This article considers the question of why labor income may be permissibly redistributed to the poor even though non-essential body parts should generally be protected from redistribution to the infirm – the body-income puzzle. It argues that proposed solutions that affirm self-ownership but reject ownership of labor income are unsuccessful. And proposed solutions that grant individuals entitlements to resources based on the centrality of those resources to the individual’s personal identity are also unsuccessful. Instead, this article defends a solution (...) to the body-income puzzle based on a novel conception of respect for the separateness of persons. This conception holds that the sphere of moral authority protected from interference by respect for the separateness of persons includes both the body and labor income. And the strength of the negative rights constituting this sphere vary based on these rights' importance to the personal identity of the right-holder. It is shown that a commitment to helping the disadvantaged tempered by this conception of respect for the separateness of persons can solve the body-income puzzle. (shrink)

Electron redistribution is the cornerstone of our understanding of chemical reactivity. For the vast majority of organic reactions electrons are assumed to move in pairs providing explanatory mechanisms through the generation of intermediate structures. But for many transformations these discrete steps are idealized constructs, involving intermediates assumed but not empirically justified. This unitary perspective predicated on the curved arrow formalism has resulted in the scenario where for many organic transformations our supposed understanding far surpasses our growing knowledge. Reformulating organic (...) mechanisms to include single electron transfer as a component of, or an alternative to, the prevailing iconic descriptions can provide for a more empirically adequate mechanistic description. In addition using the language of SET presents an opportunity to unify mechanistic concepts under a common donor/acceptor framework. (shrink)

Calls to expand temporary work programmes come from two directions. First, as global justice advocates observe, every year thousands of poor migrants cross borders in search of better opportunities, often in the form of improved employment opportunities. As a result, international organizations now lobby in favour of expanding ‘guest-work’ opportunities, that is, opportunities for citizens of poorer countries to migrate temporarily to wealthier countries to fill labour shortages. Second, temporary work programmes permit domestic governments to respond to two internal, contradictory (...) political pressures: (1) to fill labour shortages and (2) to do so without increasing rates of permanent migration. Temporary work programmes permit governments to appear ‘tough’ on migration, while responding to employer pressure to locate workers willing to work in low-skilled, poorly remunerated positions. The coincidence of national self-interest and global justice generates a strong case in favour of expanding guest-work. We evaluate the moral benefits and burdens of expanding guest-work opportunities, and conclude that although there are benefits to be gleaned from the perspective of global wealth redistribution, at present, temporary work programmes are generally unjust. We will argue that just temporary work programmes, in time, permit temporary workers to attain citizenship. This spells the end of traditional temporary work programmes, which require that workers return to their home country in time; instead, what is temporary is the employment obligation that must be fulfilled as a requirement to access citizenship. As long as this requirement is met, we endorse guest-work programmes as a tool to respond to global inequality. (shrink)

This article draws on the history of automobile safety in the United States to illustrate how technical design has been used to promote or maintain duties, values, and ethics. It examines two specific episodes: the debates over the “crash avoidance” and “crash-worthiness” approaches in the 1960s and the responses to the accusation that air bags were killing dozens of people in the mid-1990s. In each of these debates, certain auto safety advocates promoted the development of technologies designed to circumvent, replace, (...) or compensate for “irresponsible” human actions because they believed that devices and techniques would be considerably more obedient and reliable than the American public. Other organizations, however, contested such reallocations because they also involved a shift in responsibilities throughout the rest of the sociotechnical network of auto safety. This article argues that those who controlled the precise definition of risk in auto safety had the upper hand in constructing both the solution to the problem and the distribution of responsibilities the solution entailed. (shrink)

This article studies the conceptions of social justice of women active in transnational migrant politics over a period of roughly 20 years in the Netherlands. The novel focus on migrant women reveals that transnational politics is almost completely male-dominated and -directed. Two of the exceptions found in this article include a leftist and a Kurdish women organization supporting the communist cause in the 1980s and the Kurdish struggle in the 1990s in Turkey, respectively. In both organizations gender equality was subordinated (...) to broader ideologies of political parties in their homeland. Leftist activists in the cold war era supported a narrow definition of the "politics of redistribution," while and Kurdish activists, combined classical features of the latter with those of traditional identity politics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In 1975 John Harris envisaged a survival lottery to redistribute organs from one to a greater number in order to reduce number of deaths as a consequence of organ failure. In this paper I reach a conclusion about when running a survival lottery is permissible by looking at the reason prospective participants have for allowing the procedure from a contractual perspective. I identify three versions of the survival lottery. In a National Lottery, everyone within a jurisdiction is a (...) candidate for being a donor for everyone else, disregarding all differences between individuals' eventual possibility of needing an organ. In a Group Specific Lottery, it is a question of running a lottery among members of a specific group who share the same probability of getting organ failure. In a Local Lottery one randomises among individuals who are already in need of a new organ but who happen to be compatible and in need of different organs. While the first is vulnerable to considerations of fairness, it is difficult to perceive a feasible way to implement the second option that does not come with a host of unwelcome consequences. I argue, however, that it is permissible to run Local Lotteries. (shrink)

Scholars who debate the cause of and solutions for the decline in civic engagement have suggested that Americans have increasingly withdrawn from community organizations, reducing their political activity such as voting and interest in the political world, and generally failing to place the common good over individual self-interest. Their analyses are steeped in a tradition that is largely gender blind and consequently ignores care work. We infuse feminist analyses of paid labor and citizenship, which emphasize the merits and burdens of (...) care work, into the civic engagement debate. We argue that care work, predominantly performed by women, paradoxically limits, enhances, and even constitutes a vital form of civic activity. We call for a fuller slate of social policies that will both redistribute the burden of care work and reinvigorate civic engagement. (shrink)

This paper studies the capture of organisms and materials in soil construction – a branch of ecological engineering dedicated to making soil in order to compensate for soil degradation. This approach takes all organisms to be ‘ecosystem engineers’, and often refers to earthworms as ‘collaborators’ in making soil. I examine the claim that such a convocation of worms amounts to a redistribution of agency and the underlying assumption that form-taking is the shaping of raw matter according to pre-existing forms. (...) Drawing on processual anthropology, I question the distinction between living and material components of soils, and between growing and making. I elaborate on soil scientists’ description of soil growth as pedogenesis in order to propose a view in which soil materials, along with organisms, participate in soil’s transformative and generative fluxes. I envisage the process as a concrescence, an experimentation that brings humans, worms, and soil materials together in new ways. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments ENJOYING NEGATIVE EMOTIONS IN FICTIONS by John Morreall There is a puzzle going back to Aristotle and Augustine that has sometimes been called the "paradox of tragedy": how is it that nonmasochistic, nonsadistic people are able to enjoy watching or reading about fictional situations which are filled with suffering? The problem here actually extends beyond tragedy to our enjoyment of horror films and other fictional depictions (...) of situations which we would not enjoy in real life. What is it about fiction that turns intensely unpleasant situations into situations we can enjoy? Ofthe many solutions proposed to this puzzle, I shall mentionjust four. Aristotle held that in viewing tragedy we experience negative emotions — pity and fear — but get pleasure from the experience nonetheless because we are thereby purged of excess pity and fear. For Aristotle, too, there is a pleasure which tragedy shares with fiction in general, the delight we take in representations.1 Hume put more weight on this latter delight. Our pleasure in tragedy, he said, is based on our appreciation of the skill with which the literary or other artist has depicted the unpleasant scenes.2 Susan Feagin has recently located the pleasure we take in tragic art not in our direct responses to the work, which are "unpleasant experiences," she says, but in our meta-response of moral self-congratulation at these responses.3 The fourth solution to our puzzle is really a dissolution: it consists of denying that we actually feel fear, pity, and other negative emotions in our experience of fiction. The guiding principle here is that in order to have some emotion toward a situation, we must believe that it is a real situation. This principle is articulated in an influential article by Kendall Walton, though he does not apply it to our puzzle.4 95 96Philosophy and Literature I believe that this last solution is no solution at all because we do in fact feel emotions in our appreciation of fiction (a point I will develop later). The other three solutions above address the puzzle, and the pleasures they appeal to all have some explanatory power. But these solutions seem to me to overlook perhaps the most basic pleasure we take in tragedy, horror films, and the like — the direct pleasure of feeling (ear, pity, and similar emotions. The idea of enjoying negative emotions seems counterintuitive at first; indeed it may seem analytically false. But let us look more closely at those emotions to see what there might be to enjoy in them. Because the idea that we experience real emotions in response to fiction is controversial, we will begin not with fiction but with real life. After seeing how negative emotions can be enjoyed in real life, we can then consider their enjoyment in response to fiction. Fear is perhaps the most basic negative emotion, and at first glance one of the least likely to be enjoyed. To feel fear, many have claimed, we have tojudge that we are in danger, and danger is disturbing to us. And so it is natural that in fear there is the motivation to eliminate the danger, by fleeing, protecting ourselves, or attacking. Changes in the autonomic nervous system and the endocrine system equip us forjust such actions. They produce an increase in alertness and muscle tension, a faster and stronger heartbeat, a redistribution of the blood from the skin and internal organs to the voluntary muscles and brain, and a release of stored sugar from the liver into the bloodstream. Now although we may not be able to identify all these changes when we are in a state of fear, we can feel many of them directly, and we certainly feel the overall excitement which they produce. It is this excitement, I think, that makes fear potentially enjoyable. Especially for someone who leads a relatively dull life, the stimulation provided by fear can be pleasurable by contrast with the ordinary lack of stimulation. Many people, indeed, go to considerable trouble to put themselves into dangerous situations, in part, at least, for the thrill of fear that the danger will provide. Consider mountain climbers and skydivers, for instance. Now there are many sources... (shrink)

This study uses conversation analysis to investigate how participants in Korean conversations negotiate their epistemic rights to information by deploying alternate evidential markers. The participants mutually monitor each other’s different or changing epistemic rights to the information and routinely shift their choice of evidential markers to —tamye to redistribute their epistemic rights. By manipulating the turn-taking and sequence organizations which underlie the —tamye evidential marker, the participants can claim or downgrade their epistemic rights to the information. The findings of this (...) study contribute to research on evidentiality by providing an interactional perspective which takes the orientation of the participants in actual interactions as the starting point of analysis. The study illustrates how evidential markers serve to negotiate the relationships among the speaker, the hearer, and the information in the course of the interaction rather than merely function to reflect an implicit contract or territory between the speaker’s and the hearer’s information. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to introduce the concept of dissensus as an important perspective for making current organizational discourses of environmental sustainability more radically democratic. It presents the Anthropocene as a force for social naturalization—one that paradoxically acknowledges humanity’s role in negatively impacting the environment while restricting their agency to address this problem to those compatible with a market ideology. Radical democratic theories of agonism help to denaturalize the relation of organizations to the environment yet risk reproducing values (...) of anthropocentrism and patriarchy in doing so. Dissensus, by contrast, emphasizes the need to ‘redistribute the sensible’, treating organizations as a space for continually denaturalizing and renaturalizing our socio-material relation with the world. Yet it also puts forward a radically democratic political ethics demanding that firms ecologically preserve the environment to allow for positive dissensus while internally resisting institutional power structures that naturalize these organizational environments. This paper, thus, seeks to show the significance of dissensus for enhancing radical democracy both in regards to discourses of environmental sustainability specifically and more generally within organizations. (shrink)

The successful global diffusion of formal democracy has gone hand in hand with the hollowing out of its substance. Ever more realms of domestic public policy are removed from the purview of national legislative deliberation and insulated from popular scrutiny. Rhetoric of accountability has accompanied the increasing unaccountability of international financial and trade organizations, transnational corporations as well as of states and NGOs. The new architecture of global governance characterized by legal plurality and overlapping sovereignties has facilitated a game of (...) ‘passing the blame’ among these four actors. There is a curious ambivalence in current debates on globalization about the role of the state, which is conceived of as both central and marginal. Globalization is seen to be marked by the decline of both the external and the internal sovereignty of the state. Contrary to such a view, it will be argued here that the state is both an agent and an object of globalization. Although inadequate, the state remains indispensable as its laws and policies play a key role in transposing neo-liberal agendas to the national and local levels. If in the age of globalization and of economic Empire, political violence has been replaced by legal violence, resistance to it is also articulated in the language of law. This paper focuses on the dynamic of legal politics against impoverishment and dispossession caused by the new global designs of intellectual property protection, biodiversity conservation and privatization of the commons in India. The case studies in this paper point to the emergence of intertwined structures of rule, overlapping sovereignties and complex processes of legal transnationalization that have reconfigured the relations between law, state, and territoriality. If welfare states were concerned with the redistribution of risk and resources, cunning states seek to redistribute responsibility. Sensitivity to the history of colonialism would be an important corrective to the presentism and Westerncentrism of analyses of (legal) globalization. (shrink)

Discourses of recovery and resilience have risen to positions of dominance in the mental health field. Models of recovery and resilience enjoy purchase, in both policy and practice, across a range of settings from self-described psychiatric survivors through to mental health charities through to statutory mental health service providers. Despite this ubiquity, there is confusion about what recovery means. In this article we problematize notions of recovery and resilience, and consider what, if anything, should be recovered from these concepts. We (...) focus on three key issues, i) individualization, ii) the persistence of a deficit model, and iii) collective approaches to recovery. Through documentary analysis we consider these issues across third sector organizations, and public and mental health policy. Firstly, definitional debates about recovery reflect wider ideological debates about the nature of mental health. The vagueness of these concepts and implicit assumptions inherent in dominant recovery and resilience discourses render them problematic because they individualize what are social problems. Secondly, these discourses, despite being seen as inherently liberatory are conceptually dependent on a notion of deficit in that talk of “positives” and “strengths” requires the existence of “negatives” and “weaknesses” for these concepts to make sense. We argue that this does little to substantially transform dominant understandings of psychological distress. Thirdly, these issues combine to impact upon the progressive potential of recovery. It comes to be seen as an individualistic experiential narrative accompaniment to medical understandings where the structural causes of distress are obscured. This in turn impacts upon the potential for recovery to be used to explore more collective, political aspects of emotional distress. Drawing on the work of Fraser, we use this critique to characterize “recovery” as a “struggle for recognition,” founded on a model of identity politics which displaces and marginalizes the need for social, political and economic redistribution to address many of the underlying causes of emotional distress. We conclude by stating that it is only when the collective, structural experiences of inequality and injustice are explicitly linked to processes of emotional distress that recovery will be possible. (shrink)

Since the establishment of the first food bank in 1995, charitable food aid has become entrenched in Finland as a seemingly irreplaceable solution to food poverty. Further, it has recently been suggested that the focus of food aid activities is shifting from food poverty and temporary hunger alleviation towards environmental sustainability through addressing food waste via organized re-distribution of expiring food from retail to charitable organizations. This potentially creates a mechanism that solidifies food poverty and fortifies the paradoxical situation where (...) charitable organizations delivering food aid are dependent on food waste rather than trying to reduce it. To understand the process that has led to this shift, a longitudinal media data analysis on the evolution of the discussion and the interpretations on CFA is presented. By conducting an inductive frame analysis, the paper answers three key questions: How was CFA framed by and through the media in Finland between 1995 and 2016? Has any single frame dominated the discussion at any given point? Finally, what are the characteristics of the frame that focuses on food surplus redistribution? The results suggest that when the practices are framed as potential receivers and redistributors of surplus, perception of CFA is mainly favourable and the root causes for food insecurity are not addressed. Thus, by focusing on environmental sustainability, food aid practices—hitherto depoliticized as a poverty problem—have gained policy relevance in the discursive space of the circular economy; perhaps at the cost of poverty policy and with unintended consequences. (shrink)

As there are changes in today's needs of the information society, the development of information technologies, the information behavior of scientists, the habits of information processing and its management in modern scientific libraries form their unique, atypical and constantly changing functions. This forces scientific libraries to take on new roles while ensuring the stability of their traditional roles. The vision for the future of the academic library is to become an academic partner from the service provider [1]. Preparation of employees (...) for doing the right job is becoming more and more important and challenging. The combination of individual self-expression, knowledge and skills undoubtedly contributes to the successful implementation of changes, therefore it is important to focus on and distinguish significant employee competencies to ensure organizational goals.In recent decades academic libraries conditioned by the changes happening in information society have fundamentally changed their activities: reorganize structures, carry out reorganization in collections, improve information search systems, organize open access to scientific resources, redistribute budget priorities, expand collaboration with academic community, organize the training and participate in the training process, focus on employee learning, implementation and adaptation of new technologies, conduct scientific research, constantly improve services.The role of today's scientific libraries is not limited to the diversity of book collections and the ways in which they are stored, they play an active role in building technology and knowledge infrastructures. It is now more evident that the functions of libraries' dissemination of information, accessibility, storage and social functions are crucial. "In the age of technology, the availability of information streams and the efficiency of their processing are becoming critical criteria for determining the quality and attractiveness of libraries" [2]. The abundance and variety of exploring scientific research sources are equally important for their availability and presentation. Therefore, the transformation of library staff from a curator of publications to a high-tech specialist or IT consultant in modern scientific libraries is an inevitable phenomenon.Having done the systematic analysis of scientific literature [3-7], the article presents the refined competencies of library employees as a result of changes in library activities and necessary for their successful implementation (see Table). Taking into account that organizational intelligence is one of the main guarantees of the quality of activities, which ensures the possibility to implement organizational changes, such competencies as personal knowledge, skills (abilities) and personal qualities (internal readiness) are necessary for implementing library changes. It can be noted that the greatest success of change implementation is determined by the skills (abilities) and personal qualities of the employees. This demonstrates that the library staff should be flexible, operational, tolerant, able to successfully develop their skills, and effectively apply other personal qualities to prepare for changes in the organization.Table 1. Necessary staff competencies to implement library changesKnowledgeProfessional; Knowledge of technologyManagement of information resourcesOrganized management of information resourcesPractical application of advanced technologiesBudget managementManagement of information and communicationInterest in scientific communication trendsAbilities (skills)Academic perceptivity; Development of activity projectsAnalyzing digital systems; Planning changeAbility to recognize and characterize information environment featuresIntegration into educational and scientific research processesPlanning and coordination of activities· Conducting trainings for student information educationAbility to acquire information and manage its contentCommunicationGuidance on political and legal issuesIntegration of library information into study processesManagement and coordination of electronic resourcesAbility to work in a teamCreating the most acceptable and comfortable conditions for the users working with informationAbility to negotiate; Development of operating methodsIntegration of new planned activitiesUnderstanding and applying digital systemsInformation search engine developmentDeveloping a library training programManagement of organization’s knowledgePersonal qualitiesPerssistence; FlexibilityCreativity; PromptnessCuriosity DiscretionSocial networkingAnalytical and logical thinkingTolerance to changeOptimism; Realization of consumer claimsLeadership; EnthusiasmSelf-confidence; Confidentiality Librarians are skillful creators of information and knowledge, users and organizers who can make an effective contribution to science and learning when operating effectively. This can be seen in the library employees’ distinguished functional, managerial, organizational, negotiation (communication, cooperation), education, coordination (planning, integration), understanding and analysis of digital systems, development of projects and methodologies, and data analysis and evaluation abilities. The knowledge of the library staff was detailed based on the main knowledge groups, i.e. professional, theoretical, technological, management, scientific communication, digital systems. It is almost certain that in recent decades changes in libraries have created new concepts of librarians' erudition.Knowledge such as technological, digital systems and, to some extent, scientific communication were certainly not on the list of key competencies of the traditional library staff. This proves the fundamental transformation of library staff competence in an inclusive digital environment.In conclusion, it could be stated that changes of activities in academic libraries initiate changes in staff competences - in the context of changes, there is a need for the staff to develop new or existing competences that are attributed to skill and knowledge, and personal qualities groups. It is these competences that need to be strengthened, since only a combination of them will lead to successful implementation of change. (shrink)

This article proposes a form of visual narrative that fuses authoring and data within a unified paradigm called the ‘visual image data field’. A structure with multidimensional connections in a fluid environment that self-reflexively responds to its own usage supports the future language of visual sources. The intuitive gestures and curiosity that drive visual knowledge similarly drive development of this organic architecture. Diffusing iconic images that are shorthand for conveying historical trends makes this type of unambiguous expository reading obsolete as (...) images are embedded within the rich image fields native to digital media. A topsy-turvy game of images upsets the dominance of iconic images most frequently reproduced in text-based media and redistributes meaning across a pictorial array. Meaning not only changes according to the juxtaposition of images, but also emerges from the cracks between similar scenes. Images in relationship to other images acquire a granularity that deepens meaning by adding different qualities – less narrative and quantifiable – of understanding. If images become the ‘narremes’ or grammatical elements in a visual narratology, then meaning emerges from their sequencing and re-sequencing. (shrink)

Anouck Alary | : La transformation du sang placentaire en une précieuse source de cellules souches a donné naissance à partir des années 1990 à une industrie globale de conservation de sang de cordon ombilical faisant désormais concurrence à un large réseau de banques publiques de sang de cordon. Cet article explore les soubassements socioculturels liés à l’émergence de cette industrie et tente d’élucider les enjeux éthiques et politiques qu’elle pose. Si les banques publiques de sang de cordon sont porteuses (...) des valeurs d’altruisme et de solidarité nationale traditionnellement liées au modèle redistributif d’échange de sang et d’organes né après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les banques privées renvoient, elles, à des formes de solidarité bien différentes. C’est effectivement sous couvert de la solidarité familiale et de la responsabilité morale des mères de protéger leurs enfants qu’elles définissent la conservation privée comme une forme d’ « assurance biologique » contre les risques à la santé de l’enfant. En permettant aux mères d’investir leurs tissus corporels à la fois dans le futur incertain de leurs enfants et dans des thérapies cellulaires expérimentales, ces banques promeuvent un nouveau modèle de participation du/de la patient.e à la coconstitution de futures innovations thérapeutiques. Nous inscrivons ce modèle de participation dans les reconfigurations contemporaines du biopolitique que le sociologue britannique Nikolas Rose voit s’incarner dans l’émergence d’une nouvelle forme de biocitoyenneté. L’article critique finalement ces services personnalisés en soulignant qu’ils ont le potentiel d’opérer de nouvelles formes de coercition sur les mères, dans un contexte sociopolitique caractérisé par une responsabilisation accrue des individus au regard de la « bonne gestion » de leurs risques à la santé. Ces services sont aussi jugés problématiques sur le plan éthique, au vu de leur incohérence avec un principe de justice distributive défendant l’accès égal pour chaque citoyen.ne à des soins de santé de base. | : Since the 1990s, the transformation of cord blood into a precious source of stem cells has given rise to a global cord blood bank industry, which is now competing with a large network of public cord blood banks. This article explores the sociocultural context surrounding the emergence of this industry and aims at elucidating the ethical and political concerns that this industry raises. Whereas public cord blood banks are purveyors of values such as altruism and national solidarity traditionally linked to the redistributive model of human blood and organ donation that emerged after World War Two, private banks engage very different forms of solidarity. It is indeed under the guise of family solidarity and mothers’ moral responsibility to do their best to protect their children that they come to define private preservation as a form of “biological insurance” against potential risks to their children’s health. By allowing mothers to invest their bodily tissues simultaneously in their children’s uncertain future and in experimental cell therapies, these banks promote a new model of patient participation in the development of future therapeutic innovations. This article analyzes this model as embedded in the contemporary reconfiguration of biopolitics that sociologist Nikolas Rose envisions as constituting a new form of biocitizenship. The paper finally casts a critical eye on these personalized services, in particular because of the new forms of social coercion on mothers that are brought about in a social and political context characterized by an increasing moral accountability of individuals with regard to the “good management” of their own health risks. These services also appear ethically problematic in relation to political demands of distributive justice—e.g., the ideal of equal access to basic health care for every citizen. (shrink)

When a plant root is reoriented within the gravity field, it responds by initiating a curvature which eventually results in vertical growth. Gravity sensing occurs primarily in the root tip. It may involve amyloplast sedimentation in the columella cells of the root cap, or the detection of forces exerted by the mass of the protoplast on opposite sides of its cell wall. Gravisensing activates a signal transduction cascade which results in the asymmetric redistribution of auxin and apoplastic Ca2+across the (...) root tip, with accumulation at the bottom side. The resulting lateral asymmetry in Ca2+and auxin concentration is probably transmitted to the elongation zone where differential cellular elongation occurs until the tip resumes vertical growth. The Cholodny‐Went theory proposes that gravity‐induced auxin redistribution across a gravistimulated plant organ is responsible for the gravitropic response. However, recent data indicate that the gravity‐induced reorientation is more complex, involving both auxin gradient‐dependent and auxin gradient‐independent events. (shrink)

In the face of a technological revolution which massively reduces the quantity of work demanded, there are the following alternatives: 1) Either a smaller and smaller core of full-time workers monopolizes the interesting jobs and marginalizes the majority of the population, with the unions degenerating into corporatism elitist and conservative organizations; or, 2) wage labor is redistributed in such a way that all people can work less; work then ceases to be the central focus of life and the main source (...) of identity. To survive, then, the union movement must transform itself so as to encompass the totality of human expectations (mainly cultural, non-economic, ecological), and no longer just expectations related to wage-labor. (shrink)

Hayek developed two contradictory epistemologies. The epistemology for which he is famous attributed dispersed knowledge to economic actors and credited the price system for aggregating and communicating this knowledge. The other epistemology attributed to human and non-human organisms alike the error-prone interpretation of stimuli, which could never truly be said to be “knowledge.” Several of the paradoxes of Hayek's economic and political thought that are explored in this symposium can be explained by the triumph of the first epistemology over the (...) second, including his historical interpretation of socialism as a planning mentality; his tendentious definitions of “liberty” and “justice”; and his opposition to economic redistribution even as he endorsed all manner of economic and social regulations. (shrink)

Waged in 2016, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs has claimed over 20,000 lives according to human rights groups. The Duterte administration’s own count is significantly lower: around 6,000. The huge discrepancy between the government’s official count and that of arguably more impartial organizations about something as concretely material as body count is symptomatic of how disinformation is central to the Duterte administration and how it can sustain the approval of the majority of the Philippine electorate. We suggest that (...) Duterte’s populist politics generates what Boler and Davis call “affective feedback loops,” which create emotional and informational ecosystems that facilitate smooth algorithmic governance. We turn to Patron Saints of Nothing, a recently published novel by Randy Ribay about a Filipino-American who goes back to the Philippines to uncover the truth behind the death of his cousin. Jay’s journey into the “heart of darkness” as a “hyphenated” individual allows him access to locally networked subjectivities but not its affective entanglements. Throughout the novel, he encounters numerous versions of the circumstances of Jun’s demise and the truth remains elusive at the end of the novel. We argue that despite the constant distortion of fact and fiction in the novel, what remains relatively stable or “sticky” throughout the novel are the letters from Jun Reguero that Jay carries with him back to the Philippines. We suggest that these letters can potentially serve as a form of “dissensus” that challenges the constant redistribution of the sensible in the novel. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The relationship between equality and equity has been theorized and described in many ways. Recently, this relationship has been popularly illustrated via a meme depicting three people watching a baseball game while standing on boxes. The meme's analogy, that achieving health equity is the ability to view a spectator sport, is a neoliberal account of health. The analogy defines equality at the expense of equity, characterizes health as individualistic, describes health equity as a static outcome, and implies that the bioethical (...) questions for achieving health equity are about the distribution and redistribution of resources. As the SARS CoV-2 pandemic vividly reminded us, health equity is no spectator sport. Health equity is the intentional removal of obstacles to health and the enabling of human flourishing to assure that everyone has fair and just opportunities for health. That relational and radical account of health equity requires different analogies. This article reimagines and re-illustrates the relationship between equality and equity using an organic analogy of three plants. The analogy calls for bioethics to nurture communal relationships and engage community leaders in pursuit of communal flourishing. (shrink)

Brazil stands out at the global level for having implemented several policies intending to promote agroecology as a productive paradigm for small-holder farmers. However, the impacts of this process of institutionalization of agroecology still lack research and debates that evaluate the effectiveness of these policies. In this paper, we assess and discuss the impacts of a policy specifically focused on education in agroecology, the support to the establishment of Centers for the Study of Agroecology and Organic Production (NEAs) in more (...) than 150 higher education institutions throughout Brazil. NEAs bring together teachers, researchers, and students who engage in teaching, research, and extension activities in partnerships with peasant farmers, their organizations, and rural extension workers. The hypothesis that guides our analysis is that this support to establish NEAs allowed redistribution of symbolic power in the universities where they were established, supporting agroecology to gain greater legitimacy inside and outside the university field. Based on an in-depth study of four NEAs, performed through participant observation and documentary analysis, the NEAs are evaluated from the perspective of social fields in dispute, first in a university sphere, but also from the perspective of training people in integrative and transdisciplinary thinking that will contest the industrial-corporate food regime. Our findings suggest that the State support to university groups dedicated to the promotion of agroecology has allowed the construction of what we have named agroecological spaces, which symbolically dispute the dominant paradigms in educational institutions, supporting the constitution of material and immaterial agroecological territories. (shrink)

The biochemistry of geotropism in plants and gravisensing in e.g. cyanobacteria or paramacia is still not well understood today [1]. Perhaps there are more ways than one for organisms to sense gravity. The two best known relatively old explanations for gravity sensing are sensing through the redistribution of cellular starch statoliths and sensing through redistribution of auxin. The starch containing statoliths in a gravity field produce pressure on the endoplasmic reticulum of the cell. This enables the cell to (...) sense direction. Alternatively, there is the redistribution of auxin under the action of gravity. This is known as the Cholodny-Went hypothesis [2], [3]. The latter redistribution coincides with a redistribution of electrical charge in the cell. With the present study the aim is to add a mathematical unified field explanation to gravisensing. (shrink)

Ecological Immunology assumes that immunological defenses must be minimized in terms of cost (energy expenditure). To reach this goal, a complex and still largely unexplored strategy has evolved to assure survival. From invertebrates to vertebrates, an integrated immune–neuroendocrine response appears to be crucial for the hierarchical redistribution of resources within the body according to the specific ecological demands. Thus, on the basis of experimental data on the intimate relationship between stress and immune responses that has been maintained during evolution, (...) we argue that a broader perspective based on the integration of immune and neuroendocrine responses should be adopted to describe the comprehensive strategy that the body utilizes to adapt to dynamic environmental conditions. We discuss the hypothesis that a bow‐tie architecture might be suitable to describe the variety of immune–neuroendocrine inputs that continuously target cells and organs while, at the same time, fulfilling the basic requirement of minimizing the cost of immune–neuroendocrine responses. Bow‐tie architectures are able to convert a variety of stimuli (fan in) into a wide range of fine‐tuned responses (fan out) by passing through the integrating activity of a core (knot) constituted by a limited number of elements. Finally, we argue that the ecologically negotiated immune–neuroendocrine strategies may have deleterious effects in the post‐reproductive period of life when, at least in humans, chronic, low‐grade, systemic inflammation develops, in accordance with the antagonistic pleiotropy theory of aging. BioEssays 30:868–874, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Myriad contemporary public-policy issues--including physician-assisted suicide, medical marijuana, abortion, surrogate motherhood, gay rights, conscription, and markets in human organs--raise the following important question: what rights should individuals have over their own bodies? The concept of self-ownership offers one way to answer this question. Just as ownership of an external object involves having rights, liberties, powers, immunities, etc., with respect to it, so self-ownership involves having these incidents of ownership with respect to one's own body and labor power. Much of the (...) contemporary debate over self-ownership has been about which of these incidents should be included in its definition. This dissertation endorses a particular configuration of incidents called Control Self-Ownership, consisting of permanent rights in rem of use, exclusion, and transfer over one's own body and labor power. As I show, this conception of self-ownership is coherent--two of its incidents can be either directly or indirectly derived from the third--but it creates difficulties for the political theorists who use it. For example, liberal egalitarians' tentative adoption of CSO forces them to be not only more liberal but also less egalitarian than they would otherwise be, whereas libertarians' efforts to adopt CSO but also extend it to include a right to labor income are unsuccessful, leaving their opposition to redistributive labor taxation ungrounded. The dissertation also shows that CSO can act as a mediating concept between the abstract political value of autonomy and a variety of concrete policy prescriptions, including the decriminalization of victimless crimes and the abolition of forced labor. More specifically, I demonstrate that CSO is tightly linked to autonomy by developing two distinct but interrelated Kantian defenses of it. I also argue that CSO is highly inconsistent with several existing and proposed nonmarket institutions to allocate transplantable human organs but that it can provide moral support for markets in human organs. The dissertation concludes with a critical examination of anticommodificationist and social-contract critiques of self-ownership. (shrink)

Inclusive trade is taking hold in various forms in international organizations and in the trade policy of national governments. Absent empirical evidence that will take time to generate, it can be difficult to assess the achievements of this new approach to trade. Nancy Fraser's three justice idioms provide a conceptual entry point for evaluating the potential of the inclusive trade agenda. Fraser argues that the contemporary global justice conversation must acknowledge claims for recognition, representation, and redistribution. Applying this conceptualization (...) to the inclusive trade agenda shows that trade agreement provisions intended to favor women and Indigenous peoples go some distance in addressing claims for recognition and representation but accomplish less in remedying injustices associated with maldistribution. Therefore, the inclusive trade agenda does significantly advance global justice for marginalized groups, but works primarily in ways that are political and cultural, not economic. (shrink)

Using the term world to mean a creative response to objective reality, this book considers the ways in which Eastern and Western peoples construct their natural, social, aesthetic, and religious worlds. It points the way to a view of Eastern and Western as complementary, rather than contradictory, descriptions.

Essays originally published ca. 1949-1989.

Invites the reader to examine the concept of the One in several complex cultural and philosophical mileux. The uniqueness of the study is its collation of Eastern and Western sources and systems.