Role of the entrepreneur in a distinct role of profit.

Luck egalitarianism is a family of egalitarian theories of distributive justice that aim to counteract the distributive effects of luck. This article explains luck egalitarianism's main ideas, and the debates that have accompanied its rise to prominence. There are two main parts to the discussion. The first part sets out three key moves in the influential early statements of Dworkin, Arneson, and Cohen: the brute luck/option luck distinction, the specification of brute luck in everyday or theoretical terms and the specification (...) of advantage as resources, welfare, or some combination of these. The second part covers three later developments: the democratic egalitarian critique of luck egalitarianism, the luck egalitarian acceptance of pluralism, and luck egalitarian doubts about the significance of the brute luck/option luck distinction. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin maintains that value is unitary, in the sense that different values do not conflict. This article resists this ‘hedgehog’ view with reference to the values of equality and utility. These appear to yield conflicting prescriptions in cases where one possible distribution gives different individuals the same amount of advantage, and the other contains an unequal distribution of a greater overall amount of advantage. Hedgehogs might respond to such a case in two ways. First, they might claim that equality (...) and utility are not truly in conflict. However, this claim seems implausible on our ordinary concepts of these values, and Dworkin does not provide grounds for revising our concepts. Second, they might deny that one of these values – utility – is a genuine value. However, one of the two aspects of Dworkin’s fundamental principle of equal concern appears to be supportive of utility, and he offers no good arguments for his preferred strategy of accommodating this aspect of equal concern within the value of equality. Furthermore, the alternative ‘fox’ view, which recognizes equality and utility as conflicting values, each accommodating one aspect of equal concern, has the advantage that it stays truer to familiar moral concepts. (shrink)

Examining sources and case studies, this fascinating book explores early Christianity, how it was studied, how it is studied now, and how Judaeo-Christian values came to form the ideological bedrock of modern western culture. Looking at the diverse source materials available, from the earliest New Testament texts and the complex treaties of third century authors such as Lactantius, to archaeology, epigraphy and papyrology, the book examines what is needed to study the subject, what materials were available, how useful they were, (...) and how the study of the subject may be approached. Also including a comprehensive guide for students that lists major collections of literary and non-literary sources, major journals and series, and major text books. (shrink)

The activity of wildlife viewing rests on an underlying contradiction. Wild animals are generally human-averse; they avoid humans and respond to human encounters by fleeing and retreating to cover. One would therefore expect human viewing of wild animals to be at best unpredictable, intermittent, and fleeting. Yet in recent decades, wildlife viewing has become a major recreational activity for millions of people around the world and has emerged as a thriving commercial industry. How can these two things—widespread wildlife intolerance of (...) humans and large-scale human observation of wildlife—be squared? The answer is that wild animals are only viewed on this scale because they have been made viewable through human intervention. This article examines two kinds of intervention—habituation and attraction—that change wildlife behavior toward humans and render hitherto elusive animals susceptible to regular, proximate, and protracted human viewing. (shrink)

Palliative care serves both as an integrated part of treatment and as a last effort to care for those we cannot cure. The extent to which palliative care should be provided and our reasons for doing so have been curiously overlooked in the debate about distributive justice in health and healthcare. We argue that one prominent approach, the Rawlsian approach developed by Norman Daniels, is unable to provide such reasons and such care. This is because of a central feature in (...) Daniels' account, namely that care should be provided to restore people's opportunities. Daniels' view is both unable to provide pain relief to those who need it as a supplement to treatment and, without justice-based reasons to provide palliative care to those whose opportunities cannot be restored. We conclude that this makes Daniels' framework much less attractive. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre has recently had published two books of selected essays, a study of the phenomenologist Edith Stein, a third edition of After Virtue, and an extensive collection of his early Marxist writings. These are reviewed, along with two recently published commentaries upon his work. The recent reinterpretation and revival of interest in that work receives much support from most of these publications. Central to this reinterpretation is the concept of practices, which MacIntyre first elaborated in After Virtue. His recent (...) work indicates how that concept may be further developed in the direction of a politically radical moral realism. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Common to language and kinship is digital format. This is a discovery, not an innate feature of human cognition. But to produce a testable model, we need Darwinian behavioural ecology.

Furthermore, it is not easy for most of us to accept a philosophy however well reasoned which refuses exterior reality to all we see, hear and touch about us. It is such philosophy that gives point to Valery's boutade: 'Philosophy pretends not to ...

This article draws on recent research in the medical humanities to analyze two contemporary Chinese films: Zhang Yuan's Sons (1996) and Zhou Xiaowen's The Common People (1998). By portraying psychic and physical anguish in ways that refuse to divorce biology from culture, such films offer rare moral dialogues on biomedical issues and contribute a cross-cultural perspective invaluable to the task of responding to illness and suffering.

In Japan, yaen kōen or "wild monkey parks" are popular visitor attractions that show free-ranging monkey troops to the paying public. Unlike zoos, which display nonhuman animals through confinement, monkey parks control the movements of the monkeys through provisioning. The parks project an image of themselves as "natural zoos," claiming to practice a more authentic form of displaying animals-in-the-wild than that practiced by the zoo. This article critically evaluates the monkey park's claim by examining park management of the monkeys. The (...) article shows the monkey park's claim to display wild monkeys to be questionable because of the way that provisioning changes monkey behavior. Against the background of human encroachment onto the forest habitat of the monkey, the long-term effect of provisioning is to sedentarize nomadic monkey animals and to turn the wild monkey park into a megazoo. (shrink)

Oersted has been a puzzle for historians of science. Unflatteringly regarded by contemporaries in Britain and France as a metaphysician, he astonished and galvanised the learned world in 1820 with his discovery of electromagnetism. Suddenly famous, he was belatedly honoured; but, like Röntgen with X-rays, did no more serious work on the discovery that brought him renown, leaving that to Ampère and Faraday while he concentrated on an aesthetics that would bridge arts and sciences, and on building up scientific institutions (...) at home in Denmark in the wake of the Napoleonic wars and the British bombardment of Copenhagen. He lived in exciting times under the last absolutist monarchy in western Europe; and as he lay dying, his country was lapsing into civil war over the Schleswig–Holstein question, following the 1848 revolutions all over Europe. Although not geographically remote, Denmark was peripheral as far as science was concerned and was a very small country in which the int .. (shrink)

‘Read until you hear the voices’; so the maxim goes for those who would engage with the Victorians. Let us try with Thomas Henry Huxley:A great chapter in the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few passages in the history of man can be supported by such an overwhelming mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the truth of the fragment of the history of the globe, which I hope to enable you to (...) read, with your own eyes, tonight. Let me add, that few chapters of human history have a more profound significance for ourselves. I weigh my words well when I assert, that the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderful universe, and man's relation to it, than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant of those of Nature. (shrink)

It could be argued that there is now a crisis of confidence in the professions. Although many professionals individually undertake their roles with care and diligence, there have been so many systematic failures involving professionals across a range of sectors, both in the UK and globally, that the special status enjoyed by the professions is being widely questioned. In this article, I argue that recent cases are symptomatic of a lack of ethical reasoning in professional practice, yet professions enjoy an (...) elevated status based on claims that ethics, typically communicated in codes of conduct, are central to their purpose. I argue that to help solve this crisis, philosophical literacy needs to be promoted in school, initial professional education and continuing professional development. Passing tests to superficially demonstrate an understanding of a code is quite different from reasoning through practical dilemmas in the professional workplace with judgements informed by philosophical ideas. (shrink)