Hobbes’s own justification for the existence of governments relies on the assumption that, without a government, our lives in the state of nature would result in a state of war of every man against every man. Many contemporary scholars have tried to explain why universal war is unavoidable in Hobbes’s state of nature by utilizing modern game theory. However, most game-theoretic models that have been presented so far do not accurately capture what Hobbes deems to be the primary cause of (...) conflict in the state of nature – which is uncertainty, rather than people’s egoistic psychology. Any game- theoretic model that does not incorporate uncertainty into the picture is, therefore, I claim, the wrong model. In this paper, I use Bayesian game-theory to show how universal conflict can break-out in the state of nature - even when the majority of the population would strictly prefer to cooperate and seek peace with other people - due to uncertainty about the other person’s type. Along the way, I show that the valuation of one’s own life is one of the central mechanisms that drives Hobbes’s pessimistic conclusion. (shrink)

The original position together with the veil of ignorance have served as one of the main methodological devices to justify principles of distributive justice. Most approaches to this topic have primarily focused on the single person decision-theoretic aspect of the original position. This paper, in contrast, will directly model the basic structure and the economic agents therein to project the economic consequences and social outcomes generated either by utilitarianism or Rawls’s two principles of justice. It will be shown that when (...) the differences in people’s productive abilities are sufficiently great, utilitarianism dominates Rawls’s two principles of justice by providing a higher level of overall well-being to every member of society. Whenever this is the case, the parties can rely on the Principle of Dominance (which is a direct implication of instrumental rationality) to choose utilitarianism over Rawls’s two principles of justice. Furthermore, when this is so, utilitarianism is free from one of its most fundamental criticisms that it ‘does not take seriously the distinction between persons’ (Rawls 1971 [1999]: 24). (shrink)

John Rawls’s most mature notion of political order is “stability for the right reasons.” Stability for the right reasons is the kind of political order that Rawls hoped a well-ordered society could ideally achieve. In this paper, I demonstrate through the tools of modern game theory, the instability of “stability for the right reasons.” Specifically, I will show that a well-ordered society can completely destabilize by the introduction of an arbitrarily small number of non- compliers whenever individuals fail to achieve (...) full common knowledge ever so slightly. (shrink)

A defining characteristic of a liberal democratic society is the assignment of basic rights and liberties that protect each person’s private sphere. Hence, social choice made in a liberal democratic society must at the very least be consistent with the exercise of each person’s basic rights. However, even when everybody agrees to this basic principle, there could still remain irreconcilable social conflict and disagreement when it comes to the specific assignment of basic rights. This is especially so in a pluralistic (...) society where there is a clash among radically different and incompatible world views. Philosophers have now started to focus on this issue, which now goes by the name “perspectival diversity.” This paper extends the basic social choice theoretic framework of liberal rights by extending the domain to include individual perspectives alongside individual preferences. In this new framework, different individuals are able to see or perceive the same social alternative differently based on their own unique perspectives. The formal results of the paper imply that generating a viable social choice that is consistent with the assignment of basic rights can quickly break down once we start to increase the level of perspectival diversity in society. (shrink)

In April 2011, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the results of an epidemiological investigation that an unknown cause of lung disease that occurred throughout Korea was caused by humidifier disinfectants. The unprecedented social catastrophe caused by humidifier disinfectants, a household chemical, has so far reported 1,784 deaths and 5,984 survivors in South Korea. This study was designed to investigate the multi-layer relationships between psychological symptoms and adaptive functioning in survivors of the Humidifier disinfectants in South Korea (...) caused by chemical toxic substances. Specifically, this study aimed to explore how psychological symptoms affect actual interpersonal relationships and job adjustment with two variable sets, six internalizing and externalizing subscales, and three adaptation subscales. A total of 224 survivors recruited from a program to support humidifier disinfectant survivors by the government participated in this study. This research was approved by the Institutional Review Board of one of the Universities in South Korea. The age range of the participants was 18–73 years, 37.1% were male, and 62.9% were female. The participants responded to the Adult Self-Report of the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment. A Canonical Correlation Analysis generated three unique patterns in the relationships between psychological symptoms and adaptive functions. Humidifier disinfectant survivors in the first pattern were more vulnerable to psychological symptoms and showed maladaptive functioning in life. Survivors in the second pattern showed intrusive behaviors and appeared to be adaptive in relationships with friends. Finally, survivors in the third pattern showed aggressive behaviors and reported poor partner relationships while showing good relationships with friends. The practical implications of the interventions are also discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:554 BOOK REVIEWS though he had carried out a radical interpretation of Thomas Aquinas's esse in his transcendental turn. Thus, Sheehan has brilliantly shown both Rahner's indebtedness to Heidegger (especially his notion of the human person as a bivalent and kinetic being; note the parallels between Rahner's cogitative sense and Heidegger's Temporalitiit, between Rahner's agent intellect and Heidegger's Existentialitiit, between Rahner 's possible intellect and Heidegger's Faktizitiit) and Rahner's (...) profound differences from Heidegger, especially in his understanding of being (see pp. 110-116; 280-291). Finally, Sheehan has provided the clearest exposition to date on Rahner's theory of " inner-worldly efficient causality " (pp. 244-255). The book would have been much more helpful if an index of topics and a bibliography had been provided. There are two omissions. On p. 135, the last line should read: " Chapter VIII concludes the study by laying out the critical difference between Rahner's effort to re-establish the science of metaphysics on a transcendental base and Heidegger's attempt to overcome metaphysics." On p. 186, line 19: "In whatever way we read the content of predicate (Aquinas: quiddities)." There are also a number of minor misprints. Strange that this book was published only in 1987, even though the research was apparently completed before 1982 (see p. 171, note 62). But its many assets will make Sheehan's work a permanent feature among the best Rahnerian studies. The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. PETER c. PHAN The World and Language in Wittgenstein's Philosophy. By GORDON HUNNINGS. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989. Pp. xiv +266. $34.50. This book will not find a place among the distinguished commentaries on Wittgenstein's work. Aiming to cover the full sweep of that work, Hunnings devotes three of his eight chapters to the Tractatus, one to the" Notes on Logical Form" (1929) and Philosophical Grammar, one to the transitional material of The Blue and Brown Books, one to writings and lectures on the philosophy of mathematics, and just two to the central themes of the later philosophy. Indeed, of the book's 256 pages of text, 193 are spent before the reader finds himself dealing with Philosophical Investigations. So there is a problem of balance. For a book of this size and scope striving to cover the whole of Wittgenstein's BOOK REVIEWS 555 thought on representation and grammar, there is too much exposition of transitional detail and too little attention to the difficult but fertile work at the heart of the mature later Wittgenstein. There are now many fine expository studies of Wittgenstein's work. This is not to say that all important matters of interpretation are settled. Indeed, there are significant areas of rival interpretation and there are varying assessments of the adequacy of Wittgenstein's views. There is contention over the degree to which his work is assimilable to the philosophical tradition. These facts suggest, not that there is no profit in further investigation of his work, but that new studies-particularly ones attempting a comprehensive survey of Wittgenstein's work from the Notebooks to On Certainty-should situate themselves in a well cultivated terrain of commentary and interpretation. But Hunning's work does little to inform prospective readers of the extent to which scholarly study of Wittgenstein's work has advanced. Eschewing a bibliography, Hunnings makes it somewhat difficult for the reader to discern his command of the scholarship. In construing the Tractatus he relies on Anscombe, Stenius, Griffin, and Black-all standard sources. But in dealing with the later philosophy and the much-debated transitional period between Wittgenstein's resumption of philosophical work in the late 1920's and the period of the Investigations, Hunnings simply does not scratch the surface of the huge body of secondary writing available to serious students of Wittgenstein's work. It would be pointless to list the important commentators whose works are ignored; suffice to say that Hunnings's book is apparently unassisted by a full scholarly command of the available literature. In this regard it suffers by comparison with A. C. Grayling's Wittgenstein in the Oxford University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Object of French Studies GebrauchkunstRichard Klein (bio)If I may say something about the title—it points to the possibility that we are discussing the nature and future of French studies at the precise moment that France is about to disappear. There are those who believe that on January 1, 1999, when the euro becomes the common currency of the European Union, France will become a province of Germany. Effectively (...) real sovereignty will pass from Paris to Frankfurt.Already there are those at Cornell, for example, who think that we, in the French section, should seek to merge with the German department. I support the move (which isn’t going to happen), if only as a permanent reminder to avoid the fetishism of French. In today’s world, French is a question more than an answer to any question. French studies should be open even to the possibility that, these days, to speak French, it is becoming more and more necessary to speak German. The opposite has been true for a long time, as the French smugly know all too well—having for centuries lent their language of refinement and savoir-vivre to the Huns. The imminence of the conjuncture should remind us, too, that French studies is itself situated within the history of French—is transformed in its possibilities and embodiments by that history and by what is happening now, as we say, historically. Finally, the point here is to recall that the question of French studies has a history, that it is not merely being invented at this moment, but also reactivated as an object of discussion and debate.In fact, the current debate has been going on for some time. In 1993–94 the issue was addressed at two national conferences: a two-part symposium was organized by the Committee for the Future of French Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Wisconsin; another was held at New York University organized by the Association for French Cultural Studies and the Institute of French Studies. Summer institutes at Dartmouth and Northwestern have dealt with the issue. There is a large and growing bibliography. I cite some of the most prominent recent articles—to judge by how frequently they are cited in others I have read:—Emily Apter, “Comparative Exile: Competing Margins in the History of Comparative Literature.”—Lawrence Kritzman, “Identity Crises: France, Culture, and the Idea of the Nation.—Marie-Pierre Le Hir, “French Cultural Studies in the United States.”—Sandy Petrey, “French Studies/Cultural Studies: Reciprocal Invigoration or Mutual Destruction?”—Kristen Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (often cited as the best example we have of what French studies might be).—Kristen Ross, “World Literature and Cultural Studies.”—Thomas Pavel, “Les études culturelles: Une nouvelle discipline?” Many questions have been raised in these articles about the possibility and necessity of doing French studies. There are those here who take it for granted that one can identify something French, can locate whatever it is that may be said to participate in a specifically French identity. Some, like Pavel, see French studies (and a fortiori so-called cultural [End Page 5] studies) as an excuse for doing n’importe quoi; it defies definition and merely authorizes more confusion and incoherence. Others, like Kritzman, have a more optimistic notion of how one could define French studies without abandoning some notion of the specificity and uniqueness, the irreducible identity of what is called French.Some critics, like Ross and Le Hir, tend to see French studies as inevitably serving to dissolve any particularism associated with French. What is called French culture has been irretrievably pluralized by the effects of decolonization, by the multiplication of francophonies and by their insertion into an Americanized system of globalization. Kids in suburbs of Paris and Cairo wear American baseball hats turned around and grow up eating McDonald’s. Where is the French in that? The object of French studies may be nothing but France’s assimilationist tendency to colonize others, to claim a universal mission, even as it is transformed by its own failed colonial history and by the very diversity it aims to... (shrink)

As we all know, the Silk Road, as a famous ancient transportation route, was a trade line cross-Eurasian continent in history. Its name was from the delivery of silk. However, no Chinese ancient documents mentioned the name of “Silk Road”. German F. V. Richthofen (1933-1905) firstly used the term “Silk Road” in his book China, published in 1877. Afterwards, the name of “Silk Road” has been accepted universally and used by the world widely. The Silk Road was an ancient business (...) channel, acrossing the middle of China and countries in Central Asia, gradually forming after Qian Zhang visited Western Regions twice, two thousand and one hundred years ago. The north-west land Silk Road started from Chinese ancient Capital Chang’an (now Xi’an), acrossing Central Asia, and reaching ancient Rome in Europe. It was a bridge for communication of politics, economy, and culture between ancient China and the Western. Before 11 Century, the Sino-Western silk trade mainly depended on the land transportation. During Han Dynasty, it was a competition between the Huns and the Hans for occupy the Silk road. The silk as a kind of material culture was a sort of intermediary for making people to know how to get along together.This article attempts to describe the Sino-Western silk trade conditions before and after the two missions of Qian Zhang to Western Regions (Xiyu), including archaeological evidences, kinds of silk and trade scale, transportation routes, trade participants, and so on. (shrink)

Public reason liberalism takes as its starting point the deep and irreconcilable diversity we find characterizing liberal societies. This deep and irreconcilable diversity creates problems for social order. One method for adjudicating these conflicts is through the use of rights. This paper is about the ability of such rights to adjudicate disputes when perspectival disagreements—or disagreements over how to categorize objects in the world—obtain. We present both formal possibility and impossibility results for rights structures under varying degrees of perspectival diversity. (...) We show that though perspectival diversity appears to be a troubling problem for the prospect of stable social order, if rights are defined properly then disagreements can likely be resolved in a consistent manner, achieving social cooperation rather than conflict. (shrink)

One of John Rawls’s major aims, when he wrote A Theory of Justice, was to present a superior alternative to utilitarianism. Rawls’s worry was that utilitarianism may fail to protect the fundamental rights and liberties of persons in its attempt to maximize total social welfare. Rawls’s main argument against utilitarianism was that, for such reasons, the representative parties in the original position will not choose utilitarianism, but will rather choose his justice as fairness, which he believed would securely protect the (...) worth of everybody’s basic rights and liberties. In this paper, I will argue that, under close formal examination, Rawls’s argument against utilitarianism is self-defeating. That is, I will argue that Rawls’s own reasons, assumptions, and the many theoretical devices he employs demonstrably imply that the representative parties in the original position will choose utilitarianism instead of justice as fairness. (shrink)

Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued that aggregative forms of democracy cannot lend full democratic justification for the collective decisions reached. Hence, democratic theorists have turned their attention to deliberative democracy, according to which “outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals” (Cohen 1997a, 73). However, relatively little work has been done to offer a formal theory of democratic deliberation. This (...) article helps fill that gap by offering a formal theory of three different modes of democratic deliberation: myopic discussion, constructive discussion, and debate. We show that myopic discussion suffers from indeterminacy of long run outcomes, while constructive discussion and debate are conclusive. Finally, unlike the other two modes of deliberation, debate is path independent and converges to a unique compromise position, irrespective of the initial status quo. (shrink)

A well-ordered society faces a crisis whenever a sufficient number of noncompliers enter into the political system. This has the potential to destabilize liberal democratic political order. This article provides a formal analysis of two competing solutions to the problem of political stability offered in the public reason liberalism literature—namely, using public reason or using convergence discourse to restore liberal democratic political order in the well-ordered society. The formal analyses offered in this article show that using public reason fails completely, (...) and using convergent discourse, although doing better, has its own critical limitations that have not been previously recognized properly. (shrink)

In a recently published paper entitled, “The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the Veil of Ignorance”, Johan E. Gustafsson attempts to demonstrate that the parties in Rawls’s original position would not choose the difference principle. Gustafsson’s main strategy was to show that Rawls’s difference principle in both of its ex post and ex ante versions imply counterintuitive distributional prescriptions in a few contrived examples. The purpose of this paper is to precisely demonstrate exactly how Gustafsson’s arguments have failed (...) to show that the difference principle would not be chosen behind the veil of ignorance. (shrink)

This book explores the interrelated concepts of representation and grammar in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Suppose we assume that the parties in the original position took Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory as constituting their general knowledge of human psychology that survives through the veil of ignorance. How would this change the choice situation of the original position? In this paper, I present what I call ‘prospect utilitarianism’. Prospect utilitarianism combines the utilitarian social welfare function with individual utility functions characterized by Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory. I will argue that, once prospect utilitarianism is on the (...) table, Rawls's original arguments in support of justice as fairness as well as his arguments against utilitarianism are, at best, inconclusive. This shows that how implausible a choice for utilitarianism in the original position is heavily depends on what one assumes to be general knowledge of human psychology that the original contracting parties know. (shrink)

In his article, “Equality as a Moral Ideal”, Harry Frankfurt argues against economic egalitarianism and presents what he calls the “doctrine of sufficiency.” According to the doctrine of sufficiency, what is morally important is not relative economic equality, but rather, whether somebody has enough, where “having enough” is a non-comparative standard of reasonable contentment that may differ from person to person given his/her aims and circumstances. The purpose of this paper is to show that Frankfurt’s original arguments in support for (...) his doctrine of sufficiency have critical problems that Frankfurt himself does not properly recognize. In the end, I will argue that in order to solve these problems the doctrine of sufficiency cannot help but to incorporate certain prioritarian commitments – commitments which many would view as implying economic egalitarianism. This is embarrassing for a doctrine whose raison d’être was mainly to defeat economic egalitarianism. (shrink)

In Book 1 of Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus contends two major claims: (1) justice is the advantage of the stronger, and (2) justice is the good of the other, while injustice is to one’s own profit and advantage. In the beginning of Book II, Glaucon self-proclaims that he will be representing Thrasymachus’ claims in a better way, and provides a story of how justice has originated from a state of nature situation. However, Glaucon’s story of the origin of justice has an (...) implication that justice is the advantage of the weak rather than the stronger. This is inconsistent with Thrasymachus’ first claim which states that justice is the advantage of the stronger. This is a problem for Glaucon since Glaucon is supposed to be representing Thrasymachus’ original claims in a better way. In this paper, I provide two solutions to this puzzle with the help of elementary game theory. (shrink)

Ever since the publication of Harry Frankfurt’s “Equality as a Moral Ideal” :21–43, 1987), the doctrine of sufficiency has attracted great attention among both ethical theorists and political philosophers. The doctrine of sufficiency consists of two main theses: the positive thesis states that it is morally important for people to have enough; and the negative thesis states that once everybody has enough, relative inequality has absolutely no moral importance. Many political philosophers have presented different versions of sufficientarianism that retain the (...) general spirit of what Frankfurt had proposed in his seminal work. However, all of these different versions of sufficientarianism suffer from two critical problems: they fail to give right answers to lifeboat situations, and they fail to provide continuous ethical judgments. In this paper, I show a version of utilitarianism that solves these problems while retaining the major attractions of sufficientarianism. I call it “prospect utilitarianism.” In addition, I show that prospect utilitarianism can avoid standard objections to utilitarianism and has aspects that can appeal to both prioritarians and egalitarians as well. (shrink)

On health science in Yoga philosophy with special reference to Yogasūtra of Patañjali.