in their care. It argues that if there is to be reform of the law it needs to follow from a comprehensive review of all the issues in which the minimum standards imposed by law fit together with good practice standards and not in response to individual cases. (shrink)